And this was in no respect the result of an accident. Fielding looked upon his first work as a new attempt in English literature. "Joseph Andrews" was first intended to be merely a satire on "Pamela." But study and reflection on the nature of his work determined Fielding to produce a "prose epic." "The epic as well as the drama," he said in the preface, "is divided into tragedy and comedy." Now, he continued, "when any kind of writing contains all the other parts (of the epic), such as fable, action, characters, sentiments, and diction, and is deficient in metre only; it seems, I think, reasonable to refer it to the epic." Such, too, was the opinion of the Chevalier Bunsen. "The romance of modern times," he says in his preface to "Soll und Haben" * * * "represents the latest stadium of the epic. Every romance is intended, or ought to be, a new Iliad or Odyssey; in other words, a poetic representation of a course of events consistent with the highest laws of moral government, whether it delineate the general history of a people, or narrate the fortunes of a chosen hero. * * * The excellence of a romance, like that of an epic or a drama, lies in the apprehension and truthful exhibition of the course of human things."[177] Lord Byron expressed his opinion that Fielding had realized this view of the nature of the novel by calling him the prose Homer of human nature.

Fielding's novels are now considered unfit for general perusal. In considering the coarseness and immorality of a writer, the intention and the result must be separated. That Fielding's works are coarse, and that they contain scenes and characters of a dissolute nature, is neither to be denied nor to be regretted. If they were more pure, they would be less valuable from a historical point of view; less true to nature, and therefore less artistic. That the author's intention was far from the production of works with an evil tendency, is evident. He was careful to say in the preface to "Joseph Andrews": "It may be objected to me that I have against my own rules introduced vices, and of a very black kind, in this work. To which I shall answer first, that it is very difficult to pursue a series of human actions, and keep clear from them. Secondly, that the vices to be found here are rather the accidental consequences of some human frailty or foible, than causes habitually existing in the mind. Thirdly, that they are never set forth as the objects of ridicule, but detestation. Fourthly, that they are never the principal figure at that time on the scene; and lastly, they never produce the intended evil." And again, still more strongly, Fielding claims the merit of purity and moral effect for "Tom Jones," "I hope my reader will be convinced, at his very entrance on this work, that he will find, in the whole course of it, nothing prejudicial to the cause of religion and virtue; nothing inconsistent with the strictest rules of decency, nor which can offend the chastest eye in the perusal. On the contrary, I declare, that to recommend goodness and innocence hath been my sincere endeavor in this history. * * * Besides displaying that beauty of virtue which may attract the admiration of mankind, I have attempted to engage a stronger motive to human action in her favor, by convincing men that their true interest directs them to a pursuit of her. For this purpose I have shown, that no acquisitions of guilt can compensate the loss of that solid inward comfort of mind, which is the sure companion of innocence and virtue; nor can in the least balance the evil of that horror and anxiety which, in their room, guilt introduced into our bosoms."

Thus, it is evident, that Fielding had no desire to write what might be harmful. The contrast between his promise and his fulfilment is simply an illustration of the standard of his time. His novels are coarse to a degree which may nullify their merits in the eyes of some readers of the present day, and may unfit them for the perusal of very young people. But this is simply because the standard in such matters has changed, and not because the novels were purposely made dissolute. Their coarseness was adapted to the lack of refinement in thought and speech characteristic of that time. Fielding wished to "laugh mankind out of their follies and vices." In his coarseness there is always an open, frank laughter. There is none of that veiled pruriency which lurks underneath the more conventionally expressed, but really vicious sentiments that are to be found in too many novels of our own day.

The novel was well defined in character and well established in popularity when Smollett entered the field so well occupied by Richardson and Fielding. On this account his works have a less important place in the history of fiction than those of his predecessors. While he added greatly to the store of fictitious writing, he developed no new ideas concerning it. Fielding had announced at the outset of his career as a novelist that he had taken Cervantes as a prototype, and the influence of the great Spanish writer is plainly visible in "Joseph Andrews." But in the literary workmanship of his two later novels, Fielding's entire originality is undeniable. Smollett, however, is plainly an imitator of Le Sage. He did not aim at that artistic construction of plot, which is Fielding's chief merit. The novel, in his hands, became rather a series of adventures, linked together by their occurrence to the same individuals. "A novel," he said, "is a large, diffused picture, comprehending the characters of life, disposed in different groups, and exhibited in various attitudes, for the purposes of a uniform plan and general occurrence, to which every individual figure is subservient. But this plan cannot be executed with propriety, probability, or success, without a principal personage to attract the attention, unite the incidents, unwind the clue of the labyrinth, and at last close the scene by virtue of his importance."[178] But Smollett presents the "different groups" and "various attitudes" of his "diffused picture" with a luxuriance of imagination, a fidelity to nature, and an exuberance of broad humor which inspire interest even when they occasion disgust. If he added nothing new to the novel from a purely literary point of view, his works have an exceptional historical value.

His life was well adapted to educate him as an observer and student of human nature. Of a good Scotch family, but obliged by poverty to rely on his own efforts for a living, he mixed familiarly with varied classes of men. As a surgeon in London, he came in contact with the middle and lower ranks of the city, from which many of his best characters are taken. As surgeon's mate on board a man-of-war, he obtained that acquaintance with a seafaring life which was afterward turned to such excellent account.

Of Smollett's works, "Humphrey Clinker" is the most humorous, "Roderick Random" the simplest and most natural, "Perigrine Pickle," the most elaborate and brilliant. The reader is conducted from adventure to adventure with an unfailing interest, sustained by the distinctness of the picture and the brightness of the coloring. The characters met with are natural and well studied. Trunnion, Hatchway, Pipes, Lieutenant Bowling, and Jack Rattlin are all distinctly seamen, and yet each has a marked individuality of his own. Matthew Bramble and Winifred Jenkins are among the best-drawn and most entertaining of fictitious personages. Smollett's humor is usually of the broadest and most elementary kind. It consists largely of hard blows, a-propos knockdowns, and practical jokes. More than any novelist, he illustrates the coarseness of his time. His pages are filled with cruelties and blackguardism. Many of his principal characters are dissolute without enjoyment, and brutal without good nature. Modern taste is shocked by the succession of repulsive scenes and degrading representations of vice which are often intended to amuse, and always to entertain. But it is because life in the eighteenth century had so many repulsive features, that the novels of the time often repel the modern reader, There is nothing strained or uncommon in the experiences of Miss Williams while in prison:

There I saw nothing but rage, anguish, and impiety; and heard nothing but groans, curses, and blasphemy. In the midst of this hellish crew, I was subjected in the tyranny of a barbarian, who imposed upon me tasks that I could not possibly perform, and then punished my incapacity with the utmost rigor and inhumanity. I was often whipped into a swoon, and lashed out of it, during which miserable intervals I was robbed by my fellow-prisoners of every thing about me, even to my cap, shoes, and stockings; I was not only destitute of necessaries, but even of food, so that my wretchedness was extreme. Not one of my acquaintance, to whom I imparted my situation, would grant me the least succor or regard, on pretence of my being committed for theft; and my landlord refused to part with some of my own clothes, which I sent for, because I was indebted to him for a week's lodging. Overwhelmed with calamity, I grew desperate, and resolved to put an end to my grievances and life together; for this purpose I got up in the middle of the night, when I thought everybody around me asleep, and fixing one end of my handkerchief to a large hook in the ceiling that supported the scales on which the hemp is weighed, I stood upon a chair, and making a noose on the other end, put my neck into it with an intention to hang myself; but before I could adjust the knot, I was surprised and prevented by two women who had been awake all the while, and suspected my design. In the morning my attempt was published among the prisoners, and punished with thirty stripes, the pain of which co-operating with my disappointment and disgrace, bereft me of my senses, and threw me into an ecstasy of madness, during which I tore the flesh from my bones with my teeth, and dashed my head against the pavement.[179]

While Smollett mingled such scenes of misery with coarse adventures and coarse humor, he is yet always true to nature and always picturesque. He keeps the reader's attention even when he offends his taste. He impaired the literary merit of "Perigrine Pickle," but at the same time added to its dissolute character and its immediate popularity by the forced insertion of the licentious "Memoirs of a Lady of Quality." Now a serious blemish, these memoirs formed at the time an added attraction to the book. They were eagerly read as the authentic account of Lady Vane, a notorious woman of rank, and were furnished to Smollett by herself, in the hope, fully gratified, that her infamous career might be known to future generations.[180]

That the standard of public taste was rising, would appear from the fact that in the second edition of "Perigrine Pickle," Smollett found it advisable to "reform the manners and correct the expression" of the first; but when "he flatters himself that he has expunged every adventure, phrase, and insinuation that could be construed by the most delicate reader into a trespass upon the rules of decorum," he does not give a high idea of the standard of the "most delicate reader." But Smollett has left an account of his own views regarding the moral effect of the pictures of vice and degradation which his works contain, and that account is a striking statement of contemporary feeling upon the subject:

The same principle by which we rejoice at the remuneration of merit, will teach us to relish the disgrace and discomfiture of vice, which is always an example of extensive use and influence, because it leaves a deep impression of terror upon the minds of those who were not confirmed in the pursuit of morality and virtue, and, while the balance wavers, enables the right scale to preponderate. * * * The impulses of fear, which is the most violent and interesting of all the passions, remain longer than any other upon the memory; and for one that is allured to virtue by the contemplation of that peace and happiness which it bestows, an hundred are deterred from the practice of vice, by the infamy and punishment to which it is liable from the laws and regulations of mankind. Let me not, therefore, be condemned for having chosen my principal character from the purlieus of treachery and fraud, when I declare that my purpose is to set him up as a beacon for the benefit of the inexperienced and the unwary, who, from the perusal of these memoirs, may learn to avoid the manifold snares with which they are continually surrounded in the paths of life; while those who hesitate on the brink of iniquity may he terrified from plunging into that irremediable gulph, by surveying the deplorable fate of Ferdinand Count Fathom.[181]

This passage illustrates with remarkable fidelity the attitude, not only of Smollett, but of the other novelists and the general public of the first half of the eighteenth century, toward vice and crime. The consciousness of evil and the desire for reformation were prominent features of the time. But to deter men from wrong-doing, fear was the only recognized agent. There was absolutely no feeling of philanthropy. There was no effort to prevent crime through the education or regulation of the lower classes; there was no attempt to reform the criminal when convicted. The public fear of the criminal classes was expressed in the cruel and ineffective code which punished almost every offense with death. The corruptions which pervaded the administration of justice made it almost impossible to punish the wealthy and influential. When Smollett declared that the miserable fate of Count Fathom would deter his reader from similar courses by a fear of similar punishment, when Defoe urged the moral usefulness of "Moll Flanders" and "Roxana," the two novelists simply expressed the general feeling that the sight of a malefactor hanging on the gallows was the most effective recommendation to virtue. In the same spirit in which justice exposed the offender in the stocks to public view, the novelist described his careers of vice ending in misery, and Hogarth conducted his Idle Apprentice from stage to stage till Tyburn Hill is reached. The same moral end is always in view, but the lesson is illustrated by the ugliness of vice, and not by the beauty of virtue. In our time we have reason to be thankful for a criminal legislation tempered by mercy and philanthropy. We have attained, too, a standard of taste and of humanity which has banished the degrading exhibitions of public punishments, which has largely done away with coarseness and brutality, and has added much to the happiness of life. In fiction, the writer who wishes to serve a moral purpose attains his end by the more agreeable method of holding up examples of merit to be imitated, rather than of vice to be shunned.

But when the great novelists of the eighteenth century were writing, the standard of taste was extremely low. The author knew that he was keeping his reader in bad company, and was supplying his mind with coarse ideas, but he believed that he might do this without offense. Defoe thought that "Moll Flanders" would not "offend the chastest reader or the modestest hearer"; Richardson, that the prolonged effort to seduce Pamela could be described "without raising a single idea throughout the whole that shall shock the exactest purity"; Fielding, that there was nothing in "Tom Jones" which "could offend the chastest eye in the perusal." Nor, as concerned their own time, were they mistaken. They clearly understood the distinction between coarseness and immorality. The young women who read "Tom Jones" with enthusiasm were not less moral than the women who now avoid it, they were only less refined. They did not think vice less reprehensible, but were more accustomed to the sight of it, and therefore less easily offended by its description.

While the novels of which we have been speaking were making their first appearance, there lived in Kent a charming young lady who went by the name of "the celebrated Miss Talbot." She had attained this distinction by her great cultivation. She had studied astronomy and geography, was "mistress of French and Italian," and knew a little Latin. When she was only twenty years of age, the Dean of Canterbury spoke of her with high admiration. Her acquaintance was eagerly sought by accomplished young ladies, and by none more successfully than "the learned" Miss Carter. Both of these girls read the novels of the day, and fortunately recorded some of their opinions in the letters which passed between them.[182] "I want much to know," wrote Miss Talbot, "whether you have yet condescended to read 'Joseph Andrews.'" "I must thank you," replied Miss Carter, "for the perfectly agreeable entertainment I have met in reading 'Joseph Andrews.' It contains such a surprising variety of nature, wit, morality, and good sense, as is scarcely to be met with in any one composition, and there is such a spirit of benevolence through the whole, as, I think renders it peculiarly charming," Some years later the Bishop of Gloucester came to visit Miss Talbot's family, and read "Amelia," the young lady wrote, while he was nursing his cold by the fireside. Miss Carter replied that "in favor of the bishop's cold, his reading 'Amelia' in silence may be tolerated, but I am somewhat scandalized that, since he did not read it to you, you did not read it yourself." "The more I read 'Tom Jones,'" wrote Miss Talbot, "the more I detest him, and admire Clarissa Harlowe,—yet there are in it things that must touch and please every good heart, and probe to the quick many a bad one, and humor that it is impossible not to laugh at." "I am sorry," replied Miss Carter, "to find you so outrageous about poor Tom Jones; he is no doubt an imperfect, but not a detestable character, with all that honesty, good-nature, and generosity." Miss Talbot, in a later letter, said that she had once heard a lady piously say to her son that she wished with all her heart he was like Tom Jones.[183] In 1747 "Clarissa" was read aloud at the palace of the Bishop of Oxford, Miss Talbot's uncle. "As for us," she wrote, "we lived quite happy the whole time we were reading it, and we made that time as long as we could, too, for we only read it en famille, at set hours, and all the rest of the day we talked of it. One can scarcely persuade one's self that they are not real characters and living people." Even "Roderick Random" made part of the young ladies' reading. "It is a very strange and a very low book," commented the Bishop's celebrated niece, "though not without some characters in it, and, I believe, some very just, though very wretched descriptions."

[Footnote 162: Mrs. Barbauld's "Life of Richardson," vol. 1, p. 42. Scott's "Life of Richardson."]

[Footnote 163: Mrs. Barbauld's "Life of Richardson," vol. 1, p. 37.]

[Footnote 164: Edinburgh Review. Oct., 1804. Scott's "Life of Richardson," note.]

[Footnote 165: Richardson's correspondence, 1748.]

[Footnote 166: Richardson's correspondence. Forsyth's "Novels and Novelists," p. 251.]

[Footnote 167: See the interesting "Glimpses of Our Ancestors," by Charles Fleet, p. 33.]

[Footnote 168: Mrs. Barbauld's "Life of Richardson."]

[Footnote 169: W.M. Thackeray, "Nil Nisi Bonum", Cornhill Mag., No. 1.]

[Footnote 170: D'Israeli's "Curiosities of Literature," art. "Richardson."]

[Footnote 171: Mrs. Barbauld's "Life of Richardson," vol. I, p. 40. Scott's "Life of Richardson."]

[Footnote 172: The reader may find some curious examples of the fidelity with which Fielding portrayed contemporary character and manners in comparing passages in "Tom Jones," with "Glimpses of our Ancestors," by Charles Fleet, pp. 38, 39, et passim.]

[Footnote 173: "Joseph Andrews," book III, chap. 9.]

[Footnote 174: "Tom Jones," book iv, ch. 8.]

[Footnote 175: Samuel Rogers, "Table Talk," p. 227.]

[Footnote 176: Coleridge, "Table Talk," p. 339, vol. 2, London, 1835.]

[Footnote 177: Preface to "Debit and Credit" ("Soll und Haben"), by Gustav Freitag.]

[Footnote 178: "Adventures of Count Fathom," letter of dedication.]

[Footnote 179: "Roderick Random," chap. xxiii.]

[Footnote 180: 'The wife of William, second Viscount Vane, "was the too celebrated Lady Vane; first married to Lord William Hamilton, and secondly to Lord Vane; who has given her own extraordinary and disreputable adventures to the world in Smollett's novel of 'Perigrine Pickle,' under the title of 'Memoirs of a Lady of Quality.'"—Walpole to Mann, Nov 23, 1743. "The troops continue going to Flanders, but slowly enough. Lady Vane has taken a trip thither after a cousin of Lord Berkeley, who is as simple about her as her own husband is, and has written to Mr. Knight at Paris to furnish her with what money she wants. He says she is vastly to blame, for he was trying to get her a divorce from Lord Vane, and then would have married her himself. Her adventures are worthy to be bound up with those of my good sister-in-law, the German Princess, and Moll Flanders."—Walpole to Mann, June 14, 1742.]

[Footnote 181: "Adventures of Count Fathom," letter of dedication.]

[Footnote 182: "The Carter and Talbot Correspondence," Ed. by Rev. Montagu Pennington, 1809.]

[Footnote 183: See "The Carter and Talbot Correspondences."]



CHAPTER VII.

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY CONTINUED. I.—THE RELIGIOUS REVIVAL. II.—STERNE, JOHNSON, GOLDSMITH, AND OTHERS. III.—MISS BURNEY, AND THE FEMALE NOVELISTS. IV.—THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL.

I.

We have observed in the earlier works of fiction of the eighteenth century, together with great coarseness of thought and manners, the reflection of a strong moral and reforming tendency. As early as the reign of William III, Parliament had requested the king to issue proclamations to justices of the peace, instructing them to put in execution the neglected laws against open licentiousness.[184] In 1698, Collier published his "Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage," a powerful and effective protest against the depravity of the drama. At about the same time had been formed the Societies for the Reformation of Manners, which energetically attacked the more flagrant forms of crime. "England, bad as she is," wrote Defoe in 1706, "is yet a reforming nation; and the work has made more progress from the court even to the street, than, I believe, any nation in the world can parallel in such a time and in such circumstances." Toward the middle of the century, these tendencies took effect in the Methodist Revival, a movement destined to exert a profound influence on society. Accompanying this revival, or resulting from it, were many important reforms. The corruption of political life gradually diminished. A new patriotism and unselfishness began to appear in public men. A spirit of philanthropy arose which corrected some of the worst social abuses. Under the leadership of the noble John Howard, the prisons, so long the abandoned haunts of squalor, oppression, and misery, were considerably redeemed from their shameful condition. Beau Nash marked the progress of peaceful and law-abiding habits by formally forbidding the wearing of swords wherever his fashionable authority was recognized. In the fiction of the latter half of the eighteenth century is illustrated a gradual transition of morals and taste from the unbridled coarseness of the century's earlier years to the comparative refinement of our own times.

There lived in Sussex about the time of the Methodist revival, a thriving shopkeeper named Thomas Turner. He had received a good education, and in early life had been a schoolmaster. On reading "Clarissa" he had exclaimed, what would have gladdened the heart of Richardson: "Oh, may the Supreme Being give me grace to lead my life in such a manner as my exit may in some measure be like that divine creature's!" His literary tastes were so pronounced and varied that in the space of six weeks he had read Gray's "Poems," Stewart "On the Supreme Being," the "Whole Duty of Man," "Paradise Lost and Regained," "Othello," the "Universal Magazine," Thomson's "Seasons," Young's "Night Thoughts," Tournefort's "Voyage to the Levant," and "Perigrine Pickle." This scholarly tradesman kept a diary, in which he recorded his thoughts, his studies, and his amusements with a frankness which deserves the thanks of posterity. Some passages of his diary, in their illustration of the combination of licence, coarseness, and moral earnestness characteristic of the writer's time may greatly assist us in appreciating the power and influence of the religious revival.[185]

"I went to the audit and came home drunk. But I think never to exceed the bounds of moderation more. * * * "Sunday, 28th, went down to Jones', where we drank one bowl of punch and two muggs of bumboo; and I came home again in liquor. Oh, with what horrors does it fill my heart, to think I should be guilty of doing so, and on a Sunday, too! Let me once more endeavour, never, no never, to be guilty of the same again. * * * I read part of the fourth volume of the Tatler; the oftener I read it, the better I like it. I think I never found the vice of drinking so well exploded in my life, as in one of the numbers." In January, 1751, "Mr. Elless (the schoolmaster), Marchant, myself, and wife sat down to whist about seven o'clock, and played all night; very pleasant, and I think I may say innocent mirth, there being no oaths nor imprecations sounding from side to side, as is too often the case at cards." February 2, "we supped at Mr. Fuller's, and spent the evening with a great deal of mirth, till between one and two. Tho, Fuller brought my wife home on his back, I cannot say I came home sober, though I was far from being bad company. I think we spent the evening with a great deal of pleasure." March 7th, a party met at Mr. Joseph Fuller's, "drinking," records our diarist, "like horses, as the vulgar phrase is, and singing, till many of us were very drunk, and then we went to dancing, and pulling of wigs, caps, and hats; and thus we continued in this frantic manner, behaving more like mad people than they that profess the name of Christians." Three days after, the same amusements are enjoyed at the house of Mr. Porter, the clergyman of the parish, except "there was no swearing and ill words, by reason of which Mr. Porter calls it innocent mirth, but I in opinion differ much therefrom." Mr. Turner had no great reason to respect the opinion of clergymen on such matters. Soon after, "Mr. ——, the curate of Laughton, came to the shop in the forenoon, and he having bought some things of me (and I could wish he had paid for them), dined with me, and also staid in the afternoon till he got in liquor, and being so complaisant as to keep him company, I was quite drunk. How do I detest myself for being so foolish!" A little later, Mr, Turner attended a vestry meeting, at which "we had several warm arguments, and several vollies of execrable oaths oftentime redounded from almost all parts of the room.

"About 4 P.M. I walked down to Whyly. We played at bragg the first part of the even. After ten we went to supper, on four broiled chicken, four boiled ducks, minced veal, cold roast goose, chicken pastry, and ham. Our company, Mr. and Mrs. Porter, Mr. and Mrs. Coates, Mrs. Atkins, Mrs. Hicks, Mr. Piper and wife, Joseph Fuller and wife, Tho. Fuller and wife, Dame Durrant, myself and wife, and Mr. French's family. After supper our behaviour was far from that of serious, harmless mirth; it was downright obstreperious, mixed with a great deal of folly and stupidity. Our diversion was dancing or jumping about, without a violin or any musick, singing of foolish healths, and drinking all the time as fast as it could be well poured down; and the parson of the parish was one among the mixed multitude. If conscience dictates right from wrong, as doubtless it sometimes does, mine is one that I may say is soon offended: for, I must say, I am always very uneasy at such behavior, thinking it not like the behaviour of the primitive Christians, which, I imagine, was most in conformity to our Saviour's gospel.

"Thursday, Feb, 25th. This morning, about six o'clock, just as my wife was got to bed, we was awaked by Mrs. Porter, who pretended she wanted some cream of tartar; but as soon as my wife got out of bed, she vowed she should come down. She found Mr. Porter (the clergyman), Mr. Fuller, and his wife, with a lighted candle, and part of a bottle of port wine and a glass. The next thing was to have me down stairs, which being apprised of, I fastened my door. Up stairs they came, and threatened to break it open; so I ordered the boys to open it, when they poured into my room; and as modesty forbid me to get out of bed, so I refrained; but their immodesty permitted them to draw me out of bed, as the phrase is, topsy-turvey; but, however, at the intercession of Mr. Porter, they permitted me to put on * * * my wife's petticoats; and in this manner they made me dance, without shoes and stockings, until they had emptied a bottle of wine, and also a bottle of my beer. * * * About three o'clock in the afternoon, they found their way to their respective homes, beginning to be a little serious, and, in my opinion, ashamed of their stupid enterprise and drunken perambulation. Now let any one call in reason to his assistance, and reflect seriously on what I have before recited, and they will join me in thinking that the precepts delivered from the pulpit on Sunday, though delivered with the greatest ardour, must lose a great deal of there efficacy by such examples."

Such were the amusements and such the moral reflections of a country tradesman in the middle of the last century, Fielding, Smollett, and the other novelists described the same kind of life: the same succession of brawls, drunken sprees, cock-fights, boxing matches, and bull-baitings. It would be difficult to imagine a state of society more ripe for a revival. Mr. Thomas Turner had moral and religious aspirations, but these could not be satisfied by the clergyman of his parish or the curate of Laughton, the companions of his debauches but not the sharers of his remorse. When the clergy were sincere and moral, they were still too cold and commonplace to seriously influence their flocks. The sermons of the time were at best, moral essays, teaching little, as Mr. Lecky says, "that might not have been taught by disciples of Socrates and Confucius." They might encourage honesty and temperance where those virtues already existed, but they had no spell to arouse religious feelings, nor to reclaim the vicious. How great, then, must have been the effect of the impassioned eloquence of a Whitefield, which could draw tears from thousands of hardened colliers, upon such a society as that of Mr. Turner and his friends, accustomed only to the discourses of their boon companion, the Rev. Mr. Porter. The prevailing licence and the prevailing moral consciousness were elements especially adapted to the work of the religious revivalist. The effect of the sermons of Berridge is thus described by an eye-witness[186]:

I heard many cry out, especially children, whose agonies were amazing. One of the eldest, a girl of ten or twelve years old, was full in my view, in violent contortions of body, and weeping aloud, I think incessantly, during the whole service. * * * While poor sinners felt the sentence of death in their souls, what sounds of distress did I hear! Some shrieking, some roaring aloud. The most general was a loud breathing, like that of people half strangled and gasping for life. And indeed, almost all the cries were like those of human creatures dying in bitter anguish. Great numbers wept without any noise; others fell down as dead; some sinking in silence; some with extreme noise and violent agitation. I stood on the pew seat, as did a young man in an opposite pew—an able-bodied, fresh, healthy countryman. But in a moment, when he seemed to think of nothing less, down he dropped with a violence inconceivable. The adjoining pews seemed shook with his fall. I heard afterward the stamping of his feet, ready to break the boards as he lay in strong convulsions at the bottom of the pew. * * * Among the children who felt the arrows of the Almighty I saw a sturdy boy about eight years old, who roared above his fellows, and seemed, in his agony, in struggle with the strength of a grown man. His face was red as scarlet; and almost all on whom God laid his hand turned either red or almost black. * * * A stranger, well dressed, who stood facing me, fell backward to the wall; then forward on his knees, wringing his hands and roaring like a bull. His face at first turned quite red, then almost black. He rose and ran against the wall till Mr. Keeling and another held him. He screamed out "Oh! what shall I do? what shall I do? Oh, for one drop of the blood of Christ!"

These were violent remedies, but they were applied to a powerful disease. If the revivalists did harm by the religious terrorism which they excited, they yet had a powerful and wide-spread influence for good. They awakened religious feelings among the people, and diffused a new earnestness among the clergy. A spirit of philanthropy was born with their teachings which has gone on growing until it now extends a protecting arm even to brutes. The societies for the prevention of cruelty to children and to animals are part of a great philanthropic movement which began at the end of the eighteenth century, which has carried into practical, every-day life the spirit of Christianity, and has given to the words mercy and charity, the signification of real and existing virtues. Horses, dogs, even rats, are now more safe from wanton brutality than great numbers of men and women in the eighteenth century. To any one who studies that period, the stocks, the whipping post, the gibbet, cock fights, prize-fights, bull-baitings, accounts of rapes, are simply the outward signs of an all-pervading cruelty. If he opens a novel, he finds that the story turns on brutality in one form or other. It is not only in such novels as those of Fielding and Smollett, which are intended to describe the lower classes of society, and in which blackened eyes and broken heads are relished forms of wit, that the modern reader is offended by the continual infliction of pain. Goldsmith gives Squire Thornhill perfect impunity from the law and from public opinion in his crimes. Mackenzie does not think of visiting any legal retribution on his "Man of the World." Godwin wrote "Caleb Williams" to show with what impunity man preyed on man, how powerless the tenant and the dependent woman lay before the violence or the intrigue of the rich. And it is not only that a crime should be committed with perfect security which would now receive a severe sentence at the hands of an ordinary judge and jury which surprises the reader of to-day, but that scenes which would now shock any person of common humanity or taste, were, in the last century, especially intended to amuse. In Miss Burney's "Evelina," Captain Mirvan continually insults and maltreats Mme. Duval, the grandmother of the heroine, in a manner which would not only be inconceivable in a gentleman tolerated in society, but in a blackguard, not entirely bereft of feelings of decency or good-nature. While she is a guest in his own house, he torments her with false accounts of the sufferings of a friend; sends her on a futile errand to relieve those sufferings in a carriage of his own, and then, disguised as a highwayman, he assaults her with the collusion of his servants, tears her clothes, and leaves her half dead with terror, tied with ropes, at the bottom of a ditch. When Mme. Duval relates her ill-treatment to her granddaughter, Evelina could only find occasion to say: "Though this narrative almost compelled me to laugh, yet I was really irritated with the captain, for carrying his love of tormenting—sport, he calls it to such harshness and unjustifiable extremes." And Miss Burney expected, no doubt with reason, that her reader would be amused by all this.

In the same work a nobleman and a fashionable commoner are described as settling a bet by a race between two decrepit women over eighty years of age. "When the signal was given for them to set off, the poor creatures, feeble and frightened, ran against each other: and neither of them being able to support the shock, they both fell on the ground. * * * Again they set off, and hobbled along, nearly even with each other, for some time, yet frequently, to the inexpressible diversion of the company, they stumbled and tottered. * * * Not long after, a foot of one of the poor women slipped, and with great force she came again to the ground. * * * Mr. Coverley went himself to help her, and insisted that the other should stop. A debate ensued, but the poor creature was too much hurt to move, and declared her utter inability to make another attempt. Mr. Coverley was quite brutal; he swore at her with unmanly rage, and seemed scarce able to refrain even from striking her." It would be impossible perhaps to find a party of the upper ranks gathered at a country house at the present time, composed of persons who could have endured, without remonstrance, such treatment of a pair of superannuated horses; yet Miss Burney describes the efforts and sufferings of these old women as affording inexpressible diversion to the ladies and gentlemen who figure in her novel, and she evidently expects the reader to be equally entertained. "Evelina" was written by a young woman who saw the best society, who was maid of honor to Queen Charlotte, who was universally admired for her delicacy and her talents, and whose novels are among the most refined of the time.

The higher ranks were much less influenced by the religious revival than the lower. Although certainly not less in need of reformation, they were far less inclined to welcome it. The fashionable indifference to religion was an obstacle which Wesley found much more difficult to overcome than the brutal ignorance of the inmates of Newgate. After listening to a sermon by Whitefield, Bolingbroke complimented the preacher by saying that he had "done great justice to the divine attributes." The Duchess of Buckingham's remarks on the preaching of the Methodists, in a letter to Lady Huntingdon, are an amusing commentary on the times. "I thank your ladyship for the information concerning the Methodist preachers. Their doctrines are most repulsive, and strongly tinctured with impertinence and disrespect toward their superiors, in perpetually endeavoring to level all ranks and do away with all distinctions. It is monstrous to be told that you have a heart as sinful as the common wretches that crawl the earth. This is highly offensive and insulting, and I cannot but wonder that your ladyship should relish any sentiments so much at variance with high rank and good-breeding."[187] High rank and good-breeding, however, in the society of which the Duchess of Buckingham was so proud, were not considered inconsistent with habitual drunkenness, indecency, and profanity. The vices which "the common wretches that crawl the earth" practised in addition to these, her Grace would have had difficulty in mentioning.

Still, in the latter half of the eighteenth century is to be traced a continual improvement, which is reflected in contemporary fiction. As a remarkable example of the change which took place may be mentioned the instance of the Earl of March. "As Duke of Queensberry, at nearer ninety than eighty years of age, he was still rolling in wealth, still wallowing in sin, and regarded by his countrymen as one whom it was hardly decent to name, because he did not choose, out of respect for the public opinion of 1808, to discontinue a mode of existence which in 1768 was almost a thing of course" among the higher ranks.[188]

[Footnote 184: Wilson's "Memoirs of Daniel Defoe."]

[Footnote 185: For the diary of Thomas Turner, see "Glimpses of our Ancestors," by Charles Fleet, pp. 31-52.]

[Footnote 186: For these manifestations, see Wesley's "Journal," and Lecky's "History of England in the Eighteenth Century," vol. II, chap. ix.]

[Footnote 187: Lecky, "Hist. of England in the 18th Century," vol. ii, chap. 9.]

[Footnote 188: See Trevelyan's "Early History of Charles James Fox," Harper's ed., p. 75.]



II.

In 1759, were published the first two volumes of "Tristram Shandy," a singular and brilliant medley of wit, sentiment, indecency, and study of character. Laurence Sterne was a profligate clergyman, a dishonest author, and an unfaithful husband. He wrote "Tristram Shandy," and he wrote a great many sermons. He descended to the indulgence of low tastes, and rose to an elevated strain of thought, with equal facility. He was a man who knew the better and followed the worse. His talents made him a welcome guest at great men's tables, where he paid for his dinner by amusing the company with a brilliant succession of witticisms and indecent anecdotes, which, to his hearers, derived an additional piquancy from the fact that they proceeded from the mouth of a divine. But although the man was in many respects contemptible, although he disgraced his priestly character by his profligacy, and his literary character by a shameless plagiarism,[189] he possessed in a high degree a quality which must give him a distinguished place in English fiction. His borrowed plumage and his imitation of Rabelais' style apart, Sterne had originality, a gift at all times rare, and always, perhaps, becoming rarer. As a humorist, he is to be classed with Fielding and Smollett, but as a novelist, his position in the history of fiction is separate and unique.

"Tristram Shandy" has all the elements of a novel except the plot. The author has no story to tell. His aim is to amuse the reader by odd and whimsical remarks on every subject and on every personage whose peculiarities promise material for humor and satire. Sterne is perpetually digressing, moralizing commenting on every trivial topic which enters into his story, until the story itself is completely lost, if, indeed, it can be said ever to have been begun. The absence of arrangement is so marked that it is very difficult to turn to a passage which in a previous perusal has struck the eye. The eccentricity and whimsicality of the book contributed greatly to its immediate popularity. But the same characteristics which seem brilliant when novel, soon become dull when familiar, and although "Tristram Shandy" will always afford single passages of lasting interest to the lover of literature, the work as a whole is not a little tedious when read continuously from cover to cover.

In the course of his literary medley, Sterne introduces his reader to a group of characters amongst the most odd and original in fiction. Mr. Shandy, with his syllogisms and his hypotheses, his "close reasoning upon the smallest matters"; Yorick, the witty parson, whose epitaph, Alas! Poor Yorick! expresses so tenderly the amiable faults for which he suffered; Captain Shandy, that combination of simplicity, gentleness, humanity, and modesty, are all creations which deserve to rank with the most individual and happily conceived of fictitious personages. Sterne makes a character known to the reader by a succession of delicate touches rather than by description. He seems to enter into an individual, and make him betray his peculiarities by significant actions and phrases. Thus Mr. Shandy exposes at once the nature of his mind and the vigor of his "hobby-horse," when he exclaims to his brother Toby: "What is the character of a family to an hypothesis?"

The combination of sentiment, pathos, and humor which Sterne sometimes reached with remarkable success, is particularly apparent in every incident which concerns the celebrated Captain Toby Shandy, for the creation of which character this author may most easily be forgiven his indecencies and his literary thefts. Uncle Toby's sympathy with Lefevre, a poor army officer, on his way to join his regiment, who died in an inn near Shandy's house, is exquisitely painted throughout, and the colloquy between the captain and his faithful servant, Corporal Trim, when the death of the officer is imminent, is probably the finest passage which ever fell from the skilful pen of Laurence Sterne:

A sick brother-officer should have the best quarters, Trim; and if we had him with us,—we could tend and look to him.—Thou art an excellent nurse thyself, Trim: and what with thy care of him, and the old woman's, and his boy's, and mine together, we might recruit him again at once, and set him upon his legs.

—In a fortnight or three weeks, added my uncle Toby, smiling, he might march.—He will never march, an' please your Honour, in this world, said the Corporal.—He will march, said my uncle Toby, rising up from the side of the bed with one shoe off.—An' please your Honour, said the Corporal, he will never march but to his grave. He shall march, cried my uncle Toby, marching the foot which had a shoe on, though without advancing an inch,—he shall march to his regiment.—He cannot stand it, said the Corporal.—He shall be supported, said my uncle Toby.—He'll drop at last, said the Corporal, and what will become of his boy? He shall not drop said my uncle Toby, firmly,—Ah, well-a-day!—do what we can for him, said Trim, maintaining his point,—the poor soul will die.—He shall not die, by G—, cried my uncle Toby.

—The accusing spirit, which flew up to Heaven's chancery with the oath, blushed as he gave it in;—and the recording angel, as he wrote it down, dropped a tear upon the word, and blotted it out for ever.[190]

"Ye, who listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy, and pursue with eagerness the phantoms of hope; who expect that age will perform the promises of youth, and that the deficiencies of the present day will be supplied by the morrow; attend to the history of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia." Thus begins the famous tale which Dr. Johnson made the repository of so much of his wisdom, and so beautiful an example of English style. Rasselas and his royal brothers and sisters live in a secluded portion of the earth known as the Happy Valley, where, completely isolated from the world, they await their succession to the crown of the imaginary land of Abyssinia, surrounded by every luxury which can make life agreeable, and shut off from all knowledge of those evils which can make it painful. The aim of the story is to show the vanity of expecting perfect happiness, and the folly of sacrificing present advantages for the delusive promises of the future.

The scene opens in the Happy Valley, where there is all that labor or danger can procure or purchase, without either labor to be endured or danger to be dreaded. Rasselas illustrates the habitual discontent of man by wearying of the monotonous happiness of his royal home, and, together with his sister Nekayah, who shares his ennui, and Imlac, a man of learning, he escapes from the abode of changeless joys and perpetual merriment.

Once beyond the barriers of the Happy Valley, Rasselas and Nekayah seek in the various ranks and conditions of men the abode of true happiness. It is sought in vain amidst the hollow and noisy pleasures of the young and thoughtless; in vain among philosophers, whose theories so ill accord with their practice; in vain among shepherds, whose actual life contrasts so painfully with the descriptions of the poet; in vain in crowds, where sorrow lurks beneath the outward smile; in vain in the cell of the hermit, who counts the days till he shall once more mix with the world. The task becomes more hopeless with each new disappointment. Rasselas pursues his investigation among the higher ranks, in courts and cities; Nekayah, hers among the poor and humble, in the shop and the hamlet. But when the brother and sister meet to share their experiences, they both have the same tale to tell of human discontent. Finally, in returning disappointed to Abyssinia, they illustrate the tendency among men to look back with regret on the early pleasures of life, abandoned for the impossible happiness which discontent had taught them to seek.

On this slight thread of narrative, Johnson strung his thoughts with great felicity. The characters, by the different view which they entertain of life, are distinct and individual. The book is filled with pregnant and beautiful passages, which leave a deep impression on the reader. The words in which Imlac describes to the Prince and Princess the dangers of an unrestrained imagination, might, with equal propriety, find a place in a scientific treatise on the causes of insanity, and in a collection of beautiful literary extracts:

To indulge the power of fiction, and send imagination out upon the wing, is often the sport of those who delight too much in silent speculation. When we are alone, we are not always busy; the labour of excogitation is too violent to last long; the ardour of inquiry will sometimes give way to idleness or satiety. He who has nothing external that can divert him, must find pleasure in his own thoughts, and must conceive himself what he is not; for who is pleased with what he is? He then expatiates in boundless futurity, and culls from all imaginable conditions that which for the present moment he should most desire, amuses his desires with impossible enjoyments, and confers upon his pride unattainable dominion. The mind dances from scene to scene, unites all pleasures in all combinations, and riots in delights which nature and fortune, with all their bounty, cannot bestow.

In time, some particular train of ideas fixes the attention; all other intellectual gratifications are rejected; the mind, in weariness or leisure, recurs constantly to the favorite conception, and feasts on the luscious falsehood whenever she is offended with the bitterness of truth. By degrees, the reign of fancy is confirmed; she grows first imperious, and in time, despotic. Then fictions begin to operate as realities, false opinions fasten upon the mind, and life passes in dreams of rapture or of anguish.[191]

The resemblance between Johnson's "Rasselas" and Voltaire's "Candide" is so marked, that had either author seen the other's work, he must have been suspected of imitation. But while both these great minds were writing at nearly the same time on the same theme of human misery, the lessons they taught differed in a manner which is strongly illustrative of the differences between the two men and their respective surroundings. French scepticism and distrust of divine power led Voltaire to impute human griefs to the incapacity of the Creator. But Johnson, writing "Rasselas" in an hour of sorrow, to obtain means to pay for his mother's funeral, taught that that happiness, which this world can not afford, should be sought in the prospect of another and a better.[192]

All readers of Boswell know how the "Vicar of Wakefield" found a publisher. How Goldsmith's landlady arrested him for his rent, and how he wrote to Johnson in his distress. How the kind lexicographer sent a guinea at once, and followed to find the guinea already changed, and a bottle of Madeira before the persecuted but philosophical author. How Johnson put the cork in the bottle, and after a hasty glance at the MS. of the "Vicar of Wakefield," went out and sold it for sixty pounds. And how triumphantly Goldsmith rated his landlady.

In the hands of that bookseller, who purchased the novel as much out of charity as in hope of profit, the "Vicar of Wakefield" remained neglected, until the publication of "The Traveler" had made the author famous. This interval would have afforded Goldsmith ample time to correct the obvious inconsistencies and faults which his work contained. But in the spirit of a man who depended on his pen for his bread, he made no effort to improve what had already brought him all this remuneration for which he could hope. This is the more to be regretted, that very little revision would have been sufficient, to make the "Vicar of Wakefield" as perfect in its construction as in its style and spirit. "There are a hundred faults in this thing," says the preface, "and a hundred things might be said to prove them beauties. But it is needless. A book may be amusing with numerous errors, or it may be very dull without a single absurdity. The hero of this piece unites in himself the three greatest characters upon earth;—he is a priest, a husbandman, and the father of a family. He is drawn as ready to teach, and ready to obey—as simple in affluence, and majestic in adversity."

These few words are not an inaccurate statement of the merits and demerits of the "Vicar of Wakefield." Faults there are, certainly. The improbability of Sir William Thornhill's being able to go about among his own tenantry incognito, without other disguise than a change of dress; the inconsistency of the philanthropist's allowing his villainous nephew to retain possession of the wealth which he used only to assist him in his crimes; and, finally, the impossibility of that nephew's being so nearly of an age with Sir William himself, when he must have been the son of a younger brother, are all blemishes which Goldsmith might easily have removed, had he not relied on the opinion which he expressed in Chapter xv, "the reputation of books is raised, not by their freedom from defect, but by the greatness of their beauties."

Such a rule would be an obviously dangerous one for an author to follow. But Goldsmith's confidence in the beauties of his novel was fully justified by the verdict of the world. No novelist has more deeply imbued his work with his own genius and spirit, and none have had a more beneficent genius, nor a more beautiful spirit to impart than the author of "The Deserted Village." The exquisite style, the delicate choice of words, the amiability of sentiment, so peculiarly his own, and so well suited to express the simple beauty of his thoughts, give a charm to the work which familiarity can only endear. Dr. Primrose, preserving his simplicity, his modesty, and his nobility of character alike when surrounded by the pleasures of his early and prosperous home, when struggling with the hardships of his ruined fortune, and when rewarded at last by the surfeit of good-fortune which follows his trial, stands high among the most noble conceptions of English fiction. "We read the 'Vicar of Wakefield,'" said the great Sir Walter, "in youth and in age. We return to it again and again, and bless the memory of an author who contrives so well to reconcile us to human nature."

Goethe, when in his eighty-first year, declared that Goldsmith's novel "was his delight at the age of twenty, that it had in a manner formed a part of his education, influencing his tastes and feelings throughout life, and that he had recently read it again from beginning to end, with renewed delight, and with a grateful sense of the early benefit derived from it." "Rogers, the Nestor of British literature, whose refined purity of taste and exquisite mental organization rendered him eminently calculated to appreciate a work of the kind, declared that of all the books, which, through the fitful changes of three generations he had seen rise and fall, the charm of the 'Vicar of Wakefield' had alone continued as at first; and could he revisit the world after an interval of many more generations, he should as surely look to find it undiminished." So wrote Washington Irving; and if the reader is inclined to look for the causes of the extraordinary endurance of Goldsmith's work, he can find them nowhere better stated than in the words of John Forster: "Not in those graces of style, nor even in that home-cherished gallery of familiar faces can the secret of its extraordinary fascination be said to consist. It lies nearer the heart. A something which has found its way there; which, while it amused, has made us happier; which, gently interweaving itself with our habits of thought, has increased our good-humour and charity; which, insensibly it may be, has corrected wilful impatiences of temper, and made the world's daily accidents easier and kinder to us all; somewhat thus should be expressed, I think, the charm of the 'Vicar of Wakefield.'"

In 1760 was published "Chrysal, the Adventures of a Guinea," by Charles Johnstone, the author of several deservedly forgotten novels.[193] The first volume was sent to Dr. Johnson for his opinion, who thought, as Boswell tells us, that it should be published—an estimate justified by the considerable circulation which the book enjoyed.

Chrysal is an elementary spirit, whose abode is in a piece of gold converted into a guinea. In that form the spirit passes from man to man, and takes accurate note of the different scenes of which it becomes a witness. This is a natural and favorable medium for a satire, which Johnstone probably owed, in some measure, both to the "Diable Boiteux" of Gil Blas, and the "Adventures of a Halfpenny" of Dr. Bathurst. The circulation of the guinea enables the author to describe the characteristics of its possessors as seen by a truthful witness, and he has taken advantage of his opportunity to produce one of the most disgusting records of vice in literature. A depraved mind only could find any pleasure in reading "Chrysal," and whoever is obliged to read it from cover to cover for the purpose of describing it to others, must find himself, at the end of his task, in sore vexation of spirit. Human depravity is never an agreeable subject for a work of entertainment, and while Swift's genius holds the reader fascinated with the horror of his Yahoos, the ability of a Manley or a Johnstone is not sufficient to aid the reader in wading through their vicious expositions of corruption. It must be said that Johnstone had some excuse. If he were to satirize society at all, it was better that he should do it thoroughly; that he should expose official greed and dishonesty, the orgies of Medenham Abbey, the infamous extortions of trading justices, in all their native ugliness. It must be said that the time in which he lived presented many features to the painter of manners which could not look otherwise than repulsive on his canvas. But his zeal to expose the vices of his age led him into doing great injustice to some persons, and into grossly libelling others. He imputed crimes to individuals of which he could have had no knowledge; and he shamefully misrepresented the Methodists and the Jews. If Johnstone had wished to see how offensive a book he might write, and how disgusting and indecent a book the public of his day would read and applaud, he might well have brought "Chrysal" into the world. If he had intended, by exposing crime, to check it, he had better have burned his manuscript. He has added one other corruption to those he exposed, and one other evidence of the lack of taste and decency which characterized his time. No man can plead the intention of a reformer as an excuse for placing before the world the scenes and suggestions of unnatural crime which sully the pages of "Chrysal," and if men do, in single instances, fall below the level of brutes, he who gloats over their infamy and publishes their contagious guilt deserves some share of their odium.

The novels of Henry Mackenzie have a charm of their own, which may be largely attributed to the fact that their author was a gentleman. Whoever has read, to any extent, the works of fiction of the eighteenth century, must have observed how perpetually he was kept in low company, how rarely he met with a character who had the instincts as well as the social position of a gentleman. A tone of refined sentiment and dignity pervades "The Man of Feeling," which recalls the "Vicar of Wakefield," and introduces the reader to better company and more elevated thoughts than the novels of the time usually afford. "The Man of Feeling" is hardly a narrative. Harley, the chief character, is a sensitive, retiring man, with feelings too fine for his surroundings. The author places him in various scenes, and traces the effect which each produces upon his character. The effect of the work is agreeable, though melancholy, and the early death of Harley completes the delineation of a man too gentle and too sensitive to battle with life.

In his next novel Mackenzie described the counterpart of Harley, "The Man of the World." Almost any writer of the present day who took a man of the world for his hero, would draw him as a calm, philosophical person, neither very good nor very bad,—one who took the pleasures and troubles of life as they came, without quarrelling with either. But the man of the world as Mackenzie paints him, and as the eighteenth century made him, was quite another individual. Sir Thomas Sindall is a villain of the heroic type. Not one, simply, who does all the injury and commits all the crimes which chance brings in his way. He labors with a ceaseless persistency, and a resolution which years do not diminish, to seduce a single woman. Without any apparent passion, he finally accomplishes his object by force, after having spent several years in ruining her brother to prevent his interference. The long periods of time, the great expenditure of vital energy, and the exhaustless fund of brutality which are consumed by the fictitious villains of the eighteenth century in gratifying what would seem merely a passing inclination, astonish the reader of to-day. The crime of rape, rarely now introduced into fiction, and rarely figuring even in criminal courts, is a common incident in old novels, and as commonly, remains unpunished. In Sir Thomas Sindall, Mackenzie meant to present a contrast to the delicate and benevolent character of Harley. Both are extremes, the one of sensibility, the other of brutality. Harley was a new creation, but Sindall quite a familiar person, with whom all readers of the novels of the last century have often associated.

It was suggested very sensibly to Mackenzie, that the interest of most works of fiction depended on the designing villainy of one or more characters, and that in actual life calamities were more often brought about by the innocent errors of the sufferers. To place this view before his readers, Mackenzie wrote "Julia de Roubigne," in which a wife brings death upon herself and her husband by indiscreetly, though innocently, arousing his jealousy. Sir Walter Scott ranked this novel among the "most heart-wringing histories" that ever were written—a description which justly becomes it. Mackenzie's aim was less to weave a complicated plot, than to study and move the heart; and to the lover of sentiment his novels may still be attractive.

The "Fool of Quality," by Henry Brooke, has had a singular history. The author was a young Irishman of a fine figure, a well-stored mind, and a disposition of particular gentleness. He was loved by Pope and Lyttleton, caressed by the Prince of Wales, and honored by the friendly interest of Jonathan Swift. Married before he was twenty-one to a young girl who presented him with three children before she was eighteen, his life was a constant struggle to provide for a family which increased with every year. After a long period of active life, passed in literary occupations, he retired to an obscure part of Ireland, and there died, attended by a daughter, the only survivor of twenty-two children, who remembered nothing of her father "previous to his retirement from the world; and knew little of him, save that he bore the infirmities and misfortunes of his declining years with the heroism of true Christianity, and that he was possessed of virtues and feelings which shone forth to the last moment of his life, unimpaired by the distractions of pain, and unshaken amid the ruins of genius."[194]

The "Fool of Quality" was first published in 1766, and received a moderate share of public attention. Its narrative was extremely slight. Harry, the future Earl of Moreland, was stolen from his parents by an uncle in disguise; and the five volumes of the work consist almost entirely of an account of the education of the child, and the various incidents which affected or illustrated his mental growth. One day John Wesley chanced to meet with it, and although he required his followers "to read only such books as tend to the knowledge and love of God," he was tempted to look into this particular novel. The "whimsical title" at first offended him, but as he proceeded, he became so enthusiastic over the moral excellence of the work, that he expunged some offensive passages it contained, and republished it for the benefit of the Methodists. "I now venture to recommend the following treatise," said Wesley to his people, "as the most excellent in its kind that I have seen either in the English or any other language. * * * It perpetually aims at inspiring and increasing every right affection; at the instilling gratitude to God and benevolence to man. And it does this not by dry, dull, tedious, precepts, but by the liveliest examples that can be conceived; by setting before your eyes one of the most beautiful pictures that ever was drawn in the world. The strokes of this are so delicately fine, the touches so easy, natural, and affecting, that I know not who can survey it with tearless eyes, unless he has a heart of stone. I recommend it, therefore, to all those who are already, or who desire to be, lovers of God and man." It was not as a good novel that Wesley either enjoyed or republished the "Fool of Quality." He recommended it for the excellence of its moral, and the "Fool of Quality" would have been allowed to slumber forever on Methodist book-shelves, had it not been revived by a man who was an equally good judge of a moral and a work of fiction.

But, in regard to this novel, it must be admitted that Charles Kingsley's judgment was seriously at fault. He saw both its qualities and its faults, but he did not realize that a good purpose will not make up for a poor execution. The causes of the neglect of the book, said the Canon in his preface, are to be found "in its deep and grand ethics, in its broad and genial humanity, in the divine value which it attaches to the relations of husband and wife, father and child, and to the utter absence, both of that sentimentalism and that superstition which have been alternately debauching of late years the minds of the young. And if he shall have arrived at this discovery, he will be able possibly to regard at least with patience those who are rash enough to affirm that they have learnt from this book more which is pure, sacred, and eternal, than from any which has been published since Spenser's 'Fairy Queen.'"[195] On the testimony of Wesley and of Kingsley, all the merits of a moral nature which they claim for the "Fool of Quality" will readily be accorded to it. But it is very doubtful that such qualities would necessarily interfere with the success of a work of fiction. The real reason why very few who can help it will read this novel, lies in those characteristics which Kingsley himself admitted would appear to the average reader. "The plot is extravagant as well as ill-woven, and broken, besides, by episodes as extravagant as itself. The morality is quixotic, and practically impossible. The sermonizing, whether theological or social, is equally clumsy and obtrusive. Without artistic method, without knowledge of human nature and the real world, the book can never have touched many hearts and can touch none now."[196]

It is singular that Kingsley should have expected that a book with so many and so evident faults could have remained popular simply because its moral was a good one. If he had sat down to warn the world against Henry Brooke's novel, he could hardly have expressed himself with more effect. Whatever merit it may have is buried under a mass of dulness almost impossible to penetrate, and a silliness pervades the characters and the conversations which makes even the lighter portions unreadable. The "Fool of Quality" has all the drawbacks of a novel of purpose in an exaggerated form. The improvement of his reader is a laudable object for a novelist. But it is an object which can be successfully carried out in a work of art, only very indirectly. An author may have a great influence for good, but that influence can be obtained, not by deliberate sermonizing, but only by tone of healthy sentiment which insensibly elevates the reader's mind.

Toward the end of the eighteenth century, the number and variety of works of fiction rapidly increased. William Beckford, whom Byron calls in "Childe Harold," "Vathek, England's wealthiest son," wrote in his twentieth year the oriental romance "Vathek," which excited great attention at the time. It was composed in three days and two nights, during which the author never took off his clothes. Byron considered this tale superior to "Rasselas." It represented the downward career of an oriental prince, who had given himself up to sensual indulgence, and who is allured by a Giaour into the commission of crimes which lead him to everlasting and horrible punishments. "Vathek" gives evidence of a familiarity with oriental customs, and a vividness of imagination which are remarkable in so youthful an author. The descriptions of the Caliph and of the Hall of Eblis are full of power. But in depth of meaning, and in that intrinsic worth which gives endurance to a literary work, it bears no comparison to "Rasselas." The one affords an hour's amusement; the other retains its place among those volumes which are read and re-read with constant pleasure and satisfaction.

The novels of Richard Cumberland, "Henry," "Arundel," and "John de Lancaster," contain some well-drawn characters and readable sketches of life. But Cumberland had little originality. He aimed without success at Fielding's constructive excellence, and imitated that great master's humor, only to reproduce his coarseness. The character of Ezekiel Daw, the Methodist, in "Henry," is fair and just, and contrasts very favorably with the libellous representations of the Methodist preachers in Graves' "Spiritual Quixote," and other contemporary novels. Another writer of fiction of considerable prominence in his day, but of none in ours, was Dr. Moore, whose "Zeluco" contained some very lively "Views of human nature, taken from life and manners, foreign and domestic," but also some very disagreeable exhibitions of human degradation and vice.

The influence of the French Revolution in England is apparent in the works of several novelists who wrote at the end of the eighteenth century. Thomas Holcroft embodied radical views in novels now quite forgotten.[197] Robert Bage has left four works containing opinions of a revolutionary character—"Barham Downs," "James Wallace," "The Fair Syrian," and "Mount Henneth." These novels are written in the form of a series of letters and have little narrative interest. The author has striven, sometimes successfully, at a powerful delineation of character, but his works are too evidently a vehicle for his political and philosophical opinions. He represents with unnatural consistency the upper classes as invariably corrupt and tyrannical, and the lower as invariably honest and deserving. His theories are not only inartistically prominent, but are worthless and immoral. He looks upon a tax-gatherer as a thief, and condones feminine unchastity as a trivial and unimportant offence.

The novelist most deeply embued with the doctrines of the French Revolution was William Godwin—a man of great literary ambition, and less literary capacity. His "Life of Chaucer" has the merits of a compilation, but not those of an original literary work. His political and social writings were merely reproductions of French revolutionary views, and were entirely discredited by Malthus' attacks upon them. The same lack of originality and of independent power characterized Godwin's novels. They all have a patch-work effect, and in all may be found the traces of imitation. "St. Leon" and "Mandeville"[198] are dull attempts in the direction of the historical novel. "Fleetwood, or the New Man of Feeling" embodies some of the author's social views, and contains evidence of an imitation of Fielding and Smollett, in which only their coarseness is successfully copied.

But Godwin gave one book to the world which has acquired a notoriety which entitles it to a more extended notice than its intrinsic merits would otherwise justify. "Caleb Williams" was first published in 1794, and was widely read. Lord Byron is said to have threatened his wife that he would treat her as Falkland had treated Caleb Williams, and this fact brought the novel into prominence with the Byron controversy, and occasioned its republication in the present century. The author tells us that his object was "to comprehend a general review of the modes of domestic and unrecorded despotism by which man becomes the destroyer of man." And this was to be done "without subtracting from the interest and passion by which a performance of this sort (a novel) ought to be characterized." In both his didactic and his artistic purpose the author must be said to have failed. The story is briefly as follows: Falkland, who is represented as a man whose chief thought and consideration consist in guarding his honor from stain, stabs Tyrrel, his enemy, in the back, at night. He then allows two innocent men to suffer for the murder on the gallows. His aim, during the remainder of his life, is to prevent the discovery of his crime and the consequent disgrace to his name. Caleb Williams enters his employment as a secretary, discovers the secret with the greatest ease, and promises never to betray his patron. Williams soon becomes weary of his position, and attempts to escape. He is accused by Falkland of robbery and is imprisoned. He escapes from prison, and wanders about the country, always pursued by the hirelings of his master who use every means to render his life miserable. Finally he openly accuses Falkland of his crime, who confesses it and dies. The story is full of the most evident inconsistencies. There is no adequate reason for Tyrrel's hatred of Falkland, which leads to the murder. It is inconceivable that a man of Falkland's worship of honor should commit so dastardly a crime, and should suffer two innocent men to pay its penalty. The facility with which Falkland allows his secretary to discover a secret which would bring him to the gallows is entirely inconsistent with the strength of mind which the author imputes to his hero. Finally, the confession of crime, after so many years of secrecy, and when conscience must have been blunted by time and habit, is without adequate cause. The characters are very slightly sketched, and excite neither interest nor sympathy. Emily Melville resembles Pamela too closely, and Tyrrel is a poor reproduction of Squire Western.

Godwin tells us that, when thinking over "Caleb Williams," he said to himself a thousand times: "I will write a tale, that shall constitute an epoch in the mind of the reader, that no one, after he has read it, shall ever be exactly the same man that he was before." The effort, and straining after effect which this confession implies, are evident throughout the work. The reader's curiosity is continually excited by the promise of new interest and new developments, but he is as continually disappointed. The main idea of the story is certainly a striking one, but it is feebly carried out. The constitution of society cannot be effectively attacked by so improbable and exceptional an illustration of tyranny as the persecution of Caleb Williams.

[Footnote 189: It would be difficult to find a more bare-faced and impudent literary theft than the case in which Sterne appropriated to himself the remonstrance of Burton ("Anatomy of Melancholy"), against that very plagiarism which he (Sterne) was then committing. Burton said: "As apothecaries, we make new mixtures, every day pour out of one vessel into another * * * We weave the same web, still twist the same rope again and again." Sterne says, with an effrontery all his own: "Shall we forever make new books, as apothecaries make new medicines, by pouring only out of one vessel into another? Are we forever to be twisting and untwisting the same rope—forever in the same track? forever at the same pace?" For Sterne's plagiarism, see Dr. Ferriar's "Essay and Illustrations," also Scott's "Life of Sterne."]

[Footnote 190: "Tristram Shandy," orig. ed., vol. viii, chap. 8.]

[Footnote 191: "Rasselas," chap. xliv. Contrast with Porter on "The Human Intellect," pp. 371-2.]

[Footnote 192: See Scott's "Memoir of Johnson."]

[Footnote 193: "The Reverie," "The History of Arbaces," "The Pilgrim," "The History of John Juniper."]

[Footnote 194: The facts of Brooke's life are taken from the introduction to the "Fool of Quality," by Rev. Charles Kingsley, New York, 1860.]

[Footnote 195: Charles Kingsley, preface to the "Fool of Quality."]

[Footnote 196: Kingsley's preface to "Fool of Quality."]

[Footnote 197: "Alwyn," "Anna St. Ives," "Hugh Trevor," "Bryan Perdue."]

[Footnote 198: Published in 1817, when the author was far advanced in years.]



III.

The publication of "Evelina," in 1778, made a sensation which the merits of the work fully justified. The story of Miss Burney's[199] early life, her furtive attempts at fictitious composition, the great variety of artistic and political characters who passed in review before her observant eyes at Dr. Burney's house have been made familiar by her own diary and letters. Petted and admired by Johnson, Mrs. Thrale, and the brilliant literary society of which they formed the centre, she lived sufficiently far into the present century to see the works of her early friends enrolled among the classics or consigned to oblivion, and to recognize that the approval of posterity had been added to the early fame of her own writings. As a very young girl, unnoticed by the distinguished persons who frequented her father's house, she had studied with careful attention the characters and manners of those who talked and moved about her. A strong desire to reproduce the impressions which filled her mind induced Miss Burney in her sixteenth year to devote her stolen hours of seclusion to fictitious composition. Discouraged in her early efforts by her stepmother, her habits of observation remained active, and took form, when the authoress was twenty five years old, in the famous novel of "Evelina." The book was issued secretly and anonymously, the publisher even being ignorant of the writer's true name. But the immediate popularity and admiration which greeted the work soon led to its open acknowledgment by the happy young authoress.

And "Evelina" fully deserved the praise and interest which it obtained and still excites. The aim was to describe the difficulties and sensations of a young girl just entering life. The heroine chosen by Miss Burney was one whose circumstances particularly well suited her to form the centre of a varied collection of characters and of a comprehensive picture of contemporary society. Well connected on her father's side, Evelina moved in fashionable circles with the Mirvan family. On account of the origin of her mother she was brought into close contact with humbler personages, with Madame Duval and the Brangtons. Hence this novel presents to the reader a variety of social scenes which gives it a value possessed by no other work of fiction of the eighteenth century. No novelist has described so well or so fully the aspect of the theatres, of Vauxhall and Ranelagh, of Bath in the season, of the ridottos and assemblies of the London fashionable world. The shops, the amusements and the manners of the middle classes are made familiar to Evelina by her association with the Brangtons, and add greatly to the breadth of this valuable picture of metropolitan life. With a feminine attention to detail, and a quick perception of salient characteristics, Miss Burney described the world about her so faithfully and picturesquely as to deserve the thanks of every student of social history. The novel of "Evelina," the letters of Horace Walpole and Mrs. Delany corroborate each other, and may be appropriately placed on the same shelf in a well-ordered library.

In the painting of manners Miss Burney was eminently successful. But she was hardly less so in a point in which excellence could not have been expected in so youthful a writer. The plot of "Evelina" is constructed with a skill worthy of a veteran. Fielding alone, of the eighteenth century novelists, can be said to surpass Miss Burney in this respect. The whole story of the mischances and misunderstanding of Evelina's intercourse with Lord Orville, the skill with which the various personages are brought into contact with each other and made to contribute to the final denoument, compose a truly artistic success. The introduction of Macartney and his marriage to the supposed daughter of Sir John Belmont form a very happy and effective invention.

In regard to her sketches of character, it may be objected that Miss Burney lacked breadth of treatment, that she dwelt on one distinctive characteristic at the expense of the others. But still, Lord Orville, though somewhat too much of a model, and Mrs. Selwyn, though somewhat too habitually a wit, are vivid and life-like characters. The Brangtons and Sir Clement Willougby are nature itself, and the girlish nature of Evelina is betrayed in her letters with great felicity.

It is no small triumph for Miss Burney, who has had so many and so deserving competitors in the department of literature to which she contributed, that her novels should have remained in active circulation for more than a century after their publication. "Cecilia" has much the same merits which distinguished "Evelina," and the two novels bid fair to hold their own as long as English fiction retains its popularity. Johnson considered Miss Burney equal to Fielding. But although she possessed qualities similar to his—constructive power and picturesqueness—she possessed them in a lesser degree. In the management of the difficulties of the epistolary form of novel-writing, she surpassed Richardson in verisimilitude and concentration.

Some readers of the present day object to Miss Burney's novels that they contain so many references to "delicacy" and "propriety" that an air of affectation is produced. But at the time when "Evelina" was written, a perpetual discretion in actions and words was absolutely necessary to a young woman who did not wish to be subjected to libertine advances. Society is now so much more generally refined that there is far less danger of such misconstruction, and far less need for a young girl to be always on her guard. A sound objection, on the ground of taste, may be made against the excessively prolonged account of Captain Mirvan's brutalities. The effect might have been as well produced in a much shorter space, and the reader spared the uninteresting scenes which now fill so many repulsive pages. For this defect, however, we must blame the times more than the author.

Charlotte Lennox was the daughter of Sir James Ramsay, Lieutenant governor of New York, where she was born in 1720. When fifteen years of age she was sent to London, and there supported herself by her pen. Johnson said that he had "dined at Mrs. Garrick's with Mrs. Carter, Miss Hannah More, and Miss Fanny Burney: three such women are not to be found. I know not where I could find a fourth, except Mrs. Lennox, who is superior to them all." Such high praise was not called forth by Mrs. Lennox's novels, which have little originality or power. "The Female Quixote" is an entertaining satire on the old French romances, but "Sophia," and "Euphemia" are without any special interest.

A writer of more ability, whose name is still remembered by novel-readers, is Mrs. Inchbald. She was overcome in early life by an enthusiasm for the stage; ran away from home to find theatrical employment, and remained for many years a popular London actress. Although possessed of great and durable beauty, and the object of constant attention from aristocratic admirers, it is believed that her reputation continued unsullied. Her poverty, largely caused by a worthless husband, obliged her to perform the most menial labors. She rejoiced on one occasion that the approach of warmer weather released her from the duty of making fires, scouring the grate, sifting the cinders, and of going up and down three pair of long stairs with water or dirt. All this Mrs. Inchbald thought that she could cheerfully bear, but the labor of being a fine lady the remainder of the day was almost too much for her. "Last Thursday," she wrote to a friend, "I finished scouring my bed-chamber, while a coach with a coronet and two footmen waited at the door to take me an airing."