ances. COMEDY IN FICTION. THE world grows graver as it grows older, and humanity gets duller as it becomes more civilised. Worse luck! for the fact is brought home to us every day. We are busied about many things, and bothered with many cares. We think overmuch about our manners and our neighbours; we are bilious, and gouty, and dyspeptic, or at all events we ought to be, if we are judged by appearWhat can be more dreary than a great London dinner? It seems to anticipate the indigestion that waits upon indifferent entrées. Theodore Hook would freeze up in that icy atmosphere of starched formality; and the Prince Regent, who was called the first gentleman of his time, would be condemned as an intolerable bore, if he were not absolved for his station. Croker, who, although snappish and somewhat cross-grained, was no bad judge, after a merry evening at Carlton House declared that Scott and the Regent in their respective manners were the best raconteurs he had ever heard. The one kept capping the other in a swift succession of admirable stories. But stories now are as much out of date as the songs and lyrics by Moore and Morris that gave a bouquet to the '72 claret at dessert. Not, be it remarked parenthetically, that we much complain of that; for a story-teller holds the courteous company at his mercy, and for one who hits the mark there are scores who mistake their vocation. Nowadays at a dinnerparty the best a gifted and genial convive can do is to make himself quietly agreeable to the women on either side of him; his wits are wasted like the flashes from a thunder-cloud, and he does nothing to brighten the general gloom. Nevertheless, as the wise Sam Slick remarks, there is considerable human natur' in every man! which is but a free American version of the familiar old classical adage. Happily a hearty appreciation of fun and drollery still lurks in many a nook and corner; and we often come across it where we should least expect it. Detesting the modern fashion of interviewing, we should be the last to intrude on the privacies of social life. But we may whisper that the merriest dinner we have lately assisted at came off in what should have been a solemn company of venerable seigneurs, in an establishment that takes for its symbol the sage bird of Minerva. The meeting at the round table was decidedly more successful than that at another "round table" which we know of. The circumference was not very great, yet round it were assembled representatives of the Benches, both clerical and legal, with a sprinkling of men of some little distinction in arms, letters, and science. The guests were of course in evening costume; but, metaphorically, when the servants had left the room, they may be said to have exchanged it for slippers and shooting-coats. The frost had never been severe, but now the ice was broken and pulverised. We need hardly say that decorum reigned supreme, for want of decency is want of sense, and the society was something more than sensible. But short of licence, there was liberty in every shape; there was an incessant radiation of sparks from the contact of bright intellects, without the faintest semblance of effort; even anecdotes, by way of illustration, were freely risked by veterans of the Bar and the pulpit; one happy thought suggested another; and so the hours glided by imperceptibly to an accompaniment of light-hearted laughter. When the party reluctantly broke up, latch-keys must have been generally in requisition; and, in short, as William Laidlaw remarked of a memorable meeting between Scott and Davy, "it was a very superior occasion." That reminiscence of yesterday bears directly on the subject of fun in fiction. There is a season for mirth, as the Preacher sagely remarks, but the season comes from time to time to the most saturnine of us. We naturally turn to good novels for distraction; but more or less consciously we long to be amused, and we like our fiction light and somewhat playful. It is safe to say that all the greatest novelists have shown a strong sense of humour in some shape. There are writers whom we place in the second rank, who made their mark purely by sensation; but, like Wilkie Collins, they paid homage to the principle by striving to be humorous, although unsuccessfully. Humour in fiction may take an infinity of forms, from the broadest farce to quaint suggestion; and no one has more admirably summarised the Protean aspect of wit than Bishop Butler in a passage that has been often quoted. We are inclined to attribute the decay of the historical novel to the difficulty of introducing any natural fun in it. It needs a Shakespeare, or cum intervallo, a Scott or a Dumas, to conjure up the Falstaffs, the Justice Shallows, the comical clowns and the blundering peasantry of former generations; to make the medieval men in armour shake their sides; and to catch the rough flavour of the boisterous jests that made the rafters ring again in the baronial hall, when the flagons were going the rounds of the oaken tables. Scott for the life of him could not help being ludicrous sometimes, though even with his natural flow of sympathetic geniality the merriment in 'Quentin Durward' or 'Anne of Geierstein,' in 'Ivanhoe' or the chivalrous Tales of the Crusaders, is obviously strained. Dumas, with the overflowing vivacity of a light-spirited and versatile Frenchman, was perhaps scarcely less successful than Scott in the remarkable novels in which he has romanced on the dissolute histories of the Valois and the Bourbons. And Scott and Dumas are easily first among modern historical novelists. G. P. R. James was not unfrequently picturesque and dramatic; but, so far as we remember, he seldom or never laughs; and nowadays nobody reads him by any accident, unless occasionally when some intelligent tourist in the Palatinate buys the 'Heidelberg,' which is published in the Tauchnitz edition. Even then we will lay long odds that the purchaser skips a full third of the stilted pages. A few of Harrison Ainsworth's earlier novels will survive, but simply because he makes the reader sip deep of horrors, in what Thackeray pleasantly characterised. as his light and playful romances. His reputation, such as it is, will rest on the rack and the quarteringblock, on the horrors of famine and plague, and the dark mysteries of the dungeon; for his merry dwarfs, and his giant warders, and his headsmen drawing tankards of ale when off duty, are lamentable caricatures from the comical point of view. Even the 'Harold, the 'Rienzi,' and the 'Last of the Barons' of Lord Lytton, are consigned already to comparative oblivion; while 'My Novel, with such inimitably humorous sketches as the Squire and the Parson, and the Machiavellian philanthropist of the Casino, is likely to live with the English language. Lord Lytton could put a Riccabocca in the stocks, resigning himself philosophically to patience under the red umbrella; but it surpassed powers which were less flexible than vigorously dramatic to give us to realise the rude humour of the jovial Saxons when they were carousing in bellicose anticipation before the battle of Hastings. It is certain that the humour is not there; but it might be pleaded, had not Shakespeare taught us differently, that the novelist holds the mirror faithfully to nature when he ignores the existence of fun in these days. Like Dr John Brown's famous dog, people of all ranks were taking life seriously, and for good reason. The lower classes were suffering in the blackness of despair, seldom lightened by one hopeful flicker of sunshine, and their so-called betters were busily oppressing them, when not fighting among themselves. A mad and a melancholy world, my masters! might have been the motto of all the medieval chronicles. The historical romance at its best is dramatic, picturesque, and sensational, but the fathers of modern English fiction, on the other hand, are nothing if they are not farcical or humorous. And the humour is necessarily of the broadest kind, for it aims at the close reproduction of contemporary manners and the tone of contemporary talk, when it was the fashion to call a spade a spade. We know what Sir Robert Walpole said about the only conversation he found generally suitable to the very mixed parties of guests who gathered round his hospital board at Houghton. And if the loosest conversation, the most ribald stories, and the most licentious jests were encouraged by the Prime Minister, we may conceive what went on at the table of a Squire Western, or at dinner and supper in the country inns where the occupants of the stage-waggons stopped to refresh themselves. Those early novelists were the veritable realists. They painted from the life exactly as they had seen it, drawing very charily on fancy or imagination. They conformed themselves to the tastes of the times, or the interested advice of the booksellers. Even the super-refined Sterne has a not unfrequent outbreak of coarseness, just as he studs the pages of his ‘Sentimental Journey' with what Thackeray calls "his dreary double entendres." But we doubt whether Fielding or Smollett even suspected they were indecent; they only copied Nature as they knew her, and scouted hypocrisy and sanctimonious pretences. For, long after the accession of the house of Hanover, the reaction against Puritanism still ran strong. Indeed what is barely indelicate in one age is considered grossly indecent in the next. Readers of the 'Life of Scott' will remember how he was asked by his old aunt, Mrs Keith of Ravelston, to get her the novels of Mrs Afra Behn, which she had enjoyed as a girl. Her dutiful nephew sent her the books, which he had procured with considerable trouble, in a sealed parcel. But before she had turned over many pages, the good lady had had more than enough. She could not understand, she said, why she blushed as an old woman at what she had read in her maidenhood as a matter of course. The mystery. was easily explained, but the story is nevertheless significant. We glanced at Mrs Behn ourself in an edition which was brought out about a dozen years ago. We did not get far enough to be either shocked or contaminated, for we found her intolerably dull. Dulness is assuredly not the fault of Fielding or Smollett; and the more often we turn to 'Tom Jones' or 'Roderick Random,' the more genuine is the admiration we feel for those admirable painters of manners. With Fielding especially the subtly humorous analysis of character is so cleverly disguised under an appearance of candid simplicity, that on a hasty perusal it is impossible to do it justice. There are innumerable telling touches of description which are rather suggested than expressed; but the charm of both Fielding and Smollett is, that characters are continually being brought out in the free-and-easy play of every day action. With them all the world's a stage, and all the men and women are players. But as they wrote after the manners of the age, and made their hits by studying the likings of the audience, broad comedy is constantly transforming itself into screaming farce. Consequently not a few of the most effective situations which were always strong, strike us now as repulsive, and when they turn upon love, whether light or serious, they pass the limits of modern licence. The passion of Tom Jones is sensual far more than sentimental, and even the fair Sophia, with all her delicacy, is content to accept it as it is. The key to the spirit of Fielding's love-making is to be found in the final and very suggestive scene where the lady expresses some natural doubts as to her volatile admirer's future constancy. Tom does not trouble himself to swear eternal fidelityto declare that he has seen the error of his ways, and means to tread in the paths of virtue as a reformed character. He simply leads the young beauty before a looking-glass, asks her to cast a glance at her unrivalled charms, and then say whether it is possible for a lover to be false to her. Sophia smiles at the compliment and is satisfied-though it leaves her happiness at the mercy of an attack of the small-pox. That scene seemed perfectly natural then. Now it would be condemned, not, perhaps, altogether on moral grounds, but as an artistic mistake and an outrage on the conventionalities. And if many of the scenes are strong, it follows that the language is full-flavoured to coarseness, especially when the primitive natives break out in a passion. Squire Western never stopped to pick his words; and when in the best of tempers, after the second bottle, he scattered about such flowers of speech as are current now in the Black Country. "Our army swore terribly in Flanders," and our gallant soldiers were recruited from the small farmers and agricultural labourers, who swear at large and are foulmouthed as they habitually were in the most mirth-stirring episodes of Fielding and Smollett. Hence Fielding and Smollett are meat for strong men and for nobody else. Not only so, but we are glad to think that even modern men of the world are repelled by their antiquated grossness. For ourselves, we admire their works as we admire those plays of Shakespeare for which we happen to have no especial predilection. We recognise their incontestable merits. But we confess we come to the enjoyment of them with some sense of a task, and we should never take them up by way of relaxation towards the small hours, when the wearied brain craves innocent refreshment. Smollett's scenes on board ship, and Fielding's story of his cruising to Lisbon in search of health, suggest sea-novels, although thereby we set the chronology of our sketching at defiance. For the best sea-novels have always perpetuated something of the licence of the older writers. The seanovelist has been bred and brought up in a midshipman's berth, far away from the strict social proprieties; if he takes pen in hand, as a sailor, and succeeds, we may generally swear that the spirit of fun has been strong in him. He begins by looking at the humorous side of the seaman's life, which says much for the buoyancy of his temperament, when we remember the hardships and miseries to which the tars of two generations back were condemned. They were knocked out of time by pressgangs, to find themselves manacled and bleeding below battened - down hatches. They were summarily separated from the wives and families dependent on them; they were shipped for interminable cruises, when they seldom had a day's liberty on shore; they might be flogged, ironed, or keelhauled at the caprice of an autocratic captain: when struck down in an engagement, they were cut up by some surgeon's mate in a stuffy cockpit; and they were brought round to convalescence on the salt pork and weevily biscuits which bred scurvy and other diseases in healthy constitutions. As for the officers, they fared scarcely better in their different degree. And moreover, unless they had aristocratic connections or patronage, they had to scramble for each step of deferred promotion, or sicken in the cold shade of neglect, till the master's mate became the greyhaired veteran. Consequently, as matter of fact, the realistic maritime novel should be the most melancholy of all reading. But look how a life at sea is misrepresented by the jovial and comical imagination of a Marryat. He skims over improbabilities by selecting his heroes among young fellows of fortune or fair expectations. Fortune befriends them, or luck steps in, and he leads them on from one laughable scene to another. They have their trials, as who has not? to parody the remarks of Mr Guppy, when he touched gently on his mother's weakness for getting drunk. But we know all the time that those trials will prepare them for advancement, and they rise superior to them in the elasticity of youthful courage even when still feeling the pangs, -as when Peter Simple is rope's-ended by O'Brien out of the prostrating fit of sea-sickness which threatened to be indefinitely prolonged. O'Brien, though he chastens paternally, is by no means brutal. He knows that Peter, like a young bear, has all his sorrows before him; he thinks it best he should have a small instalment at once, which shall save worse suffering in the end. He lays it into the groaning sufferer with the knotted rope, and we do not say that it is a form of treatment which will be popular in a Channel packet. But Peter tumbles somehow out of his hammock, and painfully taking a seat upon his sea-chest, enjoys a biscuit and basin of pea-soup. How heartily a young fellow laughs at that sort of scene, although any well-intended discipline of the kind would be singularly disagreeable to himself! For Marryat administers anodynes in narrating atrocities, |