On the other hand, The Convent of Grey Penitents, one of the crops which rewarded Miss Wilkinson for tilling the lands of her imagination with the spade of her style, is very nearly consummate—in badness. It is a fair example of the worst imitations of Mrs. Radcliffe and Mat Lewis conjointly, though without the latter's looseness. The Marquis di Zoretti was an Italian nobleman—"one of those characters in whose bosom resides an unquenchable thirst of avarice" ["thirst of avarice" is good!], etc. He marries, however, a lovely signora of the odd name of Rosalthe, without a fortune, "which circumstance was overlooked by his lordship" for a very short time only. He plots to be free of her: she goes to England and dies there to the genteelest of slow music. Their son Horatio falls in love with a certain Julietta, who is immured by wicked arts in the "Convent of Grey Penitents," tormented by the head, Gradisca, but rescued, and so forth. The book, if harmless, is about as worthless as a book can be: but it represents, very fairly, the ruck, if not indeed even the main body, of the enormous horde of romances which issued from the press towards the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, and which, in their different action on persons of genius, gave us Zastrozzi on the one side and Northanger Abbey on the other.
As for Miss Henrietta Mosse, otherwise Rouvière, she represents the other school of abortive historical novel. A Peep at Our Ancestors (1807) is fairly worthy of its ridiculous name. It is preceded by expressions of thanks to the authorities of "the British Museum and the Heralds' Office" for the "access to records" vouchsafed to its author. As the date of the story is 1146 (it was long before Mr. Freeman wrote) access to records would certainly not have been superfluous. The actual results of it are blocks of spiritless and commonplace historic narrative—it is nearly all narrative, not action—diversified by utterances like this of Malcolm III. of Scotland, "O my Edward! the deed which struck my son's life has centred [sic] thy noble youthful bosom also," or this of the heroine (such as there is), "the gentle elegant Adelaise," "And do I not already receive my education of thee, mamma?" It is really a pity that the creator of this remarkable peep-show did not give references to her "records," so that one might look up this "elegant" young creature of the twelfth century who talked about "education" and said "mamma!" But this absolute failure in verisimilitude is practically universal before Scott.
The works of the very beautifully named Regina Maria Roche should probably be read, as they were for generations, in late childhood or early youth. Even then an intelligent boy or girl would perceive some of the absurdity, but might catch a charm that escapes the less receptive oldster. They were, beyond all question, immensely popular, and continued to be so for a long time: in fact it is almost sufficient evidence that there is, if I mistake not, in the British Museum no edition earlier than the tenth of the most famous of them, The Children of the Abbey (1798). This far-renowned work opens with the exclamation of the heroine Amanda, "Hail, sweet sojourn of my infancy!" and we are shortly afterwards informed that in the garden "the part appropriated to vegetables was divided from the part sacred to Flora." Otherwise, the substance of the thing is a curious sort of watered-down Richardson, passed through successive filtering beds of Mackenzie, and even of Mrs. Radcliffe. It is difficult for even the most critical taste to find much savour or stimulus in the resulting liquid. But, like almost everybody mentioned here, Regina is a document of the demands of readers and the faculty of writers: and so she "standeth," if not exactly "crowned," yet ticketed.
Work—somewhat later—of some interest, but not of first-class quality, is to be found in the Discipline (1811) and Self-Control (1814) of Mary Brunton. A Balfour of Orkney on the father's side and a Ligonier on the mother's, the authoress had access to the best English as well as Scottish society, and seems to have had more than a chance of taking a place in the former: but preferred to marry a minister-professor and settled down to country manse life. She died in middle age and her husband wrote a memoir of her. Discipline seems to represent a sort of fancy combination of the life she might have led and the life she did lead. Ellen Percy, the heroine, starts in the highest circles; forgets herself so far as to "waltze" with a noble ne'er-do-weel, thereby earning the "stern disapprobation" of a respectable lover; comes down in the world; has Highland experiences which, at the book's early date, are noteworthy; marries (like her creatress) a minister; but "retains a little of her coquettish sauciness." "Bless her, poor little dear!" one can imagine Thackeray exclaiming in his later and mellowed days. Mrs. Brunton's letters breathe a lady-like and not unamiable propriety, and she is altogether a sort of milder, though actually earlier, Miss Ferrier.
Ireland vindicated its claim to comparative liveliness in the work of a better known contemporary and survivor. Lady Morgan's (Miss Sydney Owenson's) Wild Irish Girl (1806) is one of the books whose titles have prolonged for them a kind of shadowy existence. It is written in letters: and the most interesting thing about it for some readers now is that the heroine supplied Thackeray with the name Glorvina, which, it seems, means in Irish "sweet voice," if Lady Morgan is to be trusted in rebus Celticis. It is to be hoped she is: for the novel is a sort of macédoine of Irish history, folk-lore, scenery, and what not, done up in a syrup of love-making quant. suff. Its author wrote many more novels and became a butt for both good- and ill-natured satire with the comic writers of the twenties, thirties, and forties. The title was actually borrowed by Maturin in The Wild Irish "Boy," and it is fair to say that the book preceded Scott's, though not Miss Edgeworth's, experiments in the line of the "national" novel. The earlier Reviewers were discreditably savage on women-writers, and Lady Morgan had her share of their truculence. She did not wholly deserve it: but it must be said that nothing she wrote can really be ranked as literature, save on the most indiscriminate and uncritical estimate. It is, however, difficult to see much harm in her.
Ida of Athens, for instance, which shocked contemporaries, and which, by the way, has the very large first title of Woman, could only bring a blush to cheeks very tickle of that sere: a yawn might come much more easily. The most shocking thing that the heroine, who is "an attempt to delineate woman in her natural state," does (and that not of malice) is to receive her lover in a natural bathroom. But her adventures are told in a style which is the oddest compound of Romantesque and Johnsonese. ("The hour was ardent. The bath was cool. He calculated upon the probable necessity of its enjoyment.") The spirit is the silliest and most ignorant Philhellenism—all the beauty, virtue, wisdom, of the ancient Greeks being supposed to be inherited by their mongrel successors of the early nineteenth century. An English and a Turkish lover dispute Ida's affection or possession. There are the elaborate pseudo-erudite notes which one has learnt to associate chiefly with Moore. The authoress boasts in her preface that she "has already written almost as many volumes as she has years," and that she has hardly ever corrected her proofs. Perhaps this silliness will make some think her not more an example of the savagery of contemporary criticism than a justification thereof.
It was in fact not only brutal man who objected to the preposterous excesses of pseudo-romance: and serious or jocular parables were taken up against it, if not before Northanger Abbey was written, long before it was published. In 1810 a certain "G." or "S.G.," whose full name was Sarah Green, wrote, besides some actual history and an attempt at the historical novel, a very curious and rather hybrid book entitled Romance Readers and Romance Writers. Its preface is an instance of "Women, beware Women," for though it stigmatises male creatures, such as a certain Curteis and a certain Pickersgill, it treats Lady Morgan (then only Sydney Owenson) and "Rosa Matilda" even more roughly and asks (as has been asked about a hundred years later and was asked about a hundred years before), "Is it not amazing that the [two] most licentious writers of romance are women?" And it starts with a burlesque account of a certain Margaret Marsham who exclaims, "What then? to add to my earthly miseries am I to be called Peggy? My name is Margaritta!" "I am sure that if I am called Peggy again I shall go into a fit." But this promise of something to complete the trio with Northanger Abbey and The Heroine (to be presently mentioned) is not maintained. Not only does the writer force the note of parody too much by making "Margaritta" say to herself, "Poor persecuted dove that I am," and adore a labourer's shirt on a hedge, but she commits the far more fatal fault of exchanging her jest for earnest. Margaritta—following her romance-models—falls a victim to an unprincipled great lady and the usual wicked baronet—at whose head, one is bound to say, she flings herself with such violence as no baronet could possibly resist. Her sister Mary, innocent of romance-reading and all other faults, is, though not as guilty, as unlucky almost as Margaret: and by far the greater part of the book is an unreal presentment, in nearly the worst manner of the eighteenth century itself, of virtuous curates, unvirtuous "tonish" rectors, who calmly propose to seduce their curates' daughters (an offence which, for obvious reasons, must, in the worst times, have been unusual), libertine ladies, and reckless "fashionables" of all kinds. The preface and the opening create expectations, not merely of amusement but of power, which are by no means fulfilled. It is "S.G." who asserts that Ida of Athens "has brought a blush to the cheek of many," and one can only repeat the suggested substitution.
The only faults that can be found with The Heroine or The Adventures of Cherubina, by Eaton Stannard Barrett, which appeared in the same year, with no very different object and subject, though written in lighter vein, are one that it could not help and another that it could. Unjustly, but unavoidably, the first is the worst. That it is a burlesque rather overdone—a burlesque burlesqué—not in the manner of Thackeray, but in that of some older and some more recent writers—is unfortunate, but not fatal. One can forgive—one can even enjoy—the ghost who not only sneezes but says, "D—n, all is blown!" When the heroine is actually locked up with a man in a chest one is more doubtful: recovering when the Marquis de Furioso, "bowing gracefully to the bride," stabs himself to the heart, which is almost "the real Mackay" as they say in the North. The slight awkwardness of snow falling the day after the characters have been eating strawberries does not amuse us much, because this is a comparatively ordinary event of the early twentieth century, whatever it might be of the early nineteenth. But what is fatal, though the author could not help it, is that the infinitely lighter, more artistic, and more lethal dart of Northanger Abbey had been launched by the pen, if not the press, more than a dozen years before.
There are few more curious and interesting personages in the history of the English Novel than Maria Edgeworth. The variety of her accomplishment in the kind was extraordinary: and in more than one of its species she went very near perfection. One is never quite certain whether the perpetual meddling of her rather celebrated father Richard—one of the capital examples of the unpractical pragmatists and clever-silly crotcheteers who produced and were produced by the Revolutionary period—did her more harm than good. It certainly loaded her work with superfluous and (to us) disgusting didacticism: but it might be contended that, without its stimulus, she would have done much less, perhaps nothing. As it was, she lived for more than eighty years (till all but the middle of the nineteenth century) and wrote for more than sixty. Her work is thus very bulky: but it may be considered, for our present purpose, in three groups—her short stories written mainly but not wholly for children; her regular novels; and her Irish studies. Of these the middle division has been, and no doubt has deserved to be, the least popular: but its principal example, Belinda (1801) (Patronage, a longer and later book, and others are inferior), is considerably better than is usually admitted and, by its early date, deserves special notice here. It preceded Miss Austen's work in publication, and is specially cited by her as a capital example of novel in connection with the work of Miss Burney: and it is evidently founded on study of the latter, of which, indeed, it is the first really worthy continuation. Maria has nothing so good as Fanny's Smiths and Branghtons: but the whole book is far superior to Evelina. The extravagance of the fin-de-siècle society which it represents has probably disguised from not a few readers who do not know the facts, the other fact that it is a real attempt at realist observation of manners: and it has the narrative merit which was Miss Edgeworth's gift of nature. But the hero is patchy and improbable: the heroine, a good and quite possible girl, is not sufficiently "reliefed out"; and the most important figures of the book, Lord and Lady Delacour, almost great successes, are not helped by the peculiar academic-didactic moralising which she had caught from Marmontel.
The following of that ingenious and now too much under-valued writer stood her in better stead in the Moral Tales (1801) (which she deliberately called after his[16]), the Popular Tales of the same kind, and (though Marmontel did not intentionally write for children) the delightful Parent's Assistant (1801) and Frank. In the two first-named divisions, the narrative faculty just mentioned appears admirably, together with another and still greater gift, that of character-painting, and even a grasp of literary and social satire, which might not be anticipated from some of her other books. The French governess (Mlle. Panache) and the satire on romantic young-ladyism (Angelina) are excellent examples of this. As for the pure child's stories, generation after generation of competent criticism, childish and adult, has voted them by acclamation into almost the highest place possible: and the gain-sayers have for the most part been idle paradoxers, ill-conditioned snarlers at things clean and sweet, or fools pure and simple.