Chapter IV: The Minor and Later Eighteenth-Century Novel7 (2)

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.