THE WOMEN NOVELISTS
BY
R. BRIMLEY JOHNSON
AUTHOR OF
“TALES PROM CHAUCER” “TOWARDS RELIGION”
“TENNYSON AND HIS POETRY”
LONDON: 48 PALL MALL
W. COLLINS SONS & CO. LTD.
GLASGOW MELBOURNE AUCKLAND
[Pg vii]
I have to thank the editor and publisher of
The Athenæum for permission to reprint the
chapter on “Parallel Passages”; the editor
and publisher of The Gownsman for permission
to use “A Study in Fine Art”;
Professor Gollancz and Messrs. Chatto &
Windus for permission to reprint the
section on “Cranford” which was written for
an Introduction to a reprint of that novel
in “The King’s Classics.”
CONTENTS
[Pg 1]
THE WOMEN NOVELISTS
INTRODUCTION
Although women wrote novels before Defoe,
the father of English fiction, or Richardson, the
founder of the modern novel, we cannot detect
any peculiarly feminine elements in their work, or
profitably consider it apart from the general development
of prose.
In the beginning they copied men, and saw
through men’s eyes, because—here and elsewhere—they
assumed that men’s dicta and practice in
life and art were their only possible guides and
examples. Women to-day take up every form of
fiction attempted by men, because they assume
that their powers are as great, their right to express
themselves equally varied.
But there was a period, covering about a hundred
years, during which women “found themselves”
in fiction, and developed the art, along lines of their[Pg 2]
own, more or less independently. This century
may conveniently be divided into three periods,
which it is the object of the following pages to
analyse:
From the publication of Evelina to the publication
of Sense and Sensibility, 1778-1811.
From the publication of Sense and Sensibility
to the publication of Jane Eyre, 1811-1847.
From the publication of Jane Eyre to the publication
of Daniel Deronda, 1847-1876.
It may be noticed, however, in passing to the
establishment of a feminine school by Fanny
Burney, that individual women did pioneer work;
among whom the earliest, and the most important,
is “the ingenious Mrs. Aphra Behn” (1640-1689).
She is generally believed to have been the first
woman “to earn a livelihood in a profession, which,
hitherto, had been exclusively monopolized by
men,”—“she was, moreover, the first to introduce
milk punch into England”! For much of her
work she adopted a masculine pseudonym and,
with it, a reckless licence no doubt essential to
success under the Restoration. Yet she wrote
“the first prose story that can be compared with
things that already existed in foreign literatures”;[Pg 3]
and, allowing for a few rather outspoken descriptive
passages, there is nothing peculiarly objectionable
in her Oroonoko; or, The History of the Royal
Slave. Making use of her own experience of the
West Indies, acquired in childhood, she invented
the “noble savage,” the “natural man,” long afterwards
made fashionable by Rousseau; and boldly
contrasted the ingenuous virtues, and honour, of
this splendid heathen with Christian treachery
and avarice. The “great and just character of
Oroonoko,” indeed, would scarcely have satisfied
“Revolutionary” ideals of the primitive; since he
was inordinately proud of his birth and his beauty,
and killed his wife from an “artificial” sense of
honour. But there is a naïvely exaggerated
simplicity in Mrs. Behn’s narrative; which does
faithfully represent, as she herself expresses it,
“an absolute idea of the first state of innocence,
before man knew how to sin.” Whence she
declares “it is most evident and plain, that simple
nature is the most harmless, inoffensive, and
virtuous mistress. It is she alone, if she were
permitted, that better instructs the world than
all the inventions of man: religion would here but
destroy that tranquility they possess by ignorance; and[Pg 4]
laws would but teach them to know offence, of which
now they have no notion ... they have a native
justice, which knows no fraud; and they understand
no vice, or cunning, but when they are taught
by the white men.”
Our author is quite uncompromising in this
matter; and her eulogy of “fig-leaves” should
refute the most cynical: “I have seen a handsome
young Indian, dying for love of a beautiful Indian
maid; but all his courtship was, to fold his arms,
pursue her with his eyes, and sighs were all his
language: while she, as if no such lover were
present, or rather as if she desired none such, carefully
guarded her eyes from beholding him; and
never approached him, but she looked down with
all the blushing modesty I have seen in the most
severe and cautious of our world.”
The actual story of Oroonoko will hardly move
us to-day; and the final scene, where that Prince
and gentleman is seen smoking a pipe (!) as the
horrid Christians “hack off” his limbs one by one,
comes dangerously near the ludicrous. Still we
may “hope,” with the modest authoress, that
“the reputation of her pen is considerable enough
to make his glorious name to survive all ages.”
[Pg 5]
It should finally be remarked that Aphra forestalls
one more innovation of the next century,
by introducing slight descriptions of scenery; and
that here, as always, she arrested her readers’
attention by plunging straight into the story.
Two other professional women of that generation
deserve mention: Mrs. Manley (1672-1724),
author of the scurrilous New Atalantis, and Mrs.
Heywood (or Haywood) (1693-1756), editor of
the Female Spectator. Both were employed by their
betters for the secret promotion of vile libels—the
former political, the latter literary; and both
wrote novels of some vigour, but deservedly forgotten:
although the latest, and best, of Mrs.
Manley’s were written after Pamela, and bear
striking witness to the influence of Richardson.
A few more years bring us to the true birth of the
modern novel; when Sarah Fielding (1710-1768),
whose David Simple, in an unfortunate attempt
to combine sentiment with the picaresque, revealed
some of her brother’s humour and the
decided influence of Richardson. And though
The Female Quixote of Charlotte Lennox
(1720-1804) has been pronounced “more absurd
than any of the romances which it was designed[Pg 6]
to ridicule,” Macaulay himself allows it “great
merit, when considered as a wild satirical harlequinade”;
and it remains an early, if not the first,
example of conscious revolt against the artificial
tyrannies of “Romance,” of which the evil influences
on the art of fiction were soon to be triumphantly
abolished for ever by a sister-authoress.
[Pg 7]
THE FIRST WOMAN NOVELIST
(Fanny Burney, 1752-1840)
It is, to-day, a commonplace of criticism that the
novel proper, though partially forestalled in subject
and treatment by Defoe, began with Richardson’s
Pamela in 1740. The main qualities which distinguish
this work from our earlier “romances”
were the attempt to copy, or reproduce, real life;
and the choice of middle-class society for dramatis
personæ. It is difficult for us to realise how long
the prejudice against “middle-class” characters
held sway; but no doubt Christopher North reflected
the sentiments of the majority in 1829
when he represented the “Shepherd” declaring it
to be his “profound conviction that the strength
o’ human nature lies either in the highest or lowest
estate of life. Characters in books should either
be kings, and princes, and nobles, and on a level
with them, like heroes; or peasants, shepherds,
farmers, and the like, includin’ a’ orders amaist
o’ our ain working population. The intermediate[Pg 8]
class—that is, leddies and gentlemen in general—are
no worth the Muse’s while; for their life
is made up chiefly o’ mainners,—mainners,—mainners;—you
canna see the human creters for
their claes; and should ane o’ them commit
suicide in despair, in lookin’ on the dead body,
you are mair taen up wi’ its dress than its decease.”
The “romance” only condescended below
Prince or Peer for the exhibition of the Criminal.
It aimed at exaggeration in every detail for
dramatic effect. It recognised no limit to the
resources of wealth, the beauty of virtue, the
splendour of heroism, or the corruption of villainy.
It permitted the supernatural. Fielding clearly
considers it necessary to apologise for the vulgarity
of mere “human nature”:
“The provision, then, which we have here made, is
no other than Human Nature: nor do I fear that any
sensible reader, though most luxurious in his taste, will
start, cavil, or be offended because I have named but
one article. The tortoise, as the alderman of Bristol,
well learned in eating, knows by much experience, besides
the delicious calipash and calipee, contains many different
kinds of food; nor can the learned reader be ignorant,
that in human nature, though here collected under one
general name, is such prodigious variety, that a cook will
have sooner gone through all the several species of animal[Pg 9]
and vegetable food in the world, than an author will be
able to exhaust so extensive a subject.
“An objection may perhaps be apprehended from the
more delicate, that this dish is too vulgar and common;
for what else is the subject of all the romances, novels,
plays, and poems, with which the stalls abound? Many
exquisite viands might be rejected by the epicure, if it
was sufficient cause for his contemning of them as common
and vulgar, that something was to be found in the most
paltry alleys under the same name. In reality, true
nature is as difficult to be met with in authors, as the
Bayonne ham, or Bologna sausage, is to be found in the
shops.
“But the whole, to continue the metaphor, consists
in the cooking of the author; for, as Mr. Pope tells us,—
‘True wit is nature to advantage dress’d;
What oft was thought, but ne’er so well express’d.’
“The same animal which hath the honour to have
some part of his flesh eaten at the table of a duke, may
perhaps be degraded in another part, and some of his
limbs gibbetted, as it were, in the vilest stall in town.
Where then lies the difference between the food of the
nobleman and the porter, if both are at dinner on the
same ox or calf, but in the seasoning, the dressing,
the garnishing, and the setting forth? Hence the one provokes
and incites the most languid appetite, and the other
turns and palls that which is the sharpest and keenest.
“In like manner the excellence of the mental entertainment
consists less in the subject than in the author’s
skill in well dressing it up. How pleased, therefore,
will the reader be to find that we have, in the following[Pg 10]
work, adhered closely to one of the highest principles
of the best cook which the present age, or perhaps that
of Heliogabalus, hath produced? This great man, as
is well known to all lovers of polite eating, begins at
first by setting plain things before his hungry guests,
rising afterwards by degrees, as their stomachs may be
supposed to decrease, to the very quintessence of sauce
and spices.
“In like manner we shall represent human nature
at first, to the keen appetite of our reader, in that more
plain and simple manner in which it is found in the
country, and shall hereafter hash and ragout it with all
the high French and Italian seasoning of affectation
and vice which courts and cities afford. By these means,
we doubt not but our reader may be rendered desirous
to read on for ever, as the great person just above mentioned,
is supposed to have made some persons eat.”
Samuel Richardson, printer, revolutionised
fiction. He inaugurated a method of novel-writing:
shrewdly adapted, and developed, by
Fielding; boisterously copied by Smollett;
humorously varied by Goldsmith and Sterne.
And when the new ideal of realism and simple
narrative had been thus, more or less consciously,
established as fit fruit for the circulating library:
that “evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge,”
finally purified of all offence against decency,
was planted in every household by a timid and[Pg 11]
bashful young lady, who “hemmed and stitched
from breakfast to dinner with scrupulous regularity.”
The mental development of Frances Burney,
authoress of Evelina, was encouraged by “no
governess, no teacher of any art or of any language.”
Her father’s library contained only one novel;
and she does not appear to have supplemented
it in this particular. But the peculiar circumstances
of Dr. Burney’s social position, and the
infectious enthusiasm of his artistic temperament,
provided his daughter with very exceptional
opportunities for the study of material appropriate
to the construction of a modern novel.
On the one hand, he permitted her free intercourse
“with those whom butlers and waiting-maids
call vulgar”; and, on the other, he gave her
every opportunity of watching Society at ease
in the company of artists and men of letters.
At his concerts and tea-parties, again, she often
saw Johnson and Garrick; Bruce, Omai, and the
“lions” of her generation; the peers and the
politicians; the ambassadors and the travellers;
the singers and the fiddlers.
And, finally, if her most worthy stepmother[Pg 12]
has been derided for the conventionality which
discouraged the youthful “observer,” and
dictated a “bonfire” for her early manuscripts,
it may not be altogether fanciful to conjecture
that the domestic ideals of feminine propriety
thus inculcated had some hand in shaping the
precise direction of the influence which Fanny was
destined to exert upon the development of her art.
For if Evelina was modelled on the work of
Richardson, and the fathers of fiction, who had so
recently passed away, it nevertheless inaugurated
a new departure—the expression of a feminine outlook
on life. It was, frankly and obviously, written
by a woman for women, though it captivated men
of the highest intellect.
We need not suppose that Johnson’s pet “character-monger”
set out with any intention of
accomplishing this reform; but the woman’s
view is so obvious on every page that we can
scarcely credit the general assumption of “experienced”
masculine authorship, which was certainly
prevalent during the few weeks it remained
anonymous. It would have been far more reasonable
for the public to have accepted the legend of
its being written by a girl of seventeen. For the[Pg 13]
heroine is represented as being no older; and
though Miss Burney was twenty-six at the time,
she has been most extraordinarily successful in
assuming the tone of extreme youth, and thus
emphasising still further the innovation. Its main
subject is “The Introduction of a Young Lady
to the World”; and being told in letters from the
heroine to her guardian, could scarcely have been
better arranged, by a self-conscious artist, for the
exposition of the novelty. On the other hand,
the success of its execution doubtless owes much
to the author’s spontaneity and to her untrained
mind. It would seem that she was blissfully
unconscious of any accepted “rules” in composition;
and even in Cecilia, generally supposed
to be partially disfigured by Johnson’s advice, it
is only in the structure of her sentences that she
attempted to be “correct.” It is a more complex
variant of the same theme, with a precisely similar
inspiration: the manipulation of her own experience
of life, and her own comments thereon.
It is obvious that we can only realise the precise
nature of what she accomplished for fiction by
comparing her work with Richardson’s, since
Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne wove all their stories[Pg 14]
about a “hero,” and even Goldsmith drew women
through the spectacles of a naïvely “superior”
and obviously masculine vicar. Richardson, on
the other hand, was admittedly an expert in the
analysis of the feminine. We must recognise a
lack of virility in touch and outlook. The prim
exactitude of his cautious realism, however startling
in comparison with anything before Pamela, has
much affinity with what our ancestors might have
expected from their womenkind. Yet his women
are quite obviously studies, not self-revelations.
We can fancy that Pamela sat on his knee to have
her portrait taken; while he was giving such infinite
care to Clarissa’s drapery on the model’s throne.
We can only marvel that he could ever determine
whether Clementina or Miss Harriet Byron were
a more worthy mate for “the perfect man.”
Verily they were all as men made them; exquisite
creatures, born for our delight, but regulated
by our taste in loveliness and virtue. That marvellous
little eighteenth-century tradesman
understood their weaknesses no less than their
perfections; but the fine lines of his brush show
through every word or expression: the delicacy
of outline is deliberately obtained by art. They[Pg 15]
are patently the fruits of acute observation, keen
sympathy, and subtle draughtsmanship. They
remain lay figures, posed for the centre of the
picture. The showman is there, pulling the strings.
And above all they are man-made. For all his
extraordinary insight Richardson can only see
woman from the outside. Our consciousness of
his skill proves it is conscious. His world still
centres round the hero: the rustic fine gentleman,
the courtly libertine, or the immaculate male.
Fanny Burney reverses the whole process. To
begin with external evidence: it is Evelina who
tells the tale, and every person or incident is
regarded from her point of view. The resultant
difference goes to the heart of the matter. The
reader does not here feel that he is studying a
new type of female: he is making a new friend.
Evelina and Cecilia speak for themselves throughout.
There is no sense of effort or study; not
because Fanny Burney is a greater artist or has
greater power to conceal her art, but because, for
the accomplishment of her task, she has simply
to be herself. It is here, in fact, that we find the
peculiar charm, and the supreme achievement,
of the women who founded the school. By never[Pg 16]
attempting professional study of life outside their
own experience, they were enabled to produce a
series of feminine “Confessions”; which remain
almost unique as human documents. We must
recognise that it was Richardson who had made
this permissible. He broke away, for ever, from
the extravagant impossibilities and unrealities of
Romance. He copied life, and life moreover in
its prosaic aspect—the work-a-day, unpicturesque
experience of the middle-class. But still he
lingered among its crises. It is not that in
his days men were still given to the expression
of emotion by words, and deeds, of violence. While
beautiful maidens were liable to be driven furiously
by the villain into the presence of an unfrocked
clergyman; while money could buy a whole
army of accomplices for their undoing; Richardson
remains a realist in the narration of such episodes.
We are here referring to the fact that his stories
are all concerned with the elaborate development
of one central emotion or the analysis of one predominating
character. They are pictures of life
composed for the exhibition of a slightly phenomenal aspect:
the depths of human nature, not
commonly obvious to us in the moods of a day.
[Pg 17]
It was reserved for Fanny Burney, and still
more Jane Austen, to “make a story” out of the
trivialities of our everyday existence; to reveal
humanity at a tea-party or an afternoon call.
This is, of course, but carrying on his reform
one step further. The women, besides introducing
the new element of their own especial point of
view, made the new realism strictly domestic; and
learned to depend, even less than he, upon the
exceptional, more obviously dramatic, or less
normal, incidents of actual life. If Richardson
invented the ideal of fidelity to human nature,
Miss Burney selected its everyday habits and
costume for imitation. Evelina’s account of
“shopping” in London would not fit into
Richardson’s scheme; while the many incidents
and characters, introduced merely for comic effect,
lie outside his province.
Miss Burney’s ideal for heroines, indeed, must
seem singularly old-fashioned to-day; nor do we
delight in Evelina for those passages to which its
author devoted her most serious ambitions. She
does not excel in minute, or sustained, characterisation;
nor have we ever entirely confirmed the
appreciation which declares that her work was[Pg 18]
“inspired by one consistent vein of passion,
never relaxed.” The passion of Evelina—by which,
however, the critic does not mean her love for
Orville—has always seemed to us melodramatic
and artificial. We have little, or no, patience with
those refined tremors and heart-burnings which
completely prostrate the young lady at the mere
possibility of seeing her long-lost father. It is
not in human nature to feel so deeply about anyone
we have never seen, of whom we know nothing
but evil.
No blame attaches to Miss Burney as an artist
in this respect, however, because she was intent
upon the revelation of sensibility, that most elusive
of female graces on which our grandmothers were
wont to pride themselves. Any definition of
this quality, suited to our comprehension to-day,
would seem beyond the subtleties of emotional
analysis; but we may observe, as some indication
of its meaning, that no man was ever supposed,
or expected, to possess it. Sensibility, in fact,
was the acknowledged privilege of ladies—as distinguished
at once from gentlemen or women;
particularly becoming in youth; and indicating
the well-bred, the elegant, and the fastidious.[Pg 19]
It must not, of course, be confounded with “susceptibility,”
a sign of weakness; for though it,
temporarily, unfitted the lady for action or speech,
it was the expression of deep, permanent, feeling
and of exquisite taste. Her gentle voice rendered
inaudible by tears, her streaming eyes buried in
the cushions of her best sofa, or on the bosom of
her best friend, the beautiful maiden would fondly
persuade herself that her life was blighted for evermore.
Pierced to the heart by a cold world, a
faithless friend, or a stern parent, as the case might
be, she would terrify those who loved her by the
wild expression of her eyes, the dead whiteness of
her lips, her feeble gesticulations, and the disorder
of her whole person. In the end, mercifully, she
would—faint! Under such influences, we cannot
distinguish very explicitly between the effects of
joy or sorrow. Evelina is scarcely more natural
about her transports at discovering a brother,
or in the final satisfaction of her filial instincts,
than in her alarm about “how He would receive
her,” already mentioned.
We are not justified, on the other hand, in
supposing that a heroine should only exhibit sensibility
on some real emotional catastrophe. There[Pg 20]
was a tendency, we have observed, in “elegant
females” to be utterly abashed and penetrated
with remorse, covered with shame, trembling
with alarm, and on the verge of hysterics—from
joy or grief—upon most trivial provocation. A
tone, a look, even a movement, if unexpected or
mysterious, was generally sufficient to upset the
nice adjustment of their mental equilibrium.
“Have I done wrong? Am I misunderstood? Is
it possible he really loves me?” The dear creatures
passed through life on the edge of a precipice: on
the borderland between content, despair, and the
seventh heaven.
The wonder of it all comes from admitting that
Miss Burney actually reconciles us to such absurdities.
Except in the passionate scenes, Evelina’s
sensibility is one of her chief charms. In some
mysterious and subtle fashion, it really indicates
the superiority of her mind and her essential refinement.
She will be prattling away, with all the
naïveté of genuine innocence, about her delight
in the condescending perfections of the “noble
Orville,” and then—at one word of warning
from her beloved guardian—the whole world
assumes other aspects, no man may be trusted, and[Pg 21]
she would fly at once to peace, and forgetfulness,
in the country. We smile, inevitably, at the
“complete ingénue”; but the quick response
to her old friend’s loving anxiety, the transparent
candour of a purity which, if instinctive, is not
dependent on ignorance, combine to form a really
“engaging” personality.
It may be that we have here discovered the
secret of sensibility—a perception of the fine
shades, and instant responsiveness to them. There
is, however, a most instructive passage in The
Mysteries of Udolpho which throws much light
on this matter. Mrs. Radcliffe has every claim
to be heard, for her heroines are much addicted
to sensibility. The passage occurs in an early
chapter; when St. Aubert is dying, and naturally
wishes to impress upon his orphan daughter such
truths as may guide her safely through life. It
has, therefore, all the significance of the death-bed;
while he “had never thought more justly,
or expressed himself more clearly, than he did
now.” Under such circumstances, and in such
manner, did that worthy gentleman discourse
on
[Pg 22]
The Dangers of Sensibility
“Above all, my dear Emily, said he, do not indulge
in the pride of fine feeling, the romantic error of amiable
minds. Those who really possess sensibility ought early
to be taught that it is a dangerous quality, which is
continually extracting the excess of misery or delight
from every surrounding circumstance. And since, in
our passage through this world, painful circumstances
occur more frequently than pleasing ones, and since our
sense of evil is, I fear, more acute than our sense of good,
we become the victim of our feelings, unless we can in
some degree command them. I know you will say—for
you are young, my Emily—I know you will say, that you
are contented sometimes to suffer, rather than give up
your refined sense of happiness at others; but when
your mind has been long harassed by vicissitude, you
will be content to rest, and you will then recover from
your delusion: you will perceive that the phantom of
happiness is exchanged for the substance; for happiness
arises in a state of peace, not of tumult: it is of a
temperate and uniform nature; and can no more exist
in a heart that is continually alive to minute circumstances
than in one that is dead to feeling. You see,
my dear, that, though I would guard you against the
dangers of sensibility, I am not an advocate for apathy.
At your age, I should have said that is a vice more hateful
than all the errors of sensibility, and I say so still. I
call it a vice, because it leads to positive evil. In this,
however, it does no more than an ill-governed sensibility,
which, by such a rule, might also be called a vice; but
the evil of the former is of more general consequence....
[Pg 23]
“I would not teach you to become insensible, if I could—I
would only warn you of the evils of susceptibility,
and point out how you may avoid them. Beware, my
love, I conjure you, of that self-delusion which has been
fatal to the peace of many persons—beware of priding
yourself on the gracefulness of sensibility: if you yield
to this vanity, your happiness is lost for ever. Always
remember how much more valuable is the strength of
fortitude, than the grace of sensibility. Do not, however,
confound fortitude with apathy: apathy cannot
know the virtue. Remember, too, that one act of beneficence,
one act of real usefulness, is worth all the abstract
sentiment in the world. Sentiment is a disgrace, instead
of an ornament, unless it lead us to good actions: the
miser, who thinks himself respectable merely because
he possesses wealth, and thus mistakes the means of
doing good for the actual accomplishment of it, is not
more blameable than the man of sentiment without
active virtue. You may have observed persons, who
delight so much in this sort of sensibility to sentiment,
that they turn from the distressed, and because their
sufferings are painful to be contemplated, do not
endeavour to relieve them. How despicable is that
humanity which can be contented to pity where it might
assuage!”
And we are finally disposed to question whether
Miss Burney herself were actually conscious of the
subtlety with which she has allowed her heroine
to reveal, in every sentence, the scarcely perceptible
advance of her unsuspected “partiality.” The[Pg 24]
reader, of course, recognises Orville at sight for
what he proves to be in the final event; but he
frequently reminds us of Sir Charles Grandison—and
in nothing so much, perhaps, as in his gentlemanly
precautions against letting himself go or
expressing his emotions. Only a woman of real
delicacy, indeed, could have imagined, or
appreciated, the self-effacement with which he
helps and protects the guileless heroine from her
unprincipled admirers; and it required genuine
refinement to give him the courage evinced by his
tactful inquiries into her circumstances and his
most fatherly advice. The whole development
of the relations between them must be acknowledged
as a triumph of art, and conclusive evidence
of “nice” feeling.
It is impossible, I think, to put Cecilia herself
on a level with Evelina; though I personally have
always felt that the more crowded canvas of the
book so entitled, and its greater variety of incident,
reveal more mature power. But it is less
spontaneous and, in a certain sense, less original.
To begin with, Cecilia is always conscious of her
superiority. Like her sister heroine, a country
“miss,” and suddenly tossed into Society without[Pg 25]
any proper guidance, she yet assumes the centre
of the stage without effort, and queens it over the
most experienced, by virtue of beauty and wealth.
It may be doubted if she has much “sensibility”
for everyday matters: whereas the lavish expenditure
of emotional fireworks over the haughty
Delviles, and the melodramatic sufferings they
entail, are most intolerably protracted, and entirely
destroy our interest in the conclusion of the narrative.
The occasional scene, or episode, we complained
of in Evelina, is here extended to long
chapters, or books, of equally strained passion on a
more complex issue. Fortunately they all come at
the end, and need not disturb our enjoyment of the
main story; though, indeed, the whole plot depends
far more on melodramatic effect. Mr. Harrell’s
abominable recklessness, and his sensational
suicide, the criminal passion of Mr. Monckton,
and the story of Henrietta Belfield, carry us into
depths beyond the reach of Evelina, where Miss
Burney herself does not walk with perfect safety.
And, in our judgment, such experiences diminish
the charm of her heroine.
Yet in the main Cecilia possesses, and exhibits
those primarily feminine qualities which now made[Pg 26]
their first appearance in English fiction, being
beyond man’s power to delineate. She, too, is
that “Womanly Woman” whom Mr. Bernard
Shaw has so eloquently denounced. She has the
magnetic power of personal attraction; the charm
of mystery; the strength of weakness; the irresistible
appeal with which Nature has endowed
her for its own purposes: so seldom present in
the man-made heroine, certainly not revealed to
Samuel Richardson and his great contemporaries.
For the illustration of our main theme, we have
so far dwelt upon the revelation of womanhood
achieved by Miss Burney. It is time to consider,
in more detail, her application of the new
“realism,” her method of “drawing from life,”
now first recognised as the proper function of the
novelist. It is here that her unique education,
or experience, has full play. Instead of depending,
like Richardson, upon the finished analysis of a
few characters, centred about one emotional situation,
or of securing variety of interests and character-types,
à la Fielding, by use of the “wild-oats”
convention, she works up the astonishing “contrasts”
in life, which she had herself been privileged
to witness, and achieves comedy by the abnormal[Pg 27]
mixture of Society. Thus she is able to find drama
in domesticity. Her most original effects are
produced in the drawing-room or the assembly,
at a ball or a theatre, in the “long walks” of
Vauxhall or Ranelagh: wherever, and whenever,
mankind is seen only at surface-value, enjoying
the pleasures and perils of everyday existence.
How vividly, as Macaulay remarks, did she conjecture
“the various scenes, tragic and comic,
through which the poor motherless girl, highly
connected on one side, meanly connected on the
other, might have to pass. A crowd of unreal
beings, good and bad, grave and ludicrous, surrounded
the pretty, timid young orphan: a coarse
sea-captain; an ugly insolent fop, blazing in a
superb court-dress; another fop, as ugly and as
insolent, but lodged on Snow Hill, and tricked out
in second-hand finery for the Hampstead ball;
an old woman, all wrinkles and rouge, flirting her
fan with the air of a Miss of seventeen, and
screaming in a dialect made up of vulgar French
and vulgar English; a poet lean and ragged, with
a broad Scotch accent. By degrees these shadows
acquired stronger and stronger consistence: the
impulse which urged Fanny to write became[Pg 28]
irresistible; and the result was the history of
Evelina.”
Of what must seem, to our thinking, the extraordinary
licence permitted to persons accounted
gentlemen, Miss Burney avails herself to the
utmost; and Evelina is scarcely less often embarrassed
or distressed by Willoughby’s violence
and the insolence of Lord Merton, than by the
stupid vulgarity of the Branghtons and “Beau”
Smith. We have primarily the sharp contrast
between Society and Commerce—each with its
own standards of comfort, pleasure, and decorum;
and secondarily, a great variety of individual
character (and ideal) within both groups. The
“contrasts” of Cecilia are, in the main, more
specifically individual, lacking the one general
sharp class division, and may be more accurately
divided into one group of Society “types,” another
of Passions exemplified in persons obsessed by a
single idea. It is “in truth a grand and various
picture-gallery, which presented to the eye a long
series of men and women, each marked by some
strong peculiar feature. There were avarice and
prodigality, the pride of blood and the pride of
money, morbid restlessness and morbid apathy,[Pg 29]
frivolous garrulity, supercilious silence, a Democritus
to laugh at everything, and a Heraclitus to
lament over everything.... 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 miseries 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.”
It is primarily, indeed, a most diverting picture
of manners; and if, as we have endeavoured to
show, Miss Burney advanced on Richardson by
the revelation of womanhood in her heroines, the
realism of her minor persons must be applauded
rather for its variety in outward seeming than for[Pg 30]
its subtlety of characterisation. As Ben Jonson
hath it:
“When some one peculiar quality
Does so possess a man, that it doth draw
All his effects, his spirits, and his powers,
In their confluxions all to run one way,
This may be truly said to be a humour.”
It is in the exhibition of “humours” that our
authoress delights and excels.
Of any particular construction Miss Burney
was entirely guiltless; in this respect, of course,
lagging far behind Fielding. She has no style,
beyond a most attractive spontaneity; writing in
“true woman’s English, clear, natural, and lively.”
Under the watchful eye of Dr. Johnson, indeed,
she made some attempt at the rounded period,
the “elegant” antithesis, in Cecilia: but, regretting
the obvious effort, we turn here again, with renewed
delight, to the flowing simplicity of her
dramatic dialogue.
There is no occasion, at this time of day, to dwell
upon her sparkling wit, though we may note in
passing its obviously feminine inspiration—as
opposed to the more scholarly subtleties of Fielding—and
its patent superiority to, for example,[Pg 31]
the kitten-sprightliness of Richardson’s “Lady
G.” We cannot claim that Miss Burney made
any particular advance in this matter; but, here
again, her work stands out as the first permanent
expression—at least in English—of that shrewd
vivacity and quickness of observation with which
so many a woman, who might have founded a
salon, has been wont to enliven the conversation
of the home and to promote the gaiety of social
gatherings. We must recognise, on the other
hand, that, if commonly more refined than her
generation, Miss Burney has yielded to its prejudice
against foreigners in some coarseness towards
Madame Duval; as we marvel at her father’s
approval of this detail—while actually deploring
the vigour of her contempt for Lovel, the fop!
Finally, for all technicalities of her art, Miss
Burney remains an amateur in authorship, who,
by a lucky combination of genius and experience,
was destined to utter the first word for women in
the most popular form of literature; and to point
the way to her most illustrious successors for the
perfection of the domestic novel.
Probably the most important, more or less
contemporary, criticism on the early achievements[Pg 32]
of women, was uttered—incidentally—by
Hazlitt in 1818. Dismissing Miss Edgeworth’s
Tales as “a kind of pedantic, pragmatical common-sense,
tinctured with the pertness and pretensions
of the paradoxes to which they are so complacently
opposed,” assigning the first place to Mrs. Radcliffe
for her power of “describing the indefinable and
embodying a phantom,” he says of Miss Burney
and of feminine work generally:
“Madame D’Arblay is a mere common observer of
manners, and also a very woman. It is this last circumstance
which forms the peculiarity of her writings, and
distinguishes them from those masterpieces[1] which I
have before mentioned. She is a quick, lively, and
accurate observer of persons and things; but she always
looks at them with a consciousness of her sex, and in
that point of view in which it is the particular business
and interest of women to observe them ... her forte is
in describing the absurdities and affectations of external
behaviour, or the manners of people in company....
The form such characters or people might be supposed
to assume for a night at a masquerade....
“Women, in general, have a quicker perception of any
oddity or singularity of character than men, and are
more alive to any absurdity which arises from a violation
of the rules of society, or a deviation from established
custom. This partly arises from the restraints on their[Pg 33]
own behaviour, which turn their attention constantly
on the subject, and partly from other causes. The surface
of their minds, like that of their bodies, seems of a finer
texture than ours; more soft, and susceptible of immediate
impulses. They have less muscular strength, less power
of continued voluntary attention, of reason, passion,
and imagination; but they are more easily impressed
with whatever appeals to their senses or habitual prejudices.
The intuitive perception of their minds is less
disturbed by any abstruse reasonings on causes or consequences.
They learn the idiom of character, as they
acquire that of language, by rote, without troubling themselves
about the principles. Their observation is not the
less accurate on that account, as far as it goes, for it has
been well said that ‘there is nothing so true as habit.’
“There is little other power in Madame D’Arblay’s
novels than that of immediate observation; her characters,
whether of refinement or vulgarity, are equally
superficial and confined. The whole is a question of form,
whether that form is adhered to or infringed. It is this
circumstance which takes away dignity and interest from
her story and sentiments, and makes the one so teasing
and tedious, and the other so insipid. The difficulties
in which she involves her heroines are too much ‘Female
Difficulties’; they are difficulties created out of nothing.
The author appears to have no other idea of refinement
than that it is the reverse of vulgarity; but the reverse
of vulgarity is fastidiousness and affectation. There is a
true and a false delicacy. Because a vulgar country Miss
would answer ‘Yes’ to a proposal of marriage in the
first page, Madame D’Arblay makes it a proof of an excess[Pg 34]
of refinement, and an indispensable point of etiquette in
her young ladies, to postpone the answer to the end of
five volumes, without the smallest reason for their doing so,
and with every reason to the contrary.... The whole
artifice of her fable consists in coming to no conclusion.
Her ladies ‘stand so upon their going,’ that they do not
go at all.... They would consider it as quite indecorous
to run downstairs though the house were in flames, or to
move an inch off the pavement though a scaffolding was
falling. She has formed to herself an abstract idea of
perfection in common behaviour, which is quite as
romantic and impracticable as any other idea of the
sort.... Madame D’Arblay has woven a web of difficulties
for her heroines, something like the great silken
threads in which the shepherdesses entangled the steed
of Cervantes’ hero, who swore, in his fine enthusiastic way,
that he would sooner cut his passage to another world
than disturb the least of these beautiful meshes.”
The critic recognises the essential quality of
Miss Burney’s work—its femininity—which he
reckons, curiously enough, as a fault. But prejudices
die hard and it is evident that he is not
ready for the new point of view.
Evelina, 1778.
Cecilia, 1782.
Camilla, 1796.
The Wanderer, 1814.
[Pg 35]
A PICTURE OF YOUTH
It is natural, if not inevitable, that the later works
of Miss Burney should have been suffered to remain
unread and unremembered. Critics have told us
that they only face them unwillingly, from a sense
of duty; and none has ventured a second time.
To-day, no doubt, readers would hesitate before the
five, or more, volumes of extenuated sensibility.
And yet, though we should not ask for any
reversal of this verdict, there are points of interest—at
any rate in Camilla—which will repay attention.
The fact is, that in this work Miss Burney
has given full rein to her ideal of women, her
conception of home life, and her notions about
marriage: all eminently characteristic of the age,
and full of suggestion as to the work of women.
We have again, as the closing paragraph reminds
us, “a picture of youth,” primarily feminine;
but Camilla is no mere repetition either of Evelina
or Cecilia. She has even more sensibility, and a
new quality of most attractive impulsiveness,
which is perpetually leading her into difficulties.
[Pg 36]
There is a double contrast, or comparison, of
types. The heroine’s uncle—Sir Hugh Tyrold—seems
to have been conceived as a parody of the
young lady herself. He flies off at a tangent—far
more youthfully than she—changes his will
three or four times in the first few chapters, and
is constantly upsetting the whole family by most
ridiculous “plans” for their happiness.
On the other hand, Edgar Mandlebert—the hero—suffers
from too much caution; implanted, it
is true, by his worthy tutor; but obviously “at
home” in his nature. Practically the whole five
volumes are concerned with the misunderstandings
produced by Camilla’s hasty self-sacrifices, and his
care in studying her character, without the key to
her motives. It would be easy, indeed, to describe
the plot as a prolonged “much ado about nothing.”
The sentiments involved are palpably strained,
absurdly high-flown, and singularly unbalanced.
But we should remember two reasons for modifying
our judgment, and hesitating before a
complete condemnation.
In the first place, the ideals for women, and
for all intercourse between the sexes, differ in
nearly every particular from those of our own[Pg 37]
day; and, in the second, these people were
almost ridiculously young. Love affairs, and often
marriage, began for them when they were fifteen;
and it may be that were our own sons and daughters
put to the test at that age, their deeds and sentiments
might surprise us considerably.
“In the bosom of her respectable family resided Camilla.
Nature, with a bounty the most profuse, had been lavish
to her of attractions; Fortune, with a moderation yet
kinder, had placed her between luxury and indigence.
Her abode was in the parsonage-house of Etherington,
beautifully situated in the unequal county of Hampshire,
and in the vicinity of the varied landscapes of the New
Forest. Her father, the rector, was the younger son of
the house of Tyrold. The living, though not considerable,
enabled its incumbent to attain every rational
object of his modest and circumscribed wishes; to bestow
upon a deserving wife whatever her own forbearance
declined not; to educate a lovely race of one son and
three daughters, with that expansive propriety, which
unites improvement for the future with present enjoyment.
“In goodness of heart, and in principles of piety, this
exemplary couple were bound to each other by the most
perfect union of character, though in their tempers there
was a contrast which had scarce the gradation of a single
shade to smooth off its abrupt dissimilitude. Mr. Tyrold,
gentle with wisdom, and benign in virtue, saw with compassion
all imperfections but his own, and there doubled
the severity which to others he spared. Yet the mildness[Pg 38]
that urged him to pity blinded him not to approve;
his equity was unerring, though his judgment was indulgent.
His partner had a firmness of mind which
nothing could shake: calamity found her resolute;
even prosperity was powerless to lull her duties asleep.
The exalted character of her husband was the pride of
her existence, and the source of her happiness. He was
not merely her standard of excellence, but of endurance,
since her sense of his worth was the criterion for her
opinion of all others. This instigated a spirit of comparison,
which is almost always uncandid, and which here could
rarely escape proving injurious. Such, at its very best,
is the unskilfulness of our fallible nature, that even the
noble principle which impels our love of right, misleads
us but into new deviations, when its ambition presumes
to point at perfection. In this instance, however, distinctness
of disposition stifled not reciprocity of affection—that
magnetic concentration of all marriage felicity;—Mr.
Tyrold revered while he softened the rigid virtues
of his wife, who adored while she fortified the melting
humanity of her husband.”
Mrs. Tyrold, in fact, was a most alarming lady;
and as that “sad fellow,” their son Lionel—one
of “the merry blades of Oxford”—remarked with
spirit, “A good father is a very serious misfortune
to a poor lad like me, as the world runs; it causes
one such confounded gripes of conscience for every
little awkward thing one does.”
It will be seen, at once, that such surroundings[Pg 39]
promised that “repose” so “welcome to the
worn and to the aged, to the sick and to the
happy,” with small occasion for “danger, difficulty,
and toil”—the delight of youth. Wherefore
the flock, with only the son for black sheep,
must quit the fold, and see something of the
wicked world outside the garden. Their first
venture would seem harmless enough; being no
farther than over the fields to Cleves Park, just
purchased by Uncle Sir Hugh, who had “inherited
from his ancestors an unencumbered estate of
£5,000 per annum.”
“His temper was unalterably sweet, and every
thought of his breast was laid open to the world with
an almost infantine artlessness. But his talents bore
no proportion to the goodness of his heart, an insuperable
want of quickness, and of application in his early
days, having left him, at a later period, wholly uncultivated,
and singularly self-formed.”
Mrs. Tyrold found occasion for further delight
in the “superiority” of her husband; “though
she was not insensible to the fair future prospects
of her children, which seemed the probable result
of this change of abode.” Both parents, indeed,
prove unexpectedly “worldly” on this point;
and though obviously far above the sacrifice of[Pg 40]
principle for profit, they permit their offspring
to run risks—as they deem them—in their complaisance
to a rich relative.
Sir Hugh is a very prodigy of indiscretion, and
complicates matters by the introduction of more
cousins—Indiana Lynmere, an empty-headed but
“most exquisite workmanship of nature,” and
her wicked brother Clermont; who were his wards.
A young orphan of great wealth, Edgar Mandlebert,
pupil and ward of the Rev. Tyrold, completes
the group; though mischief is made, and all complications
really inaugurated, by Indiana’s silly
governess, Miss Margland.
Obviously there are two main issues at stake—the
property of Sir Hugh, and the hand of Edgar.
Miss Margland desires both for her favourite,
and evinces much ingenuity in the pursuit. The
worthy baronet, however, does not long hesitate
about the estate. He designs it originally for
Camilla, simply because she charms him most,
and, with his customary naïveté, lets all the world
into the secret. Then, by his own absurd thoughtlessness,
he suffers the “little sister Eugenia”
to catch the smallpox; and by ill-timed playfulness,
lames her for life. Heart-broken with[Pg 41]
remorse, and perfectly confident in Camilla’s
generous disinterestedness, he promptly compensates
the poor child by making her his heiress;
and, after again announcing his intentions in
public, proves unexpectedly resolute in maintaining
them to the end. By outsiders, however,
it is occasionally still supposed that all his money
will go to Camilla; and, consequently, she has
some experience of fortune-hunters.
The character of Eugenia deserves notice. She
is quite unlike Camilla, and the differences are no
doubt accentuated by the combination of disease
and deformity which, shutting her out from the
obvious distractions of “youth,” afford much
time for solitary reflection. Her uncle, moreover,
provided her with a scholarly tutor, and to Lionel
she was always “dear little Greek and Latin.”
It was, indeed, this highly educated, but very
youthful, paragon on whom her own family depended
at every crisis, whose advice they followed,
whose opinion they sought, whose approval was
their standard of conduct and feeling. Younger
than Camilla, she was more mature, more thoughtful
and clear-headed, always decided and always
right. Curiously enough, these young people seldom[Pg 42]
consulted their parents, they went to Eugenia;
and she, in the most important crisis of her life,
actually opposed the judgment of her elders, demanding
from herself a sacrifice which even their
lofty ideal did not expect or commend. They
considered her mistaken, but “they knew she
must do what she thought right,” and they sadly
acquiesced.
Yet there were no Spartan heroics about Eugenia.
She had even more “sensibility” than Camilla,
far more romance, and was more easily deceived.
Among other schemes of repentance for the injuries
he had so innocently inflicted on her, Sir Hugh
“arranged” for her to marry Clermont Lynmere,
before that young gentleman had come home;
and, of course, informed the whole household
of his project. Such was Eugenia’s extravagant
refinement in romance, that, though she could not
avoid being attracted by the most obviously insincere
raptures of young men in want of her
fortune, one of them “kissing her hand she
thought a liberty most unpardonable. She regarded
it as an injury to Clermont, that would risk his
life should he ever know it, and a blot to her own
delicacy, as irreparable as it was irremediable.”
[Pg 43]
It is obvious that such excessive refinement
proves ill-fitted to combat the unprincipled
ambitions of the other sex, incited by her uncle’s
generosity; and when the villain, feigning a
passion well calculated to stir her fancy, threatens
to blow out his brains if she refuse him, we do
not read of her yielding with surprise. To her
notion a promise given under any circumstances
is absolutely binding; and when, undeceived, she
is recommended by her pious parents to repudiate
it, the heroic martyr remains steadfast, and suffers
much through some volumes. Yet even in that
extremity she proves a rock to her more wavering
elder sister.
We have wandered too long, however, from our
heroine.
“Camilla was, in secret, the fondest hope of her
mother, though the rigour of her justice scarce permitted
the partiality to beat even in her own breast.
Nor did the happy little person need the avowed distinction.
The tide of youthful glee flowed jocund
from her heart, and the transparency of her fine blue
veins almost showed the velocity of its current. Every
look was a smile, every step was a spring, every thought
was a hope, every feeling was joy! and the early
felicity of her mind was without alloy.... The
beauty of Camilla, though neither perfect nor regular,[Pg 44]
had an influence peculiar on the beholder, it was hard
to catch its fault; and the cynic connoisseur, who
might persevere in seeking it, would involuntarily
surrender the strict rules of his art to the predominance
of its loveliness. Even judgment itself, the
coolest and last betrayed of our faculties, she took
by surprise, though it was not till she was absent the
seizure was detected. Her disposition was ardent in
sincerity, her mind untainted with evil. The reigning
and radical defect of her character—an imagination
that submitted to no control—proved not any antidote
against her attractions: it caught, by its force and
fire, the quick-kindling admiration of the lively; it
possessed, by magnetic persuasion, the witchery to
create sympathy in the most serious.”
It is a picture of an ideal, stammeringly defined
by Edgar: “The utmost vivacity of sentiment,
all the charm of soul, eternally beaming in the
eyes, playing in every feature, glowing in the
complexion, and brightening every smile.”
Obviously hero and heroine are born for each
other. He admires her above all women, himself
has every perfection. And though Mrs. Tyrold
may have “gloried in the virtuous delicacy of her
daughter, that so properly, till it was called for,
concealed her tenderness from the object who
so deservingly inspired it,” the reader can feel no[Pg 45]
doubt, from the beginning, of her decided “partiality.”
There are two obstacles, however, between the
lovers. In the first place, Edgar’s tutor had twice
been deceived by women; and so acts upon his
loyal pupil, by the urgent recommendation of
caution and delay, that he becomes “a creature
whose whole composition is a pile of accumulated
punctilios”; one who “will spend his life in
refining away his own happiness.” It is obvious
that, left to herself, Camilla’s nature would bear
the closest inspection, as even the old misanthrope
ultimately admits. But Miss Margland cannot
endure any rivalry with Indiana, the “beautiful
vacant-looking cousin” who has been taught to
consider herself irresistible, though it is not quite
clear what Miss Burney would have her readers
believe as to the power of beauty. At one point
she declares that “a very young man seldom likes
a silly wife. It is generally when he is further
advanced in life that he takes that depraved taste.
He then flatters himself a fool will be easier to
govern.” But elsewhere we are told that
“Men are always enchanted with something that is
both pretty and silly; because they can so easily[Pg 46]
please and so soon disconcert it; and when they have
made the little blooming fools blush and look down,
they feel nobly superior, and pride themselves in
victory.... A man looks enchanted while his
beautiful young bride talks nonsense; it comes so
prettily from her ruby lips, and she blushes and dimples
with such lovely attraction while she utters it; he
casts his eyes around him with conscious elation to see
her admirers, and his enviers.”
The wily governess has all the audacity of a
born diplomatist. She simply informs Sir Hugh,
who always believes everybody, that Edgar is
“practically” engaged to her pet pupil. The old
man regards the matter as settled, and, in perfect
innocence, encourages her machinations to make a
fact of her desire—the girl herself being flattered
into an indifferent accomplice.
Now Camilla had acquired the habit, quite becoming
to girlhood, of looking to Edgar, more or less
consciously, for guidance through life, and of actually
asking his advice on all delicate, or doubtful,
occasions. Miss Margland ingeniously accuses her
of trying to catch the heir by these “confidences,”
and Sir Hugh, without for one moment
acknowledging the possibility of Camilla having
a bad motive, advises her to avoid even the[Pg 47]
appearance of jealousy, and leave Indiana a fair
field. Such an appeal to her generosity, from so
kind a friend, was sure of eager support; and the
unfortunate girl is thus driven to seek friends
against whom Edgar had warned her, and to assume
the character of capriciousness and instability.
This proves her Introduction to the Great World,
whither Miss Burney hurries all her heroines.
Like the rest, she arrives entirely unprepared,
parents of those days apparently not considering
either advice or guidance on such matters a part
of their duty. Framed for innocent pleasure, her
natural gaiety and ardent temperament lead her
astray in every direction. She remains entirely
unsoiled, but invariably does the wrong thing.
She gets into debt, through sheer ignorance and
humility; she makes friends of “doubtful” people,
through pity and innocence; she even follows the
advice of a worldly acquaintance, attempting to
move her lover by flirting with other men. Every
word and action is designed to please him: all
have the contrary effect. His heart remains
faithful; his reason must criticise.
At this stage of the work Miss Burney revives
somewhat of her first, spontaneous, manner. The[Pg 48]
descriptions of Society—wherein “Ton, in the
scale of connoisseurs in certain circles, is as much
above fashion, as fashion is above fortune”—are
animated and amusing. We are introduced to
many new types, male and female, naïvely exaggerated
perhaps in detail, but absolutely alive and
cunningly varied. The “prevailing ill-manners of
the leaders in the ton” astonish, no less than their
brutal cowardice—in face of a girl’s danger—disgusts.
Fine gentlemen, it would seem, are neither
gallant nor chivalrous. The ladies, indeed, are
not much better. A divinity, unequally yoked,
“excites every hope by a sposo[2] properly detestable—yet
gives birth to despair by a coldness the most
shivering.” Less favoured beauties are equally
vain, and some of them more indiscreet.
But here, as in Cecilia, our author cannot resist
the indulgence of heroics. She is not satisfied with
her delightful “Comedy of Manners,” with the
ordinary misunderstandings and heart-burnings
essential to romance. In her later volumes she
plunges Camilla, and the whole Tyrold family,
into the wildest distress. They lose all their
money; Eugenia’s husband commits suicide;[Pg 49]
Lionel nearly murders an uncle, from whom he had
expectations, by a practical joke; and Camilla
acquires, by an over-elaborated series of foolish
impulses, the appearance of having injured her
parents beyond forgiveness. Immersed in difficulties,
and not in the least understanding the
circumstances, her father and mother refuse to
see her; and the forsaken maiden prays for death.
The whole episode is given in Miss Burney’s worst
manner, tempting the reader to mere angry impatience
with so much false sentiment and senseless
emotion. They tremble, they faint, they weep,
they see visions; we could almost fancy ourselves
in Bedlam.
In the end, of course, Edgar comes back, receives
an “explanation” from Camilla—written, as she
supposed, on her death-bed; and promptly restores
everybody to their senses and, incidentally—having
plenty to spare—to prosperity.
“Thus ended the long conflicts, doubts, suspenses,
and sufferings of Edgar and Camilla; who, without
one inevitable calamity, one unavoidable distress, so
nearly fell the sacrifice to the two extremes of Imprudence,
and Suspicion, to the natural heedlessness
of youth unguided, or to the acquired distrust of
experience that had been wounded.”
[Pg 50]
At first sight, certainly, it would seem that we
had little here of the Richardson-realism, and that
Miss Burney was challenging comparison, in their
own field, with such melodramatic romancists as
Mrs. Radcliffe. Yet Camilla, and even Eugenia,
are far more like real life than Emily St. Aubert.
However extravagantly composed, they are founded
on nature, whereas the older novelists worked
entirely from imagination. Before Richardson
(and here, of course, Mrs. Radcliffe belongs to the
earlier age) the models for character were not
drawn from experience and observation. There
was, it would seem, a preconceived notion, and
certain accepted rules, for the “make-up” of
heroes, heroines, parents, villains and the rest—which
are somewhat akin to the constructed ideal
of abstract Beauty favoured by certain art critics.
They were prepared, without very much reference
to actual humanity, from mysteriously acquired
recipes of virtue and vice.
We cannot find any reason to believe that Miss
Burney ever worked, in her most “exalted”
moments, on such a plan. She idealised from life,
not from the imagination. She really believed
that the young ladies of her acquaintance all aimed,[Pg 51]
more or less consciously, at that exquisite delicacy
which she delighted to exhibit; and, in all probability,
she was justified in her faith. Her rhapsodies
are sincere; and they obviously apply to her
own sentiments, shared by her contemporaries.
They are—in their own very feminine fashion—reflections
on reality—not creations of art by any
accepted canons.
And the very exaggerated artificiality of Camilla
makes it more typical—of herself and her period—than
Evelina or Cecilia: and therefore more representative
of Woman, when she began to write fiction
for herself. The genius of her earlier work carried
it some way in advance of its time; although the
progress of her immediate successors is most remarkable.
Camilla is the very essence of eighteenth-century
girlhood; ill-mated, as they were no doubt,
to “our present race of young men,” whose
“frivolous fickleness nauseates whatever they can
reach”; who—when they are not heroes—“have
a weak shame of asserting, or even listening to
what is right, and a shallow pride in professing
and performing what is wrong.”
It is instructive, indeed, to observe with
what apparent crudity Miss Burney has chosen[Pg 52]
to illustrate the greater purity and refinement, the
superior moral standard, of women to those of
men: a problem which seems to have almost
vanished with Jane Austen (though we may detect
it at work under the surface), and which has
reappeared so prominently, after quite a new
fashion, in modern literature. By the men
novelists this was practically assumed without
comment; but our knowledge of facts would seem
to warrant the emphasis awarded the question
by women in their opening campaign of the pen.
Here, as elsewhere, Miss Burney was almost the
first to teach us what women actually thought
and felt: in marked contrast to what it had been
hitherto considered becoming for them to express.
She was, always, and everywhere, the mouthpiece
of her sex.
And, finally, because she was not an “instructed”
or professional writer, and had not studied good
literature, we must recognise the real, great drawback
of Camilla: its grandiloquent style. Dr.
Johnson did much for English prose: his ultimate
influence was towards vigour, simplicity, clearness,
and common sense. But he was personally pompous,
a whale in the dictionary; and those who[Pg 53]
copied him without discretion only made themselves
ridiculous. It would be easy enough to find
parallels in Rasselas, and elsewhere, for all the
clumsy inversions and stilted antitheses of Camilla.
But here we can only regret the blindness of
ignorant hero-worship, and the natural, if foolish,
desire to please or flatter by imitation. Miss
Burney wrote Johnsonese fluently, and thereby
ruined her natural powers. We cannot estimate,
by her foolishness, the influence of the Dictator.
Imitation has not been, fortunately, the besetting
sin of women novelists, and we may pass over this
one “terrible example” without further comment.
[Pg 54]
“CECILIA” TO “SENSE AND
SENSIBILITY”
(1782-1811)
In considering the women writers immediately
following Miss Burney, we are confronted at the
outset with a deliberate return to the methods
of composition in vogue before Richardson. If
Mrs. Radcliffe (1764-1823) employs, as she
does, Defoe-like minuteness of detail in description,
she entitles all her works “Romances,”
and is fully justified in that nomenclature. “It
was the cry at the period,” says her biographer,
“and has sometimes been repeated since, that
the romances of Mrs. Radcliffe, and the applause
with which they were received, were evil signs of
the times, and argued a great and increasing
degradation of the public taste, which, instead of
banqueting as heretofore upon scenes of passion,
like those of Richardson, or of life and manners,
as in the pages of Smollett and Fielding, was now
coming back to the fare of the nursery, and gorged[Pg 55]
upon the wild and improbable fictions of an over-heated
imagination.”
Yet the anonymous author of the Pursuits of
Literature writes of some sister-novelists: “Though
all of them are ingenious ladies, yet they are too
frequently whining and frisking in novels, till our
girls’ heads turn wild with impossible adventures.
Not so the mighty magician of The Mysteries of
Udolpho, bred and nourished by the Florentine
muses in their sacred solitary caverns, amid the
paler shrines of Gothic superstition, and in all
the dreariness of enchantment: a poetess whom
Ariosto would with rapture have acknowledged, as
‘... La nudrita
Damigella Trivulzia al sacro speco.’”—O.F. c. xlvi.
We fear to-day it would be difficult to find
men “too mercurial to be delighted” by
Richardson, “too dull to comprehend” Le Sage,
“too saturnine to relish” Fielding, who would
yet “with difficulty be divorced from The Romance
of the Forest”: since every one of us now
“boasts an English heart,
Unused at ghosts or rattling bones to start.”
Jane Austen, of course, could never have written[Pg 56]
Northanger Abbey had she not enjoyed Mrs.
Radcliffe; and we say at once that those delightfully
absurd chapters in which Catherine is allowed
to indulge in the most unfounded suspicions of
General Tilney, are not substantially unfair to
the famous wife of William Radcliffe, Esq.; as the
artless conversations between Miss Morland and
Miss Thorpe no doubt justly reflect the deep
interest excited by her stories in the young and
inexperienced. We do not readily, to-day, admire
so much “exuberance and fertility of imagination”:
we have little, or no, patience with “adventures
heaped on adventures in quick and brilliant succession,
with all the hairbreadth charms of escape
or capture,” resembling some “splendid Oriental
tale.”
But there can be no question that Mrs. Radcliffe
achieved, in three admirable examples, a perfectly
legitimate attempt—the establishment of that
School of Terror inaugurated by no less brilliant
a writer than Horace Walpole (in his Castle of
Otranto, 1764), and seldom revived in England
with any success.
It is true that very careful criticism of her
methods may discover their artificiality. “Her[Pg 57]
heroines voluntarily expose themselves to situations
which, in nature, a lonely female would
certainly have avoided. They are too apt to
choose the midnight hour for investigating the
mysteries of a deserted chamber or secret passage,
and generally are only supplied,” like Mr. Pickwick,
“with an expiring lamp when about to read
the most interesting documents.” But Emily
St. Aubert is not surely designed for comparison
with even that “imbecility in females” which
Henry Tilney declared to be “a great enhancement
of their personal charms.” She is a heroine,
not a woman; and if, unlike Walpole, Mrs. Radcliffe
demands, and supplies, a material explanation of
all supernatural appearances, she yet allows her
imagination to wander freely over the realms of
superstitious alarm, wherein the reason of woman
cannot presumably hold sway. Certainly, had
Emily been less impulsive she would have missed
many opportunities of proving herself courageous.
I cannot myself, however, entirely avoid the
impression that, in their natural desire for classification,
the critics have laid undue stress on
Mrs. Radcliffe’s use of Mystery. In the three
hundred and four, double column, pages of Udolpho[Pg 58]
there are, besides occasional voices, only three
definite examples of this artifice—the waxen
figure behind the veil, the moving pall, and the
disappearance of Ludovico. The main plot is
really no more than a spirited example of the
conventional Romance-plan (in the development
of which she is wittily said to have invented Lord
Byron)—an involved narrative of terrible sufferings
and dangers incurred by an immaculate heroine,
of unmeasured tyranny and violence exerted by
a melancholy villain, of protracted misunderstandings
concerning the gallant hero, with
hurried explanations all round in the last
chapter to justify the wedding-bells.
Obviously there is no realism here. Everything
depends upon conscious exaggeration:
whether it be a description of “the Apennines in
their darkest horrors,” or of a “gloomy and
sublime” castle’s “mouldering walls”; of crime
indulged without restraint, or innocence unsullied
by the world. Montoni is not more inhuman in
his passion than Emily in the “tender elevation
of her mind.”
For despite the most solemn warnings of St.
Aubert (quoted above), his Emily has far more[Pg 59]
sensibility than any of Miss Burney’s heroines,
and exemplifies the dangerous doctrine that
“virtue and taste are nearly the same.” She and
Valancourt, indeed, were indifferent to “the
frivolities of common life”; their “ideas were
simple and grand, like the landscapes among which
they moved”; their sentiments spontaneously
“arranged themselves” in original verse.
The fact is, that Scott’s startlingly generous
estimate suggests several sound conclusions: by
dwelling upon the genuine poetical feeling to be
observed in Mrs. Radcliffe’s romances, and the
sincerity of her sympathy with nature. Though
it has been remarked, with some justice, that “as
her story is usually enveloped in mystery, so there
is, as it were, a haze over her landscapes”; and
that, “were six artists to attempt to embody
the Castle of Udolpho upon canvas, they would
probably produce six drawings entirely dissimilar
to each other, all of them equally authorised by
the printed description.”
Mrs. Inchbald (1753-1821), on the other hand,
followed the new school in writing simple narratives
of everyday life; but she produced little
more than a pale imitation of The Man of Feeling[Pg 60]
(1771), by Henry Mackenzie, the only masculine
exponent of “sensibility”; though her Simple
Story (1791) and Nature and Art (1796) have been
frequently reprinted. She aimed at dissecting
the human heart, as Richardson had done; and
there is, admittedly, a certain melodramatic, and
almost decadent, charm in her work.
Maria Edgeworth (1767-1849) was, certainly,
the most prominent of our novelists between Fanny
Burney and Jane Austen. Being a girl of eleven
when Evelina was published, she lived to witness
the triumph of Vanity Fair. Living beyond her
eighth decade, she produced over sixty books.
Having inspired Scott, on his own testimony, to
the production of the Waverley Novels, she actually
inaugurated, promoted, or established at least
four forms of fiction more or less new to her
contemporaries.
Like Fanny Burney, she owed much to the
enthusiasm and example of a liberal-minded and
cultured father: that Richard Lovell Edgeworth
who married several of the young persons whom
the author of Sandford and Merton had educated
for the honour of his own hand. He and Day
were notable scholastic reformers, and the influence[Pg 61]
of their innumerable theories on life and
the Pedagogue, largely imported from over the
Channel, is everywhere visible in Maria’s work.
Richard Lovell actually collaborated in the
two volumes, inspired by Rousseau’s Émile, on
Practical Education (1798), and supplied forewords
of edification to that marvellous series in which
she first proved the possibility of training the
young idea by ethical storiettes which were not
tracts. That most clumsily named Parents’
Assistant (1801), the Moral Tales of the same year,
and the fascinating Frank, are still nursery classics
deserving of immortality. We may not, to-day,
accept without protest many of the “lessons”
which they were designed to enforce; but their
sympathetic insight into the nature of the child
(with which recently we have been so much concerned),
the attractive simplicity and dramatic
interest of the direct narrative, set an example,
from the very foundations of juvenile literature,
which has borne plentiful fruit.
It should be noticed, moreover, in this connection
that Miss Edgeworth had already produced
a spirited defence of female education (Letters to
Literary Ladies, 1795); while she soon followed[Pg 62]
in the footsteps of Fanny Burney by writing
most lively satires on fin de siècle Society, pointed
with travesties of French “naturalism,” of which
the chief, perhaps, is Belinda, published in 1801;
and further extended the scope of the modern
novel by the introduction of the finished Short
Story, under the attractive heading of Tales of
Fashionable Life.
And, finally, besides again collaborating with her
father in an Essay on Irish Bulls (1802), she produced
that stimulating “Irish Brigade,” which
banished the “stage” Patrick from literature,
introduced genuine Celtic types, such as Coney,
King of the Black Isles; and, by creating the
“national” novel, may be regarded as the legitimate
parent of what their illustrious author so
modestly offered to the public as “something of the
same kind for his own country.”
Although just failing everywhere to reveal
genius, Miss Edgeworth reflects, with marvellous
versatility, all the intellectual movements of her
generation. Adopting, and adapting to her own
purposes, the “form for women” set out by Miss
Burney, she widened its application to the discussion
of social and political problems, and was[Pg 63]
the first to make fiction a picture not only of life,
but of its meaning. In fact she forestalled no
less for adults, than for the young, that vast array
of consciously didactic narrative which threatens,
in our own time, to bury beyond revival the
original, and the supreme, inspiration of Art in
Literature—to give pleasure.
The humour, the pathos, the knowledge of the
world, and, above all, the common sense regulating
Miss Edgeworth’s work, have not secured her as
permanent a popularity as she justly merits. But,
if we do not, to-day, frequently read even Ormond,
The Absentee, or Castle Rackrent, the occasions
which gratefully recall their accomplished author
to our remembrance are most astonishingly
frequent.
Of Hannah More (1745-1833) most readers
probably know even far less than of Maria Edgeworth;
and her work can only claim notice in this
place on account of the energy with which she
followed Miss Edgeworth’s lead in didactic fiction.
Accustomed to the society of fashionable blue-stockings
(then a comparative novelty in London
life), she exposed their foibles with considerable
humour in private correspondence; while her plays[Pg 64]
were cheerfully staged by Garrick. But awakened,
in later life, to the sin of play-going, she became
known for her vigorous tracts (inspiring, by turns,
the foundation of Sunday schools and of the Religious
Tract Society), until she published, at sixty-four,
her one novel entitled Cœlebs in Search of a
Wife.
If this somewhat ponderous effusion does not
altogether deserve the satirical onslaught with
which Sydney Smith heralded in the Edinburgh
its first appearance, we cannot claim for the author
any particular skill in construction or much fidelity
to real life. It is, in fact, no more than a “dramatic
sermon,” and a sermon, moreover, in support of
narrow-minded sectarianism. As the reviewer
informs us, “Cœlebs wants a wife ... who may
add materially to the happiness of his future life.
His first journey is to London, where, in the midst
of the gay society of the metropolis, of course, he
does not find a wife; and his next journey is to the
family of Mr. Stanley, the head of the Methodists,
a serious people, where, of course, he does find a
wife.” That is the whole story. We must submit,
in the meantime, to diatribes, pronounced by the
virtuous, against dancing, theatres, cards, assemblies,[Pg 65]
and frivolous conversation, until we are in danger
of losing all interest in the persons of the tale.
It is enough for us, in fact, to mark a niche for
Miss More in the development of women’s work;
only remembering the great service she rendered
her generation by a rarely sympathetic understanding
of the poor as individual human beings.
[Pg 66]
A STUDY IN FINE ART
(Jane Austen, 1775-1817)
With Jane Austen we reach the centre of our
subject: the establishment of the Woman’s School,
the final expression of domesticity. If not, perhaps,
more essentially feminine than Fanny Burney,
she is more womanly. The charming girlishness
of Evelina has here matured into a grown-up
sisterly attitude towards humanity, which, without
being either quite worldly or at all pedantic, is yet
artistically composed. Whether consciously or not,
she has spoken—within her chosen province—the
last word for all women for all time. There is
no comment on life, no picture of manners, no
detail of characterisation—either humorous or sympathetic—which
a man could have expressed in
these precise words. Woman is openly the centre
of her world; and, if men are more to her than
fireside pets, she is only concerned with them as
an element (or rather the chief element) in the life
of women.
[Pg 67]
The comparison, already instituted, between the
man-made “feminines” of Pamela and Clarissa
Harlowe with Miss Burney’s “young ladies,” may
be applied to Elizabeth Bennet and Emma Woodhouse
with added emphasis in every particular.
The “woman” in them is more modern, nearer
the heart of humanity, but still spontaneously of
that sex.
“To say the truth,” confesses a contemporary reviewer,
“we suspect one of Miss Austen’s great merits
in our eyes to be the insight she gives us into the
peculiarities of female character. Authoresses can
scarcely ever forget the esprit de corps—can scarcely
ever forget that they are authoresses. They seem to
feel a sympathetic shudder at exposing naked a female
mind. Elles se peignent en buste, and leave the mysteries
of womanhood to be described by some interloping
male, like Richardson or Marivaux, who is turned out
before he has seen half the rites, and is forced to spin
from his own conjectures the rest. Now from this
fault Miss Austen is free. Her heroines are what one
knows women must be, though one never can get them
to acknowledge it. As liable ‘to fall in love first,’ as
anxious to attract the attention of an agreeable man,
as much taken with a striking manner, or a handsome
face, as unequally gifted with constancy and firmness,
as liable to have their affections biased by convenience
or fashion, as we, on our part, will admit men to be.
As some illustration of what we mean, we refer our[Pg 68]
readers to the conversation between Miss Crawford
and Fanny (vol. iii. p. 102); Fanny’s meeting with
her father (p. 199); her reflection after reading
Edmund’s letter (p. 246); her happiness (good, and
heroine though she be), in the midst of the miseries of
all her friends, when she finds that Edmund has decidedly
broken with her rival; feelings, all of them,
which, under the influence of strong passion, must
alloy the purest mind, but with which scarcely any
authoress but Miss Austen would have ventured to
temper the œtherial materials of a heroine.”
Again, Miss Burney, as we have seen, had first
made it possible for a woman to write novels and
be respectable. Yet even with her, authorship was
something of an adventure. Her earliest manuscripts
were solemnly burnt, as in repentance for
frivolity, before her sorrowing sisters; needlework
was ordained every morning by a not tyrannical
stepmother; social duties occupied most afternoons
and evenings. And if she must write, Dr. Burney
was always ready enough at dictation, and any
lady might act as secretary to such a father without
reproach.
In the outside world, when her success was won,
we can detect a similar attitude. The authoress
of Evelina, indeed, was taken up everywhere and
universally petted; but even literary Society never[Pg 69]
regarded her quite as one of themselves. We feel
that she was always on show among them—a kind
of freak, like the girl who cried to order at dinner-parties
without spoiling her complexion; welcomed,
but not admitted—as were actors, musicians, and
others born and bred for the amusement of the
great.
She herself never resumed work for its own
sake after the first flush of popularity, in which
she composed Cecilia. As lady-in-waiting, bored by
tiresome punctilio; as Madame D’Arblay, happy
in simple domesticity; her pen lay idle save when
exercised by filial piety or specifically to earn
money. The later novels were pure hack-work,
obviously lacking in spontaneity.
It was reserved for Jane Austen, the daughter
of a later generation, though actually dying before
Miss Burney, to establish finally the position of
woman as a professional novelist. True, she was
even more domestic than her predecessor, and
entirely without what we should regard as the
necessary training or experience. Her family were
seldom aware of the time given to work, simply
because it never occurred to her that she might
claim privacy or resent interruption. But they[Pg 70]
took a keen interest in the results, and evidence
exists in abundance of their reading every completed
volume with enthusiasm.
Of her own attitude towards her work, and of
its reception with the public, there can be no
doubt. She always regarded herself, and was regarded,
as a professional. Circumstances might
induce temporary silence, because she was domestic,
modest, and affectionate; but if Jane Austen never
complained—and we hear of no protest at the extraordinary
delay in their appearance—we may be
quite sure the novels were written for the public, by
whom she felt confident one day of being read.
The style is obviously spontaneous, of which the
writing itself meant keen enjoyment; but the
work was not done merely for the pleasure of
doing it. It was her life—not because of any
disappointment in love, if she experienced such,
but because genius such as hers demands self-expression
and commands a hearing. From the
beginning, moreover, no one stopped to marvel
that a woman could do so well: they judged her as
an artist among her peers.
Jane Austen had none of the advantages of Miss
Burney, who knew everybody, including the wig-maker[Pg 71]
next door. Apparently she took little
interest in politics or social problems; and our
ideals of culture suffer shock before her allusions
to The Spectator, to read and admire which she
holds the affectation of a blue-stocking. Admittedly
she was a voracious novel-reader, but for
her own pleasure merely; certainly not with any
idea of historical development or artistic criticism.
In all probability even her study of human nature
was spontaneous and unconscious.
Yet she expected to be taken seriously. Miss
Burney had ventured an apology for her art—a
plea as woman to men which was daring enough
for her generation, but still an apology. Miss
Austen, speaking as much for the authoress of
Evelina as for herself, shows far more confidence.
She enlarges upon the skill and the labour involved
in writing a novel, for which honour is due.[3] What
she demands has been given her in full measure to
overflowing. How closely her stories have wound
themselves about the hearts of every successive
generation, it were idle to measure or estimate.
They are a part of our inheritance: appreciation
is reckoned a test of culture.
[Pg 72]
In the perfection, or development, of the methods
inaugurated by Samuel Richardson—particularly
as applied by women-writers—she also stands
supreme. She entirely avoids criminals, melodrama,
or any form of excitement. She does not
even demand sensibility from her common-sense
heroines.
While a woman was thus placing the corner-stone
to the rise of domestic realism, man accomplished
a glorious revival of Romanticism. Scott
was born only four years before Jane Austen:
Waverley and Mansfield Park were published in
the same year. Fortunately we are able to form
an accurate estimate of the impression her work
produced upon her great contemporary, since the
earliest serious appreciation of Jane was actually
written by Sir Walter, and opens with a most
instructive comparison between the “former rules
of the novel” and “a class of fictions which has
arisen,” as he expresses it, “almost in our times.”
The article appeared in the Quarterly Review,
October 1815; and it is very significant for us to
notice that Scott places Peregrine Pickle and Tom
Jones in the “old school,” dating the new style
only “fifteen or twenty years” back.
[Pg 73]
“In its first appearance, the novel was the legitimate
child of the romance; and though the manners and
general turn of the composition were altered so as to
suit modern times, the author remained fettered by many
peculiarities derived from the original style of romantic
fiction. These may be chiefly traced in the conduct of
the narrative, and the tone of sentiment attributed to
the fictitious personages. On the first point, although
‘The talisman and magic wand were broke,
Knights, dwarfs, and genii vanish’d into smoke,’
still the reader expected to peruse a course of adventures
of a nature more interesting and extraordinary
than those which occur in his own life, or that of his
next-door neighbour. The hero no longer defeated
armies by his single sword, clove giants to the chine,
or gained kingdoms. But he was expected to go through
perils by sea and land, to be steeped in poverty, to
be tried by temptation, to be exposed to the alternate
vicissitudes of adversity and prosperity, and his life
was a troubled scene of suffering and achievement.
Few novelists, indeed, adventured to deny to the hero
his final hour of tranquillity and happiness, though it
was the prevailing fashion never to relieve him out of
his last and most dreadful distress until the finishing
chapters of his history; so that although his prosperity
in the record of his life was short, we were bound to
believe it was long and uninterrupted when the author
had done with him. The heroine was usually condemned
to equal hardships and hazards. She was
regularly exposed to being forcibly carried off like a
Sabine virgin by some frantic admirer. And even if[Pg 74]
she escaped the terrors of masked ruffians, an insidious
ravisher, a cloak wrapped forcibly around her head, and
a coach with the blinds [down] driving she could not
conjecture whither, she had still her share of wandering,
of poverty, of obloquy, of seclusion, and of imprisonment,
and was frequently extended upon a bed of
sickness, and reduced to her last shilling before the
author condescended to shield her from persecution.
In all these dread contingencies the mind of the reader
was expected to sympathise, since by incidents so
much beyond the bounds of his ordinary experience,
his wonder and interest ought at once to be excited.
But gradually he became familiar with the land of
fiction, the adventures of which he assimilated not
with those of real life, but with each other. Let the
distress of the hero or heroine be ever so great,
the reader reposed an imperturbable confidence in the
talents of the author, who, as he had plunged them
into distress, would in his own good time, and when
things, as Tony Lumkin says, were in a concatenation
accordingly, bring his favourites out of all their troubles.
Mr. Crabbe has expressed his own and our feelings
excellently on this subject.
‘For should we grant these beauties all endure
Severest pangs, they’ve still the speediest cure;
Before one charm be wither’d from the face,
Except the bloom which shall again have place,
In wedlock ends each wish, in triumph all disgrace.
And life to come, we fairly may suppose,
One light bright contrast to these wild dark woes.’
“In short, the author of novels was, in former times,
expected to tread pretty much in the limits between[Pg 75]
the concentric circles of probability and possibility;
and as he was not permitted to transgress the latter,
his narrative, to make amends, almost always went
beyond the bounds of the former. Now, although
it may be urged that the vicissitudes of human life
have occasionally led an individual through as many
scenes of singular fortune as are represented in the
most extravagant of these fictions, still the causes and
personages acting on these changes have varied with
the progress of the adventurer’s fortune, and do not
present that combined plot, (the object of every skilful
novelist), in which all the more interesting individuals
of the dramatis personæ have their appropriate share
in the action and in bringing about the catastrophe.
Here, even more than in its various and violent changes
of fortune, rests the improbability of the novel. The
life of man rolls forth like a stream from the fountain,
or it spreads out into tranquillity like a placid or
stagnant lake. In the latter case, the individual grows
old among the characters with whom he was born,
and is contemporary,—shares precisely the sort of weal
and woe to which his birth destined him,—moves in
the same circle,—and, allowing for the change of seasons,
is influenced by, and influences the same class of persons
by which he was originally surrounded. The man of
mark and of adventure, on the contrary, resembles,
in the course of his life, the river whose mid-current
and discharge into the ocean are widely removed from
each other, as well as from the rocks and wild flowers
which its fountains first reflected; violent changes of
time, of place, and of circumstances, hurry him forward[Pg 76]
from one scene to another, and his adventures will
usually be found only connected with each other because
they have happened to the same individual. Such
a history resembles an ingenious, fictitious narrative,
exactly in the degree in which an old dramatic chronicle
of the life and death of some distinguished character,
where all the various agents appear and disappear as
in the page of history, approaches a regular drama,
in which every person introduced plays an appropriate
part, and every point of the action tends to one common
catastrophe.
“We return to the second broad line of distinction
between the novel, as formerly composed, and real life,—the
difference, namely, of the sentiments. The
novelist professed to give an imitation of nature, but
it was, as the French say, la belle nature. Human
beings, indeed, were presented, but in the most sentimental
mood, and with minds purified by a sensibility
which often verged on extravagance. In the serious
class of novels, the hero was usually
‘A knight or lover, who never broke a vow.’
And although, in those of a more humorous cast, he
was permitted a licence, borrowed either from real
life or from the libertinism of the drama, still a distinction
was demanded even from Peregrine Pickle, or
Tom Jones; and the hero, in every folly of which he
might be guilty, was studiously vindicated from the
charge of infidelity of the heart. The heroine was, of
course, still more immaculate; and to have conferred
her affections upon any other than the lover to whom
the reader had destined her from their first meeting,[Pg 77]
would have been a crime against sentiment which no
author, of moderate prudence, would have hazarded,
under the old régime.
“Here, therefore, we have two essential and important
circumstances, in which the earlier novels
differed from those now in fashion, and were more
nearly assimilated to the old romances. And there
can be no doubt that, by the studied involution and
extrication of the story, by the combination of incidents
new, striking and wonderful beyond the course of
ordinary life, the former authors opened that obvious
and strong sense of interest which arises from curiosity;
as by the pure, elevated, and romantic cast of the
sentiment, they conciliated those better propensities
of our nature which loves to contemplate the picture
of virtue, even when confessedly unable to imitate
its excellences.
“But strong and powerful as these sources of emotion
and interest may be, they are, like all others, capable
of being exhausted by habit. The imitators who
rushed in crowds upon each path in which the great
masters of the art had successively led the way, produced
upon the public mind the usual effect of satiety.
The first writer of a new class is, as it were, placed on
a pinnacle of excellence, to which, at the earliest glance
of a surprised admirer, his ascent seems little less than
miraculous. Time and imitation speedily diminish the
wonder, and each successive attempt establishes a
kind of progressive scale of ascent between the lately
deified author, and the reader, who had deemed his
excellence inaccessible. The stupidity, the mediocrity,[Pg 78]
the merit of his imitators, are alike fatal to the first
inventor, by showing how possible it is to exaggerate
his faults and to come within a certain point of his
beauties.
“Materials also (and the man of genius as well as
his wretched imitator must work with the same) become
stale and familiar. Social life, in our civilized days,
affords few instances capable of being painted in the
strong dark colours which excite surprise and horror;
and robbers, smugglers, bailiffs, caverns, dungeons, and
mad-houses, have been all introduced until they cease
to interest. And thus in the novel, as in every style
of composition which appeals to the public taste, the
more rich and easily worked mines being exhausted,
the adventurous author must, if he is desirous of success,
have recourse to those which were disdained by his
predecessors as unproductive, or avoided as only capable
of being turned to profit by great skill and labour.
“Accordingly a style of novel has arisen, within
the last fifteen or twenty years, differing from the
former in the points upon which the interest hinges;
neither alarming our credulity nor amusing our imagination
by wild variety of incident, or by those
pictures of romantic affection and sensibility, which
were formerly as certain attributes of fictitious characters
as they are of rare occurrence among those
who actually live and die. The substitute for these
excitements, which had lost much of their poignancy
by the repeated and injudicious use of them, was the
art of copying from nature as she really exists in the
common walks of life, and presenting to the reader,[Pg 79]
instead of the splendid scenes of an imaginary world,
a correct and striking representation of that which
is daily taking place around him.
“In adventuring upon this task, the author makes
obvious sacrifices, and encounters peculiar difficulty.
He who paints from le beau idéal, if his scenes and
sentiments are striking and interesting, is in a great
measure exempted from the difficult task of reconciling
them with the ordinary probabilities of life: but he
who paints a scene of common occurrence, places his
composition within that extensive range of criticism
which general experience offers to every reader. The
resemblance of a statue of Hercules we must take on
the artist’s judgment; but every one can criticize
that which is presented as the portrait of a friend, or
neighbour. Something more than a mere sign-post
likeness is also demanded. The portrait must have
spirit and character, as well as resemblance; and
being deprived of all that, according to Bayes, goes
‘to elevate and surprize,’ it must make amends by
displaying depth of knowledge and dexterity of execution.
We, therefore, bestow no mean compliment
upon the author of Emma, when we say that, keeping
close to common incidents, and to such characters as
occupy the ordinary walks of life, she has produced
sketches of such spirit and originality, that we never
miss the excitation which depends upon a narrative
of uncommon events, arising from the consideration
of minds, manners and sentiments, greatly above our
own. In this class she stands almost alone; for the
scenes of Miss Edgeworth are laid in higher life, varied[Pg 80]
by more romantic incident, and by her remarkable
power of embodying and illustrating national character.
But the author of Emma confines herself chiefly to the
middling classes of society; her most distinguished
characters do not rise greatly above well-bred country
gentlemen and ladies; and those which are sketched
with most originality and precision, belong to a class
rather below that standard. The narrative of all her
novels is composed of such common occurrences as may
have fallen under the observation of most folks; and
her dramatis personæ conduct themselves upon the
motives and principles which the readers may recognize
as ruling their own and that of most of
their acquaintances.”
It is manifestly clear to us, then, from these
passages, that Jane Austen’s contemporaries were
quite aware of her influence upon the progress of
fiction; and so generous a tribute, from one whose
mighty genius had set the current in other directions,
must be accounted no less honourable to the
critic than to the criticised.
Four years after her death (i.e. six years later)
the new school is again applauded, in an admirable
appreciation, by Archbishop Whately of the
posthumous Persuasion and Northanger Abbey,[4]
who dwells at great length upon an important[Pg 81]
distinction between the “unnatural” and the
“merely improbable” in fiction.
Scott, of course, was always generous in criticism;
and his striking enthusiasm for Mrs. Radcliffe and
the earlier women-writers, in his Lives of the
Novelists, reveals no less chivalrous gallantry than
his famous tribute to Miss Edgeworth. Still it
was obviously necessary for the great critic to
explain the grounds of his enthusiasm; and the
“more assured attitude of applause which Whateley
was able to adopt, after so short an interval, may
serve to witness the advance which her genius had
achieved in the general estimate.”
We cannot avoid noticing, however, that neither
of her contemporary masculine critics seems to have
been quite happy about the ideal of womanhood
which Jane Austen was certainly the first to
introduce. It required courage, indeed, to conceive
of a heroine without “sensibility,” and the
creator of Marianne Dashwood must certainly
have been perfectly conscious of the omission.
It happens that Scott and Whateley were both
thirty-four when these articles were written, yet
each complains, after his own fashion, of the
calculating prudence here revealed towards love[Pg 82]
and matrimony by the young ladies of the piece.
One would have supposed that neither of them was
either old enough to remember “sensibility” in
real life, or young enough for idle dreaming.
Clearly, however, they had a tender partiality for
the old type, probably shared by their readers;
although both writers assure us that young people
in their day were not in fact at all addicted to the
sacrifice of all for love.
Scott is certainly not justified in stating that
Elizabeth was led to accept Darcy by discovering
the grandeur of his estates; both because such
an attitude was inconsistent with her mental
independence, and because she herself jokingly
suggests this explanation of the remarkable change
in her sentiments towards him, to tease her
sister.
But, on the other hand, Jane Austen’s heroines
may fairly be called cool and calculating in comparison
with the poetical maidens of romance;
and we have intentionally laboured this point
at some length in order to emphasise the thoroughness
with which reformers in fiction discarded the
many artistic ornaments formerly used by story-tellers
to enhance the “pleasures of imagination.”[Pg 83]
Every convention of romance was ruthlessly
abandoned.
Later developments, as we shall see, introduced
other elements which partially supplied these
omissions, and once more removed the novel from
pure realism; but it would almost seem as if Jane
Austen had deliberately set herself to prove how
much it was possible to do without. She admits
neither unusual mixture of society, cultured
allusion, nor morbid or criminal impulses. Like
her immediate predecessors, she wilfully limits
the variety of character-types by strictly confining
herself to her own narrow experience—her
groups of character are curiously similar, her
plots repeat each other: she discards every source
of excitement from adventure, mystery, or melodramatic
emotion; and, finally, she denies the
hero or heroine any charm which may be derived
from “sensibility” or romantic idealism. Hers
is realism,[5] naked and unashamed; challenging[Pg 84]
comparison with life itself at every point, wholly
dependent upon truthfulness to nature. Her
triumph is purely artistic: the absolute fitness of
expression to reveal insight, observation, sympathy,
and humour; in a simple narrative of parochial
affairs, composed with rare skill, faithfully reflecting
everyday life and ordinary people.
From such commonplace material she has
woven a spell over the imagination and secured
our warm interest in characters and episodes: much
as the simplicity of English landscapes will hold
our affection against the claims of nature’s grandest
magnificence.
Detailed analysis of her six “studies from
life” will serve only to increase our wonder, and
may be indulged without fear of reversed, or
even qualified, judgment.
Inevitably Jane Austen scribbled in girlhood—too
busily, according to her own judgment;
but the printed fragments are not specially
precocious, and we have no right to judge so
careful an artist by work she left unfinished or
rejected with deliberation, however interesting in
itself.
As we all know, without having any clue to[Pg 85]
the explanation, she found herself rather suddenly,
while still a young woman; and did all her
work in two surprisingly brief periods—sharply
separated, and each responsible for three novels,
two full length and one much shorter. Pride
and Prejudice, her first finished production, has
every appearance of maturity, and reveals the
principal qualities which characterised her to the
end.
This novel, by many considered her greatest
work, is primarily—like Evelina and Cecilia—a
study in manners. Its aim is frankly to amuse:
the dominant note is irresponsible gaiety: the
appeal is more intellectual than emotional. Certainly
we are interested in the story, we have
considerable affection for the characters: but it
does not excite passion, stimulate philosophic
reflection, or stir imagination. We find here no
solutions to any vexed social problem. Past
mistress she is in the great art of story-telling,
and a supreme stylist; yet the authoress seems
always content to skim the surface of things,
taking no thought of storm or fire below.
Miss Austen is no cynic: she certainly detests
coarseness: yet Lydia’s fall and its consequences,[Pg 86]
round which any modern novelist would have
centred the whole picture, is handled with something
very like levity. We can scarcely avoid
amazement at the astonishingly vulgar attitude
of Mrs. Bennet or at Mary’s appalling priggishness
on the occasion: but such serious thoughts do not
retain us long. In reality we are chiefly interested
in the possible effects of the girl’s folly upon her
elder sisters—will it, or will it not, separate
them for ever from the men they love? It is
only a few quiet words of unselfish sympathy
from Jane, easily forgotten by most of us, that
reveal the sentiments of the authoress on such
questions—with which, apparently, she holds
that fiction has little concern.
Primarily, however, we are attracted by Pride
and Prejudice as a work of art. The unfailing
humour and pointed wit, the marvellous aptness
of every polished phrase, hold us spellbound.
The very first sentence plunges us right into the
heart of affairs: every incident or dialogue, to
the closing page, follows without pause or digression,
clear and firm as crystal. No trace of
obscurity or hesitation blurs the gay scene:
every character is vividly, and individually,[Pg 87]
alive. Yet how simple, almost commonplace,
the material: how parochial the outlook. We
have here no mystery or melodrama, no psychology
or local colour. Miss Austen’s young ladies
have absolutely no interests in life except “the
men,” however superior their manners and instincts
to the egregious frivolity of Mrs. Bennet.
They are the normal heroines of a conventional
love-story; with the usual surroundings—a
handsome hero or two, some tiresome relatives,
a confidante, a mild villain, and varied comic
relief. It has been said further that Miss Austen’s
ideal of a gentleman was deficient, since Darcy’s
insolence betrays lack of breeding: and, certainly,
no Elizabeth of to-day would even temporarily
be deceived or attracted by so common
an adventurer as Wickham.
At a first glance, indeed, it might seem that
Miss Austen depended entirely for her effects upon
the creation of oddities. Reflecting on Lady
Catherine and Mr. Collins, touching perfection,
we may well fancy that we have surprised her
secret—the impulse of her achievement, the
cause of our own enthusiasm. This, however,
is but a hasty and superficial impression. To[Pg 88]
begin with, she does not concentrate, either in
wit or humour, upon these figures of fun: and,
in the second place, she has powers quite other
than the mirth-provoking. Though grammatically
not above reproach, she seems always to use
the right word by instinct, hitting every nail
full on the head, never wasting a syllable. The
art nowhere obtrudes itself: her most skilfully
polished phrases appear natural and fluent, just
what her characters must have said in real life,
to express precisely their thoughts and feelings.
Faultlessly neat and compact, her style is yet
daring, vigorous, and thoroughly alive.
Similar qualities appear in her delineation of
character. Always knowing her own mind, and
going straight to the point: there is no vagueness
in outline, no uncertainty anywhere. Jane Bennet
could never have said or done just what came
most naturally from Elizabeth; Darcy shared no
thought or deed with his best friend: less prominent
persons are as firmly, if less fully, individualised.
The incidents, moreover, however
trifling, are well varied; the plot has ample movement—once
those concerned in it have won our
sympathies. Assuredly Miss Austen’s aim is not[Pg 89]
strenuous; but it is direct, vigorous, and clear-headed.
And where she aims, she hits.
Sense and Sensibility reveals the very same
method and the reappearance of many similar
types, applied to an entirely new story in which
no interest or situation repeats those of the earlier
book. With her daring indifference to originality
in the mechanical construction of a plot,
Miss Austen once more centres her story round
two sisters, more widely diverse in temperament,
indeed, than Jane and Elizabeth, but no
less everything to each other. Their mother,
after the way of parents in these novels, is as
foolish as Mrs. Bennet, though far more lovable.
Willoughby is Wickham over again, with a fancy
for accomplishments. The tragi-comedy introduced
by Lucy Steele, more essentially vulgar
than any of the Bennets, Mrs. Palmer’s candid
frivolity, and the languid elegance of Lady
Middleton (later perfected in Lady Bertram),
provide abundant occasion for laughter; though
no one figure of absurdity stands out so strongly
as those of the earlier novel. On the other hand,
Miss Austen has nowhere exposed a character
more trenchantly by one short dialogue than[Pg 90]
in the discussion between Mr. and Mrs. John
Dashwood about “what he could do for” his
widowed mother and orphaned sisters. It were
surely impossible for selfish hypocrisy to go
further; and the subtle touches by which the
wife reveals herself leader of the pair, must afford
us the keenest enjoyment.
But this tale of Marianne and her Willoughby
has one element entirely absent from Pride and
Prejudice, and never again attempted by Jane
Austen. It may be said to border on melodrama.
The young people’s ingenuous revels in emotion,
whether of joy or grief, surprise one in so balanced
a writer, and reveal powers we should not otherwise
have suspected. Marianne, indeed, is the
very personification of that sensibility, so dear
to “elegant females” of the old world, so foreign
to modern ideals. Having chosen her type, Miss
Austen would seem determined to show how far
she could go in this direction without distorting
humanity. To the more conventional Miss Burney,
sensibility was a grace essential in heroines. She is
its acknowledged exponent, and compels us, despite
prejudice, to recognise its real charm. But neither
Evelina nor Cecilia exhibits so much naïveté as[Pg 91]
Marianne, such tempestuous abandon, such a fiery
glow; yet we can read of her with equal patience,
we can love her no less. She is saved, for us,
by her genuine affection for “sensible” Eleanor,
and her unselfish devotion to a mother who seems
even younger and more foolish than herself.
And Willoughby’s temperament fits her like a
glove. His wooing, his wickedness, and his
repentance belong to a generation before Miss
Austen’s. Through this couple she triumphs in
otherwise unexplored regions.
Northanger Abbey has very much the appearance
of juvenile effort, possibly recast in maturity.
If not actually written in girlhood, it must be
regarded as the flower of a true holiday spirit,
blossoming in sheer fun. Fresh from the excited
perusal of some novel by the terrifying Anne
Radcliffe, whom I believe Miss Austen enjoyed
as keenly as her own Catherine, she must have
thrown herself into the composition of this delightful
parody, just to renew its thrills, to linger
over its absurdities. It is all pure farce, exaggeration
cheerfully unrestrained. The irrepressible
Arabella belongs to Miss Burney: her
boasting brother should hang in the same[Pg 92]
gallery. Dear, foolish Catherine’s idle imaginings
about General Tilney were never meant to
resemble nature. Henry could scarcely have
forgiven them, had he taken her quite seriously.
Moreover, having one parody in hand, Miss Austen
gaily embarks on yet another, no less irresponsible
and spontaneous. Catherine is Evelina in miniature;
the real ingénue whose country breeding
exposes her to the most diverting distresses
in a Society amazingly mixed. Hovering between
Thorpes and Tilneys, like Evelina between
Mirvans and Branghtons, she enters each circle
with the same innocence, enthusiasm, and naïveté.
Miss Austen’s sly boast of originality in allowing
her heroine to fall in love without stopping to
ascertain “the gentleman’s feelings,” is but gentle
raillery at a similar presumption in Miss Burney.
Certainly Orville, no less than Tilney, was led on
to serious thoughts of matrimony by the simple-minded
revelation of a pretty girl’s partiality.
Where a laugh lurks behind every sentence, we
need not expect the special “studies in humour”
which stand out, everywhere, in the more serious
stories. Yet General Tilney (later perfected in Sir
Walter Elliot) is a finished sketch: while John[Pg 93]
Thorpe, who never opens his lips without betraying
himself; and Arabella, whether in pursuit of the
“two young men” or quizzing the naughty Captain,
were hard to beat.
Nowhere, in all her work, has Miss Austen
concentrated such pungent sarcasm as in the
condescending explanation of how much folly
reasonable men prefer in lovely women.
“The advantages of natural folly in a beautiful girl
have been already set forth by the capital pen of a sister
author; and to her treatment of the subject I will only
add, in justice to men, that though to the larger and
more trifling part of the sex, imbecility in females is a
great enhancement of their personal charms, there is a
portion of them too reasonable, and too well informed
themselves, to desire anything more in woman than
ignorance.”
Do not the smooth words sting?
Approaching the second group, we look naturally,
and not in vain, for evidence of maturity and
development. Miss Austen does not, in fact,
make any attempt to enlarge her sphere, to widen
her outlook, to handle more strenuous emotion.
But her plots, still based on parochial gossip, are
more varied and complex: she works with a
larger number of characters; actually perfecting[Pg 94]
some types already familiar, and introducing us
to many a new acquaintance. Above all, her
dramatis personæ are no longer fixed and defined
at their first entrance: they grow with the story,
often surprising us at last by qualities, no doubt
dormant from the beginning, and never strained
or inconsistent, but only possible to development
through experience.
Emma obviously invites comparison with Pride
and Prejudice. The two heroines have long shared
almost equally the position of a most popular
favourite: one or other of the two books is almost
universally judged her best. The charms of Emma
and Harriet are more naturally diverse because
they are not sisters: yet in the accidents of intimacy,
mutual confidence, and common interests
they form a basis for the plot precisely similar to
that of the sisters in Pride and Prejudice or Sense
and Sensibility, not greatly differing from those in
Mansfield Park or Persuasion. Mr. Elton, the
very pink of pretentious vulgarity, recalls Lydia
and Lucy Steele: her caro sposo eclipses Mr. Collins
on his own ground. Miss Bates the garrulous,
and Mr. Woodhouse the fussy, varied examples of
the eternal bore, are formidable rivals, if not[Pg 95]
conquerors, of the inimitable Lady Catherine.
Here we have “characters” in greater abundance,
almost more finished in fuller detail.
Advance is more obvious, however, in the introduction
of such independent family groups as the
Westons, the Martins, the John Knightleys, and the
Eltons: in the presence of a full-grown secondary
plot—“The Fairfax Mystery,” as we might call it:
and in the heroine’s development through experience.
A secret engagement is, in itself, new kind of
material for Jane Austen to handle: well calculated
to exercise her delicate command of dialogue.
It lends particular interest to this novel, however
simple the intrigue compared with more modern
examples, however foreign to our own conceptions
the “sense of sin” thereby engendered in Jane
Fairfax. Young Churchill’s spirited conduct of
the affair is a perpetual delight, certainly not least
for its unintentional humbling of “the great Miss
Woodhouse”: though his insinuations about Mr.
Dixon (like Darcy’s rudeness) exceed the licence
permitted a gentleman, however spoilt and high-spirited.
We have already noted the popularity of Emma,
but, in this unlike Elizabeth, she has her detractors.[Pg 96]
Some find her too managing, self-centred, and
“superior” for charm. Admittedly she is a matchmaker,
far less refined than she imagines herself:
her rudeness to Miss Bates is difficult to pardon.
But, as Knightley alone had the wit to recognise,
Harriet’s innocent folly encouraged her worst
qualities, and Emma’s repentance is sincere, bearing
good fruit. To the end she is herself indeed; but
how different a self—standing witness to the
powers of character in bringing out the best of us.
Having played with fire, she learnt her lesson, and
so we may leave her, no less marvelling than she
at the workings of what little Harriet was pleased
to call her heart; admiring, as all must, Jane
Austen’s finished study of that engaging “Miss.”
Mansfield Park, probably, is the least popular
of the novels—on account of its heroine. Fanny
Price has her partisans, but can never become a
general favourite, until we again idealise humility
in woman. Accepting, without a murmur, the
most unreasonable and most exacting demands of
all her “betters”; meekly grateful, to the point of
servility, if Edmund bestows on her a kind word;
she stands before us condemned by every code
accepted to-day.
[Pg 97]
Yet Fanny, reversing the process in Emma,
acquires self-confidence with years, and actually
learns to play the heroine in adversity. The novel
contains Miss Austen’s first, and last, picture of the
great world beyond parish boundaries: it deals,
successfully, with greater contrasts in social status
than she ever attempted before or since. Lady
Bertram, no less than Mrs. Norris, fairly eclipses
all former achievements in character study.
Its crowded canvas, indeed, demands notice in
detail. Sir Thomas neglects his family much as did
Mr. Bennet, and suffers more serious punishment.
The “villain” is replaced by Henry and Miss
Crawford, of the world, worldly: figuring at first
as very wholesome instruments of distraction to a
stiff family circle; but ingeniously convicted, in
touch with realities, of serious moral depravity.
Their presence, however, reveals new power in the
authoress, and considerably enlivens the scene.
They do much towards the development of Fanny.
No two characters, on the other hand, could be
more profoundly diverse than those of Lady Bertram
and Mrs. Norris: yet they fit each other
without friction, and it were hard indeed to say
which is more perfectly drawn. A woman more[Pg 98]
utterly devoid of feeling or lacking in common
sense than the former, it is impossible to conceive.
The mere hint of responsibility towards anyone or
anything would have shattered her nerves completely;
and no emergency, of joy or grief, ever
taught her to face the exertion of making up
her own mind for herself on the most trivial
question. Yet there is no exaggeration. She
is perfectly natural, not without charm, an ornament
to the family circle whom all would miss.
For Mrs. Norris, the intolerable busybody, it
has been suggested that Miss Austen owed something
directly to personal experience. Was this
her revenge for much silent endurance? Certainly
so much concentrated scorn, so stern a
portrait seems to imply animus. Gentle, tender,
and sympathetic by nature, was she at times
lashed to fury by the cruel inanity of village
types? Mrs. Elton, Miss Bates, and Mr. Collins
may, in a less degree, have been similarly inspired.
If it be so, verily they have their reward.
The central motive in Mansfield Park is
more complex than heretofore: its scenes more
varied. The whole episode of Fanny’s visit to
her struggling parents, and their squalid home,[Pg 99]
introduces an aspect of life elsewhere ignored, shows
us humanity unrefined. The work is alive and
vigorous, not altogether foreign to modern realism.
Coming, moreover, from such uncongenial, and to
them unfamiliar, surroundings; bred to hard
work and hard times; cousin Fanny brings a new
element into the lives of the elegant Miss Bertrams,
our usual couple of sisters; who, again, are destined
to further awakening from the manners
and experience of Mary Crawford.
Finally, we have here the nearest approach
to a so-called “social problem” ever handled
by Jane Austen, and a thoroughly serious picture
of punishment. It may seem hard to all of us, and
modern casuists would certainly declare it unjust,
that Maria should suffer so much more than Julia,
who had no more principle, but less opportunity.
In this matter, however, Miss Austen is uncompromising.
Of the two Maria was more spoilt—by
Mrs. Norris, more exposed to temptation;
and actually committed sin. Therefore she must
expect punishment. Julia proved herself equally
cold-hearted and selfish; but by luck, neither
through wisdom nor goodness, she kept within the
code—and was forgiven.
[Pg 100]
Miss Austen does not let off the man altogether;
for it is quite clear that Henry Crawford lost Fanny,
and, with her, his best chance for happiness. But
Maria lost everything; and so, the authoress seems
to imply, it must be always. There is no hint
of mercy, no chance for retrievement, in one of
the sternest decrees of Fate that could overtake
a woman—perpetual imprisonment with her
aunt!
“Shut up together with little society, on one side
no affection, on the other no judgment, it may reasonably
be supposed that their tempers became their
mutual punishment.”
Justice, indeed, hath fair play with Mrs. Norris.
May we not whisper—Poor Maria!
Persuasion, Miss Austen’s last work and perhaps
her finest, reveals maturity in other ways.
No longer than Northanger Abbey, it has neither
the complexity nor the crowded canvas distinguishing
others of the second group. It is
written throughout in a minor key, without one
outstanding comic “character.” But, on the
other hand, its construction is singularly compact,
its emotions have a new depth, sincerity,
and tenderness. Anne Elliot can never rival[Pg 101]
Elizabeth or Emma; though she is no less
“superior” to her own family, and has in reality
more character. Here our appreciation and our
sympathies are emotional rather than intellectual.
We feel with her far more than with them. Though
never recognised in her own circle, as were all
Miss Austen’s heroines save Fanny Price, she
dominates the story more than any. Persuasion,
in fact, is a study in character, such as its
authoress had never before attempted. No more,
if indeed actually less, sensational than its predecessors,
the whole scheme moves below the
surface. It holds us more by feeling and atmosphere
than by incident. We experience a similar
delight in the perfectly turned phrases, the finished
dialogue, and the neat characterisation; but
here are no figures of fun, no animated social
functions, no clash of types. We may smile,
indeed, at Sir Walter Elliot or at the family of
Uppercross; but the humour, however subtle
and permeating, does not anywhere prevail over
deeper emotion.
Certainly we note that Miss Austen still seeks
out no new material, depends on no more startling
situation. Anne’s happiness and misery alike[Pg 102]
arise, as did Jane’s and Elizabeth’s, from a refinement
to which every other member of her family
was absolutely blind. The natural understanding
between two sisters is destroyed, as between
Julia and Maria, by rivalry for the one eligible
visitor to the neighbourhood; though here with
no permanently disastrous results. The naïvely
conceived villain of the first group has become—again
as in Mansfield Park—an accomplished
man of the world, with no sister indeed to further
his perfectly honourable designs on the heroine,
but, in the last event, not lacking a female
accomplice. Its most striking effect in local
colour, the glowing picture of naval types,
was foreshadowed in William Price: though
Admiral and Mrs. Croft admittedly stand high
in Miss Austen’s gallery of character-studies.
Society, as in Northanger Abbey, is located at
Bath.
Yet nowhere has she attempted, with any approach
to a like depth of feeling or earnestness,
so much philosophy on life, so searching an
analysis of human nature, as in the remarkable
conversation on faithfulness, as severally exhibited
by men and women, which artistically[Pg 103]
produces a permanent understanding between
hero and heroine.
“Oh!” cried Anne eagerly to Captain Harville, “I
hope I do justice to all that is felt by you and by those
who resemble you. God forbid that I should undervalue
the warm and faithful feelings of any of my
fellow-creatures. I should deserve utter contempt if
I dared to suppose that true attachment and constancy
were known only by woman. No, I believe you capable
of everything great and good in your married lives. I
believe you equal to every important exertion, and to
every domestic forbearance, so long as—if I may be
allowed the expression—so long as you have an object.
I mean while the woman you love lives, and lives for
you. All the privilege I claim for my own sex (it is
not a very enviable one: you need not covet it) is
that of loving longest, when existence or when hope
is gone.”
This is the text of the whole novel, woven
with subtlety into its very fabric, inspiring each
thought, each word, though never obtruding.
Persuasion is neither a sermon nor a pamphlet.
Its author assuredly holds no brief for woman,
brings no charge against man. Yet here she
speaks for her sex. Of what she has seen and
felt it would appear that she could no longer
remain silent.
[Pg 104]
Jane Austen reveals herself in her last message
to posterity.
Sense and Sensibility, 1811.
Pride and Prejudice, 1813.
Mansfield Park, 1814.
Emma, 1816.
Northanger Abbey, 1818.
Persuasion, 1818.
[Pg 105]
A “MOST ACCOMPLISHED
COQUETTE”
In spite of the almost universal inclination to
pass over Jane Austen’s “minor” works without
serious comment, we are ourselves strongly disposed
to consider Lady Susan of considerable
importance.
The early compositions, if sprightly, are not
precocious: the cancelled chapter of Persuasion—replaced
only eleven months before her death by
chaps. x. and xi.—remains an interesting record
of what would have fully satisfied a less careful
artist; and the description—with extracts—which
Mr. Austen-Leigh has given us of the novel begun
on 27th January 1817 and continued until the
17th of March,[6] does not contain body enough for
confident anticipation: i.e. of detail. There is,
however, no reason for dreading any decline in
artistic power.
Water-marks of 1803 and 1804 on the original
manuscript prove The Watsons to have been written[Pg 106]
between her two periods of productive activity;
and it is not likely that definite evidence will now
transpire in explanation of its having been left
unfinished: unless we accept Mr. Austen-Leigh’s
somewhat fastidious conclusion—
“that the author became aware of the evil of having
placed her heroine too low, in such a position of poverty
and obscurity as, though not necessarily connected
with vulgarity, has a sad tendency to degenerate
into it; and therefore, like a singer who has begun on
too low a note, she discontinued the strain. It was an
error of which she was likely to become more sensible,
as she grew older, and saw more of society: certainly
she never repeated it by placing the heroine of any
subsequent work under circumstances likely to be
unfavourable to the refinement of a lady.”[7]
Her nephew further remarks that “it could not
have been broken up for the purpose of using the
materials in another fabric”; although, in his
opinion, a resemblance between Mr. Robert Watson
and Mr. Elton is “very discernible.” We might
also observe that Mr. Watson appears to have taken
his “basin of gruel” as regularly as Mr. Woodhouse;
while, on the other hand, Lord Osborne’s
affected superiority to dancing recalls Darcy. Miss[Pg 107]
Watson’s theories on life and marriage are
particularly characteristic:
“I would rather do anything than be a teacher at
a school. I have been at school, Emma, and know
what a life they lead; you never have. I should not
like marrying a disagreeable man any more than
yourself; but I do not think there are many very
disagreeable men; I think I could like any good-humoured
man with a comfortable income. I suppose
my aunt brought you up to be rather refined.”
Emma Watson, in fact, like all Jane Austen’s
heroines, shines by comparison with the rest of her
family.
Lady Susan, unlike any of the stories mentioned
above, is obviously complete and finished. “Her
family have always believed it to be an early
production”; but we cannot conjecture why it
was laid aside and never published by her. It is,
however, an “experiment”—never repeated; and
very possibly Jane Austen did not feel moved to
revise what evidently had not satisfied her own
standard of perfection.
For us, however, its striking dissimilarity to the
six recognised “works,” and its unique position in
the development of fiction, are of peculiar interest.
To begin with, it belongs to the old “picaresque”[Pg 108]
school of fiction, seldom popular in England, though
practised with considerable vigour by Defoe, and
once revived by Thackeray in a work of genius—Barry
Lyndon.
It may, perhaps, be considered an exaggeration
to call the heroine a villain; and certainly Jane
Austen entirely avoids the sordid material of
criminal adventure (not scorned by Thackeray);
which is the recognised foundation of ordinary
picaresque work. But the essential characteristic
remains prominent. The good people are
comparatively colourless; our interest centres
around Lady Susan, and it is on her that the author
has devoted her most careful work. Moreover,
it should not be overlooked that Lady Susan does
contemplate, and actually instigate—in refined
language—a course of action which may fairly
be called criminal. The confidante, Mrs. Johnson—a
recognised appendage to villainy—receives the
following significant hint:
“Mainwaring is more devoted to me than ever; and
were we at liberty, I doubt if I could resist even matrimony
offered by him. This event, if his wife live with
you, it may be in your power to hasten. The violence
of her feelings, which must wear her out, may easily be
kept in irritation. I rely on your friendship for this.”
[Pg 109]
The quiet audacity of this paragraph is really
astounding; and just because no other word in
all the forty-one letters contains so much as a hint
at anything beyond unblushing effrontery and
reckless lying, we regard it, without hesitation,
as the keynote of Jane Austen’s method, and the
declaration of her aim. Only a villain could
possibly have written these words; only a genius
could have refrained from giving her away on some
other occasion.
Superficially, Lady Susan is no worse than a
merry widow, given to man conquest, perfectly
indifferent—if not contemptuous—towards the
wives or the fiancées of her victims. In this
matter, indeed, her enemies complain that “she
does not confine herself to that sort of honest flirtation
which satisfies most people, but aspires to the
more delicious gratification of making a whole
family miserable.” During the first months of
widowhood she had determined on “discretion”
and being “as quiet as possible”:—“I have admitted
no one’s attentions but Mainwaring’s. I
have avoided all general flirtation whatever; I
have distinguished no creature besides, of all the
numbers resorting hither, except Sir John Martin,[Pg 110]
on whom I bestowed a little notice, in order to
detach him from Miss Mainwaring; but, if the
world could know my motive there they would
honour me”;—the fact being that she wanted
the man for her daughter.
This “most accomplished coquette in England”
is described with some fullness by a sister-in-law
who had every reason to think ill of her.
“She is really excessively pretty; however you
may choose to question the allurements of a lady no
longer young, I must, for my own part, declare that
I have seldom seen so lovely a woman as Lady Susan.
She is delicately fair, with fine grey eyes and dark
eyelashes; and from her appearance one would not
suppose her more than five and twenty; though she
must in fact be ten years older. I was certainly not
disposed to admire her, though always hearing she
was beautiful; but I cannot help feeling that she
possesses an uncommon union of symmetry, brilliancy,
and grace. Her address to me was so gentle, frank,
and even affectionate, that, if I had not known how
much she has always disliked me for marrying Mr.
Vernon, and that we had never met before, I should
have imagined her an attached friend. One is apt, I
believe, to connect assurance of manner with coquetry,
and to expect that an impudent address will naturally
attend an impudent mind; at least, I myself was
prepared for an improper degree of confidence in Lady
Susan; but her countenance is absolutely sweet, and[Pg 111]
her voice and manner winningly mild. I am sorry it
is so, for what is this but deceit? Unfortunately, one
knows her too well. She is clever and agreeable, has
all that knowledge of the world which makes conversation
easy, and talks very well, with a happy
command of language, which is too often used, I believe,
to make black appear white.”
Such being the lady’s own manners and sentiments,
we are fully prepared for her satirical
references to her daughter:
“I never saw a girl of her age”—she was sixteen—“bid
fairer to be the sport of mankind. Her feelings
are tolerably acute, and she is so charmingly artless in
their display as to afford the most reasonable hope of
her being ridiculous, and despised by every man who
sees her. Artlessness will never do in love-matters;
and that girl is born a simpleton who has it either by
nature or affectation.”
It is hardly necessary to add that Lady Susan
has no desire, or ambition, in life beyond universal
admiration. She is “tempted” indeed, but does
not on one occasion lose her head: and we cannot
feel that she was even exactly pre-eminent in
her practice. It does not appear that she quite
succeeded in ever enjoying the fruits of victory.
Miss Austen has not drawn for us a really “cunning”
coquette. Lady Susan subdued men, but[Pg 112]
she could seldom hold them; and on no occasion
does she conquer “circumstances,” i.e., other
women.
There may be, obviously, three explanations
of this fact. Either Jane Austen was lacking in
the more robust humour of Thackeray and his
predecessors, who seem to revel in the gaiety of
the heartless; or she recognised the limitations
of country life, where the artificial can never
prosper for long; or she had, in her own quiet way,
too much principle to countenance, even in fiction,
any permanent happiness for the wicked.
However it be, the result is unique. Lady
Susan stands alone as a heroine. As we have
seen, the full depths of her criminality lurk beneath
the surface: her power is rather hinted at than
described. It is only on looking back over the
accumulation of slight touches and chance words
that we realise her astounding insincerity, her
absolute lack of feeling, or the brilliance of her
superficial attractiveness. It is a very short book,
containing few characters and practically no events;
yet we are startled, on reflection, at its unsparing
picture of the incalculable amount of mischief
that may be done by sheer empty-headedness,[Pg 113]
entirely without strong feeling or passion; and of
the incredible isolation in which such a character
must always live.
Lady Susan injures, in some degree, literally
every person named in the whole story. She has
not a friend in the world. In reality, perhaps, the
last consideration indicates most clearly the virtue
in Miss Austen’s characterisation. It is not once
even mentioned, and, consequently, arouses no
remark. We must deduct from it our own observation.
But, inasmuch as never for one instant
does a single thought for anyone but herself cross
the mind of Lady Susan, so never does anyone else
show one spark of affection for her. Mrs. Johnson,
obviously, was governed by interested motives, and
frankly abandons her at the first serious danger
of “the consequences” to herself. The kind of
devotion she inspired in men had no affinity to
friendship, respect, consideration, or unselfishness.
The closing scene is described with a cutting brevity,
that recalls Miss Austen’s dismissal of Maria Rushworth
and Mrs. Norris.
She married the man designed for her daughter—for
an establishment: “Whether Lady Susan was
or was not happy in her second choice, I do not[Pg 114]
see how it can ever be ascertained; for who would
take her assurance of it on either side of the question?
The world must judge from probabilities;
she had nothing against her but her husband, and
her conscience.”
As we have noticed before, Miss Austen seldom
obtrudes her opinions, but they are occasionally
implied. And, on such occasions, they are unhesitating.
We find in her no doubt, no compromise—we
might almost say no charity—about a few
questions of ultimate morality.
On the whole, however, we cannot claim for Lady
Susan all those perfections of style associated with
the genius of its author. Save for a few turns of
phrase, of which we have quoted the most significant,
it has little of her pointed epigram or subtle
humour. The language is equally finished and
inevitable, but there is neither sparkle nor gaiety.
We miss the dialogue and the delicate variety
in characterisation. It would be hazardous,
indeed, to suppose that anyone could have
“discovered” Jane Austen from Lady Susan;
but, knowing her other work, we can detect the
mastery.
In conclusion, it is worth noticing that she has[Pg 115]
here given us some insight into the constancy of
man.
Reginald de Courcy had been a victim of
Lady Susan’s. After her second marriage, her
daughter
“Frederika was fixed in the family of her uncle and aunt
till such time as Reginald de Courcy could be talked,
flattered, and finessed into an affection for her which,
allowing leisure for the conquest of his attachment to
her mother, for his abjuring all future attachments,
and detesting the sex, might be reasonably looked for in
a twelvemonth. Three months might have done it in
general, but Reginald’s feelings were no less lasting
than lively.”
It will be remembered that Miss Austen is less
explicit about Edmund Bertram:
“I purposely abstain from dates on this occasion,
that every one may be at liberty to fix their own, aware
that the cure of unconquerable passions, and the
transfer of unchanging attachments, must vary much
as to time in different people. I only entreat everybody
to believe that exactly at the time when it was quite
natural that it should be so, and not a week earlier,
Edmund did cease to care about Miss Crawford, and
became as anxious to marry Fanny as Fanny herself
could desire.”
On the other hand, Marianne Dashwood required[Pg 116]
two years to conquer her devotion to Willoughby
in favour of Colonel Brandon; but then Miss Austen
has claimed for her sex, through Anne Elliot, “the
privilege of loving longest, when existence, or when
hope, is gone.”
[Pg 117]
PARALLEL PASSAGES
It would be difficult, if not impossible, to name an
author of genius even approximately equal to Jane
Austen’s who owed so little as she to any deliberate
study of literary models or conscious attention
to the laws of style. Concerning her personal
character and private interests we know, indeed,
surprisingly little; but it is certain, on the one
hand, that she was not in touch with the men and
women of letters among her contemporaries, and,
on the other, that her family circle did not practise
the gentle art of criticism. The further assumption
that she had thought little, and read less, about the
theory of her art, is justified by the absence of
any such references in her letters, and by her simple
ideas of construction, as developed in the advice
to a young relative who was attempting to follow
her example:
“You are now collecting your people delightfully,
getting them exactly into such a spot as is the delight
of my life. Three or four families in a country village
is the very thing to work on.”
[Pg 118]
Jane Austen, however, read novels with keen
enjoyment: Northanger Abbey is in part an avowed
burlesque of Mrs. Radcliffe, and we can discover,
in the language of Shakespearean commentary,
the “originals” for several of her plots and persons
in the works of Fanny Burney.
Such an investigation, indeed, seems to have
been almost courted by the author herself when
she borrowed a title from a chance phrase of her
sister-novelist’s, for a story with a somewhat similar
plot, developed, among other coincidences, in two
closely parallel scenes. When at length, after a
series of cruel misfortunes, the hero and heroine
of Cecilia were permitted to console each other,
an onlooker thus pointed the moral of their experience:
“The whole of this unfortunate business has
been the result of PRIDE AND PREJUDICE.”
There must have been a day, about twenty
years after they were written, when these words
assumed, in Jane Austen’s eyes, a sudden significance.
She had read them before, probably
many times, but on this occasion they proved
no less than an inspiration. Within her desk,
on which perhaps the favourite volume was then
lying, lay the neatly written manuscript of a tale[Pg 119]
constructed, in some measure, on the lines of this
very Cecilia. She had called it First Impressions.
Would not Pride and Prejudice be a better name?
It was certainly a happy thought.[8]
Now Delvile, like Darcy, fell in love against
his family instincts, and, with an equally offensive
condescension, discoursed at length on his struggles
between pride and passion to the young lady he
desired to honour with his affection. He, too,
resisted long, yielded in the end, and was forgiven.
His mother’s appeal to Cecilia was as violent, and
almost as impertinent, as Lady Catherine’s to
Elizabeth.
A close comparison of these two parallel scenes
will serve at once to show Jane Austen’s familiarity
with the copy and her originality of treatment.
Darcy, like Delvile, is not “more eloquent on the
subject of tenderness than of pride.” But he has
overcome his scruples and offers his hand, in confidence
of its being accepted, to one who dislikes
and despises him. Delvile, on the other hand,[Pg 120]
wishes merely to explain the reasons that have
induced him to deny himself the dangerous solace
of the “society” of one whom he believes to be
entirely indifferent to him, and to excuse the
occasional outbursts of tenderness into which he
has been betrayed in unguarded moments. He does
not complain of “the inferiority of her connections,”
but of the clause in her uncle’s will by which her
future husband is compelled to take her name.
Cecilia had been puzzled by his uncertain behaviour,
but, believing him only cautious from respect to his
parents, had permitted herself to love him.
Mrs. Delvile again, like Lady Catherine, based
her appeal on the “honour and credit” of the
young man she was so anxious to release; but her
insolence was tempered by affection, and disguised
by high-sounding moral sentiments. Cecilia was
softened, as Elizabeth had not been, by a sense of
gratitude for past kindness and by a strained notion
of respect for the older lady. Mrs. Delvile, except
in her pride, is intended to inspire us with genuine
respect; Lady Catherine is always treated with
amused contempt.
There are other instances—less familiar, but
equally striking—in which Miss Austen made[Pg 121]
use, in her own inimitable fashion, of characters,
phrases, and situations in Evelina and Cecilia.
Mr. Delvile, the pompous and foolish man of
family, reappears in Sir Walter Elliot of Persuasion,
and General Tilney of Northanger Abbey. Cecilia
could never determine “whether Mr. Delvile’s
haughtiness or his condescension humbled her
most,” and he became “at length so infinitely
condescending, with intention to give her courage,
that he totally depressed her with mortification
and chagrin.” Catherine Morland always found
that “in spite of General Tilney’s great civilities
to her, in spite of his thanks, invitations, and
compliments, it had been a release to get away
from him.”
Cecilia’s friendship for Henrietta Belfield resembles
Emma’s for Harriet Smith. She was
ever watching the state of her young friend’s
heart; now soliciting her confidence, and again,
from motives of prudence, rejecting it. For a
time both girls are in love with the hero, and
Henrietta dreams as fondly and as foolishly over
Delvile’s imagined partiality as Harriet did over
Knightley’s. Neither heroine has any thought of
resigning her lover to her friend, or “of resolving[Pg 122]
to refuse him at once and for ever, without vouchsafing
any motive, because he could not marry
them both.”
The following conversation between Mr. Gosport
and Miss Larolles recalls Miss Steele’s persistence
in laughing at herself about the doctor (Sense and
Sensibility), and Tom Bertram’s affected belief
that Miss Crawford was “quizzing him and Miss
Anderson” (Mansfield Park).
Gosport attacks Miss Larolles on a rumour
now current about her, and, after some skirmishing,
confesses to having heard that “she had left
off talking.”
“‘Oh, was that all,’ cried she, disappointed. ‘I
thought it had been something about Mr. Sawyer, for
I declare I have been plagued so about him, I am quite
sick of his name.’
“‘And for my part, I never heard it! So fear
nothing from me on his account.’
“‘Lord, Mr. Gosport, how can you say so! I am
sure you must know about the festino that night, for
it was all over the town in a moment.’
“‘What festino?’
“‘Well, only conceive how provoking! Why, I
know nothing else was talked of for a month.’”
This is the Miss Larolles who haunted the mind
of Anne Elliot, in Persuasion, when she moved to[Pg 123]
the end of a form at the concert, in order to be
sure of not missing Captain Wentworth:
“She could not do so without comparing herself
with Miss Larolles, the inimitable Miss Larolles, but
still she did it, and not with much happier effect.”
Here is the passage in question: “Do you know,”
says Miss Larolles,
“Mr. Meadows has not spoke one word to me all the
evening! though I am sure he saw me, for I sat at the
outside on purpose to speak to a person or two, that I
knew would be strolling about; for if one sits on the
inside there’s no speaking to a creature you know;
so I never do it at the opera, nor in the boxes at Ranelagh,
nor anywhere. It’s the shockingest thing you
can conceive, to be made sit in the middle of these
forms, one might as well be at home, for nobody can
speak to one.”
The singularly unselfish affection of Mrs. and
Miss Mirvan for Evelina, never clouded by envy
of her superior attractions, finds its echo in the
experience of Jane Fairfax:
“The affection of the whole family, the warm attachment
of Miss Campbell in particular, was the more
honourable to each party, from the circumstance of
Jane’s decided superiority, both in beauty and acquirements.”
When Evelina is in great trouble, and the “best[Pg 124]
of men,” Mr. Villars, is penetrated to the heart
by the sight of her grief, he can think of no better
consolation than:
“My dearest child, I cannot bear to see thy tears;
for my sake dry them: such a sight is too much for
me: think of that, Evelina, and take comfort, I charge
thee.”
With similar masculine futility the self-centred
Edmund Bertram attempts to soften the grief
of his dear cousin:
“No wonder—you must feel it—you must suffer.
How a man who had once loved, could desert you.
But yours—your regard was new compared with——Fanny,
think of me.”
Many a reader, doubtless, has, with Elizabeth
Bennet, “lifted up his eyes in amazement” at
the platitudes of Mary on the occasion of Lydia’s
elopement, without suspecting that offensive
young moralist of having culled her phrases
from the earlier novelist. “Remember, my
dear Evelina,” writes Mr. Villars, “nothing is
so delicate as the reputation of a woman; it is
at once the most beautiful and most brittle of all
human things.” Now Mary was “a great reader
and made extracts.” She evidently studied the[Pg 125]
art of judicious quotation: “Unhappy as the
event must be for Lydia,” says this astounding
sister,
“we may draw from it this useful lesson: that loss
of virtue in a female is irretrievable—that one false
step involves her in endless ruin—that her reputation
is no less brittle than it is beautiful, and that she cannot
be too guarded in her behaviour towards the undeserving
of the other sex.”
The general resemblance of Catherine Morland’s
situation to Evelina’s may have been unconscious,
but was scarcely, we think, accidental. In
Northanger Abbey, as in no other of Miss Austen’s
novels, though in all Miss Burney’s, the heroine
is detached from her ordinary surroundings and
introduced to society under the inefficient protection
of foolish acquaintances. Like Evelina,
she finds in the great world much cause for alarm
and anxiety, though, like her, she has the hero for
partner at her first ball. She, too, is frequently
tormented by the differences between her aristocratic
and her vulgar friends. Henry Tilney’s
attitude towards her, on the other hand, is very
similar to Lord Orville’s towards Evelina. He can
read her like an open book, and his discovery of[Pg 126]
her suspicions about his father is as ingenious
and as delicately revealed as Orville’s generous
chivalry to Evelina at the ridotto. Indeed, had
Fanny Burney been more daring she would have
confessed that Orville’s affection for Evelina, like
Tilney’s for Catherine,
“originated in nothing better than gratitude; or in
other words, that a persuasion of her partiality for him
had been the only cause of giving her a serious thought.”
The admiration which Evelina expressed with
so much naïveté and earnestness to her guardian
must have betrayed itself in her looks and conversation.
Orville’s heart was won by unconscious
flattery, though Miss Burney herself was too conventional
to admit it. She left the conception
and its defence to another. “It is a new circumstance
in romance,” writes Miss Austen, “and
dreadfully derogatory of an heroine’s dignity; but
if it be as new in common life, the credit of a
wild imagination will at least be all my own.”
We can scarcely avoid wondering whether Miss
Austen remembered Sir Clement Willoughby when
she decided upon the name of Marianne’s devoted,
but faithless, lover. The two men bear somewhat
similar relations to hero and heroine.
[Pg 127]
In one of her rare outbursts of self-confidence
with the reader, Miss Austen appears to put Camilla
on a level with Cecilia; and Thorpe’s abuse of this
novel in Northanger Abbey must be interpreted as
her own indirect praise, for that youth is never
allowed to open his lips without exposing himself
to our derision. It is immaterial to our purpose
that posterity has accepted his verdict rather than
Miss Austen’s. Her name appears among the
subscribers to Camilla, and she was loyal to it
without an effort. Here she was not likely to
find much available material; but the conduct
of Miss Margland towards Sir Hugh Tyrold and
his adopted children may have suggested some
traits in Mrs. Norris, and Mr. Westwyn’s naïve
enthusiasm for his son bears a strong resemblance
to that of Mr. Weston[9] for the inevitable Frank
Churchill.
Miss Bingley made herself ridiculous by her
definition of an accomplished woman as one who
“must have a thorough knowledge of music,
singing, drawing, dancing, and the modern languages.”
The germ of the satire appears in the
experiences of Miss Burney’s The Wanderer, and[Pg 128]
in an allusion to the prevalent idea of feminine
culture in Camilla:
“A little music, a little drawing, and a little dancing,
which should all be but slightly pursued, to distinguish
a lady of fashion from an artist.”
So writes Jane Austen, again, in Lady Susan:
“Not that I am an advocate for the prevailing fashion
of acquiring a perfect knowledge of all languages,
arts, and sciences. It is throwing away time to be
mistress of French, Italian, and German; music,
singing, and dancing.... I do not mean, therefore,
that Frederika’s acquirements should be more than
superficial, and I flatter myself that she will not
remain long enough at school to understand anything
thoroughly.”
It remains only to notice with what kindred
indignation the two writers complain of the little
honour accorded their craft. Miss Burney, in
fact, did much to raise her profession; but it
was not considered “quite respectable” by Miss
Austen’s contemporaries.
Mr. Delvile complains of Cecilia’s large bill at
the booksellers’, on the ground that
“a lady, whether so called from birth, or only from
fortune, should never degrade herself by being put on
a level with writers, and such sort of people.”
[Pg 129]
In the preface to Evelina Miss Burney declares
that
“in the republic of letters, there is no member of
such inferior rank, or who is so much disdained by his
brethren of the quill, as the humble novelist; nor is
his fate less hard in the world at large, since, among
the whole class of writers, perhaps not one can be
named of which the votaries are more numerous but
less respectable.”
Jane Austen is more spirited in her complaint,
and takes her example from Miss Burney herself:
“Yes, novels; for I will not adopt that ungenerous
and impolitic custom, so common with novel-writers,
of degrading, by their contemptuous censure, the very
performances to the number of which they are themselves
adding; joining with their greatest enemies in
bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and
scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own
heroine, who, if she accidentally take up a novel, is
sure to turn over its insipid pages with disgust. Alas!
if the heroine of one novel be not patronised by the
heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection
and regard? I cannot approve it. Let us
leave it to the Reviewers to abuse such effusions of
fancy at their leisure, and over every new novel to talk
in threadbare strains of the trash with which the Press
now groans. Let us not desert one another; we are
an injured body. Although our productions have
afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than[Pg 130]
those of any other literary corporation in the world,
no species of composition has been so much decried.
From pride, ignorance, or fashion, our foes are almost
as many as our readers; and while the ability of the
nine-hundredth abridger of the History of England, or
of the man who collects and publishes in a volume some
dozen lines of Milton, Pope, and Prior, with a paper
from the Spectator and a chapter from Sterne, is eulogised
by a thousand pens, there seems almost a general wish
of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour
of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which
have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them.
‘I am no novel-reader; I seldom look into novels; it
is really very well for a novel.’ Such is the common
cant. ‘And what are you reading, Miss ——?’
‘Oh, it’s only a novel!’ replies the young lady, while
she lays down her book with affected indifference
or momentary shame. ‘It is only Cecilia, or Camilla,
or Belinda,’ or, in short, only some work in which the
greatest powers of mind are displayed, in which the
most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest
delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit
and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best
chosen language.”
[Pg 131]
“PERSUASION” TO “JANE EYRE”
(1818-1847)
Susan Ferrier (1782-1854) once declared that
“perhaps, after all, the only uncloying pleasure in
life is that of fault-finding”; and this cynical conclusion
may serve to measure, in some degree, the
peculiar flavour of her brisk satire. The fact is,
that she acquired her notions of literary skill from
intimate association with “the Modern Athens,”
as Edinburgh then styled itself, wherein “Crusty
Christopher” and “The Ploughman Poet” held
sway. It was here, as we know, that “Brougham and
his confederates” formed that conspiracy of scorn,
The Edinburgh Review, which Wilson out-Heroded in
Blackwood. Following Miss Burney, in her spirited
exhibition of “Humours,” Miss Ferrier also continued
the Edgeworth “national” novel, by exploiting
a period of Scotch history untouched by Scott.
As her friend, Wilson, remarks in the Noctes:
“These novels have one feature of true and melancholy
interest quite peculiar to themselves. It is in[Pg 132]
them alone that the ultimate breaking-down and debasement
of the Highland character has been depicted.
Sir Walter Scott had fixed the enamel of genius over
the last fitful flames of their half-savage chivalry, but
a humbler and sadder scene—the age of lucre-banished
clans—of chieftains dwindled into imitation squires,
and of chiefs content to barter the recollections of a
thousand years for a few gaudy seasons of Almacks
and Crockfords, the euthanasia of kilted aldermen and
steamboat pibrochs was reserved for Miss Ferrier.”
And for the accuracy of her picture, the authoress
herself lays claim to having paid careful attention
to the results of deliberate study. “You may
laugh,” she writes to Miss Clavering, “at the idea
of its being at all necessary for the writer of a
romance to be versed in the history, natural and
political, the modes, manners, customs, etc., of
the country where its bold and wanton freaks
are to be played; but I consider it most essentially
so, as nothing disgusts even an ordinary reader
more than a discovery of the ignorance of the
author, who is pretending to instruct and amuse.”
Meanwhile, the “Highlander” was more or less
in fashion, and Susan Ferrier set off her picture by
vivid contrasts with the most recherché daughters
of Society. An elegant slave of passion longs to fly
with her Henry to the desert—“a beautiful place,[Pg 133]
full of roses and myrtles, and smooth, green turf,
and murmuring rivulets, and though very retired,
not absolutely out of the world; where one could
occasionally see one’s friends, and give déjeuner et
fêtes-champêtres.” So the foolish Indiana in Miss
Burney’s Camilla considered a “cottage” but
“as a bower of eglantine and roses, where she
might repose and be adored all day long.”
But a little experience soon teaches her she “did
not very well then know what a desert was.”
Scotch mists and mountain blasts dispel the fancy
picture, and, after a brief period of acute wretchedness,
the really heartless victim of a so-called love
match becomes the zealous promoter of mercenary
connections.
Miss Ferrier then introduces us to the next generation,
where any attempt at dogmatism about love
becomes hazardous.
“Love is a passion that has been much talked of,
often described, and little understood. Cupid has
many counterfeits going about the world, who pass
very well with those whose minds are capable of passion,
but not of love. These Birmingham Cupids have many
votaries among boarding-school misses, militia officers,
and milliners’ apprentices, who marry upon the mutual
faith of blue eyes and scarlet coats; have dirty houses[Pg 134]
and squalling children, and hate each other most
delectably. Then there is another species for more
refined souls, which owes its birth to the works of
Rousseau, Goethe, Coffin, etc. Its success depends
very much upon rocks, woods, and waterfalls; and it
generally ends in daggers, pistols, poisons, or Doctors’
Commons.”
It would seem that even the heroine is, like
Emily in Udolpho, rather at sea concerning the
proper distinction between virtue and taste.
She is “religious—what mind of any excellence is
not? but hers is the religion of poetry, of taste, of
feeling, of impulse, of any and everything but Christianity.”
The worthy youth who loved her “saw
much of fine natural feeling, but in vain sought for any
guiding principle of duty. Her mind seemed as a lovely,
flowery, pathless waste, whose sweets exhaled in vain;
all was graceful luxuriance, but all was transient and
perishable in its loveliness. No plant of immortal
growth grew there, no ‘flowers worthy of Paradise.’”
Inevitably the dear creature is captivated, at
first sight, by any good-looking villain: “There
might, perhaps, be something of hauteur in his lofty
bearing; but it was so qualified by the sportive
gaiety of his manners, that it seemed nothing more
than that elegant and graceful sense of his own
superiority, to which, even without arrogance, he
could not be insensible.”
[Pg 135]
The hero will no doubt require time before he can
stand up against so fine a gentleman; but justice
requires his ultimate triumph, since, in Miss Ferrier’s
judgment, a “good moral” was always essential to
fiction.
“I don’t think, like all penny-book manufacturers,
that ’tis absolutely necessary that the good boys and
girls should be rewarded, and the naughty ones punished.
Yet, I think, where there is much tribulation, ’tis fitter
it should be the consequence, rather than the cause,
of misconduct or frailty. You’ll say that rule is absurd,
inasmuch as it is not observed in human life. That I
allow; but we know the inflictions of Providence are
for wise purposes, therefore our reason willingly submits
to them. But, as the only good purpose of a book
is to inculcate morality, and convey some lesson of
instruction as well as delight, I do not see that what is
called a good moral can be dispensed with in a work of
fiction.”
Miss Ferrier, in fact, would have no hand in the
“raw head and bloody bone schemes” in which
Miss Clavering (who wrote “The History of Mrs.
Douglas” in Marriage) had, apparently, invited
her to collaborate, and chose rather to exemplify
her own theories in three very similar stories:
Marriage (1818), The Inheritance (1824), and Destiny
(1831). Urged, again and again, to supplement[Pg 136]
these successes, she made “two attempts to write
something else, but could not please herself, and
would not publish anything”—a most praiseworthy
resolution.
She has left us an entertaining account of
her “plan” for Marriage, which may well serve for
an exact description of her actual achievement.
“I do not recollect ever to have seen the sudden
transition of a high-bred English beauty, who thinks
she can sacrifice all for love, to an uncomfortable,
solitary, Highland dwelling, among tall, red-haired
sisters and grim-faced aunts. Don’t you think this
would make a good opening of the piece? Suppose
each of us[10] try our hands on it; the moral to be deduced
from that is to warn all young ladies against runaway
matches, and the character and fate of the two sisters
would be unexceptionable. I expect it will be the
first book every wise matron will put into the hand of
her daughter, and even the reviewers will relax of their
severity in favour of the morality of this little work.
Enchanting sight! already do I behold myself arrayed
in an old mouldy covering, thumbed and creased and
filled with dog’s ears. I hear the enchanting sound
of some sentimental miss, the shrill pipe of some antiquated
spinster, or the hoarse grumbling of some
incensed dowager as they severally enquire for me at
the circulating library, and are assured by the master
that it is in such demand that, though he has thirteen[Pg 137]
copies, they are insufficient to answer the calls upon
it; but that each one of them may depend upon having
the very first that comes in!!!”
The interest, in these novels, is not awakened
by any subtle characterisation or by serious sympathy
with the dramatis personæ. It depends
rather upon caustic wit, accurate local colour,
a picture of manners, and a “museum of
abnormalities.”
Miss Ferrier’s nice distinctions between the
“well-bred,” and her photographs of vulgarity,
may claim to rival Miss Burney’s.
“Mrs. St. Clair, for example, was considerably
annoyed by the manners of Lady Charles, which made
her feel her own as something unwieldy and overgrown;
like a long train, they were both out of the way and in
the way, and she did not know very well how to dispose
of them. Indeed, few things can be more irritating
than for those who have hitherto piqued themselves
upon the abundance of their manner, to find all at
once that they have a great deal too much, and that
no one is inclined to take it off their hands, and that,
in short, it is dead stock.”
Mrs. Bluemit’s tea-party, again, reveals the Blue-Stockings
in all their glory; while Mr. Augustus
Larkins—with his “regular features, very pink eyes,
very black eyebrows, and what was intended for a[Pg 138]
very smart expression”—forcibly recalls Mr. Smith
of Snow Hill. His ideal of dress and manners was
evidently shared by Bob and Davy Black, who
were
“dressed in all the extremes of the reigning fashions—small
waists, brush-heads, stiff collars, iron heels,
and switches. Like many other youths they were
distinctly of opinion that ‘dress makes the man.’...
Perhaps, after all, that is a species of humility rather
to be admired in those who, feeling themselves destitute
of mental qualifications, trust to the abilities of their
tailor and hairdresser for gaining them the good-will
of the world.”
It must be admitted that Miss Ferrier’s obviously
spontaneous delight in satire has occasionally
tempted her beyond the limits of artistic realism.
Her miniature of the M‘Dow, for example, has all
the objectionable qualities which revive our preference
for the “elegancies” of romance.
“Here Miss M‘Dow was disencumbered of her pelisse
and bonnet, and exhibited a coarse, blubber-lipped,
sun-burnt visage, with staring sea-green eyes, a quantity
of rough sandy hair, and mulatto neck, with merely a
rim of white round her shoulders.... The gloves
were then taken off, and a pair of thick mulberry paws
set at liberty.”
No such criticism, however applies to those full-length[Pg 139]
portraits of the inimitable Aunts in
Marriage—the “sensible” Miss Jacky, Miss Nicky,
who was “not wanting for sense either,” and Miss
Grizzy, the great letter-writer. “Their life was one
continued fash about everything or nothing”; and
if a “sensible woman” generally means “a very
disagreeable, obstinate, illiberal director of all men,
women, and children,” the Aunts were really “well-meaning,
kind-hearted, and, upon the whole, good-tempered”
old ladies, whose garrulous absurdities
are a perpetual delight.
Again, Miss Pratt (of The Inheritance) has certain
obvious affinities to the inimitable Miss Bates; as
Mr. M‘Dow (in Destiny) recalls Collins; and the
creation of that good soul, Molly Macaulay, bears
solitary evidence to Miss Ferrier’s seldom-exerted
powers of sympathetic subtlety.
We are tempted to wonder if there be any particular
significance in the fact that, though Miss Ferrier
wrote Marriage almost immediately after the appearance
of Sense and Sensibility, she did not publish
it till seven years later.[11] If, during that interval,
she felt compelled to study the supreme[Pg 140]
excellences of a sister-authoress, it is clear that she
wisely abandoned any attempt at imitation. Her
work, as we have seen, directly follows Miss Burney’s,
and should be properly regarded in relation
to Evelina and Cecilia; reflecting Society—and the
upstart—of a slightly later generation, then flourishing
in North Britain.
Mary Russell Mitford (1787-1855) is the only
writer on record who has deliberately declared
herself a disciple.
“Of course, I shall copy as closely as I can nature
and Miss Austen—keeping, like her, to genteel country
life; or rather going a little lower, perhaps; and, I am
afraid, with more of sentiment and less of humour. I
do not intend to commit these delinquencies, mind. I
mean to keep as playful as I can; but I am afraid they
will happen in spite of me.... It will be called—at
least, I mean it so to be—Our Village; will consist of
essays, and characters, and stories, chiefly of country
life, in the manner of the Sketch Book, connected by
unity of locality and purpose. It is exceedingly playful
and lively, and I think you will like it. Charles Lamb
(the matchless Elia of the London Magazine) says
nothing so fresh and characteristic has appeared for
a long time.”
It was called Our Village; and appeared in parts
between 1824 and 1832, the earlier series being the[Pg 141]
best, because afterwards she wrote for remuneration—when
“I would rather scrub floors, if I could get
as much by that healthier, more respectable, and
more feminine employment,”—a declaration which
prepares us for the criticism that, though in her
own day she was accused of copying the “literal”
manner of Crabbe and Teniers, she was at heart a
frank sentimentalist. “Are your characters and
descriptions true?” asked her friend Sir William
Elford; and she replied, “Yes! yes! yes! as true
as is well possible. You, as a great landscape
painter, know that, in painting a favourite scene,
you do a little embellish, and can’t help it, you
avail yourself of happy accidents of atmosphere,
and if anything be ugly, you strike it out, or if anything
be wanting, you put it in. But still the
picture is a likeness.”
Assuredly Miss Mitford was no realist, nor was
her imitation servile. Once she expressed a desire
that Miss Austen had shown “a little more taste,
a little more perception of the graceful”; and, in
such matters, as in culture, she was herself far more
professional. But although she could describe, and
even “compose,” with a charm of her own which
almost defies analysis, Miss Mitford’s powers were[Pg 142]
strictly limited. The “country-town” atmosphere
of Belford Regis lacks spontaneity; and Atherton,
her only attempt at a novel, is wanting in varied
incident or motion. Readers attracted by mere
simplicity, however, will feel always a peculiar
affection for Miss Mitford, that would be increased
by her “Letters” which she describes as “just
like so many bottles of ginger-beer, bouncing and
frothy, and flying in everybody’s face.”
Christopher North remarked in Noctes Ambrosianæ
that her writings were “pervaded by a
genuine rural spirit—the spirit of Merry England.
Every line bespeaks the lady.”
And the “Shepherd” replied:
“I admire Miss Mitford just excessively. I dinna
wunner at her being able to write sae weel as she does
about drawing-rooms wi’ sofas and settees, and about
the fine folk in them seeing themsels in lookin-glasses
frae tap to tae; but what puzzles the like o’ me, is
her pictures o’ poachers, and tinklers, and pottery-trampers,
and ither neerdoweels, and o’ huts and hovels
without riggin’ by the wayside, and the cottages o’
honest puir men, and byres, and barns, and stackyards,
and merry-makins at winter ingles, and courtship
aneath trees, and at the gable-end of farm houses,
’tween lads and lasses as laigh in life as the servants
in her father’s ha’. That’s the puzzle, and that’s the[Pg 143]
praise. But ae word explains a’—Genius—Genius,
wull a’ the metafhizzians in the warld ever expound
that mysterious monosyllable.—Nov. 1826.”
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851)
has no place in the development of women’s work
in fiction, since her one novel, Frankenstein, belongs
to no type that has been attempted before or
since, though it is often roughly described as a
throw-back to the School of Terror. The conception
of a man-made Monster, with human feelings—of
pathetic loneliness and brutal cruelty—was
eminently characteristic of an age which hankered
after the byways of Science, imagined unlimited
possibilities from the extension of knowledge,
and was never tired of speculation. Inevitably the
daughter of William Godwin had some didactic
intentions; and her “Preface” declares her “by
no means indifferent to the manner in which whatever
moral tendencies exist in the sentiments or
characters it contains shall affect the reader; yet
my chief concern in this respect has been limited
to the avoiding of the enervating effects of the
novels of the present day, and to the exhibition of
the amiableness of domestic affection and the excellence
of universal virtue.” Among other things,[Pg 144]
Mrs. Shelley betrays her sympathy with Rousseau’s
ideal of the “Man Natural,” and with vegetarianism.
In a mood of comparative reasonableness and
humanity the Monster promises, under certain
conditions, to abandon his revenge and bury
himself in the “Wilds of South America.”
“My food is not that of man; I do not destroy the
lamb and the kid, to glut my appetite; acorns and
berries will afford me sufficient nourishment. My
companion will be of the same nature as myself, and
will be content with the same fare. We shall make
our bed of dried leaves; the sun will shine on us as
on man, and will ripen our food.”
The ethical struggle, with which Mrs. Shelley
has here concerned herself, arises from circumstances
beyond the pale of experience; but her
solution is characteristic, and echoes the spirit
of Shelley himself. Frankenstein, “in a fit of enthusiastic
madness, has created a rational creature,”
who, finding himself hated by mankind, resolves
to punish his creator. He promises, however,
to abstain from murdering Frankenstein’s family,
if that man of science will make for him a female
companion with whom he may peacefully retire to
the wilderness. Obviously the temptation is great.
Frankenstein’s brother has been already destroyed:[Pg 145]
it would seem his duty to protect his father and his
wife. But, on the other hand,
“My duties towards my fellow-creatures had greater
claims to my attention, because they included a greater
proportion of happiness or misery. Urged by this view,
I refused, and I did right in refusing, to create a companion
for the first creature.”
There is no professional art in the story of
Frankenstein, though it has a certain gloomy and
perverse power. It is told in letters from an arctic
explorer “To Mrs. Saville, England”; and the
monster’s own life-story, with the only revelation
of his emotions, is narrated within this narrative,
in a monologue to Frankenstein.
It is uncertain whether the work would ever
have been remembered, or revived, apart from our
natural interest in the author; although, so far
as it has any similarity with other work, it belongs
to a class of novels which English writers have
seldom attempted, and never accomplished with
any distinction.
Frances Trollope (1780-1863) has been so
completely overshadowed by her son Anthony—himself
a distinguished practitioner in the domestic[Pg 146]
novel—that few readers to-day are aware that her
fertile pen produced a “whole army of novels
and books of travel, sometimes pouring into the
libraries at the rate of nine volumes a year.” She
began her career—curiously enough, when she was
past fifty—by a severely satirical attack on the
United States, entitled Domestic Manners of the
Americans; and her first novel, The Abbess, did not
appear till 1833. She was essentially feminine in
the enthusiasm of her tirades against various
practices in her generation, and has been freely
criticised for want of taste. The Vicar of Wrexhill
(1837), indeed, is coloured by a violent prejudice
which goes far to justify this objection,
and may even excuse the disparaging deduction on
women’s intellect drawn by a contemporary reviewer,
who thus characterises her spirited defence
of “oppressed Orthodoxy”:
“It is a great pity that the heroine ever set forth on
such a foolish errand; she has only harmed herself and
her cause (as a bad advocate always will) and had
much better have remained at home pudding-making
or stocking-mending, than have meddled with what
she understands so ill.
“In the first place (we speak it with due respect for
the sex) she is guilty of a fault which is somewhat[Pg 147]
too common among them; and having very little,
except prejudice, on which to found an opinion, she
makes up for want of argument by a wonderful fluency
of abuse. A woman’s religion is chiefly that of the heart,
and not of the head. She goes through, for the most
part, no dreadful stages of doubt, no changes of
faith: she loves God as she loves her husband by a kind
of instinctive devotion. Faith is a passion with her,
not a calculation; so that, in the faculty of believing,
though they far exceed the other sex, in the power of
convincing they fall far short of them.”[12]
More than one woman writer has risen, of later
years, triumphantly to confute any such complacent
masculine superiority; but it must be
admitted that Mrs. Trollope is scarcely judicial
in the venom she pours out so eloquently upon the
head of her “Vicar,” his worshippers, and his
accomplices. This was not quite the direction in
which women could most wisely develop the
domestic novel in her day; while they still—like
the Brontës, but in a spirit quite alien to Jane
Austen’s—upheld “that manly passion for superiority
which leads our masters to covet in a companion
chosen for life ... that species of weakness
which is often said to be the most attractive feature
in the female character.” It is, again, a curious[Pg 148]
want of taste which allows her to dwell upon the
pleasure experienced by a comparatively respectable
young man in making a little girl of eight
tipsy—though he is the Vicar’s son.
But, on the other hand, there is considerable
power and much sprightly humour in the story.
Mrs. Trollope’s good (i.e. orthodox) people are
really delightful, and admirably characterised. The
genuine piety of Rosalind, the Irish heiress, is
most artistically united to graceful vivacity and
natural charm: the testy Sir Gilbert is perfectly
matched with Lady Harrington: and the three
young Mowbrays are drawn from life. The study
of Henrietta Cartwright, driven to atheism by
the hypocrisy of her horrible father, has all the
force of a real human tragedy; and, if the villainy
of Evangelicism is exaggerated, it is painted with
graphic humour. She works from nature, and
finds excellent “copy” in the parish.
Mrs. Trollope, in fact, has left us proof in abundance
that women had learnt to “write with ease”;
if, in her case, over-production and misplaced zeal
have led to an abuse of her talents.
Harriet Martineau (1802-1876), “Queen of[Pg 149]
philanthropists,” has left a stamp of almost passionate
sincerity on everything she wrote. From
earliest days she declared that her “chief subordinate
object in life was the cultivation of her
intellectual powers, with a view to the instruction
of others by her writings.” Believing herself the
servant of humanity, she sought to save souls by
the diffusion of a little knowledge.
Inevitably, under such influence, her work was
always didactic; whether inspired by the orthodox
faith of her earlier years or the Atkinson-interpretation
of Comte she afterwards espoused:
whether directed towards social reform, or expressed
in narrative and biography. The greater number
of her publications, whether or no actually written
for the press, contain those qualities which make
the best journalism; and, though occasionally
capricious and “superior” in private judgment,
her brief critical biographies, from the Daily News,
are masterpieces in the vignette. She knew
“everybody” in her day; and contributed much
to the thirst for “information,” reasonably applied,
which characterised our grandfathers.
But, as a novelist, she has two special claims
to notice. Her “Playfellow Series” (embracing[Pg 150]
Feats on the Fiord, The Crofton Boys, and The
Peasant and the Prince) are living to-day among
the few priceless inherited treasures of literature.
Less obviously didactic than the Edgeworth
“nursery classics,” they have certain similar
characteristics of spontaneity, sympathetic understanding,
and simple directness. Each occupied
with quite different subjects, they are informed
by the same spirit, excite the same kind of pleasure,
and—for all their decided, but not obtrusive,
moralising—appeal to the same healthy taste. By
those to whom their life-like young people have
been among the chosen friends of childhood, the
memories will never fade.
Miss Martineau’s adult narratives have less
distinction; although her Hour and the Man is a
creditable effort in the historic form, and Deerbrook
has much emotional power. To our taste the tone
of the latter must be criticised for its somewhat
sensational religiosity, and for the priggish perfection
of its “white” characters. But, on the other
hand, there is subtlety in contrasts among the
“undesirables”; genuine pathos in, for example,
the description of Mrs. Enderby’s death; and
plenty of artistic “interest” in the plot: nor[Pg 151]
can we neglect mention of the remarkable portrait
of Morris, the servant and most real friend to her
“young ladies.”
We cannot avoid, in conclusion, some reference
to a distinction elaborated in an early chapter
between the drudgery of “teaching” and the “sublime
delights of education”: wherein the author
quaintly remarks that a visiting governess can
“do little more than stand between children and
the faults of the people about them”; betraying
herein the normal prejudice of the pedagogue
against the parent.
Similar theories clearly inspire the eloquence—of
a later chapter—upon a thorny subject on which
the author achieved some pioneer work in her
own life.
“‘Cannot you tell me,’ enquires the persecuted
heroine, ‘of some way in which a woman may earn
money?’
“‘A woman?’ is the stern reply. ‘What rate
of woman? Do you mean yourself? That question
is easily answered. A woman from the uneducated
classes can get a subsistence by washing and cooking, by
milking cows and going into service, and, in some parts
of the kingdom, by working in a cotton mill, or burnishing
plate, as you have no doubt seen for yourself at
Birmingham. But, for an educated woman, a woman[Pg 152]
with the powers God gave her religiously improved,
with a reason which lays life open before her, an understanding
which surveys science as its appropriate
task, and a conscience which would make every species
of responsibility safe,—for such a woman there is in all
England no chance of subsistence but teaching—that
sort of ineffectual teaching, which can never countervail
the education of circumstances—and for which
not one in a thousand is fit,—or by being a superior
Miss Nares—the feminine gender of the tailor and
hatter.’”
Mrs. Gaskell (1810-1865) must always be remembered
as authoress of Cranford, which has
startling similarities to the work of Jane Austen,
and excels her in pathos. If Fanny Burney immortalised
“sensibility,” and Jane Austen created
“the lady,” Mrs. Gaskell may well be called “The
Apologist of Gentility.” She taught us that it was
possible to be genteel without being vulgar; and
her “refined females,” if enslaved to elegance and
propriety, are ladies in the best sense of the word.
“Although they know all each other’s proceedings,
they are exceedingly indifferent to each
other’s opinions.” They are “very independent of
fashion; as they observe: ‘What does it signify
how we dress here at Cranford, where everybody
knows us?’ and if they go from home, their reason[Pg 153]
is equally cogent: ‘What does it signify how we
dress here, where nobody knows us?’” We may
smile at their ingenious devices for concealing
poverty, their grotesque small conventions, their
horror at any allusions to death or other causes for
genuine emotion, and their love of gossip; but
our superiority stands rebuked before simple Miss
Matty’s sense of honour “as a shareholder,” and
before the “meeting of the Cranford ladies” for
the generous contribution of their “mites in a secret
and concealed manner.” As Miss Pole expresses
it, “We are none of us what may be called rich,
though we all possess a genteel competency, sufficient
for tastes that are elegant and refined, and would
not, if they could, be vulgarly ostentatious”; and
they fully appreciated the true charity of “showing
consideration for the feelings of delicate independence
existing in the mind of every refined
female.”
Here, indeed, as in almost every thought or
deed of their uneventful existence, our grandmothers
can teach us that the eager interest in
our neighbours, which we are accustomed to brand
as vulgar and impertinent, was in actual fact a
powerful incentive to Christian practices. There[Pg 154]
is a passage in Cranford which would baffle the
most elaborate statistics of ordered philanthropy,
as it must silence the protest of false pride, and
remain an invulnerable argument against the
isolation of modern life. “I had often occasion
to notice,” observes the visitor, “the use that
was made of fragments and small opportunities
in Cranford: the rose-leaves that were gathered
ere they fell, to make a pot-pourri for some one
who had no garden; the little bundles of lavender-flowers
sent to strew the drawers of some town-dweller,
or to burn in the bedroom of some
invalid. Things that many would despise, and
actions which it seemed scarcely worth while to
perform, were all attended to in Cranford.”
Nor were Miss Matilda Jenkyns and her friends
deficient in any outward show of true breeding.
Despite the most astonishing vagaries of taste in
dress, language, and behaviour, they were dignified
by instinct, and, on all occasions of moment, revealed
a natural manner that is above reproach.
Their simple-minded innocence and genuine
humility never tempted them to pass over impertinence
or tolerate vulgarity, and their powers
of delicate reproof were unrivalled. We cannot[Pg 155]
admire the “green turban” of Miss Matty’s dream,
or share her dread of the frogs in Paris not agreeing
with Mr. Holbrook; we should have been ashamed,
maybe, to assist her in “chasing the sunbeams”
over her new carpet; and we may detect sour
grapes in Miss Pole’s outcry against that “kind of
attraction which she, for one, would be ashamed
to have”; yet I fancy the best of us would covet
admission to Cranford society, and be proud to
number its leaders among our dearest friends.
In fact, the artistic achievement of Cranford is
the creation of an atmosphere. Like the authors
of Evelina and of Emma, Mrs. Gaskell is frankly
feminine, and not superior to the smallest detail
of parochial gossip; but while the ideals of refinement
portrayed are more akin to Miss Burney’s
(allowing for altered social conditions), her methods
of portraiture more nearly resemble Miss Austen’s.
She depends, even less, upon excitement, mystery,
or crime, and Cranford, indeed, may be described
as “a novel without a hero,” without a plot, and
without a love-scene. Miss Brown’s death is the
one event with which we are brought, as it were,
face to face throughout the whole sixteen chapters.
The realities of life, whether sad or joyful, are[Pg 156]
enacted behind the scenes and never used for
dramatic effect, a reticence most striking in the
incident of Captain Brown’s heroic death. They
serve only to reveal the strong and true hearts of
those whose dainty old-world mannerisms have
already secured our sympathy.
Mrs. Gaskell has left out even more than Jane
Austen of the ordinary materials of fiction (though
she is an adept at pathos), and her characters are
equally living. She has less wit, but almost as
much humour.
The most obvious limitation of Cranford, indeed,
is more apparent than real. As everyone will
remember, “all the holders of houses” are women.
“If a married couple settles in the town, somehow
the gentleman disappears; he is either fairly
frightened to death by being the only man in the
Cranford evening tea-parties, or he is accounted
for by being at his regiment, his ship, or closely
engaged in business all the week in the great
neighbouring commercial town of Drumble, distant
only twenty miles on a railroad. In short, whatever
does become of the gentlemen, they are not
at Cranford. What could they do there?... A
man is so in the way in the house.”
[Pg 157]
Even the Rector dare not attend a public entertainment
unless “guarded by troops of his own
sex—the National School boys whom he had treated
to the performance.” The “neat maid-servants”
were never allowed “followers”; and it was Miss
Matty’s chief consolation in starting her little
business that “she did not think men ever bought
tea.” She was afraid of men. “They had such
sharp, loud ways with them, and did up accounts,
and counted their change so quickly.”
Yet, in fact, the masculine element in Cranford
comes frequently to the front; and the men’s
characters are drawn with no less firmness of
outline than the women’s. Miss Matty derives
much from her Reverend father—deceased,
from that sturdy yeoman Thomas Holbrook,
and from “Mr. Peter.” It is Captain Brown,
and no other, whose misfortunes unmask the
real tenderness of Miss Jenkyns herself; and
the good Mr. Hoggins occasions the only serious
discord narrated in the select circle of “elegant
females,” to whom his uncouth surname was a
perpetual affront. The unfortunate conjurer,
Signor Brunoni, otherwise Mr. Brown (was it
accident or design, we wonder, which gave him[Pg 158]
the same plebeian name as the gallant Captain?);
his brother Thomas; the great Mr. Mulliner,
“who seemed never to have forgotten his condescension
in coming to live at Cranford”; honest
farmer Dobson; and dear, blundering Jim Hearn,
whose tactful notion of kindness was “to keep
out of your way as much as he could”; each
played their part in the lives of their lady-betters.
Thomas Holbrook, his quotations from Shakespeare,
George Herbert, and Tennyson; his love
of Nature; his two-pronged forks; and his
charming “counting-house,” have no less subtle
originality than any character in the whole
book; and we should hesitate to name any record
of perfect fidelity, without sentimentalism, to be
compared with the simply chivalrous and cheerful
attentions of this gentleman of seventy to the old
lady who had refused, at the bidding of father and
sister, “to marry below her rank.” One can
only echo the pious aspiration (so touching in its
unselfish abandonment of a cherished ideal), by
which alone Miss Matty betrayed the emotions
excited by the visit to her old lover: “‘God
forbid,’ said she, in a low voice, ‘that I should
grieve any young hearts.’”
[Pg 159]
Holbrook, moreover, had been no doubt largely
responsible for encouraging the inherent good
qualities of Miss Matty’s scapegrace brother (afterwards
the popular Mr. Peter), whose thoughtless
pranks form so strange, and yet so fitting, a background
to those finished miniature-sketches of the
stern Rector and his sweet young wife. It is, indeed,
a fine instance of poetical justice by which
Mr. Peter is allowed, in his old age, to bestow a
richly merited peace and comfort, in addition to
the diversion of masculine society, upon the very
sister whose early life had been so terribly clouded
by his misdeeds.
One is almost tempted to say that Mrs. Gaskell
does scant justice to the first invader of the
Amazons, when she refers to Captain Brown as
“a tame man about the house.” Yet those of
us with sufficient imagination to realise the firm
exclusiveness of Miss Deborah Jenkyns, should
appreciate the significance of the phrase. The
military gentleman, “who was not ashamed to
be poor,” only found his way to that lady’s good
graces by sterling qualities of true manliness.
He was “even admitted in the tabooed hours
before twelve,” because no errand of kindness[Pg 160]
was beneath his dignity or beyond his
patience.
Miss Matty expresses the prevailing sentiment
about men, as she has done on most subjects
worthy of attention, with that “love of peace
and kindliness,” which “makes all of us better
when we are near her.”
“I don’t mean to deny that men are troublesome
in a house. I don’t judge from my own experience,
for my father was neatness itself, and wiped his shoes
in coming in as carefully as any woman; but still a
man has a sort of knowledge of what should be done
in difficulties, that it is very pleasant to have one at
hand ready to lean upon. Now Lady Glenmire”
(whose engagement to Mr. Hoggins was the occasion
of this gentle homily), “instead of being tossed about
and wondering where she is to settle, will be certain
of a home among pleasant and kind people, such as
our good Miss Pole and Mrs. Forrester. And Mr.
Hoggins is really a very personable man; and so far
as his manners—why, if they are not very polished, I
have known people with very good hearts, and very
clever minds too, who were not what some people
reckoned refined, but who were tender and true.”
Again: “Don’t be frightened by Miss Pole from
being married. I can fancy it may be a very happy
state, and a little credulity helps one through life very
smoothly—better than always doubting and doubting,[Pg 161]
and seeing difficulties and disagreeables in everything.”
The finality of the above quotations may further
remind us of an unexpected conclusion to which a
careful study of Cranford must compel the critic.
Despite its apparent inconsequence, the desultory
nature of the narrative, and its surprising innocence
of plot, the work is composed with an almost
perfect sense of dramatic unity. In reality every
event, however trivial or serious, every shade of
character, however subtle or obvious, is at once
subordinate and essential to the character of the
heroine. A heroine, “not far short of sixty, whose
looks were against her,” may not attract the
habitual novel-reader; but unless we submit to
the charm of Miss Matty’s personality, we have
misread Cranford. Deborah, the domineering, had
not so much real strength of character, and serves
only as a foil to her sister’s wider sympathies;
the superficial quickness of Miss Pole never ultimately
misled her friend’s finer judgment; the
(temporary) snobbishness of the Honourable Mrs.
Jamieson troubles her heart indeed, but leaves
her dignity unruffled; and the other members of
the circle scarcely aspire to be more than humble[Pg 162]
admirers of the “Rector’s daughter.” Miss Matty,
of course, is sublimely unconscious of her own influence,
and the authoress very nearly deceives
us into fancying her equally innocent. But she
gives away the secret in her farewell sentence;
and I, for one, would not quarrel with her for
pointing the moral. Miss Matty can never lose
her place in the Gallery of the Immortals,
and we would not neglect to honour the painter’s
name.
Mrs. Gaskell, in Cranford, may claim to have
reached perfection by one finished achievement;
which embodies the ideal to which we conceive
that the work in fiction peculiar to women had
been, more or less consciously, directed from the
beginning. Probably the art would have been
less flawless, if applied—as it was by sister-novelists—to
a wider range of persons and subjects.
Nothing of quite this kind has been again
attempted, and it is not likely that such an
attempt would succeed.
We should only notice, in passing, that Mrs.
Gaskell left other admirable, and quite feminine,
work on more ordinary lines. Wives and Daughters
is a delightful love story; while North and South[Pg 163]
and Mary Barton are almost the first examples
of that keen interest in social problems, and the
life of the poor, in legitimate novels (not fiction-tracts),
which we shall find so favourite a topic
of women from her generation until to-day.
[Pg 164]
A LONELY SOUL
(Charlotte Brontë, 1816-1855)
The genius of Charlotte Brontë presents several
characteristics which do not belong to the more or
less orderly development of the earlier women’s
work. In the first place she is primarily a romancist,
depending far more on emotional analysis than
on the exact portraiture of everyday life. Though
her materials, like theirs, are gained entirely from
personal experience, she clothes them with a
passionate imagination very foreign to anything
in Miss Burney or Jane Austen. She writes,
in other words, because her emotions are forced
into speech by that very intensity; not at all from
amused observation of life. It would be difficult,
indeed, to find outside her few remarkable stories
so powerful an expression of passion as felt by
women—who do not, as a rule, admit the power
of such stormy emotions. Her work is further
remarkable for being mainly inspired by memory;
while the recognition of responsiveness in women[Pg 165]
leads her to paint mutual passion as it has been
seldom revealed elsewhere.
Much has been written of late years concerning
the life of Charlotte Brontë, and we have been told
that the mystery is solved at last. For despite
the almost startling frankness of Mrs. Gaskell’s
famous Life; despite the intimate character of
many of her published letters; it has always been
recognised that the Charlotte Brontë of the biographers
was not the Charlotte Brontë of Jane
Eyre and Villette. Now that we have the letters
to Monsieur Heger, however, it seems to be a prevailing
conclusion that reconciliation, and understanding,
are possible. If Charlotte Brontë, like
her own Lucy Snowe, was in love with “her
master”; if he was perfectly happy in his married
life and, however responsive to enthusiastic admiration,
found warmer feelings both embarrassing
and vexatious; we have discovered the tragedy
which fired her imagination, the utter loneliness
which taught her to dwell so bitterly on the aching
void of unreturned affection, to idealise so romantically
the rapture of marriage. Personally we
are disposed to accept these interpretations, but
not to rely on them for everything. To begin[Pg 166]
with, it is always dangerous to dwell upon any
“explanation” of genius; and, in the second place,
it was not Charlotte Brontë’s experiences (which
others have suffered), but the nature awakened
by them, which determined their artistic expression.
Part of the difficulty arises from the two almost
contradictory methods in which she “worked
up” her stories. She had remarkable powers of
observation and borrowed from real life as recklessly
as Shakespeare borrowed plots, with very
similar indifference to possible criticism. In this
matter, indeed, she cannot be altogether acquitted
of malice or spite; and we do not learn with unmixed
pleasure how many “originals” actually
existed for her dramatis personæ.
But, on the other hand, if “every person and
a large proportion of the incidents were copied
from life,” the emotional power of her work is
entirely imaginative. As pictures of life, her
stories are inadequate and unsatisfying, partly
because there is so much in human nature and in
life which does not interest her: so much of which
she knew nothing; and she is only at home in
the heart of her subject. Here again she is in no
way realistic—as was Jane Austen in manners or[Pg 167]
George Eliot in emotion—but entirely romantic,
however original her conception of romance. Her
heroes and heroines are as far from everyday
humanity, and as ideal and visionary, as Mrs.
Radcliffe’s, though she does not, of course, follow
the “rules” of romance: rather creating out of
her own brain a new heaven and a new earth,
inhabited by a people that know not God or man.
Apart from the rude awakening at Brussels,
again, she exhibited in private correspondence
by turns the strange contrasts between common
sense and emotionalism which mark her work.
She defines the “right path” as “that which
necessitates the greatest sacrifice of self-interest”:
she thinks, “if you can respect a person before
marriage, moderate love at least will come after;
and as to intense passion, I am convinced that that
is no desirable feeling.”
She advises her best friend that
“no young lady should fall in love till the offer has
been made, accepted, the marriage ceremony performed,
and the first half-year of wedded life has passed
away. A woman may then begin to love, but with
great precaution, very coolly, very moderately, very
rationally. If she ever loves so much that a harsh word
or a cold look cuts her to the heart, she is a fool.[Pg 168]
If she ever loves so much that her husband’s will is her
law, and that she has got into the habit of watching
his looks in order that she may anticipate his wishes,
she will soon be a neglected fool.”
On the other hand, “if you knew my thoughts,
the dreams that absorb me, and the fiery imagination
that at times eats me up, and makes me feel
society, as it is, insipid, you would pity me and
I daresay despise me.”
Her emotion on first seeing the sea is absolutely
overpowering; and surely we know the woman
who insisted on visiting a maidservant “attacked
by a violent fever,” fearlessly entered her room
in spite of every remonstrance, “threw herself
on the bed beside her, and repeatedly kissed her
burning brow.”
Experience with her, in fact, had never been
confined to the external happenings, which can
be accumulated, with more or less sympathy,
by the biographer; and her own declaration of
how she worked up episodes outside her own experience
may be applied, without much modification,
to her manipulation of that experience itself.
Asked whether the description of taking opium
in Villette was based on knowledge,
[Pg 169]
“She replied, that she had never, to her knowledge,
taken a grain of it in any shape, but that she had
followed the process she always adopted when she had
to describe anything which had not fallen within her
own experience; she had thought intently on it for
many and many a night before falling to sleep—wondering
what it was like or how it would be—till at length,
sometimes after the progress of her story had been
arrested at this one point for weeks, she wakened up
in the morning with all clear before her, as if she had
in reality gone through the experience, and then could
describe it word for word as it had happened.”
It is obvious that, if no less feminine than her
predecessors, the nature and methods of Charlotte
Brontë would produce very different work from
theirs. In narrative and description she remains
domestic and middle-class. She does not adopt
the “high” notions of aristocracy, she does not
plunge into the mysteries of crime. Her plots are
laid “at home,” so to speak, and among the professional
classes or small gentry with whom she
was personally familiar. The only material which
may be noticed as a new departure is derived from
her particular experiences in schools in England
and abroad, combined with her intimate knowledge
of the governess and the tutor. In Shirley,
again, she is one of the earliest women to devote[Pg 170]
any serious attention to the progress of trade and
the introduction of machinery, with its effect on
the social problems of the working classes.
In construction, on the other hand, she is admittedly
inferior to her predecessors, since her plots
are melodramatic, and her characterisation is disturbed
by a somewhat morbid analysis of unusual
passion. Her feminine ideal has no parallel in the
“sensibility” of Fanny Burney or the sprightly
“calm” of Jane Austen. Its most distinguishing
characteristic is, naturally, revealed in the attitude
assumed towards man. The hero, the ideal lover,
is always “the Master” of the heroine. Jane
Eyre being a governess and Lucy Snowe a pupil,
we might perhaps miss the full significance of the
phrase; but even the strong-minded Shirley refuses
Sir Philip Nunnely, because, among other
reasons, “he is very amiable—very excellent—truly
estimable, but not my master; not in one
point. I could not trust myself with his happiness:
I would not undertake the keeping of it for
thousands; I will accept no hand that cannot hold
me in check.”
Jane Austen once playfully accused herself of
having dared to draw a heroine who had fallen in[Pg 171]
love without first having ascertained the gentleman’s
feeling. This is the normal achievement—in
Charlotte Brontë—not only of heroines, but of
all women. It is, of course, almost inevitable that
since, in her work (as in those of her sister-authors)
we see everything through the minds of the women
characters, we should learn the state of their heart
first; but, in most cases at least, it is certain that
we are in as much doubt as the heroine herself
concerning the man’s feelings, and it is fairly
obvious that often he has actually not made up
his mind. The women in Charlotte Brontë, in
fact, are what we now call “doormats.” They
delight in serving the Beloved; they expect him to
be a superior being, with more control over his
emotions; less dependent on emotion or even on
domestic comfort, appropriately concerned with
matters not suited to feminine intellects, and
accustomed to “keep his own counsel” about the
important decisions of life.
It is her achievement to have secured our enthusiastic
devotion to “females” so thoroughly
Early Victorian; for the heroines of Charlotte
Brontë remain some of the most striking figures
in fiction. They are really heroic, and, while glorying[Pg 172]
in their self-imposed limitations, become vital
by their intensity and depth. Jane Austen once
quietly demonstrated the natural “constancy”
of women; Charlotte Brontë paints this virtue in
fiery colours across all her work. Her incidental,
but most marked, preference for plain heroines—inspired,
apparently, by passionate jealousy of
popular beauty—serves to emphasise the abnormal
capacity for passion and fidelity which, in her
judgment, the power of easily exciting general admiration
apparently tends to diminish.
A contemporary reviewer in the Quarterly—probably
Lockhart—found this type of women
disgustingly sly. The whole of Jane Eyre, indeed,
fills him with holy horror, which is genuine enough,
though expressed with most ungentlemanly virulence,
and prefaced with the extraordinary suggestion
that “Jane Eyre is merely another Pamela (!)
... a small, plain, odd creature, who has been
brought up dry upon school learning, and somewhat
stunted accordingly in mind and body, and
who is thrown upon the world as ignorant of its
ways, and as destitute of its friendships, as a shipwrecked
mariner upon a strange coast.” Rochester,
on the other hand, he finds “captious and Turklike[Pg 173]
... a strange brute, somewhat in the Squire Western
style of absolute and capricious eccentricity.”
The book is guilty of the “highest moral offence
a novel-writer can commit, that of making an unworthy
character interesting in the eyes of the
reader. Mr. Rochester is a man who deliberately
and secretly seeks to violate the laws both of God
and man, and yet we will be bound half our lady
writers are enchanted with him for a model of generosity
and honour.”
We cannot, to-day, detect the “pedantry,
stupidity, or gross vulgarity” of the novel; nor do
we distinguish so sharply between the sly governess—“this
housemaid beau ideal of the arts of
coquetry”—determined to catch Rochester, and
the “noble, high-souled woman” who rejects
his dishonourable proposals. The fact seems to
be that masculine critics of those days regarded
the expression of emotion as indelicate in woman.
Was it this criticism, or merely her knowledge of
men, that inspired that bitter passage in Shirley:
“A lover masculine if disappointed can speak and
urge explanation; a lover feminine can say nothing;
if she did, the result would be shame and anguish,
inward remorse for self-treachery. Nature would
brand such demonstration as a rebellion against her[Pg 174]
instincts, and would vindictively repay it afterwards
by the thunderbolt of self-contempt smiting suddenly
in secret. Take the matter as you find it; ask no
question; utter no remonstrance: it is your best
wisdom. You expected bread, and you have got a
stone; break your teeth on it, and don’t shriek because
the nerves are martyrised: do not doubt that your
mental stomach—if you have such a thing—is strong
as an ostrich’s: the stone will digest. You held out
your hand for an egg, and fate put into it a scorpion.
Show no consternation: close your fingers firmly
upon the gift; let it sting through your palm. Never
mind; in time, after your hand and arm have swelled
and quivered long with torture, the squeezed scorpion
will die, and you will have learned the great lesson
how to endure without a sob.”
Men could not conceive that any lady who was
conscious of love had “really nice feelings” about
it. Moreover, Jane Eyre is “a mere heathen ...
no Christian grace is perceptible upon her.”
She upheld women’s rights, which is “ungrateful”
to God. “There is throughout a murmuring
against the comforts of the rich and against the
privations of the poor, which, as far as each individual
is concerned, is a murmuring against
God’s appointment.” Wherefore the “plain, odd
woman, destitute of all the conventional features of
feminine attraction,” is not made interesting, but[Pg 175]
remains “a being totally uncongenial to our feelings
from beginning to end ... a decidedly vulgar-minded
woman—one whom we should not care
for as an acquaintance, whom we should not seek
as a friend, whom we should not desire for a
relation, and whom we should most scrupulously
avoid for a governess.”
This outspoken, and unsympathetic, criticism
is yet eminently instructive. It shows us all that
Charlotte Brontë accomplished for the first time;
and reveals the full force of prejudice against
which she was, more or less consciously, in revolt.
It remains only to note that in the matter of
style her critics at once recognised her power. “It
is impossible not to be spellbound with the freedom
of the touch. It would be mere hackneyed
courtesy to call it ‘fine writing.’ It bears no
impress of being written at all, but is poured out
rather in the heat and flurry of an instinct which
flows ungovernably on to its object, indifferent by
what means it reaches it, and unconscious too.”
Passing to modern criticism, we find one writer
declaring that Rochester’s character “belongs
to the realm of the railway bookstall shilling
novel,” while to another it seems “of all her[Pg 176]
creations the most wonderful ... from her own
inmost nobility of temper and depth of suffering
she moulded a man, reversing the marvels of God’s
creation.”
It is not, I think, necessary to be dogmatic
in comparing the “greatness” of Villette and
Jane Eyre. The former is “more elaborated,
more mature in execution, but less tragic, less
simple and direct.” The influence of personal
tragedy (assuming her love for Monsieur Heger)
obviously permeates the work; leading to the
idealisation of the pedagogue genius (revived in
Louis Gerard Moore, Esq.—himself half Flemish),
and to unjust hostility against the Continental
feminine (partially atoned for in Hortense Moore).
On the other hand, it is more in touch with real
life; less melodramatic, though still sensational;
more acutely varied, and equally vivid, in characterisation.
Finally, in Shirley, if the spirit of Charlotte
Brontë is less concentrated, it burns with no less
steady flame. Here, for almost the first time in
a woman-writer, we find that eager questioning
upon the earlier struggles between capital and
labour—the risks attendant upon the introduction[Pg 177]
of machinery, the proper relations between master
and men—which afterwards became part of the
stock material for fiction. We find, too, much
shrewd comment upon her own experience of
clerical types—no less in the contrast between
Helstone and Hall than in the somewhat heavily
satirised curates; and some, probably inherited,
injustice towards Dissenters. The characterisation
is far more varied and more realistic; since we
have at least two pairs of lovers, the numerous
Yorke family, and a whole host of “walking
ladies and gentlemen,” more or less carefully
portrayed. Local colour appears in several
passages of enthusiastic analysis of Yorkshire
manners; and the philosophy is frequently turned
on everyday life. For example:
“In English country ladies there is this point to
be remarked. Whether young or old, pretty or
plain, dull or sprightly, they all (or almost all)
have a certain expression stamped on their features,
which seems to say, ‘I know—I do not boast of it—but
I know that I am the standard of what is proper;
let everyone therefore whom I approach, or who
approaches me, keep a sharp look-out, for wherein
they differ from me—be the same in dress, manner,
opinion, principle, or practice—therein they are
wrong.”
[Pg 178]
Yet the inspiration of Shirley echoes Jane
Eyre and Villette. Here, too, as we have seen,—though
the heroine is a rich beauty,—Man should
be Master; and “indisputably, a great, good,
handsome man is the first of created things.”
Yet neither Shirley nor her friend Caroline have
anything in common with the “average” woman,
who, “if her admirers only told her that she was
an angel, would let them treat her like an idiot”;
or with her parents, who “would have delivered
her over to the Rector’s loving-kindness and his
tender mercies without one scruple”; or with the
second Mrs. Helstone, who “reversing the natural
order of insect existence, would have fluttered
through the honeymoon, a bright, admired butterfly,
and crawled the rest of her days a sordid,
trampled worm.”
Jane Eyre, 1847.
Shirley, 1849.
Villette, 1852.
The Professor, 1857.
[Pg 179]
“JANE EYRE” TO “SCENES OF
CLERICAL LIFE”
(1847-1858)
Emily Brontë (1818-1848) can scarcely, in character
or genius, be accommodated to any ordered
consideration of development. Regarded by many
enthusiasts as greater than her more famous
sister, she stands alone for all time. Her one
novel, Wuthering Heights, is unique for the passionate
intensity of its emotions and the wild
dreariness of its atmosphere. Save for the
clumsily introduced stranger, who merely exists
to “hear the story,” the entire plot is woven
about seven characters, all save one nearly related,
and a few servants.
“Mr. Heathcliff,” said the second Catherine,
“you have nobody to love you; and, however
miserable you make us, we shall still have the
revenge of thinking that your cruelty arises from
your greater misery. You are miserable, are
you not? Lonely, like the devil, and envious[Pg 180]
like him? Nobody loves you—nobody will cry
for you when you die! I wouldn’t be you!”
Charlotte calls him “child neither of Lascar
nor gipsy, but a man’s shape animated by
demon life—a Ghoul—an afreet”; and “from
the time when ‘the little black-haired swarthy
thing, as dark as if it came from the Devil,’ was
first unrolled out of the bundle and set on its feet
in the farm-house kitchen, to the hour when
Nelly Dean found the grim, stalwart corpse laid
on its back on the panel-enclosed bed, with wide-gazing
eyes that seemed to ‘sneer at her attempt
to close them, and parted lips and sharp white
teeth that sneered too,’” this human monster
dominates every character and event in the whole
book. Men and women, Linton or Earnshaw,
are but pawns in his remorseless brain; thwarting
his will, daring his anger time after time;
yet always submitting at last to the will of their
“master”: save, indeed, at the fall of the curtain,
when he had “lost the faculty of enjoying destruction.”
For the passion of Heathcliff’s
strange existence is gloomy revenge—against fate
and his own associates. Bitterly concentrated
on the few human beings—all occupying two[Pg 181]
adjacent farms—with whom his life is passed,
he seems the embodiment of an eternal curse,
directed to thwart every natural feeling, every
hope of happiness or peace.
Emily Brontë reveals no conception of humanity
save this fiendish misanthrope; churlish boors like
Hindley and Hareton Earnshaw; weak good
people like Edgar, Isabella, and Linton; passionate
sprites like the two Catherines. Old Joseph
indeed contains some elements of the comic spirit,
exhibited in hypocrisy; and Nelly Dean alone has
both virtue and strength of character. But in
making, or striving to unmake, marriages between
these “opposites”; in forcing their society upon
each other, and hovering around his helpless
victims; the arch-fiend Heathcliff has ample scope
for the indulgence of his diabolical whim. The
tormenting of others and of himself; the perverse
making of misery for its own sake; the ingenious
exercise of brutal tyranny, are food and drink
to this twisted soul. In ordinary cases we should
wonder what might have happened had Catherine
married him. We should set about picturing
Heathcliff in happy possession of the love for
which he craved so mightily: we should have[Pg 182]
murmured, “What cruel waste.” But the power
of Emily Brontë’s conception denies us such idle
imaginings. Heathcliff was manifestly incapable
of “satisfaction” in anything, and there, as
elsewhere, was Catherine his true mate. No
circumstances, the most roseate or ideal, could
have tamed his savage nature, quieted his stormy
discontents, or lulled his passion for hurting all
creatures weaker than himself. Such love as his
must always have crushed and devoured what
it yearned for: he could never have had enough
of it: have rested in it, or rested upon it. He
was, indeed, possessed by the “eighth devil.”
In reality, then, the resemblance between Charlotte
and Emily Brontë is comparatively superficial,
arising from similarity of experience and the bleak
atmosphere of the scenes and people among which
they lived.[13] Emily can scarcely be called an exponent
of human passion, since the beings she has created
bear little or no resemblance to actual humanity.
[Pg 183]
Charlotte has told us that her sister’s impressions
of scenery and locality are truthful, original, and
sympathetic; the bleakness of the atmosphere is not
exaggerated. But, on the other hand, we learn—as
we should expect—that “she had scarcely more
practical knowledge of the peasantry among whom
she lived, than a nun has of the country people who
sometimes pass her gates.... She knew their
ways, their language, their family histories: she
could hear of them with interest, and talk of them
with detail, minute, graphic, and accurate; but
with them she rarely exchanged a word.” Hence,
having a naturally sombre mind, she drank in only
“those tragic and terrible traits of which, in
listening to the secret annals of every rude vicinage,
the memory is sometimes compelled to receive the
impress.”
For those characteristics, more or less superficial,
in which her dramatis personæ resemble real life,
they are drawn, with marvellous insight and sympathy,
from the moorlands; but they are not, themselves,
moorland folk. They are sheer creations
of the imagination. The terrible possibilities
which lurk within us are used indeed in the compounding,
but so combined and concentrated as[Pg 184]
to banish all human semblance. It is up to any
of us to become such as Heathcliff and the rest, for
she has not violated the possibilities; but a kinder
fate, that grain of virtue and gentleness without
which no human being was ever born and held his
reason, has saved us from the absolutely elementary
passions, tormenting and repining, of these strange
beings.
She is as far from realism as an “unromantic”
writer can well be; and, by sheer force of will or
vividness of imagination, compels and fascinates us
to accept, as worthy of study and full of interest,
the characters she has created.
And because, as has been often noticed, women
are—curiously enough—not usually pre-eminent
in imagination, her work remains supreme for certain
qualities, which we may vainly seek elsewhere
in English literature.
Anne Brontë (1820-1849) sheds but a pale
glimmer beside her fiery sisters. She produced
two novels: Agnes Grey, the record of a governess,
and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, a morbid picture
of “talents misused and faculties abused”—both
founded on personal experience. She worked[Pg 185]
quietly, but with mild resolution; reproducing
exactly her own observations on life, never straying
beyond what she believed to be literally the truth.
“She hated her work, but would pursue it. When
reasoned with on the subject, she regarded such
reasonings as a temptation to self-indulgence. She
must be honest: she must not varnish, soften, or
conceal.”
Anne Brontë has left us her “warning”; and if
the stories embodying the moral are not particularly
stimulating or dramatic, they do, after a painstaking
fashion, reveal character and reflect life.
She had, moreover, a mild humour, entirely denied
to Charlotte or Emily, as the following description
of an “unchristian” rector may serve to show:
“Mr. Hatfield would come sailing up the aisle, or
rather sweeping along like a whirlwind, with his rich
silk gown flying behind him and rustling against the
pew doors, mount the pulpit like a conqueror ascending
his triumphal car; then, sinking on the velvet cushion
in an attitude of studied grace, remain in silent prostration
for a certain time; then mutter over a Collect,
and gabble through the Lord’s Prayer, rise, draw off
one bright lavender glove, to give the congregation
the benefit of his sparkling rings, lightly pass his fingers
through his well-curled hair, flourish a cambric handkerchief,
recite a very short passage, or, perhaps, a[Pg 186]
mere phrase of Scripture, as a headpiece to his discourse,
and, finally, deliver a composition which, as a composition,
might be considered good.”
Like Charlotte, she prefers a plain heroine, seeming
almost jealous of beauty in others, and regards
man as the natural “master” of woman.
Art, inspired by a sense of duty, need not detain
us further.
Mrs. Craik (1826-1887) belongs, in all essentials,
to the modern school of novelists; although (like
many another of her day) she appears almost more
out-of-date than the women of genius who preceded
her. For the “average” writers belong to one age
and only one. Yet the enormous mass of work she
produced may still be read with some pleasure, and
deserves notice for its competent witness to certain
phases of development in women’s work.
In the first place she practically invented the
“novel for the young person” (which is not “a
children’s story”); and, in the second, she carried
to its extreme limit that enthusiasm for domestic
sentimentality (which is quite different from
“sensibility”) so dear to the Early Victorians.
Obviously it can be no matter for surprise that,
as women became accustomed to the use of their[Pg 187]
pen and experienced in its influence, they should
wake at last to the peculiar needs of their daughters—for
a class of story which, without the false ideals
of romance or the coarseness of early fiction, was
in itself thoroughly interesting and absorbing.
We have seen that, in purifying the novel, our
greatest women-novelists were, for the most part,
content to practise their art as an art. Jane
Austen, undoubtedly, is a peculiarly wholesome
writer (and therefore an influence for good); but
she had no direct moral purpose. And the didactic
elements in Miss Edgeworth, Hannah More, and
Harriet Martineau are somewhat inartistically
pronounced.
In Mrs. Craik’s day the desire for improvement
was phenomenally active and varied. She was
“conscious” of this particular opening (afterwards
expressed and developed by Miss Yonge), and,
in her own manner, prepared to meet it. It is
impossible not to recognise that the whole appeal
of John Halifax, Gentleman is directed towards
youth. The feminine idealism, whether applied to
men or women, embraces all the vague and innocent
dreams of heroic virtue which belong to the dawn
of life. The supreme domination of family life,[Pg 188]
the education “at home” for boys and girls alike,
and a thousand other minutiæ of feeling and
opinion, are designed for that period—possibly
the most important in character-training—before
experience has tested the will. There is no shirking
of truth, the method is realistic; and we must
recognise the value of an atmosphere so refined
and purified, yet manly and practical. For John
Halifax is always a fighter, one who makes his own
way—without sacrifice of principle or losing his
sympathy with the less capable, and less fortunate,
among the sons of toil.
John Halifax may fairly be taken as “standing”
for Mrs. Craik. Here and in other novels (numbering
about fifty) we may read her message, understand
the Early Victorian lady, and observe one
groove along which the woman-novelist was destined
to work with comparative independence. From
revealing themselves, they have turned (as had
Charlotte Brontë with very different results) to
give away their ideal of manhood.
Mrs. Oliphant (1828-1897) belongs to the
same group of thoroughly efficient Victorian
novelists as Mrs. Craik. Living to an old age she[Pg 189]
produced nearly a hundred volumes, all witnessing
the scope and power which had now been accepted
in women’s work. Her output is far more varied
than Mrs. Craik’s—bolder, more humorous, and
less sentimental. She published some admirable
history, a notable record of the Blackwoods—involving
expert, if rather emotional, criticism—and
dabbled in the Unseen. Having great sympathy
with the Scotch temperament, she also imparted a
more modern tone to the “national” novel, somewhat
after Galt’s manner.
In her work also we find, very definitely, the
“note” of protest. Those truly feminine young
ladies (a Jane Austen pair), the daughters of the
Curate-in-Charge, for example, are perpetually in
revolt against convention. Mab, the artist, suffers
from a governess who considers drawing “unladylike,”
and believes that “a young lady who respects
herself, and who has been brought up as she ought,
never looks at gentlemen: There are drawings of
gentlemen in that book. Is that nice, do you
suppose?”[14] The practical Cicely shoulders the
family burdens; and is promptly “cut” by her[Pg 190]
friends, because she takes up the post of village
schoolmistress. Like “John Halifax” she had
been compelled to face life (for others as well as
herself) with absolutely nothing but “her head and
her hands.” With less fuss she made an equally
good fight, with no encouragement from that
proud and tender-hearted old gentleman, her
father, whose one idea of happiness was to “fall
into our quiet way again.” He “felt it was quite
natural his girls should come home and keep house
for him, and take the trouble of the little boys,
and visit the schools: How is a man like that to be
distinguished from a Dissenting preacher?” To
them it still seems: “We cannot go and do things
like you men, and we feel all the sharper, all the
keener, because we cannot do.”
It is doubtful if women had ever been less conscious
of their limitations, or less dissatisfied with them;
but the definite expression of criticism arose at this
period, because they were acquiring the habit of
expressing themselves, and had glimpses of possible
change. From Charlotte Brontë, women not only
pictured life from a feminine standpoint, but discussed
and criticised it—a movement which “found
itself” in George Eliot.
[Pg 191]
Mrs. Oliphant still speaks, and thinks, consciously,
as a woman. But she does not “accept” everything.
As to the craftmanship of fiction, we may
now assume it for women, as had the public.
We are reaching, indeed, the time when her province
is no longer to stand aside. The later writers
speak as individuals among artists, not as part of
a group or school.
As mentioned above, Mrs. Oliphant also wrote
competent criticism and played the part, still
comparatively novel among women, of an all-round
practical journalist, knowing the world of
letters, familiar with publishers and the “business”
of authorship, handling history or biography
like a person of culture. In her later years she
essayed, in The Beleaguered City and elsewhere,
some way into that field of psychic inquiry—developed
by her son Laurence—and since their
day a familiar topic in fiction.
At one time, indeed, greater things were expected
of her. The Chronicles of Carlingford
(1863) approach genius. They appeared after
Adam Bede, and it is scarcely surprising that men
imagined the discovery of a second George Eliot.
We find in them that almost masculine insight—from[Pg 192]
an intellectual eminence—of parochial affairs,
small society, and the country town, combined
with passionate character-analysis, emotional philosophy,
and bracing humour, which constituted the
individuality of George Eliot.
Mrs. Oliphant, in her early days, produced
several “Chronicles,” in which the characters reappear,
though diversely centralised; and we may
consider two examples at some length.
Miss Marjoribanks, following the woman’s lead,
is professedly a study in a certain feminine type.
The heroine was known among her schoolfellows
as “a large girl.”
“She was not to be described as a tall girl—which
conveys an altogether different idea—but she was
large in all particulars, full and well-developed, with
somewhat large features, not at all pretty as yet, though
it was known in Mount Pleasant that somebody had
said that such a face might ripen into beauty,
and become ‘grandiose,’ for anything anybody could
tell. Miss Marjoribanks was not vain; but the word
had taken possession of her imagination, as was natural,
and solaced her much when she made the painful discovery
that her gloves were half a number larger, and
her shoes a hair-breadth broader, than those of any
of her companions; but the hands and feet were
perfectly well-shaped; and being at the same time[Pg 193]
well-clothed and plump, were much more presentable
and pleasant to look upon than the lean rudimentary
school-girl hands with which they were surrounded.
To add to these excellences, Lucilla had a mass of hair
which, if it could but have been cleared a little in its
tint, would have been golden, though at present it was
nothing more than tawny, and curly to exasperation.
She wore it in large thick curls, which did not, however,
float or wave, or do any of the graceful things
which curls ought to do; for it had this aggravating
quality, that it would not grow long, but would grow
ridiculously, unmanageably thick, to the admiration of
her companions, but to her own despair, for there was
no knowing what to do with those short but ponderous
locks.”
After which unconventional description, we are
not surprised to learn that our heroine “was
possessed by nature of that kind of egotism, or
rather egoism, which is predestined to impress
itself, by its perfect reality and good faith, upon
the surrounding world.... This conviction of the
importance and value of her own proceedings
made Lucilla, as she grew older, a copious and
amusing conversationalist—a rank which few people
who are indifferent to, or do not believe in, themselves
can attain to.”
Miss Marjoribanks had two objects in life—to
“be a comfort to” her widowed father and[Pg 194]
“to revolutionise society.” Undoubtedly she
“made” Carlingford, and, though her father was
perfectly satisfied with his own management of life,
she did actually succeed in proving herself essential
to his well-being. A young woman who, on
her own showing, “never made mistakes” and
was “different” from other ladies, was able to
effect much with the “very good elements” of
Carlingford. She created a social atmosphere of
peculiar distinction, she managed the most intractable
of archdeacons, she found “the right
man” to represent the borough. She was as
fearless as, and far more successful than, Miss
Woodhouse, in making marriages; and in every
respect went her own way with a most engaging
self-confidence. Dr. Marjoribanks respected and
“understood” her, though he thought her more
“worldly” than she proved herself; and no one
gave her full credit “for that perfect truthfulness
which it was her luck always to be able to maintain.”
The character is worth our study; for it is
improbable that fiction has ever produced, or will
ever venture to repeat, a heroine so entirely convinced
of a mission in life, and so competent to[Pg 195]
carry it out. Scarcely ever concerned with sentiment,
she had a genius for doing “the right thing,”
and thoroughly enjoying the contemplation of
her own achievements. Yet she was really generous
and kind-hearted, entirely above jealousy or
meanness. We may question, perhaps, whether
any woman, or man either, was ever quite so consistent:
since even in yielding to Cousin Tom’s
importunities, she was but planning a new campaign—“to
carry light and progress” into “the
County.” Yet few readers will fail to recognise
the power and charm of Lucilla Marjoribanks—a
new revelation of what a woman conceives woman
may be.
In all her dialogue, in the narrative, and in the
minor characterisation, Mrs. Oliphant here proves
herself an easy master of convincing realism. We
know Carlingford and its inhabitants as intimately
as our native town.
Salem Chapel, indeed, reveals another side
of the picture. Miss Marjoribanks and her friends
were staunch church people. The sturdy deacons,
their women-folk, and Mr. Vincent’s whole flock,
belong to another sphere. “Greengrocers, dealers
in cheese and bacon, milkmen, with some dressmakers[Pg 196]
of inferior pretensions, and teachers of day
schools of similar humble character, formed the
élite of the congregation.” Indeed, “the young
man from ’Omerton” proves to be something of
a firebrand among these simple souls. His declaration
of independence does not meet with their
approval: “Them ain’t the sentiments for a
pastor in our connection. That’s a style of thing
as may do among fine folks, or in the church where
there’s no freedom; but them as chooses their
own pastor, and don’t spare no pains to make
him comfortable, has a right to expect different.”
Since the poor fellow is “getting his livin’ off
them all the time,” he must go their way without
question: “A minister ain’t got no right to have
business of his own, leastways on Sundays. Preaching’s
his business.” The most loyal of them can
always recall “that period of delightful excitation
when they were hearing candidates, and felt themselves
the dispensers of patronage”; though, as
the caustic Adelaide truthfully remarked, “even
when they are asses like your Salem people, you
know they like a man with brains”; and Mr.
Vincent had “filled the chapel.”
Mrs. Oliphant has contrasted the limitations of[Pg 197]
Dissent with a somewhat melodramatic personal
tragedy which insensibly draws Mr. Vincent under
the influence of “them great ladies” who “when
they’re pretty-looking” are “no better nor evil
spirits,” and, alas, “a minister of our connection
as was well acquainted with them sort of folks
would be out of nature.” The whole atmosphere
is obviously uncongenial, and we see that it makes
the man totally unfit for his work.
Nevertheless, it is with two characters wholly
“within the fold” that our sympathies must finally
remain. It is Mrs. Vincent and Tozer the Butterman
who are the real hero and heroine. Certainly
the gentle widow cannot understand her
clever son, and her absolute lack of common sense
is quite exasperating; but everyone recognises
that she is “quite the lady,” and no Roman
mother of classic immortality ever revealed such
perfect loyalty under such tragic difficulties. She
knew “how little a thing makes mischief in a
congregation,” for “she had been a minister’s wife
for thirty years,” and her superb devotion to
doing the right thing by everybody conquered
persons of far greater intellect and assurance,
under difficulties that few men could have faced[Pg 198]
for any consideration. Again and again this quiet
and most provokingly fussy of women absolutely
dominates the stage, conquering all adversaries.
She is almost absurdly inadequate for the “realities”
of life; but such a past mistress of tact and
decorum, so instinctively aware of “what is expected
of her,” and so courageously punctilious
in manner, that she triumphs over odds the most
overwhelming, proving inflexible where she knows
her ground. Entirely without control over her
emotions, she yet never forgets or fails in her
“duty.”
The heroism of Mr. Tozer, naturally, does not
depend upon such subtleties or refinements. He
is of sterner stuff; but it would be hard to find, in
life or fiction, a zealous deacon, so thoroughly
conversant with the duties and the privileges of
his position, who could rise with such broad-minded
charity to circumstances so exceptional.
He is genuinely kind, and really loyal to Mr.
Vincent. Without the slightest knowledge, or any
power to appreciate the emotional turmoil which
had thrown that young minister off his balance,
the worthy shopkeeper trusts his own instincts,
fights like a hero for his friend, and absolutely[Pg 199]
pulverises the enemy. He has no natural gifts
for eloquence, no diplomacy or tact; but he has
faith, insight, and courage.
The minister’s wife and the deacon entirely remove
the reproach we might otherwise level against
Mrs. Oliphant of satirical contempt for Nonconformity.
With Miss Marjoribanks, they establish
her power in characterisation.
Finally, the crowded picture of life at Carlingford
given in the two novels prepares us for that
conscious and professional study of “material”
for fiction which women had only recently acquired,
and which bears its finest fruit in George Eliot.
Charlotte M. Yonge (1823-1901) presents almost
as many facets as Mrs. Oliphant, but her work
more nearly resembles Mrs. Craik’s. Primarily
a High-Churchwoman and a sentimentalist, she
was more directly educational than either. Her
Cameos of English History are models of popular
narrative, a little coloured by prejudice; but no
praise can be too high for that children’s story, also
historical, The Little Duke, or for the equally charming
The Lances of Lynwood.
As a novelist she was chiefly concerned, as hinted[Pg 200]
already, with the conscious development of the tale
“for the young person,” which she defines and
justifies in her
Preface to “The Daisy Chain; or, Aspirations”
“No one can be more sensible than is the author
that the present is an overgrown book of a nondescript
class, neither the ‘tale’ for the young, nor the novel
for their elders, but a mixture of both.
“Begun as a series of conversational sketches, the
story outran both the original intention and the limits
of the periodical in which it was commenced; and,
such as it has become, it is here presented to those
who have already made acquaintance with the May
family, and may be willing to see more of them. It
would beg to be considered merely as what it calls
itself, a Family Chronicle—a domestic record of home
events, large and small, during those years of early
life when the character is chiefly formed, and as an
endeavour to trace the effects of those aspirations
which are a part of every youthful nature. That the
young should take the hint, to think whether their
hopes and upward breathings are truly upwards, and
founded in lowliness, may be called the moral of the
tale.
“For those who may deem the story too long, and
the characters too numerous, the author can only beg
their pardon for any tedium that they may have
undergone before giving it up.
“Feb. 22nd, 1856.”
[Pg 201]
As it happens, this passage contains several points
which serve to elucidate the special characteristics
of its author’s work. We see at once the serious
moral purpose, and its direct aim. We may
notice, again, that she at least recognises, and
admits, what may be called disparagingly the chief
function of women novelists—the narration of
“Family Chronicles,” the domesticity, the emphasis
on “home” life. And, finally, we have a confession
of her tendency to overcrowd the characters; her
devotion for persons to whom the reader has been
already introduced, now reappearing—for further
development—in another tale.
Miss Yonge, in fact, had a weakness for genealogy.
One novel often describes the children of persons
figuring in another. We may recognise old friends
in every chapter. No doubt the habit may become
wearisome, and it was carried to excess. But, on
the other hand, we must be conscious of exceptional
familiarity with “the May family,” for example;
and the process, when restrained with discretion,
is a perfectly legitimate application of the realistic
ideal. In real life the plots are not rounded off
in one volume. Reunions that are utterly unexpected,
if not unwelcome, are constantly surprising[Pg 202]
us, and the children of friends or relatives have a
natural bias towards each other.
Moreover, in this matter Miss Yonge reveals
extraordinary skill. Technically, we could name the
heroine of The Daisy Chain. She has several peculiarities,
recalling Maggie Tulliver. But we are nearly
as intimate with the two Margarets; the “worldly”
sister is drawn with subtle command of detail; the
innumerable brothers are perfectly differentiated;
Dr. May stands out clear in every mood; the
“heiress” is absolutely alive; and there is no hesitation
about the minor characters. Miss Yonge can
“manage” as many people as you please. There is
no faltering or hesitation about her touch anywhere.
To-day, probably, we do not quite willingly
accept so much religiosity. We certainly cannot
“assume” the Church. Our “aspirations” may
not expend themselves upon a steeple or a Sunday
school. But there can be no question about this
good lady’s understanding of young people. The
family picture is sound and wholesome. No member
of the group offends us by his or her sanctimonious
perfection. All are perfectly human,
youthfully impulsive, and wholesomely eager.
And the Early Victorians were sentimental.
[Pg 203]
As in John Halifax, Gentleman, the atmosphere
belongs to the dawn of life. The love-stories—of
which, needless to say, we have several—are whole-hearted,
without complexity. There is no juggling
with right and wrong, no “questioning,” no element
of sordidness.
Though we should alter a good deal, perhaps,
in detail—of manner, thought, and ideal—it is
difficult to see how work could be done better for
the particular class of readers appealed to; who
would, undoubtedly, actually prefer a crowd.
Once more, Miss Yonge is frankly feminine. She
has established one more special function for women
novelists, a legitimate offspring of the domestic
realism which they followed from the first; a work
almost impossible to man.
[Pg 204]
A PROFESSIONAL WOMAN
(George Eliot, 1819-1880)
George Eliot once declared that “if art does
not enlarge men’s sympathies, it does nothing
morally.... The only effect I long to produce by
my writings is that those who read them shall
be better able to imagine and to feel the pains
and joys of those who differ from themselves.”
It is written in Adam Bede:
“My strongest effort is to avoid any arbitrary
picture, and to give a faithful account of men and
things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind.
The mirror is doubtless defective; the outlines will
sometimes be disturbed, the reflection faint or confused;
but I feel as much bound to tell you as precisely as I
can what that reflection is, as if I were in a witness box
narrating my experience on oath....
“I would not, even if I had the choice, be the clever
novelist who could create a world so much better than
this, in which we get up in the morning to do our daily
work, that you would be likely to turn a harder, colder
eye on the dusty streets and the common green fields—on
the real breathing men and women who can be[Pg 205]
chilled by your indifference or injured by your prejudice,
who can be cheered and helped onward by your
fellow-feeling, your forbearance, your outspoken, brave
justice.
“So I am content to tell my simple story, without
trying to make things seem better than they were;
dreading nothing, indeed, but falsity, which, in spite
of one’s efforts, there is reason to dread. Falsehood
is so easy, truth so difficult....
“It is for this rare, precious quality of truthfulness
that I delight in many Dutch paintings; which lofty-minded
people despise. I find a source of delicious
sympathy in these faithful pictures of a monotonous,
homely existence, which has been the fate of so many
more among my fellow-mortals than a life of pomp
or of absolute indigence, of tragic suffering or of world-stirring
actions. I turn, without shrinking, from cloud-borne
angels, from prophets, sibyls, and heroic warriors,
to an old woman bending over her flower-pot, or eating
her solitary dinner, while the noonday light, softened
perhaps by a screen of leaves, falls on her mob-cap, and
just touches the rim of her spinning wheel, and her
stone jug, and all those cheap common things which
are the precious necessaries of life to her; or I turn
to that village wedding, kept between four brown
walls, where an awkward bridegroom opens the dance
with a high-shouldered, broad-faced bride, while
elderly and middle-aged friends look on, with very
irregular noses and lips, and probably with quart-pots
in their hands, but with an expression of unmistakable
contentment and good-will....
[Pg 206]
“All honour and reverence to the divine beauty of
form! Let us cultivate it to the utmost in men,
women, and children—in our gardens and in our houses....
Paint us an angel if you can, with a floating
violet robe, and a face paled by the celestial light;
paint us yet oftener a Madonna, turning her mild face
upward and opening her arms to welcome the divine
glory; but do not impose on us any æsthetic rules which
shall banish from the region of art those old women
scraping carrots with their work-worn hands, those
heavy clowns taking holiday in a dingy pothouse,
those rounded backs and stupid, weather-worn faces
that have bent over the spade and done the rough
work of the world—those homes with their tin pans,
their brown pitchers, their rough curs, and their clusters
of onions....
“There are few prophets in the world, few sublimely
beautiful women, few heroes. I can’t afford to give
all my love and reverence to such rarities: I want
a great deal of those feelings for my everyday fellow-men,
especially for the few in the foreground of the
great multitude whose faces I know, whose hands I
touch, for whom I have to make way with kindly
courtesy. Neither are picturesque lazzaroni or romantic
criminals half so frequent as your common labourer,
who gets his own bread, and eats it vulgarly but creditably
with his own pocket-knife. It is more needful
that I should have a fibre of sympathy connecting
me with that vulgar citizen who weighs out my sugar
in a vilely-assorted cravat and waistcoat, than with
the handsomest rascal in red scarf and green feathers;[Pg 207]
more needful that my heart should swell with loving
admiration at some trait of gentle goodness in the
faulty people who sit at the same hearth with me, or
in the clergyman of my own parish, who is perhaps
rather too corpulent, and in other respects is not an
Oberlin or a Tillotson, than at the deeds of heroes
whom I shall never know except by hearsay, or at the
sublimest abstract of all clerical graces that was ever
conceived by an able novelist.”
Woman has found, and proclaimed, her mission.
She is a moral realist, and her realism is not inspired
by any idle ideal of art, but by sympathy
with life. Jane Austen and Mary Mitford were
compared, condescendingly, with Dutch painters.
George Eliot claims the parallel with pride. It
may be questioned if realism was ever defended
with so much eloquence, from such high motives.
Finally, if the romance of high life has no place
in these pictures, neither has the romance of
crime, adventure, or squalid destitution. They
hold up the mirror to mediocrity. They present
the parish.
And for many years George Eliot influenced
thought and culture among the middle-classes
more widely, and perhaps more profoundly, than
any other writer. We can remember a generation[Pg 208]
for whom the moral problems involved in the
relations between Dorothea and Will Ladislaw were
a favourite topic for tea-table conversation in
serious families; and when the novelist herself
married a second time, it seemed to many that
an ideal had been desecrated. Her intensity of
religious feeling, combined with independence
towards theological authority, expressed with truly
artistic effect the whole temperament of an age
whose spiritual cravings were almost exclusively
ethical. Her contribution to literature, placing
her in the highest rank, was the creation of many
characters, instinct with humanity, struggling
with fine moral earnestness towards the attainment
of an ideal, halting long and stumbling often by
the way. Their appeal to young readers of each
generation is irresistible; while the crowded backgrounds,
so truthfully and dramatically portrayed,
of a day when the English middle-classes were
ever eager in extending their moral and mental
horizon, can never lose value as an important
chapter in social history.
If we have read them rightly, it is this for which
women’s work had been all along preparing the
way. George Eliot certainly had not so great a[Pg 209]
genius as Jane Austen or Charlotte Brontë; she was
not a pioneer like Fanny Burney. But she had
greater breadth, more firm solidity; and she was
conscious of her aim, with the professional training,
the culture, and the genius to achieve.
Women, we see, have been always realistic and
parochial. They have avoided the glitter of
wealth and the grime of sin. Tender to prodigals,
they have loved the home. If the “intense and continuous
note of personal conviction,” so conspicuous
in George Eliot, began with Charlotte Brontë,
women have always felt and thought morally.
She has been summarily dismissed as an
“example of the way in which the novel—once a
light and frivolous thing—had come to be taken
with the utmost seriousness—had in fact ceased to
be light literature at all, and began to require
rigorous and elaborate training and preparation
in the writer, perhaps even something of the
athlete’s processes in the reader.”
But such seriousness was characteristic of her
age, and everyone had then learnt to demand
professionalism in art; while, on the other hand,
readers of 1821 were assured that “Miss Austen
had the merit of being evidently a Christian writer,”[Pg 210]
who conveyed “that unpretending kind of instruction
which is furnished by real life,” and whose
works may “on the whole be recommended, not
only as among the most unexceptionable of their
kind, but as combining, in an eminent degree,
instruction with amusement.”
Charlotte Brontë, we may remember, was declared,
by her contemporaries, “one who has, for
some sufficient reason, long forfeited the society of
her sex”; and George Eliot herself was accused
of “coarseness and immorality,” in her attempt
“to familiarise the minds of our young women
in the middle and higher ranks with matters on
which their fathers and brothers would never
venture to speak in their presence ... and to
intrude on minds which ought to be guarded from
impurity the unnecessary knowledge of evil.” To
such critics her claim to kinship with the “honest
old Dutchman” is set aside for a parallel to “the
perverseness of our modern ‘pre-Raphaelites,’ with
their choice of disagreeable subjects, uncomely
models, and uncouth attitudes.”
Such is the natural result of women daring to
think for themselves. To-day we are content
rather to notice that Miss Burney first cleansed the[Pg 211]
circulating library, and Miss Austen most unobtrusively
extolled the domestic virtues; while
their sisters in art all contributed to the prevalence
of wholesome fiction; until Miss Brontë and George
Eliot stirred up the conscience of man towards
woman. In reality women are born preachers, and
always work for an ideal.
The period, indeed, is already approaching in
which women’s work can no longer be treated
en masse and by itself, apart from men’s. It is no
longer essentially spontaneous or unconscious, as
in Miss Burney and Jane Austen. We have described
the writers immediately preceding George
Eliot as professional experts, careful of art; and
once the world had learnt to expect good work from
woman and grown accustomed to her as an artist,
there remained no further occasion for her to speak
as a woman among aliens. George Eliot, indeed,
like Charlotte Brontë, had been, by some of her
contemporaries, taken for a man; but the youngest
and most inexperienced reader to-day could scarcely
have been momentarily deceived. There are, indeed,
certain tricks, or mannerisms, of masculinity;
but they are superficial, and not actually worn
with much grace or skill.
[Pg 212]
No earlier woman-writer, indeed, had assumed
so comprehensive a philosophy, or scarcely any
attempt at ordered opinion on life in general, on
character, or on faith. But, despite the enthusiasm
of certain biographers, despite the influence—unquestioned—of
Herbert Spencer, Strauss, George
Henry Lewes, and others, we are not personally
disposed to grant much weight to our
author’s generalisations; while certainly the obtrusiveness
of her moralising is an artistic
blemish.
The fact is that George Eliot’s outlook remains
thoroughly emotional and feminine. In herself,
we know, she always saw life through a man-interpreter;
and the didactics of her novels are derived
from the study of books, not from the exercise of
independent reason or thought. If she talked
ethics, she felt faith.
But, on the other hand, her work has little
external affinity with that of the women of genius
preceding her (though it may be a natural development
from theirs), because it is obviously the result
of training and study, that is professional. It is,
moreover, the first important contribution by
women to the problem novel with a purpose. Both[Pg 213]
points can be easily illustrated by the most
elementary comparison.
We have tacitly assumed, and with obvious
justification in fact, that Fanny Burney and Jane
Austen, for example, wrote entirely out of their
own personal experience. We picture their own
surroundings from the society in their novels,
noting the power acquired by the limitation.
Charlotte Brontë did not go beyond her own circle,
save in imagination. But George Eliot, no less
certainly, studied mankind for copy. It is true
that she made more direct use of her own family
and friends than they. Maggie Tulliver is no less
autobiographical than Lucy Snowe. True also that
for description and atmosphere she depended largely
on memory. But even here the treatment is that
of a self-conscious artist, composing and presenting
from outside, studying effects, grouping types;
always alive to a comparison between life and
literature. And as she uses the human material
which has come to her in the natural order of things,
she increases it by the journalist’s eye for new copy,
piquant contrast, and unexpected revelation. She
invokes, moreover, the assistance of every literary
device—prepared humour, scholarly style, cultured[Pg 214]
allusion, local colour, analytical characterisation,
and dramatic construction. We have here no
longer a spontaneous revelation of woman; rather
her captain in full array, armed for fight.
Nor is the message, or open discussion of problems,
less novel or less deliberate. It was possible, indeed
inevitable, to notice in the earlier examples
of woman’s work that she held theories on life
not quite in accord with what man had always
expected from her. Part of her inspiration, no
doubt, was the desire to express these. On certain
points, recognised womanly,—such as education
and the ordering of a home,—she soon learnt to
speak openly; but, in the main, we studied
the woman’s ideal of character and conduct from
her portrait-painting; we deduced her approval
from her sympathy, her budding criticism from her
scorn. If she attempted direct teaching, it was
mostly in support of mere conventional duty;
the reward of virtue and the punishment of vice,
tentatively measured perhaps by a standard, not
quite blindly copied from men. The greatest
artists among women before Charlotte Brontë
never obtruded the moral, discussed the problem.
But what was fearlessly urged on a few chosen[Pg 215]
topics from the Haworth parsonage became the
foreground and main subject with the assistant
editor of the Westminster Review. We are, to-day,
somewhat overweighted with problem novels;
but George Eliot was the first among us to realise
the full power of fiction as a vehicle more persuasive,
if not more powerful, than the pulpit;
for the fearless and intimate discussion of all the
questions and difficulties which must confront a
man, or a woman, who is not content to accept
things as they are, or to believe all he is told.
To-day we may detect
“a curious naïveté in the whole impression George
Eliot’s novels convey.... The ethical law is, in her
universe, as all powerful as the law of gravitation, and as
unavoidable. Remorse, degeneration of character, and
even material loss, are meted out for transmission with
the rigid and childlike sense of justice which animated
the writers of the Old Testament. Her temper was
Hebraistic, and goodness was more to her than beauty.
It may be doubted whether in the world, as we see it,
justice works as impartially and with such unmistakable
exactitude, whether the righteous is never forsaken,
and evil always hunts the wicked person to
overthrow him.”
But we must remember that George Eliot’s
conception of wickedness, if limited, was well in[Pg 216]
advance of her age; that she understood temptation,
and could draw a most dramatically “mixed”
character. Her people are not all black or all
white. She knew how slight an error or slip, how
amiable a weakness, could lead to actions which
the Pharisee called sin, and the Puritan would
punish with hell-fire. She entirely forgave Maggie
Tulliver, she held out the hand of fellowship to
Godfrey Cass, and even to Arthur Donnithorne.
If “we are almost afraid of” Dinah Morris, she,
too, certainly loved sinners. George Eliot, in fact,
will not accept any opinion on authority, or follow
the world in judgment; and if “the world has
never produced a woman philosopher,” her work
remains pre-eminent as the first complete and
outspoken record of woman’s “scientific speculation
to discover an interpretation of the universe,”
her first conscious message to mankind; destined
to “raise the standard of prose-fiction to a higher
power; to give it a new impulse and motive.”
She has now spoken for herself on conduct and
on faith.
Nevertheless George Eliot remains a woman.
We still look to her primarily for the revelation
of woman, and woman’s vision of man. We have[Pg 217]
taken another step, onward and inward, towards
the mystery of the feminine ideal, the meaning of
the Home and the Family to those who make it.
All this is far more complex, indeed, than anything
we have studied in earlier chapters. It embraces,
in Romola, some reconstruction of past times;
in Daniel Deronda, some study of an alien race.
It includes sympathy for a woman wandering so
far from the natural feminine instincts as to
abandon, and half murder, her own child; for a
girl who, given to dreamy ideals and passionate
self-sacrifice, will yet suffer attentions from the
acknowledged lover of her cousin, simply because
he is handsome. It reveals the genuine repentance
and uplifting of a drunken wife; it permits
“friendship” between a married woman and a
young artist whose very vices are more attractive
than the heartless tyrannical egoism of her
husband. We have travelled a long way, certainly,
from Catherine Morland and Fanny Price.
We can imagine a new Lydia Bennet under George
Eliot.
Still the problems are women’s problems: the
solutions are feminine, as we may see from the
eagerness with which they were condemned by[Pg 218]
man, the conservative and the conventional.
“I’m no denyin’,” said Mrs. Poyser, “the women
are foolish. God almighty made ’em to match
the men.” It was George Eliot’s ambition, towards
which she accomplished much, that “the women”
should be less intent upon that matching, more
willing, and able, to mould themselves after their
own pattern: in their turn to form a creed, to
establish a standard—wherein she was following,
but more consciously, those who had gone before.
As Huxley remarked, in answer to Princess Louise,
she did not “go in for” the superiority of women.
She rather “teaches the inferiority of men.”
For, verily, there is no more in it. Her women
are lost outside the home; they are not financially,
or intellectually, “independent.” They
have no professions, no clubs, no sports. Their
interests are confined to religion, domesticity,
and love. Nor does George Eliot attempt to
follow “the men” into politics[15] or business, on
to the cricket field or the parade ground. A
soldier is distinguished by his regimentals, a
scholar by his library, a doctor by his gig. She
has a strong partiality, tempered by criticism,[Pg 219]
for the clergy; she can distinguish, intelligently,
between Church and Dissent; she knows a good
deal about squires and farmers; she loves the
labourer. We may safely regard her work as the
continuation, and the completion, of our subject.
The completion, indeed, is rather intellectual
than artistic. She covers the whole ground, as
none of her predecessors had attempted; she
makes the last final addition of subject by discovering,
and facing, social problems; she applies
the last word in literary professionalism; but
inasmuch as her characters are more typical and
more studied than Jane Austen’s, they are, in a
sense, less modern and less universal. We may
learn more from her about women, and women’s
opinions; but these are the women of one age
only—fast awakening, indeed, and conscious of
many troubling possibilities, but not free.
Their chief aim is, while widening their knowledge
and sympathy, to speak with imperious
accents of duty, that “stern Daughter of the Voice
of God.” Despite her assumption of masculine
logic and reasoning, itself an artistic blemish, she
offers no explanation of her categorical and materialistic,
ethical dogma. The distinction between good[Pg 220]
and evil with her is in the last resort a question
of emotional instinct, haunted by “the faltering
hope that a spiritual interpretation of the universe
may be true.” It is impossible to avoid
feeling that she accords the greatest strength of
character to serene piety like that of Dinah Morris,
or to Adam Bede’s conception of the “deep, spiritual
things in religion ... when feelings come into
you like a rushing, mighty wind.... His work,
as you know, had always been part of his religion,
and from very early days he saw clearly that good
carpentry was God’s will.” In her heart of hearts,
George Eliot, we are certain, would have echoed
Mrs. Poyser’s preference for character over doctrine:
“Mr. Irvine was like a good meal o’ victual,
you were the better for him without thinking on it;
and Mr. Ryde was like a dose o’ physic, he gripped
you and worrited you, and, after all, he left you
much the same.”
It was Mr. Irvine, you will remember, who put
on his slippers before going upstairs to his plain,
invalid sister; and “whoever remembers how
many things he has declined to do even for himself,
rather than have the trouble of putting on or
taking off his boots, will not think this last detail[Pg 221]
insignificant.” It needs a woman, however, to
appreciate such a service of love.
George Eliot, indeed, could be humorous, somewhat
pedantically, and even genial about little
things, and she recognised most fully their importance
in life. But her more calculated and accumulative
effects were all tragic or subdued melancholy;
partly, no doubt, from this uncertainty of hers about
faith and her passionate sense of justice, so relentless
in its demand for the punishment of sin; partly
also from that tinge of sadness which overshadows
the narrow, old-fashioned dogma by which her own
childhood was moulded. Hard as she strove for
intellectual freedom, and eagerly as she proclaimed
independence of judgment, the halter of early impressions
was round her neck; and it is only
by dwelling upon incidents or individuals, and
ignoring the studied main motive, that we can gain
from her work any of the joy in physical or natural
beauty which should be an artist’s first care to
impart.
Yet, after all, nature has triumphed over temperament.
In reality, for example, Dinah Morris
lives for us in her tactful tenderness for the querulous
old Lisbeth, and in her yearning towards Hetty;[Pg 222]
not in the “call,” the “leading,” and the “voices”
by which her ministry was inspired. On the other
hand, we admire her dignified superiority to masculine
criticism of women’s preaching: “It isn’t
for men to make channels for God’s Spirit, as they
make channels for the water-courses, and say, ‘Flow
here, but flow not there.’”
Hetty Sorrel, again, was only adventurous
through misfortune; she belongs to the fireside.
Dorothea was a hero-worshipper; Maggie Tulliver
is the ideal sister; Mary Garth the ideal helpmate.
The crimes of Rosamond Vincy, if there be no mercy
in their exposure, are wholly domestic; the sins
of Janet are committed for her husband.
It is the same with the men. Amos Barton is
only a poor country clergyman, and grey-haired
Mr. Gilfil “filled his pocket with sugar-plums for
the little children.” Adam Bede “had no theories
about setting the world to rights,” and “couldn’t
abide a fellow who thought he made himself fine
by being coxy to’s betters.” The Tullivers, father
and son, were, in their different ways, as fine specimens
of honest tradesmen as Bulstrode was a consummate
hypocrite of the provinces. Lydgate
was no more than an exceptionally clever and[Pg 223]
cultured general practitioner, and we fancy that
Will Ladislaw was a better lover than artist. George
Eliot’s squires are typical ornaments of the countryside;
her farmers belong as permanently to one
side of the hearth as their wives to the other. Silas
Marner, practising a trade that could not “be carried
on entirely without the help of the Evil One,”
since “all cleverness was in itself suspicious,” had
no power of filling his life with “movement, mental
activity, and close fellowship” outside the “narrow
religious sect” in which his youth was passed.
Nancy Osgood “actually said ‘mate’ for ‘meat,’
‘’appen’ for ‘perhaps,’ and ‘’oss’ for ‘horse,’
which, to young ladies living in good Lytherly
society, who habitually said ’orse, even in domestic
privacy, and only said ’appen on the right occasions,
was necessarily shocking.” She supported “a
cheerful face under rough answers and unfeeling
words by the belief that ‘a man must have so
much on his mind’”; and “had her unalterable
code” ready for all occasions.
They are not an heroic company, you perceive,
these sons and daughters of a highly intellectual
woman-novelist. In its more primitive exponents
their “kindness” is “of a beery and bungling[Pg 224]
sort,” their anger is brutal and bigoted; they are
not really interested in general principles, in psychological
analysis, in refined passion, or in the future
of mankind. Yet they are very serious about life,
a good deal puzzled by the apparent injustice of
God, and filled with love or hatred towards all
their neighbours. In this parish, as in most,
everyone knows all about everyone else’s affairs,
and finds them of supreme interest.
Thus George Eliot maintains the feminine attention
to minutiæ; the woman’s centralisation of
Life round the family. She has acquired knowledge,
“read up” literature, and to some extent
digested philosophy; but she applies her powers,
her culture, and her training—from practice and
association with professional writers—to the amplification
and rounding off of woman’s art. She
established domestic realism by the expression of
feminine insight. She is content to leave other
things to other pens. The appearance of generalisations
not influenced by her sex is misleading. It is
only a modern form of the old story. Her heart,
and her genius, are those of a woman, womanly.
Scenes of Clerical Life, 1858.
Adam Bede, 1859.[Pg 225]
The Mill on the Floss, 1860.
Silas Marner, 1861.
Romola, 1863.
Felix Holt, 1866.
Middlemarch, 1872.
Daniel Deronda, 1876.
Before completing our general conclusions as
to the aim and achievement of women’s work, it
may be well to institute certain comparisons between
the four writers of genius around whom we have
chronicled our record of progress; to estimate
the ground covered by their work; to analyse their
ideals, witnessing change and development.
Although, as we have seen, all primarily domestic,
if not actually parochial, the middle-class, “set”
as a subject by Richardson, became—more or less
consciously—subdivided in their hands. Fanny
Burney confined herself, almost without reserve,
to studies of town life, with an occasional digression
to fashionable health resorts. It is true that her
heroines may sigh for a sylvan glade or dream of
green fields: no woman of sensibility could do
less. In their minds the country must inevitably
be allied to virtue and content. But we cannot
pretend that the rural scenes of Camilla are drawn
from nature; and Miss Burney was, undoubtedly,
most at home in the drawing-room, at the assembly,[Pg 227]
in the opera-house, or at the baths. Nowhere
else can we find so vivid and lifelike a picture of
Society in the eighteenth century—the dramatic
contrast with “Commerce at play” recalling
Vanity Fair. It is here, in fact, that Miss Burney’s
exceptional personal experience gave her the
enviable opportunity of drawing both Mayfair and
Holborn at first hand. She is specifically Metropolitan,
though we should not say Cockney. In
her imagination there is no world outside London,
no higher ambition than notoriety about Town.
The difference in Jane Austen’s work is almost
startling. She seems practically unaware of
London; and it would be difficult to name any
group of intelligent persons so absolutely indifferent
to its gaieties, its activities, or its problems as the
characters in all her novels. It may be that Lucy
Steele could not so easily have caught Robert
Ferrars elsewhere; but the few Town chapters in
Sense and Sensibility only illustrate our contention
as a whole, since the relations between all remain
precisely the same as in the country, and practically
everyone is delighted to “get away again.” The
John Knightleys and the excellent Gardiners,
indeed, live in London: but we only meet them[Pg 228]
away from home; and, after all, the one “suggestive”
comment on town life is the “unexpected
discovery” that people who “live over their
business” were able to “mix with” the County.
Jane Austen’s familiars are all drawn from the
most unpromising circle: those who live “just
outside” small towns, have just enough to live on
without working for it, are just sufficiently well-bred
to marry into “the County,” just simple
enough to welcome a few “superior” townspeople.
Doctors, attorneys, and—of course—clergymen, are
included, as well as officers, naval or military,
retired or on promotion. Elizabeth’s “He is a
gentleman, I am a gentleman’s daughter,” defines
the enclosure. The men, presumably, have
business to transact, affairs to arrange. They read
the newspapers and talk politics—among themselves.
But Miss Austen does not concern herself
with these aspects of life. Her heroines are
not so gay as Miss Burney’s; they are not so
thoroughly “in the swim.” But her picture is
similarly one of home life, varied by “visiting”
and “receiving.” She describes the distribution
of one family into several—by “suitable”
marriages. One section of English society, at one[Pg 229]
period, in the home, is completely brought to life
again.
Miss Brontë, even more thoroughly ignoring
London, does not exhaustively represent any one
class, and has, indeed, little concern with
“manners.” Nevertheless, practically all her
characters have “something to do.” They follow
a profession, or own a factory. Clergymen are
still largely in evidence, but education—in different
forms—has come to the front, and, what is still
more significant, some of her heroines have to
work for their living. Wherefore, apart from the
increased intensity of emotion, the external atmosphere
is far more strenuous, and in Shirley we
even find the dawn of a social problem, echoes of
the early struggle between Capital and Labour. The
pictures of school life, at home and abroad, do not
merely reproduce facts, but cry out for improvements.
The intimate knowledge of Continental
conditions is, in itself, a new feature.
Finally, George Eliot extends the sphere of
action in many directions. Maintaining the
middle-class realism of Richardson, in her case
largely concentrated on small-town tradesmen
and farmers, she still avoids London, but embraces[Pg 230]
every “profession,” and approaches, by
expert study for “copy,” the labourers and
mechanics “discovered” by Victorian novelists.
She travels lower and more widely than her predecessors
for atmosphere. She does not confine
herself, like them, to personal experience. In
Felix Holt she deliberately arranges for the illustration
of economic politics; in Daniel Deronda
she opens a big “race” problem; in Romola she
essays “historical” romance. The passionate
emotional outbursts of Charlotte Brontë have
become psychological analyses; “problems” of
all sorts are discussed with philosophical composure
and professional knowledge. Within her
self-imposed limits, woman has covered the field.
For the revelation of womanhood, through the
types chosen for heroines, we find that Miss Burney
still idealises a form of “sensibility,” which does
not exhibit much advance on the ethereal purity
of the old-world romance. The difference, however,
is important, since the type is studied
from life, not created by the imagination. The
essential features of this quality are susceptibility
to the fine shades, delicate refinement, and an
exalted ideal of love. It is itself thoroughly[Pg 231]
romantic, and separates heroines from ordinary
mortals. Similar characteristics, if betrayed by
men, may be attractive, but do not command
respect.
Jane Austen, planting her challenge in the very
title of her first novel, extols sense. Marianne,
and—more subtly, perhaps—her mother, remain
to secure our affection for a vanishing feminine
grace; but, evidently, the type cannot survive
the century. For, though few writers have
actually said less about the rights of women or
the problems of sex, no one has established with
more undaunted conviction the progress to a
new position. Gaily, and with well-assumed irresponsibility,
brushing aside for ever “the advantages
of folly in a pretty girl,” Jane assumes—with
irresistible good humour—woman’s intellectual
equality in everything that really matters.
Catherine Morland is obviously a relic, conceived
of parody; and Fanny Price was born at a disadvantage.
Generally speaking, her heroines
judge for themselves as a matter of course, and
judge wisely. They even “judge for” the men.
Their charm arises from mental independence.
Though to our modern notions their lives may[Pg 232]
seem empty enough, a thousand and one touches
reveal advance on the eighteenth-century conception
of “what is becoming to elegant females.”
They demand rational occupation, common-sense
culture, the right to express themselves. They
fall in love at the dictate of their own hearts.
They set the standard of fidelity. It is true that
Colonel Brandon’s adopted daughter and Maria
Bertram submit to convention, and that Lydia
Bennet is let off more easily because Darcy
had “patched up” the affair; but the feeling
about purity is sound and clear—that is, feminine.
The “sense of sin” experienced by Jane Fairfax
may be a little strained, but we meet with no
high-flown notions of self-sacrifice in Emma;
Elizabeth encourages Darcy to an explanation;
and women are no longer afraid of happiness.
They have grown to recognise that their life is in
their own hands, not in those of man; that it is
largely in their own power to shape their own
destiny; that they will be wise to create their
own standard of conduct, to settle their own
affairs. The ideal emerging is startlingly modern
in essentials. Though the problems confronting
us to-day have not arisen, we feel that Jane[Pg 233]
Austen’s young ladies could have faced them
with equanimity, possibly with a more balanced
judgment than our own. There is a hint, indeed,
in Mansfield Park that the poor woman may one
day triumph over her sisters of leisure; for are
not Fanny, William, and even Susan, the only
real “comforts” to their elders? Sir Thomas
“saw repeated, and for ever repeated, reason
to ... acknowledge the advantages of early
hardship and discipline and the consciousness of
being born to struggle and endure.”
Curiously enough, Charlotte Brontë, while
uttering the first feminine protest, seems to have
slipped back somewhat on this question. Taking
for text Anne Elliot’s claim that women love
longer without hope or life, she demands, even for
Shirley, a male “master.” The explanation of this
attitude was partly temperament—since women of
vigorous intellect always need a flesh and blood
prophet (witness Harriet Martineau and George
Eliot): and it arose partly from her individual
circumstances. The men of her family were, in
different ways, exasperatingly weak; the “strong”
men of her native moorlands were naturally
domineering: her imagination was stirred, and her[Pg 234]
mind trained, by the Belgian Professor, Monsieur
Heger, who was her master—technically, and who—as
we learn from independent testimony—always
took a delight in scolding his pupils. We do not,
to-day, admire the feminine footstool; nevertheless
Charlotte Brontë’s heroines have strong
individual character, and are much given to
defying the world. The type will never become
popular in fiction, it is too angular intellectually,
and too discontented. The quality of physical
plainness has been seldom adopted by novelists,
male or female. But in Shirley Miss Brontë
generously abandons many of her favourite ideals,
for both heroines. The types are mixed here;
and we must feel that had circumstances encouraged
a larger output, we might be compelled
to modify many of our conclusions. It remains
a fact that the authoress of Jane Eyre and
Villette does not stand in the direct line of progress:
save that she introduces the awakening of
women to serious topics, and proves them intent
not merely on self-revelation, but on reform. Her
central inspiration, however, is passion: which
no woman had hitherto handled; which few have
since so powerfully portrayed.
[Pg 235]
It is not easy, even if possible, to summarise the
more complex, and much varied, ideals of womanhood
exhibited by George Eliot. Each of her
heroines is a study from life; and, by this time,
women were not all created in one pattern. Again,
we can scarcely say that she has given us a
heroine in Adam Bede, whereas Middlemarch
might claim to offer three. Maggie Tulliver
shows little resemblance to Romola. Yet, undoubtedly,
George Eliot had more conscious, and
more definite, theories on women than any of her
predecessors: she deliberately set out to expound
and enforce them.
We are tempted, however, to conclude that
her favourite ideal was self-sacrifice. Her outlook
was inclined to be melancholy; and she introduces
us to that struggle between temperament and
circumstances which is the keynote of modern
fiction, forming the problem novel. In Fanny
Burney and Jane Austen the heroine was simply
more refined, or more sensible, than her family;
and the story was founded on this difference.
In George Eliot each heroine has her own temperament
and her own set of circumstances which
create her own problem. Women are now no[Pg 236]
longer concerned only with manners and delicacy:
they have entered into life as a whole. The
central fact, which may be seen in the earliest
women-writers, is now expressed and deliberately
put forward—that their moral standard is higher
than men’s, that they have been treated unfairly
by the world. Charlotte Brontë had emphasised
this protest on one question, George Eliot applies
it everywhere.
The elementary truth which the women novelists
revealed (and for which they were censured
by masculine critics) was that women do fall in
love without waiting to be wooed. George Eliot
develops this into a declaration of feminine judgment
on life and character. Woman is no longer
man-made, man-taught, or man-led. The door is
opened for her independence.
Finally, it must not be forgotten that—whether
intentionally or by instinct concerned with the
revelation of their own nature—the great women-writers
have been always awake to the humour
of life. One says continually that women have
no sense of humour; but this mistake arises from
generalisings, where the true test can only be
applied by discrimination. Nothing differs so[Pg 237]
widely between individuals as the appreciation
of humour; though it is true that much masculine
wit, tending towards farce, appeals to few
women.
In our “leading ladies” (here scarcely including
Charlotte Brontë) we find peculiar power and
extensive variety. Fanny Burney depends on
an eye for comedy, Jane Austen on the humorous
phrase, George Eliot on the study of wit.
In Evelina and Cecilia the comic effects are
mostly produced by the sudden meeting of
opposites; the gay, irresponsible exaggeration
of types; the clash of circumstances. Dickens,
consciously or unconsciously, borrowed much of
his method from Fanny Burney. The characters
of each have their allotted foible, their catch
phrase, their moral label, which somehow delights
and surprises us afresh, however expected, at
each repetition. Those inherently uncongenial
are forced into close contact, one exposing the
other. Speaking roughly, this is the stage manner.
Could we not fancy the speakers confronted, and
imagine their expressions of mutual astonishment,
there would be little fun in them. They are not
always quite so comic to our eyes as in each other’s.[Pg 238]
Captain Mirvan needs Madame Duval as a foil;
that egregious fop Lovel is always playing up to
Mrs. Selwyn; and, if Miss Branghton does not
herself see the humour of the inimitable Smith,
she brings it out. In Cecilia, again, the guardians
produce each other; the “Larolles” is never so
happy as when expounding Mr. Meadows; Mr.
Gosport requires an audience.
Miss Burney’s wit is the child of Society generated
in a crowd; it savours of repartee. Although
spontaneous and true to life, it does not flash out
from the nature of things, but from deliberate
arrangement. It has been sought and is found.
The material is well chosen. The people are
“put together” for our amusement.
Jane Austen has used, and refined, this method—as
she has adapted everything from Miss
Burney—in her earlier work. The titles—Pride
and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility—and the
ideas behind them betray their own inspiration.
Elizabeth Bennet, clearly, is intended to strike fire
from Mr. Collins and Lady Catherine; Mrs. Bennet
would scarcely have seemed so funny to another
husband. The “Burney” innocence of Catherine
Morland tempts Isabella to extremes in knowing[Pg 239]
vulgarity; Mrs. Jennings cannot ruffle Lady
Middleton.
But on her own account, and in her best moments,
Miss Austen is far more subtle. Hers is an intimate
humour, dependent on shades, not contrasts, of
character. Even the more boisterous figures
of fun, even Catherine’s ridiculous applications
of Udolpho, are complete in themselves, needing
no foil. Miss Austen possesses a humorous
imagination, where Miss Burney could only observe.
A mere list of her quaint characters would
fill a chapter, and no one of them is only comic.
They are human beings, not mere puppets set up
to laugh at. Moreover, the humour of them
is derived from the polished phrase. Generally
a few words suffice, fit though few.
Most assuredly, on the other hand, Miss Austen
does not depend for her humour upon her comic
characters. To begin with, these are never dragged
in for “relief,” they “belong to” the plotting; and
in the second place, much of her most perfect
satire arises from scenes in which they have no
part. We have, for example, the dialogue on
generosity between Mr. and Mrs. John Dashwood;
the paragraph about “natural folly in a beautiful[Pg 240]
girl”; Miss Bingley’s ideal for a ball; Harriet’s
“most precious treasures”; Sir Thomas Bertram’s
complacent pride in Fanny; Mary Musgrave’s
anxiety about “the precedence that was
her due”; with other incidents too numerous to
mention.
The fact is that almost every sentence of Miss
Austen’s is pointed with humour; the finished
phrasing of her narrative and her descriptions are
unrivalled in wit. There is no strain or distortion,
no laboured antithesis or uncouth dialect: merely
the light touch, the unerring instinct for the happy
phrase. At times we can detect indignation behind
the laughter: her scorn is often most biting,
she indulges in cynicism. But, in the main, her
object is plainly derisive: the sheer joy of merriment,
the consolation of meeting folly with a gay
heart. And analysis will prove that, in her
opinion, hypocrisy and pose are the sins unforgivable,
the only legitimate occasion of joy to the
jester. Elizabeth may turn off her discomfiture
with a joke, but in reality she is honest, and
wise enough to know that Darcy is unassailable
by reason of his good qualities.
The attributes Miss Austen ridicules are those[Pg 241]
she seriously despises or dislikes, however generously
she often secures our affection for their
possessors. Her “figures of fun” are not wholly
despicable.
Attention has been drawn of late to a marked
contrast between the French comedy of “social
gesture”—which is entirely intellectual—and the
whole-souled laughter of the English. Shakespeare’s
comic “figures are not a criticism of
life—no great English literature is that. It is
a piece of life imaginatively realised. Falstaff is
not judged, he is accepted. Dogberry is not
offered as a fool to be ridiculed by his intellectual
betters. We are not asked to deride him. We
are asked to become part of his folly. Falstaff
appeals to the Falstaff in ourselves. Dogberry is
our common stupidity, enjoyed for the sake of the
dear fool that is part of every man. Shakespeare’s
laugh includes vice and folly in a humour which
is the tolerance of Nature herself for all her works....
English laughter lives in good fellowship.”
Since Macaulay did not hesitate to compare
Jane Austen with Shakespeare in one matter, we
may repeat his audacity here. The definition, if
definition it can be called, will surely apply to[Pg 242]
Emma and Pride and Prejudice. They are “pieces
of life imaginatively realised.” We laugh with
the eccentricities, not at them. Properly speaking,
Miss Austen is no satirist. She can amuse us
without killing emotion.
As hinted already, Charlotte Brontë has neither
humour nor wit. She takes life most seriously;
and, in attempting a comic relief, becomes lumping
or savage. The fact of her “Shirley” curates
recognising, and enjoying, their own portraits
may serve to measure the limit of her success.
Such men could only enjoy the second-rate. Her
satire against charity schools and Belgian pensionnats
is mere spite.
We must pass on, therefore, to George Eliot,
who certainly had wit, and was once acclaimed
very humorous. Here, as elsewhere, our authoress
appears to have gathered up the resources of
her predecessors, developed them by study and
culture, dressed them up in the language of the
professional. The fact that the mechanism of
her humour can be analysed, however, must
prove its limitation. It is “worked in,” skilfully,
but obviously. There is everywhere an “impression
of highly-wrought sentences which are meant[Pg 243]
to arrest the reader’s attention and warn him what
he is to look for of tragedy, of humour, of philosophy.”
The humour is obviously “composed”
to heighten the tragic effect by contrast. In her
earlier work, indeed, every form of elaboration in
style was but “one sign of her overmastering
emotion,” therefore “fitting and suitable”; but
repetition made it tedious and mechanical. After
a time we see through “the expression of a
humorous fancy in a pedantic phrase; the reminiscence
of a classical idiom applied to some
everyday triviality; the slight exaggeration of
verbiage which is to accentuate an aphorism
... moulded on the plaster casts of the schools.”
The fact is that humour, and even wit, flourish
most happily in uncultured fields—for there is
only one George Meredith. Yet, within her
limitations, there is triumph for the genius of
George Eliot. None can deny tribute to Mrs.
Poyser, or the “Aunts” in The Mill on the Floss.
That very severe study and applied observation,
which kills spontaneity, lent her the power to
excite tears and laughter. She has given us
oddities as rugged as, and more various than, Miss
Burney’s, contrasts of manners as bustling; scenes[Pg 244]
and persons as humanly humorous as Jane
Austen’s. She combines their methods, enriching
them by dialect, antithesis, allusion, and the
“study” of types. There is humour and wit in
her work.
If, as we certainly admit, both are “worked
out” carefully and the labour shows through,
we must also acknowledge that she has embraced,
and extended, all the achievements of woman
before her day, indicating the powers realised and
the possibilities to be accomplished.
Although, as we have seen everywhere, the
women novelists did so much in lifting the veil
and, so to speak, giving themselves away; they
also held up the mirror to man’s complacency,
and, in a measure, enabled the other sex to see
himself as they saw him. In the process they
created a type, beloved of schoolgirls, which can
only be described as the “Woman’s Man,” and
must be admitted a partial travesty on human
nature. It does not, however, reveal any less
insight than much of man’s feminine portraiture.
Curiously enough, the earliest “Woman’s Man”
in fiction was of male origin. We all know how
Richardson, having given us Clarissa, was invited
to exert his genius upon the “perfect gentleman.”
But the little printer had ever an eye on the ladies,
and, whether or no of malice prepense, drew the
immaculate Sir Charles Grandison—frankly, in
every particular—not as he must have known him
in real life, but rather according to the pretty[Pg 246]
fancy of the dear creatures whose entreaties
had called into being the gallant hero.
And, as elsewhere, Fanny Burney took up the
type, refined it, and lent an attractive subtlety
to that somewhat monumental erection of the
infallible. The actual imaginings of woman are
proved less wooden than Richardson supposed
them, and infinitely more like human nature.
In many things Lord Orville resembles Sir Charles.
He is scarcely less perfect, but his empire is more
restricted. The chorus of admiration granted to
Grandison, and his astounding complacency, are
replaced by the unconscious revelations of innocent
girlhood naturally expressing her simple enthusiasm
to the kindest of foster-parents. The peerless
Orville, indeed, is not exactly a “popular” hero.
It needs a superior mind to appreciate his
superiority; and we suspect there were circles
in which he was voted a “prodigious dull fellow.”
His life was not passed in an atmosphere of worship.
It is only in the heart of Evelina that he
is king. Nor can we fancy Miss Burney submitting
her heroine to the ignominy, as modern readers
must judge it, of patiently and contentedly waiting,
like Harriet Byron, until such time as his[Pg 247]
majesty should determine between the well-balanced
claims of herself and her rival to the
honour of his hand. Personally, we have never
been able to satisfy ourselves whether Grandison
loved Clementina more or less than Harriet; if
he was properly “in love” with either.
It was, indeed, rather becoming so fine a
gentleman to be wooed than to woo; and
the visit to Italy was, in all likelihood, actually
brought in as an afterthought, mainly designed to
illustrate the power of conscience over a good
man. Anyone less perfect than Sir Charles would
be universally charged with having compromised
Clementina; and the real motive of his English
“selection in wives” was to escape the consequences
of an entanglement involving difficulties about
religion and constant association with the Italian
temperament. Having thoroughly investigated the
circumstances and judicially examined his own
heart, the cool-headed young man decides that he
is not in honour bound; gently but firmly severs
the somewhat embarrassing connection; and, in
dignified language, communicates his decision to
“the other lady.” Humbly and gratefully she
accepts his self-justification and his love. It is[Pg 248]
obvious that no one could ever have either refused
him or questioned the dictates of his conscience.
But as Jane Austen remarks, in a very different
connection, “It is a new circumstance in
romance, I acknowledge, and dreadfully derogatory
of a heroine’s dignity.” No woman writer
would permit it.
Nevertheless, in the essential qualities of heart
and mind, no less than in the heroine’s mental
attitude towards their perfections, Lord Orville
and Sir Charles Grandison belong to the same order
of men: made by women for women. So far as
I am aware, Miss Burney originated the semi-paternal
relationship (reappearing, with variations,
in Knightley and Henry Tilney) which certainly
helped to deceive Evelina as to the state of her
heart, and has in itself a peculiar charm. There
is real delicacy, quite beyond Richardson or his
Sir Charles, in Orville’s repeated attempts to
preserve Evelina from her own ignorance; to
give her (as none of her natural guardians ever
attempted) some slight knowledge of the world;
protect her from insult; and advise her in difficulty.
He never intrudes or presumes; and,
because, after all, women’s first and last mission[Pg 249]
as novel-writers was the refinement of fiction,
it cannot be too often emphasised that Miss Burney
was most extraordinarily refined for her age. The
very coarseness in certain externals which she
admits without protest, should serve only to
establish her own innate superiority.
But it remains true that the essential attribute
of Orville, as of Grandison, was perfectibility.
He is a very Bayard, the preux chevalier, and the
Sir Galahad of eighteenth-century drawing-rooms.
Neither the author, nor her heroine, would have
ever imagined it possible to criticise this prince
of gentlemen. It really pained them when persons
of inferior breeding or less exalted morality occasionally
ventured to oppose his will or question his
judgment. His praise, and his love, were alike
a mighty condescension; his mere notice an honour
almost greater than they could bear.
This is the modern, civilised notion of knighthood;
the personification (in terms of everyday
life) of that pure dream which has haunted, and
will ever haunt, the musings of maidenhood; the
pretty fancy that one day He, prince of fairyland,
will ride into her very ordinary little existence,
acclaim her queen, and carry her away somewhere[Pg 250]
to be happy ever after. Miss Burney translated
the vision for her generation, making it, verily,
not greatly dissimilar from actual human experience.
We shall see later how certain women of the
Victorian era visualised the same ideal.
In the numberless remarkable signs of feminine
advance between the authoress of Evelina and
Jane Austen we find that this particular attitude
and ideal has almost completely vanished. The
hero is no longer quite perfect; condescension is
not now his most conspicuous virtue. The heroine,
indeed, has become the one woman who ventures
to criticise him. Darcy learns quite as much
from Elizabeth as she from him. As already
hinted, “Mr. Knightley” is the nearest approach
in Jane Austen to the old type. He is the only
person in Highbury who “ventured to criticise
Emma”—without being sufficiently snubbed for
his pains. He is, admittedly, the personification
of superiority; though he is not very “sure of the
lady.” Again the character is gently satirised in
Henry Tilney, the situation of Northanger Abbey,
as we have said above, being a more subtle parody
of Evelina than of Udolpho. The young clergyman
is nearly faultless. Catherine swears by[Pg 251]
him in everything—from theology to “sprigged
muslin.” He, too, teaches her all she ever knew
about the “great world”; and guides her, without
a rival in authority, among the bewildering
intricacies of men and books.
But, in her own domain and as to her most
original creations, Miss Austen has been criticised
for her occasional lack of insight towards men.
It may be true, indeed, that neither Darcy nor
Knightley always speaks, or behaves, quite like a
gentlemen; which means that, like all women,
she had not an absolutely unerring instinct for the
things which are “not done.” In all probability,
as men will never quite understand women’s
emotional purity, women will never fully appreciate
men’s alert sense of honour. Generally speaking,
of course, the feminine standard in all things is
far higher than the masculine; and the women
novelists have done much in pulling us up to their
level. But there are a few points, which concern
deeper issues than social polish, of which few women,
if any, can attain to the absolute ideal of chivalry.
There are, of course, many more superficial
aspects by which the men in Jane Austen may be
easily recognised as woman-made. We hear comparatively[Pg 252]
little of their point of view in affairs of
the heart, with which the novels are mainly concerned,
save in that most thoughtful passage
closing Persuasion; and we know even less of their
attitude towards ethics, citizenship, business, or
social problems. Only clergymen or sailors are
shown to be even superficially concerned with any
profession in life; and this is merely because the
authoress was personally intimate with both. It
is, in fact, an infallible instinct for her own limitations
which saved her from more obvious failure
as a portrait-painter of men. Man at the tea-table
is her chosen theme; and this too is a work
which could not have been safely entrusted to any
male pen.
The Brontës, on the other hand, exhibit a
startlingly original and unexpected revival of the
early type, in the central feature of its conception.
Here once more the hero is most emphatically
“the master”—of body and soul. Jane Eyre, we
remember, loved—and served—her “employer”;
Lucy Snowe and Shirley their “teachers.” There
are, probably, no more arrogant males in fiction
than these gentlemen; no more enslaved female
worshippers. Yet the combination is totally unlike[Pg 253]
the Richardson-Burney brand. To begin with,
the dominant, and domineering, hero is represented
in each case as almost, if not quite, unique; not as
the man normal. Nor are we called upon to admire
without qualification. There is nothing ideal about
Rochester, Monsieur Heger, Paul Emmanuel, or
Louis Moore. The Brontë heroines did not at all
admire perfection in man, and they abominated
good looks. Nor were they, on the other hand,
in the least humble by nature, generally yielding
and clinging, or ever grateful for guidance and
information. They had no patience and very
little respect for the genus Homo.
There is, indeed, a touch of melodrama in the
sharp contrast exhibited between their proud
prickliness towards mankind and their idolatry of
The Man. Few women have written more bitterly
of our idle vanity, our heartless neglect and supreme
selfishness, our blind folly, and our indifference to
moral standards. None has spoken with more
biting emphasis of woman’s natural superiority,
or of the grinding tyranny which, for so many
generations, she is herein shown to have stupidly
endured. Yet Charlotte Brontë has declared, without
qualification and more frankly than any of[Pg 254]
her sisters, that no woman can really love a man
incapable of mastery; that she is ever longing for
the whip.
To assert herself, to demand liberty or even
equality, is uncongenial; and the aggressive attitude
is only adopted as a duty, undertaken for the
weaker sister from a passionate instinct for justice
and an intolerance of sham. There were two things
Charlotte Brontë hated: a handsome man and a
deceitful woman. But hate left her very weary.
It was the strain of playing prophetess that inspired
her taste for “doormats.”
Obviously, the conception of a Hero thus evolved
is essentially feminine. The most complacently
conservative among us, however intolerant of the
fine shades, could never have either conceived or
admired a Rochester. We should certainly not
suppose him attractive to any woman of character.
To us he appears mere tinsel, the obvious counterfeit
and exaggeration of a type we have come to
despise a little at its best. Naturally, such men
fancy that they can “do what they like with the
women”; but we knew better, until the novelist
confirmed the truth of their boast. Miss Brontë,
moreover, is very much farther from our idea of a[Pg 255]
gentleman than Miss Austen. It may be doubted
if men ever like or applaud rudeness, which she
apparently considers essential to honest manliness.
Yet, however unique in its external manifestations,
and however exaggerated in expression, the Brontë
hero-recipe involves, like Miss Burney’s, an
assumption that happy marriages are achieved
by meeting mastery with submission. However
diverse their conceptions of the proper everyday
balance between the sexes, both find their ideal
in the absolute monarchy of Man.
It must be always more difficult and more
hazardous to determine an author’s private point
of view as her art becomes more professional and
self-conscious. George Eliot’s characters are all
deliberate studies, neither the instinctive expression
of an ideal nor the unconscious reflection of experience;
and such manufactured products naturally
tend to be extensively varied, seeking to avoid
repetition or even similarity. We may, perhaps,
say that George Eliot, out of her wider experience
and more scholarly training, understood men better
than her predecessors. She certainly avoided, as did
Jane Austen, the specific “Woman’s Man”; and,
on the other hand, she penetrated, without losing[Pg 256]
her way, more deeply into the masculine mystery
than the creator of Messrs. Elton and Collins.
Tom Tulliver’s whole relationship with his sister
is an admirable study in the conventional notion of
a stupid man’s “superiority” to a clever woman;
but it cannot be criticised, or in any way regarded,
as a feminine conception. That provokingly
worthy and obstinate young man is perfectly true
to life. There is neither mistake nor exaggeration
here. We must all feel that “this lady” knows.
In marriage, Tom would certainly have played the
master to any woman “worthy of him,” but would
not thereby have become less normal or natural. If
men question or puzzle over anything in The Mill on
the Floss, it is not Maggie’s toleration of Tom, but
her temporary infatuation for Stephen. He indeed
is something of a lady’s man, not a woman’s; but
probably we may not disown the type. To some
extent, again, Adam Bede is “masterly” to his
mother, and would probably—barring accidents
on which the plot hinges—have been accepted by
Hetty in the same spirit; but he is certainly not
perfect, and seldom, if ever, outruns probability.
But although George Eliot, having a wide outlook,
recognises and illustrates the tendency in[Pg 257]
man to play the master, she does not associate it
with any idea of perfection, nor does she idealise
submission in women. Yet we know that personally,
though less intensely than Charlotte Brontë,
she too disliked sex-assertion, and found comfort
in what the other only desired, a large measure of
intellectual rest, by letting a man think and act for
her. At all times her religion and her philosophy
were largely borrowed or reflective—for all their
assumption of independence—and every page of her
life reveals the carefully protective influence of
George Henry Lewes. Only less than any of the
other chief women novelists did George Eliot permit
self-expression in her work, and the particular
portraiture of man we are here discussing was not
the result of study but the exposure of conviction.
Finally, it was reserved for later writers, not of
supreme genius, to develop the type to its extremity.
Charlotte Yonge, with her usual superabundance
of dramatis personæ, has two “women’s men” in
The Heir of Redclyffe, and the contrast between
them is most instructive. The aggressive “perfection”
of Philip, indeed, is crude enough. Miss
Yonge deliberately exaggerates his manifold virtues
in order to darken the evil within. The reader and[Pg 258]
his own conscience alone ever realise the full force
of his jealous suspicions and obstinacy in self-justification.
Guy’s faults, on the other hand, are all
on the surface; but his exalted saintliness is even
more superhuman than the other’s unerring morality.
Both exemplify a feminine ideal; though Philip
has only one worshipper, her faith is unfaltering.
His, indeed, is the type that lives to hold forth, to
inform, and to dogmatise. Woe to the woman
who ventures to think for herself. The power or
charm of Guy is unconscious. They love his passionate
outbursts, his generous impetuosity, his childish
remorse and “sensibility.” In him, however, there
are some qualities which men esteem: he was a
sportsman, adventurous, and transparently sincere.
Only his final “conversion” and the death-bed
scene spoil the picture. He becomes, in the end
(what Philip had always been), the sport of feminine
imagination with its craving for perfectibility. He
loses the human touch, vanishing among the gods.
We have the “last word” in this matter
from John Halifax, Gentleman. With school-girl
naïveté Phineas tells us on every page that “there
was never any man like him.” His smile, his tenderness,
his courage, his independence, his tact and[Pg 259]
tyranny in the home, his quiet influence on
Capital and Labour, are certainly unique, and no
less certainly monotonous. He understands everybody,
and “deals with them” easily. It costs him
nothing to lead men and dominate women. Quietly
and without effort, he pursues his way—to an
admiring chorus, always “the master,” the
perfect gentleman. He was dignified, attractive,
and very “particular over his daintiest of cambric
and finest of lawn.” The little waif of the opening
chapters indignantly repudiated the name of
“beggar-boy”: “You mistake; I never begged in
my life: I am a person of independent property,
which consists of my head and my two hands, out
of which I hope to realise a large capital some day.”
And he kept his word.
Prompt and acute in business, of unflinching
integrity, and guided by generous understanding
as to the serious labour problems of his generation,
John was one of those fine English tradesmen who
effected so much, not only towards the foundation
of our commercial empire, but towards removing
the barriers between their own class and a Society
largely composed of “fox-hunting, drinking, dicing
fools.” The girl who loved him was “shocked”[Pg 260]
to hear of his being “in business,” although her
feelings quickly developed to proud worship.
It is here, indeed, that Mrs. Craik reveals most
power. Towards the “world”—his equals, his
“men,” or his “superiors”—John Halifax is the
true gentleman, and a splendid specimen of manhood.
He has rare dignity, shrewd insight, and
ready command of language. The scene of his
“drawing-room” fracas with Richard Brithwood
is extremely dramatic, and gives us almost a higher
opinion of the hero than any other. Entirely free
from the narrow-mindedness of the ordinary self-made
man, he almost subdues our dislike of the
gentle despotism which he assumes towards wife
and family. The complacent masculinity is exaggerated
by the author’s persistence in keeping
him to the centre of the picture; and we are disposed
to believe that it might have been less open
to criticism if expressed, as well as conceived, by
a woman. Phineas Fletcher, the fictional Ego, has
some charm; but he is absolutely feminine, if not
womanish, and the Jonathan-David attitude of
every page becomes wearisome by repetition. There
is no doubt that this perpetual enthusiasm of one
man for another offends our taste, and has a tendency[Pg 261]
to make both a little ridiculous. John has
a positive weakness for perfection, and we should
observe the fact with more pleasure if it were less
frequently “explained.”
Here the man creates his surroundings or sets
the tone, presumably exemplifying the author’s
ideal. He is singularly pure-minded, preposterously
domestic, and very confident about the
natural supremacy of man. It is the immense
amount of tender detail, the infinite number of
soft touches which convict the author of femininity.
Her hero, however, is no knight of romance, no
Bayard of the drawing-room, no love-lorn youth
of dreams, no “fine gentleman,” the mate of a
girl’s sensibility. He is not all soul and heart.
He is of tougher fibre in groundwork (despite
his “halo”), and primarily practical. Concerned
externally with such tough problems as trade
depression, the “bread riots,” and the introduction
of machinery, he is more often placed
before us as lover, husband, father, and friend.
Frank and decisive, he has remarkable self-control,
and remains ideally simple. He has no
doubts about sin and goodness, indifference or
faith. We should be tempted to say that he[Pg 262]
spent his life in the nursery, though sometimes,
indeed, the view of the nursery is not unworthy
of our attention:
“I delighted to see dancing. Dancing, such as
it was then, when young people moved breezily and
lightly, as if they loved it; skimming like swallows
down the long line of the Triumph—gracefully winding
in and out through the graceful country-dance—lively
always, but always decorous. In those days people
did not think it necessary to the pleasures of dancing
that any stranger should have the liberty to snatch a
shy, innocent girl round the waist, and whirl her about
in mad waltz or awkward polka, till she stops, giddy and
breathless, with burning cheek and tossed hair, looking—as
I would not have liked to see our pretty Maud look.”
Most of us, I fancy, would think better of John
without Phineas at his elbow, if he were less
supremely self-conscious, less given to that analysis
of his own acts and emotions which is essentially
feminine. But Mrs. Craik will not let her hero
alone. She thrusts him upon us without mercy,
till we are driven to cry “halt.” We are convinced
that no human being could comfortably carry
about with him so heavy a burden of perfectibility.
He is (as women have often fancied us) not what we
are but what she would have us be; and here, as
elsewhere, even the Ideal does not please man.
All art is the expression of an individuality, and
environment has some influence on genius. Without
question Evelina and Cecilia owe much to
the accidents of Miss Burney’s own experience.
Hers, indeed, was an eventful, almost romantic,
life. To-day we only remember Dr. Burney as
the father of Fanny; but he was a man of mark
in his own generation, and his industrious enthusiasm
was obviously infectious. Fanny was
not early distinguished among his clever children,
and we must conclude that she had something of
that delicate refinement granted her heroines,
making her rather shy and diffident among the
mixed gatherings in which he took such pride
and delight. As one of her sisters remarked, this
lack of self-confidence gave her at times the appearance
of hauteur; and it is quite obvious that
no suspicions could have been aroused in any of
them of her capacity for “taking notes.” Hers
was always the quiet corner where “the old
lady,” as they called her at home, could observe[Pg 264]
the quality, occasionally join in a spirited conversation,
and—after her own fashion—enjoy “the
diversions.” Her characteristics, says fourteen-year-old
Susan, “seem to be sense, sensibility,
and bashfulness, even to prudery.” It would be
kinder, perhaps, to credit her with modesty such
as we find expressed in her own account of Evelina;
or, A Young Lady’s Entrance into the World:
“Perhaps this may seem rather a bold attempt
and title for a female whose knowledge of the world
is very confined, and whose inclinations, as well as
situation, incline her to a private and domestic life.
All I can urge is, that I have only presumed to trace
the accidents and adventures to which a ‘young woman’
is liable; I have not pretended to shew the world
what it actually is, but what it appears to a young
girl of seventeen: and so far as that, surely any girl
who is past seventeen may safely do? The motto
of my excuse shall be taken from Pope’s Temple of
Fame:
‘In every work, regard the author’s end;
None e’er can compass more than they intend.’”
How far she had actually experienced adventures,
or at least met characters, similar to those of her
novel, her entertaining Diaries most abundantly
illustrate. One is almost ashamed before the
enthusiasm which, between domesticities considered[Pg 265]
becoming a lady, secretarial work for Dr.
Burney, and voluminous letters to her faithful
friend Daddy Crisp, the authoress accomplished
so much in so comparatively short a period.
For she had not only to “scribble” Evelina, but
to copy it all out in a feigned upright hand. It was
natural enough that Lowndes, bookseller, should
have refused to publish without the whole manuscript,
but equally natural that she should complain:
“This man, knowing nothing of my situation, supposed,
in all probability, that I could sit quietly at my
bureau, and write on with expedition and ease, till the
work was finished. But so different was the case, that
I had hardly time to write half a page a day; and
neither my health nor inclination would allow me to
continue my nocturnal scribbling for so long a time, as
to write first, and then copy, a whole volume. I was
therefore obliged to give the attempt and affair entirely
over for the present.”
Genius, of course, would not be stifled; and, in
the end, she completed her work within the year,
gaily accepting the payment of £20 down for the
copyright, to which the publisher added £10 when
its success was assured by a sale of 2300 copies
during 1778.
Frances Burney became immediately the pet of[Pg 266]
Society. The diaries of this period are crowded
with records of flattery which may seem extravagant,
if not ludicrous, to modern reticence; and
she has been criticised for repeating them. Yet
for us it is fortunate that there were “two or three
persons,” for whom her diaries were written, “to
whom her fame gave the purest and most exquisite
delight.” They have become history, and, as
Macaulay remarks, “nothing can be more unjust
than to confound these outpourings of a kind heart,
sure of perfect sympathy, with the egotism of a
blue-stocking who prates to all who come near her
about her own novel or her own volume of sonnets.”
The fact is that, by a comparison with the Early
Diaries, we may feel confident that Miss Burney
was never spoilt by popularity. Inevitably she
came out of the shade, talked more as she was more
often singled out for compliments or conversation;
but there is no appearance of conceit, and little
increase in self-confidence. The youthful simplicity
of her work remains her prevailing characteristic;
and the slight maturity of Cecilia, not always
an advantage, is obviously no more than a desire
to please. It is not her own sense of dignity in
authorship, but the pride of Crisp and the affection[Pg 267]
of Dr. Johnson which stimulates the effort. Always
“instinct with the proprieties and the delicacies
implanted by careful guardians,”[16] it was her
business to “describe the world as it seems to a
woman utterly preoccupied with the thought of how
she seems to the world,” to picture man “simply
and solely as a member of a family.” One recognises
the limit and single-mindedness of her aim,
in her reason for abandoning drama. She found she
could not “preserve spirit and salt, and yet keep
up delicacy.”
We are all familiar enough to-day with the cruelty
of the reward by which foolish persons thought to
acknowledge her prowess. The five years’ imprisonment
at Court, though it could not ultimately
tame her spirit, brought about temporary physical
wreck, and seems to have lulled for ever the desire
for literary fame. We have endeavoured to show,
in an earlier chapter, that Camilla is not entirely
without significance; but there can be no question
that after her marriage she wrote only for money,
and, if not without individuality, yet, as it were,
to order and by rule.
We are concerned here only with her earlier[Pg 268]
years, when she was the replica of her own
heroines.
The real character of Miss Austen almost defies
analysis. Contemporary evidence, of any discrimination,
is practically non-existent; her life
presents no outstanding adventure; and it is very
dangerous to assume identity between any expression
in the novels and her experience or opinion. As a
matter of fact, she never even states a truth, exhibits
an emotion, or judges a case except by implication.
Even the apparent generalisations or author’s comments
on life are really attuned to the atmosphere of
the particular novel in which they appear.
“It is a truth universally acknowledged,” we
read, “that a single man in possession of a good
fortune must be in want of a wife.” Miss Austen
knows better. She is perfectly aware of the perverseness
often exhibited by wealthy bachelors.
The sentence is no more than a most ingenious
stroke of art. It plunges us at once into the atmosphere
of Meryton and the subject of the tale.
It betrays Mrs. Bennet and, in a lesser degree,
Lady Lucas. It prepares us for her vulgarity, at
once distressing, and elevating by contrast, the
refinement of Jane and Elizabeth. Never surely[Pg 269]
did a novel open with a paragraph so suggestive.
Again, the first page of Mansfield Park contains
a phrase of similar significance. The author remarks:
“There certainly are not so many men of
large fortune in the world as there are pretty
women to deserve them.” Again, she is not speaking
in her own person. Lady Bertram felt this—so
far as she ever formed an opinion for herself.
Mrs. Norris and Mrs. Price had personal experience
of its truth. The subtle irony reveals their point
of view, not Miss Austen’s.
It requires, of course, no particular subtlety to
trace from her novels the type of character she
approves and loves best, her general standard of
manners and conduct, and her scorn for hypocrisy.
We have even hazarded to affirm evidence for
her opinions on one or two questions of more importance.
But they do not reveal her personality
in detail; and to say, with her nephew, that she
possessed all the charms of all her heroines, would
be to make her inhuman.
There is, in fact, an undiscriminating conventionality
about such descriptions as we possess which
gives us no real information. We are told, for
example, that
[Pg 270]
“her carriage and deportment were quiet, yet
graceful. Her features were separately good. Their
assemblage produced an unrivalled expression of that
cheerfulness, sensibility, and benevolence which were
her real characteristics. Her complexion was of the
finest texture. It might with truth be said that her
eloquent blood spoke through her modest cheek.
Her voice was extremely sweet. She delivered herself
with fluency and precision. Indeed, she was formed
for elegant and rational society, excelling in conversation
as much as in composition. In the present
age it is hazardous to mention accomplishments. Our
authoress would, probably, have been inferior to few
in such acquirements had she not been so superior to
most in higher things.”
It would seem as if the writer were really intent
on describing perfection.
And yet, we are convinced personally that Miss
Austen had a peculiar charm of her own. Undoubtedly
she lived among persons as empty-headed
as those she has immortalised; probably
she had met Mrs. Norris, Mr. Elton, and Mr.
Collins: apparently she was happy. No doubt her
devotion to Cassandra (suggesting her partiality
for sister-heroines) counted for much; and all
her family were agreeable. They had a good deal
of “sense.” Her life provided even less variety
of incident than she discovered at Longbourn or[Pg 271]
Uppercross; and, if she was fond of reading, she
knew nothing about literature. Her letters do not
suggest the uneasiness attached to the possession
of a soul—as we moderns understand it.
Yet one point merits attention and may partially
reveal. There can be no question that the very
breath of her art is satire, and she is at times even
cynical. Yet the one thing we know positively
of her private life is that she was a favourite aunt,
a devoted sister, a sympathetic daughter. Now
the child-lover, beloved of children, must possess
certain qualities, which prove that her cynicism
was not ingrained, misanthropic, or pessimistic;
that her pleasure in fun was neither ill-natured nor
unsympathetic. There must have been strength
of character in two directions not often united.
Her life was, in a measure, isolated—from superiority.
She gave more than she received. Nor
can we believe her entirely unaware of what life
might have yielded her in more equal companionship;
entirely without bitterness—for example—in
the invention of Mrs. Norris. There can be no question,
we think, that life never awakened the real
Jane Austen. She lived absolutely in, and for, her
art, of which the delight to her was supreme. Yet[Pg 272]
family tradition declares, with obvious truth, that
her genius never tempted her to arrogance, affectation,
or selfishness. She worked in the family
sitting-room, writing on slips of paper that could
immediately, without bustle or parade, be slipped
inside her desk at the call of friendship or courtesy.
At any moment she suffered interruption without
protest. The absolute self-command so obvious in
the work governed her life.
But we have always believed that one passage
in Pride and Prejudice does give us a suggestive
glimpse—again only by implication—of very real
autobiography:
“‘You are a great deal too apt,’ says Eliza to Jane
Bennet, ‘to like people in general. You never see
a fault in anybody. All the world are good and agreeable
in your eyes. I never heard you speak ill of a
human being in my life.’
“‘I would not wish to be hasty in censuring anyone,’
answers Jane, ‘but I always speak what I think.’
“‘I know you do, and it is that which makes the
wonder. With your good sense, to be so honestly
blind to the follies and nonsense of others. Affectation
of candour is common enough—one meets it everywhere.
But to be candid without ostentation or
design—to take the good of everybody’s character and
make it still better, and say nothing of the bad—belongs
to you alone.’”
[Pg 273]
This is, we like to fancy, a portrait of her own
sister, Cassandra. Jane Austen herself was not
“a great deal too apt to like people in general,”
though she too could be marvellously tender with
Marianne Dashwood, most “silly” of heroines,
and her still more ridiculous mother. It is certain,
indeed, that she never neglected even the most
tiresome “neighbours,” but she did not love them.
There is evidence enough in Persuasion that she
could sympathise with deep feelings, which were
necessarily suppressed in such surroundings as she
gives all her heroines, and had experienced herself.
Her reverend father, “the handsome proctor,”
like most clergymen of his generation, was essentially
a country gentleman, not very much better educated,
and scarcely more strenuous, than his neighbours.
His wife took a simple and honest pride
in the management of her household; and his
sons followed their father’s footsteps, entered the
navy, or pursued whatever other profession they
could most conveniently enter. The whole atmosphere
of the vicarage was complacently material
and old-fashioned, where the ideas of progress
filtered slowly and discontent was far from being
considered divine. The personal aloofness from[Pg 274]
characters delineated, so conspicuous in her art, was
borrowed from life. Everywhere, and always, the
real Jane stood aside.
Nor were there granted her any of the consolations
of culture. We have no doubt that she
received no more education than might be acquired
at Mrs. Goddard’s:
“A school, not a seminary, or an establishment, or
anything which professed, in long sentences of refined
nonsense, to combine liberal acquirements with elegant
morality, upon new principles and new systems—and
where young ladies, for enormous pay, might be screwed
out of health and into vanity—but a real, honest,
old-fashioned boarding-school, where a reasonable
quantity of accomplishments were sold at a reasonable
price, and where girls might be sent out of the way and
scramble themselves into a little education, without any
danger of coming back prodigies.”
It needed, perhaps, some such unromantic, unruffled,
and unvaried existence, with a mind perfectly
composed, to produce those six flawless
works of art which remain for us the most complete
expression of good sense, the most complete triumph
over the fanciful exaggerations of romance. Genius
alone could adjust the balance with such nicety
and leave us content. She forces us, by sheer[Pg 275]
wit and sympathy, to love and admire the very
persons of all time and place who have in themselves
least to interest or attract.
The character of Charlotte Brontë, like her
work, brings us at once into a new atmosphere.
All here is emotionally strenuous, if not melodramatic.
The bleak parsonage, the stern
widowed father, the vicious son, the three
wonderful sisters: around and about them the
mysteries of Wuthering Heights. The picture of
those lonely girls, all the world to each other and
nothing to the world, dreaming and scribbling in
the cold, without sympathy and without guidance,
is stamped for ever on our imagination. We
know something, moreover, from Jane Eyre, about
their cruel experience of schooldays, something,
from Agnes Grey, about their noble efforts at
independence. Finally, we have studied and
talked over “the Secret”—supposed to reconcile
work and life. As to the main outlines of temperament,
at any rate, there can be no question.
Charlotte Brontë’s experience of life was strictly
limited: she had little interest about the trivialities
of the tea-table. But she observed keenly,
had a tenacious memory, and felt with intensity.[Pg 276]
Without hardness or conceit, she was entirely
self-centred: there is no aloofness about her
work: it centres passionately around the heroine,
reflecting her own emotional outlook. She took
life seriously, like her heroines: acutely sensitive
to words and looks; caring nothing for what did
not personally affect her. No doubt there is
something Irish, something too of the grim moorlands,
in that mysterious instinct which fired
Charlotte, and her sisters, to their perpetual questionings
of Providence, their burning protests
against the harshness and hypocrisy of the world.
Circumstances stifle them and they must speak.
Speaking, they must strike.
Charlotte Brontë, indeed, lived almost as much
aside from the world as Jane Austen. But
Haworth was not Stevenage: the Rev. Patrick
was certainly not a “handsome proctor,” and
Bramwell could never have risen in “the Service.”
It was in nature, however, that the contrast is
most marked. The author of Jane Eyre, however
shy and unsociable, was not content to stand
aloof and look on. With little enough experience
of actualities, she was for ever making life for
herself, sending that plain, visionary, eager, and[Pg 277]
sensitive ego of hers out into the world; and uttering
with fiery eloquence her comments on what
she imagined herself to have done and seen.
Until recently, indeed, we have supposed that even
the heart of her work, that passionate devotion
which she was the first of women to reveal, was
entirely imaginative, an invention created without
guidance from personal experience. Now evidence
has been published which scarcely permits doubt;
that whereas, obviously, her pupil-teacherdom at
Brussels widened her social outlook, it also awoke
her heart. Charlotte Brontë, evidently, fell in love
with the “Professor” at the Pensionnat Heger;
and thus gained the memory of passion. But it
may be reasonably questioned, after all, whether
the experience did much for her art. Since
Monsieur Heger, no less certainly, did not return
her love, and seldom even answered her letters,
he could not have taught her the mysteries; and
as, like her heroines, she was fatally addicted to
exaggeration—in love or hate—it is not probable
that her heroes—or ideal men—bear any very
real likeness to him in character. After all, she
practically “invented” him, as independent
witnesses have established; and the accident[Pg 278]
of her idealisations centring about a living man
is not particularly significant. Her attitude, and
that of her heroines, towards mankind in general,
and towards “the man” in particular, is really
woven out of a strong imagination: and the
essence of her being remains a dreamer’s. Jane
Eyre and Villette are, transparently, the work of
one who created her own world for herself only;
and we need not modify this impression from
any letters of hers ever printed or written. Emotionally
she was nourished on her own thoughts;
and, in her case, we may read them fearlessly
in her work. It was not her nature to suppress,
or conceal, anything. She has put herself on
record. Here lies the essential difference between
her work and Miss Burney’s or Jane Austen’s.
While they reflected, with almost unruffled enjoyment,
the surface of life, she tore off the wrappings
and revealed a Soul. That, too, was of her very
self. She had missed everything that mattered.
It was at once her consolation and her revenge to
project herself into the heart of life, and tell the
tale.
The character and experience of George Eliot
is far more complex, like her achievement, than[Pg 279]
that of those who preceded her. Like them,
bred in retirement, though among more strenuous
surroundings, her youth gave her also much insight
into what life means to “small” people.
But there was a strong religious atmosphere around
her, accident gave her the early control of affairs,
and her education—of a later date—was more
thorough. Then came the stirring of doubt, from
associations with sceptics; the professional training
from practical journalism; and the “problem”
evoked by her friendship with George Henry
Lewes. Life was training her for modern work.
The intense seriousness, the active conscience
of primitive faith, remained always with her,
influencing characterisation. But it was the wider
teachings of philosophy, the later experiences, and
the conscious desire after advance that made her
didactic. Her letters reveal an unexpected
sentimentalism and an intense craving for personal
affection; her teachings are all interpreted by
what she has read, or inspired by men she has
met; but they are in touch with real life and
directed by real thought. It was her personal
experience and character which enabled George
Eliot to combine the “manners” comedy of[Pg 280]
Fanny Burney and Jane Austen with Miss
Brontë’s moral campaign; to weld the message
of woman into modernity.
She was, however, before all things, a professional
student of humanity. Though she
actually commenced novelist at a comparatively
advanced age, the previous years, and every item
of character, had been a training for this work.
She observed with accuracy, remembered without
effort, and studiously cultivated her natural
literary powers. Emotionally and intellectually she
got the most out of life; never, perhaps, quite letting
herself go, but keenly alive to every impression, on
the alert for experience and information. It was
not in her ever to let things alone.
Such a temperament, of course, does not produce
either spontaneous fun, sleepless humour,
or unbridled self-torment; but it acquires the
power of responding to all human difficulties,
understanding the “problem” of life, and sympathising
in its beauty and joy. George Eliot
was always pondering about truth, considering
the remedies for evil, looking forward towards
progress. Her own experience was utilised freely,
with an instinct for dramatic effect, but it is not[Pg 281]
the whole body of her work. That was a deliberately
composed art, put out as an instrument
for a given purpose, studied and ornamented.
But while thus nurtured and apart, it is also the
expression of herself, the sum of her being.
Therein, like an actress, she plays many parts,
putting on the mood of each new story and living
in it.
She is, in fact, a typical woman of letters, as
we now understand the term, with all the excellences
and all the limitations of even the greatest
among us.
We find, in the main, that women developed—and
perfected—the domestic novel. They made circulating
libraries respectable, establishing the right,
and the power, of women to write fiction.
They carried on the traditions of Richardson
and Fielding by choosing the middle-class for
subject, at first confining themselves to Society
and the County, but extending—with George Eliot—to
all “Professions,” and to a study of the poor.
They made novels a reflection, and a criticism, of
life.
It seems curious that, with the possible exception
of Charlotte Brontë, women were all stern realists:
while even her imaginativeness can scarcely be called
romantic. The fact is, probably, that the heroes
and heroines of romance were mainly conceived
for young ladies, and popularly supposed to represent
their ideal. Wherefore, when women began to
express themselves, they—more or less consciously—set
out to expose this fallacy: to prove that they
could enjoy and face real life. No school of writers,[Pg 283]
indeed, has more fearlessly or more persistently
created their characters from flesh and blood than
the school represented by Jane Austen and George
Eliot. None has dwelt more persistently on the
trivial details of everyday life, the conquests of
observation. Whether concerned, like Miss Burney,
with the Comedy of Manners; or, like George Eliot,
with the Analysis of Soul; they have one and all
found their inspiration in human nature. And,
in reality, this was the main progress achieved in
fiction between Richardson and the nineteenth
century—the growth on which the true modern
novel was built up. Critics, indeed, have treated
the “romance” and the “novel” as independent
entities; and if we limit the term romance to work
preceding Pamela, we may accept their dictum.
There is an essential difference between “making
up” characters from a pseudo-ideal of the possibilities
in human nature, and reflecting life. The
old system, no doubt, was unhealthy in two ways:
The ideals not well-chosen, being composed
by high-flown exaggeration; and they were so
mingled with actuality as to deceive the young
person. For that matter the complaint is still
living that girls and boys continually fancy real[Pg 284]
life will prove “just like a novel.” It does not, of
course, differ greatly from those of Jane Austen or
George Eliot. The former, in fact, was accused—in
her own day—of setting too high a price on
“prudence” in matrimony; and the latter of
encouraging a gloomy outlook.
Obviously realism, as here applied, has no connection
with that Continental variety of the art
which has more recently usurped the name.
Women-writers, of this era, had not developed the
cult of Ugliness, they did not confound painting
with photography, they did not busy themselves
with the morbid or the abnormal. Their works
are not documents, but revelations. They dwell
on manners, without ignoring their spiritual significance.
To-day we have some use for the new
realism, while dreading its predominance. They
had none.
In enumerating the classes, or types, of humanity
with whom the women-writers were mainly concerned,
we were witnessing, of course, the allied
progress of history. It was during the second half
of the eighteenth, and the first of the nineteenth,
centuries that the great English middle-class steadily
grew in power and importance, boldly educating[Pg 285]
itself for influence,—before labour was heard in the
land.
Fanny Burney has given us the “classes” at play;
we fancy that Jane Austen, betraying their empty-mindedness,
must have longed for, if she did not
actually anticipate, better things; Charlotte Brontë
utters the first protest, indicating a struggle for
existence; George Eliot finds them busy about
the meaning of life and its possibilities. Thus,
finally, we read of real workers—men and women
with the world at their feet, building an Empire,
facing problems, questioning the gods.
And, in their own particular sphere,—the revelation
of Woman,—we have seen already the same
advance. Each of them gives us, for her own
generation, a “new woman”; creating, by the
revelation of possibilities, an actual type. By teaching
us what was “going on” in women, they taught
women to be themselves. They opened the doors
of Liberty towards Progress.
Minor achievements, on the other hand, were
mostly directed towards the extension of subject
matter, and the provision of new channels for
fiction. Mrs. Radcliffe—who stood aside from the
line of advance—established the School of Terror,[Pg 286]
applying romance methods to melodrama, with
more power than we can find elsewhere in English.
Maria Edgeworth introduced the story for children,
which was not a tract, but the literary answer
to “Tell me a story,” the exploitation of nursery
tales told by mothers from time immemorial.
This was developed by Harriet Martineau and
Charlotte Yonge, bearing fruit later in libraries
of most varied achievement. As we all know,
there have been several works of genius written
expressly for children (as were not the Pilgrim’s
Progress, Robinson Crusoe, and Gulliver’s Travels);
innumerable delightful stories of a similar nature,
and much inferior work.
The earlier women-writers set an excellent
example in this field, if they retained overmuch
moralising. They gave us a few nursery classics
which show practical insight into the child’s
mind, and the gift of holding his interest by healthy
wonder. We need only compare Sandford and
Merton with Frank to recognise their peculiar
fitness for such work.
The invention (by Mrs. Craik) of the “novel
for the young person” is an allied achievement.
It was developed by Charlotte Yonge, and has[Pg 287]
been always a legitimate province for women.
Its dangers are over-sentimentalism (kin to
Romance proper) and the idealism of the Woman’s
Man. Mrs. Craik gave us one type in John Halifax,
Gentleman; there are two in Miss Yonge’s Heir
of Redclyffe.
It must be noted further that Harriet Martineau
exploited philanthropy, and introduced the
didactic element developed by George Eliot.
Most women are born preachers—even Jane Austen
occasionally points a moral—and this characteristic
became prevalent early in their work. It
was employed sometimes in the defence, or the
exposure, of particular religious tenets; at others,
on questions of pure ethics. There is a sense, of
course, in which every story of life must carry
its own moral; but George Eliot and most of the
minor novelists obtrude this matter. In many
cases the lesson is the motive, which is false art.
However, the “novel with a purpose” clearly has
come to stay. It outlived the period with which
we are concerned, and is still vital. Speaking
generally, the earlier women novelists contented
themselves with raising the standard of domestic
morality, upholding the family, and hinting at one[Pg 288]
ideal for the two sexes. George Eliot, indeed, went
into individual cases with much detail; but we
note in all that their pet abomination is hypocrisy
and cant.
Finally, and most important of all in outside
influence, Maria Edgeworth invented the “national”
novel—developed by Susan Ferrier and Mrs.
Oliphant. We have noted already that in banishing
the stage Irishman Miss Edgeworth inspired
Waverley; and the list of more recent examples
(sprung from India, the “kailyard,” the moorlands,
and a hundred localities) would prove too
formidable for passing enumeration. Her instinctive
patriotism has sprung a mine that is practically
inexhaustible and has given us much of our best
work. The “Hardy” country and all “local
colour” are similarly inspired. It is not too
much to say that in this matter Miss Edgeworth
introduced an entirely new element, only second
in importance to the revelation of femininity,
which is woman’s chief contribution to the progress
of Fiction.
While women were thus developing English
fiction, with no rival of genius except Scott in his
magnificent isolation, men had in some way[Pg 289]
advanced from Richardson to Thackeray and
Dickens. It is worth noticing how far the two
Victorian novelists showed the influence of feminine
work, in what respects they reverted to the
eighteenth century, and what new elements they
introduced.
Both are still middle-class and, in one sense,
domestic realists. Thackeray satirises Society (like
Miss Burney and Jane Austen); Dickens works on
manners, expounds causes, and takes up the poor.
Both caught an enthusiasm for history from Scott,
in which women did nothing of the first importance.
Thackeray capped Lady Susan with Barry Lyndon,
and Dickens produced a few overwrought washes
of childhood—which women, curiously enough, never
treated in their regular novels.
A certain resemblance in scope and arrangement
has been noted already between Vanity Fair and
Evelina; but, speaking generally, it is obvious that
Thackeray writes of Society more as a man of the
world, and with broader insight, than either Miss
Burney or Miss Austen. He not only observes,
but criticises. One might say that, like all moderns,
he feels morally responsible for the world. The
“manners” which constitute the humour of[Pg 290]
Dickens are more varied and, on the other hand,
more caricatured than those of the women-writers.
His fury against social evils is more public-spirited
and less specialised; his knowledge of the poor
more intimate and genuinely sympathetic.
They have learnt, it would seem, from women
to elaborate details in observation, to depend on
truthful pictures of everyday life, avoiding
romance-characterisation or the aid of adventure
in the composition of their plots. In fact, the
development from Richardson’s revolution is consecutive,
taken up by the Victorians where the
women left it. New side-issues are introduced;
the novel becomes more complex with the increased
activities of civilisation, and grows with the growth
of the middle classes. It is now the mouthpiece
of what Commerce and Education began to feel
and express. But the direction of progress is not
changed.
So far it may fairly be said that Thackeray and
Dickens have followed the women’s lead, and bear
witness to their influence.
Yet Thackeray reverts, particularly in Pendennis,
to the “wild-oats” plot of Fielding; Dickens is
quite innocent of artistic construction, as perfected[Pg 291]
in Jane Austen; and neither of them seems to have
benefited at all from the extraordinary revelation
of womanhood which we have traced from its
earliest source.
Thackeray’s heroines are, one and all, obviously
made by a man for men. Amelia is a hearth-rug,
with a pattern of pretty flowers. Beatrice and
Blanche are variants of the eternal flirt—as man
reads her. Lady Castlewood, Helen and Laura Pendennis
are of the women who spend their lives
waiting for the right man. Ethel Newcome is a
man’s dream; and we venture to fancy that if
ever a woman be born with genius to draw
Becky Sharpe, she would find something to add to
the picture.
The case of Dickens is even more desperate.
His “pretty housemaids,” indeed, are “done to
a turn”; and Nancy is of the immortals. He
could illustrate with melodramatic intensity certain
feminine characteristics, good or evil, tragic or
comic. But all his heroines belong to a few obvious
waxwork types—the idiotic “pet” or the fireside
“angel”; the “comfort” or the prig, composed
of curls, blushes, and giggles; looks of reproach
and tender advice. Possibly Dora is rather more[Pg 292]
aggravating than Dolly Varden, Agnes is wiser than
Kate Nickleby, but they all work by machinery,
with visible springs.
It was reserved for George Meredith to understand
women.
LIST OF MINOR WRITERS
(Their dates will indicate their place in our history of
development: where they are not alluded to.)
Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle (1624-1673), in
her CCXI Sociable Letters (1664), tells an imaginary
narrative by correspondence, which she describes as
“rather scenes than letters, for I have endeavoured
under cover of letters to express the humours of
mankind.” Also author of Nature’s Pictures drawn
by Fancie’s pencil (1656).
Frances Sheridan.—Her Memoirs of Miss Sydney
Biddulph, extracted from her own Journal (1761),
made a name by its supreme melancholy. The
heroine suffers from obeying her mother, and
receives no reward. Dr. Johnson “did not know
whether she had a right, on moral principles, to
make her readers suffer so much.”
Miss Clara Reeve (1725-1803) began to write novels
at fifty-one, and attempted in The Old English
Baron (1777) to compromise with the School of
Terror, by limiting herself to “the utmost verge
of probability.” Her “groan” is not interesting,
and Scott complains of “a certain creeping and
low line of narrative and sentiment”; adding,[Pg 294]
however, that perhaps “to be somewhat prosy is
a secret mode of securing a certain necessary degree
of credulity from the hearers of a ghost-story.”
Anna Seward (1747-1809), a florid and picturesque
poetess, whose verse-novel Louisa was valued in
her day. She has a place in Scott’s Lives of the
Novelists.
Charlotte Smith (1749-1806).—Her The Old
Manor House reveals independent, and novel,
appreciation of scenery, illustrated by an unobtrusive
familiarity with natural history. Her
plots “bear the appearance of having been hastily
run up,” but her characterisation is vigorous. There
is a “tone of melancholy” throughout.
Harriet (1766-1851) and Sophia (1750-1824) Lee
wrote some of the earliest historical novels—The
Recess; or, A Tale of other Times (1783), introducing
Queen Elizabeth and the “coarse virulence that
marks her manners,” and the Canterbury Tales,
from which Byron borrowed.
Mrs. Bennet, whose Anna; or, The Memoirs of a Welsh
Heiress (1785) is a bad imitation of Miss Burney,
“with a catchpenny interspersion.”
Regina Maria Roche, author of the once popular
The Children of the Abbey (1798). Richardson,
diluted with Mackenzie—in “elegant” language.
Mrs. Opie (1769-1853).—One of her best stories, Adeline
Mowbray; or, The Mother and Daughter (1804), is
partially founded on the life of Godwin, and shows
the influence of his theories.
[Pg 295]
Jane Porter (1776-1850), author of Thaddeus of
Warsaw and The Scottish Chiefs, who claimed
unjustly to have “invented” the historical
romance, copied by Scott. Very famous in her
day.
Also Anna Maria Porter (1780-1832), author of
Don Sebastian.
Mrs. Brunton (1778-1818), author of the excellent
Self-Control (1811) and Discipline (1814), which
were overshadowed by Susan Ferrier. Lacking
humour, her morality becomes tiresome, but she
could draw living characters. The Highland experiences
of her heroine, who, after marrying a
minister, retained “a little of her coquettish
sauciness,” are significant for their date.
Lady Morgan (1783-1859), as Miss Sydney Owenson,
published Wild Irish Girl (1806), which is a fairly
spirited réchauffé of all things Celtic. Thackeray
found here the name Glorvina, meaning “sweet
voice.”
Henrietta Mosse (otherwise Rouvière), whose A
Peep at our Ancestors (1807) and other novels have
been described as “blocks of spiritless and commonplace
historic narrative.”
Anna Elizabeth Bray (1789-1883), author of The
Protestant, various competent historical romances,
and “local novels.”
Mrs. Sherwood, an evangelical propagandist, who
naïvely enforced her views in The Fairchild Family
(1818) and Little Henry and his Bearer.
[Pg 296]
Elizabeth Sewell set the style of High-Church
propaganda, developed by Miss Yonge. Her chief
tales, Gertrude and Amy Herbert (1844), are rigidly
confined to everyday life. The characters, if living,
are uninteresting; and her morals are obtrusive.
Catherine Gore (1799-1861), author of over seventy
tales; and, in her own day, “the leader in the
novel of fashion.”
Lady G. Fullerton (1812-1885), author of Emma
Middleton, who shares with Miss Sewell the beginnings
of High Church propaganda in fiction.
Anne Caldwell (Mrs. Marsh), one of the best writers
of the “revival” in domesticity. Her Emilia
Wyndham (1846) was unfairly described as the
“book where the woman breaks her desk open
with her head.” Though contemporary with Pendennis,
has no ease in style.
Mrs. Archer Clive (1801-1873), author of an early
and well-told story of crime, entitled Paul Ferroll
(1855).
Mrs. Henry Wood (1814-1887).—A good plot-maker,
whose East Lynne—both as book and play—has
been phenomenally popular for many years;
though The Channings, and others, are better
literature.
INDEX OF AUTHORS AND TITLES
- Abbess, The, 146.
-
Absentee, The, 63.
-
Adam Bede, 191, 204, 205, 220, 235.
-
Agnes Grey, 184, 275.
-
Atherton, 142.
-
Austen, Jane, 17, 52, 55, 66-116, 117-30, 140, 152, 155, 156, 164, 166, 170, 172, 189, 207, 209, 211, 213, 219, 227-9, 231-3, 235, 237, 238-42, 244, 248, 250-2, 255, 268-75, 276, 280, 283, 284, 285, 289.
-
Barry Lyndon, 108, 289.
-
Behn, Mrs. Aphra, 2-5.
-
Beleaguered City, The, 191.
-
Belford Regis, 142.
-
Belinda, 62, 130.
-
Brontë, Anne, 184-6.
-
— Charlotte, 164-78, 180, 183, 185, 188, 190, 209, 210, 213, 229, 230, 233-4, 236, 237, 252-5, 257, 275-8, 280, 282, 285.
-
— Emily, 179-84, 185.
-
Burney, Fanny (Madame D’Arblay), 2, 7-53, 59, 62, 67, 68, 70, 91, 117-30, 131, 137, 152, 155, 164, 170, 209, 211, 213, 226-7, 230-1, 235, 237, 238, 243, 246-250, 253, 255, 263-8, 280, 283, 289.
-
— Dr., 11, 68.
-
Byron, Lord, 58.[Pg 297]
-
Cameos of English History, 199.
-
Camilla, 35-53, 127, 128, 133, 226, 267.
-
Castle of Otranto, 56.
-
Castle Rackrent, 63.
-
Cecilia, 13, 15, 48, 85, 118-23, 127, 128, 130, 140, 237, 238, 263, 266.
-
Chronicles of Carlingford, The, 191-9.
-
Clarissa, 14, 67, 245.
-
Cœlebs in Search of a Wife, 64.
-
Crabbe, 74, 141.
-
Craik, Mrs., 186-8, 189, 199, 258-62, 286, 287.
-
Cranford, 152-62.
-
Curate-in-Charge, 189.
-
Daisy Chain, The, 200-3.
-
Daniel Deronda, 2, 217, 230.
-
David Simple, 5.
-
Day, Thomas, 60.
-
Deerbrook, 150.
-
Defoe, Daniel, 1, 7, 108.
-
Destiny, 135, 139.
-
Dickens, Charles, 289-92.
-
Domestic Manners of the Americans, 146.
-
Edgeworth, Maria, 32, 60-3, 81, 131, 187, 286, 288.
-
Eliot, George, 167, 190, 191, 199, 204-25, 229-30, 233, 235-6, 237, 242, 243, 244, 255-57, 278-81, 282-284, 285, 287.
-
Émile, 61.
-
Emma, 80, 94-6, 121, 123, 242.
-
Essay on Irish Bulls, 62.
-
Evelina, 2, 11, 15, 18 seq., 66, 71, 85, 121, 123, 124, 125-6, 129, 140, 237, 250, 263, 265.
-
Felix Holt, 218, 230.
-
Female Quixote, 5.
-
Female Spectator, 5.
-
Ferrier, Susan, 131-40.
-
Fielding, Henry, 5, 10, 13, 26, 30, 55, 282, 290.
-
— Sarah, 5.
-
Frank, 61, 286.
-
Frankenstein, 143-5.
-
Galt, John, 189.
-
Gaskell, Mrs., 152-63, 165.
-
Godwin, William, 143.
-
Goldsmith, Oliver, 10, 14.
-
Gulliver’s Travels, 286.
-
Hardy, Thomas, 288.
-
Hazlitt, 32.
-
Heir of Redclyffe, 257, 258.
-
Heywood, Mrs., 5.
-
Hour and the Man, The, 150.
-
Jane Eyre, 2, 165, 170, 172-6, 182, 234, 275, 276, 278.
-
John Halifax, Gentleman, 187, 188, 190, 203, 258-62.
-
Johnson, Dr., 11, 12, 13, 30, 52, 53, 267.
-
Jonson, Ben, 30.
-
Lady Susan, 105-16, 128, 289.
-
Lamb, Charles, 140.[Pg 298]
-
Lances of Lynwood, The, 199.
-
Lennox, Charlotte, 5.
-
Letters to Literary Ladies, 61.
-
Little Duke, The, 199.
-
Lockhart, John Gibson, 172-175, 182.
-
Macaulay, 6, 27, 241, 266.
-
Mackenzie, Henry, 60.
-
Man of Feeling, 59.
-
Manley, Mrs., 5.
-
Mansfield Park, 72, 96-100, 122, 124, 139, 233, 269.
-
Marivaux, 67.
-
Marriage, 135, 136, 139.
-
Martineau, Harriet, 148-52, 187, 233, 286, 287.
-
Mary Barton, 163.
-
Meredith, George, 292.
-
Mill on the Floss, The, 243, 256.
-
Miss Marjoribanks, 192-5.
-
Mitford, Mary Russell, 140-3, 207.
-
Moral Tales, 61.
-
More, Hannah, 63-5, 187.
-
Mysteries of Udolpho, 21-23, 54-9, 134, 239, 250.
-
Nature and Art, 60.
-
New Atlantis, The, 5.
-
Noctes Ambrosianæ, 131, 142.
-
North, Christopher (Prof. Wilson), 131, 142.
-
North and South, 162.
-
Northanger Abbey, 56, 80, 91-3, 118, 121, 125-7, 250.
-
Oliphant, Laurence, 191.
-
— Mrs., 188-99.
-
Oroonoko, 3-5.
-
Our Village, 140-3.[Pg 299]
-
Pamela, 5, 7, 14, 67, 283.
-
Parent’s Assistant, 61.
-
Peasant and Prince, 150.
-
Pendennis, 290.
-
Peregrine Pickle, 72, 76.
-
Persuasion, 80, 100-4, 121, 122, 252, 273.
-
Pilgrim’s Progress, 286.
-
Playfellow Series, 149, 150.
-
Ploughman Poet, see The “Shepherd.”
-
Pope, Alexander, 9, 264.
-
Practical Education, 61.
-
Pride and Prejudice, 85-9, 118-20, 124, 125, 127, 139, 238, 242, 272.
-
Pursuit of Literature, The, 55.
-
Radcliffe, Mrs., 21-23, 32, 50, 54-9, 81, 91, 118, 167, 285.
-
Richardson, Samuel, 1, 5, 7, 10, 13, 16, 50, 55, 67, 72, 229, 245, 248, 253, 282, 290.
-
Robinson Crusoe, 286.
-
Romola, 217, 230, 235.
-
Rousseau, 3, 61.
-
Salem Chapel, 195-9.
-
Sandford and Merton, 60, 286.
-
Scott, Sir Walter, 59, 72, 81, 131, 132, 288.
-
Sense and Sensibility, 2, 89-91, 122, 126, 139, 227, 238.
-
Shaw, Bernard, 26.
-
Shelley, Mary, 143-5.
-
“Shepherd,” The (that is, James Hogg), 7, 131, 142.
-
Shirley, 169, 170, 176-8, 234.
-
Simple Story, 60.
-
Sir Charles Grandison, 24, 246-9.
-
Sketch Book, The, 140.
-
Smith, Sydney, 64.
-
Smollett, Tobias, 10, 13.
-
Sterne, Laurence, 10, 13.
-
Tales of Fashionable Life, 62.
-
Thackeray, W. M., 108, 112, 289-91.
-
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, 184.
-
Tom Jones, 72, 76.
-
Trollope, Mrs., 145-8.
-
Vanity Fair, 227, 289.
-
Vicar of Wrexhill, The, 146.
-
Villette, 165, 168, 169, 170, 176, 234, 278.
-
Walpole, Horace, 56, 57.
-
Wanderer, The, 127.
-
Waverley, 72.
-
Whately, Archbishop, 80, 81.
-
Wives and Daughters, 162.
-
Wuthering Heights, 179-84, 275.
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