[CHAPTER XXXIII.]
LATER GEORGIAN NOVELISTS.
With the death of Sterne it might have been said that the English novel expired for the time, though of course, as Donne admitted in the case of the decease of Miss Drury, "a kind of world" lingered in existence. Indeed, plenty of novels were published and read. But they are forgotten. Experience proves that nobody need waste his time over the tales of Clara Reeve, such as "The Old English Baron"; and only infinite leisure and curiosity need try to disengage the qualities from the defects of Brooke's "Fool of Quality," while Beckford's "Vathek" is certainly worth notice as the ingenious and in places impressive feat of a millionaire. It is curious that the most poignant detail of the Hall of Eblis, the phantasms of lost souls, wandering each with his hand pressed to his heart, occurs in the mythology of an Australian tribe, the Euahlayi. Research might discover a wilderness of forgotten novels, probably quite as good, given the conditions of the ages, as the myriads of "masterpieces," which our newspaper critics daily receive with stereotyped formulæ of applause.
Frances Burney.
When a novelist did appear, a girl gifted with a delight in observing traits of character, and recording them from her early teens in a diary; when Fanny Burney came, she received such a welcome as warms the heart after all these years. Frances Burney (1752-1840) was born while the Elibank Plot for kidnapping the Royal family in the interests of the King over the water was maturing, and she outlived by eight years the author of "Waverley, or 'Tis Sixty Years Since".
The daughter of Dr. Burney, a teacher and historian of music, and a friend of the great wits, Johnson, Burke, Reynolds, Garrick, and the rest, Miss Burney, from childhood, was observing mankind and womankind; was reading "The Vicar of Wakefield," and Sterne, the novels of the Abbé Provost and of Marivaux, and apparently of Smollett no less than of the moral Richardson. She was writing, too, in secret; but at the command of her stepmother, probably when she herself was about 16 or 17, she burned all her works, including a novel on which her first published romance, "Evelina" (1778), was based, or rather out of which it was developed. We cannot estimate the merits of those "first blights," as Keats says, but "the little character-monger," as Johnson called her, continued to make her sketches of character in her Journal and in letters to her kind old mentor, "Daddy Crisp," a man much older than her father, who had retired from society and the sorrows of the playwright to a hospitable country house near Epsom. As the favourite and assistant of her musical and historical father, the retiring observant girl lived till, at about the age of 24, she returned to her first love, and, under great difficulties, wrote, and copied in a feigned hand, her "Evelina". With secrecy enough for a Jacobite conspiracy the book was conveyed to a bookseller, accepted, and published in 1778. Among her burned works was "The History of Caroline Evelyn," a young woman of moving adventures, whose mother was a vulgar barmaid, married, for the second time, in France, to a Monsieur Duval. As Caroline died of a broken heart, leaving a legitimate daughter, Evelina, Miss Burney told the story of that daughter's fortunes, situated as she was between her well-born English father's kin and her barmaid Frenchified mother, with her grotesque associates. The scheme had great possibilities, of which the author took full advantage; her chief successes being the members of the City family, the Branghtons, their smart low-bred friend, Mr. Smith, and the naval Captain Mirvan, whose language is discreetly veiled, while his bullying of Madame Duval and other persons is rather more than Smollettian. Evelina, through all the dangers which then beset the fair at Vauxhall and other resorts of the gay, reaches the haven where she and Lord Orville would be, and all ends happily, as in a novel all ought to end. There is an extraordinary wealth of characters, Burke thought them too abundant. The novel set literary society on fire with delight and admiration, Dr. Johnson leading the chorus of praise, and Miss Burney was his darling, and was welcomed by Mrs. Thrale, Reynolds, Burke, Garrick, Mrs. Montagu; even Horace Walpole, though he kept his head, applauded. The triumphs of Fanny are recorded in her Diary and Letters, a contribution to history even more delightful than her "Evelina". All the good fortunes that Miss Austen missed, or shunned, fell to Miss Burney, who well deserved them. Her later novel, "Cecilia" (1782) is not really inferior to "Evelina," but it is not "the first sprightly runnings". After her years as a tiring woman of Queen Charlotte (whereof the record in her Diary is at least on a level with her novels), her "Camilla" appeared, was subscribed for by all the world and Miss Austen, and was censured by John Thorpe in "Northanger Abbey". This immortal crown is hardly deserved by "Camilla". The story of Miss Burney's marriage to that amiable émigré, the Comte d'Arblay, is told in Macaulay's famous essay, which, again, is toned down and corrected by Mr. Austin Dobson ("Fanny Burney" in "English Men of Letters"). But the novels themselves, and the Diary, remain monuments, and not dull but delightful monuments, of social and personal history. We need not dwell on that lucrative failure, "The Wanderer" (1814). Miss Burney had opened the way, which was later to be trodden by the lighter feet of a far greater genius, whom some men have named with Shakespeare—Jane Austen.
Mrs. Radcliffe.
It is impossible to restore a faded popularity, and in a generation which sees at least two dozen new novels bloom every week, the desire to revive the taste for Mrs. Radcliffe's romances is a "vain hope and vision vain". None the less, Mrs. Radcliffe (Ann Ward, born in the birth year of Horace Walpole's "Castle of Otranto," 1764, and married to a Mr. Radcliffe in 1787), was the grandmother, as Horace Walpole was the great-grandfather, of the Romantic school of fiction. Her first tale, "The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne" (1789) is but a pioneer work: Mrs. Radcliffe knew nothing of the castles and manners of the Mackays, Sinclairs, and Gunns "in the dark ages". In 1790, with "The Sicilian Romance," Mrs. Radcliffe "found herself," and opened the way for all the terrors of Mr. Rochester's house in "Jane Eyre". The remarkable phenomena of the haunted Sicilian castle are not supernormal, but, till you discover that they are caused by the concealed wife of the proprietor (Ferdinand, fifth Marquis of Mazzini), they strike terror; later they move pity. "Northanger Abbey" is the inspired parody of Mrs. Radcliffe's effects in this work, which also contains the germ of a thrilling scene in R. L. Stevenson's "Kidnapped". In "The Romance of the Forest" (1791) Mrs. Radcliffe struck the keynote of the novels about the Valois Court, which we owe to her spiritual descendants, Alexandre Dumas and Mr. Stanley Weyman. To "local colour" and the historical "atmosphere," Mrs. Radcliffe was indifferent; but she always had a story to tell, a story new and startling; and she managed her chiaroscuro with the touch of genius. She awakened curiosity, she struck terror; she skilfully interwove the many threads of her plots; she was far from being destitute of humour; and her Italian landscapes are designed after Poussin and Salvator Rosa. "Every reader," says Scott, "felt her force, from the sage in his study to the family group in middle life." Her "Mysteries of Udolpho" is hardly worthy of its reputation. But in "The Italian" she anticipates the manner of Hawthorne; her wicked Monk, Schedoni, is (as Scott himself saw and said), the original of Byron's Giaour, and his other darkling lurid heroes; and her comic valet, Paolo, who loyally follows his master into the dungeon of the Inquisition, is the model of Sam Weller, in the Fleet Prison, with Mr. Pickwick. Mrs. Radcliffe's genius is not appreciated merely because she is not read. The student who gives her a fair chance is carried away by the spell of this "great enchantress"; and "The Italian" is by far the best romantic novel that ever was written before Scott. He applauded her with his wonted generosity, but objected to her habit of explaining away her supernormal incidents. But this was done in homage to the stupid "common sense" of her age. After her masterpiece "The Italian," Mrs. Radcliffe deserted fiction; wrote "The Female Advocate" in defence of "Woman's Rights," and suffered from unhappy domestic circumstances for which she was in no way responsible. She died in 1823.
Maria Edgeworth.