CHAPTER IV
THE MINOR AND LATER EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL[7]
[7] A little of the work to be noticed in this chapter is not strictly eighteenth century, but belongs to the first decade or so of the nineteenth. But the majority of the contents actually conform to the title, and there is hardly any more convenient or generally applicable heading for the novel before Miss Austen and Scott, excluding the great names dealt with in the last chapter.
It is at last beginning to be recognised in principle, though it isstill much too often forgotten in practice, that the minor work of atime is at least as important as the major in determining generalliterary characteristics and tendencies. Nor is this anywhere much morenoticeable than in regard to the present period of our present subject.The direct influence of Richardson and Fielding was no doubt very great:but the development of the novel during the middle and later century wastoo large and too various to be all mere imitation. As a result,however, of their influence, there certainly came over the whole kind avery remarkable change. Even before them the _nisus_ towards it, whichhas been noticed in the chapter before the last, is observable enough.Mrs. Manley's rather famous _New Atlantis_ (1709) has at least the formof a key-novel of the political sort: but the whole interest is in thekey and not in the novel, though the choice of the form is something.And the second, third, and fourth decades of the century saw other worktestifying to the vague and almost unconscious hankering after prosefiction which was becoming endemic. A couple of examples of this may betreated, in passing, before we come to the work--not exactly of thefirst class in itself--of a writer who shows both the pre-Richardsonianand the post-Richardsonian phases of it most interestingly, and after afashion to which there are few exact parallels.
A book, which counts here from the time of its appearance, and from acertain oddity and air of "key" about it, rather than from much merit asliterature, or any as a story, is the _Adventures of Gaudentio di Lucca_by Simon Berington.[8] It appeared in 1737, between Defoe and Swift onthe earlier, and Richardson on the later side, while the English worldwas to the novel as an infant crying for the light--and the bottle--atonce. It begins and ends with adventures and discoveries of an ordinaryromantic type. But the body consists of a revelation to certain ItalianInquisitors (who are not at all of the lurid type familiar to theProtestant imagination, but most equitable and well-disposed as well aspotent, grave, and reverend signers) of an unknown country of "the GrandPophar" in the centre of Africa. This country is civilised, but not yetChristianised: and the description of it of course gives room for theexercise of the familiar game of contrast--in this case not so muchsatiric as didactic--with countries nearer home which are at leastsupposed to be both civilised and Christian. It is a "respectable" bookboth in the French and the English sense: but it is certainly not veryamusing, and cannot even be called very interesting in any way, savehistorically.
[8] The not infrequent attribution of this book to Berkeley is a good instance of the general inability to discriminate _style_.
The other example which we shall take is of even less intrinsicattraction: in fact it is a very poor thing. There are, however, moreways than one in which _corpora vilia_ are good for experiment andevidence: and we may find useful indications in the mere bookmaking ofthe time. Lowndes, the fortunate publisher of _Evelina_, some dozenyears before that windfall came, had issued, or reissued, a collectioncalled _The Novelist_ and professedly containing _The select novels ofDr. Croxall_ [the ingenious author of _The Fair Circassian_ and the partdestroyer of Hereford Cathedral] _and other Polite Tales_. The book isan unblushing if not an actually piratical compilation; sweepingtogether, with translations and adaptations published by Croxall himselfat various times in the second quarter of the century and probablyearlier, most of the short stories from the _Spectator_ class ofperiodical which had appeared during the past two-thirds of a century.Most of the rest are obvious (and very badly done) translations from theFrench and even from Cervantes' _Exemplary Novels_; seasoned withpersonal and other anecdotes, so that the whole number of separatearticles may exceed four-score. Of these a few are interesting attemptsat the historical novel or novelette--short sketches of Mary Queen ofScots (very sympathetic and evidently French in origin from the phrase"a _temple_ which was formerly a church"), Jane Shore (an exquisitelyabsurd piece of eighteenth-century middle-class modernising andmoralising), Essex, Buckingham, and other likely figures. There are cutsby the "Van-somethings and Back-somethings" of the time: and the whole,though not worthy of anything better than the "fourpenny box," is anevident symptom of popular taste. The sweetmeats or _hors d'oeuvre_ ofthe older caterings for that taste are here collected together to form a_piece de resistance_. It is true that _The Novelist_ is only a truetitle in the older sense--that the pieces are _novelle_ not "novels"proper. But they are fiction, or fact treated like fiction: and thoughthe popular taste itself was evidently ceasing to be satisfied withthese morsels and demanding a substantial joint, yet the substance was,after all, the same.
We rise higher, if not very high, with the novels of Mrs. Eliza Haywood(1693-1756), one of the damned of the _Dunciad_, but, like some of herfellows in that _Inferno_, by no means deserving hopeless reprobation.Every one who has devoted any attention to the history of the novel, aswell as some who have merely considered it as a part of that of Englishliterature generally, has noticed the curious contrast between theearlier and the later novels of this writer. _Betsy Thoughtless_ (1751)and _Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy_ (1753) could, without much difficulty, betransposed into novels of to-day. _Idalia_ (1723) is of an entirelydifferent mood and scheme. It is a pure Behnesque _nouvelle_, merelydescribing the plots and outrage which ruin the heroine (_TheUnfortunate Mistress_ is the second title), but attempting nocharacter-drawing (the only hint at such a thing is that Idalia, insteadof being a meek and suffering victim, is said to have a violent temper),and making not the slightest effort even to complete what story thereis. For the thing breaks off with a sort of "_perhaps_ to be concludedin _some_ next," about which we have not made up our minds. Very rarelydo we find such a curious combination or succession of styles so early:but the novel, for pretty obvious reasons, seems to offer temptations toit and facilities for it.
For _Idalia's_ above-named juniors, while not bad books to read for mereamusement, have a very particular interest for the student of thehistory of the novel. Taken in connection with their author's earlierwork, they illustrate, for the first time, a curious phenomenon whichhas repeated itself often, notably in the case of Bulwer, and of aliving novelist who need not be named. This is that the novel, morealmost than any other kind of literature, seems to lend itself to whatmay be called the _timeserving_ or "opportunism" of craftsmanship--tocall out the adaptiveness and versatility of the artist. _Betsy_ and_Jenny_ are so different from _Idalia_ and her group that a critic ofthe idle Separatist persuasion would, were it not for troublesomecertainties of fact, have no difficulty whatever in proving that theymust be by different authors. We know that they were _not_: and we knowalso the reason of their dissimilarity--the fact that _Pamela_ and herbrother and their groups _ont passe par la_.[9] This fact is mostinteresting: and it shows, among other things, that Mrs. Eliza Haywoodwas a decidedly clever woman.
[9] The elect ladies about Richardson joined _Betsy_ with _Amelia_, and sneered at both.
At the same time the two books also show that she was not quite cleverenough: and that she had not realised, as in fact hardly one of theminor novelists of this time did realise, the necessity ofindividualising character. Betsy is both a nice and a goodgirl--"thoughtless" up to specification, but no fool, perfectly"straight" though the reverse of prudish, generous, merry, lovable. Butwith all these good qualities she is not quite a person. Jenny is, Ithink, a little more of one, but still not quite--while the men and theother women are still less. Nor had Eliza mastered that practised knackof "manners-painting" which was to stand Fanny Burney, and many anotherafter her, in the stead of actual c
haracter-creation. Her situations areoften very lively, if not exactly decorous; and they sometimes have areal dramatic verisimilitude, for instance, the quarrel andreconciliation of the Lord and the Lady in _Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy_;but the higher verisimilitude of prose fiction they lack. Neither again(though Smollett had given her a lead here) had she attained that powerof setting and furnishing a scene which is so powerful a weapon in thenovelist's armoury. Yet she had learnt much: and her later work wouldhave been almost a wonder in her own earlier time.
She had even been preceded in the new line by one, and closely followedby another writer of her own sex, both of unblemished reputation, andperhaps her superiors in intellectual quality and accomplishment, thoughthey had less distinct novel-faculty. Sarah Fielding, the greatnovelist's sister, but herself one of Richardson's literary seraglio,had a good deal of her brother's humour, but very little of hisconstructive grasp of life. _David Simple_ (1744), her best known work,the _Familiar Letters_ connected with it (to which Henry contributed),and _The Governess_ display both the merit and the defect--but thedefect is more fatal to a novel than the merit is advantageous. Oncemore--if the criticism has been repeated _ad nauseam_ the occasions ofit may be warranted to be much more nauseous in themselves--one looks upfor interest, and is not fed. "The Adventures" of David--whose progenymust have been rapidly enriched and ennobled if Peter Simple was hisdescendant--were "in search of a Friend," and he came upon nobody in theleast like O'Brien. It was, in fact, too early or too late for a _lady_to write a thoroughly good novel. It had been possible in the days ofMadeleine de Scudery, and it became possible in the days of FrancesBurney: but for some time before, in the days of Sarah Fielding, it wasonly possible in the ways of Afra and of Mrs. Haywood, who, without anyunjust stigma on them, can hardly be said to fulfil the idea ofladyhood, as no doubt Miss Fielding did.
There is an amusing and (in its context) just passage of Thackeray's,in which he calls Charlotte Lennox, author of _The Female Quixote_(1752), a "figment." But it would be unlucky if any one were therebyprevented from reading this work of the lady whom Johnson admired, andfor whom he made an all-night orgie of apple-pie and bay-leaves. Herbook, which from its heroine is also called _Arabella_, is clever andnot unamusing, though it errs (in accordance with the moral-criticalprinciples of the time) by not merely satirising the "heroic" romancesof the Gomberville-La Calprenede-Scudery type, but solemnly discussingthem. Arabella, the romance-bitten daughter of a marquis, is, for allher delusion, or because of it, rather a charming creature. Her loverGlanville, his Richardsonian sister, and the inevitable bad Baronet (hecan hardly be called wicked, especially for a Baronet) are morecommonplace: and the thing would have been better as a rather long_nouvelle_ than as a far from short novel. It alternately comes quiteclose to its original (as in the intended burning of Arabella's books)and goes entirely away from it, and neither as an imitation norindependently is it as good as Graves's _Spiritual Quixote_: but it isvery far from contemptible.
Yet though the aptitude of women for novel-writing was thus earlyexemplified, it is not to be supposed that the majority of persons whofelt the new influences were of that sex. By far the larger number ofthose who crowded to follow the Four were, like them, men.
That not exactly credit to the Tory party, Dr. John Shebbeare, has hadhis demerits in other ways excused to some extent on the score of_Lydia_--whose surname, by the way, was "Fairchild," not unknown inlater days of fiction. Even one who, if critical conscience would inany way permit it, would fain let the Tory dogs have a little the bestof it, must, I fear, pronounce _Lydia_ a very poor thing. Shebbeare, whowas a journalist, had the journalist faculty of "letting everything goin"--of taking as much as he could from Richardson, Fielding, Smollett,etc., up to date (1755); and of throwing back to Afra for an interestingIndian, Canassatego. The book (like not a few other eighteenth-centurynovels) has very elaborate chapter headings and very short chapters, sothat an immoral person can get up its matter pretty easily. A virtuousone who reads it through will have to look to his virtue for reward. Theirony is factitious and forced; the sentiment unappealing; thecoarseness quite destitute of Rabelaisian geniality; and thenomenclature may be sampled from "the Countess of Liberal" and "LordBeef." I believe Shebbeare was once pilloried for his politics. If ithad been for _Lydia_, I should not have protested.
The next book to be mentioned is an agreeable change. Why Hazlittcompared _The Life of John Buncle_ (1756-1766) to Rabelais is a somewhatidle though perhaps not quite unanswerable question; the importance ofthe book itself in the history of the English novel, which has sometimesbeen doubted or passed over, is by no means small. Its author, ThomasAmory (1691?-1788), was growing old when he wrote it and even when heprefaced it with a kind of Introduction, the _Memoirs of several Ladies_(1755). It is a sort of dream-exaggeration of an autobiography; at firstsight, and not at first sight only, the wildest of farragos. The authorrepresents himself as a disinherited son who is devoted, with equalenthusiasm, to matrimony, eating and drinking as much as he can of thebest things he can find, discussion of theological problems in a"Christian-deist" or Unitarian sense, "natural philosophy" in the vagueeighteenth-century meaning, and rambling--chiefly in the fell districtwhich includes the borders of Lancashire, Yorkshire, Westmoreland,"Bishopric" (Durham), and Cumberland. With this district--which evennow, though seamed with roads and railways, does actually contain someof the wildest scenery of the island; which only forty years ago wasmuch wilder; and which in Amory's time was a howling wilderness inparts--he deals in the characteristic spirit of exaggeration whichperhaps, as much as anything else, suggested Rabelais to Hazlitt. FromMalham Cove and Hardraw Scar, through the Wild Boar Fell district to thehead of Teesdale, you can find at this moment rough and rugged sceneryenough, some of which is actually recognisable when "reduced" fromAmory's extravagance. But that extravagance extends the distances fromfurlongs to leagues; deepens the caverns from yards to furlongs; andexalts fell and scar into Alps and Andes. In the same way he has tomarry eight wives (not seven as has been usually, and even by thepresent writer, said), who are distractingly beautiful and wonderfullywise, but who seldom live more than two years: and has a large number ofchildren about whom he says nothing, "because he has not observed inthem anything worth speaking about." The courtships are varied betweenabrupt embraces soon after introduction, and discussions on Hebrew,Babel, "Christian-deism," and the binomial theorem. In the mostinhospitable deserts, his man or boy[10] is invariably able to producefrom his wallet "ham, tongue, potted blackcock, and a pint of cyder,"while in more favourable circumstances Buncle takes his ease in his innby consuming "a pound of steak, a quart of green peas, two fine cuts ofbread, a tankard of strong ale, and a pint of port" and singing cheerfullove-ditties a few days after the death of an adored wife. He comes downthe side of precipices by a mysterious kind of pole-jumping--half adozen fathoms at a drop with landing-places a yard wide--like a chamoisor a rollicking Rocky Mountain ram. Every now and then he finds askeleton, with a legend of instructive tenor, in a hermitage which heannexes: and almost infallibly, at the worst point of the wilderness,there is an elegant country seat with an obliging old father and alively heiress ready to take the place of the last removed charmer.
[10] It has been observed, and is worth observing, that the eighteenth-century hero, even in his worst circumstances, can seldom exist without a "follower."
Mad, however, as this sketch may sound, and certainly not quite sane asAmory may have been, there is a very great deal of method in his, andsome in its, madness. The flashes of shrewdness and the blocks of prettysolid learning (Rabelaisian again) do not perhaps so much concern us:but the book, ultra-eccentric as it is, does count for something in thehistory of the English novel. Its descriptions, rendered through amagnifying glass as they are, have considerable power; and are quiteunlike anything in prose fiction, and most things in prose literature,before it. In Buncle himself there is a sort of extra-natural,"four-dimension" nature and proportion which assert the
novelist's powermemorably:--if a John Buncle could exist, he would very probably be likeAmory's John Buncle. Above all, the book (let it be remembered that itcame before _Tristram Shandy_) is almost the beginning of the EccentricNovel--not of the satiric-marvellous type which Cyrano and Swift hadrevived from Lucian, but of a new, a modern, and a very English variety.Buncle is sometimes extraordinarily like Borrow (on whom he probablyhad influence), and it would not be hard to arrange a very considerablespiritual succession for him, by no means deserving the uncomplimentaryterms in which he dismisses his progeny in the flesh.
If there is an almost preposterous cheerfulness about _Buncle_, thenecessary alternative can be amply supplied by the next book to which wecome. The curious way in which Johnson almost invariably managed to hitthe critical nail on the head is well illustrated by his remark toFrances Sheridan, author of the _Memoirs of Miss Sydney Bid[d]ulph_(1761), that he "did not know whether she had a right, on moralprinciples, to make her readers suffer so much." Substitute "aesthetic"for "moral" and "heroine" for "readers," and the remark retains itstruth on another scheme of criticism, which Johnson was not ostensiblyemploying, and which he might have violently denounced. The book, thoughwith its subsequent prolongation too long, is a powerful one: and thoughactually dedicated to Richardson and no doubt consciously owing much tohis influence, practically clears off the debt by its own earnings. ButMiss Bidulph (she started with only one _d_, but acquired another),whose journal to her beloved Cecilia supplies the matter and method ofthe novel, is too persistently unlucky and ill-treated, without thesmallest fault of her own, for anything but really, not fictitiously,real life. Her misfortunes spring from obeying her mother (but there wasneither moral nor satire in this then), and husbands, lovers, rivals,relations, connections--everybody--conspire to afflict her. Poeticaljustice has been much abused in both senses of that verb: _SydneyBiddulph_ shows cause for it in the very act of neglect.
But the eighteenth century, on the whole, loathed melancholy. The_Spiritual Quixote_ (1772) of the Reverend Richard Graves (1715-1804)has probably been a little injured by the ingenuous proclamation ofindebtedness in the title. It is, however, an extremely clever andamusing book: and one of the best of the many imitations of itsoriginal, which, indeed, it follows only on broad and practicallyindependent lines. During his long life (for more than half a century ofwhich he was rector of Claverton near Bath) Graves knew many interestingpersons, from Shenstone and Whitefield (with both of whom he was atPembroke College, Oxford, though he afterwards became a fellow of AllSouls) to Malthus, who was a pupil of his; and he had some interestingprivate experiences. He wove a good deal that was personal into hisnovel, which, as may easily be guessed, is a satire upon Methodism, andin which Whitefield is personally and not altogether favourablyintroduced. But even on him Graves is by no means savage: while histreatment of his hero, Geoffrey Wildgoose, a young Oxford man who,living in retirement with his mother in the country, becomes anevangelist, very mainly from want of some more interesting occupation,is altogether good-humoured. Wildgoose promptly falls in love with afascinating damsel-errant, Julia Townsend; and the various adventures,religious, picaresque, and amatory, are embroiled and disembroiled withvery fair skill in character and fairer still in narrative. Nor is theSancho-Partridge of the piece, Jerry Tugwell, a cobbler (who thinks,though he is very fond of his somewhat masterful wife, that a littleabsence from her would not be unrefreshing), by any means a failure.Both Scott and Dickens evidently knew Graves well,[11] and knowledge ofhim might with advantage be more general.
[11] Julia Mannering reminds me a little of Julia Townsend: and if this be doubtful, the connection of Jerry's "Old madam gave me some higry-pigry" and Cuddie's "the leddy cured me with some hickery-pickery" is not. While, for Dickens, compare the way in which Sam Weller's landlord in the Fleet got into trouble with the Tinker's Tale in _Spiritual Quixote_, bk. iv. chap. ii.
The novels that have been noticed since those contrasted ones of Mrs.Haywood's, which occupy a position by themselves, all possess a sort oftraditional fame; and cover (with the proper time allowed for the startgiven by Richardson and Fielding) nearly the same period of thirtyyears--in this case 1744 (_David Simple_) to 1772 (_The SpiritualQuixote_)--which is covered by the novels of the great quartettethemselves. It would be possible to add a great many, and easy and notdisagreeable to the writer to dwell on a few. Of these few some areperhaps necessary. Frank Coventry's _Pompey the Little_--an amusingsatirical novel with a pet dog for the title-giver and with thepromising (but as a rule ill-handled) subject of university life treatedearly--appeared in 1751--the same year which saw the much higher flight(the pun is in sense not words) of _Peter Wilkins_, by Robert Paltock ofClement's Inn, a person of whom practically nothing else is known. Itwould be lucky for many people if they were thus singly yoked tohistory. It was once fashionable to dismiss _Peter_ as a boy's book,because it discovers a world of flying men and women, modelled partly onDefoe, partly on Swift; it has more recently been fashionable to hint asneer at it as "sentimental" because of its presentment of a sort offantastic and unconventional Amelia (who, it may be remembered, made herappearance in the same year) in the heroine Youwarkee. Persons who donot care for fashion will perhaps sometimes agree that, though notexactly a masterpiece, it is rather a charming book. If anybody issickened by its charm he may restore himself by a still better knownstory which no one can accuse of charm or sentiment, though it isclever enough--Charles Johnstone's _Chrysal_ or _The Adventures of aGuinea_ (1760). This, which is strongly Smollettian in more ways thanone, derives its chief notoriety from the way in which the scandalous(and perhaps partly fabulous) orgies of Medmenham Abbey are, like otherscandalous and partly fabulous gossip of the time, brought in. But it_is_ clever; though emphatically one of the books which "leave a badtaste in the mouth." Indeed about this time the novel, which even inclean hands allowed itself not a little freedom, took, in others,excursions in the direction of the province of "prohibited literature,"and sometimes passed the border.
One rather celebrated book, however, has not yet been mentioned: and itwill serve very well, with two others greater in every way, as usher toa few general remarks on the weakness of this generation of minornovelists. Between 1766 and 1770 Henry Brooke, an Irishman of position,fortune, and literary distinction in other ways, who was at the time ofmore than middle age, published _The Fool of Quality_ or _The Adventuresof Henry Earl of Morland_. The hero is a sort of Grandison-Buncle, asproper though scarcely as priggish as the one, and as eccentric anddiscursive as the other; the story is chaos: the book is stuffed withdisquisitions on all sorts of moral, social, and political problems. Itis excellently written; it is clear from it that Brooke (who was for atime actually mad) did not belie the connection of great wits withmadness. But it is, perhaps, most valuable as an evidence of theunconquerable set of the time towards novel.
Of this, however, as of some other points, we have greater evidencestill in the shape of two books, each of them, as nothing else yetmentioned in this chapter can claim to be, a permanent and capitalcontribution to English literature--Johnson's _Rasselas_ (1759) andGoldsmith's _Vicar of Wakefield_ (1766).
It is not from the present writer that any one need look for an attemptto belittle Johnson: and there is no doubt (for the _Lives of the Poets_is but a bundle of essays) that _Rasselas_ is Johnson's greatest _book_.But there may be, in some minds, as little doubt that attempts to defendit from the charge of not being a novel are only instances of that notwholly unamiable frenzy of eagerness to "say _not_ ditto to Mr. Burke"which is characteristic of clever undergraduates, and of periods whichare not quite of the greatest in literature. _Rasselas_ is simply anextended and glorified moral apologue--an enlarged "Vision of Mirza." Ithas no real story; it has no real characters; its dialogue is "talkingbook;" it indulges in some but not much description. It is in fact aprose _Vanity of Human Wishes_, admirably if somewhat stiffly arrangedin form, and as true to life as life itself. You will have difficulty infi
nding a wiser book anywhere; but although it is quite true that anovel need not be foolish, wisdom is certainly not its determining_differentia_. Yet for our purposes _Rasselas_ is almost as valuable as_Tom Jones_ itself: because it shows how imperative and wide-ranging wasthe struggle towards production of this kind in prose. The book isreally--to adapt the quaint title of one of the precedingcentury--_Johnson al Mondo_: and at this time, when Johnson wanted tocommunicate his thoughts to the world in a popular form, we see that hechose the novel.
The lesson is not so glaringly obvious in the _Vicar of Wakefield_,because this _is_ a novel, and a very delightful one. The only pointof direct contact with _Rasselas_ is the knowledge of humannature, though in the one book this takes the form of melancholyaphorism and apophthegm, in the other that of felicitous trait anddialogue-utterance. There is plenty of story, though this has not beenarranged so as to hit the taste of the martinet in "fable;" the book hasendless character; the descriptions are Hogarth with less of _peuple_about them; the dialogue is unsurpassable. Yet Goldsmith, untiring hackof genius as he was, wrote no other novel; evidently felt no particularcall or predilection for the style; would have been dramatist, poet,essayist with greater satisfaction to himself, though scarcely(satisfactory as he is in all these respects) to us. That he tried it atall can hardly be set down to anything else than the fact that the stylewas popular: and his choice is one of the highest possible testimoniesto the popularity of the style. Incidentally, of course, the _Vicar_ hasmore for us than this, because it indicates, as vividly as any of thework of the great Four themselves, how high and various the capacitiesof the novel are--how in fact it can almost completely compete with and,for a time, vanquish the drama on its own ground. Much of it, ofcourse--the "Fudge!" scene between Mr. Burchell and the town ladies maybe taken as the first example that occurs--_is_ drama, with all thecumbrous accessories of stage and scene and circumstance spared. One mayalmost see that "notice to quit," which (some will have it) has been,after nearly a century and a half, served back again on the novel,served by the _Vicar of Wakefield_ on the drama.
At the same time even the _Vicar_, though perhaps less than any otherbook yet noticed in this chapter, illustrates the proposition to whichwe have been leading up--that, outside the great quartette, and even toa certain extent inside of it, the novel had not yet fully found itsproper path--had still less made up its mind to walk freely and firmlytherein. Either it has some _arriere pensee_, some second purpose,besides the simple attempt to interest and absorb by the artisticre-creation of real and ordinary life: or, without exactly doing this,it shows signs of mistrust and misgiving as to the sufficiency of suchan appeal, and supplements it by the old tricks of the drama in"revolution and discovery;" by incident more or less out of the ordinarycourse; by satire, political, social, or personal; by philosophicaldisquisition; by fantastic imagination--by this, that, and the other ofthe fatal auxiliaries who always undo their unwise employers. Men wantto write novels; and the public wants them to write novels; and supplydoes not fail desire and demand. There is a well-known _locus classicus_from which we know that, not long after the century had passed itsmiddle, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in Italy regularly received boxes ofnovels from her daughter in England, and read them, eagerly though by nomeans uncritically, as became Fielding's cousin and her ladyship's self.But while the kind had not conquered, and for a long time did notconquer, any high place in literature from the point of view of seriouscriticism--while, now and long afterwards, novel-writing was theCinderella of the literary family, and novel-reading the inexhaustibletext for sermons on wasted, nay positively ill-spent, time--thenovelists themselves half justified their critics by frequentextravagance; by more frequent unreality; by undue licence pretty often;by digression and divagation still oftener. Except Fielding, hardly anyone had dared boldly to hold up the mirror to nature, and be contentwith giving the reflection, in his own way, but with respect for it. Foreven Goldsmith, with infinite touches of nature, had not given quite anatural whole, and even Johnson, though absolutely true, had failed toaccommodate his truth to the requirements of the novel.
The turning point in this direction of the kind was to be made by aperson far inferior in ability to any one of the great quartette, and ina book which, _as_ a book, cannot pretend to an equality with the worstof theirs--by a person indeed of less intellectual power, and in a bookof less literary merit, than not a few of the persons and books justnoticed. There is something, no doubt, paradoxical in this: and theparadox is connected, both with a real quality of the subject and with asurprising diversity of opinions about it. Frances Burney and her_Evelina_ (1778), not to mention her subsequent works and her delightful_Diary_, have been the subject of a great deal of writing: but thoughmore than a hundred years--more indeed than a century and aquarter--have passed since the book insidiously took London by gradualstorm, it may, without too much presumption, be questioned whethereither book or author has yet been finally or satisfactorily "placed."The immense advantage of not having a history, positively illustratedonce for all in Shakespeare, could hardly be negatively illustratedbetter than in Madame d'Arblay. She had the curious, and actually veryunpleasant, experience of being selected for a position at court on thestrength of her literary achievements, of finding it intolerable, ofbreaking down, and of never doing any really good work after herrelease, through much more than half of her long life. On this factcritical biography has fastened almost exclusively. Macaulay, in one ofhis most brilliant and best known essays, represents the world as havingbeen deprived of unknown quantities of admirable work by the misplacedkindness, and the positive unkindness, of Queen Charlotte. Some haveagreed with him, some have differed with him. Some, in one of thenatural if uncritical revulsions, have questioned whether even _Evelina_is a very remarkable book. Some, with human respect for the great namesof its early admirers, have passed it over gingerly--not exactly aswilling to wound, but as quite afraid or reluctant to strike. Nay,actual critical evaluations of the novel-values of Miss Burney's fourattempts in novel-writing are very rare. I dare say there are otherpeople who have read _The Wanderer_ through: but I never met any one whohad done so except (to quote Rossetti) myself: and I could not bringmyself, even on this occasion, to read it again. I doubt whether verymany now living have read _Camilla_. Even _Cecilia_ requires an effort,and does not repay that effort very well. Only _Evelina_ itself islegible and relegible--for reasons which will be given presently. Yet_Cecilia_ was written shortly after _Evelina_, under the same stimulusof abundant and genial society, with no pressure except that of friendlyencouragement and perhaps assistance, and long before the supposedblight of royal favour and royal exigences came upon its author. When_Camilla_ was published she had been relieved from these exigences,though not from that favour, for five years: and was a thoroughly happywoman, rejoicing in husband and child. Even when the impossible_Wanderer_ was concocted, she had had ample leisure, had as yet incurrednone of her later domestic sorrows, and was assured of lavish recompensefor her (it must be said) absolutely worthless labours. Why this steadydeclension, with which, considering the character of _Cecilia_, thecourt sojourn can have had nothing to do? And admitting it, why stilluphold, as the present writer does uphold, _Evelina_ as one of the_points de repere_ of the English novel? Both questions shall beanswered in their order.
Frances Burney must have been, as we see not merely from externaltestimony, but from the infallible witness of her own diary, a mostengaging person to any one who could get over her shyness and herprudery:[12] but she was only in a very limited sense a gifted one.Macaulay grants her a "fine understanding;" but even his own articlecontradicts the statement, which is merely one of his exaggerations forthe sake of point. She had _not_ a fine understanding: though she wasneither silly nor stupid, her sense was altogether inferior to hersensibility. Although living in a most bookish circle she was, asMacaulay himself admits, almost illiterate: and (which he does not say)her comparative critical estimates of books, when she does give them,are merely conte
mptible. This harsh statement could be freelysubstantiated: but it is enough to say that, when a girl, she preferredsome forgotten rubbish called _Henry and Frances_ to the _Vicar ofWakefield_: and that, when a woman, she deliberately offendedChateaubriand by praising the _Itineraire_ rather than the _Genie duChristianisme_, or _Atala_, or _Rene_, or _Les Martyrs_. She had verylittle inventive power; her best novel, _Evelina_, has no plot worthspeaking of. She never wrote really well. Even the _Diary_ derives itswhole charm from the matter and the _reportage. Evelina_ is tolerablestyle of the kind that has no style; _Cecilia_ is pompous andJohnsonian; _Camilla_ was stigmatised by the competent and affectionatejudgment of Mrs. Delany as "Gallicised;" and _The Wanderer_ is in alingo which suggests the translation of an ill-written French originalby a person who does not know English.
[12] Also, perhaps, to one who had not yet discovered that intense concentration on herself and her family with which, after their quarrel, Mrs. Thrale, not quite an impartial judge, but a very shrewd one, charged her, and which does appear in the _Diary_.
What then was it in _Evelina_, and in part in _Cecilia_ (with a faintsurvival even into _Camilla_), which turned the heads of such a "town"as Johnson and Burke, Walpole and Windham, and many others--which, topersons who can see it, makes the books attractive to-day, and whichshould always give their author a secure and distinguished place in thegreat torch-race of English fiction-writers? It is this--that MissBurney had a quite marvellous faculty of taking impressions of actualspeech, manners, and to a certain extent character: that she had, at anyrate for a time, a corresponding faculty of expressing, or at leastreporting, her impressions. Next (and perhaps most of all) that she hadthe luck to come at a moment when speech and manners were turning to themodern; and lastly, that she was content, in parts of her work at anyrate, to let her faculty of expression work, automatically anduninterfered with, on the impressions: and thereby give us record ofthem for all time. Her acute critic "Daddy" Crisp lamented that we hadnot had a series of recorders of successive _tons_ [fashions] likeFanny. But she was much more than a mere fashion-monger: and what haslasted best in her was not mere fashion. She could see and record lifeand nature: and she did so. Still, fashion had a good deal to do withit: and when her access to fashion and society ceased, the goodness ofher work ceased likewise.
Even this gift, and this even in _Evelina_ and the better parts of_Cecilia_, she had not always with her. The sentimental parts of_Evelina_--the correspondence with Mr. Villars, the courtship with LordOrville, and others--are very weak: and it cannot be said that Evelinaherself, though she is a pleasant girl enough, gives the lie to Mr.Pope's libel about women. Cecilia has a little more individuality. Butthe great strength of the former book lies in the admirable lowermiddle-class pictures of the Branghtons and Mr. Smith, whom Fanny hadevidently studied from the life in the queer neighbourhood of PolandStreet: as also in the justness and verisimilitude of the picture of thesituation, which in different ways both books present--that of theintroduction of a young girl to the world.[13] In these points, as inothers which there is neither space nor need to particularise, MissBurney showed that she had hit upon--stumbled upon one may almostsay--the real principle and essence of the novel as distinguished fromthe romance--its connection with actual ordinary life--life studiedfreshly and directly "_from_ the life," and disguised and adulterated aslittle as possible by exceptional interests and incidents. It isscarcely too much to say that one great reason why the novel was so longcoming into existence was precisely this--that life and society so longremained subject to these exceptional interests and incidents. It isonly within the last century or so that the "life of 'mergency" (toadapt Mr. Chucks slightly) ceased to be the ordinary life. Addison's"Dissenter's Diary" with its record of nothing but constitutionals andmarrow-bones, and Mr. Nisby's opinions, has simply amused half a dozengenerations. Yet, in a sense, it has nearly as much to do with theadvent of the novel as Sir Roger de Coverley himself. For these thingsare, not merely in an allegory, the subjects of the novel. Not so verymuch earlier Mr. Nisby would have had a chance of delivering hisopinions on the scaffold: and his disciple would have had prison breadand water for marrow-bones and "Brooks and Hellier." These would havebeen subjects for romance: the others were subjects for novel.
[13] Dunlop and others have directly or indirectly suggested a good deal of plagiarism in _Evelina_ from _Miss Betsy Thoughtless_: but it is exactly in this _life_-quality that the earlier novelist fails.
All glory, therefore, be to Frances Burney; both that which hergenerous successor and superior gives her in _Northanger Abbey_, andmore also--for Miss Austen, naturally enough, was not taking theview-point of literary history. But it has been said that Fanny herselfpossessed her gift in two senses uncertainly--first, in that she did notvery clearly perceive what it was, and, secondly, in that she soon lostgrip of it. It is, therefore, not wonderful that few others caught thetrick from her for a long time--for indeed fully twenty years, till MissEdgeworth made her appearance. But these twenty years were years ofextreme fertility in novels of different sorts, while--a phenomenon thatoccurs not seldom--the older kind of fiction made a kind of rally at thevery time that the newer was at last solidly establishing itself. Therewas, indeed, ample room for both. You cannot kill Romance: it would be aprofound misfortune, perhaps the profoundest that could befall the humanrace, if you could. But the new romance was of rather a bastard kind,and it showed more of the bad blood than of the good till, by a curiouscoincidence, Scott once more found the true strain, just about the sametime as that at which Miss Austen was making known the true strain ofthe novel proper.
This hybrid new romance had been stumbled upon more than a decade beforeFanny Burney in her turn stumbled upon the pure novel: and most peopleknow in what and by whom. To this day it is by no means easy to becertain what Horace Walpole really meant to write, or thought he waswriting, in _The Castle of Otranto_ (1764). His own references to hisown writings are too much saturated with affectation and pose to make itsafe to draw any conclusions from them; there is little or no externalevidence; and the book itself is rather a puzzle. Taking the Preface tothe second edition with a very large allowance of salt--the success ofthe first _before_ this preface makes double salting advisable--andaccommodating it to the actual facts, one finds it hardly necessary togo beyond the obvious and almost commonplace solution that _The Castleof Otranto_ was simply the castle of Strawberry Hill itself with paperfor lath and ink for plaster--in other words, an effort to imitatesomething which the imitator more than half misunderstood. Of mediaevalliterature proper, apart from chronicles and genealogies, Walpole knewnothing: and for its more precious features he had the dislike whichsometimes accompanies ignorance. But he undoubtedly had positiveliterary genius--flawed, alloyed, incomplete, uncritical of itself, butexisting: and this genius showed itself here. His paper-and-ink"Strawberry" is quite another guess structure from his lath-and-plasterone. For itself in itself--for what it _is_--the present writer, thoughhe has striven earnestly and often for the sake of the great things thatit _did_, has never been able to get up any affection or admiration. Itis preposterous, desultory, tedious, clumsy, dull. But it made people(we know it on such excellent authority as Gray's) shudder: and theshudder was exactly what they wanted--in every sense of the verb "towant." Moreover, quite independently of this shudder, it pointed the wayto a wide, fertile, and delightful province of historical, social,literary, and other matter which had long been neglected, and whichpeople had been assured was not worth exploring. Blair was just using,or about to use, "any romance of chivalry" as a hyperbolicalexemplification of the contemptible in literature. Hume had been arguingagainst, and Voltaire was still sneering at, all sorts of superstitionand supernaturalism. The common cant of criticism for generations hadbeen that "sense" and "reason" were to be the only criteria. Walpole'segregious helmet dropped from no one knew (or knows) where on all thesePhilistinisms: and squelched them. How it did this, why it did it, andso forth, one know
s not much more than one knows why and how all thethings happened in the novel itself. _Apres coup_, the author talkedabout "Shakespeare" (of whom, by the way, he was anything but a ferventor thorough admirer) and the like. Shakespeare had, as Sir WalterRaleigh has well pointed out, uncommonly little to do with it. ButShakespeare at least supplies us with an appropriate phrase for theoccasion. _The Castle of Otranto_ "lay in" Horace's "way, and he foundit." And with it, though hardly in it, he found the New Romance.
In Horace's case also, as in that of Frances, though the success waseven more momentous, the successors were slow and doubtful, though notquite so slow. In some dozen years Walpole read Miss Clara Reeve's _OldEnglish Baron_ (1777), and as in another celebrated case "thought it abore." It _is_ rather a bore. It has more consecutiveness than_Otranto_, and escapes the absurdities of the copiously but clumsilyused supernatural by administering it in a very minute dose. But thereis not a spark of genius in it, whereas that spark, though sometimescuriously wrapped up in ashes, was always present (Heaven knows where hegot it!) in Sir Robert's youngest son. And the contagion spread. Forgeneral and epidemic purposes it had to wait till the Germans hadcarried it over the North Sea and sent it back again. For particularones, it found a new development in one of the most remarkable of allnovels, twenty years younger than _Otranto_, and a few years older thanthe new outburst of the "Gothic" supernatural in the works of AnneRadcliffe and Mat Lewis.
_Vathek_ (1786) stands alone--almost independent even of itssponsors--it would be awkward to say godfathers--Hamilton and Voltaire;apart likewise from such work as it, no doubt, in turn partly suggestedto Peacock and to Disraeli. There is, perhaps, no one towards whom it isso tempting to play the idle game of retrospective Providence as towardsthe describer of Batalha and Alcobaca, the creator of Nouronnihar andthe Hall of Eblis. Fonthill has had too many vicissitudes sinceBeckford, and Cintra is a far cry; but though his associations with Bathare later, it is still possible, in that oddly enchanted city, to getsomething of the mixed atmosphere--eighteenth century, nineteenth, andof centuries older and younger than either--which, _tamisee_ in amysterious fashion, surrounds this extraordinary little masterpiece.Take Beckford's millions away; make him coin his wits to supply the wantof them; and what would have been the result? Perhaps more _Vatheks_;perhaps things even better than _Vathek_;[14] perhaps nothing at all. Onthe whole, it is always wiser not to play Providence, in fact or fancy.All that need be said is that Anthony Hamilton and Voltaire arecertainly not by themselves--good as they are, and admirable as thefirst is--enough to account for _Vathek_. Romance has passed there aswell as persiflage and something like _coionnerie_; it is Romance thathas given us the baleful beauty of that Queen of Evil, Nouronnihar, andthe vision of the burning hearts that make their own wandering buteternal Hell. The tendency of the novel had been on the whole, even inits best examples, to prose in feeling as well as in form. It wasBeckford who availed himself of the poetry which is almost inseparablefrom Romance. But it was Horace Walpole who had opened the door toRomance herself.
[14] Since the text was written--indeed very recently--the long-missing "Episodes" of _Vathek_ itself have been at length supplied by the welcome diligence of Mr. Lewis Melville. They are not "better than Vathek," but they are good.
Still, _Vatheks_ are not to be had to order: and as Romance was wanted,to order and in bulk, during the late years of the eighteenth century,some other kind had to be supplied. The chief accredited purveyors of ithave been already named and must now be dealt with, to be followed bythe list of secondary, never quite accomplished, exponents now of novel,now of romance, now of the two mixed, who filled the closing years ofthe eighteenth century.
It is, however, unjust to put the author of _The Mysteries of Udolpho_and the author of _The Monk_ on the same level. Mat Lewis was a cleverboy with a lively fancy, a knack of catching and even of anticipatingpopular tendencies in literature, a rather vulgar taste by nature, andno faculty of self-criticism to correct it. The famous _Monk_ (1795),which he published when he was twenty, is as preposterous as _Otranto_and adds to its preposterousness a _haut gout_ of atrocity and indecencywhich Walpole was far too much of a gentleman, and even of a true man ofletters, to attempt or to tolerate. Lewis's other work in various formsis less offensive: but--except in respect of verse-rhythm which does nothere concern us--hardly any of it is literature. What does concern us isthat the time took it for literature, because it adopted theterror-style in fiction.
Anne Ward (she married a barrister named Radcliffe, of whom we do nothear much except that his engagements in journalism threw time on hiswife's hands for writing) appears to have started on her career ofterror-novelist, in which she preceded Lewis, with two fixed resolves ofprinciple very contrary to his practice. The first was to observestrict "propriety" in her books--a point in which the novel had alwaysbeen a little peccant. The second and more questionable, but also moreoriginal, was a curious determination to lavish the appearance of thesupernatural, in accordance with the Walpolian tradition and the Germanadoption of it, but never to allow anything _really_ supernatural inultimate explanation or want of explanation. She applied these twoprinciples to the working out, over and over again, of practically thesame story--the persecutions of a beautiful and virtuous heroine, andher final deliverance from them. Her first attempt, _The Castles ofAthlin and Dunbayne_, appeared as early as 1789: and she left aposthumous romance, _Gaston de Blondeville_, which did not come out till1826, four years after her death. She also wrote some poems and a volumeof _Travels_ (1794) which is important for a reason to be noticedpresently. But her fame rests upon four books, which she published inseven years, between her own twenty-sixth and thirty-third, _A SicilianRomance_ (1790), _The Romance of the Forest_ (1791), the world-renowned_Mysteries of Udolpho_ in 1794-1795, and _The Italian_ two years later.
These stories owed their original attraction to the skill with which, bythe use of a Defoe-like minuteness of detail, added to a pictorialfaculty which Defoe had not, an atmosphere of terror is constantlydiffused and kept up. Very little that is terrible actually happens: butthe artist succeeds (so long as the trick has not become too familiar)in persuading you that something very terrible is _going_ to happen, orhas just happened. And so the delight of something "horrid," as theCatherines and Isabellas of the day put it, is given much moreplentifully, and even much more excitingly, than it could be by a realhorror now and then, with intervals of miscellaneous business. In onesense, indeed, the process will not stand even the slightest criticalexamination: for it is soon seen to consist of a succession of seriousmystifications and non-comic much-ados-about-nothing. But these "ados"are most cunningly made (her last book, _The Italian_, is, perhaps, thebest place to look for them, if the reader is not taking up the wholesubject with a virtuous thoroughness), and Mrs. Radcliffe's great praiseis that she induced her original readers to suspend their criticalfaculties sufficiently to enable them to take it all seriously. Scott,who undoubtedly owed her something, assigned her positive genius: andmodern critics, while, perhaps, seldom experiencing much realdelectation from her work, have discovered in it not a few positive andmany more indirect and comparative merits. The influence on Scott is notthe least of these: but there is even a more unquestionable asset of thesame kind in the fact that the Byronic villain-hero, if not Byronhimself, is Mrs. Radcliffe's work. Schedoni did much more than beget orpattern Lara: he _is_ Lara, to all intents and purposes, in "firststate" and before the final touch has been put by the greater master whotook the plate in hand.
But there is more to be said for Mrs. Radcliffe than this. Her"explained supernatural," tiresome as it may be to some of us nowadays,is really a marvel of patience and ingenuity: and this same qualityextends to her plots generally. The historical side of her novels (whichshe does to some extent attempt) is a failure, as everything of the kindwas before Scott: that we may leave till we come to Scott himself. Butone important engine of the novelist she set to work in a fashion whichhad never been managed before, and
that is elaborate description. Sheshows an early adaptation of that "picturesque," of which we see thebeginnings in Gray, when she was in the nursery, which was beingdirectly developed by Gilpin, but which, as we may see from her_Travels_, she had got not merely from books, but from her ownobservation. She applies it both within and without: at one momentgiving pages on the scenery of the Apennines, at another paragraphs onthe furniture of her abbeys and castles. The pine forests and thecataracts; the skyline of Udolpho bathed in sunset glow, while a"melancholy purple tint" steals up the slopes to its foundations--areall in the day's work now; but they were not so then, and it is fair tosay that Mrs. Radcliffe does them well. The "high canopied tester ofdark green damask" and the "counterpane of black velvet" whichillustrate the introduction of the famous chapter of the Black Pall inChateau le Blanc may be mere inventory goods now: but, once more, theywere not so then. And this faculty of description (which, as notedabove, could hardly have been, and pretty certainly was not, got frombooks, though it may have been, to some extent and quite legitimately,got from pictures) was applied in many minor ways--touches of really orsupposedly horrible objects in the dark, faint suggestions of sound, orof appeals to the other senses--hints of all sorts, which were to becomecommon tricks of the trade, but were then quite new.
At any rate, by these and other means she attained that great result ofthe novel which has been noted in Defoe, in Richardson, and inothers--the result of what the French vividly call _enfisting_ thereader--getting hold of his attention, absorbing him in a pleasantfashion. The mechanism was often too mechanical: taken with theauthor's steady and honest, but somewhat inartistic determination toexplain everything it sometimes produces effects positively ridiculousto us. With the proviso of _valeat quantum_, it is not quite unfair todwell, as has often been dwelt, on the fact that the grand triumph ofMrs. Radcliffe's terrormongering--the famous incident of the BlackVeil--is produced by a piece of wax-work. But the result resulted--theeffect _was_ produced: and it was left to those who were clever enoughto improve upon the means. For the time these means were "improved upon"in another sense; we shall glance at some of the caricatures, intendedand unintended, later. For the present we may turn to other varieties ofthe curiously swarming novel-production of these two last decades of thecentury, and especially of the very last.
If Scott had not established Richard Cumberland's _Henry_ (1795) in thefortress of the Ballantyne Novels, it would hardly be necessary tonotice "Sir Fretful Plagiary's" contributions to the subject of ourhistory. He preluded it with another, _Arundel_ (1789), and followed itmuch later with a third, _John de Lancaster_: but there is no need tosay anything of these. _Henry_ displays the odd hit-_and_-miss qualitywhich seems to have attached itself to Cumberland everywhere, whether asnovelist, dramatist, essayist, diplomatist, poet, or anything else. Itis, though by no means a mere "plagiarism," an obvious and avowedimitation of Fielding, and the writer is so intent on his _pastiche_that he seems quite oblivious himself, and appears to expect equaloblivion on the part of his readers, of the fact that nearly twogenerations had passed. Henry is Joseph; Susan May is a much moreelaborate and attractive Betty; the doctor's wife a vulgarised andrepulsive Lady Booby; Ezekiel Daw, whom Scott admired, a _dissenting_Adams--the full force of the outrage of which variation Sir Walterperhaps did not feel. There are some good things in the story, but, as awhole, it is chiefly valuable as an early example of that great dangerof modern literature--the influence of the "printed book" itself: and ina less degree of that forging ahead of the novel generally in publicfavour which we are chronicling. If the kind had not been popular, andif Fielding had not been its great prophet, one may be pretty sure that_Henry_ would never have existed. The causes are important: the effectnot quite so.
There was, however, at this time a novel-school, and not such a verysmall one, which had more legitimate reasons for existence, inasmuch asit really served as mouthpiece to the thoughts and opinions of the time,whether these thoughts and opinions were good or bad. This may be calledthe "revolutionary school," and its three most distinguished scholarswere Bage, Holcroft, and Godwin, with Mrs. Inchbald perhaps to be added.The first began considerably before the outbreak of the actual FrenchRevolution and shows the influence of its causes: the others weredirectly influenced by itself.
One of the most remarkable of English novel-writers who are not absolutesuccesses, and one who, though less completely obscured by Fortune thansome, has never had quite his due, is Robert Bage. It was unfortunatefor him that he fell in with the crude generation contemporary in theirmanhood with the French Revolution, and so manifested the crudity infull. Bage, in fact, except for a certain strength of humour, is almostmore French than English. He has been put in the school of Richardson,but it is certain that Richardson would have been shocked at thesupposed scholar: and it is not certain that Bage would or need havefelt complimented by the assignment of the master. He has the speciallaxity of the time in point of "morality," or at least of decency; itsaffectations of rather childish perfectibilism and anti-theism; and thetendency of at least a part of it to an odd Calibanic jesting. Bage isgood-tempered enough as it is: but he rather suggests possibleCarrier-and-Fouche developments in a favourable and fosteringatmosphere. One does not quite know why Scott, who included in theBallantyne Novels three of Bage's, _Mount Henneth_ (1781), _BarhamDowns_ (1784), and _James Wallace_ (1788), did not also include, if not_The Fair Syrian_ (1787), two others, _Man as He is_ (1792) and thestill later _Hermsprong_, or _Man as He is Not_ (1796). This last hassometimes been regarded as Bage's masterpiece: but it does not seem soto the present writer. It begins by the sketch of an illegitimate child,written in Bage's worst vein of hard rasping irony, entirely devoid ofthe delicate spring and "give" which irony requires, and whichconstitutes the triumph even of such things as _A Tale of a Tub_ and_Jonathan Wild_. The rather impossibly named Hermsprong himself is notreally so named at all, but is related (and in fact head-of-the-house)to the wicked or at least not good lord of the story. He is of the kindof Sir Charles Grandison, Rights-of-Mannified, which infests all thesenovels and is a great bore--as, indeed, to me is the whole book. Theearlier _Man as He is_ is far better. The hero, Sir George Paradyne,though of the same general class, is very much more tolerable and (beingsometimes naughty) preferable to Grandison himself: while the heroine--acertain Miss Colerain, who is a merchant's daughter under a double cloudof her father's misfortune and of calumny as regards herself--though notan absolute success, is worth a dozen Harriets, with thirteenCharlottes thrown in to make "25 as 24" in bookseller's phrase. Bage'sextravagant or perhaps only too literal manners-painting (for it was anodd time) appears not infrequently, as in the anecdote of a justlyenraged, though as a matter of fact mistaken, husband, who finds a younggentleman sitting on his wife's lap, with her arms round him, while heis literally and _en tout bien tout honneur_ painting her face--being agreat artist in that way. _Mount Henneth_ is perhaps the liveliest ofall: though its liveliness is partly achieved by less merely extravagantunconventionalities than this. But as a matter of fact Bage neverentirely "comes off": though there is cleverness enough in him to havemade a dozen popular and deservedly popular novelists at a better timefor the novel. For he was essentially a novelist of manners andcharacter at a transition time, when manners and character had come outof one stage and had not settled into another. Even Miss Edgeworth in_Belinda_ shows the disadvantage of this: and she was a lady of genius,while Bage had only talent and was not quite a gentleman.
Thomas Holcroft was not a gentleman at all, never pretended to thetitle, and would probably have been rather affronted if any one hadapplied it to him: for he was a violent Atheist and Jacobin, glorying inhis extraction from a shoemaker and an oysterseller, and in hiseducation as a stable boy. He was, however, a man of considerableintellectual power and of some literary gift, which chiefly showeditself in his dramas (the best known, _The Road to Ruin_), but is notquite absent from his novels _Alwyn_ (1780), _Anna St. Ives_ (1792), and_Hugh Trevor_ (1794-1797). The ser
ies runs in curious parallel to thatof Bage's work: for _Alwyn_, the liveliest and the earliest by far ofthe three, is little more than a study partly after Fielding, but moreafter Smollett, with his own experiences brought in. The other two arepurpose-novels of anarchist perfectibilism, and Holcroft enjoys thetraditional credit of having directly inspired Godwin. Godwin himselfacknowledged the obligation; indeed it is well known that--in pecuniarymatters more particularly--Godwin had no hesitation either in incurringor in acknowledging obligations, always provided that he was notexpected to discharge them. It is possible that Holcroft's rough andready acceptance and exaggeration of the doctrines which Rousseau had(as seems most probable) developed from a paradox of Diderot's, gave animpetus to the rather sluggish but more systematic mind of Godwin. Butit is certain that _Political Justice_, though it is not a novel at all,is a much more amusing book than _Anna St. Ives_, which is one. Andthough Holcroft (especially if the presence of this quality in his_Autobiography_ is not wholly due to Hazlitt--there is some chance thatit is) possessed a liveliness in narrative to which Godwin could neverattain, there is no doubt that this enigmatical and many-sided spunger,philanderer, and corruptor of youth had a much higher generalqualification for novel-writing than any one mentioned hitherto in thischapter, or perhaps than any to be mentioned, except the curiouslycontrasted pair, of Irish birth, who are to come last in it.
I have sometimes thought that the greatest testimony to Godwin's powerin this respect is the idea (which even Hazlitt, though he did not shareit, does not seem to have thought preposterous, and which seems to havebeen held by others who were not fools) that Godwin might be the authorof _Waverley_. To us, looking back, the notion seems as absurd as thatBacon could be the author of Shakespeare or Steele of the _Tale of aTub_: but if, instead of looking back, we throw ourselves back, theabsurdity does not quite persist as it does in the other two instances.There are some who, of course, would say, "Why take this fanciful testof Godwin's ability when you have a real one in _Caleb Williams_?" Thereasons are double: for, historically, such an estimate bycontemporaries is of the very first value, and to the present writer_Caleb Williams_ (1794) has never seemed a very interesting book. It isimpossible to sympathise with a hero who is actuated by the very lowestof human motives, sheer inquisitiveness: and _my_ sense of naturaljustice (which is different from Godwin's) demands not that he shallescape, but that he shall be broken on the wheel, or burnt at a slowfire, or made to read _Political Justice_ after the novelty of itscolossal want of humour has palled on him. One could sympathise withFalkland, but is not allowed to do so: because he is not human, exceptin his crime. But, as has been said, to those whose sporting interestsare excited by the pleasures and hazards of the chase, these things nodoubt do not occur. After all _Caleb_ is, in a sense, the first"detective novel": and detective novels have always been popular, thoughthey bore some people to extinction. Far, however, be it from me to denythat this popularity, especially when, as in the present case, it hasbeen continued for four whole generations, is a real and a veryconsiderable asset. Even if it were now to cease, it is actually fundedand vested to Godwin's credit in the _grand livre_ of literary history:and it can never be written off. Perhaps _Caleb_ is the one book of thelater English eighteenth century in novel for which there must always bea public as soon as it is presented to that public. And when this issaid and endorsed by those who do not personally much care for the book,it is at once a sufficient testimony to the position of the author, anda vindication of the not absolutely imbecile position of those whothought that he might have written _Waverley_ and its successors. Theway in which Godwin in his later novels came down from the mountain-topsof theory and paradox just as he came down from those of _PoliticalJustice_ itself is interesting and amusing, but not for us. As novelsthey are certainly inferior. The best parts of _St. Leon_ (1799) and_Fleetwood_ (1805) are perhaps better than anything in _Caleb:Mandeville_ (1817) and _Deloraine_ (1833) are _senilia_.[15] Thegraceful figure of the heroine Marguerite in _St. Leon_ is said to bemodelled on Mary Wollstonecraft, and there are some fresh pictures ofyouth and childhood in _Fleetwood_. But _St. Leon_, besides itshistorical shortcomings (which, once more, we may postpone), is full offaults, from the badly managed supernatural to an only too naturaldullness and languor of general story: nor has _Fleetwood_ anything likethe absorbing power which _Caleb Williams_ exercises, in its own way andon its own people. Yet again we may perhaps say that the chief interestof Godwin, from our point of view, is his repeated and further weightedtestimony to the importance of the novel as an appeal to publicattention. In this respect it was in fact displacing, not only the dramaon one side, but the sermon on the other. Not so very long before thesetwo had almost engrossed the domain of _popular_ literature, the graverand more precise folk habitually reading sermons as well as hearingthem, and the looser and lighter folk reading drama much oftener than(in then-existing circumstances) they had the opportunity of seeing it.With the novel the "address to the reader" became direct and stood byitself. The novelist could emulate Burke with his right barrel andLydia Languish with his left. He certainly did not always endeavour toprofit as well as to delight: but the double power was, from this timeforward, shared by him with his brother in the higher and older_Dichtung_.
[15] Godwin had written novel-_juvenilia_ of which few say anything.
Next to Godwin may be placed a lady who was much adored by that curiousprofessor of philandering, political _in_justice, psychology, and theuse of the spunge, but who wisely put him off. Mrs. Inchbald's(1753-1821) command of a certain kind of dramatic or at least theatricalsituation, and her propensity to Richardsonian "human-heart"-mongering,have from time to time secured a certain number of admirers for _ASimple Story_ (1791) and _Nature and Art_ (1796). Some, availingthemselves of the confusion between "style" and "handling" which hasrecently become fashionable, have even credited her with style itself.Of this she has nothing--unless the most conventional ofeighteenth-century phraseology, dashed with a kind of _marivaudage_which may perhaps seem original to those who do not know Marivaux'sFrench followers, shall deserve the name. She is indeed very much of anEnglish Madame Riccoboni. But her situations--such as the meeting in _ASimple Story_ of a father with the daughter whom, though not exactlycasting her off, he has persistently refused to see, in revenge for hermother's unfaithfulness, and the still more famous scene in _Nature andArt_ where a judge passes the death-sentence on a woman whom he hasbetrayed--have, as has been allowed, the dramatic or melodramaticquality which attracts people in "decadent" periods. There seems,indeed, to have been a certain decadent charm about Mrs. Inchbaldherself--with her beauty, her stage skill, her strict virtue combinedwith any amount of "sensibility," her affectation of nature, and herbenevolence not in the least sham but distinctly posing. And somethingof this rococo relish may no doubt, with a little good will andsympathy, be detected in her books. But of the genuine life and thenatural language which occasionally inspirit the much more unequal andmore generally commonplace work of Miss Burney, she has practicallynothing. And she thus falls out of the main line of development, merelyexemplifying the revolutionary and sentimental episode.
We must now, for some pages, illustrate the course of the novel by minorexamples: and we may begin with a brief notice of two writers, one ofwhom might have been taken before Miss Burney and the other just afterher chronologically: but who, in the order of thought and method, willcome better here. Both were natives of Scotland and both illustratedifferent ways of the novel. Henry Mackenzie, an Edinburgh advocate, inthree books--the names of which at least are famous, while his friendSir Walter has preserved the books themselves in the collection so oftenmentioned--produced, in his own youth and in rapid succession, _The Manof Feeling_ (1771), _The Man of the World_ (1773), and _Julia deRoubigne_ (1777). John Moore, a Glasgow physician, wrote, when he wasnearly sixty, the novel of _Zeluco_ (1786) and followed it up with_Edward_ ten years afterwards and _Mordaunt_ (1800). Mackenzie did goodwork later in the periodical essay: but his
fiction is chiefly the"sensibility"-novel of the French and of Sterne, reduced to theabsolutely absurd. From his essay-work, and from Scott's and otheraccounts of him, he must have possessed humour of a kind: but theextremely limited character of its nature and operation may beexemplified by his representation of a whole press-gang as bursting intotears at the pathetic action and words of an old man who offers himselfas substitute for his son. This is one of the not rare, but certainlyone of the most consummate, instances of fashion caricaturing itself intotal unconsciousness. But it _was_ the fashion: and Mackenzie, thoughperhaps he helped to bring it to an end, no doubt caused the shedding,by "the fair" of the time, of an ocean of tears as great as the ocean ofport wine which was contemporaneously absorbed by "the brave."
Moore saw a good deal of continental society--he is indeed one of thefirst-hand witnesses for the events of the French Revolution--and he hada more considerable influence on the novel than has always been allowedhim. _Zeluco_ chiefly survives because of the exquisitely ludicrous andhuman trait of the English sailor who, discussing the French army,pronounces white uniforms "absurd" and blue "only fit for the artilleryand the blue horse." But it is not quite certain that its villain-herohad not something, and perhaps a good deal, to do with those of Mrs.Radcliffe who were soon to follow, and, through these, with Byron whowas not to be very long after. The later books are of much lessimportance, if only because they follow the outburst of fiction whichthe French Revolution itself ushered. But Moore, who was intimatelyconnected with Smollett, carried on the practice of making national orsub-national characteristics important elements of novel interest: andis thus noteworthy in more ways than one.
He is a late instance--he was born in 1729 and so was only a few yearsyounger than Smollett himself--of the writers who had, for all but halfa century after Richardson's appearance, accumulated patterns andexamples of the novel in all sorts of forms, hardly one of which lackednumerous and almost innumerable imitators and followers. By these lateryears of the century the famous "Minerva Press" and many others issueddeluges of novel-work which were eagerly absorbed by readers."Absorbed" in more senses than one: for the institution of circulatinglibraries, while it facilitated reading, naturally tended towards thedestruction of the actual volumes read. Novels were rarely produced in avery careful or sumptuous fashion, and good copies of those that were inany way popular are now rather hard to obtain: while even in the BritishMuseum it will frequently be found that only the later editions arerepresented. We shall finish this chapter with some instances, taken notquite at random, of the work of the last decades of the eighteenth andthe beginning of the nineteenth century, winding up with more generalnotice of two remarkable writers who represent--though at least one ofthem lived far later--the period before Scott, and who also, as ithappens, represent the contrast of novel and romance in a fashionunusually striking. The description, as some readers will haveanticipated, refers to Miss Edgeworth and to Maturin. But the smallerfry must be taken first.
It is not uninteresting to compare two such books as Mrs. Bennett's_Anna_ and Mrs. Opie's _Adeline Mowbray_. Published at twenty years'distance (1785 and 1804) they show the rapid growth of the novel, evenduring a time when nothing of the first class appeared. _Anna, or theMemoirs of a Welsh Heiress, interspersed with Anecdotes of a Nabob_, isa kind of bad imitation of Miss Burney, with a catchpenny"interspersion" to suit the day. _Adeline Mowbray_, written with moretalent, chimes in by infusing one of the tones of _its_ day--Godwiniantheories of life. The space between was the palmy time of that nowalmost legendary "Minerva Press" which, as has been said, flooded theever-absorbent market with stuff of which _The Libertine_, masterpieceof Mrs. Byrne, _alias_ Charlotte Dacre, _alias_ "Rosa Matilda," isperhaps best worth singling out from its companions, _Hours of Solitude,The Nun of St. Omers, Zofloya_, etc., because it specially shocked thecensor of the style who will be mentioned presently. It is pure (ornot-pure) rubbish. Angelo (the libertine) seduces the angelic Gabriellede Montmorency, who follows him to Italy in male attire, saves him fromthe wicked courtesan Oriana and her bravo Fiorenz_a_ (_sic_), is marriedby him, but made miserable, and dies. He continues his misbehaviour totheir children, and finally blows his brains out. "Bah! it is bosh!" asthe Master observes of something else.
It may seem iniquitous to say that some tolerably good novel-writersmust be more summarily treated than some bad ones here: but there isreason for it. Such, for instance, as Charlotte Smith and the Miss Leesare miles above such others as the just-mentioned polyonymous "Rosa," asSarah Wilkinson, or as Henrietta Mosse-Rouviere. The first three wouldmake a very good group for a twenty-page causerie. Charlotte Smith, whowas tolerably expert in verse as well as prose; who anticipated, andperhaps taught, Scott in the double use of the name "Waverley"; andwhose _Old Manor House_ (1793) is a solid but not heavy work of itskind--is something of a person in herself, but less of a figure inhistory, because she neither innovates nor does old things consummately.Harriet and Sophia Lee claimed innovation for the latter's _Recess_(1783-1786), as Miss Porter did for _Thaddeus of Warsaw_, but the claimcan be even less allowed. There is nothing of real historical spirit,and very little goodness of any kind, in _The Recess. The CanterburyTales_ (1797-1805) (so named merely because they are supposed to be toldby different persons) were praised by Byron, as he praised the _PercyAnecdotes_ and other things--either irresponsibly or impishly. They arenot exactly bad: but also as far as possible from consummateness.
On the other hand, _The Convent of Grey Penitents_, one of the cropswhich rewarded Miss Wilkinson for tilling the lands of her imaginationwith the spade of her style, _is_ very nearly consummate--in badness. Itis a fair example of the worst imitations of Mrs. Radcliffe and MatLewis conjointly, though without the latter's looseness. The Marquis diZoretti was an Italian nobleman--"one of those characters in whose bosomresides an unquenchable thirst of avarice" ["_thirst_ of _avarice_" isgood!], etc. He marries, however, a lovely signora of the odd name ofRosalthe, without a fortune, "which circumstance was overlooked by hislordship" for a very short time only. He plots to be free of her: shegoes to England and dies there to the genteelest of slow music. Theirson Horatio falls in love with a certain Julietta, who is immured bywicked arts in the "Convent of Grey Penitents," tormented by the head,Gradisca, but rescued, and so forth. The book, if harmless, is about asworthless as a book can be: but it represents, very fairly, the ruck, ifnot indeed even the main body, of the enormous horde of romances whichissued from the press towards the end of the eighteenth century and thebeginning of the nineteenth, and which, in their different action onpersons of genius, gave us _Zastrozzi_ on the one side and _NorthangerAbbey_ on the other.
As for Miss Henrietta Mosse, otherwise Rouviere, she represents theother school of abortive historical novel. _A Peep at Our Ancestors_(1807) is fairly worthy of its ridiculous name. It is preceded byexpressions of thanks to the authorities of "the British Museum and theHeralds' Office" for the "access to records" vouchsafed to its author.As the date of the story is 1146 (it was long before Mr. Freeman wrote)access to records would certainly not have been superfluous. The actualresults of it are blocks of spiritless and commonplace historicnarrative--it is nearly all narrative, not action--diversified byutterances like this of Malcolm III. of Scotland, "O my Edward! the deedwhich struck my son's life has centred [_sic_] thy noble youthful bosomalso," or this of the heroine (such as there is), "the gentle _elegant_Adelaise," "And do I not already receive my education of thee, mamma?"It is really a pity that the creator of this remarkable peep-show didnot give references to her "records," so that one might look up this"elegant" young creature of the twelfth century who talked about"education" and said "mamma!" But this absolute failure inverisimilitude is practically universal before Scott.
The works of the very beautifully named Regina Maria Roche shouldprobably be read, as they were for generations, in late childhood orearly youth. Even then an intelligent boy or girl would perceive some ofthe absurdity, but might catch a charm that escapes the less rece
ptiveoldster. They were, beyond all question, immensely popular, andcontinued to be so for a long time: in fact it is almost sufficientevidence that there is, if I mistake not, in the British Museum noedition earlier than the tenth of the most famous of them, _The Childrenof the Abbey_ (1798). This far-renowned work opens with the exclamationof the heroine Amanda, "Hail, sweet sojourn of my infancy!" and we areshortly afterwards informed that in the garden "the part appropriated tovegetables was divided from the part sacred to Flora." Otherwise, thesubstance of the thing is a curious sort of watered-down Richardson,passed through successive filtering beds of Mackenzie, and even of Mrs.Radcliffe. It is difficult for even the most critical taste to find muchsavour or stimulus in the resulting liquid. But, like almost everybodymentioned here, Regina is a document of the demands of readers and thefaculty of writers: and so she "standeth," if not exactly "crowned," yetticketed.
Work--somewhat later--of some interest, but not of first-class quality,is to be found in the _Discipline_ (1811) and _Self-Control_ (1814) ofMary Brunton. A Balfour of Orkney on the father's side and a Ligonier onthe mother's, the authoress had access to the best English as well asScottish society, and seems to have had more than a chance of taking aplace in the former: but preferred to marry a minister-professor andsettled down to country manse life. She died in middle age and herhusband wrote a memoir of her. _Discipline_ seems to represent a sort offancy combination of the life she might have led and the life she didlead. Ellen Percy, the heroine, starts in the highest circles; forgetsherself so far as to "waltz_e_" with a noble ne'er-do-weel, therebyearning the "stern disapprobation" of a respectable lover; comes down inthe world; has Highland experiences which, at the book's early date, arenoteworthy; marries (like her creatress) a minister; but "retains alittle of her coquettish sauciness." "Bless her, poor little dear!" onecan imagine Thackeray exclaiming in his later and mellowed days. Mrs.Brunton's letters breathe a lady-like and not unamiable propriety, andshe is altogether a sort of milder, though actually earlier, MissFerrier.
Ireland vindicated its claim to comparative liveliness in the work of abetter known contemporary and survivor. Lady Morgan's (Miss SydneyOwenson's) _Wild Irish Girl_ (1806) is one of the books whose titleshave prolonged for them a kind of shadowy existence. It is written inletters: and the most interesting thing about it for some readers now isthat the heroine supplied Thackeray with the name Glorvina, which, itseems, means in Irish "sweet voice," if Lady Morgan is to be trusted _inrebus Celticis_. It is to be hoped she is: for the novel is a sort of_macedoine_ of Irish history, folk-lore, scenery, and what not, done upin a syrup of love-making _quant. suff._ Its author wrote many morenovels and became a butt for both good- and ill-natured satire with thecomic writers of the twenties, thirties, and forties. The title wasactually borrowed by Maturin in _The Wild Irish_ "Boy," and it is fairto say that the book preceded Scott's, though not Miss Edgeworth's,experiments in the line of the "national" novel. The earlier Reviewerswere discreditably savage on women-writers, and Lady Morgan had hershare of their truculence. She did not wholly deserve it: but it must besaid that nothing she wrote can really be ranked as literature, save onthe most indiscriminate and uncritical estimate. It is, however,difficult to see much harm in her.
_Ida of Athens_, for instance, which shocked contemporaries, and which,by the way, has the very large first title of _Woman_, could only bringa blush to cheeks very tickle of that sere: a yawn might come much moreeasily. The most shocking thing that the heroine, who is "an attempt todelineate woman in her natural state," does (and that not of malice) isto receive her lover in a natural bathroom. But her adventures are toldin a style which is the oddest compound of Romantesque and Johnsonese.("The hour was ardent. The bath was cool. _He calculated upon theprobable necessity of its enjoyment_.") The spirit is the silliest andmost ignorant Philhellenism--all the beauty, virtue, wisdom, of theancient Greeks being supposed to be inherited by their mongrelsuccessors of the early nineteenth century. An English and a Turkishlover dispute Ida's affection or possession. There are the elaboratepseudo-erudite notes which one has learnt to associate chiefly withMoore. The authoress boasts in her preface that she "has already writtenalmost as many volumes as she has years," and that she has hardly evercorrected her proofs. Perhaps this silliness will make some think hernot more an example of the savagery of contemporary criticism than ajustification thereof.
It was in fact not only brutal man who objected to the preposterousexcesses of pseudo-romance: and serious or jocular parables were takenup against it, if not before _Northanger Abbey_ was written, long beforeit was published. In 1810 a certain "G." or "S.G.," whose full name wasSarah Green, wrote, besides some actual history and an attempt at thehistorical novel, a very curious and rather hybrid book entitled_Romance Readers and Romance Writers_. Its preface is an instance of"Women, beware Women," for though it stigmatises male creatures, such asa certain Curteis and a certain Pickersgill, it treats Lady Morgan (thenonly Sydney Owenson) and "Rosa Matilda" even more roughly and asks (ashas been asked about a hundred years later and was asked about a hundredyears before), "Is it not amazing that the [two] most licentious writersof romance are women?" And it starts with a burlesque account of acertain Margaret Marsham who exclaims, "What then? to add to my earthlymiseries am I to be called Peggy? My name is Margari_tt_a!" "I am surethat if I am called Peggy again I shall go into a fit." But this promiseof something to complete the trio with _Northanger Abbey_ and _TheHeroine_ (to be presently mentioned) is not maintained. Not only doesthe writer force the note of parody too much by making "Margaritta" sayto herself, "Poor persecuted _dove_ that I am," and adore a labourer'sshirt on a hedge, but she commits the far more fatal fault of exchangingher jest for earnest. Margaritta--following her romance-models--falls avictim to an unprincipled great lady and the usual wicked baronet--atwhose head, one is bound to say, she flings herself with such violenceas no baronet could possibly resist. Her sister Mary, innocent ofromance-reading and all other faults, is, though not as guilty, asunlucky almost as Margaret: and by far the greater part of the book isan unreal presentment, in nearly the worst manner of the eighteenthcentury itself, of virtuous curates, _un_virtuous "tonish" rectors, whocalmly propose to seduce their curates' daughters (an offence which, forobvious reasons, must, in the worst times, have been unusual), libertineladies, and reckless "fashionables" of all kinds. The preface and theopening create expectations, not merely of amusement but of power, whichare by no means fulfilled. It is "S.G." who asserts that _Ida of Athens_"has brought a blush to the cheek of many," and one can only repeat thesuggested substitution.
The only faults that can be found with _The Heroine_ or _The Adventuresof Cherubina_, by Eaton Stannard Barrett, which appeared in the sameyear, with no very different object and subject, though written inlighter vein, are one that it could not help and another that it could.Unjustly, but unavoidably, the first is the worst. That it is aburlesque rather overdone--a burlesque _burlesque_--not in the manner ofThackeray, but in that of some older and some more recent writers--isunfortunate, but not fatal. One can forgive--one can even enjoy--theghost who not only sneezes but says, "D--n, all is blown!" When theheroine is actually locked up with a man in a chest one is moredoubtful: recovering when the Marquis de Furioso, "bowing gracefully tothe bride," stabs himself to the heart, which is almost "the realMackay" as they say in the North. The slight awkwardness of snow fallingthe day after the characters have been eating strawberries does notamuse _us_ much, because this is a comparatively ordinary event of theearly twentieth century, whatever it might be of the early nineteenth.But what is fatal, though the author could not help it, is that theinfinitely lighter, more artistic, and more lethal dart of _NorthangerAbbey_ had been launched by the pen, if not the press, more than a dozenyears before.
There are few more curious and interesting personages in the history ofthe English Novel than Maria Edgeworth. The variety of heraccomplishment in the kind was extraordinary: and in more than one ofits species she went very near perfection. On
e is never quite certainwhether the perpetual meddling of her rather celebrated fatherRichard--one of the capital examples of the unpractical pragmatists andclever-silly crotcheteers who produced and were produced by theRevolutionary period--did her more harm than good. It certainly loadedher work with superfluous and (to us) disgusting didacticism: but itmight be contended that, without its stimulus, she would have done muchless, perhaps nothing. As it was, she lived for more than eighty years(till all but the middle of the nineteenth century) and wrote for morethan sixty. Her work is thus very bulky: but it may be considered, forour present purpose, in three groups--her short stories written mainlybut not wholly for children; her regular novels; and her Irish studies.Of these the middle division has been, and no doubt has deserved to be,the least popular: but its principal example, _Belinda_ (1801)(_Patronage_, a longer and later book, and others are inferior), isconsiderably better than is usually admitted and, by its early date,deserves special notice here. It preceded Miss Austen's work inpublication, and is specially cited by her as a capital example of novelin connection with the work of Miss Burney: and it is evidently foundedon study of the latter, of which, indeed, it is the first really worthycontinuation. Maria has nothing so good as Fanny's Smiths andBranghtons: but the whole book is far superior to _Evelina_. Theextravagance of the _fin-de-siecle_ society which it represents hasprobably disguised from not a few readers who do not know the facts, theother fact that it is a real attempt at realist observation of manners:and it has the narrative merit which was Miss Edgeworth's gift ofnature. But the hero is patchy and improbable: the heroine, a good andquite possible girl, is not sufficiently "reliefed out"; and the mostimportant figures of the book, Lord and Lady Delacour, almost greatsuccesses, are not helped by the peculiar academic-didactic moralisingwhich she had caught from Marmontel.
The following of that ingenious and now too much under-valued writerstood her in better stead in the _Moral Tales_ (1801) (which shedeliberately called after his[16]), the _Popular Tales_ of the samekind, and (though Marmontel did not intentionally write for children)the delightful _Parent's Assistant_ (1801) and _Frank_. In the twofirst-named divisions, the narrative faculty just mentioned appearsadmirably, together with another and still greater gift, that ofcharacter-painting, and even a grasp of literary and social satire,which might not be anticipated from some of her other books. The Frenchgoverness (_Mlle. Panache_) and the satire on romantic young-ladyism(_Angelina_) are excellent examples of this. As for the pure child'sstories, generation after generation of competent criticism, childishand adult, has voted them by acclamation into almost the highest placepossible: and the gain-sayers have for the most part been idleparadoxers, ill-conditioned snarlers at things clean and sweet, or foolspure and simple.
[16] The peculiar pedantic ignorance which critics sometimes show has objected to this rendering of Marmontel's _Contes Moraux_, urging that it should read "tales _of manners_." It might be enough to remark that the Edgeworths, father and daughter, were probably a good deal better acquainted both with French and English than these cavillers. But there is a rebutting argument which is less _ad hominem_. "Tales of Manners" leaves out at least as much on one side as "Moral Tales" does on the other: and the actual meaning is quite clear to those who know that of the Latin _mores_ and the French _moeurs_. It is scarcely worth while to attempt to help those who do not know by means of paraphrases.
The "Irish brigade" of the work--_Castle Rackrent_ (1800), _Ormond_, and_The Absentee_, with the non-narrative but closely-connected _Essay onIrish Bulls_--have perhaps commanded the most unchequered applause. Theyare not quite free from the sentimentality and the didacticism whichwere both rampant in the novel of Miss Edgeworth's earlier time: butthese are atoned for by a quite new use of the "national" element. EvenSmollett and, following Smollett, Moore had chiefly availed themselvesof this for its farcical or semi-farcical opportunities. Miss Edgeworthdid not neglect these, but she did not confine herself to them: and suchcharacters as Corny the "King of the Black Isles" in _Ormond_ actuallyadd a new province and a new pleasure to fiction.
Her importance is thus very great: and it only wanted the proverbial oranecdotic "That!" to make it much greater. "That!" as it generally is,was in her case the last fusing touch of genius to accomplish the_grand oeuvre_--the perfect projection. She had humour, pathos,knowledge of the world, power of drawing it, acquaintance withliterature, shrewd common sense, an excellent style when she was allowedto write in her own way, the feelings of a lady who was also a goodwoman. King Charles is made to say in _Woodstock_ that "half the thingsin the world remind him of the Tales of Mother Goose." It isastonishing, in the real complimentary sense, how many things remind oneof situations, passages, phrases, in Miss Edgeworth's works of all thekinds from _Castle Rackrent_ to _Frank_. She also had a great and anacknowledged influence on Scott, a considerable and a certainly notdisavowed influence on Miss Austen. She is good reading always, howevermuch we may sometimes pish and pshaw at the untimely poppings-in of theplatitudes and crotchets (for he was that most abominable of things, aplatitudinous crotcheteer) of Richard her father. She was a girl offourteen when the beginnings of the domestic novel were laid in_Evelina_, and she lived to see it triumph in _Vanity Fair_. But her ownwork, save in some of her short stories, which are pretty perfect,represents the imperfect stage of the development--the stage when thenovel is trying for the right methods and struggling to get into theright ways, but has not wholly mastered the one or reached the others.
There are those who would assign what they might call "higher genius,"or "rarer gift," or something similar, to her countryman Charles RobertMaturin. The present writer is not very fond of these measuringstogether of things incommensurable--these attempts to rank the "lightwhite sea-mew" as superior or inferior to the "sleek black pantheress."It is enough to say that while Miss Edgeworth very deliberately adoptedthe novel, and even, as we have seen, slightly satirised at leastpseudo-romance, Maturin was romantic or nothing. His life was hardlyhalf hers in length, and his temperament appears to have been asdiscontented as hers was sunny: but he had his successes in drama aswell as in novel, and one of his attempts in the latter kind had awide-ranging influence abroad as well as at home, has been recentlyprinted both in whole and in part, and undoubtedly ranks among thenovels which any tolerably well instructed person would enumerate if hewere asked to give a pretty full list of celebrated (and deservedlycelebrated) books of the kind in English. The others fall quite out ofcomparison. _The Fatal Revenge_ or the _Family of Montorio_ (1807) is atry for the "furthest" in the Radcliffe-Lewis direction, discardingindeed the crudity of _The Monk_, but altogether neglecting therestraint of _Udolpho_ and its companions in the use of thesupernatural. _The Wild Irish Boy_ (1808), _The Milesian Chief_ (1812),_Women_ (1818), and _The Albigenses_ (1824) are negligible, the last,perhaps, rather less so than the others. But _Melmoth the Wanderer_(1820) is in quite a different case. It has faults in plenty--especiallya narrative method of such involution that, as it has been said, "aconsiderable part of the book consists of a story told to a certainperson, who is a character in a longer story, found in a manuscriptwhich is delivered to a third person, who narrates the greater part ofthe novel to a fourth person, who is the namesake and descendant of thetitle-hero." Stripped of these tiresome lendings (which, as has beenfrequently pointed out, were a mania with the eighteenth century andnaturally grew to such intricacy as this), the central story, though notexactly new, is impressive: and it is told and worked out in manner moreimpressive, because practically novel, save for, perhaps, a littlesuggestion from _Vathek_. Melmoth has bartered his soul with the devilfor something like immortality and other privileges, including theunusual one of escaping doom if he can get some one to take the bargainoff his hands. This leads up to numerous episodes or chapters in whichMelmoth endeavours to obtain substitutes: and in one of these the loveinterest of the book--the, of course, fatal love of Melmoth himself fora Spanish-Indian girl Immalee or Isidora--is re
lated with some realpathos and passion, though with a good deal of mere sentiment andtwaddle. Maturin is stronger in his terror-scenes, and affected his owngeneration very powerfully: his influence being so great in France thatBalzac attempted a variation and continuation, and that there areconstant references to the book in the early French Romantics. In factfor this kind of "sensation" Maturin is, putting _Vathek_ aside, quitethe chief of the whole school. But it is doubtful whether he had manyother gifts as a novelist, and this particular one is one that cannot beexercised very frequently, and is very difficult to exercise at allwithout errors and extravagances.
The child-literature of this school and period was very large, and, hadwe space, would be worth dealing with at length--as in the instances ofthe famous _Sandford and Merton_ (1783-1789) by Thomas Day, RichardEdgeworth's friend, of Mrs. Trimmer's _Story of the Robins_, and others.It led up to the definitely religious school of children's books, firstevangelical, then tractarian, with which we shall deal later: but wasitself as a rule utilitarian--or sentimental--moral rather than directlyreligious. It is, however, like other things--indeed almost allthings--in this chapter--a document of the fashion in which the novelwas "filling all numbers" and being used for all purposes. It was, ofcourse, in this case, nearest to the world-old "fable"--especially tothe moral apologues of which the mediaeval sermon-writers and others hadbeen so fond. But its popularity, especially when taken in connectionwith the still surviving distrust of fiction, is valuable. It involvesnot merely the principle that "the devil shall not have all the besttunes," but the admission that this tune is good.
This point, and that other also frequently mentioned and closelyconnected with it, that the novel at this time overflows into almostevery conceivable department of subject and object, are the main factsof a general historical kind, which should be in the reader's mind asthe upshot of this chapter. But there is a third, almost as important aseither, and that is the almost universal coming short of completesuccess--the lack of consummateness, the sense that if the Novel Israelis not exactly still in the wilderness, it has not yet crossed theJordan. Even if we take in the last chapter, and its comparative giants,with the present and its heroes, ordinary folk, and pygmies, we shallscarcely find more than one great master, Fielding, and one littlemasterpiece, _Vathek_, deserving the adjective "consummate." No doubtthe obvious explanation--that the hour was not because the man had notcome except in this single case--is a good one: but it need not be leftin the bare isolation of its fatalism. There are at least severalsubsidiary considerations which it is well to advance. The transitionstate of manners and language cannot be too often insisted upon: forthis affected the process at both ends, giving the artist in fictitiouslife an uncertain model to copy and unstable materials to work in. Thedeficiency of classical patterns--at a time which still firmly believed,for the most part, that all good work in literature had been so done bythe ancients that it could at best be emulated--should count forsomething: the scanty respect in which the kind was held for somethingmore. As to one of the most important species, frequent allusions havebeen made, and in the next chapter full treatment will be given, to thecauses which made the _historical_ novel impossible until very late inthe century, and decidedly unlikely to be good even then. Perhaps,without attempting further detail, we may conclude by saying that theproductions of this time present, and present inevitably, the nonage andnovitiate of a branch of art which hardly possessed any genuinerepresentatives when the century was born and which numbered them, badand good, by thousands and almost tens of thousands at its death. In theinterval there had been continuous and progressive exercise; there hadbeen some great triumphs; there had been not a little good and pleasantwork; and of even the work that was less good and less pleasant one maysay that it at least represented experiment, and might save others fromfailure.
The English Novel Page 4