Collected Essays (10 page)

The man Sterne is unbearable, even the emotions he displayed with such amazing mastery were cheap emotions. Dryden is dead: the great days are over: Cavaliers and Roundheads have become Whigs and Tories: Cumberland has slaughtered the Stuart hopes at Culloden: the whole age cannot produce a respectable passion. So anyone must feel to whom the change, say, from the essays of Bacon and his true descendant Cowley to the essays of Lamb is a change for the worse in human dignity: a change from ‘Revenge is a kind of wild justice’ or ‘It was the Funeral day of the late man who made himself to be called Protector’ to ‘I have no ear – Mistake me not, reader – nor imagine that I am by nature destitute of those exterior twin appendages or hanging ornaments . . .’ or to the latest little weekly essay on ‘Rising Early’ or on ‘Losing a Collar Stud’. The personal emotion, personal sensibility, the whim, in Sterne’s day crept into our literature. It is impossible not to feel a faint disgust at this man, officially a man of God, who in the
Sentimental Journey
found in his own tearful, reaction to the mad girl of Moulines the satisfactory conclusion: ‘I am positive I have a soul; nor can all the books with which materialists have pester’d the world ever convince me of the contrary.’

It is a little galling to find the conceit of such a man justified. However much we hate the man, or hate rather his coy whimsical defences, he is more ‘readable’ than Fielding by virtue of that most musical style, the day-dream conversation of a man with a stutter in a world of his imagination where tongue and teeth have no problems to overcome, where no syllables are harsh, where mind speaks softly to mind with infinite subtlety of tone.

The various accidents which befell a very worthy couple, after their uniting in the state of matrimony, will be the subject of the following history. The distresses which they waded through were some of them so exquisite, and the incidents which produced them so extraordinary that they seem to require not only the utmost malice, but the utmost invention which superstition hath ever attributed to Fortune.

So Fielding begins his most mature – if not his greatest – novel. How this book, one wants to protest, should appeal to the craftsman: the
tour de force
with which for half the long novel he unfolds the story of Booth and Amelia without abandoning the absolute unity of his scene, the prison where Booth is confined. It is quite as remarkable as the designed confusion of
Tristram Shandy
, but there is no answer to a reader who replies: ‘I read to be entertained and how heavily this style of Fielding’s weighs beside Sterne’s impudent opening. “I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me . . .”’

No, one must surrender to Sterne most of the graces. What Fielding possessed, and Sterne did not, was something quite as new to the novel as Sterne’s lightness and sensibility, moral seriousness. He was not a poet – and Sterne was at any rate a minor one – but this moral seriousness enabled him to construct a form which would later satisfy the requirements of major poets as Defoe’s plain narrative could not. When we admire Tom Jones as being the first portrait of ‘a whole man’ (a description which perhaps fits only Bloom in later fiction), it is Fielding’s seriousness to which we are paying tribute, his power of discriminating between immorality and vice. He had no high opinion of human nature: the small sensualities of Tom Jones, the incorrigible propensities of Booth, his own direct statement, when he heard his poor dying body, ugly with the dropsy, mocked by the watermen at Rotherhithe (‘it was a lively picture of that cruelty and inhumanity in the nature of men which I have often contemplated with concern, and which leads the mind into a train of very uncomfortable and melancholy thoughts’), prove it no more certainly than his quite incredible pictures of virtue, the rectitude of Mr Allworthy, the heroic nature of the patient Amelia. Experience had supplied him with many a Booth and Tom Jones (indeed someone of the latter name appeared before him at Bow Street), but for examples of virtue he had to call on his imagination, and one cannot agree with Saintsbury who remarked quaintly and uncritically of his heroines: ‘There is no more touching portrait in the whole of fiction than this heroic and immortal one of feminine goodness and forbearance.’

It is impossible to use these immoderate terms of Fielding without absurdity: to compare the kept woman, Miss Mathews, in
Amelia
, as Dobson did, with a character of Balzac’s. He belonged to the wrong century for this kind of greatness. His heroic characters are derived from Dryden – unsuccessfully (the relation between Amelia and a character like Almeyda is obvious). But what puts us so supremely in his debt is this: that he had gathered up in his novels the two divided strands of Restoration fiction: he had combined on his own lower level the flippant prose fictions of the dramatists and the heroic drama of the poets.

On the lower, the unreligious level. His virtues are natural virtues, his despair a natural despair, endured with as much courage as Dryden’s but without the supernatural reason.

So Dryden, and here more lovably perhaps, with purely natural virtue, Fielding faces death – death in the shape of a last hard piece of work for public order, undertaken in his final sickness with intention of winning from the government some pension for his wife and children: ‘And though I disclaim all pretence to that Spartan or Roman patriotism which loved the public so well that it was always ready to become a voluntary sacrifice to the public good I do solemnly declare I have that love for my family.’

He hated iniquity and he certainly died in exile: his books do represent a moral struggle, but they completely lack the sense of supernatural evil or supernatural good. Mr Eliot has suggested that ‘with the disappearance of the idea of Original Sin, with the disappearance of the idea of intense moral struggle the human beings presented to us both in poetry and in prose fiction . . . tend to become less and less real’, and it is the intensity of the struggle which is lacking in Fielding. Evil is always a purely sexual matter: the struggle seems invariably to take the form of whether or not the ‘noble lord’ or colonel James will succeed in raping or seducing Amelia, and the characters in this superficial struggle, carried out with quite as much ingenuity as Uncle Toby employed on his fortifications, do tend to become less and less real. How can one take seriously Mrs Heartfree’s five escapes from ravishment in twenty pages? One can only say in favour of this conception that it is at least expressed with more dignity than in the
Sentimental Journey
where Sterne himself has stolen the part of Pamela, of Amelia, and Mrs Heartfree, and asks us to be breathlessly concerned for
his
virtue (The foot of the bed was within a yard and a half of the place where we were standing – I had still hold of her hands – and how it happened I can give no account, but I neither ask’d her – nor drew her – nor did I think of the bed –’). But the moral life in Fielding is apt to resemble one of those pictorial games of Snakes and Ladders. If the player’s counter should happen to fall on a Masquerade or a ticket to Vauxhall Gardens, down it slides by way of the longest snake.

It would be ungrateful to end on this carping note. There had been picaresque novels before Fielding – from the days of Nashe to the days of Defoe – but the picaresque had not before in English been raised to an art, given the form, the arrangement, which separates art from mere realistic reporting however vivid. Fielding lifted life out of its setting and arranged it for the delight of all who love symmetry. He can afford to leave Sterne his graceful play with the emotions, his amusing little indecencies: the man who created Partridge had a distant kinship to the creator of Falstaff. ‘Nothing’, Jones remarks, ‘can be more likely to happen than death to men who go into battle. Perhaps we shall both fall in it – and what then?’ ‘What then?’ replied Partridge; ‘why then there is an end of us, is there not? When I am gone, all is over with me. What matters the cause to me, or who gets the victory, if I am killed? I shall never enjoy any advantage from it. What are all the ringing of bells, and bonfires, to one that is six foot under ground? there will be an end of poor Partridge.’

Fielding had tried to make the novel poetic, even though he himself had not the poetic mind, only a fair, a generous and a courageous mind, and the conventions which he established for the novel enabled it in a more passionate age to become a poetic art, to fill the gap in literature left when Dryden died and the seventeenth century was over. He was the best product of his age, the post-revolutionary age when politics for the first time ceased to represent any deep issues and religion excited only the shallowest feeling. His material was underpaid officers, highwaymen, debtors, noblemen who had nothing better to do than pursue sexual adventures, clergymen like Parson Adams whose virtues are as much pagan as Christian. ‘At the moment when one writes,’ to quote Mr Eliot again, ‘one is what one is, and the damage of a lifetime . . . cannot be repaired at the moment of composition.’ We should not complain; rather we should be amazed at what so unpoetic a mind accomplished in such an age.

1937

SERVANTS OF THE NOVEL

R
OBERT BAGE,
Edward Bancroft, Elizabeth Blower – like the names on country tombs they are deeply forgotten, but now a new scroll has been beautifully cut for them. They deserve their new memorial, for they held the fort. When Richardson, Smollett, Fielding, and Sterne were dead, these kept their public ready for Jane Austen and Scott. Without a novel-reading public. Scott would have remained an inferior poet, and even the self-sufficient and solitary genius of Jane Austen owed a debt to the innumerable female novelists of this dead period, who persuaded the critics that it was respectable for a woman to write.

‘There was, in the period that followed the masterpieces of the four great novelists, a real conviction that the novel was played out.’ Miss Tompkins
*1
might be referring to the 1930s as easily as to the 1770s. We, too, have our four great dead, Hardy and Lawrence, James and Conrad, and Miss Tompkins’s sketch of the novel market bears many resembblances to the noisier modern trade. In the 1770s new editions were faked, being announced long before the first had been sold, a method of advertisement with a familiar ring. To give them a longer life books were post-dated (a custom adopted today by women’s magazines); reviewers complained of the flood of novels and were abused in their turn for high-handedness; there were schoolboy novelists; and women, always women, writing with ‘a dry intolerance of phrase’, ‘an irritated fastidiousness’.

‘Dead books’, Miss Tompkins remarks in her preface ‘can provide little information when exposed on the gibbet of scorn.’ It would have been too easy to guy the novel of sensibility with its voluptuous enjoyment of charity or the Gothic romance; it is far more valuable to discover the aim of the author. The popular writer of today will be fortunate if in a hundred and fifty years he is disinterred by a critic so sensitive to shades of intention, who responds so quickly to the faintest sign of originality, cutting away from the dead the quick wood, the ‘real things seen and heard, dresses and street-cries and smoking puddings and the talk of the servants’ hall’; who is alive in Charles Jenner to the first lyric quickening of prose when a character tells how, as a boy of nineteen, he was drowsing all night in a dark stage coach and at last opened the wooden shutter to see if it was light: ‘I had better have left it alone; it was light; and by that light I saw over against me a face, which several years’ experience of its deceit has hardly been able to reconcile me to consigning to oblivion.’

There are passages in Miss Tompkins’s chapter on ‘Theory and Technique’ which should modify the criticism of the novel. She is discussing the accepted view that the novel of her period suffered from laxity of structure.

It is abundantly clear that careful articulation of plot and due regard for proportion, even in a simple story, were not among the principles of composition current in the ‘seventies and ‘eighties. But principles of composition there must have been; and we shall appreciate them more easily if, remembering the
Sentimental Journey
and the
Man of Feeling
, we discard the term structure, with its architectural suggestions, and think of these books rather in terms of colour. What their authors aimed at – at least the best of them – was delicacy and variety of emotional hue. The novel was to be a sort of artificial rainbow, woven of tears and glinting sunshine, but allowing, at times, of more violent contrasts.

This was the excuse for the episode unconnected with the main plot and for the apparently unnecessary character.

A technical device is practised by the novelist half-consciously a long while before the critic analyses it. Henry James did not invent the ‘point of view’, but his prefaces gave the method a general importance it lacked as long as it was practised unconsciously. No novelist now can fail to take the ‘point of view’ into account. For this reason Miss Tompkins’s study of eighteenth-century technique is of far wider importance than the novelists she discusses.

1932

ROMANCE IN PIMLICO

T
HIS
entertaining volume
*2
is a by-product of the author’s reading while she was engaged on her fascinating study,
The Popular Novel in England
, and the reviewer who criticizes it can only do so on material supplied him by Dr Tompkins, for I doubt if there is any other living authority on the Bristol Milkwoman, Dr Downman, the author of
Infancy
, a poem published with the wish ‘that even in hostile America mothers might be the better for his advice’, Mary Hays, Philosophess, James White, the author of burlesque medieval romances, the Griffiths who publicized their happy marriage with the reckless confidence of modern film-stars, and, best of all to my mind, the ingenuous and disreputable author of
The Scotch Parents.
For once the reviewer is also the general reader, and as a general reader let us leave behind all nonsense about literary influences and the like and consider a
character
– John Ramble, whom we should certainly have never encountered without Dr Tompkins’s aid, and his cunning, emotional and heartless pursuit of Nell Macpherson, a milliner’s apprentice.