But they are bent to uses alien, indeed hostile, to
those for which they were originally devised.
those for which they were originally devised.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v10
This was the first of his
services to his brethren of the craft. It is, perhaps, the only one
which has left a deep mark upon the subsequent history of a form
which, when he wrote, was still in the early stages of its growth.
When Tristram Shandy began to appear (1760), there was real
danger that the English novel would remain little more than a
mirror of contemporary life: a reproduction, often photographically
accurate, of the social conditions of the time. Defoe, Fielding,
Smollett, each in his own way and according to the measure of his
genius, had yielded to the impulse; Richardson alone, by striking
into tragedy, had partially escaped. Sterne defiantly throws
himself athwart the tradition of the elders. He delivers one blow
after another at the fashion they had set. Tale of manners,
.
,
picaresque adventure, types of contemporary humanity, plot
itself, all go by the board. His very title is a resounding challenge
to all accepted notions of what the novelist should attempt. And
even the title falls very far short of what the novel actually
provides. The Life and Opinions of the hero is the subject we
are bidden to expect. The opinions, the character, the caprices
of his father, his uncle, his uncle's servant-above all, of the author
himself—is what we actually find. In other words, the novel has
ceased to be a mirror of life and manners. It has ceased to be
what Johnson, himself a heretic against his own theory, thought it
must naturally be, 'a smooth tale, mostly of love. ' It has become
a channel for the outpouring of the author's own personality and
idiosyncrasy; a stage from which, under the thinnest of disguises
or with no disguise at all, he lays bare the workings of his heart,
his intellect, his most fleeting imaginations, before any audience
he can gather round him. If we compare Tristram with Tom
Jones, with Roderick Random, with Moll Flanders—if we compare
it even with Pamela or Clarissa-we shall see that the wheel has
come full circle. Every known landmark has been torn up. And,
in asserting his own liberty, Sterne, little as he may have cared
about it, has won unbounded liberty for all novelists who might
follow. Whatever innovations the future might have in store, it
was hardly possible that they should go beyond the freedom
## p. 49 (#75) ##############################################
Sterne as Liberator
49
triumphantly vindicated by Sterne. For whatever purposes future
writers might wish to use the novel, it was hardly conceivable that
they would not be covered by the principle which he had victoriously,
though, it may be, unconsciously, laid down. The purpose for which
Sterne used the novel was to give free utterance to his own way of
looking at life, his own moral and intellectual individuality. So
much granted, it was impossible to quarrel with those who used
it for a more limited purpose; for embodying in a narrative form
a
the passions stirred by any burning problem of the day; for giving
utterance to their own views on any specific question, political,
social or religious. The perils of such a task might be great. They
could hardly, however, be greater, they would almost certainly be
less great, than those which Sterne had already faced and con-
quered. And, with the success of Tristram before him, no critic
could maintain that, given sufficient genius, the venture was im-
possible. The challenge of Sterne was wide enough to include all
the other challenges that have followed. The Fool of Quality,
Nature and Art, Oliver Twist, Wilhelm Meister, Les Misérables
all are covered by the unformulated formula of Tristram.
Not, of course, that the whole credit of the widening process
should be given to Sterne. Rasselas in England, if Rasselas is,
indeed, to be counted as a novel, much more Candide in France,
had already pointed the way in the same direction. Both appeared
in the year 1759, before the publication of the first volume of
Tristram. Neither of them, however, attempts more than a
fragment of the task which Sterne attempted and performed. In
neither case does the author stake his whole personality upon the
throw; he lets his mind work, or play, round a single question, or
group of questions, and that is all. It was an easier venture, a
smaller venture and one far less rich in promise, than that which,
a few weeks later, launched the Shandy family upon their voyage
round the world.
It is, then, as liberator that Sterne comes before us in the first
instance. And it is as liberator that he has left his chief, perhaps
his only enduring, mark upon the subsequent history of the novel.
His other great qualities are almost purely personal to himself.
His very originality has caused him to count for less, as a moulding
influence, than many a writer not to be compared with him in
genius.
And, first, his humour. The elements which go to make up
this are strangely various and, for the most part, as strangely
baffling and elusive. His handling of character is humorous to
E. L. x.
CH. III.
4
## p. 50 (#76) ##############################################
50 Sterne, and the Novel of his
Times
the very core. It is so with the figures that merely flit across the
stage: Susannah and the scullion, Obadiah and Dr Slop, Eugenius
and Yorick. It is so a hundred times more with those constantly
before the footlights: above all, the undying trio, Walter Shandy,
my uncle Toby and corporal Trim.
The last three are humorous in a whole sheaf of senses, each
of which fades insensibly into the others. In the first place, to
employ a term sanctioned by long usage, they are themselves
humourists of the first water. Each of them is fast astride on his
own hobby-horse, galloping as hard as may be in pursuit of his
own fad. In this sense, though in no other, they are akin to
Puntarvolo and Fastidious Brisk, to Morose and Volpone. They
are akin, also, to Tom Bowling and commodore Trunnion. Sterne,
however, had far too subtle a spirit to content himself with
the mere oddities in which Smollett and, in his own masterful
way, Jonson also, had delighted. His characters may be born
humourists, in the Jonsonian sense. But they have been born
anew, and have taken on an entirely new nature, in the soul of a
writer who was a humourist in another, and a far higher, sense:
the sense in which we apply the term to Fielding and Walter Scott,
to Cervantes and Shakespeare. And the second birth counts for
infinitely more than the first. All that in the original draft of the
character may have been overcharged, distorted and ungenial is
now interwoven with so many softer strands, crossed by so many
subtler strokes, touched to so many finer issues that the primitive
harshness has altogether vanished, and the caricature become a
living creature, of like nature with ourselves. The 'humour,' in
the sense of Jonson and Smollett, is still the groundwork of the
character. But it is so transformed and humanised by the sub-
sequent touches as to have passed without effort into a nobler
plane of being. It is soon recognised as something scarcely differing
from that leaven of idealisation which is the indispensable condition
of the highest creative work and which, much as we may desire to
fix it, is, in this, as in many other instances, lost in the general
effect of the whole. Compare 'my Uncle Toby,' the supreme
instance of this subtle transformation, with Tom Bowling or
commodore Trunnion, and the difference proclaims itself at once.
The name of Cervantes has been mentioned. And Sterne
himself does not make any attempt to conceal that Cervantes
was his model. Others-Rabelais, Montaigne, Burton, the last
especially-may have provided hints and suggested methods.
That, however, is only for the more discursive and abstract parts
2
1
-
1
## p. 51 (#77) ##############################################
Tristram Shandy and Don Quixote 51
of the story. In the humorous handling of character, Sterne's
master was Cervantes and none other. My uncle Toby and
corporal Trim are variations, but variations of genius, upon Don
Quixote and Sancho Panza. Yet, on taking over the suggestion,
Sterne has made it entirely his own. And the differences are even
more strongly marked than the resemblance. Neither master
nor servant, in Sterne's creation, has the universal significance
which makes itself felt even to the most casual reader of Don
Quixote. And this is true of the relation between the two men
no less than of each as taken by himself. There is nothing in
Sterne of the contrast between sense and spirit, between the ideal
and the material, which gives a depth of unfathomable meaning
to the twofold creation of Cervantes. Trim is in no wise the foil
of his master. Still less is he his critic. The very thought would
have filled him with dismay. He is uncle Toby's devoted follower,
the ardent sharer of his dreams, the zealous agent of their fulfilment,
hardly less warm-hearted, hardly less overflowing with kindness,
a point or two shrewder and less unworldly, by many points less
simple and more studious of effect, moulded of slightly coarser
clay but on the same general pattern; altogether, far more bis
counterpart than his opposite. The relation between the two is
full of beauty, as well as of humour. And, just because it is so,
it is wholly different from that which Cervantes has cunningly
woven between Sancho and Don Quixote.
But yet further differences are to be noted. Both Don Quixote
and uncle Toby are possessed with a dream. So, for that matter,
is Walter Shandy. But the dream of the knight, though absurd
in appearance, is, in essentials, noble and heroic. Those of the
Shandy brothers--no ingenuity can conceal the fact-are futile
and childish. To follow them is to watch ‘Nestor play at push-pin
with the boys. ' Don Quixote may tilt at windmills; but all his
thoughts are for the weak and the oppressed. As for uncle Toby,
'our armies in Flanders’ may be upon his lips; but all he cares
about is toy cannons and tin soldiers. The one point of vital
resemblance is the fervour with which each rushes in pursuit of
his delusion. The heavens might fall; but Don Quixote would
still worship Dulcinea as a princess. The world might come to an
end; but Toby would still be rearing midget demilunes, his brother
still be spinning paradoxes and striking impressive attitudes.
Thus, when all is said and done, the contrast goes even deeper
than the resemblance. And this accounts for a difference of method
which could hardly otherwise be explained. Cervantes is so sure
6
4-2
## p. 52 (#78) ##############################################
52 Sterne, and the Novel of his Times
of his hero's nobility that he is not afraid to cover him with every
outward mark of ridicule. Sterne puts forth all his art to make
us forget the futility of the craze which he has imagined for the
central figure of his story. There are moments, it must be con-
fessed, when the ridiculous in Don Quixote is pushed further than
we are willing to endure. In such moments, it is clear that the
satirist has got the better of the creative artist; and it is not on
the hero, but on the author, that our resentment is, instinctively,
apt to fall. Our admiration is proof against all that Cervantes
himself can do to undermine it. Could the intrinsic nobility of
his conception be more decisively driven home? Put either Toby
or Walter Shandy to the same test, and who shall say that either
of them would come through it? The delicate raillery of Sterne
is not too much for them to bear. Before the relentless satire of
Cervantes, they would shrivel into nothing.
It is just here, however, that Goethe found not only the most
characteristic, but, also, the most helpful, quality of Sterne's
genius—that from which there is most to be learned for the
practical conduct of our lives. The very detachment from all that
is commonly reckoned to belong to the serious interests of life,
the readiness to escape from that for which other men are striving
and fighting, to withdraw into the citadel of our bare, naked self
and let the world go its way, to count all for nought, so long as
our own ideal is kept intact, had, for him, a moral worth, a
‘liberating' value, which it was hard to overrate. That it was
the whole truth, Goethe was the last man to suppose. Wilhelm
Meister is there to protest against so impossible a charge. But,
as a half-truth, and one which the world seems for ever bent on
denying, he held, and he was right in holding, that it was beyond
price. He recognised, and he was right in recognising, that, of all
men who ever wrote, Sterne was the most firmly possessed of it
himself, and the most able, by the magic of his art, to awaken the
sense of it in others. 'Shandyism,' he says, in the words of Sterne
himself, 'is the incapacity for fixing the mind on a serious object
for two minutes together. ' And Sterne himself he defines as 'a
free spirit,' 'a model in nothing, in everything an awakener and
suggester! !
So much as to Sterne's humour in the creation of character.
This, however, is anything but the only channel through which
his humour finds an outlet. He is rich in the humour of situation;
rich, also, in that which gathers round certain instincts of man's
* Goethe, Sprüche in Prosa. Werke, vol. XLII, ii, pp. 200—205 (Weimar ed. ).
1
## p. 53 (#79) ##############################################
His Pruriency
53
nature. On the former, there is no need to enlarge: the less so,
as it is often inseparably interwoven with the humour of character,
which has already been sufficiently discussed. If we consider such
scenes as that of Trim's kitchen discourse on mortality, or the
collapse of Mr Shandy the elder upon his bed, or, above all, the
curse of Ernulphus and all that leads up to it, we shall see at once
the infinite art with which Sterne arranges his limelights and the
astounding effects which he makes them produce. To say, as
Goldsmith came near to saying, that Sterne's humour depends
upon a judicious use of dashes and stars, upon the insertion of
marbled sheets and other mechanical or pert devices, is not even
a parody of the truth. As a criticism,
As a criticism, it is incredibly beside the
mark; only less so than Thackeray's—'The man is not a great
humourist; he is a great jester. '
On the other head, Sterne is more open to attack. It is useless
to deny that the instincts round which he best loves to let his
humour play are just those which lend themselves most readily
to abuse, and that, in his handling of them, there is a pruriency
which justly gives offence. There is none of the frankness which
takes the sting out of the obscenity of Aristophanes or the riotous
coarseness of Rabelais. On the contrary, there is a prying sug-
gestiveness which is nothing but an aggravation of the misdeed.
Yet, so much being granted, it is right to guard ourselves against
two possible misconstructions. It is an injustice if we read what
we know of the author's life and conduct into his writings. It is
an injustice if we fail to take into account what may fairly be said
in mitigation of the charge, on this score, against the writings
themselves.
With Sterne, as a man, it is hard to have much patience. He
was unkind to his wife, and he philandered persistently with other
women. His pruriency, moreover, is a blot upon his character;
and, in a man of his cloth, it is doubly distasteful. The two former
defects, however, have nothing to do with his genius as a writer.
And the last, as a trait of character, would concern us much more
than it does if he made any attempt to conceal it in his writings.
Exactly the contrary is the case. The charge, and the just charge,
against him is that he parades it at every turn. There is no need
to go to the records of his life for the knowledge of it. It is pro-
claimed upon the housetops in his books. If a man makes great
professions of nobility of soul in his writings, it is, no doubt, a
1 Goldsmith, Citizen of the World, pp. 50, 52; Thackeray, Lectures on English
Humourists (Sterne).
## p. 54 (#80) ##############################################
54 Sterne, and the Novel of his Times
點
disenchantment to discover that they are contradicted by his life.
The very suspicion of hypocrisy may and does interfere with the
pleasure we take in a work even of imaginative creation. But
hypocrisy, at least in this connection, is the very last thing that
can be charged upon the work of Sterne. His sins go before him to
the judgment; and it is by his writings that they are made known.
Again, offensive as his pruriency is, the specific, and very
peculiar, appeal it makes to the intellect and imagination, may
be urged as a mitigating plea. The two things are closely con-
nected; the former, in fact, is a consequence of the latter. The
indecency of Sterne is of a peculiarly intellectual kind. He holds
it jealously aloof from all that can touch the passions or emotions.
It works, as it were, in a void which he has created specially for
the purpose and of which he alone, of all writers, holds the secret.
In this dry handling of the matter, the affections of the reader are
left unenlisted and unmoved. He is too much engrossed in following
the intellectual ingenuity of the writer, the rapid quips and turns
of his fancy, to have much attention left for the gross insinuations
which too often form the primitive groundwork of the arabesque
cunningly stencilled on the surface. Certainly, he is not carried
off his feet, as he might easily be by warmer, if far more innocent,
descriptions.
The sentimentalism of Sterne goes much deeper and, in its
more extreme forms, is, perhaps, less capable of defence. Here,
again, no doubt, we are mainly, though, in this case, not solely,
concerned with the actual effect stamped by the artist's hand upon
our imagination. We have little--and, in that little, we have
nothing directly—to do with the havoc which sentiment, as he
nursed it, may have wrought with his personal conduct and his
practical outlook on life. The truth is that sentiment so highly
wrought-still more, sentiment so deliberately cultivated and laid
out with such a manifest eye to effect-can hardly fail to rouse
the suspicion of the reader. When the limelights are manipulated
with design so palpable as in the death of Le Fevre or the story
of the dead ass, the author goes far to defeat his own purpose.
The spontaneity which is the first charm of sentiment is imme-
diately seen to be wanting, and the effect of the whole effort is
largely destroyed. More than that. We instinctively feel that,
with the author himself, as a man, all can hardly be well. We are
driven to cast doubts on his sincerity; and, when we look to his
life, we more than half expect our doubts to be confirmed. Such
suspicions inevitably react upon the imaginative pleasure which
1
1
## p. 55 (#81) ##############################################
Henry Mackenzie
55
the picture itself would otherwise have given. There is an air
of unreality, if not of imposture, about the whole business which,
with the best will in the world, it is impossible wholly to put by.
Yet, the same command of effect, which, in matters of sentiment,
is apt to prove perilous, is, elsewhere, brought into play with the
happiest results. Give him a situation, a thought which appeals
strongly either to his imagination or to his humanitarian instincts
for Sterne also, in his own curious way, is among the prophets--
and no man knows so well how to lead up to it; how to make the
most of it; how, by cunning arrangement of light and shade and
drapery, to show it off to the best possible advantage. As stage-
manager, as master of effective setting, he is without equal, we
may almost say without rival, among novelists. And there are
moments when such mastery is pure gain. Take the curse of
Ernulphus, take Trim's reading of the sermon on conscience, take
his oration upon death; and this will hardly be denied. There
are, no doubt, other moments—those of sentimentality or in-
decency-when, from the nature of the theme, approval is not
likely to be so unreserved. Yet, even here, we cannot but admire
the cunning of the craftsman, deliberate yet light-handed, deeply
calculated yet full of sparkle, nimbleness and humour.
From Sterne to his alleged disciples the descent is abrupt.
Two only of these call for notice in this sketch: Mackenzie and
Brooke.
Henry Mackenzie (1745—1831) passed a long and peaceful life
at Edinburgh, where he held the post of attorney for the Crown,
and subsequently of comptroller of the taxes, for Scotland. After
the publication of The Man of Feeling (1771, the year of Scott's
birth) he was recognised as the literary leader of Edinburgh
society, and he may be said to have held that post by courtesy
until his death, a year before that of Scott. In addition to his
three novels, he wrote a successful play (The Prince of Tunis,
1773) and edited two successive periodicals, The Mirror (1779–80)
and The Lounger (1785–7). He was also chairman of the
committee which reported on Macpherson's Ossian (1805).
He is, of course, best known by his earliest work, The Man of
Feeling (1771). At the time, this won for him a name which still
survives as a tradition, but which is hardly justified by the intrinsic
merits of the book, either in conception or in execution. It is, in
fact, mainly remarkable as a record of the influences which, at this
period, were battling for the mastery of the novel.
## p. 56 (#82) ##############################################
56
Sterne, and the Novel of his Times
a
The form of it, which, at first sight, might be taken for
picaresque, is, in reality, a reversion to a yet more primitive type
of structure: that familiar to us from the Coverly papers. And
it may be noted that The Life of John Buncle, Esq. , by Thomas
Amory', the first part of which appeared some fifteen years
earlier (1756), shows, with much better justification for itself,
something of the same peculiarity. Mackenzie, however, does
not, like Amory, write what professes to be an autobiography.
He has not, therefore, the excuse of recording what give them-
selves out for 'actual facts. On the contrary, he sets about to
write a novel with a full-fledged hero to its credit. The hero and
the beggar, the hero on a visit to Bedlam, the hero in a stage-
coach, the hero in the park and at the gambling-table-such are
the disjointed fragments tacked together by way of apology for
a story. We are back again at Sir Roger in the Abbey, Sir Roger
at the play, Sir Roger and the gipsy-woman; which gives a
significant meaning to the title of 'the northern Addison,' given
to Mackenzie, on quite different grounds, by Scott. The author,
indeed, is nothing if not apologetic. He is at pains to account for
the lack of connection by the lame expedient of a middleman-a
curate with a turn for sport and literature—who gives or withholds
material as suits the humour of the moment, suppressing ten
chapters at the beginning and some thirty more as the story slowly
creeps towards an end. It is manifest that the episodes are chosen,
not in the least for the sake of the excitement they may offer, but
solely to make call upon the virtuous, if ill-regulated, 'feelings,' and,
still more, upon the tears, of the hero. And, neither in the spirit
of the story, nor in its incidents, is there the smallest trace of
humour. These things alone are enough to show that The Man
of Feeling owes little or nothing to Fielding or Smollett; but that
in form, if in nothing else, it casts back to Addison and the essayists.
Some of the elements which, in the interval, the picaresque writers
had employed for their own ends, may, doubtless, be fairly recog-
nised as present.
But they are bent to uses alien, indeed hostile, to
those for which they were originally devised. They are no longer
there for their own sake, or for the humour which they offer.
The sole purpose they serve is to furnish the stage on which the
'sentimental education of the hero—and, through him, of the
reader-is carried out.
It is in working the mine of sentiment that Mackenzie comes
as near as he ever comes to Sterne. His methods and aims are
1 As to Amory, see vol. XI, chap. XI.
## p. 57 (#83) ##############################################
The Man of Feeling and Man of the World 57
utterly different. With him, as with the great humourist, the raw
material is sentiment. But how raw the material remains in
Mackenzie's hands! What a wide difference between his clumsy
insistence and the light, airy touch of Sterne! Define Mackenzie
as sentimentalist or sentimental moralist, and you have told almost
the whole truth about him. Describe Sterne by the same terms,
and almost everything remains unsaid. A slenderer thread of
affiliation could not easily be conceived.
The debt of Mackenzie to Rousseau is, undeniably, more sub-
stantial. It is, however, a debt purely of sentiment, of the
humanitarian feelings which Rousseau did more than any man to
spread abroad through Europe. From the nature of the case,
these feelings could not fail to make their way sooner, or later,
into the novel. They had done so already in Sterne, and, by
anticipation, even in Richardson; nor can it have been an
accident that, in the preface to The Man of Feeling, Mackenzie
should have placed himself behind the shield of Richardson and
Rousseau ; though he certainly goes far to destroy the force of the
appeal by tacking on the name of Marmontel. For, in spite of
their title, the Contes Moraux of that writer belong to a wholly
different order.
In his next book, The Man of the World (1773), Mackenzie
returned to the same theme, but from the other side. This time,
he has taken the precaution to provide himself with a villain, the
nominal hero of the story; and the villain, in a long career of
intrigue and seduction, brings a plot in his train. The plot may
not be specially good; but, after the disconnected episodes of
The Man of Feeling, it is an untold relief to have any plot at all.
This is the one new element of importance. In all else, The Man
of the World moves in the same circle as The Man of Feeling.
The influence of Rousseau may, perhaps, be still more strongly
marked, and beyond doubt is so in one passage, which exalts the
virtues of the Cherokee over the corruptions of Europe with a
fervour clearly inspired by the second Discourse and the Letter to
Philopolis. But, even this outbreak might be met by an attack
on our east Indian conquests, which is to be found in the earlier
novel, and which reveals the same train of thought and feeling.
Mackenzie's last and best book, Julia de Roubigné (1777),
strikes a wholly different vein and places him in the straight line
of descent from Richardson. The work is planned on a much
smaller scale; the intrigue is far simpler, and less elaborately
prepared. But it is, none the less, the direct offspring of Clarissa,
## p. 58 (#84) ##############################################
58 Sterne, and the Novel of his Times
and one of the very few tragedies to be found in the early stages
of the English novel. In scale and general treatment, Julia
may, perhaps, have owed something to certain French models: to
La Princesse de Clèves, and, still more, to Manon Lescaut. But,
when all allowance has been made for this, the star of Richardson
—and that, in the letter form as well as in the tragic substance-
still remains in the ascendant. Still, whatever Mackenzie might
write, he was still for the men of his own day the man of feeling
and nothing else. And it was as the man of feeling that he was
known to the younger generation, Scott and others, who looked up
to him as a venerable oracle of the past. Such are the curious
freaks of literary reputation.
With Brooke, we return once more, in however loose a sense,
to what may be called the sphere of influence of Sterne ; and, like
Mackenzie, he, too, has sat at the feet of Rousseau. To many
readers, perhaps to most, the spirit of Brooke will seem much
healthier, as his outlook is undoubtedly much wider, than that
of Mackenzie. He writes in a far breezier spirit; and, as the
picaresque model is more unreservedly adopted, there is far more
variety in his incidents and his settings. The extreme looseness of
structure which inevitably results from this is, no doubt, something
of a drawback; but it is amply redeemed by the vivacity of the
characters, and by the vividness of the ever-changing scenes
through which they are led. It is redeemed, also, by the unfailing
zest with which the author throws himself into the varying
fortunes of his hero—whose pugnacity is hardly less conspicuous
than his overflowing benevolence and of the motley crew among
whom his lot is cast. Moreover, full of 'feeling' as the book is, it
is of the kind which leads as often to laughter as to tears. After
a course of Mackenzie, we cannot but be grateful for this rel
Henry Brooke (1703 ? 83) was born in Ireland and educated
at Trinity college, Dublin; he lived in Dublin for the greater part
of his life. In addition to his work in the novel, drama and poetry,
he took some part in the political controversies of his time; issuing
a warning against the Jacobite tendencies of the Irish catholics in
the panic of 1745 (The Farmer's Letters), and subsequently
pleading for a mitigation of the penal laws (1761). He was
deeply affected by the religious movements of his day, that of the
methodists as well as that of the mystics; a fact which did much
to popularise his most important work, The Fool of Quality.
For our purposes, two things in particular deserve notice in the
work of Brooke. In the first place, The Fool of Quality (1766) is
## p. 59 (#85) ##############################################
Henry Brooke's Fool of Quality 59
more deeply stamped with the seal of Rousseau—the Rousseau of
the second Discourse and of Émile—than is any other book of the
period. The contempt which Rousseau felt for the conventions of
society, his 'inextinguishable hatred of oppression’ in high places,
his faith in the virtues of the poor and simple, his burning desire
to see human life ordered upon a more natural basis—all this is
vividly reflected upon every page of The Fool of Quality. It is
reflected in the various discourses, whether between the personages
of the story or between the author and an imaginary friend (of the
candid sort), which are quaintly scattered throughout the book :
discourses on education, heroism, debtors' prisons, woman's rights,
matter and spirit, the legislation of Lycurgus, the social contract,
the constitution of England-on everything that happened to
captivate the quick wit of the author. Clearly, Brooke had grasped
far more of what Rousseau came to teach the world, and had
felt it far more intensely, than Mackenzie. Before we can find
anything approaching to this keenness of feeling, this revolt
against the wrongs of the social system, we have to go forward to
the years immediately succeeding the outbreak of the French
revolution ; in particular to the years from 1790 to 1797—the
years of Paine and Godwin, of Coleridge's 'penny trumpet of
sedition’; or, in the field of the novel, the years of Caleb Williams,
of Nature and Art, of Hermsprong, or Man as he is not. There,
no doubt, the cry of revolt was raised more defiantly. For, there,
speculation was reinforced by practical example; and the ideas of
Rousseau were flashed back, magnified a hundredfold by the deeds
of the national assembly, the convention and the reign of terror.
And this contrast between the first and the second harvest of
Rousseau's influence is not the least interesting thing in the story
of the eighteenth century novel.
The second point which calls for remark is connected with the
mystical side of Brooke's character, of which notice has been taken
in an earlier chapter? Through the mystics, it will be remem-
bered, Brooke was brought into touch with John Wesley and the
methodists. It is, in fact, the methodistical, rather than the
mystical, strain which comes to the surface in The Fool of Quality
—though, in the discourse on matter and spirit, mentioned above,
the author boldly declares, “I know not that there is any such
thing in nature as matter? ' Such defiances, however, are rare,
and, in general, the appeal of Brooke is of a less esoteric kind.
He dwells much on conversion; and, as revised by Wesley, the
1 Cf. vol. 1x, chap. XI.
2 Vol. I, p. 81, ed. 1766.
## p. 60 (#86) ##############################################
60 Sterne, and the Novel of his Times
6
book was long a favourite with methodists. The importance of
this is to remind us of the bond which unites the literary with the
religious revival of the eighteenth century. It is, of course, only
in a small number of writers—Collins, Smart, Cowper, for instance
—that the two strands are visibly interwoven. But it is probable
that the emotional appeal of the religious revival was an awakening
force to many writers, whether poets or novelists, who, in the out-
ward ordering of their lives, were indifferent, or even hostile, to
the enthusiasm' either of the methodist or of the evangelical.
And it is certain that, from the general change of temper of which
the religious revival was at once the cause and the symptom, both
poet and novelist found the hearts of men more ready to receive
their creations than would have been possible at any earlier period
of the century. The same thing holds good as to the corresponding
movement in the literature of Germany and, to a less degree, as to
that in the literature of France. If the pietists had not prepared
the ground, Goethe, who himself owed not a little to intercourse
with the beautiful soul'—the Moravian sister-would have found
it much harder to win a hearing for his youthful poems and for
Werther. If, in his earlier writings, Rousseau had not roughly
challenged the speculative creed of 'the enlightenment, La
Nouvelle Héloïse and the Rêveries would probably have been
written in a very different spirit; conceivably they might never
have been written at all.
On the other novel of Brooke-Juliet Grenville, or the History
of the Human Heart (1774), it is not worth while to linger. His
plays and poems may be passed by here? . He lives, indeed, by
The Fool of Quality, and by that alone.
6
From the novel of sentiment to that of terror, or of the far
past, is a startling transition. And the harvest in this field is so
poor that our account of it may be brief.
The fountainhead of both streams of romance is to be found in
The Castle of Otranto, which was struck off at feverheat by
Walpole in the summer of 1764 and published at the end of the
year, or the beginning of the next. The execution is weak in the
extreme. The ‘history' is one vast anachronism, and the portents
are absurd. Yet, in spite of these glaring defects, of wbich it is
hard to suppose that the author was not in some degree aware, an
entirely new turn is here given to the novel, and elements are
brought into it which, at a later time and in hands more skilful,
1 As to his contributions to the drama, see vol. XI.
2
## p. 61 (#87) ##############################################
a
Horace Walpole. Clara Reeve 61
were to change it out of all knowledge. The book, as Walpole
himself tells us, was written in conscious reaction against the domes-
ticities and the sentiment of Richardson. It was a deliberate attempt
to divert fiction from the channel along which it had hitherto flowed;
to transport it from the sphere of close observation to that of
free invention; to substitute for the interest of the present that
of the past, the world of experience by that of the mysterious and
the supernatural. The performance is bungling; but the design is
in a high degree original and fruitful. It was, in fact, so original
that, as sometimes happens in such cases, Walpole himself took
fright at his own boldness. He is at the pains to explain that, all
appearances to the contrary, his heart is still half with the novel
of every-day life. 'It was not so much my intention to recall the
glories of ancient romance as to blend the wonderful of old stories
with the natural of modern novels? . ' And he appeals, in proof of
his sincerity, to Matilda's avowal of her passion for Theodore. We
are not bound to take him at his word. He may, with more kind-
ness, be regarded as a whole-hearted rebel, who led the forlorn
hope in a cause which, years after, had its day of triumph. It is
that which makes The Castle of Otranto a marked book-even more
marked perhaps for its ultimate bearing on foreign literature than
on our own.
Clara Reeve, to whom we now pass, led an entirely uneventful
life (1729-1807), marked only by the publication of various tales,
of which The Old English Baron has alone survived, and by her
friendship with Mrs Brigden, Richardson's daughter, who revised
that work in its earlier shape, The Champion of Virtue.
If there is some doubt about the intentions of Walpole, about
those of Clara Reeve, his successor and disciple, there is none
whatever. The Old English Baron (1777)-it had been published
earlier in the same year as The Champion of Virtue, a Gothic
Tale-is undeniably what The Castle of Otranto professes to be,
'an attempt to unite the merits and graces of the ancient Romance
and of the modern Novel. ' There is 'a sufficient degree of the
.
marvellous,' in the shape of a ghost, 'to excite attention ; enough
of the manners of real life,' or what passes for such, 'to give an air
of probability; and enough of the pathetic'-in the form of a
love-story, with an interesting peasant, who turns out to be son and
heir of the ghost (a murdered baron), for hero—'to engage the
heart in its behalf. It is quite true that the ingredients of
Otranto, including the irresistible young peasant, were much the
1 Letter to Élie de Beaumont, 18 March 1765.
## p. 62 (#88) ##############################################
62 Sterne, and the Novel of his Times
same.
But they were differently mixed. In Walpole’s book, the
chief appeal was to 'terror' and to the romantic past. In The
Old English Baron, these have sunk into little more than
trimmings. The main stress on the part of the author lies upon a
tale of righteous vengeance and of love. About the use of the mar-
vellous, she is manifestly nervous. She reduces it, therefore, to the
presence of an ordinary ghost, who contents himself with groaning
beneath the floor, by way of instituting proceedings against his
murderer. Even the medieval is a source of some alarm. And,
considering what she makes of it, we can hardly be surprised.
Walpole, absurd as novelist of the crusades—his scene is laid with
delightful vagueness during the century and a half which covered
them—at least contrives to give some faint flavour of the later
middle ages to his characters and their setting. Clara Reeve can
boast of no such success. A trial by combat, her supreme effort
in this direction, is conducted with all the flourishes of forensic
etiquette. The manners of the eighteenth century are transplanted
straight into the fifteenth. The scene may be labelled 'A Feudal
Castle'; in reality, it is the cedar parlour of Miss Byron and
Sir Charles. The Gothic element and the element of terror being
thus disposed of, nothing is left but that which 'engages the heart
on its behalf': the eternal theme of 'virtue rewarded,' of injured
innocence triumphant over treachery and crime. In the com-
promise which the authoress strove to effect, the 'modern Novel'
carries off all the honours; the ancient Romance' is represented
by little beyond garnish and appurtenance.
How far can it be said that the works comprised in the above
group did anything to prepare the way for the historical and
romantic novel, as it was subsequently shaped by Scott? The
answer is : only in the vaguest and most rudimentary sense. The
novel of terror-if by that we understand the terror which springs
from the marvellous and supernatural-has never taken kindly to
English soil. And it is manifest that Scott fought shy of the mar-
vellous as an element of prose fiction. In appealing to terror,
accordingly, neither Walpole nor Clara Reeve did much more than
enter a claim that the borders of the novel might without treason
be enlarged; that the novel was not bound down by the charter
of its being to the presentation of current life in its most obvious
aspects—of buying and selling, of marrying and giving in marriage.
That, if judged by the permanent results, was all; but it was
enough. The appeal to history told in the same direction ; but it
was far more fruitful of results. Walpole, it is true, did not make
## p. 63 (#89) ##############################################
Fanny Burney (Mme d'Arblay)
63
much of it; Clara Reeve still less. But they pointed the way
which, with a thousand modifications suggested by his genius,
Scott was triumphantly to follow. And the very defects of The
Old English Baron may have aided him in the discovery, so often
missed by his successors, that, in the historical novel, the history
is of far less importance than the human interest and the romance.
The earlier and greater Waverleys, in fact, can be called historical
only by a stretch. It was not until Scott had worked for years
upon the near past—a past which still made itself felt as a
living force upon the present—that he plunged into the middle
ages. Moreover, in spite of its stirring adventure, Ivanhoe has
always counted for less with the English reader than with those of
Germany and France.
Frances Burney (1752—1840), the last novelist of note belonging
to our period, was daughter of Dr Burney, the historian of music.
During her youth, and until some years after the publication of
her second novel, Cecilia (1782), she lived in the most brilliant
literary society of her day, including that of Johnson, Mrs Thrale
and Burke. In 1786 she was appointed second keeper of the robes
to queen Charlotte, a post which she held for four years, to her own
great discomfort, but to the delight of those who read her fascinating
Diary. After her release, she married (1793) a French officer of
the name of d’Arblay, one of the emigrants who gathered at
Juniper hall and of whom her Diary contains many striking and
amusing notices. From 1802 to 1812 she lived in France, returning
only to publish her last novel, The Wanderer (1814). The later
years of her life (1815—40) were passed peacefully in England.
With the novels of Fanny Burney we pass into another world.
They stand far nearer to the novel as we know it than anything
which had yet appeared. The picaresque scaffolding, the obtrusive
moral, the deliberate sentiment-much more the marvellous and
the medievalism-of the writers who had immediately gone before
her are thrown to the winds. She sets herself to tell a plain story
-enlivened, doubtless, with strange adventures, with characters
still stranger-and that is all.
Yet in this very simplicity is contained a new and, as time
has proved, a very fruitful conception of what the novel might
achieve. Starting from the general plan laid down by Richardson,
she limits, she adds, she modifies, until the result is something
entirely different. The tragic element is the first to go. This,
with other modifications, leaves her with a story of home life for
the ground-work of her picture. And the introduction of a whole
## p. 64 (#90) ##############################################
64 Sterne, and the Novel of his Times
*
gallery of oddities, dogging the steps of the heroine at every turn,
gives variety, zest and sparkle to what otherwise would have been
a humdrum, and, perhaps, a slightly sentimental, tale. The novel
of home life, it is not too much to say, is the creation of Fanny
Burney. There is a great deal else, and a great deal more
brilliant, in her creations. But it is this that makes them a land-
mark in the history of fiction.
Her method is simplicity itself. Evelina is the 'History of a
young lady's entrance into the world. And the same description
would apply to every one of the stories which followed. Her
unvarying plan is to take a young girl with a virtuous mind, a
cultivated understanding and a feeling heart,' but wholly “ignorant
of the forms and inexperienced in the manners of the world'; to
provide her with a guardian instead of parents and so throw her
on her own resources; to place her in circumstances unusual but
not, except in The Wanderer, unnatural; and, with an inexhaust-
ible fertility of invention, to devise incidents and situations such
as will draw out her character and keep the interest of the reader
on the stretch. In Cecilia, no doubt, she added to this something
of the tragic purpose, the solemn moral, of Richardson; and very
few are likely to regard the addition as an improvement. But, with
this partial exception, her aim was always what has been said; and
she had two gifts which enabled her triumphantly to attain it.
The first is a talent, not easily to be matched among English
novelists, for telling a story; an unaffected delight in telling it,
which wakens a like pleasure in the reader. The second is an
amazing power—a power in which she is surpassed by Dickens
only-of giving flesh and blood to caricature. 'My little character-
monger' was Johnson's pet name for her! ; and, in the sense just
hinted at, she earned it ten times over. With infectious zest, she
adds touch after touch of absurdity to her portrait, until the
reader is fairly swept off his feet by the drollery of the figure
she has conjured up. This particular talent is, no doubt, most
conspicuous in her earliest two works, Evelina (1778) and Cecilia
(1782). But it flashes out often enough in Camilla (1796) and, on
occasion, even in The Wanderer (1814). In all this gallery of
'humourists' the most laughable is Mr Briggs, the ill-bred but not
unkindly skinflint of Cecilia. But he is hard run by the Branghtons,
i The story is told in the dedication to The Wanderer. There was a party at Lady
Galloway's, shortly after the appearance of Cecilia. “Johnson endeavouring to detain
me when I rose to depart, by calling out“Don't go yet, little character-monger,” Burke
followed, gaily but impressively exclaiming, "Miss Burney, die to-night! ”.
## p. 65 (#91) ##############################################
65
Diary of Mme d'Arblay
still harder perhaps by Mr Smith, the 'gentleman manqué, as
Mrs Thrale called him, of Evelina ; while Sir Hugh Tyrold and
Dr Orkborne, the Admiral, Sir Jasper Herrington and Mr Tedman
keep up the succession not quite unworthily, in the two later
novels. But even to mention instances is to do injustice. For,
after all, the most surprising thing is their unlimited abundance;
the way in which they start up from every corner, from each rung
of the social ladder, at the bidding of the author. For vulgarity,
in particular, she has the eye of a lynx. Right and left, high or
low, she unmasks it with unflagging delight, tearing off the count-
less disguises under which it lurks and holding it up, naked but
not ashamed, to the laughter, and, sometimes, though not often, to
the contempt of the reader. By the side of these lively beings,
the figures of Smollett seem little better than stuffed birds in a
museum.
Spontaneity is among the best gifts of the novelist. And few
novelists are more spontaneous than Fanny Burney. We should
have guessed this from the novels themselves. The Diary', in
some ways a yet greater masterpiece, puts it beyond doubt. It is
evident that all she saw and all she heard presented itself to her
instinctively in dramatic form ; that all the incidents through
which she passed naturally wove themselves into a story-one
might almost say, into a novel-before her eyes. In the Diary,
as in the novels, the two gifts are intertwined beyond possibility of
separation. The observation which enabled her to take in the
passing scene, to seize the distinctive features of every man and
woman she met, may have put the material in her hands. But the
material would have lost half its effect, it would have lost more
than half its charm, if the genius of the born story-teller had not
been there to weave it into a coherent whole, to give it life and
movement. The Diary is a better test of this even than the
novels. The incidents recorded in it are, for the most part, what
might happen to any of us. The men and women it brings before
us are, with some marked exceptions, such as might be met at any
party. Who but themselves would have cared a straw for Miss
Streatfield or M. de Guiffardière, for colonel Blakeney or even the
'sweet Queen'? Yet, through the magic glass of the Diary, each
of them takes distinct form and feature; all have gestures,
mannerisms, gesticulations of their own; and each, without the
smallest effort, fits into a drama as lively as any that could be put
upon the stage. It is, of course, perfectly true, and it is as it should
1 Cf, chap. XI, post.
5
E. L.
services to his brethren of the craft. It is, perhaps, the only one
which has left a deep mark upon the subsequent history of a form
which, when he wrote, was still in the early stages of its growth.
When Tristram Shandy began to appear (1760), there was real
danger that the English novel would remain little more than a
mirror of contemporary life: a reproduction, often photographically
accurate, of the social conditions of the time. Defoe, Fielding,
Smollett, each in his own way and according to the measure of his
genius, had yielded to the impulse; Richardson alone, by striking
into tragedy, had partially escaped. Sterne defiantly throws
himself athwart the tradition of the elders. He delivers one blow
after another at the fashion they had set. Tale of manners,
.
,
picaresque adventure, types of contemporary humanity, plot
itself, all go by the board. His very title is a resounding challenge
to all accepted notions of what the novelist should attempt. And
even the title falls very far short of what the novel actually
provides. The Life and Opinions of the hero is the subject we
are bidden to expect. The opinions, the character, the caprices
of his father, his uncle, his uncle's servant-above all, of the author
himself—is what we actually find. In other words, the novel has
ceased to be a mirror of life and manners. It has ceased to be
what Johnson, himself a heretic against his own theory, thought it
must naturally be, 'a smooth tale, mostly of love. ' It has become
a channel for the outpouring of the author's own personality and
idiosyncrasy; a stage from which, under the thinnest of disguises
or with no disguise at all, he lays bare the workings of his heart,
his intellect, his most fleeting imaginations, before any audience
he can gather round him. If we compare Tristram with Tom
Jones, with Roderick Random, with Moll Flanders—if we compare
it even with Pamela or Clarissa-we shall see that the wheel has
come full circle. Every known landmark has been torn up. And,
in asserting his own liberty, Sterne, little as he may have cared
about it, has won unbounded liberty for all novelists who might
follow. Whatever innovations the future might have in store, it
was hardly possible that they should go beyond the freedom
## p. 49 (#75) ##############################################
Sterne as Liberator
49
triumphantly vindicated by Sterne. For whatever purposes future
writers might wish to use the novel, it was hardly conceivable that
they would not be covered by the principle which he had victoriously,
though, it may be, unconsciously, laid down. The purpose for which
Sterne used the novel was to give free utterance to his own way of
looking at life, his own moral and intellectual individuality. So
much granted, it was impossible to quarrel with those who used
it for a more limited purpose; for embodying in a narrative form
a
the passions stirred by any burning problem of the day; for giving
utterance to their own views on any specific question, political,
social or religious. The perils of such a task might be great. They
could hardly, however, be greater, they would almost certainly be
less great, than those which Sterne had already faced and con-
quered. And, with the success of Tristram before him, no critic
could maintain that, given sufficient genius, the venture was im-
possible. The challenge of Sterne was wide enough to include all
the other challenges that have followed. The Fool of Quality,
Nature and Art, Oliver Twist, Wilhelm Meister, Les Misérables
all are covered by the unformulated formula of Tristram.
Not, of course, that the whole credit of the widening process
should be given to Sterne. Rasselas in England, if Rasselas is,
indeed, to be counted as a novel, much more Candide in France,
had already pointed the way in the same direction. Both appeared
in the year 1759, before the publication of the first volume of
Tristram. Neither of them, however, attempts more than a
fragment of the task which Sterne attempted and performed. In
neither case does the author stake his whole personality upon the
throw; he lets his mind work, or play, round a single question, or
group of questions, and that is all. It was an easier venture, a
smaller venture and one far less rich in promise, than that which,
a few weeks later, launched the Shandy family upon their voyage
round the world.
It is, then, as liberator that Sterne comes before us in the first
instance. And it is as liberator that he has left his chief, perhaps
his only enduring, mark upon the subsequent history of the novel.
His other great qualities are almost purely personal to himself.
His very originality has caused him to count for less, as a moulding
influence, than many a writer not to be compared with him in
genius.
And, first, his humour. The elements which go to make up
this are strangely various and, for the most part, as strangely
baffling and elusive. His handling of character is humorous to
E. L. x.
CH. III.
4
## p. 50 (#76) ##############################################
50 Sterne, and the Novel of his
Times
the very core. It is so with the figures that merely flit across the
stage: Susannah and the scullion, Obadiah and Dr Slop, Eugenius
and Yorick. It is so a hundred times more with those constantly
before the footlights: above all, the undying trio, Walter Shandy,
my uncle Toby and corporal Trim.
The last three are humorous in a whole sheaf of senses, each
of which fades insensibly into the others. In the first place, to
employ a term sanctioned by long usage, they are themselves
humourists of the first water. Each of them is fast astride on his
own hobby-horse, galloping as hard as may be in pursuit of his
own fad. In this sense, though in no other, they are akin to
Puntarvolo and Fastidious Brisk, to Morose and Volpone. They
are akin, also, to Tom Bowling and commodore Trunnion. Sterne,
however, had far too subtle a spirit to content himself with
the mere oddities in which Smollett and, in his own masterful
way, Jonson also, had delighted. His characters may be born
humourists, in the Jonsonian sense. But they have been born
anew, and have taken on an entirely new nature, in the soul of a
writer who was a humourist in another, and a far higher, sense:
the sense in which we apply the term to Fielding and Walter Scott,
to Cervantes and Shakespeare. And the second birth counts for
infinitely more than the first. All that in the original draft of the
character may have been overcharged, distorted and ungenial is
now interwoven with so many softer strands, crossed by so many
subtler strokes, touched to so many finer issues that the primitive
harshness has altogether vanished, and the caricature become a
living creature, of like nature with ourselves. The 'humour,' in
the sense of Jonson and Smollett, is still the groundwork of the
character. But it is so transformed and humanised by the sub-
sequent touches as to have passed without effort into a nobler
plane of being. It is soon recognised as something scarcely differing
from that leaven of idealisation which is the indispensable condition
of the highest creative work and which, much as we may desire to
fix it, is, in this, as in many other instances, lost in the general
effect of the whole. Compare 'my Uncle Toby,' the supreme
instance of this subtle transformation, with Tom Bowling or
commodore Trunnion, and the difference proclaims itself at once.
The name of Cervantes has been mentioned. And Sterne
himself does not make any attempt to conceal that Cervantes
was his model. Others-Rabelais, Montaigne, Burton, the last
especially-may have provided hints and suggested methods.
That, however, is only for the more discursive and abstract parts
2
1
-
1
## p. 51 (#77) ##############################################
Tristram Shandy and Don Quixote 51
of the story. In the humorous handling of character, Sterne's
master was Cervantes and none other. My uncle Toby and
corporal Trim are variations, but variations of genius, upon Don
Quixote and Sancho Panza. Yet, on taking over the suggestion,
Sterne has made it entirely his own. And the differences are even
more strongly marked than the resemblance. Neither master
nor servant, in Sterne's creation, has the universal significance
which makes itself felt even to the most casual reader of Don
Quixote. And this is true of the relation between the two men
no less than of each as taken by himself. There is nothing in
Sterne of the contrast between sense and spirit, between the ideal
and the material, which gives a depth of unfathomable meaning
to the twofold creation of Cervantes. Trim is in no wise the foil
of his master. Still less is he his critic. The very thought would
have filled him with dismay. He is uncle Toby's devoted follower,
the ardent sharer of his dreams, the zealous agent of their fulfilment,
hardly less warm-hearted, hardly less overflowing with kindness,
a point or two shrewder and less unworldly, by many points less
simple and more studious of effect, moulded of slightly coarser
clay but on the same general pattern; altogether, far more bis
counterpart than his opposite. The relation between the two is
full of beauty, as well as of humour. And, just because it is so,
it is wholly different from that which Cervantes has cunningly
woven between Sancho and Don Quixote.
But yet further differences are to be noted. Both Don Quixote
and uncle Toby are possessed with a dream. So, for that matter,
is Walter Shandy. But the dream of the knight, though absurd
in appearance, is, in essentials, noble and heroic. Those of the
Shandy brothers--no ingenuity can conceal the fact-are futile
and childish. To follow them is to watch ‘Nestor play at push-pin
with the boys. ' Don Quixote may tilt at windmills; but all his
thoughts are for the weak and the oppressed. As for uncle Toby,
'our armies in Flanders’ may be upon his lips; but all he cares
about is toy cannons and tin soldiers. The one point of vital
resemblance is the fervour with which each rushes in pursuit of
his delusion. The heavens might fall; but Don Quixote would
still worship Dulcinea as a princess. The world might come to an
end; but Toby would still be rearing midget demilunes, his brother
still be spinning paradoxes and striking impressive attitudes.
Thus, when all is said and done, the contrast goes even deeper
than the resemblance. And this accounts for a difference of method
which could hardly otherwise be explained. Cervantes is so sure
6
4-2
## p. 52 (#78) ##############################################
52 Sterne, and the Novel of his Times
of his hero's nobility that he is not afraid to cover him with every
outward mark of ridicule. Sterne puts forth all his art to make
us forget the futility of the craze which he has imagined for the
central figure of his story. There are moments, it must be con-
fessed, when the ridiculous in Don Quixote is pushed further than
we are willing to endure. In such moments, it is clear that the
satirist has got the better of the creative artist; and it is not on
the hero, but on the author, that our resentment is, instinctively,
apt to fall. Our admiration is proof against all that Cervantes
himself can do to undermine it. Could the intrinsic nobility of
his conception be more decisively driven home? Put either Toby
or Walter Shandy to the same test, and who shall say that either
of them would come through it? The delicate raillery of Sterne
is not too much for them to bear. Before the relentless satire of
Cervantes, they would shrivel into nothing.
It is just here, however, that Goethe found not only the most
characteristic, but, also, the most helpful, quality of Sterne's
genius—that from which there is most to be learned for the
practical conduct of our lives. The very detachment from all that
is commonly reckoned to belong to the serious interests of life,
the readiness to escape from that for which other men are striving
and fighting, to withdraw into the citadel of our bare, naked self
and let the world go its way, to count all for nought, so long as
our own ideal is kept intact, had, for him, a moral worth, a
‘liberating' value, which it was hard to overrate. That it was
the whole truth, Goethe was the last man to suppose. Wilhelm
Meister is there to protest against so impossible a charge. But,
as a half-truth, and one which the world seems for ever bent on
denying, he held, and he was right in holding, that it was beyond
price. He recognised, and he was right in recognising, that, of all
men who ever wrote, Sterne was the most firmly possessed of it
himself, and the most able, by the magic of his art, to awaken the
sense of it in others. 'Shandyism,' he says, in the words of Sterne
himself, 'is the incapacity for fixing the mind on a serious object
for two minutes together. ' And Sterne himself he defines as 'a
free spirit,' 'a model in nothing, in everything an awakener and
suggester! !
So much as to Sterne's humour in the creation of character.
This, however, is anything but the only channel through which
his humour finds an outlet. He is rich in the humour of situation;
rich, also, in that which gathers round certain instincts of man's
* Goethe, Sprüche in Prosa. Werke, vol. XLII, ii, pp. 200—205 (Weimar ed. ).
1
## p. 53 (#79) ##############################################
His Pruriency
53
nature. On the former, there is no need to enlarge: the less so,
as it is often inseparably interwoven with the humour of character,
which has already been sufficiently discussed. If we consider such
scenes as that of Trim's kitchen discourse on mortality, or the
collapse of Mr Shandy the elder upon his bed, or, above all, the
curse of Ernulphus and all that leads up to it, we shall see at once
the infinite art with which Sterne arranges his limelights and the
astounding effects which he makes them produce. To say, as
Goldsmith came near to saying, that Sterne's humour depends
upon a judicious use of dashes and stars, upon the insertion of
marbled sheets and other mechanical or pert devices, is not even
a parody of the truth. As a criticism,
As a criticism, it is incredibly beside the
mark; only less so than Thackeray's—'The man is not a great
humourist; he is a great jester. '
On the other head, Sterne is more open to attack. It is useless
to deny that the instincts round which he best loves to let his
humour play are just those which lend themselves most readily
to abuse, and that, in his handling of them, there is a pruriency
which justly gives offence. There is none of the frankness which
takes the sting out of the obscenity of Aristophanes or the riotous
coarseness of Rabelais. On the contrary, there is a prying sug-
gestiveness which is nothing but an aggravation of the misdeed.
Yet, so much being granted, it is right to guard ourselves against
two possible misconstructions. It is an injustice if we read what
we know of the author's life and conduct into his writings. It is
an injustice if we fail to take into account what may fairly be said
in mitigation of the charge, on this score, against the writings
themselves.
With Sterne, as a man, it is hard to have much patience. He
was unkind to his wife, and he philandered persistently with other
women. His pruriency, moreover, is a blot upon his character;
and, in a man of his cloth, it is doubly distasteful. The two former
defects, however, have nothing to do with his genius as a writer.
And the last, as a trait of character, would concern us much more
than it does if he made any attempt to conceal it in his writings.
Exactly the contrary is the case. The charge, and the just charge,
against him is that he parades it at every turn. There is no need
to go to the records of his life for the knowledge of it. It is pro-
claimed upon the housetops in his books. If a man makes great
professions of nobility of soul in his writings, it is, no doubt, a
1 Goldsmith, Citizen of the World, pp. 50, 52; Thackeray, Lectures on English
Humourists (Sterne).
## p. 54 (#80) ##############################################
54 Sterne, and the Novel of his Times
點
disenchantment to discover that they are contradicted by his life.
The very suspicion of hypocrisy may and does interfere with the
pleasure we take in a work even of imaginative creation. But
hypocrisy, at least in this connection, is the very last thing that
can be charged upon the work of Sterne. His sins go before him to
the judgment; and it is by his writings that they are made known.
Again, offensive as his pruriency is, the specific, and very
peculiar, appeal it makes to the intellect and imagination, may
be urged as a mitigating plea. The two things are closely con-
nected; the former, in fact, is a consequence of the latter. The
indecency of Sterne is of a peculiarly intellectual kind. He holds
it jealously aloof from all that can touch the passions or emotions.
It works, as it were, in a void which he has created specially for
the purpose and of which he alone, of all writers, holds the secret.
In this dry handling of the matter, the affections of the reader are
left unenlisted and unmoved. He is too much engrossed in following
the intellectual ingenuity of the writer, the rapid quips and turns
of his fancy, to have much attention left for the gross insinuations
which too often form the primitive groundwork of the arabesque
cunningly stencilled on the surface. Certainly, he is not carried
off his feet, as he might easily be by warmer, if far more innocent,
descriptions.
The sentimentalism of Sterne goes much deeper and, in its
more extreme forms, is, perhaps, less capable of defence. Here,
again, no doubt, we are mainly, though, in this case, not solely,
concerned with the actual effect stamped by the artist's hand upon
our imagination. We have little--and, in that little, we have
nothing directly—to do with the havoc which sentiment, as he
nursed it, may have wrought with his personal conduct and his
practical outlook on life. The truth is that sentiment so highly
wrought-still more, sentiment so deliberately cultivated and laid
out with such a manifest eye to effect-can hardly fail to rouse
the suspicion of the reader. When the limelights are manipulated
with design so palpable as in the death of Le Fevre or the story
of the dead ass, the author goes far to defeat his own purpose.
The spontaneity which is the first charm of sentiment is imme-
diately seen to be wanting, and the effect of the whole effort is
largely destroyed. More than that. We instinctively feel that,
with the author himself, as a man, all can hardly be well. We are
driven to cast doubts on his sincerity; and, when we look to his
life, we more than half expect our doubts to be confirmed. Such
suspicions inevitably react upon the imaginative pleasure which
1
1
## p. 55 (#81) ##############################################
Henry Mackenzie
55
the picture itself would otherwise have given. There is an air
of unreality, if not of imposture, about the whole business which,
with the best will in the world, it is impossible wholly to put by.
Yet, the same command of effect, which, in matters of sentiment,
is apt to prove perilous, is, elsewhere, brought into play with the
happiest results. Give him a situation, a thought which appeals
strongly either to his imagination or to his humanitarian instincts
for Sterne also, in his own curious way, is among the prophets--
and no man knows so well how to lead up to it; how to make the
most of it; how, by cunning arrangement of light and shade and
drapery, to show it off to the best possible advantage. As stage-
manager, as master of effective setting, he is without equal, we
may almost say without rival, among novelists. And there are
moments when such mastery is pure gain. Take the curse of
Ernulphus, take Trim's reading of the sermon on conscience, take
his oration upon death; and this will hardly be denied. There
are, no doubt, other moments—those of sentimentality or in-
decency-when, from the nature of the theme, approval is not
likely to be so unreserved. Yet, even here, we cannot but admire
the cunning of the craftsman, deliberate yet light-handed, deeply
calculated yet full of sparkle, nimbleness and humour.
From Sterne to his alleged disciples the descent is abrupt.
Two only of these call for notice in this sketch: Mackenzie and
Brooke.
Henry Mackenzie (1745—1831) passed a long and peaceful life
at Edinburgh, where he held the post of attorney for the Crown,
and subsequently of comptroller of the taxes, for Scotland. After
the publication of The Man of Feeling (1771, the year of Scott's
birth) he was recognised as the literary leader of Edinburgh
society, and he may be said to have held that post by courtesy
until his death, a year before that of Scott. In addition to his
three novels, he wrote a successful play (The Prince of Tunis,
1773) and edited two successive periodicals, The Mirror (1779–80)
and The Lounger (1785–7). He was also chairman of the
committee which reported on Macpherson's Ossian (1805).
He is, of course, best known by his earliest work, The Man of
Feeling (1771). At the time, this won for him a name which still
survives as a tradition, but which is hardly justified by the intrinsic
merits of the book, either in conception or in execution. It is, in
fact, mainly remarkable as a record of the influences which, at this
period, were battling for the mastery of the novel.
## p. 56 (#82) ##############################################
56
Sterne, and the Novel of his Times
a
The form of it, which, at first sight, might be taken for
picaresque, is, in reality, a reversion to a yet more primitive type
of structure: that familiar to us from the Coverly papers. And
it may be noted that The Life of John Buncle, Esq. , by Thomas
Amory', the first part of which appeared some fifteen years
earlier (1756), shows, with much better justification for itself,
something of the same peculiarity. Mackenzie, however, does
not, like Amory, write what professes to be an autobiography.
He has not, therefore, the excuse of recording what give them-
selves out for 'actual facts. On the contrary, he sets about to
write a novel with a full-fledged hero to its credit. The hero and
the beggar, the hero on a visit to Bedlam, the hero in a stage-
coach, the hero in the park and at the gambling-table-such are
the disjointed fragments tacked together by way of apology for
a story. We are back again at Sir Roger in the Abbey, Sir Roger
at the play, Sir Roger and the gipsy-woman; which gives a
significant meaning to the title of 'the northern Addison,' given
to Mackenzie, on quite different grounds, by Scott. The author,
indeed, is nothing if not apologetic. He is at pains to account for
the lack of connection by the lame expedient of a middleman-a
curate with a turn for sport and literature—who gives or withholds
material as suits the humour of the moment, suppressing ten
chapters at the beginning and some thirty more as the story slowly
creeps towards an end. It is manifest that the episodes are chosen,
not in the least for the sake of the excitement they may offer, but
solely to make call upon the virtuous, if ill-regulated, 'feelings,' and,
still more, upon the tears, of the hero. And, neither in the spirit
of the story, nor in its incidents, is there the smallest trace of
humour. These things alone are enough to show that The Man
of Feeling owes little or nothing to Fielding or Smollett; but that
in form, if in nothing else, it casts back to Addison and the essayists.
Some of the elements which, in the interval, the picaresque writers
had employed for their own ends, may, doubtless, be fairly recog-
nised as present.
But they are bent to uses alien, indeed hostile, to
those for which they were originally devised. They are no longer
there for their own sake, or for the humour which they offer.
The sole purpose they serve is to furnish the stage on which the
'sentimental education of the hero—and, through him, of the
reader-is carried out.
It is in working the mine of sentiment that Mackenzie comes
as near as he ever comes to Sterne. His methods and aims are
1 As to Amory, see vol. XI, chap. XI.
## p. 57 (#83) ##############################################
The Man of Feeling and Man of the World 57
utterly different. With him, as with the great humourist, the raw
material is sentiment. But how raw the material remains in
Mackenzie's hands! What a wide difference between his clumsy
insistence and the light, airy touch of Sterne! Define Mackenzie
as sentimentalist or sentimental moralist, and you have told almost
the whole truth about him. Describe Sterne by the same terms,
and almost everything remains unsaid. A slenderer thread of
affiliation could not easily be conceived.
The debt of Mackenzie to Rousseau is, undeniably, more sub-
stantial. It is, however, a debt purely of sentiment, of the
humanitarian feelings which Rousseau did more than any man to
spread abroad through Europe. From the nature of the case,
these feelings could not fail to make their way sooner, or later,
into the novel. They had done so already in Sterne, and, by
anticipation, even in Richardson; nor can it have been an
accident that, in the preface to The Man of Feeling, Mackenzie
should have placed himself behind the shield of Richardson and
Rousseau ; though he certainly goes far to destroy the force of the
appeal by tacking on the name of Marmontel. For, in spite of
their title, the Contes Moraux of that writer belong to a wholly
different order.
In his next book, The Man of the World (1773), Mackenzie
returned to the same theme, but from the other side. This time,
he has taken the precaution to provide himself with a villain, the
nominal hero of the story; and the villain, in a long career of
intrigue and seduction, brings a plot in his train. The plot may
not be specially good; but, after the disconnected episodes of
The Man of Feeling, it is an untold relief to have any plot at all.
This is the one new element of importance. In all else, The Man
of the World moves in the same circle as The Man of Feeling.
The influence of Rousseau may, perhaps, be still more strongly
marked, and beyond doubt is so in one passage, which exalts the
virtues of the Cherokee over the corruptions of Europe with a
fervour clearly inspired by the second Discourse and the Letter to
Philopolis. But, even this outbreak might be met by an attack
on our east Indian conquests, which is to be found in the earlier
novel, and which reveals the same train of thought and feeling.
Mackenzie's last and best book, Julia de Roubigné (1777),
strikes a wholly different vein and places him in the straight line
of descent from Richardson. The work is planned on a much
smaller scale; the intrigue is far simpler, and less elaborately
prepared. But it is, none the less, the direct offspring of Clarissa,
## p. 58 (#84) ##############################################
58 Sterne, and the Novel of his Times
and one of the very few tragedies to be found in the early stages
of the English novel. In scale and general treatment, Julia
may, perhaps, have owed something to certain French models: to
La Princesse de Clèves, and, still more, to Manon Lescaut. But,
when all allowance has been made for this, the star of Richardson
—and that, in the letter form as well as in the tragic substance-
still remains in the ascendant. Still, whatever Mackenzie might
write, he was still for the men of his own day the man of feeling
and nothing else. And it was as the man of feeling that he was
known to the younger generation, Scott and others, who looked up
to him as a venerable oracle of the past. Such are the curious
freaks of literary reputation.
With Brooke, we return once more, in however loose a sense,
to what may be called the sphere of influence of Sterne ; and, like
Mackenzie, he, too, has sat at the feet of Rousseau. To many
readers, perhaps to most, the spirit of Brooke will seem much
healthier, as his outlook is undoubtedly much wider, than that
of Mackenzie. He writes in a far breezier spirit; and, as the
picaresque model is more unreservedly adopted, there is far more
variety in his incidents and his settings. The extreme looseness of
structure which inevitably results from this is, no doubt, something
of a drawback; but it is amply redeemed by the vivacity of the
characters, and by the vividness of the ever-changing scenes
through which they are led. It is redeemed, also, by the unfailing
zest with which the author throws himself into the varying
fortunes of his hero—whose pugnacity is hardly less conspicuous
than his overflowing benevolence and of the motley crew among
whom his lot is cast. Moreover, full of 'feeling' as the book is, it
is of the kind which leads as often to laughter as to tears. After
a course of Mackenzie, we cannot but be grateful for this rel
Henry Brooke (1703 ? 83) was born in Ireland and educated
at Trinity college, Dublin; he lived in Dublin for the greater part
of his life. In addition to his work in the novel, drama and poetry,
he took some part in the political controversies of his time; issuing
a warning against the Jacobite tendencies of the Irish catholics in
the panic of 1745 (The Farmer's Letters), and subsequently
pleading for a mitigation of the penal laws (1761). He was
deeply affected by the religious movements of his day, that of the
methodists as well as that of the mystics; a fact which did much
to popularise his most important work, The Fool of Quality.
For our purposes, two things in particular deserve notice in the
work of Brooke. In the first place, The Fool of Quality (1766) is
## p. 59 (#85) ##############################################
Henry Brooke's Fool of Quality 59
more deeply stamped with the seal of Rousseau—the Rousseau of
the second Discourse and of Émile—than is any other book of the
period. The contempt which Rousseau felt for the conventions of
society, his 'inextinguishable hatred of oppression’ in high places,
his faith in the virtues of the poor and simple, his burning desire
to see human life ordered upon a more natural basis—all this is
vividly reflected upon every page of The Fool of Quality. It is
reflected in the various discourses, whether between the personages
of the story or between the author and an imaginary friend (of the
candid sort), which are quaintly scattered throughout the book :
discourses on education, heroism, debtors' prisons, woman's rights,
matter and spirit, the legislation of Lycurgus, the social contract,
the constitution of England-on everything that happened to
captivate the quick wit of the author. Clearly, Brooke had grasped
far more of what Rousseau came to teach the world, and had
felt it far more intensely, than Mackenzie. Before we can find
anything approaching to this keenness of feeling, this revolt
against the wrongs of the social system, we have to go forward to
the years immediately succeeding the outbreak of the French
revolution ; in particular to the years from 1790 to 1797—the
years of Paine and Godwin, of Coleridge's 'penny trumpet of
sedition’; or, in the field of the novel, the years of Caleb Williams,
of Nature and Art, of Hermsprong, or Man as he is not. There,
no doubt, the cry of revolt was raised more defiantly. For, there,
speculation was reinforced by practical example; and the ideas of
Rousseau were flashed back, magnified a hundredfold by the deeds
of the national assembly, the convention and the reign of terror.
And this contrast between the first and the second harvest of
Rousseau's influence is not the least interesting thing in the story
of the eighteenth century novel.
The second point which calls for remark is connected with the
mystical side of Brooke's character, of which notice has been taken
in an earlier chapter? Through the mystics, it will be remem-
bered, Brooke was brought into touch with John Wesley and the
methodists. It is, in fact, the methodistical, rather than the
mystical, strain which comes to the surface in The Fool of Quality
—though, in the discourse on matter and spirit, mentioned above,
the author boldly declares, “I know not that there is any such
thing in nature as matter? ' Such defiances, however, are rare,
and, in general, the appeal of Brooke is of a less esoteric kind.
He dwells much on conversion; and, as revised by Wesley, the
1 Cf. vol. 1x, chap. XI.
2 Vol. I, p. 81, ed. 1766.
## p. 60 (#86) ##############################################
60 Sterne, and the Novel of his Times
6
book was long a favourite with methodists. The importance of
this is to remind us of the bond which unites the literary with the
religious revival of the eighteenth century. It is, of course, only
in a small number of writers—Collins, Smart, Cowper, for instance
—that the two strands are visibly interwoven. But it is probable
that the emotional appeal of the religious revival was an awakening
force to many writers, whether poets or novelists, who, in the out-
ward ordering of their lives, were indifferent, or even hostile, to
the enthusiasm' either of the methodist or of the evangelical.
And it is certain that, from the general change of temper of which
the religious revival was at once the cause and the symptom, both
poet and novelist found the hearts of men more ready to receive
their creations than would have been possible at any earlier period
of the century. The same thing holds good as to the corresponding
movement in the literature of Germany and, to a less degree, as to
that in the literature of France. If the pietists had not prepared
the ground, Goethe, who himself owed not a little to intercourse
with the beautiful soul'—the Moravian sister-would have found
it much harder to win a hearing for his youthful poems and for
Werther. If, in his earlier writings, Rousseau had not roughly
challenged the speculative creed of 'the enlightenment, La
Nouvelle Héloïse and the Rêveries would probably have been
written in a very different spirit; conceivably they might never
have been written at all.
On the other novel of Brooke-Juliet Grenville, or the History
of the Human Heart (1774), it is not worth while to linger. His
plays and poems may be passed by here? . He lives, indeed, by
The Fool of Quality, and by that alone.
6
From the novel of sentiment to that of terror, or of the far
past, is a startling transition. And the harvest in this field is so
poor that our account of it may be brief.
The fountainhead of both streams of romance is to be found in
The Castle of Otranto, which was struck off at feverheat by
Walpole in the summer of 1764 and published at the end of the
year, or the beginning of the next. The execution is weak in the
extreme. The ‘history' is one vast anachronism, and the portents
are absurd. Yet, in spite of these glaring defects, of wbich it is
hard to suppose that the author was not in some degree aware, an
entirely new turn is here given to the novel, and elements are
brought into it which, at a later time and in hands more skilful,
1 As to his contributions to the drama, see vol. XI.
2
## p. 61 (#87) ##############################################
a
Horace Walpole. Clara Reeve 61
were to change it out of all knowledge. The book, as Walpole
himself tells us, was written in conscious reaction against the domes-
ticities and the sentiment of Richardson. It was a deliberate attempt
to divert fiction from the channel along which it had hitherto flowed;
to transport it from the sphere of close observation to that of
free invention; to substitute for the interest of the present that
of the past, the world of experience by that of the mysterious and
the supernatural. The performance is bungling; but the design is
in a high degree original and fruitful. It was, in fact, so original
that, as sometimes happens in such cases, Walpole himself took
fright at his own boldness. He is at the pains to explain that, all
appearances to the contrary, his heart is still half with the novel
of every-day life. 'It was not so much my intention to recall the
glories of ancient romance as to blend the wonderful of old stories
with the natural of modern novels? . ' And he appeals, in proof of
his sincerity, to Matilda's avowal of her passion for Theodore. We
are not bound to take him at his word. He may, with more kind-
ness, be regarded as a whole-hearted rebel, who led the forlorn
hope in a cause which, years after, had its day of triumph. It is
that which makes The Castle of Otranto a marked book-even more
marked perhaps for its ultimate bearing on foreign literature than
on our own.
Clara Reeve, to whom we now pass, led an entirely uneventful
life (1729-1807), marked only by the publication of various tales,
of which The Old English Baron has alone survived, and by her
friendship with Mrs Brigden, Richardson's daughter, who revised
that work in its earlier shape, The Champion of Virtue.
If there is some doubt about the intentions of Walpole, about
those of Clara Reeve, his successor and disciple, there is none
whatever. The Old English Baron (1777)-it had been published
earlier in the same year as The Champion of Virtue, a Gothic
Tale-is undeniably what The Castle of Otranto professes to be,
'an attempt to unite the merits and graces of the ancient Romance
and of the modern Novel. ' There is 'a sufficient degree of the
.
marvellous,' in the shape of a ghost, 'to excite attention ; enough
of the manners of real life,' or what passes for such, 'to give an air
of probability; and enough of the pathetic'-in the form of a
love-story, with an interesting peasant, who turns out to be son and
heir of the ghost (a murdered baron), for hero—'to engage the
heart in its behalf. It is quite true that the ingredients of
Otranto, including the irresistible young peasant, were much the
1 Letter to Élie de Beaumont, 18 March 1765.
## p. 62 (#88) ##############################################
62 Sterne, and the Novel of his Times
same.
But they were differently mixed. In Walpole’s book, the
chief appeal was to 'terror' and to the romantic past. In The
Old English Baron, these have sunk into little more than
trimmings. The main stress on the part of the author lies upon a
tale of righteous vengeance and of love. About the use of the mar-
vellous, she is manifestly nervous. She reduces it, therefore, to the
presence of an ordinary ghost, who contents himself with groaning
beneath the floor, by way of instituting proceedings against his
murderer. Even the medieval is a source of some alarm. And,
considering what she makes of it, we can hardly be surprised.
Walpole, absurd as novelist of the crusades—his scene is laid with
delightful vagueness during the century and a half which covered
them—at least contrives to give some faint flavour of the later
middle ages to his characters and their setting. Clara Reeve can
boast of no such success. A trial by combat, her supreme effort
in this direction, is conducted with all the flourishes of forensic
etiquette. The manners of the eighteenth century are transplanted
straight into the fifteenth. The scene may be labelled 'A Feudal
Castle'; in reality, it is the cedar parlour of Miss Byron and
Sir Charles. The Gothic element and the element of terror being
thus disposed of, nothing is left but that which 'engages the heart
on its behalf': the eternal theme of 'virtue rewarded,' of injured
innocence triumphant over treachery and crime. In the com-
promise which the authoress strove to effect, the 'modern Novel'
carries off all the honours; the ancient Romance' is represented
by little beyond garnish and appurtenance.
How far can it be said that the works comprised in the above
group did anything to prepare the way for the historical and
romantic novel, as it was subsequently shaped by Scott? The
answer is : only in the vaguest and most rudimentary sense. The
novel of terror-if by that we understand the terror which springs
from the marvellous and supernatural-has never taken kindly to
English soil. And it is manifest that Scott fought shy of the mar-
vellous as an element of prose fiction. In appealing to terror,
accordingly, neither Walpole nor Clara Reeve did much more than
enter a claim that the borders of the novel might without treason
be enlarged; that the novel was not bound down by the charter
of its being to the presentation of current life in its most obvious
aspects—of buying and selling, of marrying and giving in marriage.
That, if judged by the permanent results, was all; but it was
enough. The appeal to history told in the same direction ; but it
was far more fruitful of results. Walpole, it is true, did not make
## p. 63 (#89) ##############################################
Fanny Burney (Mme d'Arblay)
63
much of it; Clara Reeve still less. But they pointed the way
which, with a thousand modifications suggested by his genius,
Scott was triumphantly to follow. And the very defects of The
Old English Baron may have aided him in the discovery, so often
missed by his successors, that, in the historical novel, the history
is of far less importance than the human interest and the romance.
The earlier and greater Waverleys, in fact, can be called historical
only by a stretch. It was not until Scott had worked for years
upon the near past—a past which still made itself felt as a
living force upon the present—that he plunged into the middle
ages. Moreover, in spite of its stirring adventure, Ivanhoe has
always counted for less with the English reader than with those of
Germany and France.
Frances Burney (1752—1840), the last novelist of note belonging
to our period, was daughter of Dr Burney, the historian of music.
During her youth, and until some years after the publication of
her second novel, Cecilia (1782), she lived in the most brilliant
literary society of her day, including that of Johnson, Mrs Thrale
and Burke. In 1786 she was appointed second keeper of the robes
to queen Charlotte, a post which she held for four years, to her own
great discomfort, but to the delight of those who read her fascinating
Diary. After her release, she married (1793) a French officer of
the name of d’Arblay, one of the emigrants who gathered at
Juniper hall and of whom her Diary contains many striking and
amusing notices. From 1802 to 1812 she lived in France, returning
only to publish her last novel, The Wanderer (1814). The later
years of her life (1815—40) were passed peacefully in England.
With the novels of Fanny Burney we pass into another world.
They stand far nearer to the novel as we know it than anything
which had yet appeared. The picaresque scaffolding, the obtrusive
moral, the deliberate sentiment-much more the marvellous and
the medievalism-of the writers who had immediately gone before
her are thrown to the winds. She sets herself to tell a plain story
-enlivened, doubtless, with strange adventures, with characters
still stranger-and that is all.
Yet in this very simplicity is contained a new and, as time
has proved, a very fruitful conception of what the novel might
achieve. Starting from the general plan laid down by Richardson,
she limits, she adds, she modifies, until the result is something
entirely different. The tragic element is the first to go. This,
with other modifications, leaves her with a story of home life for
the ground-work of her picture. And the introduction of a whole
## p. 64 (#90) ##############################################
64 Sterne, and the Novel of his Times
*
gallery of oddities, dogging the steps of the heroine at every turn,
gives variety, zest and sparkle to what otherwise would have been
a humdrum, and, perhaps, a slightly sentimental, tale. The novel
of home life, it is not too much to say, is the creation of Fanny
Burney. There is a great deal else, and a great deal more
brilliant, in her creations. But it is this that makes them a land-
mark in the history of fiction.
Her method is simplicity itself. Evelina is the 'History of a
young lady's entrance into the world. And the same description
would apply to every one of the stories which followed. Her
unvarying plan is to take a young girl with a virtuous mind, a
cultivated understanding and a feeling heart,' but wholly “ignorant
of the forms and inexperienced in the manners of the world'; to
provide her with a guardian instead of parents and so throw her
on her own resources; to place her in circumstances unusual but
not, except in The Wanderer, unnatural; and, with an inexhaust-
ible fertility of invention, to devise incidents and situations such
as will draw out her character and keep the interest of the reader
on the stretch. In Cecilia, no doubt, she added to this something
of the tragic purpose, the solemn moral, of Richardson; and very
few are likely to regard the addition as an improvement. But, with
this partial exception, her aim was always what has been said; and
she had two gifts which enabled her triumphantly to attain it.
The first is a talent, not easily to be matched among English
novelists, for telling a story; an unaffected delight in telling it,
which wakens a like pleasure in the reader. The second is an
amazing power—a power in which she is surpassed by Dickens
only-of giving flesh and blood to caricature. 'My little character-
monger' was Johnson's pet name for her! ; and, in the sense just
hinted at, she earned it ten times over. With infectious zest, she
adds touch after touch of absurdity to her portrait, until the
reader is fairly swept off his feet by the drollery of the figure
she has conjured up. This particular talent is, no doubt, most
conspicuous in her earliest two works, Evelina (1778) and Cecilia
(1782). But it flashes out often enough in Camilla (1796) and, on
occasion, even in The Wanderer (1814). In all this gallery of
'humourists' the most laughable is Mr Briggs, the ill-bred but not
unkindly skinflint of Cecilia. But he is hard run by the Branghtons,
i The story is told in the dedication to The Wanderer. There was a party at Lady
Galloway's, shortly after the appearance of Cecilia. “Johnson endeavouring to detain
me when I rose to depart, by calling out“Don't go yet, little character-monger,” Burke
followed, gaily but impressively exclaiming, "Miss Burney, die to-night! ”.
## p. 65 (#91) ##############################################
65
Diary of Mme d'Arblay
still harder perhaps by Mr Smith, the 'gentleman manqué, as
Mrs Thrale called him, of Evelina ; while Sir Hugh Tyrold and
Dr Orkborne, the Admiral, Sir Jasper Herrington and Mr Tedman
keep up the succession not quite unworthily, in the two later
novels. But even to mention instances is to do injustice. For,
after all, the most surprising thing is their unlimited abundance;
the way in which they start up from every corner, from each rung
of the social ladder, at the bidding of the author. For vulgarity,
in particular, she has the eye of a lynx. Right and left, high or
low, she unmasks it with unflagging delight, tearing off the count-
less disguises under which it lurks and holding it up, naked but
not ashamed, to the laughter, and, sometimes, though not often, to
the contempt of the reader. By the side of these lively beings,
the figures of Smollett seem little better than stuffed birds in a
museum.
Spontaneity is among the best gifts of the novelist. And few
novelists are more spontaneous than Fanny Burney. We should
have guessed this from the novels themselves. The Diary', in
some ways a yet greater masterpiece, puts it beyond doubt. It is
evident that all she saw and all she heard presented itself to her
instinctively in dramatic form ; that all the incidents through
which she passed naturally wove themselves into a story-one
might almost say, into a novel-before her eyes. In the Diary,
as in the novels, the two gifts are intertwined beyond possibility of
separation. The observation which enabled her to take in the
passing scene, to seize the distinctive features of every man and
woman she met, may have put the material in her hands. But the
material would have lost half its effect, it would have lost more
than half its charm, if the genius of the born story-teller had not
been there to weave it into a coherent whole, to give it life and
movement. The Diary is a better test of this even than the
novels. The incidents recorded in it are, for the most part, what
might happen to any of us. The men and women it brings before
us are, with some marked exceptions, such as might be met at any
party. Who but themselves would have cared a straw for Miss
Streatfield or M. de Guiffardière, for colonel Blakeney or even the
'sweet Queen'? Yet, through the magic glass of the Diary, each
of them takes distinct form and feature; all have gestures,
mannerisms, gesticulations of their own; and each, without the
smallest effort, fits into a drama as lively as any that could be put
upon the stage. It is, of course, perfectly true, and it is as it should
1 Cf, chap. XI, post.
5
E. L.
