Chapter IV: The Minor and Later Eighteenth-Century Novel7 (1)

[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.