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

the term better. But it is an exercise in a by-way of the novel road-system, though an early proof of the fact that such by-ways are endlessly open.

But the time was coming, though it did not (and could hardly) come very quickly, when Fielding was to discard all kinds of adventitious aids and suggestions--all crutches, spring-boards, go-carts, tugs, patterns, tracings--and go his own way--and the Way of the Novel--with no guidance but something of the example of Cervantes directly and Shakespeare indirectly among the moderns, and of the poetic fiction-writers of old. It is perfectly clear that he had thought widely (and perhaps had read not a little) on the subject of literary criticism, in a sense not common in his day, and that the thinking had led him to a conception of the "prose epic" which, though it might have been partly (not wholly by any means) pieced out of the Italian and Spanish critics of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, had never been worked out as a complete theory, much less applied in practice and to prose. The Prose Epic aims at--and in Fielding's case has been generally admitted to have hit--something like the classical unity of main action. But it borrows from the romance-idea the liberty of a large accretion and divagation of minor and accessory plot:--not the mere "episode" of the ancients, but the true minor plot of Shakespeare. It assumes, necessarily and once for all, the licence of tragi-comedy, in that sense of the term in which Much Ado About Nothing and A Winter's Tale are tragi-comedies, and in which Othello itself might have been made one. And it follows further in the wake of the Shakespearean drama by insisting far more largely than ancient literature of any kind, and far more than any modern up to its date except drama had done, on the importance of Character. Description and dialogue are rather subordinate to these things than on a level with them--but they are still further worked out than before. And there is a new element--perhaps suggested by the parabasis of ancient comedy, but, it may be, more directly by the peculiar method of Swift in A Tale of a Tub . At various places in his narrative, but especially at the beginnings of books and chapters, Fielding as it were "calls a halt" and addresses his readers on matters more or less relevant to the story, but rather in the manner of a commentator and scholiast upon it than as actual parts of it. Of this more later: for the immediate purpose is to survey and not to criticise.

The result of all this was Tom Jones --by practically universal consent one of the capital books of English literature. It is unnecessary to recapitulate the famous praises of Gibbon, of Coleridge, of Byron, and of others: and it is only necessary to deal briefly with the complaints which, if they have never found such monumental expression as the praises, have been sometimes widely entertained. These objections--as regards interest--fasten partly on the address-digressions, partly on the great inset-episode of "The Man of the Hill:" as regards morality on a certain alleged looseness of principle in that respect throughout, and especially on the licence of conduct accorded to the hero himself and the almost entire absence of punishment for it. As for the first, "The Man of the Hill" was partly a concession to the fancy of the time for such things, partly a following of such actual examples as Fielding admitted--for it need hardly be said that the inset-episode, of no or very slight connection with the story, is common both in the ancients and in Cervantes, while it is to be found as long after Fielding as in the early novel-work of Dickens. The digression-openings are at least as satisfactory to some as they are unsatisfactory to others; it is even doubtful whether they annoy anybody half so much as they have delighted some excellent judges. The other point is well worn: but the wearing has not taken off its awkwardness and unsavouriness. Difference of habit and manners at the time will account for much: but the wiser apologists will simply say that Fielding's attitude to certain deviations from the strict moral law was undoubtedly very indulgent, provided that such deviations were unaccompanied by the graver and more detestable vices of cruelty, treachery, and fraud--that to vice which was accompanied by these blacker crimes he was utterly merciless; and that if he is thus rather exposed to the charge of "compounding by damning"--in the famous phrase--the things that he damned admit of no excuse and those that he compounded for have been leniently dealt with by all but the sternest moralists.

Such things are, however (in the admirable French sense),
misères --wretched petty cavils and shallows of criticism. The only sensible thing to do is to launch out with Fielding into that deep and open sea of human character and fate which he dared so gloriously. During the curious phase of literary opinion which the last twenty years or so have seen, it has apparently been discovered by some people that his scheme of human thought and feeling is too simple--"toylike" I think they call it--in comparison with that, say, of Count Tolstoi or of Mr. Meredith, that modern practice has reached a finer technique than his or even than that of his greatest follower, Thackeray. Far be it from the present writer to say, or to insinuate, anything disrespectful of the great moderns who have lately left us. Yet it may be said without the slightest disrespect to them that the unfavourable comparison is mainly a revival of Johnson's mistake as to Fielding and Richardson. It is, however, something more--for it comes also from a failure to estimate aright the parabasis -openings which have been more than once referred to. These passages do not perhaps exhibit the by-work and the process in the conspicuous skeleton-clock fashion which their critics admire and desire, but they contain an amount of acute and profound exploration of human nature which it would be difficult to match and impossible to surpass elsewhere: while the results of Fielding's working, of his "toylike" scheme, are remarkable toys indeed--toys which, if we regard them as such, must surely strike us as rather uncanny. One is sometimes constrained to think that it is perhaps not much more difficult to make than to recognise a thoroughly live character. It certainly must be very difficult to do the latter if there is any considerable number of persons who are unable to do it in the case of almost every one of the personages of Tom Jones . With one possible exception they are all alive--even more so than those of Joseph Andrews and with a less peculiar and limited liveliness than those of Jonathan Wild . But it certainly is curious that as the one good man of Jonathan , Heartfree, is the least alive of its personages, so the one bad man of Tom , Blifil, occupies the same position.

The result of this variety and abundance of life is an even more than corresponding opportunity for enjoyment. This enjoyment may arise in different persons from different sources. The much praised and seldom cavilled at unity and completeness of the story may appeal to some. There are others who are inclined towards elaborate plots as Sam Weller was to the "'rig'nal" of his subpoena. It was a "gratifyin' sort o' thing, and eased his mind" to be aware of its existence, and that was all. These latter find their sources of enjoyment elsewhere, but everywhere else. The abundance and the vividness of character-presentation; the liveliness and the abundance of the staging of that character; the variety of scene and incident--all most properly connected with the plot, but capable of existing and of being felt without it; the human dialogue; the admirable phrase in that dialogue and out of it, in the digressions, in the narrative, above, and through, and about, and below it all--these things and others (for it is practically impossible to exhaust the catalogue) fill up the cup to the brim, and keep it full, for the born lover of the special novel-pleasure.

In one point only was Fielding a little unfortunate perhaps: and even here the "perhaps" has to be underlined. He came just before the end of a series of almost imperceptible changes in ordinary English speech which brought about something like a stationary state. His maligner and only slightly younger contemporary, Horace Walpole, in some of his letters, writes in a fashion which, putting mere slang aside, has hardly any difference from that of to-day. Fielding still uses "hath" for "has" and a few other things which seem archaic, not to students of literature but to the general. In the same way dress, manners, etc., though much more picturesque, were by that fact distinguished from those of almost the whole nineteenth century and the twentieth as far as it has gone: while incidents were, even in ordinary life, still usual which have long ceased to be so. In this way the immense advance--greater than was made by any one else till Miss Austen--that he made in the pure novel of this ordinary life may be missed. But the intrinsic magnificence, interest, nature, abundance of Tom Jones can only be missed by those who were predestined to miss them. It is tempting--but the temptation must be resisted--to enliven these pages with an abstract of its astonishing "biograph-panorama." But nothing save itself can do it justice. "Take and read" is the only wise advice.

No such general agreement has been reached in respect of Fielding's last novel, Amelia . The author's great adversary, Johnson--an adversary whose hostility was due partly to generous and grateful personal relations with Richardson, partly to political disagreement (for Fielding was certainly "a vile Whig"), but most of all perhaps to a sort of horrified recoil from the novelist's easy handling of temptations which were no easy matter to his critic--was nearly if not quite propitiated by it: and the enthusiasm for it of such a "cynic" as Thackeray is well known. Of the very few persons whom it would not be ridiculous to name with these, Scott--whose competence in criticising his own art is one of the most wonderful though the least generally recognised things about him--inclines, in the interesting Introduction-Dialogue to The Fortunes of Nigel , to put it on a level with Tom Jones itself as a perfectly constructed novel. But modern criticism has, rightly or wrongly, been more dubious. Amelia is almost too perfect: her very forgiveness (it has been suggested) would be more interesting if she had not almost completely shut her eyes to there being anything to forgive. Her husband seems to us to prolong the irresponsibility of youth, which was pardonable in Tom, to a period of life and to circumstances of enforced responsibility which make us rather decline to honour the drafts he draws; and he is also a little bit of a fool, which Tom, to do him justice, is not, though he is something of a scatterbrain. Dr. Harrison, whose alternate wrath and reconciliation supply the most important springs of the plot, is, though a natural, a rather unreasonable person. The "total impression" has even been pronounced by some people to be a little dull. What there is of truth in these criticisms and others (which it would be long even to summarise) may perhaps be put briefly under two heads. It is never so easy to arouse interest in virtue as it is in vice: or in weak and watered vice as in vice rectified (or un rectified) to full strength. And the old requirement of "the quest"