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.

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

Sterne (NIVEL AVANZADO)

- Sterne como novelista experimental y paradójico:
La aporía temporal de la narración en Tristram Shandy.

- Una adaptación cinematográfica: Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story:




(Hay otros capítulos disponibles en YouTube).

— Half a lecture on Sterne's Tristram Shandy.

— A tutorial on the narrative technique of Tristram Shandy.