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

in 1794-1795, and The Italian two years later.

These stories owed their original attraction to the skill with which, by the use of a Defoe-like minuteness of detail, added to a pictorial faculty which Defoe had not, an atmosphere of terror is constantly diffused and kept up. Very little that is terrible actually happens: but the artist succeeds (so long as the trick has not become too familiar) in persuading you that something very terrible is going to happen, or has just happened. And so the delight of something "horrid," as the Catherines and Isabellas of the day put it, is given much more plentifully, and even much more excitingly, than it could be by a real horror now and then, with intervals of miscellaneous business. In one sense, indeed, the process will not stand even the slightest critical examination: for it is soon seen to consist of a succession of serious mystifications and non-comic much-ados-about-nothing. But these "ados" are most cunningly made (her last book, The Italian , is, perhaps, the best place to look for them, if the reader is not taking up the whole subject with a virtuous thoroughness), and Mrs. Radcliffe's great praise is that she induced her original readers to suspend their critical faculties sufficiently to enable them to take it all seriously. Scott, who undoubtedly owed her something, assigned her positive genius: and modern critics, while, perhaps, seldom experiencing much real delectation from her work, have discovered in it not a few positive and many more indirect and comparative merits. The influence on Scott is not the least of these: but there is even a more unquestionable asset of the same kind in the fact that the Byronic villain-hero, if not Byron himself, is Mrs. Radcliffe's work. Schedoni did much more than beget or pattern Lara: he is Lara, to all intents and purposes, in "first state" and before the final touch has been put by the greater master who took the plate in hand.

But there is more to be said for Mrs. Radcliffe than this. Her "explained supernatural," tiresome as it may be to some of us nowadays, is really a marvel of patience and ingenuity: and this same quality extends to her plots generally. The historical side of her novels (which she does to some extent attempt) is a failure, as everything of the kind was before Scott: that we may leave till we come to Scott himself. But one important engine of the novelist she set to work in a fashion which had never been managed before, and that is elaborate description. She shows an early adaptation of that "picturesque," of which we see the beginnings in Gray, when she was in the nursery, which was being directly developed by Gilpin, but which, as we may see from her
Travels , she had got not merely from books, but from her own observation. She applies it both within and without: at one moment giving pages on the scenery of the Apennines, at another paragraphs on the furniture of her abbeys and castles. The pine forests and the cataracts; the skyline of Udolpho bathed in sunset glow, while a "melancholy purple tint" steals up the slopes to its foundations--are all in the day's work now; but they were not so then, and it is fair to say that Mrs. Radcliffe does them well. The "high canopied tester of dark green damask" and the "counterpane of black velvet" which illustrate the introduction of the famous chapter of the Black Pall in Chateau le Blanc may be mere inventory goods now: but, once more, they were not so then. And this faculty of description (which, as noted above, could hardly have been, and pretty certainly was not, got from books, though it may have been, to some extent and quite legitimately, got from pictures) was applied in many minor ways--touches of really or supposedly horrible objects in the dark, faint suggestions of sound, or of appeals to the other senses--hints of all sorts, which were to become common tricks of the trade, but were then quite new.

At any rate, by these and other means she attained that great result of the novel which has been noted in Defoe, in Richardson, and in others--the result of what the French vividly call enfisting the reader--getting hold of his attention, absorbing him in a pleasant fashion. The mechanism was often too mechanical: taken with the author's steady and honest, but somewhat inartistic determination to explain everything it sometimes produces effects positively ridiculous to us. With the proviso of valeat quantum , it is not quite unfair to dwell, as has often been dwelt, on the fact that the grand triumph of Mrs. Radcliffe's terrormongering--the famous incident of the Black Veil--is produced by a piece of wax-work. But the result resulted--the effect was produced: and it was left to those who were clever enough to improve upon the means. For the time these means were "improved upon" in another sense; we shall glance at some of the caricatures, intended and unintended, later. For the present we may turn to other varieties of the curiously swarming novel-production of these two last decades of the century, and especially of the very last.

If Scott had not established Richard Cumberland's Henry (1795) in the fortress of the Ballantyne Novels, it would hardly be necessary to notice "Sir Fretful Plagiary's" contributions to the subject of our history. He preluded it with another, Arundel (1789), and followed it much later with a third, John de Lancaster : but there is no need to say anything of these. Henry displays the odd hit- and -miss quality which seems to have attached itself to Cumberland everywhere, whether as novelist, dramatist, essayist, diplomatist, poet, or anything else. It is, though by no means a mere "plagiarism," an obvious and avowed imitation of Fielding, and the writer is so intent on his pastiche that he seems quite oblivious himself, and appears to expect equal oblivion on the part of his readers, of the fact that nearly two generations had passed. Henry is Joseph; Susan May is a much more elaborate and attractive Betty; the doctor's wife a vulgarised and repulsive Lady Booby; Ezekiel Daw, whom Scott admired, a dissenting Adams--the full force of the outrage of which variation Sir Walter perhaps did not feel. There are some good things in the story, but, as a whole, it is chiefly valuable as an early example of that great danger of modern literature--the influence of the "printed book" itself: and in a less degree of that forging ahead of the novel generally in public favour which we are chronicling. If the kind had not been popular, and if Fielding had not been its great prophet, one may be pretty sure that
Henry would never have existed. The causes are important: the effect not quite so.

There was, however, at this time a novel-school, and not such a very small one, which had more legitimate reasons for existence, inasmuch as it really served as mouthpiece to the thoughts and opinions of the time, whether these thoughts and opinions were good or bad. This may be called the "revolutionary school," and its three most distinguished scholars were Bage, Holcroft, and Godwin, with Mrs. Inchbald perhaps to be added. The first began considerably before the outbreak of the actual French Revolution and shows the influence of its causes: the others were directly influenced by itself.

One of the most remarkable of English novel-writers who are not absolute successes, and one who, though less completely obscured by Fortune than some, has never had quite his due, is Robert Bage. It was unfortunate for him that he fell in with the crude generation contemporary in their manhood with the French Revolution, and so manifested the crudity in full. Bage, in fact, except for a certain strength of humour, is almost more French than English. He has been put in the school of Richardson, but it is certain that Richardson would have been shocked at the supposed scholar: and it is not certain that Bage would or need have felt complimented by the assignment of the master. He has the special laxity of the time in point of "morality," or at least of decency; its affectations of rather childish perfectibilism and anti-theism; and the tendency of at least a part of it to an odd Calibanic jesting. Bage is good-tempered enough as it is: but he rather suggests possible Carrier-and-Fouché developments in a favourable and fostering atmosphere. One does not quite know why Scott, who included in the Ballantyne Novels three of Bage's, Mount Henneth (1781), Barham Downs (1784), and James Wallace (1788), did not also include, if not
The Fair Syrian (1787), two others, Man as He is (1792) and the still later Hermsprong , or Man as He is Not (1796). This last has sometimes been regarded as Bage's masterpiece: but it does not seem so to the present writer. It begins by the sketch of an illegitimate child, written in Bage's worst vein of hard rasping irony, entirely devoid of the delicate spring and "give" which irony requires, and which constitutes the triumph even of such things as A Tale of a Tub and
Jonathan Wild . The rather impossibly named Hermsprong himself is not really so named at all, but is related (and in fact head-of-the-house) to the wicked or at least not good lord of the story. He is of the kind of Sir Charles Grandison, Rights-of-Mannified, which infests all these novels and is a great bore--as, indeed, to me is the whole book. The earlier Man as He is is far better. The hero, Sir George Paradyne, though of the same general class, is very much more tolerable and (being sometimes naughty) preferable to Grandison himself: while the heroine--a certain Miss Colerain, who is a merchant's daughter under a double cloud of her father's misfortune and of calumny as regards herself--though not an absolute success, is worth a dozen Harriets, with thirteen Charlottes thrown in to make "25 as 24" in bookseller's phrase. Bage's extravagant or perhaps only too literal manners-painting (for it was an odd time) appears not infrequently, as in the anecdote of a justly enraged, though as a matter of fact mistaken, husband, who finds a young gentleman sitting on his wife's lap, with her arms round him, while he is literally and en tout bien tout honneur painting her face--being a great artist in that way. Mount Henneth is perhaps the liveliest of all: though its liveliness is partly achieved by less merely extravagant unconventionalities than this. But as a matter of fact Bage never entirely "comes off": though there is cleverness enough in him to have made a dozen popular and deservedly popular novelists at a better time for the novel. For he was essentially a novelist of manners and character at a transition time, when manners and character had come out of one stage and had not settled into another. Even Miss Edgeworth in
Belinda shows the disadvantage of this: and she was a lady of genius, while Bage had only talent and was not quite a gentleman.

Thomas Holcroft was not a gentleman at all, never pretended to the title, and would probably have been rather affronted if any one had applied it to him: for he was a violent Atheist and Jacobin, glorying in his extraction from a shoemaker and an oysterseller, and in his education as a stable boy. He was, however, a man of considerable intellectual power and of some literary gift, which chiefly showed itself in his dramas (the best