Miss Ferrier. Miss Mitford. Anna Maria Hall
Walter Scott, the most chivalrous of all writers, brought to an end woman's supremacy in the novel, in 1814. At this time prose fiction was far different from what it was in 1772, when Tobias Smollet died, and much of this difference was due to women. Professor Masson, in his lectures on the novel, gives the names of twenty novelists who wrote between 1789-1814 who are remembered in the history of English literature. "With the exception of Godwin," he writes, "I do not know that any of the male novelists I have mentioned could be put in comparison, in respect of genuine merit, with such novelists of the other sex as Mrs. Radcliffe, Miss Edgeworth, and Miss Austen." It is equally worthy of note that, of the twenty names given, fourteen are women.
Although during these years women had developed the historical novel, and had brought the novel of mystery to a high degree of perfection, they left the most enduring stamp on literature as realists, as painters of everyday life and commonplace people. Francis Jeffrey wrote:
"It required almost the same courage to get rid of the jargon of fashionable life and the swarms of peers, foundlings, and seducers, that infested our modern fables as it did in those days to sweep away the mythological persons of antiquity, and to introduce characters who spoke and acted like those who were to peruse their adventures."
Women awakened interest in the humdrum lives of their neighbours next door, and this without any exaggeration, simply by minute attention to little things, and quick sympathy in the joys and sorrows of others. They described manners and customs; their view of life was largely objective. It is a noteworthy fact that while Scott was casting over all Europe the light of romanticism, the women writers of the time, with but one or two exceptions, were viewing life with the clear vision of Miss Edgeworth and Miss Austen, as if the world obtruded too glaringly upon their eyes to be lost sight of in happy day-dreams.
Susan Edmonstone Ferrier is better known to-day as the friend of Scott, and an occasional visitor at Abbotsford, than as a successful novelist. She was born at Edinburgh in 1782, where her father, James Ferrier, was Writer to the Signet, and at one time Clerk of Session, Scott being one of his colleagues. That great genius was one of the earliest to appreciate the excellence of her descriptions of Scottish life given in her first book, entitled Marriage, published anonymously in 1818. In the conclusion of the Tales of my Landlord he paid the unknown writer this graceful tribute:
"There remains behind not only a large harvest, but labourers capable of gathering it in; more than one writer has of late displayed talents of this description, and if the present author, himself a phantom, may be permitted to distinguish a brother, or perhaps a sister, shadow, he would mention in particular the author of the very lively work entitled Marriage."
Miss Ferrier wrote but three novels, Marriage, The Inheritance, and Destiny, a period of six years intervening between the appearance of each of them. Like Miss Burney and Miss Edgeworth she depicts two grades of society. She shows forth the fashionable life of Edinburgh and London, and the cruder mode of living found in the Scottish Highlands. But between her and her models there is the great difference of genius and talent. They passed what they had seen through the alembic of imagination; she has depicted what she saw with the faithfulness of the camera, and the crude realism of these scenes does not always blend with the warp and woof of the story.
Like Miss Edgeworth, Miss Ferrier had a moral to work out. She treats society as a satirist, and lays bare its heartlessness, and the unhappiness of its members who to escape ennui are led hither and thither by the caprice of the moment. While she may present one side of the picture, one hesitates to accept Lady Juliana, Mrs. St. Clair, or Lady Elizabeth as common types of a London drawing-room.
Her plots as well as her characters suffer from this conscious attempt to teach the happiness that must follow the practice of the Christian virtues. In Marriage there are two complete stories. Lady Juliana is the heroine of the first part; her two daughters, who are born in the first half, supplant their mother as heroines of the second half. The plot of Destiny is not much better. The denouement is tame, and the characters lack consistency. The Inheritance has the strongest plot of the three; but Mrs. St. Clair and her secret interviews with the monstrosity Lewiston, who, by the way, has the honour to be an American, throw an air of unreality over a story in many respects intensely real. In this story, as in so many old novels, the nurse's daughter had been brought up as the rightful heiress. The scene in which she tells her betrothed lover, the heir of the estate, the story of her birth, which she had just learned, is said to have suggested to Tennyson the beautiful ballad of Lady Clare.
But when Miss Ferrier sees loom in imagination the sombre purple hills of the Highlands, with the black tarns in the hollows half-hidden in mist, her genius awakes. If she had devoted herself to these people and this region, and ignored the fashionable life of the cities, she might have written a book worthy to be placed beside the best of Miss Edgeworth or Miss Mitford. At the time she wrote, the Highland chief no longer summoned his clan about him at a blast from his bugle, but he had lost little of his old-time picturesqueness. The opening of Destiny describes the wealth of the chief of Glenroy:
"All the world knows that there is nothing on earth to be compared to a Highland chief. He has his loch and his islands, his mountains and his castle, his piper and his tartan, his forests and his deer, his thousands of acres of untrodden heath, and his tens of thousands of black-faced sheep, and his bands of bonneted clansmen, with claymores and Gaelic, and hot blood and dirks."
But Miss Ferrier also depicted a more sordid type of Highlander. Christopher North in his Noctes Ambrosianæ writes of her novels:
"They are the works of a very clever woman, sir, and they have one feature of true and melancholy interest quite peculiar to themselves. It is in 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 gleams 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."
Besides her descriptions of the Highlands, Miss Ferrier has drawn several Scotch characters that deserve to live. What a delightful group is described in Marriage, consisting of the three Misses Douglas, known as "The girls," and their friend Mrs. Maclaughlan! Miss Jacky Douglas, the senior of the trio, "was reckoned a woman of sense"; Miss Grizzy was distinguished by her good-nature and the entanglement of her thoughts; and it was said that Miss Nicky was "not wanting for sense either"; while their friend Lady Maclaughlan loved and tyrannised over all three of them. Sir Walter Scott admired the character of Miss Becky Duguid, a poor old maid, who "was expected to attend all accouchements, christenings, deaths, chestings, and burials, but she was seldom asked to a marriage, and never to any party of pleasure." Joanna Baillie thought the loud-spoken minister, M'Dow, a true representative of a few of the Scotch clergy whose only aim is preferment and good cheer. But none of her other characters can compare with the devoted Mrs. Molly Macaulay, the friend of the Chief of Glenroy in Destiny. When Glenroy has an attack of palsy, she hurries to him, and when she is told that he has missed her, she exclaims with perfect self-forgetfulness:
"Deed, and I thought he would do that, for he has always been so kind to me,—and I thought sometimes when I was away, oh, thinks I to myself, I wonder what Glenroy will do for somebody to be angry with,—for Ben-bowie's grown so deaf, poor creature, it's not worth his while to be angry at him,—and you're so gentle that it would not do for him to be angry at you; but I'm sure he has a good right to be angry at me, considering how kind he has always been to me."
Christopher North said of Molly Macaulay, "No sinner of our gender could have adequately filled up the outline."
George Saintsbury, considering the permanent value of Miss Ferrier's work, wrote for the Fortnightly Review in 1882:
"Of the four requisites of the novelist, plot, character, description, and dialogue, she is only weak in the first. The lapse of an entire half-century and a complete change of manners have put her books to the hardest test they are ever likely to have to endure, and they come through it triumphantly."
But, besides the excellences mentioned by Mr. Saintsbury, Miss Ferrier is master of humour and pathos. No story is sadder than that of Ronald Malcolm, the hero of Destiny. He had been willed the castle of Inch Orran with its vast estates, but with the provision that he was to have no benefit from it until his twenty-sixth year. In case of his death the property was to go to his father, an upright but poor man. As Ronald had many years to wait before he could enjoy his riches, he entered the navy. His ship was lost at sea and the news of his death reported in Scotland. But Ronald had been rescued from the sinking ship, and returned to his father's cottage. Here he met a purblind old woman, who told him how his father, Captain Malcolm, had moved to the castle, and what good he was doing among his tenantry. She described the sorrow of the people at the death of Ronald, but added: "Och! it was God's providence to tak' the boy out of his worthy father's way; and noo a' thing 's as it should be, and he has gotten his ain, honest man; and long, long may he enjoy it!" And then she said thankfully, "The poor lad's death was a great blessing—och ay, 'deed was 't." The scene where Ronald goes to the castle and looks in at the window upon the happy family group, consisting of his father and mother, brothers and sisters, resembles in many particulars the sad return of Enoch Arden. The close of the scene is as touching in the novel as in the poem: "Yes, yes, they are happy, and I am forgotten!" sobs the lad, as he turns away.
Miss Ferrier, however, seldom touches the pathetic; she is first of all a humourist. But there is a blending of the smiles and tears of human life in the delightful character of Adam Ramsay. Engaged as a boy to Lizzie Lundie, he had gone forth into the world to make a fortune, but when he returned after many years he found that she had married in his absence, and soon afterwards had died. Crabbed to all about him, he still cherished the remembrance of his early love, and was quickly moved by any appeal to her memory.
The practical philosophy of the Scottish peasantry is amusingly set forth in the scene where Miss St. Clair visits one of the cottages on Lord Rossville's estate. She found the goodman very ill, and everything about the room betokening extreme poverty. When she offered to send him milk and broth, and a carpet and chairs to make the room more comfortable, his wife interposed, "A suit o' gude bein comfortable dead claise, Tammes, wad set ye better than aw the braw chyres an' carpets i' the toon." Sometime afterward, when Miss St. Clair called to see how the invalid was, she found him in the press-bed, while the clothes were warming before the fire. His wife explained that she could not have him in the way, and if he were cold, it could not be helped, as the clothes had to be aired, and added, "An' I 'm thinkin' he 'll no be lang o' wantin' them noo."
But notwithstanding her humour, Miss Ferrier was a stern moralist, whose attitude toward life had been influenced indirectly by the teachings of John Knox. She sometimes seems to stand her characters in the stocks, and call upon the populace to view their sins or absurdities. She seldom throws the veil of charity over them. Men as novelists are prone to exaggeration. Women have represented life with greater truth both in its larger aspects and in details. Miss Ferrier carries this quality to an extreme. She tells not only the truth, but, with almost heartless honesty, reveals the whole of it, so that many of her men and women are repugnant to the reader while they amuse him. The best judges of Scottish manners have borne witness to the exactness of her portraiture. She is, perhaps, an example of the artistic failure of over-realism.
Mary Russell Mitford like Miss Ferrier painted her scenes and her portraits from real life. But there is as wide a difference between their writings as between the rocky ledges of the Grampian Hills and the soft meadows bathed in the sunshine which stretch back of the cottages of Our Village. Miss Mitford's, indeed, was a sunny nature, not to be hardened nor embittered by a lifelong anxiety over poverty and debts. Her father, Dr. Mitford, had spent nearly all his own fortune when he married Miss Mary Russell, an heiress. Besides being constantly involved in lawsuits, he was addicted to gambling, and soon squandered the fortune which his wife had brought him, besides twenty thousand pounds won in a lottery. He is said to have lost in speculations and at play about seventy thousand pounds, at that time a large fortune. The authoress was a little over thirty years of age when the poverty of the family forced them to leave Bertram House, their home for many years, and remove to a little labourer's cottage about a mile away, on the principal street of a little village near Reading, known as Three Mile Cross. Here the support of the family devolved upon the daughter, a burden made harder by the continual extravagance of the father, whom she devotedly loved. Although she received large sums for her writings, it is with the greatest weariness that she writes to her friend Miss Barrett, afterwards Mrs. Browning, of the struggles that have been hers the greater part of her life, the ten or twelve hours of literary drudgery each day, often in spite of ill health, and her hope that she may always provide for her father his accustomed comforts. Not only was she enabled to do this, but, through the help of friends, to pay, after his death, the one thousand pounds indebtedness, his only legacy to her.
Yet there is not a trace of this worry in the delightful series of papers called Our Village, which she began to contribute at this time to the Lady's Magazine. Before this she had become known as a poet and a successful playwright, but had believed herself incapable of writing good prose. Necessity revealed her fine power of description, and Three Mile Cross furnished her with scenes and characters.
Our Village marked a new style in fiction. The year it was commenced, she wrote to a friend:
"With regard to novels, I should like to see one undertaken without any plot at all. I do not mean that it should have no story; but I should like some writer of luxuriant fancy to begin with a certain set of characters—one family, for instance—without any preconceived design farther than one or two incidents or dialogues, which would naturally suggest fresh matter, and so proceed in this way, throwing in incidents and characters profusely, but avoiding all stage tricks and strong situations, till some death or marriage should afford a natural conclusion to the book."
Miss Mitford followed this plan as far as her great love of nature would permit. For when she found her daily cares too great to be borne in the little eight-by-eight living-room, she escaped to the woods and fields. She loved the poets who wrote of nature, and next to Miss Austen, whom she placed far above any other novelist, she delighted in the novels of Charlotte Smith, and in her own pages there is the same true feeling for nature.
Our Village follows in a few particulars Gilbert White's History of Selborne. As he described the beauties of Selborne through the varying seasons of the year, she describes her walks about Three Mile Cross, first when the meadows are covered with hoar frost, then when the air is perfumed with violets, and later when the harvest field is yellow with ripened corn. All the lanes, the favourite banks, the shady recesses are described with delicate and loving touch. How her own joyous, optimistic nature speaks in this record of a morning walk in a backward spring:
"Cold bright weather. All within doors, sunny and chilly; all without, windy and dusty, It is quite tantalising to see that brilliant sun careering through so beautiful a sky, and to feel little more warmth from his presence than one does from that of his fair but cold sister, the moon. Even the sky, beautiful as it is, has the look of that one sometimes sees in a very bright moonlight night—deeply, intensely blue, with white fleecy clouds driven vigorously along by a strong breeze, now veiling and now exposing the dazzling luminary around whom they sail. A beautiful sky! and, in spite of its coldness, a beautiful world!"
But how naturally we meet the people of the village and become interested in them. There is Harriet, the belle of the village, "a flirt passive," who made the tarts and puddings in the author's kitchen; Joel Brent, her lover, a carter by calling, but, by virtue of his personal accomplishments, the village beau. There is the publican, the carpenter, the washerwoman; little Lizzie, the spoilt child, and all the other boys and girls of the village. It is very natural to-day to meet these poor people in novels; at that time the poor people of Ireland and Scotland had begun to creep into fiction, but it was as unusual in England as a novel without a plot. Even to-day Miss Mitford's attitude toward these people is not common. It seems never to have occurred to the author, and certainly does not to her readers, that these men dressed in overalls and these women in print dresses with sleeves rolled to the elbow were not the finest ladies and gentlemen of the land. She greets them all with a playful humour which reminds one of the genial smile of Elia. C. H. Herford in The Age of Wordsworth wrote of Our Village:
"No such intimate and sympathetic portrayal of village life had been given before, and perhaps it needed a woman's sympathetic eye for little things to show the way. Of the professional story-teller on the alert for a sensation there is as little as of the professional novelist on the watch for a lesson."
Belford Regis, a series of country and town sketches, was written soon after the completion of Our Village. Here again is the happy blending of nature and humanity; the same fusion of truth and fiction. As Belford Regis is "Our Market Town," there is a wider range of characters, as different classes are represented; and a more intimate view, since the same people appear in more than one story. Stephen Lane, the butcher, and his wife are often met with. He is so fat that "when he walks, he overfills the pavement, and is more difficult to pass than a link of full-dressed misses or a chain of becloaked dandies." Of Mrs. Lane she writes: "Butcher's wife and butcher's daughter though she were, yet was she a graceful and gracious woman, one of nature's gentlewomen in look and in thought." There was Miss Savage, "who was called a sensible woman because she had a gruff voice and vinegar aspect"; and Miss Steele, who was called literary, because forty years ago she made a grand poetical collection. Miss Mitford even does justice to Mrs. Hollis, the fruiterer and the village gossip; "There she sits, a tall, square, upright figure, surmounted by a pleasant, comely face, eyes as black as a sloe, cheeks as rounds as an apple, and a complexion as ruddy as a peach, as fine a specimen of a healthy, hearty English tradeswoman, the feminine of John Bull, as one would desire to see on a summer's day.... As a gossip she was incomparable. She knew everybody and everything; had always the freshest intelligence, and the newest news; her reports like her plums had the bloom on them, and she would as much have scorned to palm upon you an old piece of scandal as to send you strawberries that had been two days gathered."
A reviewer in the Athenæum thus criticises the book:
"If (to be hypercritical) the pictures they contain be a trifle too sunny and too cheerful to be real—if they show more generosity and refinement and self-sacrifice existing among the middle classes than does exist,—too much of the meek beauty, too little of the squalidity of humble life,—we love them none the less, and their authoress all the more."
In Belford Regis we miss the fields, the brooks, the flowers, and the sky, which made the charm of Our Village. In some respects it is a more ambitious book, but it has not the perennial charm of Our Village.
Miss Mitford's favourite author, as we have seen, was Jane Austen. She had the same regard for her that Miss Austen felt for Fanny Burney. The two authors have many points of resemblance. Both have the same clear vision, and sunny nature; the same repugnance to all that is sensational, or coarse, or low; the same dislike of strong pathos or broad humour; and Miss Mitford has approached more closely than any other writer to the elegance of diction and purity of style of Miss Austen.
They have another point in common, they both show excellent taste in their writings. This quality of good taste is due to native delicacy and refinement, a sensitive withdrawal from what is ugly, and a quick feeling for true proportion; the very things which give to a woman her superior tact, which Ruskin has called "the touch sense." In the novel it is pre-eminently a feminine characteristic. Few men have it in a marked degree. It adds all the charm we feel in the presence of a refined woman to the novels of Miss Edgeworth, Miss Austen, and Miss Mitford.
But, while Miss Mitford and Miss Austen have many points of resemblance, they have many points of difference. Miss Austen liked the society of men and women, and during her younger days was fond of dinner-parties and balls. Miss Mitford preferred the woods and fields, liked the society of her dogs, and wrote to a friend before she was twenty that she would never go to another dance if she could help it. Miss Austen selects a small group of gentry, and by the intertwining of their lives forms a beautiful plot; Miss Mitford rambles through the village and the country walks of Three Mile Cross, and as she meets the butcher, the publican, the boys at cricket, she gleans some story of interest, and brings back to us, as it were, a basket in which have been thrown in careless profusion violets and anemones, cowslips and daisies, and all the other flowers of the field.
Mrs. Anna Maria Hall, a country-woman of Miss Edgeworth, wrote of her first novel: "My Sketches of Irish Character, my first dear book, was inspired by a desire to describe my native place, as Miss Mitford had done in Our Village, and this made me an author." Most of these sketches were drawn from the county of Wexford, her native place, whose inhabitants, she says in the preface, are descendants of the Anglo-Norman settlers of the reign of Henry the Second, and speak a language unknown in other districts of Ireland.
The book is a series of well-told stories of the poor people, whom we should have imagined to be pure Celt, if the author had not said they resembled the English. There is the tender pathos, the quick humour, the joke which often answers an argument, the guidance of the heart rather than the head; but she has dwelt upon one characteristic but lightly touched upon by Miss Edgeworth and Lady Morgan, the poetic feeling of the Celt, the imagery that so often adorns their common speech. The old Irish wife says to the bride who speaks disrespectfully of the fairies: "Hush, Avourneen! Sure they have the use of the May-dew before it falls, and the colour of the lilies and the roses before it's folded in the tender buds; and can steal the notes out of the birds' throats while they sleep."
The Irish Peasantry, and Lights and Shadows of Irish Life, won Mrs. Hall the ill-will rather than the love of her countrymen. She had lived for a long time in England, and upon returning to her native land was impressed by the lack of forethought which kept the country poor. Their early marriages, their indifference to time, their frequent visits to the public house, their hospitality to strangers even when they themselves were in extreme poverty and debt—all made so deep an impression upon her mind that she attempted to teach the Irish worldly wisdom. But the lesson was distasteful to the people and probably useless, as the characteristics which she would change were the very essence of the Irish nature, the traits which made him a Celt, not a Saxon. In these books, the wooings, weddings, and funerals are portrayed, and there is a little glimpse of fairy lore.
Midsummer Eve, a Fairy Tale of Love, grew out of the fairy legends of Ireland. It is said that a child whose father has died before its birth is placed by nature under the peculiar guardianship of the fairies; and, if born on Midsummer Eve, it becomes their rightful property; they take it to their own homes and leave in its place one of their changelings. The heroine of the story is a child of that nature, over whose birth the fairies of air, earth, and water preside. But at the will of Nightstar, Queen of the Fairies of the Air, she is left with her mother, but adopted and watched over by the fairies as their own. Their great gift to her is that of loving and being loved. The human element is not well blended with the fairy element. The entire setting should have been rural, for in the city of London, particularly in the exhibition of the Royal Academy, where part of the story is placed, it is not easy to keep the tranquil twilight atmosphere, which fairies love. The book is like a song in which the bass and soprano are written in different keys. But when we are back in Ireland, and the fairies again appear and disappear, it is charming. The old woodcutter, Randy, who sees and talks with the fairies, is a delightful creature, and gives to the story much of its beauty.
Mrs. Hall's novels have but little literary value, but she has brought to light Irish characteristics and Irish traditions which were overlooked by her predecessors, and for that reason they deserve to live.