The English Novel by George Saintsbury (essential reading TXT) 📖

She has had rather hard measure with critics for the last century and a little more. The questions to ask now are, "Is she a probable human being?" and then, "Where are we to find a probable human being, worked out to the same degree, before?" I say unhesitatingly that the answer to the first is "Yes," and the answer to the second "Nowhere." The last triumph of originality and individuality she does not indeed reach. Richardson had, even more than other men of his century in England, a strong Gallic touch: and he always tends to the type rather than the individual. Beatrix Esmond is a coquette of the highest--almost of the heroic-poetic--class, but she is first of all Beatrix Esmond. Blanche Amory is a middle-class minx, hardly heroic at all, but she is first of all Blanche Amory. Becky Sharp is an adventuress who would go pretty close to, and perhaps not stop at, positive crime, but she is first of all Becky Sharp. Pamela Andrews is not first of all--perhaps she is hardly at all--Pamela Andrews. There might be fifty or five hundred Pamelas, while there could be only one of each of the others. She is the pretty, good-natured, well-principled, and rather well-educated menial, whose prudence comes to the aid of her principles, whose pride does not interfere with either, and who has a certain--it is hardly unfair to call it--slyness which is of the sex rather than of the individual. But, as such, she is quite admirably worked out--a heroine of Racine in more detail and different circumstances, a triumph of art, and at the same time with so much nature that it is impossible to dismiss her as merely artificial. The nearest thing to her in English prose fiction before (Marianne, of course, is closer in French) is Moll Flanders: and good as Moll is, she is flat and lifeless in comparison with Pamela. You may call "my master's" mistress (actually in the honourable sense, but never in the dishonourable) again a minx, though a better minx than Blanche, if you like. But there is no animal more alive than a minx: and you will certainly not find a specimen of the species in any English novel before.

As for description and dialogue, there is not very much of the former in Pamela , though it might not be unfair to include under the head those details, after the manner of Defoe (such as Pamela's list of purchases when she thinks she is going home), which supply their own measure of verisimilitude to the story. But there are some things of the kind which Defoe never would have thought of--such as the touches of the "tufts of grass" and the "pretty sort of wildflower that grows yonder near the elm, the fifth from us on the left," which occur in the gipsy scene. The dialogue plays a much more important part: and may be brought into parallel with that in the Polite Conversation , referred to above and published just before Pamela . It is "reported" of course, instead of being directly delivered, in accordance with the letter-scheme of which more presently, but that makes very little difference; to the first readers it probably made no difference at all. Here again that process of "vivification," which has been so often dwelt on, makes an astonishing progress--the blood and colour of the novel, which distinguish it from the more statuesque narrative, are supplied, if indirectly yet sufficiently and, in comparison with previous examples, amply. Here you get, almost or quite for the first time in the English novel, those spurts and sparks of animation which only the living voice can supply. Richardson is a humorist but indirectly; yet only the greatest humorists have strokes much better than that admirable touch in which, when the "reconciliations and forgivenesses of injuries" are being arranged, and Mr. B. (quite in the manner of the time) suggests marrying Mrs. Jewkes to the treacherous footman John and giving them an inn to keep--Pamela, the mild and semi-angelic but exceedingly feminine Pamela, timidly inquires whether, "This would not look like very heavy punishment to poor John?" She forgives Mrs. Jewkes of course, but only "as a Christian"--as a greater than Richardson put it afterwards and commented on it in the mouth of a personage whom Richardson could never have drawn, though Fielding most certainly could.

The original admirers of Pamela , then, were certainly justified: and even the rather fatuous eulogies which the author prefixed to it from his own and (let us hope) other pens (and which probably provoked Fielding himself more than even the substance of the piece) could be transposed into a reasonable key. But we ought nowadays to consider this first complete English novel from a rather higher point of view, and ask ourselves, not merely what its comparative merits were in regard to its predecessors, and as presented to its first readers, but what its positive character is and what, as far as it goes, are the positive merits or defects which it shows in its author.

The first thing to strike one in this connection is, almost of course, the letter-form. More agreement has been reached about this, perhaps, than about some other points in the inquiry. The initial difficulty of fiction which does not borrow the glamour of verse or of the stage is the question, "What does all this mean?" "What is the authority?" "How does the author know it all?" And a hundred critics have pointed out that there are practically only three ways of meeting this. The boldest and the best by far is to follow the poet and the dramatist themselves; to treat it like one of the magic lions of romance, ignore it, and pass on, secure of safety, to tell your story "from the blue," as if it were an actual history or revelation, or something passing before the eyes of the reader. But at that time few novelists had the courage to do this, daunted as they were by the absence of the sword and shield of verse, of the vantage-room of the stage. Then there is the alternative of recounting it by the mouth of one of the actors in, or spectators of, the events--a plan obvious, early, presenting some advantages, still very commonly followed, but always full of little traps and pits of improbability, and peculiarly trying in respect to the character (if he is made to have any) of the narrator himself. Thirdly, there is the again easy resource of the "document" in its various forms. Of these, letters and diaries possess some prerogative advantages; and were likely to suggest themselves very particularly at this time when the actual letter and diary (long rather strangely rare in English) had for some generations appeared, and were beginning to be common. In the first place the information thus obtained looks natural and plausible: and there is a subsidiary advantage--on which Richardson does not draw very much in Pamela , but which he employs to the full later--that by varying your correspondents you can get different views of the same event, and first-hand manifestations of extremely different characters.

Its disadvantages, on the other hand, are equally obvious: but there are two or three of them of especial importance. In the first place, it is essentially an artificial rather than an artful plan--its want of verisimilitude, as soon as you begin to think of it, is as great as that of either of the others if not greater. In the second, without immense pains, it must be "gappy and scrappy," while the more these pains are taken the more artificial it will become. In the third, the book is extremely likely, in the taking of these pains and even without them, to become intolerably lengthy and verbose. In the first part at least of the first part of Pamela , Richardson avoided these dangers fairly if not fully; in the second part he succumbed to them; in his two later novels, though more elaborate and important plots to some extent bore up the expansion, he succumbed to them almost more. Pains have been taken above to show how the first readers of Pamela might rejoice in it, because of its contrast with the character of the seventeenth-century novel which was most read--the Scudéry or "heroic" romance. It is not, I think, too severe to say that nothing but the parallel with that romance, and the tolerance induced by familiarity with it, could make any one put up with the second part of Pamela itself, or with the inhumanly prolonged divagation of Clarissa and Grandison . Nor, as has been hinted, is the solace of the letters--in the opportunity of setting forth different tempers and styles--here much taken.

There is no doubt that one main attraction of this letter-plan (whether consciously experienced or not does not matter) was its ready adaptation to Richardson's own special and peculiar gift of minute analysis of mood, temper, and motive. The diary avowedly, and the letter in reality, even though it may be addressed to somebody else, is a continuous soliloquy: and the novelist can use it with a frequency and to a length which would be intolerable and impossible on the stage. Now soliloquy is the great engine for self--revelation and analysis. It is of course to a great extent in consequence of this analysis that Richardson owes his pride of place in the general judgment. It is quite possible to lay too much stress on it, as distinguishing the novel from the romance: and the present writer is of opinion that too much stress has actually been laid. The real difference between romance per se and novel per se (so far as they are capable of distinct existence) is that the romance depends more on incident and the novel more on character. Now this minute analysis and exhibition, though it is one way of drawing or constructing character, is not the only, nor even a necessary, one. It can be done without: but it has impressed the vulgar, and even some who are not the vulgar, from Dr. Johnson to persons whom it is unnecessary to mention. They cannot believe that there is "no deception"--that the time is correctly told--unless the works of the watch are bared to them: and this Richardson most undoubtedly does. Even in his 'prentice work, every flutter of Pamela's little heart is registered, and registered probably enough: nor could the registry have been effected, perhaps, in any other way that should be in the least probable so well as by the letter and journal method. Of course this analysis was not quite new; it had existed in a sort of way in the heroic novel: and it had been eminently present in the famous Princesse de Clèves of Madame de la Fayette as well as in her French successors. But these stories had generally been as short as the heroics had been long: and no one had risen (or descended) to anything like the minuteness and fullness of Richardson. As was before pointed out in regard to the letter-system generally, this method of treatment is exposed to special dangers, particularly those of verbosity and "overdoing"--not to mention the greater one of missing the mark. Richardson can hardly be charged with error, though he may be with excess, in regard to Pamela herself in the earlier part of the book--perhaps even not in regard to Mr. B.'s intricacies of courtship, matrimonial compliment, and arbitrary temper later. But he certainly succumbs to them in the long and monstrous scene in which Lady Davers bullies, storms at, and positively assaults her unfortunate sister-in-law before she is forced to allow that she is her sister-in-law. Part of course of his error here comes from the mistake