Nor must it for a moment be supposed that such creations as this and the Aunts are mere masterpieces of the caricaturist. In Miss Ferrier's best characters it may almost be said to be a rule that caricature enters only into the details, and is never allowed to interfere with the main outline. An accusation far more justly to be brought against the authoress of this book is that of hard-heartedness, or a defect of sympathy and even of toleration for her own creations. Susan Ferrier was an uncompromisingly candid woman, as her interesting account of the visits paid by her to Sir Walter Scott are enough to show. That her heart was a kind one we know; but when she took pen in hand it was not her way to extenuate anything. Neither was she given to view persons or occurrences through any softening light of imagination or feeling. 'What a cruel thing is a farce to those engaged in it!' wrote another Scottish author. But she, having devised a farcically cruel situation, squares her shoulders and regards its development with a ruthlessness more proper perhaps to science than to art. Not a touch of compunction has she for her heroine—who, intolerably selfish and heartless as she is, is yet but a child and the victim of the harshest circumstance; not a touch of pity for the pathos and repression of such lives as those of the Aunts. In a word, tolerance is not her strong point. And, admirable as it is, her art yet suffers by the limitation of her sympathies. For one pines for the hundred little humanising touches by virtue of which the same characters—living though they be—might have lived with a fuller and more gracious life. It is stated that Miss Ferrier's favourite author was La Bruyère, and in such studies as those of Lady Placid and Mrs Wiseacre he is obviously the model followed. And, though her best creations surpass those of her master as a living character will always surpass an abstract type, yet in this, her earliest effort, she still retains a good deal too much of the frigid intellectual method of the Frenchman.
What will, perhaps, more generally be considered a legitimate ground for the unpleasant task of fault-finding is, however, the extremely inartistic construction of the book. As we approach the middle, we are surprised to find the interest shifted to an almost entirely new set of characters, who belong to a new generation. Thus at a time when Lady Juliana cannot be much more than eighteen years of age, she ceases to be prominent in the story, and after the briefest interval we are called on to follow the fortunes of her twin daughters, who are now nearing that age. The bridegroom, Douglas, and two of the Aunts disappear altogether from the book; and this is the more to be regretted because there are few readers but will infinitely prefer the racy humours of the elder generation to the insipid long-drawn-out love-affairs of the contrasted sisters, even when these are more or less successfully enlivened by the sallies of the shrewd Lady Emily, by the caricature figure of Dr Redgill the gourmand, and by the absurdities of the literary précieuses of Bath.
The success of Marriage, justified by its painting of Scottish manners and by the figures of Lady Maclaughlan and the spinster aunts, had the right effect upon the sterling Scottish character of the authoress. It led her to try how much better still she could do. Six years elapsed before the appearance of her next book, which was published in 1824—like its predecessor, anonymously. Indeed secrecy as to her literary undertakings appears to have been one of the novelist's strongest desires; and, writing much of The Inheritance at Morningside House, near Edinburgh—where her father spent the summers—she complains of the smallness of the house as making concealment very difficult.
In the endeavour to improve upon her first achievement, Miss Ferrier was triumphantly successful. 'The new book,' wrote one of Mr Blackwood's correspondents at the time of its publication, 'is a hundred miles above Marriage.' Nor does this assertion overshoot the mark; for if the one is at most a bit of brilliant promise, the other is a superb performance. Foremost among its advantages must be counted, in place of the slip-slop of Marriage, an interesting and admirably-compacted plot, and a vigorous literary style—the latter marked indeed, yet not marred, by a mannerism of literary quotation. What was shapeless and redundant in Marriage is here moulded and restrained by exigencies of the story, with the result that characters well-defined, and skilfully contrasted and relieved, confront the reader standing boldly and firmly on their feet.
Several features of The Inheritance seem to have been suggested by the celebrated Douglas Cause. The Honourable Thomas St Clair, youngest son of the Earl of Rossville, has forfeited the countenance of his family by marrying out of his own rank in life. He settles with his wife in France, and here in the course of years a succession of deaths places him in the position of heir-presumptive to the earldom. He announces at head-quarters the important tidings that Mrs St Clair is expecting to be confined, and having done so, with the Earl's concurrence he and his wife prepare to return to Scotland. But the confinement takes place, prematurely, on the journey. A female child is born, after which event the projected return is indefinitely postponed. So much by way of proem. The opening of the story shows us Mrs St Clair, now a widow, and her daughter, Gertrude, a beautiful and blooming maiden, taking up their abode with the elderly and unmarried Lord Rossville, who recognises the young lady as heiress to his title and estates. Under his roof, attention is drawn to a likeness existing between Gertrude and the portrait of one Lizzie Lundie, a low-born beauty of a bygone day, who had sat as model for a painting in the Castle. This resemblance is noticed by more than one person, and on more than one occasion, and reference to it is generally accompanied by marks of agitation in Mrs St Clair. Meantime the youthful heiress has won the admiration of two young men, cousins of her own, who frequent the Castle—the handsome and elegant Colonel Delmour, a man of fashion and of the world, and the less showy but far deeper-natured Edward Lyndsay. A singular meeting now takes place between Mrs St Clair and a stranger named Lewiston, and soon afterwards it becomes apparent that the latter exercises a great, though unexplained, power over the lady. The stranger's identity is presently revealed as that of the husband—long supposed to be dead—of a nurse of Gertrude's, to whom she had been tenderly attached. At a nocturnal meeting with Lewiston, at which Mrs St Clair has by entreaty, and by throwing out vague threats, compelled her daughter to be present, Lyndsay arrives upon the scene in time to save Gertrude from molestation, and thus earns her gratitude. However Delmour now declares his passion, which Gertrude returns—with the result that an understanding is come to between them. But the Earl has other intentions regarding the disposal of the hand of his heir, which for family and political reasons he designs to confer upon the Colonel's elder brother, a colourless man-of-affairs. By asserting her independence in this matter, Gertrude provokes Lord Rossville's displeasure; but the unforeseen effect of his lordship's purblind and blundering intervention is merely to bring to light the fact that Lyndsay also is in love with his beautiful cousin. The Earl, who has power to dispose of his possessions as he pleases, is meditating to disinherit Gertrude on account of her disobedience, when his sudden death leaves her free to follow her own wishes. In the meantime, Delmour's conduct has supplied ground for doubting the purity of his motives; whilst Lyndsay, who has again come to her rescue in a trying interview with Lewiston, has shown himself throughout a staunch friend to her best interests. But Gertrude is now Countess of Rossville in her own right; her lover returns to her side, and she is herself too noble-minded to question his disinterestedness. Under his influence she launches out into a variety of extravagant schemes, and going to London, where she becomes the admired of all admirers, devotes herself wholly to the pleasures of society, which for a time have rather an injurious effect upon her character. Lyndsay makes an appeal to her better self, but amid the excitement of her surroundings his remonstrance passes unheeded. Jaded by the excesses of fashionable life, at the end of the season she returns to Rossville, where the intrusive Lewiston, who has been thought drowned, now again appears upon the scene, and provoked by her disdainful treatment divulges the secret that she is the daughter, not of Mrs St Clair, but of her nurse, and that consequently she has no title to her present position. Overwhelmed by this intelligence, which Mrs St Clair's confession confirms, Gertrude loses no time in informing her lover of the true state of matters, and in so doing reveals the miserable shallowness of his nature. Delmour's love for the beautiful and high-spirited girl is genuine; but nameless and without fortune as she now is, he hesitates to fulfil his engagement towards her. Her love for him has been of such a different nature that she is well-nigh broken-hearted by the discovery. But the faithful Lyndsay stands her friend in need, and the book closes with her reinstatement, long afterwards, as his wife, in the brilliant position which she has already wrongly, though innocently, occupied.
The plot of The Inheritance, of which the above is a sketch, is a model of its kind, whilst from first to last the conduct of the narrative is perfect. Indeed the form of the story could not be improved—a rare merit even in a masterpiece of British fiction; and though the book is a long one, it contains not a superfluous page. Among the numerous authors quoted in the course of it are Shakespeare and the Greek dramatists, and perhaps, without stretching probability too far, we may assume that the authoress had studied the latter as well as the former. In any case The Inheritance in its own degree unites principal characteristics of the Greek and the Shakespearian drama, for the web of circumstance inexorably woven about the innocent and unconscious heroine is entirely in the manner of the first, whilst the indifferent, life-like alternation of tragic and ludicrous incident in the narrative is of a piece with Shakespeare's irony. No finer example of the latter could be cited than the impressive scene in which Lord Rossville, looking blankly from his window one snowy afternoon, is amazed to see a hearse approaching the Castle. Out of the vehicle, when it has reached the door, steps his lordship's pet aversion and the reader's delight—the undaunted and ubiquitous Miss Pratt. The voluble lady has a long story to tell of the circumstances which have compelled her to resort to this unconventional mode of conveyance, whilst the pompous Earl is scandalised at the general impropriety of the proceedings, and especially at thought of the hearse of Mr McVitae, the Radical distiller, putting up for the night at the Castle. However there is no help for it; nor as it turns out is the visit so ill-timed as had seemed, for the next morning Lord Rossville is discovered dead upon his bed.
But if the book is remarkable for its admirable story, certainly not less remarkable is it for the extraordinary wealth of character which it portrays. Probably few 'novels of plot' are so rich in character, few 'novels of character' so strong in plot. It may be that some carping critic of the ungentle sex will be found to object to Lyndsay and to Delmour, the contrasted lovers of the heroine, as to 'a woman's men'—to urge that their demeanour is too consistently emotional, too demonstrative, to be founded upon any very solid base of character or of disposition. But supposing (which I am far from granting) that there were some truth in this, here at any rate all ground even for hypercriticism must end. And where in fiction is there a heroine more charming and more lovable than Gertrude St Clair—gentle yet high-spirited as she is, natural, and the soul of truth? Her pretended mother—ambitious and worldly-minded, violent, embittered by the slights and mortifications of her youth and bent vindictively upon retaliation—rises to the dignity of tragedy. Then we have the inimitable rattle and busybody, Miss Pratt, at home everywhere except in her own house, and incessantly referring to the sayings and doings of an invisible 'Anthony Whyte'—a very masterpiece of humorous delineation; and old Adam Ramsay, the cross-grained, misanthropic, Indian uncle, who yet compels our sympathy by his sentimental attachment to the home of his boyhood, and his constancy to the memory of his ill-starred love. Miss Bell Black, afterwards Mrs Major Waddell, is delightful in her perfect inanity and fatuity; and though her creator may not yet have learned to suffer fools gladly, she certainly has by this time mastered the art of portraying 'as though she loved' them. The Earl of Rossville, puffed up by a sense of his own importance, long-winded, sesquepedalian and null; Miss Lilly, the poetess, her Cockney lover and her brothers; gentle Anne Black; Miss Becky Duguid, the accommodating poor relation; Mrs Fairbairn, the materfamilias; and the peasant-woman whose misguided foresight leads her to prepare betimes her ailing husband's dead-clothes,—all of them are admirable, and all bear evidence of being freshly observed from the life. But the writer has learnt the lesson of substituting poetic for local truth; and if any portraits appear in this gallery—and it is stated that Adam Ramsay to some extent represents the authoress's father—they are such as can no longer rightly give offence to anyone. Miss Ferrier had reached middle life when she wrote The Inheritance, and perhaps the laughter which it provokes is less boisterous than that aroused by the first essays of her youth. But for a scene of high comedy—to select one from many—the first conversation of Miss Pratt and Uncle Adam would certainly be difficult to surpass. Finally, we have abundant evidence that in all that she wrote our authoress was actuated by a genuine desire for the moral and religious welfare of her reader; but in comparison to that of Marriage, her tone in this book is as is the influence of a well-guided life to a sententious homily delivered from a pulpit. In one word, there is no single point in her art in which she has not risen from what is crude and tentative to what is finished and masterly.
As it well deserved to be, The Inheritance was a great success, and amongst those from whom it elicited warm commendation the names of Jeffrey and Sir Walter Scott may be particularised. Some of the chief comic actors of the day wished to have it produced upon the stage, with which object the manager of Covent Garden Theatre applied to Mrs Gore, the novelist, for a dramatic version of the story. But that lady's intentions were anticipated by one Fitzball, a purveyor of transpontine wares in the kind, to whose unfitness for his task the complete failure of the play, when it came to be produced, may probably be ascribed. For in its strong, well-developed plot, and diversified characterisation, the story possesses in a high degree the chief requisites of a successful stage-play. The Inheritance has also the distinction of having furnished to Tennyson the outline of his beautiful ballad of Lady Clare.
Miss Ferrier was a very careful craftswoman—a fact to which much of her success has been attributed—and it was not until 1831 that her next book, Destiny, appeared. Much of it was written at Stirling Castle, while she was on a visit to the wife of the Governor of the garrison. The new novel was dedicated to Sir Walter Scott, to whom the authoress had good reason to feel obliged, for it was largely in consequence of his skilful bargaining that she had received for it the large sum of £1700 from Cadell. The prices paid to her by Blackwood for her two previous books had been £150 and £1000 respectively.
As The Inheritance represents the meridian of the writer's powers, so Destiny represents their decline—not because there are not some as good things, or very nearly as good things, in the latter as in the former, but because the whole is very much less good. The construction of Destiny is loose and inartificial, and almost from the outset the want of a strong frame-work which shall hold the contents together and keep them in place makes itself felt. Properly speaking, there are two stories in the story,—namely, that which centres in the disposal of the Inch Orran property and the adventures of Ronald Malcolm, and that which concerns itself with the development of the relations between Edith and her recalcitrant lover. In itself of course this would be no defect, but instead of being interwoven, or subordinated one to the other, the two stories are allowed to run parallel and distinct until near the end of the book. Thus their interest is dissipated—an effect which diffuseness of treatment materially increases. Idle pages and straggling incidents abound, and in fact the sense of form which was so conspicuous in The Inheritance is in Destiny conspicuous only by absence.