FOOTNOTES
Footnote 1: [(return)]
As a work of general literature, the attraction of the Arcadia is of course much enhanced by, if it does not chiefly depend upon, its abundant, varied, and sometimes charming verse-insets. But, as a novel, it cannot count these.
Footnote 2: [(return)]It is pleasant to remember that one of the chief publishers of these things in the late seventeenth century was W. Thackeray.
Footnote 3: [(return)]"Quant à moi, je trouve les choses que ces messieurs se disent fort bien dites et tout à fait dignes de deux gentilhommes."
Footnote 4: [(return)]He has a name, Meriton Latroon, but it is practically never used in the actual story.
Footnote 5: [(return)]The heroic kind had lent itself very easily and obviously to allegory. Not very long before Bunyan English literature had been enriched with a specimen of this double variety which for Sir W. Raleigh "marks the lowest depth to which English romance writing sank." I do not know that I could go quite so far as this in regard to the book—Bentivolio and Urania by Nathaniel Ingelo. The first edition of this appeared in 1660: the second (there seem to have been at least four) lies before me at this moment dated 1669, or nine years before the Progress itself. You require a deep-sea-lead of uncommonly cunning construction to sound, register, and compare the profundities of the bathos in novels. The book has about 400 folio pages very closely packed with type, besides an alphabetical index full of Hebrew and Greek derivations of its names—"Gnothisauton," "Achamoth," "Ametameletus," "Dogmapernes," and so forth. Its principles are inexorably virtuous; there is occasional action interspersed among its innumerable discourses, and I think it not improbable that if it were only possible to read it, it might do one some good. But it would not be the good of the novel.
Footnote 6: [(return)]This is said not to have been quite the case at the very first: but it has been so since.
Footnote 7: [(return)]A little of the work to be noticed in this chapter is not strictly eighteenth century, but belongs to the first decade or so of the nineteenth. But the majority of the contents actually conform to the title, and there is hardly any more convenient or generally applicable heading for the novel before Miss Austen and Scott, excluding the great names dealt with in the last chapter.
Footnote 8: [(return)]The not infrequent attribution of this book to Berkeley is a good instance of the general inability to discriminate style.
Footnote 9: [(return)]The elect ladies about Richardson joined Betsy with Amelia, and sneered at both.
Footnote 10: [(return)]It has been observed, and is worth observing, that the eighteenth-century hero, even in his worst circumstances, can seldom exist without a "follower."
Footnote 11: [(return)]Julia Mannering reminds me a little of Julia Townsend: and if this be doubtful, the connection of Jerry's "Old madam gave me some higry-pigry" and Cuddie's "the leddy cured me with some hickery-pickery" is not. While, for Dickens, compare the way in which Sam Weller's landlord in the Fleet got into trouble with the Tinker's Tale in Spiritual Quixote, bk. iv. chap. ii.
Footnote 12: [(return)]Also, perhaps, to one who had not yet discovered that intense concentration on herself and her family with which, after their quarrel, Mrs. Thrale, not quite an impartial judge, but a very shrewd one, charged her, and which does appear in the Diary.
Footnote 13: [(return)]Dunlop and others have directly or indirectly suggested a good deal of plagiarism in Evelina from Miss Betsy Thoughtless: but it is exactly in this life-quality that the earlier novelist fails.
Footnote 14: [(return)]Since the text was written—indeed very recently—the long-missing "Episodes" of Vathek itself have been at length supplied by the welcome diligence of Mr. Lewis Melville. They are not "better than Vathek," but they are good.
Footnote 15: [(return)]Godwin had written novel-juvenilia of which few say anything.
Footnote 16: [(return)]The peculiar pedantic ignorance which critics sometimes show has objected to this rendering of Marmontel's Contes Moraux, urging that it should read "tales of manners." It might be enough to remark that the Edgeworths, father and daughter, were probably a good deal better acquainted both with French and English than these cavillers. But there is a rebutting argument which is less ad hominem. "Tales of Manners" leaves out at least as much on one side as "Moral Tales" does on the other: and the actual meaning is quite clear to those who know that of the Latin mores and the French moeurs. It is scarcely worth while to attempt to help those who do not know by means of paraphrases.
Footnote 17: [(return)]The frankness of the ingenious creator of Mr. Jorrocks should be imitated by 99 per cent. of English novelists. "The following story," says he of Ask Mamma, "does not involve the complication of a plot. It is a mere continuous narrative."
Footnote 18: [(return)]Those who are curious about the matter will find it treated in a set of Essays by the present writer, which originally appeared in Macmillan's Magazine during the autumn of 1894, and were reprinted among Essays in English Literature, Second Series, London, 1895.
Footnote 19: [(return)]Some work of distinction, actually later than hers in date, is older in kind. This is the case not only with the later books of her Irish elder sister. Miss Edgeworth (see last chapter), but with all those of her Scotch younger one, Miss Ferrier, who wrote Marriage just after Sense and Sensibility appeared, but did not publish it (1818) till after Miss Austen's death, following it with The Inheritance (1824) and Destiny (1831). Miss Ferrier, who had a strong though rather hard humour and great faculty of pronounced character-drawing, is better at a series of sketches than at a complete novel—only The Inheritance having much central unity. And there is still eighteenth-century quality rather than nineteenth in her alternations of Smollettian farce-satire and Mackenziefied sentiment. She is very good to read, but stand a little out of the regular historic succession, as well as out of the ordinary novel classes.
Footnote 20: [(return)]Here and in a good many cases to come it is impossible to particularise criticism. It matters the less that, from Ainsworth's Rookwood (1834) and James' Richelieu (1829) onwards, the work of both was very much par sibi in merit and defect alike.
Footnote 21: [(return)]It has not been thought necessary to insert criticism of Dickens's individual novels. They are almost all well known to almost everybody: and special discussion of them would be superfluous, while their general characteristics and positions in novel-history are singularly uniform and can be described together.
Footnote 22: [(return)]For this reason, and for the variety of kind of his later novels a little more individual notice must be given to them than in the case of Dickens, but still only a little, and nothing like detailed criticism.
Footnote 23: [(return)]Edgar Poe has a perfectly serious and very characteristic explosion at the prominence of these agreeable viands in the book.
Footnote 24: [(return)]Some will have it that this was really Charlotte's: but not with much probability.
Footnote 25: [(return)]It is curious to compare this (dealing as it does largely with sport) and the "Jorrocks" series of Robert Surtees (1803-1864). Kingsley was nearly as practical a sportsman as Surtees: but Surtees's characters and manners have the old artificial-picaresque quality only.
Footnote 26: [(return)]His most ambitious studies in strict character are the closely connected heroines of The Bertrams (1859) and Can you Forgive Her? (1864-1865). But the first-named book has never been popular; and the other hardly owes its popularity to the heroine.
Footnote 27: [(return)]Anthony Trollope, in one of the discursive passages in his early books, has left positive testimony to the distaste with which publishers regarded it.
Footnote 28: [(return)]Another novel of Mrs. Marsh-Caldwell's, Norman's Bridge, has strong suggestions of John Halifax, and is ten years older.