That is the one link which binds them to him, the
one tangible mark which he left upon the novel of his generation.
one tangible mark which he left upon the novel of his generation.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v10
This he prepared, in the midst of his heavy work as
magistrate. He stayed in London, and succeeded in breaking up
a gang of ruffians. His illness, now, had become a combination of
dropsy, jaundice and asthma, and he was unfit to take the journey
to Bath. The winter of 1753—4 was long and severe. In May,
he betook himself to his house, Fordhook, at Ealing, where he
found some relief in drinking bishop Berkeley's tar-water, though
his dropsy grew worse. He was ordered to Lisbon; and, on
26 June 1754, he left Fordhook, never to return.
Of his voyage to Lisbon, in the company of his wife and daughter,
on The Queen of Portugal, he has left an account which has more
in it of the quality of charm than anything else that he wrote.
It shows his courage and his zest for life undiminished by the
sufferings that had wasted his great frame, and mellowed by a
manly patience; his courtesy and consideration for others; his
sound sense and sincerity. Neither his eye for character nor
his power of ironical expression had deserted him; and the
portraits of captain Veale, and others, are as shrewd and
complete as any in his novels. The book was published in
February 1755, in a version which omitted portions of the manu-
script; the whole text being issued in December of that year.
But, before the earlier issue appeared, the author had passed
away. Fielding died at Lisbon on 8 October 1754, and lies buried
in the English cemetery there. He had lived hard. A self-
indulgent youth had been succeeded, after his first marriage, by a
manhood crammed with arduous work in literature and in the law.
As justice of the peace, he had seen further than his contem-
poraries into the causes of crime, and into the remedies for it; as
writer, he had poured ridicule and contempt on meanness, on
pretence and on vanity, and had fixed the form of a new branch
of literature. Poverty, sorrow, ill-health and detraction could
not quench his delight in life ; and he used his energies, his good-
sense and his knowledge of the world consistently in the service
of what he saw to be the right.
In speaking of Smollett, we have to deal with a man of very
different character from Fielding, though of scarcely less ability.
3-2
## p. 36 (#62) ##############################################
36
Fielding and Smollett
Born in the spring of 1721 at Dalquhurn, Cardross, in the vale of
Leven, Dumbartonshire, Tobias George Smollett was the grandson
of Sir James Smollett of Bonhill, judge and member of the Scottish
and the united parliaments. Tobias's father, Sir James's youngest
son, died in the future novelist's childhood. The account of
Roderick Random's childhood and youth, Smollett afterwards said,
was not autobiographical ; but the main outlines were the same.
He was educated at the school at Dumbarton, and, in 1736, went
to Glasgow university. In the same year, he was apprenticed to a
surgeon and apothecary in Glasgow, by name Gordon, whom, though
he ridiculed him as Potion in Roderick Random, he honoured in
Humphrey Clinker. He came to London at the age of eighteen;
obtained a commission as surgeon in the navy, and, in 1740, sailed
on The Cumberland, to join the fleet in the West Indies under
admiral Vernon, whose previous expedition against Porto Bello
had been celebrated in a poem by Fielding. Smollett's object in
coming to London was not, it seems, to obtain an appointment in
connection with his profession. Like Johnson, a year or two
before, he had in his pocket a tragedy-The Regicide. He was
not, however, a dramatist; and no manager was found to put The
Regicide on the stage. This disappointment Smollett never
forgot or forgave. In boyhood, he had shown a disposition for
savage sarcasm ; and the rejection of The Regicide was to
lead to fierce attacks on Garrick, Lyttelton and others. After
Vernon's disastrous expedition to Cartagena, Smollett sailed with
the fleet to Jamaica. There, he left the service in disgust, and
in Jamaica he stayed till 1744, when he returned to London,
betrothed to Anne Lascelles, a Jamaican lady of some fortune,
whom he married in or about 1747. On his return to London, he
set up as a surgeon in Downing street, and seems to have had no
thought of literature as a profession, for he wrote but little. The
suppression of the rising in 1745 drew from him a poem, The
Tears of Scotland. In 1746, he published Advice, a satire; in
1747, Reproof, another satire; both in the heroic couplet, both
characteristic in spirit and diction. In the same year, the fate of
The Regicide still rankling, he made a brutal attack on Lyttelton
in A Burlesque Ode on the Loss of a Grandmother, a parody of
Lyttelton's monody on the death of his wife. None of these
works is of any importance to literature; but, in 1748, they were
succeeded by a work of very high importance, The Adventures of
Roderick Random.
Smollett admitted that he modelled his story on the plan of
## p. 37 (#63) ##############################################
Roderick Random and the Picaresque Novel 37
Le Sage's Gil Blas. In the country of Defoe, the picaresque
novel—the realistic novel of travel and adventure—was not
absolutely new; nor was the device of stringing the episodes of
the story together along the thread of a single character. What
Smollett achieved in Roderick Random and, later, in Peregrine
Pickle, was to show how much could still be done with this form,
to introduce new life and new types, and to present them with
unequalled brilliance and energy. The new type for which he is
most famous is not the hungry and adventurous Scot, like Roderick
Random himself or Strap, his faithful attendant, but the British
sailor. The expedition to Cartagena had given great opportunities
for knowledge of the navy to a man who had great skill in ex-
pressing that knowledge. So vivid a picture of a certain kind of
life peopled with such clear-cut types as Morgan, the Welsh
surgeon, Bowling, Oakum, Mackshane, Jack Rattlin, had never
been presented before and has not been surpassed since. The
British tar was all but new to English literature, and, in this direction
alone, Smollett's influence has been as important as his achieve-
ment. Though he sees men and women chiefly from the outside,
he sees them with extraordinary clarity, and has a way of hitting
them off in the first few words which keeps the attention arrested
all through the rambling, ill-constructed book. Smollett was not
a moralist; he was even without a view of life and conduct such
as might have lent unity to his several works. Dickens, in boy-
hood, found Roderick ‘a modest and engaging hero’; to the adult
reader, he is one of the most shameless young scoundrels in
fiction. In his preface to the work, Smollett writes of Roderick's
modest merit,' and he may have been sincere. The truth is that he
did not care. He aimed almost exclusively at what he abundantly
secured-movement and variety; and his taste for farce, horse-
play and violence was inexhaustible. It should be added that
Smollett's study of medicine had doubtless inured him to the
contemplation of certain physical facts, and that he revels in
contemplating them.
The publication of Roderick Random brought Smollett imme-
diately into fame. The first advantage he took of it was to publish
his unfortunate tragedy The Regicide, with a preface full of railing
at the blindness, the jealousy and so forth, of those who would not
see its merits. He made-or revised and corrected-an English
translation of Gil Blas, which was published in 1749. Yet, just
as Fielding tried to live by the law, Smollett seems to have gone
on hoping to make a living by medicine. In 1750, he took the
## p. 38 (#64) ##############################################
38
Fielding and Smollett
a
degree of doctor of medicine in Marischal college, Aberdeen. In
the autumn of that year, however, he set out for Paris with
Dr John Moore, the author of Zeluco, in order to collect material
for another novel. The result of the tour was The Adventures
of Peregrine Pickle, published in 1751. In some respects, this is
the most remarkable of Smollett's novels ; it is, also, the longest,
and it maintains its vivacity and vigour throughout. In morality,
the treatment of the main theme (if such a book can be said to
have a main theme) shows scarcely any advance on Roderick
Random. Peregrine is a scoundrel with a very moderate sense
of shame; he is also, in his elegant and rather witty way, a bully
of the most refined cruelty, who is not content to feast on others'
folly, but likes to pay for the feast with all kinds of insult and
annoyance. It would be easier to insist on the fact that morality
and good taste have nothing to do with the effect that Smollett
wished to produce, were it not that the same novel contains
the finest character he ever drew. In a work of this kind, coherence
is of little moment; and, that Smollett clearly changed his mind as
he went on, not only about Pickle's mother, and his aunt Grizzle,
but about his aunt Grizzle's husband, commodore Trunnion, does
not lessen the beauty of the commodore's character in its final
form. A modern reader, by reason of a satiety that must have
been almost unknown in Smollett's day, wishes that Trunnion
could open his lips just once or twice without using a nautical
metaphor; but metaphor was never more finely used than in the
famous death-scene of that simple, wise, lovable old sea-dog. This
character alone (supposing that there had been no Matthew Bramble
or Lismahago to follow) would prove that Smollett had it in him to
be a humourist of a high order, if his savageness and brutality
had not stifled the humourist's qualities. In Peregrine Pickle,
much of the characterisation is on the highest level ever reached
by Smollett. The household at The Garrison,' where Hawser
Trunnion lived, included that “great joker,' lieutenant Hatchway,
and Tom Pipes, the silent and faithful, who is more attractive,
if not better fun, than Strap. Though Mrs Pickle is an impossible
person, her husband Gamaliel lives from the first line of the story;
and the adventures of the painter and the doctor, the banquet
in the manner of the ancients and the escape from the Bastille,
offer a concurrent development of farcical incident and oddity of
character hardly to be paralleled for vivacity and inventiveness.
In Roderick Random, many of the characters were taken from
life; so it was with Peregrine Pickle; and, in the first edition,
+
6
6
## p. 39 (#65) ##############################################
Ferdinand Count Fathom
39
Smollett attacked several of those whom he considered his
enemies—Lyttelton (under the name Sir Gosling Scrag), Garrick,
Rich and Cibber, his rancour against whom, on account of the
rejection of The Regicide, was continuous, besides Akenside and
Fielding. At this date, he cannot have had any cause of complaint
against Fielding, unless it were the belief that Partridge in Tom
Jones was imitated from Strap in Roderick Random; and, in the
main, the secret of his dislikes seems to have been jealousy.
Fielding's retorts, in two numbers of The Covent Garden Journal,
drew from Smollett one of his most savage and indecent perform-
ances: A Faithful Narrative of the Base and Inhuman Acts
that were lately practised upon the Brain of Habbakuk Hilding,
Justice, Dealer and Chapman. . . (1752). In the second edition
of Peregrine Pickle, however, which was issued before the end
of 1751, the attacks on Fielding were withdrawn. It remains to
add that the form of the book is still the picaresque novel; but
even this loose construction is disturbed by the interpolation of
the immoral but vivacious Memoirs of a Lady of Quality.
Smollett had not yet given up all idea of practising as a doctor.
He took up his abode in Bath; but, failing to meet with success,
he wrote a pamphlet to prove that Bath water was but little
more efficacious than any other water, and, returning to London,
definitely took up literature as his profession. He settled in
Chelsea, at Monmouth house, where he was visited by Johnson,
Garrick, Goldsmith, Sterne and others; and here he held those
Sunday dinners which he was to describe later in Humphrey
Clinker, for the benefit of the hacks who worked in the 'literary
factory' established by him. His next novel, published in 1752,
was The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom. If Partridge
owed something to Strap, Fathom undoubtedly owed something
to Jonathan Wild; but Smollett's book lacks the unity to
which Fielding attained by his consistent irony and by the
intellectual conception of the relations of goodness and greatness.
And Smollett betrays his half-heartedness by leaving Fathom
converted and repentant, in which not very convincing or edifying
condition he is found again in Humphrey Clinker. Yet, if the
book, as a whole, be unsatisfactory, it is, like all Smollett's fiction,
vivacious and brilliant, and its influence may be traced in Pelham,
in Dennis Duval and in other works.
After Ferdinand Count Fathom, Smollett did not write any
more novels for some years. He was constantly in need of money, for
he was always overspending his income, considerable as it was. Of
>
## p. 40 (#66) ##############################################
40
Fielding and Smollett
his wife's fortune, only a small part ever reached him; but Smollett
was practically the first man to conduct a literary factory' with
success; and, at one time, his profits came to about £600 a year.
After the publication of Ferdinand Count Fathom, the factory
and the trade of book-making absorbed him. In 1755, he published
a translation of Don Quixote, which critics have declared to be
only a réchauffé of Jervas's translation (published, posthumously,
in 1742), Smollett not having Spanish enough to be capable of
making an entirely new version. In 1756, Archibald Hamilton,
formerly an Edinburgh printer, put Smollett at the head of the
contributors to his new monthly paper, The Critical Review, started
in opposition to Ralph Griffiths's Monthly Review. Smollett, as we
have seen, was trenchant in attack; and his writings in The Critical
Review involved him in quarrels with Grainger, Joseph Reed,
Churchill, Shebbeare and several others. To digress for a moment
from the chronological order of his doings, in January 1757, Garrick
brought on the stage at Drury lane Smolletts farce of life at sea,
The Reprisal, or the Tars of Old England, a rollicking play, full
of the oddities of national character and sure of popularity because
of its attacks on the French Garrick having gone out of his way
to see that Smollett was well remunerated, Smollett has praise
for him in The Critical Review, and, later, more of it in 'a work
of truth,' his History of England. In 1759, Smollett was fined
£100 and suffered three months' not uncomfortable imprisonment
in the king's bench prison (which he was afterwards to describe in
Sir Launcelot Greaves) for impugning, in The Critical Review,
the courage of admiral Sir Charles Knowles.
Meanwhile, at the close of 1757, he published the first four
volumes of his History of England, bringing it down to the treaty
of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748. The work seems to have been a mere
bookseller's venture. Hume had already published two volumes
on the Stewart period, and was known to be at work on the
Tudors? In order to take the wind out of his sails by bringing
out a complete history before him, Smollett worked very hard,
reading, he said, 300 volumes; and, in twenty months, com-
pleted a work written, though in haste, with his usual clearness
and force. What he really thought of public affairs was not to
become evident till the publication of The History of an Atom,
some years later. Between 1761 and 1765, he added five more
volumes to his History of England, bringing the story down to
the moment of publication, and taking opportunities, by the way,
1 Cf. chap. xii, post.
5
## p. 41 (#67) ##############################################
Miscellaneous Work.
Sir Launcelot Greaves 41
ชา
of praising Fielding, Hume and others whom he had attacked in
earlier days.
The work of these strenuous years included, also, the prepara-
tion of Dodsley's Compendium of Voyages in seven volumes, among
which appeared Smollett's own account of the expedition against
Cartagena; the compiling of a Universal History, in which he com-
posed the histories of France, Germany and Italy, besides painfully
revising the contributions of his hacks ; eight volumes entitled The
Present State of the Nations; a translation, with Thomas Francklin,
of the works of Voltaire; and two further excursions into journalism
-one of them as editor of The North Briton, a tory paper started
in May 1762, in support of Lord Butel. While Smollett was in the
king's bench prison, in 1759, Newbery, the bookseller, secured his
services for his new monthly paper, The British Magazine. Its first
number, published in January 1760, contained the first instalment
of Smollett's fourth, and feeblest, novel, The Adventures of
Sir Launcelot Greaves. Sir Launcelot is an eighteenth century
gentleman who rides about the country in armour, attended
by his comic squire, Timothy Crabshaw, redressing grievances.
When one remembers their originals, Don Quixote and Sancho
Panza, it is impossible to feel much interest in this pair; and the
fun of the story, almost entirely, is horse-play. Some of the
lesser characters, however, are well done, including the sour
and crafty rogue, Ferret, said to be a caricature of Shebbeare.
Though the talk of captain Crowe, the naval man, whose
adventures as knight-errant are a burlesque of the hero's, in
the main resembles that of commodore Trunnion, it is very
suggestive, at times, of Alfred Jingle; and to Mrs Gobble, the
justice's wife, Bob Sawyer's landlady unquestionably owed her
indignation at being addressed as 'woman. ' Another feature of
note in the book is that it begins straight away with an admirable
piece of description, in the manner of Scott, leaving out the
exordium which had till then been usual.
By 1763, Smollett's health was broken by incessant overwork,
disappointment in his hopes of aid from Bute, and the excesses
of his own systema nervosum maxime irritabile. And, in April
of that year, the violent, affectionate man suffered the heaviest
of blows in the loss of his only child, Elizabeth, at the age of
fifteen. For the sake of his own health and his wife's spirits, he
left England in the month of June, and travelled across France
to Nice. In the autumn of 1764, he visited Genoa, Rome, Florence
+ Ct. chap. xvky post.
IL
## p. 42 (#68) ##############################################
42
Fielding and Smollett
1
and other towns of Italy; for the winter, he returned to Nice, and,
by June 1765, he was back in London. In the following year,
he published an account of his Travels through France and Italy,
one of the most entertaining books of travel extant, and a mine
of information, on the whole remarkably accurate, concerning
the natural phenomena, history, social life, economics, diet and
morals of the places described. Smollett had a lively and perti-
nacious curiosity, and, as his novels prove, a very quick eye. He
foresaw the merits of Cannes, then a small village, as a health-
resort, and the possibilities of the Corniche road. The chief
interest of the book, however, for the general reader, lies in its
unsparing revelation of the author's character. In place of the
bravery, serenity and sweetness of the dying Fielding, we have here
little but spleen, acerbity and quarrelsomeness. Smollett's fierce
engagements with innkeepers, postillions and fellow-travellers ;
his profound contempt for foreigners, now fortified by first-hand
observation; his scorn of the Roman catholic faith and ceremonies,
of duelling, of such domestic arrangements as the cicisbeo, of
petty and proud nobility, of a hundred other French institutions
and ways; and the shrewd sense and the keen eye (keener than
Carlyle's) for shams which fortify all his violent prejudices, combine
to make the book a masterpiece in description and ironic
criticism of men and manners. Not that he was wilfully blind to
merit or beauty; he has good words, now and then, even for a
foreign doctor. But he was determined to see everything with
his own eyes; and, being a sick man and splenetic, he saw every-
thing, from politics to statues and pictures, with an eye more or
less jaundiced. Sterne, who met Smollett in Italy, hit off the
truth, with his usual pungency, in the portrait of Smelfungus in
A Sentimental Journey.
Smollett was better, but far from well, when he returned home.
In 1766, he travelled in Scotland, revisited the scenes of his child-
hood, and was made much of by learned Edinburgh. Here, and
in Bath, whither he now went as a patient, he gathered material, and
possibly laid plans, for his last novel. Before Humphrey Clinker
appeared, however, Smollett was to show himself in his most rancor-
ous and pseudo-Rabelaisian mood in The History and Adventures of
an Atom (1769). In this work, the Atom relates, to one Nathaniel
Peacock, his experiences while in the body of a Japanese. Since
Japan stands for England, and the names in the story (many of them
formed on the principle afterwards adopted by Samuel Butler in
Erewhon) each represented a wellknown figure in British public
## p. 43 (#69) ##############################################
>
Humphrey Clinker. Smollett's last journey 43
life, the work is merely a brutal satire on British public affairs
from the year 1754 to the date of publication—and the Travels of
Lemuel Gulliver are fragrant beside it.
In the last month of 1769, Smollett's health compelled him,
once more, to leave England. He went to Italy, and, in the spring
of 1770, settled in a villa near Leghorn. Here, he wrote his last
and most agreeable novel, The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker.
In its way, this is another picaresque story, insomuch as, during
its progress, the characters (who relate everything in letters to
their friends) pursue their travels in England and Scotland. But
its tone and temper (owing, possibly, to the influence of Sterne,
possibly, to the pacific mood which often blesses the closing days
of even the angriest men) are very different from those of Roderick
Random and of Peregrine Pickle. Smollett the humourist, of
whom we have had but brief glimpses in his earlier works, is more
evident here than anywhere else. Matthew Bramble, the out-
wardly savage and inwardly very tender old bachelor, his sister
Mrs Tabitha Bramble, smart Jery Melford, their nephew, and
his sister Miss Lydia, Mrs Winifred Jenkins, the maid, and
Humphrey Clinker himself, the 'methodist 'manservant whom they
pick up on their travels—all these are characters more deeply and
kindly seen than any of their predecessors except Hawser Trunnion.
The best among them all is Lismahago, the Scottish soldier,
needy, argumentative, proud, eccentric—a figure of genuine
comedy, among whose many descendants must be reckoned one of
great eminence, Dugald Dalgetty. The novel is planned with a
skill unusual in Smollett's fiction. In Richardson, the device
of telling the story in letters leads to wearisome repetitions and
involutions. Smollett contrives to avoid much repetition; and the
story, though loosely built, as picaresque novels must be, goes
steadily and clearly forward to reach a more or less inevit-
able ending. This was his last work. He died at his villa in
September 1771, and is buried in the English cemetery at Leghorn.
After his death, his Ode to Independence-not a great poem, but
a vigorous expression of his sturdy temperament—was published;
and, in 1795, there appeared under his name a curious pamphlet,
foretelling the revolt of America and the French revolution.
Whether he wrote this pamphlet or not, he had shown a prevision
hardly less remarkable in certain political forecasts to be found
in his Travels.
One of the marks of Hazlitt's 'common-place critic' was that
he preferred Smollett to Fielding. To dilate on preferences is
6
## p. 44 (#70) ##############################################
44
Fielding and Smollett
less profitable than to enquire, first, what the two greatest of
English eighteenth century novelists achieved between them.
Both tried their hands in youth at the drama; and both failed
almost precisely in so far as they followed the prevalent fashion
of the drama. Fielding's comedies and Smollett's tragedy are
attempts at expression through outworn media.
The long-
enduring somnolence which overtook the English drama early
in the eighteenth century had already begun. In turning from
the stage to the new field of prose fiction, Fielding and Smollett
together raised the novel to the chief place among contemporary
forms of literary expression, and showed how much it could
contain of philosophy, of incident, of humour and of fun. Of
the pair, Smollett was the more learned, and, perhaps, the more
inventive in finding value for the purposes of his art in modes of life
hitherto untouched. Fielding's mind went deeper.
'I should be at a loss,' wrote Hazlitt, 'where to find in any authentic
documents of the same period so satisfactory an account of the general state
of society, and of moral, political, and religious feeling in the reign of
George II as we meet with in The Adventures of Joseph Andrews and
his friend Mr Abraham Adams1'
In other words, the novel had already taken the whole of life'
for its province. It remained for Scott to sweep into its compass
all the past, with its romance and its ideals, and the novel had
conquered the empire in the possession of which it has not yet
been disturbed.
The direct influence of Fielding is harder to estimate than that
of Smollett. Episodes and characters have been borrowed from
him, freely enough. The Vicar of Wakefield, Tristram Shandy,
Quentin Durward, Pendennis, Barry Lyndon-each of these,
among a hundred others, shows clear traces of the study of Fielding.
But the very completeness and individuality of Fielding's work
prevented his founding a school. The singleness of intellectual
standpoint which governs all his novels makes him difficult of
imitation; and he is no less different from those who have taken
him as model than he is from Cervantes, whom he professed to
follow. But this it is safe to say: that Fielding, a master of the
philosophical study of character, founded the novel of character
and raised it to a degree of merit which is not likely to be
surpassed. What his successors have done is to take advantage of
1 Lectures on the Comic Writers, vol. VI.
Waller and Glover's Hazlitt, vol. VIII,
p. 106.
## p. 45 (#71) ##############################################
Fielding and Smollett compared 45
changes in social life since his day, and to study, from their own
point of view, character as affected by those changes. His
greatest disciple is Thackeray, who had much of his genius,
much of his power of seeing human nature beneath the robes of
a peer or the rags of a beggar, much of his satirical power; but
who lacked the large-hearted geniality of his master. The novel
of character must always go to Fielding as its great exemplar.
Smollett's novels have about them more of the quarry and less
of the statue. He is richer in types than Fielding; and it needs
only a mention of his naval scenes and characters to raise memories
of a whole literature, which, receiving an impetus from the naval
battles won a few years after Smollett's death, has persisted even
after the disappearance of wooden ships. The picaresque novel in
general, which burst into activity soon after the publication of
Roderick Random, was under heavy obligations to Smollett, and
nowhere more so than in its first modern example, Pickwick.
Dickens, indeed, who was a great reader of Smollett, was his most
eminent disciple. In both, we find the observation of superficial
oddities of speech and manner carried to the finest point; in both,
we find these oddities and the episodes which display them more
interesting than the main plot; in both, we find that, beneath
those oddities, there is often a lack of real character. Dickens's
fun is purer than Smollett's; but it is not less rich and various.
Although, at the present moment, the picaresque novel has fallen
a little out of fashion, Smollett will continue to be read by those
who are not too squeamish or too stay-at-home to find in him
complete recreation.
## p. 46 (#72) ##############################################
CHAPTER III
STERNE, AND THE NOVEL OF HIS TIMES
The subject of this chapter is, virtually, the history of the
English novel from 1760 to 1780, a crucial period in the earlier
stages of its growth. And the chief questions to be asked are:
what are the new elements which these years added to the novel ?
how far has each of them proved of lasting value? and what is the
specific genius of the two or three writers who stand out above
the rest?
The answer to the first of these questions may be given, in
summary form, at once. In the hands of Sterne and a group of
writers who, though it may be without sufficient reason, are
commonly treated as disciples of Sterne, sentiment began to count
for more than had hitherto been held allowable. As a natural
consequence, the individuality of these writers impressed itself
more and more unreservedly upon a theme which, in the days
of Defoe and even Richardson, had been treated mainly from
without. Sterne, it need hardly be said, is undisputed master in
this way of writing; and here, so far, at least, as his own century
is concerned, he stands absolutely alone. Others, such as Brooke
and Mackenzie, may use the novel as a pulpit for preaching their
own creed or advancing their own schemes of reform. But their
relation to Sterne, on this head, is, manifestly, of the slightest, and
the effect produced is utterly different. A little more of personality,
a great deal more of emotion and sentiment, may come into their
work than any novelist before Sterne would have thought possible.
But that is all.
That is the one link which binds them to him, the
one tangible mark which he left upon the novel of his generation.
Sterne is the sole novelist of first-rate importance in the period
under review ; for even Fanny Burney, inventive and sparkling
though she is, can hardly lay claim to that description. And, thanks
to his very originality, he stands aloof from the main stream of
contemporary fiction. Apart from him, the writers of the time
>
## p. 47 (#73) ##############################################
Sterne's Life
47
fall, roughly, into three groups: the novelists of 'sentiment and
reflection,' who, though far enough from Sterne, are yet nearer to
him than any of the others; the novelists of home life, who, in the
main, and with marked innovations of their own, follow the chief
lines laid down by Richardson in the preceding generation; and,
finally, the novelists of a more distinctly romantic bent, Horace
Walpole and Clara Reeve, who drew their theme from the medieval
past, and supported the interest by an appeal to the sense of
mystery and terror-Horace Walpole, no doubt, the more defiantly
of the two and, perhaps, with less seriousness than has sometimes
been imputed to him. It should be added that the romantic
writers are of far less importance for their own sake than for that
of the writers who followed during the next fifty years, and of
whom, in some measure, they may be regarded as precursors.
The main facts of Laurence Sterne's life (1713-1768) are
sufficiently well known. After a struggling boyhood, he went to
Cambridge, where he made the friendship of Hall-Stevenson, the
Eugenius of his great novel. In 1738 he became vicar of Sutton,
the first of his Yorkshire livings, and a few years later prebendary
of York, of which his great-grandfather had been archbishop. In
1741 he married Eliza Lumley, for whom he soon ceased to feel
any affection and from whom he was formally separated shortly
before his death. By her he had one daughter, Lydia, subsequently
Mme Medalle, whom he seems to have genuinely loved. The
greater part of his life was passed in a succession of love affairs,
mainly of the sentimental kind, with various women of whom
Mrs Draper is the best known. The publication of Tristram
Shandy was begun in 1760 (vols. I and 11), and continued at
intervals until the year before his death. In 1762 his health,
which had always been frail, broke down and he started on travels
in France and Italy which lasted, with an interval, till 1766 and of
which the literary result was A Sentimental Journey (1768).
He died, of pleurisy, in March 1768.
Few writers have thrown down so many challenges as Sterne;
and, if to win disciples be the test of success, few have paid so
heavily for their hardihood. He revolutionised the whole scope
and purpose of the novel; but, in his own country, at any rate,
years passed before advantage was taken of the liberty he asserted.
He opened new and fruitful fields of humour; and one of the
greatest of his successors has denied him the name of humourist.
He created a style more subtle and flexible than any had found
before him; and all that Goldsmith could see in it was a tissue
## p. 48 (#74) ##############################################
48 Sterne, and the Novel of his Times
of tricks and affectations. But, if the men of letters hesitated,
the public had no doubt. The success of Tristram Shandy swept
everything before it. And here, as is often the case, the popular
verdict has worn better than the craftsman's or the critic's.
Sterne was nothing if not an innovator. And in no innovation
was he more daring than in that which widened the scope and
loosened the structure of the novel. 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.
magistrate. He stayed in London, and succeeded in breaking up
a gang of ruffians. His illness, now, had become a combination of
dropsy, jaundice and asthma, and he was unfit to take the journey
to Bath. The winter of 1753—4 was long and severe. In May,
he betook himself to his house, Fordhook, at Ealing, where he
found some relief in drinking bishop Berkeley's tar-water, though
his dropsy grew worse. He was ordered to Lisbon; and, on
26 June 1754, he left Fordhook, never to return.
Of his voyage to Lisbon, in the company of his wife and daughter,
on The Queen of Portugal, he has left an account which has more
in it of the quality of charm than anything else that he wrote.
It shows his courage and his zest for life undiminished by the
sufferings that had wasted his great frame, and mellowed by a
manly patience; his courtesy and consideration for others; his
sound sense and sincerity. Neither his eye for character nor
his power of ironical expression had deserted him; and the
portraits of captain Veale, and others, are as shrewd and
complete as any in his novels. The book was published in
February 1755, in a version which omitted portions of the manu-
script; the whole text being issued in December of that year.
But, before the earlier issue appeared, the author had passed
away. Fielding died at Lisbon on 8 October 1754, and lies buried
in the English cemetery there. He had lived hard. A self-
indulgent youth had been succeeded, after his first marriage, by a
manhood crammed with arduous work in literature and in the law.
As justice of the peace, he had seen further than his contem-
poraries into the causes of crime, and into the remedies for it; as
writer, he had poured ridicule and contempt on meanness, on
pretence and on vanity, and had fixed the form of a new branch
of literature. Poverty, sorrow, ill-health and detraction could
not quench his delight in life ; and he used his energies, his good-
sense and his knowledge of the world consistently in the service
of what he saw to be the right.
In speaking of Smollett, we have to deal with a man of very
different character from Fielding, though of scarcely less ability.
3-2
## p. 36 (#62) ##############################################
36
Fielding and Smollett
Born in the spring of 1721 at Dalquhurn, Cardross, in the vale of
Leven, Dumbartonshire, Tobias George Smollett was the grandson
of Sir James Smollett of Bonhill, judge and member of the Scottish
and the united parliaments. Tobias's father, Sir James's youngest
son, died in the future novelist's childhood. The account of
Roderick Random's childhood and youth, Smollett afterwards said,
was not autobiographical ; but the main outlines were the same.
He was educated at the school at Dumbarton, and, in 1736, went
to Glasgow university. In the same year, he was apprenticed to a
surgeon and apothecary in Glasgow, by name Gordon, whom, though
he ridiculed him as Potion in Roderick Random, he honoured in
Humphrey Clinker. He came to London at the age of eighteen;
obtained a commission as surgeon in the navy, and, in 1740, sailed
on The Cumberland, to join the fleet in the West Indies under
admiral Vernon, whose previous expedition against Porto Bello
had been celebrated in a poem by Fielding. Smollett's object in
coming to London was not, it seems, to obtain an appointment in
connection with his profession. Like Johnson, a year or two
before, he had in his pocket a tragedy-The Regicide. He was
not, however, a dramatist; and no manager was found to put The
Regicide on the stage. This disappointment Smollett never
forgot or forgave. In boyhood, he had shown a disposition for
savage sarcasm ; and the rejection of The Regicide was to
lead to fierce attacks on Garrick, Lyttelton and others. After
Vernon's disastrous expedition to Cartagena, Smollett sailed with
the fleet to Jamaica. There, he left the service in disgust, and
in Jamaica he stayed till 1744, when he returned to London,
betrothed to Anne Lascelles, a Jamaican lady of some fortune,
whom he married in or about 1747. On his return to London, he
set up as a surgeon in Downing street, and seems to have had no
thought of literature as a profession, for he wrote but little. The
suppression of the rising in 1745 drew from him a poem, The
Tears of Scotland. In 1746, he published Advice, a satire; in
1747, Reproof, another satire; both in the heroic couplet, both
characteristic in spirit and diction. In the same year, the fate of
The Regicide still rankling, he made a brutal attack on Lyttelton
in A Burlesque Ode on the Loss of a Grandmother, a parody of
Lyttelton's monody on the death of his wife. None of these
works is of any importance to literature; but, in 1748, they were
succeeded by a work of very high importance, The Adventures of
Roderick Random.
Smollett admitted that he modelled his story on the plan of
## p. 37 (#63) ##############################################
Roderick Random and the Picaresque Novel 37
Le Sage's Gil Blas. In the country of Defoe, the picaresque
novel—the realistic novel of travel and adventure—was not
absolutely new; nor was the device of stringing the episodes of
the story together along the thread of a single character. What
Smollett achieved in Roderick Random and, later, in Peregrine
Pickle, was to show how much could still be done with this form,
to introduce new life and new types, and to present them with
unequalled brilliance and energy. The new type for which he is
most famous is not the hungry and adventurous Scot, like Roderick
Random himself or Strap, his faithful attendant, but the British
sailor. The expedition to Cartagena had given great opportunities
for knowledge of the navy to a man who had great skill in ex-
pressing that knowledge. So vivid a picture of a certain kind of
life peopled with such clear-cut types as Morgan, the Welsh
surgeon, Bowling, Oakum, Mackshane, Jack Rattlin, had never
been presented before and has not been surpassed since. The
British tar was all but new to English literature, and, in this direction
alone, Smollett's influence has been as important as his achieve-
ment. Though he sees men and women chiefly from the outside,
he sees them with extraordinary clarity, and has a way of hitting
them off in the first few words which keeps the attention arrested
all through the rambling, ill-constructed book. Smollett was not
a moralist; he was even without a view of life and conduct such
as might have lent unity to his several works. Dickens, in boy-
hood, found Roderick ‘a modest and engaging hero’; to the adult
reader, he is one of the most shameless young scoundrels in
fiction. In his preface to the work, Smollett writes of Roderick's
modest merit,' and he may have been sincere. The truth is that he
did not care. He aimed almost exclusively at what he abundantly
secured-movement and variety; and his taste for farce, horse-
play and violence was inexhaustible. It should be added that
Smollett's study of medicine had doubtless inured him to the
contemplation of certain physical facts, and that he revels in
contemplating them.
The publication of Roderick Random brought Smollett imme-
diately into fame. The first advantage he took of it was to publish
his unfortunate tragedy The Regicide, with a preface full of railing
at the blindness, the jealousy and so forth, of those who would not
see its merits. He made-or revised and corrected-an English
translation of Gil Blas, which was published in 1749. Yet, just
as Fielding tried to live by the law, Smollett seems to have gone
on hoping to make a living by medicine. In 1750, he took the
## p. 38 (#64) ##############################################
38
Fielding and Smollett
a
degree of doctor of medicine in Marischal college, Aberdeen. In
the autumn of that year, however, he set out for Paris with
Dr John Moore, the author of Zeluco, in order to collect material
for another novel. The result of the tour was The Adventures
of Peregrine Pickle, published in 1751. In some respects, this is
the most remarkable of Smollett's novels ; it is, also, the longest,
and it maintains its vivacity and vigour throughout. In morality,
the treatment of the main theme (if such a book can be said to
have a main theme) shows scarcely any advance on Roderick
Random. Peregrine is a scoundrel with a very moderate sense
of shame; he is also, in his elegant and rather witty way, a bully
of the most refined cruelty, who is not content to feast on others'
folly, but likes to pay for the feast with all kinds of insult and
annoyance. It would be easier to insist on the fact that morality
and good taste have nothing to do with the effect that Smollett
wished to produce, were it not that the same novel contains
the finest character he ever drew. In a work of this kind, coherence
is of little moment; and, that Smollett clearly changed his mind as
he went on, not only about Pickle's mother, and his aunt Grizzle,
but about his aunt Grizzle's husband, commodore Trunnion, does
not lessen the beauty of the commodore's character in its final
form. A modern reader, by reason of a satiety that must have
been almost unknown in Smollett's day, wishes that Trunnion
could open his lips just once or twice without using a nautical
metaphor; but metaphor was never more finely used than in the
famous death-scene of that simple, wise, lovable old sea-dog. This
character alone (supposing that there had been no Matthew Bramble
or Lismahago to follow) would prove that Smollett had it in him to
be a humourist of a high order, if his savageness and brutality
had not stifled the humourist's qualities. In Peregrine Pickle,
much of the characterisation is on the highest level ever reached
by Smollett. The household at The Garrison,' where Hawser
Trunnion lived, included that “great joker,' lieutenant Hatchway,
and Tom Pipes, the silent and faithful, who is more attractive,
if not better fun, than Strap. Though Mrs Pickle is an impossible
person, her husband Gamaliel lives from the first line of the story;
and the adventures of the painter and the doctor, the banquet
in the manner of the ancients and the escape from the Bastille,
offer a concurrent development of farcical incident and oddity of
character hardly to be paralleled for vivacity and inventiveness.
In Roderick Random, many of the characters were taken from
life; so it was with Peregrine Pickle; and, in the first edition,
+
6
6
## p. 39 (#65) ##############################################
Ferdinand Count Fathom
39
Smollett attacked several of those whom he considered his
enemies—Lyttelton (under the name Sir Gosling Scrag), Garrick,
Rich and Cibber, his rancour against whom, on account of the
rejection of The Regicide, was continuous, besides Akenside and
Fielding. At this date, he cannot have had any cause of complaint
against Fielding, unless it were the belief that Partridge in Tom
Jones was imitated from Strap in Roderick Random; and, in the
main, the secret of his dislikes seems to have been jealousy.
Fielding's retorts, in two numbers of The Covent Garden Journal,
drew from Smollett one of his most savage and indecent perform-
ances: A Faithful Narrative of the Base and Inhuman Acts
that were lately practised upon the Brain of Habbakuk Hilding,
Justice, Dealer and Chapman. . . (1752). In the second edition
of Peregrine Pickle, however, which was issued before the end
of 1751, the attacks on Fielding were withdrawn. It remains to
add that the form of the book is still the picaresque novel; but
even this loose construction is disturbed by the interpolation of
the immoral but vivacious Memoirs of a Lady of Quality.
Smollett had not yet given up all idea of practising as a doctor.
He took up his abode in Bath; but, failing to meet with success,
he wrote a pamphlet to prove that Bath water was but little
more efficacious than any other water, and, returning to London,
definitely took up literature as his profession. He settled in
Chelsea, at Monmouth house, where he was visited by Johnson,
Garrick, Goldsmith, Sterne and others; and here he held those
Sunday dinners which he was to describe later in Humphrey
Clinker, for the benefit of the hacks who worked in the 'literary
factory' established by him. His next novel, published in 1752,
was The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom. If Partridge
owed something to Strap, Fathom undoubtedly owed something
to Jonathan Wild; but Smollett's book lacks the unity to
which Fielding attained by his consistent irony and by the
intellectual conception of the relations of goodness and greatness.
And Smollett betrays his half-heartedness by leaving Fathom
converted and repentant, in which not very convincing or edifying
condition he is found again in Humphrey Clinker. Yet, if the
book, as a whole, be unsatisfactory, it is, like all Smollett's fiction,
vivacious and brilliant, and its influence may be traced in Pelham,
in Dennis Duval and in other works.
After Ferdinand Count Fathom, Smollett did not write any
more novels for some years. He was constantly in need of money, for
he was always overspending his income, considerable as it was. Of
>
## p. 40 (#66) ##############################################
40
Fielding and Smollett
his wife's fortune, only a small part ever reached him; but Smollett
was practically the first man to conduct a literary factory' with
success; and, at one time, his profits came to about £600 a year.
After the publication of Ferdinand Count Fathom, the factory
and the trade of book-making absorbed him. In 1755, he published
a translation of Don Quixote, which critics have declared to be
only a réchauffé of Jervas's translation (published, posthumously,
in 1742), Smollett not having Spanish enough to be capable of
making an entirely new version. In 1756, Archibald Hamilton,
formerly an Edinburgh printer, put Smollett at the head of the
contributors to his new monthly paper, The Critical Review, started
in opposition to Ralph Griffiths's Monthly Review. Smollett, as we
have seen, was trenchant in attack; and his writings in The Critical
Review involved him in quarrels with Grainger, Joseph Reed,
Churchill, Shebbeare and several others. To digress for a moment
from the chronological order of his doings, in January 1757, Garrick
brought on the stage at Drury lane Smolletts farce of life at sea,
The Reprisal, or the Tars of Old England, a rollicking play, full
of the oddities of national character and sure of popularity because
of its attacks on the French Garrick having gone out of his way
to see that Smollett was well remunerated, Smollett has praise
for him in The Critical Review, and, later, more of it in 'a work
of truth,' his History of England. In 1759, Smollett was fined
£100 and suffered three months' not uncomfortable imprisonment
in the king's bench prison (which he was afterwards to describe in
Sir Launcelot Greaves) for impugning, in The Critical Review,
the courage of admiral Sir Charles Knowles.
Meanwhile, at the close of 1757, he published the first four
volumes of his History of England, bringing it down to the treaty
of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748. The work seems to have been a mere
bookseller's venture. Hume had already published two volumes
on the Stewart period, and was known to be at work on the
Tudors? In order to take the wind out of his sails by bringing
out a complete history before him, Smollett worked very hard,
reading, he said, 300 volumes; and, in twenty months, com-
pleted a work written, though in haste, with his usual clearness
and force. What he really thought of public affairs was not to
become evident till the publication of The History of an Atom,
some years later. Between 1761 and 1765, he added five more
volumes to his History of England, bringing the story down to
the moment of publication, and taking opportunities, by the way,
1 Cf. chap. xii, post.
5
## p. 41 (#67) ##############################################
Miscellaneous Work.
Sir Launcelot Greaves 41
ชา
of praising Fielding, Hume and others whom he had attacked in
earlier days.
The work of these strenuous years included, also, the prepara-
tion of Dodsley's Compendium of Voyages in seven volumes, among
which appeared Smollett's own account of the expedition against
Cartagena; the compiling of a Universal History, in which he com-
posed the histories of France, Germany and Italy, besides painfully
revising the contributions of his hacks ; eight volumes entitled The
Present State of the Nations; a translation, with Thomas Francklin,
of the works of Voltaire; and two further excursions into journalism
-one of them as editor of The North Briton, a tory paper started
in May 1762, in support of Lord Butel. While Smollett was in the
king's bench prison, in 1759, Newbery, the bookseller, secured his
services for his new monthly paper, The British Magazine. Its first
number, published in January 1760, contained the first instalment
of Smollett's fourth, and feeblest, novel, The Adventures of
Sir Launcelot Greaves. Sir Launcelot is an eighteenth century
gentleman who rides about the country in armour, attended
by his comic squire, Timothy Crabshaw, redressing grievances.
When one remembers their originals, Don Quixote and Sancho
Panza, it is impossible to feel much interest in this pair; and the
fun of the story, almost entirely, is horse-play. Some of the
lesser characters, however, are well done, including the sour
and crafty rogue, Ferret, said to be a caricature of Shebbeare.
Though the talk of captain Crowe, the naval man, whose
adventures as knight-errant are a burlesque of the hero's, in
the main resembles that of commodore Trunnion, it is very
suggestive, at times, of Alfred Jingle; and to Mrs Gobble, the
justice's wife, Bob Sawyer's landlady unquestionably owed her
indignation at being addressed as 'woman. ' Another feature of
note in the book is that it begins straight away with an admirable
piece of description, in the manner of Scott, leaving out the
exordium which had till then been usual.
By 1763, Smollett's health was broken by incessant overwork,
disappointment in his hopes of aid from Bute, and the excesses
of his own systema nervosum maxime irritabile. And, in April
of that year, the violent, affectionate man suffered the heaviest
of blows in the loss of his only child, Elizabeth, at the age of
fifteen. For the sake of his own health and his wife's spirits, he
left England in the month of June, and travelled across France
to Nice. In the autumn of 1764, he visited Genoa, Rome, Florence
+ Ct. chap. xvky post.
IL
## p. 42 (#68) ##############################################
42
Fielding and Smollett
1
and other towns of Italy; for the winter, he returned to Nice, and,
by June 1765, he was back in London. In the following year,
he published an account of his Travels through France and Italy,
one of the most entertaining books of travel extant, and a mine
of information, on the whole remarkably accurate, concerning
the natural phenomena, history, social life, economics, diet and
morals of the places described. Smollett had a lively and perti-
nacious curiosity, and, as his novels prove, a very quick eye. He
foresaw the merits of Cannes, then a small village, as a health-
resort, and the possibilities of the Corniche road. The chief
interest of the book, however, for the general reader, lies in its
unsparing revelation of the author's character. In place of the
bravery, serenity and sweetness of the dying Fielding, we have here
little but spleen, acerbity and quarrelsomeness. Smollett's fierce
engagements with innkeepers, postillions and fellow-travellers ;
his profound contempt for foreigners, now fortified by first-hand
observation; his scorn of the Roman catholic faith and ceremonies,
of duelling, of such domestic arrangements as the cicisbeo, of
petty and proud nobility, of a hundred other French institutions
and ways; and the shrewd sense and the keen eye (keener than
Carlyle's) for shams which fortify all his violent prejudices, combine
to make the book a masterpiece in description and ironic
criticism of men and manners. Not that he was wilfully blind to
merit or beauty; he has good words, now and then, even for a
foreign doctor. But he was determined to see everything with
his own eyes; and, being a sick man and splenetic, he saw every-
thing, from politics to statues and pictures, with an eye more or
less jaundiced. Sterne, who met Smollett in Italy, hit off the
truth, with his usual pungency, in the portrait of Smelfungus in
A Sentimental Journey.
Smollett was better, but far from well, when he returned home.
In 1766, he travelled in Scotland, revisited the scenes of his child-
hood, and was made much of by learned Edinburgh. Here, and
in Bath, whither he now went as a patient, he gathered material, and
possibly laid plans, for his last novel. Before Humphrey Clinker
appeared, however, Smollett was to show himself in his most rancor-
ous and pseudo-Rabelaisian mood in The History and Adventures of
an Atom (1769). In this work, the Atom relates, to one Nathaniel
Peacock, his experiences while in the body of a Japanese. Since
Japan stands for England, and the names in the story (many of them
formed on the principle afterwards adopted by Samuel Butler in
Erewhon) each represented a wellknown figure in British public
## p. 43 (#69) ##############################################
>
Humphrey Clinker. Smollett's last journey 43
life, the work is merely a brutal satire on British public affairs
from the year 1754 to the date of publication—and the Travels of
Lemuel Gulliver are fragrant beside it.
In the last month of 1769, Smollett's health compelled him,
once more, to leave England. He went to Italy, and, in the spring
of 1770, settled in a villa near Leghorn. Here, he wrote his last
and most agreeable novel, The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker.
In its way, this is another picaresque story, insomuch as, during
its progress, the characters (who relate everything in letters to
their friends) pursue their travels in England and Scotland. But
its tone and temper (owing, possibly, to the influence of Sterne,
possibly, to the pacific mood which often blesses the closing days
of even the angriest men) are very different from those of Roderick
Random and of Peregrine Pickle. Smollett the humourist, of
whom we have had but brief glimpses in his earlier works, is more
evident here than anywhere else. Matthew Bramble, the out-
wardly savage and inwardly very tender old bachelor, his sister
Mrs Tabitha Bramble, smart Jery Melford, their nephew, and
his sister Miss Lydia, Mrs Winifred Jenkins, the maid, and
Humphrey Clinker himself, the 'methodist 'manservant whom they
pick up on their travels—all these are characters more deeply and
kindly seen than any of their predecessors except Hawser Trunnion.
The best among them all is Lismahago, the Scottish soldier,
needy, argumentative, proud, eccentric—a figure of genuine
comedy, among whose many descendants must be reckoned one of
great eminence, Dugald Dalgetty. The novel is planned with a
skill unusual in Smollett's fiction. In Richardson, the device
of telling the story in letters leads to wearisome repetitions and
involutions. Smollett contrives to avoid much repetition; and the
story, though loosely built, as picaresque novels must be, goes
steadily and clearly forward to reach a more or less inevit-
able ending. This was his last work. He died at his villa in
September 1771, and is buried in the English cemetery at Leghorn.
After his death, his Ode to Independence-not a great poem, but
a vigorous expression of his sturdy temperament—was published;
and, in 1795, there appeared under his name a curious pamphlet,
foretelling the revolt of America and the French revolution.
Whether he wrote this pamphlet or not, he had shown a prevision
hardly less remarkable in certain political forecasts to be found
in his Travels.
One of the marks of Hazlitt's 'common-place critic' was that
he preferred Smollett to Fielding. To dilate on preferences is
6
## p. 44 (#70) ##############################################
44
Fielding and Smollett
less profitable than to enquire, first, what the two greatest of
English eighteenth century novelists achieved between them.
Both tried their hands in youth at the drama; and both failed
almost precisely in so far as they followed the prevalent fashion
of the drama. Fielding's comedies and Smollett's tragedy are
attempts at expression through outworn media.
The long-
enduring somnolence which overtook the English drama early
in the eighteenth century had already begun. In turning from
the stage to the new field of prose fiction, Fielding and Smollett
together raised the novel to the chief place among contemporary
forms of literary expression, and showed how much it could
contain of philosophy, of incident, of humour and of fun. Of
the pair, Smollett was the more learned, and, perhaps, the more
inventive in finding value for the purposes of his art in modes of life
hitherto untouched. Fielding's mind went deeper.
'I should be at a loss,' wrote Hazlitt, 'where to find in any authentic
documents of the same period so satisfactory an account of the general state
of society, and of moral, political, and religious feeling in the reign of
George II as we meet with in The Adventures of Joseph Andrews and
his friend Mr Abraham Adams1'
In other words, the novel had already taken the whole of life'
for its province. It remained for Scott to sweep into its compass
all the past, with its romance and its ideals, and the novel had
conquered the empire in the possession of which it has not yet
been disturbed.
The direct influence of Fielding is harder to estimate than that
of Smollett. Episodes and characters have been borrowed from
him, freely enough. The Vicar of Wakefield, Tristram Shandy,
Quentin Durward, Pendennis, Barry Lyndon-each of these,
among a hundred others, shows clear traces of the study of Fielding.
But the very completeness and individuality of Fielding's work
prevented his founding a school. The singleness of intellectual
standpoint which governs all his novels makes him difficult of
imitation; and he is no less different from those who have taken
him as model than he is from Cervantes, whom he professed to
follow. But this it is safe to say: that Fielding, a master of the
philosophical study of character, founded the novel of character
and raised it to a degree of merit which is not likely to be
surpassed. What his successors have done is to take advantage of
1 Lectures on the Comic Writers, vol. VI.
Waller and Glover's Hazlitt, vol. VIII,
p. 106.
## p. 45 (#71) ##############################################
Fielding and Smollett compared 45
changes in social life since his day, and to study, from their own
point of view, character as affected by those changes. His
greatest disciple is Thackeray, who had much of his genius,
much of his power of seeing human nature beneath the robes of
a peer or the rags of a beggar, much of his satirical power; but
who lacked the large-hearted geniality of his master. The novel
of character must always go to Fielding as its great exemplar.
Smollett's novels have about them more of the quarry and less
of the statue. He is richer in types than Fielding; and it needs
only a mention of his naval scenes and characters to raise memories
of a whole literature, which, receiving an impetus from the naval
battles won a few years after Smollett's death, has persisted even
after the disappearance of wooden ships. The picaresque novel in
general, which burst into activity soon after the publication of
Roderick Random, was under heavy obligations to Smollett, and
nowhere more so than in its first modern example, Pickwick.
Dickens, indeed, who was a great reader of Smollett, was his most
eminent disciple. In both, we find the observation of superficial
oddities of speech and manner carried to the finest point; in both,
we find these oddities and the episodes which display them more
interesting than the main plot; in both, we find that, beneath
those oddities, there is often a lack of real character. Dickens's
fun is purer than Smollett's; but it is not less rich and various.
Although, at the present moment, the picaresque novel has fallen
a little out of fashion, Smollett will continue to be read by those
who are not too squeamish or too stay-at-home to find in him
complete recreation.
## p. 46 (#72) ##############################################
CHAPTER III
STERNE, AND THE NOVEL OF HIS TIMES
The subject of this chapter is, virtually, the history of the
English novel from 1760 to 1780, a crucial period in the earlier
stages of its growth. And the chief questions to be asked are:
what are the new elements which these years added to the novel ?
how far has each of them proved of lasting value? and what is the
specific genius of the two or three writers who stand out above
the rest?
The answer to the first of these questions may be given, in
summary form, at once. In the hands of Sterne and a group of
writers who, though it may be without sufficient reason, are
commonly treated as disciples of Sterne, sentiment began to count
for more than had hitherto been held allowable. As a natural
consequence, the individuality of these writers impressed itself
more and more unreservedly upon a theme which, in the days
of Defoe and even Richardson, had been treated mainly from
without. Sterne, it need hardly be said, is undisputed master in
this way of writing; and here, so far, at least, as his own century
is concerned, he stands absolutely alone. Others, such as Brooke
and Mackenzie, may use the novel as a pulpit for preaching their
own creed or advancing their own schemes of reform. But their
relation to Sterne, on this head, is, manifestly, of the slightest, and
the effect produced is utterly different. A little more of personality,
a great deal more of emotion and sentiment, may come into their
work than any novelist before Sterne would have thought possible.
But that is all.
That is the one link which binds them to him, the
one tangible mark which he left upon the novel of his generation.
Sterne is the sole novelist of first-rate importance in the period
under review ; for even Fanny Burney, inventive and sparkling
though she is, can hardly lay claim to that description. And, thanks
to his very originality, he stands aloof from the main stream of
contemporary fiction. Apart from him, the writers of the time
>
## p. 47 (#73) ##############################################
Sterne's Life
47
fall, roughly, into three groups: the novelists of 'sentiment and
reflection,' who, though far enough from Sterne, are yet nearer to
him than any of the others; the novelists of home life, who, in the
main, and with marked innovations of their own, follow the chief
lines laid down by Richardson in the preceding generation; and,
finally, the novelists of a more distinctly romantic bent, Horace
Walpole and Clara Reeve, who drew their theme from the medieval
past, and supported the interest by an appeal to the sense of
mystery and terror-Horace Walpole, no doubt, the more defiantly
of the two and, perhaps, with less seriousness than has sometimes
been imputed to him. It should be added that the romantic
writers are of far less importance for their own sake than for that
of the writers who followed during the next fifty years, and of
whom, in some measure, they may be regarded as precursors.
The main facts of Laurence Sterne's life (1713-1768) are
sufficiently well known. After a struggling boyhood, he went to
Cambridge, where he made the friendship of Hall-Stevenson, the
Eugenius of his great novel. In 1738 he became vicar of Sutton,
the first of his Yorkshire livings, and a few years later prebendary
of York, of which his great-grandfather had been archbishop. In
1741 he married Eliza Lumley, for whom he soon ceased to feel
any affection and from whom he was formally separated shortly
before his death. By her he had one daughter, Lydia, subsequently
Mme Medalle, whom he seems to have genuinely loved. The
greater part of his life was passed in a succession of love affairs,
mainly of the sentimental kind, with various women of whom
Mrs Draper is the best known. The publication of Tristram
Shandy was begun in 1760 (vols. I and 11), and continued at
intervals until the year before his death. In 1762 his health,
which had always been frail, broke down and he started on travels
in France and Italy which lasted, with an interval, till 1766 and of
which the literary result was A Sentimental Journey (1768).
He died, of pleurisy, in March 1768.
Few writers have thrown down so many challenges as Sterne;
and, if to win disciples be the test of success, few have paid so
heavily for their hardihood. He revolutionised the whole scope
and purpose of the novel; but, in his own country, at any rate,
years passed before advantage was taken of the liberty he asserted.
He opened new and fruitful fields of humour; and one of the
greatest of his successors has denied him the name of humourist.
He created a style more subtle and flexible than any had found
before him; and all that Goldsmith could see in it was a tissue
## p. 48 (#74) ##############################################
48 Sterne, and the Novel of his Times
of tricks and affectations. But, if the men of letters hesitated,
the public had no doubt. The success of Tristram Shandy swept
everything before it. And here, as is often the case, the popular
verdict has worn better than the craftsman's or the critic's.
Sterne was nothing if not an innovator. And in no innovation
was he more daring than in that which widened the scope and
loosened the structure of the novel. 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
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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
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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
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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. ).
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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).
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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
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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.
