ten-volumed French romance its marvelous popularity; and one
sympathizes a little with Mr. Pepys, though he was such a chronic
grumbler, when he laments in his diary that Mrs. Pepys would not only
read “Le Grand Cyrus” all night, but would talk about it all day,
“though nothing to the purpose, nor in any good manner,” remarks this
censorious husband and critic. More melancholy still to contemplate
is the early appearance on the scene of female novelists who wrote
vicious twaddle for other women to read. We may fancy that this
particular plague is a development of the nineteenth century; but
twenty years before the virtuous Pamela saw the light, Eliza Heywood
was doing her little best to demoralize the minds and manners of
her countrywomen. Eliza Heywood was, in Mr. Gosse’s opinion,--and
he is one of the few critics who has expressed _any_ opinion on the
subject,--the Ouida of her period. The very names of her heroines,
Lassellia, Idalia, and Douxmoure, are Ouidesque, and their behavior
would warrant their immediate presentation to that society which the
authoress of “Strathmore” has so sympathetically portrayed. These
“lovely Inconsiderates,” though bad enough for a reformatory, are all
as sensitive as nuns. They “sink fainting on a Bank” if they so much as
receive letters from their lovers. Their “Limbs forget their Functions”
on the most trifling provocation. “Stormy Passions” and “deadly
Melancholy” succeed each other with monotonous vehemence in their
“tortured Bosoms,” and when they fly repentant to some remote Italian
convent, whole cities mourn their loss.
Eliza Heywood’s stories are probably as imbecile and as depraved as
any fiction we possess to-day, but the women of England read them
eagerly. They read too the iniquitous rubbish of Mrs. Aphra Behn; and
no incident can better illustrate the tremendous change that swept
over public sentiment with the introduction of good and decent novels
than the well-known tale of Sir Walter Scott’s aunt, Mrs. Keith of
Ravelston. This sprightly old lady took a fancy, when in her eightieth
year, to re-read Mrs. Behn’s books, and persuaded Sir Walter to send
them to her. A hasty glance at them was more than enough, and back they
came to Scott with an entreaty that he would put them in the fire.
The ancient gentlewoman confessed herself unable to linger over pages
which she had not been ashamed nor abashed to hear read aloud to large
parties in her youth.
It must be remembered, however, that Aphra Behn, uncompromisingly bad
though she was, wrote the first English didactic novel, “Oroonoka,”
the “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” of its day. It has the advantage of “Uncle
Tom” in being a true tale, Mrs. Behn having seen the slave, Oroonoka,
and his wife, Imoinda, in the West Indies, and having witnessed his
tragic fate. It was written at the solicitation of Charles II., and
was a popular anti-slavery novel, with certain points of resemblance
to Mrs. Stowe’s famous book; in the grace and beauty of its Africans,
for example; in the strength and constancy of their affections, and in
the lavish nobility of their sentiments. Mrs. Behn knew as well as Mrs.
Stowe that, if you want to produce a strong effect, you must not be too
chary of your colors.
When the time came for the great flowering of English fiction, when
Fielding and Richardson took England by storm, and France confessed
herself beaten in the field (“Who would have thought,” wrote the
Marquis d’Argenson, “that the English would write novels, and better
ones than ours?”), then it was that women asserted themselves
distinctly as patronesses well worth the pleasing. To Smollett and
Defoe they had never given whole-hearted approbation. Such robustly
masculine writing was scarcely in their way. But Fielding, infinitely
greater than these, met with no warmer favor at their hands. It is easy
to account for the present unpopularity of “Tom Joneses” in decorous
households by saying that modest women do not consider it fit for them
to read. That covers the ground now to perfection. But the fact remains
that, when “Tom Jones” was written, everybody _did_ consider it fit
to read. Why not, when all that it contained was seen about them day
by day? Its author, like every other great novelist, described life
as he found it. Arcadia had passed away, and big libertine London
offered a scant assortment of Arcadian virtues. Fielding had nothing
to tell that might not have been heard any day at one of Sir Robert
Walpole’s dinner-parties. He had the merit--not too common now--of
never confusing vice with virtue; though it must be confessed that,
like Dumas and Scott and Thackeray, he took very kindly to his scamps;
and we all know how angry a recent critic permits himself to be because
Thackeray calls Rawdon Crawley “honest Rawdon.” As far as can be seen,
Fielding never realized the grossness of his books. He prefaced “Tom
Jones” with a beautiful little sermon about “the solid inward comfort
of mind which is the sure companion of innocence and virtue;” and he
took immense credit to himself for having written “nothing prejudicial
to the cause of religion and virtue, nothing inconsistent with the
strictest rules of decency, nor which can offend even the chastest eye
in the perusal.” What more than this could be claimed by the authors of
“The Old Homestead” and “Little Lord Fauntleroy”?
I do not for one moment believe that it was the blithe and brutal
coarseness of Fielding’s novels that exiled them from the female
heart, that inconsistent heart which never fluttered over the more
repellent indecency of “Pamela.” Insidious influences were at work
within the dovecotes. The eighteenth-century woman, while less given to
self-analysis and self-assertion than her successor to-day, was just
as conscious of her own nature, its resistless force, its inalienable
laws, its permanent limitations; and in Richardson she recognized
the artist who had divined her subtleties, and had given them form
and color. His correspondence with women is unlike anything else the
period has to show. To him they had an independence of thought and
action which it took the rest of mankind a hundred years longer to
concede; and it is not surprising to see the fervent homage this stout
little tradesman of sixty received from his female flatterers, when
we remember that he and he alone in all his century had looked into
the rebellious secrets of their hearts with understanding and with
reverence.
To any other man than Richardson, the devout attentions of so many
women would have been a trifle fatiguing. They wrote him letters as
long as Clarissa Harlowe’s. They poured out their sentiments on endless
reams of paper. They told him how they walked up and down their rooms,
shedding torrents of tears over his heroine’s distress, unable to
either go on with the book, or to put it resolutely down. They told
him how, when “Clarissa” was being read aloud in a bed-chamber, the
maid who was curling her mistress’s hair wept so bitterly she could
not go on with her work, so was given a crown for her sensibility, and
sent out of the room. They implored and entreated him to end his story
happily; “a turn,” wrote one fair enthusiast, “that will make your
almost despairing readers mad with joy.” Richardson purred complacently
over these letters, like a sleek old cat, and he answered every one of
them, instead of pitching them unread into the fire. Yet, nevertheless,
true and great artist that he was, in spite of all his vanity, these
passionate solicitations moved him not one hair’s breadth from his
path. “As well,” says Mr. Birrell, “hope for a happy ending for King
Lear as for Clarissa Harlowe.” She died, and England dissolved herself
in tears, and gay, sentimental France lifted up her voice and wept
aloud, and Germany joined in the sad chorus of lamentations, and even
phlegmatic Holland was heard bewailing from afar the great tragedy of
the literary world. This is no fancy statement. Men swore while women
wept. Good Dr. Johnson hung his despondent head, and ribald Colley
Cibber vowed with a great oath that this incomparable heroine should
not die. Years afterwards, when Napoleon was first consul, an English
gentleman named Lovelace was presented to him, whereupon the consul
brightened visibly, and remarked, “Why, that is the name of Clarissa
Harlowe’s lover!”--an incident which won, and won deservedly for
Bonaparte, the lifelong loyalty of Hazlitt.
Meanwhile Richardson, writing quietly away in his little summer-house,
produced Sir Charles Grandison, a hero who is perhaps as famous for his
priggishness as Lovelace is famous for his villainy. I think, myself,
that poor Sir Charles has been unfairly handled. He is not half such
a prig as Daniel Deronda; but he develops his priggishness with such
ample detail through so many leisurely volumes. Richardson loved him,
and tried hard to make his host of female readers love him too, which
they did in a somewhat perfunctory and lukewarm fashion. Indeed, it
should in justice be remembered that this eighteenth-century novelist
intended all his books to be didactic. They seem now at times too
painful, too detestable for endurance; but when “Pamela,” with all its
loathsome details, was published, it was actually commended from the
pulpit, declared to be better than twenty sermons, and placed by the
side of the Bible for its moral influence. Richardson himself tells us
a curiously significant anecdote of his childhood. When he was a little
boy, eleven years old, he heard his mother and some gossips complaining
of a quarrelsome and acrimonious neighbor. He promptly wrote her a long
letter of remonstrance, quoting freely from the scriptures to prove
to her the evil of her ways. The woman, being naturally very angry,
complained to his mother of his impertinence, whereupon she, with true
maternal pride, commended his principles, while gently censuring the
liberty he had taken.
With Richardson’s splendid triumph to spur them on, the passion of
Englishwomen for novel-reading reached its height. Young girls,
hitherto debarred from this diversion, began more and more to taste the
forbidden sweets, and wise men, like Dr. Johnson, meekly acknowledged
that there was no stopping them. When Frances Chamberlayne Sheridan
told him that she never allowed her little daughter to read anything
but the “Rambler,” or matters equally instructive, he answered with
all his customary candor: “Then, madam, you are a fool! Turn your
daughter’s wits loose in your library. If she be well inclined, she
will choose only good food. If otherwise, all your precautions will
amount to nothing.” Both Charles Lamb and Ruskin cherished similar
opinions, but the sentiment was more uncommon in Dr. Johnson’s day, and
we know how even he reproached good Hannah More for quoting from “Tom
Jones.”
With or without permission, however, the girls read gayly on. In
Garrick’s epilogue to Colman’s farce, “Polly Honeycombe,” the wayward
young heroine confesses her lively gratitude for all the dangerous
knowledge she has gleaned from novels.
“So much these dear instructors change and win us,
Without their light we ne’er should know what’s in us.
Here we at once supply our childish wants,
Novels are hotbeds for your forward plants.”
Later on, Sheridan gave us the immortal Lydia Languish feeding her
sentimentality upon that “evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge,”
the circulating library. Lydia’s taste in books is catholic, but
not altogether free from reproach. “Fling ‘Peregrine Pickle’ under
the toilet,” she cries to Lucy, when surprised by a visit from Mrs.
Malaprop and Sir Anthony. “Throw ‘Roderick Random’ into the closet.
Put ‘The Innocent Adultery’ into ‘The Whole Duty of Man.’ Thrust ‘Lord
Aimworth’ under the sofa. Cram ‘Ovid’ behind the bolster. Put ‘The Man
of Feeling’ into your pocket. There--now for them!”
How “The Man of Feeling” ever went into Lucy’s pocket remains a
mystery, for it takes many volumes to hold that discursive romance,
where everything from character to clothes is described with
relentless minuteness. If a lady goes to a ball, we are not merely told
that she looked radiant in “white and gold,” or in “scarlet tulle,”
after the present slipshod fashion; but we are carefully informed that
“a scarf of cerulean tint flew between her right shoulder and her
left hip, being buttoned at each end by a row of rubies. A coronet of
diamonds, through which there passed a white branch of the feathers of
the ostrich, was inserted on the left decline of her lovely head.” And
so on, until the costume is complete.
By this time women had regularly enrolled themselves in the victorious
army of novel-writers, and had won fame and fortune in the field.
Consider the brilliant and instantaneous success of Frances Burney.
Think of the excitement she aroused, and the honors heaped thick and
fast upon her. A woman of twenty-six when she wrote “Evelina,” she
was able, by dint of short stature and childish ways, to pass for a
girl of seventeen, which increased amazingly the popular interest
in her novel. Sheridan swore he could not believe so young a thing
could manifest such genius, and begged her to write him a comedy on
the spot. Sir Joshua Reynolds professed actual fear of such keen wit
and relentless observation. Dr. Johnson vowed that Richardson had
written nothing finer, and Fielding nothing so fine as “Evelina;” and
playfully protested he was too proud to eat cold mutton for dinner when
he sat by Miss Burney’s side. Posterity, it is true, while preserving
“Evelina” with great pride, has declined to place it by the side of
“Tom Jones” or “Clarissa Harlowe;” but if we had our choice between the
praise of posterity which was Miss Austen’s portion, and the praise
of contemporaries which was Miss Burney’s lot, I doubt not we should
be wise enough to take our applause off-hand,--“dashed in our faces,
sounded in our ears,” as Johnson said of Garrick, and leave the future
to look after itself.
It is pleasant, however, to think that the first good woman novelist
had her work over rather than under estimated. It is pleasant also to
contemplate the really bewildering career of Maria Edgeworth. Miss
Edgeworth’s books are agreeable reading, and her children’s stories
are among the very best ever written; but it is not altogether easy
to understand why France and England contended to do her honor. When
she went to London or to Paris she became the idol of brilliant and
fashionable people. Peers and poets united in her praise. Like Mrs.
Jarley, she was the delight of the nobility and gentry. The Duke of
Wellington wrote verses to her. Lord Byron, whom she detested, extolled
her generously. Moore pronounced her “delightful.” Macaulay compared
the return of the Absentee to the return of Ulysses in the “Odyssey.”
Sir Walter Scott took forcible possession of her, and carried her away
to Abbotsford,--a too generous reward, it would seem, for all she ever
did. Sydney Smith delighted in her. Mrs. Somerville, the learned, and
Mrs. Fry, the benignant, sought her friendship; and finally, Mme. de
Staël, who considered Jane Austen’s novels “vulgar,” protested that
Miss Edgeworth was “worthy of enthusiasm.”
Now this was all very charming, and very enjoyable; but with such
rewards following thick and fast upon successful story-writing, it is
hardly surprising that every year saw the band of literary aspirants
increase and multiply amazingly. People were beginning to learn how
easy it was to write a book. Already Hannah More had bewailed the
ever increasing number of novelists, “their unparalleled fecundity,”
and “the frightful facility of this species of composition.” What
would she think if she were living now, and could see over a thousand
novels published every year in England? Already Mrs. Radcliffe had
woven around English hearths the spell of her rather feeble terrors,
and young and old shuddered and quaked in the subterranean corridors
of castles amid the gloomy Apennines. Why a quiet, cheerful, retiring
woman like Mrs. Radcliffe, who hated notoriety, and who loved
country life, and afternoon drives, and all that was comfortable and
commonplace, should have written “The Mysteries of Udolpho” passes our
comprehension; but write it she did, and England received it with a mad
delight she has never manifested for any triumph of modern realism. The
volume, we are assured, was too often torn asunder by frantic members
of a household so that it might pass from hand to hand more rapidly
than if it held together.
Mrs. Radcliffe not only won fame and amassed a considerable
fortune,--she received five hundred pounds for “Udolpho” and eight
hundred for “The Italian,”--but she gave such impetus to the novel
of horrors, which had been set going by Horace Walpole’s “Castle of
Otranto,” that for years England was oppressed and excited by these
dreadful literary nightmares. Matthew--otherwise “Monk”--Lewis,
Robert Charles Maturin, and a host of feebler imitators, wrote grisly
stories of ghosts, and murders, and nameless crimes, and supernatural
visitations. Horrors are piled on horrors in these dismal and
sulphurous tales. Blue fire envelops us, and persevering spectres,
who have striven a hundred years for burial rites, sit by their
victims’ bed-sides and recite dolorous verses, which is more than
any self-respecting spectre ought to do. Compacts with Satan are as
numerous as bargain counters in our city shops. Suicides alternate
briskly with assassinations. In one melancholy story, the despairing
heroine agrees to meet her lover in a lonely church, where they intend
stabbing themselves sociably together. Unhappily, it rains hard all
the afternoon, and--with an unexpected touch of realism--she is
miserably afraid the bad weather will keep her indoors. “The storm was
so violent,” we are told, “that Augusta often feared she could not go
out at the appointed time. Frequently did she throw up the sash, and
view with anxious looks the convulsed elements. At half past five the
weather cleared, and Augusta felt a fearful joy.”
It might have been supposed that the gay, good-humored satire of
“Northanger Abbey” would have laughed these tragic absurdities from the
land. But Miss Austen alone, of all the great novelists of England, won
less than her due share of profit and renown. Her sisters in the field
were loaded down with honors. When the excellent Mrs. Opie became a
Friend, and refused to write any more fiction, except, indeed, those
moral but unlikely tales about the awful consequences of lying, her
contemporaries spoke gravely of the genius she had sacrificed at the
shrine of religion. Charlotte Bronté’s masterpiece gained instant
recognition throughout the length and breadth of England. Of George
Eliot’s sustained success there is no need to speak. But Jane Austen,
whose incomparable art is now the theme of every critic’s pen, was
practically ignored while she lived, and perhaps never suspected,
herself, how admirable, how perfect was her work. Sir Walter Scott,
it is true, with the intuition of a great story-teller, instantly
recognized this perfection; and so did Lord Holland and a few others,
among whom let us always gladly remember George IV., who was wise
enough to keep a set of Miss Austen’s novels in every one of his
houses, and who was happy enough to receive the dedication of “Emma.”
Nevertheless, it cannot be forgotten that fifteen years elapsed between
the writing of “Pride and Prejudice” and its publication; that Cadell
refused it unread,--a dreadful warning to publishers,--and that all
Miss Austen ever realized from her books in her lifetime was seven
hundred pounds,--one hundred pounds less than Mrs. Radcliffe received
for a single story, and nearly two thousand pounds less than Frances
Burney was paid for her absolutely unreadable “Camilla.” High-priced
novels are by no means a modern innovation, though we hear so much more
about them now than formerly. Blackwood gave Lockhart one thousand
pounds for the manuscript of “Reginald Dalton,” and “Woodstock”
brought to Scott’s creditors the fabulous sum of eight thousand pounds.
For with Sir Walter flowered the golden age of English fiction.
Fortune and fame came smiling at his beck, and the great reading world
confessed itself better and happier for his genius. Then it was that
the book-shops were besieged by clamorous crowds when a new Waverly
novel was promised to the public. Then Lord Holland sat up all night
to finish “Old Mortality.” Then the excitement over the Great Unknown
reached fever heat, and the art of the novelist gained its absolute
ascendency, an ascendency unbroken in our day, and likely to remain
unbroken for many years to come. At present, every child that learns
its letters makes one more story-reader in the world, and the chances
are it will make one more story-writer to help deluge the world with
fiction. Novels, it has been truly said, are the only things that can
never be too dear or too cheap for the market. The beautiful and costly
editions of Miss Austen and Scott and Thackeray compete for favor with
marvelously cheap editions of Dickens, that true and abiding idol of
people who have no money to spend on hand-made paper and broad margins.
It is the same with living novelists. Rare and limited editions for
the rich; cheap and unlimited editions for the poor; all bought, all
read, and the novelist waxing more proud and prosperous every day. So
prosperous, indeed, so proud, he is getting too great a man to amuse
us as of yore. He spins fewer stories now, and his glittering web has
grown a trifle gray and dusty with the sweepings from back outlets and
mean streets. He preaches occasionally in the market-place, and he says
acrimonious things anent other novelists whose ways of thinking differ
from his own. These new, sad fashions of speech are often very grievous
to his readers, but nothing can rob him of our friendship; for always
we hope that he will take us by the hand, and lead us smilingly away
from the relentless realities of life to the golden regions of romance
where the immortal are.
FROM THE READER’S STANDPOINT.
It is a serious age in which we live, and there is a painful sense of
responsibility manifested by those who have assigned to themselves
the task of directing their fellow creatures, not only in matters
spiritual, but in all that pertains to intellectual or artistic life.
That we need guidance is plain enough; the helping hand of patient
and scholarly criticism was never more welcome than now; but to be
driven, or rather hounded along the sunny paths of literature by
severe and self-appointed teachers is not perhaps the surest way of
reaching the best that has been known and thought in the world. Neither
is it calculated to increase our enjoyment en route. The “personally
conducted” reader must weary now and then of his restricted range, as
well as of the peculiar contentiousness of his guides. If he be reading
for his own entertainment,--and there are men and women who keep that
object steadily and selfishly in view,--if he be deep in a novel, for
example, with no other purpose than an hour’s unprofitable pleasure, it
is annoying to be told by the authors of several other novels that he
has chosen this pleasure unwisely. He may be pardoned if, in a moment
of irritation, he tells the disputants plucking at his sleeve to please
go on writing their fiction as well as in them lies, and he will decide
for himself which of their books to read.