14b
PARTISAN REVIEW
novel an area that has largely been neglected by modem critics and
has
~erhaps
received too much attention, of the hearty defensive sort,
from the scholars.
The Rise of the Novel
concentrates upon Defoe and
Richardson, to great effect with the former and brilliantly with the
latter; a concluding section on Fielding seems, by comparison, incom–
plete. Now these are not easy writers for the modem critic to handle.
Except in occasional passages their work resists the techniques of close
textual analysis, and even when such analysis proves locally useful
it
can easily divert one from apprehending thematic and structural wholes.
The
usual
study of character
in
terms of psychological shadings
and
motivations is of limited value, yielding very little in Defoe and
only
a
bit
more
in Fielding. (As
Mr.
Watt
observes:
"Defoe
does
not
so
much portray his heroine's character
[in
Moll Flanders]
as assume its
reality
in every action ...-if we accede to the reality of the deed, it
is difficult to challenge the reality of the doer.") The practice, inherited
from romanticism, of judging a work of literature by the intensity of
emotion it arouses in the reader rather than by the decorum with which
it meets the requirements of traditional genres or the intelligence
with
which it satisfies a traditional moral standard, is usually a poor prepara–
tion for reading any eighteenth century English novelist except, at times,
Richardson. Even in his case the romantic criterion can be misleading:
it tempts one to confuse the
Clarissa
he intended to write with the
Clarissa
we think we read. When applied to Fielding and Smollett, the
expectation of intensity can result in a total misunderstanding. One
repeatedly hears bright students, only slightly mimicking their elders,
ask why Tom Jones fails to grow in moral stature-a question that re–
veals how tyrannical the assumptions of the modem, or any other,
li–
terary outlook can be.
Mr. Watt transforms these difficulties into advantages: they
be–
come the underlying concerns of his book, the implicit problems
be–
hind the explicit topics. The result is a reading of Defoe and Richardson
which, if it does not make them seem as attractive or "necessary" to us
as Hardy or James, does permit that grasp of the work in its context
which is indispensable for any genuine appreciation. The historical ima–
gination leads to--becomes-the literary imagination. And meanwhile
not
the least value of
The Rise of the Novel
is that in reading it one
realizes how rash was Mr. Leavis's suggestion that the eighteenth cen–
tury English novelists are, in the main, barely worth the attention of
a mature mind.
Mr. Watt begins with a compressed discussion of "formal realism,"
by which he means the cluster of those elements of form differentiating
