Mrs. Gore. Mrs. Bray
During the second decade of the nineteenth century, while Scott was
writing some of the most powerful of the Waverley novels, a host of new
writers sprang into popular notice. John Galt, William Harrison
Ainsworth, and G. P. R. James began their endless series of historical
romances, while in 1827, Bulwer Lytton and Benjamin Disraeli introduced
to the reading public, as the representatives of fashionable society,
_Falkland_ and _Vivian Grey_. The decade was prolific also in novels by
women. Jane Austen had died in 1817, but Maria Edgeworth, Lady Morgan,
the Porters, Amelia Opie, Miss Ferrier, Mrs. Shelley and Miss Mitford
were still writing; during this period, Mrs. S. C. Hall began her work
in imitation of Miss Mitford, while Mrs. Gore and Mrs. Bray took up the
goose-quill, piled reams of paper on their desks, and began their
literary careers.
About a score of years before Thackeray tickled English society with
pictures of its own snobbery, Mrs. Gore, a young woman, wife of an
officer in the Life Guards, saw through the many affectations of the
polite world, and in a series of novels, pointed out its ludicrous
pretences with lively wit. Mrs. Gore has suffered, however, from the
multiplicity of her writings. During the years between 1823, when she
wrote her first novel, _Theresa Marchmont_, and 1850, when, quite blind,
she retired from the world of letters, she published two hundred volumes
of novels, plays, and poems. Her plots are often hastily constructed,
her men and women dimly outlined, but she is never dull. No writer since
Congreve has so many sparkling lines. She has been likened to Horace,
and if we compare her wit with that of Thackeray, who by the way
ridiculed her in his _Novels by Eminent Hands_, her humour has qualities
of old Falernian, beside which his too frequently has the bitter flavour
of old English beer. The Englishman is inclined to take his wit, like
his sports, too seriously, and to mingle with it a little of the spice
of envy. Mrs. Gore has none of this, however, and skims along the
surface of fashionable life with a grace and ease and humour extremely
diverting.
Her writings are so voluminous that one can only make excerpts at
random. One of the liveliest is _Cecil, or the Adventures of a Coxcomb_,
a humorous satire on _Vivian Grey_. "The arch-coxcomb of his
coxcombical time" had become a coxcomb at the age of six months, when he
first saw himself in the mirror, from which time his nurse stopped his
crying by tossing him in front of a looking-glass. His curls made him so
attractive that at six years of age he was admitted to his mother's
boudoir, from which his red-headed brother was excluded, and he
superseded the spaniel in her ladyship's carriage. With the loss of his
curls went the loss of favour. He did not prosper at school, and was
rusticated after a year's residence at Oxford. Here he formed an
acquaintance which helped him much in the world of coxcombry. Though
this man was not well born, he was an admitted leader among gentlemen.
Cecil soon discovered that his high social position was due entirely to
his impertinence, and he made this wise observation: "Impudence is the
quality of a footman; impertinence of his master. Impudence is a thing
to be rebutted with brute force; impertinence requires wit for the
putting down." So he matched his wit with this man's impertinence, and
they became sworn friends.
When Cecil went to London, he found that "people had supped full of
horrors, during the Revolution, and were now devoted to elegiac
measures. My languid smile and hazel eyes were the very thing to settle
the business of the devoted beings left for execution." Of course all
the women fell desperately in love with him. "I had always a
predisposition to woman-slaughter, with extenuating circumstances, as
well as a stirring consciousness of the exterminating power," he
explains to us. Like Childe Harold and Vivian Grey, this coxcomb soon
became weary of London, and travelled through Europe in an indolent way,
for after all it was his chief pleasure "to lie in an airy French bed,
showered over with blue convolvulus," and read tender billets from the
ladies. This book was an excellent antidote to the Byronic fever, then
at its height.
In her _Sketches of English Character_, Mrs. Gore describes different
men who were in her time to be met with in the social life of London.
The Dining-Out Man thus speaks for himself:
"Ill-natured people fancy that the life of a dining-out man is a life of
corn, wine, and oil; that all he has to do is to eat, drink and be
merry. I only know that, had I been aware in the onset of life, of all I
should have to go through in my vocation, I would have chosen some
easier calling. I would have studied law, physic, or divinity."
In the sketches of _The Clubman_, she assigns John Bull's dislike of
ladies' society as the reason for the many clubs in the English
metropolis:
"While admitting woman to be a divinity, he chooses to conceal his idol
in the Holy of Holies of domestic life. Duly to enjoy the society of
Mrs. Bull, he chooses a smoking tureen, and cod's head and shoulders to
intervene between them, and their olive branches to be around their
table.... For John adores woman in the singular, and hates her in the
plural; John loves, but does not like. Woman is the object of his
passion, rarely of his regard. There is nothing in the gaiety of heart
or sprightliness of intellect of the weaker sex which he considers an
addition to society. To him women are an interruption to business and
pleasure."
Mrs. Gore could also unveil hypocrisy. In her novel _Preferment, or My
Uncle the Earl_, she thus describes a worthy ornament of the church:
"The Dean of Darbington glided along his golden railroad--'mild as
moonbeams'--soft as a swansdown muff--insinuating as a silken eared
spaniel. His conciliating arguments were whispered in a tone suitable to
the sick chamber of a nervous hypochondriac, and his strain of argument
resembled its potations of thin, weak, well-sweetened barley water.
While Dr. Macnab succeeded with _his_ congregation by kicking and
bullying them along the path of grace, Dr. Nicewig held out his finger
with a coaxing air and gentle chirrup, like a bird-fancier decoying a
canary."
A critic in the _Westminster Review_ in 1831 thus writes of her:
"Mrs. Gore has a perfectly feminine knowledge of all the weaknesses and
absurdities of an ordinary man of fashion, following the routine of
London life in the season. She unmasks his selfishness with admirable
acuteness; she exposes his unromantic egotism, with delightful
sauciness. Her portraits of women are also executed with great spirit;
but not with the same truth. In transferring men to her canvas, she has
relied upon the faculty of observation, usually fine and vigilant in a
woman; but when portraying her own sex, the authoress has perhaps looked
within; and the study of the internal operations of the human machine is
a far more complex affair, and requires far more extensive experience,
and also different faculties, from those necessary to acquire a perfect
knowledge of the appearances on the surface of humanity."
Notwithstanding Mrs. Gore touches so lightly on the surface of life,
certain definite sociological and moral principles underlie her work.
She is as democratic as Charlotte Smith, Mrs. Inchbald, Miss Mitford, or
even William Godwin. She asserts again and again that men of inferior
birth with the same opportunities of education may be as intellectual
and refined as the sons of a "hundred earls." Those members of the
aristocracy who fail to recognise the true worth of intelligent men of
plebeian origin are made very ridiculous. In her novel _Pin Money_,
published in 1831, how very funny is Lady Derenzy's speech when she
learns that a soap manufacturer is being feted in fashionable society!
Lady Derenzy, by the way, is the social law-giver to her little coterie:
"It is now some years," said she, "since the independence of America,
and the influence exerted in this country by the return of a large body
of enlightened men, habituated to the demoralising spectacle of an
equalisation of rank, was supposed to exert a pernicious influence on
the minds of the secondary and inferior classes of Great Britain. At
that critical moment I whispered to my husband, 'Derenzy! be true to
yourself, and the world will be true to you. Let the aristocracy of
Great Britain unite in support of the Order; and it will maintain its
ground against the universe!' Lord Derenzy took my advice, and the
country was saved.
"Again, when the assemblage of the States General of France,--the fatal
tocsin of the revolution,--spread consternation and horror throughout
the higher ranks of every European country, and the very name of the
guillotine operated like a spell on the British peerage, I whispered to
my husband, 'Derenzy! be true to yourself, and the world will be true
to you. Let the aristocracy of Great Britain unite in support of the
Order; and it will maintain its ground against the universe!' Again Lord
Derenzy took my advice, and again the country was saved."
Mrs. Gore has so cleverly mingled the so-called self-made men and men of
inherited rank in her books that one cannot distinguish between them. In
_The Soldier of Lyons_, one of her early novels, which furnished Bulwer
with the plot of his play _The Lady of Lyons_, the hero, a peasant by
birth and a soldier of the Republic, enters into a marriage contract
with the widow of a French marquis, in order to save her from the
guillotine. This lady of high rank learns to respect her husband, and
becomes the suitor for his love. In _The Heir of Selwood_, a former
field marshal of Napoleon, a peasant, devotes his energies to improving
the condition of the poor on the estate he had won by his services to
his country, and at his death his tenants erected a column to his
memory, bearing the inscription: "Most dear to God, to the king, and to
the people."
Mrs. Gore constantly asserts that the only distinctions between men are
based upon character and ability. She says of one of her characters, a
poet:
"His footing in society is no longer dependent upon the caprice of a
drawing-room. It is the security of that intellectual power which forces
the world to bend the knee. The poor, dreamy boy, self-taught,
self-aided, had risen into power. He wields a pen. And the pen in our
age weighs heavier in the social scale than a sword of a Norman baron."
Mrs. Gore lived at a time when the introduction of machinery and the
establishment of large factories was producing a new type of man: men
like Burtonshaw in _The Hamiltons_: "A practical, matter-of-fact
individual, with plenty of money and plenty of intellect; the sort of
human power-loom one would back to work wonders against a dawdling old
spinning-jenny like Lord Tottenham."
A critic in the _Westminster Review_ wrote in 1832 as follows:
"The wealthy merchant or money-dealer is represented, perhaps for the
first time in fiction, as a man of true dignity, self-respect,
education, and thorough integrity, agreeable in manners, refined in
tastes, and content with, if not proud of, his position in society."
Mrs. Gore was called by her contemporaries the novelist of the new era.
She was also interested in the great ethical questions of life. She did
not write of the love of youthful heroes and more youthful heroines. She
often traced the consequences of sin on character and destiny. In _The
Heir of Selwood_, she is as stern a moralist in tracing the effects of
vice as George Eliot. _The Banker's Wife_, the scene of which is laid
among the merchants of London, is a serious study of the sorrows of a
life devoted to outward show. The picture of the banker among his
guests, whose wealth, unknown to them, he has squandered, reminds one of
the days before the final overthrow of Dombey and Son.
Mrs. Gore was a woman of genius. With the stern principles of the
puritan, and feelings as republican as the mountain-born Swiss, she was
never controversial. She saw the absurdities of certain hollow
pretensions of society, but her good-humoured raillery offended no one.
If her two hundred volumes could be weeded of their verbiage by some
devotee of literature, and reduced to ten or fifteen, they would be not
only entertaining reading, but would throw strong lights upon the
_elite_ of London in the days when hair-oils, pomades, and strong
perfumes were the distinguishing marks of the Quality.
* * * * *
Mrs. Gore owed her place in English letters to native wit and ability;
Mrs. Bray owed hers to hard study and painstaking endeavour. She was one
of the few women who followed the style of writing brought to perfection
by Sir Walter Scott.
Mrs. Bray became imbued with the historic spirit early in life. Her
first husband was Charles Stothard, the author of _Monumental Effigies
of Great Britain_, with whom she travelled through Brittany, Normandy
and Flanders. While he made careful drawings of the ruins of castles and
abbeys, she read Froissart's _Chronicles_, visited the places which he
has described, and traced out among the people any surviving customs
which he has recorded.
Two novels were the result of these studies. _De Foix, or Sketches of
the Manners and Customs of the Fourteenth Century_, is a story of Gaston
Phoebus, Count de Foix, whose court Froissart visited, and of whom he
wrote: "To speak briefly and truly, the Count de Foix was perfect in
person and in mind; and no contemporary prince could be compared with
him for sense, honour, or liberality." _The White Hoods_, a name by
which the citizens of Ghent were denominated, is laid in the
Netherlands, and tells of the conflict between the court and the
citizens of Ghent, under Philip von Artaveld, during the reign of
Charles the Fifth of France and the early kingship of Charles the Sixth.
As in all her novels, the accuracy for which she strove in the most
minute details retards the action of the plot, but adds to the
historical value of these romances.
For the tragic romance of _The Talba, or Moor of Portugal_, Mrs. Bray,
as she had not visited the Spanish peninsula, depended upon her reading.
The plot was suggested to her by a picture of Ines de Castro in the
Royal Academy. It represented the gruesome coronation of the corpse of
Ines de Castro, six years after her death. Thus did her husband, Don
Pedro, show honour to his wife, who had been put to death while he, then
a prince, was serving in the army of Portugal. The whole story is a
fitting theme for tragedy, and was at one time dramatised by Mary
Mitford. In order to give her mind the proper elevation for the
impassioned scenes of this novel, it was Mrs. Bray's custom to read a
chapter of Isaiah or Job each day before beginning to write.
After the death of her first husband, Mrs. Bray married the vicar of
Tavistock, and for thirty-five years lived in the vicarage of that town.
Here she became interested in the legends of Devon and Cornwall, and
wrote five novels founded upon the history of tradition of those
counties. _Henry de Pomeroy_ opens at the abbey of Tavistock, one of the
oldest abbeys in England, during the reign of Richard Coeur-de-Leon.
The scene of _Fitz of Fitz-Ford_ is also laid at Tavistock, but during
the reign of Queen Elizabeth. Another story of the reign of the Virgin
Queen was _Warleigh, or the Fatal Oak: a Legend of Devon_. _Courtenay of
Walreddon: a Romance of the West_ takes place in the reign of Charles
the First, about the commencement of the Civil War. A gypsy girl, by
name Cinderella Small, is introduced into the story, and has been highly
praised. The character, as well as some of the stories told of her, was
drawn from life.
But the most famous of these novels is _Trelawny of Trelawne; or the
Prophecy: a Legend of Cornwall_, a story of the rebellion of Monmouth.
Like most of the romances upon English themes, the private history of
the family furnishes the romance, the historical happenings being used
only for the setting: the usual method of Scott. The hero of this novel
is Sir Jonathan Trelawny, one of the seven bishops who were committed to
the Tower by James the Second. When he was arrested by the king's
command, the Cornish men rose one and all, and marched as far as Exeter,
in their way to extort his liberation. Trelawny is a popular hero of
Cornwall, as the following lines testify:
A good sword and a trusty hand!
A merry heart and true!
King James's men shall understand
What Cornish lads can do!
And have they fixed the where and when?
And shall Trelawny die?
Here's twenty thousand Cornish men
Will know the reason why!
Out spake their captain brave and bold,
A merry wight was he--
"If London Tower were Michael's hold,
We'll set Trelawny free!"
We'll cross the Tamar, land to land,
The Severn is no stay,
All side to side, and hand to hand,
And who shall say us nay?
And when we come to London Wall,
A pleasant sight to view,
Come forth! Come forth! Ye cowards all,
To better men than you!
Trelawny he's in keep and hold--
Trelawny he may die,
But here's twenty thousand Cornish bold
Will know the reason why!
Like Scott, Mrs. Bray went about with notebook in hand, and noted the
features of the landscape, the details of a ruin, or the furniture or
armour of the period of which she was writing. It is this painstaking
work, together with the fact that she had access to places and books
that were then denied to the ordinary reader, and chose subjects and
places not before treated in fiction, that gives permanent value to her
writings. She also had the proper feeling for the past, and dignity and
elevation of style. Sometimes an entire page of her romances might be
attributed to the pen of the "Mighty Wizard." Perhaps the highest
compliment that can be paid her as an artist is that she resembles Scott
when he is nodding.