Horatio, meanwhile, after leaving Westminster School to serve as a volunteer in Flanders, has encountered fewer amorous and more military adventures than usually fell to the lot of Haywoodian heroes. His promising career under Marlborough is terminated when he is taken captive by the French, but he is subsequently released to enter the service of the Chevalier. He then becomes enamored of the beautiful Charlotta de Palfoy, and in the hope of making his fortune equal to hers, resolves to cast his lot with the Swedish monarch. In the Saxon campaign he wins a commission as colonel of horse and a comfortable share of the spoils, but later is taken prisoner by the Russians and condemned to languish in a dungeon at St. Petersburg. After many hardships he makes his way to Paris to be welcomed as a son by Dorilaus and as a husband by his adored Charlotta.
In describing Horatio's martial exploits Mrs. Haywood may well have learned some lessons from the "Memoirs of a Cavalier." The narrative is direct and rapid, and diversified by the mingling of private escapades with history. Too much is made, of course, of the hero's personal relations with Charles XII, but that is a fault which few historical novelists have known how to avoid. The geographical background, as well as the historical setting, is laid out with a precision unusual in her fiction. The whole map of Europe is the scene of action, and the author speaks as one familiar with foreign travel, though her passing references to Paris, Venice, Vienna, and other cities have not the full vigor of the descriptions in "Peregrine Pickle."
From the standpoint of structure, too, "The Fortunate Foundlings" is an improvement over the haphazard plots of Mrs. Haywood's early romances, though the double-barreled story necessitated by twin hero and heroine could hardly be told without awkward interruptions in the sequence of one part of the narrative in order to forward the other. But the author doubtless felt that the reader's interest would be freshened by turning from the amorous adventures of Louisa to the daring deeds of Horatio, while a protagonist of each sex enabled her to exhibit at once examples of both male and female virtue. And in spite of inherent difficulties, she succeeded to some extent in showing an interrelation of plots, as where Dorilaus by going to the north of Ireland to hear the dying confession of the mother of his children, thereby misses Horatio's appeal for a ransom, and thus prevents him from rejoining Marlborough's standard. But there is nothing like Fielding's ingenious linking of events and careful preparation for the catastrophe, nor did Mrs. Haywood make much out of the hint of unconscious incest and the foundling motif which her book has in common with "Tom Jones." Occasionally also she cannot refrain from inserting a bit of court gossip or an amorous page in her warmest manner, but the number of intercalated stories is small indeed compared to that in a romance like "Love in Excess," and they are usually dismissed in a few paragraphs. Here for the first time the author has shown some ability to subordinate sensational incident to the needs of the main plot.
When Mrs. Haywood's inclination or necessities led her back to the novel four years later, she produced a work upon a still more consistent, if also more artificial plan than any of her previous attempts. "Life's Progress through the Passions: or, the Adventures of Natura" avowedly aims to trace the workings of human emotion. The author's purpose is to examine in "what manner the passions operate in every stage of life, and how far the constitution of the outward frame is concerned in the emotions of the internal faculties," for actions which we might admire or abhor "would lose much of their eclat either way, were the secret springs that give them motion, seen into with the eyes of philosophy and reflection." Natura, a sort of Everyman exposed to the variations of passion, is not the faultless hero of romance, but a mere ordinary mortal. Indeed, the writer declares that she is "an enemy to all romances, novels, and whatever carries the air of them … and as it is a real, not fictitious character I am about to present, I think myself obliged … to draw him such as he was, not such as some sanguine imaginations might wish him to have been."
The survey of the passions begins with an account of Natura's birth of well-to-do but not extraordinary parents, his mother's death, and his father's second marriage, his attack of the small-pox, his education at Eton, and his boyish love for his little play-mate, Delia. Later he becomes more seriously compromised with a woman of the streets, who lures him into financial engagements. Though locked up by his displeased father, he manages to escape, finds his lady entertaining another gallant, and in despair becomes a regular vagabond. Just as he is about to leave England, his father discovers him and sends him to make the grand tour under a competent tutor.
In Paris the tutor dies, and the young man is left to the exercise of his own discretion. Benighted in a wood, he finds shelter in a monastery of noble ladies, where both the abbess and her sister fall in love with him. After fluctuating between the two, he tries to elope with the sister, is foiled by the abbess, and sets off again upon his travels. In Italy he hears of his father's difficulties and starts for home, but enters the French service instead. He is involved with a nobleman in an attempt to abduct a lady from a nunnery, and would have been tortured had not the jailor's wife eloped with him to England. There he enters Parliament and is about to contract a fortunate marriage when he incautiously defends the Chevalier in conversation, fights a duel, and, although his antagonist is only wounded, he finds his reputation blighted by the stigma of Jacobitism. After a long illness at Vienna where he is pestered by Catholic priests, he recovers his health at Spa, and falls in love with a young English girl. Her parents gladly give their consent, but Maria seems unaccountably averse to the match. And when our hero is assaulted by a jealous footman, he perceives that the lady has fixed her affections on a lower object. Natura on his return to England prospers and marries happily, but his joy is soon destroyed by the death of his father and of his wife in giving birth to a son. Consumed by ambition, the widower then marries the niece of a statesman, only to discover what misery there is in a luxurious and unvirtuous wife.
Natura soon experiences the passions of melancholy, grief, and revenge. His son dies, and his wife's conduct forces him to divorce her. In the hope of preventing his brother from inheriting his estate he is about to marry a healthy country girl when he hears that his brother is dead and that his sister's son is now his heir. Thereupon he buys off his intended bride. At his sister's house he meets a young matron named Charlotte, for whom he long entertains a platonic affection, but finally marries her and has three sons. Thereafter he sinks into a calm and natural decline and dies in his sixty-third year.
"Thus I have attempted to trace nature in all her mazy windings, and shew life's progress through the passions, from the cradle to the grave.—The various adventures which happened to Natura, I thought, afforded a more ample field, than those of any one man I ever heard, or read of; and flatter myself, that the reader will find many instances, that may contribute to rectify his own conduct, by pointing out those things which ought to be avoided, or at least most carefully guarded against, and those which are worthy to be improved and imitated."
The obvious and conventional moral ending and the shreds of romance that still adhere to the story need not blind us to its unusual features. Besides insisting upon the necessity for psychological analysis of a sort, the author here for the first time becomes a genuine novelist in the sense that her confessed purpose is to depict the actual conditions of life, not to glorify or idealize them. As Fielding was to do in "Tom Jones," Mrs. Haywood proclaims the mediocrity of her hero as his most remarkable quality. Had she been able to make him more than a lay figure distorted by various passions, she might have produced a real character. Although at times he seems to be in danger of acquiring the romantic faculty of causing every woman he meets to fall in love with him, yet the glamor of his youth is obscured by a peaceful and ordinary old age. Artificial in design and stilted in execution as the work is, it nevertheless marks Eliza Haywood's emancipation from the traditions of the romance.[3]
In "The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless" (1751) she reached the full fruition of her powers as a novelist. Her heroine, like Natura, is little more than a "humour" character, whose prevailing fault is denoted by her surname.[4] Though not fundamentally vicious, her heedless vanity, inquisitiveness, and vivacity lead her into all sorts of follies and embarrassments upon her first entry into fashionable life in London. Among all the suitors who strive to make an impression upon her heart Mr. Trueworth alone succeeds, but her levity and her disregard of appearances force him to think her unworthy of his attentions. Meanwhile her guardian's wife, Lady Mellasin, has been turned out of the house for an egregious infidelity, and Betsy is left to her own scant discretion. After somewhat annoying her brothers by receiving men at her lodgings, she elects under family pressure to marry a Mr. Munden, who quickly shows himself all that a husband should not be. Eventually she has to abandon him, but demonstrates her wifely devotion by going back to nurse him through his last illness. Mr. Trueworth's mate in the interim has conveniently managed to succumb, his old passion revives, and exactly upon the anniversary of Mr. Munden's death he arrives in a chariot and six to claim the fair widow, whose youthful levity has been chastened by the severe discipline of her unfortunate marriage. Told in an easy and dilatory style and interspersed with the inevitable little histories and impassioned letters, the story attained the conventional bulk of four duodecimo volumes.