The Facts of Fiction

by Norman Collins

  Of course a man can stand a lot of criticism smilingly when he has been compared with Homer by anyone of the stature of Diderot. But Richardson found criticism where he can least have expected it. Even his apparently unexceptionable Sir Charles Grandison —his original title The Good Man, shows how abysmally innocent it was—stabbed the soul of Lady Bradshaigh. The plot of the piece seems to us as innocuous as that of Meredith’s Egoist. Scott describes it in these words:

  The only dilemma to which he (Sir Charles) is exposed in seven volumes is the doubt which of the two beautiful and accomplished women, excellent in disposition and high in rank, sister excellences as it were, both being devotedly attached to him, he shall be pleased to select for his bride; and this with so small a shade of partiality towards either, that we cannot conceive his happiness to be endangered wherever his lot may fall, except by a generous compassion for her whom he must necessarily relinquish.

  But the eighteenth century had its standards even though they were not always our own. Lady Bradshaigh, immediately upon reading Sir Charles Grandison, wrote to Richardson as follows:

  You have made me bounce off my chair that two good girls were in love with your hero, and that he was fond of both, I have such despicable notions of a divided love that I cannot have an idea how a worthy object can entertain such a thought.CF

  I have quoted Lady Bradshaigh’s opinion, not so much for the amusing trifle it is as because in such a piece of criticism the chief difficulties and perils of a novel-with-a-purpose may be seen. Art, in such works, walks handcuffed and the policeman that is the public has its eye on Life itself. If the novelist ruthlessly carries out his purpose the result is certain not to please any readers of fiction, except those who belong to the same group as the author. And if the novel, for one moment, steps out on its own, using its own imaginative muscles, the moralists at once begin to beat the author over the head with his Preface.

  Richardson as a novelist was always a little embarrassed by his exertions as a moralist. That he made Clarissa a tragedy of classical bleakness and insisted on its remaining so despite such hysterical appeals as that from Colley Cibber and Letitia Pilkington: “Spare her virgin purity, dear sir, spare it. Consider if this wounds Cibber and me (who neither of us set up for immaculate chastity) what must it be to those who possess that inestimable treasure?” is the most convincing proof that Richardson could practise as a novelist as well as preach as a saint. And Richardson, to whom such appeals were common, must often have felt rather as the Creator would have felt had he received a petition on the seventh day asking for the removal from the Garden of Eden of the Tree of Good and Evil, with attendant Serpent. Both were appeals which the Creator was bound, in the interests of intelligent creation, to ignore.

  The true defects of Sir Charles Grandison are that it was so slow, so trivial, so proper and so Italian (Italy was far more genteel than France at the time) that had a petition been got up on behalf of Miss Byron or Miss Selby, or even for Sir Charles himself on the eve of his duel with Sir Hargreave Pollexfen, no one would have put himself to the trouble of signing it.

  Sir Charles Grandison was a failure (it can hardly be said to have failed) not so much because it was too Italian—Macaulay ingeniously suggested that shorn of its Italianate appendages it would make an excellent novel—as because its propriety was so uniformly of the order that led Johnson to remark that “Richardson taught the passions to move at the command of virtue.”

  For some reason, virtue, at least the kind of virtue that leads its possessors to be called good, is tolerable only in a woman. Virtue of that sort is usually the last resort of an idle feminine mind. In a man it can be a positive vice. And that monster of rectitude, Sir Charles Grandison, comes down to us as virtuous merely because the aggregate of his qualities amounts to nothing higher than his not being vicious.

  Another reason why Sir Charles Grandison is a poorish novel is that Richardson in reaching above his height in society was also stepping out of his depth in experience. That is, however, more a reason why people should have affected to laugh at the book in its own day than now.

  A reader has to be a formidable historian to be disturbed by errors in the differences of manners between one social structure and another two centuries distant. And though Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in her Letters remarks that Richardson “has no idea of the manners of high life,” and adds that his virtuous young ladies “romp like wenches round a maypole,” I doubt if many readers would be aware of such solecisms to-day if they had been left to find them out for themselves.

  It is a habit, and almost an unavoidable one, in writing of Richardson, to enumerate all his weaknesses, faults and deficiencies, and conclude by saying what a great writer he is. He certainly does appear, when one comes to compare his books with his biography, to have given as an author more than he had as a man to give.

  He is all but unread to-day, not because of any obvious defects in his work but because time is harder to come by than it was in his day. And to go to Richardson without time is like going to Homer without Greek. Clarissa is a full week’s work. To get from it what it has to offer—a really amazing upheaval of the emotions—it has to be read as though it were being gone through for an examination.

  Richardson’s contribution to thought, Dr. Baker remarks, is “a loftier ideal of personality.” He might have added that Richardson was the first novelist to raise women to the full dignity of literary responsibility. For he began a process that it was left for Meredith to complete.

  Richardson’s novels may seem antiquated to despair in their scenes and diction, but they are forerunners of a popular school of fiction in which someone, and it is usually a woman, is desperately eager to express himself or herself, without ever knowing quite why, what or how; novels of suppressed individuality we should call them to-day.

  There is, indeed, about the ceaseless striving of Richardson’s characters the frantic, unearthly persistence of the actors in a dream. For Richardson in his simplicity believed that bad men spent the entire twenty-four hours of every day in being bad, and that good women (like Sir Charles Grandison) passed the entire twenty-four hours in indecently shaming the Devil.

  Hazlitt said that Richardson “seemed to spin his materials entirely out of his own brain, as if there had been nothing existing in the world beyond that little room in which he sat writing.” And when the outside world did flow into that little room, it was only women, as pure as ice and as anxious about rape as the most nervous, elderly memsahib at an Indian hill-station, that it brought in on its flood.

  Henry Fielding

  History has given us the portrait of Fielding as the archetype of eighteenth century genius; a handsome decaying face and sprawling figure, with canary vest claret-stained, seen above a palisade of bottles, orange-wenches and dunning tradesmen. It is a picturesque contrast; young Fielding, the man of the world, indolently loitering between Ranelagh and Vauxhall, and old Richardson, the man of letters industriously hurrying between Hammersmith and Salisbury Court.

  It does not, however, require a literary critic to detect that something is wrong with this historic conception. Fielding was forty-eight when he died, Richardson was over fifty before he had started Pamela. And playing mad Kit cannot be all beer and skittles if one is to be remembered as a Marlowe at the end of it.

  There is, indeed, no more fallacious view of Fielding’s most popular achievement, Tom Jones, than that it is a work of unrelieved inspiration: that Fielding throughout the whole tumultuous stream of it was cox and not stroke.

  Tom Jones, on the contrary, bears almost every mark of evidence that we should expect in a production of painstaking intelligence and conscientious application of intellect. It is the high spirits that disguise the hard thinking. And it is the richness of incident that conceals the author’s recurrent poverty of something better. For it has to be admitted that the characters that are introduced on to the turntable of Fielding’s wit, like so many gramophone records all waiting for the
ir creator to flick the needle on to them and set them speaking, denote a creator of greater fertility than profundity. Not that we need object, as is often done, to the discursive episodes—and “The Man on the Hill” is not the worst—on the score of their interrupting the story. To attempt to interrupt Tom Jones would be like putting a mouse-trap in the way of a Chinese cracker. The telling of the story of a life was Fielding’s especial talent; and more particularly to-day, when the story has died beneath a load of motive, we may be grateful to a writer who gives us half-a-dozen stories in place of one.

  There is perhaps in the whole history of English Letters no author more violently debated than Fielding. Richardson is now merely ignored; which is a simple, if unsatisfactory, end to all controversy. Fielding, however, is neither forgotten nor forgiven.

  It is possible to praise him extravagantly in the society of Hazlitt, Coleridge, Leigh Hunt, Gibbon, Jane Austen, Macaulay and Meredith, or to disparage him fiercely beside Johnson, Cobbett, De Quincey, Charlotte Bronte, Carlyle, Tennyson, Browning and Stevenson. On either side the society is so extremely good, that it makes the division more thoroughly bad.

  It would be easy to say that it is all a matter of morals, to decide whether a reader can tolerate Fielding’s heroes, who change their bed-fellows as other men change their bed-linen. But it is difficult to construct a world in which Carlyle, all frowns and blushes, recedes shocked from what is merely amusing to Jane Austen.

  And pursuing this theory we should very soon see that Fielding’s reputation hangs not upon the slender thread of a reader’s sense of honour, but upon that infinitely more slender thread, the reader’s sense of humour.

  Thus, though there were perfectly adequate reasons why Fielding’s ferocious Whiggism and his habit of draining the cup of life dry and continually roaring for more before payment, should have alienated Dr. Johnson in his day, that is no adequate reason why Browning and Tennyson and Stevenson should have been alienated a century later. Fielding’s humour, indeed, raises the question of every laugh in literature. To say that the fun in Joseph Andrews is crude would be to consume prematurely the words we shall be needing later to describe the innocent amusement in the Pickwick Papers. If Dickens is crude, Fielding is barbaric.

  It would be possible to have quite a good, working sense of humour and still fail to be amused by Parson Trulliber’s pigsty. There are many funnier things in literature. But there are none told as though the author thought they were funnier. And it is this huge and heroic conviviality that leaves us until the cold walk home alone to wonder why we laughed so loud a few short hours ago.

  Fielding’s entry into the literature for which he is remembered has about it as much of the gamin as the man of genius. The new laws of dramatic censorship had stoppered the chief outlet of his impudence. Lord Chesterfield had seen what it meant when he wrote: “Wit, my lords, is a sort of property; it is the property of those that have it, and too often the only property.”

  In those days to have the stage closed to a wit was as ruinous as it would be for an author to-day to be forbidden the craft of novel writing. It was a blow in the face for Fielding. Penniless as he was, there was nothing for him to do but to turn the other cheek—and the coolest and most colossal cheek it was.

  Richardson’s Pamela, published in 1740, was everywhere being recommended in the parlour and pulpit, and snatched from the maid to be devoured by the mistress. Fielding sickened at the reiterated name of the popular and prosperous author; or as Scott reasonably suggests, merely saw which way literary profits then lay. For whatever the reason, he perpetrated one of the memorable outrages of letters by publishing Joseph Andrews, a parody of Pamela, in which Pamela’s virtuous young brother is assailed by all the assaults upon his innocence that his sister had suffered; and finally sails into the haven of honourable marriage, the flag of chastity still flying, though the hull is riddled with the small shot of temptation—just as his sister had sailed in before him.

  The fact that Joseph Andrews is ten times the book that Pamela is—indeed it is probably the best that Fielding ever wrote: which was the author’s opinion of it—cannot have made things any the sweeter for Richardson. Had Joseph Andrews been grinned over and forgotten in a fortnight, as a previous parody, Shamela, also probably by Fielding, had been, Richardson could have been spared our sympathy. But it was not. It was grinned over and remembered.

  Nowadays we are apt to be faintly amused at Richardson’s loathing of Fielding and to attribute it to Richardson’s Puritanic upbringing and commercial environment. In this it is Time that has betrayed us. Translate the affair into the present day and anyone can see at a glance the enormity of the offence. Imagine that a modern writer—and it would need to be a modern writer of Mr. Somerset Maugham’s supreme audacity of talent—were to take a good and rightly-popular novel, say The Forsyte Saga, and parody it under the title of The Forsytes Gaga. No one would expect Mr. Galsworthy to forgive Mr. Maugham. They would merely enjoy the audacity and wait for the injunction! Thackeray, with complete misunderstanding of values, endeavoured to reconstruct the Richardson-Fielding affair in a passage which culminates thus:

  Fielding couldn’t do otherwise than laugh at the puny cockney bookseller, pouring out endless volumes of sentimental twaddle, and hold him up to scorn as a moll-coddle and a milksop. His genius had been nursed on sack posset, and not on dishes of tea. His muse had sung the loudest in tavern choruses, and had seen the daylight streaming in over thousands of empty bowls, and reeled home to chambers on the shoulders of the watchman. Richardson’s goddess was attended by old maids and dowagers, and fed on muffins and bohea! “Milksop!” roars Harry Fielding, clattering at the timid shop shutters. “Wretch! Monster! Mohock! ” shrieks the sentimental author of Pamela; and all the ladies of his court cackle out an affrighted chorus.

  From Joseph Andrews the incautious social historian might deduce that the life of every gentleman of the eighteenth century was an exhausting succession of whores, bawds and orange-wenches; play-houses, coffee houses and the Temple; singing, shouting, holloaing, wrangling, drinking, toasting, “sp-wing ” and “smoaking ”; with Newgate Prison looming large and grinning invitingly in the background. And this impression is scarcely dispelled by Fielding’s other novels.

  Life as he saw it might have been designed for the Hammersmith stage. No one, I suppose, imagines that Fielding, in his best fiction, saw life as it really was—even as Smollett saw it—and when life fell short of a sort of Nigel Playfair-Lovat Fraser pageant, Fielding in his early novels ceased to look at it.

  His Preface to Joseph Andrews is better known than the novel it introduces. His definition of his book as “a comic epic poem in prose ” earns its living in quotation, as do his remarks about Affectations and Hypocrisies being the true source of the ridiculous. But there is one paragraph that is often overlooked by those who wish to defend Fielding from moralists with minds like magistrates, who attack him for his bawdiness.

  Perhaps it may be objected to me, that I have against my own rules introduced vices, and of a very black kind, into the work. To which I shall answer: first, that it is very difficult to pursue a series of human actions, and keep clear from them. Secondly, that the vices to be found here are rather the accidental consequences of some frailty or foible, than causes habitually existing in the mind. Thirdly, that they are never set forth as the objects of ridicule, but detestation. Fourthly, that they are never the principal figure at that time on the scene; and, lastly, they never produce the intended evil.

  It was a good answer. But it fell at the fourth ditch. For in his next novel Tom Jones, Tom, the yokel Don Juan, is the principal character in scenes where evil occurs as often as he intends it.

  It is well at this point for the reader to settle whether or no he is roused to disgust or to laughter by Fielding. A test case is to decide whether the notion of an aged hag ogling a fresh boy remains disgusting despite Fielding’s hilarious treatment of it.

  As when a hungry tigress, wh
o has long traversed the woods in fruitless search, sees within reach of her claws a lamb, she prepares to leap on her prey; or as a voracious pike, of immense size, surveys through the liquid element a roach or gudgeon, which cannot escape her jaws, opens them wide to swallow the little fish; so did Mrs. Slipslop prepare to lay her violent amorous hands on the poor Joseph, when luckily her mistress’s bell rung, and delivered the intended martyr from her clutches.

  And once through that test there is a stiffer one as to whether this amuses or nauseates.

  Lo! a pan of hog’s blood, which unluckily stood on the dresser presented itself first to her hands. She seized it in her fury, and without reflection, discharged it into the parson’s face; and with so good an aim, that the much greater part first saluted his countenance, and trickled thence in so large a current down to his beard, and over his garments, that a more horrible spectacle was hardly to be seen, or even imagined.

  Such scenes are common in Fielding. But it is doubtful whether the blood in the latter would react to a modern police test for blood stains. For the truth is that it is no more blood than the red stuff that slops about everywhere in Treasure Island. And the bruises, breakages, and injuries mend themselves at far more than the normal clinical speed. There is, indeed, throughout all Fielding something of that atmosphere of magic healing that hung over Valhalla, where the warriors fought all day to amuse the gods, and were restored every night to amuse themselves.

  The innumerable booby-traps into which the adorable old Parson Adams—a paternal great-grandfather of Mr. Pickwick—falls must inevitably have prematurely ended the blundering career of such a man in the inferior and less generous progress of life.