Miss Ferrier. Miss Mitford. Anna Maria Hall
Walter Scott, the most chivalrous of all writers, brought to an end
woman's supremacy in the novel, in 1814. At this time prose fiction was
far different from what it was in 1772, when Tobias Smollet died, and
much of this difference was due to women. Professor Masson, in his
lectures on the novel, gives the names of twenty novelists who wrote
between 1789-1814 who are remembered in the history of English
literature. "With the exception of Godwin," he writes, "I do not know
that any of the male novelists I have mentioned could be put in
comparison, in respect of genuine merit, with such novelists of the
other sex as Mrs. Radcliffe, Miss Edgeworth, and Miss Austen." It is
equally worthy of note that, of the twenty names given, fourteen are
women.
Although during these years women had developed the historical novel,
and had brought the novel of mystery to a high degree of perfection,
they left the most enduring stamp on literature as realists, as painters
of everyday life and commonplace people. Francis Jeffrey wrote:
"It required almost the same courage to get rid of the jargon of
fashionable life and the swarms of peers, foundlings, and seducers, that
infested our modern fables as it did in those days to sweep away the
mythological persons of antiquity, and to introduce characters who spoke
and acted like those who were to peruse their adventures."
Women awakened interest in the humdrum lives of their neighbours next
door, and this without any exaggeration, simply by minute attention to
little things, and quick sympathy in the joys and sorrows of others.
They described manners and customs; their view of life was largely
objective. It is a noteworthy fact that while Scott was casting over all
Europe the light of romanticism, the women writers of the time, with but
one or two exceptions, were viewing life with the clear vision of Miss
Edgeworth and Miss Austen, as if the world obtruded too glaringly upon
their eyes to be lost sight of in happy day-dreams.
* * * * *
Susan Edmonstone Ferrier is better known to-day as the friend of Scott,
and an occasional visitor at Abbotsford, than as a successful novelist.
She was born at Edinburgh in 1782, where her father, James Ferrier, was
Writer to the Signet, and at one time Clerk of Session, Scott being one
of his colleagues. That great genius was one of the earliest to
appreciate the excellence of her descriptions of Scottish life given in
her first book, entitled _Marriage_, published anonymously in 1818. In
the conclusion of the _Tales of my Landlord_ he paid the unknown writer
this graceful tribute:
"There remains behind not only a large harvest, but labourers capable of
gathering it in; more than one writer has of late displayed talents of
this description, and if the present author, himself a phantom, may be
permitted to distinguish a brother, or perhaps a sister, shadow, he
would mention in particular the author of the very lively work entitled
_Marriage_."
Miss Ferrier wrote but three novels, _Marriage_, _The Inheritance_, and
_Destiny_, a period of six years intervening between the appearance of
each of them. Like Miss Burney and Miss Edgeworth she depicts two grades
of society. She shows forth the fashionable life of Edinburgh and
London, and the cruder mode of living found in the Scottish Highlands.
But between her and her models there is the great difference of genius
and talent. They passed what they had seen through the alembic of
imagination; she has depicted what she saw with the faithfulness of the
camera, and the crude realism of these scenes does not always blend
with the warp and woof of the story.
Like Miss Edgeworth, Miss Ferrier had a moral to work out. She treats
society as a satirist, and lays bare its heartlessness, and the
unhappiness of its members who to escape ennui are led hither and
thither by the caprice of the moment. While she may present one side of
the picture, one hesitates to accept Lady Juliana, Mrs. St. Clair, or
Lady Elizabeth as common types of a London drawing-room.
Her plots as well as her characters suffer from this conscious attempt
to teach the happiness that must follow the practice of the Christian
virtues. In _Marriage_ there are two complete stories. Lady Juliana is
the heroine of the first part; her two daughters, who are born in the
first half, supplant their mother as heroines of the second half. The
plot of _Destiny_ is not much better. The denouement is tame, and the
characters lack consistency. _The Inheritance_ has the strongest plot of
the three; but Mrs. St. Clair and her secret interviews with the
monstrosity Lewiston, who, by the way, has the honour to be an American,
throw an air of unreality over a story in many respects intensely real.
In this story, as in so many old novels, the nurse's daughter had been
brought up as the rightful heiress. The scene in which she tells her
betrothed lover, the heir of the estate, the story of her birth, which
she had just learned, is said to have suggested to Tennyson the
beautiful ballad of _Lady Clare_.
But when Miss Ferrier sees loom in imagination the sombre purple hills
of the Highlands, with the black tarns in the hollows half-hidden in
mist, her genius awakes. If she had devoted herself to these people and
this region, and ignored the fashionable life of the cities, she might
have written a book worthy to be placed beside the best of Miss
Edgeworth or Miss Mitford. At the time she wrote, the Highland chief no
longer summoned his clan about him at a blast from his bugle, but he had
lost little of his old-time picturesqueness. The opening of _Destiny_
describes the wealth of the chief of Glenroy:
"All the world knows that there is nothing on earth to be compared to a
Highland chief. He has his loch and his islands, his mountains and his
castle, his piper and his tartan, his forests and his deer, his
thousands of acres of untrodden heath, and his tens of thousands of
black-faced sheep, and his bands of bonneted clansmen, with claymores
and Gaelic, and hot blood and dirks."
But Miss Ferrier also depicted a more sordid type of Highlander.
Christopher North in his _Noctes Ambrosianae_ writes of her novels:
"They are the works of a very clever woman, sir, and they have one
feature of true and melancholy interest quite peculiar to themselves. It
is in them alone that the ultimate breaking-down and debasement of the
Highland character has been depicted. Sir Walter Scott had fixed the
enamel of genius over the last fitful gleams of their half-savage
chivalry, but a humbler and sadder scene--the age of lucre-banished
clans,--of chieftains dwindled into imitation squires, and of chiefs
content to barter the recollections of a thousand years for a few gaudy
seasons of Almacks and Crockfords, the euthanasia of kilted aldermen and
steamboat pibrochs, was reserved for Miss Ferrier."
Besides her descriptions of the Highlands, Miss Ferrier has drawn
several Scotch characters that deserve to live. What a delightful group
is described in _Marriage_, consisting of the three Misses Douglas,
known as "The girls," and their friend Mrs. Maclaughlan! Miss Jacky
Douglas, the senior of the trio, "was reckoned a woman of sense"; Miss
Grizzy was distinguished by her good-nature and the entanglement of her
thoughts; and it was said that Miss Nicky was "not wanting for sense
either"; while their friend Lady Maclaughlan loved and tyrannised over
all three of them. Sir Walter Scott admired the character of Miss Becky
Duguid, a poor old maid, who "was expected to attend all accouchements,
christenings, deaths, chestings, and burials, but she was seldom asked
to a marriage, and never to any party of pleasure." Joanna Baillie
thought the loud-spoken minister, M'Dow, a true representative of a few
of the Scotch clergy whose only aim is preferment and good cheer. But
none of her other characters can compare with the devoted Mrs. Molly
Macaulay, the friend of the Chief of Glenroy in _Destiny_. When Glenroy
has an attack of palsy, she hurries to him, and when she is told that he
has missed her, she exclaims with perfect self-forgetfulness:
"Deed, and I thought he would do that, for he has always been so kind to
me,--and I thought sometimes when I was away, oh, thinks I to myself, I
wonder what Glenroy will do for somebody to be angry with,--for
Ben-bowie's grown so deaf, poor creature, it's not worth his while to be
angry at him,--and you're so gentle that it would not do for him to be
angry at you; but I'm sure he has a good right to be angry at me,
considering how kind he has always been to me."
Christopher North said of Molly Macaulay, "No sinner of our gender could
have adequately filled up the outline."
George Saintsbury, considering the permanent value of Miss Ferrier's
work, wrote for the _Fortnightly Review_ in 1882:
"Of the four requisites of the novelist, plot, character, description,
and dialogue, she is only weak in the first. The lapse of an entire
half-century and a complete change of manners have put her books to the
hardest test they are ever likely to have to endure, and they come
through it triumphantly."
But, besides the excellences mentioned by Mr. Saintsbury, Miss Ferrier
is master of humour and pathos. No story is sadder than that of Ronald
Malcolm, the hero of _Destiny_. He had been willed the castle of Inch
Orran with its vast estates, but with the provision that he was to have
no benefit from it until his twenty-sixth year. In case of his death the
property was to go to his father, an upright but poor man. As Ronald had
many years to wait before he could enjoy his riches, he entered the
navy. His ship was lost at sea and the news of his death reported in
Scotland. But Ronald had been rescued from the sinking ship, and
returned to his father's cottage. Here he met a purblind old woman, who
told him how his father, Captain Malcolm, had moved to the castle, and
what good he was doing among his tenantry. She described the sorrow of
the people at the death of Ronald, but added: "Och! it was God's
providence to tak' the boy out of his worthy father's way; and noo a'
thing 's as it should be, and he has gotten his ain, honest man; and
long, long may he enjoy it!" And then she said thankfully, "The poor
lad's death was a great blessing--och ay, 'deed was 't." The scene where
Ronald goes to the castle and looks in at the window upon the happy
family group, consisting of his father and mother, brothers and sisters,
resembles in many particulars the sad return of Enoch Arden. The close
of the scene is as touching in the novel as in the poem: "Yes, yes, they
are happy, and I am forgotten!" sobs the lad, as he turns away.
Miss Ferrier, however, seldom touches the pathetic; she is first of all
a humourist. But there is a blending of the smiles and tears of human
life in the delightful character of Adam Ramsay. Engaged as a boy to
Lizzie Lundie, he had gone forth into the world to make a fortune, but
when he returned after many years he found that she had married in his
absence, and soon afterwards had died. Crabbed to all about him, he
still cherished the remembrance of his early love, and was quickly moved
by any appeal to her memory.
The practical philosophy of the Scottish peasantry is amusingly set
forth in the scene where Miss St. Clair visits one of the cottages on
Lord Rossville's estate. She found the goodman very ill, and everything
about the room betokening extreme poverty. When she offered to send him
milk and broth, and a carpet and chairs to make the room more
comfortable, his wife interposed, "A suit o' gude bein comfortable dead
claise, Tammes, wad set ye better than aw the braw chyres an' carpets i'
the toon." Sometime afterward, when Miss St. Clair called to see how the
invalid was, she found him in the press-bed, while the clothes were
warming before the fire. His wife explained that she could not have him
in the way, and if he were cold, it could not be helped, as the clothes
had to be aired, and added, "An' I 'm thinkin' he 'll no be lang o'
wantin' them noo."
But notwithstanding her humour, Miss Ferrier was a stern moralist, whose
attitude toward life had been influenced indirectly by the teachings of
John Knox. She sometimes seems to stand her characters in the stocks,
and call upon the populace to view their sins or absurdities. She seldom
throws the veil of charity over them. Men as novelists are prone to
exaggeration. Women have represented life with greater truth both in its
larger aspects and in details. Miss Ferrier carries this quality to an
extreme. She tells not only the truth, but, with almost heartless
honesty, reveals the whole of it, so that many of her men and women are
repugnant to the reader while they amuse him. The best judges of
Scottish manners have borne witness to the exactness of her portraiture.
She is, perhaps, an example of the artistic failure of over-realism.
Mary Russell Mitford like Miss Ferrier painted her scenes and her
portraits from real life. But there is as wide a difference between
their writings as between the rocky ledges of the Grampian Hills and the
soft meadows bathed in the sunshine which stretch back of the cottages
of Our Village. Miss Mitford's, indeed, was a sunny nature, not to be
hardened nor embittered by a lifelong anxiety over poverty and debts.
Her father, Dr. Mitford, had spent nearly all his own fortune when he
married Miss Mary Russell, an heiress. Besides being constantly involved
in lawsuits, he was addicted to gambling, and soon squandered the
fortune which his wife had brought him, besides twenty thousand pounds
won in a lottery. He is said to have lost in speculations and at play
about seventy thousand pounds, at that time a large fortune. The
authoress was a little over thirty years of age when the poverty of the
family forced them to leave Bertram House, their home for many years,
and remove to a little labourer's cottage about a mile away, on the
principal street of a little village near Reading, known as Three Mile
Cross. Here the support of the family devolved upon the daughter, a
burden made harder by the continual extravagance of the father, whom she
devotedly loved. Although she received large sums for her writings, it
is with the greatest weariness that she writes to her friend Miss
Barrett, afterwards Mrs. Browning, of the struggles that have been hers
the greater part of her life, the ten or twelve hours of literary
drudgery each day, often in spite of ill health, and her hope that she
may always provide for her father his accustomed comforts. Not only was
she enabled to do this, but, through the help of friends, to pay, after
his death, the one thousand pounds indebtedness, his only legacy to her.
Yet there is not a trace of this worry in the delightful series of
papers called _Our Village_, which she began to contribute at this time
to the _Lady's Magazine_. Before this she had become known as a poet and
a successful playwright, but had believed herself incapable of writing
good prose. Necessity revealed her fine power of description, and Three
Mile Cross furnished her with scenes and characters.
_Our Village_ marked a new style in fiction. The year it was commenced,
she wrote to a friend:
"With regard to novels, I should like to see one undertaken without any
plot at all. I do not mean that it should have no story; but I should
like some writer of luxuriant fancy to begin with a certain set of
characters--one family, for instance--without any preconceived design
farther than one or two incidents or dialogues, which would naturally
suggest fresh matter, and so proceed in this way, throwing in incidents
and characters profusely, but avoiding all stage tricks and strong
situations, till some death or marriage should afford a natural
conclusion to the book."
Miss Mitford followed this plan as far as her great love of nature would
permit. For when she found her daily cares too great to be borne in the
little eight-by-eight living-room, she escaped to the woods and fields.
She loved the poets who wrote of nature, and next to Miss Austen, whom
she placed far above any other novelist, she delighted in the novels of
Charlotte Smith, and in her own pages there is the same true feeling for
nature.
_Our Village_ follows in a few particulars Gilbert White's _History of
Selborne_. As he described the beauties of Selborne through the varying
seasons of the year, she describes her walks about Three Mile Cross,
first when the meadows are covered with hoar frost, then when the air is
perfumed with violets, and later when the harvest field is yellow with
ripened corn. All the lanes, the favourite banks, the shady recesses are
described with delicate and loving touch. How her own joyous, optimistic
nature speaks in this record of a morning walk in a backward spring:
"Cold bright weather. All within doors, sunny and chilly; all without,
windy and dusty, It is quite tantalising to see that brilliant sun
careering through so beautiful a sky, and to feel little more warmth
from his presence than one does from that of his fair but cold sister,
the moon. Even the sky, beautiful as it is, has the look of that one
sometimes sees in a very bright moonlight night--deeply, intensely blue,
with white fleecy clouds driven vigorously along by a strong breeze, now
veiling and now exposing the dazzling luminary around whom they sail. A
beautiful sky! and, in spite of its coldness, a beautiful world!"
But how naturally we meet the people of the village and become
interested in them. There is Harriet, the belle of the village, "a flirt
passive," who made the tarts and puddings in the author's kitchen; Joel
Brent, her lover, a carter by calling, but, by virtue of his personal
accomplishments, the village beau. There is the publican, the carpenter,
the washerwoman; little Lizzie, the spoilt child, and all the other boys
and girls of the village. It is very natural to-day to meet these poor
people in novels; at that time the poor people of Ireland and Scotland
had begun to creep into fiction, but it was as unusual in England as a
novel without a plot. Even to-day Miss Mitford's attitude toward these
people is not common. It seems never to have occurred to the author, and
certainly does not to her readers, that these men dressed in overalls
and these women in print dresses with sleeves rolled to the elbow were
not the finest ladies and gentlemen of the land. She greets them all
with a playful humour which reminds one of the genial smile of Elia. C.
H. Herford in _The Age of Wordsworth_ wrote of _Our Village_:
"No such intimate and sympathetic portrayal of village life had been
given before, and perhaps it needed a woman's sympathetic eye for little
things to show the way. Of the professional story-teller on the alert
for a sensation there is as little as of the professional novelist on
the watch for a lesson."
_Belford Regis_, a series of country and town sketches, was written soon
after the completion of _Our Village_. Here again is the happy blending
of nature and humanity; the same fusion of truth and fiction. As Belford
Regis is "Our Market Town," there is a wider range of characters, as
different classes are represented; and a more intimate view, since the
same people appear in more than one story. Stephen Lane, the butcher,
and his wife are often met with. He is so fat that "when he walks, he
overfills the pavement, and is more difficult to pass than a link of
full-dressed misses or a chain of becloaked dandies." Of Mrs. Lane she
writes: "Butcher's wife and butcher's daughter though she were, yet was
she a graceful and gracious woman, one of nature's gentlewomen in look
and in thought." There was Miss Savage, "who was called a sensible woman
because she had a gruff voice and vinegar aspect"; and Miss Steele, who
was called literary, because forty years ago she made a grand poetical
collection. Miss Mitford even does justice to Mrs. Hollis, the fruiterer
and the village gossip; "There she sits, a tall, square, upright figure,
surmounted by a pleasant, comely face, eyes as black as a sloe, cheeks
as rounds as an apple, and a complexion as ruddy as a peach, as fine a
specimen of a healthy, hearty English tradeswoman, the feminine of John
Bull, as one would desire to see on a summer's day.... As a gossip she
was incomparable. She knew everybody and everything; had always the
freshest intelligence, and the newest news; her reports like her plums
had the bloom on them, and she would as much have scorned to palm upon
you an old piece of scandal as to send you strawberries that had been
two days gathered."
A reviewer in the _Athenaeum_ thus criticises the book:
"If (to be hypercritical) the pictures they contain be a trifle too
sunny and too cheerful to be real--if they show more generosity and
refinement and self-sacrifice existing among the middle classes than
does exist,--too much of the meek beauty, too little of the squalidity
of humble life,--we love them none the less, and their authoress all the
more."
In _Belford Regis_ we miss the fields, the brooks, the flowers, and the
sky, which made the charm of _Our Village_. In some respects it is a
more ambitious book, but it has not the perennial charm of _Our
Village_.
Miss Mitford's favourite author, as we have seen, was Jane Austen. She
had the same regard for her that Miss Austen felt for Fanny Burney. The
two authors have many points of resemblance. Both have the same clear
vision, and sunny nature; the same repugnance to all that is
sensational, or coarse, or low; the same dislike of strong pathos or
broad humour; and Miss Mitford has approached more closely than any
other writer to the elegance of diction and purity of style of Miss
Austen.
They have another point in common, they both show excellent taste in
their writings. This quality of good taste is due to native delicacy and
refinement, a sensitive withdrawal from what is ugly, and a quick
feeling for true proportion; the very things which give to a woman her
superior tact, which Ruskin has called "the touch sense." In the novel
it is pre-eminently a feminine characteristic. Few men have it in a
marked degree. It adds all the charm we feel in the presence of a
refined woman to the novels of Miss Edgeworth, Miss Austen, and Miss
Mitford.
But, while Miss Mitford and Miss Austen have many points of resemblance,
they have many points of difference. Miss Austen liked the society of
men and women, and during her younger days was fond of dinner-parties
and balls. Miss Mitford preferred the woods and fields, liked the
society of her dogs, and wrote to a friend before she was twenty that
she would never go to another dance if she could help it. Miss Austen
selects a small group of gentry, and by the intertwining of their lives
forms a beautiful plot; Miss Mitford rambles through the village and the
country walks of Three Mile Cross, and as she meets the butcher, the
publican, the boys at cricket, she gleans some story of interest, and
brings back to us, as it were, a basket in which have been thrown in
careless profusion violets and anemones, cowslips and daisies, and all
the other flowers of the field.
* * * * *
Mrs. Anna Maria Hall, a country-woman of Miss Edgeworth, wrote of her
first novel: "_My Sketches of Irish Character_, my first dear book, was
inspired by a desire to describe my native place, as Miss Mitford had
done in _Our Village_, and this made me an author." Most of these
sketches were drawn from the county of Wexford, her native place, whose
inhabitants, she says in the preface, are descendants of the
Anglo-Norman settlers of the reign of Henry the Second, and speak a
language unknown in other districts of Ireland.
The book is a series of well-told stories of the poor people, whom we
should have imagined to be pure Celt, if the author had not said they
resembled the English. There is the tender pathos, the quick humour, the
joke which often answers an argument, the guidance of the heart rather
than the head; but she has dwelt upon one characteristic but lightly
touched upon by Miss Edgeworth and Lady Morgan, the poetic feeling of
the Celt, the imagery that so often adorns their common speech. The old
Irish wife says to the bride who speaks disrespectfully of the fairies:
"Hush, Avourneen! Sure they have the use of the May-dew before it falls,
and the colour of the lilies and the roses before it's folded in the
tender buds; and can steal the notes out of the birds' throats while
they sleep."
_The Irish Peasantry_, and _Lights and Shadows of Irish Life_, won Mrs.
Hall the ill-will rather than the love of her countrymen. She had lived
for a long time in England, and upon returning to her native land was
impressed by the lack of forethought which kept the country poor. Their
early marriages, their indifference to time, their frequent visits to
the public house, their hospitality to strangers even when they
themselves were in extreme poverty and debt--all made so deep an
impression upon her mind that she attempted to teach the Irish worldly
wisdom. But the lesson was distasteful to the people and probably
useless, as the characteristics which she would change were the very
essence of the Irish nature, the traits which made him a Celt, not a
Saxon. In these books, the wooings, weddings, and funerals are
portrayed, and there is a little glimpse of fairy lore.
_Midsummer Eve, a Fairy Tale of Love_, grew out of the fairy legends of
Ireland. It is said that a child whose father has died before its birth
is placed by nature under the peculiar guardianship of the fairies; and,
if born on Midsummer Eve, it becomes their rightful property; they take
it to their own homes and leave in its place one of their changelings.
The heroine of the story is a child of that nature, over whose birth the
fairies of air, earth, and water preside. But at the will of Nightstar,
Queen of the Fairies of the Air, she is left with her mother, but
adopted and watched over by the fairies as their own. Their great gift
to her is that of loving and being loved. The human element is not well
blended with the fairy element. The entire setting should have been
rural, for in the city of London, particularly in the exhibition of the
Royal Academy, where part of the story is placed, it is not easy to
keep the tranquil twilight atmosphere, which fairies love. The book is
like a song in which the bass and soprano are written in different keys.
But when we are back in Ireland, and the fairies again appear and
disappear, it is charming. The old woodcutter, Randy, who sees and talks
with the fairies, is a delightful creature, and gives to the story much
of its beauty.
Mrs. Hall's novels have but little literary value, but she has brought
to light Irish characteristics and Irish traditions which were
overlooked by her predecessors, and for that reason they deserve to
live.