Read Online The Facts of Fiction by Norman Collins - Free Book Online

sea—Conrad, for instance, owed him nothing, despite the fact that he thought he did—but those who learnt from him to write interestingly in fiction about almost everything else.
    Dr. Baker remarks that “Fielding had dealt in character as well as in characters. Smollett’s concern was the superficial features of temperament, mannerisms in which men differ, not with the deeper human qualities that unite them.” It is an excellent distinction. It is as much as to say that Smollett’s characters, even his Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, and Humphry Clinker are flat characters to be looked at and laughed at, but not to be walked round and examined.
    It is not, however, completely true. For Fielding had his crowded background of flat characters such as Mr. Supple the curate, Mr. Thwackum the divine and Mr. Square the philosopher. But that may have been merely that the eighteenth century was one of three moments—Scott brought in another, and Dickens the last—when minor characters enjoyed all the rights of full citizenship in fiction.
    And we should remember that even though Trunnion and Bowling and Strap and Pipes may be no more than flat characters—they certainly only present one face tothe world—they are so substantial that we could spend a whole evening in their company without ever suspecting that, like Scandinavian fairies, they are knife edges of which only the broad side of the blade should ever be looked at.
    Perhaps the flattest and thinnest of all the flat characters in fiction are those unfortunate women in the novels of the eighteenth century who stray upon the stage like a dancer in a musical comedy whenever the producer feels that the strain of asking the human mind to work consecutively has grown too great.
    These women with a past who are always so eloquently and reminiscently aware of it, are the most tantalising butterflies of fiction. And the eighteenth century author plunged about after them like a kitten. The inordinate length of
The Memoirs of a Lady of Quality
makes one ask whether Smollett had the slightest interest in the original story of Peregrine Pickle. Miss Williams again simply steps from the printed page in
Roderick Random
, accosts the author and goes off arm in arm with him for three, long, seamy chapters while the unfortunate reader sits and waits like an anxious wife for his return.
    The Lady of Quality, however, had one justification for existence, that silly Miss Williams, the sister of Fielding’s Miss Matthews, had not. When
Peregrine Pickle
appeared, the public with its preference for scandal over literature greedily absorbed it more for the sake of the rumoured relation to Lady Vane, Smollett’s benefactress, than for the sake of Peregrine Pickle, the Young Man of Bad Quality.
    Seven years later when the second edition appeared, and the scandal was about as exciting as
l’affaire Putiphar
, people began to see how good the rest of the book was. And there being no profit in continuing to boast of it,Smollett industriously began to repent it publicly, and announced that he “had expunged every adventure, phrase and insinuation that could be construed by the most delicate reader,”—i.e. the most delicate reader that Smollett could imagine—“ into a trespass into the rules of decorum ”—probably very much to the annoyance of Lady Vane, whose life does not suggest that shame ever came between her and her sleep, and who probably preferred being reviled to being ignored.
    Her career, indeed, is remarkable enough to merit some passing memorial. She married Lord William Hamilton when she was seventeen. A benevolent providence excused his lordship’s obligations two years later. Then she married the unfortunate Viscount Vane when she was twenty. The rest of her life was as beautiful as it was brief. She was seventy-five when she died.
    It is not altogether clear why
The Memoirs of a Lady of Quality
should