Collected Essays (9 page)

the reason for which he didn’t reads itself back into his text as a kind of beautiful rash divination in him that he mightn’t have to. Among prose fragments it stands quite alone, with the particular grace and sanctity of mutilation worn by the marble morsels of masterwork in another art.

Unfortunately Stevenson’s reputation was not left in the hands of so cautious and subtle a critic. The early affected books of travel by canoe and donkey, the too personal letters full of ‘rot about a fellow’s behaviour’, with a slang that rings falsely on the page like an obscenity in a parson’s mouth, the immature musings on his craft (‘Fiction is to the grown man what play is to the child’), the early ethical essays of
Virginibus Puerisque
, all these were thrust into the foreground by the appearance of collected edition after collected edition: his youthful thoughts still sprinkle the commercial calendars with quotations. His comparatively uneventful life (adventurous only to the sedate Civil Service minds of Colvin and Gosse) was magnified into a saga: early indiscretions were carefully obliterated from the record, until at last his friends had their reward – that pale hollow stuffed figure in a velvet jacket with a Lang moustache, kneeling by a chair of native wood, with the pokerwork mottoes just behind the head – ’to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive’, etc., etc. Did it never occur to these industrious champions that as an adventurer, as a man of religion, as a traveller, as a friend of the ‘coloured races’ he must wither into insignificance beside that other Scotsman, with the name rather like his own but the letters reshuffled into a stronger pattern, Livingstone? If he is to survive for us today, it will not be as Tusitala or the rather absurd lover collapsing at Monterrey or the dandy of Davos, but as the tired disheartened writer of the last eight years, pegging desperately away at what he failed to recognize as his masterworks.

Miss Cooper in her short biography
*3
has followed conventionally the well-worn tracks which James noticed had been laid carefully by the hero himself. ‘Stevenson never covered his tracks,’ James wrote. ‘We follow them here, from year to year and from stage to stage, with the same charmed sense with which he has made us follow some hunted hero in the heather.’ As an interpreter of his work she is incomparably less sensitive than Miss Janet Adam Smith who has already written to my mind the best possible book on Stevenson of this length. One cannot really dismiss
The Wrong Box
as ‘
a tour de force
sometimes enlivened by a faintly ghoulish humour, but with no breath of reality in the characters’, and criticism such as this (Miss Cooper is dealing with
The Master of Ballantrae
) Has too much of the common touch even for a popular series: ‘The reader feels Henry’s unhappiness, even when he finds it difficult to care very much about Henry, who is, it must be confessed, a dull dog.’ Of
The Ebb Tide
the ignorant reader will learn only that: it is ‘a grim study of shady characters in the South Seas’.

However, here for those who want it (though insufficiently charted with dates) is the obvious trail: we can watch Stevenson scatter his scraps of paper across the clearings for his pursuers to spy. His immense correspondence was mainly written with an eye on his pursuers – he encouraged Colvin to arrange it for publication. Miss Emily Dickinson wrote with some lack of wisdom in one of her poems, ‘I like a look of agony because I know it’s true’, but we are never, before the last years, quite sure of the agony. Compare his Davos letters – ‘Here a sheer hulk lies poor Tom Bowling and aspires, yes, C.B., with tears after the past’ or doing his courageous act, ‘I am better. I begin to hope that I may, if not outlive this wolverine on my shoulder, at least carry him bravely’, with the letters of his last year (for suffering like literature has its juvenilia – men mature and graduate in suffering):

The truth is I am nearly useless at literature, and I will ask you to spare
St Ives
when it goes to you. . . . No toil has been spared over the ungrateful canvas: and it
will not
come together, and I must live, and my family. Were it not for my health, which made it impossible, I could not find it in my heart to forgive myself that I did not stick to an honest commonplace trade when I was young, which might have now supported me during these ill years. . . . It was a very little dose of inspiration, and a pretty little trick of style, long lost, improved by the most heroic industry. So far I have managed to please the journalists. But I am a fictitious article and have long known it.

A month before this he had written to his friend Baxter, admitting his life-long attempt to turn ‘Bald Conduct’ into an emotional religion and comparing with the dreariness of his own creed the new spirit of the anarchists in Europe, men who ‘commit dastardly murders very basely, die like saints, and leave beautiful letters behind ‘em . . . people whose conduct is inexplicable to me, and yet their spiritual life higher than that of most’. ‘
Si vieillesse pouvait
’, he quoted, while Colvin supplied the asterisks. He was on the eve of
Weir
: the old trim surface was cracking up: the granite was coming painfully through. It is at that point, where the spade strikes the edge of the stone, that the biographer should begin to dig.

1948

[2]

FIELDING AND STERNE

So Dryden, looking back from the turn of the century on the muddle of hopes and disappointments, revolution and counter-revolution, and revolution again. The age had been kept busily spinning, but to the poet in 1700 it seemed to have amounted to little: what Cromwell had overthrown, Charles had rebuilt: what James would have established, William had destroyed. But literature may thrive on political disturbance, if the disturbance goes deep enough and arouses a sufficiently passionate agreement or denial. One remembers Trotsky’s account of the first meeting of the Soviet after the October days of 1917: ‘Among their number were completely grey soldiers, shell-shocked as it were by the insurrection, and still hardly in control of their tongues. But they were just the ones who found the words which no orator could find. That was one of the most moving scenes of the revolution, now first feeling its power, feeling the unnumbered masses it has aroused, the colossal tasks, the pride in success, the joyful failing of the heart at the thought of the morrow which is to be more beautiful than today.’

These terms can be transposed to fit the seventeenth century as they cannot to fit the eighteenth, the century to which Fielding was born in 1707 and Sterne six years later. Bunyan, Fox, the Quakers, and Levellers, those were the grey, the shell-shocked soldiers who found the words which no official orator of the Established Church could find, and one cannot question some of the poets who welcomed the return of Charles a genuine thankfulness for a morrow which they believed was to be still more beautiful. The great figure of Dryden comprises the whole of the late seventeenth-century scene: like some infinitely subtle meteorological instrument, he was open to every wind: he registered the triumph of Cromwell, the hopes of the Restoration, the Catholicism of James, the final disillusionment. When he died, in 1700, he left the new age, the quieter, more rational age, curiously empty. Not until the romantics at the end of the century was politics again to be of importance to the creative, the recording mind, not until Newman and Hopkins orthodox religion. All that was left was the personal sensibility or the superficial social panorama, from the highwayman in the cart and the debtor in gaol to the lascivious lord at Vauxhall and the virtuous heroine bent over the admirable, unenthusiastic works of Bishop Burnet.

One cannot separate literature and life. If an age appears creatively, poetically, empty, it is fair to assume that life too had its emptiness, was carried on at a lower, less passionate level. I use the word poetry in the widest sense, in the sense that Henry James was a poet and Defoe was not. When Fielding published his first novel,
Joseph Andrews
, in 1742, Swift was on the verge of death and Pope as well, Cowper was ten years old and Blake unborn. Dramatic poetry, which had survived Dryden’s death only in such feeble hands as Addison’s and Rowe’s, was to all intents a finished form.

But fiction is one of the prime needs of human nature, and someone in that empty world had got to begin building again. One cannot in such a period expect the greatest literature: the old forms are seen to be old when the fine excitement is over, and all the best minds can do is to construct new forms in which the poetic imagination may eventually find itself a home. Something in the eighteenth century had got to take the place of dramatic poetry (perhaps it is not too fanciful to see in the innumerable translations of Homer, Virgil, Lucan a popular hunger for the lost poetic fiction), and it was Fielding who for the first time since the Elizabethan age directed the poetic imagination into prose fiction. That he began as a parodist of Richardson may indicate that he recognized the inadequacy of
Pamela
, of the epistolary novel, to satisfy the hunger of the age.

In the previous century the distinction between prose fiction and poetic fiction had been a very simple one: one might almost say that prose fiction had been pornographic fiction, in the sense that it had been confined to a more or less flippant study of sexual relations (whether you take the plays of Wycherley, the prose comedies of Dryden, the novels of Aphra Behn, the huge picaresque novel of Richard Head and Francis Kirkman, the generalization remains true almost without exception), while poetic fiction had meant heroic drama, a distinction underlined in plays like
Marriage à la Mode
which contained both poetry and prose – the heroic and the pornographic. Nowhere during the Restoration period, except perhaps in Cowley’s great comedy, does one find prose used in fiction as Webster and other Jacobean playwrights used it, as a medium of equal dignity and intensity to poetry with the rhythm of ordinary speech. It was from the traditional ideal of prose fiction that Defoe’s novels were derived:
Moll Flanders
is only a more concise
English Rogue
, and it was left to Fielding, who had not himself the poetic mind (he declared roundly: ‘I should have honoured and loved Homer more had he written a true history of his own times in humble prose’), to construct a fictional form which could attract the poetic imagination.
Tom Jones
was to prove the archetype not only of the picaresque novelists. James and Joyce owe as much to it as Dickens.

Today, when we have seen in the novels of Henry James the metaphysical poet working in the medium of prose fiction, in Lawrence’s and Conrad’s novels the romantic, we cannot easily recognize the revolutionary nature of
Tom Jones
and
Amelia.
Sterne who came later – the first volumes of
Tristram Shandy
were published five years after Fielding’s death – bears so much more the obvious marks of a revolutionary, simply because he remains, in essentials, a revolutionary still. Even today he continues magnificently to upset all our notions of what a novel’s form should be; it is his least valuable qualities which have been passed on. His sensibility founded a whole school of Bages and Bancrofts and Blowers (I cannot remember who it was who wrote: ‘Great G—d, unless I have greatly offended Thee, grant me the luxury sometimes to slip a bit of silver, though no bigger than a shilling, into the clammy-cold hand of the decayed wife of a baronet’, but it was to the author of the
Sentimental Journey
that he owed his sensibility), while his whimsicality was inherited by the essayists, by Lamb in particular. But his form no one has ever tried to imitate, for what would be the good? An imitation could do nothing but recall the original.
Tristram Shandy
exists, a lovely sterile eccentricity, the last word in literary egotism. Even the fact that Sterne was – sometimes – a poet is less important to practitioners of his art than that Fielding – sometimes – tried to be one.

Sterne, the sly, uneasy, unhappily married cleric, the son of an elderly ensign who never had the means or the influence to buy promotion, had suffered so many humiliations from the world that he had to erect defences of sentiment and of small indecencies between him and it (he admired Rabelais, but how timidly, how ‘naughtily’, his chapter on Noses reflects the author of
The Heroic Deeds of Gargantua and Pantagruel
), so that he has nothing to offer us on our side of the barrier but his genius, his genius for expressing the personal emotions of the sly, uneasy, the unhappily married. The appalling conceit of this genius, one protests, who claimed Posterity for his book without troubling himself a hang over the value of its contents: ‘for what has this book done more than the Legation of Moses, or
The Tale of a Tub
, that it may not swim down the gutter of Time along with them?’ The nearest that this shrinking sentimental man came to the ordinary run of life was Hall-Stevenson’s pornographic circle, the nearest to passion his journals to Eliza who was safely separated from him by the Indian Ocean as well as by the difference in their years. There is nothing he can tell us about anyone, we feel, but himself, and that self has been so tidied and idealized that it would be unrecognizable, one imagines, to his wife.

Compare his position in the life of his time with that of Fielding, Fielding the rake, Fielding the country gentleman, Fielding the hack dramatist, and finally Fielding the Westminster magistrate who knew all the outcast side of life, from the thief and the cut-throat to the seedy genteel and the half-pay officer in the debtor’s court, as no other man of his time. Compare the careful architecture of
Tom Jones:
the introductory essays which enable the author to put his point of view and to leave the characters to go their way untainted by the uncharacteristic moralizing of Defoe’s; the introduction of parody in the same way and for the same purpose as Joyce’s in
Ulysses
; the innumerable sub-plots which give the book the proportions of life, the personal story of Jones taking its place in the general orchestration; the movement back and forth in time as the characters meet each other and recount the past in much the same way as Conrad’s, a craftsman’s bluff by which we seem to get a glimpse of that ‘dark backward and abysm’ that challenges the ingenuity of every novelist Compare all this careful architecture with the schoolboy squibs – the blank, the blackened, and the marbled leaves, the asterisks – of
Tristram Shandy.
We cannot help but feel ungrateful when we think of the work that Fielding put into his books, the importance of his technical innovations, and realize that Sterne, who contributed nothing, can still give more pleasure because of what we call his genius, his skill at self-portraiture (even Uncle Toby is only another example of his colossal egotism: the only outside character he ever really drew – and all the time we are aware of the author preening himself at the tender insight of his admiration).