Woman's Work in
English Fiction

From the Restoration to the
Mid-Victorian Period

By

Clara H. Whitmore, A.M.

G. P. Putnam's Sons
New York and London
The Knickerbocker Press
1910

Copyright, 1909
BY
CLARA H. WHITMORE
The Knickerbocker Press, New York

PREFACE

The writings of many of the women considered in this volume have sunk into an oblivion from which their intrinsic merit should have preserved them. This is partly due to the fact that nearly all the books on literature have been written from a man's stand-point. While in other arts the tastes of men and women vary little, the choice of novels is to a large degree determined by sex. Many men who acknowledge unhesitatingly that Jane Austen is superior as an artist to Smollett, will find more pleasure in the breezy adventures of Roderick Random than in the drawing-room atmosphere of Emma; while no woman can read a novel of Smollett's without loathing, although she must acknowledge that the Scottish writer is a man of genius.

This book is written from a woman's viewpoint. Wherever my own judgment has been different from the generally accepted one, as in the estimate of some famous heroines, the point in question has been submitted to other women, and not recorded unless it met with the approval of a large number of women of cultivated taste.

This work was first undertaken at the suggestion of Dr. E. Charlton Black of Boston University for a Master's thesis, and it was due to his appreciative words that it was enlarged into book form. I also wish to thank Professor Ker of London University, and Dr. Henry A. Beers and Dr. Wilbur L. Cross of Yale University for the help which I obtained from them while a student in their classes. It is with the deepest sense of gratitude that I acknowledge the assistance given to me in this work by Mr. Charles Welsh, at whose suggestion the scope of the book was enlarged, and many parts strengthened. I wish especially to thank him for calling my attention to The Cheap Repository of Hannah More, and to the literary value of Maria Edgeworth's stories for children.

It is my only hope that this book may in a small measure fill a want which a school-girl recently expressed to me: "Our Club wanted to study about women, but we have searched the libraries and found nothing."

C. H. W.

CONTENTS

WOMAN'S WORK IN
ENGLISH FICTION

CHAPTER I

The Duchess of Newcastle. Mrs. Behn. Mrs. Manley

In the many volumes containing the records of the past, the names of few women appear, and the number is still smaller of those who have won fame in art or literature. Sappho, however, has shown that poetic feeling and expression are not denied the sex; Jeanne d'Arc was chosen to free France; Mrs. Somerville excelled in mathematics; Maria Mitchell ranked among the great astronomers; Rosa Bonheur had the stroke of a master. These women possessed genius, and one is tempted to ask why more women have not left enduring work, especially in the realm of art. The Madonna and Child, what a subject for a woman's brush! Yet the joy of maternity which shines in a mother's eyes has seldom been expressed by her in words or on canvas. It was left for a man, William Blake, to write some of our sweetest songs of childhood.

But as soon as the novel appeared, a host of women writers sprang up. Women have always been story-tellers. Long before Homer sang of the fall of Troy, the Grecian matrons at their spinning related to their maids the story of Helen's infidelity; and, as they thought of their husbands and sons who had fallen for her sake, the story did not lack in fervour. But the minstrels have always had this advantage over the story-tellers: their words, sung to the lyre, were crystallised in rhythmic form, so that they resisted the action of time, while only the substance of the stories, not the words which gave them beauty and power, could be retained, and consequently they crumbled away. When the novel took on literary form, women began to write. They were not imitators of men, but opened up new paths of fiction, in many of which they excelled.

The first woman to essay prose fiction as an art was Margaret, Queen of Navarre. In the seventy-two tales of The Heptameron, a book written before the dawn of realism, she related many anecdotes of her brother, Francis the First, and his courtiers. Woman's permanent influence over the novel began about 1640, and was due directly to the Hotel Rambouillet, in whose grand salon there mingled freely for half a century the noblest minds of France. This salon was presided over by the Marquise de Rambouillet, who had left the licentious court of Henry the Fourth, and had formed here in her home between the Louvre and the Tuileries a little academy, where Corneille read his tragedies before they were published, and Bousset preached his first sermon, while among the listeners were the beautiful Duchess de Longueville, Madame de Lafayette, Madame de Sévigné and Mademoiselle de Scudéri, besides other persons of royal birth or of genius. The ladies of this salon became the censors of the manners, the literature, and even the language of France. Here was the first group of women writers whose fame extended beyond their own country, and has lasted, though somewhat dimmed, to the present. Since the seventeenth century the influence of women novelists has been ever widening.

In England, women entered the domain of literature later than in France, Spain, or Italy. Not until the Restoration did they take any active part in the world of letters; and not until the reign of George the Third did they make any marked contribution to fiction.

The first woman writer of prose fiction in England was the thrice noble and illustrious Princess Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle. During the Commonwealth, the Duke and Duchess of Newcastle had lived in exile, but with the restoration of Charles the Second, in 1660, they returned to London, where the Duchess soon became a notable personage. Crowds gathered in the park merely to see her pass, attracted partly by her fame as a writer, partly by the singularities she affected. Her black coach furnished with white curtains and adorned with silver trimmings instead of gilt, with the footmen dressed in long black coats, was readily distinguished from other carriages in the park. Her peculiarities of dress were no less marked. Her long black juste-au-corps, her hair hanging in curls about her bared neck, her much beplumed velvet cap of her own designing, were objects of ridicule to the court wits, who even asserted that she wore more than the usual number of black patches upon her comely face.

More singular than her habiliments were her pretentions as a woman of letters, which caused the courtiers to laugh at her conceit. She was evidently aware of this failing as she writes in her Autobiography: "I fear my ambition inclines to vain-glory, for I am very ambitious; yet 't is neither for beauty, wit, titles, wealth, or power, but as they are steps to raise me to Fame's tower, which is to live by remembrance in after-ages."

But, notwithstanding her detractors, she received sufficient praise to foster her belief in her own genius. Her plays were well received. Her poems were declared by her admirers equal to Shakespeare's. Her philosophical works, which she dedicated to the great universities of Oxford and Cambridge, were accepted with fulsome flattery of their author. When she visited the Royal Society at Arundel House, the Lord President met her at the door, and, with mace carried before him, escorted her into the room, where many experiments were performed for her pleasure. In 1676, a folio volume was published, entitled Letters and Poems in Honour of the Incomparable Princess Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, written by men of high rank and of learning, with the following dedication by the University of Cambridge:

To Margaret the First:
Princess of Philosophers:
Who hath dispelled errors:
Appeased the difference of opinions:
And restored Peace
To Learning's Commonwealth.

Yet this praise was not all flattery, for the scholarly Evelyn always speaks of her with respect, and after visiting her writes, "I was much pleased with the extraordinary fanciful habit, garb, and discourse of the Duchess."

Amid the arid wastes of her philosophical works are green spots enlivened by good sense and humour that have a peculiar charm. At the time when the trained minds of the Royal Society were broadening scientific knowledge by careful experiments, this lady, with practically no education, sat herself down to write her thoughts upon the great subjects of matter and motion, mind and body. She was emboldened to publish her opinions, for, as she says: "Although it is probable, that some of the Opinions of Ancient Philosophers in Ancient times are erroneous, yet not all, neither are all Modern Opinions Truths, but truly I believe, there are more Errors in the One than Truth in the Other." Some of her explanations are very artless, as when she decides that passions are created in the heart and not in the head, because "Passion and Judgment seldom agree."

Her philosophical works are often compounded of fiction and fact. Her book called The Description of a New World called the Blazing World reminds one of some of the marvellous stories of Jules Verne. According to the story a merchant fell in love with a lady while she was gathering shells on the sea-coast, and carried her away in a light vessel. They were driven to the north pole, thence to the pole of another world which joined it. The conjunction of these two poles doubled the cold, so that it was insupportable, and all died but the lady. Bear-men conducted her to a warmer clime, and presented her to the emperor of the Blazing World, whose palace was of gold, with floors of diamonds. The emperor married the lady, and, at her desire to study philosophy, sent for the Duchess of Newcastle, "a plain and rational writer," to be her teacher. The story at this point rambles into philosophy.

Nature's Pictures drawn by Fancy's Pencil contains many suggestions for poems and novels. Particularly beautiful is the fragment of a story of a lord and lady who were forbidden to love in this world, but who died the same night, and met on the shores of the Styx. "Their souls did mingle and intermix as liquid essences, whereby their souls became as one." They preferred to enjoy themselves thus rather than go to Elysium, where they might be separated, and where the talk of the shades was always of the past, which to them was full of sorrow.

The Duchess of Newcastle wrote a series of letters on beauty, eloquence, time, theology, servants, wit, and kindred subjects, often illustrated by a little story, reminding the reader of some of the Spectator papers, which delighted the next generation. As in those papers, characters were introduced. Mrs. P.I., the Puritan dame, appears in several letters. She had received sanctification, and consequently considered all vanities of dress, such as curls, bare necks, black patches, fans, ribbons, necklaces, and pendants, temptations of Satan and the signs of damnation. In a subsequent letter she becomes a preaching sister, and the Duchess has been to hear her, and thus comments upon the meeting: "There were a great many holy sisters and holy brethren met together, where many took their turns to preach; for as they are for liberty of conscience, so they are for liberty of preaching. But there were more sermons than learning, and more words than reason."

This is the first example of the use of letters in English fiction. In the next century it was adopted by Richardson for his three great novels, Pamela, Clarissa Harlowe, and Sir Charles Grandison; it was used by Smollett in the novel of Humphry Clinker, and became a popular mode of composition with many lesser writers.

But posterity is chiefly indebted to the Duchess of Newcastle for her life of her husband and the autobiography that accompanies it. Of the former Charles Lamb wrote that it was a jewel for which "no casket is rich enough." Of the beaux and belles who were drawn by the ready pens of the playwrights of the court of Charles the Second none are worthy of a place beside the Duke of Newcastle and his incomparable wife.

With rare felicity she has described her home life in London with her brothers and sisters before her marriage. Their chief amusements were a ride in their coaches about the streets of the city, a visit to Spring Gardens and Hyde Park; and sometimes a sail in the barges on the river, where they had music and supper. She announces with dignity her first meeting with the Duke of Newcastle in Paris, where she was maid of honour to the Queen Mother of England: "He was pleased to take some particular notice of me, and express more than an ordinary affection for me; insomuch that he resolved to choose me for his second wife." And in another place she writes: "I could not, nor had not the power to refuse him, by reason my affections were fixed on him, and he was the only person I ever was in love with. Neither was I ashamed to own it, but gloried therein." Here is the charm of brevity. Richardson would have blurred these clearly cut sentences by eight volumes.

In the biography of her husband she relates faithfully his services to Charles the First at the head of an army which he himself had raised; his final defeat near York by the Parliamentary forces; and his escape to the continent in 1644. Then followed his sixteen years of exile in Paris, Rotterdam, and Antwerp, where "he lived freely and nobly," entertaining many persons of quality, although he was often in extreme poverty, and could obtain credit merely by the love and respect which his presence inspired. What a sad picture is given of the return of the exiles to their estates, which had been laid waste in the Civil War and later confiscated by Cromwell! But how the greatness of the true gentleman shines through it all, who, as he viewed one of his parks, seven of which had been completely destroyed, simply said, "He had been in hopes it would not have been so much defaced as he found it."

In the closing chapter the Duchess gives Discourses Gathered from the Mouth of my noble Lord and Husband. These show both sound sense and a broad view of affairs. She writes:

"I have heard My Lord say,

I

"That those which command the Wealth of a Kingdom, command the hearts and hands of the People.

XXXIII

"That many Laws do rather entrap than help the subject."

Clarendon, who thought but poorly of the Duke's abilities as a general, gives the same characterisation of him: a man of exact proportion, pleasant, witty, free but courtly in his manner, who loved all that were his friends, and hated none that were his enemies, and who had proved his loyalty to his king by the sacrifice of his property and at the risk of his life.

Perhaps the Duchess of Newcastle has unwittingly drawn a true representation of the great body of English cavaliers, and has partly removed the stain which the immoralities of the court afterward put upon the name. These biographies give a story of marital felicity with all the characteristics of the domestic novel.

At this time the English novel was a crude, formless thing, without dignity in literature. The Duchess of Newcastle, who aspired to be ranked with Homer and Plato, would have spurned a place among writers of romance, although her genius was primarily that of the novelist. She constantly thought of plots, which she jotted down at random, her common method of composition. She has described characters, and has left many bright pictures of the manners and customs of her age. Her style of writing is better than that of many of her more scholarly contemporaries, who studied Latin models and strove to imitate them. She wrote as she thought and felt, so that her style is simple when not lost in the mazes of philosophical speculation. She had all the requisites necessary to write the great novel of the Restoration.

But in the next century her voluminous writings were forgotten, and the casual visitor to Westminster Abbey who paused before the imposing monument in the north transept read with amused indifference the quaint inscription which marks the tomb of the noble pair; that she was the second wife of the Duke of Newcastle, that her name was Margaret Lucas; "a noble family, for all the brothers were valiant and all the sisters were virtuous." To Charles Lamb belongs the credit of discovering the worth of her writings. Delighting in oddities, but quick to discern truth from falsehood, he loved to pore over the old folios containing her works, and could not quite forgive his sister Mary for speaking disrespectfully of "the intellectuals of a dear favourite of mine of the last century but one—the thrice noble, chaste and virtuous, but again somewhat fantastical and original-brained, generous Margaret Newcastle."

Her desire for immortality is nearer its fulfilment to-day than at any previous time. A third edition of the Life of the Duke of Newcastle was published in 1675, the year after her death. Nearly two hundred years later, in 1872, it was included in Russell Smith's "Library of Old Authors," and since then a modernised English edition and a French edition of this book have been published. No one can read this biography without feeling the charm of the quaint, childlike personality of the Duchess of Newcastle.

While all London was talking of the "mad Duchess of Newcastle," another lady was living there no less eminent as a writer, but so distinguished for her wit, freedom of temper, and brilliant conversation, that even the great Dryden sought her friendship, and Sothern, Rochester, and Wycherley were among her admirers. She was named "Astrea," and hailed as the wonder and glory of her sex. But Aphra Behn's talents brought her a more substantial reward than fame. Her plays were presented to crowded houses; her novels were in every library, and she obtained a large income from her writings; she was the first English woman to earn a living by her pen.

In her early youth, Mrs. Behn lived for a time at Surinam in Dutch Guiana, where her father was governor. On one of the plantations was a negro in whose fate she became deeply interested. She learned from his own lips about his life in Africa, and was herself an eye witness of the indignities and tortures he suffered in slavery. She was so deeply impressed by his horrible fate, that on her return to London she related his story to King Charles the Second and at his request elaborated it into the novel Oroonoko.

According to the story, Oroonoko, an African warrior, was married to Imoinda, a beautiful maiden of his own people. His grandfather, a powerful chieftain, also fell in love with the beautiful Imoinda and placed her in his harem. When he found that her love for Oroonoko still continued, he sold her secretly into slavery and her rightful husband could learn nothing of her whereabouts. Later Oroonoko and his men were invited by the captain of a Dutch trading ship to dine on board his vessel. They accepted the invitation, but, after dinner, the captain seized his guests, threw them into chains, and carried them to the West Indies, where he sold them as slaves. Here Oroonoko found his wife, whose loss he had deeply mourned, and they were reunited. Oroonoko, however, indignant at the treachery practised against himself and his men, incited the slaves to a revolt. They were overcome, and Oroonoko was tied to a whipping-post and severely punished. As he found that he could not escape, he resolved to die. But rather than leave Imoinda to the cruelty of her owners, he determined to slay first his wife, then his enemies, lastly himself. He told his plans to Imoinda, who willingly accompanied him into the forest, where he put her to death. When he saw his wife dead at his feet, his grief was so great that it deprived him of the strength to take vengeance on his enemies. He was again captured and led to a stake, where faggots were placed about him. The author has described his death with a faithfulness to detail that carries with it the impress of truth: "'My Friends, am I to die, or to be whipt?' And they cry'd, 'Whipt! no, you shall not escape so well.' And then he reply'd, smiling, 'A blessing on thee'; and assured them they need not tie him, for he would stand fix'd like a Rock, and endure Death so as should encourage them to die: 'But if you whip me' [said he], 'be sure you tie me fast.'"

The popularity of the book was instantaneous. It passed through several editions. It was translated into French and German, and adapted for the German stage, while Sothern put it on the stage in England. It created almost as great a sensation as did Uncle Tom's Cabin two hundred years later. Like Mrs. Stowe's novel it had a strong moral influence, as it was among the earliest efforts to call the attention of Europe to the evils of the African slave trade. Moreover, this her first novel gave Mrs. Behn an acknowledged place as a writer.

Oroonoko marks a distinct advance in English fiction. Nearly all novels before this had consisted of a series of stories held together by a loosely formed plot running through a number of volumes, sometimes only five, but occasionally, as in The Grand Cyrus, filling ten quartos. Their form was such that like the Thousand and One Nights they could be continued indefinitely. Most of these novels belonged either to the pastoral romance or the historical allegory. In the former the ladies and gentlemen who in a desultory sort of way carried on the plot were disguised as shepherds and shepherdesses and lived in idyllic state in Arcadia. In the latter they masqueraded under the names of kings and queens of antiquity and entered with the flourish of trumpets and the sound of drums.

Oroonoko was the first English novel with a well developed plot. It moves along rapidly, without digression, to its tragic conclusion. Not until Fielding wrote Joseph Andrews was the plot of any English novel so definitely wrought. The lesser writer had a slight advantage over the greater. Mrs. Behn's novel is constructed upon dramatic lines, so that it holds the interest more closely to the main characters, and the end is awaited with intense expectation; while Fielding chose the epic form, which is more discursive, and Joseph Andrews like all his novels is excessively tame, almost hackneyed in its conclusion. Mrs. Behn's black hero is the first distinctly drawn character in English fiction, the first one that has any marked personality. Sometimes the enthusiasm with which he is described brings a smile to the lips of the modern reader and reminds one of the heroic savages of James Fenimore Cooper and Helen Hunt Jackson. She writes of him: "He was pretty tall, but of a Shape the most exact that can be Fancy'd: The most famous Statuary could not form the Figure of a Man more admirably turned from Head to Foot.... There was no one Grace wanting, that bears the Standard of true Beauty." And thus she continues the description in the superlative degree.

But the story is for the most part realistic. Although the scenes in Africa show the influence of the French heroic novels, as if the author were afraid to leave her story in its simple truth but must adorn it with purple and ermine, as soon as it is transferred to Surinam, where Mrs. Behn had lived, it becomes real. It has local colouring, at that time an almost unknown attribute. It has the atmosphere of the tropics. The descriptions are vivid, and often photographic. Occasionally they are exaggerated, but few travellers to a region of which their hearers know nothing have been able to resist the temptation to deviate from the exact truth. But the whole novel, even at this late day, leaves one with the impression that it is a true biography.

In the history of the English novel, in which Pamela is given an important place as the morning star which heralded the great light of English realism about to burst upon the world, this well arranged, definite, picturesque story of Oroonoko, whose author was reposing quietly within the hallowed precincts of Westminster Abbey fifty years before Richardson introduced Pamela to an admiring public, should not be forgotten. Before Pamela was published, the complete works of Mrs. Behn passed through eight editions. The plots of all her novels are well constructed, with little extraneous matter, but with the exception of Oroonoko the characters are shadowy beings, many of whom meet with a violent death. The Nun or the Perjured Duty has only five characters, all of whom perish in the meshes of love. The Fair Jilt or the Amours of Prince Tarquin and Miranda, founded on incidents that came to the author's knowledge during her residence in Antwerp, is well fitted for the columns of a modern yellow journal; the beautiful heroine causes the death of everyone who stands in the way of her love or her ambition, but she finally repents and lives happy ever after. Mrs. Behn's style is always careless, owing to her custom of writing while entertaining friends.

A great change took place in the public taste during the next hundred years, so that Mrs. Behn's novels, plays, and poems fell into disrepute. Sir Walter Scott tells the story of his grand-aunt who expressed a desire to see again Mrs. Behn's novels, which she had read with delight in her youth. He sent them to her sealed and marked "private and confidential." The next time he saw her, she gave them back with the words:

"Take back your bonny Mrs. Behn, and, if you will take my advice, put her in the fire, for I find it impossible to get through the very first novel. But is it not a very odd thing that I, an old woman of eighty and upward, sitting alone, feel myself ashamed to read a book which sixty years ago I have heard read aloud for the amusement of large circles, consisting of the first and most creditable society in London?"

Mrs. Behn has been accused of great license in her conduct and of gross immorality in her writings. Her friend and biographer says of the former: "For my part I knew her intimately, and never saw ought unbecoming the just modesty of our sex, though more free and gay than the folly of the precise will allow." For the latter the fashion must be blamed more than she. Mrs. Behn was not actuated by the high moral principles of Mademoiselle de Scudéri and Madame de Lafayette, with whom love was an ennobling passion, nor was she writing for the refined men and women of the Hotel Rambouillet; she was striving to earn a living by pleasing the court of Charles the Second, and in that she was eminently successful.

Nearly a quarter of a century after the death of Mrs. Behn, Mrs. Manley published anonymously the first two volumes of the New Atlantis, the book by which she is chiefly known, under the title of Secret Memoirs and Manners of Several Persons of Quality of both Sexes from the New Atalantis, an Island in the Mediterranean. Mrs. Manley was a Tory, and she peopled the New Atalantis with members of the Whig party under Marlborough as Prince Fortunatus. The book is written in the form of a conversation carried on by Astrea, Virtue, and Intelligence, a personification of the Court Gazette. They described the Whig leaders so accurately, and related the scandal of the court so faithfully, that, although fictitious names were used, no key was needed to recognise the personages in the story.

The publisher and printer were arrested for libel, but Mrs. Manley came forward and owned the authorship. In her trial she was placed under a severe cross-examination by Lord Sunderland, who attempted to learn where she had obtained her information. She persisted in her statement that no real characters were meant, that it was all a work of imagination, but if it bore any resemblance to truth it must have come to her by inspiration. Upon Lord Sunderland's objecting to this statement, on the grounds that so immoral a book bore no trace of divine impulse, she replied that there were evil angels as well as good, who might possess equal powers of inspiration. The book was published in May, 1709; in the following February, she was discharged by order of the Queen's Bench.

Soon after her discharge from court, she wrote a third and fourth volume of the New Atalantis under the title, Memoirs of Europe toward the Close of the Eighth Century written by Eginardus, Secretary and Favorite to Charlemagne, and done into English, by the Translator of the New Atalantis. Here she has followed the French models. There is a loosely constructed plot, and the characters tell a series of stories. Many of the writers of Queen Anne's reign are described with none of that lustre that surrounds them now, but as they appeared to a cynical woman who knew them well. She refers to Steele as Don Phaebo, and ridicules his search for the philosopher's stone; and laments that Addison, whom she calls Maro, should prostitute his talents for gold, when he might become a second Vergil.

Mrs. Manley had been well trained to write a book like the New Atalantis. At sixteen, an age when Addison and Steele were at the Charterhouse preparing for Oxford, her father, Sir Roger Manley, died. A cousin, taking advantage of her helplessness, deceived her by a false marriage, and after three years abandoned her. Upon this she entered the household of the Duchess of Cleveland, the mistress of Charles the Second, who soon tired of her and dismissed her from her service. She then began to write, and by her plays and political articles soon won an acknowledged place among the writers of Grub Street.

From the many references to her in the letters and journals of the period, she seems to have been popular with the writers of both political parties. Swift writes to Stella that she is a very generous person "for one of that sort," which many little incidents prove. She dedicated her play Lucius to Steele, with whom she was on alternate terms of enmity and friendship, as a public retribution for her ridicule of him in the New Atalantis, saying that "scandal between Whig and Tory goes for not." Steele, equally generous, wrote a prologue for the play, perhaps in retribution for some of the harsh criticisms of her in the Tatler. All readers of Pope remember the reference to her in the Rape of the Lock, where Lord Petre exclaims that his honour, name and praise shall live

As long as Atalantis shall be read.

Although Mrs. Manley's pen was constantly and effectively employed in the interest of the Tory party, she being at one time the editor of the Examiner, the Tory organ, none of her writings had the popularity of the New Atalantis. It went through seven editions and was translated into the French. The book has no intrinsic merit; its language is scurrilous and obscene; but it appealed to the eager curiosity of the public concerning the private immoralities of men and women who were prominent at court. Human nature in its pages furnishes a contemptible spectacle.

The New Atalantis has now, however, assumed a permanent place in the history of fiction. This species of writing had been common, in France, but it was the first English novel in which political and personal scandal formed the groundwork of a romance. Swift followed its general plan in Gulliver's Travels, placing his political enemies in public office in Lilliput and Brobdingnag, only he so wrought upon them with his imagination that he gave to the world a finished work of art, while Mrs. Manley has left only the raw material with which the artist works. Smollett's political satire, Adventures of an Atom, was also suggested by the New Atalantis, but here the earlier writer has surpassed the later. All three of these writers took a low and cynical view of humanity.

The women novelists who directly followed Mrs. Manley did not have her strength, but they had a delicacy that has given to their writings a subtle charm. From the time of Sarah Fielding to the present threatened reaction the writings of women have been marked by chastity of thought and purity of expression.

CHAPTER II

Sarah Fielding. Mrs. Lennox. Mrs. Haywood. Mrs. Sheridan

About the middle of the eighteenth century, some interesting novels were written by women, but their fame was so overshadowed by the early masters of English fiction, who were then writing, that they have been almost forgotten. For in 1740 Pamela was published, the first novel of Samuel Richardson; in 1771, Humphry Clinker appeared, the last novel of Tobias Smollett; and during the thirty-one years between these two dates all the books of Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, and Smollett were given to the world, and determined the nature of the English novel. The plot of most of their fifteen realistic novels is practically the same. The hero falls in love with a beautiful young lady, not over seventeen, and there is a conflict between lust and chastity. The hero, balked of his prey, travels up and down the world, where he meets with a series of adventures, all very much alike, and all bearing very little on the main plot. At last fate leads the dashing hero to the church door, where he confers a ring on the fair heroine, a paltry piece of gold, the only reward for her fidelity, with the hero thrown in, much the worse for wear, and the curtain falls with the sound of the wedding bells in the distance.

The range of these novels is narrow. They describe a world in which the chief occupation is eating, drinking, swearing, gambling, and fighting. Their chief artistic excellence is the strength and vigour with which these low scenes are described. Sidney Lanier says of them: "They play upon life as upon a violin without a bridge, in the deliberate endeavour to get the most depressing tones possible from the instrument." And Taine, who could hardly endure any of them, writes of Fielding what he implies of the others: "One thing is wanted in your strongly-built folks—refinement; the delicate dreams, enthusiastic elevation, and trembling delicacy exist in nature equally with coarse vigour, noisy hilarity, and frank kindness."

The women who essayed the art of fiction during these years did not have so firm a grasp of the pen as their male contemporaries, and they have added no portraits to the gallery of fiction; but they saw and recorded many interesting scenes of British life which quite escaped the quick-sighted Fielding, or Sterne with the microscopic eyes.

In 1744, when Richardson had written only one book, and Fielding had published only two, before Tom Jones or Clarissa Harlowe had seen the light of day, Sarah Fielding published David Simple, under the title of The Adventures of David Simple, containing an account of his travels through the cities of London and Westminster in the search of a real friend, by a Lady. The author commenced the story as a satire on society. For a long time David's search is unsuccessful. Although he changed his lodgings every week, he could hear of no one who could be trusted. Many, to be sure, dropped hints of their own excellence, and the pity that they had to live with inferior neighbours. Among these was Mr. Spatter, who introduced him to Mr. Varnish. The former saw the faults of people through a magnifying glass; while the latter, when he mentioned a person's failings, added, "He was sure they had some good in them." But David soon learned that Mr. Varnish was no readier to assist a friend in need than the fault-finding Mr. Spatter.

Like her brother Henry, Sarah Fielding is often sarcastic. In one of the chapters she leaves David to his sufferings, "lest it should be thought," she added, "I am so ignorant of the world as not to know the proper time of forsaking people." But the pessimistic vein of the first volume changes to a more optimistic tone in the second. David, in his search for one friend, finds three. Fortunately these consist of a brother and sister and a lady in love with the brother. Even at this early time, an author had no doubts as to how a novel should end. The heading of the last chapter in the book informs us that it contains two weddings, "and consequently the Conclusion of the Book."

In its construction, the plot is similar to that of the other novels of the period. David has plenty of time at his disposal, and listens with more patience than the reader to the detailed history of all the people he meets, and often begs a casual acquaintance to favour him with the story of his life.

But Sarah Fielding's chief charm to her women readers is the feminine view of her times. In David Simple we have the pleasure of travelling through England, but with a woman as our guide. As Harry Fielding travelled between Bath and London, the fair reader wonders what he reported to Mrs. Fielding of what he had seen and heard. Surely at these various inns there must have been some by-play of real affection, some act of modest kindness, some incident of delicate humour. Did he regale Mrs. Fielding with the scenes he has described for his readers? Probably when she asked him if anything had happened en route, he merely yawned and replied, "Oh, nothing worth while." He had too much reverence for his wife to repeat these low scenes to her, and we suspect he had eyes for no others. What would Addison or Steele have seen in the same place?

Sarah Fielding also takes her characters on a stage-coach journey, but here we sit beside the fair heroine, an intelligent lady, and gaze at the men who sit opposite her. There is the Butterfly with his hair pinned up in blue papers, wearing a laced waistcoat, and humming an Italian air. He admires nothing but the ladies, and offered some little familiarity to our heroine, which she repulsed; upon this he paid her the greatest respect imaginable, being convinced, as she would not suffer any intimacy from him, she must be one of the most virtuous women that had ever been born. There is the Atheist, who being alone with her for a few moments makes love to her in an insinuating manner, and tries to prove to her that pleasure is the only thing to be sought in life, and assures her that she may follow her inclinations without a crime, "while she knew that nothing could so much oppose her gratifying him, as her pleasing herself." Then there is the Clergyman who makes honourable love to her, but by doing so puts an end to the friendship which she had hoped might be between them; until at the end of the journey, "she almost made a resolution never to speak to a man again, beginning to think it impossible for a man to be civil to a woman, unless he had some designs upon her."

Whether or not women have ever portrayed the masculine sex truthfully is an open question. But a gentleman mellowed and softened in the light of ladies' smiles is quite a different creature from the same gentleman when seen among the sterner members of his own sex, and there are certain phases of men's characters portrayed in the novels of women which Fielding, Scott, and Thackeray seem never to have seen.

Miss Fielding descants upon many familiar scenes in a manner that would have made her a valuable contributor to the Tatler or Spectator. All kinds of human nature interested her. There is the man who advises David as a friend to buy a certain stock which he himself is secretly trying to sell because he knows it has decreased in value, thus showing that money transactions in London in the reigns of the Georges differed little from money transactions on the Stock Exchange to-day. In some respects, however, society has improved since the days of Sarah Fielding. She describes the gentlemen of social prominence who tumble up to the carriages of ladies who are driving through Covent Garden in the morning, and present them with cabbages or other vegetables which they have picked up from the stalls, too intoxicated to know that their conduct is ridiculous. There are the crowds at the theatres who show their displeasure with a playwright by making so much noise that his play cannot be heard on its first night and so is condemned. Other writers of the period complain of having received this kind of treatment at the hands of the gentlemen mob. And then we are introduced to a scene in the fashionable West End which is a familiar one to-day, where the ladies of quality have their whist assemblies and spend all the morning visiting each other and discussing how the cards were played the previous evening and why certain tricks were lost.

We recognise the fact, however, that Miss Fielding's knowledge of life was but slight. She writes from the standpoint of a spectator, not like her brother as one who had been a part of it. She was one of that group of gentlewomen who gathered around Richardson and heard him read Clarissa, or discussed life and books with him at the breakfast table in the summer-house at North End, Hammersmith. Life was not lived there, but philosophy often sat at the board, and there was fine penetration into the characters and manners of men. Richardson transferred to Miss Fielding the compliment which Dr. Johnson had bestowed upon him, and it was not undeserved by the author of David Simple:

"What a knowledge of the human heart! Well might a critical judge of writing say, as he did to me, that your late brother's knowledge of it was not (fine writer as he was) comparable to yours. His was but as the knowledge of the outside of a clock-work machine, while yours was that of all the finer springs and movements of the inside."

It is not difficult to conjure up a picture of the literary gentlemen and gentlewomen who used to breakfast with Richardson in the summer-house at North End; the gentlemen in their many-coloured velvet suits, the ladies wearing broad hoops, loose sacques, and Pamela hats. One of these ladies was Charlotte Ramsay, better known by her married name of Mrs. Lennox. Her father, Colonel James Ramsay, was lieutenant-governor of New York, where his daughter Charlotte was born in 1720. She was sent to England at the age of fifteen, and soon after her father died, leaving her unprovided for. She turned her attention to literature as a means of livelihood, and at once became a favourite in the literary circles of London, where she met and won the esteem of the great Dr. Johnson.

When her first novel, The Life of Harriet Stuart, was published, he showed his appreciation of its author in a unique manner. At his suggestion, the Ivy Lane Club and its friends entertained Mrs. Lennox and her husband at the Devil's Tavern with a night of festivity. After an elaborate supper had been served, a hot apple-pie was brought in, stuffed full of bay-leaves, and Johnson with appropriate ceremonies crowned the author with a wreath of laurel. The night was passed in mirth and conversation; tea and coffee were often served; and not until the creaking of the street doors reminded them that it was eight o'clock in the morning did the guests, twenty in number, leave the tavern.

Mrs. Lennox's claim to a place in English literature rests solely upon her novel, The Female Quixote, published in 1752. Arabella, the heroine, is the daughter of a marquis who has retired into the country, where he lives remote from society. Her mother is dead; her father is immersed in his books, so that Arabella is left alone, and whiles away the hours by reading the novels of Mademoiselle de Scudéri. Her three great novels, Clelia, The Grand Cyrus and Ibrahim, are historical allegories, in which the France of Louis XIV is given an historical setting, and his courtiers masquerade under the names of famous men of antiquity. There is no attempt at historical accuracy. But to Arabella these books represented true history and depicted the real life of the world.

In a fine satirical passage Arabella informs Mr. Selvin, a man so deeply read in ancient history that he fixed the date of any occurrence by Olympiads, not years, that Pisistratus had been inspired to enslave his country because of his love for Cleorante. Mr. Selvin wonders how this important fact could have escaped his own research, and conceives a great admiration for Arabella's learning.

In the novels of Mademoiselle de Scudéri the characters, even in moments of extreme danger, entertain each other with stories of their past experiences. When Arabella has unexpected guests she bids her maid relate to them the history of her mistress. She instructs her to "relate exactly every change of my countenance, number all my smiles, half-smiles, blushes, turnings pale, glances, pauses, full-stops, interruptions; the rise and falling of my voice, every motion of my eyes, and every gesture which I have used for these ten years past: nor omit the smallest circumstance that relates to me."

All the people Arabella meets are changed by her fancy into the characters of her favourite books. In common people she sees princes in disguise. If a man approaches her, she fancies that he is about to bear her away to some remote castle, or to mention the subject of love, which would be unpardonable, unless he had first captured cities in her behalf. Yet amid the wildest extravagances Arabella never loses her charm. Her generosity and purity of thought make her a very lovable heroine, much more womanly than Clarissa or Sophia Western, and we do not wonder that Mr. Glanville continues to love her, although he is so often annoyed by her ridiculous fancies.

But her belief in her hallucinations is as firm as that of the Spanish Quixote for whom the book was named. Everyone will remember his attack on the windmills, which he mistook for giants. Arabella was equally brave. Thinking herself and some other ladies pursued, when the Thames cuts off their escape, she addresses her companions in language becoming one of her favourite heroines: "Once more, my fair Companions, if your honour be dear to you, if an immortal glory be worth your seeking, follow the example I shall set you, and equal, with me, the Roman Clelia." She plunged into the river, but was promptly rescued. The doctor who attended her in the illness that followed this heroic deed convinced her of the folly of trying to live according to these old books, and she consented to marry her faithful and deserving lover.

The character of Arabella is not drawn with the broad strong lines of Fielding, nor with the attention to minute detail which gives life to the characters of Richardson. But the girlish sweetness of Arabella, her refusal to believe wrong of others, her ignorance of life, her contempt for a lover who has not shed blood nor captured cities in her behalf, is a reality, and shows that the author knew the nature of the romantic girl. In the noble simplicity of Arabella, Mrs. Lennox has, perhaps unconsciously, paid a high tribute to the moral effects of the novels of Scudéri. Arabella is the only clearly drawn character in the book. But one humorous situation follows another, so that the interest never flags.

The other novels of Mrs. Lennox have no value save as they show the trend of thought of the period. In Henrietta, afterward dramatised as The Sister, the heroine, granddaughter of an earl, rather than change her religion, leaves her family and becomes the maid of a rich but vulgar tradesman's daughter. Of course her mistress, who has treated her scurrilously, in time learns her true rank and is properly humbled. The name given to one of the chapters might suffice for the most of them: "In which our heroine is in great distress."

This would seem to be the proper heading for many chapters of many books of the period. In the days of Good Queen Bess, heroines were good and happy. In the merry reign of Charles, they were bad but happy. Pamela set a fashion from which heroines seldom dared to deviate for over a hundred years. They were good—but, oh, so wretched! This type of women became such a favourite with both sexes, that even the sane-minded Scott says:

And love is loveliest when embalmed in tears.

During her period of distress Henrietta lodged with a milliner. Her landlady showed her a small collection of books and pointed with especial pleasure to her favourite novels: "There is Mrs. Haywood's Novels, did you ever read them? Oh! they are the finest love-sick passionate stories: I assure you, you'll like them vastly." Henrietta, however, chose Joseph Andrews for her diversion. Mrs. Eliza Haywood was never admitted into that inner circle of highly respectable English ladies who clustered around Richardson. She was more of an adventuress in the domain of letters. In her first novels she followed the fashion set by Mrs. Manley and supplied the public with scandals in high life. Memoirs of a Certain Island Adjacent to Utopia, published in 1725, The Secret Intrigues of the Count of Caramania, published in 1727, are the highly suggestive titles of two of the most popular of her early works.

After Richardson had made Virtue more popular than Vice, Mrs. Haywood followed the literary fashion which he had set, and in 1751 wrote The History of Miss Betsey Thoughtless. This has sometimes been called a domestic novel, but that is a misnomer, since the characters are seldom found at home, but rather are met in the various pleasure resorts of London. As was the fashion in the novels of this time, and probably not an uncommon occurrence in the English capital, the heroine was often forced into a chariot by some lawless libertine, but fortunately was always rescued by some more virtuous lover. The whole story is but a new arrangement of the one or two incidents with which Richardson had wrung the heart of the British public. It has one advantage over the most of the novels which had preceded it. There is little told that does not bear directly on the plot, the characters of the sub-plot being important personages in the main story, and the book has a definite conclusion.

None of the characters, however, are pleasing. The hero, Mr. Trueworthy, a combination of Tom Jones and Sir Charles Grandison, is a hypocrite. The other male characters are insignificant. Miss Betsey, the heroine, is almost charming. Conscious of her own innocence, she repeatedly appears in a light that makes her worldly lover, Mr. Trueworthy, suspect her virtue, until at last he begs to be released from his engagement to her. The author of the book stands as a duenna at Miss Betsey's side, and points out by the misfortunes of the heroine how foolish it is for girls to ignore public opinion, and strives to inculcate the lesson that a husband is the best protection for a young girl. We are properly shocked at Miss Betsey's levity, who, although she had arrived at the mature age of fourteen, cared not a straw for any of the gentlemen who sought her hand, but liked to have them about her only because they flattered her vanity or afforded her a subject for mirth. Miss Betsey's gaiety, wit, and generosity would be very attractive—in fact, she is quite an up-to-date young lady—but we see how much better she would "get on" if she had a little more worldly wisdom. She is punished, as she deserves to be, by losing her lover, and marries a man who makes her very unhappy. Mr. Trueworthy, however, learns of her innocence; her husband fortunately dies, and the author takes the bold step of uniting the widow to her former lover, after a year of mourning and passing through much suffering, brought upon herself by her own thoughtlessness. She is rewarded, however, very much as Pamela was rewarded, by marrying a man of honour, who had judged her formerly by his own conduct, being too willing to believe by appearances that she had lost her chastity, or, at least, had sullied her good name.

In this novel, Mrs. Haywood is very near the line that divides the artist from the artisan. Like a young girl with good health and good spirits, Miss Betsey is ever on the verge of sweeping aside the prejudices of her duenna, and asserting her own individuality, but is constantly held back by the sense of worldly propriety. Had Mrs. Haywood permitted Miss Betsey to carry the plot whither she would without let or hindrance, she would have won for herself an acknowledged place among the heroines of fiction.

The History of Miss Betsey Thoughtless was an epoch-making book. The adventures of its heroine in the city of London took possession of the imagination of Fanny Burney, while little more than a child, and led to the story of Evelina, the forerunner of Jane Austen and her school.

The fashion for weeping heroines was at its height, when, in 1761, Mrs. Francis Sheridan published The Memoirs of Miss Sidney Biddulph. The story is written in the form of letters, in which the heroine reveals to a friend of her own sex all the secrets of her heart. All London rejoiced over the virtues of Sidney Biddulph, and wept over her sorrows. She had been educated "in the strictest principles of virtue; from which she never deviated, through the course of an innocent, though unhappy life." It was so pathetic a story that Dr. Johnson doubted if Mrs. Sheridan had a right to make her characters suffer so much, and Charles James Fox, who sat up all night to read it, pronounced it the best of all novels of his time.

The book, as first written, was in three volumes. The author had brought the story to a most fitting close. Both Sidney's husband and the man whom she had really loved were dead, and the widow could have spent her days in pleasing melancholy, contented with the thought that she had never done a wrong. But the public demanded a continuation of the story. In 1767, two volumes were added, giving the history of Sidney's daughters, who seem to have inherited from their mother the enmity of the fates, for their sufferings were as great as hers.

Authors are prone to draw upon their own history for the emotions they depict. But Mrs. Sheridan's life did not furnish the tragic elements of Sidney Biddulph, although it was not without romance. Before her marriage, she wrote a pamphlet in praise of the conduct of one Thomas Sheridan, the manager of the Theatre Royal in Dublin, during a riot that occurred in the theatre. Sheridan read these words in his praise, sought the acquaintance of their author, and before long married her.

History furnishes a long list of women of talent whose sons were men of genius. Mrs. Sheridan's second son, Richard Brinsley, the author of the light and sparkling Rivals, inherited his mother's talents without her gloom. But Mrs. Sheridan also had some ability as a writer of comedy, and the most famous character of the Rivals was first sketched by her. In a comedy, A Journey to Bath, declined by Garrick, one of the characters was Mrs. Twyford, whom Richard Brinsley Sheridan transformed into that famous blundering coiner of words, Mrs. Malaprop.

Mrs. Sheridan's place in literature rests upon Sidney Biddulph. This novel was an innovation in English fiction. Nearly one hundred years earlier, Madame de Lafayette had written The Princess of Clèves, one of the most nearly perfect novels that has ever been written, and the first that depended for its interest, not alone on what was done, but on the subtle workings of the human heart which led to the doing of it. From that time the novels of French women were largely introspective. English women, however, were either less interested in the inner life, or more reserved in laying bare its secrets. Sidney Biddulph was the first English novel of this kind, and it left no definite trace on fiction, although it was the favourite novel of Charlotte Smith and had some slight effect upon her writings, and Mrs. Inchbald, Mrs. Opie, and Mary Brunton noted the feelings of their characters. Not until Jane Eyre was published, long after Mrs. Sheridan had been forgotten, was there any great English novel of the inner life.

In its day Sidney Biddulph was exceedingly popular on the continent of Europe as well as in England. It was translated into German, and an adaptation of it was made in French by the Abbé Prévost, under the title, Memoirs pour servir a l'histoire de la vertu. But after all, Sidney's sorrows were not real, or she herself was not real; and we of to-day smile or yawn over the pages that drew tears from the eyes of the mighty Dr. Johnson.

Notwithstanding the many excellencies of English fiction during the middle of the eighteenth century, it was held in low repute. There had been many writers attempting to portray real life who, without the genius of the greater novelists, could imitate only their faults. In the preface to Polly Honeycomb, which was acted at Drury Lane theatre in 1760, George Colman, the author, gives the titles of about two hundred novels whose names appeared in a circulating library at that time. Amorous Friars, or the Intrigues of a Convent; Beauty put to its Shifts, or the Young Virgin's Rambles; Bubbled Knights, or Successful Contrivances, plainly evincing, in two Familiar Instances lately transacted in this Metropolis, the Folly and Unreasonableness of Parents Laying a Restraint upon their Children's Inclinations in the Affairs of Love and Marriage; The Impetuous Lover, or the Guiltless Parricide; these are the titles of a few of the popular books of that period. Colman in the character of Polly Honeycomb, an earlier Lydia Languish, attempts to show the moral effects of such reading. Her head had been so turned by these books that her father exclaims, "A man might as well turn his daughter loose in Covent-Garden, as trust the cultivation of her mind to A CIRCULATING LIBRARY."

Fiction at this time lacked delicacy and refinement. The characters lived largely in the streets or taverns, and were too much engrossed in the pleasures of active life to give any heed to thoughts or emotions. Though love was the constant theme of these books, as yet no true love story had been written. The fires of home had not been lighted. The refinements, the pure affections, the high ideals which cluster around the domestic hearth had as yet no place in the novel. It needed the feminine element, which, while no broader than that which had previously made the novel, by its own addition gave something new to it and made it truer to life.

While no woman of marked genius had appeared, the number and influence of women novelists continued to increase throughout the eighteenth century. Tim Cropdale in the novel Humphry Clinker, who "had made shift to live many years by writing novels, at the rate of five pounds a volume," complains that "that branch of business is now engrossed by female authors, who publish merely for the propagation of virtue, with so much ease, and spirit, and delicacy, and knowledge of the human heart, and all in the serene tranquillity of high life, that the reader is not only enchanted by their genius, but reformed by their morality." Schlosser in his History of the Eighteenth Century pays this tribute to the moral influence of the women novelists: "With the increase of the number of writers in England in the course of the eighteenth century, women began to appear as authors instead of educating their children, and their influence upon morals and modes of thinking increased, as that of the clergy diminished."

CHAPTER III

Fanny Burney

A noteworthy transformation took place in the English novel during the late years of the eighteenth century and the early part of the nineteenth. This change cannot be explained by the great difference in manners only. The mode of life described by the early novelists was in existence sixty years after they wrote scenes typical of the customs and manners of their day, just as the quiet home life described by Miss Austen was to be found in England a hundred years before it graced the pages of a book. This new era in the English novel was due not to a change of environment, but to the new ideals of those who wrote.

In 1778, English fiction was represented by the work of Miss Burney, and for thirty-six years, until 1814, when Waverley appeared, this rare plant was preserved and kept alive by a group of women, who trimmed and pruned off many of its rough branches and gave to the wild native fruit a delicacy and fragrance unknown to it before. English women writers did at that time for the English novel what French women had done in the preceding century for the French novel; they made it so pure in thought and expression that Bishop Huet was able to say of the French romances of the seventeenth century, "You'll scarce find an expression or word which may shock chaste ears, or one single action which may give offence to modesty."

This great change in the English novel was inaugurated by a young woman ignorant of the world, whose power lay in her innocent and lively imagination. At his home in Queen Square and later in St. Martin's Street, Charles Burney, the father of Frances, entertained the most illustrious men of his day. Johnson, Reynolds, Garrick, Burke, and Colman were frequent guests, while members of the nobility thronged his parlours to listen to the famous Italian singers who gladly sang for the author of the History of Music. Here Fanny, a bashful but observant child, saw life in the drawing-room. But as Dr. Burney gave little heed to the comings and goings of his daughters, they played with the children of a wigmaker next door, where, perhaps, Fanny became acquainted with the vulgar side of London life, which is so humorously depicted in Evelina. She received but little education, nor was she more than a casual reader, but she was familiar with Pamela, Betsey Thoughtless, Rasselas, and the Vicar of Wakefield. Such was her preparation for becoming a writer of novels.

From her earliest years, she had delighted in writing stories and dramas, although she received little encouragement in this occupation. In her fifteenth year her stepmother proved to her so conclusively the folly of girls' scribbling that Fanny burned all her manuscripts, including The History of Caroline Evelyn. She could not, however, banish from her mind the fate of Caroline's infant daughter, born of high rank, but related through her grandmother to the vulgar people of the East End of London. The many embarrassing situations in which she might be placed haunted the imagination of the youthful writer, but it was not until her twenty-sixth year that these situations were described, when Evelina or a Young Lady's Entrance into the World was published.

The success of the book was instantaneous. The name of the author, which had been withheld even from the publishers, was eagerly demanded. All agreed that only a man conversant with the world could have written such accurate descriptions of life both high and low. The wonder was increased when it was learned that the author was a young woman who had drawn her scenes, not from a knowledge of the world, but from her own intuition and imagination. Miss Burney became at once an honoured member of the literary circle which Mrs. Thrale had gathered at Streatham, and a favourite of Dr. Johnson, who declared that Evelina was superior to anything that Fielding had written, and that some passages were worthy of the pen of Richardson. The book was accorded a place among English classics, which it has retained for over a century. "It was not hard fagging that produced such a work as Evelina," wrote Mr. Crisp to the youthful author. "It was the ebullition of true sterling genius—you wrote it because you could not help it—it came—and so you put it down on paper."

The novel, following the form so common in the eighteenth century, is written in the form of letters. The plot is somewhat time-honoured; there is the nurse's daughter substituted for the real heiress, and a mystery surrounding some of the characters; it is unfolded slowly with a slight strain upon the readers' credulity at the last, but it ends to the satisfaction of all concerned. In many incidents and in some of the characters the story suggests Betsey Thoughtless, but Miss Burney had greater powers of description than Mrs. Haywood.

The plot of the novel is forgotten, however, in the lively, witty manner in which the characters are drawn and the ludicrous situations in which they are placed. So long had these men and women held the mind of the author that they are intensely real as they are presented to us at assemblies, balls, theatres, and operas, where we watch their oddities with amusement.

Indeed no woman has given so many graphic, droll, and minute descriptions of life as Miss Burney. Her genius in this respect is different from that of other women novelists. She has made a series of snap-shots of people in the most absurd situations and ridicules them while she is taking the picture. Few women writers can resist the temptation of peeping into the hearts of their men and women, and the knowledge thus gained gives them sympathy, while it often detracts from the strong lines of the external picture; a writer will not paint a villain quite so black if he believes he still preserves some remnants of a noble nature. But Miss Burney has no interest in the inner life of her men and women. She saw their peculiarities and was amused by them, and has presented them to the reader with minute descriptions and lively wit.

She also makes fine distinctions between people. Sir Clement Willoughby, the West End snob, and Mr. Smith, the East End beau, are drawn with discrimination. With what wit Miss Burney describes the scene at the ridotto between Evelina and Sir Clement. He had asked her to dance with him. Unwilling to do so, because she wished to dance with another gentleman, if he should ask her, she told Sir Clement she was engaged for that dance. He did not leave her, however, but remained by her side and speculated as to who the beast was so hostile to his own interests as to forget to come to her; pitied the humiliation a lady must feel in having to wait for a gentleman, and pointed to each old and lame man in the room asking if he were the miscreant; he offered to find him for her and asked what kind of a coat he had on. When Evelina did not know, he became angry with the wretch who dared to address a lady in so insignificant a coat that it was unworthy of her notice. To save herself from further annoyance she danced with him, for she now knew that Sir Clement had seen through her artifice from the beginning.

But the portrait of Mr. Smith, the East End snob, is even better than that of Sir Clement Willoughby. Evelina is visiting her relatives at Snow Hill, when Mr. Smith enters, self-confident and vulgar. His aim in life, as he tells us, is to please the ladies. When Tom Branghton is disputing with his sister about the place where they shall go for amusement, he reprimands Tom for his lack of good breeding.

"O fie, Tom,—dispute with a lady!" cried Mr. Smith. "Now, as for me, I'm for where you will, providing this young lady [meaning Evelina] is of the party; one place is the same as another to me, so that it be but agreeable to the ladies. I would go anywhere with you, Ma'm, unless, indeed, it were to church;—ha, ha, ha, you'll excuse me, Ma'm, but, really, I never could conquer my fear of a parson;—ha, ha, ha,—really, ladies, I beg your pardon, for being so rude, but I can't help laughing for my life."

Mr. Smith endeavoured to make himself particularly pleasing to Evelina, and for that purpose bought tickets for her and her relatives to attend the Hampstead Assembly. When he observed that Evelina was a little out of sorts, he attributed her low spirits to doubts of his intentions towards her. "To be sure," he told her, "marriage is all in all with the ladies; but with us gentlemen it's quite another thing." He advised her not to be discouraged, saying with a patronising air, "You may very well be proud, for I assure you there is nobody so likely to catch me at last as yourself."

Both Sir Clement Willoughby and Mr. Smith are selfish and conceited; but the former had lived among the gentlemen of Mayfair, the latter among the tradespeople of Snow Hill, and this difference of environment is shown in every speech they utter.

It is the contrast between these two distinct classes of society that saves the book from becoming monotonous. Evelina visits the Pantheon with her West End friends. When Captain Mirvan wonders what people find in such a place, Mr. Lovel, a fashionable fop, quickly rejoins: "What the ladies may come hither for, Sir, it would ill become us to determine; but as to we men, doubtless we can have no other view, than to admire them." At another time Evelina visits the opera with the vulgar Branghtons, who all rejoiced when the curtain dropped, and Mr. Branghton vowed he would never be caught again. The Branghtons at the opera is hardly inferior to Partridge at the play. Tom Branghton is a good representative of his class. He describes with glee the last night at Vauxhall: "There's such squealing and squalling!—and then all the lamps are broke,—and the women skimper scamper;—I declare I would not take five guineas to miss the last night!"

All the characters, even the heroine, take delight, in boisterous mirth. Much of the humour of the book consists rather in ludicrous situations than in any real delicacy of wit. Too often the laugh is at another's discomfiture, and so fails to please the present age with its kindlier feeling towards others. Such are the practical jokes which Captain Mirvan plays upon Madame Duval. In one instance, disguised as a robber, he waylays the lady's coach, and leaves her in a ditch with her feet tied to a tree. The many tricks which the doughty Salt plays upon this lady so much resemble some of the humorous scenes in Joseph Andrews, and Tom Jones that we may infer the readers of that century found them laughable. The Captain and the French woman are two puppets which serve to introduce much of this horse-play. They are not even caricatures; they are entirely unlike anything in human life. With the exception of these two characters, all the men and women who provoked the mirth of the heroine are well portrayed.

Miss Burney is less felicitous in her descriptions of serious characters. Lord Orville, the same type of man as Sir Charles Grandison, is true only in the sense that Miss Burney announces the truth of the entire book. "I have not pretended to show the world what it actually is, but what it appears to a girl of seventeen," she wrote in the preface to Evelina. Lord Orville, all dignity, nobility, charm, and perfection, is but the ideal of a young girl.

Evelina was a new woman in literature, a revelation to the men of the time of George the Third. The sincerity of the book could not be doubted. "But," they asked, "did Evelina represent the woman's point of view of life? Surely no man ever held like views." The Lovelaces and Tom Joneses are not so attractive as when seen through the eyes of their own sex, and the heroines are not so soft and yielding as a man would create them. Evelina, like all Miss Burney's heroines, is independent, fearless, and witty, with scarcely a trace of the traditional heroine of fiction. Saints and Magdalenes have always appealed to the masculine imagination. La donna dolorosa has occupied a prominent place in the art and literature of man's creation. Here he has revealed his sex egoism in all its nudity: the woman weeping for man, either lover, husband, or son; man the centre of her thoughts, her hopes and fears. This new heroine with a new regard towards man was a revelation to them. Evelina was the first woman to break the spell, to show them woman as woman, in lieu of woman as parasite and adjunct to man. Evelina is not always pleasing; she hasn't always good manners; she sometimes laughs in the faces of the dashing beaux who are addressing her. But she is a woman of real flesh and blood; such women have existed in all time, and, liked many women we meet every day and whom men in all ages have known, Evelina insists on being the centre of every scene.

In July, 1782, Miss Burney's second book, Cecilia, or Memoirs of an Heiress, was published. This novel met with as enthusiastic a reception as Evelina. Gibbon read the whole five volumes in a day; Burke declared they had cost him three days, though he did not part with the story from the time he first opened it, and had sat up a whole night to finish it; and Sir Joshua Reynolds had been fed while reading it, because he refused to quit it at the table.

The book shows more care and effort than Evelina. That was an outburst of youthful vivacity and spirits, but in Cecilia the author is striving to do her best. This is particularly revealed in the style, which shows the influence of Doctor Johnson, for it has lost the simplicity of Evelina. The diction is more ambitious, and the sentences are longer, many of them balanced. Even some of the inferior characters from their speech, appear to have received a lesson in English composition from Dr. Johnson.

But the novel owes its place among English classics to the varieties of characters portrayed and the vivid pictures of English life. Here again the gaieties of Vauxhall, Ranelagh, Marylebone and the Pantheon have become immortal, drawn with colours as vivid and enduring as Hogarth used in painting the sadder sides of London life. No other writer has brought these places before our eyes as clearly and as fully as Fanny Burney.

The plot of Cecilia, like that of Evelina, is so arranged as to present different classes of society. Cecilia has three guardians, with one of whom she must live during her minority. First she visits Mr. Harrel, a gay, fashionable man, a spendthrift and a gambler, who lives in a fashionable house in Portman Square, where Cecilia, during a constant round of festivities, meets the fashionable people of London. Next she visits Mr. Briggs in the City, "a short thick, sturdy man, with very small keen black eyes, a square face, a dark complexion, and a snub nose." He was so miserly that when Cecilia asked for pen, ink, and a sheet of paper, he gave her a slate and pencil, as he supposed she had nothing of consequence to say. He was as sparing of his words as of his money, and used the same elliptical sentences in his speech as Dickens afterwards put into the mouth of Alfred Jingle, the famous character in Pickwick Papers. He thus advises Cecilia in regard to her lovers: "Take care of sharpers; don't trust shoe-buckles, nothing but Bristol stones! tricks in all things. A fine gentleman sharp as another man. Never give your heart to a gold-topped cane, nothing but brass gilt over. Cheats everywhere: fleece you in a year; won't leave you a groat. But one way to be safe,—bring 'em all to me." Lastly she visits Mr. Delvile, her third guardian, a man of family, who despised both the men associated with him as trustees of Cecilia; he lived in such gloomy state in his magnificent old house in St. James's Square that it inspired awe, and repressed all pleasure. Pride in their birth and prejudice against all parvenus were the faults of Mr. and Mrs. Delvile.

Besides these characters, there were many others whose names were for a long time familiar in every household. Sir Robert Floyer was as vain as Mr. Smith. Mr. Meadows was constantly bored to death; it was insufferable exertion to talk to a quiet woman, and a talkative one put him into a fever. At the opera the solos depressed him and the full orchestra fatigued him. He yawned while ladies were talking to him, and after he had begged them to repeat what they had said, forgot to listen. "I am tired to death! tired of everything," was his constant expression.

In his critical essay on Madame D'Arblay, Fanny Burney's married name, under which her later works were published, Macaulay has thus dealt with her treatment of character:

"Madame D'Arblay has left us scarcely anything but humours. Almost every one of her men and women has some one propensity developed to a morbid degree. In Cecilia, for example, Mr. Delvile never opens his lips without some allusion to his own birth and station; or Mr. Briggs without some allusion to the hoarding of money; or Mr. Hobson, without betraying the self-indulgence and self-importance of a purse-proud upstart; or Mr. Simkins, without uttering some sneaking remark for the purpose of currying favour with his customers; or Mr. Meadows, without expressing apathy and weariness of life; or Mr. Albany, without declaiming about the vices of the rich and the misery of the poor; or Mrs. Belfield, without some indelicate eulogy on her son; or Lady Margaret, without indicating jealousy of her husband. Morrice is all skipping, officious impertinence, Mr. Gosport all sarcasm, Lady Honoria all lively prattle, Miss Larolles all silly prattle; if ever Madame D'Arblay aimed at more, as in the character of Monckton, we do not think that she succeeded well.... The variety of humours which is to be found in her novels is immense; and though the talk of each person separately is monotonous, the general effect is not monotony, but a most lively and agreeable diversity."

While the character of Monckton is not strongly drawn, one or two scenes in which he figures have great power. Mr. Monckton, who had married an aged woman for her money, lived in constant hope of her dissolution. He planned to keep Cecilia from marrying until that happy event, when he schemed to make her his bride, and thus acquire a second fortune. He had used his influence as a family friend to prejudice her lovers in her eyes, and had just succeeded in breaking up an intimacy which he feared: "A weight was removed from his mind which had nearly borne down even his remotest hopes; the object of his eager pursuit seemed still within his reach, and the rival into whose power he had so lately almost beheld her delivered, was totally renounced, and no longer to be dreaded. A revolution such as this, raised expectations more sanguine than ever; and in quitting the house, he exultingly considered himself released from every obstacle to his view,—till, just as he arrived home, he recollected his wife!"

Cecilia, the heroine of the novel, is only Evelina grown a little older, a little sadder, a little more worldly wise. The humour is, too, a little kindlier. The practical jokes so common in Evelina do not mar the pages of Cecilia. At times the latter novel becomes almost tragic. The scene at Vauxhall where Mr. Harrel puts an end to his life of dissipation is dramatic and thrilling. But Miss Burney had lost the buoyancy and lively fancy which made the charm of Evelina.

Miss Burney's last two novels, Camilla, or a Picture of Youth and The Wanderer, or Female Difficulties, have no claim to a place among English classics. It is strange that, as she saw more of life, she depicted it with less accuracy. This might seem to show that her first novels owe their excellence to her vivid imagination rather than to her powers of observation. Her weary life at court as second keeper of the robes to Queen Charlotte; her marriage to Monsieur D'Arblay, and the sorrows that came to her as the wife of a French refugee; all her deeper experiences of life during the fourteen years between the publication of Cecilia and Camilla—these had completely changed her light, humorous view of externals, and with that loss her power as an artist disappeared.

Camilla has several heroines whose love affairs interest the reader. It thus bears a resemblance to Miss Austen's novels, who speaks of it with admiration and was, perhaps, influenced by it. Eugenia, who has received the education of a man, is pleasing. Clermont Lynmere, like Mr. Smith and Sir Robert Floyer, imagines that all the ladies are in love with him. Sir Hugh Tyrold, with his love for the classics and his regret that he had not been beaten into learning them when he was a boy, his strict ideas of virtue and his desire to make everybody happy, is well conceived, but the outlines are not strong enough to make him a living character. Camilla shows more than Cecilia the style of Dr. Johnson. It is heavy and slow, the words are long, and many of them of Latin derivation.

It was not until the year 1814, the year of Waverley, that her last novel, The Wanderer, or Female Difficulties, was published, which, following the style of Camilla, was in five volumes. It was partly founded on incidents arising out of the French Revolution. The book was eagerly awaited; the publishers paid fifteen hundred guineas for it; but even the friendliest critic pronounced it a literary failure.

To sum up, Macaulay in the essay before quoted makes clear Miss Burney's place in fiction:

"Miss Burney did for the English novel what Jeremy Collier did for the English drama; and she did it in a better way. She first showed that a tale might be written in which both the fashionable and the vulgar life of London might be exhibited with great force and with broad comic humour, and which yet should not contain a single line inconsistent with rigid morality, or even with virgin delicacy. She took away the reproach which lay on a most useful and delightful species of composition. She vindicated the right of her sex to an equal share in a fair and noble province of letters ... we owe to her not only Evelina, Cecilia, and Camilla, but also Mansfield Park and The Absentee."

CHAPTER IV

Hannah More

During the time that Dr. Johnson dominated the literary conscience of England, a group of ladies who had wearied of whist and quadrille, the common amusements of fashion, used to meet at the homes of one another to discuss literary and political subjects. They were called in ridicule the "Blue Stocking Club," because Mr. Benjamin Stillingfleet, who was always present at these gatherings, wore hose of that colour. Among the members distinguished by their wit and talents were Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu, the author of an Essay on the Genius of Shakespeare; Mrs. Elizabeth Carter, a poetess and excellent Greek scholar; Mrs. Chapone, whose Letters to Young Ladies formed the standard of conduct for young women of two generations; Miss Reynolds, the sister of Sir Joshua; and Mrs. Vesey, noted as a charming hostess. Dr. Johnson, David Garrick, Reynolds, and Burke were frequenters of this club. One may well imagine that the conversation and wit of the Blue Stockings were far too rare to be understood by the grosser minds of the mere devotees of fashion, who in consequence threw a ridicule upon them which has always adhered to the name.

Hannah More, who had already become known as a playwright, visited London in 1773, and at once was welcomed by this group. In a poem called The Bas Bleu, dedicated to Mrs. Vesey, she thus describes the pleasure of these meetings:

Enlighten'd spirits! You, who know
What charms from polish'd converse flow,
Speak, for you can, the pure delight
When kindling sympathies unite;
When correspondent tastes impart
Communion sweet from heart to heart;
You ne'er the cold gradations need
Which vulgar souls to union lead;
No dry discussion to unfold
The meaning caught ere well 't is told:
In taste, in learning, wit, or science,
Still kindled souls demand alliance:
Each in the other joys to find
The image answering to his mind.

The Blue Stocking Club was composed largely of Tories, so that when all Europe became restless under the influence of the French Revolution, they strongly combated the levelling doctrines of democracy. Hannah More in particular, who had been conducting schools for the very poor near Bristol, saw how the teachings of the revolutionists affected men already prone to idleness and drink. To offset these influences, she published a little book with the following title-page: "Village Politics. Addressed to all the Mechanics, Journeymen, and Labourers, in Great Britain. By Will Chip, a country Carpenter."

It is not a novel in the strict sense of the word, but in simple language, easily understood, it teaches the labouring people the inconsistent attitude of France, and the strength and safety of the English constitution. It is not a deep book, but has good work-a-day common-sense, such as keeps the world jogging on, ready to endure the ills it has rather than fly to others it knows not of.

The book is in the form of a dialogue between Jack Anvil, the blacksmith, and Tom Hood, the mason.

"Tom. But have you read the Rights of Man?

"Jack. No, not I: I had rather by half read the Whole Duty of Man. I have but little time for reading, and such as I should therefore only read a bit of the best."

"Tom. And what dost thou take a democrat to be?

"Jack. One who likes to be governed by a thousand tyrants, and yet can't bear a king."

"Tom. What is it to be an enlightened people?

"Jack. To put out the light of the Gospel, confound right and wrong, and grope about in pitch darkness."

"Tom. And what is benevolence?

"Jack. Why, in the new-fangled language, it means contempt of religion, aversion to justice, overturning of law, doating on all mankind in general, and hating everybody in particular."

For a long time the authorship of the book remained a secret, and Will Chip became a notable figure. The clergy and the land-owners in particular rejoiced over his homely common-sense, and distributed these pamphlets broadcast over the land. One hundred thousand copies were sold in a short time. Village Politics is said to have been one of the strongest influences in England to awaken the common people to the dangers which lie in a sudden overthrow of government. The book was timely, for that decade had become intoxicated by the name of Liberty. To-day democracy and equality are no longer feared.

During many years Hannah More worked industriously among the poor of Cheddar and its vicinity. On a visit to the Cliffs of Cheddar she found an ignorant, half-savage people, many of whom dwelt in the caves and fissures of the rocks, and earned a miserable subsistence by selling stalactites and other minerals native to the place, to the travellers who were attracted thither by the beautiful scenery. Among these people Hannah More opened a Sunday-school, and later a day school, where the girls were taught knitting, spinning, and sewing. A girl trained in her school was presented on her marriage day with five shillings, a pair of white stockings, and a new Bible. The teaching in the schools was so practical that within a year schools were opened in nine parishes.

In this missionary work, Miss More became intimately acquainted not only with the very poor, but also with the rich farmers living in the neighbourhood and the prosperous tradespeople of the villages. From these better educated men she met with great opposition. One petty landlord met her request for assistance with the remark: "The lower classes are fated to be poor, ignorant and wicked; and wise as you are, you cannot alter what is decreed." Another man informed her that religion was the worst thing for the poor, it made them so lazy and useless.

But the minds of the people had been awakened by the French Revolution. They were beginning to think. Books and ballads attacking church and constitution were hawked through the country and placed within reach of all. To counteract the influence of these "corrupt and inflammatory publications" Hannah More, between the years 1795-1798, published The Cheap Repository, the first regular issue of this kind. Every month a story, a ballad, and a tract for Sunday were published. Hannah More knew so well the common reasoning and the mental attitude of those for whom she wrote, that she was able to make her lessons most effective. So great was the demand for these chap-books that over two million were sold the first year.[1]

[1] For a complete bibliography of these chap-books, see the Catalogue of English and American Chap-Books in Harvard College Library, pp. 8-10; compiled in part by Charles Welsh.

These stories were divided into two classes, those for "persons of middle rank" and those for the common people. The former point out the dangers of pride and covetousness; of substituting abstract philosophy for religion; and warn masters not to forget their moral obligations towards their servants. The latter aim to teach neatness, sobriety, regularity in church attendance, and point out the happiness of those who follow these precepts, and the misery of those who neglect them.

Her two best known stories are Mr. Fantom and The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain. Mr. Fantom: or the History of the New-Fashioned Philosopher, and his Man William was written to warn masters of the danger of teaching their servants disrespect for the Bible and for civil law. Mr. Fantom was a shallow man, who glided upon the surface of philosophy and culled those precepts which relieved his conscience from any moral obligations. When he was asked to help the poor in his own parish, he refused to consider their wants because his mind was so engrossed by the partition of Poland. Like Mrs. Jellyby of a later time, he was so much troubled by sufferings which he could not see that he neglected his family and servants. When he reprimanded his butler, William, for being intoxicated, the young man replied: "Why, sir, you are a philosopher, you know; and I have often overheard you say to your company, that private vices are public benefits; and so I thought that getting drunk was as pleasant a way of doing good to the public as any, especially when I could oblige my muster at the same time." In course of time William became a thief and a murderer, and expiated his crimes on the scaffold.

In contrast to this is The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain. This shepherd was contented with his lot, and says: "David was happier when he kept his father's sheep on such a plain as this, and employed in singing some of his own psalms perhaps, than ever he was when he became king of Israel and Judah. And I dare say we should never have had some of the most beautiful texts in all those fine psalms, if he had not been a shepherd, which enabled him to make so many fine comparisons and similitudes, as one may say, from country life, flocks of sheep, hills and valleys, fields of corn, and fountains of water." The shepherd's neat cottage with its simple furnishings, his frugal wife and industrious children are described in simple and convincing language.

In the stories of the poor there are many interesting details of the everyday life of that class that did not blossom into heroes and heroines of romance for nearly half a century. Mrs. Sponge, in The History of Betty Brown, the St. Giles's Orange Girl, is a character that Dickens might have immortalised. Mrs. Sponge kept a little shop and a kind of eating-house for poor girls near the Seven Dials. She received stolen goods, and made such large profits in her business that she was enabled to become a broker among the poor. She loaned Betty five shillings to set her up in the orange business; she did not ask for the return of her money, but exacted a sixpence a day for its use, and was regarded by Betty, and the other girls whom she thus befriended, as a benefactor. At last, Betty was rescued from the clutches of Mrs. Sponge. By industry and piety she became mistress of a handsome sausage-shop near the Seven Dials, and married a hackney coachman, the hero of one of Miss More's ballads:

I am a bold coachman, and drive a good hack
With a coat of five capes that quite covers my back;
And my wife keeps a sausage-shop, not many miles
From the narrowest alley in all broad St. Giles.
Though poor, we are honest and very content,
We pay as we go, for meat, drink, and for rent;
To work all the week I am able and willing,
I never get drunk, and I waste not a shilling;
And while at a tavern my gentleman tarries,
The coachman grows richer than he whom he carries,
And I'd rather (said I), since it saves me from sin,
Be the driver without, than the toper within.

The Cheap Repository was written to teach moral precepts. Neither Hannah More nor her readers saw any artistic beauty in the sordid lives of this lower stratum of society. They were not interested in the superstitions of "Poor Sally Evans," who hung a plant called "midsummer-men" in her room on Midsummer eve so that she might learn by the bending of the leaves if her lover were true to her, and who consulted all the fortune-tellers that came to her door to learn whether the two moles on her cheek foretold two husbands or two children. Hannah More recorded these simple fancies of poor Sally only to show her folly and the misfortunes that afterwards befell her on account of her superstitions. Writers of that century either laughed at the ignorant blunders of the poor, or used them to point a moral. An interest in them because they are human beings like ourselves with common frailties belongs to the next century. Nothing proves more conclusively the growth of the democratic idea than the changed attitude of the novel toward the ignorant and the criminal.

Hannah More was always interested in the education of young ladies. She wrote a series of essays called Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education, in which she protested loudly against the tendency to give girls an ornamental rather than a useful education. This was so highly approved that she was asked to make suggestions for the education of the Princess Charlotte. This led to her writing Hints towards Forming the Character of a Young Princess.

Hannah More finally embodied her theories on the education of women in a book which she thought might appeal most strongly to the young ladies themselves, Cœlebs in Search of a Wife. Running through it, is a slight romance. Cœlebs, filled with admiration for Eve, as described in Paradise Lost, where she is intent on her household duties, goes forth into the world to find, if possible, such a helpmate for himself. As he meets different women, he compares them with his ideal, and, finding them lacking, passes a severe criticism upon female education and accomplishments. Finally, he meets a lady with well-trained mind, who delights in works of charity and piety, one well calculated to conduct wisely the affairs of his household. She has besides proper humility, and accepts with gratitude the honour of becoming Cœlebs's wife.

Until her death at the advanced age of eighty-eight years, Hannah More continued to write moral and religious essays, so that she was before the public view for over fifty years, Mrs. S. C. Hall in her book Pilgrimages to English Shrines thus describes her in old age:

"Hannah More wore a dress of very light green silk—a white China crape shawl was folded over her shoulders; her white hair was frizzled, after a by-gone fashion, above her brow, and that backed, as it were, by a very full double border of rich lace. The reality was as dissimilar from the picture painted by our imagination as anything could well be; such a sparkling, light, bright, 'summery'-looking old lady—more like a beneficent fairy, than the biting author of Mr. Fantom, though in perfect harmony with The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain."

CHAPTER V

Charlotte Smith. Mrs. Inchbald

While Hannah More was endeavouring to improve the condition of the poor by teaching them diligence and sobriety, a group of earnest men and women were writing books and pamphlets in which they claimed that poverty and ignorance were due to unjust laws. The writings of Voltaire and Rousseau had filled their minds with bright pictures of a democracy. These theories were considered most dangerous in England, but they were the theories which helped to shape the American constitution. Among these English revolutionists were William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Smith, Mrs. Inchbald, and for a time Amelia Opie.

The strongest political novel was Caleb Williams by William Godwin. In this he shows how through law man may become the destroyer of man. This interest in the rights of man awakened interest in the condition of women; and Mary Wollstonecraft, who afterward became Mrs. Godwin, wrote Vindication of the Rights of Woman. This pamphlet was declared contrary to the Bible and to Christian law, although all its demands have now been conceded. Charlotte Smith was also interested in the position of women and the laws affecting them. In Desmond she discussed freely a marriage problem which in her day seemed very bold, while in her private life she ignored British prejudices.

She was the mother of twelve children and the wife of a man of many schemes, so that she was continually devising ways to extricate her large family from the financial difficulties into which he plunged them. At one time a friend suggested to her that her husband's attention should be turned toward religion. Her reply was: "Oh, for heaven's sake, do not put it into his head to take to religion, for if he does, he will instantly begin by building a cathedral." She is supposed to have caricatured him in the projector who hoped to make a fortune by manuring his estate with old wigs. But when her husband was imprisoned for debt, she shared his captivity, and began to write to support her family. Although she died at the age of fifty-seven, she found time during her manifold cares to write thirty-eight volumes.

But not only did Mrs. Smith endure sorrows as great as those of her favourite heroine, Sidney Biddulph, but one of her daughters was equally unfortunate. She was married unhappily, and returned with her three children for her mother to support. Mr. and Mrs. Smith, after twenty-three years of married life, agreed to live in separate countries, he in Normandy, and she in England, although they always corresponded and were interested in each other's welfare. Yet this separation, together with the revolutionary tendencies discovered in her writings, raised a storm of criticism against her.

In Desmond, which was regarded as so dangerous, Mrs. Smith has presented the following problem: Geraldine, the heroine, is married to a spendthrift, who attempts to retrieve his fortunes by forcing his wife to become the mistress of his friend, the rich Duc de Romagnecourt. To preserve her honour she leaves him, hoping to return to her mother's roof; but her mother refuses to receive her and bids her return to her husband. As she dares not do this, and is without money, a faithful friend, Desmond, takes her under his protection, asking no reward but the pleasure of serving her. Finally Geraldine receives a letter informing her that her husband is ill. She returns to him, and nurses him until he dies; after a year of mourning she marries Desmond.

How could a woman have behaved more virtuously than Geraldine? She is always high-minded and actuated by the purest motives. But it was feared that her example might encourage wives to desert their husbands, and consequently the novel was declared immoral.

Desmond was published in 1792, when the feeling against France was very bitter in England. The plot, as it meanders slowly through three volumes, is constantly interrupted by political discussions. The author's clearly expressed preference for a republican government, and her criticism of English law, met with bitter disapproval. One of the characters pronounces a panegyric upon the greater prosperity and happiness that has come to the French soldiers, farmers, and peasants, since they came to believe that they were sharers in their own labours, and the hero of the book, writing from France to a friend in England, says: "I lament still more the disposition which too many Englishmen show to join in this unjust and infamous crusade, against the holy standard of freedom; and I blush for my country." In the same book, the author censures the penal laws of England, by which robbery to the amount of forty shillings is punishable with death; and criticises the delay of the courts in dealing justice.

This criticism is expressed tamely, barely more than suggested, when compared with the vigorous attacks which Dickens made in the next century on English law and the slow action of justice in the famous "Circumlocution Office." Dickens wrote with such vigour that he brought about a reform. A modern reader finds Desmond earnest and sincere, but tame to the point of dulness. It seems strange how the Tory party could see in this book a menace to the British constitution. But a writer in the Monthly Review for December, 1792, advocated her cause. "She is very justly of opinion," he writes, "that the great events that are passing in the world are no less interesting to women than to men, and that, in her solicitude to discharge the domestic duties, a woman ought not to forget that, in common with her father and husband, her brothers and sons, she is a citizen."

The publication of The Old Manor House in the following year won back for her many of the friends that she had lost by Desmond. But in this work also the same love of liberty, the same indifference to social distinctions, occur. The hero of The Old Manor House joins the English army, and is sent to fight against the Americans; in the many reflections upon this conflict, the author shows that her sympathies are with the colonists. The father of the hero had married a young woman who had nothing to recommend her but "beauty, simplicity, and goodness." The hero himself falls in love with and marries a girl beneath him in rank, but he does not seem to feel that he has done a generous thing, nor does the heroine show any gratitude for this honour. Each seems unconscious that their difference in rank should be a bar to their union, provided they do not offend old Mrs. Rayland, the owner of the manor. A great change had come over the novel since Pamela was overpowered with gratitude to her profligate master, Mr. B, for condescending to make her his wife.

The revolutionary principles of Mrs. Smith's novels were soon forgotten, but two new elements were introduced by her that bore fruit in English fiction. Her great gift to the novel was the portrayal of refined, quiet, intellectual ladies, beside whom Evelina and Cecilia seem but school-girls. Her heroines may be poor, they may be of inferior rank, but they are always ladies of sensitive nature and cultivated manners, and are drawn with a feeling and tenderness which no novelist before her had reached. A contemporary said of Emmeline, "All is graceful, and pleasing to the sight, all, in short, is simple, femininely beautiful and chaste." This might be said of all the women she has created. Old Mrs. Rayland, the central personage in her most popular novel, The Old Manor House, notwithstanding her exalted ideas of her own importance as a member of the Rayland family, and the arbitrary manner in which she compels all to conform to her old-fashioned notions, is always the high-born lady. We smile at her, but she never forfeits our respect. Scott said of her, "Old Mrs. Rayland is without a peer."

Mrs. Smith's second gift to the novel was her charming descriptions of rural scenery. Nature had for a long time been banished from the arts. Wordsworth in one of his prefaces wrote:

"Excepting The Nocturnal Reverie of Lady Winchelsea, and a passage or two in the Windsor Forest of Pope, the poetry of the period intervening between the publication of Paradise Lost and The Seasons does not contain a single new image of external nature; and scarcely presents a familiar one, from which it can be inferred that the eye of the Poet had been steadily fixed upon his object, much less that his feelings had urged him to work upon it in the spirit of genuine imagination."

Fiction was as barren of scenery as poetry. None of the novelists were cognisant of the country scenes amid which their plots were laid, with the possible exception of Goldsmith. The Vicar of Wakefield has a rural setting, and there are references to the trees, the blackbirds, and the hayfields; but description is not introduced for the sake of its own beauty as in the novels of Charlotte Smith. In Ethelinda there are beautiful descriptions of the English Lakes, part of the scene being laid at Grasmere; Celestina is in the romantic Provence; Desmond in Normandy; and in The Old Manor House we have the soft landscape of the south of England.

In The Old Manor House she thus describes one of the paths that led from the gate of the park to Rayland Hall:

"The other path, which in winter or in wet seasons was inconvenient, wound down a declivity, where furze and fern were shaded by a few old hawthorns and self-sown firs: out of the hill several streams were filtered, which, uniting at its foot, formed a large and clear pond of near twenty acres, fed by several imperceptible currents from other eminences which sheltered that side of the park; and the bason between the hills and the higher parts of it being thus filled, the water found its way over a stony boundary, where it was passable by a foot bridge unless in time of floods; and from thence fell into a lower part of the ground, where it formed a considerable river; and, winding among willows and poplars for near a mile, again spread into a still larger lake, on the edge of which was a mill, and opposite, without the park paling, wild heaths, where the ground was sandy, broken, and irregular, still however marked by plantations made in it by the Rayland family."

Every feature of the landscape is brought distinctly before the eye. Such descriptions are not unusual now, but they were first used by Charlotte Smith.

Even more realistic is the picture of a road in a part of the New Forest near Christchurch:

"It was a deep, hollow road, only wide enough for waggons, and was in some places shaded by hazel and other brush wood; in others, by old beech and oaks, whose roots wreathed about the bank, intermingled with ivy, holly, and evergreen fern, almost the only plants that appeared in a state of vegetation, unless the pale and sallow mistletoe, which here and there partially tinted with faint green the old trees above them.

"Everything was perfectly still around; even the robin, solitary songster of the frozen woods, had ceased his faint vespers to the setting sun, and hardly a breath of air agitated the leafless branches. This dead silence was interrupted by no sound but the slow progress of his horse, as the hollow ground beneath his feet sounded as if he trod on vaults. There was in the scene, and in this dull pause of nature, a solemnity not unpleasant to Orlando, in his present disposition of mind."

In 1842, Miss Mitford wrote to Miss Barrett: "Charlotte Smith's works, with all their faults, have yet a love of external nature, and a power of describing it, which I never take a spring walk without feeling." And again she wrote to a friend referring to Mrs. Smith, "Except that they want cheerfulness, nothing can exceed the beauty of the style."

The life and writings of Mrs. Inchbald had some things in common with the life and writings of Mrs. Smith. Both were obliged to write to support themselves as well as those dependent upon them. Both had seen many phases of human nature, and both viewed with scorn the pretensions of the rich and beheld with pity the sorrows of the poor. Both were champions of social and political equality. Mrs. Inchbald, however, was an actress and a successful playwright, hence her novels are the more dramatic, but they lack the beautiful rural setting which gives a poetic atmosphere to the writings of Charlotte Smith.

A Simple Story, the first, of Mrs. Inchbald's two novels, has been called the precursor of Jane Eyre. It is the first novel in which we are more interested in what is felt than in what actually happens. Mr. Dorriforth, a Catholic priest, and Miss Milner, his ward, fall in love with each other, and we watch this hidden passion, which preys upon the health of both. He is horrified that he has broken his vows; she is mortified that she loves a man who, she believes, neither can nor does return her feeling for him. When he is released from his vow, it is the emotion, not external happenings, that holds the interest. The first part of the story is brought to a close with the marriage of Mr. Dorriforth, now Lord Elmwood, and Miss Milner.

Seventeen years elapse between the two halves of the novel. During this time trouble has come between them and they have separated. The character of each has undergone a change. Traits of disposition that were first but lightly observed have been intensified with years. Mrs. Inchbald writes of the hero: "Dorriforth, the pious, the good, the tender Dorriforth, is become a hard-hearted tyrant; the compassionate, the feeling, the just Lord Elmwood, an example of implacable rigour and justice." His friend Sandford has also changed with the years, but he has been softened, not hardened by them—"the reprover, the enemy of the vain, the idle, and the wicked, but the friend and comforter of the forlorn and miserable."

The story of Dorriforth gives unity to the two parts of the novel. The conflict between his love and his anger holds the reader in suspense until the conclusion. The characters of eighteenth-century fiction were actuated by but a small number of motives. In nearly all the novels the men were either generous and free or stingy and hypocritical; the women were either virtuous and winsome, or immoral and brazen. Mrs. Inchbald possessed, only in a less degree, George Eliot's power of character-analysis; she observed minor qualities, and she was as unflinching in following the development of evil traits to a tragic conclusion as was the author of Adam Bede.

In The Gentleman's Magazine for March, 1791, some one wrote of A Simple Story:

"She has struck out a path entirely her own. She has disdained to follow the steps of her predecessors, and to construct a new novel, as is too commonly done, out of the scraps and fragments of earlier inventors. Her principal character, the Roman Catholic lord, is perfectly new: and she has conducted him, through a series of surprising well-contrasted adventures, with an uniformity of character and truth of description that have rarely been surpassed."

There is, however, one hackneyed scene. A young girl is seized, thrust into a chariot, and carried at full speed to a lonely place. There is hardly an early novel where this bald incident is not worked up into one or more chapters, with variations to suit the convenience of the plot. It was as much a part of the stock in trade of the novelist of the eighteenth century as a family quarrel is of the twentieth. With this exception, A Simple Story is new in its plot, incidents, characters, and mode of treatment. Emotion did not play so important a part in a novel again until Charlotte Brontë wrote Jane Eyre.

Mrs. Inchbald's only other novel, Nature and Art, shows the artificialities of society. Two cousins, William and Henry, are contrasted. William is the son of a dean. Henry's father went to Africa to live, whence he sent his son to his rich uncle to be educated. Henry fails to comprehend the society in which he finds himself placed, and cannot understand that there should be any poor people.

"'Why, here is provision enough for all the people,' said Henry; 'why should they want? why do not they go and take some of these things?'

"'They must not,' said the dean, 'unless they were their own.'

"'What, Uncle! Does no part of the earth, nor anything which the earth produces, belong to the poor?'"

His uncle fails to answer this question to his nephew's satisfaction.

The vices and the fawning duplicity of William are contrasted with the virtues and independent spirit of Henry.

"'I know I am called proud,' one day said William to Henry.

"'Dear Cousin,' replied Henry, 'it must be only then by those who do not know you; for to me you appear the humblest creature in the world.'

"'Do you really think so?'

"'I am certain of it; or would you always give up your opinion to that of persons in a superior state, however inferior in their understanding? ... I have more pride than you, for I will never stoop to act or to speak contrary to my feelings.'"

William rises to eminence, in time becoming a judge. Henry, who is always virtuous, can obtain no preferment. This contrast in the two cousins is not so overdrawn as at first appears. William represents the aristocracy of the old world; Henry, the free representative of a new country.

A tragic story runs through the novel, which becomes intensely dramatic at the point where William puts on his black cap to pronounce sentence on the girl whom he had ruined years before. He does not recognise her; but she, who had loved him through the years, becomes insane, not at the thought of death, but that he should be the one to pronounce the sentence. It is doubtful if any novelist before Scott had produced so thrilling a situation, a situation which grew naturally out of the plot, and the anguish of the poor unfortunate Agnes has the realism of Thomas Hardy or Tolstoi.

Only by reading these old novels can one comprehend the change produced in England by the next half-century. The teachings of Mrs. Charlotte Smith and Mrs. Inchbald were declared dangerous to the state. That they taught disrespect for authority, was one of the many charges brought against them. Yet with what ladylike reserve they advance views which a later generation applauded when boldly proclaimed by Dickens, Thackeray, and Disraeli!

CHAPTER VI

Clara Reeve. Ann Radcliffe. Harriet and Sophia Lee

The novel of the mysterious and the supernatural did not appear in modern literature until Horace Walpole wrote The Castle of Otranto in 1764, during the decade that was dominated by the realism of Smollett and Sterne. The author says it was an attempt to blend two kinds of romance, the ancient, which was all improbable, and the modern, which was a realistic copy of nature. The machinery of this novel is clumsy. An enormous helmet and a huge sword are the means by which an ancestor of Otranto, long since dead, restores the castle to a seeming peasant, who proves to be the rightful heir.

This book produced no imitators until 1777, when Clara Reeve wrote The Old English Baron, which was plainly suggested by Walpole's novel, but is more delicate in the treatment of its ghostly visitants. Here, as in The Castle of Otranto, the rightful heir has been brought up a peasant, ignorant of his high birth. Again his ancestors, supposedly dead and gone, bring him into his own. One night he is made to sleep in the haunted part of the castle, where his parents reveal to him in a dream things which he is later able to prove legally. He learns the truth about his birth, comes into his estate, and wins the lady of his heart. When he returns to the castle as its master, all the doors fly open through the agency of unseen hands to welcome their feudal lord.

The characters of both these novels are without interest, and the mysterious element fails to produce the slightest creepy thrill.

Twelve years passed before Walpole's novel found another imitator in Mrs. Ann Radcliffe, who so far excelled her two predecessors that she has been called the founder of the Gothic romance, and in this field she remains without a peer. In her first novel, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne, as in The Old English Baron by Clara Reeve, a peasant renowned for his courage and virtue loves and is beloved by a lady of rank. A strawberry mark on his arm proves that he is the Baron Malcolm and owner of the castle of Dunbayne, at which juncture amid great rejoicings the story ends.

The characters and the style foreshadow Mrs. Radcliffe's later work. The usurping Baron of Dunbayne, who has imprisoned in his castle the women who might oppose his ambition; the two melancholy widows; their gentle and pensive daughters; their brave, loyal, and virtuous sons in love respectively with the two daughters; the Count Santmorin, bold and passionate, who endeavours by force to carry off the woman he loves—these are types that Mrs. Radcliffe repeatedly developed until in her later novels they became real men and women with strong conflicting emotions.

But superior to all her other powers is her ability to awaken a feeling of the presence of the supernatural. The castle of Dunbayne has secret doors and subterranean passages. The mysterious sound, as of a lute, is wafted on the air from an unknown source. Alleyn, in endeavouring to escape through a secret passage, stumbles over something in the dark, and, on stooping to learn what it is, finds the cold hand of a corpse in his grasp. This dead man has nothing to do with the story, but is introduced merely to make the reader shudder, which Mrs. Radcliffe never fails to do, even after we have learned all the secrets of her art. We learn later in the book how the corpse happened to be left here unburied; for in that day of intense realism, half-way between the ancient belief in ghosts and the modern interest in mental suggestion, every occurrence outside the known laws of physics was greeted with a cynical smile. But, although Mrs. Radcliffe always explains the mystery in her books, we hold our breath whenever she designs that we shall.

The Sicilian Romance, The Romance of the Forest, The Mysteries of Udolpho, and The Italian were written and published during the next seven years and each one shows a marked artistic advance over its predecessor. With the opening paragraph of each, we are carried at once into the land of the unreal, into regions of poetry rather than of prose. Rugged mountains with their concealed valleys, whispering forests which the eye cannot penetrate, Gothic ruins with vaulted chambers and subterranean passages, are the scenes of her stories; while event after event of her complicated plot happens either just as the mists of evening are obscuring the sun, or while the moonlight is throwing fantastic shadows over the landscape. It is an atmosphere of mystery in which one feels the weird presence of the supernatural. This is heightened by the ghostly suggestions she brings to the mind, as incorporeal as spirits. A low hurried breathing in the dark, lights flashing out from unexpected places, forms gliding noiselessly along the dark corridors, a word of warning from an unseen source, cause the reader to wait with hushed attention for the unfolding of the mystery.

Sometimes the solution is trivial. The reader and the inmates of Udolpho are held in suspense chapter after chapter by some terrible appearance behind a black veil. When Emily ventures to draw the curtain, she drops senseless to the ground. But this appearance turns out to be merely a wax effigy placed there by chance. Often the explanation is more satisfactory. The disappearance of Ludovico during the night from the haunted chamber where he was watching in hopes of meeting the spirits that infested it, makes the most sceptical believe for a time in the reality of the ghostly visitants; and his reappearance at the close of the book, the slave of pirates who had found a secret passage leading from the sea to this room, and had used it as a place of rendezvous, is declared by Sir Walter Scott to meet all the requirements of romance.

But by a series of strange coincidences and dreams Mrs. Radcliffe still makes us feel that the destiny of her characters is shaped by an unseen power. Adeline is led by chance to the very ruin where her unknown father had been murdered years before. She sees in dreams all the incidents of the deed, and a manuscript he had written while in the power of his enemies falls into her hands. Again by chance she finds an asylum in the home of a clergyman, Arnaud La Luc, who proves to be the father of her lover, Theodore Peyrou. It seems to be by the interposition of Providence that Ellena finds her mother and is recognised by her father. So in every tale we are made aware of powers not mortal shaping human destiny.

Mrs. Radcliffe adds to this consciousness of the presence of the supernatural by another, perhaps more legitimate, method. She felt what Wordsworth expressed in Tintern Abbey, written the year after her last novel was published:

And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.

Mrs. Radcliffe seldom loses her feeling for nature, and has a strong sense of the effect of environment on her characters. Julia, when in doubt about the fate of Hippolitus, often walked in the evening under the shade of the high trees that environed the abbey. "The dewy coolness of the air refreshed her. The innumerable roseate tints which the parting sun-beams reflected on the rocks above, and the fine vermil glow diffused over the romantic scene beneath, softly fading from the eye as the night shades fell, excited sensations of a sweet and tranquil nature, and soothed her into a temporary forgetfulness of her sorrow." As the happy lovers, Vivaldi and Ellena, are gliding along the Bay of Naples, they hear from the shore the voices of the vine-dressers, as they repose after the labours of the day, and catch the strains of music from fishermen who are dancing on the margin of the sea.

Sometimes nature is prophetic. The whole description of the castle of Udolpho, when Emily first beholds it, is symbolical of the sufferings she is to endure there: "As she gazed, the light died away on its walls, leaving a melancholy purple tint, which spread deeper and deeper, as the thin vapour crept up the mountain, while the battlements above were still tipped with splendour. From these, too, the rays soon faded, and the whole edifice was invested with the solemn duskiness of evening. Silent, lonely, and sublime it seemed to stand the sovereign of the scene, and to frown defiance on all who dared invade its solitary reign." When Emily is happy in the peasant's home in the valley below, she lingers at the casement after the sun has set: "But a clear moonlight that succeeded gave to the landscape what time gives to the scenes of past life, when it softens all their harsh features, and throws over the whole the mellowing shade of distant contemplation." It is this feeling for nature as a constant presence in daily life, now elating the mind with joy, now awakening a sense of foreboding or inspiring terror, and again soothing the mind to repose, that gives to her books a permanent hold upon the imagination and marks their author as a woman of genius.

In her response to nature, she belongs to the Lake School. Scott said of her: "Mrs. Radcliffe has a title to be considered as the first poetess of romantic fiction, that is, if actual rhythm shall not be deemed essential to poetry." Mrs. Smith describes nature as we all know it, as it appears on the canvasses of Constable and Wilson. Mrs. Radcliffe's descriptions of ideal and romantic nature have earned for her the name of the English Salvator Rosa.

Mrs. Radcliffe's characters are not without interest, although they are often mere types. All her heroes and heroines are ladies and gentlemen of native courtesy, superior education, and accomplishments. In The Mysteries of Udolpho she has set forth the education which St. Aubert gave to his daughter, Emily: "St. Aubert cultivated her understanding with the most scrupulous care. He gave her a general view of the sciences, and an exact acquaintance with every part of elegant literature. He taught her Latin and English, chiefly that she might understand the sublimity of their best poets. She discovered in her early years a taste for works of genius; and it was St. Aubert's principle, as well as his inclination, to promote every innocent means of happiness. 'A well informed mind,' he would say, 'is the best security against the contagion of vice and folly.'"

In all their circumstances her characters are well-bred. This type has been nearly lost in literature, due, perhaps, to the minuter study of manners and the analysis of character. When an author surveys his ladies and gentlemen through a reading-glass, and points the finger at their oddities and pries into their inmost secrets, even the Chesterfields become awkward and clownish. But Mrs. Radcliffe, like Mrs. Smith, is a true gentlewoman, and speaks of her characters with the delicate respect of true gentility. Julia, Adeline, Emily, and Ellena, the heroines of four of her books, love nature, and while away the melancholy hours by playing on the lute or writing poetry, and are, moreover, well qualified to have charge of a baronial castle and its dependencies. Her heroes are worthy of her heroines. As they are generally seen in the presence of ladies, if they have vices there is no occasion for their display.

It is only in the characters of her villains that good and evil are intertwined, and she awakens our sympathy for them equally with our horror. Monsieur La Motte, a weak man in the power of an unscrupulous one, is the best drawn character in The Romance of the Forest. He has taken Adeline under his protection and has been as a father to her. But before this he had committed a crime which has placed his life in the hands of a powerful marquis. To free himself he consents to surrender Adeline to the marquis, who has become enamoured of her beauty, hoping by the sacrifice of her honour to save his own life. He is agitated in the presence of Adeline, and trembles at the approach of any stranger. Scott said of him, "He is the exact picture of the needy man who has seen better days."

In The Italian, Schedoni, a monk of the order of Black Penitents for whom the novel is named, is guilty of the most atrocious crimes in order that he may further his own ambition, but he is not devoid of natural feeling. Scott says the scene in which he "is in the act of raising his arm to murder his sleeping victim, and discovers her to be his own child, is of a new, grand, and powerful character; and the horrors of the wretch who, on the brink of murder, has just escaped from committing a crime of yet more exaggerated horror, constitute the strongest painting which has been produced by Mrs. Radcliffe's pencil, and form a crisis well fitted to be actually embodied on canvas by some great master."

Every book has one or more gloomy, deep-plotting villains. But all the people of rank bear unmistakable marks of their nobility, even when their natures have become depraved by crime. In this she is the equal of Scott.

In every ruined abbey and castle there is a servant who brings in a comic element and relieves the strained feelings. Peter, Annette, and Paulo are all faithful but garrulous, and often bring disaster upon their masters by overzeal in their service.

When Vivaldi, the hero of The Italian, is brought before the tribunal of the inquisition, his faithful servant, Paulo, rails bitterly at the treatment his master has received. Vivaldi, well knowing the danger which they both incur by too free speech, bids him speak in a whisper:

"'A whisper,' shouted Paulo, 'I scorn to speak in a whisper. I will speak so loud that every word I say shall ring in the ears of all those old black devils on the benches yonder, ay, and those on that mountebank stage, too, that sit there looking so grim and angry, as if they longed to tear us in pieces. They—'

"'Silence,' said Vivaldi with emphasis. 'Paulo, I command you to be silent.'

"'They shall know a bit of my mind,' continued Paulo, without noticing Vivaldi. 'I will tell them what they have to expect from all their cruel usage of my poor master. Where do they expect to go to when they die, I wonder? Though for that matter, they can scarcely go to a worse place than that they are in already, and I suppose it is knowing that which makes them not afraid of being ever so wicked. They shall hear a little plain truth for once in their lives, however; they shall hear—'"

But by this time Paulo is dragged from the room.

The plots of all Mrs. Radcliffe's novels are complicated. A whole skein is knotted and must be unravelled thread by thread. The Mysteries of Udolpho is the most involved. Characters are introduced that are for a time apparently forgotten; one sub-plot appears within another, but at the end each is found necessary to the whole.

The Italian is simpler than the others: the plot is less involved, and there are many strong situations. The opening sentence at once arouses the interests of the reader: "Within the shade of the portico, a person with folded arms, and eyes directed towards the ground, was pacing behind the pillars the whole extent of the pavement, and was apparently so engaged by his own thoughts as not to observe that strangers were approaching. He turned, however, suddenly, as if startled by the sound of steps, and then, without further pausing, glided to a door that opened into the church, and disappeared." Another scene in which the Marchesa Vivaldi and Schedoni are plotting the death of Ellena, is justly famous. The former is actuated by the desire to prevent her son's marriage to a woman of inferior rank; the latter hopes that he may gain an influence over the powerful Marchesa that will lead to his promotion in the church. Their conference, which takes place in the choir of the convent of San Nicolo, is broken in upon by the faint sound of the organ followed by slow voices chanting the first requiem for the dead.

The Italian is generally considered the strongest of Mrs. Radcliffe's novels. It was published in 1797, and was as enthusiastically received as were its predecessors, but for some reason it was the last book Mrs. Radcliffe published. Neither the fame it brought her, nor the eight hundred pounds she received for it from her publishers, tempted its author from her life of retirement. Publicity was distasteful to her. At the age of thirty-four, at an age when many novelists had written nothing, she ceased from writing, and spent the rest of her years either in travel or in the seclusion of her own home.

The novel at this time was not considered seriously as a work of art, and Mrs. Radcliffe may have considered that she was but trifling with time by employing her pen in that way. In looking over the book reviews in The Gentlemen's Magazine for the years from 1790 to 1800, it is significant that, while column after column is spent in lavish praise of a book of medicine or science which the next generation proved to be false, and of poetry that had no merit except that its feet could be counted, seldom is a novel reviewed in its pages. The Mysteries of Udolpho was criticised for its lengthy descriptions, and The Italian was ignored.

The direct influence of these novels on the literature of the nineteenth century cannot be estimated. Mrs. Radcliffe's influence upon her contemporaries can be more easily traced. The year after the publication of The Mysteries of Udolpho Lewis wrote The Monk. This has all the horrors but none of the refined delicacy of Mrs. Radcliffe's work. Robert Charles Maturin borrowed many suggestions from her, and the gentle satire of Northanger Abbey could never have been written if Jane Austen had not herself come under the influence of The Romance of the Forest.

But her greatest influence was upon Scott. The four great realistic novelists of the eighteenth century, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett and Sterne whose influence can be so often traced in Thackeray and Dickens, seem never to have touched the responsive nature of Scott. He edited their works and often spoke in their praise, but that which was deepest and truest in him, which gave birth to his poetry and his novels, seems never to have been aware of their existence. Mrs. Radcliffe and Maria Edgewood were his most powerful teachers.

Andrew Lang in the introduction to Rob Roy in the Border edition of the Waverley Novels calls attention to the fact that Waverley, Guy Mannering, Lovel of The Antiquary, and Frank Osbaldistone were all poets. Not only these men, but others, as Edward Glendinning and Edgar Ravenswood, bear a strong family resemblance to Theodore Peyrou, Valancourt, and Vivaldi, as well as to some of the other less important male characters in Mrs. Radcliffe's novels. Scott's men stand forth more clearly drawn, while Mrs. Radcliffe's are often but dimly outlined. Ellen Douglas, the daughter of an exiled family; the melancholy Flora MacIvor, who whiled away her hours by translating Highland poetry into English; Mary Avenel, dwelling in a remote castle, are all refined, educated gentlewomen such as Mrs. Smith and Mrs. Radcliffe delighted in, and are placed in situations similar to those in which Julia, Adeline, and Emily are found.

But the heroines of Mrs. Smith and Mrs. Radcliffe have a quality which not even Scott has been able to give to his women. It is expressed by a word often used during the reign of the Georges, but since gone out of fashion. They were women of fine sensibilities. Johnson defines this as quickness of feeling, and it has been used to mean a quickness of perception of the soul as distinguished from the intellect. The sensibilities of women may not be finer than those of men, but they respond to a greater variety of emotions. This gives to them a certain evanescent quality which we find in Elizabeth Bennet, Jane Eyre, Maggie Tulliver, Romola, the portraits of Madame Le Brun and Angelica Kauffman, and the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. This quality men have almost never grasped whether working with the pen or the brush. Rosalind, Juliet, Viola, Beatrice, all possess it; and in a less degree, Diana of the Crossways is true to her sex in this respect. But the features of nearly every famous Madonna, no matter how skilful the artist that painted her, are stiff and wooden when looked at from this point of view, and Scott's heroines, with the possible exception of Jeanie Deans, are immobile when compared with woman as portrayed by many an inferior artist of her own sex.

Scott's complicated plots and his constant introduction of characters who are surrounded by mystery or are living in disguise again suggest Mrs. Radcliffe. Again and again he selected the same scenes that had appealed to her, and in his earlier novels and poems he filled them in with the same details which she had chosen. Perhaps it is due to her influence that all the hills of Scotland, as some critic has observed, become mountains when he touches them: "The sun was nearly set behind the distant mountain of Liddesdale" was the beginning of an early romance to have been entitled Thomas the Rhymer. Knockwinnock Bay in The Antiquary is first seen at sunset, and it is night when Guy Mannering arrives at Ellangowan Castle. Melrose is described by moonlight. The sun as it sets in the Trossachs brings to the mind of Scott the very outlines and colours which Mrs. Radcliffe had used in giving the first appearance of Udolpho, a scene which Scott has highly praised; while these famous lines of James Fitz-James have caught the very essence of one of her favourite spots:

On this bold brow, a lordly tower;
In that soft vale, a lady's bower;
On yonder meadow, far away,
The turrets of a cloister grey!
How blithely might the bugle horn
Chide, on the lake, the lingering morn!
How sweet, at eve, the lover's lute
Chime, when the groves were still and mute!
And, when the midnight moon should lave
Her forehead in the silver wave,
How solemn on the ear would come
The holy matin's distant hum.

In his later works Scott is tediously prosaic in description, far inferior to Mrs. Radcliffe, and in the romantic description of scenery he never excels her. It would seem to be no mere chance that in his poetry and in his earlier novels he has so often struck the same key as did the author of The Mysteries of Udolpho.

Two sisters, Harriet and Sophia Lee, were writing books and finding readers during the time of Mrs. Smith, Mrs. Inchbald, and Mrs. Radcliffe. In 1784, Sophia Lee published a three-volume novel, The Recess, a story of the time of Queen Elizabeth, in which Elizabeth, Mary Queen of Scots, and the earls Leicester, Norfolk, and Essex play important rôles. The two heroines are unacknowledged daughters of Mary Queen of Scots and Norfolk, to whom she has been secretly married during her imprisonment in England. Many other situations in the book are equally fictitious.

The historical novels written in France during the reign of Louis XIV paid no heed to chronology, but men and women whom the author knew well were dressed in the garb of historical personages, and various periods of the past were brought into the space of the story. The Recess was not a masquerade, but the plot and characters slightly picture the reign of Elizabeth. This was one of the first novels in which there was an attempt to represent a past age with something like accuracy. As this was one of the first historical novels, using the term in the modern sense, it had perhaps a right to be one of the poorest; for it is impossible to conceive three volumes of print in which there are fewer sentences that leave any impress on the mind than this once popular novel.

Sophia Lee wrote other novels which are said to be worse than this; but in 1797 she and her sister Harriet, who had the greater imagination, published The Canterbury Tales. Some of those written by Harriet are excellent. According to the story a group of travellers have met at an inn in Canterbury, where they are delayed on account of a heavy fall of snow. To while away the weary hours of waiting, as they are gathered about the fire in true English fashion, they agree, as did the Canterbury pilgrims of long ago, that each one shall tell a story. But the pilgrims whom Chaucer accompanied to the shrine of Thomas à Becket are accurately described, and between the tales they discuss the stories and exchange lively banter in which the nature of each speaker is clearly revealed. In The Canterbury Tales there is little character-drawing. Any one of the stories might have been told by any one of the narrators, and before the conclusion the authors dropped this device.

In the stories that are told the characters are weak, but the plots are interesting and many of them original and clever. These Tales represent the beginning of the modern short story.

In a preface to a complete edition of the Tales published in 1832, Harriet Lee wrote:

"Before I finally dismiss the subject, I think I may be permitted to observe that, when these volumes first appeared, a work bearing distinctly the title of Tales, professedly adapted to different countries, and either abruptly commencing with, or breaking suddenly into, a sort of dramatic dialogue, was a novelty in the fiction of the day. Innumerable Tales of the same stamp, and adapted in the same manner to all classes and all countries, have since appeared; with many of which I presume not to compete in merit, though I think I may fairly claim priority of design and style."

The Canterbury Tales were read and reread a long time after they were written. A critic in Blackwood's says of them:

"They exhibit more of that species of invention which, as we have already remarked, was never common in English literature than any of the works of the first-rate novelists we have named, with the single exception of Fielding."

The most famous story of the collection is Kruitzener, or the German's Tale. Part of the story is laid in Silesia during the Thirty Years' War. Frederick Kruitzener, a Bohemian, is the hero, if such a term may be used for so weak a man. In his youth he is thus described:

"The splendour, therefore, which the united efforts of education, fortune, rank, and the merits of his progenitors threw around him, was early mistaken for a personal gift—a sort of emanation proceeding from the lustre of his own endowments, and for which, as he believed, he was indebted to nature, he resolved not to be accountable to man.... He was distinguished!—he saw it—he felt it—he was persuaded he should ever be so; and while yet a youth in the house of his father—dependent on his paternal affection, and entitled to demand credit of the world merely for what he was to be—he secretly looked down on that world as made only for him."

The tale traces the troubles which Kruitzener brings upon himself, his misery and his death. It belongs to romantic literature; the mountain scenes, a palace with secret doors, a secret gallery, a false friend, a mysterious murder, all these remind us of Mrs. Radcliffe's novels, but the story does not possess her power or her poetic charm. Ernest Hartley Coleridge said of this tale: "But the motif—a son predestined to evil by the weakness and sensuality of his father, a father's punishment for his want of rectitude by the passionate criminality of his son, is the very key-note of tragedy."

Byron read this story when he was about fourteen, and it affected him powerfully. By a strange coincidence Kruitzener bears a strong resemblance to Lord Byron himself. He was proud and melancholy, and, while he led a life of pleasure, his spirits were always wrapped in gloom. "It made a deep impression on me," writes Byron, "and may, indeed, be said to contain the germ of much that I have since written." In 1821, he dramatised it under the title of Werner, or the Inheritance. The play follows the novel closely both in plot and conversation. An editor of Byron's works wrote of it: "There is not one incident in his play, not even the most trivial, that is not in Miss Lee's novel. And then as to the characters—not only is every one of them to be found in Kruitzener, but every one is there more fully and powerfully developed."

The Landlady's Tale is far superior to all others in the collection, if judged by present-day standards. This story of sin and its punishment reminds one in its moral earnestness of George Eliot. Mr. Mandeville had brought ruin upon a poor girl, Mary Lawson, whose own child died, when she became the wet nurse of Robert, Mr. Mandeville's legitimate son and heir. Mary grew to love the boy, but, when the father threatened to expose her character unless she would continue to be his mistress, she ran away, taking the infant with her. She became a servant in a lodging-house in Weymouth, where she lived for fifteen years, respected and beloved. At the end of that time, Mr. Mandeville came to the house as a lodger, where he neither recognised Mary nor knew his son. But he disliked Robert, and paid no heed to the fact that one of his own servants was leading the boy into evil ways. When Robert was accused of a crime which his own servant had committed, he saw him sent to prison and later transported with indifference. The grief of the father when he learned that Robert was his own child was most poignant, and his unavailing efforts to save him are vividly told. He is left bowed with grief, for he suffers under the double penalty of "a reproachful world and a reproaching conscience."

CHAPTER VII

Maria Edgeworth. Lady Morgan

"My real name is Thady Quirk, though in the family I have always been known by no other than 'honest Thady'; afterward, in the time of Sir Murtagh, diseased, I remember to hear them calling me 'old Thady,' and now I'm come to 'poor Thady.'" Thus the faithful servant of the Rackrent family introduces himself, before relating the history of the lords of the castle, where he and his had lived rent-free time out of mind. And what consummate art Maria Edgeworth showed in her first novel, Castle Rackrent, in letting "poor Thady" ramble with all the garrulity of old age. To him, who had never been farther than a day's tramp from the castle, there was nothing in the world's history but it and its owners. No servant but an Irish servant could have told the story as he did, judging the characters of his masters with shrewd wit and relating their worst failings with a "God bless them."

And where out of Ireland could Thady have found such masters, ready to spend all they had and another man's too, happy and free, and dying as merrily as they had lived! There was Sir Patrick, who, as Thady tells us, "could sit out the best man in Ireland, let alone the three kingdoms"; Sir Kit, who married a Jewess for her money; and Sir Condy, who signed away the estate rather than be bothered to look into his steward's accounts, and then feigned that he was dead that he might hear what his friends said of him at the wake. But he soon came to life, and a merry time they had of it. "But to my mind," says Thady, "Sir Condy was rather upon the sad order in the midst of it all, not finding there was such a great talk about himself after his death, as he had expected to hear." But Thady loved his master, and it is with genuine grief that he records his ultimate death, and with simple and unconscious wit he adds, "He had but a very poor funeral after all."

In The Absentee, the manners and customs of the Irish peasants are more broadly delineated than in Castle Rackrent. The Absentee was written to call the attention of the Irish landlords who were living in England to the wretched condition of their tenants left in the power of unscrupulous stewards. Lord Colambre, the son of Lord Clonbrony, an absentee, visits his father's estates, which he has not seen for many years, in disguise, and goes among the peasants, many of whom are in abject poverty. But the quick generosity of the nation speaks in the poor Widow O'Neil's "Kindly welcome, sir," with which she opens the door to the unknown lord, and its enthusiastic loyalty in the joyful acclamations of the peasants when he reveals himself to them,—a scene which Macaulay has pronounced the finest in literature since the twenty-second book of the Odyssey.

Ennui is another of her stories of Irish life, in which the supposed Earl of Glenthorn, after a long residence in England, returns to his Irish estates. The heroine of this tale is the old nurse, Ellinor O'Donoghoe. As the nurses of many stories are said to have done, she had substituted her own child for the rightful heir, and was frantic with joy when she saw him the master of Glenthorn Castle. Her devotion to the earl is pathetic, and her secret fears of the deception she had practised on the old earl may have prompted her strange speech that, if it pleased God, she would like to die on Christmas Day, of all days, "because the gates of heaven will be open all that day; and who knows but a body might slip in unbeknownst?" Ellinor is a woman of many virtues and many failings, but she is always pure Celt.