Charlotte Smith. Mrs. Inchbald
While Hannah More was endeavouring to improve the condition of the poor
by teaching them diligence and sobriety, a group of earnest men and
women were writing books and pamphlets in which they claimed that
poverty and ignorance were due to unjust laws. The writings of Voltaire
and Rousseau had filled their minds with bright pictures of a democracy.
These theories were considered most dangerous in England, but they were
the theories which helped to shape the American constitution. Among
these English revolutionists were William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft,
Charlotte Smith, Mrs. Inchbald, and for a time Amelia Opie.
The strongest political novel was _Caleb Williams_ by William Godwin. In
this he shows how through law man may become the destroyer of man. This
interest in the rights of man awakened interest in the condition of
women; and Mary Wollstonecraft, who afterward became Mrs. Godwin, wrote
_Vindication of the Rights of Woman_. This pamphlet was declared
contrary to the Bible and to Christian law, although all its demands
have now been conceded. Charlotte Smith was also interested in the
position of women and the laws affecting them. In _Desmond_ she
discussed freely a marriage problem which in her day seemed very bold,
while in her private life she ignored British prejudices.
She was the mother of twelve children and the wife of a man of many
schemes, so that she was continually devising ways to extricate her
large family from the financial difficulties into which he plunged them.
At one time a friend suggested to her that her husband's attention
should be turned toward religion. Her reply was: "Oh, for heaven's sake,
do not put it into his head to take to religion, for if he does, he will
instantly begin by building a cathedral." She is supposed to have
caricatured him in the projector who hoped to make a fortune by manuring
his estate with old wigs. But when her husband was imprisoned for debt,
she shared his captivity, and began to write to support her family.
Although she died at the age of fifty-seven, she found time during her
manifold cares to write thirty-eight volumes.
But not only did Mrs. Smith endure sorrows as great as those of her
favourite heroine, Sidney Biddulph, but one of her daughters was
equally unfortunate. She was married unhappily, and returned with her
three children for her mother to support. Mr. and Mrs. Smith, after
twenty-three years of married life, agreed to live in separate
countries, he in Normandy, and she in England, although they always
corresponded and were interested in each other's welfare. Yet this
separation, together with the revolutionary tendencies discovered in her
writings, raised a storm of criticism against her.
In _Desmond_, which was regarded as so dangerous, Mrs. Smith has
presented the following problem: Geraldine, the heroine, is married to a
spendthrift, who attempts to retrieve his fortunes by forcing his wife
to become the mistress of his friend, the rich Duc de Romagnecourt. To
preserve her honour she leaves him, hoping to return to her mother's
roof; but her mother refuses to receive her and bids her return to her
husband. As she dares not do this, and is without money, a faithful
friend, Desmond, takes her under his protection, asking no reward but
the pleasure of serving her. Finally Geraldine receives a letter
informing her that her husband is ill. She returns to him, and nurses
him until he dies; after a year of mourning she marries Desmond.
How could a woman have behaved more virtuously than Geraldine? She is
always high-minded and actuated by the purest motives. But it was
feared that her example might encourage wives to desert their husbands,
and consequently the novel was declared immoral.
_Desmond_ was published in 1792, when the feeling against France was
very bitter in England. The plot, as it meanders slowly through three
volumes, is constantly interrupted by political discussions. The
author's clearly expressed preference for a republican government, and
her criticism of English law, met with bitter disapproval. One of the
characters pronounces a panegyric upon the greater prosperity and
happiness that has come to the French soldiers, farmers, and peasants,
since they came to believe that they were sharers in their own labours,
and the hero of the book, writing from France to a friend in England,
says: "I lament still more the disposition which too many Englishmen
show to join in this unjust and infamous crusade, against the holy
standard of freedom; and I blush for my country." In the same book, the
author censures the penal laws of England, by which robbery to the
amount of forty shillings is punishable with death; and criticises the
delay of the courts in dealing justice.
This criticism is expressed tamely, barely more than suggested, when
compared with the vigorous attacks which Dickens made in the next
century on English law and the slow action of justice in the famous
"Circumlocution Office." Dickens wrote with such vigour that he brought
about a reform. A modern reader finds _Desmond_ earnest and sincere, but
tame to the point of dulness. It seems strange how the Tory party could
see in this book a menace to the British constitution. But a writer in
the _Monthly Review_ for December, 1792, advocated her cause. "She is
very justly of opinion," he writes, "that the great events that are
passing in the world are no less interesting to women than to men, and
that, in her solicitude to discharge the domestic duties, a woman ought
not to forget that, in common with her father and husband, her brothers
and sons, she is a citizen."
The publication of _The Old Manor House_ in the following year won back
for her many of the friends that she had lost by _Desmond_. But in this
work also the same love of liberty, the same indifference to social
distinctions, occur. The hero of _The Old Manor House_ joins the English
army, and is sent to fight against the Americans; in the many
reflections upon this conflict, the author shows that her sympathies are
with the colonists. The father of the hero had married a young woman who
had nothing to recommend her but "beauty, simplicity, and goodness." The
hero himself falls in love with and marries a girl beneath him in rank,
but he does not seem to feel that he has done a generous thing, nor
does the heroine show any gratitude for this honour. Each seems
unconscious that their difference in rank should be a bar to their
union, provided they do not offend old Mrs. Rayland, the owner of the
manor. A great change had come over the novel since Pamela was
overpowered with gratitude to her profligate master, Mr. B, for
condescending to make her his wife.
The revolutionary principles of Mrs. Smith's novels were soon forgotten,
but two new elements were introduced by her that bore fruit in English
fiction. Her great gift to the novel was the portrayal of refined,
quiet, intellectual ladies, beside whom Evelina and Cecilia seem but
school-girls. Her heroines may be poor, they may be of inferior rank,
but they are always ladies of sensitive nature and cultivated manners,
and are drawn with a feeling and tenderness which no novelist before her
had reached. A contemporary said of Emmeline, "All is graceful, and
pleasing to the sight, all, in short, is simple, femininely beautiful
and chaste." This might be said of all the women she has created. Old
Mrs. Rayland, the central personage in her most popular novel, _The Old
Manor House_, notwithstanding her exalted ideas of her own importance as
a member of the Rayland family, and the arbitrary manner in which she
compels all to conform to her old-fashioned notions, is always the
high-born lady. We smile at her, but she never forfeits our respect.
Scott said of her, "Old Mrs. Rayland is without a peer."
Mrs. Smith's second gift to the novel was her charming descriptions of
rural scenery. Nature had for a long time been banished from the arts.
Wordsworth in one of his prefaces wrote:
"Excepting _The Nocturnal Reverie_ of Lady Winchelsea, and a passage or
two in the _Windsor Forest_ of Pope, the poetry of the period
intervening between the publication of _Paradise Lost_ and _The Seasons_
does not contain a single new image of external nature; and scarcely
presents a familiar one, from which it can be inferred that the eye of
the Poet had been steadily fixed upon his object, much less that his
feelings had urged him to work upon it in the spirit of genuine
imagination."
Fiction was as barren of scenery as poetry. None of the novelists were
cognisant of the country scenes amid which their plots were laid, with
the possible exception of Goldsmith. _The Vicar of Wakefield_ has a
rural setting, and there are references to the trees, the blackbirds,
and the hayfields; but description is not introduced for the sake of its
own beauty as in the novels of Charlotte Smith. In _Ethelinda_ there are
beautiful descriptions of the English Lakes, part of the scene being
laid at Grasmere; _Celestina_ is in the romantic Provence; _Desmond_ in
Normandy; and in _The Old Manor House_ we have the soft landscape of the
south of England.
In _The Old Manor House_ she thus describes one of the paths that led
from the gate of the park to Rayland Hall:
"The other path, which in winter or in wet seasons was inconvenient,
wound down a declivity, where furze and fern were shaded by a few old
hawthorns and self-sown firs: out of the hill several streams were
filtered, which, uniting at its foot, formed a large and clear pond of
near twenty acres, fed by several imperceptible currents from other
eminences which sheltered that side of the park; and the bason between
the hills and the higher parts of it being thus filled, the water found
its way over a stony boundary, where it was passable by a foot bridge
unless in time of floods; and from thence fell into a lower part of the
ground, where it formed a considerable river; and, winding among willows
and poplars for near a mile, again spread into a still larger lake, on
the edge of which was a mill, and opposite, without the park paling,
wild heaths, where the ground was sandy, broken, and irregular, still
however marked by plantations made in it by the Rayland family."
Every feature of the landscape is brought distinctly before the eye.
Such descriptions are not unusual now, but they were first used by
Charlotte Smith.
Even more realistic is the picture of a road in a part of the New Forest
near Christchurch:
"It was a deep, hollow road, only wide enough for waggons, and was in
some places shaded by hazel and other brush wood; in others, by old
beech and oaks, whose roots wreathed about the bank, intermingled with
ivy, holly, and evergreen fern, almost the only plants that appeared in
a state of vegetation, unless the pale and sallow mistletoe, which here
and there partially tinted with faint green the old trees above them.
* * * * *
"Everything was perfectly still around; even the robin, solitary
songster of the frozen woods, had ceased his faint vespers to the
setting sun, and hardly a breath of air agitated the leafless branches.
This dead silence was interrupted by no sound but the slow progress of
his horse, as the hollow ground beneath his feet sounded as if he trod
on vaults. There was in the scene, and in this dull pause of nature, a
solemnity not unpleasant to Orlando, in his present disposition of
mind."
In 1842, Miss Mitford wrote to Miss Barrett: "Charlotte Smith's works,
with all their faults, have yet a love of external nature, and a power
of describing it, which I never take a spring walk without feeling." And
again she wrote to a friend referring to Mrs. Smith, "Except that they
want cheerfulness, nothing can exceed the beauty of the style."
* * * * *
The life and writings of Mrs. Inchbald had some things in common with
the life and writings of Mrs. Smith. Both were obliged to write to
support themselves as well as those dependent upon them. Both had seen
many phases of human nature, and both viewed with scorn the pretensions
of the rich and beheld with pity the sorrows of the poor. Both were
champions of social and political equality. Mrs. Inchbald, however, was
an actress and a successful playwright, hence her novels are the more
dramatic, but they lack the beautiful rural setting which gives a poetic
atmosphere to the writings of Charlotte Smith.
_A Simple Story_, the first, of Mrs. Inchbald's two novels, has been
called the precursor of _Jane Eyre_. It is the first novel in which we
are more interested in what is felt than in what actually happens. Mr.
Dorriforth, a Catholic priest, and Miss Milner, his ward, fall in love
with each other, and we watch this hidden passion, which preys upon the
health of both. He is horrified that he has broken his vows; she is
mortified that she loves a man who, she believes, neither can nor does
return her feeling for him. When he is released from his vow, it is the
emotion, not external happenings, that holds the interest. The first
part of the story is brought to a close with the marriage of Mr.
Dorriforth, now Lord Elmwood, and Miss Milner.
Seventeen years elapse between the two halves of the novel. During this
time trouble has come between them and they have separated. The
character of each has undergone a change. Traits of disposition that
were first but lightly observed have been intensified with years. Mrs.
Inchbald writes of the hero: "Dorriforth, the pious, the good, the
tender Dorriforth, is become a hard-hearted tyrant; the compassionate,
the feeling, the just Lord Elmwood, an example of implacable rigour and
justice." His friend Sandford has also changed with the years, but he
has been softened, not hardened by them--"the reprover, the enemy of the
vain, the idle, and the wicked, but the friend and comforter of the
forlorn and miserable."
The story of Dorriforth gives unity to the two parts of the novel. The
conflict between his love and his anger holds the reader in suspense
until the conclusion. The characters of eighteenth-century fiction were
actuated by but a small number of motives. In nearly all the novels the
men were either generous and free or stingy and hypocritical; the women
were either virtuous and winsome, or immoral and brazen. Mrs. Inchbald
possessed, only in a less degree, George Eliot's power of
character-analysis; she observed minor qualities, and she was as
unflinching in following the development of evil traits to a tragic
conclusion as was the author of _Adam Bede_.
In _The Gentleman's Magazine_ for March, 1791, some one wrote of _A
Simple Story_:
"She has struck out a path entirely her own. She has disdained to follow
the steps of her predecessors, and to construct a new novel, as is too
commonly done, out of the scraps and fragments of earlier inventors. Her
principal character, the Roman Catholic lord, is perfectly new: and she
has conducted him, through a series of surprising well-contrasted
adventures, with an uniformity of character and truth of description
that have rarely been surpassed."
There is, however, one hackneyed scene. A young girl is seized, thrust
into a chariot, and carried at full speed to a lonely place. There is
hardly an early novel where this bald incident is not worked up into one
or more chapters, with variations to suit the convenience of the plot.
It was as much a part of the stock in trade of the novelist of the
eighteenth century as a family quarrel is of the twentieth. With this
exception, _A Simple Story_ is new in its plot, incidents, characters,
and mode of treatment. Emotion did not play so important a part in a
novel again until Charlotte Bronte wrote _Jane Eyre_.
Mrs. Inchbald's only other novel, _Nature and Art_, shows the
artificialities of society. Two cousins, William and Henry, are
contrasted. William is the son of a dean. Henry's father went to Africa
to live, whence he sent his son to his rich uncle to be educated. Henry
fails to comprehend the society in which he finds himself placed, and
cannot understand that there should be any poor people.
"'Why, here is provision enough for all the people,' said Henry; 'why
should they want? why do not they go and take some of these things?'
"'They must not,' said the dean, 'unless they were their own.'
"'What, Uncle! Does no part of the earth, nor anything which the earth
produces, belong to the poor?'"
His uncle fails to answer this question to his nephew's satisfaction.
The vices and the fawning duplicity of William are contrasted with the
virtues and independent spirit of Henry.
"'I know I am called proud,' one day said William to Henry.
"'Dear Cousin,' replied Henry, 'it must be only then by those who do not
know you; for to me you appear the humblest creature in the world.'
"'Do you really think so?'
"'I am certain of it; or would you always give up your opinion to
that of persons in a superior state, however inferior in their
understanding? ... I have more pride than you, for I will never stoop
to act or to speak contrary to my feelings.'"
William rises to eminence, in time becoming a judge. Henry, who is
always virtuous, can obtain no preferment. This contrast in the two
cousins is not so overdrawn as at first appears. William represents the
aristocracy of the old world; Henry, the free representative of a new
country.
A tragic story runs through the novel, which becomes intensely dramatic
at the point where William puts on his black cap to pronounce sentence
on the girl whom he had ruined years before. He does not recognise her;
but she, who had loved him through the years, becomes insane, not at the
thought of death, but that he should be the one to pronounce the
sentence. It is doubtful if any novelist before Scott had produced so
thrilling a situation, a situation which grew naturally out of the plot,
and the anguish of the poor unfortunate Agnes has the realism of Thomas
Hardy or Tolstoi.
Only by reading these old novels can one comprehend the change produced
in England by the next half-century. The teachings of Mrs. Charlotte
Smith and Mrs. Inchbald were declared dangerous to the state. That they
taught disrespect for authority, was one of the many charges brought
against them. Yet with what ladylike reserve they advance views which a
later generation applauded when boldly proclaimed by Dickens, Thackeray,
and Disraeli!