Masters of the English Novel: A Study of Principles and Personalities. Richard Burton

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СКАЧАТЬ nimis had evidently not been taken to heart by Samuel Richardson, Esquire, of Hammersmith, author of "Clarissa Harlowe" in eight volumes, and Printer to the Queen. Again and again one of Clarissa's bursts of emotion under the tantalizing treatment of her seducer loses its effect because another burst succeeds before we (and she) have recovered from the first one. He strives to give us the broken rhythm of life (therein showing his affinity with the latter day realists) instead of that higher and harder thing—the more perfect rhythm of art; not so much the truth (which cannot be literally given) as that seeming-true which is the aim and object of the artistic representation. Hence the necessity of what Brunetiere calls in an admirable phrase, the true function of the novel—"to be an abridged representation of life." Construction in the modern sense Richardson had not studied, naturally enough, and was innocent of the fineness of method and the sure-handed touches of later technique. And there is a kind of drawing-room atmosphere in his books, a lack of ozone which makes Fielding with all his open-air coarseness a relief. But judged in the setting of his time, this writer did a wonderful thing not only as the Father of the Modern Novel but one of the few authors in the whole range of fiction who holds his conspicuous place amid shifting literary modes and fashions, because he built upon the surest of all foundations—the social instinct, and the human heart.

      If the use of the realistic method alone denoted the Novel, Defoe, not Richardson, might be called its begetter. "Robinson Crusoe," more than twenty years before "Pamela," would occupy the primate position, to say nothing of Swift's "Gulliver's Travels," antedating Richardson's first story by some fifteen years. Certainly the observational method, the love of detail, the grave narrative of imagined fact (if the bull be permitted) are in this earlier book in full force. But "Robinson Crusoe" is not a rival because it does not study man-in-society; never was a story that depended less upon this kind of interest. The position of Crusoe on his desert isle is so eminently unsocial that he welcomes the black man Friday and quivers at the human quality in the famed footprints in the sand. As for Swift's chef d'oeuvre, it is a fairy-tale with a grimly realistic manner and a savage satiric intention. To speak of either of these fictions as novels is an example of the prevalent careless nomenclature. Between them and "Pamela" there yawns a chasm. Moreover, "Crusoe" is a frankly picaresque tale belonging to the elder line of romantic fiction, where incident and action and all the thrilling haps of Adventure-land furnish the basis of appeal rather than character analysis or a study of social relations. The personality of Crusoe is not advanced a whit by his wonderful experiences; he is done entirely from the outside.

      Richardson, therefore, marks the beginning of the modern form. But that the objection to Defoe as the true and only begetter of the Novel lies in his failure, in his greatest story, to center the interest in man as part of the social order and as human soul, is shown by the fact that his less known, but remarkable, story "Moll Flanders," picaresque as it is and depicting the life of a female criminal, has yet considerable character study and gets no small part of its appeal for a present-day reader from the minute description of the fall and final reform of the degenerate woman. It is comparatively crude in characterization, but psychological value is not entirely lacking. However, with Richardson it is almost all. It was of the nature of his genius to make psychology paramount: just there is found his modernity. Defoe and Swift may be said to have added some slight interest in analysis pointing towards the psychologic method, which was to find full expression in Samuel Richardson.

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