London, April to September 1822
NOVELS, at the end of the last century, were included in the general proscription. Richardson slept forgotten; his countrymen saw traces in his style of the inferior society in the heart of which he had lived. Fielding maintained his reputation. Sterne, the impresario of originality, was passé. The Vicar of Wakefield was still read.
If Richardson lacks style (which we foreigners are in no position to judge), he will not survive, for we live only by means of style. It is useless to rebel against this truth: the best-composed work, adorned with verisimilar description and filled with a thousand other perfections, is stillborn without style. Style, and there a thousand kinds, is not to be learned; it is a gift from heaven; it is talent itself. But if Richardson has been abandoned merely because of certain bourgeois turns of phrase, intolerable to elegant society, he may live again. The Revolution underway, by abasing the aristocracy and lifting up the middle classes, will make the traces of household customs and inferior language less remarkable, or make them disappear.
From Clarissa and Tom Jones sprang the two principal branches of the family of modern English novels: the novels of family life and domestic drama, and the novels of adventure and social description. With Richardson, the manners of the West End erupted into fiction’s domain: novels were suddenly full of castles, Lords and Ladies, water-parties, adventures on the race-course, at balls, at the opera, and at Ranelagh, complete with plenty of “chit-chat” and endless prattle. It was never long before the scene shifted to Italy, where lovers crossed the Alps amid dreadful perils and sorrows of the soul fit to melt the heart of a lion. “A lion would shed tears!” was common parlance in good society.
Among the thousands of novels that have flooded England for half a century, two have held their ground: Caleb Williams and The Monk. I never did meet Godwin during my exile in London, but I saw Lewis twice. He was then a young member of Parliament, an amiable man with the look and manners of a Frenchman. The works of Anne Radcliffe were a type unto themselves. Those of Mrs. Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Miss Burney, and so on, have, as they say, a chance of survival. “There ought to be laws,” Montaigne says, “against inept and useless scribblers, as there are against vagabonds and idlers. They should ban the use of people’s hands, including mine and a hundred others. Scribbling seems to be a symptom of an inundated age.”[6]
But these diverse schools of sedentary novelists, novelists traveling by stagecoach or carriage, novelists of lakes and mountains, of ruins and ghosts, cities and drawing rooms, have all been lost in the new school of Walter Scott, just as poetry has hurried to follow in the footsteps of Lord Byron.
The illustrious Scots writer made his debut in the theater of letters, during my exile in London, with a translation of Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen. He went on to make his name as a poet, and the bent of his genius finally led him to the novel. It seems to me that he created a false genre, perverting novel and history alike, so that novelists are trying now to write historical novels and historians are novelizing their histories. If, in Walter Scott, I sometimes have to pass over the interminable conversations, no doubt it is my own fault; but, in my eyes, one of Walter Scott’s great merits is that everyone can read him. It demands much greater efforts of talent to interest the reader by keeping within limits than to please him by exceeding all measure; it is more difficult to regulate the heart than to disturb it.
Burke may have rooted English politics in the past, but Walter Scott pushed the English back to the Middle Ages. Everything that he wrote, made, and built was Gothic: books, furniture, churches, castles. But the lords of the Magna Carta are today the “fashionables” of Bond Street: a frivolous tribe pitching camp in ancient manors, awaiting the arrival of the new generations who are preparing to drive them out.