CHAPTER IV

THE MINOR AND LATER EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL[7]

[7] A little of the work to be noticed in this chapter is not

strictly eighteenth century, but belongs to the first decade or

so of the nineteenth. But the majority of the contents actually

conform to the title, and there is hardly any more convenient or

generally applicable heading for the novel before Miss Austen

and Scott, excluding the great names dealt with in the last

chapter.

It is at last beginning to be recognised in principle, though it is

still much too often forgotten in practice, that the minor work of a

time is at least as important as the major in determining general

literary characteristics and tendencies. Nor is this anywhere much more

noticeable than in regard to the present period of our present subject.

The direct influence of Richardson and Fielding was no doubt very great:

but the development of the novel during the middle and later century was

too large and too various to be all mere imitation. As a result,

however, of their influence, there certainly came over the whole kind a

very remarkable change. Even before them the _nisus_ towards it, which

has been noticed in the chapter before the last, is observable enough.

Mrs. Manley's rather famous _New Atlantis_ (1709) has at least the form

of a key-novel of the political sort: but the whole interest is in the

key and not in the novel, though the choice of the form is something.

And the second, third, and fourth decades of the century saw other work

testifying to the vague and almost unconscious hankering after prose

fiction which was becoming endemic. A couple of examples of this may be

treated, in passing, before we come to the work--not exactly of the

first class in itself--of a writer who shows both the pre-Richardsonian

and the post-Richardsonian phases of it most interestingly, and after a

fashion to which there are few exact parallels.

A book, which counts here from the time of its appearance, and from a

certain oddity and air of "key" about it, rather than from much merit as

literature, or any as a story, is the _Adventures of Gaudentio di Lucca_

by Simon Berington.[8] It appeared in 1737, between Defoe and Swift on

the earlier, and Richardson on the later side, while the English world

was to the novel as an infant crying for the light--and the bottle--at

once. It begins and ends with adventures and discoveries of an ordinary

romantic type. But the body consists of a revelation to certain Italian

Inquisitors (who are not at all of the lurid type familiar to the

Protestant imagination, but most equitable and well-disposed as well as

potent, grave, and reverend signers) of an unknown country of "the Grand

Pophar" in the centre of Africa. This country is civilised, but not yet

Christianised: and the description of it of course gives room for the

exercise of the familiar game of contrast--in this case not so much

satiric as didactic--with countries nearer home which are at least

supposed to be both civilised and Christian. It is a "respectable" book

both in the French and the English sense: but it is certainly not very

amusing, and cannot even be called very interesting in any way, save

historically.

[8] The not infrequent attribution of this book to Berkeley is a

good instance of the general inability to discriminate _style_.

The other example which we shall take is of even less intrinsic

attraction: in fact it is a very poor thing. There are, however, more

ways than one in which _corpora vilia_ are good for experiment and

evidence: and we may find useful indications in the mere bookmaking of

the time. Lowndes, the fortunate publisher of _Evelina_, some dozen

years before that windfall came, had issued, or reissued, a collection

called _The Novelist_ and professedly containing _The select novels of

Dr. Croxall_ [the ingenious author of _The Fair Circassian_ and the part

destroyer of Hereford Cathedral] _and other Polite Tales_. The book is

an unblushing if not an actually piratical compilation; sweeping

together, with translations and adaptations published by Croxall himself

at various times in the second quarter of the century and probably

earlier, most of the short stories from the _Spectator_ class of

periodical which had appeared during the past two-thirds of a century.

Most of the rest are obvious (and very badly done) translations from the

French and even from Cervantes' _Exemplary Novels_; seasoned with

personal and other anecdotes, so that the whole number of separate

articles may exceed four-score. Of these a few are interesting attempts

at the historical novel or novelette--short sketches of Mary Queen of

Scots (very sympathetic and evidently French in origin from the phrase

"a _temple_ which was formerly a church"), Jane Shore (an exquisitely

absurd piece of eighteenth-century middle-class modernising and

moralising), Essex, Buckingham, and other likely figures. There are cuts

by the "Van-somethings and Back-somethings" of the time: and the whole,

though not worthy of anything better than the "fourpenny box," is an

evident symptom of popular taste. The sweetmeats or _hors d'oeuvre_ of

the older caterings for that taste are here collected together to form a

_pièce de résistance_. It is true that _The Novelist_ is only a true

title in the older sense--that the pieces are _novelle_ not "novels"

proper. But they are fiction, or fact treated like fiction: and though

the popular taste itself was evidently ceasing to be satisfied with

these morsels and demanding a substantial joint, yet the substance was,

after all, the same.

We rise higher, if not very high, with the novels of Mrs. Eliza Haywood

(1693-1756), one of the damned of the _Dunciad_, but, like some of her

fellows in that _Inferno_, by no means deserving hopeless reprobation.

Every one who has devoted any attention to the history of the novel, as

well as some who have merely considered it as a part of that of English

literature generally, has noticed the curious contrast between the

earlier and the later novels of this writer. _Betsy Thoughtless_ (1751)

and _Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy_ (1753) could, without much difficulty, be

transposed into novels of to-day. _Idalia_ (1723) is of an entirely

different mood and scheme. It is a pure Behnesque _nouvelle_, merely

describing the plots and outrage which ruin the heroine (_The

Unfortunate Mistress_ is the second title), but attempting no

character-drawing (the only hint at such a thing is that Idalia, instead

of being a meek and suffering victim, is said to have a violent temper),

and making not the slightest effort even to complete what story there

is. For the thing breaks off with a sort of "_perhaps_ to be concluded

in _some_ next," about which we have not made up our minds. Very rarely

do we find such a curious combination or succession of styles so early:

but the novel, for pretty obvious reasons, seems to offer temptations to

it and facilities for it.

For _Idalia's_ above-named juniors, while not bad books to read for mere

amusement, have a very particular interest for the student of the

history of the novel. Taken in connection with their author's earlier

work, they illustrate, for the first time, a curious phenomenon which

has repeated itself often, notably in the case of Bulwer, and of a

living novelist who need not be named. This is that the novel, more

almost than any other kind of literature, seems to lend itself to what

may be called the _timeserving_ or "opportunism" of craftsmanship--to

call out the adaptiveness and versatility of the artist. _Betsy_ and

_Jenny_ are so different from _Idalia_ and her group that a critic of

the idle Separatist persuasion would, were it not for troublesome

certainties of fact, have no difficulty whatever in proving that they

must be by different authors. We know that they were _not_: and we know

also the reason of their dissimilarity--the fact that _Pamela_ and her

brother and their groups _ont passé par là_.[9] This fact is most

interesting: and it shows, among other things, that Mrs. Eliza Haywood

was a decidedly clever woman.

[9] The elect ladies about Richardson joined _Betsy_ with

_Amelia_, and sneered at both.

At the same time the two books also show that she was not quite clever

enough: and that she had not realised, as in fact hardly one of the

minor novelists of this time did realise, the necessity of

individualising character. Betsy is both a nice and a good

girl--"thoughtless" up to specification, but no fool, perfectly

"straight" though the reverse of prudish, generous, merry, lovable. But

with all these good qualities she is not quite a person. Jenny is, I

think, a little more of one, but still not quite--while the men and the

other women are still less. Nor had Eliza mastered that practised knack

of "manners-painting" which was to stand Fanny Burney, and many another

after her, in the stead of actual character-creation. Her situations are

often very lively, if not exactly decorous; and they sometimes have a

real dramatic verisimilitude, for instance, the quarrel and

reconciliation of the Lord and the Lady in _Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy_;

but the higher verisimilitude of prose fiction they lack. Neither again

(though Smollett had given her a lead here) had she attained that power

of setting and furnishing a scene which is so powerful a weapon in the

novelist's armoury. Yet she had learnt much: and her later work would

have been almost a wonder in her own earlier time.

She had even been preceded in the new line by one, and closely followed

by another writer of her own sex, both of unblemished reputation, and

perhaps her superiors in intellectual quality and accomplishment, though

they had less distinct novel-faculty. Sarah Fielding, the great

novelist's sister, but herself one of Richardson's literary seraglio,

had a good deal of her brother's humour, but very little of his

constructive grasp of life. _David Simple_ (1744), her best known work,

the _Familiar Letters_ connected with it (to which Henry contributed),

and _The Governess_ display both the merit and the defect--but the

defect is more fatal to a novel than the merit is advantageous. Once

more--if the criticism has been repeated _ad nauseam_ the occasions of

it may be warranted to be much more nauseous in themselves--one looks up

for interest, and is not fed. "The Adventures" of David--whose progeny

must have been rapidly enriched and ennobled if Peter Simple was his

descendant--were "in search of a Friend," and he came upon nobody in the

least like O'Brien. It was, in fact, too early or too late for a _lady_

to write a thoroughly good novel. It had been possible in the days of

Madeleine de Scudèry, and it became possible in the days of Frances

Burney: but for some time before, in the days of Sarah Fielding, it was

only possible in the ways of Afra and of Mrs. Haywood, who, without any

unjust stigma on them, can hardly be said to fulfil the idea of

ladyhood, as no doubt Miss Fielding did.

There is an amusing and (in its context) just passage of Thackeray's,

in which he calls Charlotte Lennox, author of _The Female Quixote_

(1752), a "figment." But it would be unlucky if any one were thereby

prevented from reading this work of the lady whom Johnson admired, and

for whom he made an all-night orgie of apple-pie and bay-leaves. Her

book, which from its heroine is also called _Arabella_, is clever and

not unamusing, though it errs (in accordance with the moral-critical

principles of the time) by not merely satirising the "heroic" romances

of the Gomberville-La Calprenède-Scudèry type, but solemnly discussing

them. Arabella, the romance-bitten daughter of a marquis, is, for all

her delusion, or because of it, rather a charming creature. Her lover

Glanville, his Richardsonian sister, and the inevitable bad Baronet (he

can hardly be called wicked, especially for a Baronet) are more

commonplace: and the thing would have been better as a rather long

_nouvelle_ than as a far from short novel. It alternately comes quite

close to its original (as in the intended burning of Arabella's books)

and goes entirely away from it, and neither as an imitation nor

independently is it as good as Graves's _Spiritual Quixote_: but it is

very far from contemptible.

Yet though the aptitude of women for novel-writing was thus early

exemplified, it is not to be supposed that the majority of persons who

felt the new influences were of that sex. By far the larger number of

those who crowded to follow the Four were, like them, men.

That not exactly credit to the Tory party, Dr. John Shebbeare, has had

his demerits in other ways excused to some extent on the score of

_Lydia_--whose surname, by the way, was "Fairchild," not unknown in

later days of fiction. Even one who, if critical conscience would in

any way permit it, would fain let the Tory dogs have a little the best

of it, must, I fear, pronounce _Lydia_ a very poor thing. Shebbeare, who

was a journalist, had the journalist faculty of "letting everything go

in"--of taking as much as he could from Richardson, Fielding, Smollett,

etc., up to date (1755); and of throwing back to Afra for an interesting

Indian, Canassatego. The book (like not a few other eighteenth-century

novels) has very elaborate chapter headings and very short chapters, so

that an immoral person can get up its matter pretty easily. A virtuous

one who reads it through will have to look to his virtue for reward. The

irony is factitious and forced; the sentiment unappealing; the

coarseness quite destitute of Rabelaisian geniality; and the

nomenclature may be sampled from "the Countess of Liberal" and "Lord

Beef." I believe Shebbeare was once pilloried for his politics. If it

had been for _Lydia_, I should not have protested.

The next book to be mentioned is an agreeable change. Why Hazlitt

compared _The Life of John Buncle_ (1756-1766) to Rabelais is a somewhat

idle though perhaps not quite unanswerable question; the importance of

the book itself in the history of the English novel, which has sometimes

been doubted or passed over, is by no means small. Its author, Thomas

Amory (1691?-1788), was growing old when he wrote it and even when he

prefaced it with a kind of Introduction, the _Memoirs of several Ladies_

(1755). It is a sort of dream-exaggeration of an autobiography; at first

sight, and not at first sight only, the wildest of farragos. The author

represents himself as a disinherited son who is devoted, with equal

enthusiasm, to matrimony, eating and drinking as much as he can of the

best things he can find, discussion of theological problems in a

"Christian-deist" or Unitarian sense, "natural philosophy" in the vague

eighteenth-century meaning, and rambling--chiefly in the fell district

which includes the borders of Lancashire, Yorkshire, Westmoreland,

"Bishopric" (Durham), and Cumberland. With this district--which even

now, though seamed with roads and railways, does actually contain some

of the wildest scenery of the island; which only forty years ago was

much wilder; and which in Amory's time was a howling wilderness in

parts--he deals in the characteristic spirit of exaggeration which

perhaps, as much as anything else, suggested Rabelais to Hazlitt. From

Malham Cove and Hardraw Scar, through the Wild Boar Fell district to the

head of Teesdale, you can find at this moment rough and rugged scenery

enough, some of which is actually recognisable when "reduced" from

Amory's extravagance. But that extravagance extends the distances from

furlongs to leagues; deepens the caverns from yards to furlongs; and

exalts fell and scar into Alps and Andes. In the same way he has to

marry eight wives (not seven as has been usually, and even by the

present writer, said), who are distractingly beautiful and wonderfully

wise, but who seldom live more than two years: and has a large number of

children about whom he says nothing, "because he has not observed in

them anything worth speaking about." The courtships are varied between

abrupt embraces soon after introduction, and discussions on Hebrew,

Babel, "Christian-deism," and the binomial theorem. In the most

inhospitable deserts, his man or boy[10] is invariably able to produce

from his wallet "ham, tongue, potted blackcock, and a pint of cyder,"

while in more favourable circumstances Buncle takes his ease in his inn

by consuming "a pound of steak, a quart of green peas, two fine cuts of

bread, a tankard of strong ale, and a pint of port" and singing cheerful

love-ditties a few days after the death of an adored wife. He comes down

the side of precipices by a mysterious kind of pole-jumping--half a

dozen fathoms at a drop with landing-places a yard wide--like a chamois

or a rollicking Rocky Mountain ram. Every now and then he finds a

skeleton, with a legend of instructive tenor, in a hermitage which he

annexes: and almost infallibly, at the worst point of the wilderness,

there is an elegant country seat with an obliging old father and a

lively heiress ready to take the place of the last removed charmer.

[10] It has been observed, and is worth observing, that the

eighteenth-century hero, even in his worst circumstances, can

seldom exist without a "follower."

Mad, however, as this sketch may sound, and certainly not quite sane as

Amory may have been, there is a very great deal of method in his, and

some in its, madness. The flashes of shrewdness and the blocks of pretty

solid learning (Rabelaisian again) do not perhaps so much concern us:

but the book, ultra-eccentric as it is, does count for something in the

history of the English novel. Its descriptions, rendered through a

magnifying glass as they are, have considerable power; and are quite

unlike anything in prose fiction, and most things in prose literature,

before it. In Buncle himself there is a sort of extra-natural,

"four-dimension" nature and proportion which assert the novelist's power

memorably:--if a John Buncle could exist, he would very probably be like

Amory's John Buncle. Above all, the book (let it be remembered that it

came before _Tristram Shandy_) is almost the beginning of the Eccentric

Novel--not of the satiric-marvellous type which Cyrano and Swift had

revived from Lucian, but of a new, a modern, and a very English variety.

Buncle is sometimes extraordinarily like Borrow (on whom he probably

had influence), and it would not be hard to arrange a very considerable

spiritual succession for him, by no means deserving the uncomplimentary

terms in which he dismisses his progeny in the flesh.

If there is an almost preposterous cheerfulness about _Buncle_, the

necessary alternative can be amply supplied by the next book to which we

come. The curious way in which Johnson almost invariably managed to hit

the critical nail on the head is well illustrated by his remark to

Frances Sheridan, author of the _Memoirs of Miss Sydney Bid[d]ulph_

(1761), that he "did not know whether she had a right, on moral

principles, to make her readers suffer so much." Substitute "æsthetic"

for "moral" and "heroine" for "readers," and the remark retains its

truth on another scheme of criticism, which Johnson was not ostensibly

employing, and which he might have violently denounced. The book, though

with its subsequent prolongation too long, is a powerful one: and though

actually dedicated to Richardson and no doubt consciously owing much to

his influence, practically clears off the debt by its own earnings. But

Miss Bidulph (she started with only one _d_, but acquired another),

whose journal to her beloved Cecilia supplies the matter and method of

the novel, is too persistently unlucky and ill-treated, without the

smallest fault of her own, for anything but really, not fictitiously,

real life. Her misfortunes spring from obeying her mother (but there was

neither moral nor satire in this then), and husbands, lovers, rivals,

relations, connections--everybody--conspire to afflict her. Poetical

justice has been much abused in both senses of that verb: _Sydney

Biddulph_ shows cause for it in the very act of neglect.

But the eighteenth century, on the whole, loathed melancholy. The

_Spiritual Quixote_ (1772) of the Reverend Richard Graves (1715-1804)

has probably been a little injured by the ingenuous proclamation of

indebtedness in the title. It is, however, an extremely clever and

amusing book: and one of the best of the many imitations of its

original, which, indeed, it follows only on broad and practically

independent lines. During his long life (for more than half a century of

which he was rector of Claverton near Bath) Graves knew many interesting

persons, from Shenstone and Whitefield (with both of whom he was at

Pembroke College, Oxford, though he afterwards became a fellow of All

Souls) to Malthus, who was a pupil of his; and he had some interesting

private experiences. He wove a good deal that was personal into his

novel, which, as may easily be guessed, is a satire upon Methodism, and

in which Whitefield is personally and not altogether favourably

introduced. But even on him Graves is by no means savage: while his

treatment of his hero, Geoffrey Wildgoose, a young Oxford man who,

living in retirement with his mother in the country, becomes an

evangelist, very mainly from want of some more interesting occupation,

is altogether good-humoured. Wildgoose promptly falls in love with a

fascinating damsel-errant, Julia Townsend; and the various adventures,

religious, picaresque, and amatory, are embroiled and disembroiled with

very fair skill in character and fairer still in narrative. Nor is the

Sancho-Partridge of the piece, Jerry Tugwell, a cobbler (who thinks,

though he is very fond of his somewhat masterful wife, that a little

absence from her would not be unrefreshing), by any means a failure.

Both Scott and Dickens evidently knew Graves well,[11] and knowledge of

him might with advantage be more general.

[11] Julia Mannering reminds me a little of Julia Townsend: and

if this be doubtful, the connection of Jerry's "Old madam gave

me some higry-pigry" and Cuddie's "the leddy cured me with some

hickery-pickery" is not. While, for Dickens, compare the way in

which Sam Weller's landlord in the Fleet got into trouble with

the Tinker's Tale in _Spiritual Quixote_, bk. iv. chap. ii.

The novels that have been noticed since those contrasted ones of Mrs.

Haywood's, which occupy a position by themselves, all possess a sort of

traditional fame; and cover (with the proper time allowed for the start

given by Richardson and Fielding) nearly the same period of thirty

years--in this case 1744 (_David Simple_) to 1772 (_The Spiritual

Quixote_)--which is covered by the novels of the great quartette

themselves. It would be possible to add a great many, and easy and not

disagreeable to the writer to dwell on a few. Of these few some are

perhaps necessary. Frank Coventry's _Pompey the Little_--an amusing

satirical novel with a pet dog for the title-giver and with the

promising (but as a rule ill-handled) subject of university life treated

early--appeared in 1751--the same year which saw the much higher flight

(the pun is in sense not words) of _Peter Wilkins_, by Robert Paltock of

Clement's Inn, a person of whom practically nothing else is known. It

would be lucky for many people if they were thus singly yoked to

history. It was once fashionable to dismiss _Peter_ as a boy's book,

because it discovers a world of flying men and women, modelled partly on

Defoe, partly on Swift; it has more recently been fashionable to hint a

sneer at it as "sentimental" because of its presentment of a sort of

fantastic and unconventional Amelia (who, it may be remembered, made her

appearance in the same year) in the heroine Youwarkee. Persons who do

not care for fashion will perhaps sometimes agree that, though not

exactly a masterpiece, it is rather a charming book. If anybody is

sickened by its charm he may restore himself by a still better known

story which no one can accuse of charm or sentiment, though it is

clever enough--Charles Johnstone's _Chrysal_ or _The Adventures of a

Guinea_ (1760). This, which is strongly Smollettian in more ways than

one, derives its chief notoriety from the way in which the scandalous

(and perhaps partly fabulous) orgies of Medmenham Abbey are, like other

scandalous and partly fabulous gossip of the time, brought in. But it

_is_ clever; though emphatically one of the books which "leave a bad

taste in the mouth." Indeed about this time the novel, which even in

clean hands allowed itself not a little freedom, took, in others,

excursions in the direction of the province of "prohibited literature,"

and sometimes passed the border.

One rather celebrated book, however, has not yet been mentioned: and it

will serve very well, with two others greater in every way, as usher to

a few general remarks on the weakness of this generation of minor

novelists. Between 1766 and 1770 Henry Brooke, an Irishman of position,

fortune, and literary distinction in other ways, who was at the time of

more than middle age, published _The Fool of Quality_ or _The Adventures

of Henry Earl of Morland_. The hero is a sort of Grandison-Buncle, as

proper though scarcely as priggish as the one, and as eccentric and

discursive as the other; the story is chaos: the book is stuffed with

disquisitions on all sorts of moral, social, and political problems. It

is excellently written; it is clear from it that Brooke (who was for a

time actually mad) did not belie the connection of great wits with

madness. But it is, perhaps, most valuable as an evidence of the

unconquerable set of the time towards novel.

Of this, however, as of some other points, we have greater evidence

still in the shape of two books, each of them, as nothing else yet

mentioned in this chapter can claim to be, a permanent and capital

contribution to English literature--Johnson's _Rasselas_ (1759) and

Goldsmith's _Vicar of Wakefield_ (1766).

It is not from the present writer that any one need look for an attempt

to belittle Johnson: and there is no doubt (for the _Lives of the Poets_

is but a bundle of essays) that _Rasselas_ is Johnson's greatest _book_.

But there may be, in some minds, as little doubt that attempts to defend

it from the charge of not being a novel are only instances of that not

wholly unamiable frenzy of eagerness to "say _not_ ditto to Mr. Burke"

which is characteristic of clever undergraduates, and of periods which

are not quite of the greatest in literature. _Rasselas_ is simply an

extended and glorified moral apologue--an enlarged "Vision of Mirza." It

has no real story; it has no real characters; its dialogue is "talking

book;" it indulges in some but not much description. It is in fact a

prose _Vanity of Human Wishes_, admirably if somewhat stiffly arranged

in form, and as true to life as life itself. You will have difficulty in

finding a wiser book anywhere; but although it is quite true that a

novel need not be foolish, wisdom is certainly not its determining

_differentia_. Yet for our purposes _Rasselas_ is almost as valuable as

_Tom Jones_ itself: because it shows how imperative and wide-ranging was

the struggle towards production of this kind in prose. The book is

really--to adapt the quaint title of one of the preceding

century--_Johnson al Mondo_: and at this time, when Johnson wanted to

communicate his thoughts to the world in a popular form, we see that he

chose the novel.

The lesson is not so glaringly obvious in the _Vicar of Wakefield_,

because this _is_ a novel, and a very delightful one. The only point

of direct contact with _Rasselas_ is the knowledge of human

nature, though in the one book this takes the form of melancholy

aphorism and apophthegm, in the other that of felicitous trait and

dialogue-utterance. There is plenty of story, though this has not been

arranged so as to hit the taste of the martinet in "fable;" the book has

endless character; the descriptions are Hogarth with less of _peuple_

about them; the dialogue is unsurpassable. Yet Goldsmith, untiring hack

of genius as he was, wrote no other novel; evidently felt no particular

call or predilection for the style; would have been dramatist, poet,

essayist with greater satisfaction to himself, though scarcely

(satisfactory as he is in all these respects) to us. That he tried it at

all can hardly be set down to anything else than the fact that the style

was popular: and his choice is one of the highest possible testimonies

to the popularity of the style. Incidentally, of course, the _Vicar_ has

more for us than this, because it indicates, as vividly as any of the

work of the great Four themselves, how high and various the capacities

of the novel are--how in fact it can almost completely compete with and,

for a time, vanquish the drama on its own ground. Much of it, of

course--the "Fudge!" scene between Mr. Burchell and the town ladies may

be taken as the first example that occurs--_is_ drama, with all the

cumbrous accessories of stage and scene and circumstance spared. One may

almost see that "notice to quit," which (some will have it) has been,

after nearly a century and a half, served back again on the novel,

served by the _Vicar of Wakefield_ on the drama.

At the same time even the _Vicar_, though perhaps less than any other

book yet noticed in this chapter, illustrates the proposition to which

we have been leading up--that, outside the great quartette, and even to

a certain extent inside of it, the novel had not yet fully found its

proper path--had still less made up its mind to walk freely and firmly

therein. Either it has some _arrière pensée_, some second purpose,

besides the simple attempt to interest and absorb by the artistic

re-creation of real and ordinary life: or, without exactly doing this,

it shows signs of mistrust and misgiving as to the sufficiency of such

an appeal, and supplements it by the old tricks of the drama in

"revolution and discovery;" by incident more or less out of the ordinary

course; by satire, political, social, or personal; by philosophical

disquisition; by fantastic imagination--by this, that, and the other of

the fatal auxiliaries who always undo their unwise employers. Men want

to write novels; and the public wants them to write novels; and supply

does not fail desire and demand. There is a well-known _locus classicus_

from which we know that, not long after the century had passed its

middle, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in Italy regularly received boxes of

novels from her daughter in England, and read them, eagerly though by no

means uncritically, as became Fielding's cousin and her ladyship's self.

But while the kind had not conquered, and for a long time did not

conquer, any high place in literature from the point of view of serious

criticism--while, now and long afterwards, novel-writing was the

Cinderella of the literary family, and novel-reading the inexhaustible

text for sermons on wasted, nay positively ill-spent, time--the

novelists themselves half justified their critics by frequent

extravagance; by more frequent unreality; by undue licence pretty often;

by digression and divagation still oftener. Except Fielding, hardly any

one had dared boldly to hold up the mirror to nature, and be content

with giving the reflection, in his own way, but with respect for it. For

even Goldsmith, with infinite touches of nature, had not given quite a

natural whole, and even Johnson, though absolutely true, had failed to

accommodate his truth to the requirements of the novel.

The turning point in this direction of the kind was to be made by a

person far inferior in ability to any one of the great quartette, and in

a book which, _as_ a book, cannot pretend to an equality with the worst

of theirs--by a person indeed of less intellectual power, and in a book

of less literary merit, than not a few of the persons and books just

noticed. There is something, no doubt, paradoxical in this: and the

paradox is connected, both with a real quality of the subject and with a

surprising diversity of opinions about it. Frances Burney and her

_Evelina_ (1778), not to mention her subsequent works and her delightful

_Diary_, have been the subject of a great deal of writing: but though

more than a hundred years--more indeed than a century and a

quarter--have passed since the book insidiously took London by gradual

storm, it may, without too much presumption, be questioned whether

either book or author has yet been finally or satisfactorily "placed."

The immense advantage of not having a history, positively illustrated

once for all in Shakespeare, could hardly be negatively illustrated

better than in Madame d'Arblay. She had the curious, and actually very

unpleasant, experience of being selected for a position at court on the

strength of her literary achievements, of finding it intolerable, of

breaking down, and of never doing any really good work after her

release, through much more than half of her long life. On this fact

critical biography has fastened almost exclusively. Macaulay, in one of

his most brilliant and best known essays, represents the world as having

been deprived of unknown quantities of admirable work by the misplaced

kindness, and the positive unkindness, of Queen Charlotte. Some have

agreed with him, some have differed with him. Some, in one of the

natural if uncritical revulsions, have questioned whether even _Evelina_

is a very remarkable book. Some, with human respect for the great names

of its early admirers, have passed it over gingerly--not exactly as

willing to wound, but as quite afraid or reluctant to strike. Nay,

actual critical evaluations of the novel-values of Miss Burney's four

attempts in novel-writing are very rare. I dare say there are other

people who have read _The Wanderer_ through: but I never met any one who

had done so except (to quote Rossetti) myself: and I could not bring

myself, even on this occasion, to read it again. I doubt whether very

many now living have read _Camilla_. Even _Cecilia_ requires an effort,

and does not repay that effort very well. Only _Evelina_ itself is

legible and relegible--for reasons which will be given presently. Yet

_Cecilia_ was written shortly after _Evelina_, under the same stimulus

of abundant and genial society, with no pressure except that of friendly

encouragement and perhaps assistance, and long before the supposed

blight of royal favour and royal exigences came upon its author. When

_Camilla_ was published she had been relieved from these exigences,

though not from that favour, for five years: and was a thoroughly happy

woman, rejoicing in husband and child. Even when the impossible

_Wanderer_ was concocted, she had had ample leisure, had as yet incurred

none of her later domestic sorrows, and was assured of lavish recompense

for her (it must be said) absolutely worthless labours. Why this steady

declension, with which, considering the character of _Cecilia_, the

court sojourn can have had nothing to do? And admitting it, why still

uphold, as the present writer does uphold, _Evelina_ as one of the

_points de repère_ of the English novel? Both questions shall be

answered in their order.

Frances Burney must have been, as we see not merely from external

testimony, but from the infallible witness of her own diary, a most

engaging person to any one who could get over her shyness and her

prudery:[12] but she was only in a very limited sense a gifted one.

Macaulay grants her a "fine understanding;" but even his own article

contradicts the statement, which is merely one of his exaggerations for

the sake of point. She had _not_ a fine understanding: though she was

neither silly nor stupid, her sense was altogether inferior to her

sensibility. Although living in a most bookish circle she was, as

Macaulay himself admits, almost illiterate: and (which he does not say)

her comparative critical estimates of books, when she does give them,

are merely contemptible. This harsh statement could be freely

substantiated: but it is enough to say that, when a girl, she preferred

some forgotten rubbish called _Henry and Frances_ to the _Vicar of

Wakefield_: and that, when a woman, she deliberately offended

Chateaubriand by praising the _Itinéraire_ rather than the _Génie du

Christianisme_, or _Atala_, or _René_, or _Les Martyrs_. She had very

little inventive power; her best novel, _Evelina_, has no plot worth

speaking of. She never wrote really well. Even the _Diary_ derives its

whole charm from the matter and the _reportage. Evelina_ is tolerable

style of the kind that has no style; _Cecilia_ is pompous and

Johnsonian; _Camilla_ was stigmatised by the competent and affectionate

judgment of Mrs. Delany as "Gallicised;" and _The Wanderer_ is in a

lingo which suggests the translation of an ill-written French original

by a person who does not know English.

[12] Also, perhaps, to one who had not yet discovered that

intense concentration on herself and her family with which,

after their quarrel, Mrs. Thrale, not quite an impartial judge,

but a very shrewd one, charged her, and which does appear in the

_Diary_.

What then was it in _Evelina_, and in part in _Cecilia_ (with a faint

survival even into _Camilla_), which turned the heads of such a "town"

as Johnson and Burke, Walpole and Windham, and many others--which, to

persons who can see it, makes the books attractive to-day, and which

should always give their author a secure and distinguished place in the

great torch-race of English fiction-writers? It is this--that Miss

Burney had a quite marvellous faculty of taking impressions of actual

speech, manners, and to a certain extent character: that she had, at any

rate for a time, a corresponding faculty of expressing, or at least

reporting, her impressions. Next (and perhaps most of all) that she had

the luck to come at a moment when speech and manners were turning to the

modern; and lastly, that she was content, in parts of her work at any

rate, to let her faculty of expression work, automatically and

uninterfered with, on the impressions: and thereby give us record of

them for all time. Her acute critic "Daddy" Crisp lamented that we had

not had a series of recorders of successive _tons_ [fashions] like

Fanny. But she was much more than a mere fashion-monger: and what has

lasted best in her was not mere fashion. She could see and record life

and nature: and she did so. Still, fashion had a good deal to do with

it: and when her access to fashion and society ceased, the goodness of

her work ceased likewise.

Even this gift, and this even in _Evelina_ and the better parts of

_Cecilia_, she had not always with her. The sentimental parts of

_Evelina_--the correspondence with Mr. Villars, the courtship with Lord

Orville, and others--are very weak: and it cannot be said that Evelina

herself, though she is a pleasant girl enough, gives the lie to Mr.

Pope's libel about women. Cecilia has a little more individuality. But

the great strength of the former book lies in the admirable lower

middle-class pictures of the Branghtons and Mr. Smith, whom Fanny had

evidently studied from the life in the queer neighbourhood of Poland

Street: as also in the justness and verisimilitude of the picture of the

situation, which in different ways both books present--that of the

introduction of a young girl to the world.[13] In these points, as in

others which there is neither space nor need to particularise, Miss

Burney showed that she had hit upon--stumbled upon one may almost

say--the real principle and essence of the novel as distinguished from

the romance--its connection with actual ordinary life--life studied

freshly and directly "_from_ the life," and disguised and adulterated as

little as possible by exceptional interests and incidents. It is

scarcely too much to say that one great reason why the novel was so long

coming into existence was precisely this--that life and society so long

remained subject to these exceptional interests and incidents. It is

only within the last century or so that the "life of 'mergency" (to

adapt Mr. Chucks slightly) ceased to be the ordinary life. Addison's

"Dissenter's Diary" with its record of nothing but constitutionals and

marrow-bones, and Mr. Nisby's opinions, has simply amused half a dozen

generations. Yet, in a sense, it has nearly as much to do with the

advent of the novel as Sir Roger de Coverley himself. For these things

are, not merely in an allegory, the subjects of the novel. Not so very

much earlier Mr. Nisby would have had a chance of delivering his

opinions on the scaffold: and his disciple would have had prison bread

and water for marrow-bones and "Brooks and Hellier." These would have

been subjects for romance: the others were subjects for novel.

[13] Dunlop and others have directly or indirectly suggested a

good deal of plagiarism in _Evelina_ from _Miss Betsy

Thoughtless_: but it is exactly in this _life_-quality that the

earlier novelist fails.

All glory, therefore, be to Frances Burney; both that which her

generous successor and superior gives her in _Northanger Abbey_, and

more also--for Miss Austen, naturally enough, was not taking the

view-point of literary history. But it has been said that Fanny herself

possessed her gift in two senses uncertainly--first, in that she did not

very clearly perceive what it was, and, secondly, in that she soon lost

grip of it. It is, therefore, not wonderful that few others caught the

trick from her for a long time--for indeed fully twenty years, till Miss

Edgeworth made her appearance. But these twenty years were years of

extreme fertility in novels of different sorts, while--a phenomenon that

occurs not seldom--the older kind of fiction made a kind of rally at the

very time that the newer was at last solidly establishing itself. There

was, indeed, ample room for both. You cannot kill Romance: it would be a

profound misfortune, perhaps the profoundest that could befall the human

race, if you could. But the new romance was of rather a bastard kind,

and it showed more of the bad blood than of the good till, by a curious

coincidence, Scott once more found the true strain, just about the same

time as that at which Miss Austen was making known the true strain of

the novel proper.

This hybrid new romance had been stumbled upon more than a decade before

Fanny Burney in her turn stumbled upon the pure novel: and most people

know in what and by whom. To this day it is by no means easy to be

certain what Horace Walpole really meant to write, or thought he was

writing, in _The Castle of Otranto_ (1764). His own references to his

own writings are too much saturated with affectation and pose to make it

safe to draw any conclusions from them; there is little or no external

evidence; and the book itself is rather a puzzle. Taking the Preface to

the second edition with a very large allowance of salt--the success of

the first _before_ this preface makes double salting advisable--and

accommodating it to the actual facts, one finds it hardly necessary to

go beyond the obvious and almost commonplace solution that _The Castle

of Otranto_ was simply the castle of Strawberry Hill itself with paper

for lath and ink for plaster--in other words, an effort to imitate

something which the imitator more than half misunderstood. Of mediæval

literature proper, apart from chronicles and genealogies, Walpole knew

nothing: and for its more precious features he had the dislike which

sometimes accompanies ignorance. But he undoubtedly had positive

literary genius--flawed, alloyed, incomplete, uncritical of itself, but

existing: and this genius showed itself here. His paper-and-ink

"Strawberry" is quite another guess structure from his lath-and-plaster

one. For itself in itself--for what it _is_--the present writer, though

he has striven earnestly and often for the sake of the great things that

it _did_, has never been able to get up any affection or admiration. It

is preposterous, desultory, tedious, clumsy, dull. But it made people

(we know it on such excellent authority as Gray's) shudder: and the

shudder was exactly what they wanted--in every sense of the verb "to

want." Moreover, quite independently of this shudder, it pointed the way

to a wide, fertile, and delightful province of historical, social,

literary, and other matter which had long been neglected, and which

people had been assured was not worth exploring. Blair was just using,

or about to use, "any romance of chivalry" as a hyperbolical

exemplification of the contemptible in literature. Hume had been arguing

against, and Voltaire was still sneering at, all sorts of superstition

and supernaturalism. The common cant of criticism for generations had

been that "sense" and "reason" were to be the only criteria. Walpole's

egregious helmet dropped from no one knew (or knows) where on all these

Philistinisms: and squelched them. How it did this, why it did it, and

so forth, one knows not much more than one knows why and how all the

things happened in the novel itself. _Après coup_, the author talked

about "Shakespeare" (of whom, by the way, he was anything but a fervent

or thorough admirer) and the like. Shakespeare had, as Sir Walter

Raleigh has well pointed out, uncommonly little to do with it. But

Shakespeare at least supplies us with an appropriate phrase for the

occasion. _The Castle of Otranto_ "lay in" Horace's "way, and he found

it." And with it, though hardly in it, he found the New Romance.

In Horace's case also, as in that of Frances, though the success was

even more momentous, the successors were slow and doubtful, though not

quite so slow. In some dozen years Walpole read Miss Clara Reeve's _Old

English Baron_ (1777), and as in another celebrated case "thought it a

bore." It _is_ rather a bore. It has more consecutiveness than

_Otranto_, and escapes the absurdities of the copiously but clumsily

used supernatural by administering it in a very minute dose. But there

is not a spark of genius in it, whereas that spark, though sometimes

curiously wrapped up in ashes, was always present (Heaven knows where he

got it!) in Sir Robert's youngest son. And the contagion spread. For

general and epidemic purposes it had to wait till the Germans had

carried it over the North Sea and sent it back again. For particular

ones, it found a new development in one of the most remarkable of all

novels, twenty years younger than _Otranto_, and a few years older than

the new outburst of the "Gothic" supernatural in the works of Anne

Radcliffe and Mat Lewis.

_Vathek_ (1786) stands alone--almost independent even of its

sponsors--it would be awkward to say godfathers--Hamilton and Voltaire;

apart likewise from such work as it, no doubt, in turn partly suggested

to Peacock and to Disraeli. There is, perhaps, no one towards whom it is

so tempting to play the idle game of retrospective Providence as towards

the describer of Batalha and Alcobaça, the creator of Nouronnihar and

the Hall of Eblis. Fonthill has had too many vicissitudes since

Beckford, and Cintra is a far cry; but though his associations with Bath

are later, it is still possible, in that oddly enchanted city, to get

something of the mixed atmosphere--eighteenth century, nineteenth, and

of centuries older and younger than either--which, _tamisée_ in a

mysterious fashion, surrounds this extraordinary little masterpiece.

Take Beckford's millions away; make him coin his wits to supply the want

of them; and what would have been the result? Perhaps more _Vatheks_;

perhaps things even better than _Vathek_;[14] perhaps nothing at all. On

the whole, it is always wiser not to play Providence, in fact or fancy.

All that need be said is that Anthony Hamilton and Voltaire are

certainly not by themselves--good as they are, and admirable as the

first is--enough to account for _Vathek_. Romance has passed there as

well as persiflage and something like _coïonnerie_; it is Romance that

has given us the baleful beauty of that Queen of Evil, Nouronnihar, and

the vision of the burning hearts that make their own wandering but

eternal Hell. The tendency of the novel had been on the whole, even in

its best examples, to prose in feeling as well as in form. It was

Beckford who availed himself of the poetry which is almost inseparable

from Romance. But it was Horace Walpole who had opened the door to

Romance herself.

[14] Since the text was written--indeed very recently--the

long-missing "Episodes" of _Vathek_ itself have been at length

supplied by the welcome diligence of Mr. Lewis Melville. They

are not "better than Vathek," but they are good.

Still, _Vatheks_ are not to be had to order: and as Romance was wanted,

to order and in bulk, during the late years of the eighteenth century,

some other kind had to be supplied. The chief accredited purveyors of it

have been already named and must now be dealt with, to be followed by

the list of secondary, never quite accomplished, exponents now of novel,

now of romance, now of the two mixed, who filled the closing years of

the eighteenth century.

It is, however, unjust to put the author of _The Mysteries of Udolpho_

and the author of _The Monk_ on the same level. Mat Lewis was a clever

boy with a lively fancy, a knack of catching and even of anticipating

popular tendencies in literature, a rather vulgar taste by nature, and

no faculty of self-criticism to correct it. The famous _Monk_ (1795),

which he published when he was twenty, is as preposterous as _Otranto_

and adds to its preposterousness a _haut goût_ of atrocity and indecency

which Walpole was far too much of a gentleman, and even of a true man of

letters, to attempt or to tolerate. Lewis's other work in various forms

is less offensive: but--except in respect of verse-rhythm which does not

here concern us--hardly any of it is literature. What does concern us is

that the time took it for literature, because it adopted the

terror-style in fiction.

Anne Ward (she married a barrister named Radcliffe, of whom we do not

hear much except that his engagements in journalism threw time on his

wife's hands for writing) appears to have started on her career of

terror-novelist, in which she preceded Lewis, with two fixed resolves of

principle very contrary to his practice. The first was to observe

strict "propriety" in her books--a point in which the novel had always

been a little peccant. The second and more questionable, but also more

original, was a curious determination to lavish the appearance of the

supernatural, in accordance with the Walpolian tradition and the German

adoption of it, but never to allow anything _really_ supernatural in

ultimate explanation or want of explanation. She applied these two

principles to the working out, over and over again, of practically the

same story--the persecutions of a beautiful and virtuous heroine, and

her final deliverance from them. Her first attempt, _The Castles of

Athlin and Dunbayne_, appeared as early as 1789: and she left a

posthumous romance, _Gaston de Blondeville_, which did not come out till

1826, four years after her death. She also wrote some poems and a volume

of _Travels_ (1794) which is important for a reason to be noticed

presently. But her fame rests upon four books, which she published in

seven years, between her own twenty-sixth and thirty-third, _A Sicilian

Romance_ (1790), _The Romance of the Forest_ (1791), the world-renowned

_Mysteries of Udolpho_ in 1794-1795, and _The Italian_ two years later.

These stories owed their original attraction to the skill with which, by

the use of a Defoe-like minuteness of detail, added to a pictorial

faculty which Defoe had not, an atmosphere of terror is constantly

diffused and kept up. Very little that is terrible actually happens: but

the artist succeeds (so long as the trick has not become too familiar)

in persuading you that something very terrible is _going_ to happen, or

has just happened. And so the delight of something "horrid," as the

Catherines and Isabellas of the day put it, is given much more

plentifully, and even much more excitingly, than it could be by a real

horror now and then, with intervals of miscellaneous business. In one

sense, indeed, the process will not stand even the slightest critical

examination: for it is soon seen to consist of a succession of serious

mystifications and non-comic much-ados-about-nothing. But these "ados"

are most cunningly made (her last book, _The Italian_, is, perhaps, the

best place to look for them, if the reader is not taking up the whole

subject with a virtuous thoroughness), and Mrs. Radcliffe's great praise

is that she induced her original readers to suspend their critical

faculties sufficiently to enable them to take it all seriously. Scott,

who undoubtedly owed her something, assigned her positive genius: and

modern critics, while, perhaps, seldom experiencing much real

delectation from her work, have discovered in it not a few positive and

many more indirect and comparative merits. The influence on Scott is not

the least of these: but there is even a more unquestionable asset of the

same kind in the fact that the Byronic villain-hero, if not Byron

himself, is Mrs. Radcliffe's work. Schedoni did much more than beget or

pattern Lara: he _is_ Lara, to all intents and purposes, in "first

state" and before the final touch has been put by the greater master who

took the plate in hand.

But there is more to be said for Mrs. Radcliffe than this. Her

"explained supernatural," tiresome as it may be to some of us nowadays,

is really a marvel of patience and ingenuity: and this same quality

extends to her plots generally. The historical side of her novels (which

she does to some extent attempt) is a failure, as everything of the kind

was before Scott: that we may leave till we come to Scott himself. But

one important engine of the novelist she set to work in a fashion which

had never been managed before, and that is elaborate description. She

shows an early adaptation of that "picturesque," of which we see the

beginnings in Gray, when she was in the nursery, which was being

directly developed by Gilpin, but which, as we may see from her

_Travels_, she had got not merely from books, but from her own

observation. She applies it both within and without: at one moment

giving pages on the scenery of the Apennines, at another paragraphs on

the furniture of her abbeys and castles. The pine forests and the

cataracts; the skyline of Udolpho bathed in sunset glow, while a

"melancholy purple tint" steals up the slopes to its foundations--are

all in the day's work now; but they were not so then, and it is fair to

say that Mrs. Radcliffe does them well. The "high canopied tester of

dark green damask" and the "counterpane of black velvet" which

illustrate the introduction of the famous chapter of the Black Pall in

Chateau le Blanc may be mere inventory goods now: but, once more, they

were not so then. And this faculty of description (which, as noted

above, could hardly have been, and pretty certainly was not, got from

books, though it may have been, to some extent and quite legitimately,

got from pictures) was applied in many minor ways--touches of really or

supposedly horrible objects in the dark, faint suggestions of sound, or

of appeals to the other senses--hints of all sorts, which were to become

common tricks of the trade, but were then quite new.

At any rate, by these and other means she attained that great result of

the novel which has been noted in Defoe, in Richardson, and in

others--the result of what the French vividly call _enfisting_ the

reader--getting hold of his attention, absorbing him in a pleasant

fashion. The mechanism was often too mechanical: taken with the

author's steady and honest, but somewhat inartistic determination to

explain everything it sometimes produces effects positively ridiculous

to us. With the proviso of _valeat quantum_, it is not quite unfair to

dwell, as has often been dwelt, on the fact that the grand triumph of

Mrs. Radcliffe's terrormongering--the famous incident of the Black

Veil--is produced by a piece of wax-work. But the result resulted--the

effect _was_ produced: and it was left to those who were clever enough

to improve upon the means. For the time these means were "improved upon"

in another sense; we shall glance at some of the caricatures, intended

and unintended, later. For the present we may turn to other varieties of

the curiously swarming novel-production of these two last decades of the

century, and especially of the very last.

If Scott had not established Richard Cumberland's _Henry_ (1795) in the

fortress of the Ballantyne Novels, it would hardly be necessary to

notice "Sir Fretful Plagiary's" contributions to the subject of our

history. He preluded it with another, _Arundel_ (1789), and followed it

much later with a third, _John de Lancaster_: but there is no need to

say anything of these. _Henry_ displays the odd hit-_and_-miss quality

which seems to have attached itself to Cumberland everywhere, whether as

novelist, dramatist, essayist, diplomatist, poet, or anything else. It

is, though by no means a mere "plagiarism," an obvious and avowed

imitation of Fielding, and the writer is so intent on his _pastiche_

that he seems quite oblivious himself, and appears to expect equal

oblivion on the part of his readers, of the fact that nearly two

generations had passed. Henry is Joseph; Susan May is a much more

elaborate and attractive Betty; the doctor's wife a vulgarised and

repulsive Lady Booby; Ezekiel Daw, whom Scott admired, a _dissenting_

Adams--the full force of the outrage of which variation Sir Walter

perhaps did not feel. There are some good things in the story, but, as a

whole, it is chiefly valuable as an early example of that great danger

of modern literature--the influence of the "printed book" itself: and in

a less degree of that forging ahead of the novel generally in public

favour which we are chronicling. If the kind had not been popular, and

if Fielding had not been its great prophet, one may be pretty sure that

_Henry_ would never have existed. The causes are important: the effect

not quite so.

There was, however, at this time a novel-school, and not such a very

small one, which had more legitimate reasons for existence, inasmuch as

it really served as mouthpiece to the thoughts and opinions of the time,

whether these thoughts and opinions were good or bad. This may be called

the "revolutionary school," and its three most distinguished scholars

were Bage, Holcroft, and Godwin, with Mrs. Inchbald perhaps to be added.

The first began considerably before the outbreak of the actual French

Revolution and shows the influence of its causes: the others were

directly influenced by itself.

One of the most remarkable of English novel-writers who are not absolute

successes, and one who, though less completely obscured by Fortune than

some, has never had quite his due, is Robert Bage. It was unfortunate

for him that he fell in with the crude generation contemporary in their

manhood with the French Revolution, and so manifested the crudity in

full. Bage, in fact, except for a certain strength of humour, is almost

more French than English. He has been put in the school of Richardson,

but it is certain that Richardson would have been shocked at the

supposed scholar: and it is not certain that Bage would or need have

felt complimented by the assignment of the master. He has the special

laxity of the time in point of "morality," or at least of decency; its

affectations of rather childish perfectibilism and anti-theism; and the

tendency of at least a part of it to an odd Calibanic jesting. Bage is

good-tempered enough as it is: but he rather suggests possible

Carrier-and-Fouché developments in a favourable and fostering

atmosphere. One does not quite know why Scott, who included in the

Ballantyne Novels three of Bage's, _Mount Henneth_ (1781), _Barham

Downs_ (1784), and _James Wallace_ (1788), did not also include, if not

_The Fair Syrian_ (1787), two others, _Man as He is_ (1792) and the

still later _Hermsprong_, or _Man as He is Not_ (1796). This last has

sometimes been regarded as Bage's masterpiece: but it does not seem so

to the present writer. It begins by the sketch of an illegitimate child,

written in Bage's worst vein of hard rasping irony, entirely devoid of

the delicate spring and "give" which irony requires, and which

constitutes the triumph even of such things as _A Tale of a Tub_ and

_Jonathan Wild_. The rather impossibly named Hermsprong himself is not

really so named at all, but is related (and in fact head-of-the-house)

to the wicked or at least not good lord of the story. He is of the kind

of Sir Charles Grandison, Rights-of-Mannified, which infests all these

novels and is a great bore--as, indeed, to me is the whole book. The

earlier _Man as He is_ is far better. The hero, Sir George Paradyne,

though of the same general class, is very much more tolerable and (being

sometimes naughty) preferable to Grandison himself: while the heroine--a

certain Miss Colerain, who is a merchant's daughter under a double cloud

of her father's misfortune and of calumny as regards herself--though not

an absolute success, is worth a dozen Harriets, with thirteen

Charlottes thrown in to make "25 as 24" in bookseller's phrase. Bage's

extravagant or perhaps only too literal manners-painting (for it was an

odd time) appears not infrequently, as in the anecdote of a justly

enraged, though as a matter of fact mistaken, husband, who finds a young

gentleman sitting on his wife's lap, with her arms round him, while he

is literally and _en tout bien tout honneur_ painting her face--being a

great artist in that way. _Mount Henneth_ is perhaps the liveliest of

all: though its liveliness is partly achieved by less merely extravagant

unconventionalities than this. But as a matter of fact Bage never

entirely "comes off": though there is cleverness enough in him to have

made a dozen popular and deservedly popular novelists at a better time

for the novel. For he was essentially a novelist of manners and

character at a transition time, when manners and character had come out

of one stage and had not settled into another. Even Miss Edgeworth in

_Belinda_ shows the disadvantage of this: and she was a lady of genius,

while Bage had only talent and was not quite a gentleman.

Thomas Holcroft was not a gentleman at all, never pretended to the

title, and would probably have been rather affronted if any one had

applied it to him: for he was a violent Atheist and Jacobin, glorying in

his extraction from a shoemaker and an oysterseller, and in his

education as a stable boy. He was, however, a man of considerable

intellectual power and of some literary gift, which chiefly showed

itself in his dramas (the best known, _The Road to Ruin_), but is not

quite absent from his novels _Alwyn_ (1780), _Anna St. Ives_ (1792), and

_Hugh Trevor_ (1794-1797). The series runs in curious parallel to that

of Bage's work: for _Alwyn_, the liveliest and the earliest by far of

the three, is little more than a study partly after Fielding, but more

after Smollett, with his own experiences brought in. The other two are

purpose-novels of anarchist perfectibilism, and Holcroft enjoys the

traditional credit of having directly inspired Godwin. Godwin himself

acknowledged the obligation; indeed it is well known that--in pecuniary

matters more particularly--Godwin had no hesitation either in incurring

or in acknowledging obligations, always provided that he was not

expected to discharge them. It is possible that Holcroft's rough and

ready acceptance and exaggeration of the doctrines which Rousseau had

(as seems most probable) developed from a paradox of Diderot's, gave an

impetus to the rather sluggish but more systematic mind of Godwin. But

it is certain that _Political Justice_, though it is not a novel at all,

is a much more amusing book than _Anna St. Ives_, which is one. And

though Holcroft (especially if the presence of this quality in his

_Autobiography_ is not wholly due to Hazlitt--there is some chance that

it is) possessed a liveliness in narrative to which Godwin could never

attain, there is no doubt that this enigmatical and many-sided spunger,

philanderer, and corruptor of youth had a much higher general

qualification for novel-writing than any one mentioned hitherto in this

chapter, or perhaps than any to be mentioned, except the curiously

contrasted pair, of Irish birth, who are to come last in it.

I have sometimes thought that the greatest testimony to Godwin's power

in this respect is the idea (which even Hazlitt, though he did not share

it, does not seem to have thought preposterous, and which seems to have

been held by others who were not fools) that Godwin might be the author

of _Waverley_. To us, looking back, the notion seems as absurd as that

Bacon could be the author of Shakespeare or Steele of the _Tale of a

Tub_: but if, instead of looking back, we throw ourselves back, the

absurdity does not quite persist as it does in the other two instances.

There are some who, of course, would say, "Why take this fanciful test

of Godwin's ability when you have a real one in _Caleb Williams_?" The

reasons are double: for, historically, such an estimate by

contemporaries is of the very first value, and to the present writer

_Caleb Williams_ (1794) has never seemed a very interesting book. It is

impossible to sympathise with a hero who is actuated by the very lowest

of human motives, sheer inquisitiveness: and _my_ sense of natural

justice (which is different from Godwin's) demands not that he shall

escape, but that he shall be broken on the wheel, or burnt at a slow

fire, or made to read _Political Justice_ after the novelty of its

colossal want of humour has palled on him. One could sympathise with

Falkland, but is not allowed to do so: because he is not human, except

in his crime. But, as has been said, to those whose sporting interests

are excited by the pleasures and hazards of the chase, these things no

doubt do not occur. After all _Caleb_ is, in a sense, the first

"detective novel": and detective novels have always been popular, though

they bore some people to extinction. Far, however, be it from me to deny

that this popularity, especially when, as in the present case, it has

been continued for four whole generations, is a real and a very

considerable asset. Even if it were now to cease, it is actually funded

and vested to Godwin's credit in the _grand livre_ of literary history:

and it can never be written off. Perhaps _Caleb_ is the one book of the

later English eighteenth century in novel for which there must always be

a public as soon as it is presented to that public. And when this is

said and endorsed by those who do not personally much care for the book,

it is at once a sufficient testimony to the position of the author, and

a vindication of the not absolutely imbecile position of those who

thought that he might have written _Waverley_ and its successors. The

way in which Godwin in his later novels came down from the mountain-tops

of theory and paradox just as he came down from those of _Political

Justice_ itself is interesting and amusing, but not for us. As novels

they are certainly inferior. The best parts of _St. Leon_ (1799) and

_Fleetwood_ (1805) are perhaps better than anything in _Caleb:

Mandeville_ (1817) and _Deloraine_ (1833) are _senilia_.[15] The

graceful figure of the heroine Marguerite in _St. Leon_ is said to be

modelled on Mary Wollstonecraft, and there are some fresh pictures of

youth and childhood in _Fleetwood_. But _St. Leon_, besides its

historical shortcomings (which, once more, we may postpone), is full of

faults, from the badly managed supernatural to an only too natural

dullness and languor of general story: nor has _Fleetwood_ anything like

the absorbing power which _Caleb Williams_ exercises, in its own way and

on its own people. Yet again we may perhaps say that the chief interest

of Godwin, from our point of view, is his repeated and further weighted

testimony to the importance of the novel as an appeal to public

attention. In this respect it was in fact displacing, not only the drama

on one side, but the sermon on the other. Not so very long before these

two had almost engrossed the domain of _popular_ literature, the graver

and more precise folk habitually reading sermons as well as hearing

them, and the looser and lighter folk reading drama much oftener than

(in then-existing circumstances) they had the opportunity of seeing it.

With the novel the "address to the reader" became direct and stood by

itself. The novelist could emulate Burke with his right barrel and

Lydia Languish with his left. He certainly did not always endeavour to

profit as well as to delight: but the double power was, from this time

forward, shared by him with his brother in the higher and older

_Dichtung_.

[15] Godwin had written novel-_juvenilia_ of which few say

anything.

Next to Godwin may be placed a lady who was much adored by that curious

professor of philandering, political _in_justice, psychology, and the

use of the spunge, but who wisely put him off. Mrs. Inchbald's

(1753-1821) command of a certain kind of dramatic or at least theatrical

situation, and her propensity to Richardsonian "human-heart"-mongering,

have from time to time secured a certain number of admirers for _A

Simple Story_ (1791) and _Nature and Art_ (1796). Some, availing

themselves of the confusion between "style" and "handling" which has

recently become fashionable, have even credited her with style itself.

Of this she has nothing--unless the most conventional of

eighteenth-century phraseology, dashed with a kind of _marivaudage_

which may perhaps seem original to those who do not know Marivaux's

French followers, shall deserve the name. She is indeed very much of an

English Madame Riccoboni. But her situations--such as the meeting in _A

Simple Story_ of a father with the daughter whom, though not exactly

casting her off, he has persistently refused to see, in revenge for her

mother's unfaithfulness, and the still more famous scene in _Nature and

Art_ where a judge passes the death-sentence on a woman whom he has

betrayed--have, as has been allowed, the dramatic or melodramatic

quality which attracts people in "decadent" periods. There seems,

indeed, to have been a certain decadent charm about Mrs. Inchbald

herself--with her beauty, her stage skill, her strict virtue combined

with any amount of "sensibility," her affectation of nature, and her

benevolence not in the least sham but distinctly posing. And something

of this rococo relish may no doubt, with a little good will and

sympathy, be detected in her books. But of the genuine life and the

natural language which occasionally inspirit the much more unequal and

more generally commonplace work of Miss Burney, she has practically

nothing. And she thus falls out of the main line of development, merely

exemplifying the revolutionary and sentimental episode.

We must now, for some pages, illustrate the course of the novel by minor

examples: and we may begin with a brief notice of two writers, one of

whom might have been taken before Miss Burney and the other just after

her chronologically: but who, in the order of thought and method, will

come better here. Both were natives of Scotland and both illustrate

different ways of the novel. Henry Mackenzie, an Edinburgh advocate, in

three books--the names of which at least are famous, while his friend

Sir Walter has preserved the books themselves in the collection so often

mentioned--produced, in his own youth and in rapid succession, _The Man

of Feeling_ (1771), _The Man of the World_ (1773), and _Julia de

Roubigné_ (1777). John Moore, a Glasgow physician, wrote, when he was

nearly sixty, the novel of _Zeluco_ (1786) and followed it up with

_Edward_ ten years afterwards and _Mordaunt_ (1800). Mackenzie did good

work later in the periodical essay: but his fiction is chiefly the

"sensibility"-novel of the French and of Sterne, reduced to the

absolutely absurd. From his essay-work, and from Scott's and other

accounts of him, he must have possessed humour of a kind: but the

extremely limited character of its nature and operation may be

exemplified by his representation of a whole press-gang as bursting into

tears at the pathetic action and words of an old man who offers himself

as substitute for his son. This is one of the not rare, but certainly

one of the most consummate, instances of fashion caricaturing itself in

total unconsciousness. But it _was_ the fashion: and Mackenzie, though

perhaps he helped to bring it to an end, no doubt caused the shedding,

by "the fair" of the time, of an ocean of tears as great as the ocean of

port wine which was contemporaneously absorbed by "the brave."

Moore saw a good deal of continental society--he is indeed one of the

first-hand witnesses for the events of the French Revolution--and he had

a more considerable influence on the novel than has always been allowed

him. _Zeluco_ chiefly survives because of the exquisitely ludicrous and

human trait of the English sailor who, discussing the French army,

pronounces white uniforms "absurd" and blue "only fit for the artillery

and the blue horse." But it is not quite certain that its villain-hero

had not something, and perhaps a good deal, to do with those of Mrs.

Radcliffe who were soon to follow, and, through these, with Byron who

was not to be very long after. The later books are of much less

importance, if only because they follow the outburst of fiction which

the French Revolution itself ushered. But Moore, who was intimately

connected with Smollett, carried on the practice of making national or

sub-national characteristics important elements of novel interest: and

is thus noteworthy in more ways than one.

He is a late instance--he was born in 1729 and so was only a few years

younger than Smollett himself--of the writers who had, for all but half

a century after Richardson's appearance, accumulated patterns and

examples of the novel in all sorts of forms, hardly one of which lacked

numerous and almost innumerable imitators and followers. By these later

years of the century the famous "Minerva Press" and many others issued

deluges of novel-work which were eagerly absorbed by readers.

"Absorbed" in more senses than one: for the institution of circulating

libraries, while it facilitated reading, naturally tended towards the

destruction of the actual volumes read. Novels were rarely produced in a

very careful or sumptuous fashion, and good copies of those that were in

any way popular are now rather hard to obtain: while even in the British

Museum it will frequently be found that only the later editions are

represented. We shall finish this chapter with some instances, taken not

quite at random, of the work of the last decades of the eighteenth and

the beginning of the nineteenth century, winding up with more general

notice of two remarkable writers who represent--though at least one of

them lived far later--the period before Scott, and who also, as it

happens, represent the contrast of novel and romance in a fashion

unusually striking. The description, as some readers will have

anticipated, refers to Miss Edgeworth and to Maturin. But the smaller

fry must be taken first.

It is not uninteresting to compare two such books as Mrs. Bennett's

_Anna_ and Mrs. Opie's _Adeline Mowbray_. Published at twenty years'

distance (1785 and 1804) they show the rapid growth of the novel, even

during a time when nothing of the first class appeared. _Anna, or the

Memoirs of a Welsh Heiress, interspersed with Anecdotes of a Nabob_, is

a kind of bad imitation of Miss Burney, with a catchpenny

"interspersion" to suit the day. _Adeline Mowbray_, written with more

talent, chimes in by infusing one of the tones of _its_ day--Godwinian

theories of life. The space between was the palmy time of that now

almost legendary "Minerva Press" which, as has been said, flooded the

ever-absorbent market with stuff of which _The Libertine_, masterpiece

of Mrs. Byrne, _alias_ Charlotte Dacre, _alias_ "Rosa Matilda," is

perhaps best worth singling out from its companions, _Hours of Solitude,

The Nun of St. Omers, Zofloya_, etc., because it specially shocked the

censor of the style who will be mentioned presently. It is pure (or

not-pure) rubbish. Angelo (the libertine) seduces the angelic Gabrielle

de Montmorency, who follows him to Italy in male attire, saves him from

the wicked courtesan Oriana and her bravo Fiorenz_a_ (_sic_), is married

by him, but made miserable, and dies. He continues his misbehaviour to

their children, and finally blows his brains out. "Bah! it is bosh!" as

the Master observes of something else.

It may seem iniquitous to say that some tolerably good novel-writers

must be more summarily treated than some bad ones here: but there is

reason for it. Such, for instance, as Charlotte Smith and the Miss Lees

are miles above such others as the just-mentioned polyonymous "Rosa," as

Sarah Wilkinson, or as Henrietta Mosse-Rouvière. The first three would

make a very good group for a twenty-page causerie. Charlotte Smith, who

was tolerably expert in verse as well as prose; who anticipated, and

perhaps taught, Scott in the double use of the name "Waverley"; and

whose _Old Manor House_ (1793) is a solid but not heavy work of its

kind--is something of a person in herself, but less of a figure in

history, because she neither innovates nor does old things consummately.

Harriet and Sophia Lee claimed innovation for the latter's _Recess_

(1783-1786), as Miss Porter did for _Thaddeus of Warsaw_, but the claim

can be even less allowed. There is nothing of real historical spirit,

and very little goodness of any kind, in _The Recess. The Canterbury

Tales_ (1797-1805) (so named merely because they are supposed to be told

by different persons) were praised by Byron, as he praised the _Percy

Anecdotes_ and other things--either irresponsibly or impishly. They are

not exactly bad: but also as far as possible from consummateness.

On the other hand, _The Convent of Grey Penitents_, one of the crops

which rewarded Miss Wilkinson for tilling the lands of her imagination

with the spade of her style, _is_ very nearly consummate--in badness. It

is a fair example of the worst imitations of Mrs. Radcliffe and Mat

Lewis conjointly, though without the latter's looseness. The Marquis di

Zoretti was an Italian nobleman--"one of those characters in whose bosom

resides an unquenchable thirst of avarice" ["_thirst_ of _avarice_" is

good!], etc. He marries, however, a lovely signora of the odd name of

Rosalthe, without a fortune, "which circumstance was overlooked by his

lordship" for a very short time only. He plots to be free of her: she

goes to England and dies there to the genteelest of slow music. Their

son Horatio falls in love with a certain Julietta, who is immured by

wicked arts in the "Convent of Grey Penitents," tormented by the head,

Gradisca, but rescued, and so forth. The book, if harmless, is about as

worthless as a book can be: but it represents, very fairly, the ruck, if

not indeed even the main body, of the enormous horde of romances which

issued from the press towards the end of the eighteenth century and the

beginning of the nineteenth, and which, in their different action on

persons of genius, gave us _Zastrozzi_ on the one side and _Northanger

Abbey_ on the other.

As for Miss Henrietta Mosse, otherwise Rouvière, she represents the

other school of abortive historical novel. _A Peep at Our Ancestors_

(1807) is fairly worthy of its ridiculous name. It is preceded by

expressions of thanks to the authorities of "the British Museum and the

Heralds' Office" for the "access to records" vouchsafed to its author.

As the date of the story is 1146 (it was long before Mr. Freeman wrote)

access to records would certainly not have been superfluous. The actual

results of it are blocks of spiritless and commonplace historic

narrative--it is nearly all narrative, not action--diversified by

utterances like this of Malcolm III. of Scotland, "O my Edward! the deed

which struck my son's life has centred [_sic_] thy noble youthful bosom

also," or this of the heroine (such as there is), "the gentle _elegant_

Adelaise," "And do I not already receive my education of thee, mamma?"

It is really a pity that the creator of this remarkable peep-show did

not give references to her "records," so that one might look up this

"elegant" young creature of the twelfth century who talked about

"education" and said "mamma!" But this absolute failure in

verisimilitude is practically universal before Scott.

The works of the very beautifully named Regina Maria Roche should

probably be read, as they were for generations, in late childhood or

early youth. Even then an intelligent boy or girl would perceive some of

the absurdity, but might catch a charm that escapes the less receptive

oldster. They were, beyond all question, immensely popular, and

continued to be so for a long time: in fact it is almost sufficient

evidence that there is, if I mistake not, in the British Museum no

edition earlier than the tenth of the most famous of them, _The Children

of the Abbey_ (1798). This far-renowned work opens with the exclamation

of the heroine Amanda, "Hail, sweet sojourn of my infancy!" and we are

shortly afterwards informed that in the garden "the part appropriated to

vegetables was divided from the part sacred to Flora." Otherwise, the

substance of the thing is a curious sort of watered-down Richardson,

passed through successive filtering beds of Mackenzie, and even of Mrs.

Radcliffe. It is difficult for even the most critical taste to find much

savour or stimulus in the resulting liquid. But, like almost everybody

mentioned here, Regina is a document of the demands of readers and the

faculty of writers: and so she "standeth," if not exactly "crowned," yet

ticketed.

Work--somewhat later--of some interest, but not of first-class quality,

is to be found in the _Discipline_ (1811) and _Self-Control_ (1814) of

Mary Brunton. A Balfour of Orkney on the father's side and a Ligonier on

the mother's, the authoress had access to the best English as well as

Scottish society, and seems to have had more than a chance of taking a

place in the former: but preferred to marry a minister-professor and

settled down to country manse life. She died in middle age and her

husband wrote a memoir of her. _Discipline_ seems to represent a sort of

fancy combination of the life she might have led and the life she did

lead. Ellen Percy, the heroine, starts in the highest circles; forgets

herself so far as to "waltz_e_" with a noble ne'er-do-weel, thereby

earning the "stern disapprobation" of a respectable lover; comes down in

the world; has Highland experiences which, at the book's early date, are

noteworthy; marries (like her creatress) a minister; but "retains a

little of her coquettish sauciness." "Bless her, poor little dear!" one

can imagine Thackeray exclaiming in his later and mellowed days. Mrs.

Brunton's letters breathe a lady-like and not unamiable propriety, and

she is altogether a sort of milder, though actually earlier, Miss

Ferrier.

Ireland vindicated its claim to comparative liveliness in the work of a

better known contemporary and survivor. Lady Morgan's (Miss Sydney

Owenson's) _Wild Irish Girl_ (1806) is one of the books whose titles

have prolonged for them a kind of shadowy existence. It is written in

letters: and the most interesting thing about it for some readers now is

that the heroine supplied Thackeray with the name Glorvina, which, it

seems, means in Irish "sweet voice," if Lady Morgan is to be trusted _in

rebus Celticis_. It is to be hoped she is: for the novel is a sort of

_macédoine_ of Irish history, folk-lore, scenery, and what not, done up

in a syrup of love-making _quant. suff._ Its author wrote many more

novels and became a butt for both good- and ill-natured satire with the

comic writers of the twenties, thirties, and forties. The title was

actually borrowed by Maturin in _The Wild Irish_ "Boy," and it is fair

to say that the book preceded Scott's, though not Miss Edgeworth's,

experiments in the line of the "national" novel. The earlier Reviewers

were discreditably savage on women-writers, and Lady Morgan had her

share of their truculence. She did not wholly deserve it: but it must be

said that nothing she wrote can really be ranked as literature, save on

the most indiscriminate and uncritical estimate. It is, however,

difficult to see much harm in her.

_Ida of Athens_, for instance, which shocked contemporaries, and which,

by the way, has the very large first title of _Woman_, could only bring

a blush to cheeks very tickle of that sere: a yawn might come much more

easily. The most shocking thing that the heroine, who is "an attempt to

delineate woman in her natural state," does (and that not of malice) is

to receive her lover in a natural bathroom. But her adventures are told

in a style which is the oddest compound of Romantesque and Johnsonese.

("The hour was ardent. The bath was cool. _He calculated upon the

probable necessity of its enjoyment_.") The spirit is the silliest and

most ignorant Philhellenism--all the beauty, virtue, wisdom, of the

ancient Greeks being supposed to be inherited by their mongrel

successors of the early nineteenth century. An English and a Turkish

lover dispute Ida's affection or possession. There are the elaborate

pseudo-erudite notes which one has learnt to associate chiefly with

Moore. The authoress boasts in her preface that she "has already written

almost as many volumes as she has years," and that she has hardly ever

corrected her proofs. Perhaps this silliness will make some think her

not more an example of the savagery of contemporary criticism than a

justification thereof.

It was in fact not only brutal man who objected to the preposterous

excesses of pseudo-romance: and serious or jocular parables were taken

up against it, if not before _Northanger Abbey_ was written, long before

it was published. In 1810 a certain "G." or "S.G.," whose full name was

Sarah Green, wrote, besides some actual history and an attempt at the

historical novel, a very curious and rather hybrid book entitled

_Romance Readers and Romance Writers_. Its preface is an instance of

"Women, beware Women," for though it stigmatises male creatures, such as

a certain Curteis and a certain Pickersgill, it treats Lady Morgan (then

only Sydney Owenson) and "Rosa Matilda" even more roughly and asks (as

has been asked about a hundred years later and was asked about a hundred

years before), "Is it not amazing that the [two] most licentious writers

of romance are women?" And it starts with a burlesque account of a

certain Margaret Marsham who exclaims, "What then? to add to my earthly

miseries am I to be called Peggy? My name is Margari_tt_a!" "I am sure

that if I am called Peggy again I shall go into a fit." But this promise

of something to complete the trio with _Northanger Abbey_ and _The

Heroine_ (to be presently mentioned) is not maintained. Not only does

the writer force the note of parody too much by making "Margaritta" say

to herself, "Poor persecuted _dove_ that I am," and adore a labourer's

shirt on a hedge, but she commits the far more fatal fault of exchanging

her jest for earnest. Margaritta--following her romance-models--falls a

victim to an unprincipled great lady and the usual wicked baronet--at

whose head, one is bound to say, she flings herself with such violence

as no baronet could possibly resist. Her sister Mary, innocent of

romance-reading and all other faults, is, though not as guilty, as

unlucky almost as Margaret: and by far the greater part of the book is

an unreal presentment, in nearly the worst manner of the eighteenth

century itself, of virtuous curates, _un_virtuous "tonish" rectors, who

calmly propose to seduce their curates' daughters (an offence which, for

obvious reasons, must, in the worst times, have been unusual), libertine

ladies, and reckless "fashionables" of all kinds. The preface and the

opening create expectations, not merely of amusement but of power, which

are by no means fulfilled. It is "S.G." who asserts that _Ida of Athens_

"has brought a blush to the cheek of many," and one can only repeat the

suggested substitution.

The only faults that can be found with _The Heroine_ or _The Adventures

of Cherubina_, by Eaton Stannard Barrett, which appeared in the same

year, with no very different object and subject, though written in

lighter vein, are one that it could not help and another that it could.

Unjustly, but unavoidably, the first is the worst. That it is a

burlesque rather overdone--a burlesque _burlesqué_--not in the manner of

Thackeray, but in that of some older and some more recent writers--is

unfortunate, but not fatal. One can forgive--one can even enjoy--the

ghost who not only sneezes but says, "D--n, all is blown!" When the

heroine is actually locked up with a man in a chest one is more

doubtful: recovering when the Marquis de Furioso, "bowing gracefully to

the bride," stabs himself to the heart, which is almost "the real

Mackay" as they say in the North. The slight awkwardness of snow falling

the day after the characters have been eating strawberries does not

amuse _us_ much, because this is a comparatively ordinary event of the

early twentieth century, whatever it might be of the early nineteenth.

But what is fatal, though the author could not help it, is that the

infinitely lighter, more artistic, and more lethal dart of _Northanger

Abbey_ had been launched by the pen, if not the press, more than a dozen

years before.

There are few more curious and interesting personages in the history of

the English Novel than Maria Edgeworth. The variety of her

accomplishment in the kind was extraordinary: and in more than one of

its species she went very near perfection. One is never quite certain

whether the perpetual meddling of her rather celebrated father

Richard--one of the capital examples of the unpractical pragmatists and

clever-silly crotcheteers who produced and were produced by the

Revolutionary period--did her more harm than good. It certainly loaded

her work with superfluous and (to us) disgusting didacticism: but it

might be contended that, without its stimulus, she would have done much

less, perhaps nothing. As it was, she lived for more than eighty years

(till all but the middle of the nineteenth century) and wrote for more

than sixty. Her work is thus very bulky: but it may be considered, for

our present purpose, in three groups--her short stories written mainly

but not wholly for children; her regular novels; and her Irish studies.

Of these the middle division has been, and no doubt has deserved to be,

the least popular: but its principal example, _Belinda_ (1801)

(_Patronage_, a longer and later book, and others are inferior), is

considerably better than is usually admitted and, by its early date,

deserves special notice here. It preceded Miss Austen's work in

publication, and is specially cited by her as a capital example of novel

in connection with the work of Miss Burney: and it is evidently founded

on study of the latter, of which, indeed, it is the first really worthy

continuation. Maria has nothing so good as Fanny's Smiths and

Branghtons: but the whole book is far superior to _Evelina_. The

extravagance of the _fin-de-siècle_ society which it represents has

probably disguised from not a few readers who do not know the facts, the

other fact that it is a real attempt at realist observation of manners:

and it has the narrative merit which was Miss Edgeworth's gift of

nature. But the hero is patchy and improbable: the heroine, a good and

quite possible girl, is not sufficiently "reliefed out"; and the most

important figures of the book, Lord and Lady Delacour, almost great

successes, are not helped by the peculiar academic-didactic moralising

which she had caught from Marmontel.

The following of that ingenious and now too much under-valued writer

stood her in better stead in the _Moral Tales_ (1801) (which she

deliberately called after his[16]), the _Popular Tales_ of the same

kind, and (though Marmontel did not intentionally write for children)

the delightful _Parent's Assistant_ (1801) and _Frank_. In the two

first-named divisions, the narrative faculty just mentioned appears

admirably, together with another and still greater gift, that of

character-painting, and even a grasp of literary and social satire,

which might not be anticipated from some of her other books. The French

governess (_Mlle. Panache_) and the satire on romantic young-ladyism

(_Angelina_) are excellent examples of this. As for the pure child's

stories, generation after generation of competent criticism, childish

and adult, has voted them by acclamation into almost the highest place

possible: and the gain-sayers have for the most part been idle

paradoxers, ill-conditioned snarlers at things clean and sweet, or fools

pure and simple.

[16] The peculiar pedantic ignorance which critics sometimes

show has objected to this rendering of Marmontel's _Contes

Moraux_, urging that it should read "tales _of manners_." It

might be enough to remark that the Edgeworths, father and

daughter, were probably a good deal better acquainted both with

French and English than these cavillers. But there is a

rebutting argument which is less _ad hominem_. "Tales of

Manners" leaves out at least as much on one side as "Moral

Tales" does on the other: and the actual meaning is quite clear

to those who know that of the Latin _mores_ and the French

_moeurs_. It is scarcely worth while to attempt to help those

who do not know by means of paraphrases.

The "Irish brigade" of the work--_Castle Rackrent_ (1800), _Ormond_, and

_The Absentee_, with the non-narrative but closely-connected _Essay on

Irish Bulls_--have perhaps commanded the most unchequered applause. They

are not quite free from the sentimentality and the didacticism which

were both rampant in the novel of Miss Edgeworth's earlier time: but

these are atoned for by a quite new use of the "national" element. Even

Smollett and, following Smollett, Moore had chiefly availed themselves

of this for its farcical or semi-farcical opportunities. Miss Edgeworth

did not neglect these, but she did not confine herself to them: and such

characters as Corny the "King of the Black Isles" in _Ormond_ actually

add a new province and a new pleasure to fiction.

Her importance is thus very great: and it only wanted the proverbial or

anecdotic "That!" to make it much greater. "That!" as it generally is,

was in her case the last fusing touch of genius to accomplish the

_grand oeuvre_--the perfect projection. She had humour, pathos,

knowledge of the world, power of drawing it, acquaintance with

literature, shrewd common sense, an excellent style when she was allowed

to write in her own way, the feelings of a lady who was also a good

woman. King Charles is made to say in _Woodstock_ that "half the things

in the world remind him of the Tales of Mother Goose." It is

astonishing, in the real complimentary sense, how many things remind one

of situations, passages, phrases, in Miss Edgeworth's works of all the

kinds from _Castle Rackrent_ to _Frank_. She also had a great and an

acknowledged influence on Scott, a considerable and a certainly not

disavowed influence on Miss Austen. She is good reading always, however

much we may sometimes pish and pshaw at the untimely poppings-in of the

platitudes and crotchets (for he was that most abominable of things, a

platitudinous crotcheteer) of Richard her father. She was a girl of

fourteen when the beginnings of the domestic novel were laid in

_Evelina_, and she lived to see it triumph in _Vanity Fair_. But her own

work, save in some of her short stories, which are pretty perfect,

represents the imperfect stage of the development--the stage when the

novel is trying for the right methods and struggling to get into the

right ways, but has not wholly mastered the one or reached the others.

There are those who would assign what they might call "higher genius,"

or "rarer gift," or something similar, to her countryman Charles Robert

Maturin. The present writer is not very fond of these measurings

together of things incommensurable--these attempts to rank the "light

white sea-mew" as superior or inferior to the "sleek black pantheress."

It is enough to say that while Miss Edgeworth very deliberately adopted

the novel, and even, as we have seen, slightly satirised at least

pseudo-romance, Maturin was romantic or nothing. His life was hardly

half hers in length, and his temperament appears to have been as

discontented as hers was sunny: but he had his successes in drama as

well as in novel, and one of his attempts in the latter kind had a

wide-ranging influence abroad as well as at home, has been recently

printed both in whole and in part, and undoubtedly ranks among the

novels which any tolerably well instructed person would enumerate if he

were asked to give a pretty full list of celebrated (and deservedly

celebrated) books of the kind in English. The others fall quite out of

comparison. _The Fatal Revenge_ or the _Family of Montorio_ (1807) is a

try for the "furthest" in the Radcliffe-Lewis direction, discarding

indeed the crudity of _The Monk_, but altogether neglecting the

restraint of _Udolpho_ and its companions in the use of the

supernatural. _The Wild Irish Boy_ (1808), _The Milesian Chief_ (1812),

_Women_ (1818), and _The Albigenses_ (1824) are negligible, the last,

perhaps, rather less so than the others. But _Melmoth the Wanderer_

(1820) is in quite a different case. It has faults in plenty--especially

a narrative method of such involution that, as it has been said, "a

considerable part of the book consists of a story told to a certain

person, who is a character in a longer story, found in a manuscript

which is delivered to a third person, who narrates the greater part of

the novel to a fourth person, who is the namesake and descendant of the

title-hero." Stripped of these tiresome lendings (which, as has been

frequently pointed out, were a mania with the eighteenth century and

naturally grew to such intricacy as this), the central story, though not

exactly new, is impressive: and it is told and worked out in manner more

impressive, because practically novel, save for, perhaps, a little

suggestion from _Vathek_. Melmoth has bartered his soul with the devil

for something like immortality and other privileges, including the

unusual one of escaping doom if he can get some one to take the bargain

off his hands. This leads up to numerous episodes or chapters in which

Melmoth endeavours to obtain substitutes: and in one of these the love

interest of the book--the, of course, fatal love of Melmoth himself for

a Spanish-Indian girl Immalee or Isidora--is related with some real

pathos and passion, though with a good deal of mere sentiment and

twaddle. Maturin is stronger in his terror-scenes, and affected his own

generation very powerfully: his influence being so great in France that

Balzac attempted a variation and continuation, and that there are

constant references to the book in the early French Romantics. In fact

for this kind of "sensation" Maturin is, putting _Vathek_ aside, quite

the chief of the whole school. But it is doubtful whether he had many

other gifts as a novelist, and this particular one is one that cannot be

exercised very frequently, and is very difficult to exercise at all

without errors and extravagances.

The child-literature of this school and period was very large, and, had

we space, would be worth dealing with at length--as in the instances of

the famous _Sandford and Merton_ (1783-1789) by Thomas Day, Richard

Edgeworth's friend, of Mrs. Trimmer's _Story of the Robins_, and others.

It led up to the definitely religious school of children's books, first

evangelical, then tractarian, with which we shall deal later: but was

itself as a rule utilitarian--or sentimental--moral rather than directly

religious. It is, however, like other things--indeed almost all

things--in this chapter--a document of the fashion in which the novel

was "filling all numbers" and being used for all purposes. It was, of

course, in this case, nearest to the world-old "fable"--especially to

the moral apologues of which the mediæval sermon-writers and others had

been so fond. But its popularity, especially when taken in connection

with the still surviving distrust of fiction, is valuable. It involves

not merely the principle that "the devil shall not have all the best

tunes," but the admission that this tune is good.

This point, and that other also frequently mentioned and closely

connected with it, that the novel at this time overflows into almost

every conceivable department of subject and object, are the main facts

of a general historical kind, which should be in the reader's mind as

the upshot of this chapter. But there is a third, almost as important as

either, and that is the almost universal coming short of complete

success--the lack of consummateness, the sense that if the Novel Israel

is not exactly still in the wilderness, it has not yet crossed the

Jordan. Even if we take in the last chapter, and its comparative giants,

with the present and its heroes, ordinary folk, and pygmies, we shall

scarcely find more than one great master, Fielding, and one little

masterpiece, _Vathek_, deserving the adjective "consummate." No doubt

the obvious explanation--that the hour was not because the man had not

come except in this single case--is a good one: but it need not be left

in the bare isolation of its fatalism. There are at least several

subsidiary considerations which it is well to advance. The transition

state of manners and language cannot be too often insisted upon: for

this affected the process at both ends, giving the artist in fictitious

life an uncertain model to copy and unstable materials to work in. The

deficiency of classical patterns--at a time which still firmly believed,

for the most part, that all good work in literature had been so done by

the ancients that it could at best be emulated--should count for

something: the scanty respect in which the kind was held for something

more. As to one of the most important species, frequent allusions have

been made, and in the next chapter full treatment will be given, to the

causes which made the _historical_ novel impossible until very late in

the century, and decidedly unlikely to be good even then. Perhaps,

without attempting further detail, we may conclude by saying that the

productions of this time present, and present inevitably, the nonage and

novitiate of a branch of art which hardly possessed any genuine

representatives when the century was born and which numbered them, bad

and good, by thousands and almost tens of thousands at its death. In the

interval there had been continuous and progressive exercise; there had

been some great triumphs; there had been not a little good and pleasant

work; and of even the work that was less good and less pleasant one may

say that it at least represented experiment, and might save others from

failure.