It is remarkable that our four best novel writers belong nearly to the same age. We also owe to the same period, (the reign of George II.), the inimitable Hogarth, and some of our best writers of the middle style of comedy. If we were called upon to account for this coincidence, we should wave the consideration of more general causes, (as, that imagination naturally descends with the progress of civilization), and ascribe it at once to the establishment of the Protestant ascendancy, and the succession of the House of Hanover. These great events appear to have given a more popular turn to our literature and genius, as well as to our Government. It was found high time that the people should be represented in books as well as in parliament. They wished to see some account of themselves in what they read, and not to be confined always to the vices, the miseries and frivolities of the great. Our domestic tragedy, and our earliest periodical works, appeared a little before the same period. In despotic countries, human nature is not of sufficient importance to be studied or described. The canaille are objects rather of disgust than curiosity; and there are no middle classes. The works of Racine and Moliere are little else than imitations of the verbiage of the court, before which they were represented; or fanciful caricatures of the manners of the lowest of the people. But in the period of our history in question, a security of person and property, and a freedom of opinion had been established, which made every man feel of some consequence to himself, and appear an object of some curiosity to his neighbours; our manners became more domesticated; there was a general spirit of sturdiness and independence, which made the English character more truly English than perhaps at any other period—that is, more tenacious of its own opinions and purposes. The whole surface of society appeared cut out into square enclosures and sharp angles, which extended to the dresses of the time, their gravel walks, and clipped hedges. Each individual had a certain ground-plot of his own to cultivate his particular humours in, and let them shoot out at pleasure; and a most plentiful crop they have produced accordingly.
The reign of George II. was, in a word, in an eminent degree, the age of hobby-horses. But since that period, things have taken a different turn. His present Majesty, during almost the whole of his reign, has been constantly mounted on a great War-horse; and has fairly driven all competitors out of the field. Instead of minding our own affairs, or laughing at each other, the eyes of all his faithful subjects have been fixed on the career of the Sovereign, and all hearts anxious for the safety of his person and government. Our pens and our swords have been drawn alike in their defence; and the returns of killed and wounded, the manufacture of newspapers and parliamentary speeches, have exceeded all former example. If we have had little of the blessings of peace, we have had enough of the glories and calamities of war. His Majesty has indeed contrived to keep alive the greatest public interest ever known, by his determined manner of riding his hobby for half a century together, with the aristocracy—the democracy—the clergy—the landed and monied interest—and the rabble, in full cry after him! and at the end of his career, most happily and unexpectedly succeeded—amidst empires lost and won—kingdoms overturned and created—and the destruction of an incredible number of lives—in restoring the divine right of Kings,—and thus preventing any further abuse of the example which seated his family on the throne!
It is not to be wondered, if, amidst the tumult of events crowded into this period, our literature has partaken of the disorder of the time; if our prose has run mad, and our poetry grown childish. Among those few persons who ‘have kept the even tenor of their way,’ the author of Evelina, Cecilia, and Camilla, holds a distinguished place. Mrs. Radcliffe’s ‘enchantments drear’ and mouldering castles, derived a part of their interest, we suppose, from the supposed tottering state of all old structures at the time; and Mrs. Inchbald’s ‘Nature and Art’ would not have had the same popularity, but that it fell in (in its two main characters) with the prevailing prejudice of the moment, that judges and bishops were not pure abstractions of justice and piety. Miss Edgeworth’s tales, again, are a kind of essence of common sense, which seemed to be called for by the prevailing epidemics of audacious paradox and insane philosophy. The author of the present novel is, however, quite of the old school, a mere common observer of manners,—and also a very woman. It is this last circumstance which forms the peculiarity of her writings, and distinguishes them from those masterpieces which we have before mentioned. She is unquestionably a quick, lively, and accurate observer of persons and things; but she always looks at them with a consciousness of her sex, and in that point of view in which it is the particular business and interest of women to observe them. We thus get a kind of supplement and gloss to our original text, which we could not otherwise have obtained. There is little in her works of passion or character, or even manners, in the most extended sense of the word, as implying the sum-total of our habits and pursuits; her forte is in describing the absurdities and affectations of external behaviour, or the manners of people in company. Her characters, which are all caricatures, are no doubt distinctly marked, and perfectly kept up; but they are somewhat superficial, and exceedingly uniform. Her heroes and heroines, almost all of them, depend on the stock of a single phrase or sentiment; or at least have certain mottoes or devices by which they may always be known. They are such characters as people might be supposed to assume for a night at a masquerade. She presents not the whole length figure, nor even the face, but some prominent feature. In the present novel, for example, a lady appears regularly every ten pages, to get a lesson in music for nothing. She never appears for any other purpose; this is all you know of her; and in this the whole wit and humour of the character consists. Meadows is the same, who has always the same cue of being tired, without any other idea, etc. It has been said of Shakespeare, that you may always assign his speeches to the proper characters:—and you may infallibly do the same thing with Madame D’Arblay’s; for they always say the same thing. The Branghtons are the best. Mr. Smith is an exquisite city portrait.—Evelina is also her best novel, because it is shortest; that is, it has all the liveliness in the sketches of character, and exquisiteness of comic dialogue and repartee, without the tediousness of the story, and endless affectation of the sentiments.
Women, in general, have a quicker perception of any oddity or singularity of character than men, and are more alive to every absurdity which arises from a violation of the rules of society, or a deviation from established custom. This partly arises from the restraints on their own behaviour, which turn their attention constantly on the subject, and partly from other causes. The surface of their minds, like that of their bodies, seems of a finer texture than ours; more soft, and susceptible of immediate impression. They have less muscular power,—less power of continued voluntary attention,—of reason—passion and imagination: But they are more easily impressed with whatever appeals to their senses or habitual prejudices. The intuitive perception of their minds is less disturbed by any general reasonings on causes or consequences. They learn the idiom of character and manner, as they acquire that of language, by rote merely, without troubling themselves about the principles. Their observation is not the less accurate on that account, as far as it goes; for it has been well said, that ‘there is nothing so true as habit.’
There is little other power in Miss Burney’s novels, than that of immediate observation: her characters, whether of refinement or vulgarity, are equally superficial and confined. The whole is a question of form, whether that form is adhered to, or violated. It is this circumstance which takes away dignity and interest from her story and sentiments, and makes the one so teazing and tedious, and the other so insipid. The difficulties in which she involves her heroines are indeed ‘Female Difficulties;’—they are difficulties created out of nothing. The author appears to have no other idea of refinement than that it is the reverse of vulgarity; but the reverse of vulgarity is fastidiousness and affectation. There is a true, and a false delicacy. Because a vulgar country Miss would answer ‘yes’ to a proposal of marriage in the first page, Mad. d’Arblay makes it a proof of an excess of refinement, and an indispensable point of etiquette in her young ladies, to postpone the answer to the end of five volumes, without the smallest reason for their doing so, and with every reason to the contrary. The reader is led every moment to expect a denouement, and is as constantly disappointed on some trifling pretext. The whole artifice of her fable consists in coming to no conclusion. Her ladies stand so upon the order of their going, that they do not go at all. They will not abate an ace of their punctilio in any circumstances, or on any emergency. They would consider it as quite indecorous to run down stairs though the house were in flames, or to move off the pavement though a scaffolding was falling. She has formed to herself an abstract idea of perfection in common behaviour, which is quite as romantic and impracticable as any other idea of the sort: and the consequence has naturally been, that she makes her heroines commit the greatest improprieties and absurdities in order to avoid the smallest. In contradiction to a maxim in philosophy, they constantly act from the weakest motive, or rather from pure affectation.
Thus L. S.—otherwise Ellis, in the present novel, actually gives herself up to the power of a man who has just offered violence to her person, rather than return to the asylum of a farm-house, at which she has left some friends, because, as she is turning her steps that way, ‘she hears the sounds of rustic festivity and vulgar merriment proceed from it.’ That is, in order that her exquisite sensibility may not be shocked by the behaviour of a number of honest country-people making merry at a dance, this model of female delicacy exposes herself to every species of insult and outrage from a man whom she hates. In like manner, she runs from her honourable lover into the power of a ruffian and an assassin, who claims a right over her person by a forced marriage. The whole tissue of the fable is, in short, more wild and chimerical than any thing in Don Quixote, without having any thing of poetical truth or elevation. Madame D’Arblay has woven a web of difficulties for her heroine, something like the green silken threads in which the shepherdess entangled the steed of Cervantes’s hero, who swore, in his fine enthusiastic way, that he would sooner cut his passage to another world than disturb the least of those beautiful meshes. The Wanderer raises obstacles, lighter than ‘the gossamer that idles in the wanton summer air,’ into insurmountable barriers; and trifles with those that arise out of common sense, reason, and necessity. Her conduct never arises directly out of the circumstances in which she is placed, but out of some factitious and misplaced refinement on them. It is a perpetual game at cross-purposes. There being a plain and strong motive why she should pursue any course of action, is a sufficient reason for her to avoid it; and the perversity of her conduct is in proportion to its levity—as the lightness of the feather baffles the force of the impulse that is given to it, and the slightest breath of air turns it back on the hand from which it is launched. We can hardly consider this as an accurate description of the perfection of the female character!
We are sorry to be compelled to speak so disadvantageously of the work of an excellent and favourite writer; and the more so, as we perceive no decay of talent, but a perversion of it. There is the same admirable spirit in the dialogues, and particularly in the characters of Mrs. Ireton, Sir Jasper Herrington, and Mr. Giles Arbe, as in her former novels. But these do not fill a hundred pages of the work; and there is nothing else good in it. In the story, which here occupies the attention of the reader almost exclusively, Madame D’Arblay never excelled.
SISMONDI’S LITERATURE OF THE SOUTH
Vol. xxv.] [June 1815.
This is another great work from the pen of the celebrated historian of the Italian Republics: though we think it written, on the whole, with less force and spirit than that admirable history. The excellent author has visibly less enthusiasm as a critic than as a politician; and therefore he interests us less in that character, and at the same time inspires us rather with less than greater confidence in the accuracy of his opinions; for there can be no real love of liberty, or admiration of genius, where there is no enthusiasm—and no one who does not love them, will ever submit to the labour of a full and fair investigation of their history and concerns. A cold, calculating indifference in matters of taste, is generally the effect of want of feeling; as affected moderation in politics is (nine times out of ten) a cloak for want of principle. Notwithstanding the very great pleasure we have received from the work before us, we should have been still more gratified, therefore, if the author had himself appeared more delighted with his task, and consequently imparted to it a more decided and original character. In his Republics, he describes events and characters in the history of modern Italy with the genuine feelings of an enlightened reasoner, indignant at the wrongs, the vices, and the degradation of the country of his ancestors: In judging of its literature, he too often borrows French rules and German systems of criticism. His practical taste and speculative principles do not, therefore, always coincide; and, regarding this work on Literature as an appendage to his History, it is impossible not to observe, that he is glad, upon all occasions, to slide into his old and favourite subject; to pass from the professor’s chair into the rostrum; and to connect, in glowing terms, the rise or fall of letters with the political independence or debasement of the states in which they flourished or decayed.