CHAPTER VIII

THE NOVELISTS

THERE is nothing offensive to the dignity of literary history in acknowledging that the most prominent piece of work effected by literature in England during the eighteenth century is the creation, for it can be styled nothing less, of the modern novel. In the seventeenth century there had been a very considerable movement in the direction of prose fiction. The pastoral romances of the Elizabethans had continued to circulate; France had set an example in the heroic stories of D'Urfé and La Calprenède, which English imitators and translators had been quick to follow, even as early as 1647. The Francion of Sorel and the Roman Bourgeois of Furetière (the latter, published in 1666, of especial interest to students of the English novel) had prepared the way for the exact opposite to the heroic romance, namely, the realistic story of everyday life. Bunyan and Richard Head, Mrs. Behn and Defoe-each had marked a stage in the development of English fiction. Two noble forerunners of the modern novel, Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver's Travels, had inflamed the curiosity and awakened the appetite of British readers; but, although there were already great satires and great romances in the language, the first quarter of the eighteenth century passed away without revealing any domestic genius in prose fiction, any master of the workings of the human heart. Meanwhile the drama had decayed. The audiences which had attended the poetic plays of the beginning and the comedies of

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close of the seventeenth century now found nothing on the boards of the theatre to satisfy their craving after intellectual excitement. The descendants of the men and women who had gone out to welcome the poetry of Shakespeare and the wit of Congreve were now rather readers than playgoers, and were most ready to enjoy an appeal to their feelings when that appeal reached them in book form. In the playhouse, they came to expect bustle and pantomine rather than literature. This decline in theatrical habits prepared a domestic audience for the novelists, and accounts for that feverish and apparently excessive anxiety with which the earliest great novels were awaited and received.

Meanwhile, the part taken by Addison and Steele in preparing for this change of taste must not be overlooked, and the direct link between Addison, as a picturesque narrative essayist, and Richardson, as the first great English novelist, is to be found in Pierre de Marivaux (1688-1763), who imitated the Spectator, and who is often assumed, though somewhat too rashly, to have suggested the tone of Pamela. Into this latter question we shall presently have need to inquire again. It is enough to point out here that when the English novel did suddenly and irresistibly make its appearance, it had little in common with the rococo and coquettish work which had immediately preceded it in France, and which at first, even to judges so penetrating as the poet Gray, was apt to seem more excellent, because more subtle and refined. The rapidity with which the novel became domiciled amongst us, and the short space of time within which the principal masterpieces of the novelists were produced, are not more remarkable than the lassitude which fell upon English fiction as soon as the first great generation had passed away. The flourishing period of the eighteenth-century novel lasted exactly twenty-five years, during which time we have to record the publication of no less than fifteen eminent works of fiction. These fifteen are naturally divided into three groups. The first contains Pamela, Joseph Andrews, David Simple, and Jonathan Wild. In these books the art is still somewhat crude, and the science of fiction incom

pletely understood. After a silence of five years we reach the second and greatest section of this central period, during which there appeared, in quick succession, Clarissa, Roderick Random, Tom Jones, Peregrine Pickle, Amelia, and Sir Charles Grandison. As though invention had been exhausted by the publication of this incomparable series of masterpieces, there followed another silence of five years, and then were issued, each on the heels of the other, Tristram Shandy, Rasselas, Chrysal, The Castle of Otranto, and The Vicar of Wakefield. Five years later still, a book born out of due time, appeared Humphrey Clinker, and then, with one or two such exceptions as Evelina and Caleb Williams, no great novel appeared again in England for forty years, until, in 1811, the new school of fiction was inaugurated by Sense and Sensibility. The English novel, therefore, in its first great development, should be considered as comprised within the dates 1740 and 1766; and it may not be uninstructive, before entering into any critical examination of the separate authors, to glance at this chronological list of the first fifteen great works of English fiction.

The novels contained in the catalogue just given, however widely they differed from one another in detail, had this in common, that they dealt with mental and moral phenomena. Before 1740 we possessed romances, tales, prose fiction of various sorts, but in none of these was essayed any careful analysis of character or any profound delineation of emotion. In Defoe, where the record of imaginary fact was carried on with so much ingenuity and knowledge, the qualities we have just mentioned are notably absent; nor can it be said that we find them in any prose-writer of fiction earlier than Richardson, except in some very slight and imperfect degree in Aphra Behn, especially in her Rousseauish novel of Oroonoko. Before, indeed, we begin to chronicle the feats of the novelists, we have to deal with the last of the old school of romance-writers, whose solitary work appeared when Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett were in the midst of their successes. This was Robert Paltock (1697?-1767?) of Clement's Inn, of whom nothing is certainly known, save that, in

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1751, he published, in two volumes, The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins, a sailor who was shipwrecked near the South Pole, and who fell in with a wonderful winged race of Glums and Gawries, one of whom, the beautiful Youwarkee, he found fainting outside his hut, and afterwards married. On taking her up, "I found she had a sort of brown chaplet, like lace, round her head, under and about which her hair was tucked up and twined; and she seemed to me to be clothed in a thin hair-coloured silk garment, which, upon trying to raise her, I found to be quite warm, and therefore hoped there was life in the body it contained."

This book is not so skilfully imagined as Robinson Crusoe, to which it owes not a little; but the strange people, winged with graundees or throbbing crimson robes of their own skin, are described with a charming fancy, and Peter Wilkins will never want admirers. It belongs, however, to the old school, and was probably written before the publication of Pamela.

The first great English novelist, Samuel Richardson (16891761), was born and bred in Derbyshire. He records of himself that when still a little boy he had two peculiarities-he loved the society of women best, and he delighted in letter-writing. Indeed, before he was eleven, he wrote a long epistle to a widow of fifty, rebuking her for unbecoming conduct. The girls of the neighbourhood soon discovered his insight into the human heart, and his skill in correspondence, and they employed the boy to write their love-letters for them. In 1706 Richardson was apprenticed to a London printer, served a diligent apprenticeship, and worked as a compositor until he rose, late in life, to be Master of the Stationers' Company. He was fifty years of age before he showed symptoms of any higher ambition than that of printing correctly Acts of Parliament and new editions of law-books. In 1739 the publishers, Rivington and Osborne, urged him to compose for them a volume of Familiar Letters, afterwards actually produced as an aid to illiterate persons in their correspondence. Richardson set about this work, gave it a moral flavour, and at last began to write what would serve as a caution to young serving

women who were exposed to temptation. At this point he recollected a story he had heard long before, of a beautiful and virtuous maid-servant who succeeded in marrying her master; and then, laying the original design aside, Richardson, working rapidly, wrote in three months his famous story of Pamela.

All Richardson's novels are written in what Mrs. Barbauld has ingeniously described as "the most natural and the least probable way of telling a story," namely, in consecutive letters. The famous heroine of his first book is a young girl, Pamela Andrews, who describes in letters to her father and mother what goes on in the house of a lady with whom she had lived as maid, and who is just dead when the story opens. The son of Pamela's late mistress, a Mr. B. (it was Fielding who wickedly enlarged the name to Booby) becomes enamoured of her charms, and takes every mean advantage of her defenceless position; but, fortunately, Pamela is not more virtuous than astute, and after various agonies, which culminate in her thinking of drowning herself in a pond, she brings her admirer to terms, and is discovered to us at last as the rapturous though still humble Mrs. B. There are all sorts of faults to be found with this crude book.

The hero is a

rascal, who comes to a good end, not because he has deserved to do so, but because his clever wife has angled for him with her beauty, and has landed him at last, like an exhausted salmon. So long as Pamela is merely innocent and frightened, she is charming, but her character ceases to be sympathetic as she grows conscious of the value of her charms, and even the lax morality of the day was shocked at the craft of her latest manœuvres. But all the world went mad with pleasure over the book. What we now regard as tedious and prolix was looked upon as so much linkèd sweetness long drawn out. The fat printer had invented a new thing, and inaugurated a fresh order of genius. For the first time, the public was invited, by a master of the movements of the heart, to be present at the dissection of that fascinating organ, and the operator could not be leisurely enough, could not be minute enough, for his breathless and enraptured audience. In France,