The Facts of Fiction

by Norman Collins

  In the eighteenth century everyone had a sense of the religious tradition, but few the spirit of religious faith. So God floated out of the Churches and ghosts floated into the home. And from Walpole onwards came a stream of terrifying writers: Clara Reeve, Mrs. Radcliffe, “Monk ” Lewis and the rest, who created a superstition of singular density, and no little literary effectiveness—to those left with sufficient religious instinct to enjoy it.

  But Walpole was not a pumpkin-spectre out to frighten yokels. He foresaw his successors as little as he foresaw his success. And there is no reason to believe that he saw the real significance of what he had done for fiction.

  He seemed to think that because he had taught his characters to behave with that admirable detachment and suspicion that Gideon displayed before the miraculous fleece, he had instituted a new kind of romance. It is necessary only to remember Gulliver’s behaviour before the Houyhnhnms to see that Manfred had been rather seriously anticipated.

  But what Walpole did do was the infinitely more important thing of changing the story from a mere string of events into a cat’s cradle of ingenious complexity; to lay out a plot like a pattern and not merely uncoil it like a rope. And he did this, not because of any superior intelligence in his mind but because the nature of his plot compelled him.

  If you write a story with a skeleton in the cupboard in the first chapter you must, sooner or later, explain how it came to be there, and the story will move forward with this as its purpose. And so when Walpole begins with a miraculous helmet, crushing a bridegroom to death on the first page, we know that we shall have to hear more about the helmet, and that we shall be given some reason, no matter how unreasonable, for its behaviour. Each chapter, thereupon, assumes a new responsibility, earning its keep, not merely by adding to the length, but to the purpose, of the novel.

  Tom Jones, for example, could have stretched to twice its length, with no damage or improvement to itself, only providing that Tom’s endurance could support the strain of forgetting his Sophia in the simplest way he knew, and that the reader’s patience could endure him for so long.

  * * *

  The third major piece of minor fiction of the period is The Vicar of Wakefield. It is the typically repentant product of a man who has crowded the greatest wildnesses of his life into the early years. There is a kind of innocence that is so closely akin to idiocy that we may be forgiven if we call it by its harder name. And the idiotic incumbent of Wakefield reveals just those deficiencies of intelligence that made his author one of Fortune’s gifts to the trickster and the cheat.

  The Vicar of Wakefield is usually exhibited as the most successful of Johnson’s god-children. But Johnson found it in circumstances that were likely to commend it. The description that he has left of the incident is this:

  I received one morning a message from poor Goldsmith that he was in great distress, and as it was not in his power to come to me, begging that I would come to him as soon as possible. I sent him a guinea, and promised to come to him directly. I accordingly went as soon as I was drest, and found that his landlady had arrested him for his rent, at which he was in a violent passion. I perceived that he had already changed my guinea, and had got a bottle of Madeira and a glass before him. I put the cork into the bottle, desired he would be calm, and began to talk to him of the means by which he might be extricated. He then told me that he had a novel ready for the press, which he produced to me. I looked into it and saw its merit; told the landlady I should soon return, and having gone to a bookseller, sold it for sixty pounds. I brought Goldsmith the money, and he discharged his rent, not however without rating his landlady in a high tone for having used him so ill.

  In a room with the shadow of the bailiff on the blind a man would find merit in sixpence. That is not for one moment to pretend that The Vicar of Wakefield was devoid of merit. The simple sentiment of the story is obviously sincere; it goes straight to the heart of the public like the picture on a sublime tradesman’s calendar.

  No one, I suppose, could fail to see the charm of the nincompoop old vicar; no one, that is, who can put his common sense in his pocket for a space. But the trouble is that Goldsmith’s picture of an honest man was no more than that of a fat, affectionate pig, politely handing the fatal knife to a pig-sticking destiny.

  That was at the back of Goldsmith’s mind because it had been at the back of his life. Goldsmith was a pawn of Fate who began the game with a gambit. When his family did contrive to send him to college in Dublin he played the fool so strenuously that his tutor, poor desperate man, broke into his rooms and boxed his ears in the middle of an uproarious party. The disgrace was too great; Goldsmith sold his books and, with his ears still singing with shame, left Erin never to return.

  At least, it is what he intended. But being the weak, asinine creature that he was, he dawdled on in Dublin, plying his sacred trade of idler, until he had only a shilling left. Then the family appeared and Goldsmith had to be reconciled with his tutor. It was all a part of the shifting design in his patternless life.

  The next years show us Goldsmith wandering about the world from Edinburgh to Padua, being arrested and robbed and cheated and tricked, playing his flute for pence, spending the money that his family with saintly patience continued to send him, now in Leyden, now in Italy, and behaving in general as though Life had really created him to see if for one character at least she could not behave as generously and variously as fiction. But patternless as the life was it was all of a piece; like needing a patron and ridiculously mistaking his manservant for him, and then spurning the patron on the entirely false assertion that “book-sellers are the best patrons ”; behaving like a Duke in the intervals of living like a pauper; earning a prosperous living, yet dying in debt to the tune of £2,000.

  Goldsmith is one of the few inspired loafers in history; a man who learned more from idleness than most men do from industry. Since loafing was his apprenticeship to life, and he was so diligent, we may forgive him that for its sake he was also a liar, a cheat and a thief. He was the pickpocket in leading strings. His mother had always had great faith in her son’s ingenuity as a writer. And her proof was not long lacking. For young Oliver was fertile in reasons for her giving him money.

  For example, there was his old story of how he embarked upon a ship for America, paid his fare, sent his kit, his valuable kit, on board and then missed the vessel. The only thing that makes the story even worth repeating, now that its original purpose of getting money is pointless, is that there certainly is something that rings true about Goldsmith’s not knowing the name of the ship.

  For there is another story of how he first arrived in Edinburgh, took his luggage to his rooms and left to explore the town, only to find he had failed to note the number or street of his lodgings. By chance, it is said, he met the porter who had carried his luggage: which saved him. And the little vignette of An Irishman in Scotland was complete.

  But in matters of money Goldsmith is hard to blame. His was a nature of lavish habits, for which money was essential. When he came to have it later in life he spent it. And probably he quite sincerely could not imagine that there were people in this world who liked to have money by them, at rest as well as in motion.

  Goldsmith’s generosity, indeed, has become one of the great historical attributes, like Smollett’s temper and Sterne’s wit and Sidney’s grace.

  To have been a friend of either Goldsmith or Johnson would have been to be as immune from the fear of actual hunger as any man possibly could be. The only difference between Goldsmith’s generosity and Johnson’s was that Johnson knew the value of money and deliberately made himself forget it upon occasion, and Goldsmith never knew.

  One of the unfading scenes of sentimental history is that of the crowd of indigent mourners, pauper dependents on a debtor, who thronged Goldsmith’s staircase in Brick Court when he died. And the scene is still affecting even though the grief of a beggar when his benefactor dies is necessarily not above suspicion.

&n
bsp; It would be easy criticism to say that the simplicity of The Vicar of Wakefield was the same simplicity which led Goldsmith to give away his money and his coat and his breakfast, and behave always as though St. Anthony were holding out a hand from every doorway. But that would be misleading, because it would overlook such a piece of work as She Stoops to Conquer. Goldsmith was perpetually puzzling his contemporaries by suddenly shining through the mists of his own mind like a sun, and then as suddenly taking cover again. And he puzzles us still more. She Stoops to Conquer, for example, is the product of a man who has seen through all the follies of mankind. And seeing through a folly is usually halfway to overlooking it.

  In The Traveller and The Deserted Village, on the other hand, Goldsmith still believed in Human Folly and Human Frailty and Human Despair and Human Regret and Human Pride: and wrote about them in the manner of a yearning and pessimistic preacher. In She Stoops to Conquer and The Good Natured Man the moralist has given place to the Epicurean; and the soft, serious things of life are all deliciously played upon by the comic spirit.

  Not that Goldsmith’s was a consistent and chronological pilgrimage from pessimism to comedy. On the contrary, it was a hesitating jay-flight between one mood and the next. And it so happens that The Vicar of Wakefield, which is that part of Goldsmith that concerns us, was written in a moment when Life outside was a forbidding grey, and everything within was a delicate shell pink.

  “With that sweet story of The Vicar of Wakefield’” wrote Thackeray, “he has found entry into every castle and every hamlet in Europe. Not one of us, however busy or hard, but once or twice in our lives has passed an evening with him and undergone the charm of his delightful music.”

  Such an utterance illuminates more of the kindly soul of Thackeray than of his subject. At the least provocation Thackeray’s heart was ready to overflow; and his pictures of every king and peasant from Novaya Zemlya to Gibraltar all greedily poring over Goldsmith, and of Scrooges indulging themselves with their solitary feast of pathos, are the product of a mind that carries more than a fair handicap of sentimental lead.

  Scott said: “We read The Vicar of Wakefield in youth and in age—we return to it again and again, and bless the memory of an author who contrives so well to reconcile us to human nature.” And that is very fairly put. Scott had fewer of that sort of books to which a man may return again and again than Thackeray had. And there was intelligence as well as affection in naming youth and age as the best times for reading about the Vicar.

  The subject of The Vicar of Wakefield rather obviously is Marriage: the characters in the story are a wife, sons and daughters and the spectre of poverty. Now, though Goldsmith was extremely well equipped to describe the latter, he had as a bachelor no qualifications at all for writing about the former. And his novel in consequence is very much what a well disposed hermit might imagine marriage to be like. It is a mixture of nonsense and realism; an Arcady in which a writ of impeachment could still be served.

  Its chief merit is that it is constantly interesting; and its popular appeal is due to the fact that it is made up of small, separate scenes, sufficiently short to be appreciated as a whole by a simple mind.

  It is, indeed, the product of a mind working as a dramatist’s mind works, in moments and divisions of activity. And such a passage as:

  “Where, where are my children? ” cried I, rushing through the flames and bursting the door of the chamber in which they were confined: “Where are my little ones? ”—“Here, dear papa, here we are,” cried they together, while the flames were just catching the bed where they lay. I caught them both in my arms, and conveyed them through the fire as fast as possible, while just as I was going out the roof sunk in …

  is a classic example of the sort of melodrama which was to get out of hand a century later, but which was still a respectable literary device in the eighteenth century.

  THE ARRIVAL OF FEMALE GENIUS

  Fanny Burney is the first recorded specimen of a now familiar English bird often shot on these shores, the woman novelist, who could write a really admirable novel, yet remain a foolish young thing all her life.

  She was favoured as few have been in the moment of her coming: 1778 was the end of one of the most alarming literary droughts in English history. But it would be ungenerous to attribute one of the conspicuous successes of talent merely to an accident of time. For Fanny Burney could write. Indeed, she could not help writing. Like Richardson’s, her soul expanded and expended itself on paper. And it is probable that at any moment her mind was comparatively well emptied; she certainly behaved at the Thrales’ as though it was. When Sheridan, very politely making conversation, asked Fanny, “What, then, are you about now? ” she replied with the fatuity of a coy nursemaid, “Why, twirling my fan, I think.”

  By the age of sixteen she had written enough to make a bonfire of her writings, which included a complete novel. The reason for the conflagration is said to have been that her stepmother had admonished her to guard her mind against such gaudy toys of invention. That may have been the reason: for Fanny in the flesh had the spirit of a fly. But—so far as I know, there is no tangible evidence to support the theory—it seems far more likely that the second Mrs. Burney’s disparagements had sent Fanny back to reading her own juvenilia. And the rosy prose fiction of thirteen and fourteen doubtless had a strangely flaccid look in the white light of the eyes of sixteen.

  At any rate, Fanny burned her romances, put authorship resolutely behind her, and began to keep a diary. Probably something of the kind was absolutely necessary. Fanny would simply have disappeared out of existence if she had not been living a robust life on paper as well as a bashful life on earth. And soon she was secretly at work on Evelina, writing as industriously and cautiously as Pamela. “The fear of discovery or of suspicion in the house,” she tells us, “made the copying extremely laborious to me; for in the daytime, I could only take odd moments, so that I was obliged to sit up the greater part of many nights, in order to get it ready.”

  She preserved an elaborate anonymity, which was probably more fascinating than necessary: it was as though a little peninsula of romantic fiction had at last managed to obtrude its nose into the world of fact. She offered the first two volumes of her book to the fashionable Dodsley, in Pall Mall, under no signature, and asked that the reply should be addressed to Mr. Grafton at the Orange Coffee House in Pall Mall. Mr. Dodsley’s reply restored the geographies of fact. He answered (as any self-respecting publisher was bound to answer) that he would not stir a finger without knowing the author’s name. Fanny, therefore, made one more effort to impose romantic fancy on unromantic, manuscript-rejecting Life. And she beat Life at its own game. She dressed up her brother Charles in a disguise and sent him off, bearing the manuscript, to Mr. Lowndes in Fleet Street. Thereafter the impatient Mr. Grafton called for his letters at the Orange Coffee House, with almost feminine nervousness and frequency. And he finally received the reply that as soon as the book was finished there was a publisher waiting to receive it.

  Probably the original plan of Evelina seemed unnecessarily long to Fanny about that date. Certainly she wrote: “I had hardly time to write half a page in a day; and neither my health nor inclination would allow me to continue my nocturnal scribbling, for so long a time, as to write first, and then copy, a whole volume.” But the question whether to write only two parts or persevere with a concluding one usually ends with the completion of the third, and a year later, in 1778, Mr. Lowndes had paid her £20 for the entire work, a sum which caused Fanny “boundless surprise at its magnificence.”

  Fanny was soon enjoying the highly practical pleasure of hard cash and that purely æsthetic pleasure (to an artistic mind such as hers) of watching everyone wondering who the author of Evelina really was. And the romantic little soul of Fanny is again revealed when she and her stepmother, who, like a sensible woman, disapproved not of authorship but only of unsuccessful authorship, visited Mr. Dodsley to inquire about the indentity of the author of
Evelina, and the poor bewildered bookseller replied that he knew nothing except that “it was a page torn from life.”

  The extraordinary thing is that everyone should have thought the novel was by a man. One has only to compare the sweet vaporous morality of The Vicar of Wakefield with the acidulated comment of Evelina to detect the difference in the sex of the two authors.

  From the publication of Evelina onwards Fanny’s career was so remarkably successful that it was quite impossible for her ever again to write anything so good. She appears to have kept respectable people awake almost as outrageously as the air-raids did later. Indeed, her very reputation hangs on the fact that she made half fashionable London insomniomaniacs when Evelina was first out. Joshua Reynolds, for instance, who started it and was “too much engaged to go on with it,” was “so caught that he could think of nothing else, and was quite absent all the day, not knowing a word that was said to him; and, when he took it up again, found himself so much interested in it, that he sat up all night to finish it.” While this tribute is revealing, as much of Sir Joshua’s memorably excitable mind, as of Fanny Burney’s genius, it is well to remember that for the past ten years or so there had been nothing published that could keep even a wakeful man from sleep. But Fanny was always hearing of her successes, and was the recipient of as many bouquets during her lifetime as Congreve. Like Congreve she got to know everyone. But unlike Congreve, whose magnificence commanded praise even from Dryden, she was a pet whose helplessness educed flattery even from Johnson. Everyone in the presence of an author has said harmless, happy, helpful things that he would not repeat on paper for the price of his soul. The fact is that no one would expect him to. Thus when Johnson declared that he was too proud to eat earthly food when sitting next to Fanny Burney, we know that it is Johnson, the ponderously agreeable luncheon guest, and not Johnson, the mentally alert critic, who has spoken. The flatteries that were paid Fanny, indeed, are so numerous as to make one wonder just what her contemporaries really thought of her. A deep respect for the intelligence of anyone simply freezes words of flattery in the throat. Yet Johnson and Sheridan and Burke and Sir Joshua Reynolds and Mrs. Thrale were all raiding the flowershops of the imagination for bouquets to throw to her; until on one occasion Fanny felt so overpowered that she would like to have been able to “poke herself under the table.”