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It is not a part of the plan of this book to present any extended bibliography, but there are certain reference books to which the student's attention should be called.
5. We have not yet mentioned what according to Richardson's own reiterated statement was his main purpose in writing, namely, the conveying of moral and religious instruction. He is extremely anxious to demonstrate to his readers that goodness pays and that wickedness does not, generally even in this world (though in 'Clarissa' his artistic sense refuses to be turned aside from the inevitable tragic outcome). The spiritual vulgarity of the doctrine, so far as material things are concerned, is clearly illustrated in the mechanically virtuous Pamela, who, even in the midst of the most outrageous besetments of Squire B----, is hoping with all her soul for the triumph which is actually destined for her, of becoming his wife and so rising high above her original humble station. Moreover, Richardson often goes far and tritely out of his way in his preaching. At their worst, however, his sentimentality and moralizing were preferable to the coarseness which disgraced the works of some of his immediate successors.
6. Lastly
must be mentioned the form of his novels. They all consist of series
of letters, which constitute the correspondence between some of the
principal characters, the great majority being written in each case
by the heroine. This method of telling a story requires special concessions
from the reader; but even more than the other first-personal method,
exemplified in 'Robinson Crusoe,' it has the great advantage of giving
the most intimate possible revelation of the imaginary writer's mind
and situation. Richardson handles it with very great skill, though in
his anxiety that his chief characters may not be misunderstood he occasionally
commits the artistic blunder of inserting footnotes to explain their
real motives.
Richardson,
then, must on the whole be called the first of the great English novelists--a
striking case of a man in whom one special endowment proved much weightier
than a large number of absurdities and littlenesses.
HENRY FIELDING.
Sharply opposed
to Richardson stands his later contemporary and rival, Henry Fielding.
Fielding was born of an aristocratic family in Somersetshire in 1707.
At Eton School and the University of Leyden (in Holland) he won distinction,
but at the age of twenty he found himself, a vigorous young man with
instincts for fine society, stranded in London without any tangible
means of support. He turned to the drama and during the next dozen years
produced many careless and ephemeral farces, burlesques, and light plays,
which, however, were not without value as preparation for his novels.
Meanwhile he had other activities--spent the money which his wife brought
him at marriage in an extravagant experiment as gentleman-farmer; studied
law and was admitted to the bar; and conducted various literary periodicals.
His attacks on the government in his plays helped to produce the severe
licensing act which put an end to his dramatic work and that of many
other light playwrights. When Richardson's 'Pamela' appeared Fielding
was disgusted with what seemed to him its hypocritical silliness, and
in vigorous artistic indignation he proceeded to write 'The History
of Joseph Andrews,' representing Joseph as the brother of Pamela and
as a serving-man, honest, like her, in difficult circumstances. Beginning
in a spirit of sheer burlesque, Fielding soon became interested in his
characters, and in the actual result produced a rough but masterful
picture of contemporary life. The coarse Parson Trulliber and the admirable
Parson Adams are among the famous characters of fiction. But even in
the later part of the book Fielding did not altogether abandon his ridicule
of Richardson. He introduced among the characters the 'Squire B----'
of 'Pamela,' only filling out the blank by calling him 'Squire Booby,'
and taking pains to make him correspondingly ridiculous.
Fielding now
began to pay the penalty for his youthful dissipations in failing health,
but he continued to write with great expenditure of time and energy.
'The History of Jonathan Wild the Great,' a notorious ruffian whose
life Defoe also had narrated, aims to show that great military conquerors
are only bandits and cutthroats really no more praiseworthy than the
humbler individuals who are hanged without ceremony. Fielding's masterpiece,
'The History of Tom Jones,' followed hard after Richardson's 'Clarissa,'
in 1749. His last novel, 'Amelia,' is a half autobiographic account
of his own follies. His second marriage, to his first wife's maid, was
intended, as he frankly said, to provide a nurse for himself and a mother
for his children, but his later years were largely occupied with heroic
work as a police justice in Westminster, where, at the sacrifice of
what health remained to him, he rooted out a specially dangerous band
of robbers. Sailing for recuperation, but too late, to Lisbon, he died
there at the age of forty-seven, in 1754.
The chief characteristics of Fielding's nature and novels, mostly directly opposite or complementary to those of Richardson, are these:
1. He is a broad realist, giving to his romantic actions a very prominent background of actual contemporary life. The portrayal is very illuminating; we learn from Fielding a great deal, almost everything, one is inclined to say, about conditions in both country and city in his time--about the state of travel, country inns, city jails, and many other things; but with his vigorous masculine nature he makes abundant use of the coarser facts of life and character which a finer art avoids. However, he is extremely human and sympathetic; in view of their large and generous naturalness the defects of his character and works are at least pardonable.
2. His structure is that of the rambling picaresque story of adventure, not lacking, in his case, in definite progress toward a clearly-designed end, but admitting many digressions and many really irrelevant elements. The number of his characters, especially in 'Tom Jones,' is enormous. Indeed, the usual conception of a novel in his day, as the word 'History,' which was generally included in the title, indicates, was that of the complete story of the life of the hero or heroine, at least up to the time of marriage. It is virtually the old idea of the chronicle-history play. Fielding himself repeatedly speaks of his masterpiece as an 'epic.'
3. His point of view is primarily humorous. He avowedly imitates the manner of Cervantes in 'Don Quixote' and repeatedly insists that he is writing a mock-epic. His very genuine and clear-sighted indignation at social abuses expresses itself through his omnipresent irony and satire, and however serious the situations he almost always keeps the ridiculous side in sight. He offends some modern readers by refusing to take his art in any aspect over-seriously; especially, he constantly asserts and exercises his 'right' to break off his story and chat quizzically about questions of art or conduct in a whole chapter at a time.
4. His
knowledge of character, that of a generous-hearted man of the world,
is sound but not subtile, and is deeper in the case of men than of women,
especially in the case of men who resemble himself. Tom Jones is virtually
Henry Fielding in his youth and is thoroughly lifelike, but Squire Allworthy,
intended as an example of benevolent perfection, is no less of a pale
abstraction than Sir Charles Grandison. The women, cleverly as their
typical feminine traits are brought out, are really viewed only from
without.
THE OTHER SENTIMENTALISTS AND REALISTS.
Richardson
and Fielding set in motion two currents, of sentimentalism and realism,
respectively, which flowed vigorously in the novel during the next generation,
and indeed (since they are of the essence of life), have continued,
with various modifications, down to our own time. Of the succeeding
realists the most important is Tobias Smollett, a Scottish ex-physician
of violent and brutal nature, who began to produce his picaresque stories
of adventure during the lifetime of Fielding. He made ferociously unqualified
attacks on the statesmen of his day, and in spite of much power, the
coarseness of his works renders them now almost unreadable. But he performed
one definite service; in 'Roderick Random,' drawing on his early experiences
as a ship's surgeon, he inaugurated the out-and-out sea story, that
is the story which takes place not, like 'Robinson Crusoe,' in small
part, but mainly, on board ship. Prominent, on the other hand, among
the sentimentalists is Laurence Sterne, who, inappropriately enough,
was a clergyman, the author of 'Tristram Shandy.' This book is quite
unlike anything else ever written. Sterne published it in nine successive
volumes during almost as many years, and he made a point of almost complete
formlessness and every sort of whimsicality. The hero is not born until
the third volume, the story mostly relates to other people and things,
pages are left blank to be filled out by the reader--no grotesque device
or sudden trick can be too fantastic for Sterne. But he has the gift
of delicate pathos and humor, and certain episodes in the book are justly
famous, such as the one where Uncle Toby carefully puts a fly out of
the window, refusing to 'hurt a hair of its head,' on the ground that
'the world surely is wide enough to hold both thee and me.' The best
of all the sentimental stories is Goldsmith's 'Vicar of Wakefield' (1766),
of which we have already spoken (above, page 244). With its kindly humor,
its single-hearted wholesomeness, and its delightful figure of Dr. Primrose
it remains, in spite of its artlessness, one of the permanent landmarks
of English fiction.
HISTORICAL AND 'GOTHIC' ROMANCES.
Stories which
purported to reproduce the life of the Past were not unknown in England
in the seventeenth century, but the real beginning of the historical
novel and romance belongs to the later part of the eighteenth century.
The extravagance of romantic writers at that time, further, created
a sort of subspecies called in its day and since the 'Gothic' romance.
These 'Gothic' stories are nominally located in the Middle Ages, but
their main object is not to give an accurate picture of medieval life,
but to arouse terror in the reader, by means of a fantastic apparatus
of gloomy castles, somber villains, distressed and sentimental heroines,
and supernatural mystery. The form was inaugurated by Horace Walpole,
the son of the former Prime Minister, who built near Twickenham (Pope's
home) a pseudo-medieval house which he named Strawberry Hill, where
he posed as a center of the medieval revival. Walpole's 'Castle of 'Otranto,'
published in 1764, is an utterly absurd little story, but its novelty
at the time, and the author's prestige, gave it a great vogue. The really
best 'Gothic' romances are the long ones written by Mrs. Ann Radcliffe
in the last decade of the century, of which 'The Mysteries of Udolpho,'
in particular, was popular for two generations. Mrs. Radcliffe's books
overflow with sentimentality, but display real power, especially in
imaginative description. Of the more truly historical romances the best
were the 'Thaddeus of Warsaw' and 'Scottish Chiefs' of Miss Jane Porter,
which appeared in the first decade of the nineteenth century. None of
all these historical and 'Gothic' romances attains the rank of great
or permanent literature, but they were historically important, largely
because they prepared the way for the novels of Walter Scott, which
would hardly have come into being without them, and which show clear
signs of the influence of even their most exaggerated features.
NOVELS OF
PURPOSE. Still another
sort of novel was that which began to be written in the latter part
of the century with the object of exposing some particular abuse in
society. The first representatives of the class aimed, imitating the
French sentimentalist Rousseau, to improve education, and in accordance
with the sentimental Revolutionary misconception which held that all
sin and sorrow result from the corruptions of civilization, often held
up the primitive savage as a model of all the kindly virtues. The most
important of the novels of purpose, however, were more thorough-going
attacks on society composed by radical revolutionists, and the least
forgotten is the 'Caleb Williams' of William Godwin (1794), which is
intended to demonstrate that class-distinctions result in hopeless moral
confusion and disaster.
MISS BURNEY AND THE FEMININE NOVEL OF MANNERS.
The most permanent
results of the latter part of the century in fiction were attained by
three women who introduced and successively continued the novel which
depicts, from the woman's point of view, with delicate satire, and at
first in the hope of accomplishing some reform, or at least of showing
the beauty of virtue and morality, the contemporary manners of well-to-do
'society.' The first of these authoresses was Miss Frances Burney, who
later became Madame D'Arblay, but is generally referred to familiarly
as Fanny Burney.
The unassuming
daughter of a talented and much-esteemed musician, acquainted in her
own home with many persons of distinction, such as Garrick and Sir Joshua
Reynolds, and given from girlhood to the private writing of stories
and of a since famous Diary, Miss Burney composed her 'Evelina' in leisure
intervals during a number of years, and published it when she was twenty-five,
in 1778. It recounts, in the Richardsonian letter form, the experiences
of a country girl of good breeding and ideally fine character who is
introduced into the life of London high society, is incidentally brought
into contact with disagreeable people of various types, and soon achieves
a great triumph by being acknowledged as the daughter of a repentant
and wealthy man of fashion and by marrying an impossibly perfect young
gentleman, also of great wealth. Structure and substance in 'Evelina'
are alike somewhat amateurish in comparison with the novels of the next
century; but it does manifest, together with some lack of knowledge
of the real world, genuine understanding of the core, at least, of many
sorts of character; it presents artificial society life with a light
and pleasing touch; and it brought into the novel a welcome atmosphere
of womanly purity and delicacy. 'Evelina' was received with great applause
and Miss Burney wrote other books, but they are without importance.
Her success won her the friendship of Dr. Johnson and the position of
one of the Queen's waiting women, a sort of gilded slavery which she
endured for five years. She was married in middle-age to a French emigrant
officer, Monsieur D'Arblay, and lived in France and England until the
age of nearly ninety, latterly an inactive but much respected figure
among the writers of a younger generation.
MISS EDGEWORTH.
Much more voluminous
and varied was the work of Miss Burney's successor, Maria Edgeworth,
who devoted a great part of her long life (1767-1849) to active benevolence
and to attendance on her father, an eccentric and pedantic English gentleman
who lived mostly on his estate in Ireland and who exercised the privilege
of revising or otherwise meddling with most of her books. In the majority
of her works Miss Edgeworth followed Miss Burney, writing of the experiences
of young ladies in fashionable London life. In these novels her purpose
was more obviously moral than Miss Burney's--she aimed to make clear
the folly of frivolity and dissipation; and she also wrote moral tales
for children which though they now seem old-fashioned were long and
widely popular. Since she had a first-hand knowledge of both Ireland
and England, she laid the scenes of some of her books partly in both
countries, thereby creating what was later called 'the international
novel.' Her most distinctive achievement, however, was the introduction
of the real Irishman (as distinct from the humorous caricature) into
fiction. Scott testified that it was her example that suggested to him
the similar portrayal of Scottish character and life.
JANE AUSTEN.
Much the greatest
of this trio of authoresses is the last, Jane Austen, who perhaps belongs
as much to the nineteenth century as the eighteenth. The daughter of
a clergyman, she past an absolutely uneventful life of forty-two years
(1775-1817) in various villages and towns in Southern England. She had
finished her masterpiece, 'Pride and Prejudice,' at the age of twenty-two,
but was unable for more than a dozen years to find a publisher for this
and her other earlier works. When at last they were brought out she
resumed her writing, but the total number of her novels is only six.
Her field, also, is more limited than that of any other great English
novelist; for she deliberately restricted herself, with excellent judgment,
to portraying what she knew at first-hand, namely the life of the well-to-do
classes of her own 'provincial' region. Moreover, her theme is always
love; desirable marriage for themselves or their children seems to be
the single object of almost all her characters; and she always conducts
her heroine successfully to this goal. Her artistic achievement, like
herself, is so well-bred and unobtrusive that a hasty reader may easily
fail to appreciate it. Her understanding of character is almost perfect,
her sense for structure and dramatic scenes (quiet ones) equally good,
and her quiet and delightful humor and irony all-pervasive. Scott, with
customary generosity, praised her 'power of rendering ordinary things
and characters interesting from the truth of her portrayal,' in favorable
contrast with his own facility in 'the Big Bow-Wow strain.' Nevertheless
the assertion of some present-day critics that she is the greatest of
all English authoresses is certainly extravagant. Her novels, though
masterly in their own field and style, do not have the fulness of description
or the elaboration of action which add beauty and power to most later
ones, and her lack of a sense for the greater issues of life denies
her legitimate comparison with such a writer as George Eliot.
SUMMARY.
The variety
of the literary influences in eighteenth century England was so great
that the century can scarcely be called a literary unit; yet as a whole
it contrasts clearly enough both with that which goes before and with
that which follows. Certainly its total contribution to English literature
was great and varied.
Chapter
X. Period VIII. The Romantic Triumph, 1798 To About 1830
THE GREAT WRITERS OF 1798-1830. THE CRITICAL REVIEWS.
As we look
back to-day over the literature of the last three quarters of the eighteenth
century, here just surveyed, the progress of the Romantic Movement seems
the most conspicuous general fact which it presents. But at the, death
of Cowper in 1800 the movement still remained tentative and incomplete,
and it was to arrive at full maturity only in the work of the great
writers of the following quarter century, who were to create the finest
body of literature which England had produced since the Elizabethan
period. All the greatest of these writers were poets, wholly or in part,
and they fall roughly into two groups: first, William Wordsworth, Samuel
Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, and Walter Scott; and second, about
twenty years younger, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats.
This period of Romantic Triumph, or of the lives of its authors, coincides
in time, and not by mere accident, with the period of the success of
the French Revolution, the prolonged struggle of England and all Europe
against Napoleon and the subsequent years when in Continental Europe
despotic government reasserted itself and sternly suppressed liberal
hopes and uprisings, while in England liberalism and democracy steadily
and doggedly gathered force until by the Reform Bill of 1832 political
power was largely transferred from the former small governing oligarchy
to the middle class. How all these events influenced literature we shall
see as we proceed. The beginning of the Romantic triumph is found, by
general consent, in the publication in 1798 of the little volume of
'Lyrical Ballads' which contained the first significant poetry of Wordsworth
and Coleridge.
Even during
this its greatest period, however, Romanticism had for a time a hard
battle to fight, and a chief literary fact of the period was the founding
and continued success of the first two important English literary and
political quarterlies, 'The Edinburgh Review' and 'The Quarterly Review,'
which in general stood in literature for the conservative eighteenth
century tradition and violently attacked all, or almost all, the Romantic
poets. These quarterlies are sufficiently important to receive a few
words in passing. In the later eighteenth century there had been some
periodicals devoted to literary criticism, but they were mere unauthoritative
booksellers' organs, and it was left for the new reviews to inaugurate
literary journalism of the modern serious type. 'The Edinburgh Review,'
suggested and first conducted, in 1802, by the witty clergyman and reformer
Sydney Smith, passed at once to the hands of Francis (later Lord) Jeffrey,
a Scots lawyer who continued to edit it for nearly thirty years. Its
politics were strongly liberal, and to oppose it the Tory 'Quarterly
Review' was founded in 1808, under the editorship of the satirist William
Gifford and with the cooperation of Sir Walter Scott, who withdrew for
the purpose from his connection with the 'Edinburgh.' These reviews
were followed by other high-class periodicals, such as 'Blackwood's
Magazine,' and most of the group have maintained their importance to
the present day.
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE.
The poets Wordsworth
and Coleridge are of special interest not only from the primary fact
that they are among the greatest of English authors, but also secondarily
because in spite of their close personal association each expresses
one of the two main contrasting or complementary tendencies in the Romantic
movement; Coleridge the delight in wonder and mystery, which he has
the power to express with marvelous poetic suggestiveness, and Wordsworth,
in an extreme degree, the belief in the simple and quiet forces, both
of human life and of Nature.
To Coleridge,
who was slightly the younger of the two, attaches the further pathetic
interest of high genius largely thwarted by circumstances and weakness
of will. Born in Devonshire in 1772, the youngest of the many children
of a self-made clergyman and schoolmaster, he was a precocious and abnormal
child, then as always a fantastic dreamer, despised by other boys and
unable to mingle with them. After the death of his father he was sent
to Christ's Hospital, the 'Blue-Coat' charity school in London, where
he spent nine lonely years in the manner briefly described in an essay
of Charles Lamb, where Coleridge appears under a thin disguise. The
very strict discipline was no doubt of much value in giving firmness
and definite direction to his irregular nature, and the range of his
studies, both in literature and in other fields, was very wide. Through
the aid of scholarships and of contributions from his brothers he entered
Cambridge in 1791, just after Wordsworth had left the University; but
here his most striking exploit was a brief escapade of running away
and enlisting in a cavalry troop. Meeting Southey, then a student at
Oxford, he drew him into a plan for a 'Pantisocracy' (a society where
all should be equal), a community of twelve young couples to be founded
in some 'delightful part of the new back settlements' of America on
the principles of communistic cooperation in all lines, broad mental
culture, and complete freedom of opinion. Naturally, this plan never
past beyond the dream stage.
Coleridge left
the University in 1794 without a degree, tormented by a disappointment
in love. He had already begun to publish poetry and newspaper prose,
and he now attempted lecturing. He and Southey married two sisters,
whom Byron in a later attack on Southey somewhat inaccurately described
as 'milliners of Bath'; and Coleridge settled near Bristol. After characteristically
varied and unsuccessful efforts at conducting a periodical, newspaper
writing, and preaching as a Unitarian (a creed which was then considered
by most Englishmen disreputable and which Coleridge later abandoned),
he moved with his wife in 1797 to Nether Stowey in Somersetshire. Expressly
in order to be near him, Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy soon leased
the neighboring manor-house of Alfoxden, and there followed the memorable
year of intellectual and emotional stimulus when Coleridge's genius
suddenly expanded into short-lived but wonderful activity and he wrote
most of his few great poems, 'The Ancient Mariner,' 'Kubla Khan,' and
the First Part of 'Christabel.' 'The Ancient Mariner' was planned by
Coleridge and Wordsworth on one of their frequent rambles, and was to
have been written in collaboration; but as it proceeded, Wordsworth
found his manner so different from that of Coleridge that he withdrew
altogether from the undertaking. The final result of the incident, however,
was the publication in 1798 of 'Lyrical Ballads,' which included of
Coleridge's work only this one poem, but of Wordsworth's several of
his most characteristic ones. Coleridge afterwards explained that the
plan of the volume contemplated two complementary sorts of poems. He
was to present supernatural or romantic characters, yet investing them
with human interest and semblance of truth; while Wordsworth was to
add the charm of novelty to everyday things and to suggest their kinship
to the supernatural, arousing readers from their accustomed blindness
to the loveliness and wonders of the world around us. No better description
could be given of the poetic spirit and the whole poetic work of the
two men. Like some other epoch-marking books, 'Lyrical Ballads' attracted
little attention. Shortly after its publication Coleridge and the Wordsworths
sailed for Germany, where for the greater part of a year Coleridge worked
hard, if irregularly, at the language, literature, and philosophy.