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

with which Lady Mary afterwards most justly reproached him--that he talked about fine ladies and gentlemen without knowing anything about them. It was quite natural for Lady Davers to be disgusted, to be incredulous, to be tyrannical, to be in a certain sense violent. But it is improbable that she would in any case have spoken and behaved like a drunken fishfag quarrelling with another in the street: and the extreme prolongation of the scene brings its impropriety more forcibly into view. Here, as elsewhere (a point of great importance to which I may invite attention), Richardson follows out, with extraordinary minuteness and confidence, a wrong course: and his very expertness in the process betrays him and brings him to grief. If he had run the false scent for a few yards only it would not matter: in a chase prolonged to something like "Hartleap Well" extension there is less excuse for his not finding it out. Nevertheless it would of course be absurd not to rank this "knowledge of the human heart" among the claims which not only gave him but have kept his reputation. I do not know that he shows it much less in the later part of the first two volumes (Pamela's recurrent tortures of jealous curiosity about Sally Godfrey are admirable) or even in the dreary sequel. But analysis for analysis' sake can have few real, though it may have some pretended, devotees.

The foregoing remarks have been designed, less as a criticism of
Pamela (which would be unnecessary here), or even of Richardson (which would be more in place, but shall be given in brief presently), than as an account and justification of the book's position in the real subject of this volume--the History of the English Novel. And this account will dispense us from dealing, at corresponding length, with the individually more important but historically subordinate books which followed. Of these Clarissa , as few people can be ignorant, is a sort of enlarged, diversified, and transposed Pamela , in which the attempts of a libertine of more resolution and higher gifts than Mr. B. upon a young lady of much more than proportionately higher station and qualities than Pamela's, are--as such success goes--successful at last: but only to result in the death of the victim and the punishment of the criminal. The book is far longer than even the extended Pamela ; has a much wider range; admits of episodes and minor plots, and is altogether much more ambitious; but still--though the part of the seducer Lovelace is much more important than that of Mr. B.--it is chiefly occupied with the heroine. In Sir Charles Grandison , on the contrary, though no less than three heroines exist after a fashion and are carefully treated, the author's principal object is to depict--in direct contrast to Mr. B. and Lovelace--a "Good Man"--the actual first title of the book, which he wisely altered. This faultless and insufferable monster is frantically beloved by, and hesitates long between, two beauties, the Italian Clementina della Porretta and the English Harriet Byron. The latter of these carries him off (rather because of religious difficulties than of any great predilection on his own part) and the piece ends with a repetition, extension, and intensification of the bounties showered upon Pamela by her husband, and her almost abject gratitude for them. Only of course "the good man" could never be guilty of Mr. B.'s meditated relapse from the path of rectitude, nor (one may perhaps add) does Miss Byron seem to possess the insinuating astuteness by which Pamela once more

"Reconciles the new perverted man,"

to adapt the last line of A Lover's Complaint to the situation.

Grandison , like Clarissa , has a much wider range of personage and incident than Pamela , and is again double the length of it. No detailed criticism of these enormous books (both of which are conducted in the letter-form, though, in the latter case especially, with long retrospects and narratives which rather strain the style) is possible here. But a few remarks on the characters of Lovelace and Clarissa, which have usually been regarded as Richardson's greatest triumphs, may fitly precede some on his whole character as a novelist.

Admiration and sympathy, tempered with a few reserves, have been the general notes of comment on Clarissa: and--as she goes through the long martyrdom of persecution by her family for not marrying the man she does not love; of worse persecution from the man whom she does love, but who will not marry her, at least until he has conquered her virtue; and of perhaps worst when she feels it her duty to resist his repentant and (as such things go) honourable proffers after he has treacherously deprived her of technical honour--compassion at least is impossible to refuse. But "compassion," though it literally translates "sympathy" from Greek into Latin, is not its synonym in English. It is a disagreeable thing to have to say: but Clarissa's purity strikes one as having at once too much questionable prudery in it and too little honest prudence: while her later resolution has as much false pride as real principle. Even some of her admirers admit a want of straightforwardness in her; she has no passion, which rather derogates from the merit of her conduct in any case; and though she is abominably ill-treated by almost everybody, one's pity for her never comes very near to love.

Towards Lovelace, on the other hand, the orthodox attitude, with even greater uniformity, has been shocked, or sometimes even unshocked, admiration. Hazlitt went into frequently quoted raptures over the "regality" of his character: and though to approve of him as a man would only be the pretence of a cheap paradoxer, general opinion seems to have gone various lengths in the same direction. There have, however, been a few dissenters: and I venture to join myself to them in the very dissidence of their dissent. Lovelace, it is true, is a most astonishingly "succeeded" blend of a snob's fine gentleman and of the fine gentleman of a silly and rather unhealthy-minded schoolgirl. He is--it is difficult to resist the temptation of dropping and inserting the h's--handsome, haughty, arbitrary, as well as rich, generous after a fashion, well descended, well dressed, well mannered--except when he is insolent. He is also--which certainly stands to his credit in the bank which is not that of the snob or the schoolgirl--no fool in a general way. But he is not in the least a gentleman except in externals: and there is nothing really "great" about him at all. Even his scoundrelism is mostly, if not wholly, pose --which abominable thing indeed distinguishes him throughout, in every speech and every act, from the time when he sighs as he kisses Miss Arabella Harlowe's hand to the time when he says, "Let this expiate!" as that hallowed sword of Colonel Morden's passes through his rotten heart. Now if Richardson had meant this, it might be granted at once that Lovelace is one of the greatest characters of fiction: and I do not deny that taken as this , meant or not meant, he is great. But Richardson obviously did not mean it; and Hazlitt did not mean it; and none of the admirers mean it. They all thought and think that Lovelace is something like what Milton's Satan was, and what my Lord Byron would have liked to be. This is very unfair to the Prince of Darkness: and it is even not quite just to "the noble poet."

At the same time, the acute reader will have noticed, the acknowledgment that the fact that Richardson--even not knowing it and intending to do something else--did hit off perfectly and consummately the ideal of such a "prevailing party" (to quote Lord Foppington) as snobs and schoolgirls, is a serious and splendid tribute to his merits: as is also the fact that his two chief characters are characters still interesting and worth arguing about. Those merits, indeed, are absolutely incontestable. His immediate and immense popularity, abroad as well as at home, would not necessarily prove much, though it must not be neglected, and historically, at least, is of the first importance. But he does not need it.

For, as should have been sufficiently shown, he did very great things--first by gathering up the scattered means and methods which had been half ignorantly hit on by others, and co-ordinating them into the production of the finished and complete novel; secondly (though less) by that infusion of elaborate "minor psychology" as it may be called, which is his great characteristic; and, thirdly, by means of it and of other things, in raising the pitch of interest in his readers to an infinitely higher degree than had ever been known before. The dithyrambs of Diderot are, though not ridiculously, amusingly excessive: but they are only an exaggeration of the truth. On the comic side he was weak: and he made a most unfortunate mistake by throwing this part of the business on young ladies of position and (as he thought) of charm--Miss Darnford, Miss Howe, Charlotte Grandison--who are by no means particularly comic and who are sometimes very particularly vulgar. But of tragedy positive, in the bourgeois kind, he had no small command, and in the middle business--in affairs neither definitely comic nor definitely tragic--he was wonderfully prolific and facile. His immense and heart-breaking lengthiness is not mere verbosity: it comes partly from the artist's natural delight in a true and newly found method, partly from a still more respectably artistic desire not to do the work negligently. As for the unhealthiness of atmosphere which has been generally and not unjustly charged upon him, it is, in part, no doubt the result of imperfect temperament and breeding: but it is also as closely connected with his very method as are the merits thereof. You cannot "consider so curiously" without considering too curiously. The drawbacks of his work are obvious, and they were likely to be, and were, exaggerated. But they might be avoided and the merits kept: nor is it too much to say that the triumphs of the English novel in the last century have been not a little due to the avoidance of the one and the keeping of the other.

It would be, in the circumstances, peculiarly uncivil and disobliging to lay very much stress on the fact that, after all, the greatest of Richardson's works is his successor, caricaturist, and superior--Fielding. When the memoirs of Miss Pamela Andrews appeared, the future biographer of her doubly supposititious brother was a not very young man of thirty-three, who had written a good many not very good plays, had contributed to periodicals, and had done a little work at the Bar, besides living, at least till his marriage and it may be feared later, an exceedingly "rackety" life. It is not improbable, though it is not certain, that he had already turned his attention to prose fiction of a kind. For, though the Miscellanies which followed
Joseph Andrews were three years later than Pamela in appearance, the Journey from this World to the Next which they contain has the immaturity of earliness; and we can hardly conceive it as written after the adventures and character of Mr. Abraham Adams. It is unequal, rather tedious in parts, and in conception merely a pastiche of Lucian and Fontenelle: but it contains some remarkable things in the way of shrewd satirical observation of human nature. And the very fact that it is a following of something else is interesting, in connection with the infinitely more important work that preceded it in publication, The Adventures of Joseph Andrews and