Chapter 10

These symptoms indicate the tendencies of the rising class to which the author has mainly to address himself. It has ceased to be fully represented by the upper social stratum whose tastes are reflected by Pope. No distinct democratic sentiment had yet appeared; the aristocratic order was accepted as inevitable or natural; but there was a vague though growing sentiment that the rulers are selfish and corrupt. There is no strong sceptical or anti-religious sentiment; but a spreading conviction that the official pastors are scandalously careless in supplying the wants of their flocks. The philosophical and literary canons of the scholar and gentleman have become unsatisfactory; the vulgar do not care for the delicate finish appreciated by your Chesterfield and acquired in the conversations of polite society, and the indolent scepticism which leads to metaphysical expositions, and is not allied with any political or social passion, does not appeal to them. The popular books of the preceding generation had been the directly religious books: Baxter's _Saint's Rest_, and the _Pilgrim's Progress_--despised by the polite but beloved by the popular class in spite of the critics; and among the dissenters such a work as Boston's _Fourfold State_, or in the Church, Law's _Serious Call_. Your polite author had ignored the devil, and he plays a part in human affairs which, as Carlyle pointed out in later days, cannot be permanently overlooked. The old horned and hoofed devil, indeed, for whom Defoe had still a weakness, shown in his _History of the Devil_, was becoming a little incredible; witchcraft was dying out, though Wesley still felt bound to profess some belief in it; and the old Calvinistic dogmatism, though it could produce a certain amount of controversy among the Methodists, had been made obsolete by the growth of rationalism. Still the new public wanted something more savoury than its elegant teachers had given; and, if sermons had ceased to be so stimulating as of old, it could find it in secular moralisers. Defoe, always keenly alive to the general taste, had tried to supply the demand not only by his queer _History of the Devil_ but by appending a set of moral reflections to _Robinson Crusoe_ and other edifying works, which disgusted Charles Lamb by their petty tradesman morality, and which hardly represent a very lofty ideal. But the recognised representative of the moralists was the ponderous Samuel Johnson. It is hard when reading the _Rambler_ to recognise the massive common sense and deep feeling struggling with the ponderous verbiage and elephantine facetiousness; yet it was not only a treasure of wisdom to the learned ladies, Mrs. Chapone, and Mrs. Elizabeth Carter and the like, who were now beginning to appear, but was received, without provoking ridicule, by the whole literary class. _Rasselas_, in spite of its formality, is still a very impressive book. The literary critic may amuse himself with the question how Johnson came to acquire the peculiar style which imposed upon contemporaries and excited the ridicule of the next generation. According to Boswell, it was due to his reading of Sir Thomas Browne, and a kind of reversion to the earlier period in which the Latinisms of Browne were still natural, when the revolt to simple prose had not begun. Addison, at any rate, as Boswell truly remarks, writes like a 'companion,' and Johnson like a teacher. He puts on his academical robes to deliver his message to mankind, and is no longer the Wit, echoing the coffee-house talk, but the moralist, who looks indeed at actual life, but stands well apart and knows many hours of melancholy and hypochondria. He preaches the morality of his time--the morality of Richardson and Young--only tempered by a hearty contempt for cant, sentimentalism, and all unreality, and expressing his deeper and stronger nature. The style, however acquired, has the idiosyncrasy of the man himself; but I shall have to speak of the Johnsonian view in the next period, when he became the acknowledged literary dictator and expressed one main tendency of the period.

Meanwhile Richardson, as Johnson put it, had been teaching the passions to move at the command of virtue. In other words, Richardson had discovered an incomparably more effective way of preaching a popular sermon. He had begun, as we know, by writing a series of edifying letters to young women; and expounded the same method in _Pamela_, and afterwards in the famous _Clarissa Harlowe_ and _Sir Charles Grandison_. All his books are deliberate attempts to embody his ideal in model representatives of the society of his day. He might have taken a suggestion from Bunyan; who besides his great religious allegory and the curious life of _Mr. Badman_, couched a moral lesson in a description of the actual tradesman of his time. Allegory was now to be supplanted by fiction. The man was to take the place of the personified virtue and vice. Defoe had already shown the power of downright realistic storytelling; and Richardson perhaps learnt something from him when he was drawing his minute and vivid portraits of the people who might at any rate pass for being realities. I must take for granted that Richardson was a man of genius, without adding a word as to its precise quality. I need only repeat one familiar remark. Richardson was a typical tradesman of the period; he was the industrious apprentice who marries his master's daughter; he lived between Hammersmith and Salisbury Court as a thorough middle-class cockney, and had not an idea beyond those common to his class; he accepted the ordinary creeds and conventions; he looked upon freethinkers with such horror that he will not allow even his worst villains to be religious sceptics; he shares the profound reverence of the shopkeepers for the upper classes who are his customers, and he rewards virtue with a coach and six. And yet this mild little man, with the very narrowest intellectual limitations, writes a book which makes a mark not only in England but in Europe, and is imitated by Rousseau in the book which set more than one generation weeping; _Clarissa Harlowe_, moreover, was accepted as the masterpiece of its kind, and she moved not only Englishmen but Germans and Frenchmen to sympathetic tears. One explanation is that Richardson is regarded as the inventor of 'sentimentalism.' The word, as one of his correspondents tells him, was a novelty about 1749, and was then supposed to include anything that was clever and agreeable. I do not myself believe that anybody invented the mode of feeling; but it is true that Richardson was the first writer who definitely turned it to account for a new literary genus. Sentimentalism, I suppose, means, roughly speaking, indulgence in emotion for its own sake. The sentimentalist does not weep because painful thoughts are forced upon him but because he finds weeping pleasant in itself. He appreciates the 'luxury of grief.' (The phrase is used in Brown's _Barbarossa_; I don't know who invented it.) Certainly the discovery was not new. The charms of melancholy had been recognised by Jaques in the forest of Arden and sung by various later poets; but sentimentalism at the earlier period naturally took the form of religious meditation upon death and judgment. Young and Hervey are religious sentimentalists, who have also an eye to literary elegance. Wesley was far too masculine and sensible to be a sentimentalist; his emotions impel him to vigorous action; and are much too serious to be cultivated for their own sakes or to be treated aesthetically. But the general sense that something is not in order in the general state of things, without as yet any definite aim for the vague discontent, was shared by the true sentimentalist. Richardson's sentimentalism is partly unconscious. He is a moralist very much in earnest, preaching a very practical and not very exalted morality. It is his moral purpose, his insistence upon the edifying point of view, his singular fertility in finding illustrations for his doctrines, which makes him a sentimentalist. I will confess that the last time I read _Clarissa Harlowe_ it affected me with a kind of disgust. We wonder sometimes at the coarse nerves of our ancestors, who could see on the stage any quantity of murders and ghosts and miscellaneous horrors. Richardson gave me the same shock from the elaborate detail in which he tells the story of Clarissa; rubbing our noses, if I may say so, in all her agony, and squeezing the last drop of bitterness out of every incident. I should have liked some symptom that he was anxious to turn his eyes from the tragedy instead of giving it so minutely as to suggest that he enjoys the spectacle. Books sometimes owe part of their success, as I fear we must admit, to the very fact that they are in bad taste. They attract the contemporary audience by exaggerating and over-weighting the new vein of sentiment which they have discovered. That, in fact, seems to be the reason why in spite of all authority, modern readers find it difficult to read Richardson through. We know, at any rate, how it affected one great contemporary. This incessant strain upon the moral in question (a very questionable moral it is) struck Fielding as mawkish and unmanly. Richardson seemed to be a narrow, straitlaced preacher, who could look at human nature only from the conventional point of view, and thought that because he was virtuous there should be no more cakes and ale.

Fielding's revolt produced his great novels, and the definite creation of an entirely new form of art which was destined to a long and vigorous life. He claimed to be the founder of a new province in literature, and saw with perfect clearness what was to be its nature. The old romances which had charmed the seventeenth century were still read occasionally: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, for example, and Dr. Johnson had enjoyed them, and Chesterfield, at a later period, has to point out to his son that Calprenède's _Cassandra_ has become ridiculous. The short story, of which Mrs. Behn was the last English writer, was more or less replaced by the little sketches in the _Spectator_; and Defoe had shown the attractiveness of a downright realistic narrative of a series of adventures. But whatever precedents may be found, our unfortunate ancestors had not yet the true modern novel. Fielding had, like other hack authors, written for the stage and tried to carry on the Congreve tradition. But the stage had declined. The best products, perhaps, were the _Beggar's Opera_ and _Chrononhotonthologos_ and Fielding's own _Tom Thumb_. When Fielding tried to make use of the taste for political lampoons, the result was the Act of Parliament which in 1737 introduced the licensing system. The Shakespearian drama, it is true, was coming into popularity with the help of Fielding's great friend, Garrick; but no new Shakespeare appeared to write modern _Hamlets_ and _Othellos_; Johnson tried to supply his place with the ponderous _Irene_, and John Home followed with _Douglas_ of 'My name is Norval' fame. The tragedies were becoming more dreary. Characteristic of Fielding was his admiration of Lillo, whose _George Barnwell_ (1730) and _Fatal Curiosity_ (about 1736), the last of them brought out under Fielding's own management, were remarkable attempts to revive tragedies by going to real life. It is plain, however, that the theatre is no longer the appropriate organ of the reading classes. The licensing act seems to have expressed the general feeling which, if we call it Puritan, must be Puritan in a sense which described the general middle-class prejudices. The problem which Fielding had to solve was to find a literary form which should meet the tastes of the new public, who could not be drawn to the theatre, and which yet should have some of the characteristics which had hitherto been confined to the dramatic form. That was the problem which was triumphantly solved by _Tom Jones_. The story is no longer a mere series of adventures, such as that which happened to Crusoe or Gil Blas, connected by the fact that they happen to the same person; nor a prolonged religious or moral tract, showing how evil will be punished and virtue rewarded. It implies a dramatic situation which can be developed without being hampered by the necessities of stage-representation; and which can give full scope to a realistic portrait of nature as it is under all the familiar circumstances of time and place. This novel, which fulfilled those conditions, has ever since continued to flourish; although a long time was to elapse before any one could approach the merits of the first inventor. In all ages, I suppose, the great artist, whether dramatist or epic poet or novelist, has more or less consciously had the aim which Fielding implicitly claims for himself; that is, to portray human nature. Every great artist, again, must, in one sense, be thoroughly 'realistic.' The word has acquired an irrelevant connotation: but I mean that his vision of the world must correspond to the genuine living convictions of his time. He only ceases to be a realist in that wide sense of the word when he deliberately affects beliefs which have lost their vitality and uses the old mythology, for example, as convenient machinery, when it has ceased to have any real hold upon the minds of their contemporaries. So far Defoe and Richardson and Fielding were perfectly right and deservedly successful because they described the actual human beings whom they saw before them, instead of regarding a setting forth of plain facts as something below the dignity of the artist. Every new departure in literature thrives in proportion as it abandons the old conventions which have become mere survivals. Each of them, in his way, felt the need of appealing to the new class of readers by direct portraiture of the readers themselves, Fielding's merit is his thorough appreciation of this necessity. He will give you men as he sees them, with perfect impartiality and photographic accuracy. His hearty appreciation of genuine work is characteristic. He admires Lillo, as I have said, for giving George Barnwell instead of the conventional stage hero; and his friend Hogarth, who was in pictorial art what he was in fiction, and paints the 'Rake's Progress' without bothering about old masters or the grand style; and he is enthusiastic about Garrick because he makes Hamlet's fear of the ghost so natural that Partridge takes it for a mere matter of course. Downright, forcible appeals to fact--contempt for the artificial and conventional--are his strength, though they also imply his weakness. Fielding, in fact, is the ideal John Bull; the 'good buffalo,' as Taine calls him, the big, full-blooded, vigorous mass of roast-beef who will stand no nonsense, and whose contempt for the fanciful and arbitrary tends towards the coarse and materialistic. That corresponds to the contrast between Richardson and Fielding; and may help to explain why the sentimentalism which Fielding despised yet corresponded to a vague feeling after a real element of interest. But, in truth, our criticism, I think, applies as much to Richardson as to Fielding. Realism, taken in what I should call the right sense, is not properly opposed to 'idealism'; it points to one of the two poles towards which all literary art should be directed. The artist is a realist so far as he deals with the actual life and the genuine beliefs of his time; but he is an idealist so far as he sees the most essential facts and utters the deepest and most permanent truths in his own dialect. His work should be true to life and give the essence of actual human nature, and also express emotions and thoughts common to the men of all times. Now that is the weak side of the fiction of this period. We may read _Clarissa Harlowe_ and _Tom Jones_ with unstinted admiration; but we feel that we are in a confined atmosphere. There are regions of thought and feeling which seem to lie altogether beyond their province. Fielding, in his way, was a bit of a philosopher, though he is too much convinced that Locke and Hoadley have said the last words in theology and philosophy. Parson Adams is a most charming person in his way, but his intellectual outlook is decidedly limited. That may not trouble us much; but we have also the general feeling that we are living in a little provincial society which somehow takes its own special arrangements to be part of the eternal order of nature. The worthy Richardson is aware that there are a great many rakes and infamous persons about; but it never occurs to him that there can be any speculation outside the Thirty-nine Articles; and though Fielding perceives a great many abuses in the actual administration of the laws and the political system, he regards the social order, with its squires and parsons and attorneys as the only conceivable state of things. In other words they, and I might add their successor Smollett, represent all the prejudices and narrow assumptions of the quiet, respectable, and in many ways worthy and domestically excellent, middle-class of the day; which, on the whole, is determined not to look too deeply into awkward questions, but to go along sturdily working out its own conceptions and plodding along on well-established lines.