THE ENGLISH NOVEL

[From "The English Novel: A Study in the Development of Personality,” 1883. Copyright: Charles Scribner's Sons]

[F you should be wandering meditatively along the bank

leap across it without effort, so quiet in its singing that its loudest tinkle cannot be heard in the next field, carrying upon its bosom no craft that would draw more water than the curving leaf of a wild-rose floating down stream, too small in volume to dream of a mill-wheel and turning nothing more practical than maybe a piece of violet-petal in a little eddy off somewhere, — if, I say, you should be strolling alongside such a brook and should see it suddenly expand, without the least intermediate stage, into a mighty river, turning a thousand great wheels for man's profit as it swept on to the sea, and offering broad highway and favorable currents to a thousand craft freighted with the most precious cargoes of human aspiration: you would behold the aptest physical semblance of that spiritual phenomenon which we witnessed at our last meeting, when in tracing the quiet and mentally-wayward course of demure Marian Evans among the suave pastorals of her native Warwickshire, we came suddenly upon the year 1857 when her first venture in fiction - The Scenes of Clerical Life - appeared in Blackwood's Magazine and magically enlarged the stream of her influence from the diameter of a small circle of literary people in London to the width of all England.

At this point it seems interesting now to pause a moment, to look about and see exactly what network English fiction had done since its beginning, only about a century before,

to note more particularly what were the precise gains to humanity which Thackeray and Dickens had poured in just at this time of 1857, and thus to differentiate a clear view of the actual contribution which George Eliot was now beginning to make to English life and thought.

It is not a pleasant task, however instructive, to leave off looking at a rose and cast one's contemplation down to the unsavory muck in which its roots are imbedded. This, however, is what one must do when one passes from the many-petalled rose of George Eliot's fiction to the beginning of the English novel.

This beginning was as curious as it was unlooked-for by the people engaged in it. In the year 1740 a book in two volumes called Pamela: or Virtue Rewarded, was printed, in which Samuel Richardson took what seems to have been the first revolutionary departure from the wild and complex romances such as Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia which had formed the nearest approach to the modern novel until then. At this time Richardson was fifty years old, and probably the last man in England who would have been selected as likely to write an epoch-making book of any description. He had worked most of his life as a printer, but by the time referred to had gotten so far towards the literary life as to be employed by booksellers to arrange indexes and to write prefaces and dedications. It so happened that on a certain occasion he was asked by two booksellers to write a volume of letters on different subjects which might serve as models to uneducated persons sort of Every Man His Own Letter Writer, or the like. The letters, in order to be more useful, were to be upon such subjects as the rustic world might likely desire to correspond about. Richardson thinks it over; and presently writes to inquire, "Will it be any harm, in a piece you want to be written so low, if we should instruct them how they should think and act in common cases, as well as indite?" This seemed a capital idea and in the course of time, after some experiments and after recalling an actual

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story he had once heard which gave him a sort of basis, he takes for his heroine a simple servant-girl, daughter of Goodman Andrews, a humbly born English farmer, rather sardonically names her Pamela after the Lady Pamela in Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia, carries her pure through a series of incredibly villainous plots against her by the master of the house where she is at service, who has taken advantage of the recent death of his wife, Pamela's mistress, to carry these on, and finally makes 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 very short time wins a great host of admiring readers, insomuch that since the first two volumes ended with the marriage, he adds two more showing the married life of Pamela and her squire.

The whole novel, like all of Richardson's, is written in the form of letters passing between the characters. It is related, apropos of his genius in letter-writing, that in his boyhood he was the love-letter-writer-in-chief for three of the young ladies of his town, and that he maintained this embarrassing position for a long time without suspicion. from either of the three. Richardson himself announces the moral purpose of his book, saying that he thinks it might "introduce a new species of writing that might possibly turn young people into a course of reading different from the pomp and parade of romance-writing, and promote the cause of religion and virtue; and in the preface to the continuation before-mentioned he remarks as follows: "The two former volumes of Pamela met with a success greatly exceeding the most sanguine expectations; and the editor hopes" (Richardson calls himself the editor of the letters) "that the letters which compose these will be found equally written to nature; avoiding all romantic flights, improbable surprises, and irrational machinery; and that the passions are touched where requisite; and rules equally new and practicable inculcated

throughout the whole for the general conduct of life." I have given these somewhat tedious quotations from Richardson's own words to show first that the English novel starts out with a perfectly clear and conscious moral mission, and secondly to contrast this pleasing moral announcement of Richardson's with what I can only call the silly and hideous realization of it which meets us when we come actually to read this wonderful first English novel· - Pamela. I have already given the substance of the first two volumes in which the rich squire, Mr. B. (as he is called throughout the novel) finally marries and takes home the girl who had been the servant of his wife and against whom, ever since that lady's death, he had been plotting with an elaborate baseness which has never before been, and I sincerely hope will never hereafter be described. By this action Mr. B. has in the opinion of Richardson, of his wife, the servant-girl and the whole contemporary world, saturated himself with such a flame of saintliness as to have burnt out every particle of any little misdemeanor he may have been guilty of in his previous existence; and I need only read you an occasional line from the first four letters of the third volume in order to show the marvelous sentimentality, the untruth towards nature, and the purely commercial view of virtue and of religion which make up this intolerable book. At the opening of Volume III we find that Goodman Andrews, the father of the bride, and his wife have been provided with a comfortable farm on the estate of Mr. B., and the second letter is from Andrews to his daughter, the happy bride, Pamela. After rhapsodizing for several pages Andrews reaches this climax and it is worth while observing that though only a rude farmer of the eighteenth century, whose daughter was a servant maid, 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