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reality than the plot. A young gentleman, violently in love with a young lady, and deeply sensitive to his own supposed illegitimacy, spends his army furlough in hanging about her neighbourhood, meeting her at picnics, and rescuing her life. After a somewhat intricate story, in which the lady's father is hoodwinked and impoverished by a German impostor, the dying confessions of a mysterious old woman establish the fact that a local earl's problematic son, supposed to be illegitimate and dead, was really born in lawful wedlock; and, of course, the contents of a sealed packet successfully demonstrate that Miss Wardour's lover is the gentleman in question. Thus, all obstacles removed, they marry, and live happily ever after. All this, with its minor accessories, is very thin; its atmosphere is legalised romance; everything takes place upon an ideal plane, where everybody and everything live, move, and have their being in a manner incompatible-unless by a strange subversion of the laws of life-with reality. In such cases we know exactly what is going to happen. If the lover adventures on a morning walk in the hope of meeting his mistress, he will twice be reduced to despair, but the third time will crown his perseverance; sensible of his unworthiness and inferior position, he will chivalrously surrender all hope of the lady and go to America; but in the far West he will meet the missing or unsuspected individual whose testimony supplies the necessary proof of his identity and sends him back to England on the wings of hope. This is the view of life which inevitably appeals to the general reader; and it is unnecessary to say that a century after the romantic revolution, when the pendulum has swung almost as far in the opposite direction, the tradition still holds good with the great mass of the public.

Scott used this flimsy machinery as no one else could have used it; he created with it a series of masterpieces of story

The romance and the modern novel.

telling. This is as high a tribute as can be paid to his genius; he found imitators, but not a single follower whose name is more than a curiosity of literature. His general influence upon fiction is not to be disputed. It was Scott who gave it an entirely new tone, who purged it of its coarseness, who gave subsequent novelists lessons in the art of objective description, who destroyed the cult of sentimentalism, and breathed a new life into every part of it. More than all, he created an infinite variety of character; and it was in the creation of character, in the distinction between men, not as types, but as separate organisms, that the power of all the great novelists who succeeded him lay. But the historical novel, in which he had done so great a work, languished in the course of nature; the romantic machinery on which he had relied grew old and rusty. In the whole fabric of their story the novelists of the nineteenth century derive from Fielding rather than from Scott. The main difference between the romance and the novel,

properly speaking, consists in the illusion which each produces. We are persuaded that Monkbarns in The Antiquary is a real person, but we know that the main plot of the book is hopelessly contrary to experience. On the other hand, in all novels, properly so called, from those of Fielding to those of Mr. George Meredith, we have the intimate sense that a detail here and there may exceed the probable, but that the whole is true, and is, moreover, a valuable contribution to that experience which forbids us to believe the other. The motive which lies at the root of all fiction is the same. There is no novel which does not turn upon the hinge of love; to all fiction a pair of lovers is absolutely necessary. Further, every reasonable and cheerfully-minded reader, who knows that in every-day life the course of true love may be seriously disturbed, prefers in his fiction to see the happier side of the matter; and thus the tradition of a satisfactory dénouement to a novel still retains its place among us. But the means to this end are very different in the romantic novel it is attained by impossible coincidences; in the regular novel of contemporary life the melodramatic element is successfully avoided; in Tom Jones the real facts of the hero's parentage come to light in a perfectly natural and consistent way; in Pride and Prejudice no deus ex machind stratagem weds Elizabeth to Darcy; in The Newcomes the sorrows and separations of Clive and Ethel need no tour de force to bring about the ultimate result. And it must be owned that, in the present state of the novel, when there is so strong a tendency to depart from the well-trod paths, the divergence often takes place at the expense of a reality for which no amount of subjective insight on the writer's part can compensate.

BURNEY
(1752-1840).

§ 2. This, briefly speaking, is the character of the nineteenthcentury novel. To sum up, it is a picture of contemporary life producing, in its highest forms, the illusion of reality; it is spiritually derived from Fielding, but its manner has been changed by the influence of Scott. Another curious point about it is the prominence of the female element among the new novelists. The novel of the century opens with a quartet of illustrious ladies. The work of the first of these, FRANCES BURNEY, belongs to the period just before 1800, and marks a curious intermediate stage in the history of FRANCES fiction. She was the daughter of Dr. Burney, the author of the History of Music. Her novel of Evelina (1778) appeared anonymously while she was living under her father's roof, and it was not until the extraordinary success of the book had made the secret an impossibility that she revealed it to her family. In 1728 she followed up her success with Cecilia, a much longer novel. In 1786 she was made second keeper of the robes to Queen Charlotte, and spent a most unhappy period of five years in the royal household. In 1791 she retired to Mickleham, where she met many French refugees. ENG. LIT.

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and, two years later, married one of them, General d'Arblay. In 1796 she published Camilla, and, in 1814, a very feeble novel called The Wanderer. She brought out a life of her father in 1832, and, ten years after, when she had been dead for two years, the first five volumes of her famous Diaries and Letters were published.

in her

Miss Burney is something of a Melchisedek in fiction. Everyone knows that Macaulay made the successful discovery of "Sam Johnson or the devil" in her style, but she, Originality fortunately, did not make Rasselas the model of her work. fiction. She simply wrote as she was moved in a manner entirely her own. As a natural result of the originality which she showed in Evelina, her subsequent work deteriorated. It was impossible for a genius so independent and self-reliant to produce anything better, unless she was protected by her relation to previous models. She began to build on no foundation, and it is only the beginning of her work that is likely to retain its stability. Cecilia showed weaknesses and incoherencies of structure which, in Camilla, became serious rifts and settlements, and in The Wanderer brought to pass absolute ruin. Evelina, however, with its manifest imperfections, is a very sturdy piece of work. It was written "Evelina". by a girl of no experience, who had spent a very (1778): secluded youth, had read very few novels, had its charac teristic greedily absorbed all the unconsidered trifles of life faults and and conversation which she had had the opportunity humour. of noticing, and had imagined the rest for herself. Naturally, she fell into mistakes. Evelina is the crudest novel which has ever won a lasting reputation. The heroine is chained to an artificial refinement which is really a gross form of prudery. She is perpetually worrying herself about the delicacy of her manners and conduct; altogether, she is a silly, ecstatic young miss" of seventeen, who betrays herself into a studied vulgarity. Her friend and benefactor, Mr. Villars, is ineffably tiresome; the society in which she moves, uncongenial to herself, is laughable to the reader, and her French grandmother, Madam Duval, is a ludicrous exaggeration. But what Miss Burney lacked in natural refinement and discrimination she supplied by her humour; there is enough acute observation in her pictures to give them a certain amount of reality; and while we are thankful that no possible opportunity can bring us to meet Mr. Villars or the unspeakable Branghtons, such scenes as the evening at Vauxhall, with the amenities of Madam Duval and the Captain, vividly imagined and vigorously executed, with a touch that has something more in it than ordinary caricature, could not easily be spared from English fiction. And, at any rate, this novel-which, by the way, is written in the form of letters-and Cecilia, in which the more ordinary form of narrative is adopted, are conspicuous landmarks on the way to Miss Austen's books.

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EDGEWORTH

(1767-1849).

§ 3. The second of our ladies was fifteen years younger than Miss Burney. MARIA EDGEWORTH was the daughter of an Irish country gentleman, but was born and, for the most part, educated in England. Her father was a very MARIA eccentric person, who took a great interest in French philosophy, and had peculiar views of his own on methods of education. She shared his opinions and made use of them in her Parents' Assistant (1796); moreover, she allowed him to retouch her books and introduce propagandist passages of his own. All her life long she wrote with a purpose, and such books as the Moral Tales, Frank, Harry and Lucy, and Rosamond, were welcomed and enjoyed by more than one generation of young readers. These stories were written in the most simple and easy language; they were full of instruction on subjects which children would not find so attractive in the ordinary manuals, and they showed not only skill in construction but a singular appreciation of little differences of character. In spite of their apparent primness and childishness these little books are the work of an artist who knew how to give an absorbing and life-like interest to her little people in their studies and pastimes. Frank, Harry, and Lucy, and the rest, were combined under the general heading of Early Lessons (1801). The Parents' Assistant contained a series of tales in which methods of educating growing boys and girls, and combating their errors and weaknesses, were illustrated; and some of these for example, Simple Susan-are little masterpieces of style and execution. Finally, in the Moral Tales, Popular Tales, and Tales of Fashionable Life, she wrote for young people, warning them against the temptations to be encountered in various ranks of society. Some of her stories-Belinda (1801), Leonora (1806), and Helen (1834), for instance-have the length and importance of regular novels. Every one of these stories is obviously written by a woman who was seriously impressed by the dangers common to youth, and yet had too great a sense of the artistic treatment due to her work to attach the highest importance to the unmitigated and unlikely triumph of virtue, or to weary her readers with preaching to them.

However, high as the place of these tales would be under any circumstances, they would not of themselves give Miss Edgeworth her true distinction among the great novelists. Castle Rackrent (1800), Ormond (1817), and The Her novels of Irish Absentee (1812)-which last is included in the Tales character. of Fashionable Life-mark her out especially as the accurate and sympathetic painter of Irish manners and character. Her long life in Ireland taught her to appreciate the merits and faults of her fellow-countrymen, and especially of "the finest peasantry in the world"; and in these novels and in others, directly and indirectly, she did for the Irish character what Scott did for the Scottish. Thus, in point of subjects, there is a considerable difference between her best novels and

those of Miss Austen, who devoted her attention to more or less genteel society; but she had something of the same fineness and penetration, the same microscopic insight into character, a less delicate but more obviously abundant humour, and the same power of accurate transcription. The construction of some of her stories, however, is somewhat different from that of the ordinary novel. Castle Rackrent, for instance, is a narrative in which we read the consecutive biographies, humorous and pathetic, of a series of Irish landlords. On the whole, we read Miss Edgeworth on account of her humour and truth to life rather than for the sake of any dramatic effect. In her writings we have the ordinary Irishman as he is, and not as he appears on the stage or in the conventional course of every-day fiction. She felt for the sufferings of her country and knew the follies and vices which had caused no small proportion of its social miseries; she described them without any great enthusiasm, but with a true capacity for hitting the point and giving her result its full value. Superficially, she is perhaps a little antiquated and out of fashion, and her stories may be the last word of the eighteenth century; but, as a writer of unparalleled force, vivacity, and consistency, as one who employed the pen of common-sense in a good cause, she emphatically belonged to the new generation of novelists which during her lifetime-she lived to be eighty-two-was achieving such success.

JANE
AUSTEN
(1775-1817).

§ 4. JANE AUSTEN was the daughter of a clergyman at Steventon in Hampshire. There is even less to be said of her life than can be said of Miss Edgeworth's. She lived at Bath and at various places in Hampshire, and died at Winchester when she was only forty-one. While she was quite a girl she began to write; and her first published novels, Sense and Sensibility (1811) and Pride and Prejudice (1813), were certainly in existence as more or less complete organisms long before their appearance in print. Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1816) were the remaining novels of her lifetime; Northanger Abbey, her earliest book, was not published till after her death. Her last novel, Persuasion, appeared with it (1818). There remain beside these two fragmentary sketches, Lady Susan and The Watsons.

As years go on Miss Austen's greatness is more universally recognised. Since Fielding, no one had appeared with the

Charac teristics:

same power of describing life. She had not the exuberant humour of Fielding, which harmonised so her humour. Well with his out-door view of life, but she showed the same fidelity to her model, the same grasp of complex character, the same artistic handling of common things. She had a humour of her own that was more fine and subtle than Fielding's, that depended entirely on minute observations and distinctions. Her novels made no pretence to an epic character; nothing could very well be more different than Fielding's mock-Homeric rhapsodies and Miss Austen's slender,

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