The Facts of Fiction Read Online Free PDF

left for Meredith to complete.
    Richardson’s novels may seem antiquated to despair in their scenes and diction, but they are forerunners of a popular school of fiction in which someone, and it is usually a woman, is desperately eager to express himself or herself, without ever knowing quite why, what or how; novels of suppressed individuality we should call them to-day.
    There is, indeed, about the ceaseless striving of Richardson’s characters the frantic, unearthly persistence of the actors in a dream. For Richardson in his simplicity believed that bad men spent the entire twenty-four hours of every day in being bad, and that good women (like Sir Charles Grandison) passed the entire twenty-four hours in indecently shaming the Devil.
    Hazlitt said that Richardson “seemed to spin his materials entirely out of his own brain, as if there hadbeen nothing existing in the world beyond that little room in which he sat writing.” And when the outside world did flow into that little room, it was only women, as pure as ice and as anxious about rape as the most nervous, elderly memsahib at an Indian hill-station, that it brought in on its flood.

Henry Fielding
    History has given us the portrait of Fielding as the archetype of eighteenth century genius; a handsome decaying face and sprawling figure, with canary vest claret-stained, seen above a palisade of bottles, orange-wenches and dunning tradesmen. It is a picturesque contrast; young Fielding, the man of the world, indolently loitering between Ranelagh and Vauxhall, and old Richardson, the man of letters industriously hurrying between Hammersmith and Salisbury Court.
    It does not, however, require a literary critic to detect that something is wrong with this historic conception. Fielding was forty-eight when he died, Richardson was over fifty before he had started
Pamela
. And playing mad Kit cannot be all beer and skittles if one is to be remembered as a Marlowe at the end of it.
    There is, indeed, no more fallacious view of Fielding’s most popular achievement,
Tom Jones
, than that it is a work of unrelieved inspiration: that Fielding throughout the whole tumultuous stream of it was cox and not stroke.
    Tom Jones
, on the contrary, bears almost every mark of evidence that we should expect in a production of painstaking intelligence and conscientious application of intellect. It is the high spirits that disguise the hard thinking. And it is the richness of incident that conceals the author’s recurrent poverty of something better. For it has to be admitted that the characters that are introduced on to the turntable of Fielding’s wit, like so many gramophone records all waiting for their creator to flick the needle on to them and set them speaking, denote acreator of greater fertility than profundity. Not that we need object, as is often done, to the discursive episodes—and “The Man on the Hill” is not the worst—on the score of their interrupting the story. To attempt to interrupt
Tom Jones
would be like putting a mouse-trap in the way of a Chinese cracker. The telling of the story of a life was Fielding’s especial talent; and more particularly to-day, when the story has died beneath a load of motive, we may be grateful to a writer who gives us half-a-dozen stories in place of one.
    There is perhaps in the whole history of English Letters no author more violently debated than Fielding. Richardson is now merely ignored; which is a simple, if unsatisfactory, end to all controversy. Fielding, however, is neither forgotten nor forgiven.
    It is possible to praise him extravagantly in the society of Hazlitt, Coleridge, Leigh Hunt, Gibbon, Jane Austen, Macaulay and Meredith, or to disparage him fiercely beside Johnson, Cobbett, De Quincey, Charlotte Bronte, Carlyle, Tennyson, Browning and Stevenson. On either side the society is so extremely good, that it makes the division more thoroughly bad.
    It would be easy to say that it is all