All the Facts of Fiction
Dn. BAKER has issued the fifth volume of his painstaking history of the English Novel, and a sixth volume will soon appear. Another volume, or possibly several volumes, will bring his history down to the eve of the present day. It is salutary to remember that Mr. Ford Madox Ford covered the whole ground from Nash to Henry James in one very short volume, without neglecting any novelist of major importance. Dr. Baker can hardly be accused of Mr. Ford's unacademic preference for one novelist rather than another ; he has devoted one volume to "The Elizabethan Age and After," one volume to "The Later Romances and the Establishment of Realism," one volume to "Intellectual Realism" (a volume which includes Smollett, Fielding, Richardson and Sterne) ; and now he devotes roughly the same space to the period between Smollett and Jane 'Austen when there were no novel- ists of greater importance than Fanny Burney, Goldsmith, Beckford and Mrs. Radcliffe.
The Memoirs of a Flea, Lettres de Mistriss Butlerd ix mylord Charles Alfred, duc de Cailombridge, The Memoirs of an Hermaphrodite, even the entrancing period titles do little to lighten Dr. Baker's pedestrian humourless style. For few of the novels he describes has he any sympathy. "They were affected by literary fashions," he writes, not realizing that he is robbing himself of the only excuse for his history, "but had little influence on the course of literary development . . . poor novels may be landmarks when they contain the germs of some tendency or hint at some line of interest that others will pursue much further." It was the merit of Miss Tompkins's valuable work on the same period, The Popular Novel in England, 1770-1800, that she did disclose the germ of better things in such novelists RS Rage and Jenner and Elizabeth Blower. "Bare mention," Dr. Baker strites, "must suffice for Charles Jenner," in whose prose Miss Tompkins noted the
first lyric quickening of the romantic movement. He finds nothing more illuminating of the novel of sensibility than that "high flown emotionalism is a disguise for baser impulses, 'fiddling harmonics on the strings of sensualism,'" while Miss Tompkins made the invaluable technical point that in criticizing these novels we should " discard the term structure with its architectural suggestions, and think of these books in terms of colour. What their authors aimed at—at least, the best of them—was delicacy and variety of emotional hue."
Technical criticism of this kind is quite outside Dr. Baker's range. Putting, in his own words, Joseph Andrezvs and
Tom Jones, "under the magnifying glass and exhibiting the technical means by which Fielding obtained his effects," he naively notes "how he made his personages portray. themselves and always speak in character, how his fiction was thus self-auihenticated and all pretences were rendered superfluous ; how, again, he so managed his scenes and links of narrative that the story seemed to tell itself, and yet all the while his was a controlled. realism, conveying 's dear philosophy% Of life at the same time as it seemed to present a polished. mirror to reality."
Later he remarks that Fanny Burnek's fiction "was simply a. mirror ; Fielding's had been a mirror with a'philosoPhy of life; Rasselas is an example of the philosophy without the mirror."
These are fair examples of Dr: 'Baker's 'criticism and fair examples, too, of his clotted. style. One can 'dilly suppose that an undiscriminating love of facts for their own sake', without relation to any literary or even historical value, has spurred him to the immense labour of this history in which as many pages 'must have been devoted to forgotten novels as Ranke devoted to forgotten Popes. Certainlk it can hardly be a labour of even an uncritical love for fiction, or he Would not have made so lukewarm and irrelevant a claim : that the novel secures an illusion of actuality in the reader's mind. differing psychologically, but hardly less powerful than that evoked by living actors with scenery mimicking the real
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