VIII.
If you should be wandering meditatively along the banks of some tinybrook, so narrow that you can leap across it without effort, so quietin its singing its loudest tinkle cannot be heard in the next field,carrying upon its bosom no craft that would draw more water than thecurving leaf of a wild-rose floating down stream, too small in volumeto dream of a mill-wheel and turning nothing more practical than maybea piece of violet petal in a little eddy off somewhere,--if, I say,you should be strolling alongside such a brook and should see itsuddenly expand, without the least intermediate stage, into a mightyriver, turning a thousand great wheels for man's profit as it swept onto the sea, and offering broad highway and favorable currents to athousand craft freighted with the most precious cargoes of humanaspirations; you would behold the aptest physical semblance of thatspiritual phenomenon which we witnessed at our last meeting, when intracing the quiet and mentally wayward course of demure Marian Evansamong the suave pastorals of her native Warwickshire, we came suddenlyupon the year 1857 when her first venture in fiction--_The Scenes fromClerical Life_ appeared in _Blackwood's Magazine_ and magicallyenlarged the stream of her influence from the diameter of a smallcircle of literary people in London to the width of all England.
At this point it seems interesting now to pause a moment, to lookabout and see exactly what network English fiction had done since itsbeginning, only about a century before; to note more particularlywhat were the precise gains to humanity which Thackeray and Dickenshad poured in just at this time of 1857; and thus to differentiate aclear view of the actual contribution which George Eliot was nowbeginning to make to English life and thought.
It is not a pleasant task, however instructive, to leave off lookingat a rose and cast one's contemplation down to the unsavory muck inwhich its roots are imbedded. This, however, is what one must do whenone passes from the many-petalled rose of George Eliot's fiction tothe beginning of the English novel.
This beginning was as curious as it was unlooked for by the peopleengaged in it.
In the year 1740, a book in two volumes called _Pamela: or The Rewardof Virtue_, was printed, in which Samuel Richardson took what seems tohave been the first revolutionary departure from the wild and complexromances--such for example, as Sir Philip Sidney's _Arcadia_--whichhad formed the nearest approach to the modern novel until then. Atthis time Richardson was fifty years old, and probably the last man inEngland who would have been selected as likely to write anepoch-making book of any description.
He had worked most of his life as a printer, but by the time referredto had gotten so far towards the literary life as to be employed bybooksellers to arrange indexes and to write prefaces and dedications.It so happened that on a certain occasion he was asked by twobooksellers to write a volume of letters on different subjects whichmight serve as models to uneducated persons--a sort of Every Man HisOwn Letter Writer, or the like.
The letters, in order to be more useful, were to be upon such subjectsas the rustic world might likely desire to correspond about.Richardson thinks it over; and presently writes to inquire, "Will itbe any harm, in a piece you want to be written so low, if we shouldinstruct them how they should think and act in common cases, as wellas indite?" This seemed a capital idea and in the course of time,after some experiments, and after recalling an actual story he hadonce heard which gave him a sort of basis, he takes for his heroine asimple servant-girl, daughter of Goodman Andrews, a humbly bornEnglish farmer, rather sardonically names her Pamela after the LadyPamela in Sir Philip Sidney's _Arcadia_, carries her pure through aseries of incredibly villainous plots against her by the master of thehouse where she is at service, and who takes advantage of the recentdeath of his wife, Pamela's mistress, to carry these on, and finallymakes the master marry her in a fit of highly spasmodic goodness,after a long course of the most infamous but unsuccessful villainy,calls the book _Pamela or Virtue Rewarded_, prints it, and in a veryshort time wins a great host of admiring readers, insomuch that sincethe first two volumes ended with the marriage, he adds two moreshowing the married life of Pamela and her squire.
The whole novel, like all of Richardson's, is written in the form ofletters passing between the characters. It is related, apropos of hisgenius in letter-writing, that in his boyhood he was thelove-letter-writer-in-chief for three of the young ladies of his town,and that he maintained this embarrassing position for a long timewithout suspicion from either of the three. Richardson himselfannounces the moral purpose of his book, saying that he thinks itmight "introduce a new species of writing that might possibly turnyoung people into a course of reading different from the pomp andparade of romance-writing, and ... promote the cause of religion andvirtue;" and in the preface to the continuation before-mentioned, heremarks as follows: "The two former volumes of _Pamela_ met with asuccess greatly exceeding the most sanguine expectations; and theeditor hopes" (Richardson calls himself the editor of the letters),"that the letters which compose these will be found equally written tonature, avoiding all romantic flights, improbable surprises, andirrational machinery; and that the passions are touched whererequisite; and rules equally new and practicable inculcated throughoutthe whole for the general conduct of life." I have given thesesomewhat tedious quotations from Richardson's own words, to show firstthat the English novel starts out with a perfectly clear and consciousmoral mission, and secondly, to contrast this pleasing moralannouncement of Richardson's with what I can only call the silly andhideous realization of it which meets us when we come actually to readthis wonderful first English novel--_Pamela_.
I have already given the substance of the first two volumes in whichthe rich squire, Mr. B. (as he is called throughout the novel),finally marries and takes home the girl who had been the servant ofhis wife and against whom, ever since that lady's death, he had beenplotting with an elaborate baseness which has never before been, and Isincerely hope will never hereafter be described. By this action Mr.B. has, in the opinion of Richardson, of his wife, the servant girl,and of the whole contemporary world, saturated himself with such aflame of saintliness as to have burnt out every particle of any littlemisdemeanors he may have been guilty of in his previous existence; andI need only read you an occasional line from the first four letters ofthe third volume in order to show the marvellous sentimentality, theuntruth towards nature, and the purely commercial view of virtue andof religion which make up this intolerable book. At the opening ofVolume III. we find that Goodman Andrews, the father of the bride, andhis wife have been provided with a comfortable farm on the estate ofMr. B., and the second letter is from Andrews to his daughter, thehappy bride, Pamela. After rhapsodizing for several pages, Andrewsreaches this climax--and it is worth while observing that though onlya rude farmer of the eighteenth century whose daughter was a servantmaid, he writes in the most approved epistolary style of the period:
"When here in this happy dwelling and this well-stocked farm, in these rich meadows and well-cropped acres, we look around us and whichever way we turn our heads see blessings upon blessings and plenty upon plenty; see barns well stored, poultry increasing, the kine lowing and crowding about us, and all fruitful; and are bid to call all these our own. And then think that all is the reward of our child's virtue! O, my dear daughter, who can bear these things! Excuse me! I must break off a little! For my eyes are as full as my heart; and I will retire to bless God and your honored husband."
Here there is a break in the page, by which the honest farmer issupposed to represent the period of time occupied by him in retiring,and, as one hopes, dividing his blessing impartially between theCreator and Pamela's honored husband--and the farmer resumes hiswriting:
"So, my dear child, I now again take up my pen. But reading what I had written, in order to carry on the thread, I can hardly forbear again being in like sort affected."
And here we have a full stop and a dash, during which it is only fairto suppose that the honest Andrews manages to weep and bless up tosomet
hing like a state of repose.
Presently Pamela:
"My dear father and mother; I have shown your letter to my beloved.... 'Dear good soul,' said he, 'how does everything they say and everything they write manifest the worthiness of their hearts! Tell them ... let them find out another couple as worthy as themselves, and I will do as much for them. Indeed I would not place them,' continued the dear obliger, 'in the same county, because I would wish two counties to be blessed for their sakes.'... I could only fly to his generous bosom ... and with my eyes swimming in tears of grateful joy ... bless God and bless him with my whole heart; for speak I could not! but almost choked with joy, sobbed to him my grateful acknowledgements.... ''Tis too much, too much,' said I, in broken accents. 'O, sir, bless me more gradually and more cautiously--for I cannot bear it!' And, indeed, my heart went flutter, flutter, flutter, at his dear breast, as if it wanted to break its too narrow prison to mingle still more intimately with his own."
And a few lines further on we have this purely commercial view ofreligion:
"And if our prayers shall be heard," continues Pamela, "and we shall have the pleasure to think that his" (her husband's) "advances in piety are owing not a little to them ... then indeed may we take the pride to think we have repaid his goodness to us and that we have satisfied the debt which nothing less can discharge."
Or, again, in the same letter, she exclaims anew:
"See, O see, my excellent parents, how we are crowned with blessings upon blessings, until we are the talk of all who know us; you for your honesty, I for my humility and virtue;" so that now I have "nothing to do but to reap all the rewards which this life can afford; and if I walk humbly and improve my blessed opportunities, will heighten and perfect all, in a still more joyful futurity."
Perhaps a more downright creed, not only of worldliness, but of"other-worldliness," was never more explicitly avowed.
Now, to put the whole moral effect of this book into anutshell--Richardson had gravely announced it as a warning to youngservant-girls, but why might he not as well have announced it as anencouragement to old villains? The virtue of Pamela, it is true, isduly rewarded: but Mr. B., with all his villainy, certainly faresbetter than Pamela: for he not only receives to himself a paragon of awife, but the sole operation of his previous villainy towards her isto make his neighbors extol him to the skies as a saint, when he turnsfrom it; so that, considering the enormous surplus of Mr. B.'s rewardsas against Pamela's, instead of the title _Pamela; or, The Reward ofVirtue_, ought not the book to have been called _Mr. B.; or, TheReward of Villainy_?
It was expressly to ridicule some points of Richardson's Pamela thatthe second English novel was written. This was Henry Fielding's_Joseph Andrews_, which appeared in 1742. It may be that the highbirth of Fielding--his father was great-grandson of the Earl ofDenbigh, and a lieutenant-general in the army--had something to dowith his opposition to Richardson, who was the son of a joiner; at anyrate, he puts forth a set of exactly opposite characters to those inPamela, takes a footman for his virtuous hero, and the footman'smistress for his villainous heroine, names the footman Joseph Andrews,explaining that he was the brother of Richardson's Pamela, who, youremember, was the daughter of Goodman Andrews, makes principal figuresof two parsons, Parson Adams and Parson Trulliber, the former of whomis set up as a model of clerical behavior, and the latter the reverse;and with these main materials, together with an important peddler, hegives us the book still called by many the greatest English novel,originally entitled: _The Adventures of Joseph Andrews and His FriendAbraham Adams_.
I will not, because I cannot, here cite any of the vital portions of_Joseph Andrews_ which produce the real moral effect of the book upona reader. I can only say, that it is not different in essence from themoral effect of Richardson's book just described, though the tone ismore clownish. But for particular purposes of comparison with Dickensand George Eliot hereafter, let me recall to you in the briefest waytwo of the comic scenes. That these are fair samples of the humorousatmosphere of the book I may mention that they are both among thenumber which were selected by Thackeray, who was a keen lover ofFielding generally, and of his Joseph Andrews particularly, for hisown illustrations upon his own copy of this book.
In the first scene Joseph Andrews is riding along the road upon a veryuntrustworthy horse who has already given him a lame leg by a fall,attended by his friend Parson Adams. They arrive at an inn, dismount,and ask for lodging: the landlord is surly, and presently behavesuncivilly to Joseph Andrews; whereupon Parson Adams, in defence of hislame friend, knocks the landlord sprawling upon the floor of his owninn; the landlord, however, quickly receives reinforcements, and hiswife, seizing a pan of hog's blood which stood on the dresser,discharged it with powerful effect into the good parson's face. Whilethe parson is in this condition, enters Mrs. Slipshod--a veritableGrendel's mother--
"Terrible termagant, mindful of mischief,"
and attacks the landlady, with fearsome results of uprooted hair anddefaced feature. In scene second, Parson Adams being in need of atrifling loan, goes to see his counter parson Trulliber, who wasnoted, among other things, for his fat hogs. Unfortunately ParsonAdams meets Mrs. Trulliber first, and is mistakenly introduced by herto her husband as "a man come for some of his hogs." Trulliberimmediately begins to brag of the fatness of his swine, and dragsParson Adams to his stye, insisting upon examination in proof of hispraise. Parson Adams complies; they reach the stye, and by way ofbeginning his examination, Parson Adams lays hold of the tail of avery high-fed, capricious hog; the beast suddenly springs forward, andthrows Parson Adams headlong into the deep mire. Trulliber bursts intolaughter, and contemptuously cries: "Why, dost not know how to handlea hog?"
It is impossible for lack of space to linger over furthercharacteristics of these writers. It has been very fairly said, thatFielding tells us what o'clock it is, while Richardson shows us howthe watch is made; and this, as characterizing the highly analyticfaculty of Richardson in contrast to the more synthetic talent ofFielding, is good as far as it goes.
In 1748 appears Richardson's _Clarissa Harlowe_ in eight volumes,which, from your present lecturer's point of view, is quitesufficiently described as a patient analysis of the most intolerablecrime in all history or fiction, watered with an amount of tears andsensibility as much greater than that in Pamela as the cube of eightvolumes is greater than the cube of four volumes.
In 1753 Richardson's third and last novel, _Sir Charles Grandison_,appeared; a work differing in motive, but not in moral tone, from theother two, though certainly less hideous than _Clarissa Harlowe_.
Returning to bring up Fielding's novels, in 1743 appeared his _Historyof the Life of the late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great_, in which thehero Jonathan Wild was a taker of thieves, or detective, who ended hisown career by being hung; the book being written professedly as "anexposition of the motives that actuate the unprincipled great, inevery walk and sphere of life, and which are common alike to the thiefor murderer on the small scale and to the mighty villain and recklessconqueror who invades the rights or destroys the liberties ofnations." In 1749 Fielding prints his _Tom Jones_, which some considerhis greatest book. The glory of _Tom Jones_ is Squire Allworthy, whomwe are invited to regard as the most miraculous product of the divinecreation so far in the shape of man; but to your present lecturer'sway of thinking, the kind of virtue represented by Squire Allworthy iscompletely summed in the following sentence of the work introducinghim in the midst of nature: it is a May morning, and Squire Allworthyis pacing the terrace in front of his mansion before sunrise; "when,"says Fielding, "in the full blaze of his majesty up rose the sun, thanwhich one object alone in this lower creation could be more glorious,and that Mr. Allworthy himself presented--a human being replete withbenevolence meditating in what manner he might render himself mostacceptable to his Creator by doing most good to his creatures;" thatis, in p
lain commercial terms, how he might obtain the largestpossible amount upon the letter of credit which he found himselfforced to buy against the inevitable journey into the foreign partslying beyond the waters of death.
Out of Fielding's numerous other writings, dramatic and periodical, itis perhaps necessary to mention farther only his _Amelia_, belongingto the year 1751, in which he praised his first wife and satirized thejails of his time.
We must now hastily pass to the third so-called classic writer inEnglish fiction, Tobias Smollett, who, after being educated as asurgeon, and having experiences of life as surgeon's mate on a shipof the line in the expedition to Carthagena, spent some time in theWest Indies, returned to London, wrote some satire, an opera, &c., andpresently when he was still only twenty-seven years old captivatedEngland with his first novel, _Roderick Random_, which appeared, in1748, the same year with _Clarissa Harlowe_. In 1751 came Smollett's_Peregrine Pickle_, famous for its bright fun and the caricature itcontains of Akenside--_Pleasures of Imagination._ Akenside, who isrepresented as the host in a very absurd entertainment after theancient fashion. In 1752 Smollett's _Adventures of Ferdinand CountFathom_ gave the world a new and very complete study in humandepravity. In 1769, appeared his _Adventures of an Atom_; a themewhich one might suppose it difficult to make indecorous; and which wasreally a political satire; but the unfortunate liberty of locating hisatom as an organic particle in various parts of various successivehuman bodies gave Smollett a field for indecency which he cultivatedto its utmost yield. A few months before his death in 1771 appearedhis _Expedition of Humphrey Clinker_, certainly his best novel. It isworth while noticing that in Humphrey Clinker the veritable Britishwoman, poorly-educated and poor-spelling, begins to express herself inthe actual dialect of the species; and in the letters of Mrs. WinifredJenkins to her fellow-maid-servant Mrs. Mary Jones at Brambleton Hall,during a journey made by the family to the North we have some veryworthy and strongly-marked originals not only of Mrs. Malaprop andMrs. Partington, but of the immortal Sairey Gamp and of scores ofother descendants in Thackeray and Dickens, here and there.
I can quote but a few lines from the last letter of Mrs. WinifredJenkins concluding the _Expedition of Humphrey Clinker_, which by theway is told entirely through letters from one character to another,like Richardson's.
"To Mrs. Mary Jones at Brambleton Hall,
Mrs. Jones,:--
Providence has bin pleased to make great halteration in the pasture of our affairs. We were yesterday three kiple chined by the grease of God in the holy bands of matter-money."
(The novel winds up with a general marriage of pretty much all parties concerned, mistress, maid, master and man); "and I now subscribe myself Loyd, at your sarvice." Here she of course describes the wedding. "As for Madam Lashmiheygo, you nose her picklearities--her head to be sure was fantastical; and her spouse had wrapped her with a long ... clock from the land of the selvedges.... Your humble servant had on a plain pea-green tabby sack, with my runnela cap, ruff toupee, and side-curls. They said I was the very moral of Lady Rickmanstone but not so pale--that may well be, for her ladyship is my elder by seven good years or more. Now, Mrs. Mary, our satiety is to suppurate; and we are coming home"--which irresistibly reminds us of the later Mrs. Malaprop's famous explanation in _The Rivals_:--"I was putrefied with astonishment."--"Present my compliments to Mrs. Gwillim, and I hope she and I will live upon dissent terms of civility. Being by God's blessing removed to a higher spear you'll excuse my being familiar with the lower sarvints of the family, but as I trust you will behave respectful and keep a proper distance you may always depend on the good will and protection of
Yours, W. LOYD."
To these I have now only to add the name of Lawrence Sterne, whose_Tristram Shandy_ appeared in 1759, in order to complete a group ofnovel writers whose moral outcome is much the same, and who are stillreputed in all current manuals as the classic founders of Englishfiction. I need give no characterization of Sterne's book, which isprobably best known of all the three. Every one recalls the Chinesepuzzle of humor in _Tristram Shandy_, which pops something grotesqueor indecent at us in every crook. As to its morality, I know goodpeople who love the book; but to me, when you sum it all up, itsteaching is that a man may spend his life in low, brutish, inanepursuits, and may have a good many little private sins on hisconscience, but will, nevertheless, be perfectly sure of heaven if hecan have retained the ability to weep a maudlin tear over a tale ofdistress; or, in short, that a somewhat irritable state of thelachrymal glands will be cheerfully accepted by the Deity as asubstitute for saving grace or a life of self-sacrifice. As I havesaid, these four writers still maintain their position as the classicnovelists, and their moral influence is still copiously extolled; butI cannot help believing that much of this praise is simply wellmeaning ignorance. I protest that I can read none of these bookswithout feeling as if my soul had been in the rain, draggled, muddy,miserable. In other words, they play upon life as upon a violinwithout a bridge, in the deliberate endeavor to get the mostdepressing tones possible from the instrument. This is done underpretext of showing us vice.
In fine, and this is the characterization I shall use in contrastingthis group with that much sweeter group led by George Eliot, thedistinctive feature of these first novelists is to show men withmicroscopic detail how bad men may be. I shall presently illustratewith the George Eliot group how much larger the mission of the novelis than this; meantime, I cannot leave this matter without recording,in the plainest terms, that, for far deeper reasons than those whichRoger Bacon gave for sweeping away the works of Aristotle, if I had myway with these classic books I would blot them from the face of theearth. One who studies the tortuous behaviors of men in history soonceases to wonder at any human inconsistency; but, so far as I _can_marvel, I _do_ daily that we regulate by law the sale of gunpowder,the storage of nitro-glycerine, the administration of poison--all ofwhich can hurt but our bodies--but are absolutely careless of thesethings--so-called classic books, which wind their infiniteinsidiousnesses about the souls of our young children, and eitherstrangle them or cover them with unremovable slime under our veryeyes, working in a security of fame and so-called classicism that ismore effectual for this purpose than the security of the dark. Of thisterror it is the sweetest souls who know most.
In the beginning of _Aurora Leigh_, Mrs. Browning speaks this matterso well that I must clinch my opinion with her words. Aurora Leighsays, recalling her own youthful experience:
"Sublimest danger, over which none weep, When any young wayfaring soul goes forth Alone, unconscious of the perilous road, The day-sun dazzling in his limpid eyes, To thrust his own way, he an alien, through The world of books! Ah, you!--you think it fine, You clap hands--'A fair day!'--you cheer him on As if the worst could happen, were to rest Too long beside a fountain. Yet behold, Behold!--the world of books is still the world; And worldlings in it are less merciful And more puissant. For the wicked there Are winged like angels. Every knife that strikes Is edged from elemental fire to assail Our spiritual life. The beautiful seems right By force of beauty, and the feeble wrong Because of weakness.... ... In the book-world, true, There's no lack, neither, of God's saints and kings... True, many a prophet teaches in the roads ... But stay--who judges?... ... The child there? Would you leave That child to wander in a battle-field And push his innocent smile against the guns? Or even in the catacombs--his torch Grown ragged in the fluttering air, and all The dark a-mutter round him? not a child!"
But to return to our sketch of English fiction, it is now delightfulto find a snow-drop springing from this muck of the classics. In theyear 1766 appeared Goldsmith's _Vicar of Wakefield_.
One likes to recall the impression which th
e purity of this charmingbook made upon the German Goethe. Fifty years after Goethe had readit--or rather after Herder read to him a translation of the _Vicar ofWakefield_ while he was a law-student at Strasburg--the old poetmentions in one of his letters to Zelter the strong and healthyinfluence of this story upon him, just at the critical point of hismental development; and yesterday while reading the just published_Reminiscences of Thomas Carlyle_ I found a pleasant pendant to thistestimony of Goethe's in favor of Goldsmith's novel in an entry of therugged old man in which he describes the far outlook and new wisdomwhich he managed to conquer from Goethe's _Wilhelm Meister_, aftermany repulsions.
"Schiller done, I began _Wilhelm Meister_, a task I liked perhaps rather better, too scanty as my knowledge of the element, and even of the language, still was. Two years before I had at length, after some repulsion, got into the heart of _Wilhelm Meister_, and eagerly read it through; my sally out, after finishing, along the vacant streets of Edinburgh, a windless, Scotch-misty morning, is still vivid to me. 'Grand, serenely, harmoniously built together, far-seeing, wise and true. Where, for many years, or in my whole life before, have I read such a book?' Which I was now, really in part as a kind of duty, conscientiously translating for my countrymen, if they would read it--as a select few of them have ever since kept doing."
Of the difference between the moral effect of Goldsmith's _Vicar ofWakefield_ and the classical works just mentioned I need not wasteyour time in speaking. No great work in the English novel appearsuntil we reach Scott whose _Waverley_ astonished the world in 1814;and during the intervening period from this book to the _Vicar ofWakefield_ perhaps there are no works notable enough to be mentionedin so rapid a sketch as this unless it be the society novels of MissBurney, _Evelina_ and _Cecilia_, the dark and romantic stories of Mrs.Radcliffe, the _Caleb Williams_ of William Godwin--with which hebelieved he was making an epoch because it was a novel without love asa motive--Miss Edgeworth's moral tales and the quiet and elegantnarratives of Jane Austen.
But I cannot help mentioning here a book which occurs during thisperiod, and which attaches itself by the oddest imaginable ties towhat was said in a previous lecture, of The Novel, as the truemeeting-ground where the poetic imagination and the scientificimagination come together and incorporate themselves. Now, to make thetrue novel--the work which takes all the miscellaneous products ofscientific observation and carries them up into a higher plane andincarnates them into the characters (as we call them) of a book, andmakes them living flesh and blood like ourselves--to effect this,there must be a true incorporation and merger of the scientific andpoetic faculties into one: it is not sufficient if they work side byside like two horses abreast, they must work like a man and wife withone soul; or to change the figure, their union must not be mechanical,it must be chemical, producing a thing better than either alone; orto change the figure again, the union must be like that which Browninghas noticed as existing among the ingredients of a musical chord,when, as he says, out of three tones, we make not a fourth, but astar.
Now the book I mean shows us the scientific faculty, and the poeticfaculty--and no weak faculties either--working along together, _not_merged, _not_ chemically united, _not_ lighting up matter like astar,--with the result, as seems to me, of producing the very drollestearnest book in our language. It is _The Loves of the Plants_, by Dr.Erasmus Darwin, grandfather, I believe, to our own grave and patientCharles Darwin. _The Loves of the Plants_ is practically a series oflittle novels in which the heroes and heroines belong to the vegetableworld. Linnaeus had announced the sexuality of plants, and so had madethis idea a principle of classification, the one-stamen class,_Monandria_, two stamen class, _Diandria_, etc., etc. Now all this thediligent and truly loving Doctor framed into poetry, and poetry whichso far as technical execution goes is quite as good as the very bestof the Pope school which it follows. Here are a few specimens of thepoem:
"Descend, ye hovering sylphs! aerial quires, And sweep with little hands your silver lyres; With fairy footsteps print your grassy rings, Ye Gnomes! accordant to the tinkling strings: While in soft notes I tune to oaten reed Gay hopes, and amorous sorrows of the mead;-- From giant Oaks, that wave their branches dark, To the dwarf Moss that clings upon their bark, What Beaux and Beauties crowd the gaudy groves, And woo and win their vegetable Loves.
* * * * *
"First the tall Canna lifts his curled brow Erect to heaven, and plights his nuptial vow; The virtuous pair, in milder regions born, Dread the rude blast of Autumn's icy morn; Round the chill fair he folds his crimson vest, And clasps the timorous beauty to his breast!"
Here, however, a serious case presents itself; in _Canna_ there wasone stamen to one pistil, and this was comfortable; but in the nextflower he happened to reach--the _Genista_ or Wild Broom--there wereten stamens to one pistil; that is, ten lovers to one lady; but theintrepid Doctor carries it through, all the same, managing the wholepoint simply by airy swiftness of treatment:
"Sweet blooms Genista[A] in the myrtle shade, And ten fond brothers woo the haughty maid."
But sometimes our botanist comes within a mere ace of beautifulpoetry, as for example:
"When o'er the cultured lawns and dreary wastes, Retiring Autumn flings her howling blasts, Bends in tumultuous waves the struggling woods, And showers their leafy honors on the floods; In withering heaps collects the flowery spoil; And each chill insect sinks beneath the soil: Quick flies fair Tulipa the loud alarms, And folds her infant closer in her arms; In some lone cave, secure pavilion, lies, And waits the courtship of serener skies."
This book has what it calls Interludes between the parts, in which theBookseller and the Poet discuss various points arising in it; and itsoddity is all the more increased when one finds here a number of themost just, incisive, right-minded and large views not only upon themechanism of poetry, but upon its essence and its relations to otherarts.[B]
[Footnote A: Genista, or _Planta Genista_, origin of "Plantagenet,"from the original name-giver's habit of wearing a tuft of his nativeheath or broom in his bonnet.]
[Footnote B: Carlyle's opinion of the book is given with a comicalgrimness in his Reminiscences _a propos_ of the younger ErasmusDarwin, who used much to visit the Carlyles after they settled inLondon: "Erasmus Darwin, a most diverse kind of mortal, came to seekus out very soon ('had heard of Carlyle in Germany,' &c.), andcontinues ever since to be a quiet home-friend, honestly attached;though his visits latterly have been rarer and rarer, health so poor,I so occupied, etc., etc. He had something of original andsarcastically ingenious in him; one of the sincerest, naturallyhonest, and most modest of men; elder brother of Charles Darwin (thefamed Darwin on Species of these days), to whom I rather prefer himfor intellect, had not his health quite doomed him to silence andpatient idleness--grandsons, both, of the first famed Erasmus('Botanic Garden,' etc.), who also seems to have gone upon 'species'questions, '_omnia ex conchis_' (all from oysters), being a dictum ofhis (even a stamp he sealed with still extant), as this presentErasmus once told me, many long years before this of Darwin on Speciescame up among us. Wonderful to me, as indicating the capriciousstupidity of mankind: never could read a page of it, or waste theleast thought upon it."]
Nor need I dwell upon Scott's novels, which stretch from 1814 to 1831,which we have all known from our childhood as among the most hale andstrengthening waters in which the young soul ever bathed. They discussno moral problems, they place us in no relation towards our fellowthat can be called moral at all, they belong to that part of us whichis youthful, undebating, wholly unmoral--though not immoral--they aresimply always young, always healthy, always miraculous. And I can onlygive now a hasty additional flavor of these Scott days by remindingyou of the bare names of Thomas Hope, Lockhart, Theodore Hook, Mrs.Trollope, Mrs. Gore and Miss Mitford. It seems always comfortable ina confusion of this kind to have some e
asily-remembered formula whichmay present us a considerable number of important facts in portableshape. Now the special group of writers which I wish to contrast withthe classic group, consisting of Dickens, Thackeray, Tennyson, Mrs.Browning, Charlotte Bronte, and George Eliot, are at work between 1837and 1857; and for the purpose of giving you a convenient skeleton orset of vertebrae, containing some main facts affecting the Englishnovel of the nineteenth century, I have arranged this simple tablewhich proceeds by steps of ten years up to the period mentioned.
For example: since these all end in seven; beginning with the year1807, it seems easy to remember that that is the date of Charles andMary Lamb's _Tales from Shakspeare_; skipping ten years to 1817, inthis year _Blackwood's Magazine_ is established, a momentous event infiction generally and particularly as to George Eliot's; advancing tenyears, in 1827, Bulwer's _Pelham_ appears, and also the verystimulating _Specimens of German Romance_, which Thomas Carlyleedited; in 1837 the adorable _Pickwick_ strolls into fiction; in 1847Thackeray prints _Vanity Fair_, Charlotte Bronte gives us _Jane Eyre_,and Tennyson _The Princess_; and finally, in 1857, as we have seen,George Eliot's _Scenes of Clerical Life_ are printed, while so closelyupon it in the previous year as to be fairly considered contemporary,comes Mrs. Browning's _Aurora Leigh_.
Now I do not know any more vivid way of bringing before you theprecise work which English fiction is doing at the time George Eliotsets in, than by asking you to run your eye along the last four dateshere given, 1827, 1837, 1847, 1857. Here, in 1827, advances awell-dressed man, bows a fine bow, and falls to preaching his gospel:"My friends, under whatever circumstances a man may be placed, he hasit always in his power to be a gentleman;" and Bulwer's gentleman isalways given as a very manful and Christian being. I am well aware ofthe modern tendency to disparage Bulwer, as a slight creature; butwith the fresh recollection of his books as they fell upon my ownboyhood, I cannot recall a single one which did not leave, as a lastresiduum, the picture in some sort of the chivalrous gentlemanimpressed upon my heart. I cheerfully admit that he sometimes camedangerously near snobbery, and that he was uncivil and undignified andmany other bad things in the _New Timon_ and the Tennyson quarrel; andI concede that it must be difficult for us--you and me, who are sosuperior and who have no faults of our own--to look upon thesefailings with patience; and yet I cannot help remembering that everynovel of Bulwer's is skilfully written and entertaining, and thatthere is not an ignoble thought or impure stimulus in the whole rangeof his works.
But, advancing, here, in 1837, comes on a preacher who takes up theslums and raggedest miseries of London and plumps them boldly down inthe parlors of high life; and, like the boy in the fairy tale whosefiddle compelled every hearer to dance in spite of himself, presentlyhas a great train of people following him, ready to do his bidding inearnestly reforming the prisons, the schools, the workhouses, and thelike, what time the entire train are roaring with the genialest oflaughter at the comical and grotesque figures which this peculiarDickens has fished up out of the London mud.
But again: here, in 1847, we have Thackeray exposing shame and highvulgarity and minute wickedness, while Charlotte Bronte and Tennyson,with the widest difference in method, are for the first timeexpounding the doctrine of co-equal sovereignty as between man andwoman, and bringing up the historic conception of the personality ofwoman to a plane in all respects level with, though properlydifferentiated from, that of man. It is curious to see the depth ofCharlotte Bronte's adoration for Thackeray, the intense, high-pitchedwoman for the somewhat slack, and as I always think, somewhatlow-pitched satirist; and perhaps the essential utterance ofThackeray, as well as the fervent tone which I beg you to observe isnow being acquired by the English novel, the awful consciousness ofits power and its mission, may be very sufficiently gathered from someof Charlotte Bronte's words about Thackeray which occur in the Prefaceto the second edition of her _Jane Eyre_:
"There is a man in our own days whose words are not framed to tickle delicate ears; who, to my thinking, comes before the great ones of society much as the son of Imlah came before the throned kings of Judah and Israel; and who speaks truth as deep, with a power as prophet-like and as vital--a mien as dauntless and as daring. Is the satirist of _Vanity Fair_ admired in high places? I cannot tell; but I think if some of those amongst whom he hurls the Greek-fire of his sarcasm, and over whom he flashes the levin-brand of his denunciation, were to take his warnings in time, they or their seed might yet escape a fatal Ramoth-Gilead.
"Why have I alluded to this man? I have alluded to him, reader, because I think I see in him an intellect profounder and more unique than his contemporaries have yet recognized; because I regard him as the first social regenerator of the day: as the very master of that working corps who would restore to rectitude the warped system of things."
Now, into this field of beneficent activity which _The Novel_ hascreated, comes in 1857 George Eliot: comes with no more noise thanthat of a snow-flake falling on snow, yet--as I have said, and as Iwish now to show with some detail--comes as an epoch-maker, both byvirtue of the peculiar mission she undertakes and of the method inwhich she carries it out.
What then is that peculiar mission?
In the very first of these stories, _Amos Barton_, she announces itquite explicitly, though it cannot be supposed at all consciously.Before quoting the passage, in order that you may at once take thefull significance of it, let me remind you of a certain old andgrievous situation as between genius and the commonplace person. For along time every most pious thinker must have found one of themysteries most trying to his faith to be the strange and apparentlyunjustifiable partiality of God's spiritual gifts as between man andman.
For example, we have a genius (say) once in a hundred years; but thishundred years represents three generations of the whole world; that isto say, here are three thousand million commonplace people to onegenius.
Now, with all the force of this really inconceivable numericalmajority, the cry arises, How monstrous! Here are three thousandmillions of people to eat, sleep, die, and rot into oblivion, and butone man is to have such faculty as may conquer death, win fame, andlive beyond the worms!
Now, no one feels this inequality so keenly as the great geniushimself. I find in Shakspeare, in Beethoven, in others, often anoutcrop of feeling which shows that the genius cringes under this loadof favoritism, as if he should cry in his lonesome moments, _DearLord, why hast thou provided so much for me, and so little for yondermultitude?_ In plain fact, it seems as if there was never such aproblem as this: what shall we do about these three thousand millionsof common men as against the one uncommon man, to save the goodnessof God from seeming like the blind caprice of a Roman Emperor!
It is precisely here that George Eliot comes to the rescue; and thoughshe does not solve the problem--no one expects to do that--at any rateshe seems to me to make it tolerable, and to take it out of that classof questions which one shuts back for fear of nightmare and insanity.Emerson has treated this matter partially and from a sort ofside-light. "But," he exclaims in the end of his essay on _The Uses ofGreat Men_, "_great men_,--the word is injurious. Is there caste? Isthere fate? What becomes of the promise to virtue?... Why are themasses, from the dawn of history down, food for knives and powder? Theidea dignifies a few leaders, ... and they make war and death sacred;but what for the wretches whom they hire and kill? The cheapness ofman is everyday's tragedy." And more to this purport. But nothingcould be more unsatisfactory than Emerson's solution of the problem.He unhesitatingly announces on one page that the wrong is to berighted by giving every man a chance in the future, in (say) differentworlds; every man is to have his turn at being a genius; until "thereare no common men." But two pages farther on this elaborate scheme ofredress is completely swept away by the announcement that after allthe individual is nothing, the quality is what abides, and so fallsaway in that singular delusion of his, that personality is to die awayinto the first cause
.
On the other hand, if you will permit me to quote a few pathetic wordswhich I find in Carlyle's _Reminiscences_, in the nature of a sigh andaspiration, and breathed blessing all in one upon his wife and herministrations to him during that singular period of his life when hesuddenly left London and buried himself in his wild Scotch farm ofCraigenputtoch, I shall be able to show you how Carlyle, mostunconsciously, dreams toward a far more satisfactory end of thismatter than Emerson's, and then how George Eliot actually bringsCarlyle's dream to definite form, and at last partial fulfilment inthe very beginning of her work. Carlyle is speaking of the ruggedtrials and apparent impossibilities of living at Craigenputtoch whenhe and his Jeanie went there, and how bravely and quietly she facedand overcame the poverty, the ugliness, the almost squalor, which wastheir condition for a long time. "Poverty and mean obstructioncontinued," he says, "to preside over it, but were transformed byhuman valor of various sorts into a kind of victory and royalty.Something of high and great dwelt in it, though nothing could besmaller and lower than many of the details. How blessed might poormortals be in the straitest circumstances, if only their wisdom andfidelity to Heaven and to one another were _adequately_ great! Itlooks to me now like a kind of humble russet-coated _epic_, that sevenyears' settlement at Craigenputtoch, very poor in this world's goods,but not without an intrinsic dignity greater and more important thanthen appeared; thanks very mainly to her, and her faculties andmagnanimities, without whom it had not been possible."
And now, let us hear the words in which George Eliot begins to preachthe "russet-coated epic" of everyday life and of commonplace people.
The Rev. Amos Barton, whose sad fortunes I have undertaken to relate, was, you perceive, in no respect an ideal or exceptional character; and perhaps I am doing a bold thing to bespeak your sympathy on behalf of a man who was so very far from remarkable,--a man whose virtues were not heroic, and who had no undetected crime within his breast; who had not the slightest mystery hanging about him, but was palpably and unmistakably commonplace; who was not even in love, but had had that complaint favorably many years ago. "An utterly uninteresting character!" I think I hear a lady reader exclaim--Mrs. Farthingale, for example, who prefers the ideal in fiction; to whom tragedy means ermine tippets, adultery, and murder; and comedy, the adventures of some personage who is quite a "character."
But, my dear madam, it is so very large a majority of your fellow-countrymen that are of this insignificant stamp. At least eighty out of a hundred of your adult male fellow-Britons returned in the last census are neither extraordinarily wicked, nor extraordinarily wise; their eyes are neither deep and liquid with sentiment, nor sparkling with suppressed witticisms; they have probably had no hair-breadth escapes or thrilling adventures; their brains are certainly not pregnant with genius, and their passions have not manifested themselves at all after the fashion of a volcano. They are simply men of complexions more or less muddy, whose conversation is more or less bald and disjointed. Yet these commonplace people--many of them--bear a conscience, and have felt the sublime prompting to do the painful right; they have their unspoken sorrows and their sacred joys; their hearts have perhaps gone out towards their first-born, and they have mourned over the irreclaimable dead. Nay, is there not a pathos in their very insignificance--in our comparison of their dim and narrow existence with the glorious possibilities of that human nature which they share.
Depend upon it, you would gain unspeakably if you would learn with me to see some of the poetry and the pathos, the tragedy and the comedy, lying in the experience of a human soul that looks out through dull gray eyes, and that speaks in a voice of quite ordinary tone. In that case, I should have no fear of your not caring to know what further befell the Rev. Amos Barton, or of your thinking the homely details I have to tell at all beneath your attention. As it is, you can, if you please, decline to pursue my story further; and you will easily find reading more to your taste, since I learn from the newspapers that many remarkable novels, full of striking situations, thrilling incidents, and eloquent writing, have appeared only within the last season.
Let us now pass on to _Adam Bede_, _The Mill on the Floss_, and the rest ofGeorge Eliot's works in historic order, and see with what delicious fun,what play of wit, what ever-abiding and depth-illuminating humor, whatcreative genius, what manifold forms of living flesh and blood, GeorgeEliot preached the possibility of such moral greatness on the part of everymost commonplace man and woman as completely reduces to a level theapparent inequality in the matter of genius, and so illustrated theuniversal "russet-coated epic."
The English Novel and the Principle of its Development Page 8