Читать книгу Dramatis Personæ - Symons Arthur - Страница 9

Certainly the modern English novel begins with that elaborate masterpiece, Tom Jones, of Henry Fielding. And it seems to me that his genius is contained, on the whole, in that one book; in which he creates living people; the very soil is living. His hero is the typical sullen, selfish, base-born, stupid, sensual, easily seduced and adventurous youth, with whom his creator is mightily amused. The very Prefaces are full of humorous wisdom; copied, I suppose, from Montaigne. The typically wicked woman is painted almost as Hogarth might have painted her. It is quite possible that she may have a few touches, here and there, of Lady Wishfort, who, wrote Meredith, "is unmatched for the vigour and pointedness of the tongue. It spins along with a final ring, like the voice of Nature in a fury, and is, indeed, racy eloquence of the elevated fishwife."

Fielding has a strong sense of the vigilant comic, which is the genius of thoughtful laughter, but never serving as a public advocate. Contempt can not be entertained by comic intelligence. Blifil is essentially the grossly and basely animal creature, who is also a villain, and who has his part in the plot; indeed one scandalous scene in which he is discovered is laughable in the purely comic sense.

Jonathan Wild presents a case of peculiar distinction, when that man of eminent greatness remarks on the unfairness of a trial in which the condemnation has been brought about by twelve men of the opposite party; yet it is immensely comic to hear a guilty villain protesting that his own "party" should have a voice in the Law. It opens an avenue into a villain's ratiocination, as in Lady Booby's exclamation when Joseph defends himself: "Your virtue! I shall never survive it!" Fielding can be equally satiric and comic: can raise laughter but never move pity. And it is as he evokes great spirits that Meredith cries: "O for a breath of Aristophanes, Rabelais, Voltaire, Cervantes, Fielding, Molière! These are spirits that, if you know them well, will come when you do call."

After Fielding comes Thackeray, and his Vanity Fair is the second masterpiece in modern fiction. It is the work of a man of the world, keenly observant of all the follies and virtues and vices and crimes and splendors, of crimes and of failures, of his neither moral nor immoral Fair. He takes his title from John Bunyan; but in originality he is almost equal with Fielding. "As the Manager of the Performance sits before the curtain on the boards, and looks into the Fair, a feeling of profound melancholy comes over him in his survey of the bustling place." Such is the moral, if you like; at any rate the whole Show "is accompanied by appropriate scenery and brilliantly illuminated with the author's own candles." At the end the Finis: "Ah! Vanitas Vanitatum! Which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied?—Come children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out."

There is no question that Becky Sharp is not derived from Balzac's Lisbeth in La Cousine Bette, but at what a distance, when once you think of the greatest of all novelists, who has the fortune to be French, and of Thackeray, who has the fortune (at times the misfortune) of being English. When we thing of Becky she startles us by her cynical entrance: she inherits from her parents bad qualities. Her first epigram sums her up. "Revenge may be wicked, but it's natural. I'm no angel." She fascinates Lord Pitt, Rawdon Crawley and Lord Steyne in a way Lisbeth never does. Lisbeth's fascination is that of the evil-doer; she is envious, spiteful, malicious, a lying hypocrite; always deliberately bent on having her own way, always for evil purposes: so that she, in her sinister effrontery, causes the ruin of many of the lives she thrives on, feigns to help, deludes; only, she never deludes as Valérie Marnette does. We have only to say: "Valérie!" and the woman is before us. As for Valérie: "Elle était belle comme sont belles les femmes assez belles, pour être belles en dormant;" a sentence certainly lyrical. Lisbeth's character has "Une dose du mordant parisien." Unmarried, she is monstrous, her snares are inevitable, her dissimulation impenetrable. But she is never given a scene so consummately achieved in its sordid and voluptuous tragedy as the scene in Vanity Fair when Rawdon enters his house at midnight, and finds Becky dressed in a brilliant toilet, her arms and her fingers sparkling with bracelets and rings, and the brilliants in her breast which Steyne had given her. "He had her hand in his, and was bowing to kiss it, when Becky started up with a faint scream as she caught sight of Rawdon's white face." And, as the writer adds, with an entire sense of the tragic and comic drama that is over: "All her lies and her schemes, all her selfishness and her wiles, all her wit and all her genius had come to this bankruptcy."

I have never had any actual admiration for the novels of George Eliot; she had her passing fame, her popularity, her success; people compared her prose—wrongly—with the poetry of Mrs. Browning; and, as for her attempts at verse, the less said of them the better. In favor of my opinion I quote this scathing sentence of Swinburne: "Having no taste for the dissection of dolls, I shall leave Daniel Deronda in his natural place above the ragshop door; and having no ear for the melodies of a Jew's harp, I shall leave the Spanish Gypsy to perform on that instrument to such audience as she may collect." Certainly Charlotte Brontë excelled George Eliot in almost every quality; the latter having, perhaps, more knowledge and culture, but not for a moment comparable with Charlotte's purity of passion, depth and fervor of feeling, inspiration, imagination and a most masterly style.

As for her Romola, I find it almost an elaborate failure in the endeavor to create the atmosphere of the period of Savonarola—that amazing age when the greatest spirits of the world were alive and producing works of unsurpassable genius—and in her too anatomical demonstration of the varying vices and virtues of Tito: for she has none of that strange subtlety that a writer of novels must possess to delineate how this human soul may pass in the course of decomposition into some irremediable ruin. She is too much of the moralist to be able to present this character as a necessary and natural figure, such as far greater writers have had no difficulty in doing. She presents him—rather after the fashion of George Sand, as a fearful and warning example. Think, for a moment,—the comparison is all but impossible,—of this attempt at characterization with Browning's Guido Franceschini; for in his two monologues every nerve of the mind is touched by the patient scalpel, every joint and vein of the subtle and intricate spirit laid bare and divided. Compare this also with Cenci: the comparison has been made by Swinburne, with an equal praise of two masterpieces, The Cenci of Shelley and The Ring and the Book of Browning. Both Cenci and Franceschini are cunningly drawn and colored so as to be absolute models of the highest form of realism: as cunningly colored and drawn as the immortal creation of Madame Bovary.

Take, for instance, the character of Rochester in Jane Eyre. It is incomparable of its kind; an absolutely conceived living being, who has enough nerves and enough passion to more or less extinguish the various male characters in George Eliot's novels. That Maggie Tulliver, in The Mill on the Floss, the finest of her novels, can be moved to any sense but that of bitter disgust and sickening disdain by a thing—I will not write, a man—of Stephen Guest's character, is a lamentable and an ugly case of shameful failure; for as Swinburne says, "The last word of realism has surely been spoken, the last abyss of cynicism has surely been sounded and laid bare." And I am glad to note here that he dismisses her with this reference to three great French writers; using, of course, his invariable ironical paradoxes. "For a higher view and a more cheery aspect of the sex, we must turn back to those gentler teachers, those more flattering painters of our own—Laclos, Stendhal and Merrimée; we must take up La Double Méprise—or Le Rouge et le Noir—or Les Liaisons Dangereuses."