With the death of Sterne it might have been said that the English novel expired for the time, though of course, as Donne admitted in the case of the decease of Miss Drury, "a kind of world" lingered in existence. Indeed, plenty of novels were published and read. But they are forgotten. Experience proves that nobody need waste his time over the tales of Clara Reeve, such as "The Old English Baron"; and only infinite leisure and curiosity need try to disengage the qualities from the defects of Brooke\'s "Fool of Quality," while Beckford\'s "Vathek" is certainly worth notice as the ingenious and in places impressive feat of a millionaire. It is curious that the most poignant detail of the Hall of Eblis, the phantasms of lost souls, wandering each with his hand pressed to his heart, occurs in the mythology of an Australian tribe, the Euahlayi. Research might discover a wilderness of forgotten novels, probably quite as good, given the conditions of the ages, as the myriads of "masterpieces," which our newspaper critics daily receive with stereotyped formul? of applause.
Frances Burney.
When a novelist did appear, a girl gifted with a delight in observing traits of character, and recording them from her early teens in a diary; when Fanny Burney came, she received such a welcome as warms the heart after all these years. Frances Burney (1752-1840) was born while the Elibank Plot for kidnapping the Royal family in the interests of the King over the water was maturing, and she outlived by eight years the author of "Waverley, or \'Tis Sixty Years Since".
[Pg 531]
The daughter of Dr. Burney, a teacher and historian of music, and a friend of the great wits, Johnson, Burke, Reynolds, Garrick, and the rest, Miss Burney, from childhood, was observing mankind and womankind; was reading "The Vicar of Wakefield," and Sterne, the novels of the Abbé Provost and of Marivaux, and apparently of Smollett no less than of the moral Richardson. She was writing, too, in secret; but at the command of her stepmother, probably when she herself was about 16 or 17, she burned all her works, including a novel on which her first published romance, "Evelina" (1778), was based, or rather out of which it was developed. We cannot estimate the merits of those "first blights," as Keats says, but "the little character-monger," as Johnson called her, continued to make her sketches of character in her Journal and in letters to her kind old mentor, "Daddy Crisp," a man much older than her father, who had retired from society and the sorrows of the playwright to a hospitable country house near Epsom. As the favourite and assistant of her musical and historical father, the retiring observant girl lived till, at about the age of 24, she returned to her first love, and, under great difficulties, wrote, and copied in a feigned hand, her "Evelina". With secrecy enough for a Jacobite conspiracy the book was conveyed to a bookseller, accepted, and published in 1778. Among her burned works was "The History of Caroline Evelyn," a young woman of moving adventures, whose mother was a vulgar barmaid, married, for the second time, in France, to a Monsieur Duval. As Caroline died of a broken heart, leaving a legitimate daughter, Evelina, Miss Burney told the story of that daughter\'s fortunes, situated as she was between her well-born English father\'s kin and her barmaid Frenchified mother, with her grotesque associates. The scheme had great possibilities, of which the author took full advantage; her chief successes being the members of the City family, the Branghtons, their smart low-bred friend, Mr. Smith, and the naval Captain Mirvan, whose language is discreetly veiled, while his bullying of Madame Duval and other persons is rather more than Smollettian. Evelina, through all the dangers which then beset the fair at Vauxhall and other resorts of the gay, reaches the haven where[Pg 532] she and Lord Orville would be, and all ends happily, as in a novel all ought to end. There is an extraordinary wealth of characters, Burke thought them too abundant. The novel set literary society on fire with delight and admiration, Dr. Johnson leading the chorus of praise, and Miss Burney was his darling, and was welcomed by Mrs. Thrale, Reynolds, Burke, Garrick, Mrs. Montagu; even Horace Walpole, though he kept his head, applauded. The triumphs of Fanny are recorded in her Diary and Letters, a contribution to history even more delightful than her "Evelina". All the good fortunes that Miss Austen missed, or shunned, fell to Miss Burney, who well deserved them. Her later novel, "Cecilia" (1782) is not really inferior to "Evelina," but it is not "the first sprightly runnings". After her years as a tiring woman of Queen Charlotte (whereof the record in her Diary is at least on a level with her novels), her "Camilla" appeared, was subscribed for by all the world and Miss Austen, and was censured by John Thorpe in "Northanger Abbey". This immortal crown is hardly deserved by "Camilla". The story of Miss Burney\'s marriage to that amiable émigré, the Comte d\'Arblay, is told in Macaulay\'s famous essay, which, again, is toned down and corrected by Mr. Austin Dobson ("Fanny Burney" in "English Men of Letters"). But the novels themselves, and the Diary, remain monuments, and not dull but delightful monuments, of social and personal history. We need not dwell on that lucrative failure, "The Wanderer" (1814). Miss Burney had opened the way, which was later to be trodden by the lighter feet of a far greater genius, whom some men have named with Shakespeare—Jane Austen.
Mrs. Radcliffe.
It is impossible to restore a faded popularity, and in a generation which sees at least two dozen new novels bloom every week, the desire to revive the taste for Mrs. Radcliffe\'s romances is a "vain hope and vision vain". None the less, Mrs. Radcliffe (Ann Ward, born in the birth year of Horace Walpole\'s "Castle of Otranto," 1764, and married to a Mr. Radcliffe in 1787), was the grandmother, as Horace Walpole was the great-grandfather, of the Romantic school of fiction. Her first tale, "The Castles of Athlin[Pg 533] and Dunbayne" (1789) is but a pioneer work: Mrs. Radcliffe knew nothing of the castles and manners of the Mackays, Sinclairs, and Gunns "in the dark ages". In 1790, with "The Sicilian Romance," Mrs. Radcliffe "found herself," and opened the way for all the terrors of Mr. Rochester\'s house in "Jane Eyre". The remarkable phenomena of the haunted Sicilian castle are not supernormal, but, till you discover that they are caused by the concealed wife of the proprietor (Ferdinand, fifth Marquis of Mazzini), they strike terror; later they move pity. "Northanger Abbey" is the inspired parody of Mrs. Radcliffe\'s effects in this work, which also contains the germ of a thrilling scene in R. L. Stevenson\'s "Kidnapped". In "The Romance of the Forest" (1791) Mrs. Radcliffe struck the keynote of the novels about the Valois Court, which we owe to her spiritual descendants, Alexandre Dumas and Mr. Stanley Weyman. To "local colour" and the historical "atmosphere," Mrs. Radcliffe was indifferent; but she always had a story to tell, a story new and startling; and she managed her chiaroscuro with the touch of genius. She awakened curiosity, she struck terror; she skilfully interwove the many threads of her plots; she was far from being destitute of humour; and her Italian landscapes are designed after Poussin and Salvator Rosa. "Every reader," says Scott, "felt her force, from the sage in his study to the family group in middle life." Her "Mysteries of Udolpho" is hardly worthy of its reputation. But in "The Italian" she anticipates the manner of Hawthorne; her wicked Monk, Schedoni, is (as Scott himself saw and said), the original of Byron\'s Giaour, and his other darkling lurid heroes; and her comic valet, Paolo, who loyally follows his master into the dungeon of the Inquisition, is the model of Sam Weller, in the Fleet Prison, with Mr. Pickwick. Mrs. Radcliffe\'s genius is not appreciated merely because she is not read. The student who gives her a fair chance is carried away by the spell of this "great enchantress"; and "The Italian" is by far the best romantic novel that ever was written before Scott. He applauded her with his wonted generosity, but objected to her habit of explaining away her supernormal incidents. But this was done in homage to the stupid "common sense" of her age. After her masterpiece[Pg 534] "The Italian," Mrs. Radcliffe deserted fiction; wrote "The Female Advocate" in defence of "Woman\'s Rights," and suffered from unhappy domestic circumstances for which she was in no way responsible. She died in 1823.
Maria Edgeworth.
A more fortunate and prosperous pioneer than Mrs. Radcliffe in the way of novel-writing was Maria Edgeworth. Born on 1 January, 1767, at Black Bourton, not far from, Oxford, Miss Edgeworth was the daughter of Richard Edgeworth, an Irish landlord and British moralist. In the words of "Hudibras" he
Married his punctual dose of wives
to the number of four, and had four families. They were wonderfully harmonious, and as Maria Edgeworth was of the first family, and only some twenty-two years younger than her father, she was the constant companion of an energetic and intelligent man, reckoned one of the leading bores of his age, and tinctured with the ideas of his friend, the humourless Mr. Thomas Day, author of "Sandford and Merton". Miss Edgeworth saw much of Irish life, fashionable and rustic, at Edgeworthstown, and very early began to write under the direction of her father, whose Muse was the didactic. She wrote the stories in "The Parents\' Assistant" for her own little brothers and sisters, to whom, as to children generally, she was devoted. The self-consciously virtuous Frank is her father, idealized (we cannot believe that she consciously satirized him), and the ever-delightful Rosamond is herself. Modern children may rage against the cruelty of the mother of Rosamond, in the tale of "The Purple Jar," but probably children of an earlier date were too much interested in Rosamond and the jar to grieve over the heroine\'s lack of shoes. "Lazy Lawrence," "Simple Susan," "Waste Not, Want Not," and the rest, are all dear to persons who read them at the right age, and draw from the last-named tale an undying love of long, sound pieces of string, saved from parcels.
It seems to be a matter of ascertained fact that Mr. Edgeworth too often had his oar in the paper boats of his daughter\'s[Pg 535] novels, that he altered, and transposed, and suggested, and inserted moral sentiments; and could not keep the maxims of Mr. Thomas Day out of the memorial. Miss Edgeworth had abundance of humour, and would not have made Sir James Brook lecture to Lord Colambie, a total stranger, "on all ancient and modern authors on Ireland from Spenser" (why not from Giraldus Cambrensis?) "to Young and Beaufort". In "Castle Rackrent" (1800) Mr. Edgeworth had no hand, and it is reckoned the best of Miss Edgeworth\'s books on Ireland. It is not a novel: Thady, an ancient peasant, merely tells the tale of four generations of O\'Shaughneseys, squires who much resembled the Osbaldistone family as described by Diana Vernon. All were greedy and reckless oppressors of their devoted tenantry, but one was more of a drunkard, another more of a litigant, another more of a cruel debauchee, and the last more of a good-natured fool, as innocent of worldly matters as Leigh Hunt (but not so much to his own advantage), than the rest. Their wives are worthy of them. Poor Thady maintains his "great respect for the family" throughout, and there is a humorous pathos in his topsy-turvy code of ethics, constructed out of insanely depraved Irish moral conventions of the period. The fairy belief, and the Banshee, peep out in the notes: Miss Edgeworth was the precise reverse of Mrs. Radcliffe in the matter of romance. The book at once became popular, with "Belinda," a very readable story of London society, and "The Absentee," in which the Irish characters are much better when in their own green isle than when abroad. The horrors of an estate ruled by a corrupt and cruel agent are barely credible, and the hero is a wooden if generous puppet, while Lady Colbrony, trying to be more English than the English, in London, is not really so amusing as similar characters in Thackeray. Scott, with his usual generosity, publicly asserted more than once that Miss Edgeworth\'s example led him to attempt the delineation of his own country-folks; and perhaps the happiest of weeks at Abbotsford was spent during Miss Edgeworth\'s visit. In Paris, Edinburgh, and London she was a lioness, and enjoyed all the pleasant rewards of friendship and fame which fortune denied to Miss Austen. Her later novels, "Ormonde," "Harrington," and[Pg 536] "Helen," were duly appreciated; in May, 1849, she ended a long, happy, and beneficent life.
Charles Brockden Brown.
Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810) is commonly regarded as the first American novelist. He came at an unfortunate moment, for in the years of his activity as a romancer (1797-1801) English fiction was at a low ebb, and, uninfluenced by Fielding and Sterne, and neglectful of Fanny Burney, he followed Godwin (in "Caleb Williams"), and adopted the mysterious effects of Mrs. Radcliffe. In his "Wieland," the terrific and fatal agency which brings down fate, is akin to that which Monsieur de Saint Luc used to frighten Henri III., and which Chicot exposed, in Dumas\'s novel. In "Arthur Mervyn," Brown wrote with much vigour a realistic description of a yellow fever hospital. His friendly critics place him above Mrs. Radcliffe in his mastery of the truly horrid; but though his books were republished in England, they do not appear in the list of Miss Catherine Morland in "Northanger Abbey". If Brown were superior to the great enchantress, at least he followed the model which she had created, without the humour which affords relief in "The Italian". He did not deal in Italian castles and abbeys of the Valois period, but cast his romances in his native Philadelphia.
Jane Austen.
Scott\'s first novel was finished and published in 1814. His friend, Morritt of Rokeby, said that before "Waverley" appeared, novels were read only by ladies\' maids and seamstresses. Yet, eighteen or nineteen years before the birth of "Waverley," novels as great in their own style as Scott\'s, and as imperishable, had been written by a girl of 21, whose first published works of fiction came earlier than "Waverley" into the world. Before 1803, Jane Austen (born 1775) had written "Northanger Abbey"; before the beginning of the nineteenth century "Pride and Prejudice" and "Sense and Sensibility," were completed by her. But though a speculative publisher bought "Northanger Abbey" in 1803, he[Pg 537] never published it, and "Sense and Sensibility" (1811) with "Pride and Prejudice" (1813), lay long neglected, like the poems of Theocritus in their dark chest, before they were given to the world. They were not received, like Miss Burney\'s "Evelina," with triumphant acclaims; the author was not surrounded and flattered by the wits, as was Miss Burney. Indeed Jane Austen, in her lifetime, was never made a lioness. Slow and all but silent approval of her genius advanced by degrees and deepened into the diapason of her ever-widening renown.
She was the daughter of a country clergyman, the Rector of Steventon in Hampshire, much of her later life (she died at 42, in 1817) was passed at the hamlet of Chawton near Winchester. Bath was her metropolis; she describes its pleasure and society with inimitable charm and humour in "Northanger Abbey," and "Persuasion," published after her death, in 1818. She lived in the heart of a kind and happy family, among her nephews and nieces, brothers and sisters, with such squires, clerics, doctors, solicitors, sportsmen, naval officers, and old maids as clustered round or visited Steventon and Chawton. She watched them with a smiling intense observation; she winced from their mindless gregariousness; they are never out of their neighbours\' houses. But she was only a very little cruel, even to the most brainless of baronets, or the stupidest of mothers, or the least well-bred of jolly good-humoured matrons, or the noisiest of children. She does show the trifling defects of spoiled children, but she was the kindest and best-beloved of aunts. Meanness she does brand in the really awful characters of John Dash wood and his wife; stupid pride in Sir Walter Elliot and Lady Catherine de Bourgh (who receives her deserts from Miss Elizabeth Bennet), and clerical sycophancy in the immortal Mr. Collins. But Mr. Collins is so amusing that we can no more be angry with him than with Mr. Pecksniff. Mr. Woodhouse, in "Emma," is next door to an idiot, and in actual life he would have been insufferable, except to the good and gentle. But the excellence of his heart, and the sweetness of his manners, cause him to be surrounded by patient and silent affection from all who know him; and not less good and fortunate is the most voluble of chatter-boxes,[Pg 538] Miss Bates. Only for a single moment is Emma, the heroine, unable to hold her peace when Miss Bates is too intolerable; and this youthful excess is bitterly repented by the beautiful sinner. Emma was extremely young when she was a snob, Miss Austen did not draw an angel in Emma, but a good, human girl. We cannot really call Miss Austen severe, though we cannot but see how much she must have suffered among people so dull that a lady\'s recollection of the name of her dead son\'s naval Captain is described as "one of those extraordinary bursts of mind that sometimes do happen".
Less than twenty years divided Miss Burney\'s "Evelina" (1778) from the composition of "Northanger Abbey" and "Pride and Prejudice". These years had brought an astonishing change. The Smollettian element in Miss Burney\'s books and the horse-play have vanished; vanished has that amazing style which the fair Fanny evolved. The manners of naval officers have passed from the brutal to the courtly. Miss Burney is antiquated, she is archaic, she belongs to another world than ours, while Miss Austen is perennially fresh, and sparkling with wit; she recaptures, without imitation, the humour and the ease of Addison. Unlike Scott, she is almost never stilted: her people, as a rule, talk like men and women of this world, not like Helen Macgregor. "Northanger Abbey," which is in part meant as a quiet but delightful mockery of Mrs. Radcliffe\'s haunted abbeys, secret panels, and mysterious sounds, was written but six years after "The Sicilian Romance" sent a shudder through its myriad readers; and is almost of the year of "The Mysteries of Udolpho". The girl of the Steventon rectory was already mocking "The Great Enchantress," and the smile outlives the shriek.
Miss Austen shunned the romantic—like Wordsworth she might have said "the moving accident is not my trade," but her incidents move us (for example, Louisa Musgrove\'s fall off the Cobb at Lyme Regis); and the mystery of Jane Fairfax\'s piano in "Emma," is as exciting as the black curtain behind which Catherine Morland expected to discover the skeleton of Laurentina. John Thorpe said of Mrs. Radcliffe\'s novels (which he had not read), "there is some fun and nature in them" (and there is plenty[Pg 539] of fun), Miss Austen found in them much more of fun than of nature.
It is said that she is afraid of the passions, but what can be more passionate than the constancy of Anne Elliot, or more ardent than the first love of Marianne Dashwood? All the family of the Bennets are charming or diverting in their various ways; the humorous father, the foolish mother, the witty and spirited Elizabeth, the gentle, beautiful Jane, the pedantic Mary, the colourless Kitty, and Lydia who might have shone in a comedy by Vanbrugh. It is rather hard to believe that Elizabeth could accept Darcy after he, like the Master of Ravenswood, had told his lady that her father was not a gentleman. But then Elizabeth came to see Darcy\'s house and place in Derbyshire!
If one novel is not quite so good as the rest, it is "Mansfield Park"; but to name it recalls Mrs. Norris, and the return of the heavy father as his progeny are rehearsing a dubious play from the German; and one has a tenderness for the good little heroine, and for her rather squalid kinsfolk, and for both of the naughty Crawfords. "Mansfield Park" is a masterpiece like the rest. Perhaps Miss Austen\'s heroes are not so good as her heroines; but Henry Crawford and Frank Churchill, in "Emma" prove that her young men are not mere lay figures.
She never went outside of the life she knew to draw wicked dukes and the virtuous poor; she had no villains, no rebels; if she read Crabbe\'s lurid and realistic studies of poverty and crime, she did not imitate them in prose. Her characters are perfectly indifferent to public affairs, throughout the struggle with Napoleon; except when the authoress cannot conceal her passionate enthusiasm for the men who fought under Nelson and Collingwood. But the expression is not enthusiastic in terms.
Miss Austen\'s art has the exquisite balance and limit of Greek art in the best period. She knew what she could do, she did it to perfection; and, naturally, the humourless Charlotte Bront? thought her tame and dull. But from Scott himself to Macaulay and Archbishop Whately, nay, from the Prince Regent (George IV., who had a set of her novels in each of his houses), the best judges recognized the greatness of one of the six greatest English[Pg 540] writers of fiction, and, a century after the publication of "Pride and Prejudice," she is a more popular favourite by far than in her own brief day. To judge by a miniature of Miss Austen, done when she was of the age when Catherine Morland began to give up playing cricket and baseball, her face and figure were as bright and charming as her genius. Like Milton\'s Eve, Miss Austen is "fairest of her daughters" in art, though among them are Mrs. Gaskell and Miss Thackeray (Lady Ritchie).
Walter Scott.
The Novelist.
When Scott, in 1814, sought for some fly-hooks in a bureau, and found the lost first chapter of "Waverley," a novel begun in 1805, prose fiction seemed to be under general contempt, was only fit for milliners, said his friend Morritt of "Rokeby". Yet, in fact, the good novel was not left without a witness. Miss Edgeworth\'s tales of Irish life and manners excited, said Scott, his own wish to write of his own people, and Miss Edgeworth\'s "Castle Rackrent" is of 1800. Jane Austen had written "Northanger Abbey" in 1797; it remained unpublished, but "Sense and Sensibility" is of 1811, "Pride and Prejudice" of 1813; thus both were prior to "Waverley". But neither, great as are their merits, attracted attention then, as Miss Burney\'s novels had done from the first; and probably the contempt of novels was one of the various causes, the chief being that "it was his humour," which made Scott conceal his authorship of his prose romances.
"Waverley"—in the first and long-lost chapters—is reckoned tame; but the hero\'s youth in peaceful rural England was deliberately designed as a quiet approach to his richly varied adventures under the White Cockade. From the moment when Waverley enters the village, so strange to English eyes, and the still stranger castle, of Tullyveolan, he passes into the land of romance; all was, to English readers, as novel and unexpected as if Edward had joined a tribe of Central Africa. The ancient feudal manners, Lowland or Highland; the learned, eccentric, brave old baron; the half idiot jester, Davy Gellatley; the Bailie, Balmawhapple;[Pg 541] the clansmen, the Celtic chief, Fergus MacIvor; the survivor of the Remnant, gifted Gilfillan, were humorous and masterly creations, while the gallant figure of the doomed Prince and his wonderful adventure, narrated with sympathy, completed the charm. The world was taken by storm, believed in Flora MacIvor, and wept afresh over the shambles of Carlisle.
Written in six weeks, the romance of "Guy Mannering" (1815), with its pell-mell of characters from the Colonel (who was thought like Scott), and his lively dark-eyed daughter Julia, (certainly like Mrs. Scott), to Pleydel, Meg Merrilies, Glossin, the bankrupt Bertram laird, to Dominie Sampson, and Dandie Dinmont with his dogs, was only less popular from the first. "The Antiquary" (1816) added a romance of dark complexion to a study of modern manners of the preceding decade; while "Old Mortality," at the end of the year, did for 1679 and the Covenanters, with even greater skill, what "Waverley" had done for the clans and the Forty-five. "Old Mortality" is probably the greatest of Scott\'s historical novels. The friends of the persecuted Remnant exclaimed against historical unfairness, but the friends of the "Indulged" of 1679, and of Claverhouse, had as good a right to pick a quarrel.
"The Black Dwarf" was condemned by Blackwood the publisher, and posterity has not differed from his verdict. The story had been written on a larger scale, but was truncated, said Scott, to the proportions of the dwarf. In 1817 "Rob Roy" gave us the best of all Scott\'s heroines, Diana Vernon, and the deathless Andrew Fairservice, and Bailie Nicol Jarvie, and the Dougal creature, with Rob himself, a tower of strength; but Helen, his wife, is somewhat melodramatic (as probably she actually was) and the plot, with its financial embroilment, is "only good for bringing in fine things".
It is difficult to decide between the rival excellences of "The Heart of Midlothian" (1818) (with another heroine, Jeanie Deans, as good and original in her way as Diana Vernon) and of "Old Mortality". We are apt to prefer the novel which we read last. Written "in torments," and totally forgotten by Scott after he had composed it, "The Bride of Lammermoor" has won tears[Pg 542] for generations, though the doomed Master is something of a lay figure, and the pathos of the old Steward is better than his humour, which grows mechanical. The darkening of the omens towards the close is matched only in the "Odyssey" and "Njal\'s Saga"; for, though the novel is not in the first rank, it contains much of the author\'s best, and could have been written by no other mortal. With "The Bride" came the brief "Legend of Montrose," in which the great Marquess is half-forgotten, for Dugald Dalgetty, that matchless creation, runs away with Scott\'s fancy, happily carrying him to meet the rival Marquess of Argyll. Confessedly Scott could adhere to no predetermined plan (he tried to do so, again and again, but was conscious of failure); his characters were alive and masterful, and led him where they would, but he had never contemplated a romance in a theme above romance, the Action and Passion of Montrose.
Leaving Scotland—lest the field should be overworked—for England and the Middle Ages, Scott, in 1819, won the hearts of most boys and many men, by "Ivanhoe," the crusader who returns disguised, like de Wilton in "Marmion". It is to be believed that Scott disliked Rowena at least as much as Thackeray did, and was no less in love than he with Rebecca. Merely to think of the characters is a pleasure—Gurth, Wamba, Locksley, de Bracy, Friar Tuck, Isaac, the Abbot, while, if Urfried is extremely incoherent in her pagan creed, the Templar is Byronic enough for the taste of that day; Scott, in fact, could draw a dark Byronic dare-devil before Byron came into the field. "The Monastery" (1820) with the White Lady of Avenel, and the Euphuist Knight, was not well received, but Sir Walter boldly carried on the tale in an infinitely better sequel, "The Abbot," with all the charm and horror of Mary Stuart at Loch Leven, with a hero full of spirit, and a heroine worthy of him in Catherine Seyton.
In "Kenilworth" (1821), a most audaciously anachronistic tale, Scott treated Queen Elizabeth with a chivalry amazing in a Scot; his fated heroine, Amy Robsart, has unusual spirit and womanliness, and his villain, Varney, is his Iago, while Michael Lambourne is a perfect sketch of the Elizabethan adventurer of the baser sort.
[Pg 543]
In "The Pirate" (1821) Scott chose the scene of his tour in the Orkney Islands (1814), and his hero is, like George Staunton in "The Heart of Midlothian," rather a Byronic being. Minna and Brenda, the two fair sisters, were immensely admired, but Norna of the Fitful Head is much inferior to Madge Wildfire and Meg Merrilies as a seeress and a romantically eccentric being; while Claude Halcro and Triptolemus Yellowley are the least entertaining of "Scott\'s bores".
"The Fortunes of Nigel" (1822) is enriched with all the wealth of Scott\'s knowledge of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays and pamphlets, and the unsatisfactory hero, much the least sympathetic of Scott\'s jeunes premiers, is redeemed by the delightful humours of gentle King Jamie, by the two grim Trapbois, father and daughter, by the flower of Scottish serving-men, Richie Moniplies, and by all the life of the Court, of the Ordinary, and of Alsatia.
In "Peveril of the Peak" (1823) Scott is less fortunate in his treatment of English society during the Popish Plot, a theme which seemed "made to his hand". His Charles II. is the least excellent of his kings, and the plot is more than commonly rambling, while Fenella is the feeblest of his romantic and eccentric puppets. "Quentin Durward," on the other hand, with the adventures of a gallant but canny Scot at the perilous Court of Louis XI., is perhaps the best constructed of all his novels. In drawing Louis XI. the author excels himself; we have not too much of Leslie le Balafré, the Dugald Dalgetty of the age; the adventures are many and exciting, and the book was welcomed eagerly in France, though at first it was scarcely appreciated at home.
"St. Ronan\'s Well" was a tale of contemporary manners, but Scott was not skilled in describing the humours of a Tweedside watering-place, interwoven as they are with a dark domestic tragedy, spoiled by an incongruous conclusion which was forced on the author by the prudery of James Ballantyne. In "Redgauntlet," Scott recovered himself: the manners and characters are a little earlier than those of his own boyhood, and mingled with the adventures of the hero on the Border is the last tragic appearance of that Prince who, twenty years earlier, had shaken the three kingdoms with the claymores of the clans.
[Pg 544]
The brief "Wandering Willie\'s Tale," in "Redgauntlet," is Sir Walter\'s masterpiece of humour and terror: this story he worked on very carefully, and his care was rewarded. The Edinburgh lawyers, the eccentrics, Nanty Ewart, and the heroine of the Green Mantle, are worthy of their places in this great romance, made the more moving by many touches of autobiography.
"The Talisman" (1825) is a brilliant tale of C?ur de Lion and Saladin; "The Betrothed" is less appreciated than it ought to be. In 1825-1826 came the ruin of Scott, entailed by that of his publisher, Constable. How he bore it, how he laboured and died to redeem it, by long heavy task work at "The Life of Napoleon,"—by "Woodstock," in which the characters of Cromwell and of Charles II. in youth, are among his best creations; by "The Fair Maid of Perth," with the great character of the timid chief, and the finale of the Clan Battle of Perth; by "The Chronicles of the Canongate," and by his latest works, written with a half-palsied hand, composed by a brain in ruin, yet again and again inspired,—is a familiar story. The eyes are dimmed as these words are penned; so potent is the spell of that rich, kind genius, of that noble character, over the hearts of those who love and honour the great and good Sir Walter.
He created the historical novel; he opened the way in which no man or woman has followed him with such genius as his: we may say this even while we remember "Esmond" and "The Virginians"; "Kidnapped," "Catriona" and "The Master of Ballantrae"; "Les Trois Mousquetaires" and "La Dame de Monsoreau".
After a voyage to Italy, Sir Walter returned to Abbotsford, where he died in his own house with the murmur of Tweed in his ears as he passed away (September, 1832). "I say," wrote Byron emphatically, "that Walter Scott is as nearly a thoroughly good man as a man can be, because I know it by experience to be the case."
James Fenimore Cooper.
James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851), bearing a name dear to grateful boyhood, is even now, with Hawthorne—an infinitely[Pg 545] greater man—the American novelist best known on the Continent of Europe. In France as in England, he was the delight of the youth of men of letters; among the characters of fiction concerning whom Thackeray says Amo he places Leather Stocking with Dugald Dalgetty. Many of us, no doubt, at about the age of 10, have made stone heads for our arrows, like the noble neolithic Indian braves of Cooper, and have found (like Scottish savages, when flint was scarce) that slate served our pu............