The English Novel, George Saintsbury [romance book recommendations .txt] 📗

transposed into novels of to-day. Idalia (1723) is of an entirely different mood and scheme. It is a pure Behnesque nouvelle , merely describing the plots and outrage which ruin the heroine ( The Unfortunate Mistress is the second title), but attempting no character-drawing (the only hint at such a thing is that Idalia, instead of being a meek and suffering victim, is said to have a violent temper), and making not the slightest effort even to complete what story there is. For the thing breaks off with a sort of " perhaps to be concluded in some next," about which we have not made up our minds. Very rarely do we find such a curious combination or succession of styles so early: but the novel, for pretty obvious reasons, seems to offer temptations to it and facilities for it.

For Idalia's above-named juniors, while not bad books to read for mere amusement, have a very particular interest for the student of the history of the novel. Taken in connection with their author's earlier work, they illustrate, for the first time, a curious phenomenon which has repeated itself often, notably in the case of Bulwer, and of a living novelist who need not be named. This is that the novel, more almost than any other kind of literature, seems to lend itself to what may be called the timeserving or "opportunism" of craftsmanship--to call out the adaptiveness and versatility of the artist. Betsy and
Jenny are so different from Idalia and her group that a critic of the idle Separatist persuasion would, were it not for troublesome certainties of fact, have no difficulty whatever in proving that they must be by different authors. We know that they were not : and we know also the reason of their dissimilarity--the fact that Pamela and her brother and their groups ont passé par là .[9] This fact is most interesting: and it shows, among other things, that Mrs. Eliza Haywood was a decidedly clever woman.

[9] The elect ladies about Richardson joined Betsy with
Amelia , and sneered at both.

At the same time the two books also show that she was not quite clever enough: and that she had not realised, as in fact hardly one of the minor novelists of this time did realise, the necessity of individualising character. Betsy is both a nice and a good girl--"thoughtless" up to specification, but no fool, perfectly "straight" though the reverse of prudish, generous, merry, lovable. But with all these good qualities she is not quite a person. Jenny is, I think, a little more of one, but still not quite--while the men and the other women are still less. Nor had Eliza mastered that practised knack of "manners-painting" which was to stand Fanny Burney, and many another after her, in the stead of actual character-creation. Her situations are often very lively, if not exactly decorous; and they sometimes have a real dramatic verisimilitude, for instance, the quarrel and reconciliation of the Lord and the Lady in Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy ; but the higher verisimilitude of prose fiction they lack. Neither again (though Smollett had given her a lead here) had she attained that power of setting and furnishing a scene which is so powerful a weapon in the novelist's armoury. Yet she had learnt much: and her later work would have been almost a wonder in her own earlier time.

She had even been preceded in the new line by one, and closely followed by another writer of her own sex, both of unblemished reputation, and perhaps her superiors in intellectual quality and accomplishment, though they had less distinct novel-faculty. Sarah Fielding, the great novelist's sister, but herself one of Richardson's literary seraglio, had a good deal of her brother's humour, but very little of his constructive grasp of life. David Simple (1744), her best known work, the Familiar Letters connected with it (to which Henry contributed), and The Governess display both the merit and the defect--but the defect is more fatal to a novel than the merit is advantageous. Once more--if the criticism has been repeated ad nauseam the occasions of it may be warranted to be much more nauseous in themselves--one looks up for interest, and is not fed. "The Adventures" of David--whose progeny must have been rapidly enriched and ennobled if Peter Simple was his descendant--were "in search of a Friend," and he came upon nobody in the least like O'Brien. It was, in fact, too early or too late for a lady to write a thoroughly good novel. It had been possible in the days of Madeleine de Scudèry, and it became possible in the days of Frances Burney: but for some time before, in the days of Sarah Fielding, it was only possible in the ways of Afra and of Mrs. Haywood, who, without any unjust stigma on them, can hardly be said to fulfil the idea of ladyhood, as no doubt Miss Fielding did.

There is an amusing and (in its context) just passage of Thackeray's, in which he calls Charlotte Lennox, author of The Female Quixote (1752), a "figment." But it would be unlucky if any one were thereby prevented from reading this work of the lady whom Johnson admired, and for whom he made an all-night orgie of apple-pie and bay-leaves. Her book, which from its heroine is also called Arabella , is clever and not unamusing, though it errs (in accordance with the moral-critical principles of the time) by not merely satirising the "heroic" romances of the Gomberville-La Calprenède-Scudèry type, but solemnly discussing them. Arabella, the romance-bitten daughter of a marquis, is, for all her delusion, or because of it, rather a charming creature. Her lover Glanville, his Richardsonian sister, and the inevitable bad Baronet (he can hardly be called wicked, especially for a Baronet) are more commonplace: and the thing would have been better as a rather long
nouvelle than as a far from short novel. It alternately comes quite close to its original (as in the intended burning of Arabella's books) and goes entirely away from it, and neither as an imitation nor independently is it as good as Graves's Spiritual Quixote : but it is very far from contemptible.

Yet though the aptitude of women for novel-writing was thus early exemplified, it is not to be supposed that the majority of persons who felt the new influences were of that sex. By far the larger number of those who crowded to follow the Four were, like them, men.

That not exactly credit to the Tory party, Dr. John Shebbeare, has had his demerits in other ways excused to some extent on the score of
Lydia --whose surname, by the way, was "Fairchild," not unknown in later days of fiction. Even one who, if critical conscience would in any way permit it, would fain let the Tory dogs have a little the best of it, must, I fear, pronounce Lydia a very poor thing. Shebbeare, who was a journalist, had the journalist faculty of "letting everything go in"--of taking as much as he could from Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, etc., up to date (1755); and of throwing back to Afra for an interesting Indian, Canassatego. The book (like not a few other eighteenth-century novels) has very elaborate chapter headings and very short chapters, so that an immoral person can get up its matter pretty easily. A virtuous one who reads it through will have to look to his virtue for reward. The irony is factitious and forced; the sentiment unappealing; the coarseness quite destitute of Rabelaisian geniality; and the nomenclature may be sampled from "the Countess of Liberal" and "Lord Beef." I believe Shebbeare was once pilloried for his politics. If it had been for Lydia , I should not have protested.

The next book to be mentioned is an agreeable change. Why Hazlitt compared The Life of John Buncle (1756-1766) to Rabelais is a somewhat idle though perhaps not quite unanswerable question; the importance of the book itself in the history of the English novel, which has sometimes been doubted or passed over, is by no means small. Its author, Thomas Amory (1691?-1788), was growing old when he wrote it and even when he prefaced it with a kind of Introduction, the Memoirs of several Ladies (1755). It is a sort of dream-exaggeration of an autobiography; at first sight, and not at first sight only, the wildest of farragos. The author represents himself as a disinherited son who is devoted, with equal enthusiasm, to matrimony, eating and drinking as much as he can of the best things he can find, discussion of theological problems in a "Christian-deist" or Unitarian sense, "natural philosophy" in the vague eighteenth-century meaning, and rambling--chiefly in the fell district which includes the borders of Lancashire, Yorkshire, Westmoreland, "Bishopric" (Durham), and Cumberland. With this district--which even now, though seamed with roads and railways, does actually contain some of the wildest scenery of the island; which only forty years ago was much wilder; and which in Amory's time was a howling wilderness in parts--he deals in the characteristic spirit of exaggeration which perhaps, as much as anything else, suggested Rabelais to Hazlitt. From Malham Cove and Hardraw Scar, through the Wild Boar Fell district to the head of Teesdale, you can find at this moment rough and rugged scenery enough, some of which is actually recognisable when "reduced" from Amory's extravagance. But that extravagance extends the distances from furlongs to leagues; deepens the caverns from yards to furlongs; and exalts fell and scar into Alps and Andes. In the same way he has to marry eight wives (not seven as has been usually, and even by the present writer, said), who are distractingly beautiful and wonderfully wise, but who seldom live more than two years: and has a large number of children about whom he says nothing, "because he has not observed in them anything worth speaking about." The courtships are varied between abrupt embraces soon after introduction, and discussions on Hebrew, Babel, "Christian-deism," and the binomial theorem. In the most inhospitable deserts, his man or boy[10] is invariably able to produce from his wallet "ham, tongue, potted blackcock, and a pint of cyder," while in more favourable circumstances Buncle takes his ease in his inn by consuming "a pound of steak, a quart of green peas, two fine cuts of bread, a tankard of strong ale, and a pint of port" and singing cheerful love-ditties a few days after the death of an adored wife. He comes down the side of precipices by a mysterious kind of pole-jumping--half a dozen fathoms at a drop with landing-places a yard wide--like a chamois or a rollicking Rocky Mountain ram. Every now and then he finds a skeleton, with a legend of instructive tenor, in a hermitage which he annexes: and almost infallibly, at the worst point of the wilderness, there is an elegant country seat with an obliging old father and a lively heiress ready to take the place of the last removed charmer.

[10] It has been observed, and is worth observing, that the
eighteenth-century hero, even in his worst circumstances, can
seldom exist without a "follower."

Mad, however, as this sketch may sound, and certainly not quite sane as Amory may have been, there is a very great deal of method in his, and some in its, madness. The flashes of shrewdness and the blocks of pretty solid learning (Rabelaisian again) do not perhaps so much concern us: but the