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

book, ultra-eccentric as it is, does count for something in the history of the English novel. Its descriptions, rendered through a magnifying glass as they are, have considerable power; and are quite unlike anything in prose fiction, and most things in prose literature, before it. In Buncle himself there is a sort of extra-natural, "four-dimension" nature and proportion which assert the novelist's power memorably:--if a John Buncle could exist, he would very probably be like Amory's John Buncle. Above all, the book (let it be remembered that it came before Tristram Shandy ) is almost the beginning of the Eccentric Novel--not of the satiric-marvellous type which Cyrano and Swift had revived from Lucian, but of a new, a modern, and a very English variety. Buncle is sometimes extraordinarily like Borrow (on whom he probably had influence), and it would not be hard to arrange a very considerable spiritual succession for him, by no means deserving the uncomplimentary terms in which he dismisses his progeny in the flesh.

If there is an almost preposterous cheerfulness about Buncle , the necessary alternative can be amply supplied by the next book to which we come. The curious way in which Johnson almost invariably managed to hit the critical nail on the head is well illustrated by his remark to Frances Sheridan, author of the Memoirs of Miss Sydney Bid[d]ulph (1761), that he "did not know whether she had a right, on moral principles, to make her readers suffer so much." Substitute "æsthetic" for "moral" and "heroine" for "readers," and the remark retains its truth on another scheme of criticism, which Johnson was not ostensibly employing, and which he might have violently denounced. The book, though with its subsequent prolongation too long, is a powerful one: and though actually dedicated to Richardson and no doubt consciously owing much to his influence, practically clears off the debt by its own earnings. But Miss Bidulph (she started with only one d , but acquired another), whose journal to her beloved Cecilia supplies the matter and method of the novel, is too persistently unlucky and ill-treated, without the smallest fault of her own, for anything but really, not fictitiously, real life. Her misfortunes spring from obeying her mother (but there was neither moral nor satire in this then), and husbands, lovers, rivals, relations, connections--everybody--conspire to afflict her. Poetical justice has been much abused in both senses of that verb: Sydney Biddulph shows cause for it in the very act of neglect.

But the eighteenth century, on the whole, loathed melancholy. The
Spiritual Quixote (1772) of the Reverend Richard Graves (1715-1804) has probably been a little injured by the ingenuous proclamation of indebtedness in the title. It is, however, an extremely clever and amusing book: and one of the best of the many imitations of its original, which, indeed, it follows only on broad and practically independent lines. During his long life (for more than half a century of which he was rector of Claverton near Bath) Graves knew many interesting persons, from Shenstone and Whitefield (with both of whom he was at Pembroke College, Oxford, though he afterwards became a fellow of All Souls) to Malthus, who was a pupil of his; and he had some interesting private experiences. He wove a good deal that was personal into his novel, which, as may easily be guessed, is a satire upon Methodism, and in which Whitefield is personally and not altogether favourably introduced. But even on him Graves is by no means savage: while his treatment of his hero, Geoffrey Wildgoose, a young Oxford man who, living in retirement with his mother in the country, becomes an evangelist, very mainly from want of some more interesting occupation, is altogether good-humoured. Wildgoose promptly falls in love with a fascinating damsel-errant, Julia Townsend; and the various adventures, religious, picaresque, and amatory, are embroiled and disembroiled with very fair skill in character and fairer still in narrative. Nor is the Sancho-Partridge of the piece, Jerry Tugwell, a cobbler (who thinks, though he is very fond of his somewhat masterful wife, that a little absence from her would not be unrefreshing), by any means a failure. Both Scott and Dickens evidently knew Graves well,[11] and knowledge of him might with advantage be more general.

[11] Julia Mannering reminds me a little of Julia Townsend: and
if this be doubtful, the connection of Jerry's "Old madam gave
me some higry-pigry" and Cuddie's "the leddy cured me with some
hickery-pickery" is not. While, for Dickens, compare the way in
which Sam Weller's landlord in the Fleet got into trouble with
the Tinker's Tale in Spiritual Quixote , bk. iv. chap. ii.

The novels that have been noticed since those contrasted ones of Mrs. Haywood's, which occupy a position by themselves, all possess a sort of traditional fame; and cover (with the proper time allowed for the start given by Richardson and Fielding) nearly the same period of thirty years--in this case 1744 ( David Simple ) to 1772 ( The Spiritual Quixote )--which is covered by the novels of the great quartette themselves. It would be possible to add a great many, and easy and not disagreeable to the writer to dwell on a few. Of these few some are perhaps necessary. Frank Coventry's Pompey the Little --an amusing satirical novel with a pet dog for the title-giver and with the promising (but as a rule ill-handled) subject of university life treated early--appeared in 1751--the same year which saw the much higher flight (the pun is in sense not words) of Peter Wilkins , by Robert Paltock of Clement's Inn, a person of whom practically nothing else is known. It would be lucky for many people if they were thus singly yoked to history. It was once fashionable to dismiss Peter as a boy's book, because it discovers a world of flying men and women, modelled partly on Defoe, partly on Swift; it has more recently been fashionable to hint a sneer at it as "sentimental" because of its presentment of a sort of fantastic and unconventional Amelia (who, it may be remembered, made her appearance in the same year) in the heroine Youwarkee. Persons who do not care for fashion will perhaps sometimes agree that, though not exactly a masterpiece, it is rather a charming book. If anybody is sickened by its charm he may restore himself by a still better known story which no one can accuse of charm or sentiment, though it is clever enough--Charles Johnstone's Chrysal or The Adventures of a Guinea (1760). This, which is strongly Smollettian in more ways than one, derives its chief notoriety from the way in which the scandalous (and perhaps partly fabulous) orgies of Medmenham Abbey are, like other scandalous and partly fabulous gossip of the time, brought in. But it
is clever; though emphatically one of the books which "leave a bad taste in the mouth." Indeed about this time the novel, which even in clean hands allowed itself not a little freedom, took, in others, excursions in the direction of the province of "prohibited literature," and sometimes passed the border.

One rather celebrated book, however, has not yet been mentioned: and it will serve very well, with two others greater in every way, as usher to a few general remarks on the weakness of this generation of minor novelists. Between 1766 and 1770 Henry Brooke, an Irishman of position, fortune, and literary distinction in other ways, who was at the time of more than middle age, published The Fool of Quality or The Adventures of Henry Earl of Morland . The hero is a sort of Grandison-Buncle, as proper though scarcely as priggish as the one, and as eccentric and discursive as the other; the story is chaos: the book is stuffed with disquisitions on all sorts of moral, social, and political problems. It is excellently written; it is clear from it that Brooke (who was for a time actually mad) did not belie the connection of great wits with madness. But it is, perhaps, most valuable as an evidence of the unconquerable set of the time towards novel.

Of this, however, as of some other points, we have greater evidence still in the shape of two books, each of them, as nothing else yet mentioned in this chapter can claim to be, a permanent and capital contribution to English literature--Johnson's Rasselas (1759) and Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield (1766).

It is not from the present writer that any one need look for an attempt to belittle Johnson: and there is no doubt (for the Lives of the Poets is but a bundle of essays) that Rasselas is Johnson's greatest book . But there may be, in some minds, as little doubt that attempts to defend it from the charge of not being a novel are only instances of that not wholly unamiable frenzy of eagerness to "say not ditto to Mr. Burke" which is characteristic of clever undergraduates, and of periods which are not quite of the greatest in literature. Rasselas is simply an extended and glorified moral apologue--an enlarged "Vision of Mirza." It has no real story; it has no real characters; its dialogue is "talking book;" it indulges in some but not much description. It is in fact a prose Vanity of Human Wishes , admirably if somewhat stiffly arranged in form, and as true to life as life itself. You will have difficulty in finding a wiser book anywhere; but although it is quite true that a novel need not be foolish, wisdom is certainly not its determining
differentia . Yet for our purposes Rasselas is almost as valuable as
Tom Jones itself: because it shows how imperative and wide-ranging was the struggle towards production of this kind in prose. The book is really--to adapt the quaint title of one of the preceding century-- Johnson al Mondo : and at this time, when Johnson wanted to communicate his thoughts to the world in a popular form, we see that he chose the novel.

The lesson is not so glaringly obvious in the Vicar of Wakefield , because this is a novel, and a very delightful one. The only point of direct contact with Rasselas is the knowledge of human nature, though in the one book this takes the form of melancholy aphorism and apophthegm, in the other that of felicitous trait and dialogue-utterance. There is plenty of story, though this has not been arranged so as to hit the taste of the martinet in "fable;" the book has endless character; the descriptions are Hogarth with less of peuple about them; the dialogue is unsurpassable. Yet Goldsmith, untiring hack of genius as he was, wrote no other novel; evidently felt no particular call or predilection for the style; would have been dramatist, poet, essayist with greater satisfaction to himself, though scarcely (satisfactory as he is in all these respects) to us. That he tried it at all can hardly be set down to anything else than the fact that the style was popular: and his choice is one of the highest possible testimonies to the popularity of the style. Incidentally, of course, the Vicar has more for us than this, because it indicates, as vividly as any of the work of the great Four themselves, how high and various the capacities of the novel are--how in fact it can almost completely compete with and, for a time, vanquish the drama on its own ground. Much of it, of course--the "Fudge!"