CHAPTER XIII
Mrs. Gore. Mrs. Bray
During the second decade of the nineteenth century, while Scott was writing some of the most powerful of the Waverley novels, a host of new writers sprang into popular notice. John Galt, William Harrison Ainsworth, and G. P. R. James began their endless series of historical romances, while in 1827, Bulwer Lytton and Benjamin Disraeli introduced to the reading public, as the representatives of fashionable society, Falkland and Vivian Grey. The decade was prolific also in novels by women. Jane Austen had died in 1817, but Maria Edgeworth, Lady Morgan, the Porters, Amelia Opie, Miss Ferrier, Mrs. Shelley and Miss Mitford were still writing; during this period, Mrs. S. C. Hall began her work in imitation of Miss Mitford, while Mrs. Gore and Mrs. Bray took up the goose-quill, piled reams of paper on their desks, and began their literary careers.
About a score of years before Thackeray tickled English society with pictures of its own snobbery, Mrs. Gore, a young woman, wife of an officer in the Life Guards, saw through the many affectations of the polite world, and in a series of novels, pointed out its ludicrous pretences with lively wit. Mrs. Gore has suffered, however, from the multiplicity of her writings. During the years between 1823, when she wrote her first novel, Theresa Marchmont, and 1850, when, quite blind, she retired from the world of letters, she published two hundred volumes of novels, plays, and poems. Her plots are often hastily constructed, her men and women dimly outlined, but she is never dull. No writer since Congreve has so many sparkling lines. She has been likened to Horace, and if we compare her wit with that of Thackeray, who by the way ridiculed her in his Novels by Eminent Hands, her humour has qualities of old Falernian, beside which his too frequently has the bitter flavour of old English beer. The Englishman is inclined to take his wit, like his sports, too seriously, and to mingle with it a little of the spice of envy. Mrs. Gore has none of this, however, and skims along the surface of fashionable life with a grace and ease and humour extremely diverting.
Her writings are so voluminous that one can only make excerpts at random. One of the liveliest is Cecil, or the Adventures of a Coxcomb, a humorous satire on Vivian Grey. "The arch-coxcomb of his coxcombical time" had become a coxcomb at the age of six months, when he first saw himself in the mirror, from which time his nurse stopped his crying by tossing him in front of a looking-glass. His curls made him so attractive that at six years of age he was admitted to his mother's boudoir, from which his red-headed brother was excluded, and he superseded the spaniel in her ladyship's carriage. With the loss of his curls went the loss of favour. He did not prosper at school, and was rusticated after a year's residence at Oxford. Here he formed an acquaintance which helped him much in the world of coxcombry. Though this man was not well born, he was an admitted leader among gentlemen. Cecil soon discovered that his high social position was due entirely to his impertinence, and he made this wise observation: "Impudence is the quality of a footman; impertinence of his master. Impudence is a thing to be rebutted with brute force; impertinence requires wit for the putting down." So he matched his wit with this man's impertinence, and they became sworn friends.
When Cecil went to London, he found that "people had supped full of horrors, during the Revolution, and were now devoted to elegiac measures. My languid smile and hazel eyes were the very thing to settle the business of the devoted beings left for execution." Of course all the women fell desperately in love with him. "I had always a predisposition to woman-slaughter, with extenuating circumstances, as well as a stirring consciousness of the exterminating power," he explains to us. Like Childe Harold and Vivian Grey, this coxcomb soon became weary of London, and travelled through Europe in an indolent way, for after all it was his chief pleasure "to lie in an airy French bed, showered over with blue convolvulus," and read tender billets from the ladies. This book was an excellent antidote to the Byronic fever, then at its height.
In her Sketches of English Character, Mrs. Gore describes different men who were in her time to be met with in the social life of London. The Dining-Out Man thus speaks for himself:
"Ill-natured people fancy that the life of a dining-out man is a life of corn, wine, and oil; that all he has to do is to eat, drink and be merry. I only know that, had I been aware in the onset of life, of all I should have to go through in my vocation, I would have chosen some easier calling. I would have studied law, physic, or divinity."
In the sketches of The Clubman, she assigns John Bull's dislike of ladies' society as the reason for the many clubs in the English metropolis: