CHAPTER I THE NATURE AND BEGINNING OF THE MODERN ENGLISH NOVEL WALPOLE-ANNE RADCLIFFE-LEWIS-MARY AND WILLIAM GODWIN-FRANCES BURNEY-ELIZABETH INCHBALD-MARIA T1 HE novel dominates the literature of the nineteenth century in England more than in any other country. To the English house it is what the Press is to English public life. It is chiefly owing to the Tauchnitz collection that the English novel has become a well-known institution on the Continent also. The superabundance of material makes its classification the most difficult part of every history of literature. A strictly chronological one would obliterate all coherence: a division into different classes of novels would separate the individual authors, and need several chapters, though each is a unit in himself. A middle course will clear the prospect for the reader, and reduce the monstrous chaos to order. A merely approximately perfect list is as superfluous as it is impossible; it must suffice us to enumerate the older writers, who took the most important part in the development of the novel, and the newer ones who have in any way distinguished themselves. In England the novel is above all things a family book: hence its good and inferior qualities. It appeals, unlike the French, more to female than to male readers, and renounces the highest aims and means of art, in order to rivet the attention and interest. In accordance with the wishes of the circle of lady readers, nearly every English novel hinges upon two important questions: "Will he marry her?" and "How many hundred or thousand pounds sterling has he or she per annum?" He generally does marry her at the happy end, and the second question is usually satisfactorily solved before the last chapter. The English novel has one advantage over the German: it is a faithful reflection of real life, without falling into the one-sidedness of the French naturalistic school. The men are Englishmen, seen from a real point of view; the scenes are English homes. By carefully reading English novels, a foreigner can draw a faithful picture of English family life; can the same be said of a German novel? The English novel is distinguished from the French by its moral purity, which permits it to be read with confidence by almost every one, without distinction of age or sex. In England, novel reading has become a harmless pleasure, which is indulged in even on Sunday, though it is so strictly observed. Great passions, serious moral conflicts, bold probings of the very depths of the soul; all these things we seek for in the average English novel, even of the better sort, in vain. This brings the exceptions more prominently into the notice they deserve. Next to these novels, which describe with Dutch fidelity real life in its less exciting aspects, we find a less enjoyable kind: the "Sensation Novel." Only a few authors, the leading ones, have kept themselves free from this: Dickens himself shows strong traces of it: Bulwer and many leading celebrities have made considerable use of it. The novel of adventure, whose oldest representative was Defoe, has never been so thoroughly popular anywhere, or preserved its vital power as it has in England. Stevenson, the greatest narrator of the present day, was above all things a master of the novel of adventure. Female romance-writers have always taken a prominent part, sometimes a leading one, in English fiction. Even before Defoe, a lady, Aphra Behn (see p. 264), had written a very celebrated novel, a mixture of adventure and sentiment. And it is agreed that ladies partly inspired Walter Scott, the greatest of the old novelists, by the tone of their works. It is characteristic of the modern English novel, whose feminine character has become proverbial, that, at its very beginning, it was almost exclusively in the hands of industrious and not untalented women. As the earliest to distinguish himself in this department we must certainly mention a man, HORACE WALPOLE (1717-97), whom we have already noticed at p. 327. His Castle of Otranto (1764), which he himself called "a Gothic tale," contains the whole of the materials of these romantic, medieval ghost stories, which are often met with, for instance, in Mrs. Radcliffe's books; groaning pictures, secret trapdoors, gloomy victims of fate. Both the story and its wording are unspeakably poor; Walpole did not know how to deal with his materials. In contrast with him, ANN (Ward) RADCLIFFE may really be called the founder of the sensational and back-stairs novel. Her three chief works, The Romance of the Forest (1791), The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), and The Italian (1797), have, by a certain skill in their treat ment of the horrible, met with a success not wholly undeserved, and left deep traces in literature. She had the art, unheard of at that time, of exciting and keeping up interest. With her, too, began the triumph of the mysterious over the intellectual, and poetry over prose: in one word, of the romantic. It is easy to laugh at her now, in consequence of the superabundance of low-class backstairs novels; but to Ann Radcliffe a place is due in the front ranks of the English novelists. For that period her sensational style of writing was something new; and it bore fruit in the future. What robs her readers at the present day of its principal charm is that she ends too simply: after taking us through a thick novel and raising our expectations of something horrible, she destroys the effect entirely by a perfectly natural solution of the fearful mysteries. An image, for instance, from which there have gone forth the most terrible sounds, turns out to be a harmless wax figure; traces of blood on subterranean staircases mean nothing at all, so that we ask, "Why this noise?" and feel ashamed of the superfluous horrors. Ann Radcliffe has influenced greater writers than herself by her mysterious and interesting malefactors. The Italian, for instance, was a model for Byron's noble criminals, and Walter Scott confessed that the romantic charm of her inventive and narrative power had inspired him with many brilliant ideas. Scott learned of Mrs. Radcliffe something that was worse; his endless descriptions of landscapes, which she also unfortunately invented. She evolved all this, both landscapes and men, from the depth of her imagination: there is not a realistic line in her novels; but she is worthy of notice in literary history, because of the wonderful effect of her works, extending far beyond the boundaries of English literature. Of her imitators in the Chamber of Horrors of English novels, MATTHEW LEWIS (1773-1819) deserves mention. His novel, The Monk, excited much attention; it was devoured by high and low. This book became a mine of wealth for the writers of murderous and horrible novels, more than even those of Mrs. Radcliffe. The Wandering Jew, the Inquisition, the bleeding spectre of the nun, the devil himself, and what not, all are mixed up in this wild novel. From him and Mrs. Radcliffe Frenchmen like Dumas and Sue, and Germans like Spindler, and the romanticists too have "learned" much. MARY GODWIN (1797-1851), Shelley's second wife since 1816, ventured on a higher flight in the same path. Her spectral story Frankenstein (1814), written on the Lake of Geneva at the age of seventeen, in consequence of a wager with Byron and Shelley, is one of the most astonishing pieces of dismal fancy that ever emanated from such a young writer's pen. It relates how a man, well brought up and well educated, commits the most scandalous crimes. Stevenson, one of the first English novelists of the day, has carried out the idea at greater length in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Her father, WILLIAM GODWIN (1756-1836), better known in his day as a radical writer on politics, is only mentioned now as the founder of the criminal novel by his story Caleb Williams (1794). This story of a man who has committed a murder from other than base motives, and ceaselessly persecutes the only accessory before the fact, or counsellor of his crime, is in itself quite valueless as a work of art, being written in a dull, tasteless style. But it is important as a link in the chain of the psychological criminal novel, and may be looked on as a step towards certain novels of Dickens's (Bleak House, for instance) and Bulwer's (Eugene Aram). But in the way of character and society novels, which in the middle of this century produced such masterly works as Thackeray's and George Eliot's, this early period between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has some rare examples to show, exclusively the work of women. In point of time, the first of these was FRANCES BURNEY (1752-1840), better known by her married name, Madame D'Arblay; she had married a French refugee. Her novel Evelina (1777) which won her fame and a place as one of the court ladies of the Queen, the wife of George III., has remained the pattern of the average English ladies' novel: clear views of Society life, superficial knowledge of men and women, inability to see into the depths beneath, a lively language peculiar to herself, and an inclination to gentle irony. The Diaries of Madame D'Arblay, published after her death, are of lasting value; they are a gossipy but faithful picture of court life, one of the chief authorities for the domestic history of England under George III. ELIZABETH (Simpson) INCHBALD (1753-1821) has gone further than Miss Burney in her novel entitled A Simple Story (1791). It describes the love of a ward for her guardian, a priest, with varying art, but certainly with wondrous simplicity. Want of taste, garrulity (the chief fault of English lady novelists), and witty hits may often be found side by side in this novel. MARIA EDGEWORTH (1765-1849) continued to spin the same thread as Frances Burney in her novels Castle Rackrent (1800) and Belinda (1801). They are written by a lady for ladies, without any high artistic aim, but with a keenness of vision, peculiar to all these lady writers, for what concerns commonplace men and things. For passion we seek in vain in her books. However, she has introduced something new into English novels; she has chosen as a subject country life, as imagined by herself, and has opened up Ireland as ground for the novelist. Her Irish tales directed Scott to the wealth of material which Scotland had in store. But Maria Edgeworth's aim in writing was moral rather than artistic; therefore she must be considered as one of the discoverers of a new branch of English romance, the moral novel. Jane Austen (1775-1817) stands highest among these early novelists. In many respects she anticipates Thackeray and George Eliot. Of her five moderate-sized novels, the most valuable are Pride and Prejudice (1797) and Sense and Sensibility (1811). She seldom left her country home, and has portrayed the life of the country gentry and higher middle classes of the provinces very graphically. She has reached the highest point to which anyone can attain without warmth of heart and extended views. There is a fulness of successful details, a considerable penetration in the delineation of character, language well adapted to it; and yet every one of her novels leaves behind a feeling of dissatisfaction, almost of bitterness. She is wanting in love for her men and women! The whole is tinged with that sour disposition with which we are acquainted in so many novels by unmarried, middle-aged, female authors. Their own inward discontent often produces, as it did in Jane Austen, a sort of ironical pride and malignant joy; an old-maidish wish to expose the ridiculous points and petty miseries of men. In her novels, chiefly in Pride and Prejudice, she revels in the representation of human folly, and that in a way so true to life, so free from exaggeration, that at length it repels us. We cannot stand it throughout a whole volume, and we are continually asking ourselves, Aber was kann dieser Misère grosses begegnen ?1 It certainly does not help her, everything remains flat; one looks at least for a flash of passion here and there, but passion was unknown to her. What renders her so important a factor in the development of English romance is the manner in which she replaced the thrilling events of the criminal and sensational novels with fine, keen delineations of character. All her novels are earnest, and read like George Eliot's, without the latter's poetry and lofty way of surveying worldly things. But when George Eliot introduces silly and commonplace people in a gossiping way (as, especially, in The Mill on the Floss), the school of her predecessor, Jane Austen, is recognised immediately. Macaulay and Scott before him were full of the highest praises of the cleverness with which she drew human character, and Macaulay went so far as to say, "She has given us a multitude of characters, all, in a certain sense, commonplace, all such as we meet every day. Yet they are all as perfectly discriminated from each other as if they were 1 "How can anything great happen to such wretched people" (Misère)? A quotation from Schiller. |