CHAPTER VI.

The Novelists.

I. Characteristic of the English novel-How it differs from others. II. De Foe-His life-Energy, devotion, his part in politics-Spirit-Difference of old and modern realists - Works - Career Aim-Robinson Crusoe-How this character is English-Inner enthusiasm-Obstinate will-Patience in work-Methodical common sense-Religious emotions -Final piety.

III. Circumstances which gave rise to the novels of the eighteenth century—All these novels are moral fictions and studies of character-Connexion of the essay and the novel-Two principal notions in morality-How they produce two kinds of novels.

IV. Richardson-Condition and character-Connexion of his perspicacity and his rigour Talent, minuteness, combinations - Pamela - Her mood -Principles-The English wife-Clarissa Harlowe The Harlowe family -Despotic and unsociable characteristics in England - Clarissa — Her energy, coolness, logic-Her pedantry and scruples-Sir Charles Grandison-Incongruities of automatic and edifying heroes-Richardson as a preacher-Prolixity, prudery, emphasis.

V. Fielding-Mood, character, and life-Joseph Andrews His conception of nature-Tom Jones-Character of the squire-Fielding's heroesAmelia-Faults in her conception.

VI. Smollett-Roderick Random-Peregrine Pickle-Comparison of Smollett and Lesage Conception of lifeHarshness of his heroes-Coarseness of his pictures-Standing out of his characters-Humphrey Clinker. VII. Sterne-Excessive study of human particularities - Sterne's characterEccentricity Sensibility-Obscenity-Why he depicts the diseases and degeneracies of humanity.

VIII. Goldsmith-—Purification of the novel-Picture of citizen life, upright happiness, Protestant virtue The Vicar of Wakefield-The English clergy

man.

IX. Samuel Johnson-His authority-Person-Manners-Life-Doctrines — Opinion of Voltaire and Rousseau-Style-Works-Hogarth-Moral and realistic painting-Contrast of English temperament and morality-How morality has disciplined temperament.

A

I.

MIDST these finished and perfect writings a new kind makes its appearance, appropriate to the public tendencies and circumstances, the anti-romantic novel, the work and the reading of positive minds, observers and moralists, destined not to exalt and amuse the

imagination, like the novels of Spain and the middle ages, not to reproduce or embellish conversation, like the novels of France and the seventeenth century, but to depict real life, to describe characters, to suggest plans of conduct, and judge motives of action. It was a strange apparition, and like the voice of a people buried underground, when, amidst the splendid corruption of high life, this severe emanation of the middle class welled up, and when the obscenities of Mrs. Aphra Behn, still the diversion of ladies of fashion, were found on the same table with De Foe's Robinson Crusoe.

II.

De Foe, a dissenter, a pamphleteer, a journalist, a novel-writer, successively a hosier, a tile-maker, an accountant, was one of those indefatigable labourers and obstinate combatants, who, ill-treated, calumniated, imprisoned, succeeded by their uprightness, common sense, and energy, in gaining England over to their side. At twentythree, having taken arms for Monmouth, he was fortunate in not being hung or transported. Seven years later he was ruined, and obliged to hide. In 1702, for a pamphlet misunderstood, he was condemned to ? pay a fine, was set in the pillory, had his ears cut off, was imprisoned two years in Newgate, and only the charity of Godolphin prevented his wife and six children from dying of hunger. Being released and sent as a commissioner to Scotland, to treat about the union of the two countries, he had a narrow escape of being stoned. Another pamphlet, again misconceived, sent him to prison, compelled him to pay a fine of eight hundred pounds, and only just in time he received the queen's pardon. He was caricatured, robbed, and slandered. He was obliged to protest against the plagiarists who borrowed and altered his works for their benefit; against the neglect of the Whigs, who did not find him tractable enough; against the animosity of the Tories, who saw in him the chief champion of the Whigs. In the midst of his self-defence he was struck with apoplexy, and continued to defend himself from his bed. Yet he lived, but with great difficulty; poor and burdened with a family, he turned, at fifty-five, to fiction, and wrote successively Moll Flanders, Captain Singleton, Duncan Campbell, Colonel Jack, the History of the Great Plague in London, etc. This vein exhausted, he diverged and tried another-the Complete English Tradesman, a Tour through Great Britain. Death comes on; poverty remains. In vain had he written in prose, in verse, on all subjects, political and religious, accidental or moral, satires and novels, histories and poems, travels and pamphlets, commercial essays and statistical information, in all two hundred and ten works, not of verbiage, but of arguments, documents, and facts, crowded and piled one upon another with such prodigality, that the memory, thought, and application of one man seem too small for such a labour; he died penniless, in debt. However we regard his life, we see only prolonged efforts and persecutions. Joy seems to be

wanting; the idea of the beautiful never enters. When he comes to fiction, it is like a Presbyterian and a plebeian, with low subjects and moral aims, to treat of the adventures and reform the conduct of thieves and prostitutes, workmen and sailors. His whole delight was to think that he had a service to perform, and that he was performing it:

'He that opposes his own judgment against the current of the times ought to be backed with unanswerable truth; and he that has truth on his side, is a fool as well as a coward, if he is afraid to own it, because of the multitude of other men's opinions. 'Tis hard for a man to say, all the world is mistaken, but himself. But if it be so, who can help it?'

De Foe is like one of those brave, obscure, and useful soldiers who, with empty belly and burdened shoulders, go through their duties with their feet in the mud, pocket blows, receive day by day the fire of the enemy, and sometimes that of their friends into the bargain, and die sergeants, happy if it has been their lot to get hold of the legion of honour.

He had the kind of mind suitable to such a hard service, solid, exact, entirely destitute of refinement, enthusiasm, pleasantness. His imagination was that of a man of business, not of an artist, crammed and, as it were, jammed down with facts. He tells them as they come to him, without arrangement or style, like a conversation, without dreaming of producing an effect or composing a phrase, employing technical terms and vulgar forms, repeating himself at need, using the same thing two or three times, not seeming to suspect that there are methods of amusing, touching, engrossing, or pleasing, with no desire but to pour out on paper the fulness of the information with which he is charged. Even in fiction his information is as precise as in history. He gives dates, year, month, and day; notes the wind, north-east, south-west, north-west; he writes a log-book, an invoice, attorneys' and shopkeepers' bills, the number of moidores, interest, specie payments, payments in kind, cost and sale prices, the share of the king, of religious houses, partners, brokers, net totals, statistics, the geography and hydrography of the island, so that the reader is tempted to take an atlas and draw for himself a little map of the place, to enter into all the details of the history as clearly and fully as the author. It seems as though he had performed all Crusoe's labours, so exactly does he describe them, with numbers, quantities, dimensions, like a carpenter, potter, or an old tar. Never was such a sense of the real before or since. Our realists of to-day, painters, anatomists, decidedly men of business, are very far from this naturalness; art and calculation crop out amidst their too minute descriptions. De Foe creates illusion; for it is not the eye which deceives us, but the

1 See his dull poems, amongst others Jure Divino, a poem in twelve books, in defence of every man's birthright by nature.

mind, and that literally: his account of the great plague has more than once passed for true; and Lord Chatham took his Memoirs of a Cavalier for authentic. This was his aim. In the preface to the old edition of Robinson Crusoe it is said:

'The story is told . . . to the instruction of others by this example, and to justify and honour the wisdom of Providence. The editor believes the thing to be a just history of facts; neither is there any appearance of fiction in it.'

All his talents lie in this, and thus even his imperfections aid him; his lack of art becomes a profound art; his negligence, repetitions, prolixity, contribute to the illusion: we cannot imagine that such and such a detail, so minute, so dull, is invented; an inventor would have suppressed it; it is too tedious to have been put in on purpose: art chooses, embellishes, interests; art, therefore, cannot have piled up this heap of dull and vulgar accidents; it is the truth.

Read, for instance, A True Relation of the Apparition of one Mrs. Veal, the next Day after her Death, to one Mrs Bargrave, at Canterbury, the 8th of September 1705; which Apparition recommends the perusal of Drelincourt's Book of Consolation against the Fear of Death.1 The ancient threepenny little books, read by old needlewomen, are not more monotonous. There is such an array of circumstantial and guaranteed details, such a file of witnesses quoted, referred to, registered, compared, such a perfect appearance of tradesman-like honesty, coarse, vulgar common sense, that one would take the author for an honest retired hosier, with too little brains to invent a story; no writer careful of his reputation would have composed such nonsense. In fact, it was not his reputation that De Foe cared for; he had other motives in his head; we literary men of the present time cannot guess them, being literary men only. In short, he wanted to sell a pious book of Drelincourt, which would not sell of itself, and in addition, to confirm people in their belief by advocating the appearance of ghosts. It was the grand proof then brought to bear on sceptics. Grave Dr. Johnson himself tried to see a ghost, and no event of that time was more appropriate to the belief of the middle class. Here, as elsewhere, De Foe, like Swift, is a man of action; effect, not noise touches him; he composed Robinson Crusoe to warn the impious, as Swift wrote the life of the last man hung to inspire thieves with terror. In this positive and religious age, amidst these political and puritan citizens, practice is of such importance as to reduce art to the condition of its tool.

Never was art the tool of a more moral or more English work. Crusoe is quite one of his race, and might instruct it in the present day. He has that force of will, inner enthusiasm, dull ferment of a violent examination which formerly produced the sea-kings, and now produces emigrants and squatters. The misfortunes of his two brothers, the

1 Compare Edgar Poe's Case of M. Waldemar. The American is a suffering artist; De Foe a sensible citizen.

tears of his relatives, the advice of his friends, the remonstrances of his reason, the remorse of his conscience, are all unable to restrain him: there was 'a something fatal in his nature;' he had conceived the idea, he must go to sea. To no purpose is he seized with repentance during the first storm; he drowns in punch these 'fits' of conscience. To no purpose is he warned by shipwreck and a narrow escape from death; he is hardened, and grows obstinate. To no purpose captivity among the Moors and the possession of a fruitful plantation invite repose; the indomitable instinct returns; he was born to be his own destroyer, and embarks again. The ship goes down; he is cast alone on a desert island; then his native energy found its vent and its employment; like his descendants, the pioneers of Australia and America, he must re-create and re-master one by one the inventions and acquisitions of human industry; one by one he does so. Nothing represses his effort; neither possession nor weariness:

'I had the biggest magazine of all kinds now that ever was laid up, I believe, for one man; but I was not satisfied still; for, while the ship sat upright in that posture, I thought I ought to get everything out of her that I could. . . . I got most of the pieces of cable ashore, and some of the iron, though with infinite labour; for I was fain to dip for it into the water; a work which fatigued me very much. . . . I believe, verily, had the calm weather held, I should have brought away the whole ship, piece by piece.'1

In his eyes, work is natural. When, in order to barricade himself, he goes to cut the piles in the woods, and drives them into the earth, which cost a great deal of time and labour,' he

says:

'A very laborious and tedious work. But what need I have been concerned at the tediousness of any thing I had to do, seeing I had time enough to do it in? . . . My time or labour was little worth, and so it was as well employed one way as another. '2

Application and fatigue of head and arms give occupation to his superfluous activity and force; the mill must find grist to grind, without which, turning round empty, it would consume itself. He works, therefore, all day and night, at once carpenter, oarsinan, porter, hunter, tiller of the ground, potter, tailor, milkman, basketmaker, grinder, baker, invincible in difficulties, disappointments, expenditure of time and toil. Having but a hatchet and an adze, it took him forty-two days to make a board. He occupied two months in making his first two jars; five months in making his first boat; then, by dint of hard labour,' he levelled the ground from his timber-yard to the sea, tried to bring the sea up to his boat, and began to dig a canal; then, reckoning that he would require ten or twelve years to finish the task, he builds another boat at another place, with another canal half a mile long, four feet deep, six wide. He spends two years over it:

1 De Foe's Works, 20 vols., 1819-21. The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, i. ch. iv. 65.

2 Ibid. 76.