And for the accuracy of her picture, the authoress herself lays claim to having paid careful attention to the results of deliberate study. “You may laugh,” she writes to Miss Clavering, “at the idea of its being at all necessary for the writer of a romance to be versed in the history, natural and political, the modes, manners, customs, etc., of the country where its bold and wanton freaks are to be played; but I consider it most essentially so, as nothing disgusts even an ordinary reader more than a discovery of the ignorance of the author, who is pretending to instruct and amuse.”
Meanwhile, the “Highlander” was more or less in fashion, and Susan Ferrier set off her picture by vivid contrasts with the most recherché daughters of Society. An elegant slave of passion longs to fly with her Henry to the desert—“a beautiful place, full of roses and myrtles, and smooth, green turf, and murmuring rivulets, and though very retired, not absolutely out of the world; where one could occasionally see one’s friends, and give déjeuner et fêtes-champêtres.” So the foolish Indiana in Miss Burney’s Camilla considered a “cottage” but “as a bower of eglantine and roses, where she might repose and be adored all day long.”
But a little experience soon teaches her she “did not very well then know what a desert was.” Scotch mists and mountain blasts dispel the fancy picture, and, after a brief period of acute wretchedness, the really heartless victim of a so-called love match becomes the zealous promoter of mercenary connections.
Miss Ferrier then introduces us to the next generation, where any attempt at dogmatism about love becomes hazardous.
“Love is a passion that has been much talked of, often described, and little understood. Cupid has many counterfeits going about the world, who pass very well with those whose minds are capable of passion, but not of love. These Birmingham Cupids have many votaries among boarding-school misses, militia officers, and milliners’ apprentices, who marry upon the mutual faith of blue eyes and scarlet coats; have dirty houses and squalling children, and hate each other most delectably. Then there is another species for more refined souls, which owes its birth to the works of Rousseau, Goethe, Coffin, etc. Its success depends very much upon rocks, woods, and waterfalls; and it generally ends in daggers, pistols, poisons, or Doctors’ Commons.”
It would seem that even the heroine is, like Emily in Udolpho, rather at sea concerning the proper distinction between virtue and taste.
She is “religious—what mind of any excellence is not? but hers is the religion of poetry, of taste, of feeling, of impulse, of any and everything but Christianity.” The worthy youth who loved her “saw much of fine natural feeling, but in vain sought for any guiding principle of duty. Her mind seemed as a lovely, flowery, pathless waste, whose sweets exhaled in vain; all was graceful luxuriance, but all was transient and perishable in its loveliness. No plant of immortal growth grew there, no ‘flowers worthy of Paradise.’”
Inevitably the dear creature is captivated, at first sight, by any good-looking villain: “There might, perhaps, be something of hauteur in his lofty bearing; but it was so qualified by the sportive gaiety of his manners, that it seemed nothing more than that elegant and graceful sense of his own superiority, to which, even without arrogance, he could not be insensible.”
The hero will no doubt require time before he can stand up against so fine a gentleman; but justice requires his ultimate triumph, since, in Miss Ferrier’s judgment, a “good moral” was always essential to fiction.
“I don’t think, like all penny-book manufacturers, that ’tis absolutely necessary that the good boys and girls should be rewarded, and the naughty ones punished. Yet, I think, where there is much tribulation, ’tis fitter it should be the consequence, rather than the cause, of misconduct or frailty. You’ll say that rule is absurd, inasmuch as it is not observed in human life. That I allow; but we know the inflictions of Providence are for wise purposes, therefore our reason willingly submits to them. But, as the only good purpose of a book is to inculcate morality, and convey some lesson of instruction as well as delight, I do not see that what is called a good moral can be dispensed with in a work of fiction.”