A Novelist and a Gentleman

(This is half-baked, but we'll run with it)

George Eliot, on Fielding:

A great historian, as he insisted on calling himself, who had the happiness to be dead a hundred and twenty years ago, and so to take his place among the colossi whose huge legs our living pettiness is observed to walk under, glories in his copious remarks and digressions as the least imitable part of his work, and especially in those intital chpaters to the successive books of his history, where he seems to bring his arm-chair to the proscenium and chat with us in all the lusty ease of his fine English. We belated historians must not linger after his example; and if we did so, it is probable that our chat would be thin and eager, as if delivered from a camp-stool in a parrot house. I at least have so much to do in unravelling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe (Middlemarch 132).

Ford, with usual aplomb, cuts right to the chase:

The besetting sin of almost all other English novelists from Fielding to George Meredith is that they seem to cut their characters out with hatchets and to colour them with brushes of house-painters and never, even at that, being able to leave them alone, they are perpetually pushing their own faces and winking at you over the shoulders of Young Blifil, Uncle Toby, the Widow Wadman, Dick Swiveller...and the rest (11). (Eliot's not mentioned here -- but it's still a jab)

Elsewhere, Ford hews to the notion of a kind of objectivity -- a distancing from the moralizing voice, which Eliot seems to embrace too (her goal is to reveal, not explain - which Fielding, she implies, does too much of already). OK, check. But for Ford, the emphasis moves entirely from narrator to character, with Eliot's sympathetic narrator entirely off the radar. With Eliot, too, the emphasis is on discernment (on seeing)-- for Ford, it's style and craft (on making characters, rather than finding the right lens).

What's interesting here, in part, is that while Ford lingers on Fielding, he pretty much glosses over Eliot entirely -- the English novel, by his account, stops with Richardson, then picks up and moves to France during the entire progression of Whig politics until Henry James comes along. Fielding and Thackeray he dismisses as "nuvvelists," who care relatively little about their characters, but who "would have knocked you down if they could, supposing you had suggested that he was not a 'gentleman.'" But what's his beef with Eliot? "Gentlemen" (or ladies) don't craft, according to Ford. I wonder if he would also say they don't observe?

That's all I've got.