The Facts of Fiction Read online

  THE FACTS OF FICTION

  by

  NORMAN COLLINS

  Contents

  Introduction

  The First Psychological Novelist

  Henry Fielding

  Tobias George Smollett

  Laurence Sterne and his Fragment of Life

  The Major Minor Novelists

  Jane Austen’s Unheavenly World

  The Reign of Terror and the Noble Savage

  Sir Walter Scott

  Thackeray and the New Snobbism

  Charles Dickens

  The Best of the Second-Best

  The Independent Brontes

  The Daughters of Publicity

  The Aristocratic Novel

  Meredith and Hardy

  Henry James

  The Case Against D. H. Lawrence

  Mr. George Moore

  The Regular Army

  The New Battle of the Books

  Introduction

  Such a volume as this might seem to call, if not for an apology, at least for an explanation. Studies of English fiction have already appeared from the pens of writers of such catholic and unobtrusive culture as Professor Walter Raleigh (The English Novel), of such minute and exact scholarship as Dr. Baker (The History of the English Novel, 4 volumes), and of such delicate and delicious discursiveness as Mr. Percy Lubbock (The Craft of Fiction) and Mr. E. M. Forster (Aspects of the Novel).

  Mr. J. B. Priestley with conspicuous clarity has put the whole matter into one of Benn’s sixpenny nutshells (The English Novel). Mr. Gerald Gould, whose victorious weekly battles with novels have made him the greatest hero of contemporary fiction, has acted as Registrar-General in a Census of novelists writing in the Post-War world (The English Novel To-day).

  Why then, the reader may ask, give us more? And the answer must be that histories like those of Professor Raleigh and Dr. Baker start too early to interest any but the scholar and end too early to satisfy that voracious, protean creature, the general reader. Mr. Lubbock and Mr. Forster have both been content that their lovely luminous minds should dart about like kingfishers from side to side of their subject, and not cover the whole course like a homing pigeon. Mr. Priestley was bound to reject most of the amusing inessentials that make for the fun of the thing. And Mr. Gould is all finely drawn, finely detailed for ground—of 1924. The only complete study of the subject is by a Frenchman, M. Abel Chevalley (Le Roman Anglais de Notre Temps) and is disqualified by reason of its language before it even competes.

  There does therefore seem to be room enough and reason enough for a volume in which those English men of letters who chose the form of fiction are to be seen in something like their essential originality if not in their entirety; a volume in which, when the critic collapses, he may temporarily turn biographer, and when biography proves bald he may turn commentator again.

  I realise that starting this historical romance of fiction at Richardson, and not at Defoe, or at Swift, or at Bunyan, or at Mrs. Aphra Benn, or at Lyly, or at Deloney, may seem rather like starting the Grand National on the easy side of Becher’s Brook, and romping home unfairly ahead of the winner. I have deliberately overlooked the claims of everyone up to Defoe, just as the historian of horse-racing must overlook the claims of the primitive three-toed horse.

  True, Defoe could do most of the things that a modern novelist can do, and do them as well. But he does not happen to have been interested in those things that have become the main topics of modern fiction. His mind in fiction remained the busy mind of a brilliant boy. The mental age of Robinson Crusoe is, I suppose, somewhere between 10 and 15. The intelligence, it is perfectly true, is fully developed: which is why it remains so strangely satisfying to the adult mind. But the imagination is fertile and unforced with the feverish and natural fertility of youth. And the subject owes some of its perpetual youthfulness quite simply to its author’s own youthfulness of mind.

  Robinson Crusoe is as much a piece of everyone’s boyhood as a rubber ball; something that we can take a whack at so long as there is any strength left in us.

  I do not know exactly how I can explain to anyone who does not see it at once how Robinson Crusoe remains such famous fiction, yet never quite becomes a novel as we understand the term to-day. But perhaps I can hint at my meaning by suggesting what a colossal blunder—in a modern novelist’s eyes—the creation of Man Friday really was. It would have needed the arrival of Woman Wednesday in place of Man Friday to make a modern novel of that nursery romance.

  Now is not the moment to take the plunge and inspect the salt-mill of sex that is ceaselessly turning and giving the whole sea of fiction its savour. Some later novelists have turned their backs on sex. But they have been like men deliberately looking away from it and not like a boy looking through it without seeing it.

  Moll Flanders, it might be objected, is not unrelated to the subject of sex. It might be argued that it deals with sex not only as a man, but as a bad man—that is one who is too much of a man—sees it. But really there is more of the bad boy than of the bad man about it. Moll Flanders sins so artlessly that it is not sin at all, but a commercial contract of a particular kind that she so conscientiously, good-humouredly and frequently fulfils. Her simplicity of demeanour or more particularly of misdemeanour is very different from the tormented emotions of Richardson’s heroines.

  For Richardson had seen at least one of the centres of complexity in the female heart—the ideal of chastity. And Defoe saw woman simply as a brave, buxom, jolly body that could be beaten and bought. Much modern fiction, incidentally, is based on the same idea; though the beating has descended to a gentle social pressure and the buying is no more than marrying.

  No one, I think, minds the omission of writers like Malory, or Nashe or Dekker or Deloney, together with the writers of idyllic romance, and Bunyan, or even Swift, from a volume that pretends to give no more than the scantiest outline of the novel.

  Swift, it is perfectly true, wrote a sharper, more pointed prose than any writer who succeeded him. But to call such a work as Gulliver’s Travels, or more particularly The Battle of the Books, a piece of fiction, as is sometimes done, is either to forget the allegory or to return to the nursery in the demands we are to make upon the novel.

  As narrative Gulliver’s Travels may be better than, say, Sense and Sensibility. As a curious, ingenious invention it may be preferred. But granted the narrative capacity, the work of writing it stopped at the moment when the thought came to Swift. A-little-man-among-big-men, and a-big-man-among-little-men was the extent of the creation: which is what Johnson said in one of those moments when he is often quite wrongly imagined to have come a critical cropper.

  Sense and Sensibility on the other hand—and, indeed, any true novel—continues in energetic succession of creation from sentence to sentence, and from the first chapter to the last. The charm of both Gulliver’s Travels and Robinson Crusoe lay in the idea and not in the application of it. Richardson, on the other hand, is to be met assiduously applying the very principles that are the foundations of modern psychological fiction.

  There is one other apology or explanation of this book required. And that is because it is not based upon any new or startling philosophy of fiction that rejects all the favourites and fixes on the freaks. It does not promote Henry Kingsley above his brother Charles, or Mortimer Collins above Wilkie, or Frances Trollope (not that she was a freak) above Anthony, or make any quixotic attempt to fling a great load of praise or blame into the scales of literary justice that Time has patiently been levelling.

  The object of this volume is merely to show the authors of the past in as much detail as we know those of the present: to show the long romantic spectacle of these men at work as well as of the works of thes
e men.

  The First Psychological Novelist

  Art for art’s sake has never been one of the popular national slogans. The English, indeed, have always rejected, with perfect composure and little sense of loss, the metaphysical delights of æsthetics for the more practical pleasures and displeasures of ethics. And to this Samuel Richardson owes the thick nimbus that surrounded his head from his fifty-first year onwards.

  He did not pretend that he had invented a new prose form: which he had done, and which could have interested only a few. But he claimed to have discovered a new way of teaching morals: which, of course, he had not done, but which naturally interested everyone. And his novel Pamela came into the world with a title page as well devised, as nicely directed, and as long-winded as any in the language:

  PAMELA

  or

  VIRTUE REWARDED.

  In a Series of Familiar Letters

  from a Beautiful Young Damsel

  to her Parents.

  Now First Published

  In order to cultivate the Principles of Virtue and Religion in the minds of the Youth of both sexes. A narrative which has its foundation in Truth and Nature; and at the same time that it agreeably entertains, by a Variety of curious and affecting Incidents, is entirely divested of all those Images which in too many Pieces calculated for amusement only, tend to inflame the minds they should instruct.

  The success of the work was unspeakable. No doubt it owed some of its success to the fact that those who plunged about in its somewhat scabrous recesses (it was all founded on fact) felt that they always had the title page to excuse their suspiciously deep interest. Indeed, so far as the cultivation of virtue and religion go, Richardson’s novel seems to us very little better than almost any other novel of the time, sewn between the two boards of a devotional work. Pope said of it that it would “do more good than many volumes of sermons,” but though he said it in an age of sermons it is not as a judge of them that Pope is remembered.

  In the vivid and economical language of our day we should probably express the affecting story of Pamela thus:

  PRETTY SERVANT GIRL’S AMAZING ALLEGATIONS AGAINST WEALTHY EMPLOYER. ASTOUNDING LETTERS HOME PUBLISHED.

  These two terse and accurate headlines serve a doubly useful purpose. They tell the entire story of the novel in a dozen words, and they show the extreme modernity—or, in its essentials, agelessness—of the plot. They show also the unsavoury and sensational, as well as the subjective and sentimental nature of the story. For Richardson was interested in the darts and arrows of the world only as they lodged in the breast of mankind. He was the reporter of the human heart; and more especially of the human heart in perplexity or distress.

  The plot of his second novel, Clarissa, transcribed into modern headline English would come out to nothing less than:

  INNOCENT GIRL RAPED IN HOUSE OF ILL FAME. VICTIM’S DEATH UNNERVES SEDUCER: MORE LETTERS.

  It would be possible to expatiate endlessly on the change in educated taste since Richardson’s day. Pamela, the handsome housemaid, who brings off the coup of marrying her dissolute master, seems to us in the twentieth century a model of the adventuress rather than a model of virtue. Richardson saw this too late; Scott saw it later still. At this date we can hardly forget it.

  But, at the time, Richardson’s novels were considered by all but a few to be models of decorous entertainment. Despite the lurid luxury of their plots they were devoured by women. This, perhaps, is not so surprising as it may seem. Women always adore stories about womanly women and male men; the luscious landscape of love where every prospect pleases and only man is vile satisfies feminine curiosity and vanity simultaneously. And Richardson was essentially a feminine author. Adapting Austin Dobson’s phrase, we might say that Richardson was the first important woman novelist in the language. His thoughts all moved in skirts. His novels are the apotheosis of vapours and virtue. He wrote as women write; only a little better. He describes his pleasant girlhood in these words:

  As a bashful and forward young boy, I was an early favourite with all the young women of taste and reading in the neighbourhood. Half a dozen of them, when BF they met to work with their needles, used, when they got a book they liked, and thought I should, to borrow me to read to them, their mothers sometimes with them; and both mothers and daughters used to be pleased with the observations they put me upon making. I was not more than thirteen when three of these young women, unknown to each other, having a high opinion of my taciturnity, revealed to me their love secrets, in order to induce me to give them copies to write after, or correct for answer to their lovers’ letters; nor did any one of them ever know that I was secretary to the others. I have been directed to chide and even to repulse when an offence was either taken or given, at the very time when the heart of the chider or repulser was open before me, overflowing with esteem and affection; and the fair repulser, dreading to be taken at her word, directing this word, or that expression, to be softened or exchanged.

  There is something hauntingly repellent about the notion of this priggish and clammy infant assiduously “correcting ” and “chiding ” and “repulsing.” There is, at least, when the scene is viewed in the light of ordinarily decent human conduct. But to the literary historian the scene is one of life’s more nearly golden moments. The first English psychological novelist is actually to be seen gathering his material.

  It would be inopportune at this point in the book to consider at length what we mean by a psychological novelist. But it might be well to clear up one or two of the current misconceptions on the subject. In the first place it is merely the word “psychological ” and not the thing that it describes, that is young. The word entered the language in force about 1870, and from that moment it has been used incessantly and often incorrectly by writers who have meant anything in fiction that has attempted to catch the will-o’-the-wisp of the human mind, by those who have meant something that satisfied their own theories of thought in relation to life, and by those who have meant nothing at all but “profound ” or “penetrating.”

  Richardson’s claim to be considered not only as the father of fiction but as the father of psychological fiction (for of course there is a difference, largely dependent on the proportion of action to attitude and so on) is considerable. In the first place he was minutely interested in sex—which has come to be an almost indisputable claim to psychological celebrity. In the second place, though he describes in vivid and sufficient detail such hair-bleaching events as befel the formidably virtuous Clarissa, he really was not interested in them at all, and was concerned only with educating the reader’s mind into the necessary state of horror, remorse, penitence and good resolve. Johnson, with his uncanny gift of saying absolutely the right thing in utterly the right way, once remarked: “If you were to read Richardson for the story, your impatience would be so much fretted that you would hang yourself. But you must read him for the sentiment, and consider the story only as giving occasion to the sentiment.”

  There is nevertheless something curiously misleading about this remark. With so many hungry minds all gaping for a story, it has certainly had the effect of driving readers away. And that is a pity. For Richardson’s novels are not all spells to raise the spirit of sentiment. The only way to prove this is to read them. They will be found to contain innumerable passages of vivid, economical description, unmarred by manner or moral; exactly the kind of thing, indeed, that the story-reader wants.

  Such a chapter as the death of the bawdy-house keeper in Clarissa contains writing as energetic and disgusting as the best that was done by those two writers Fielding and Smollett; whose fame has overshadowed his. The unfortunate woman spent some days in dying, thus giving Richardson ample time to say the worst of her:

  Behold her, then, spreading the whole troubled bed with her huge quaggy carcass: her mill-pot arms held up, her broad hands clenched with violence: her big eyes goggling and flaming red as we may suppose those of a salamander; her matted grisly hair made irr
everent by her nakedness (her clouted head-dress being half off); her livid lips parched, and working violently; her broad chin in convulsive motion; her wide mouth by reason of the contraction of her forehead (which seemed to be half lost in its own frightful furrows) splitting her face, as it were, into two parts: and her huge tongue lolling hideously in it; heaving, puffing as if for breath; her bellow-shaped and various coloured breasts ascending by turns to her chin and descending out of sight, with the violence of her gaspings.

  He had, however, reserved an ample store of abuse for the others:

  … seven (there were eight of her “cursed daughters ” in all) seemed to have been but just up, arisen perhaps from their customers in the forehouse, and their noctural orgies, with faces, three or four of them, that had run, the paint lying in streaky seams not half blowzed off, discovering coarse wrinkled skins, the hair of some of them in diverse colours, obliged to the black-lead comb where black was affected, the artificial jet, however, yielding apace to the natural brindle, those of the others plastered with oil and powder; the oil predominating; but everyone’s hanging about her ears and neck in broken curls or ragged ends, and each at my entrance taken with one motion, stroking their matted locks with both hands under their coifs, curls or pinners, every one of which was awry. They were all slip-shod, some stockingless, only underpetticoated all; their gowns made to cover straddling hoops, hanging trollopy, and daggling about their heels; but hastily wrappt round them as soon as I came upstairs. And half of them (unpadded, shoulder-bent, pallid-lipt, limber-jointed wretches) appearing from a blooming nineteen or twenty perhaps over night haggard well-worn strumpets of thirty-eight or forty.

  Richardson, indeed, in these transports of Comstockian delight goes so far as to describe the creatures as being as revolting as the aerially incontinent harpies whose unhygienic habits above the Trojan lines provided Virgil with one of his few passages that remain in the mind of every schoolboy.