They dance—they sing—they bless the day,I weep the while—and well I may:Husband, nor child, to greet me come,Without a friend—without a home:I sit beneath my favourite tree,Sing then, my little birds, to me,In music, love, and liberty.
They dance—they sing—they bless the day,I weep the while—and well I may:Husband, nor child, to greet me come,Without a friend—without a home:I sit beneath my favourite tree,Sing then, my little birds, to me,In music, love, and liberty.
At the time that the British public was smiling graciously, even if a little humorously, upon Lady Caroline Lamb, and was lionising Lord Byron, it spurned from its presence with the greatest disdain Percy and Mary Shelley. Even after the death of Shelley, when Mary returned to London with herself and son to support, it received her as the prodigal daughter for whom the crumbs from the rich man's table must suffice.
Mary Shelley had inherited from her mother the world's frown. Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin had been, the greater part of her life, at variance with society. She was the author, as has been said, of theVindication of the Rights of Woman, and had for a long time been an opponent of marriage, chiefly because the civil laws pertaining to it deprived both husband and wife of their proper liberty. Her bitter experience with Imlay had, however, so modified her views on this latter subject that she became the wife of William Godwin a short time before the birth of their daughter Mary, who in after years became Mrs. Shelley. Although her mother died at her birth, Mary Godwin was deeply imbued with her theories of life. She had read her books, and had often heard her father express the same views concerning the bondage of marriage and its uselessness. Her elopement with Shelley while his wife Harriet was still living gains a certain sanction from the fact that she plighted her troth to him at her mother's grave. After the sad death of Harriet, however, Shelley and Mary Godwin conceded to the world's opinion, and were legally married. But the anger of society was not appeased, and, even after both had become famous, it continued to ignore the poet Shelley and his gifted wife.
At the age of nineteen Mrs. Shelley was led to write her first novel. Mr. and Mrs. Shelley and Byron were spending the summer of 1816 in the mountains of Switzerland. Continuous rain kept them in-doors, where they passed the time in reading ghost stories. At the suggestion of Byron, each one agreed to write a blood-curdling tale. It is one of the strange freaks of invention that this young girl succeeded where Shelley and Byron failed. Byron wrote a fragment of a story which was printedwithMazeppa. Shelley also began a story, but when he had reduced his characters to a most pitiable condition, he wearied of them and could devise no way to bring the tale to a fitting conclusion. After listening to a conversation between the two poets upon the possibilities of science discovering the secrets of life, the story known asFrankenstein, or the Modern Prometheusshaped itself in Mary's mind.
Frankensteinis one of those novels that defy the critic. Everyone recognises that the letters written by Captain Walton to his sister in which he tells of his meeting with Frankenstein, and repeats to her the story he has just heard from his guest, makes an awkward introduction to the real narrative. Yet all this part about Captain Walton and his crew was added at the suggestion of Shelley after the rest of the story had been written. But the narrative of Frankenstein is so powerful, so real, that, once read, it can never be forgotten. Mrs. Shelley wrote in the introduction of the edition of 1839 that, before writing it, she was trying to think of a story, "one that would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature, and awaken thrilling horror—one to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle the blood and quicken the beatings of the heart." That she has done this the experience of every reader will prove.
But the story has a greater hold on theimagination than this alone would give it. The monster created by Frankenstein is closely related to our own human nature. "My heart was fashioned to be susceptible of love and sympathy," he says, "and, when wrenched by misery to vice and hatred, it did not endure the violence of the change without torture, such as you cannot even imagine." There is a wonderful blending of good and evil in this demon, and, while the magnitude of his crimes makes us shudder, his wrongs and his loneliness awaken our pity. "The fallen angel becomes a malignant devil. Yet even that enemy of God and man had friends and associates in his desolation; I am quite alone," the monster complains to his creator. Who can forget the scene where he watches Frankenstein at work making for him the companion that he had promised? Perhaps sadder than the story of the monster is that of Frankenstein, who, led by a desire to widen human knowledge, finds that the fulfilment of his lofty ambition has brought only a curse to mankind.
In 1823, Mary Shelley published a second novel,Valperga, so named from a castle and small independent territory near Lucca. Castruccio Castracani, whose life Machiavelli has told, is the hero of the story. The greatest soldier and satirist of his times, the man of the novel is considered inferior to the man ofhistory. Mrs. Shelley had read broadly before beginning the book, and she has described minutely the customs of the age about which she is writing. Shelley pronounced it "a living and moving picture of an age almost forgotten."
The interest centres in the two heroines, Euthanasia, Countess of Valperga, and Beatrice, Prophetess of Ferrara. Strong, intellectual, and passionate, not until the time of George Eliot did women of this type become prominent in fiction. Euthanasia, a Guelph and a Florentine, with a soul "adapted for the reception of all good," was betrothed to the youth Castruccio, whom she at that time loved. Later, when his character deteriorated under the influence of selfish ambition, she ceased to love him, and said, "He cast off humanity, honesty, honourable feeling, all that I prize." Castruccio belonged to the Ghibelines, so that the story of their love is intertwined with the struggle between these two parties in Italy.
But more beautiful than the intellectual character of Euthanasia, is the spiritual one of Beatrice, the adopted daughter of the bishop of Ferrara, who is regarded with feelings of reverence by her countrymen, because of her prophetic powers. Pure and deeply religious, she accepted all the suggestions of her mind as a message from God. When Castruccio came to Ferrara andwas entertained by the bishop as the prince and liberator of his country, she believed that together they could accomplish much for her beloved country: "She prayed to the Virgin to inspire her; and, again giving herself up to reverie, she wove a subtle web, whose materials she believed heavenly, but which were indeed stolen from the glowing wings of love." No wonder she believed the dictates of her own heart, she whose words the superstition of the age had so often declared miraculous. She was barely seventeen and she loved for the first time. How pathetic is her disillusionment when Castruccio bade her farewell for a season, as he was about to leave Ferrara. She had believed that the Holy Spirit had brought Castruccio to her that by the union of his manly qualities and her divine attributes some great work might be fulfilled. But as he left her, he spoke only of earthly happiness:
"It was her heart, her whole soul she had given; her understanding, her prophetic powers, all the little universe that with her ardent spirit she grasped and possessed, she had surrendered, fully, and without reserve; but, alas! the most worthless part alone had been accepted, and the rest cast as dust upon the winds."
Afterwards, when she wandered forth a beggar, and was rescued by Euthanasia, she exclaimed to her:
"You either worship a useless shadow, or a fiend in the clothing of a God."
The daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft could fully sympathise with Beatrice. In the grief, almost madness, with which Beatrice realises her self-deception, there are traces of Frankenstein. Perhaps no problem plucked from the tree of good and evil was so ever-present to Mary Shelley as why misery so often follows an obedience to the highest dictates of the soul. Both her father and mother had experienced this; and she and Shelley had tasted of the same bitter fruit. In the analysis of Beatrice's emotions Mrs. Shelley shows herself akin to Charlotte Brontë.
Three years after the death of Shelley, she publishedThe Last Man. It relates to England in the year 2073 when, the king having abdicated his throne, England had become a republic. Soon after this, however a pestilence fell upon the people, which drove them upon the continent, where they travelled southward, until only one man remained. The plot is clumsy; the characters are abstractions.
But the feelings of the author, written in clear letters on every page, are a valuable addition to the history of the poet Shelley and his wife. Besides her fresh sorrow for her husband, Byron had died only the year before. Her mind was brooding on the days the three hadspent together. Her grief was too recent to be shaken from her mind or lost sight of in her imaginative work. Shelley, and the scenes she had looked on with him, the conversations between him and his friends, creep in on every page. Lionel Verney, the Last Man, is the supposed narrator of the story. He thus describes Adrian, the son of the king: "A tall, slim, fair boy, with a physiognomy expressive of the excess of sensibility and refinement, stood before me; the morning sunbeams tinged with gold his silken hair, and spread light and glory over his beaming countenance ... he seemed like an inspired musician, who struck, with unerring skill, the 'lyre of mind,' and produced thence divinest harmony.... His slight frame was over informed by the soul that dwelt within.... He was gay as a lark carrolling from its skiey tower.... The young and inexperienced did not understand the lofty severity of his moral views, and disliked him as a being different from themselves." Shelley, of course, was the original of this picture. Lord Byron suggested the character of Lord Raymond: "The earth was spread out as a highway for him; the heavens built up as a canopy for him." "Every trait spoke predominate self-will; his smile was pleasing, though disdain too often curled his lips—lips which to female eyes were the very throne of beauty and love.... Thus full of contradictions, unbendingyet haughty, gentle yet fierce, tender and again neglectful, he by some strange art found easy entrance to the admiration and affection of women; now caressing and now tyrannising over them according to his mood, but in every change a despot."
A large part of the three volumes is taken up with a characterisation of Adrian and Lord Raymond, the latter of whom falls when fighting for the Greeks. How impossible it was for her to rid her mind of her own sorrow is shown at the end of the third volume, where Adrian is drowned, and Lionel Verney is left alone. He thus says of his friend:
"All I had possessed of this world's goods, of happiness, knowledge, or virtue—I owed to him. He had, in his person, his intellect, and rare qualities, given a glory to my life, which without him it had never known. Beyond all other beings he had taught me that goodness, pure and simple, can be an attribute of man."
Mrs. Shelley made the great mistake of writing this novel in the first person.The Last Man, who is telling the story, although he has the name of Lionel, is most assuredly of the female sex. The friendship between him and Adrian is not the friendship of man for man, but rather the love of man and woman.
Mrs. Shelley's next novel,Lodore, written in 1835, thirteen years after the death of her husband, had a better outlined plot and more definite characters. But again it echoes the past. Lord Byron's unhappy married relations and Shelley's troubles with Harriet are blended in the story, Lord Byron furnishing the character in some respects of Lord Lodore, while his wife, Cornelia Santerre, resembles both Harriet and Lady Byron. Lady Santerre, the mother of Cornelia, augments the trouble between Lord and Lady Lodore, and, contrary to the evident intentions of the writer, the reader's sympathies are largely with Cornelia and Lady Santerre. When Lodore wishes Cornelia to go to America to save him from disgrace, Lady Santerre objects to her daughter's accompanying him:
"He will soon grow tired of playing the tragic hero on a stage surrounded by no spectators; he will discover the folly of his conduct; he will return, and plead for forgiveness, and feel that he is too fortunate in a wife who has preserved her own conduct free from censure and remark while he has made himself a laughing-stock to all."
These words strangely bring to mind Lord Byron as having evoked them.
Again Lady Lodore's letter to her husband at the time of his departure to America reminds one of Lady Byron:
"If heaven have blessings for the coldly egotistical, the unfeeling despot, may thoseblessings be yours; but do not dare to interfere with emotions too pure, too disinterested for you ever to understand. Give me my child, and fear neither my interference nor resentment."
Lady Lodore's character changes in the book, and becomes more like that of Harriet Shelley. As Mrs. Shelley wrote, fragments of the past evidently came into her mind and influenced her pen, and her original conception of the characters was forgotten. Clorinda, the beautiful, eloquent, and passionate Neapolitan, was drawn from Emilia Viviani, who had suggested to Shelley his poemEpipsychidion, while both Horatio Saville, who had "no thought but for the nobler creations of the soul, and the discernment of the sublime laws of God and nature," and his cousin Villiers, also an enthusiastic worshipper of nature, possessed many of Shelley's qualities.
Besides two other novels of no value,Perkin WarbeckandFalkner, Mrs. Shelley wrote numerous short stories for the annuals, at that time so much in vogue. In 1891, these were collected and edited with an appreciative criticism by Sir Richard Garnett. Many of them have the intensity and sustained interest of Frankenstein.
After the death of her husband, grief and trouble dimmed Mrs. Shelley's imagination.But the pale student Frankenstein, the monster he created, and the beautiful priestess, Beatrice, three strong conceptions, testify to the genius of Mary Shelley.
During the second decade of the nineteenth century, while Scott was writing some of the most powerful of the Waverley novels, a host of new writers sprang into popular notice. John Galt, William Harrison Ainsworth, and G. P. R. James began their endless series of historical romances, while in 1827, Bulwer Lytton and Benjamin Disraeli introduced to the reading public, as the representatives of fashionable society,FalklandandVivian Grey. The decade was prolific also in novels by women. Jane Austen had died in 1817, but Maria Edgeworth, Lady Morgan, the Porters, Amelia Opie, Miss Ferrier, Mrs. Shelley and Miss Mitford were still writing; during this period, Mrs. S. C. Hall began her work in imitation of Miss Mitford, while Mrs. Gore and Mrs. Bray took up the goose-quill, piled reams of paper on their desks, and began their literary careers.
About a score of years before Thackeray tickled English society with pictures of its ownsnobbery, Mrs. Gore, a young woman, wife of an officer in the Life Guards, saw through the many affectations of the polite world, and in a series of novels, pointed out its ludicrous pretences with lively wit. Mrs. Gore has suffered, however, from the multiplicity of her writings. During the years between 1823, when she wrote her first novel,Theresa Marchmont, and 1850, when, quite blind, she retired from the world of letters, she published two hundred volumes of novels, plays, and poems. Her plots are often hastily constructed, her men and women dimly outlined, but she is never dull. No writer since Congreve has so many sparkling lines. She has been likened to Horace, and if we compare her wit with that of Thackeray, who by the way ridiculed her in hisNovels by Eminent Hands, her humour has qualities of old Falernian, beside which his too frequently has the bitter flavour of old English beer. The Englishman is inclined to take his wit, like his sports, too seriously, and to mingle with it a little of the spice of envy. Mrs. Gore has none of this, however, and skims along the surface of fashionable life with a grace and ease and humour extremely diverting.
Her writings are so voluminous that one can only make excerpts at random. One of the liveliest isCecil, or the Adventures of a Coxcomb, a humorous satire onVivian Grey. "The arch-coxcomb of his coxcombical time" had become a coxcomb at the age of six months, when he first saw himself in the mirror, from which time his nurse stopped his crying by tossing him in front of a looking-glass. His curls made him so attractive that at six years of age he was admitted to his mother's boudoir, from which his red-headed brother was excluded, and he superseded the spaniel in her ladyship's carriage. With the loss of his curls went the loss of favour. He did not prosper at school, and was rusticated after a year's residence at Oxford. Here he formed an acquaintance which helped him much in the world of coxcombry. Though this man was not well born, he was an admitted leader among gentlemen. Cecil soon discovered that his high social position was due entirely to his impertinence, and he made this wise observation: "Impudence is the quality of a footman; impertinence of his master. Impudence is a thing to be rebutted with brute force; impertinence requires wit for the putting down." So he matched his wit with this man's impertinence, and they became sworn friends.
When Cecil went to London, he found that "people had supped full of horrors, during the Revolution, and were now devoted to elegiac measures. My languid smile and hazel eyes were the very thing to settle the business of the devoted beings left for execution." Of courseall the women fell desperately in love with him. "I had always a predisposition to woman-slaughter, with extenuating circumstances, as well as a stirring consciousness of the exterminating power," he explains to us. Like Childe Harold and Vivian Grey, this coxcomb soon became weary of London, and travelled through Europe in an indolent way, for after all it was his chief pleasure "to lie in an airy French bed, showered over with blue convolvulus," and read tender billets from the ladies. This book was an excellent antidote to the Byronic fever, then at its height.
In herSketches of English Character, Mrs. Gore describes different men who were in her time to be met with in the social life of London. The Dining-Out Man thus speaks for himself:
"Ill-natured people fancy that the life of a dining-out man is a life of corn, wine, and oil; that all he has to do is to eat, drink and be merry. I only know that, had I been aware in the onset of life, of all I should have to go through in my vocation, I would have chosen some easier calling. I would have studied law, physic, or divinity."
In the sketches ofThe Clubman, she assigns John Bull's dislike of ladies' society as the reason for the many clubs in the English metropolis:
"While admitting woman to be a divinity,he chooses to conceal his idol in the Holy of Holies of domestic life. Duly to enjoy the society of Mrs. Bull, he chooses a smoking tureen, and cod's head and shoulders to intervene between them, and their olive branches to be around their table.... For John adores woman in the singular, and hates her in the plural; John loves, but does not like. Woman is the object of his passion, rarely of his regard. There is nothing in the gaiety of heart or sprightliness of intellect of the weaker sex which he considers an addition to society. To him women are an interruption to business and pleasure."
Mrs. Gore could also unveil hypocrisy. In her novelPreferment, or My Uncle the Earl, she thus describes a worthy ornament of the church:
"The Dean of Darbington glided along his golden railroad—'mild as moonbeams'—soft as a swansdown muff—insinuating as a silken eared spaniel. His conciliating arguments were whispered in a tone suitable to the sick chamber of a nervous hypochondriac, and his strain of argument resembled its potations of thin, weak, well-sweetened barley water. While Dr. Macnab succeeded withhiscongregation by kicking and bullying them along the path of grace, Dr. Nicewig held out his finger with a coaxing air and gentle chirrup, like a bird-fancier decoying a canary."
A critic in theWestminster Reviewin 1831 thus writes of her:
"Mrs. Gore has a perfectly feminine knowledge of all the weaknesses and absurdities of an ordinary man of fashion, following the routine of London life in the season. She unmasks his selfishness with admirable acuteness; she exposes his unromantic egotism, with delightful sauciness. Her portraits of women are also executed with great spirit; but not with the same truth. In transferring men to her canvas, she has relied upon the faculty of observation, usually fine and vigilant in a woman; but when portraying her own sex, the authoress has perhaps looked within; and the study of the internal operations of the human machine is a far more complex affair, and requires far more extensive experience, and also different faculties, from those necessary to acquire a perfect knowledge of the appearances on the surface of humanity."
Notwithstanding Mrs. Gore touches so lightly on the surface of life, certain definite sociological and moral principles underlie her work. She is as democratic as Charlotte Smith, Mrs. Inchbald, Miss Mitford, or even William Godwin. She asserts again and again that men of inferior birth with the same opportunities of education may be as intellectual and refined as the sons of a "hundred earls." Those members of thearistocracy who fail to recognise the true worth of intelligent men of plebeian origin are made very ridiculous. In her novelPin Money, published in 1831, how very funny is Lady Derenzy's speech when she learns that a soap manufacturer is being fêted in fashionable society! Lady Derenzy, by the way, is the social law-giver to her little coterie:
"It is now some years," said she, "since the independence of America, and the influence exerted in this country by the return of a large body of enlightened men, habituated to the demoralising spectacle of an equalisation of rank, was supposed to exert a pernicious influence on the minds of the secondary and inferior classes of Great Britain. At that critical moment I whispered to my husband, 'Derenzy! be true to yourself, and the world will be true to you. Let the aristocracy of Great Britain unite in support of the Order; and it will maintain its ground against the universe!' Lord Derenzy took my advice, and the country was saved.
"Again, when the assemblage of the States General of France,—the fatal tocsin of the revolution,—spread consternation and horror throughout the higher ranks of every European country, and the very name of the guillotine operated like a spell on the British peerage, I whispered to my husband, 'Derenzy! be trueto yourself, and the world will be true to you. Let the aristocracy of Great Britain unite in support of the Order; and it will maintain its ground against the universe!' Again Lord Derenzy took my advice, and again the country was saved."
Mrs. Gore has so cleverly mingled the so-called self-made men and men of inherited rank in her books that one cannot distinguish between them. InThe Soldier of Lyons, one of her early novels, which furnished Bulwer with the plot of his playThe Lady of Lyons, the hero, a peasant by birth and a soldier of the Republic, enters into a marriage contract with the widow of a French marquis, in order to save her from the guillotine. This lady of high rank learns to respect her husband, and becomes the suitor for his love. InThe Heir of Selwood, a former field marshal of Napoleon, a peasant, devotes his energies to improving the condition of the poor on the estate he had won by his services to his country, and at his death his tenants erected a column to his memory, bearing the inscription: "Most dear to God, to the king, and to the people."
Mrs. Gore constantly asserts that the only distinctions between men are based upon character and ability. She says of one of her characters, a poet:
"His footing in society is no longer dependentupon the caprice of a drawing-room. It is the security of that intellectual power which forces the world to bend the knee. The poor, dreamy boy, self-taught, self-aided, had risen into power. He wields a pen. And the pen in our age weighs heavier in the social scale than a sword of a Norman baron."
Mrs. Gore lived at a time when the introduction of machinery and the establishment of large factories was producing a new type of man: men like Burtonshaw inThe Hamiltons: "A practical, matter-of-fact individual, with plenty of money and plenty of intellect; the sort of human power-loom one would back to work wonders against a dawdling old spinning-jenny like Lord Tottenham."
A critic in theWestminster Reviewwrote in 1832 as follows:
"The wealthy merchant or money-dealer is represented, perhaps for the first time in fiction, as a man of true dignity, self-respect, education, and thorough integrity, agreeable in manners, refined in tastes, and content with, if not proud of, his position in society."
Mrs. Gore was called by her contemporaries the novelist of the new era.
She was also interested in the great ethical questions of life. She did not write of the love of youthful heroes and more youthful heroines. She often traced the consequencesof sin on character and destiny. InThe Heir of Selwood, she is as stern a moralist in tracing the effects of vice as George Eliot.The Banker's Wife, the scene of which is laid among the merchants of London, is a serious study of the sorrows of a life devoted to outward show. The picture of the banker among his guests, whose wealth, unknown to them, he has squandered, reminds one of the days before the final overthrow of Dombey and Son.
Mrs. Gore was a woman of genius. With the stern principles of the puritan, and feelings as republican as the mountain-born Swiss, she was never controversial. She saw the absurdities of certain hollow pretensions of society, but her good-humoured raillery offended no one. If her two hundred volumes could be weeded of their verbiage by some devotee of literature, and reduced to ten or fifteen, they would be not only entertaining reading, but would throw strong lights upon theéliteof London in the days when hair-oils, pomades, and strong perfumes were the distinguishing marks of the Quality.
Mrs. Gore owed her place in English letters to native wit and ability; Mrs. Bray owed hers to hard study and painstaking endeavour. She was one of the few women who followed the style of writing brought to perfection by Sir Walter Scott.
Mrs. Bray became imbued with the historic spirit early in life. Her first husband was Charles Stothard, the author ofMonumental Effigies of Great Britain, with whom she travelled through Brittany, Normandy and Flanders. While he made careful drawings of the ruins of castles and abbeys, she read Froissart'sChronicles, visited the places which he has described, and traced out among the people any surviving customs which he has recorded.
Two novels were the result of these studies.De Foix, or Sketches of the Manners and Customs of the Fourteenth Century, is a story of Gaston Phoebus, Count de Foix, whose court Froissart visited, and of whom he wrote: "To speak briefly and truly, the Count de Foix was perfect in person and in mind; and no contemporary prince could be compared with him for sense, honour, or liberality."The White Hoods, a name by which the citizens of Ghent were denominated, is laid in the Netherlands, and tells of the conflict between the court and the citizens of Ghent, under Philip von Artaveld, during the reign of Charles the Fifth of France and the early kingship of Charles the Sixth. As in all her novels, the accuracy for which she strove in the most minute details retards the action of the plot, but adds to the historical value of these romances.
For the tragic romance ofThe Talba, or Moor of Portugal,Mrs. Bray, as she had not visited the Spanish peninsula, depended upon her reading. The plot was suggested to her by a picture of Ines de Castro in the Royal Academy. It represented the gruesome coronation of the corpse of Ines de Castro, six years after her death. Thus did her husband, Don Pedro, show honour to his wife, who had been put to death while he, then a prince, was serving in the army of Portugal. The whole story is a fitting theme for tragedy, and was at one time dramatised by Mary Mitford. In order to give her mind the proper elevation for the impassioned scenes of this novel, it was Mrs. Bray's custom to read a chapter of Isaiah or Job each day before beginning to write.
After the death of her first husband, Mrs. Bray married the vicar of Tavistock, and for thirty-five years lived in the vicarage of that town. Here she became interested in the legends of Devon and Cornwall, and wrote five novels founded upon the history of tradition of those counties.Henry de Pomeroyopens at the abbey of Tavistock, one of the oldest abbeys in England, during the reign of Richard Cœur-de-Leon. The scene ofFitz of Fitz-Fordis also laid at Tavistock, but during the reign of Queen Elizabeth. Another story of the reign of the Virgin Queen wasWarleigh, or the Fatal Oak: a Legend of Devon.Courtenay of Walreddon: aRomance of the Westtakes place in the reign of Charles the First, about the commencement of the Civil War. A gypsy girl, by name Cinderella Small, is introduced into the story, and has been highly praised. The character, as well as some of the stories told of her, was drawn from life.
But the most famous of these novels isTrelawny of Trelawne; or the Prophecy: a Legend of Cornwall, a story of the rebellion of Monmouth. Like most of the romances upon English themes, the private history of the family furnishes the romance, the historical happenings being used only for the setting: the usual method of Scott. The hero of this novel is Sir Jonathan Trelawny, one of the seven bishops who were committed to the Tower by James the Second. When he was arrested by the king's command, the Cornish men rose one and all, and marched as far as Exeter, in their way to extort his liberation. Trelawny is a popular hero of Cornwall, as the following lines testify:
A good sword and a trusty hand!A merry heart and true!King James's men shall understandWhat Cornish lads can do!And have they fixed the where and when?And shall Trelawny die?Here's twenty thousand Cornish menWill know the reason why!Out spake their captain brave and bold,A merry wight was he—"If London Tower were Michael's hold,We'll set Trelawny free!"We'll cross the Tamar, land to land,The Severn is no stay,All side to side, and hand to hand,And who shall say us nay?And when we come to London Wall,A pleasant sight to view,Come forth! Come forth! Ye cowards all,To better men than you!Trelawny he's in keep and hold—Trelawny he may die,But here's twenty thousand Cornish boldWill know the reason why!
A good sword and a trusty hand!A merry heart and true!King James's men shall understandWhat Cornish lads can do!And have they fixed the where and when?And shall Trelawny die?Here's twenty thousand Cornish menWill know the reason why!Out spake their captain brave and bold,A merry wight was he—"If London Tower were Michael's hold,We'll set Trelawny free!"We'll cross the Tamar, land to land,The Severn is no stay,All side to side, and hand to hand,And who shall say us nay?And when we come to London Wall,A pleasant sight to view,Come forth! Come forth! Ye cowards all,To better men than you!Trelawny he's in keep and hold—Trelawny he may die,But here's twenty thousand Cornish boldWill know the reason why!
Like Scott, Mrs. Bray went about with notebook in hand, and noted the features of the landscape, the details of a ruin, or the furniture or armour of the period of which she was writing. It is this painstaking work, together with the fact that she had access to places and books that were then denied to the ordinary reader, and chose subjects and places not before treated in fiction, that gives permanent value to her writings. She also had the proper feeling for the past, and dignity and elevation of style. Sometimes an entire page of her romancesmight be attributed to the pen of the "Mighty Wizard." Perhaps the highest compliment that can be paid her as an artist is that she resembles Scott when he is nodding.
Somewhere between the second and third decades of the nineteenth century, the modern novel was born. The romances of the twenties are, for the most part, old-fashioned in tone, and speak of an earlier age; but in the thirties, the modern novel, with its exact reproduction of places, customs, and speech, and strong local flavour, was full-grown. Dickens, under the name of Boz, was contributing his sketches toThe Old Monthly Magazineand theEvening Chronicle. Thackeray was beginning to contribute articles toFraser's Magazine, established in 1830. Annuals and monthlies sprang up in the night, and paid large sums for long and short stories. The thirst for them was unquenchable. Many women were supporting themselves by writing tales which did not live beyond the year of their publication. Mrs. Marsh was writing stories of fashionablelife varied by historical romances. Mrs. Crowe wrote stories of fashionable life varied by supernatural romances and tales of adventure. InThe Story of Lilly Dawson, published in 1847, the heroine was captured and brought up by smugglers, and the gradual development of her character was traced; thus giving to the story a psychological interest. Lady Blessington earned two thousand pounds a year for twenty years by novels and short stories of fashionable life. Lady Blessington had a European reputation as a court beauty and a brilliant and witty conversationalist. This with the coronet must have helped to sell her books. They do not contain even a sentence that holds the attention. A friend said of her, "Her genius lay in her tongue; her pen paralysed it." More enduring work in fiction was done by Julia Pardoe, Mrs. Trollope, and Harriet Martineau.
The novels of Julia Pardoe, like those of Mrs. Bray, owe their value, not to their intrinsic merit, but to the comparatively unknown places to which she introduces her readers. She accompanied her father, Major Pardoe, to Constantinople, where they were entertained by natives of high position, to whom they had letters of introduction, and Miss Pardoe was the guest of their wives in the harem. Her knowledge of the mode of life and habits ofthought of Turkish women is considered second only to that of Mary Wortley Montagu.
The material for her storyThe Romance of the Haremwas obtained during her visits to these Turkish ladies. In this she has caught the languid, heavily perfumed atmosphere of the Orient. Besides the main plot, stories of adventure and love are related which beguiled the slowly passing hours of the inmates of the seraglio. Some of them might have been told by Schehezerhade, if she had wished to add to her entertainment ofThe Thousand and One Nights.
After Miss Pardoe's return to England, she wrote a series of fashionable novels, inferior to many of those of Mrs. Gore, and better than the best of those by Lady Blessington.Confessions of a Pretty Woman,The Jealous Wife, andThe Rival Beautieswere the most popular of these, although they have long since been forgotten.
In 1849, Miss Pardoe published a collection of stories under the titleFlies in Amber. The title, she explains in the preface, was suggested by a belief of the Orientals that amber comes from the sea, and attracts about it all insects, which find in it both a prison and a posthumous existence. Some of the stories of this collection were gathered in her travels.An Adventure in Bithynia,The Magyar and theMoslem, or an Hungarian Legend, and theYèrè-Batan-Seraï, which means Swallowed-up Palace, the great subterranean ruin of Constantinople, have the interest which always attaches to tales gathered by travellers in unfrequented places.
Mrs. Frances Trollope, the mother of the more famous author Anthony Trollope, like Miss Pardoe, found material for stories in unfamiliar places. Mrs. Trollope had the nature of the pioneer. With her family, she sought our western lands of the Mississippi Valley, where the virgin forest had resounded to the axe of the first settler but a short time before. She wrote the first book of any note describing the manners of the Americans; the first strong novel calling attention to the evils of slavery in our Southern States; and the first one describing graphically the white slavery in the cotton-mills of Lancashire; and she is, perhaps, the only writer who began a long literary career at the age of fifty-two.
On the fourth of November, 1827, Mrs. Trollope with her three children sailed from London, and, after about seven weeks on the sea, arrived on Christmas Day at the mouth of the Mississippi. After a brief visit in New Orleans, this party of English travellers sailed up the river to Memphis, where, remote from the comforts of civilisation, they abode for a time under thedirection of Mrs. Wright, an English lecturer who had come to America for the avowed purpose of proving the perfect equality of the black and white races. But Mrs. Trollope and her family soon tired of life in the wilderness, and sought Cincinnati, at that time a small city of wooden houses, not over thirty years of age. After two years' residence in Cincinnati, she went by stage to Baltimore, visited Philadelphia and New York, and returned to England, after a sojourn of three and a half years in this country.
During her residence in the United States, she made copious notes of what she saw and heard. These she published the year after her return to England, under the titleDomestic Manners of the Americans. At once the pens of all the critics were let loose upon the author. Her American critics declared that she knew nothing about them or their country; and their English friends refused to believe that the people of America had such shocking bad manners.
Mrs. Trollope reported truthfully what she saw and heard. But a frontier city is made up of people gathered from the four corners of the earth: each family is a law unto itself; so that the speeches Mrs. Trollope carefully set down, and the customs she depicted, were often peculiarities of individuals rather than of a community. But she has left a vivid picture ofAmerican life in the twenties, less exaggerated than the picture Charles Dickens gave of it in the forties. Mrs. Trollope's attitude is no more hostile than his, but he is more entertaining. He held us up to ridicule and laughed at us; she seriously pointed out our errors in the hope that we might amend. She is slightly inconsistent at times, for, while asserting the equality of whites and blacks, she as bitterly resented the equality of white master and white servant. Her purpose in writing this book was to warn her own countrymen of the evils which must follow a government of the many.
Although she never takes the broad view, but always the narrow and partial one, her book gives a good picture of the everyday life and habits of thought of the next generation to that which had fought and won the American Revolution. The white heat of republican fervour, so obnoxious to a European, welded the nation together as one people, and filled their hearts with a religious reverence for the constitution. She meant them as a reproach, but we read these words with pride: "I never heard from anyone a single disparaging word against their government."
Mrs. Trollope has been described by her friends as a refined woman of charming personality. But as soon as she began to write, she donned her armour and proclaimed her hostility either to her hero or to the larger part of the characters of the book. This method is dangerous to art. Even the genius of Thackeray is lessened by his lack of sympathy.
In 1833 Mrs. Trollope published her first novel,The Refugee in America. It is the story of an English lord who has fled to America to escape English justice. He and his friends have settled in Rochester, New York. It was written for the sole purpose of describing the manners of the people of our Eastern cities. The author's attitude toward them is well illustrated by a conversation between Caroline, the young English girl, and her Americanprotégée, Emily. After a dinner in Washington, Caroline exclaims to her friend:
"'Oh, my own Emily, you must not live and die where such things be.'
"Emily sighed as she answered, 'I am born to it, Miss Gordon.'
"'But hardly bred to it. We have caught you young, and we have spoiled you for ever as an American lady.'"
Three years later Mrs. Trollope published her strongest novel,The Life and Adventures of Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw. This is a powerful picture of early life on the Mississippi; it was the first novel since Mrs. Behn'sOroonokowhich called attention to the evils of African slavery. It is marred, however, by want of sympathywith the community she is describing. Mr. Jonathan Whitlaw Senior has "squat in the bush," an expression to which Mrs. Trollope objects, but which brings to mind at once the log cabin in the forest clearing, and the muscular, uncouth pioneer. Jonathan furnishes firewood to the Mississippi steamers, and by this means gains sufficient wealth to carry out his life's ambition: to set up a store in Natchez, and to own "niggers." But the life of a pioneer has made Jonathan as cunning as a fox. This cunning his son Jonathan, the hero of the story, has inherited to the full. As a slave-owner he is as grasping and cruel as Legree, whom Mrs. Stowe immortalised some years later. His character, though drawn with strength and vigour, is inconsistent. He is a miser, yet he is a gambler and a spendthrift, qualities not often found together. He is not a true representative of the son of a pioneer. Clio Whitlaw, the aunt of the hero, belongs more truly to her environment. One suspects the English family at Cincinnati had received neighbourly kindnesses from women like her. With her physical strength and great courage she is kind and neighbourly to all who need her help. The sad story of Edward Bligh, the young Kentuckian who preached the gospel to the slaves, the victim of lynch law, a word dreaded even then, is as thrilling as parts ofUncle Tom's Cabin.
BesidesJonathan Jefferson Whitlaw, Mrs. Trollope created two other characters that will cause her name to live as long as those of William Harrison Ainsworth or G. P. R. James. The coarse scheming widow Barnaby is the heroine of three novels,Widow Barnaby,The Widow Married, andThe Widow Wedded, or the Barnabys in America. In the last book Mrs. Trollope somewhat humorously pays off her scores against her American critics, who had dubbed her a cockney, unfamiliar with good society in either England or America. The Widow Barnaby, who has come to New Orleans with her husband after his little gambling ways have made residence in London unpleasant, decides to earn some money by writing a book on America. She describes the Americans, not as they are, but as they think they are. She listens to all their boasts about themselves and country, and puts it faithfully in her book. Of course they like it and she becomes the literary lion of America.
Anthony Trollope, in his bookAn Autobiography, said of his mother's books on America: "Her volumes were very bitter; but they were very clever, and they saved the family from ruin." She is also given the credit of having improved the manners of American society. Whenever a "gentleman" at his club put his feet on the table, or indulged in any liberty ofwhich she would not have approved, others cried, "Trollope! Trollope! Trollope!"
TheVicar of Wrexhill, the scene of which is laid in England, is an attack on the evangelical clergy in the Episcopal Church. The vicar is no truer to the great body of evangelical preachers than Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw is true to the great body of slave-owners. There is the same exaggeration to prove a theory. Evangelical preaching is harmful, is the theorem, and a man is selected to prove it who in any walk of life would be a hypocrite and libertine. The book has many interesting situations. The vicar's proposal to the rich widow, one of his parishioners, is clever: "Let me henceforth be as the shield and buckler that shall guard thee; so that thou shalt not be afraid for any terror by night, nor for the arrow that flieth by day." And he promises, if she will marry him, to lead her "sinful children into the life everlasting." No other book has shown, as this does, the powerful effect upon sensitive natures of this kind of preaching. One feels that the followers of the Reverend Vicar were under the influence of hypnotic suggestion, and that their awakening from this spell was like the awakening from a trance.
Mrs. Trollope was actuated by humanitarian motives. This was not as usual then as since Dickens popularised the humanitarian novel.Only three years after he wroteSketches by Boz, Mrs. Trollope wroteThe Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong, the story of a boy employed in the mills of Lancashire. Negro slavery in the South, even as Mrs. Trollope saw it, was a happy state of existence compared with child slavery in the mills of Ashleigh and Deep Valley, Lancashire, where the children were driven to work by the lash in the morning, and were crippled by the "Billy roller," the name of the stick by which they were beaten for inattention to their work during the day. If the truth of these horrors were not attested by other writers of this time, one would doubt the possibility of their existence in the same land and at the same time in which Wordsworth was writing of the beauties of his own childhood, where the river Derwent mingled its murmurs with his nurse's song.
Mrs. Trollope assailed injustice with a powerful pen. Woman's moral nature is truer and more sensitive than man's. Even if her sympathies cloud her judgment, it is better than that her judgment should reason away her sympathies. Neither has woman in her philanthropy contented herself with broad principles which would help all and therefore reach none. The dusky slave in the cotton-fields, the pale-faced child in the cotton-mills, have alike touched the hearts of women, who by their penshave been able to awaken the conscience of a nation. The horror of child labour wrung from Mrs. Browning the heart-felt poem,The Cry of the Children. The four strong novels proclaiming the tyranny of the whites over the blacks,Oronooko,Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw,Uncle Tom's Cabin, andThe Hour and the Man, were written by women.
The name of Harriet Martineau was a familiar one in every household during the early years of Queen Victoria's reign. Like Mrs. Trollope she was a woman of fearless honesty. But Harriet Martineau was never theraconteur, she was first the educator. She wrote story after story to teach lessons in political and social science. Her method of work, as set forth in her autobiography, was peculiar, and the result is not uninteresting. In herPolitical Economy Tales, she selected certain principles which she wished to set forth, and embodied each principle in a character. The operations of these principles furnished the plot of the story. Besides the illustrations of the principles by the characters, the laws were discussed in conversation, and thus the lesson was taught. In the storyBrooke and Brooke Farm, she made use of an expression which Ruskin almost paraphrased: "The whole nation, the whole world, is obliged to him who makes corn grow where it never grewbefore; and yet more to him who makes two ears ripen where only one ripened before." In the taleA Manchester Strike, factory life and the problems that face the working men are set forth, the aim being to show that work and wages depend upon the great laws of supply and demand.
Miss Martineau wrote two novels.Deerbrook, in 1839, was modelled onOur Village. The village doctor, Mr. Hope, is the central figure. Firm in his convictions, he loses the favour of the leading families, and through their influence he is deprived of his practice. A fever, however, sweeps over the place and his former enemies beg, not in vain, for his skilful services. A double love story runs through the book. Mrs. Rowland, a scheming woman, is the most cleverly drawn of the characters, and was evidently suggested by some of Miss Edgeworth's fashionable ladies.
Harriet Martineau also visited America, but some years later than Mrs. Trollope, when the slavery agitation was at its height. As she had written upon the evils of slavery before she left England, she was invited to attend a meeting of the Abolitionists in Boston. She accepted this invitation, and expressed there her abhorrence of slavery. After this she received letters from some of the citizens of the pro-slavery States, threatening her life if she enteredtheir domain. This naturally threw her entirely with the Abolition party, and she wrote many articles to help their cause.
Miss Martineau's second novel,The Hour and the Man, grew out of her sympathy and belief in the coloured race. Toussaint de L'Ouverture, the devoted slave, soldier, liberator, and martyr, is the hero. Every scene in which this wonderful black figures is vividly written. Many of the minor incidents are but slightly sketched, and many of the minor characters elude the reader's grasp. How far this book is a truthful portrayal of the negro cannot be judged until the "race problem" is surveyed with unprejudiced eyes. Then and not until then will its place in literature be assigned. She gives the same characterisation of this hero of St. Domingo as does Wendell Phillips in his wonderful speech of which the following is the peroration:
"But fifty years hence, when Truth gets a hearing, the Muse of History will put Phocian for the Greek, Brutus for the Roman, Hampden for England, Fayette for France, choose Washington as the bright, consummate flower of our earlier civilisation, then, dipping her pen in the sunlight, will write in the clear blue, above them all, the name of the soldier, the statesman, the martyr,Toussaint L'Ouverture."
The Hour and the Manwas published in 1840, and was warmly received by the Abolitionists. William Lloyd Garrison, after reading it, wrote the following sonnet to the author: