§ 1. New elements in the English Novel of the period from 1760 to 1780: Personality, Emotion and Sentiment.

§ 1. New elements in the English Novel of the period from 1760 to 1780: Personality, Emotion and Sentiment.

THE subject of this chapter is, virtually, the history of the English novel from 1760 to 1780, a crucial period in the earlier stages of its growth. And the chief questions to be asked are: what are the new elements which these years added to the novel? how far has each of them proved of lasting value? and what is the specific genius of the two or three writers who stand out above the rest?

1

The answer to the first of these questions may be given, in summary form, at once. In the hands of Sterne and a group of writers who, though it may be without sufficient reason, are commonly treated as disciples of Sterne, sentiment began to count for more than had hitherto been held allowable. As a natural consequence, the individuality of these writers impressed itself more and more unreservedly upon a theme which, in the days of Defoe and even Richardson, had been treated mainly from without. Sterne, it need hardly be said, is undisputed master in this way of writing; and here, so far, at least, as his own century is concerned, he stands absolutely alone. Others, such as Brooke and Mackenzie, may use the novel as a pulpit for preaching their own creed or advancing their own schemes of reform. But their relation to Sterne, on this head, is, manifestly, of the slightest, and the effect produced is utterly different. A little more of personality, a great deal more of emotion and sentiment, may come into their work than any novelist before Sterne would have thought possible. But that is all. That is the one link which binds them to him, the one tangible mark which he left upon the novel of his generation.

§ 2. Pre-eminence of Sterne.

Sterne is the sole novelist of first-rate importance in the period under review; for even Fanny Burney, inventive and sparkling though she is, can hardly lay claim to that description. And, thanks to his very originality, he stands aloof from the main stream of contemporary fiction. Apart from him, the writers of the time fall, roughly, into three groups: the novelists of “sentiment and reflection,” who, though far enough from Sterne, are yet nearer to him than any of the others; the novelists of home life, who, in the main, and with marked innovations of their own, follow the chief lines laid down by Richardson in the preceding generation; and, finally, the novelists of a more distinctly romantic bent, Horace Walpole and Clara Reeve, who drew their theme from the medieval past, and supported the interest by an appeal to the sense of mystery and terror—Horace Walpole, no doubt, the more defiantly of the two and, perhaps, with less seriousness than has sometimes been imputed to him. It should be added that the romantic writers are of far less importance for their own sake than for that of the writers who followed during the next fifty years, and of whom, in some measure, they may be regarded as precursors.

§ 3. His life.

The main facts of Laurence Sterne’s life (1713–1768) are sufficiently well known. After a struggling boyhood, he went to Cambridge, where he made the friendship of Hall-Stevenson, the Eugenius of his great novel. In 1738 he became vicar of Sutton, the first of his Yorkshire livings, and a few years later prebendary of York, of which his great-grandfather had been archbishop. In 1741 he married Eliza Lumley, for whom he soon ceased to feel any affection and from whom he was formally separated shortly before his death. By her he had one daughter, Lydia, subsequently Mme. Medalle, whom he seems to have genuinely loved. The greater part of his life was passed in a succession of love affairs, mainly of the sentimental kind, with various women of whom Mrs.Draper is the best known. The publication of Tristram Shandy was begun in 1760 (vols. I and II), and continued at intervals until the year before his death. In 1762 his health, which had always been frail, broke down and he started on travels in France and Italy which lasted, with an interval, till 1766 and of which the literary result was A Sentimental Journey (1768). He died, of pleurisy, in March, 1768.

4

Few writers have thrown down so many challenges as Sterne; and, if to win disciples be the test of success, few have paid so heavily for their hardihood. He revolutionised the whole scope and purpose of the novel; but, in his own country, at any rate, years passed before advantage was taken of the liberty he asserted. He opened new and fruitful fields of humour; and one of the greatest of his successors has denied him the name of humourist. He created a style more subtle and flexible than any had found before him; and all that Goldsmith could see in it was a tissue of tricks and affectations. But, if the men of letters hesitated, the public had no doubt. The success of Tristram Shandy swept everything before it. And here, as is often the case, the popular verdict has worn better than the craftsman’s or the critic’s.

§ 4. Tristram Shandy and its success; Fiction as the vehicle of the Novelist’s idiosyncrasy.

Sterne was nothing if not an innovator. And in no innovation was he more daring than in that which widened the scope and loosened the structure of the novel. This was the first of his services to his brethren of the craft. It is, perhaps, the only one which has left a deep mark upon the subsequent history of a form which, when he wrote, was still in the early stages of its growth.	6
When Tristram Shandy began to appear (1760), there was real danger that the English novel would remain little more than a mirror of contemporary life: a reproduction, often photographically accurate, of the social conditions of the time. Defoe, Fielding, Smollett, each in his own way and according to the measure of his genius, had yielded to the impulse; Richardson alone, by striking into tragedy, had partially escaped. Sterne defiantly throws himself athwart the tradition of the elders. He delivers one blow after another at the fashion they had set. Tale of manners, picaresque adventure, types of contemporary humanity, plot itself, all go by the board. His very title is a resounding challenge to all accepted notions of what the novelist should attempt. And even the title falls very far short of what the novel actually provides. The Life and Opinions of the hero is the subject we are bidden to expect. The opinions, the character, the caprices of his father, his uncle, his uncle’s servant—above all, of the author himself—is what we actually find. In other words, the novel has ceased to be a mirror of life and manners. It has ceased to be what Johnson, himself a heretic against his own theory, thought it must naturally be, “a smooth tale, mostly of love.” It has become a channel for the outpouring of the author’s own personality and idiosyncrasy; a stage from which, under the thinnest of disguises or with no disguise at all, he lays bare the workings of his heart, his intellect, his most fleeting imaginations, before any audience he can gather round him. If we compare Tristram with Tom Jones, with Roderick Random, with Moll Flanders —if we compare it even with Pamela or Clarissa —we shall see that the wheel has come full circle. Every known landmark has been torn up. And, in asserting his own liberty, Sterne, little as he may have cared about it, has won unbounded liberty for all novelists who might follow. Whatever innovations the future might have in store, it was hardly possible that they should go beyond the freedom triumphantly vindicated by Sterne. For whatever purposes future writers might wish to use the novel, it was hardly conceivable that they would not be covered by the principle which he had victoriously, though, it may be, unconsciously, laid down. The purpose for which Sterne used the novel was to give free utterance to his own way of looking at life, his own moral and intellectual individuality. So much granted, it was impossible to quarrel with those who used it for a more limited purpose; for embodying in a narrative form the passions stirred by any burning problem of the day; for giving utterance to their own views on any specific question, political, social or religious. The perils of such a task might be great. They could hardly, however, be greater, they would almost certainly be less great, than those which Sterne had already faced and conquered. And, with the success of Tristram before him, no critic could maintain that, given sufficient genius, the venture was impossible. The challenge of Sterne was wide enough to include all the other challenges that have followed. The Fool of Quality, Nature and Art, Oliver Twist, Wilhelm Meister, Les Misérables —all are covered by the unformulated formula of Tristram.	7
Not, of course, that the whole credit of the widening process should be given to Sterne. Rasselas in England, if Rasselas is, indeed, to be counted as a novel, much more Candide in France, had already pointed the way in the same direction. Both appeared in the year 1759, before the publication of the first volume of Tristram. Neither of them, however, attempts more than a fragment of the task which Sterne attempted and performed. In neither case does the author stake his whole personality upon the throw; he lets his mind work, or play, round a single question, or group of questions, and that is all. It was an easier venture, a smaller venture and one far less rich in promise, than that which, a few weeks later, launched the Shandy family upon their voyage round the world.

§ 5. Sterne as the Liberator of the Novel; His Humour the groundwork of his Characters.

It is, then, as liberator that Sterne comes before us in the first instance. And it is as liberator that he has left his chief, perhaps his only enduring, mark upon the subsequent history of the novel. His other great qualities are almost purely personal to himself. His very originality has caused him to count for less, as a moulding influence, than many a writer not to be compared with him in genius.	9
And, first, his humour. The elements which go to make up this are strangely various and, for the most part, as strangely baffling and elusive. His handling of character is humorous to the very core. It is so with the figures that merely flit across the stage: Susannah and the scullion, Obadiah and Dr. Slop, Eugenius and Yorick. It is so a hundred times more with those constantly before the footlights: above all, the undying trio, Walter Shandy, my uncle Toby and corporal Trim.	10
The last three are humorous in a whole sheaf of senses, each of which fades insensibly into the others. In the first place, to employ a term sanctioned by long usage, they are themselves humourists of the first water. Each of them is fast astride on his own hobby-horse, galloping as hard as may be in pursuit of his own fad. In this sense, though in no other, they are akin to Puntarvolo and Fastidious Brisk, to Morose and Volpone. They are akin, also, to Tom Bowling and commodore Trunnion. Sterne, however, had far too subtle a spirit to content himself with the mere oddities in which Smollett and, in his own masterful way, Jonson also, had delighted. His characters may be born humourists, in the Jonsonian sense. But they have been born anew, and have taken on an entirely new nature, in the soul of a writer who was a humourist in another, and a far higher, sense: the sense in which we apply the term to Fielding and Walter Scott, to Cervantes and Shakespeare. And the second birth counts for infinitely more than the first. All that in the original draft of the character may have been overcharged, distorted and ungenial is now interwoven with so many softer strands, crossed by so many subtler strokes, touched to so many finer issues that the primitive harshness has altogether vanished, and the caricature become a living creature, of like nature with ourselves. The “humour,” in the sense of Jonson and Smollett, is still the groundwork of the character. But it is so transformed and humanised by the subsequent touches as to have passed without effort into a nobler plane of being. It is soon recognised as something scarcely differing from that leaven of idealisation which is the indispensable condition of the highest creative work and which, much as we may desire to fix it, is, in this, as in many other instances, lost in the general effect of the whole. Compare “my Uncle Toby,” the supreme instance of this subtle transformation, with Tom Bowling or commodore Trunnion, and the difference proclaims itself at once.

§ 6. Tristram Shandy and Don Quixote.

The name of Cervantes has been mentioned. And Sterne himself does not make any attempt to conceal that Cervantes was his model. Others—Rabelais, Montaigne, Burton, the last especially—may have provided hints and suggested methods. That, however, is only for the more discursive and abstract parts of the story. In the humorous handling of character, Sterne’s master was Cervantes and none other. My uncle Toby and corporal Trim are variations, but variations of genius, upon Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Yet, on taking over the suggestion, Sterne has made it entirely his own. And the differences are even more strongly marked than the resemblance. Neither master nor servant, in Sterne’s creation, has the universal significance which makes itself felt even to the most casual reader of Don Quixote. And this is true of the relation between the two men no less than of each as taken by himself. There is nothing in Sterne of the contrast between sense and spirit, between the ideal and the material, which gives a depth of unfathomable meaning to the twofold creation of Cervantes. Trim is in no wise the foil of his master. Still less is he his critic. The very thought would have filled him with dismay. He is uncle Toby’s devoted follower, the ardent sharer of his dreams, the zealous agent of their fulfilment, hardly less warmhearted, hardly less overflowing with kindness, a point or two shrewder and less unworldly, by many points less simple and more studious of effect, moulded of slightly coarser clay but on the same general pattern; altogether, far more his counterpart than his opposite. The relation between the two is full of beauty, as well as of humour. And, just because it is so, it is wholly different from that which Cervantes has cunningly woven between Sancho and Don Quixote.	12
But yet further differences are to be noted. Both Don Quixote and uncle Toby are possessed with a dream. So, for that matter, is Walter Shandy. But the dream of the knight, though absurd in appearance, is, in essentials, noble and heroic. Those of the Shandy brothers—no ingenuity can conceal the fact—are futile and childish. To follow them is to watch “Nestor play at push-pin with the boys.” Don Quixote may tilt at windmills; but all his thoughts are for the weak and the oppressed. As for uncle Toby, “our armies in Flanders” may be upon his lips; but all he cares about is toy cannons and tin soldiers. The one point of vital resemblance is the fervour with which each rushes in pursuit of his delusion. The heavens might fall; but Don Quixote would still worship Dulcinea as a princess. The world might come to an end; but Toby would still be rearing midget demilunes, his brother still be spinning paradoxes and striking impressive attitudes.	13
Thus, when all is said and done, the contrast goes even deeper than the resemblance. And this accounts for a difference of method which could hardly otherwise be explained. Cervantes is so sure of his hero’s nobility that he is not afraid to cover him with every outward mark of ridicule. Sterne puts forth all his art to make us forget the futility of the craze which he has imagined for the central figure of his story. There are moments, it must be confessed, when the ridiculous in Don Quixote is pushed further than we are willing to endure. In such moments, it is clear that the satirist has got the better of the creative artist; and it is not on the hero, but on the author, that our resentment is, instinctively, apt to fall. Our admiration is proof against all that Cervantes himself can do to undermine it. Could the intrinsic nobility of his conception be more decisively driven home? Put either Toby or Walter Shandy to the same test, and who shall say that either of them would come through it? The delicate raillery of Sterne is not too much for them to bear. Before the relentless satire of Cervantes, they would shrivel into nothing.	14
It is just here, however, that Goethe found not only the most characteristic, but, also, the most helpful, quality of Sterne’s genius—that from which there is most to be learned for the practical conduct of our lives. The very detachment from all that is commonly reckoned to belong to the serious interests of life, the readiness to escape from that for which other men are striving and fighting, to withdraw into the citadel of our bare, naked self and let the world go its way, to count all for nought, so long as our own ideal is kept intact, had, for him, a moral worth, a “liberating” value, which it was hard to overrate. That it was the whole truth, Goethe was the last man to suppose. Wilhelm Meister is there to protest against so impossible a charge. But, as a half-truth, and one which the world seems forever bent on denying, he held, and he was right in holding that it was beyond price. He recognised and he was right in recognising, that, of all men who ever wrote, Sterne was the most firmly possessed of it himself, and the most able, by the magic of his art, to awaken the sense of it in others. “Shandyism,” he says, in the words of Sterne himself, “is the incapacity for fixing the mind on a serious object for two minutes together.” And Sterne himself he defines as “a free spirit,” “a model in nothing, in everything an awakener and suggester.”	15
So much as to Sterne’s humour in the creation of character. This, however, is anything but the only channel through which his humour finds an outlet. He is rich in the humour of situation; rich, also, in that which gathers round certain instincts of man’s nature. On the former, there is no need to enlarge: the less so, as it is often inseparably interwoven with the humour of character, which has already been sufficiently discussed. If we consider such scenes as that of Trim’s kitchen discourse on mortality, or the collapse of Mr. Shandy the elder upon his bed, or, above all, the curse of Ernulphus and all that leads up to it, we shall see at once the infinite art with which Sterne arranges his limelights and the astounding effects which he makes them produce. To say, as Goldsmith came near to saying, that Sterne’s humour depends upon a judicious use of dashes and stars, upon the insertion of marbled sheets and other mechanical or pert devices, is not even a parody of the truth. As a criticism, it is incredibly beside the mark; only less so than Thackeray’s—“The man is not a great humourist; he is a great jester.”

§ 7. Sterne’s artificiality and pruriency.

On the other head, Sterne is more open to attack. It is useless to deny that the instincts round which he best loves to let his humour play are just those which lend themselves most readily to abuse, and that, in his handling of them, there is a pruriency which justly gives offence. There is none of the frankness which takes the sting out of the obscenity of Aristophanes or the riotous coarseness of Rabelais. On the contrary, there is a prying suggestiveness which is nothing but an aggravation of the misdeed. Yet, so much being granted, it is right to guard ourselves against two possible misconstructions. It is an injustice if we read what we know of the author’s life and conduct into his writings. It is an injustice if we fail to take into account what may fairly be said in mitigation of the charge, on this score, against the writings themselves.	17
With Sterne, as a man, it is hard to have much patience. He was unkind to his wife, and he philandered persistently with other women. His pruriency, moreover, is a blot upon his character; and, in a man of his cloth, it is doubly distasteful. The two former defects, however, have nothing to do with his genius as a writer. And the last, as a trait of character, would concern us much more than it does if he made any attempt to conceal it in his writings. Exactly the contrary is the case. The charge, and the just charge, against him is that he parades it at every turn. There is no need to go to the records of his life for the knowledge of it. It is proclaimed upon the housetops in his books. If a man makes great professions of nobility of soul in his writings, it is, no doubt, a disenchantment to discover that they are contradicted by his life. The very suspicion of hypocrisy may and does interfere with the pleasure we take in a work even of imaginative creation. But hypocrisy, at least in this connection, is the very last thing that can be charged upon the work of Sterne. His sins go before him to the judgment; and it is by his writings that they are made known.	18
Again, offensive as his pruriency is, the specific, and very peculiar, appeal it makes to the intellect and imagination, may be urged as a mitigating plea. The two things are closely connected; the former, in fact, is a consequence of the latter. The indecency of Sterne is of a peculiarly intellectual kind. He holds it jealously aloof from all that can touch the passions or emotions. It works, as it were, in a void which he has created specially for the purpose and of which he alone, of all writers, holds the secret. In this dry handling of the matter, the affections of the reader are left unenlisted and unmoved. He is too much engrossed in following the intellectual ingenuity of the writer, the rapid quips and turns of his fancy, to have much attention left for the gross insinuations which too often form the primitive groundwork of the arabesque cunningly stencilled on the surface. Certainly, he is not carried off his feet, as he might easily be by warmer, if far more innocent, descriptions.

§ 8. Nature of his Sentimentalism.

The sentimentalism of Sterne goes much deeper and, in its more extreme forms, is, perhaps, less capable of defence. Here, again, no doubt, we are mainly, though, in this case, not solely, concerned with the actual effect stamped by the artist’s hand upon our imagination. We have little—and, in that little, we have nothing directly —to do with the havoc which sentiment, as he nursed it, may have wrought with his personal conduct and his practical outlook on life. The truth is that sentiment so highly wrought—still more, sentiment so deliberately cultivated and laid out with such a manifest eye to effect—can hardly fail to rouse the suspicion of the reader. When the limelights are manipulated with design so palpable as in the death of Le Fevre or the story of the dead ass, the author goes far to defeat his own purpose. The spontaneity which is the first charm of sentiment is immediately seen to be wanting, and the effect of the whole effort is largely destroyed. More than that. We instinctively feel that, with the author himself, as a man, all can hardly be well. We are driven to cast doubts on his sincerity; and, when we look to his life, we more than half expect our doubts to be confirmed. Such suspicions inevitably react upon the imaginative pleasure which the picture itself would otherwise have given. There is an air of unreality, if not of imposture, about the whole business which, with the best will in the world, it is impossible wholly to put by.

20

Yet, the same command of effect, which, in matters of sentiment, is apt to prove perilous, is, elsewhere, brought into play with the happiest results. Give him a situation, a thought which appeals strongly either to his imagination or to his humanitarian instincts—for Sterne also, in his own curious way, is among the prophets—and no man knows so well how to lead up to it; how to make the most of it; how, by cunning arrangement of light and shade and drapery, to show it off to the best possible advantage. As stage-manager, as master of effective setting, he is without equal, we may almost say without rival, among novelists. And there are moments when such mastery is pure gain. Take the curse of Ernulphus, take Trim’s reading of the sermon on conscience, take his oration upon death; and this will hardly be denied. There are, no doubt, other moments—those of sentimentality or indecency—when, from the nature of the theme, approval is not likely to be so unreserved. Yet, even here, we cannot but admire the cunning of the craftsman, deliberate yet light-handed, deeply calculated yet full of sparkle, nimbleness and humour.

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