It is chiefly on this account that he is blamed, and, in some measure, rightly so. He does not openly attack Christianity, which he hates, looking on it as a spiritual disease in the Roman Empire; but, while apparently impartial, he represents its origin as a vain imposture and self-deception, and attributes its propagation to the basest motives. Gibbon had no heart for Christianity: the chapter on Mahomet is full of greater sympathy, and finer delineation of character, than that on the first century of Christianity. Hence we can understand his predilection for Julian the Apostate. BIBLIOGRAPHY. PITT.-Collection of his Parliamentary Speeches by Almon; F. Thackeray, Life of Chatham (1827). LETTERS OF JUNIUS.-Edited by Wade, in German by Arnold Ruge; F. Brockhaus, Die Briefe des Junius; Hans Blum (in the Magdeburger Zeitung, 1883, Nos. 409-17); Taylor, Junius Identified (1816); E. Twisleton and Chabot, The Handwritings of Junius Professionally Investigated (1873, a most important work); G. Francis, Junius Revealed by his Surviving Grandson (1894). ADAM SMITH.-D. Stewart, Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith; HUME.-Philosophical and Miscellaneous Works, by Green; Life of David Hume, GIBBON.-Best edition of his works by W. Smith; Lord Sheffield, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Edward Gibbon; H. H. Milman, Life and Correspondence of Edward Gibbon; J. Morrison, Gibbon (in English Men of Letters); Royal Historical Society, Proceedings of the Gibbon Commemoration; J. Murray, The Autobiographies of Edward Gibbon (1896); Letters, by Prothero (1897). CHAPTER III NOVELISTS AND DRAMATISTS RICHARDSON-FIELDING-SMOLLETT-STERNE-GOLDSMITHCUMBERLAND-SHERIDAN S TRICT justice would have required the historian of literature to begin this chapter with Daniel Defoe, for he was the first great English writer of fiction. But it is not only on account of his activity as a newspaper writer that we must place him in another class, but because the character of his stories is quite unique. Defoe was a narrator of sensational stories, with whom delineation of character was a matter of secondary moment. The five writers of fiction mentioned above are novelists in the modern sense; they attach the chief importance to men and women and their characters, looking on their stories as merely accessory. Next to Defoe comes Smollett; Richardson and Sterne are the farthest from him. It is to England that the merit of having created the family novel is due. Until the eighteenth century was somewhat advanced French romance, under the sway of D'Urfé and Madame Scudéry, was a mixture of sentimental nonsense and unfeeling affectation. The heroes and heroines were virtuous princes and still more virtuous princesses, amorous shepherds and cruel shepherdesses, with their crooks adorned with ribbons, to make them presentable in the drawing-room. The Spanish "Picaresque" novel was anything but a family novel; nor could the German "Simplicissimus" be classed as such. Neither in England nor in France could the family novel exist so long as court society and the public were one and the same. The increasing influence of the middle classes after the Revolution of 1688; the rousing up of the trading classes by the periodical press; the democratisation of literature, this it was that led to the production of a vast amount of English fiction, the materials of which were founded on family life. The moralising novel enchanted the reader above all. Richardson, its creator and master, followed the moralising dramatist Lillo, and led the way for Cumberland; but all three were imitators of the didactic periodical writers. What sort of "moral" these stories convey, and especially Richardson's, Thackeray has stated very expressively: "Tom was a naughty boy, and the master flogged him; Jack was a good boy, and had plum-cake." SAMUEL RICHARDSON (1689–1761) is the name of the man whose three novels delighted two generations in the eighteenth century. Only three; but each consisted, on an average, of eight volumes! The first, dated 1740, is Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (Jack and his plum-cake!). It describes the heroic virtue of a sentimental servantgirl, who resists the wiles of her master, a lord, for a long period, until he ends by marrying her in the eighth volume. All this we learn from letters. Richardson wrote his novels in the form of letters, thereby originating that dreadful kind of romance, which even now is not quite extinct. There is affectation in the form itself; letters never contain more than half the truth, least of all letters on love affairs! The name "Pamela" is taken from Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia (compare p. 226). Richardson has received in this novel material assistance from Marivaux's Marianne. In his second novel, Clarissa Harlowe (1748), virtue succumbs, but only to brute force, and the criminal Lovelace meets with the punishment he so well deserves (Tom gets the stick!). In Sir Charles Grandison (1753), virtue arrives at the point at which it begins to grow not only tedious, but actually repulsive. The hero, who gives the title to the book, is a faultless man; a creature of Richardson's fancy. His characters are really utterly unlike the ordinary people one meets with in this world; they all wade up to the knees in hideous vice, or in loquacious virtue. With regard to Sir Charles Grandison, we cannot help asking ourselves: can so godly a man become anything better than he is when he is received into Paradise after his death, of which there can be no doubt? After reading some volumes of these prosy, wishy-washy praises of virtue, drawn out to such portentous length, a volume of Fielding or Smollett with such amusing scamps as Tom Jones or Peregrine Pickle acts as a real restorative. It was not only in England that Richardson was so much admired in his day: his books were loved in France, and translated in Germany. By Rousseau especially he was passionately admired; but he also influenced Goethe considerably. Richardson is still a celebrity, but merely by favour of the literary historian: he is no longer liked or read. Indeed, it is impossible to read him in large quantities at the present day. Our moral ideas have altered for the better; he is repugnant to our taste; only the people of his own day could thoroughly understand him; he must be read with tears in our eyes or not at all, and at the present day we have no time to shed tears, except for more real woes. Richardson has not formed his characters on any models; they are not false, but generally speaking they are unsubstantial; they are shadows gliding through a superhuman or non-human world. The narrator has spun out the whole from his own ideas, both plot and characters, much as an industrious spider spins its web from its own body; and both are cobwebs destined to be covered with dust and be swept away. The characters in Bunyan's allegory were truer to life than Richardson's imaginary men and women. The outspoken Samuel Johnson pronounced a striking verdict on the insipidity of his novels: "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 as only giving occasion to the sentiment." Richardson's Pamela, in spite of the sentimental admiration with which it was received, stirred up violent antagonism; his cleverest adversary was HENRY FIELDING (1707-54). Whether it is the case, as Gibbon says, that he was connected with the house of the Habsburgs, is doubtful; but another bold assertion of Gibbon's may prove true in a distant future. "The romance of Tom Jones, that exquisite picture of human manners, will outlive the Palace of the Escurial and the imperial eagle of Austria." Fielding is in every respect the opposite of Richardson. His men and women are real men and women, with many virtues and many weaknesses; true to the life, clearly recognisable. His most famous character, "Tom Jones," deserves sometimes the stick, sometimes plum-cake, and he gets both; but at the end, he brings home as his bride the charming Sophia, in spite of all the opposition of her father, Squire Western, also a personage not to be forgotten. On the other hand, his arch enemy, the malicious Blifil, receives the well-deserved punishment of his baseness. Fielding's "Tom Jones," the careless Tom, who is only virtuous when it answers his purpose, is a much more agreeable person than Richardson's "Sir Charles Grandison," with his excessive virtue, which only disgusts us. The thorough contrast between the fantastic Richardson and the realistic Fielding appeared in the fact that the latter wrote his first novel, Joseph Andrews (1742), with the intention of producing a takeoff of Pamela. But it was with him much as with the German writer Wilhelm Hauff, whose Mann im Monde (Man in the Moon) was intended to bring Clauren's mawkish story Mimili into ridicule. Both authors found such pleasure in the characters they drew for this purpose, that, instead of two caricatures, they have left us two interesting novels. Fielding's principal work is Tom Jones (1749), the story of a poor foundling, who marries the daughter of a rich landed proprietor. A somewhat simple story; but full of people never to be forgotten! No princes or princesses, as in the novels which suit the taste of courts; only everyday men and women, plebeians, except the doubtful Lady Bellaston; but how well he has drawn them! Squire Western, that mixture of roughness and good-nature, who continues obstinate to the last, and "compels " Tom Jones to marry his daughter Sophia, after refusing her to him for so long! And Tom Jones and Sophia themselves, that somewhat insignificant young man and that fresh amiable girl! They are commonplace, by no means "interesting," not in the least romantic; but they are persons whom we are glad to reckon among our best acquaintances; they may be numbered, indeed, amongst the many friends of our intellectual life. At the present day, it is the fashion to praise the art of the French realists, whose descriptive power presents to us unimportant and ordinary persons in the most attractive forms; but a hundred years before Flaubert and Zola, Henry Fielding proved himself a master of this art, certainly a most difficult one, in Tom Jones. At the same time, Tom Jones contains a bit of English life so fresh, and so charming in its truthfulness, that we seem permitted by a miracle, as it were, to live for a few hours in our own persons in the middle of the last century. Fielding's last novel, Amelia (1751), reminds us, in a slight degree, of Richardson's Grandison: like it, it is a triumphal song, in praise of human virtue. But how much truer to nature is Fielding, even in this work! The heroine is a faithful wife, whose love knows no end, and this is not contrary to what we find in real life. It is said that in Amelia Fielding wished to erect a literary monument to his deceased wife. TOBIAS SMOLLETT (1721-71), a Scotchman, is a novelist whose style is coarser; though by many readers he is probably accounted the most agreeable of all the English romancists of that period. Not, of course, on account of his lack of delicacy, which often betrays him into vulgarity; but on account of his irresistible drollery, his natural wit, his powerful description of ridiculous people. In this respect Smollett is in the front rank; he has scarcely ever been surpassed, even by the more artistic Dickens and Thackeray. Marryat has made attempts to imitate him, but with doubtful success. Smollett led a stormy life. As a ship's doctor he made long voyages, went through naval engagements, and other perils; his first novel, Roderick Random (1748), was the result of his experiences in foreign |