Ten Novels and Their Authors Read online

  In the past, readers, preferring quantity to quality, to get their money’s worth wanted their novels long, and the author was often hard put to it to provide more matter for the printer than the story he had to tell required. He hit upon an easy way to do this. He inserted into his novel stories, sometimes long enough to be called novelettes, which had nothing to do with his theme or, at best, were tacked on to it with little plausibility. No writer did this with greater nonchalance than Cervantes in Don Quixote. These interpolations have always been regarded as a blot on an immortal work, and can only be read now with impatience. Contemporary criticism attacked him on this account, and in the second part of the book we know he eschewed the bad practice, so producing what is generally thought to be impossible, a sequel that was better than its forerunner; but this did not prevent succeeding writers (who doubtless had not read the criticisms) from using so convenient a device to enable them to deliver to the booksellers a quantity of copy sufficient to make a saleable volume. In the nineteenth century new methods of publication exposed novelists to new temptations. Monthly magazines that devoted much of their space to what is somewhat depreciatingly known as light literature achieved great success, and so provided authors with the opportunity to bring their work before the public in serial form with profit to themselves. At about the same time, the publishers found it to their advantage to issue the novels of popular authors in monthly numbers. The authors contracted to provide a certain amount of material to fill a certain number of pages. The system encouraged them to be leisurely and long-winded. We know from their own admissions how from time to time the authors of these serials, even the best of them, Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, found it a hateful burden to be obliged to deliver an instalment by a given date. No wonder they padded! No wonder they burdened their stories with irrelevant episodes! When I consider how many obstacles the novelist has to contend with, how many pitfalls to avoid, I am not surprised that even the greatest novels are imperfect; I am only surprised that they are not more imperfect than they are.

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  I have in my time, hoping to improve myself, read several books on the novel. Their writers are, on the whole as disinclined as was H. G. Wells to look upon it as a means of relaxation. One point they are pretty unanimous on is that the story is of little consequence. Indeed, they are inclined to regard it as a hindrance to the reader’s capacity to occupy himself with what in their opinion are the novel’s significant elements. It does not seem to have occurred to them that the story, the plot, is as it were a lifeline which the author throws to the reader in order to hold his interest. They consider the telling of a story for its own sake as a debased form of fiction. That seems strange to me, since the desire to listen to stories appears to be as deeply rooted in the human animal as the sense of property. From the beginning of history men have gathered round the camp-fire, or in a group in the market place, to listen to the telling of a story. That the desire is as strong as ever is shown by the amazing popularity of detective stories in our own day. The fact remains that to describe a novelist as a mere storyteller is to dismiss him with contumely. I venture to suggest that there is no such creature. By the incidents he chooses to relate, the characters he selects and his attitude towards them, the author offers you a criticism of life. It may not be a very original one, or very profound, but it is there; and consequently, though he may not know it, he is in his own modest way a moralist. But morals, unlike mathematics, are not a precise science. Morals cannot be inflexible for they deal with the behaviour of human beings, and human beings, as we know, are vain, changeable and vacillating.

  We live in a troubled world, and it is doubtless the novelist’s business to deal with it. The future is uncertain. Our freedom is menaced. We are in the grip of anxieties, fears and frustrations. Values that were long unquestioned now seem dubious. But these are serious matters, and it has not escaped the writers of fiction that the reader may find a novel that is concerned with them somewhat heavy going. Now, owing to the invention of contraceptives, the high value that was once placed on chastity no longer obtains. Novelists have not been slow to notice the difference this has made in the relations of the sexes and so, whenever they feel that something must be done to sustain the reader’s flagging interest, they cause their characters to indulge in copulation. I am not sure they are well-advised. Of sexual intercourse Lord Chesterfield said that the pleasure was momentary, the position ridiculous and the expense damnable: if he had lived to read modern fiction he might have added that there is a monotony about the act which renders the reiterated narration of it excessively tedious.

  At present there is a tendency to dwell on characterisation rather than on incident and, of course, characterisation is important; for unless you come to know intimately the persons of a novel, and so can sympathise with them, you are unlikely to care what happens to them. But to concentrate on your characters, rather than on what happens to them, is merely one way of writing a novel like another. The tale of pure incident, in which the characterisation is perfunctory or commonplace, has just as much right to exist as the other. Indeed, some very good novels of this kind have been written, Gil Blas, for instance, and Monte Cristo. Scheherazade would have lost her head very soon if she had dwelt on the characters of the persons she was dealing with, rather than on the adventures that befell them.

  In the chapters that follow I have given in each case some account of the life and character of the author I am writing about. This I have done partly to please myself, but also for the reader’s sake, since I think that to know what sort of a person the author was adds to one’s understanding and appreciation of his work. To know something about Flaubert explains a good deal that would otherwise be disturbing in Madame Bovary, and to know the little there is to know about Emily Brontë gives a greater poignancy to her strange and wonderful book. A novelist, I have written these essays from my own standpoint. The danger of this is that the novelist is very apt to like best the sort of thing he does himself, and he will judge the work of others by how nearly they approach his own practice. In order to do full justice to works with which he has no natural sympathy, he needs a dispassionate integrity, a liberality of spirit, of which the members of an irritable race are seldom possessed. On the other hand, the critic who is not himself a creator is likely to know little about the technique of the novel, and so in his criticism he gives you either his personal impressions, which may well be of no great value, unless like Desmond MacCarthy he is not only a man of letters but also a man of the world; or else he proffers a judgment founded on hard and fast rules which must be followed to gain his approbation. It is as though a shoemaker made shoes only in two sizes and if neither of them fitted your foot, you could for all he cared go shoeless.

  The essays which are contained in this volume were written in the first place to induce readers to read the novels with which they are concerned, but in order not to spoil their pleasure it seemed to me that I had to take care not to reveal more of the story than I could help. That made it difficult to discuss the book adequately. In re-writing these pieces I have taken it for granted that the reader already knows the novels I treat of, and so it cannot matter to him if I divulge facts which the author has for obvious reasons delayed to the end to tell him. I have not hesitated to point out the defects as well as the merits that I see in these various novels, for nothing is of greater disservice to the general reader than the indiscriminate praise that is sometimes bestowed on certain works that are rightly accepted as classics. He reads and finds that such and such a motive is unconvincing, a certain character unreal, such and such an episode irrelevant and a certain description tedious. If he is of an impatient temper, he will cry that the critics who tell him that the novel he is reading is a masterpiece are a set of fools, and if he is of a modest one, he will blame himself and think that it is above his head and not for the likes of him; if, on the other hand, he is by nature dogged and persistent he will read on conscientiously, though without enjoyment. But a no
vel is to be read with enjoyment. If it doesn’t give the reader that, it is, so far as he is concerned, valueless. In this respect every reader is his own best critic, for he alone knows what he enjoys and what he doesn’t. I think, however, that the novelist may claim that you do not do him justice unless you admit that he has the right to demand something of his readers. He has the right to demand that they should possess the small amount of application that is needed to read a book of three or four hundred pages. He has the right to demand that they should have sufficient imagination to be able to interest themselves in the lives, joys and sorrows, tribulations, dangers and adventures of the characters of his invention. Unless a reader is able to give something of himself, he cannot get from a novel the best it has to give. And if he isn’t able to do that, he had better not read it at all. There is no obligation to read a work of fiction.

  2

  Henry Fielding and Tom Jones

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  The difficulty of writing about Henry Fielding, the man, is that very little is known about him. Arthur Murphy, who wrote a short life of him in 1762, only eight years after his death, as an introduction to an edition of his works, seems to have known him, if he knew him at all, only in his later years, and had so little material to work with that, presumably to fill the eighty pages of his essay, he indulged in long and tedious digressions. The facts he tells are few, and subsequent research has shown that they are not always accurate. The last author to deal at length with Fielding is Dr Homes Dudden, Master of Pembroke. The two stout volumes of his work are a monument of painstaking industry. By giving a lively picture of the political circumstances of the times, and a vivid account of the Young Pretender’s disastrous adventure in 1745, he has added colour, depth and substance to the narrative of his hero’s checkered career. I don’t believe that there is anything to be said about Henry Fielding that the eminent Master of Pembroke has left unsaid.

  Fielding was a gentleman born. His father was the third son of John Fielding, a Canon of Salisbury, and he in turn was the fifth son of an Earl of Desmond. The Desmonds were a younger branch of the family of Denbigh, who flattered themselves that they were descended from the Habsburgs. Gibbon, the Gibbon of The Decline and Fall, wrote in his autobiography: ‘The successors of Charles the Fifth may disclaim their brethren of England; but the romance of Tom Jones, that exquisite picture of human manners, will outlive the palace of the Escorial, and the imperial eagle of the House of Austria.’ The phrase has a fine resonance, and it is a pity that the claim of these noble lords has been shown to have no foundation. They spelt their name Feilding, and there is a well-known story that on one occasion the then Earl asked Henry Fielding how this came about; whereupon he answered: ‘I can only suppose it is because my branch of the family learnt to spell before your lordship’s.’

  Fielding’s father entered the army and served in the wars under Marlborough ‘with much bravery and reputation’. He married Sarah, the daughter of Sir Henry Gould, a Judge of the King’s Bench; and at his country seat, Sharpham Park, near Glastonbury, our author was born in 1707. Two or three years later the Fieldings, who by this time had had two more children, daughters, moved to East Stour in Dorsetshire, a property which the judge had settled on his daughter, and there three more girls and boy were born. Mrs. Fielding died in 1718, and in the following year Henry went to Eton. Here he made some valuable friends and, if he did not leave, as Arthur Murphy states, ‘uncommonly well versed in the Greek authors and an early master of the Latin classics,’ he certainly acquired a real love for classical learning. Later in life, when he was ill and poverty-stricken, he found comfort in reading Cicero’s De Consolatione; and when, dying, he set out in the ship that took him to Lisbon, he carried with him a volume of Plato.

  On leaving Eton, instead of going up to a university, he lived for a while at Salisbury with his grandmother, Lady Gould, the judge being dead; and there, according to Dr. Dudden, read some law and a good deal of miscellaneous literature. He was then a handsome youth, over six feet tall, strong and active, with deep-set eyes, a Roman nose, a short upper lip with an ironical curl to it, and a stubborn, prominent chin. His hair was brown and curly, his teeth white and even. By the time he was eighteen, he gave promise of the sort of man he was going to be. He happened to be staying at Lyme Regis with a trusty servant, ready to ‘beat, maim or kill’ for his master, and there fell in love with a Miss Sarah Andrews, whose considerable fortune added to the charm of her beauty, and he concocted a scheme to carry her off, by main force if necessary, and marry her. It was discovered, and the young woman was hurried away and safely married to a more eligible suitor. For all one knows to the contrary, Fielding spent the next two or three years in London, with an allowance from his grandmother, engaging in the gaieties of the town as agreeably as a well-connected young man can do when he has good looks and charm of manner. In 1728, by the influence of his cousin, Lady Mary Wortley-Montagu, and with the help of the charming, but not particularly chaste, actress, Anne Oldfield, a play of Fielding’s was put on by Colley Cibber at Drury Lane. It was called Love in Several Masques and was given four performances. Shortly after this he entered the University of Leyden with an allowance from his father of two hundred pounds a year. But his father had married again and either could not, or would not, continue to pay him the allowance he had promised, so after about a year Fielding was obliged to return to England. He was in such straits then that, as in his light-hearted way he put it himself, he had no choice but to be a hackney coachman or a hackney writer.

  Austin Dobson, who wrote his life for the English Men of Letters Series, says that ‘his inclinations as well as his opportunities led him to the stage’. He had the high spirits, the humour, the keen-witted observation of the contemporary scene, which are needed by the playwright; and he seems to have had, besides, some ingenuity and a sense of construction. The ‘inclinations’ of which Austin Dobson speaks may very well mean that he had the vicarious exhibitionism which is part of the playwright’s make-up, and that he looked upon writing plays as an easy way to make quick money; the ‘opportunities’ may be a delicate way of saying that he was a handsome fellow of exuberant virility and had taken the fancy of a popular actress. To please a leading lady has ever been the surest way for a young dramatist to get his play produced. Between 1729 and 1737 Fielding composed or adapted twenty-six plays, of which at least three greatly pleased the town; and one of which made Swift laugh, a thing that to the best of the Dean’s recollection he had only done twice in his life before. Fielding did not do very well when he attempted pure comedy; his great successes seem to have been in a genre which, so far as I know, he devised himself, an entertainment in which there were singing and dancing, brief topical sketches, parodies and allusions to public figures: in fact, something indistinguishable from the revues popular in our own day. According to Arthur Murphy, Fielding’s farces ‘were generally the production of two or three mornings, so great was his facility in writing’. Dr. Dudden looks upon this as an exaggeration. I don’t think it is. Some of these pieces were very short, and I have myself heard of light comedies that were written over a week-end and were none the worse for that. The last two plays Fielding wrote were attacks on the political corruption of the times, and the attacks were effective enough to cause the Ministry to pass a Licensing Act which obliged managers to obtain the Lord Chamberlain’s licence to produce a play. This act still obtains, to torment British authors. After this, Fielding wrote only rarely for the theatre and, when he did, presumably for no other reason than that he was more than usually hard up.

  I will not pretend that I have read his plays, but I have flipped through the pages, reading a scene here and there, and the dialogue seems natural and sprightly. The most amusing bit I have come across is the description which, after the fashion of the day, he gives in the list of Dramatis Personæ in Tom Thumb the Great: ‘A woman entirely faultless, save that she is a little given to drink.’ It is usual to dismiss Fielding’s plays as of no account, a
nd doubtless no one would give them a thought if he were not the author of Tom Jones. They lack the literary distinction (such as Congreve’s plays have) which the critic, reading them in his library two hundred years later, would like them to have. But plays are written to be acted, not to be read; it is certainly well for them to have literary distinction; but it is not that which makes them good plays, it may (and often does) make them less actable. Fielding’s plays have by now lost what merit they had, for the drama depends very much on actuality and so is ephemeral, almost as ephemeral as a newspaper, and Fielding’ plays, as I have said, owed their success to the fact that they were topical; but light as they were, they must have had merit, for neither a young man’s wish to write plays, nor pressure brought to bear by a favourite actress, will induce managers to put on play after play unless they please the public. For in this matter the public is the final judge. Unless the manager can gauge their taste, he will go bankrupt. Fielding’s plays had at least the merit that the public liked to go to see them. Tom Thumb the Great ran for ‘upwards of forty nights’, and Pasquin for sixty, which was as long as The Beggar’s Opera had run.