Notes on Ian Watt's THE RISE OF THE NOVEL

  1: Realism and the Novel Form

The novel arises in the 18th c. because of favourable social conditions. it's a new literary genre; we must define its characteristics.

Realism. This term has come to mean "fiction that portrays low life" (from Flaubert). But the novel's realism doesn't reside in the kind of life it presents, but in the way it presents it—a scientific scrutiny of life. Epistemological value: in the 18th ce. universals have been rejected; truth comes through the senses (Locke, Descartes). But the method is more important: for the realists, the individual investigator studies the particulars of experience. Importance is given to the relation between words and reality. Descartes followed an individualist method. For the novel, individual experience is always unique, new. It can't be analyzed by referring it to the accepted models. Traditional plots are rejected for the first time (Shakespeare, Milton, the Greeks, the Romans—all considered human life basically unchangeable adn complete). Plot, character and morals are still not perfectly interpenetrated in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. Tradicional characters (universals) are also rejected (cf. Berkeley: "everything that exists is particular"). Shaftesbury still rejects particularity and the taste of the peculiar. But in Defoe and Richardson we find a particularity of descriptions of characters and environmnet. Individual identity is a matter of controversy to the philosophers of this time. Characters are given particular names and surnames, not generic or descriptive names. (Nevertheless, Richardson's and Fielding's characters still preserve msome of that tradition. But that is a secondary function already. In Amelia names are natural, assigned in a random manner.

Locke and Hume analyze personal identity, and identify it with the identity of consciousness through duration. Both ideas and characters become general by separating them from their particular circumstances of time and place.The novel uses stories set in time: past experience is the cause of present action; time scale is more minutely discriminated. Realism is associated to the slowness of virtual time (stream of consciousness carries it to an extreme). Also, a respect arises for a coherent time-scheme which didn't exist in the classics. Defoe's plots are rooted in time; in Richardson we find a date at the heading of each letter. Fielding mocks Richardson's exactitude, but uses a time-coherent scheme: the Jacobite rebellion in 1745 and the phases of the moon in Tom Jones, etc. Time and space are inseparable. Defoe is the first writer to use a definite space and objects. In Richardson provides description of interiors: settings are, like in Balzac, a pervasive force. Fielding is more conventional, but gives an exact topography. Prose must be adapted to give an air of authenticity. Up to them, rhetoric ws used to embellish in an artificial way. Locke attacks the deceitfulness of rhetoric. Defoe and Richardson are often clumsy, because they want to be real. Fielding is more orthodox and polished But his stylistic virtues bring a selectiveness of vision which is far from the uncompromising application of the realist point of view in Richardson and Defoe. Like La Fayette and Laclos, he is too stylized to be authentic. The novel works more by exhaustive presentation than by selection—more so than other genres. It is also more translatable.

The formal realism of the novel is, too, a convention, but it allows a more immediate imitation of actual experience than other literary forms. It makes less demands on the audience. Predecessors of the novel: Homer, Chaucer, Apuleius's The Golden Ass, Aucassin et Nicolette... But this aesthetic had never been followed systematically. 

2: The Reading Public and The Rise of the Novel

There is a gradual extension of the reading class. About 80,000 in the 1690s— unreliable figures perhaps? But it's still a progress. There was a very limited distribution of literacy. School for the lower classes was intermittent and limited. It was not a necessity to learn. Books were very expensive: circulating libraries appear. The middle class grows, and there are more and more women readers. They read mostly religious works: readers of fiction are a different group. Readers of periodicals, too—a miscellaneous taste, a mixture of improvement and entertainment. Booksellers achieve a strong fiinancial standing, and can influence authors, who are their employees. Richardson was commissioned by them; Johnson was promoted by them. The commercial laws favour prose and copiousness rather than verse: this helps the novel. Writers are independent and not oriented to the Court as in France: there is a lesser force of tradition.


3: Robinson Crusoe. Individualism and the Novel

The novel's concern for the individual depends on
- the society's hight valuation of the individual
- variety of belief and action among ordinary people, to make them intereseing.
In modern society there is a value of the individual apart from society or tradition. Two historical causes: the rise of modern capitalism, and the spread of Protestantism.

Capitalism. Capitalism is linked to economic specialization,  and to more democracy; it promotes freedom of choice. Social arrangements typical of capitalism are individual, not collective (as they were in the family, the guild, the church...). There is a slow rise of capitalim from the 16th to the 19th century. Shakespeare, Jonson, Dryden, etc. defend the traditional order. Now, the contrary is the case. Hobbes stresses individualism. Locke speaks of the rights of the individual. Defoe is in this line of thought; there is a link between individualism and the rise of the novel. Robinson is homo oeconomicus. All of Defoe's heroes pursue money, according to a profit-and-loss bookkeeping technique. They enter continuous contractual relationships. Traditional relationships (family, town, nation...) appear weakened. Defoe's heroes have no family, or leave them to better their situation. The argument between his parents and Crusoe is not one of filial duty or religion, but one of material advantages. Religion has an obstructive role: the contrary appears in Defoe's moral pamphlets. Xeenophobia appears only where there are no economic virtues; "with money in the pocket one is at home everywhere." The plot of Robinson Crusoe is rooted in the realities of the time; merchants, colonists... Sex is placed under strict control as a non-rational factor: there is no romantic love, and little sexual satisfaction. Matrimony is an investment. Crusoe desires a male slave. The story of Xury is significant: relationships are treated in terms of their commodity value. With Friday, Robinson establishes egocentric master-slave relations. Only when he receives mone does he feel deep feelings. His friends are those that secure his economic interests. Crusoe and Defoe are blind to aesthetic experience. The natural scenery is exploited, not admired. If he plays with his animals, he doesn't dance with them. We find Crusoe's adventure intereesting because capitalist economic specialization has deprived us from a lot of daily life experiences. We only do one thing, and enjoy others through printed matter. Crusoe experiences the Dignity of Labour: an absolute equivalence between individual effort and individual reward. Labour is varied and inspiring. This is a Calvinistic idea: labour is a religious and ethical obligation. Friday doesn't bring relaxation, but extended productivity. Defoe cofuses religious and material values: a sophistic creed. There is still a religious framework, but this will disappear in other authors.

Protestantism. Protestantism is associated to individualism. It promotes a direct contact between man and God. Protestants emphasize self-scrutiny; journals are kept, and extreme egocentricity is promoted. Defoe was a Dissenter with no fixed creed. Crusoe has Puritan tendencies: toward self examination, Bibliolatry, interpretation of natural phenomena in an egotistic way. But Crusoe is intended to be a neutral character, a man for whom we could all substitute ourselves. Democratic individualism of Defoe—no high birth for Robinson, etc. Defoe nonetheless subordinates allegory to reality (i.e. he is a novelist, while Bunyan doesn't). Religion in his work is perfunctory: there is an unconscious secularization, due to economic and social progress. Ties with the Church are loosened, resulting in individualism.

Crusoe is a Western myth: the man who can manage on his own, without any social restrictions, and usfulness as the rule, a philosophy of laissez-faire. But it is a false myth: Defoe has disregarded the social nature of all human economies and the psychological effects of solitude. Moreover Robinson has tools: he is not a primitive or a proletarian, but a capitalist. Crusoe turns his disgrace into a triumph: solitude is the prelude to the fuller realization of the individual's potentialities. Defoe is conscious of this meaning, and he even hints that it is an allegory of his own life. An ethics of resolution against bad circumstances; praise of personal alienation from society. Communication is false, only a mockery. The first novel presents us with the annihilation of the relationships of the traditional social order: new relationships have to be built up.


4. Defoe as novelist: Moll Flanders

This is Defoe's most typical novel. Moll is a product of modern individualism; her crimes are rooted in the dynamics of economic individualism, she's not a picaro. (The picaro is not interesting in himself; it is a literary convention for the presentation of satiric observations and comic episodes). The reader identifies with Moll. Indigence is shameful: we see again Economic Man, similar to Robinson. Defoe has little control over his narrative: there are unconscious blunders, and little consistency. There is no authorial conscience—this is ephemeral writing. Most novelists concentrate on a few pictures and reduce synopses of action to a minimum. Defoe does the contrary, which weakens the force of the narrative. But it gives an impression of authenticity. He writes unadorned prose, with many Anglo-Saxon words, and focusing on the primary qualities of objects (there are no colours, sound or taste)—related to the scientific and rational outlook of the eighteenth century. It is popular fiction, highly readable, and of a journalistic nature ("Mr Review", Defoe's editorial character in "The Review", is similar to Moll Flanders as a narrator.

There is formal realism, but an incoherent structure. 2 parts, with a long first part—Moll's career as a wife. The second tells her criminal activities and their consequences. Five marriages, rather rudimentary interlockings. Her criminal adventures lead to her meeting in prison a former husband; later she returns to her family in Virginia. There is a unifying mechanism, similar to "Roxana", based on relationships, both have inconclusive endings. Unity comes through the central character, as in biographies (cf. Hume on identity) —due to a desire to be realistic, or to an inability to be otherwise? According to Aristotle, history is concerned with what actually happened, and poetry with the propable or necessary. Defoe then writes pseudo-history, as a liar.

Moll Flanders is a novel of character without any psychological analysis: elections are made quickly and aptly, automatically. He assumes the heroine's character withougt describing it. But we are told contradictory things; she has hidden information, etc. Is she a loving wife? A heartless mother? Is she affectionate? She enters self-centered relationships with other characters. Moll is similar to Defoe: her feminine traits are superficial. The novel was admired by Virginia Woolf because Moll shows no unconscious feminine traits. She is, according to Defoe, a public-minded citizen who has had bad luck. She doesn't like vice for its own sake. But Moll is also unaffected by her surroundings.

A middle-class notion of gentility reigns, a restless and amoral individualism. There is an unconscious identification between the author and the character. Defoe claims that it is a moral story, that crime doees not pay, but this is unsubstantiated. Moll is not repentant—that would impair the delight the reader takes in the action, and it would also be less immediate. Didactic commentaries fail to be clearly placed at any stage of moral development. Formal realism appears here as an end, not as a means: there is no moral. Morals will later be expressed through the control of the point of view; Defoe has no such control. Claims are sometimes made that he did have it—that he is morally detached from his heroine, e.g. in the ironical preface (Virginia Woolf, Coleridge, E. M. Forster). There is often a bathetic transition from sentiment to action (money, rhum); but the irony has a dubious status, there is no consistent ironical attitude throughout the novel. Defoe cannot ironize—only impersonate (as in "The Shortest Way with the Dissenters"). Only in an ahistorical view can Moll Flanders be considered a masterpiece, by judging it by the standards of our time—which is a tribute to Defoe's vitality as a writer. His formal realism mixes many traditions (tragedy, comedy, history journalism); irony can be achieved by contrasting the attiudes peculiar to them, but Defoe doesn't know that. There is a lack of moral or formal pattern, a weakness of construction, an inattention to detail. But he has a supreme talent as a realist portrayer of episodes. Richardson will have both assets—which is why he is the real founder.

Defoe, like Marlowe, produces unconsciously autobiographic works, episodic in nature—ego vs. mundum.  As in Stendhal, individualism rules: an energetic and unwise vision of life. There is a kind of moral: an energetic stoicism, a comfortable vitality. The chance mingling of attitudes and situations is original, and will influence later novels. Defoe creates both a new subject and a new literary form to embody it.

5. Love and the Novel: Pamela

Richardson solves some of Defoe's failures: he gives the novel a plot. The traditional theme of courtship is exploited in a new way, to give his novels unity, not episodity.

I. Love as a positive value arises in Provence. Like individualism, it has its roots in Christianity (the courtship of the Virgin). However, courtly love was too conventionalied to be a novel plot. In England, a new conception of marriage arises, through puritan influence. Marriage as God-given unity, difficult for women to achieve. In Pamela we find romantic love combined with social class conflicts, and conflicts between sexual instinct and the moral code.

II. The values of courtly love and those of marriage can only be combined when there is consent, free choice. Early modern England was more liberal to women than other countries. Romantic love and matrimony are the correlative of the elementary family and the disgregation of the patriarchal system. In Defoe and Richardson, there is a tendency to the assertion of individual freedom from family ties. But women are under Roman law; they can't realize economic individualism. Roxana is a clear example. The need of a dowry was unfavourable to women.

III. There was a popular concern for these facts. The status of unmarried women declined; they come to be seen as ridiculous: the word 'spinster' appears. They had to accept badly-paid jobs or dependence: there were no convents available for high-class spinsters. Richardson advocates such convents. Bachelors appear as socially deplorable and morally dangerous (especially for Puritans). Richardson's Grandison declares: "I am for having everybody marry." Pamela symbolizes the aspirations of all women in that period, and has been followed by many (in similar conditions). The marriage ceremony goes on for 200 pages; at that time, the terms of marriage aren't still well defined. Mr. B tries to delude Pamela with a mock marriage. Puritans support this view of marriage—even if it means that they must get married in an Anglican church.

IV. Feminine reading public: a taste for fiction and moral works. Pamela has both. Richarson has feminine tastes; domestic detail is an enjoyement to women. The plot provides flattery on women, and discipline on men. The woman rises socially.

V. A clash of two attitudes on sex and marriage, represented by Richarson and Fielding.  Richardson adjusts language to the new feminine code. There is a decarnalization of the public feminine role, and a systematic bowdlerizing. (Richardson's prudery).

VI. These changes explain Pamela's unity and its combination of moral purity and impurity. A departure from Stiltrennung—a combination of high and low motives, e.g. chastity is valued by a servant-girl. The psychological and moral content is deeper than ever: barriers are not social, but psychological. Puritanism builds a bridge between flesh and spirituality, through marriage (Courtly love doesn't). But woman must wait until she is engaged to feel love—in Pamela, when she is going away. Both characters recognize themselves. The plot includes a peripety and recognition which coincide (the best for Aristotle). This is made possible because of the unprecedented disparity between social roles and feelings. This has led to contradictory interpretations—is Pamela a hypocrite? It is social circumstances that forbid openness. It is a sex-centered work; taboo is always the centre of attention and interest. The novel appears as an initiation site to the fundamental mystery of society. Pamela is a combination of sermon and strip-tease.

Chapter 7- Richardson as Novelist - Clarissa

Richardson is a conscious innovator: he hopes that Pamela will induce a new species of writing. Clarissa revolves better the problems of the unification of narrative mode, plot, characters, and morals. There are no digressions: the themes spring from the subject (Richardson says).

I. A better use of the letter form. In Pamela, there is the dange of one-sidedness, compromising the credibility of the heroine. It ends up in a journal; the editor is a clumsy device. In Clarissa the epistolary narrative carries the whole burden. It is a dramatic narrative rather than a history, Richardson claims. The formal division rests on the dichotomy of the sexual roles: Clarisa and Lovelace write to people with their own morals, in an uninhibited way. There is a relationship between the action and the narrative mode. In the first and second volumes, only Clarissa writes; then both, at last only Clarissa. The tempo varies (e.g. in the rape scene). There is a careful characterization: Lovelace did not seem a complete villain at the time. Clarissa sees that he has good sense at the bottom, and it is that which makes her fall in his power. The moral is that both parties were wrong—her parents ought'ntto have forced Mr Solmes on her, and she shouldn't have gone away. Christian morals. As in Pamela, virtue is rewarded—but in Heaven. In spite of this, Clarissa is a tragedy. Knowledge of religion is weak, and there is a sense of defeat at the end. One third of the book is taken up by the funeral. Funeral literature was fashionable at the time; even Puritans allowed rich funerals. In her death, Clarissa collaborates with God, who has marked her for his own.

II. Richardson's moralizing, like Defoe's, is unpalatable. Fielding and Sterne are satirists: we don't judge their values. But Richardson's identification with these values makes Clarissa coherent. An obsession for class distinctions. In Pamela, there is a colliding respect for nobility and a contempt for Mr B's morals. In Clarissa, both belong to a similar class: wealthy landed gentry with aristocratic connections—Clarissa's a little less aristocratic. For James, daughters are chickens brought up for the tables of other men. He is an ally of Solmes—he doesn't want Clarissa to have a a high dowry. Solmes belongs to a lower class, but he is rich, and he only wants her father's estate (which is already hers, given her by her grandfather). Lovelace appears as attractive and motivated by attraction, while Solmes is moved by money. Clarissa is alone: both family authority and economic individualism go against her. She escapes to be free, not because of love. And to Lovelace, one of the two must be a prize. He believes at first that women have no souls—at last he acknowledges hers as superior. All others, except for Clarissa, use people as means (which Kant will forbid to do). Lovelace fears her when she is in his power, because of her inner inviolability. Lovelace believes women's bashfulness to be hypocritical—a Cavalier attitude, whereas Clarissa's is puritan.

Clarissa doesn't want to marry Lovelace—an assertment of the seriousness of the code. A reformed rake will is not a good husband (compare here the plot of Pamela). Lovelace becomes convinced that she loved virtue for its own sake.

Sexual repression can lead to self-deception (as in Pamela). In Clarissa, psychological tension arises from this self-deception. She gradually discovers that she is in love with Lovalce, something which Anna Howe knew all along. Lovelace's sophistries, on the contrary, are conscious: his honour consists in telling the truth to men and lying to women. Sadism is the extreme attitude of Lovelace's position. A sadistic sexual male vs. a masochistic asexual female (the violation episode is one of extreme passivity). Clarissa has a sexual dream in which Lovelace stabs her: an equation of sex and death by Clarissa. And she knows she's not wholly blameless.

There are various perverse deviations of sexual impulse in Clarissa's funeral. Diderot hails Richardson as the first who discovered the frightening reality of unconscious life even in virtuous persons. Evil and good are mitigated; there is a denser psychological pattern. Lovelace's villainy is conscious, buth there is a stifled goodness beneath. Their attitudes are extreme; human love is impossible because Clarissa doesn't recognize the flesh nor Lovelace the spirit; he recognizes himself only through his rakery. They are star-crossed lovers: the barriers between them are psychological—the result of internalized social forces. In theory, the novel offers flat didacticism, but actually there is deep penetration and an insight into the final ambiguity of human life.



Fielding as Novelist: Tom Jones

A widely different conception of the novel in Fielding and Richardson: two outlooks on life. Johnson condemns Fielding as coarse, although he is nearer to his own neo-classicism. He was a friend of Richardson, and finds in Fielding "superficial characters of manners". It is not so much a contrast between physical description vs. psychology as a matter of sketchiness vs. detail in both aspects. Fielding has less characterization and relies heavily on a complicated plot (Coleridge speaks of the plot of Tom Jones as one of the three best plots in literature together with Oedipus and Volpone; a return to norm in Fielding). In Moll Flanders money determines the action. In Fielding it is a plot device. Birth is a determining factor (in Defoe it was money, in Richardson virtue): Fielding is a classist. Tom doesn't discuss the appropriateness of the custom that forbids him to marry Sophia. In Richardson, the individual is crucified by society; Tom Jones adapts successfully. In Richardson, character changes and proximity drive the plot; in Fielding, a kind of law over the individual. Individuals are individual manifestations of the great pattern of Nature; they are not individuals but a species [cf. Johnson's neoclassicism.] Fieldings objective is taxonomic. Also, Richardson's approach is a breach of decorum, an intentional one. But it leads to emotional artificiality—exaggerated reactions in order to show feelings. There is little psychological development in Fielding. Has Tom learned anything? We have to believe Fielding on this issue.

An Aristotelian view of character in Fielding. Actions are not the consequences of moral behaviour; personal relationships are unimportant. Neither can touch a fixed character. There is a lack of communication between characters. Sub-plots are episodes which are dramatic variations of the central theme. There is an explicit authorial control over a fictional world. Tom thinks of Sofia but goes with Molly: he is merely a puppet to desmonstrate an idea of Fielding's. The importance of plot in the novel in general is in inverse proportion to that of character. A complicated plot leads to passive agents, but happily contrived secondary characters, those not hampered by the needs of the narrative design (the protagonists sometimes do actions which are at variance with their authors' intentions).

To Johnson, Fielding makes immoral people attractive. But Fielding's morals are more Shakespearean. He broadens our moral senses: sex is accepted in the tradition of the comedy. The author as omniscient chorus; essayistic digressions, which produce a distancing effect. An ironical attitude rowards the reality of his own creation. Moral sense is conveyed mainly through the author's speech, not through action—a defect. Fielding goes far from formal realism, but gives a wider view of mankind and society. Not of the individual, though.


Realism and the Later Tradition: A Note

Sterne conciliates Richardson and Fielding, with both internal and external approaches to character: formal realism of time, place, and persons, and lifelike action. Great detail. But it is a parody, not a novel. Narration in the present of the author's mind (as in Richardson)—but it is past because of its subject. External time as in Fielding (allusions to Flanders). Contrast between literature and reality; the time of reading, life, and the time of writing. Mental life gives flexibility and accounts for durée. There is a freedom to comment, as in Fielding, but no unrealistic effect because it is autobiographic. Contrastive scenes in order to assess (artificial in Fielding) are natural in Sterne because of the stream of consciousness. Toby is benevolent as Clarissa, but there is also irony (Widow Wadman, similar to Lady Booby in Fielding). Characters are shown in detail, but they are humours. An undermining or a reconciliation of Fielding and Richardson?

Jane Austen and Fanny Burney: Similar to Grandison, emphasis on daily life). Minute presentation of everyday life, but a detached attitude. Authorial narration, not a participant narrator. But they do not produce an inauthentic effect, distancing is discreet. And the point of view is close to the subjective world. The themes too: social and moral problems of economic individuals and the middle-class quest for status. They are centered on the feminine role, marriage.



Notes from Ian Watt's book 

 The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. (Berkeley: U of California P; London: Chatto & Windus, 1957) Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963.

The Eighteenth-Century Novel (Saintsbury)

 

From George Saintsbury's A History of English Literature.
Book IX: Middle and Later Eighteenth-century Literature.  

 Ch. II, "The Eighteenth-century Novel"

Richardson - Fielding - Smollett - Sterne - Minor novelists - Walpole - Beckford - Mrs. Radcliffe - Lewis


Some reference has been made earlier to the differences, or rather the hesitations, of opinion in reference to the exact history of the English novel (1). But for general purposes these may be neglected. The early prose romance, the Euphuist innovation, major and minor, the philosophical or Utopian fantasy, the brief Elizabethan tale, the long-winded translations or imitations of the Scudéry Heroic story, the picaresque miscellany, and the like, are stages obvious as the general history unfolds itself. As to the exact position which the great names of Bunyan and of Defoe hold, difference may be agreed to with resignation. What is certain is that about the beginning of the second quarter of the eighteenth century, the period immediately succeeding the appearance of Defoe's work, there began a development of the prose novel, and that this, partly though by no means wholly owing to one group of great writers in the style, had made very great progress by the beginning of the third, about which time we find lady Mary Wortley Montagu in Italy receiving boxes full of new novels from her daughter in England.

(1) This history has been put briefly, but with much knowledge and grace, in Mr. W. A. Raleigh's The English Novel (London, 1894).

It is so difficult to mark out the precise stages by which the modern novel came into being, that the wisest critics have abstained from attempting it. We can only say that, for the nearly three generations which passed between the Restoration and the publication of Richardson's Pamela, there was an ever greater determination and concentration towards completed prose fiction; and that the use of the general form in two such different ways by two such different men as Swift and Defoe is sufficient proof how near, by the end of the second decade or so, that completed form was. But there was not much general practice of it (1). Mrs. Manley and Mrs. Haywood, women of no very good reputation, followed in the footsteps of Afra Behn, and achieved a certain popularity, but the novels of the former are thinly-veiled political libels. The earlier books of Mrs. Haywood are in seventeenth-century styles, and though she lived to do better in Betsy Thoughtless (1751) and Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy (1753), these were not published till long after the three great re-creators of the novel had shown the way. To them, therefore, we may as well turn at once. 

(1) The minor novels of the eighteenth century are not generally accessible save in the original editions. There is, indeed, one useful and rather full collection, Harrison's Novelists, but, as a whole, it is very bulky, and duplicates much that every one has on his shelves in other forms. Richardson has been sometimes, Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, and Miss Burney have been often, reprinted.

Richardson

Samuel Richardson, by a great deal the oldest, by a little the precursor in actual publication, and indirectly the inspirer of his greatest and nearest successor, was born in 1689 in Derbyshire, his father being a joiner, his mother of rather higher rank. He went to Charterhouse, and was apprenticed in 1706 to a printer, whose daugher he afterwards married. After setting up for himself he became very prosperous, had a house in Salisbury Court, Fleet Street, and another, first at North End, then at Parson's Green, was Master of the Stationers' Company in 1754, and King's Printer in 1761. A year later he died of apoplexy. He was contented for many years to print books without writing them, and he was past fifty when a commission or suggestion from two well-known London publishers, Rivington and Osborne, for a sort of Model Letter-writer (he had in his youth practised as an amateur in this art) led to the composition of Pamela, which (at least the first part of it) was published in 1740, and became very popular. Richardson had already made some acquaintance with persons of a station superior to his own, and the fame of his book enlarged this, while it also tempted him to fly higher. In 1748 he produced Clarissa, which is usually considered his masterpiece, and in 1753 Sir Charles Grandison. Except one paper in The Adventurer, he published nothing else, but left an enormous mass of correspondence. Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, gives the story of a girl of low degree who, resisting temptation, marries her master, and in the second and less good part reclaims him from irregular courses; Clarissa, that of a young lady of family and fortune, who, partly by imprudence, partly by misfortune, falls a prey to the arts of the libertine Lovelace and, resisting his offers of marriage, dies of a broken heart, to be revenged in a duel by her cousin; Sir Charles Grandison, that of a young man of still higher family and larger fortune, who is almost faultless, and constantly successful in all his endeavours, and who, after being the object of the adoration of two beautiful girls, the Italian Clementina della Porretta and the English Harriet Byron, condescends to make the latter happy. Richardson's expressed, and beyond the slightest doubt his sincere, purpose in all was, not to produce works of art, but to enforce lessons of morality. Yet posterity, while pronouncing his morals somewhat musty and even at times a little rancid, has recognised him as a great, though by no means an impeccable, artist. It is noteworthy that his popularity was as great abroad as at home—indeed, it far exceeded that which any English writer, except Scott and Byron, has obtained on the Continent during his lifetime. His adoption of the letter-form influenced novelists very powerfully, and though his style and spirit were less imitable, there is no doubt that they practically founded the novel of analysis and feeling, as distinguished from the romance of adventure.

His fault is an excessive long-windedness (Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison are by far the longest novels of great merit in English, if not in any language), an inability, which grew upon him, to construct a stroy with any diversified and constantly lively interest, an almost total lack of humour, and a teasing and meticulous  minuteness of sentimental analysis, and history of motive and mood. To those Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, a formidable critic, added, justly enough, though not so importantly from our point of view as from hers, an ignorance of the society which, in his two later novels, he endeavours to depict. His merits, on the other hand, are a faculty of vivid, though too elaborate, presentation of the outward accessories of his scenes; a real, though somewhat limp, grasp of conversation; an intense, though not very varied or extensive, mastery of pathos; and, above all, a one-sided, partial, but intimate and true, knowledge of human motive, sentiment, and even conduct, his time being considered. The proviso is necessary; and the overlooking of it (with perhaps some personal reasons) was at the bottom of Johnson's now almost incomprehensible preference of Richardson over Fielding. Richardson knew the feminine character of his time with a quite extraordinary thoroughness and accuracy, though his men are much less good; whereas Fielding knew both men and women first, eighteenth-century men and women only afterwards, and however well, in a minor degree. Nor, though Johnson had plenty of humour himself, was he likely to resent the absence of it in Richardson, as he resented the presence of a kind different from his own in Fielding.

Great, however, as are Richardson's qualities, and immense as was the impetus which his popularity and his merits combined gave to the English novel, he cannot be said to have given that novel anything like a final or universal form. The scheme of letters, though presenting to the novelist some obvious advantages and conveniences, which have secured it not merely immediate imitation but continuance even to the present day, has disadvantages as obvious, and can never rise to the merits of prose narrative from the outside (1). But it is one of not the least curiosities of literature that the attainment of the true and highest form actually resulted from an exercise in parody, which certainly, cannot be regarded as in itself a very high, and has sometimes been regarded as almost the lowest, form of literature. It is less curious, and much less unexampled, that the author of this parody was a man who had already tried, with no very distinguished success, quite different kinds of writing.

(1) In combination it can do wondrously, as in Redgauntlet.

Fielding

Henry Fielding was born at Sharpham Park, in the south of Somerset, on 22nd April 1707. His birth was higher than that of any mano of letters of all work who had preceded him. The house of Fielding claimed kindred with that of Hapsburh; it had ranked among English gentry since the twelfth century; and in the century before the novelist's birth it had been ennobled by two peerages, the earldom of Denbigh in England and that of Desmond in Ireland. Herny Fielding himself was great-grandson of the first Earl of Desmond of this creation, but was, of course, unconnected with the great Geraldines who came to an end when they rebelled against Elizabeth. His grandfather was a canon of Salisbury, his father a general in the army who had seen service under Marlborough; his mother's father was a Justice of the King's Bench, and it was at his house that the novelist was born. Nor is it to be omitted that he was a near cousin of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, whose mother was a Fielding.

But though his pedigree was thus undeniable, his immediate forebears had for two generations been younger sons, and his own patrimony was little or nothing. He was, indeed, well educated at Eton and at Leyden, but he seems to have found himself at twenty-one in London with a nominal allowance and no particular interest for any profession, though, like other young gentlemen, he was of the Inns of Court. He turned to the stage, and for not quite ten years produced a large number of plays, neither very bad nor very good, of which Tom Thumb, a burlesque "tragedy of tragedies," is perhaps the best, and certainly the only one which has kept any reputation. About 1735 he seems to have married a Miss Charlotte Craddock, who was very beautiful, very amiable, and an heiress in a small way; but whether, as legend asserts, Fielding really set up for a country gentleman on the strength of her fortune, and spent it on hounds and showy liveries, is quite uncertain. His theatrical enterprises being interfered with by some new legislation in 1737, he turned seriously to the law, was called to the Bar, and practised or at least went on circuit, while in 1739 he contributed largely to the Champion, a paper on the Spectator pattern (1). His first published, though probably not his first written novel, The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and of his Friend Mr. Abraham Adams, appeared in February 1742, when its author was almost exactly thirty-five. It was successful, and next year Fielding published three volumes of Miscellanies, the important parts of which are A Journey from this World to the Next, in the Lucianic manner which Tom Brown had made popular, and the mighty ironic story of Jonathan Wild. His wife died soon after this publication, and he married again but not for some years afterwards. He returned to periodical essay-writing (the True Patriot and the Jacobite's Journal) in '45 on the Whig side, and in 1759 he produced his third and greatest novel, Tom Jones. Meanwhile, Lyttelton had obtained for him the position of Bow Street Magistrate, as it was called, or Justice of the Peace for Westminster, an office which, though poorly paid, was of enormous importance, for its holder practically had the police of London, outside the City, in his hands. He dischrged its duties to admiration, and found time not merely to publish his last novel, Amelia, in 1751, but to conduct the Covent Garden Journal for the greater part of 1752. His health, however, was ruined, and, trying to restore it by travel, he undertook in June 1754 the voyage to Lisbon which forms the subject of his last book, issued after his death. He reached the Portuguese capital in August, but died on the 8th of October.

(1). Fielding's dramatic, periodical, and miscellanous works must be sought in their original editions, the best of which is in 4 vols. 4to (London, 1762), or in the great édition de luxe of Mr. Leslie Stephen. The present writer attempted a selection from them in the last volume of an issue of the novels, the Journey, and the Voyage, which he superintended (12 vols. London, 1893).

Fielding's first novel started as a deliberate burlesque of Pamela. Its hero is the brother of Richardson's heroine, and her trials are transferred to this Joseph. Nor did Fielding ostensibly give up his scheme throughout the book; but his genius was altogether too great to allow him to remain in the narrow and beggarly elements of parody, and after the first few Chapters, we forget all about Richardson's ideas and morals. The great character of Mr. Abraham Adams—a poor curate, extremely unworldly, but no fool, a scholar, a tall an of his hands, and a very Good Samaritan of ordinary life—is only the centre and chief of a crowd of wonderfully lifelike characters, all of whom perform their parts with a verisimilitude which had never been seen before off the stage, and very seldom there; while the new scheme of narrative gave an infinitely wider and more varied scope than the stage ever could give. Moreover, one of the instruments of this vivid presentation—an instrument the play of which not seldom sufficed in itself to make the literary result—was a very peculiar irony, almost as intense as Swift's, though less bitter, indeed hardly bitter at all, and dealing with life in a fashion which, but for being much more personal and much less poetic, is very nearly of the same kind as Shakespeare's.

In his next published book, Jonathan Wild, this irony predominates, and is more severe. The hero was a historical personage, an audacious and ingenious blend of thief and thief-taker, who had been hanged ten years earlier. Fielding's ostensible object in composing an imaginary party-history of him was to satirise the ideas of "greatness" entertained by the ordinary historian—a design showing not imitation of, but sympathy with, certain ways of thought diversely illustrated by Swift and Voltaire. But his genius, intensely creative, once more broke away from this ideal—though the ironic side of Jonathan Wild is stronger than anything else in English or any literature outside the Tale of a Tub, and so strong that the book has probably on the whole shocked, pained, or simply puzzled more readers than it has pleased. But it is really as full of live personages as Joseph Andrews itself; and if these, being drawn almost entirely from the basest originals, cannot be so agreeable as the not more true but far more sympathetic characters of the earlier-published novel, they are, as literature, equally great, and perhaps more astonishing.

It was, however, in his third and longest novel, Tom Jones, that Fielding attained a position unquestionable by anything save mere prejudice or mere crotchet. Joseph Andrews had been, at least in inception, only a parody, and Jonathan Wild mainly a satire; the former, though not destitute of plot, had had but an ordinary and sketchy one, and the latter chiefly adapted actual facts to a series of lifelike but not necessarily connected episodes. Tom Jones, on the contrary, is as artfully constructed as the most nicely proportioned drama, and, long as it is, there is hardly a character or an incident (with the exception of some avowed episodic passages, made tolerable and almost imperative by the taste of the day and the supposed example of the classical epic) which is not strictly adjusted to the attainment of the story's end. To us, perhaps, this is a less attraction than the vividness of the story itself, the extraordinarily lifelike presentation of character, and (though this is a charm less universally admitted) the piquancy of the introductory passages. In these (after a manner no doubt copied from the parabases or addresses to the audience in the chorus of the older Attic comedy, and itself serving, beyond all doubt likewise, as a model to the later asides of Thackeray — Fielding takes occasion sometimes to discuss his own characters, sometimes to deal with more general points. But the characters themselves, and the vivacity with which they are set to work, are the thing. The singular humanity of Tom Jones himself, a scapegrace even according to the ideas of his time, but a good fellow; the benevolence, not mawkish or silly, of Allworthy; the charms and generosity of Sophia; the harmless foibles of Miss Western, the aunt, and the coarse but not offensive clownishness of her brother, the Squire, with the humours of Partridge the schoolmaster, and others, have always satisfied good judges. Even among the black sheep, Lady Bellaston, shameless as she is, is a lady; and at the other end of the scale, Black George, rascal as he is, is a man. Only perhaps the villain Blifil is not exactly human, not so much by reason of his villainy, as because Fielding, for some reason, has chosen to leave him so.

There is somewhat less power and life in Amelia, though its sketches of London society in the lower and middle classes are singularly vivid, and though the character of the heroine as an amiable wife, not so much forgiving injuries as signoring their commission, has been almost idolised by some. But no other novelist of the time — and by this the novelists were numerous — could have written it.

On the whole, if we are to pronounce the novel as such present for the first time in the pages of any writer, it must be in those of Fielding rather than in those of Richardson. Johnson, in his prejudice, endeavored to set the latter above the former by comparing Fielding to a man who can only tell the time, and Richardson to one who can put together the watch. The point may be very stoutly argued; but if it be admitted, it can be turned against Johnson. For Fielding does tell the clock of nature with absolute and universal correctness, while Richardson's ingenious machinery sometimes strikes twenty-five o'clock, and constantly gives us seconds, thirds, and other troublesome details instead of putting us in possession of the useful time of day. And in fact the comparison itself will not really hold water. Fielding does not parade his mechanism as Richardson does, but his command of it is every whit as true, and in reality as delicated. He first in English (1), he thoroughly, and he in a manner unsurpassable, put humanity into fictitious working after such a fashion that the effect hitherto produced only by the dramatist and poet, the practical re-creation and presentation of life, was achieved in the larger and fuller manner possible only to the prose novelist.

(1) "In English," for, as he himself was eager to confess, Cervantes in Spanish had not merely preceded him, but had served as his model.

Smollett

The novels of Tobias George Smollett relapse in appearance and general plan upon a form — that of the "picaresque" or adventure-novel — older than that of Fielding or even of Richardson; but in reality they contributed largely to the development of the new fiction. Their author was born in 1721 at Dalquhurn, in the West of Scotland, and was a member of a good family, of which, had he lived a little longer, he would have become the head. He was born, however, the younger son of a younger son, and the harsh treatment of Roderick Random by his relations has been thought to reflect upon his own grandfather, Sir James Smollett of Bonhill, Judge of the Commissary Court of Scotland, M.P., and Commissioner for the Union. However this may be, Smollett, though well educated, had to make his own way in the world, and was apprenticed to a Glasgow surgeon. He practised at different times during his life, but his real profession was literature, by which he set out to make his fortune in London at the age of eighteen. He did not make it with a bad and boyish tragedy, The Regicide (1), but took the place of surgeon's mate on board a man-of-war in the Carthagena expedition of 1640. He does not seem to have served long, but remained for some years in the West Indies, and probably they married his wife, Anne Lascelles, a small heiress. Returning to England he tried poems and plays with no success, and then in 1748 turned to novel-writing with a great deal, as the deserved reward of Roderick Random. 

From this time onward, Smollett was a novelist by taste and genius, and a man of letters of all work by necessity. In the former capacity he wrote and published Peregrine Pickle (1751), Ferdinand, Count Fathom (1753), Sir Lancelot Greaves in 1760, and in 1771 Humprey Clinker. In the latter he edited the Critical Review, wrote a very popular and profitable History of England, gave an account, in an ill-tempered but not uninteresting book, of his Travels in France and Italy, and did a great deal of miscellaneous work, including a fierce and foul, but rather dull, political lampoon, The Adventures of an Atom. His health, between hard work and the hard living then usual, brok down early, and making a second visit to italy, he died at Leghorn in October 1771.

(1) Smollett's plays and poems are seldom reprinted with the numerous editions of his novels, but may be found in Chalmers; his History is on all the stalls; his criticism and miscellaneous works have never been, and are never likely to be collected in full. The Travels, which are worth reading, have been more than once reprinted.

Smollett's miscellaneous work, though almost always competent, and sometimes much more, need not detain us; his novels, excellent in themselves, are of the highest historical importance. It has been said that he fell back on the adventure-scheme. Plot he hardly attempted; and even, as regards incident, he probably, as Thackeray says, "did not invent much," his own varied experiences and his sharp eye for humorous character giving him abundant material. In Roderick Random he uses his naval experiences, and perhaps others, to furnish forth the picture of a young Scotchman, arrogant, unscrupulous, and not too amiable, but bold and ready enough; in Peregrine Pickle he gives that of a spendthrift scapegrace, heir to wealth; in Fathom he draws a professional chevalier d'industrie. The strange fancy which made him attempt a sort of "New Quixote" in Sir Launcelot Greaves has seldom been regarded as happy, either in inception or inresult; but in Humphrey Clinker we have the very best of all his works. It is written in the letter form, the scenes and humours of many places in England and Scotland are rendered with admirable picturesqueness, while the book has seldom been excelled for humorous character of the broad and farcical kind. Matthew Bramble, the testy hypochondriac squire who is at heart one of the best of men, and in head not one of the foolishes; his sour-visaged and greedy sister Tabitha; her maid Winifred Jenkins, who has learnt the art of grotesque misspelling from Swift's Mrs. Harris, and has improved upon the teaching; the Scotch soldier of fortune, Lismahago, — these are among the capital figures of English fiction, and in the earlier books are the Welsh surgeon's mate Morgan, Commodore Trunnion, and others.

Besides this conception of humorous if somewhat rough character, and a remarkable faculty of drawing interiors which acompanies it, and in which he perhaps even excels Fielding, Smollett made two very important contributions too the English novel. The first was the delineation of national types in which he, almost for the first time, reduced and improved the stock exaggerations of the stage to a human and artistic temper. The second, not less important, was the introduction, under proper limitations, of the professional interest. He had, though less of universality than Fielding, yet enough of it to be successful with types in which he had only observation, not experiment, to guide him, but he was naturally most fortunate with what he knew from experience, sailors and "medical gentlemen." Until his time the sailor had been drawn almost entirely from the outside in English literature. Smollett first gives him to us in his habit as he lived, and long continued to live. To these great merits must be added one or two drawbacks — a hardness and roughness of tone approaching ferocity, and not more distinguished from the somewhat epicene temper of Richardson than from the manly but kindly spirit of Fielding, and an exreme coarseness of imagery and language — a coarseness which can hardly be called immoral, but which is sometimes positively revolting.


Sterne 


One element, however, or one special conmixture of elements, remained to be added in fiction, and then (if we except such minor varieties as the terror-novel to be handled shortly) it remained with no important addition or progress until the day of Scott and Miss Austen within the present [19th] century. This was supplied, that the three kingdoms might be separately and proportionately represented, by Laurence Sterne (1), an Irishman by birth at least, and something of an Irishman in temperament.

(1) The standard edition of Sterne — novels, sermons and not quite complete letters — is in 10 vols. The work other than the novels has been often omitted in reprints; but, as in the case of Fielding, the present writer has arranged a selection from it in 2 vols (London, 1894).

 The Sternes were an East-Anglian family which, after a member became Archbishop of York in the seventeenth century, was chiefly connected with Yorkshire. Laurence was the son of Roger Sterne, a captain in the army, who was the younger son of Simons Sterne of Erlington, third son of the Archbishop, and he was born at Clonmell, where his father was quartered, in 1713, was educated at Halifax, and went thence to Jesus College, Cambridge, of which, many years before, the Archbishop had been Master. He took his degree in 1736, and orders soon afterwards, receiving the livings of Sutton and Stillington as well as minor preferment in York chapter. He married Elizabeth Lumley in 1741, and for some twenty years seems to have felt, or at any rate indulged, no literary ambition. But on New Year's Day 1760 there appeared in York and London the first volume of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent. It was immediately popular, it made its author a lion in the capital and it turned his attention definitely to literary work, society, and foreign travel. During the remaning nine years of his life he continued Tristram Shandy at intervals, issued some volumes of Sermons, travelled and resided abroad, and embodied some of the results of this travel in A Sentimental Journey. This last appeared only just before his death, after some previous escapes from long disease, on 18th March 1768.

Sterne's work — his Sermons  even to some degree, his two novels to a much greater — is the most deliberately and ostentatiously eccentric in the higher ranges of English literature; and being so, contains an element of mere trick, which inevitably impairs its value. If a man will not, and does not, produce his effects withouth such mechanical devices as continual dashes, stars, points, and stopped sentences, even blank pages, blackened pages, marbled pages, and the like, he must lay his account with the charge that he cannot produce them without such apparatus. The charge, however, is in Sterne's case unjust; for though the "clothes-philosophy" of his style is fantastically adjusted, there is a real body both of style and of matter beneath.

Tristram Shandy, the pretended history of a personage who rarely appears, is, in fact, a "rigmarole" of partly original, partly borrowed, humour, arranged in the syle which the French call fatrasie, and of which Rabelais' great books are the most familiar, though not quite the normal, type. Although Tristram himself is the shadow of a shade, Sterne manages to present the most vivid character-pictures of his father, Walter Shandy, and his Uncle Toby (the latter the author's most famous, if not his greatest, creation), together with others, not much less achieved, of Corporal Trim, Uncle Toby's servant and comrade in the Marlborough wars, Mrs. Shandy, Widow Wadman, Dr. Slop, and others. And he thus gives a real novel-substance to a book which coould otherwise hardly pretend to the title of a novel at all. The Sentimental Journey, a pretended (and no doubt partly real) autobiographic account of a journey through France to the Italian frontier, is planned on no very different general principles, and has its own medallions of character, though they are less elaborately worked and less closely grouped.

Both books depend for their literay effect on a large number of means — out-of-the-way reading, of which Sterne availed himself with a freedom which has brought upon him the charge of plagiarism; very real though occasionally exaggerated pathos; a curiosly fertile though not extremely varied fancy; and a considerable indulgence, not in coarseness of the Smollettian kind, but in indecent hint and innuendo.  But their main appeal lies in two things — a kind of humour which, though sometimes artificial and seldom reaching the massive and yet mobile humanity of Fielding, has a singular trick of grace, and a really intimate knowledge of human nature, combined and contrasted with a less natural quality, to which Frnace at the time gave the name of "Sensibility" and England that of "Sentiment." It was this last which gave Sterne his immediate popularity, though perhaps for a generation or two past that popularity has been rather endangered by it; and it is still this which gives him his most distinct place, though not his greatest value, in literary history. For it, like the prominence of a less definite kind of the same quality in Richardson, shows the reaction from the rather excessive hardness and prosaic character of the earlier decades. This reaction was not yet directed in the right way. It was still powdered and patched, deliberate, artificial, fashionable. It bore to true passion very much the same relation which the mannerism of Ossian bore to true romance, and Strawberry Hill Gothic to real Pointed architecture. It was theatrical and mawkish; it sometimes toppled over into the ludicrous, or the disgusting, or both. But it shows at worst a blind groping after something that could touch the heart as well as amuse the head. 

Minor novelists

Perhaps it was the popularity of Richardson and Fielding, as early as the first years of the fifth decade of the century, but more probably the aura or prevalent tendency of general thought, which brought about a great expansion and multiplication of the novel about 1750 (1).

(1) Most of the books mentioned from this point to the end of the chapter will be found in the above-noted collection of Harrison, or in Scott's Ballantyne novels, sometimes in both. The latter, in ten capacious but unwieldy volumes, contains all the four great novelists (including Smollett's translations), the Adventures of a Guinea, Johnson's, Walpole's, and Goldsmith's novels, Mackenzie, Bage, Mrs. Radcliffe, Gulliver's Travels, Cumberland's Henry, and Clara Reeve's Old English Baron. 

Few of the minor results of this retain much reputation even with students of the subject, and most are not over-accessible.Some of them have obtained an additional prop from the mention and criticism of Lady Mary (vide supra et infra). We have mentioned Mrs. Haywood's books. Francis Coventry's Pompey the Little (1751) was the most amusing, as Charles Johnstone's Chrysal, or The Adventures of a Guinea (1760) was the most powerful, of a kind of personal fiction whereof a memorable example survives in the Memoirs of a Lady of Quality, inserted (one regrets to say for money) by Smollett in Peregrine Pickle, and doubtless rewritten by him from the materials of the beautiful and liberal Viscountess Vane. The too notorious Dr. Dodd attempted to combine Sterne and Smollett, and succeeded in combining the most objectionable parts of each without any of their genius, in The Sisters; Dr. Hawkesworth followed Dr. Johnson with steps of his usual inequality in Almoran and Hamet (1761). But the most interesting work in fiction of the middle of the century is to be found in two books, eccentric in more senses than one. John Buncle (1750-66) and The Fool of Quality (1766-70). The first was the work, though by no means the only work, of a curious Irishman named Thomas Amory, who was born in 1691 and died in 1788, who assures us that he was intimate with Swift, and on whom it would be extremely interesting to have Swift's opinion. Amory began in 1755, with a book, not improbably composed on French models and called Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain. But this, though interesting, pales before the Life of John Buncle, Esq. The hero is an enthusiastic Unitarian, the husband of seven wives of surpassing beauty, a man of letters in a way, a man of science and distinctly marked with the madness which no doubt existed in a temperate and intangible form in his creator. The book, which is entirely sui generis, fascinated Hazlitt, and has been reprinted, but never widely read.

A much more respectable and an almost equally interesting book, though a worse novel, seeing that it attempts innumerable things which the novel cannot manage, is The Fool of Quality. The author of this, Henry Brooke, was like Amory and Irishman, was born in County Cavan in 1703, and died at Dublin in 1783. He was, also like Amory, mad, and died so. He had money, education, and abundant ability, while in his earlier manhood he was familiar with the best literary society of London. In 1735 he published a poem called Universal Bounty, which is worth notice, though it has been too highly praised; four years later a play, Gustavus Vasa. The Fool of Quality, or The Adventures of Henry, Earl of Morland, is a wholly unpractical book and a chaotic history, but admirably written full of shrewdness and wit, and of a singularly chivalrous tone. Nor must we leave out the really exquisite Peter Wilkins, of an almost unknown author, Robert Paltock, which appeared in 1751. In conception it was a sort of following of Gulliver, but Paltock has little satire and no misanthropy, and the charm of his book, which once was a boys' book, and now delights some men, depends on his ingenious wonders, and on the character of the flying girl Youwarkee, the only heroine (except Fielding's) of the eighteenth-century novel who has very distinct charm.

Walpole 

The contributions of Johnson and Goldsmith to the novel will be best mentioned with their other work. But the history, as we can give it here, of eighteenth-century fiction proper is incomplete without a notice of the curious terror-novel which, anticipated by Horace Walpole, had its special time in the last decade of the century, the work of Fanny Burney, that of Mackenzie, and some others. Walpole himself will occupy us later. The incongruity of most of his work and character with the Castle of Otranto has always attracted and puzzled critics; nor is there perhaps any better explanation than that the Castle, momentous as its example proved, was mainly an accident of that half-understood devotion to "the Gothick" which was common at the time (1764) and of which Walpole as a dilettante, if not as a sincere disciple, was one of the chief English exponents. The story is a clumsy one, and its wonders are perpetually hovering on the verge of the burlesque. But its influence, though not immediate, was exceedingly great.

Its nearest successor, the Old English Baron of Clara Reeve in 1777, imitated rather Walpole's Gothicism than its ghostliness. Nor can the extremely remarkable and almost isolated novelette of Vathek (1783) be set down to Walpolian influence thoguh it undoubtedly did exemplify certain general tendencies of the day. Its author, William Beckford, was the son of a rather prominent politician in the city of London, and inherited very great wealth. He travelled a good deal, leaving much later literary memorials of his travels; he collected books; he built two gorgeous palaces, one in England, at Fonthill in Wiltshire, and another in Portugal, at Cintra; and he in many respects was, and perhaps deliberately aimed at being, the ideal English "milord" of continental fancy—rich, eccentric, morose, generous at times, and devoted to his own whimsical will. Such a character is generally contemptible in reality, but Beckford possessed very great intellectual ability, and Vathek stands alone. Its debts to the old Oriental tale are more apparent than real, those to the fantastic satirical romance of Voltaire, though larger, do not impair its main originaly; and a singular gust is imparted to its picture of unbridled power and unlimited desire by the remembrance that the author himself was, in not such a very small way, the insatiable voluptuary he draws. The picture of the Hall of Eblis at the end has no superior in a certain slightly theatrical, but still real, kind of sombre magnificence, and the heroine Nouronihar is great.

Mrs. Radcliffe

Mrs. Radcliffe (Anne Ward)—who was born in 1764, and did not die until 1822, but who published nothing after the beginning of the nineteenth century, though some work of hers appeared posthumously—produced in the course of a few years a series of elaborate and extremely popular work, which has not retained its vitality so well as has Vathek—The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789), A Sicilian Romance (1790), The Romance of the Forest (1791), the celebrated Mysteries of Udolpho (1795), and The Italian (1797). Mrs. Radcliffe is prodigal of the mysteries which figure in the title of her most famous work, of castles and forests, of secret passages and black veils; but her great peculiarity is the constant suggestion of supernatural interferences, which conscientious scruple, or eighteenth-century rationalism, or a mere sense of art, as constantly leads her to explain by natural causes.

Lewis

Matthew Lewis, her successor, and (though he denied it) pretty certainly her imitator, had no such scruples, and in his notorious Monk and other stories and dramas simply lavished ghosts and demons. This department of the novel, unless Vathek be ranked in it, nothing of very high literary value, but its popularity was immense, and it probably did some real good by enlarging the sphere and quickening the fancy of the novelist. 

There are more than a few names of note who might be criticized if space permitted, and who must at any rate be mentioned. Henry Mackenzie (1745-1831), who followed Sterne in sentiment, though not in other ways, drew floods of tears with The Man of Feeling (1771), The Man of the World, and Julia de Roubigné; the political philosopher Godein, who will reappear, produced, besides his still famous Caleb Williams (1794), other novels, St. Leon (1799), Fleetwood, Mandeville, etc.; Holcroft the dramatist (1745-1809) gave Alwyn, Hugh Trevor,  and especially Anna St. Ives (1792); Robert Bage, a freethinking Quaker and a man of business, wrote no less than six fictions, some of them of great lenght; Mrs. Inchbald (1753-1821), a beauty, an actress, a dramatist, and a novelist, gave to her Simple Story a certain charm; Hannah More (1745-1833), who was petted by Johnson in her youth, and petted the child Macaulay in her age, wrote Cœlebs in Search of a Wife, a moral novel not untinged with social satire. The Zeluco of Dr. John Moore (1719-1802) is not insignificant. But the most important, though far from the most gifted, novelist of the latter years of the century was Frances Burney (1752-1840), the daughter of a historian of music, who was the intimate friend of Johnson and most of the men of letters of his time, a pet of the great lexicographer and of the society of the Thrales, for some time a member of the household of Queen Charlotte, and then the wife of a French refugee. From him she took the name Madame D'Arblay, by which she is more commonly known as a diarist, though almost the whole of that delightful part of her work deals with her maiden years. Miss Burney wrote in Evelina (1778) a not very well-arranged but extremely lively picture of the entrance of a young girl into society; in Cecilia (1781) a much more ambitious and regular but less fresh story of love and family pride. Her later novels, Camilla (1796) and The Wanderer (1814) were, the former, a partial, the latter a complete, failure. Her importance, however, consists in the fact  that, at any rate in youth, she had a singular knack of catching the tone and manners of ordinary and usual society, and that by transferring these to her two first books she showed a way which all novelists have followed since. Her great predecessors of the middle of the century had not quite done this. Some of the stock ingredients of the older novel are indeed thrown in for Evelina's benefit—the discovery of parentage, the bold attempts of unscrupulous lovers, etc. — but they are of no real importance in the story, which draws its entire actual interest from the faithful presentation of the most possible, probable, and ordinary events and characters.

—oOo—

Prose in the Age of Reason

(From Anthony Burgess, English Literature, Longman, 1974)

16. Prose in the Age of Reason

Despite the interesting body of verse that the eighteenth century produced, the works that have worn best and that still hold the general reader most are in prose. Defoe and Swift and Fielding hardly seem to have dated, while Pope and his followers seem artificial to modern readers, and require to be looked at through the glass of 'historical perspective'.

Beginnings of Newspapers

Daniel Defoe (1660-1731) was a journalist, and that fact itself draws him to our own time. The development of the newspaper and the periodical is an interesting literary sideline of the seventeenth century. The Civil War undoubtedly stimulated a public appetite for up-to-the minute news (such news then was vital) and the Restoration period, with its interest in men and affairs, its information services in the coffee-houses, was developing that wider interest in news—home and foreign—which is so alive today. Defoe is, in many ways, the father of the modern periodical, purveying opinion more than news, and The Review, which he founded in 1704, is the progenitor of a long line of 'well-informed' magazines. Defoe did not see himself primarily as a literary artist: he had things to say to the public, and he said them as clearly as he could, without troubling to polish and revise. There are no stylistic tricks in his writings, no airs and graces, but there is the flavour of colloquial speech, a 'no-nonsense', down-to-earth simplicity. He was—like Swift—capable of irony, however, and his Shortest Way with the Dissenters states gravely that those who do not belong to the Church of England should be hanged. (Defoe himself was a Dissenter, of course). This pamphlet was taken seriously by many, but, when the authorities discovered they had been having their legs pulled, they put Defoe into prison.


Defoe novels

The most interesting of Defoe's 'documentary' works is the Journal of the Plague Year (one gets the impression that Defoe was actually present in London during that disastrous time, seriously taking notes, but a glance at his dates shows that this was impossible). But his memory is revered still primarily for his novels, written late in life: Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, Roxana, and others. The intention of these works is that the reader should regard them as true, not as fictions, and so Defoe deliberately avoids all art, all fine writing, so that the reader should concentrate only on a series of plausible events, thinking: 'This isn't a story-book, this is autobiography.' Defoe keeps up the straight-faced pretence admirably. In Moll Flanders we seem to be reading the real life-story of a 'bad woman', written in the style appropriate to her, In Robinson Crusoe, whose appeal to the young can never die, the fascination lies in the bald statement of facts which are quite convincing—even though Defoe never had the experience of being cast away on a desert island and having to fend for himself. The magic of this novel never palls: frequently in England a musical comedy version of it holds the stage during the after-Christmas 'pantomime season'.


Other journalists

Other journalists were Richard Steele (1672-1729) and Joseph Addison (1672-1719). Steele started The Tatler, and Addison later joined him, and their writings in this periodical had a moral purpose—they attempted to improve manners, encourage tolerance in religion and politics, condemn fanaticism, and preach a kind of moderation in all things, including the literary art. Addison comes into his own in The Spectator, started in 1711, and the most valuable articles of that paper are his. His big achievement is the creation of an imaginary club, its members representing contemporary social types, and one member has become immortal—Sir Roger de Coverley. Sir Roger is the old-type Tory, rather simple-minded, throroughly good-hearted, never for long away from his country estate, full of prejudices and superstitions which are meant to make us smile, but smile sympathetically. (Addison himself, by the way, was a Whig). Against Sir Roger is set the Whig merchant, Sir Andrew Freeport, a man of less charm than Sir Roger but of far more intelligence. Addison seems to point to a middle way in politics—there is much good in the old, and one should not scoff at the outmoded ideas of the Tories, but the Whigs stand with progress and with the lies the England of the future.Sir Roger is a fine creation, worthy to rank with any of the eccentrics of eighteenth-century fiction (such as Squire Western in Tom Jones). Addison's prose-style is an admirable compromise: it has the grace and polish of the artist, the ease and flow and simplicity of the journalist. If Addison has a fault, it lies in a certain sentimentality: he likes to provoke tears, and his humour has sometimes an over-gentle whimsicality that makes us long for stronger meat.


Swift 

The greatest prose-writer of the first part—perhaps the whole—of the century is Jonathan Swift (1667-1745). A great humorist and a savage satirist, his meat is sometimes too powerful even for a healthy stomach. He is capable of pure fun—as in some of his poems—and even schoolboy jokes, but there is a core of bitterness in him which revealed itself finally as mad hatred of mankind. On his own admission, he loved Tom, Dick, and Harry, but hated the animal, Man. Yet he strove to do good for his fellow-men, especially the poor of Dublin, where he was Dean of St. Patrick's. The Drapier's Letters were a series of attacks on abuses of the currency, and the Government heeded his sharp shafts. The monopoly of minting copper money, which had been given to a man called Wood, was withdrawn, and Swift became a hero. In his Modest Proposal he ironically suggested that famine in Ireland could be eased by cannibalism, and that the starving children should be used as food. Some fools took this seriously. His greatest books are A Tale of a Tub and Gulliver's Travels.

The first of these is a satire on the two main non-conformist religions—Catholicism and Presbyterianism. Swift tells the story of three brothers their inheritance (the Chistian religion). The story is farcical and at times wildly funny, but people of his day could perhaps be forgiven if they found blasphemy in it. It certainly shocked Queen Anne so much that she would not allow Swift to be made a bishop, and this contributed to Swift's inner frustration and bitterness.  


Gulliver

Gulliver's Travels hides much of its satire so cleverly that children still read it as a fairy story. It starts off by making fun of mankind (and especially England and English politics) in a quite gentle way: Gulliver sees in Lilliput a shrunken human race, and its concerns—so important to Lilliput—become shrunken accordingly. But in the second part, in the land of the giants, where tiny Gulliver sees human deformities magnified to a feverous pitch, we have something of this mad horror of the human body which obsesses Swift. (According to Dr. Johnson, Swift washed himself excessively—'with Oriental scrupulosity'—but his terror of dirt and shame at the body's functions never disappeared.) In the fourth part of the book, where the Houyhnhnms—horses with rational souls and the highest moral instincs—are contrasted with the filthy, depraved Yahoos, who are really human beings, Swift's hatred of man reaches its climax. Nothing is more powerful or horrible than the moment when Gulliver reaches home and cannot bear the touch of his wife—her smell is the smell of a Yahoo and makes him want to vomit.

Swift is a very great literary artist, and perhaps only in the present century is his full stature being revealed. He is skilful in verse, as well as in prose, and his experience continues: James Joyce—in his The Holy Office—has written Swiftian verse; Aldous Huxley (in Ape and Essence) and George Orwell (in Animal Farm) have produced satires which are really an act of homage to Swift's genius. Yet Gulliver's Travels stands supreme: a fairy story for children, a serious work for men, it has never lost either its allure or its topicality.


Religious writing

The first part of the century is also notable for a number of philosophical and religious works which reflect the new 'rational' spirit. The Deists (powerful in France as well as in England) try to strip Christianity of its mysteries and to establish an almost Islamic conception of God—a god in whom the persons of the Christian Trinity shall have no part—and to maintain that this conception is the product of reason, not of faith. On the other hand, there were Christian writers like William Law (1686-1761) and Isaac Watts (1674-1748) who, the first in prose, the second in simple pious verse, tried successfully to stress the importance of pure faith, even of mysticism, in religion. The religious revival which was to be initiated by John Wesley (1703-91) owes a good deal to this spirit, which kept itself alive despite the temptations of 'rationalism'. Joseph Butler (1692-1752) used reason, not to advance the doctrine of Deism, but to affirm the truths of established Christianity. His Analogy of Religion is a powerfully argued book. The most important philosopher of the early part of the century is Bishop Berkely (1685-1753), whose conclusions may be stated briefly: he did not believe that matter had any real existence apart from mind. A tree exists because we see it, and if we are not there to see it, God is always there. Things ultimately exist in the mind of God, not of themselves. He was answered later by David Hume (1711-76), the Scots philosopher, who could not accept the notion of a divine system enclosing everything. He ould see little systems in the universe: he begins and ends with human nature, which links together a series of impressions, gained by the senses, by means of 'association'. We make systems according to our needs, but there is no system that really exists in an absolute sense. There is no ultimate truth, and even God is an idea that man has developed for his own needs. This is a closely argued kind of sceptical philosophy, very different from Berkeley's somewhat mystical acceptance of reality's being the content of the 'Mind of a God'.


Richardson

The novel develops, after the death of Defoe, with Samuel Richardson (1689-1761), a professional printer who took to novel-writing when he was fifty. Richardson liked to help young women with the composition of their love letters, and was asked by a publisher to write a volume of model letters for use on various occasions. He was inspired to write a novel in the form of a series of letters, a novel which should implant a moral lesson in the minds of its readers (he thought of these readers primarily as women). This novel was Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, which describes the assaults made on the honour of a virtuous housemaid by an unscrupulous young man. Pamela resists, clinging tightly to her code of honour, and her reward is, ultimately, marriage to her would-be seducer, a man who, despite his brutishness, has always secretly attracted her. It is a strange sort of reward, and a strange basis for marriage, according to our modern view, but this moral persists in cheap novelettes and magazines even today—a girl makes herself inaccessible before marriage, and the man who has tried to seduce her, weary of the lack of success, at last accepts her terms. Richardson's Clarissa is about a young lady of wealth and beauty, virtue and innocence, who, in order to avoid a marriage which her parents are trying to arrange, seeks help from Lovelace, a handsome but, again, unscrupulous young man. Lovelace seduces her. [Actually he rapes her—JAGL.] Repentant, he asks her to marry him, but she will not: instead, worn out by shame, she dies, leaving Lovelace to her remorse. This is a more remarkable novel thatn it sounds: close analysis of character, perhaps for the first time in the history of the novel, looks forward to the great French novelists, Flaubert and Stendhal, and Lovelace has a complexity of make-up hardly to be expected in the literature of the age. Sir Charles Grandison is Richardson's third novel: its hero, full of the highest virtues, wondering which woman duty should compel him to marry, is anaemic and priggish. (A hero should have something of the devil in him.) This novel is far inferior to the other two.


Fielding

The greatest novelist of the century is Henry Fielding (1707-54). He started his novel-writing career, like Richardson, almost by accident. Moved to write a parody of Pamela, he found his Joseph Andrews developing into something far bigger than a mere skit. Joseph, dismissed from service because he will not allow his employer, Lady Booby, to make love to him, takes the road to the village where his sweetheart lives, meets the tremendous Parson Adams—who then becomes virtually the hero of the book—and has many strange adventures on the road, meeting rogues, vagabonds, tricksters of all kinds, but eventually reaching his goal and happiness ever after. With Fielding one is inclined to use the term picaresque (from the Spanish pícaro, meaning 'rogue'), a term originally applicable only to novels in which the leading character is a rogue (such as the popular Gil Blas by Le Sage, published between 1715 and 1735). It is a term which lends itself to description of all novels in which the bulk of the action takes place on the road, on a journey, and in which eccentric and low-life characters appear. Don Quixote is, in some ways, picaresque; so is Priestley's The Good Companions. Fielding's Jonathan Wild is truly picaresque, with its boastful, vicious hero who extols the 'greatness' of his every act of villainy (his standards of comparison are, cynically, provided by the so-called virtuous actions of great men) until he mees his end on the gallows or 'tree of glory'. Tom Jones is Fielding's masterpiece. It has its picaresque elements—the theme of the journey occupies the greater part of the book—but it would be more accurate to describe it as a mock-epic. It has the bulk and largeness of conception we expect from an epic, and its style sometimes parodies Homer:

Hushed be every ruder breath. May the heathen ruler of the winds confine in iron chains the boisterous limbs of noisy Boreas, and the sharp-pointed nose of bitter-biting Eurus. Do thou, sweet Zephyrus, rising from thy fragant bed, mount the western sky, and lead on those delicious gales, the charms of which call forth the lovely Flora from her chamber, perfumed with pearly dews...

And so on for several hundred words, until eventually we are introduced to the charming, but not quite Homeric, Sophia Western, heroine of the novel and beloved of the quite ordinary but quite likable hero, Jones himself. The novel introduces a rich variety of characters, contains certain shrewd moral observations, and has an acceptable philosophy—liberal and tolerant, distrustful of too great enthusiasm, recognising the social conventions, but much concerned with reform of the law. (It was Fielding's liberalism which helped along the reform movements of the end of the century.) But we appreciate Tom Jones most for its boisterous humour, its good sense, and its vivid characterisation.


Smollett

Tobias Smollett (1721-71) is responsible for Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, and Humphrey Clinker. The first gives us an insight into the life of the British Navy, which Smollett knew at first hand, having served as a ship's surgeon. The vice and brutality are vividly portrayed, but the satirical tone of the whole book seems to rob it somehow of the force of an indictment—exaggeration is Smollett's technique, not the direct 'reportage' of Defoe. But we are intrended to take the novel as entertainment, not as propaganda, nad as entertainment it is superb, though strong meat. It is the first of a long line of novels about life at sea, a line which can boast distinguished names like Conrad and Herman Melville. Peregrine Pickle is a gentler tale of sailors living on land, and Humphry Clinker, which reverts to Richardson's technique of presenting the story in the form of a series of letters, is less a novel than a travel-book—an account of a journey thorugh England and Scotland made by a framily from Wales, the letters presenting strongly the distinctive personalities of the writers. What little plot there is centres on a couple of love-affairs and the discovery that Humphry Clinker—servant of the family making the tour—is really the son of Mr. Bramble, the grumpy but golden-hearted head of the family.


Sterne

Laurence Sterne (1713-68) produced a remarkable and eccentric novel in his Tristram Shandy, which breaks all the rules, even of language and punctuation, and deliberately excludes all suggestions of a plot, so that—despite the considerable length of the book—nobody gets anywhere, nothing really happens, and the hero does not succeed even in getting born until half-way through! The author deliberately hinders all movement: just when we think a story is about to develop, Sterne introduces an incredible digression—a long piece of Latin (with translation on the opposite page), a blank sheet, a page with a marbled design on it, a collection of asterisks—anything to obstruct or mystify. Yet characters emerge: the learned Mr. Shandy, the gentle old soldier Uncle toby and Trim, his corporal (these last two spend much time reconstructing the battle of Namur on a bowling-green). There are lewd jokes, patches of sentimentality—often saved, just in time, from becoming mawkish by an ironical stroke—and grotesque Rabelaisian episodes. (Sterne looks back to Rabelais and forward to James Joyce.) Sterne's Sentimental Journey is an account of travels through France and Italy, and here tears are shed freely—especially over animals, Sterne being perhaps the first of the English 'poor-dumb-beast' sentimentalists. It was through the copious shedding of tears of pity and sympathy, in writers like Sterne, the the humanitarianism which is now said to be a great characteristic of the English was able to develop. Sentimentality may injure art, but it can improve life.


Goldsmith

Oliver Goldsmith, whom we have already met as poet and playwright, contributed to the development of the English novel a country ideyll called The Vicar of Wakefield. There is sentimentality here, too, in the portrait of the good Dr. Primrose, so good-hearted, so simple-minded, brave in adversity and tolerant and forgiving, but there is characteristic humour also, as well as the lyric gift:

When lovely woman stoops to folly
    And finds too late that men betray,
What charm can soothe her melancholy?
    What art can wash her tears away?

Late C18 Background

We are trying to trace the course of eighteenth-century prose in fairly strict chronological order. The novels we have just glanced at—from Pamela to Humphry Clinker—eover thirty years, from 1741 to 1771. other prose of the time includes attempts at History (Hume produced a History of Great Britain and William Robertson a History of Scotland, and even Smollett and Goldsmith tried their hands), many interesting collections of letters—including those of Lord Chesterfield to his son, and the vast correspondence of Horace Walpole—and the first book on Economics. This last, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith (1723-90), lies outside our scope, but we, whose study is literature, can praise it for its brilliance of style, even if we are not concerned with its content. Economics was later to become a 'dismal science', but Smith is not only elegant in the exposition of his revolutionary theory, but even prophetic: his book appeared in 1776, on the very day of the American Declaration of Independence, and it says of the Americans: 'They will become one of the foremost nations of the world.'

The last decades of the eighteenth century were shaken by great political changes. America broke away from England, and, in 1789, the French Revolution took place. English thinkers and politicians were much agitated, taking sides, preaching for and agianst the new violent movements, and a good deal of the prose of this last period is concerned with such watchwords as Liberty, Anarchy, Justice, William Godwin (1756-1836) wrote a book about Political Justice, preaching a kind of anarchy, extolling the light of pure reason as it comes to the individual soul, denouncing law and marriage and property because these interfere with individual freedom. HIs book had a great influence on Romantic poets like Shelley. Tom Paine (1737-1800) had previously defended the revolt of America, and he now defended, in his Rights of Man, the Revolution in France. Edmund Burke (1729-97), despite his Liberalism, attacked this same Revolution, and stated that tradition was more important than rational political theories—society was like a plant or a human body, growing, working out its salvation according to laws of its own, and it was dangerous to interfere with that process.


Gibbon

This period produced the great historian, Edward Gibbon (1737-94), whose The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire reached completion in 1788, a year before the fall of the Bastille. This is a great achievement, written in the most polished prose of the age, and it surveys about thirteen centuries of European history—from the reign of the Emperor Trajan to the fall of Constantinople, covering the rise of Christianity and Islam, the great migrations of the Teutonic peoples, and analysing the forces which turned the old world into the modern world. It is not a compassionate work: it chastises man for his follies much more than it extols his discoveries and virtues, and exhibits more of the author's personality than is perhaps proper in a history; but for literary skill and width of scope it is perhaps still unsurpassed among the larger historical studies.


Fanny Burney

The later days of the eighteenth-century novel produced names like Fanny Burney (1752-1840), whose Evelina and Cecilia are realistic, humorous, and full of credible characters. But much more typical of the age are those novels of terror which Horace Walpole ushered in, and novels which showed the influence of the Frenchman Jean-Jacques Rousseau.


Rousseau

Rousseau (1712-78) was one of the forerunners of the Romantic movement, and also one of the prophets of the French Revolution. He was by nature a rebel—against existing conceptions of religion, art, education, marriage, government, and in book after book he propounded his own theories on these subjects. Rousseau advocated a return to nature. In the natural state, he held, man is happy and good, and it is only society that, by making life artificial, produces evil. His Émile, a treatise on education, advocated that children should be brought up in an atmosphere of truth, and it condemned the elaborate lies that society imposed on the average child—including myths and fairy-stories. The result, in England, was a whole series of instructive books for children (including the incredibly priggish Sandford and Merton of Thomas Day) which was only broken by the thoroughly fanciful, and much healthier, children's book of men like Thackeray and Lewis Carroll in the nineteenth century. It was Rousseau's doctrine of the noble 'natural men', and his attack on the corrupting power of civilisation, that produced novels by minor writers like Bage, Holcroft, and the Caleb Williams of William Godwin, in which the spirit of revolt is expressed through central characters who have no religion or morality (like the hero of Bage's Hermsprong) or, like Godwin's hero, are a living witness to the corruption of a society in which the evil flourish and the good are victimised.


Gothic novels

There were novels of 'mystery and imagination' by writers like Mrs. Ann Radcliffe (1764-1822) and Matthew Gregory Lewis (1775-1818), who followed the example set in 1764 by The Castle of Otranto—a 'Gothic' story by Horace Walpole (1717-97). (This term 'Gothic' is primarily an architectural one, denoting that kind of European building which flourished in the Middle Ages and showed the influence of neither the Greeks nor the Romans. Gothic architecture, with its pointed arches, began to come back to England in the middle of the eighteenth century—Walpole himself built a 'little Gothic castle' at Strawberry Hill, near Twickenham, London. This kind of building suggested mystery, romance, revolt against classical order, wildness, through its association with medeaeval ruins—ivy-covered, haunted by owls, washed by moonlight, shadowy, mysterious, and so on.) The Castle of Otranto is a melodeamatic curiosity; Mrs. Radcliffe's The Romance of the Forest, The Mysteries of Udolpho, and The Italian are skilfully written hermysteries always have a rational explanation at the end, and she never offends conventional morality. Lewis's The Monk—with its devils, horror, torture, perversions, magic, and murder—is very different: its lack of taste does not compensate its undoubted power, and its popularity was understandably short-lived. We ought to mention in this context a work produced a good deal later—Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1797-1851). This was written during a wet summer in Switzerland, when her husband (the poet) and Lord Byron were amusing themselves by writing ghost-stories and she herself was asked to compose one. She could never have guessed that her story of the scientist who makes an artificial man—by which he is eventually destroyed [persecuted, rather—JAGL]—would give a new word to the language, and become so well known among even the near-illiterate (thanks chiefly to Hollywood) that its subject would rise from humble fiction to universal myth.


Johnson

I have reserved to the end of this chapter mention of the man whose personality seems to dominate the whole of the Augustan Age—Dr. Samuel Johnson (1709-84). Boswell's biography—perhaps the finest biography ever written—gives so vivid and detailed a portrait of the 'Grand Cham of Literature' and his times, that Johnson the person has, from the end of the eighteenth century to the present day, tended to overshadow Johnson the writer. There are a thousand people who can uote one of Johnson's conversational sallies to one who can give a sentence from The Rambler or a line from London. When Johnson the writer is quoted, it is usually something to his disparagement that we hear, like the tautological opening of The Vanity of Human Wishes:

Let observation with extensive view
Survey mankind from China to Peru,

or some extreme example of his highly Latinised style. Yet Johnson is worth reading. He attempted most of the literary forms of the day—drama, poetry (lyrical and didactic), the novel (his Rasselas is in the Oriental tradition, like Beckford's Vathek, and has the same sort of theme as Voltaire's Candide), and the moral essay, as in The Rambler and The Idler. He wrote sermons, prayers and meditations, admirable biography (The Lives of the Poets), dedications, prologues, speeches, political pamphlets—he leaves few branches of literature, journalism, and 'current affairs' untouched. But his name as a scholar will live chiefly because of his Dictionary of the English Language and his critical writings. The Dictionary is a great achievement—a work that can still be consulted, and, for the light it throws on Johnson's personality, even read. Johnson the critic is best met in The Lives of the Poets (especially in the Life of Cowley, where he has wise things to say about the Metaphysical Poets, and the long essay on Milton)and the preface to his edition of Shakespeare. The following may seem cruel, but there is truth in it:

A quibble is, to Shakespeare, what luminous vapours are to the traveller; he follows it at all adventures; it is sure to lead him out of his way, and sure to engulf him in the mire. It has some malignant power over his mind, and its fascinations are irresistible. . . .  A quibble is the golden apple for which he will always turn aside from his career, or stoop from his elevation. . . . A quibble was to him the fatal Cleopatra for which he lost the world, and was content to lose it.

Johnson was incapable of giving veneration to any writer just because of that writer's reputation. As a critic he was honest, and honesty and independence shine throughout all his writings, as they shine throughout the record of his personal career. To an understanding of the whole of the eighteenth-century literary world, Boswell's Life of Johnson is indispensable. In it we meet all the writers we have been hearing about—Goldsmith, Sheridan, Burke, and the rest—and, more than that, we get the 'feel', the very smell, of the Augustan Age. It is a remarkable record of a remarkable era.

Queen Anne Prose