Charlotte Smith. Mrs. Inchbald
While Hannah More was endeavouring to improve the condition of the poor by teaching them diligence and sobriety, a group of earnest men and women were writing books and pamphlets in which they claimed that poverty and ignorance were due to unjust laws. The writings of Voltaire and Rousseau had filled their minds with bright pictures of a democracy. These theories were considered most dangerous in England, but they were the theories which helped to shape the American constitution. Among these English revolutionists were William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Smith, Mrs. Inchbald, and for a time Amelia Opie.
The strongest political novel was Caleb Williams by William Godwin. In this he shows how through law man may become the destroyer of man. This interest in the rights of man awakened interest in the condition of women; and Mary Wollstonecraft, who afterward became Mrs. Godwin, wrote Vindication of the Rights of Woman. This pamphlet was declared contrary to the Bible and to Christian law, although all its demands have now been conceded. Charlotte Smith was also interested in the position of women and the laws affecting them. In Desmond she discussed freely a marriage problem which in her day seemed very bold, while in her private life she ignored British prejudices.
She was the mother of twelve children and the wife of a man of many schemes, so that she was continually devising ways to extricate her large family from the financial difficulties into which he plunged them. At one time a friend suggested to her that her husband's attention should be turned toward religion. Her reply was: "Oh, for heaven's sake, do not put it into his head to take to religion, for if he does, he will instantly begin by building a cathedral." She is supposed to have caricatured him in the projector who hoped to make a fortune by manuring his estate with old wigs. But when her husband was imprisoned for debt, she shared his captivity, and began to write to support her family. Although she died at the age of fifty-seven, she found time during her manifold cares to write thirty-eight volumes.
But not only did Mrs. Smith endure sorrows as great as those of her favourite heroine, Sidney Biddulph, but one of her daughters was equally unfortunate. She was married unhappily, and returned with her three children for her mother to support. Mr. and Mrs. Smith, after twenty-three years of married life, agreed to live in separate countries, he in Normandy, and she in England, although they always corresponded and were interested in each other's welfare. Yet this separation, together with the revolutionary tendencies discovered in her writings, raised a storm of criticism against her.
In Desmond, which was regarded as so dangerous, Mrs. Smith has presented the following problem: Geraldine, the heroine, is married to a spendthrift, who attempts to retrieve his fortunes by forcing his wife to become the mistress of his friend, the rich Duc de Romagnecourt. To preserve her honour she leaves him, hoping to return to her mother's roof; but her mother refuses to receive her and bids her return to her husband. As she dares not do this, and is without money, a faithful friend, Desmond, takes her under his protection, asking no reward but the pleasure of serving her. Finally Geraldine receives a letter informing her that her husband is ill. She returns to him, and nurses him until he dies; after a year of mourning she marries Desmond.
How could a woman have behaved more virtuously than Geraldine? She is always high-minded and actuated by the purest motives. But it was feared that her example might encourage wives to desert their husbands, and consequently the novel was declared immoral.
Desmond was published in 1792, when the feeling against France was very bitter in England. The plot, as it meanders slowly through three volumes, is constantly interrupted by political discussions. The author's clearly expressed preference for a republican government, and her criticism of English law, met with bitter disapproval. One of the characters pronounces a panegyric upon the greater prosperity and happiness that has come to the French soldiers, farmers, and peasants, since they came to believe that they were sharers in their own labours, and the hero of the book, writing from France to a friend in England, says: "I lament still more the disposition which too many Englishmen show to join in this unjust and infamous crusade, against the holy standard of freedom; and I blush for my country." In the same book, the author censures the penal laws of England, by which robbery to the amount of forty shillings is punishable with death; and criticises the delay of the courts in dealing justice.
This criticism is expressed tamely, barely more than suggested, when compared with the vigorous attacks which Dickens made in the next century on English law and the slow action of justice in the famous "Circumlocution Office." Dickens wrote with such vigour that he brought about a reform. A modern reader finds Desmond earnest and sincere, but tame to the point of dulness. It seems strange how the Tory party could see in this book a menace to the British constitution. But a writer in the Monthly Review for December, 1792, advocated her cause. "She is very justly of opinion," he writes, "that the great events that are passing in the world are no less interesting to women than to men, and that, in her solicitude to discharge the domestic duties, a woman ought not to forget that, in common with her father and husband, her brothers and sons, she is a citizen."
The publication of The Old Manor House in the following year won back for her many of the friends that she had lost by Desmond. But in this work also the same love of liberty, the same indifference to social distinctions, occur. The hero of The Old Manor House joins the English army, and is sent to fight against the Americans; in the many reflections upon this conflict, the author shows that her sympathies are with the colonists. The father of the hero had married a young woman who had nothing to recommend her but "beauty, simplicity, and goodness." The hero himself falls in love with and marries a girl beneath him in rank, but he does not seem to feel that he has done a generous thing, nor does the heroine show any gratitude for this honour. Each seems unconscious that their difference in rank should be a bar to their union, provided they do not offend old Mrs. Rayland, the owner of the manor. A great change had come over the novel since Pamela was overpowered with gratitude to her profligate master, Mr. B, for condescending to make her his wife.
The revolutionary principles of Mrs. Smith's novels were soon forgotten, but two new elements were introduced by her that bore fruit in English fiction. Her great gift to the novel was the portrayal of refined, quiet, intellectual ladies, beside whom Evelina and Cecilia seem but school-girls. Her heroines may be poor, they may be of inferior rank, but they are always ladies of sensitive nature and cultivated manners, and are drawn with a feeling and tenderness which no novelist before her had reached. A contemporary said of Emmeline, "All is graceful, and pleasing to the sight, all, in short, is simple, femininely beautiful and chaste." This might be said of all the women she has created. Old Mrs. Rayland, the central personage in her most popular novel, The Old Manor House, notwithstanding her exalted ideas of her own importance as a member of the Rayland family, and the arbitrary manner in which she compels all to conform to her old-fashioned notions, is always the high-born lady. We smile at her, but she never forfeits our respect. Scott said of her, "Old Mrs. Rayland is without a peer."
Mrs. Smith's second gift to the novel was her charming descriptions of rural scenery. Nature had for a long time been banished from the arts. Wordsworth in one of his prefaces wrote:
"Excepting The Nocturnal Reverie of Lady Winchelsea, and a passage or two in the Windsor Forest of Pope, the poetry of the period intervening between the publication of Paradise Lost and The Seasons does not contain a single new image of external nature; and scarcely presents a familiar one, from which it can be inferred that the eye of the Poet had been steadily fixed upon his object, much less that his feelings had urged him to work upon it in the spirit of genuine imagination."
Fiction was as barren of scenery as poetry. None of the novelists were cognisant of the country scenes amid which their plots were laid, with the possible exception of Goldsmith. The Vicar of Wakefield has a rural setting, and there are references to the trees, the blackbirds, and the hayfields; but description is not introduced for the sake of its own beauty as in the novels of Charlotte Smith. In Ethelinda there are beautiful descriptions of the English Lakes, part of the scene being laid at Grasmere; Celestina is in the romantic Provence; Desmond in Normandy; and in The Old Manor House we have the soft landscape of the south of England.
In The Old Manor House she thus describes one of the paths that led from the gate of the park to Rayland Hall:
"The other path, which in winter or in wet seasons was inconvenient, wound down a declivity, where furze and fern were shaded by a few old hawthorns and self-sown firs: out of the hill several streams were filtered, which, uniting at its foot, formed a large and clear pond of near twenty acres, fed by several imperceptible currents from other eminences which sheltered that side of the park; and the bason between the hills and the higher parts of it being thus filled, the water found its way over a stony boundary, where it was passable by a foot bridge unless in time of floods; and from thence fell into a lower part of the ground, where it formed a considerable river; and, winding among willows and poplars for near a mile, again spread into a still larger lake, on the edge of which was a mill, and opposite, without the park paling, wild heaths, where the ground was sandy, broken, and irregular, still however marked by plantations made in it by the Rayland family."
Every feature of the landscape is brought distinctly before the eye. Such descriptions are not unusual now, but they were first used by Charlotte Smith.
Even more realistic is the picture of a road in a part of the New Forest near Christchurch:
"It was a deep, hollow road, only wide enough for waggons, and was in some places shaded by hazel and other brush wood; in others, by old beech and oaks, whose roots wreathed about the bank, intermingled with ivy, holly, and evergreen fern, almost the only plants that appeared in a state of vegetation, unless the pale and sallow mistletoe, which here and there partially tinted with faint green the old trees above them.
"Everything was perfectly still around; even the robin, solitary songster of the frozen woods, had ceased his faint vespers to the setting sun, and hardly a breath of air agitated the leafless branches. This dead silence was interrupted by no sound but the slow progress of his horse, as the hollow ground beneath his feet sounded as if he trod on vaults. There was in the scene, and in this dull pause of nature, a solemnity not unpleasant to Orlando, in his present disposition of mind."
In 1842, Miss Mitford wrote to Miss Barrett: "Charlotte Smith's works, with all their faults, have yet a love of external nature, and a power of describing it, which I never take a spring walk without feeling." And again she wrote to a friend referring to Mrs. Smith, "Except that they want cheerfulness, nothing can exceed the beauty of the style."
The life and writings of Mrs. Inchbald had some things in common with the life and writings of Mrs. Smith. Both were obliged to write to support themselves as well as those dependent upon them. Both had seen many phases of human nature, and both viewed with scorn the pretensions of the rich and beheld with pity the sorrows of the poor. Both were champions of social and political equality. Mrs. Inchbald, however, was an actress and a successful playwright, hence her novels are the more dramatic, but they lack the beautiful rural setting which gives a poetic atmosphere to the writings of Charlotte Smith.
A Simple Story, the first, of Mrs. Inchbald's two novels, has been called the precursor of Jane Eyre. It is the first novel in which we are more interested in what is felt than in what actually happens. Mr. Dorriforth, a Catholic priest, and Miss Milner, his ward, fall in love with each other, and we watch this hidden passion, which preys upon the health of both. He is horrified that he has broken his vows; she is mortified that she loves a man who, she believes, neither can nor does return her feeling for him. When he is released from his vow, it is the emotion, not external happenings, that holds the interest. The first part of the story is brought to a close with the marriage of Mr. Dorriforth, now Lord Elmwood, and Miss Milner.
Seventeen years elapse between the two halves of the novel. During this time trouble has come between them and they have separated. The character of each has undergone a change. Traits of disposition that were first but lightly observed have been intensified with years. Mrs. Inchbald writes of the hero: "Dorriforth, the pious, the good, the tender Dorriforth, is become a hard-hearted tyrant; the compassionate, the feeling, the just Lord Elmwood, an example of implacable rigour and justice." His friend Sandford has also changed with the years, but he has been softened, not hardened by them—"the reprover, the enemy of the vain, the idle, and the wicked, but the friend and comforter of the forlorn and miserable."
The story of Dorriforth gives unity to the two parts of the novel. The conflict between his love and his anger holds the reader in suspense until the conclusion. The characters of eighteenth-century fiction were actuated by but a small number of motives. In nearly all the novels the men were either generous and free or stingy and hypocritical; the women were either virtuous and winsome, or immoral and brazen. Mrs. Inchbald possessed, only in a less degree, George Eliot's power of character-analysis; she observed minor qualities, and she was as unflinching in following the development of evil traits to a tragic conclusion as was the author of Adam Bede.
In The Gentleman's Magazine for March, 1791, some one wrote of A Simple Story:
"She has struck out a path entirely her own. She has disdained to follow the steps of her predecessors, and to construct a new novel, as is too commonly done, out of the scraps and fragments of earlier inventors. Her principal character, the Roman Catholic lord, is perfectly new: and she has conducted him, through a series of surprising well-contrasted adventures, with an uniformity of character and truth of description that have rarely been surpassed."
There is, however, one hackneyed scene. A young girl is seized, thrust into a chariot, and carried at full speed to a lonely place. There is hardly an early novel where this bald incident is not worked up into one or more chapters, with variations to suit the convenience of the plot. It was as much a part of the stock in trade of the novelist of the eighteenth century as a family quarrel is of the twentieth. With this exception, A Simple Story is new in its plot, incidents, characters, and mode of treatment. Emotion did not play so important a part in a novel again until Charlotte Brontë wrote Jane Eyre.
Mrs. Inchbald's only other novel, Nature and Art, shows the artificialities of society. Two cousins, William and Henry, are contrasted. William is the son of a dean. Henry's father went to Africa to live, whence he sent his son to his rich uncle to be educated. Henry fails to comprehend the society in which he finds himself placed, and cannot understand that there should be any poor people.
"'Why, here is provision enough for all the people,' said Henry; 'why should they want? why do not they go and take some of these things?'
"'They must not,' said the dean, 'unless they were their own.'
"'What, Uncle! Does no part of the earth, nor anything which the earth produces, belong to the poor?'"
His uncle fails to answer this question to his nephew's satisfaction.
The vices and the fawning duplicity of William are contrasted with the virtues and independent spirit of Henry.
"'I know I am called proud,' one day said William to Henry.
"'Dear Cousin,' replied Henry, 'it must be only then by those who do not know you; for to me you appear the humblest creature in the world.'
"'Do you really think so?'
"'I am certain of it; or would you always give up your opinion to that of persons in a superior state, however inferior in their understanding? ... I have more pride than you, for I will never stoop to act or to speak contrary to my feelings.'"
William rises to eminence, in time becoming a judge. Henry, who is always virtuous, can obtain no preferment. This contrast in the two cousins is not so overdrawn as at first appears. William represents the aristocracy of the old world; Henry, the free representative of a new country.
A tragic story runs through the novel, which becomes intensely dramatic at the point where William puts on his black cap to pronounce sentence on the girl whom he had ruined years before. He does not recognise her; but she, who had loved him through the years, becomes insane, not at the thought of death, but that he should be the one to pronounce the sentence. It is doubtful if any novelist before Scott had produced so thrilling a situation, a situation which grew naturally out of the plot, and the anguish of the poor unfortunate Agnes has the realism of Thomas Hardy or Tolstoi.
Only by reading these old novels can one comprehend the change produced in England by the next half-century. The teachings of Mrs. Charlotte Smith and Mrs. Inchbald were declared dangerous to the state. That they taught disrespect for authority, was one of the many charges brought against them. Yet with what ladylike reserve they advance views which a later generation applauded when boldly proclaimed by Dickens, Thackeray, and Disraeli!