No More Learning

Peacock died when only the last third of
the nineteenth had yet to run. Here are two centuries, or nearly
so, to be covered in one chapter. Moreover, the characteristics of
the various novelists to be noticed do not admit, at least in some
cases, of any obvious classification of a serious and scientific kind.
What has John Buncle to do with Belinda, or St Leon with
Gryll Grange?
It is not necessary to be very careful in order to answer these
questions. In the first place, the remarkable longevity and the
peculiar circumstances of the oldest and the youngest members of
the group render mere chronology singularly deceptive. It appears
to be true that the author of John Buncle was born (though the
exact year is not certain) not more than two or three years after
the revolution of 1688: and it is certain that Peacock died in 1866.
But Amory did not publish (though he may have written them
earlier) his Memoirs of Several Ladies till he was nearly sixty-
five, or John Buncle till he was nearly seventy, while Gryll Grange,
though it appeared only six years before its author's death and has
a wonderful absence of glaring Rip-van-Winkleism, is, in general
conception, identical with its author's work of forty years earlier.
And so we at once reduce the almost two hundred years of the
first calculation to a modest sixty or seventy at most.
But there is a good deal more than this. Not only do the
authors here dealt with represent the work of a manageable and
definite, if immature, stage in the history of the English novel,
but they also, by the very absence of their contemporaries Scott
and Jane Austen, represent a transition, of the highest historical


## p. 286 (#308) ############################################

286 The Growth of the Later Novel [ch.
a
interest, between the great 'quadrilateral of the mid-eighteenth
century novel and the immense development of the kind which Scott
and Jane Austen themselves were to usher in for the nineteenth
century. Some of them, but by no means all, are, in a way, failures.
All, or almost all, represent experiment, sometimes in partly
mistaken kinds, like the terror novel of Mrs Radcliffe and Lewis,
sometimes in ‘sports' of individual and somewhat eccentric talent
or genius, like the humour romances of Peacock. But, except in
the latter case, and even there, perhaps, to some small extent, they
all give evidence that the novel has not yet found its main way or
ways—that it is, if not exactly in the wilderness, scarcely at home
in the promised land. Hardly a single one of our company, with
the possible exception of Maria Edgeworth, can be said to be
purely normal: and even her normality was sorely interfered
with by her father's eccentricities, by circumstances of this and
that kind and, not least, perhaps, by an absence both of critical
supervision and of creative audacity in herself.
Although John Buncle, by name at least, has a certain notoriety;
although it was made the subject, by a great critic, of a criticism
quite as debatable as, and only less debated than, Lamb's on Thomas
Heywood; although it has been several times reprinted and has,
at any rate, pleased some good wits mightily, it appears to be still
very little known. And, as to its more than eccentric author scarcely
any facts seem to be accessible except that he knew, or said he
knew, Swift, that he was an Irishman and that, in his later years,
at any rate, he lived in London. It is customary to call Amory
mad; but, after repeated reading of his chief book and a fair
study of his other work, the present writer has not been able to
discover signs of anything more than the extremest eccentricity.
He was, indeed, compact of 'crazes,' in the milder and more usual
meaning of that word; and he indulged them without stint and
without mercy. A passionate unitarian, or, as he preferred to call
it, a Christian-Deist'; an eager student of several humane subjects,
especially Roman antiquities, and of some sciences, especially those
connected with medicine; by no means a bad critic of literature,
who almost literally anticipates Macaulay in his estimate of Rymer;
devoted to “the ladies,' always in a strictly, though rather oddly,
virtuous way; almost equally devoted to good food and good drink;
a most imaginative describer of, and wanderer in, picturesque
scenery-he composes his books by means of a succession of
‘screeds, devoted helter-skelter to all these subjects, and to a
great many more.


## p. 287 (#309) ############################################

XII]
Amory
287
6
This method, or contempt of method, Amory applies, in his two
books, with the most extravagant faithfulness. In the case of the
earlier, indeed, Memoirs of Several Ladies, it is applied in such
a fashion that all but the most exceptionally equipped readers
had very much better begin with the second, John Buncle itself.
There is here enough of amusing matter, and of positive, though
most eccentric, quality befitting a novel, to induce one to go back to
the Memoirs: it is more than probable that a first introduction to
the Memoirs might effectually prevent the reader from going on to
the rest of the work, or from ever taking up anything else written
by its author. Amory's announced, and, probably, quite serious,
intention was to give biographies of eighteen ladies, as well as of
the beautiful Isyphena and Judith the charming Hebrew, with
'occasional accounts' of others. He has
He has actually devoted a stout
volume of more than five hundred pages almost wholly to one
person, Mrs Marinda Benlow or Bruce, or, rather, to Mrs Marinda
and all the other subjects described or adumbrated above, including
a voyage to the Hebrides, continual raids on the destructive
theology of Athanasius,' a long introduction to ‘Mrs Monkhouse
of Paterdale'[sic] ‘on the banks of the river Glenkroden’ [sic] and
a large postscript of an even more miscellaneous character. The
French phrase about a book 'letting itself be read' is sufficiently
familiar: it is scarcely extravagant to say that these Memoirs
absolutely refuse to submit themselves to reading, except in the
fashion of the most dogged taskwork.
In John Buncle itself, Amory shows himself able to talk, or
write, a little more like a man, if not of this, yet of his own
eccentric, world. The hero becomes less nebulous: in fact, he is,
at least, of the world of Dickens, when he sits down in the highest
state of contentment, and, in fact, of positive carol, to a pound
of steak, a quart of peas, another (or several others) of strong ale
and divers cuts of fine bread. There has to be more and swifter
handling to enable him to get through his allowance of more than
half-a-dozen wives, all ravishingly beautiful; all strictly virtuous and
rigidly Christian-Deist; most of them learned in arts and sciences,
sacred and profane, and capable, sometimes, at least, of painting
at the same time' pictures of Arcadia and of the crucifixion.
They are generally discovered in some wild district of the north of
England, where the hero, after perilous adventures, comes upon
a perfectly civilised mansion, usually on the shore of a lake;
introduces himself; is warmly received by both fathers and
daughters (it is noteworthy that mothers rarely appear); argues on


## p. 288 (#310) ############################################

288
[CH.
The Growth of the Later Novel
points human and divine; marries; soon buries his wife; and
proceeds to console himself, after an interval more or less short, in
circumstances slightly varied in detail but generically identical.
And yet, though it is impossible to give any true description of
it which shall not make it seem preposterous, the book is not a
mere sandwich of dulness and extravagance. There is no doubt
that the quality which recommended it to Hazlitt, and made him
compare it to Rabelais, is his own favourite "gusto. ' One might
almost think that Amory had set himself to oppose, by anticipation,
not merely the school of 'sensibility' which was becoming fashion-
able in his own time, but the developments, nearly a century
later, which produced Jacopo Ortis and Obermann. Buncle has
his sorrows, and, despite his facility of selfconsolation, neither
mood appears to be in the least insincere, still less hypocritical.
But, sorrow is not his business in life, nor, despite his passion
for argument, introspection of any kind. It is his business to
enjoy; and he appears to enjoy everything, the peas and the anti-
quarian enquiries, the theological discussions and the beautiful
young ladies who join in them, the hairbreadth escapes and the
lovely prospects, nay, even the company of a scoundrel with some
character, like Curll. Hazlitt was perfectly right in selecting
the passage describing Buncle's visits with his friends the Dublin
'bloods' (some of them, apparently, greater scoundrels than Curll
himself) to an alehouse on the seashore. This display of mood is
one of the most remarkable things of its kind, and the wonder of
it is not lessened when we remember that it was published, if not
written, by a man of seventy. That there is, practically, nothing-
either real or factitious-of the sense of regret for the past is less
surprising than that the gusto is itself not factitious in the least-
that it is perfectly fresh, spontaneous and, as it were, the utterance
of a fullblooded undergraduate. In none of the four great con-
temporary novelists is there this absolute spontaneity-not even
in Fielding; and Amory ought to have due credit for it.
With the final remark that this development of the eccentric
novel, towards the close of the first great harvest of the novel
itself, is, as a historical fact, worthy of no little attention, we may
pass to another single figure, and single book, also, in a way,
eccentric, but towering far above Amory in genius, and standing
alone ; later than the great novelists of 1740—70; earlier than
the abundant novel-produce of the revolutionary period; exactly
contemporary with no one of much mark in the novel except


## p. 289 (#311) ############################################

X11]
Beckford
289
Miss Burney, and as different from her as the most ingenious
imagination could devise—to Beckford and Vathek.
It cannot be denied that a great part of Beckford's celebrity
is derived from, and has been always maintained by, sources
which appeal to the more vulgar kinds of human interest. His
wealth, which, even at the present day, would be reckoned great, and
which, for his time, was immense and almost incredible; his lavish
and fantastic expenditure of it; his pose as a misanthropic, or, at
least, recluse, voluptuary; his eccentricities of all sorts; his dis-
tinguished connections; and even his long life—were powerful
attractions of this kind to the vulgar. But there is no doubt that
his literary powers were great: and not much doubt that, though
his circumstances, possibly, circumscribed the exercise of them,
they helped, to some extent, to produce the colour and character
of his best work. It is a curious fact, but one attested by not
a few instances, that men of narrow, or only moderately affluent,
circumstances do not deal happily with imaginations of unbounded
luxury. Fonthill and the means which created or supported it
enabled Beckford to enlarge things still further and satisfactorily
for the purposes of Samarah and Istakar.
Had he not written the unique romance which begins in one of
these places and ends in (or below) the other, Beckford would
still have had claims by no means insignificant to a position in
literature, although his other work in the way of fiction' is not great,
his various travels, the bibliography of which is rather complicated,
are of quality high above the average', and his early skit in art
criticism (A History of Extraordinary Painters) is extremely
clever. Nevertheless, for all but anecdotic or very minute literary
history, Beckford is Vathek.
This tale itself is not free from a certain overlay of deliberate
eccentricity. As we read it in English, it is not Beckford's own
work (though finally revised by him), but that of a certain
Samuel Henley, surreptitiously published and translated from the
French, which, Beckford said (if he said it)”, he had written in
1 Modern Novel Writing or the Elegant Enthusiast (1796), a satire not quite 'brought
off'; and Azemia (1797), under the pseudonym •Jenks. '
? The earlier parts appeared first in 1783 as Dreams, Waking Thoughts and
Incidents, and display a rather juvenile coxcombry and jauntiness, no doubt due to the
imitation of Sterne, but blended with much really fanciful writing. He suppressed
most of the copies, and castigated the book severely when he reprinted it, ofty years
later, with Letters from Portugal (1834), which are of very great merit.
3 His interlocutor and reporter, Cyrus Reading, labours under something of the
same doubt as to his security' which attached to Bardolph. But large and trustworthy
additions have recently been made to our knowledge of Beckford and his work by Lewis
d
B. L. I.
CH. XIII,
19


## p. 290 (#312) ############################################

290 The Growth of the Later Novel [CH.
three days and two nights, thereby bringing on severe illness.
Other reports say that he took something like a year over it.
The matter, which will remind some readers of incidents in the
life of Balzac, is of little real importance. And, perhaps, it is not
too 'spoilsport' to observe that three days and two nights means
about sixty-four hours and that Vathek does not extend beyond
about eighty or ninety at most of pages like the present. Any-
body who could write it at all, and had thought the lines of it
out beforehand, could write three or four pages of it in an hour,
have from thirty to forty left for food, sleep and the resting of
his wrist—the strength of which latter would be the chief part of
the wonder.
Whether, however, Vathek had been written in three days, or
three weeks, or three months, or three years, its literary value
would be affected not one jot. It is an Arabian tale of the
familiar kind into which Anthony Hamilton and Voltaire had
infused western sarcasm.
The hero, grandson of Haroun, exagge-
rates the, by no means small, defects of his ancestor's character,
and has very few of his merits, if any. He is what is now called
a megalomaniac in everything: and, after a course of compara-
tively harmless luxury, devotes himself, partly under the influence
of his sorceress mother, Carathis, to the direct service of Eblis.
Crime now follows crime; and, though, in his journey towards the
haunted ruins of Istakar (the site of the purgatory of Solomon and
the inferno of Eblis himself), he conceives an at least human and
natural passion for the beautiful Nouronihar, she is as much
intoxicated by the prospect of supernatural power as he is himself.
They are at last introduced, by a subordinate fiend, to the famous
hall of Eblis, where, after a short interval, they meet with their
due reward—the eternal torture of a burning heart—as they
wander amid riches, splendours, opportunities of knowledge and
all the other treacherous and bootless gifts of hell.
It is hardly possible to praise this conclusion too highly: it is
almost Milton in arabesque, and, though Beckford has given him-
self insufficient space to develop the character of Nouronihar
(Vathek himself, it must be confessed, has very little), there are
hints and outlines which are almost Shakespearean. What
opinion may be formed of the matter which leads up to this con-
clusion will depend almost entirely upon temperament.
in parts, been called, but, to some judgments, never is, dull: it
It has,
Melville, who has, also, at last rescued, from something like oblivion in the Hamilton
archives, the Episodes to be dealt with below.


## p. 291 (#313) ############################################

X11]
Vathek and its Episodes
291
is certainly, in parts, grotesque, extravagant and even nasty.
But Beckford could plead sufficient local colour' for it, and
a contrast, again almost Shakespearean, between the flickering
farce atrocities of the beginning and the sombre magnificence
of the end. Beckford's claims, in fact, rest on the half-score or
even half-dozen pages towards the end: but these pages are hard
to parallel in the later literature of prose fiction.
There are, however, some points not directly touching the
literary merit of Vathek, which can hardly be left quite unhandled
even in the small space available here. It has been said that the
tale was written in French and handed over by its author to
Samuel Henley to translate. The translation, even with Beckford's
own revision, is not impeccable, and sometimes fails strangely
in idiom It is, however, better to read the book in the transla-
tion than in the original, which brings out too forcibly the
resemblance to Hamilton and Voltaire: and eighteenth century
French is not equal to the hall of Eblis. The circumstances of
the actual publication are strange and not entirely compre-
hensible. That Henley, after much shilly-shallying on Beckford's
part, should have ‘forced the card' and published it without
the author's permission, is not very surprising; but why he
gave it out as 'translated from the Arabic' has never been
satisfactorily explained. Beckford, for once reasonably enraged,
published the French as soon as he could; but he did not include
the Episodes which are referred to at the end, and which are
congruous enough in The Arabian Nights fashion. He showed
them, later, to some men of letters, including Rogers; but he never
published them, and it is only recently that they have appeared,
edited in French by Lewis Melville, and very well translated into
English by Sir Frank Marzials. It would have been a pity if
they had perished or remained unknown: but they can hardly
be said to add to the greatness of Vathek, though they are
not unworthy of their intended shrine. The first is a sort of
doublet of the main story, a weaker Vathek, prince Alasi, being
here actually made worse by a more malignant Nouronihar, princess
Firouzkab. The heroine of the second is a peri of some charm,
but her husband, Barkiarokh, is a repulsive and uninteresting
1 The strangest of these errors is one which the present writer has never seen
noticed. After the malodorous and murderous sacrifice to Eblis, when Vathek and his
mother carouse, the French has the very ordinary phrase that Carathis faisait raison à
the various toasts of her son. “Do right’or do reason' is actually English in the same
sense of pledging and counterpledging; but Henley writes: failed not to supply a
reason for every bumper,' which, if not quite nonsense, is quite wrong sense.
1
19-2


## p. 292 (#314) ############################################

292 The Growth of the Later Novel [CH.
scoundrel. By far the most striking is the last, the loves of the
brother and sister prince Kalilah and princess Zulkais, which
Beckford has left unfinished: whether from actual change of mind
and taste or from one of his innumerable caprices and indolences,
it is difficult to say.
The revolutionary novel of Godwin, Holcroft, Mrs Inchbald and
Bage may be said to be the first instance (unless the novel of
sensibility be allowed a position in the same line) of fiction proper
(as distinguished from religious or other allegory) succumbing to
purpose: and there may be some who would say that the inevit-
able evil of the connection showed itself at once. Here, of course,
the French originals are obvious and incontestable. Rousseau in
all the four, Diderot, to no small extent, in Bage, supply, to those
who know them, commentaries or parallel texts, as it were, to be
read with Caleb Williams and A Simple Story, Anna St Ives
and Hermsprong. But the difference, not merely of genius, but of
circumstance and atmosphere, is most remarkable.
Godwin, though he wrote three early novels of which even
biographers have been able to say little or nothing, and which fail
to leave the slightest effect on the most industrious searchers-out
of them, produced nothing of importance in this kind till long after
Holcroft, who, indeed, was a much older man. But Caleb Williams
(1794) is the most famous and St Leon (1799), with all its mis-
planning and even unreadableness, the most original, of the group;
so we may begin with Godwin.
Both the books mentioned are closely connected with Political
Justice, to the account of which, elsewhere! , reference must be
made: their successors Fleetwood (1805), Mandeville (1817) and
Cloudesley (1830), though they can hardly be said to be alien in
temper, have far less distinction, and it is doubtful whether
anyone now living has read them twice. The present writer, some
years ago, found a first reading severe enough exercise to in-
dispose him towards repetition of it, though Fleetwood, perhaps,
is worth reading once. Caleb Williams, on the other hand, has
been repeatedly reprinted and has, undoubtedly, exercised real
fascination on a large number of wellqualified readers. It is,
indeed, usual to praise it; and, in such work (for novels are
meant to please, and, if they please, there is little more to be
said), it is unnecessary and, indeed, idle to affect exception. The
book is certainly full of ingenuity; and the doubles and checks
1 See ante, chap. II.


## p. 293 (#315) ############################################

XII]
Godwin
293
and fresh starts of the criminal Falkland and his half unwilling
servant and detective Caleb display that molelike patience and
consecutiveness which distinguish Godwin's thought throughout
his work. To some tastes, however, not only is the 'nervous
impression' (as Flaubert called it, in a phrase of great critical
value) disagreeable, but there is an additional drawback in the
total inability which they, at least, feel to sympathise with either
master or man. If, at about half way in the length of the actual
book, Falkland could have been made to commit a second murder
on Caleb and be hanged for it, the interest would, to these tastes,
have been considerably improved. Still, Caleb Williams has,
generally, been found exciting. St Leon, though some have thought
it 'terrible,' has more often incurred the charge of dullness. It is
dull, and, yet, strangely enough, one feels, as, at least in the cases
above referred to, one does not feel in respect of Caleb Williams,
that it just misses being a masterpiece. It represents that curious
element of occultism' which mixed itself largely with the revolu-
tionary temper, and is associated for all time in literature with the
names of Cagliostro and Mesmer. It contains the best examples
of Godwin's very considerable, if rather artificial, power of ornate
writing. The character of the heroine or part-heroine Marguerite
(who has always been supposed to be intended for a study of
the author's famous wife Mary Wollstonecraft), if, again, a little
conventional, is, really, sympathetic. Had the thing been more
completely brought off, one might even have pardoned, though it
would have been hardly possible not to notice, the astonishing
anachronisms, not merely of actual fact, but of style and diction,
which distinguish almost the whole group dealt with in this
chapter, and which were only done away with by Scott in the
historical or quasi-historical novel. And, it is of great importance,
especially in a historical survey, to remember that, when the problem
of the authorship of the Waverley Novels presented itself, persons
of very high competence did not dismiss as preposterous the notion
that Godwin might be the Great Unknown. ' In fact, he had, as
these two books show, and as others do not wholly disprove, not
a few of the characteristics of a novelist, and of a great one. He
could make a plot; he could imagine character; and he could
write. What deprived him of the position he might have reached was
the constant presence of purpose, the constant absence of humour
and the frequent lack, almost more fatal still, of anything like
passion. The coldbloodedness of Godwin and his lack of humour
were, to some extent, sources of power to him in writings like


## p. 294 (#316) ############################################

294
The Growth of the Later Novel (CH.
Political Justice; they destroyed all hope of anything but
abnormal success in novel-writing.
His friend and senior, Holcroft", possessed both humour and
passion, as his plays and his possibly 'doctored' Autobiography
show; nor is humour absent from his first novel Alwyn (1780),
which, however, does not really belong to the class we are
discussing, but is a lively semi-picaresque working up of the
author's odd, youthful experiences on the stage and elsewhere.
The much later Anna St Ives (1792) and Hugh Trevor (1794)
are similar in general temper to Caleb Williams and, indeed, to
Political Justice itself, of which some would have Holcroft to
have been the real inspirer. Unfortunately, the interest, which, as
was said above, must be allowed to Godwin's chief novel has never
it is believed, been discovered by any recent reader in these two
long and dull vindications, by means of fiction, of the liberty, equality
and fraternity claptrap; though, at the time, they undoubtedly
interested and affected minds in a state of exaltation such as
Coleridge's and Southey's. Holcroft's very considerable dramatic
faculty, and his varied experience of life, still enable him, especially
in Anna St Ives, to intersperse some scenes of a rather livelier
character than the rest; but it is very questionable whether it
is worth anyone's while to seek them out in a desert of dreary
declamation and propagandist puppet-mongering.
Mrs Inchbald, like Holcroft, was an intimate friend of Godwin;
indeed, she was one of those rather numerous persons whom that
most marriage-seeking of misogamists wished to marry before
he fell into the clutches of Mrs Clairmont. Pretty, clever, an
accomplished actress, an industrious woman of letters, with an
unblemished character in very queer society, but, very decidedly,
a flirt—there was, perhaps, none of these rather heterogeneous
qualities or accidents which, taken in connection with the others,
was not useful to her as a novelist; and by her novels she has lived.
A Simple Story has always been more or less popular: and the
curiously 'modern' novel Nature and Art, in which a judge
sentences to death a woman whom he has formerly seduced, from
time to time receives attention. In both, her dramatic experience
for she was playwright as well as actress-enabled her to hit upon
strong situations and not contemptibly constructed character; while
her purely literary gift enabled her to clothe them in good
1 See ante, chap. XII.
2 See ante, chap. XII.
1
1


## p. 295 (#317) ############################################

XIII]
Bage
295
form. But the criticism passed on her--that prevalent ideas on
education and social convention spoil the work of a real artist-
is true, except that a real artist would not have allowed the
spoiling. Mrs Inchbald stands apart from Godwin and Holcroft, on
the one side, and from Bage, on the other, in the fact that, as some,
though not many, other people have done, she combined sincere
religious belief (she was a lifelong Roman catholic) with revo-
lutionary political notions; and this saved her, in books as in life,
from some blemishes which appear in others of the group. But the
demon of extra-literary purpose left the marks of his claws on her.
Robert Bage, the last of this quartette, is differentiated from
them by the fact that he is not unfrequently amusing, while the
others seldom succeed in causing amusement. Sir Walter Scott
has been sometimes found fault with, first, because he included some
of Bage’s books in the ‘Ballantyne novels,' and, secondly, because
he did not include what he himself, certainly with some incon-
sistency, allowed to be the best (which was also the last), Herm-
sprong or Man as he is not (1796). He also omitted the earlier
Man as he is (1792) and The fair Syrian (1787) but gave the
three others, Mount Henneth (1781), Barham Downs (1784) and
James Wallace (1788). There is, perhaps, some ground for
approving his practice at the expense of his precept. Bage, a
quaker who became a freethinker, was an active man of business,
and did not take to novel-writing till he was advanced in life. As
was said above, though there is much of Rousseau in him, there is
almost more of Diderot, and even a good deal of Voltaire; and,
it was from the latter two of the trio that he derived the free speech
as well as free thinking for which even a critic and editor so wisely
and honestly free from squeamishness as Scott had to apologise.
As the titles of his two last novels show, and as the dates of
them may explain, they are the most deeply imbued with purpose.
Hermsprong himself, in fact--and one cannot but think must have
been perceived to be by his author's shrewdness—is something
very like a caricature. He is 'the natural man'—or, rather, the
extremely unnatural one-who, somehow, sheds all tradition in
religion, politics and morals; and who, as we may put it, in a
combination of vernacularities, 'comes all right out of his own head. '
He is, also, very dull. Man as he is possesses rather more liveliness;
but The fair Syrian (of which even the British museum seems
to possess only a French translation) is duller than Hermsprong.
James Wallace admits a good deal of sentimentality; but
6


## p. 296 (#318) ############################################

296 The Growth of the Later Novel
[CH.
Mount Henneth and Barham Downs, though they have much
which suggests the French substantive fatrasie and the French
adjective saugrenu—though it is also quite clear, now and then, that
Bage is simply following his great English predecessors, especially
Fielding and Sterne-have, like Man as he is, and, perhaps, in
greater measure, a sort of unrefined liveliness, which carries
them off, and which Scott, who was almost equally as good a
judge of his kind of wares as a producer of them, no doubt
recognised. Bage, in fact, when he leaves revolutionary politics
and ethics on one side, and indulges what Scott did not scruple to
call his 'genius,' can give us people who are more of this world
than the folk of almost any of his contemporaries in novel-writing,
except Fanny Burney earlier, and Maria Edgeworth later. His
breeding, his circumstances and, perhaps, his temper, were not
such as to enable him to know quite what to do with these live
personages—but they are there.
To say that Maria Edgeworth herself holds really an outlying
position in the group of revolutionary novelists may seem absurd
to some readers; but there are others who will take the statement
as a mere matter of course. In both temper and temperament, no
one could have less of the revolutionary spirit; but the influence
of the time, and, still more, that of her father, coloured the whole
of her earlier and middle work. There is no doubt that Richard
Edgeworth—who was a sort of John Buncle revived in the
flesh and with the manners of a modern gentleman-affected his
daughter's work very much for the worse, by the admixture of
purpose and preachment which he either induced her to make or
(in some cases, pretty certainly) intruded on his own account. But
it is possible that, without this influence, she would have written
less or not at all.
The influence was itself derived from the earlier and less
aggressive-or, at least, less anarchic—side of the French philosophe
movement-ethical, economic, humanitarian, rather than politically
or religiously revolutionary. Marmontel (not only or mainly in the
actual title Moral Tales) was, perhaps, the most powerful single
influence with the Edgeworths; there is practically nothing of
Voltaire or Diderot, and not much of Rousseau, except on the
educational side. If, as was admitted above, this element may
have had a certain stimulating effect, it certainly affected the
products of that stimulation injuriously. But, fortunately, Miss
Edgeworth's native genius (we need not be afraid to use the word
-


## p. 297 (#319) ############################################

XII]
Maria Edgeworth 297
in regard to her, though Scott may have been too liberal in applying
it to Bage) did not allow itself to be wholly suppressed either by
her French models or by her father's interference. It found its
way in three different directions, producing, in all, work which
wants but a little, if, in some instances, it wants even that, to be
of the very first class.
To mention these in what may be called hierarchical order, we
ought, probably, to take first the attempts in what may be called
the regular novel, ranging from Belinda in 1801 to Helen in 1834.
This division, except when it allies itself with the next, has been
the least popular and enduring part of her work; but, at least in
Belinda, it deserves a much higher reputation than it has usually
enjoyed. In fact, Belinda itself, though it does want the pro-
verbial that ! ', wants only that to be a great novel. The picture
of the half-decadent, half-unfledged, society of the meeting of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is, at times, extremely vivid,
and curiously perennial. In the twentieth, at least, one has not to
look far before detecting, with the most superficial changes, Lady
Delacour and Mrs Lutwidge, and even Harriot Freke. The men
are not so good. Clarence Harvey, the hero, is a possible, but not
an actual, success, and the spendthrift Creole is mere stuff of
melodrama ; while the good people (in a less agreeable sense than
the roly-poly pudding in The Book of Snobs) are really too good. '
This does not apply to Belinda herself, who is a natural girl
enough ; but, in her, also, there is the little wanting which means
much. Belinda, let it be repeated, is not a great novel; but, an
acute and expert reviewer might have detected in its author some-
thing not unlike a great novelist, at a time when there was nothing
in fiction save the various extravagances criticised in other parts
of this chapter.
The second group of Maria Edgeworth’s novels with which, as has
been said, the first, as in The Absentee, to some extent, coalesces, has
had better luck, and, perhaps, deserves it. This consists of the Irish
stories from which Sir Walter Scott professed to have derived at
least part of the suggestion of his own national kind; these began
early in 1800, with the striking, but rather too typical and chronicle-
fashioned, Castle Rackrent; and which, later, produced its master-
pieces in the already mentioned Absentee (1809) and in Ormond
(1817). There is not any room here for particularising the merits
of these most agreeable and still fairly wellknown books ; but,
from the historical point of view, there is one thing about them
which deserves much study and which was probably what Scott


## p. 298 (#320) ############################################

298 The Growth of the Later Novel [CH.
honoured. The utilisation of national or pseudo-national or pro-
vincial peculiarities as an attraction in fictitious treatment of
life had originated with the drama, though we find traces of it in
that rich seed-heap, the French fabliau. Now, the drama almost
always exaggerates ; it may drop the actual cothurnus and mask, but
it always demonstrates their reason for existence. When Smollett
borrowed the device for the novel, he kept its failing, and so did
others; Miss Edgeworth did not. In the first division of her work,
and, even, in the third, to which we are coming, she may, sometimes,
especially in her dialogue, miss that absolute verisimilitude and
nature which the critical genius of Dryden had first detected in
the creative genius of Chaucer and Shakespeare. In her dealings
with Irish scenes and persons, she never misses it. She cannot
touch her ancestral soil (it was not exactly her native, and one might
draw fanciful consequences from the relation) without at once
acquiring that strange creative or mimetic strength which produces
in the reader of fiction-poetic, dramatic or prosaic alike a sudden,
but quiet, undoubting conviction that these things and persons were
80 and not otherwise.
Still, there are some who, whether in gratitude for benefits
bestowed upon their first childhood or because of the approach of
their second, regard the third division of Maria Edgeworth's work
not merely with most affection but with most positive and critical
admiration. The supremest 'grace of congruity' which has been
granted to the Irish books and passages must, indeed, again be
denied to this third group, at least as universally present. No
schoolboys, and certainly no Eton schoolboys, ever talked like the
personages of Eton Montem ; and the personal crotchets of her
father and the general crotchets of his school too frequently
appear. One is sometimes reminded of the bad, though oftener of
the good, side of Edgeworth's friend Day in dealing with similar
subjects. But, the fact remains that, in The Parent's Assistant
(1796-1801) and Early Lessons (1801), in Moral Tales (1801)
and Popular Tales (1804), Frank (1822) and Harry and Lucy
(1825), real children, save for a few touches in Shakespeare and
still fewer elsewhere, first appear—not the little misses' and 'little
masters' of her own earlier times, but children, authentic, inde-
pendent of fashion and alive. It is not in the least necessary to
be a child-worshipper in order to see this: it is only necessary to
be, what, perhaps, is not so common, a person who has eyes.
Rosamund, whose charm may, possibly, be enhanced by the contrast
of her very detestable mamma; Frederick, in The Mimic; Frank


## p. 299 (#321) ############################################

3.
XII]
The Novel of Terror 299
himself, in not a few of his appearances, both earlier and later, not to
mention many others, are examples of that strange power of fiction in
reconciling, and more than reconciling, us to what might be tedious
in fact. You might, in real life, after a short time, at any rate,
wish that their nurses would fetch them on paper, they are a joy
for ever. While, as for strict narrative faculty, the lady who could
write both Simple Susan and L'Amie Inconnue, with the unmawkish
simplicity of the first and the unmannerised satire of the second,
had it as it has been possessed by very few indeed of her class.
od
-
M
ਮਾਪਤ
TER
caini
16
Many people know that Jane Austen, in that spirited defence
of the novelist's house which appears in Northanger Abbey, showed
her grace as well as her wit by a special commendation of Belinda;
but, even those who have forgotten this are likely to remember
that the greater art of the same book turns upon satire of a
certain department of novel-writing itself to which Miss Edge-
worth did not contribute. To this department—the terror novel,
novel of mystery, novel of suspense, or whatever title it may
most willingly bear—we must now come. With the revolutionary
group', it practically divides the space usually allotted to the novel
itself for the last decade of the eighteenth, and the first of the
nineteenth, century; though there was an immense production in
other varieties. Its own courts or precincts were populous, but
.
with a folk, in general, astonishingly feeble. If such a man, or
even such a boy, as Shelley could perpetrate such utter rubbish
as Zastrozzi and St Irvyne, the gutter-scribbler was not likely
to do much better. And, as a matter of fact, all those who have
made exploration of the kind will probably agree that, except
to the pure student, there is hardly a more unprofitable, as
well as undelightful, department of literature than that of the
books which harrowed and fascinated Catherine Morland and
Isabella Thorp and the 'sweet girl' who supplied them with lists of
new performances piping hot and thrillingly horrid? .
It is, however, not without justice that three writers-two of
the first flight of this species, and one of the second-have been
able to obtain a sort of exemption—if though of a rather curious and
precarious character—from the deserved oblivion which has fallen
a
| This group spread its ripples very widely, and affected some of the work of
Charlotte Smith, whose best known book, however, The Old Manor House, despite its
date (1793), is 'terrorist' in neither sense. Nor is the once, and long enormously,
popular Children of the Abbey of Regina Maria Roche (1796).
? It is only of late years that justice has been done to another novel-satire on these
absurd novels, The Heroine of Eaton Standard Barrett (1813).
6
120


## p. 300 (#322) ############################################

300 The Growth of the Later Novel [CH.
on their companions. These are Anne Radcliffe, Matthew Gregory
Lewis and Charles Robert Maturin.
Something like a whole generation had passed since what was
undoubtedly the first example, and, to some extent, the pattern, of
the whole style, The Castle of Otranto, had appeared. Horace
Walpole was still alive; but it is not probable that he regarded
this sudden mob of children or grandchildren with any affection.
Indeed, he had just pronounced Otranto itself to Hannah More as
'fit only for its time’-a judgment which it is not difficult to
interpret without too much allowance for his very peculiar sincerity
in insincerity. At any rate, the new books were very fit for their
time; and, though the German romances which (themselves owing
not a little to Otranto) had come between influenced Lewis, at
least, very strongly, it is not certain that they were needed to
produce Mrs Radcliffe. Much stronger influence on her has been
assigned, and some must certainly be allowed, to Clara Reeve', the
direct follower (again not to his delight) of Walpole, whose Champion
of Virtue (better known by its later title The Old English Baron)
appeared. in 1777: and, though a rather feeble thing, has held its
ground in recent reprints better than either Otranto or Udolpho.
Clara Reeve's really best work, though one never likely to have
been, or to be, popular, is The Progress of Romance, a curious,
stiffly oldfashioned, but by no means ill-informed or imbecile,
defence of her art (1785). She also, in her Charoba, anticipated,
though she did not originate, and it is not sure whether she directly
suggested, the story of Landor's Gebir.
On Mrs Radcliffe herself, something of the general revolutionary
fermentation, no doubt, worked; yet, there was much else not,
perhaps, entirely unconnected with that fermentation, but not
directly due to it, though arising out of the taste for the picturesque,
for romantic adventure, for something foreign, unfamiliar, new, as
well as to the blind search and striving for the historical novel.
Her own influence was extraordinary: for it was more or less
directly exerted on two writers who exercised a most potent
influence, not merely on the English, but on the European, litera-
ture or world in the early part of the next century. Not a few
other writers in other kinds of novel or book have had bevies of
Catherines and Isabellas contending for the next volume' at
circulating library doors. It has not happened to any other to
give a novelist like Scott something of his method, and a poet
like Byron nearly the whole of his single hero.
1 See ante, vol. x, chap. III.


## p. 301 (#323) ############################################

XII]
Mrs Radcliffe
301
>
Of the novels themselves, as actual works of art, or as actual
procurers of pleasure, it is not easy to speak so decisively. Except
in the first, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789), where the
author had hardly found her method, and in the posthumous
Gaston de Blondeville (1826), the general scheme is remarkably
and, to some tastes, tediously uniform-repeating over and over
again the trials and persecutions of a heroine who, at last, wins
through them. Of the processes by which she herself, at last,
achieved something beyond the stock personages who, as Scott
says,
had wept or stormed through the chapters of romance, without much altera-
tion in their family habits and characters, for a quarter of a century before
her time,
Sir Walter's own study of her gives, perhaps, the best criticism
existing or likely to exist. His title for the motive of her more
accomplished books-suspense shows the expert. But actual
enjoyment and a sense of obligation, not merely for that but for
help in craftsmanship, made him, perhaps, a little too favourable.
It is difficult to conceive anything more childish than her first
novel, which carries out the most conventional of thin plots by the
aid of characters who have not any character at all, an almost
entire absence of dialogue, stock descriptions, stilted and absurd
language and an exaggeration of the hopeless deformation and
confusion of local colour and historical verisimilitude which dis-
tinguishes the age.
A Sicilian Romance (1790) is a very little better, but not much ;
it approaches nearer to the main theme of the persecuted heroine,
the main scene of wild landscape, house or castles honeycombed
with dungeons, broken stairs and secret passages, and the main
method of ingenious, intricate, at first alarming, but, so far as any
total result goes, almost wholly futile, incident. In the three
1 This book, never united with her other novel-work, and very little known, is a
curious instance of the danger of changing styles. Although published ten years after
Waverley, it seems to have been written more than ten years before it. The author
shows all the faults of the historical novel before Scott, and none of her own merits,
Its hopelessness may be judged from one speech of one character, an ecclesiastic of the
time of Henry III. 'I only doubt of his guilt, and that carries me no further than to
relinquishment of the prosecution'! At the same time, with Gaston de Blondeville
appeared a considerable body of Poenis and Letters. Some of these last, describing
travel, are good and connect themselves with the descriptive parts of the novels. Some
of the shorter and more descriptive poems, such as The River Dove, The Hazel Tree and
so forth are, also, mildly tolerable; but the verse romance, St Albans Abbey, between
three and four hundred pages long, is quite insignificant in quality and insufferably
tedious in quantity.


## p. 302 (#324) ############################################

302
[
The Growth of the Later Novel (ch.
central books The Romance of the Forest (1791), The Mysteries of
Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797), these motives, methods, or
machineries are fully developed ; and, among Mrs Radcliffe's
admirers, each has its partisans. The first is the freshest, and its
heroine Adeline, perhaps, is more attractive than her successors,
Emily and Ellena. The far-renowned Mysteries supply the fullest,
the most popular and, perhaps, the most thoroughly characteristic
example of the style. The Italian is the most varied, the least
mechanical and, in the personage of the villain Schedoni (whose
almost legitimate descendant the ordinary Byronic hero undoubtedly
is), has, by far, the most important and, almost, powerful character-
a character not, perhaps, wholly impossible in itself, and, even if
so, made not wholly improbable by the presentation in the book.
In fact, one may go so far as to say that, for anyone who has
'purged considerate vision' enough to behold Schedoni, unaffected
by the long vista of his deplorable successors, there is power in
him ; while, in all the three books, the various new motives above
referred to make a strong combined appeal. In particular, though
Mrs Radcliffe had never visited Italy itself, she knew the Rhine
with its castles ; she knew the more picturesque parts (including
the Lakes) of her own country; and she utilised her knowledge
more than cleverly.
On the other hand, there are two drawbacks (though, perhaps,
one of them may be included in the other) which Scott himself
perceived and admitted, and which will probably always prevent
some, if not most, readers from appreciating Udolpho and its
fellows. These are the extraordinary elaboration on means with
futility oň result already noted, and the explained supernatural,'
which, perhaps, is only a subvariety of that blend. For, this
latter, defence has sometimes been tried from different points
of view; some urging that surely nobody can want such nonsense
as the supernatural to remain unexplained and accepted; others,
that the explanation gives room for, and, indeed, necessitates, no
small possession of craftsmanship, if not of actual artistry, on the
part of the novelist. Neither plea needs much critical examina-
tion. But the fact certainly remains that, to some readers, not,
perhaps, the unfittest, this much ado about nothing process, in the
first instance, means disappointed irritation, and, in after cases, utter
boredom and lack of interest. The further prevalence of the same
much ado about nothing method, even in cases where there is
nothing supernatural, is, perhaps, equally tedious, if less positively
irritating. It has been pointed out that pages on pages, and,


## p. 303 (#325) ############################################

XII]
M. G. Lewis
303
almost, chapters on chapters, of Udolpho are occupied by the
account of Emily wandering, or being led about, the castle for hours
by one of Montoni's ruffians, and being brought back to her room
without anything really dreadful being done to her, even in the
way of threats. Once, her aunt is, with some violence, removed
from her company ; but nobody injures her, locks the door, or
interferes with her in any way. When she is in the hall, a
wounded man is carried past; but, again, nobody even speaks to her.
She wanders about the castle and sees a track of blood (which
is not very remarkable, considering the wounded man) and con-
cludes that her aunt has been murdered. She finds her maid in a
room. And then she goes back to her own, and—very sensibly-
goes to bed.
It is fair to say that, in The Italian, both hero and heroine are
exposed to much more real dangers; and that there are situations
not by any means lacking in strength. It would certainly stand
reprinting better than the others. But it shares with them the draw-
back that there is no real suspense about this so-called 'novel of
suspense. ' Jack is sure to have Jill ; both Jack and Jill are sure
to get out of their troubles; and, though there is not exactly
'much ado about nothing' here, as there almost, or altogether, is
in The Mysteries, there is certainly rather little wool for a very
great cry.
It was one of the numerous clevernesses of Matthew Gregory
Lewis that he saw the incompatibility of a certainly happy ending
for 'a tale of terror. ' It was one result of the defects which pre-
vented his cleverness from reaching genius that he went to the
other extreme and made The Monk (1796), as a whole, a mere mess
and blotch of murder, outrage, diablerie and indecency. His
scheme, indeed, was much less original than Mrs Radcliffe's ; for
he had been in Germany and there is no doubt that he had
taken for his model not merely the poems of Bürger and the
other early romantics but the drama and fiction of Schiller
and of Heinse, in The Robbers (1781) and in Ardinghello (1785).
The consequence was that The Monk did not please people
even so little squeamish as Byron, and has never, except in a
quasi-surreptitious manner, been reprinted in its original form.
It is 'messy' enough, even in its author's revised version, being
badly constructed and extravagant in every sense. It has, how-
ever, some scenes of power. The temptress Matilda de Villanegas
(better taken as an actual woman, fiend-inspired, than as a


## p. 304 (#326) ############################################

304 The Growth of the Later Novel [CH.
mere succubus) ranks next to Schedoni, in this division, as
a character; and the final destruction and damnation of the
villainous hero is not quite so ludicrous as it very easily might
have been. Lewis, before his early death, wrote (or, rather, trans-
lated) other novels ; but none of them attained, or, in the very
slightest degree, deserved, the vogue of The Monk, or of his plays
and verses. The most famous of the latter, Alonzo the Brave and
the Fair Imogene, occurs in The Monk itself. Mrs Radcliffe had
set the example of inserting verse, sometimes not very bad verse,
but she never shows the somewhat loose, but distinctly noteworthy,
novel and even influential command of rapid rhythm which was
another of Lewis's oddly flawed, but by no means ordinary, gifts.
a
The kind itself, as has been said, flourished like a weed in the
last decade of the eighteenth century, and the first two or three
of the nineteenth-in fact, examples of it, such as Leitch Ritchie's
Schinderhannes, were written in the forties, and it may be said to
have left strong traces on the early, if not, also, on the later, work
of Bulwer. But, in and of itself, it never produced another writer
of importance, with one exception. That exception, however,
Charles Robert Maturin, for the sake of at least one thing that he
did, and perhaps, of a certain quality or power diffused through his
other work, deserves to rank far above Lewis, and not a little above
Mrs Radcliffe. In technical originality, indeed, he must give way,
certainly to her, and, in a fashion, also, to Lewis ; while he pro-
bably owes something to Beckford, to whose master-scene, at the
close of Vathek, even his best things are very inferior. He
borrowed his 'shudder' from the two former ; but he made it
much more real and much less commonplace. Probably because
he was in orders, he produced his first books under the pseudonym
Murphy,' and the title of the first, The Fatal Vengeance or The
Family of Montorio (1807), may be said to be rather engaging
in the frankness with which it proclaims its extraction and its
character. In his next two, however (and the fact is important
in connection with Maria Edgeworth's work), he came nearer home,
and wrote The Wild Irish Boy (1808) and The Milesian Chief
(1811). Then, he diverged to tragedy and produced the rather
wellknown play Bertram, which was introduced (1816) to Drury
lane by Scott and Byron, was very successful and was criticised
with more justice than generosity by Coleridge in Biographia
Literaria. Women followed, in 1818; and then, in 1820, he pro-
duced his masterpiece Melmoth the Wanderer.
6


## p. 305 (#327) ############################################

XII]
Maturin
The Porters
305
a
Nothing is easier than to 'cut up' Melmoth; it has been done
quite recently, since the publication of a modern edition, with the
same 'facetious and rejoicing ignorance' which Lockhart pilloried
long ago, as exhibited towards Maturin's own jealous critic
Coleridge. A worse constructed book hardly exists: for it is a
perfect tangle of stories within stories. It has pathos, which,
not unfrequently, descends to the sensiblerie of the imitators
of Rousseau ; and terror, which not unfrequently grovels to the
melodrama caricature of Lewis himself generally, and his imitators
almost always. But its central theme-the old bargain with
Satan, refreshed and individualised by the notion of that bargain
being transferable—is more than promising, and there are numerous
passages, both in the terrible and in the pathetic varieties, which
entirely escape just sarcasm. Above all, there is an idiosyncrasy
about the book which has attracted good wits both at home and
abroadBalzac is one famous instance and Dante Rossetti another
-and which it is rather difficult to understand how any good wit,
if possessed of the power of critical winnowing, can miss. Melmoth
himself, with his famous 'piercing eyes,' touches the right nerve
not seldom, if he misses it sometimes ; and the Indian-Spanish
girl Isidora or Immalee is equally successful in her different way.
Maturin followed Bertram with two failures in play form, and
Melmoth with a doubtfully successful novel The Albigenses, in
1824, the year of his death. But he stands or falls by The Wanderer,
with the piercing eyes, and those who can comprehend the litera-
ture of power will say that, with whatever slips and staggering, he
stands.
The allowance which ought to be made for Maturin can hardly
be extended to two sisters Jane and Anna Maria Porter, who, in
their day, enjoyed something like fame, and who seem to have
thought themselves unjustly supplanted in still greater fame by
their early friend Scott. Anna Maria Porter began at a pre-
posterous age (she was barely thirteen) to write fiction, and
continued to do so till her death in 1832, producing, in all, some
two or three score volumes. But, even wellinformed students
of literature would be puzzled to name one of them, unless they
had chanced to be brought in contact with it, and neither such
chance contact nor deliberate research will discover much in any
of her books but amiable incompetence. On the other hand, the
elder sister Jane, who postponed her début till she had reached an
age double that at which her sister had begun to write, produced,
20
3. L. II.
CH. XIII.


## p. 306 (#328) ############################################

306 The Growth of the Later Novel [Ch.
in Thaddeus of Warsaw (1803) and The Scottish Chiefs (1810), two
books of which every one has heard, and which, perhaps, even now,
not a very few have read. They are, however, almost utter, though
virtuous and wellintentioned, rubbish; and their popularity, indeed,
their existence, can only be accounted for by the irresistible nisus
towards, and appetite for, romantic matter which characterised the
time. A more complete absence of local colour and historical sense
than in Mrs Radcliffe or the three sisters Lee; the tears of the sen-
timental, dashed, to some extent, with the terrors of the other,
school; diction and conversation incredibly stilted and bombastic;
adventure only exciting to the rawest palate; and a general
diffusion of silliness, characterised these almost famous books.
Only to a taste so crude as their own can they give any direct
pleasure now; but, to the student, they may still be of some
interest as an example of the days of ignorance of the historical
novel, and one can excuse them something for having produced
some of the most delightful exercises of Thackeray's schoolboy
pencil.
It would be impossible to find a greater contrast to them
than a somewhat later novel which still belongs, in one respect,
to their class—that of books which lodge their name, at least,
securely in literary history. This is the Anastasius (1819) of
Thomas Hope, a man, like Beckford, of great wealth, varied
taste and experience in art and travel, who established himself
in literature by a single book. Anastasius became at once
popular, and has retained respect, if not popularity, ever since;
yet, some persons, not, perhaps, of very uncritical or uncatholic
taste, have been known to be disappointed when they read it.
It belongs, as a kind of outsider, to the old 'picaresque' class;
though it has little or nothing of the low comedy which that class
originally, and, in fact, generally, affected. The hero is a Greek
of considerable ability and courage, but absolutely untroubled
with conscience, who becomes renegade and goes through various
adventures. The eastern colour which Byron had made popular,
and which Hope could give with less monotony and from a more
varied experience than Byron himself, may have had a good deal to
do with the vogue of the book; but its author's undoubted command
of satirical contemplation of life, of an ornate, if rather too
elaborate, style, of descriptive power and of other good gifts, must
be allowed. Its autobiographical form, though dangerous, is not
fatal; but the book is, somehow, heavy reading. Even its
>


## p. 307 (#329) ############################################

2
x11]
Peacock
307
continual ironic persiflage, which takes up from Beckford the
manner of Anthony Hamilton and Voltaire and hands it on
to Kinglake in very similar material, becomes monotonous,
though it must be owned that a chapter of Anastasius, boiled
down with a whole modern novel, would supply it with ample
seasoning of a kind now much called for. Perhaps, what casts
a greater cold over it, to some tastes, is a defect very common
in novelists, before Scott—the overdose of pure narration, un-
relieved and unspirited by dialogue and dramatic action. Nothing
happens : everything is told, and there is a fatal suggestion of
the rhetorical harangue about it, despite the variety of its scenes
and the number of its (recited) characters. Towards the end of
the book, the author does, indeed, speak of 'getting rid of the
eternal' I 'which haunts' it. But he does this only by interposing
another narrator, not by adopting the livelier mixture of action
and speech. On the whole, there are few more useful exercises of
speculative criticism than to imagine the story of Anastasius as it
would have been told by Dumas.
26
.
6
uch
Martin
called
We began with an eccentric and we must end with one,
though of a very different class from Amory. After a not extensive,
but, also, not inconsiderable, popularity during the period of his
earlier production, the silence which Thomas Love Peacock im-
posed upon himself for thirty years, and the immense development
of the novel during those same thirty, rather put him out of sight.
But, first, the appearance of Gryll Grange, and then his death,
followed, not long after, by a nearly complete edition of his works,
brought him back; and, both before and after that publication, it
became rather the fashion with critics to discover' Peacock,
while a certain number, long before, either by their own good
fortune or their fathers' wisdom, had been instructed in him.
But he never was, is not even now, when fresh discoveries of
his work have been made, and probably never will be, popular;
and there have sometimes been almost violent recalcitrances
against him, such as that made by Mrs Oliphant in her book on
English literature. Nor, in more favourable estimates, has it
sometimes been difficult to discern a sort of hesitation-a not
knowing what to make of it. ' The compound of satire and romance
in him has puzzled many; just as it has in Heine and in Thackeray.
There is also, it would seem, an additional difficulty in the fact
that, though he wrote, besides the admirable songs in his fiction,
and one or two estimable longer poems, criticism and miscellanea
20-2


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308 The Growth of the Later Novel [Ch.
in prose, dramas long unpublished and not of much value and
some other things, the bulk of his work, and almost the whole of
his possible means of popular appeal, consists of a very peculiar
kind (or, rather, two kinds) of novel : one variety of which is re-
peated twice, and the other five times, in different material,
certainly, but (in the more numerous class, especially) on an
almost identical scheme and scale.
This more momentous and, perhaps, generally thought more
characteristic division contains three novels, Headlong Hall (1816),
Melincourt (1817) and Nightmare Abbey (1818), published close
together, a fourth, Crotchet Castle, which appeared a good deal
later (1831), and a fifth, already mentioned, between which and its
immediate predecessor there was a gap of a generation, in more than
the conventional sense of the word. Every one of these has the
same skeleton plot—the assembling of a party in a country house,
with more or less adventure, much more than less conviviality, no
actual murders, but a liberal final allowance of marriages. Some
differentia is, of course, provided-in Headlong Hall, with more
than the contrasted presentation of caricatured types-optimist,
pessimist, happy-mean man, professional man of letters and so
forth, carried out with lively conversation, burlesque incident and
a large interspersion of delightful songs, mainly convivial in
character, but contenting itself with next to no plot. The next
two are rather more substantial; the long and unequal, but, in
parts, admirable, Melincourt containing a good deal of political and
personal satire on rotten boroughs, the Lake poets, political economy,
perfectibilism and what not, with, for central figure, an amiable
orang-outang, whom a young philosopher of wealth and position has
taught to do everything but speak, and for whom he has bought a
baronetcy and a rotten borough. Nightmare Abbey, one of the
most amusing of all, turns on the unfortunate difficulty which a
young man (who, in some ways, is very like Shelley) has in fixing
his affections; and contains portraits, much more remote from the
original, of Byron and Coleridge. Crotchet Castle takes up the
scheme with much less exaggeration and burlesque, with little or
no personal satire, with a marked change of political and social
view, in the direction, if not exactly of conservatism, of some-
thing not unlike it, and with still more remarkable advance in
personal characterisation ; while Gryll Grange (1860) continues
this still further, with adaptation to the changed circumstances of
its own time.
The other two novels, Maid Marian (1822) and The Misfortunes


## p. 309 (#331) ############################################

X11]
Peacock
309
of Elphin (1829), though they could hardly have been written by
any other author, are not merely on a quite different plan, but in
what may look like, though it is not, a quite different vein.
Both, as, indeed, the titles show, are actually romantic in subject;
and, though both (and Elphin almost more than anywhere else)
exhibit Peacock's ironic-satirical treatment, it must be a very
dull person who does not see that he is not shooting at the
romance, but under cover of it. Peacock has been called a
Voltairean: and, much in the form and manner of most of his tales
derives, if not from Voltaire, from Voltaire's master,our own country-
man, Anthony Hamilton. He is, even in his later and more mellowed
condition, 'Mr Sarcastic' (the name of one of his characters)
or nothing. His earlier attitude towards Anglican clergy, and
his early personal lampoons on tory politicians and men of letters,
are almost too extravagant to give much amusement to those who
sympathise with them or any offence to those who do not. He
maintained, even to the last, a purely crotchety dislike to Scott.
Few people did more to spread the utterly unjust and unfounded
notion of Southey and Wordsworth (he is, almost of necessity,
rather more lenient to Coleridge) as profligate time-servers, who
feathered their nests at the expense of their consciences. But, for
all this, he was a romantic in his own despite, and his prose very
commonly, his verse still oftener, betrays him.
Nor can the greatest admirer of the literature, the political
views, or the ecclesiastical and academic institutions which—up to
his last work, at any rate, though not there—Peacock satirises,
resist, if he himself possesses any catholic love of letters and the
genuine sense of humour, the heartiest and most unfailing enjoy-
ment of Peacock's work. Except in Melincourt, where there are
some arid passages, the whole range of his novels yields nothing
,
but refreshment. The plot so frankly abdicates, and leaves its
place to be taken by amusing, if not very closely connected, in-
cident, that nobody but a pedant can feel the want of it; the
characters, if not deeply drawn, are sketched with a verve not
easily to be outdone ; the descriptions are always sufficient and
sometimes very much more; and the dialogue, in its own way, is
consummate. The present chapter has been occupied with the
eccentric novel in more than one or two senses of that adjective.
Peacock's kind of eccentricity is certainly one of those which show
the greatest idiosyncrasy, the imitation of which, though some-
times tried by persons of ability, has proved most difficult. But,
in itself, it is likely to retain its faculty of pleasing perhaps as long


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310 The Growth of the Later Novel [CH. XIII
as any kind, though never to any very large number of people.
The first readers of Gryll Grange (even if young enough to be
liable to the disease of thinking the last age obsolete) were
astonished to find an almost octogenarian recluse, who had long
given up writing, not in the least out of date. And the quality or
gift which effected this——the quality which, fifty years later, makes
the hundred year old manners and the hundred year old personages
of Nightmare Abbey more alive than most personages of contem-
porary novels—is never very likely to lose its preserving or its
refreshing power.


## p. 311 (#333) ############################################

CHAPTER XIV
BOOK PRODUCTION AND DISTRIBUTION, 1625–1800
measure.
The middle of the seventeenth century is a drab tract in
the history of English book production. With the accession of
Charles I, the efforts of those in power to secure control over the
printing press were pursued with renewed activity, culminating,
in 1637, in a Star chamber decree which reenacted the celebrated
ordinance of 1586 with additional, and more drastic, provisions.
The many troubles which were gathering round the government
doubtless hindered the effective enforcement of this formidable
On the abolition of the Star chamber, in 1641, the
decree ceased to carry any authority, and, for the moment, printers
were freed from all control.
Now it was that, unhampered by restrictions, the press began
to pour forth political pamphlets of every description-persuasive,
polemical, abusive, scurrilous—of every shade of opinion, royalist
against parliament man, puritan versus churchman, challenges and
answers, newsbooks and gazettes. These, together with sermons
and lectures, were printed and vended in such numbers as well-
nigh made all other books unsaleable? ' It seemed, indeed, as
if all the efforts of the press could not keep pace with the fleeting
pens of ready writers and the feverish eagerness of the public to
devour their productions.
Printers were soon to discover, however, that liberty of the
press was no more to the taste of the Long parliament than it had
been to the hierocracy. As soon as it was able, amid the dis-
tractions of more pressing difficulties, parliament turned its atten-
tion to regulating the press in accordance with its own views.
The issue of various regulations and the punishment of sundry
offenders were followed, on 14 June 1643, by an order for the
regulating of printing3': a brief, business-like document which
aimed at the establishment of a rigorous censorship. In its main
1 See ante, vol. iv, p. 381.
? Milton, Areopagitica.
3 Rptd in Arber's ed. of Areopagitica (1868).


## p. 312 (#334) ############################################

312 Book Production and Distribution
[CH.
provisions it closely resembled the defunct decree of 1637, with
the important difference that the number of printers was not
limited.
It was this reactionary measure which called forth Milton's
Areopagitica, that powerful remonstrance, which, he says, he wrote
in order to deliver the press from the restraints with which it was encumbered;
that the power of determining what was true and what was false, what ought
to be published and what to be suppressed, might no longer be entrusted to a
few illiterate and illiberal individuals ?
But, notwithstanding Milton's denunciation of the act and his
scornful handling of the office of licenser, parliament could not
afford, even for the sake of liberty, to lay aside this weapon
of self defence. To what extent the censorship was effective is
not very clear. The aim, no doubt, was to suppress publications
inimical to the government; and books which did not trench upon
politics or religion were, probably, but little regarded ; but the
newspaper press was subjected to a rigorous system of licensing?
Under Cromwell's rule, the censorship, reinforced by a further
act in 1649, was more efficiently exercised, but was again relaxed
during the unrest which followed his death.
With the restoration, we come to the final and most autocratic
endeavour at state control of the press. The Licensing act of 1662,
which ‘asserted in the plainest terms the king's plenary prerogative
in the matter of printing,' was virtually a revival of the Star
chamber decree of 1637, with all its restrictive clauses, including
the limitation of the number of master printers to twenty, besides
the two university presses, but allowing an additional press at
York. The secret of the effectiveness of the new act lay in the
steps taken to secure its successful administration. The Stationers'
company, to which had formerly been committed the exercise
of police powers, was now superseded in that function by the
appointment, in 1663, of a surveyor of the imprimery and
printing presses.