The English Novel by George Saintsbury (essential reading TXT) 📖

but constitutionals and marrow-bones, and Mr. Nisby's opinions, has simply amused half a dozen generations. Yet, in a sense, it has nearly as much to do with the advent of the novel as Sir Roger de Coverley himself. For these things are, not merely in an allegory, the subjects of the novel. Not so very much earlier Mr. Nisby would have had a chance of delivering his opinions on the scaffold: and his disciple would have had prison bread and water for marrow-bones and "Brooks and Hellier." These would have been subjects for romance: the others were subjects for novel.

[13] Dunlop and others have directly or indirectly suggested a
good deal of plagiarism in Evelina from Miss Betsy
Thoughtless : but it is exactly in this life -quality that the
earlier novelist fails.

All glory, therefore, be to Frances Burney; both that which her generous successor and superior gives her in Northanger Abbey , and more also--for Miss Austen, naturally enough, was not taking the view-point of literary history. But it has been said that Fanny herself possessed her gift in two senses uncertainly--first, in that she did not very clearly perceive what it was, and, secondly, in that she soon lost grip of it. It is, therefore, not wonderful that few others caught the trick from her for a long time--for indeed fully twenty years, till Miss Edgeworth made her appearance. But these twenty years were years of extreme fertility in novels of different sorts, while--a phenomenon that occurs not seldom--the older kind of fiction made a kind of rally at the very time that the newer was at last solidly establishing itself. There was, indeed, ample room for both. You cannot kill Romance: it would be a profound misfortune, perhaps the profoundest that could befall the human race, if you could. But the new romance was of rather a bastard kind, and it showed more of the bad blood than of the good till, by a curious coincidence, Scott once more found the true strain, just about the same time as that at which Miss Austen was making known the true strain of the novel proper.

This hybrid new romance had been stumbled upon more than a decade before Fanny Burney in her turn stumbled upon the pure novel: and most people know in what and by whom. To this day it is by no means easy to be certain what Horace Walpole really meant to write, or thought he was writing, in The Castle of Otranto (1764). His own references to his own writings are too much saturated with affectation and pose to make it safe to draw any conclusions from them; there is little or no external evidence; and the book itself is rather a puzzle. Taking the Preface to the second edition with a very large allowance of salt--the success of the first before this preface makes double salting advisable--and accommodating it to the actual facts, one finds it hardly necessary to go beyond the obvious and almost commonplace solution that The Castle of Otranto was simply the castle of Strawberry Hill itself with paper for lath and ink for plaster--in other words, an effort to imitate something which the imitator more than half misunderstood. Of mediæval literature proper, apart from chronicles and genealogies, Walpole knew nothing: and for its more precious features he had the dislike which sometimes accompanies ignorance. But he undoubtedly had positive literary genius--flawed, alloyed, incomplete, uncritical of itself, but existing: and this genius showed itself here. His paper-and-ink "Strawberry" is quite another guess structure from his lath-and-plaster one. For itself in itself--for what it is --the present writer, though he has striven earnestly and often for the sake of the great things that it did , has never been able to get up any affection or admiration. It is preposterous, desultory, tedious, clumsy, dull. But it made people (we know it on such excellent authority as Gray's) shudder: and the shudder was exactly what they wanted--in every sense of the verb "to want." Moreover, quite independently of this shudder, it pointed the way to a wide, fertile, and delightful province of historical, social, literary, and other matter which had long been neglected, and which people had been assured was not worth exploring. Blair was just using, or about to use, "any romance of chivalry" as a hyperbolical exemplification of the contemptible in literature. Hume had been arguing against, and Voltaire was still sneering at, all sorts of superstition and supernaturalism. The common cant of criticism for generations had been that "sense" and "reason" were to be the only criteria. Walpole's egregious helmet dropped from no one knew (or knows) where on all these Philistinisms: and squelched them. How it did this, why it did it, and so forth, one knows not much more than one knows why and how all the things happened in the novel itself. Après coup , the author talked about "Shakespeare" (of whom, by the way, he was anything but a fervent or thorough admirer) and the like. Shakespeare had, as Sir Walter Raleigh has well pointed out, uncommonly little to do with it. But Shakespeare at least supplies us with an appropriate phrase for the occasion. The Castle of Otranto "lay in" Horace's "way, and he found it." And with it, though hardly in it, he found the New Romance.

In Horace's case also, as in that of Frances, though the success was even more momentous, the successors were slow and doubtful, though not quite so slow. In some dozen years Walpole read Miss Clara Reeve's Old English Baron (1777), and as in another celebrated case "thought it a bore." It is rather a bore. It has more consecutiveness than
Otranto , and escapes the absurdities of the copiously but clumsily used supernatural by administering it in a very minute dose. But there is not a spark of genius in it, whereas that spark, though sometimes curiously wrapped up in ashes, was always present (Heaven knows where he got it!) in Sir Robert's youngest son. And the contagion spread. For general and epidemic purposes it had to wait till the Germans had carried it over the North Sea and sent it back again. For particular ones, it found a new development in one of the most remarkable of all novels, twenty years younger than Otranto , and a few years older than the new outburst of the "Gothic" supernatural in the works of Anne Radcliffe and Mat Lewis.

Vathek (1786) stands alone--almost independent even of its sponsors--it would be awkward to say godfathers--Hamilton and Voltaire; apart likewise from such work as it, no doubt, in turn partly suggested to Peacock and to Disraeli. There is, perhaps, no one towards whom it is so tempting to play the idle game of retrospective Providence as towards the describer of Batalha and Alcobaça, the creator of Nouronnihar and the Hall of Eblis. Fonthill has had too many vicissitudes since Beckford, and Cintra is a far cry; but though his associations with Bath are later, it is still possible, in that oddly enchanted city, to get something of the mixed atmosphere--eighteenth century, nineteenth, and of centuries older and younger than either--which, tamisée in a mysterious fashion, surrounds this extraordinary little masterpiece. Take Beckford's millions away; make him coin his wits to supply the want of them; and what would have been the result? Perhaps more Vatheks ; perhaps things even better than Vathek ;[14] perhaps nothing at all. On the whole, it is always wiser not to play Providence, in fact or fancy. All that need be said is that Anthony Hamilton and Voltaire are certainly not by themselves--good as they are, and admirable as the first is--enough to account for Vathek . Romance has passed there as well as persiflage and something like coïonnerie ; it is Romance that has given us the baleful beauty of that Queen of Evil, Nouronnihar, and the vision of the burning hearts that make their own wandering but eternal Hell. The tendency of the novel had been on the whole, even in its best examples, to prose in feeling as well as in form. It was Beckford who availed himself of the poetry which is almost inseparable from Romance. But it was Horace Walpole who had opened the door to Romance herself.

[14] Since the text was written--indeed very recently--the
long-missing "Episodes" of Vathek itself have been at length
supplied by the welcome diligence of Mr. Lewis Melville. They
are not "better than Vathek," but they are good.

Still, Vatheks are not to be had to order: and as Romance was wanted, to order and in bulk, during the late years of the eighteenth century, some other kind had to be supplied. The chief accredited purveyors of it have been already named and must now be dealt with, to be followed by the list of secondary, never quite accomplished, exponents now of novel, now of romance, now of the two mixed, who filled the closing years of the eighteenth century.

It is, however, unjust to put the author of The Mysteries of Udolpho and the author of The Monk on the same level. Mat Lewis was a clever boy with a lively fancy, a knack of catching and even of anticipating popular tendencies in literature, a rather vulgar taste by nature, and no faculty of self-criticism to correct it. The famous Monk (1795), which he published when he was twenty, is as preposterous as Otranto and adds to its preposterousness a haut goût of atrocity and indecency which Walpole was far too much of a gentleman, and even of a true man of letters, to attempt or to tolerate. Lewis's other work in various forms is less offensive: but--except in respect of verse-rhythm which does not here concern us--hardly any of it is literature. What does concern us is that the time took it for literature, because it adopted the terror-style in fiction.

Anne Ward (she married a barrister named Radcliffe, of whom we do not hear much except that his engagements in journalism threw time on his wife's hands for writing) appears to have started on her career of terror-novelist, in which she preceded Lewis, with two fixed resolves of principle very contrary to his practice. The first was to observe strict "propriety" in her books--a point in which the novel had always been a little peccant. The second and more questionable, but also more original, was a curious determination to lavish the appearance of the supernatural, in accordance with the Walpolian tradition and the German adoption of it, but never to allow anything really supernatural in ultimate explanation or want of explanation. She applied these two principles to the working out, over and over again, of practically the same story--the persecutions of a beautiful and virtuous heroine, and her final deliverance from them. Her first attempt, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne , appeared as early as 1789: and she left a posthumous romance, Gaston de Blondeville , which did not come out till 1826, four years after her death. She also wrote some poems and a volume of Travels (1794) which is important for a reason to be noticed presently. But her fame rests upon four books, which she published in seven years, between her own twenty-sixth and thirty-third, A Sicilian Romance (1790), The Romance of the Forest (1791), the world-renowned
Mysteries of Udolpho