(1795.) This is the date of a very remarkable paradox. The religious
world--to use a name claimed by a doctrinal sect--had long set its face
against amusing literature, and all works of imagination. Bunyan, Milton,
and a few others were irresistible; but a long face was pulled at every
attempt to produce something readable for poor people and _poor children_.
In 1795, a benevolent association began to circulate the works of a lady
who had been herself a dramatist, and had nourished a pleasant vein of
satire in the society of Garrick and his friends; all which is carefully
suppressed in some biographies. Hannah More's[424] _Cheap Repository
Tracts_,[425] which were bought by millions of copies, destroyed the
vicious publications with which the hawkers deluged the country, by the
simple process of furnishing the hawkers with something more saleable.
_Dramatic fiction_, in which the _characters_ are drawn by themselves, was,
at the middle of the last century, the monopoly of writers who required
indecorum, such as Fielding and Smollett. All, or nearly all, which could
be permitted to the young, was dry narrative, written by people who could
not make their personages _talk character_; they all spoke {190} alike. The
author of the _Rambler_[426] is ridiculed, because his young ladies talk
Johnsonese; but the satirists forget that all the presentable novel-writers
were equally incompetent; even the author of _Zeluco_ (1789)[427] is the
strongest possible case in point.
Dr. Moore,[428] the father of the hero of Corunna,[429] with good narrative
power, some sly humor, and much observation of character, would have been,
in our day, a writer of the _Peacock_[430] family. Nevertheless, to one who
is accustomed to our style of things, it is comic to read the dialogue of a
jealous husband, a suspected wife, a faithless maid-servant, a tool of a
nurse, a wrong-headed pomposity of a priest, and a sensible physician, all
talking Dr. Moore through their masks. Certainly an Irish soldier does say
"by Jasus," and a cockney footman "this here" and "that there"; and this
and the like is all the painting of characters which is effected out of the
mouths of the bearers by a narrator of great power. I suspect that some
novelists repressed their power under a rule that a narrative should
narrate, and that the dramatic should be confined to the drama.
I make no exception in favor of Miss Burney;[431] though she was the
forerunner of a new era. Suppose a country {191} in which dress is always
of one color; suppose an importer who brings in cargoes of blue stuff, red
stuff, green stuff, etc., and exhibits dresses of these several colors,
that person is the similitude of Miss Burney. It would be a delightful
change from a universal dull brown, to see one person all red, another all
blue, etc.; but the real inventor of pleasant dress would be the one who
could mix his colors and keep down the bright and gaudy. Miss Burney's
introduction was so charming, by contrast, that she nailed such men as
Johnson, Burke, Garrick, etc., to her books. But when a person who has read
them with keen pleasure in boyhood, as I did, comes back to them after a
long period, during which he has made acquaintance with the great novelists
of our century, three-quarters of the pleasure is replaced by wonder that
he had not seen he was at a puppet-show, not at a drama. Take some
_labeled_ characters out of our humorists, let them be put together into
one piece, to speak only as labeled: let there be a Dominie with nothing
but "Prodigious!" a Dick Swiveller with nothing but adapted quotations; a
Dr. Folliott with nothing but sneers at Lord Brougham;[432] and the whole
will pack up into one of Miss Burney's novels.
Maria Edgeworth,[433] Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan),[434] Jane Austen,[435]
Walter Scott,[436] etc., are all of our century; as {192} are, I believe,
all the Minerva Press novels, as they were called, which show some of the
power in question. Perhaps dramatic talent found its best encouragement in
the drama itself. But I cannot ascertain that any such power was directed
at the multitude, whether educated or uneducated, with natural mixture of
character, under the restraints of decorum, until the use of it by two
religious writers of the school called "evangelical," Hannah More and
Rowland Hill.[437] The _Village Dialogues_, though not equal to the
_Repository Tracts_, are in many parts an approach, and perhaps a copy;
there is frequently humorous satire, in that most effective form,
self-display. They were published in 1800, and, partly at least, by the
Religious Tract Society, the lineal successor of the _Repository_
association, though knowing nothing about its predecessor. I think it right
to add that Rowland Hill here mentioned is not the regenerator of the Post
Office.[438] Some do not distinguish accurately; I have heard of more than
one who took me to have had a logical controversy with a diplomatist who
died some years before I was born.