Will to the deaf cold elements complain;
And tell the embosomed grief, however vain,
To sullen surges and the viewless wind.
It was not, however, the mournfulness of “Emmeline” which displeased Miss Seward, but rather the occasional intrusion of “low characters”; of those underbred and unimpassioned persons who—as in Miss Burney’s and Miss Ferrier’s novels—are naturally and almost cheerfully vulgar. That Mr. William Hayley, author of “The Triumphs of Temper,” and her own most ardent admirer, should tune his inconstant lyre in praise of Mrs. Smith was more than Miss Seward could bear. “My very foes acquit me of harbouring one grain of envy in my bosom,” she writes him feelingly; “yet it is surely by no means inconsistent with that exemption to feel a little indignant, and to enter one’s protest, when compositions of mere mediocrity are extolled far above those of real genius.” She then proceeds to point out the “indelicacy” of Lady Adelina’s fall from grace, and the use of “kitchen phrases,” such as “she grew white at the intelligence.” “White instead of pale,” comments Miss Seward severely, “I have often heard servants say, but never a gentleman or a gentlewoman.” If Mr. Hayley desires to read novels, she urges upon him the charms of another popular heroine, Caroline de Lichtfield, in whom he will find “simplicity, wit, pathos, and the most exalted generosity”; and the history of whose adventures “makes curiosity gasp, admiration kindle, and pity dissolve.”
Caroline, “the gay child of Artless Nonchalance,” is at least a more cheerful young person than the Orphan. Her story, translated from the French of Madame de Montolieu, was widely read in England and on the Continent; and Miss Seward tells us that its author was indebted “to the merits and graces of these volumes for a transition from incompetence to the comforts of wealth; from the unprotected dependence of waning virginity to the social pleasures of wedded friendship.” In plain words, we are given to understand that a rich and elderly German widower read the book, sought an acquaintance with the writer, and married her. “Hymen,” exclaims Miss Seward, “passed by the fane of Cytherea and the shrine of Plutus, to light his torch at the altar of genius”;—which beautiful burst of eloquence makes it painful to add the chilling truth, and say that “Caroline de Lichtfield” was written six years after its author’s marriage with M. de Montolieu, who was a Swiss, and her second husband. She espoused her first, M. de Crousaz, when she was eighteen, and still comfortably remote from the terrors of waning virginity. Accurate information was not, however, a distinguishing characteristic of the day. Sir Walter Scott, writing some years later of Madame de Montolieu, ignores both marriages altogether, and calls her Mademoiselle.
No rich reward lay in wait for poor Charlotte Smith, whose husband was systematically impecunious, and whose large family of children were supported wholly by her pen. “Emmeline, or the Orphan of the Castle” was followed by “Ethelinda, or the Recluse of the Lake,” and that by “The Old Manor House,” which was esteemed her masterpiece. Its heroine bears the interesting name of Monimia; and when she marries her Orlando, “every subsequent hour of their lives was marked by some act of benevolence,”—a breathless and philanthropic career. By this time the false-hearted Hayley had so far transferred to Mrs. Smith the homage due to Miss Seward that he was rewarded with the painful privilege of reading “The Old Manor House” in manuscript,—a privilege reserved in those days for tried and patient friends. The poet had himself dallied a little with fiction, having written, “solely to promote the interests of religion,” a novel called “The Young Widow,” which no one appears to have read, except perhaps the Archbishop of Canterbury, to whom its author sent a copy.
In purity of motive Mr. Hayley was rivalled only by Mrs. Brunton, whose two novels, “Self-Control” and “Discipline,” were designed “to procure admission for the religion of a sound mind and of the Bible where it cannot find access in any other form.” Mrs. Brunton was perhaps the most commended novelist of her time. The inexorable titles of her stories secured for them a place upon the guarded book-shelves of the young. Many a demure English girl must have blessed these deluding titles, just as, forty years later, many an English boy blessed the inspiration which had impelled George Borrow to misname his immortal book “The Bible in Spain.” When the wife of a clergyman undertook to write a novel in the interests of religion and the Scriptures; when she called it “Discipline,” and drew up a stately apology for employing fiction as a medium for the lessons she meant to convey, what parent could refuse to be beguiled? There is nothing trivial in Mrs. Brunton’s conception of a good novel, in the standard she proposes to the world.
“Let the admirable construction of fable in ‘Tom Jones’ be employed to unfold characters like Miss Edgeworth’s; let it lead to a moral like Richardson’s; let it be told with the elegance of Rousseau, and with the simplicity of Goldsmith; let it be all this, and Milton need not have been ashamed of the work.”
How far “Discipline” and “Self-Control” approach this composite standard of perfection it would be invidious to ask; but they accomplished a miracle of their own in being both popular and permitted, in pleasing the frivolous, and edifying the devout. Dedicated to Miss Joanna Baillie, sanctioned by Miss Hannah More, they stood above reproach, though not without a flavour of depravity. Mrs. Brunton’s outlook upon life was singularly uncomplicated. All her women of fashion are heartless and inane. All her men of fashion cherish dishonourable designs upon female youth and innocence. Indeed the strenuous efforts of Laura, in “Self-Control,” to preserve her virginity may be thought a trifle explicit for very youthful readers. We find her in the first chapter—she is seventeen—fainting at the feet of her lover, who has just revealed the unworthy nature of his intentions; and we follow her through a series of swoons to the last pages, where she “sinks senseless” into—of all vessels!—a canoe; and is carried many miles down a Canadian river in a state of nicely balanced unconsciousness. Her self-control (the crowning virtue which gives its title to the book) is so marked that when she dismisses Hargrave on probation, and then meets him accidentally in a London print-shop after a four months’ absence, she “neither screamed nor fainted”; only “trembled violently, and leant against the counter to recover strength and composure.” It is not until he turns, and, “regardless of the inquisitive looks of the spectators, clasped her to his breast,” that “her head sunk upon his shoulder, and she lost all consciousness.” As for her heroic behaviour when the same Hargrave (having lapsed from grace) shoots the virtuous De Courcy in Lady Pelham’s summer-house, it must be described in the author’s own words. No others could do it justice.
“To the plants which their beauty had recommended to Lady Pelham, Laura had added a few of which the usefulness was known to her. Agaric of the oak was of the number; and she had often applied it where many a hand less fair would have shrunk from the task. Nor did she hesitate now. The ball had entered near the neck; and the feminine, the delicate Laura herself disengaged the wound from its covering; the feeling, the tender Laura herself performed an office from which false sensibility would have recoiled in horror.”