The Facts of Fiction (6 page)

In our present age when we have almost forgotten how life should be enjoyed, the loud laughs and huge gusto of Fielding make him loom out strange and gigantic like a man seen in a mist. Indeed, in spirit, Richardson, the analyst of the emotions, the man with his eye for ever on the sensitive, shrinking, human mind, comes far nearer to the modern novelist than Fielding. It is only in the irresistible ease of his method that Fielding steps so easily across the century and three-quarters that divide him from us.

Thackeray, in the midst of misgivings, once almost exploded with affection for Fielding.

What a genius! What a vigour! What a bright-eyed intelligence and observation! What a wholesome hatred for meanness and knavery! What a vast sympathy! What a cheerfulness! What a manly relish of life! What a love of human kind! What a poet is here—watching, meditating, brooding, creating!…

That is all very well. But it has been quoted so often that a reader unacquainted with the novelist himself might not realise that there were faults besides. Fielding could not, for instance, with the single lovely exception of Amelia, draw a woman. Sophia Western is no more than a dutiful daughter with a naughty temper; and Fanny is merely healthy. Richardson's Pamela and Clarissa are both developed women—it is obvious that he spent more time in thinking about his characters than ever Fielding did—beside them.

Thackeray was right when he said that the wit of
Fielding “is wonderfully wise and detective; it flashes upon a rogue and lightens up a rascal like a policeman's lantern.” And he was skilful in keeping women altogether out of the range of illumination. For Fielding had a jovial habit of making his women like men; and blackguardly men at that. His Jenny Jones and Molly Seagrim and Mrs. Slipslop, Mrs. Townsend and Mrs. Waters are eighteenth century characters in the accepted dissolute male tradition. Fielding's women sin as artlessly as Moll Flanders; and in
Tom Jones
they sin almost as tediously. And that unfortunate sentence in
Tom Jones
: “though Sophia came head foremost to the ground, she happily received not the least damage ” may possibly explain their failure.

And not on all the men who cheated and reeled and swore their way across his pages did Fielding leave the signature of creation. His Blifil, for example, whose author loathed him with imperfectly explained hatred, serves no purpose but to be so morally jet black that the dark shadows of Tom are forgotten. And Squire All-worthy, “a human being replete with benevolence, meditating in which manner he might render himself most acceptable to his Creator by doing most good to his creatures,” would be more nearly tolerable as a parody of Grandison than as an original character earning his own living in fiction.

When Fielding used his wit as a bat to beat his characters over the head he produced the immortal army of caricatures, Adams, Trulliber, Western, and the rest. A caricaturist is perhaps the only artist who is honoured in his own country more than abroad; and Fielding's talent for putting Hogarth into words explains Scott's remark that “of all the works of imagination to which English has given origin the writings of Henry Fielding are perhaps
most decidedly and exclusively her own.” The caricatures are perfect of their kind; human enough to be horrible, and brutish enough to be our brothers.

Johnson made the remark that there is as much difference between Fielding and Richardson as “between a man who knew how a watch was made and one who could tell the hour by looking at the dial plate.” There is; and there are more people who need to know the time than want to set up as watch-makers. And in his best characters, even if he did not know much about their inner intricacies, Fielding at least wrote as though he did.

Anyone who cannot enjoy Fielding will probably have a thin enough time in the rest of English fiction. Just as anyone who persists in calling
Tom Jones
the greatest novel in the language must have had a thin enough time already.

Gibbon predicted that “
Tom Jones
, that exquisite picture of human manners, will outlive the palace of the Escurial and the Imperial Eagle of the House of Austria.” In its day such a pronouncement was brave to the point of blasphemy. To-day the prophecy has been fulfilled, though History (which was probably under some sense of obligation towards Gibbon) has dragged in a world war and a revolution to justify him.

Smollett was a Scotsman. He was red-headed. He thought Scottish scenery better than English. And he had the natural Scottish talent for detecting and proclaiming the defects in English character. Out of the last he got his living and his reputation; and what we call English fiction got one of its best story-tellers.

Smollett is one of those characters in whom the eighteenth century seems to have been richer than any other; men who contained in their brief but intense lives the whole essence of their time. His arrival in London, a surgeon's apprentice, all rawness and r's, with
The Regicide
, a tragedy in verse—an excellent name for it—under his arm; his search for a patron; his temporary failure; and his lasting bitterness, might be the picture of any literary aspirant of the period.

But there was a difference. He came to town a very callow country calf, and within a few weeks there was blood on his horns. For Smollett had one of the worst tempers in the history of English literature. And it was an angry mind that chased his body through anxiety and anguish and antagonism to a grave abroad at the age of fifty-one.

It was this angry mind of his that led him to publish
The Regicide
by private subscription as soon as he had become famous as the author of
Roderick Random
. It was this angry mind that led him to preface the work (which was still a failure) with the words:

I was taken into the protection of one of those little fellows who are sometimes called great men, and, like
other orphans, neglected accordingly. Stung with resentment, which I mistook for contempt, I resolved to punish this barbarous indifference, and actually discarded my patron, consoling myself with the barren praise of a few associates who, in the most indefatigable manner, employed their time and influence in collecting from all quarters observations on my piece which, in consequence of those suggestions, put on a new appearance almost every day, until my occasions called me out of the kingdom.

It was the same malice in his soul that made him introduce Lord Lyttelton, the patron who had picked him up and dropped him quite reasonably when he discovered that there was very little to patronise, as Lord Rattle or Gosling Scrag; and Garrick, who had failed as unforgivably in his appreciation and discernment of Smollett, as Mr. Marmozet.

It was his restless temper that set him up as a physician, and urged him to quarrel with his women patients and compelled him to write a book exposing the Bath Waters while practising as a doctor in the town.

It was a spirit on edge that led him to write “that the first work of his that he had left under the protection of a patron was retrieved by pure accident (I believe) from the most dishonourable apartment in his lordship's house.”

And it was a spirit in flames that led him, on no real foundation, to write in the
Critical Review
of Admiral Knowles that “he is an admiral without conduct, an engineer without knowledge, an officer without resolution and a man without veracity”; all of which cost Smollett exactly one hundred pounds and three months' imprisonment.

But it was unquestionably just this aggregate of mental furies which had made the obscure surgeon's apprentice into a great novelist.

Smollett's schoolmaster, comparing him with boys of “superior decorum and propriety,” said of him, “give me before them all my own bubbly-nosed callant with the stane in his pouch.” Fortunately there exists an English version by Sir Walter Scott of this remark. It runs: “Our Southern readers must be informed that the words contain a faithful sketch of a negligent, unlucky, but spirited urchin, never without some mischievous prank, and a stone in his pocket ready to execute it.”

A mischievous prank that involves the old Scots pastime of Tossing the Brickbat seems a trifle heavy going to the modern mind. But it was really the whole secret of Smollett's literary method. He was the artist of the flying brickbat and the broad wink. And to appreciate his novels it is necessary to throw off two of the heritages of the nineteenth century, a sensitive conscience and a kind nature, and to recover two of the heritages of the eighteenth century—jocularity, and complete inhumanity towards such unpopular persons as the watch, schoolmasters, priests and parsons.

Smollett, we have said, was a distilled bottle of the essence of his time. And the whole of Smollett condenses in one place into a single drop of picturesque prose. That place occurs in
Roderick Random:

At length it was proposed by Bragwell that we should sweat the constable, maul the watch, and then reel soberly to bed.

No entire novel of Smollett's ever proceeded quite so perfectly as that single sentence. No novel could. But they all came near to such picaresque perfection.

Smollett's mind as a mind was, on the whole, a poor drabbity affair. It was never high-flying like Fielding's, or high-falutin like Richardson's. It never soared above a servant girl's attic bedroom. Smollett moved in low places, not as Fielding, the gentleman gone rogue, but as though he were a natural part of the furniture of social grossness.

That he was descended from the Lairds of Dunhill gave him sufficient Scottish pride to declare: “The low situations in which I have exhibited Roderick I never experienced in my own person.” But that is hardly to the point. The charge brought against him is not that he was disreputable in person but that he was debased in mind. And it is not a pleasing thought that Smollett should have
invented
the vices of young Roderick. Spontaneity is the first absolution of sin.

Life, moreover, was combed by the author for so many of the burrs and snarls where Smollett had stuck to it that anyone may be forgiven for believing that it had been combed clean. If Smollett did not like to be pointed out as the young man who had fought and fornicated all the way between Scotland and London he had no more than himself to thank for the notoriety.

Roderick Random
remained in the public mind the Autobiography of a Super-Scamp. Smollett's hero was born of a good family in the North, apprenticed to a surgeon, came South, went on board a man-of-war as surgeon's mate on the expedition to Carthagena. Which is exactly what happened to Smollett And because some of the events were so conspicuously alike, everyone thought that the two careers of character and author must be identical. For if any author starts writing autobiographically, the public will always show its appreciation of the confidence by continuing to read autobiographically long after the author has ceased to talk about himself.

And so it is that the characters in Smollett's novels have all been so neatly pinned out with the names on little tabs beneath. “Scrap” (brother of Fielding's “Partridge”) = John Lewis, Bookbinder of Chelsea; “Sheerwit” = Lord Chesterfield, and so on; together with many that a child could see had their origin in the whole monstrous brood of Father Adam and not in this one eccentric son of his, or that.

Such a character as Commodore Hawser Trunnion, for example, bursts into English fiction with the blaze of art and not of nature. He is a model, not a faithful copy. He is the model after which a roaring, stampeding, blaspheming procession of choleric sailors, from those of Marryat to those of Jacobs, have been taken.

In quoting the passage which introduces Trunnion (which if you like, you will like all Smollett) I make no apology for length. I could wish indeed that it were twice as long. Or that there was no need for me to quote any of it to be understood.

At that instant, Mr. Pickle's ears were saluted with such a strange noise as even discomposed the muscles of his face, and gave immediate indications of alarm. This composition of notes at first resembled the crying of quails and the croaking of bull-frogs; but, as it approached nearer, he could distinguish articulate sounds pronounced with great violence, in such a cadence as one would expect to hear from a human creature scolding through the organs of an ass. It was neither speaking nor braying, but a surprising mixture of both, employed in the utterance of terms absolutely unintelligible to our wondering merchant, who had just opened his mouth to express his curiosity, when the landlord, starting up at the well-known sound, cried,
“Odds niggers, there is the commodore with his company, as sure as I live”; and with his apron began to wipe the dust off an elbow chair placed at one side of the fire, and kept sacred for the ease and convenience of the infirm commander. While he was thus occupied, a voice still more uncouth than the former bawled aloud “Ho! the house, ahoy!” Upon which the publican, clapping a hand to each side of his head, with his thumbs fixed in his ears, rebellowed in the same tone, which he had learned to imitate, “Hilloah! ” The voice again exclaimed “Have you got any attorneys aboard? ” and when the landlord replied “No, no,” this man of strange expectation came in, supported by his two dependents, and displayed a figure every way answerable to the oddity of his character.

He was in stature at least six feet high, though he had contracted a habit of stooping, by living so long on board; his complexion was tawny, and his aspect rendered hideous by a large scar across his nose, and a patch that covered the place of one eye. Being seated in his chair with great formality, the landlord complimented him upon being able to come abroad again; and having in a whisper communicated the name of his fellow guest, whom the Commodore already knew by report, went to prepare, with all imaginable despatch, the first allowance of his favourite liquor, in three separate cans, for each was accommodated with his own portion apart, while the lieutenant sat down on the blind side of his commander; and Tom Pipes, knowing his distance, with great modesty took his station in the rear.