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

only may a new novelist arise to-morrow, but some novelist who has been writing for almost any number of years may change his style, strike the vein, and begin the exploitation of a new gold-field in novel-production.

But this does not affect the retrospect of the past. There we are on perfectly firm ground--ground which we have traversed carefully already, and which we may survey in surety now.

We have seen, then, that the prose novel--a late growth both in ancient and in modern times in all countries--was a specially late and slow-yielding one in English. Although Thoms's Early English Prose Romances is by no means an exhaustive collection, and for this reason was not specially referred to in the first chapter, it is impossible not to recognise that its three rather small volumes, of matter for the most part exceeding poor and beggarly, contrast in the most pitiful fashion with the scores and almost hundreds containing Early English Romances in verse. Malory of course brings the prose-scale down very considerably from its uncomfortably meteoric position, and some other things help: but the total of prose and verse before 1500 can be brought level by no possible sleight of weighing. Still, as we have seen, this did not matter very much: for the verse got "transprosed" sooner or later, and the romances and tales of other countries were greedily admitted ad eundem in sixteenth and seventeenth century English.

Yet the novel proper lingered: and, except in the single and eccentric masterpiece of Bunyan, the seventeenth century ended without having seen one real specimen of prose fiction that was thoroughly satisfactory. Nearly half the eighteenth had gone too, with nothing but the less isolated but still not perfect performances of Defoe, and the once more still eccentric masterpiece of Gulliver , before the novel-period really opened. It is literally not more than two long lifetimes ago--it is quite certain that there are now living hundreds, perhaps thousands, of persons born when others were still living who drew their first breaths in or before the year when Pamela made her modest, but very distinctly self-conscious, curtsey to the world. How soon it grew to a popular form of literature, and how steadily that popularity has continued and increased, there is not much need to say or to repeat. Statistical persons every year give us the hundreds of novels that appear from the presses, and the thousands of readers who take them out of, or read them in, public libraries. I do not know whether there exists anywhere a record of the total number published since 1740, but I dare say it does. I should not at all wonder if this total ran into scores of thousands: if you were to bring in short stories it would certainly do so. People have almost left off shaking their heads over the preponderant or exclusive attention to fiction in these public libraries themselves: in fact the tendency seems to be rather to make out that it is decreasing. It may be so; or it may not. But what remains certain is that there is a very large number of educated people to whom "reading" simply means reading novels; who never think of taking up a book that is not a novel; for whom the novel exhausts even the very meaning of the word "literature." We know that the romance was originally so called simply because it was the commonest book in "Romance" language. We are less unsophisticated now: but there are certainly large numbers of His Majesty's subjects by whom a novel on this principle ought to be called "an english" though it might have to share that appellation with the newspaper.

Yet, as we have seen, for this or that reason, the average novel did not come to anything like perfection for a very long time. In a single example, or set of examples, it reached something like perfection almost at once. Fielding, Scott, Miss Austen, and Thackeray are the Four Masters of the whole subject, giving the lady the same degree as the others by courtesy of letters. But in the first (as for the matter of that in the last) of the four the success was rather a matter of individual and inimitable genius than of systematic discovery of method practicable by others. Nobody, except Thackeray himself, has ever followed Fielding successfully, and that only in parts and touches; as Fielding had (unfortunately) no opportunity of following Thackeray, no one has ever followed Thackeray satisfactorily at all. Such reasons as presented themselves have been given for the fact that nearly half of the whole period passed before the two systems--of the pure novel and the novel-romance--were discovered: and even then they were not at once put to work. But the present writer would be the very first to confess that these explanations leave a great deal unexplained.

Yet whatever faults there might be in the supply there could be no doubt about the demand when it was once started. It was indeed almost entirely independent of the goodness or badness of the average supply itself. Allowing for the smaller population and the much smaller proportion of that population who were likely to--who indeed could--read, and for the inferior means of distribution, it may be doubted whether the largest sales of novels recorded in the last half century have surpassed those of the most trumpery trash of the "Minerva Press" period--the last decade of the eighteenth and the first of the nineteenth century. For the main novel-public is quite omnivorous, and almost absolutely uncritical of what it devours. The admirable though certainly fortunate Scot who "could never remember drinking bad whisky" might be echoed, if they had the wit, by not a few persons who never seem to read a bad novel, or at least to be aware that they are reading one.

At the same time, the failure of the quest for novel-recipes was compensated by an absence of that working of those recipes to death which the last century--or the last three-quarters of it--has seen. The average work of any one of a dozen nineteenth-century producers of novels by the dozen and the score, whom at this place it is not necessary to name, is probably on the whole a much better turned out thing--one better observing its own purposes, and open to less criticism in detail--than even the best of the works of the earlier division outside of Fielding. But the eighteenth-century books--faulty, only partially satisfying as they may be in comparison, say, with a well-succeeded Trollope or one of the better Blackmores--very often have a certain idiosyncrasy, a freedom from machine-work, which supplies something not altogether unlike the contrast between the furniture of the two periods. Stress and dwelling have been purposely given, to some minor books of this period, for this very reason.

But at the same time the limitations, outside the greatest, are certainly peculiar. It seems wonderful that a man like Cumberland, for instance, who had not a little literary talent, should not have been able to make Henry into a story of real interest that might hold the reader as even second-class Trollope--say a book like Orley Farm --does. We have ungraciously recognised that some of our lady novelists, who wrote by forties and by fifties, did not always sustain the interest of their novels. Miss Burney wrote four in all, and could hardly keep up the interest of hers right through the second. Above all, there is the difficulty of their failure with conversation and, in fact, with any diction proper for conversation. If Horace Walpole, a contemporary of the eighteenth-century novel from its actual start to practically its finish, could give us thousands and all but tens of thousands of phrases that want but a little of being novel-conversation ready made, why could not the other people make it for their own purposes? But we have got no answer to these questions: and probably there is none.

The way in which Scott and Miss Austen themselves simultaneously found out the secrets of the two kinds of novel is no doubt, as such ways always are, in the larger part mysterious: but to a certain extent it can be explained and analysed, independently of the direct literary genius of each. One of the greatest gifts of Scott--one with which the non-historical novelist can dispense as little as his brother the historical--was that "genius of history" with which Lord Morley--a critic not likely to be misled by sympathy in some respects at any rate--has justly credited him. For unless you have this "historic sense," as it has been more generally and perhaps better termed (though to the intense disgust of some professed historians), it is not only impossible for you to delineate scene and character at a distance from your time, but you become really disqualified for depicting your own time itself. You fail to distinguish the temporary from the permanent; you achieve perhaps a fairly faithful copy of actual manners and fashions, but you do nothing more, and as the subject dies so does the picture. Contrast Hook, say, with Thackeray, and the difference will emerge at once.

Secondly, Scott had, besides this historic sense and the relish for humanity which must accompany it, a knowledge of literature with which he has been too seldom credited to the full. When he published
Waverley he had been reading all sorts and conditions of books for some five-and-thirty years, and assimilating them if, as the pedants will have it, with a distressing inaccuracy in particulars, with a general and genial fidelity of which the pedants do not even dream and could not comprehend, or they would not be pedants. He was thus furnished with infinite stores of illustrative matter, never to overpower, but always to accompany and season, his knowledge of life. In a few instances this felicity of adoption has been recognised, but not a tenth part of it has ever been systematically put on record. The more widely and the longer a man reads, the more constantly will he find that Scott has been before him, and has "lifted" just the touch that he wanted at the time and in the place.

But perhaps a greater gift (there were still others which it would be long to perscribe--descriptive faculty, humour, pathos, half a dozen other things of the highest importance in themselves, but of less special application) was that which enabled him to discover and apply something like a universal novel language . He did this, not as Shakespeare did (and as nobody but Shakespeare, except perhaps Dante to some extent, ever has done or apparently could do), by making a really universal language which fits all times and persons because it is universal like its creator's soul. Still less did he do it by adopting the method which Spenser did consummately, but which almost everybody else has justified Ben Jonson by doing very badly:--that is to say by constructing a mosaic of his own. But his own method was nearer to this latter. For historical creations (the most important of his non-historic, Guy Mannering and the Antiquary , were so near his own time that he had no difficulty) he threw back with remarkable cunning to a period somewhat earlier, and coloured this up to the required tint by actual suggestions from contemporary, or nearly contemporary, literature, where he could get it. He has done this so consummately that perhaps the only novel of his where the language strikes us as artificial is the single one in which he actually endeavoured to be "up-to-date"-- St. Ronan's Well .

This question of "Lingo," on the other hand, was Miss Austen's weakest point: and we have seen and shall see that it continued to be a