Why we should read. S. P. B. Mais
of them than those learned pedants whose lives have been entirely consumed in colleges and among books; for however exquisitely human nature may have been described by writers, the true practical system can be learnt only in the world."
He also requires of his ideal author "refinement, elegance and liberality of spirit." He must have a good heart and be capable of feeling. "The author who will make me weep," says Horace, "must first weep himself. No man can paint a distress well which he doth not feel while he is painting it. … I am convinced I never make my reader laugh heartily but where I have laughed before him."
Who would deny the interest or importance of digressions like these when they shed such a flood of light on to the author's attitude to his own work?
The sergeant who resented the imputation against his character conveyed by the words non sequitur ("You are another," cries the sergeant, "an you come to that. No more a sequitur than yourself. You are a pack of rascals, and I'll prove it, for I will fight the best man of you all for twenty pounds"); the lightning-like flash of inspiration which made Mrs. Waters repeat the cry, "Rape! Rape!" when she is discovered in bed with Tom; the logic of the landlady of the inn ("So easy and good-humoured were they that they found no fault with my Worcestershire perry, which I sold them for champagne; and it, to be sure, is as well tasted, and as wholesome, as the best champagne in the kingdom, otherwise I would scorn to give it 'em; and they drank me two bottles. No, no, I will never believe any harm of such sober, good sort of people")—all these touches and thousands more are proofs of how much genius depends upon "conversation," or a practical knowledge of the world, the power of distinguishing essential differences.
Fielding seems to have distinguished these essential differences not only in people but in the life of his time on every side. Realising full well that posterity would read him, he also realised what were the things that posterity would like to hear about it. So we get that inimitable description of the puppet show where "The Provoked Husband" displaced "Punch and Judy," by the throwing out of which "such idle trumpery puppet-shows were," in the words of their master, "at last brought to be a rational entertainment."
"I would by no means degrade the ingenuity of your profession," answered Jones, "but I should have been glad to have seen my old acquaintance Master Punch for all that; and so far from improving, I think, by leaving him out and his merry wife Joan, you have spoiled your puppet show"—a sentiment that many of us to-day will heartily endorse.
It is a rare treat to be shown a performance of Hamlet in the eighteenth century with Partridge as critic, preferring Claudius to the rest of the actors because he spoke louder, and objecting to the gravediggers because of their lack of skill. Then there is the gypsies' wedding in the barn, with its sumptuous food and its Solomon-like judgment delivered by the king on the cuckold: "Me do order dat you have no money given you, for you deserve punishment, not reward; me do order, therefore, dat you be de infamous gipsy, and do wear a pair of horns upon your forehead for one month; and dat your wife be called de whore, and pointed at all dat time; for you be de infamous gipsy, but she be no less de infamous whore."
Running through it all is the delicious Partridge, resenting not at all attacks upon his honour, but up in arms at once when Tom casts aspersions on his parts of speech. "A child may sometimes teach his grandmother to suck eggs. I have lived to a fine purpose, truly, if I am to be taught my grammar at this time of day."
Truly Fielding invoked the comic spirit to some purpose: "Come, thou, that hast inspired thy Aristophanes, thy Lucian, thy Cervantes, thy Rabelais, thy Molière, thy Shakespeare, thy Swift, thy Marivaux, fill my pages with humour; till mankind learn the good nature to laugh only at the follies of others, and the humility to grieve at their own." The creator of Partridge is worthy to hold his own in the kingdom of humour with any of the octette.
No less successful is he when he leaves the broad highway and the rustic inns of the west for the fashionable life of the metropolis. The coquetry of Lady Bellaston and the gallantry of Lord Fellamar are as well portrayed as the poachers and squires of Somerset. Indeed with Hogarth on the one side and Fielding on the other as companions he must be extremely dull-witted who fails to get right behind the scenes of eighteenth-century England, when the devil was no longer believed in, and ladies of fashion curtsied low to their male friends, when nobody's manners were "over-nice," when a virtuous girl was almost as rare as a road safe from highwaymen, where "the highest life is much the dullest, and affords very little humour or entertainment" beyond "dressing and cards, eating and drinking, bowing and curtsying," where a country gentleman orders as a dinner for one at the Hercules' Pillars "a shoulder of mutton roasted, a spare rib of pork and a fowl and egg sauce," where the same country gentleman sends his daughter into the arms of her lover with a "Yoicks!" and a "Tally-ho!": "To her, boy! to her! Go to her! That's it, little honeys. O, that's it!" and a "Harkee, Allworthy, I'll bet thee five pounds to a crown we have a boy to-morrow nine months; but prithee tell me what wut ha'! Wut ha' Burgundy, champagne, or what? For, please Jupiter, we'll make a night on't."
We read Tom Jones, then, first and foremost because it is a "rattling good yarn" from start to finish, full of hair-breadth escapes, trials of, and misunderstandings between, hero and heroine, ending, after fickle Fortune has done everything in her power to prevent it, in the complete happiness of their union; we read it because in the course of our journey through it we make many new and life-long friends, find much to laugh at; tenderness and pity are roused in us for the unhappy, mirth at the discomfiture of the self-complacent hypocrites.
We read it in order to be transported to a healthier century than ours, when neurasthenia was unknown and people were tortured by nothing worse than colic and spleen; we read it to get away from people who think too much and live not at all, to people who think not at all and live every moment of their lives to the full, sinning, if they sin, splendidly, like the pagans they were.
We read it because it was written by a man of genius possessed of a fine, liberal-hearted spirit, a perfect command of his native tongue and a great lover of humanity.
"And now, my friend, I take this opportunity of heartily wishing thee well. If I have been an entertaining companion to thee, I promise thee it is what I have desired."
II
WUTHERING HEIGHTS
We read and reread Wuthering Heights because it is like no other book in the world. The nearest approach to it is not English at all, but Russian. Dostoievsky in The Brothers Karamazov has characters in some degree approximating to Heathcliff. In English fiction there is no one in the least like him.
Emily Brontë with her love of life, her passionate adoration of the earth, sweeps us off our feet. She plunges us into a world of elemental lusts and hates and cruelties. Heathcliff is treated brutally and revenges himself even more brutally. The frustrated passion of Catherine for Heathcliff and of Heathcliff for Catherine is scarcely distinguishable from hate; they repay each other with torture for torture, pang for hopeless pang. Judged by his deeds, Heathcliff is as much a monster of evil as Iago, but—and this is what makes Emily Brontë's genius so amazing—we never for a moment judge him by his deeds. The material event never seems to matter. In fact, so far as material actions go, Heathcliff is completely inert. He lets things take their course. His most striking, almost his only violent, action is his running away with Isabella. He does nothing to prevent Catherine from marrying Edgar Linton: his vengeance is completely removed from any material sphere and once accomplished rouses in him no satisfaction: he merely dies. The world of Heathcliff and Catherine is a world of spiritual affinities, of spiritual conflicts and loves. The whole book moves on a spiritual plane except for one lapse, the unwholesome physical passion of Isabella for her husband. "No brutality disgusted her," says Heathcliff. "I've sometimes relented, from pure lack of invention, in my experiments on what she could endure and still creep shamefully back."
Catherine is completely innocent when she gives her body to Edgar while her soul belongs to Heathcliff. This is her unforgivable sin, the attempt to sunder the body from the soul.
"Nelly,"