The Living Novel Read online

  The Living Novel

  V. S. Pritchett

  Contents

  The British

  The Ancestor

  Clarissa

  The Shocking Surgeon

  The Crank

  A Scottish Documentary

  Scott

  Our half-Hogarth

  Disraeli

  Edwin Drood

  George Eliot

  An Irish Ghost

  A Victorian Son

  A Plymouth Brother

  The Scientific Romances

  The Five Towns

  Sons and Lovers

  A Pole in the Far East

  The Irish R.M.

  An East End Novelist

  An Amateur

  Two Writers and Modern War

  AN ITALIAN

  Cavalleria Rusticana

  The French

  Poor Relations

  The Bohemian

  The English Frenchman

  The Centenary of Anatole France

  The Russians

  The Russian Day

  The Hypocrite

  The Great Absentee

  The Minor Dostoevsky

  A Russian Cinderella

  A Russian Outsider

  The Ancestor

  When I was young and was reading too many novels the works of Fielding were regarded as one of the pleasant things in store for those about to reach the age of consent. He was the last novelist, as Thackeray said, to be allowed to describe a man, and there were book-soaked critics like Professor Saintsbury to expatiate over their wine upon Fielding’s use of the privilege. It is true that Dr. Johnson called Fielding a blockhead and that Richardson—who had reason to spit and squirm—dismissed him as an ostler; but on the whole the warm impression of his genius and character prevailed, the impression which was most frankly but tolerantly conveyed in one of the letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu:

  I am sorry for H. Fielding’s death, not only as I shall read no more of his writings, but I believe he lost more than others, as no man enjoyed life more than he did, though few had less reason to do so, the highest of his preferment being raking in the lowest sinks of vice and misery. I should think it a nobler and less nauseous employment to be one of the staff-officers than conduct the nocturnal weddings. His happy constitution (even when he had, with great pains, half demolished it) made him forget everything when he was before a venison pasty, or over a flask of champagne, and I am persuaded he has known more happy moments than any prince upon the earth. His natural spirits gave him rapture with his cook-maid, and cheerfulness when he was fluxing in a garret. There was a great similitude between his character and that of Sir Richard Steele. He had the advantage both in learning and, in my opinion, genius; they both agreed in wanting money in spite of all their friends, and would have wanted it, if their hereditary lands had been as extensive as their imaginations; yet each of them was so formed for happiness, it is a pity he was not immortal.

  Alas, the vogue of Fielding had passed by the time I grew up. The secret: reading of the mid-Victorians, and late, had lost its spell. The muscular Christians who were privately addicted to his muscular impropriety had given place to a generation with a feminine preoccupation with sex and the fortune-telling science of psychology. If one was going to read the eighteenth-century novelists at all, Richardson was your man and the masculine tradition of Fielding was less congenial. It is typical of our taste that Proust was greatly influenced by Richardson; and that when we look back to the earliest realism, we prefer the ungarnished plate of Defoe to the stylish menu that is handed to us by the author of Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews. He is said to be altogether too hearty, towny and insensitive. He is said to be that most tiresome of bores, the man’s man. He sets up as the shallowest of philosophers: the man of the world, whose world turns out to be a box of tricks. And what does the philosophy amount to beyond a number of small notions: that society is not what it seems, that self-love and self-interest are the beginning and end of human motive, and that the only real and virile view of human nature is the low one? His geniality laboured the offence.

  One has to admit the force of such a criticism of Fielding, but I am far from thinking it fatal to his rank as a novelist. In the first place the criticism is really aroused by his style rather than by his matter. Fielding is out to cut a figure. When he sets up as a satirist, he believes in the robust satire of the man who lives, not in the more cruel satire of the weaklivered man who abstains and snarls. In their rebellion against the poetic hyperbole of the early romances which had been imitated from the French, the Augustans parodied the heroic style; they were not thereby mocking the noble view of human nature; they were insinuating the sensible one.

  Yet, even when we have acquiesced in the brilliant assumptiveness of Fielding’s style and have seen beyond his sardonic preoccupation with men of honour and women of discretion, there remains the difficulty that Fielding is the ancestor. In Fielding we are haunted by almost the whole of the English novel. Pages of Dickens, Thackeray, Meredith even, incongruously, of Kipling, Galsworthy and Wodehouse, become confused in the general panorama: Fielding has the disadvantage of being the “onlie begetter”. Not only do we pick out the perennial characters of the main part of English fiction, but he has set many of its idiosyncrasies and limits. Sociable man, social problems, middle-class humour, the didactic habit, the club culture, the horseplay, the gregarious rather than the single eye, the habit of treating country life as an opportunity for the exercise of the body or of the fancy, as though Nature were a mixture of gymnasium and an open-air extension of the Established Church—these are some elements which have continued in the English novel and which date from Fielding. He expressed one kind of Englishness, so that many critics—Sir Hugh Walpole was one—seemed to think that conservative sociability or what is called “the creation of character” contains the whole English tradition; that people who speak of the novel as something inspired by ideas or concerned with a sense of the real situation of society at any given time, were importing tendentious and arid continental ideas. If these critics had considered Fielding’s work they could never have made such a wild statement. Fielding was an old Etonian, but he was one of Eton’s recalcitrants, sneered at and, in the end, pursued because he let the side down. The fact is that, from the beginning, the English novel set out to protest and to teach. Its philanthropic campaigns in the nineteenth century are paralleled in the eighteenth century by its avowed desire to reform the brutal manners of the age.

  The explanation is not necessarily that there has been an extra allowance of public spiritedness in our novelists; it is simply that the crucial problems of his own time provide a novelist with his richest material, whether he deals with it directly or by inference. The reform of manners was as vital in the eighteenth century as the reform of the Poor Law was in the nineteenth. From Elizabethan times, the Dutch, the French and the Spanish visitors had been appalled by the barbarity of English life. When Fielding and Richardson filled their novels with abducted heiresses, Tammany law, bribed judges, faked weddings, duels in Hyde Park, with squalid fights between half-naked women in Gin Alley or on the village commons; with scoundrelly nincompoops, bailiffs and middle-men from the Coffee House and the Court, they were not amusing themselves with the concoctions of artificial comedy. They were attacking the criminal violence and corruption that underlay the elegance of the time. There was a plea for the middle-class virtues at a time when the aristocracy had left the country for the Court and had abandoned its responsibilities in order to milk the Exchequer. Public societies for the Reform of Manners had existed in the early part of the century. Fielding spent his writing life fighting abuses and ended as an excellent Bow Street magistrate, trying to clean up the London streets
. “Great characters” there are in all his books, but they are inseparable from his social purpose.

  In an essay on his own work Fielding always said that he drew from life. But like Cervantes, whom he hoped to copy, and whom he so much admired, Fielding had been trained as a writer in the theatre. The English novel was not a development from the reporting of Defoe, a way of writing which, of its nature, is prevented from imaginative development. In the end the reporter can do no more than cover more and more ground; his method gives him nothing to till the ground with. Fielding took his slice of life, his chains of picaresque episode which in Joseph Andrews had made a promising but inferior version of Gil Blas, and let the artifice of the theatre break them up and rebuild them. The English novel started in Tom Jones, because the stage taught Fielding how to break the monotony of flat, continuous narrative. The methods of the theatre are abstract and summary; there is an idea before there is a scene; and one of the fascinating things in Tom Jones is the use of the summary method to set the scene, explain the types of character, cover the preparatory ground quickly by a few oblique moralisings and antics so that all the realism is reserved for the main action. Is Tom Jones a loyal and honest man? Could he be the opposite if circumstances tempt him? No great paraphernalia of dialogue and literal detail has to be used in order to introduce such questions. Fielding puts them, then illustrates with action, and frames the whole in brief commentary. Scenes do not ramble on and melt into each other. They snap past, sharply divided, wittily contrasted, cunningly balanced. The pace of Tom Jones is as fast as farce, and indeed only a theatre man’s expertness in the dramatic, the surprising, the situation capped and recapped, could cover the packed intrigue of the narrative. The theatre taught Fielding economy. It taught him to treat episodes as subjects and not as simple slices of life. Thackeray, who is the only English novelist to have learned from Tom Jones—Dickens learned from the inferior middlebrow Amelia, which has much more of the drudging realism of the later English novel—developed this method of Fielding’s in Vanity Fair, going backwards and forwards in time, as well as to and fro in moral commentary. The difference is that Thackeray was born in the time of the sermon, and Fielding in the time of the chorus and the stage aside.

  Fielding’s own ancestor is Ben Jonson. Coleridge compared the formal excellence of Tom Jones with that of The Alchemist. The satire in both writers is meaty and brainy, very packed and prolific in ridiculous situations. To every character life is surprising and Fortune perverse. In the love-chase of Sophia Western and Tom Jones, there is the familiar stage situation that when one is willing the other is not available. Tom is a healthy young rake who does not intend to be one, and he reads a severe lecture to Nightingale, the professional Lovelace, who is merely satisfying sexual vanity. In the picaresque novels there is growth or decline in fortune, and rarely is there growth in character; but in Tom Jones, Partridge grows once he has got rid of his wife. Sophia, in London, learns to tell a lie to her rival—for which one admires her as much as when she comes head first off the horse—and Tom himself passes from the loyal to the careless and, after the shock of being caught out in his infidelities at Upton, into Tom the frantic who will commit any folly. He is a young man in a mess by the time he is mixed up with Lady Bellaston. This intrigue is the one in which first her ladyship and then the lady’s maid are hidden behind the curtain in Tom’s room, a piece of turn and turn about which comes straight from the theatre; it does strike one as artificial, but Fielding brings the whole intrigue to earth by the brilliant short chapter which introduces Mrs. Hunt. Many critics have objected to this chapter as a loose end; but the naïve proposal of marriage from someone to whom Tom has never spoken comes almost affectingly out of the blue. It is a cri de cœur among a lot of sharp practice, something beautifully silly in an ill-natured episode.

  Joseph Andrews, Jonathan Wild and Tom Jones are the three important novels of Fielding, and Jonathan Wild is the diamond among them, the most dazzling piece of sustained satirical writing in our language. There remains Amelia: a hybrid that lies halfway between the Augustan and the Victorian novel. As a novelist Fielding was subject to two opposite influences which were to leave their mark on the English novel for a hundred years and to ensure that it had little resemblance to the French and Russian novels: he was trained in the rogue’s tale which introduced untidiness and irresponsibility into the English novel; and, as I have said, he was trained in the theatre, which gave our novel its long obsession with elaborate plot. Amelia is a compromise. By the time he came to write this novel, Fielding seems to have lost the heat of the theatre’s inspiration. The first chapter describing the prison is in the old manner, but presently the narrative digresses and dawdles. The didactic intention comes out frankly and, alas, unadorned. There is white-faced indignation where before there was irony, and indignation is the weaker strain, for it interrupts, where irony undermines. I do not suggest that his old comic gift is dead; far from it. There is Colonel Bath’s remarkable duel. And there is the devastating Miss Mathews, the would-be murderess, who is a development from the drawing of that hard old rip, Lady Bellaston, out of Tom Jones. Miss Mathews is a superb tart. One is delighted that the Colonel refuses to drop her; delighted, too, though Fielding does not seem to be, that she grows fat. She will so obviously enjoy growing fat. It is she who makes the celebrated remark about the English taste for prudish women: do they attract, enquires the ever-curious Miss Mathews, because they appear to promise to cool the heat of love? In Amelia, there is more psychological complexity than there was in Tom Jones; it is the book of an older man who has grown tired. If we contrast Tom Jones with Mr. Booth of Amelia, we see that Tom commits his sins, repents in a moment and ingenuously forgets them. Mr. Booth is far more complicated. He is a married man to start with; he sins with caution, is transfixed by remorse and then settles down to brood with growing misanthropy. The wages of sin is not death, but worry—middle-class worry. His case never improves, for we see the subtle influence of his affair with Miss Mathews on his relations with other people. Fielding’s rising interest in psychology marks a break with his interest in moral types. It is a signal of the coming age. And if Amelia indicates a decline from the brilliant fusing of gifts that went to make his earlier books, it points the way the English novel would go when a new genius, the genius of Dickens, seized it.

  Clarissa

  The modern reader of Richardson’s Clarissa emerges from his experience exhausted, exalted and bewildered. The book is, I fancy, the longest novel in the English language; it is the one most crowded with circumstantial detail; it is written in the most dilatory of narrative manners, i.e. in the form of letters. It is a tale perceived through a microscope; it is a monstrosity, a minute and inordinate act of prolonged procrastination. And the author himself is a monster. That a man like Samuel Richardson should write one of the great European novels is one of those humiliating frolics in the incidence of genius. The smug, juicy, pedestrian little printer from Derbyshire, more or less unlettered, sits down at the age of 50 and instructs young girls in the art of managing their virtue to the best advantage. Yet, ridiculous as Pamela is, her creator disarms criticism by a totally new ingredient in the novel: he knows how to make the reader weep. And, stung by the taunts of the educated writers of his time, Richardson calmly rises far above Pamela when he comes to the story of Clarissa Harlowe; he sets the whole continent weeping. Rousseau and even Goethe bow to him and take out their handkerchiefs; the vogue of sensibility, the first shoots of the Romantic movement, spring from the pool of Richardson’s pious tears like the grateful and delicate trees of an oasis. Yet there he is, plump, prosaic, the most middling of middling men, and so domestically fussy that even his gift of weeping hardly guarantees that he will be a major figure. Is there not some other strain in this dull and prodigiously painstaking little man? There is. Samuel Richardson was mad.

  I do not mean that Richardson was a lunatic. I do not mean he was mad as Swift was mad. At first sight, an immeasurable smugnes
s, an endlessly pettifogging normality seem to be the outer skin of Richardson’s character. We know, as I have already said, that from his youth he was an industrious and timid young man who was, for some reason or other, used by young women who wanted their love letters written. Profoundly sentimental, he sat like some pious old cook in her kitchen, giving advice to the kitchen maids, and when he came to write novels he was merely continuing this practical office. He lived vicariously like some sedentary lawyer who has to argue the disasters of other people’s lives letter by letter, but who himself never partakes. Genteel, he is, nevertheless, knowing; prim and cosy, he is, nevertheless, the victim of that powerful cult of the will, duty and conscience by which Puritanism turned life and its human relations into an incessant war. There is no love in Puritanism; there is a struggle for power. Who will win the daily battle of scruple and conscience—Pamela or the young squire; Clarissa or Lovelace? And yet what is urging Richardson to this battle of wills? What is it that the Puritan cannot get out of his mind, so that it is a mania and obsession? It is sex. Richardson is mad about sex.

  His is the madness of Paul Pry and Peeping Tom. I said just now that Clarissa is a novel written under the microscope; really it is a novel written about the world as one sees it through the keyhole. Prurient and obsessed by sex, the prim Richardson creeps on tip-toe nearer and nearer, inch by inch, to that vantage point; he beckons us on, pausing to make every kind of pious protestation, and then nearer and nearer he creeps again, delaying, arguing with us in whispers, working us up until we catch the obsession too. What are we going to see when we get there? The abduction, the seduction, the lawful deflowering of a virgin in marriage are not enough for him. Nothing short of the rape of Clarissa Harlowe by a man determined on destroying her can satisfy Richardson’s phenomenal day-dream with its infinite delays.