[2] The “_caro sposo_” of Mrs. Elton.
“CECILIA” TO “SENSE AND SENSIBILITY”
(1782-1811)
In considering the women writers immediately following Miss Burney, we
are confronted at the outset with a deliberate return to the methods of
composition in vogue before Richardson. If MRS. RADCLIFFE (1764-1823)
employs, as she does, Defoe-like minuteness of detail in description,
she entitles all her works “Romances,” and is fully justified in that
nomenclature. “It was the cry at the period,” says her biographer,
“and has sometimes been repeated since, that the romances of Mrs.
Radcliffe, and the applause with which they were received, were evil
signs of the times, and argued a great and increasing degradation of
the public taste, which, instead of banqueting as heretofore upon
scenes of passion, like those of Richardson, or of life and manners, as
in the pages of Smollett and Fielding, was now coming back to the fare
of the nursery, and gorged upon the wild and improbable fictions of an
over-heated imagination.”
Yet the anonymous author of the _Pursuits of Literature_ writes of some
sister-novelists: “Though all of them are ingenious ladies, yet they
are too frequently whining and frisking in novels, till our girls’
heads turn wild with impossible adventures. Not so the mighty magician
of _The Mysteries of Udolpho_, bred and nourished by the Florentine
muses in their sacred solitary caverns, amid the paler shrines of
Gothic superstition, and in all the dreariness of enchantment: a
poetess whom Ariosto would with rapture have acknowledged, as
‘... La nudrita
Damigella Trivulzia al sacro speco.’”--O.F. c. xlvi.
We fear to-day it would be difficult to find men “too mercurial to
be delighted” by Richardson, “too dull to comprehend” Le Sage, “too
saturnine to relish” Fielding, who would yet “with difficulty be
divorced from _The Romance of the Forest_”: since every one of us now
“boasts an English heart,
Unused at ghosts or rattling bones to start.”
Jane Austen, of course, could never have written _Northanger
Abbey_ had she not enjoyed Mrs. Radcliffe; and we say at once that
those delightfully absurd chapters in which Catherine is allowed to
indulge in the most unfounded suspicions of General Tilney, are not
substantially unfair to the famous wife of William Radcliffe, Esq.;
as the artless conversations between Miss Morland and Miss Thorpe no
doubt justly reflect the deep interest excited by her stories in the
young and inexperienced. We do not readily, to-day, admire so much
“exuberance and fertility of imagination”: we have little, or no,
patience with “adventures heaped on adventures in quick and brilliant
succession, with all the hairbreadth charms of escape or capture,”
resembling some “splendid Oriental tale.”
But there can be no question that Mrs. Radcliffe achieved, in three
admirable examples, a perfectly legitimate attempt--the establishment
of that School of Terror inaugurated by no less brilliant a writer than
Horace Walpole (in his _Castle of Otranto_, 1764), and seldom revived
in England with any success.
It is true that very careful criticism of her methods may discover
their artificiality. “Her heroines voluntarily expose themselves to
situations which, in nature, a lonely female would certainly have
avoided. They are too apt to choose the midnight hour for investigating
the mysteries of a deserted chamber or secret passage, and generally
are only supplied,” like Mr. Pickwick, “with an expiring lamp when
about to read the most interesting documents.” But Emily St. Aubert
is not surely designed for comparison with even that “imbecility in
females” which Henry Tilney declared to be “a great enhancement of
their personal charms.” She is a heroine, not a woman; and if, unlike
Walpole, Mrs. Radcliffe demands, and supplies, a material explanation
of all supernatural appearances, she yet allows her imagination to
wander freely over the realms of superstitious alarm, wherein the
_reason_ of woman cannot presumably hold sway. Certainly, had Emily
been less impulsive she would have missed many opportunities of proving
herself courageous.
I cannot myself, however, entirely avoid the impression that, in
their natural desire for classification, the critics have laid undue
stress on Mrs. Radcliffe’s use of Mystery. In the three hundred and
four, double column, pages of _Udolpho_ there are, besides occasional
voices, only three definite examples of this artifice--the waxen
figure behind the veil, the moving pall, and the disappearance of
Ludovico. The main plot is really no more than a spirited example of
the conventional Romance-plan (in the development of which she is
wittily said to have invented Lord Byron)--an involved narrative of
terrible sufferings and dangers incurred by an immaculate heroine, of
unmeasured tyranny and violence exerted by a melancholy villain, of
protracted misunderstandings concerning the gallant hero, with hurried
explanations all round in the last chapter to justify the wedding-bells.
Obviously there is no realism here. Everything depends upon conscious
exaggeration: whether it be a description of “the Apennines in their
darkest horrors,” or of a “gloomy and sublime” castle’s “mouldering
walls”; of crime indulged without restraint, or innocence unsullied by
the world. Montoni is not more inhuman in his passion than Emily in the
“tender elevation of her mind.”
For despite the most solemn warnings of St. Aubert (quoted above), his
Emily has far more sensibility than any of Miss Burney’s heroines,
and exemplifies the dangerous doctrine that “virtue and taste are
nearly the same.” She and Valancourt, indeed, were indifferent to “the
frivolities of common life”; their “ideas were simple and grand, like
the landscapes among which they moved”; their sentiments spontaneously
“arranged themselves” in original verse.
The fact is, that Scott’s startlingly generous estimate suggests
several sound conclusions: by dwelling upon the genuine poetical
feeling to be observed in Mrs. Radcliffe’s romances, and the sincerity
of her sympathy with nature. Though it has been remarked, with some
justice, that “as her story is usually enveloped in mystery, so there
is, as it were, a haze over her landscapes”; and that, “were six
artists to attempt to embody the Castle of Udolpho upon canvas, they
would probably produce six drawings entirely dissimilar to each other,
all of them equally authorised by the printed description.”
MRS. INCHBALD (1753-1821), on the other hand, followed the new school
in writing simple narratives of everyday life; but she produced little
more than a pale imitation of _The Man of Feeling_ (1771), by Henry
Mackenzie, the only masculine exponent of “sensibility”; though her
_Simple Story_ (1791) and _Nature and Art_ (1796) have been frequently
reprinted. She aimed at dissecting the human heart, as Richardson had
done; and there is, admittedly, a certain melodramatic, and almost
decadent, charm in her work.
MARIA EDGEWORTH (1767-1849) was, certainly, the most prominent of
our novelists between Fanny Burney and Jane Austen. Being a girl of
eleven when _Evelina_ was published, she lived to witness the triumph
of _Vanity Fair_. Living beyond her eighth decade, she produced over
sixty books. Having inspired Scott, on his own testimony, to the
production of the Waverley Novels, she actually inaugurated, promoted,
or established at least four forms of fiction more or less new to her
contemporaries.
Like Fanny Burney, she owed much to the enthusiasm and example of a
liberal-minded and cultured father: that Richard Lovell Edgeworth who
married several of the young persons whom the author of _Sandford and
Merton_ had educated for the honour of his own hand. He and Day were
notable scholastic reformers, and the influence of their innumerable
theories on life and the Pedagogue, largely imported from over the
Channel, is everywhere visible in Maria’s work.
Richard Lovell actually collaborated in the two volumes, inspired by
Rousseau’s _Émile_, on _Practical Education_ (1798), and supplied
forewords of edification to that marvellous series in which she first
proved the possibility of training the young idea by ethical storiettes
which were _not_ tracts. That most clumsily named _Parents’ Assistant_
(1801), the _Moral Tales_ of the same year, and the fascinating
_Frank_, are still nursery classics deserving of immortality. We may
not, to-day, accept without protest many of the “lessons” which they
were designed to enforce; but their sympathetic insight into the nature
of the child (with which recently we have been so much concerned), the
attractive simplicity and dramatic interest of the direct narrative,
set an example, from the very foundations of juvenile literature, which
has borne plentiful fruit.
It should be noticed, moreover, in this connection that Miss Edgeworth
had already produced a spirited defence of female education (_Letters
to Literary Ladies_, 1795); while she soon followed in the footsteps
of Fanny Burney by writing most lively satires on _fin de siècle_
Society, pointed with travesties of French “naturalism,” of which the
chief, perhaps, is _Belinda_, published in 1801; and further extended
the scope of the modern novel by the introduction of the finished Short
Story, under the attractive heading of _Tales of Fashionable Life_.
And, finally, besides again collaborating with her father in an _Essay
on Irish Bulls_ (1802), she produced that stimulating “Irish Brigade,”
which banished the “stage” Patrick from literature, introduced genuine
Celtic types, such as Coney, King of the Black Isles; and, by creating
the “national” novel, may be regarded as the legitimate parent of
what their illustrious author so modestly offered to the public as
“something of the same kind for his own country.”
Although just failing everywhere to reveal genius, Miss Edgeworth
reflects, with marvellous versatility, all the intellectual movements
of her generation. Adopting, and adapting to her own purposes, the
“form for women” set out by Miss Burney, she widened its application to
the discussion of social and political problems, and was the first to
make fiction a picture not only of life, but of its meaning. In fact
she forestalled no less for adults, than for the young, that vast array
of consciously didactic narrative which threatens, in our own time, to
bury beyond revival the original, and the supreme, inspiration of Art
in Literature--to give pleasure.
The humour, the pathos, the knowledge of the world, and, above all, the
common sense regulating Miss Edgeworth’s work, have not secured her as
permanent a popularity as she justly merits. But, if we do not, to-day,
frequently read even _Ormond_, _The Absentee_, or _Castle Rackrent_,
the occasions which gratefully recall their accomplished author to our
remembrance are most astonishingly frequent.
Of HANNAH MORE (1745-1833) most readers probably know even far less
than of Maria Edgeworth; and her work can only claim notice in this
place on account of the energy with which she followed Miss Edgeworth’s
lead in didactic fiction. Accustomed to the society of fashionable
blue-stockings (then a comparative novelty in London life), she exposed
their foibles with considerable humour in private correspondence; while
her plays were cheerfully staged by Garrick. But awakened, in later
life, to the sin of play-going, she became known for her vigorous
tracts (inspiring, by turns, the foundation of Sunday schools and of
the Religious Tract Society), until she published, at sixty-four, her
one novel entitled _Cœlebs in Search of a Wife_.
If this somewhat ponderous effusion does not altogether deserve the
satirical onslaught with which Sydney Smith heralded in the _Edinburgh_
its first appearance, we cannot claim for the author any particular
skill in construction or much fidelity to real life. It is, in fact, no
more than a “dramatic sermon,” and a sermon, moreover, in support of
narrow-minded sectarianism. As the reviewer informs us, “Cœlebs wants
a wife ... who may add materially to the happiness of his future life.
His first journey is to London, where, in the midst of the gay society
of the metropolis, of course, he does not find a wife; and his next
journey is to the family of Mr. Stanley, the head of the Methodists,
a serious people, where, of course, he does find a wife.” That is the
whole story. We must submit, in the meantime, to diatribes, pronounced
by the virtuous, against dancing, theatres, cards, assemblies, and
frivolous conversation, until we are in danger of losing all interest
in the persons of the tale.
It is enough for us, in fact, to mark a niche for Miss More in the
development of women’s work; only remembering the great service she
rendered her generation by a rarely sympathetic understanding of the
poor as individual human beings.