THE ROMANCE OF A RASCAL

It was Thackeray, I think, somewhere in the dizzy mazes of his Roundabout Papers, who made a remark which throws some light on literary fashions and the fate of Smollett's Peregrine Pickle. He described very vividly the fervour he felt as a boy for the Waverley Novels; and how those great romances filled the boyhood of those, like himself, who were to make the literature of that most romantic epoch which we call in England the Victorian era. He adds an interesting comment to this effect: "Our fathers used to talk about Peregrine Pickle, telling us (the sly old boys) that it was capital fun. But I think I was rather bewildered by it."

That, I fear, may be the immediate effect upon many either of Thackeray's period or even of our own period, where it has inherited the great literary tradition, which many learnt in youth from Thackeray, and which Thackeray learnt in youth from Scott. Most of those who grew up under such standards of fiction, as did the present writer, may be disposed to say at first that they find Smollett's novel rather bewildering. Not quite so bewildering as some of the most modern novels, of course. But many people seem to have a singular literary test, by which they like being bewildered by a new book, but dislike being bewildered by an old one. As I shall point out presently, this is very largely because the new book is not so new as it pretends to be. And the old book is not so very old, as the real stages of history go. In short, the real moral of all these things is the astonishing rapidity with which moods and standards change and change again; often changing back from the third condition to the first. There is nothing so mystifying as the rapidity with which new literary methods harden, except the brittleness with which they break. Each traveller who turns the corner thinks it will lead him into a straight road of progress; but really it leads him, in about ten minutes, to another corner which turns into another and equally crooked road. The point about a book like Peregrine Pickle can be fixed fairly precisely, by considering what are the changes that separated him from Thackeray, or that separate Thackeray from us.

In that little phrase from the Roundabout Papers there are, to begin with, some interesting and even amusing points. For instance, we are always told that the Victorian parent, or, even more, the early nineteenth-century parent, was a Puritan who forbade his family the idle as well as the improper forms of light literature; a Heavy Father who sat very heavily even on ordinary love-stories or romantic plays. Even so eighteenth-century a type as Macaulay identified the opinion of most sober and responsible parents with so extraordinary a parent as Sir Anthony Absolute in the comic play. "A circulating library is an evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge." Even a modern so steeped in the eighteenth century as Mr. Max Beerbohm has described the typical papa of a generation that might well have been that of Thackeray's papa, as a gloomy and ponderous person who talked to his children about nothing but Hell. Surely that one little glimpse from Thackeray's own essays might lead one to guess that there is something wrong in all this. It is difficult to imagine the Puritan papa, who commonly talked about Hell, winding up with a recommendation to read Peregrine Pickle. It is difficult to suppose that a race of Sir Anthony Absolutes, disapproving of all novels, would have gone out of their way to select this novel, out of all earthly novels, on the ground that it was "capital fun". The parent must have been a very sly old boy indeed if he really thrust Peregrine Pickle on the attention of a little boy, whose head was full of ideals of chivalry, like those of Quentin Durward and Ivanhoe.

The truth is that the elements were too mixed, and, above all, the fashions too fugitive, for any of these generalisations. Men who lose traditions abandon themselves to conventions; but the conventions are more fleeting than fashions. There were papas who would have been almost as much shocked at their daughters reading Pride and Prejudice as at their reading Peregrine Pickle. But they were the papas and not the grand-papas. There was a sort of household where Hell was the brightest topic of chat; but it was not the old-fashioned household but rather the new-fashioned household. It came in with the Methodists, who were regarded as innovators and rebels. That episode of extreme severity, which was the beginning of the highly expurgated Victorian fiction, need not here be traced to its historical causes. Broadly speaking, it came from the rapid increase of wealth and power among the Nonconformists of the north, who vetoed the frankness both of the old gentry and the old peasantry of the south. The point here is that the work of these Puritans, from Lancashire or Yorkshire, was so very rapidly done that men forgot that it was so very recent. All this has to be understood before anybody, looking back through the nineteenth century, can do justice to the work of Smollett. The point of it is that not only did the changes come, but each generation accepted them as if they had always been unchangeable. Thus, in the case just mentioned, Thackeray began to write novels long after Dickens; he was still an artist, or art student, when he offered to illustrate Pickwick. Dickens, in the flood of his popularity that followed Pickwick, had already accepted and popularised what we call the Victorian conventions. This has been somewhat harshly expressed by Mr. Aldous Huxley when he said that a writer like Dickens writes as if he were a child, while a writer like Smollett writes as if he were a grown man. But indeed there is a considerable link between a writer like Smollett and a writer like Aldous Huxley. For the road has taken another sharp turn backwards; and the interlude of Victorian innocence is again out of sight. There is one instance of this, which dominates and largely explains the whole story of Peregrine Pickle.

When Thackeray called Vanity Fair "a novel without a hero", or even when he made the relatively realistic Pendennis a novel with a rather unheroic hero, he was doubtless by that time so accustomed to Victorian fiction as to feel that he was doing something new, and even "cynical". For Victorian fiction had already returned to the old romantic idea that the hero should be heroic, even if it did not understand him so well as did the old romances. Nicholas Nickleby vanquishes Squeers as St. George vanquishes the dragon; and John Ridd is a knight without fear or reproach, like Ivanhoe. But in fact Thackeray was only slightly reacting towards what had been universal in the time of that sly old boy, his papa.

All novels like Peregrine Pickle, all novels up to the time of Pickwick, were written frankly on a far more cynical convention: that the hero should not be heroic. The enterprising Mr. Pickle is certainly not heroic. He is many things that are good; not only brave, but often warm-hearted and considerate; and, above all, capable of recognising better men than himself. But, for the rest, by Victorian and even by normal standards, he is simply a coarse and rapacious rascal; nor does Smollett really pretend that he is anything else. This tendency to follow with delight the tricks and triumphs of somebody little better than a swindler comes from the historical origin of this type of story, which began in what is called the picaresque novel. It is the romance of a wanderer, apt to turn from the romance of a peddler to that of a highway robber. It is a curious coincidence that Smollett translated Gil Blas, in which this new cynical romance made its first triumph; and also translated Don Quixote, in which the road was cleared for it by the rout of the old romances which had made their heroes impossibly heroic. But about this sort of rambling tale, of the Romance of a Rascal, there are certain modern misunderstandings to be avoided. It would be complete misunderstanding of men like Tobias Smollett to suppose that because the heroes are immoral the authors are even unmoral. It is a peculiar characteristic of all that stalwart school, which represented this picaresque element in England that they do believe in heroism for anybody except heroes. Both in Fielding and Smollett and others we find a sort of fixed habit of thought, by which virtue is represented, and is even preached, and is often preached vehemently and in terms of authority; but never by the principal character, who is a young man of the world apparently not expected either to preach it or to practise it. Parson Adams is a serious picture of a good man, and Joseph Andrews is only a bad joke; but Joseph gives his name to the book. Fielding is more concerned with Tom Jones than with Alworthy; but be agrees with Mr. Alworthy and not with Tom Jones. And if anyone wishes to note exactly how this habit expresses itself in Smollett, let him turn to the typical scene in which Peregrine Pickle provokes a duel with Mr. Gauntlet. By all possible standards Peregrine is to behave like a vulgar and low-minded cad, actually sneering at the poverty of the soldier whom he has insulted, and being ignominiously defeated by the man he has so coarsely despised. Certainly no Victorian romancer would have dragged his hero through the mud of such a meeting. And yet the whole incident brings out in glowing colours all that is really good and lovable about Peregrine Pickle. He does vividly realise that the other man is more virtuous than himself; he acts as impetuously on the moral as on the immoral impulse;. he apologises after defeat, which is more difficult than apologising before it. In other words, Mr. Gauntlet, like Parson Adams, stands for something fixed and recognised; a virtue which the other characters venerate even while they violate. In this incident Peregrine is represented in the course of an hour or so as behaving almost incredibly badly and then almost incredibly well; and yet it is quite credible. Why do we thus feel that there is something solid in it after all? First, no doubt, because Smollett was a real novelist, and the character of Peregrine Pickle was a real character. He does convey what later sentiment would have called the contradiction: that Peregrine was a scoundrel, but a warm-hearted scoundrel; that lie was very near to being a swindler, but always an impetuous swindler. But it is due, almost as much, to the sense of firmness produced by the fact that vice and virtue are still treated as facts. Our sense of sincerity is founded on the fact that Tobias Smollett, as well as Peregrine Pickle, did really believe in right and wrong, and thought the principal character wrong and the secondary character right.

It is here that we find the chief difference between old writers like Smollett and many modern writers who set themselves successfully to produce the same convincing smell of dirt, the same unmistakable ugliness in the details of life, the same slippery and sometimes slimy irresponsibility about sex, the same heroic persistency in avoiding heroism. The difference is that Smollett's hero, or villain, does know exactly where he is in the moral world, even if it is where he ought not to be. The modern adventurer of the same type occupies all his adventures in trying to discover where he is. He is not so much breaking laws with bravery and cunning, as trying to learn the laws, with constant bewilderment and despair. Virtue does not rebuke him; the best that can be said for him is that vice generally bores him. Therefore he is not wholly successful in copying the older writers in their two gifts of lucidity and grossness; because he lacks the third angle of the triangle: their confidence.

Considered as a series of chapters, Peregrine Pickle is simply a chapter of accidents. Curiously enough the splash it made in its own day, especially in the sparkling world of wit and fashion, was almost entirely due to what almost anybody would now call the dullest part of the book. The insertion called "Memoirs of a Lady of Quality" was supposed to have some scandalous allusiveness to aristocratic society at the time; but it is not typical of the author, or even of the book. Nor can we in practice class this patchy and parenthetical style with the similar irregularity of a book like Pickwick. Most people, at least most mature people, have read Pickwick. Comparatively few, even among the most aged people, have read Peregrine Pickle. There cannot be very many sly old boys still going about the street, and advising modern youth to read it and find it capital fun. To many it must now be introduced as a new book rather than an old one; and the method of approach is sharply divergent. In writing of Dickens, we are writing for our fellow Dickensians, and can prove any point or illustrate any theory by examples they know as well as we. I do not think it is unfair to say that if I were to begin by referring the average reader to the well-known attitude of Mr. Metaphor, or the incident of Mr. Hornbeck, he would hardly be so suddenly illumined as by a reference to Mr. Stiggins or Mr. Weller. In cases like this, where an historic work by a man of genius is not now widely popular, or in immediate contact with the reading public, the cause and the problem can almost always be found in certain changes of taste which, rapid as they are, do correspond largely to changes of ideas. A man who opens Peregrine Pickle must not expect what he gets from a good Victorian novel, or a good modern novel; and only by some explanation of principles can he ever discover that it may contain things quite as good. It is well, therefore, to emphasise some general qualities that are even better. The novel of Smollett's time was better than the novel of the Victorian time, in so far as it recognised more clearly that good and evil exist and are entangled even in the same man. The novel of Smollett's time was better than the novel of our own time, in so far as it recognised that, even when they are entangled in the same man, they can still be distinguished and are very different, and at war till death.