to ^ MOTIVES IN ENGLISH FICTION BY Robert Naylor Whiteford, Ph.D. Professor of English Literature in Toledo University: Editor of "Anthology Of English Poetry " and " Goldsmith's The Deserted Village And Other Poems: Together With She Stoops To Conquer And The Good-Natured Man" # G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS NEW YORK AND LONDON Zbe "fcnicfeerbocfecr press 1918 Copyright, 1918 BY ROBERT NAYLOR WHITEFORD -HS TCbe ftnicherbocfcer pre«8, Dew t:w -ft Go MARION MY WIFE WHOSE CRITICISM AND COUNSEL HAVE HELPED CREATE THIS BOOK AND TO MY FATHER / PREFACE IN this volume the English novelists from Sir Thomas Malory to Miss Mitford have been chronologically arranged according to the dates of the publication of their first novels ; and the material presented is not only a history of English fiction, but a view of its variations in atmosphere, motivation, dialogue, and characterization. During the last ten years while reading and re-reading the English novels, from Malory to De Morgan, to determine the leading motives, distinctively English in origin, which were formative in creating the atmosphere, plot, dialogue, and characterization, of the flowering period (i 833-1 870) of English fiction, and which still actuate and permeate the pattern of its composition, I have been greatly impressed by the wonderful variations of that originality that reveals itself as the unity of life, of which De Quincey says: "The fleeting accidents of a man's life, and its external shows, may indeed be irrelate and incongruous; but the organ- izing principles which fuse into harmony, and gather about fixed predetermined centres, whatever heterogeneous ele- ments life may have accumulated from without, will not permit the grandeur of human unity greatly to be violated." This book shows the motives that color the threads in the warp and woof of all our fiction. When we pick up the garment of atmosphere, motivation, dialogue, and char- v vi f Preface acterization, we find it is a Joseph-coated raiment that for centuries has been woven and worn by the novelists from Malory to De Morgan. The whole force of my exposition of the advance of the English novel has been thrown on motives manifesting themselves in variations that lie back of all life. Sir Walter Scott in the introductory chapter in Waverley revealed the passions of life as always the same whether "sixty years since" in 1745 or in 1805: "those passions common to men in all stages of society, and which have alike agitated the human heart, whether it throbbed under the steel corslet of the fifteenth century, the bro- caded coat of the eighteenth, or the blue frock and white dimity waistcoat of the present day. Upon these passions it is no doubt true that the state of manners and laws casts a necessary coloring; but the bearings, to use the lan- guage of heraldry, -remain the same, though the tincture may be not only different, but opposed in strong contra- distinction. The wrath of our ancestors, for example, was colored gules; it broke forth in acts of open and sanguin- ary violence against the objects of its fury. Our malig- nant feelings, which must seek gratification through more indirect channels, and undermine the obstacles which they cannot openly bear down, may be rather said to be tinc- tured sable. But the deep-ruling impulse is the same in both cases ; and the proud peer, who can now only ruin his neighbor according to law, by protracted suits, is the genuine descendant of the baron who wrapped the castle of his competitor in flames, and knocked him on the head as he endeavored to escape from the conflagration. It is from the great book of Nature, the same through a thou- sand editions, whether of black-letter, or wire-wove and hot-pressed, that I have venturously essayed to read a chapter to the public. " In conclusion, I am deeply grateful to my friend, Pro- fessor Richard G. Moulton, Head of the Department of Preface vii General Literature in the University of Chicago, for his ex- amination of my manuscript. He has kindly given me many helpful suggestions and such criticism as have made my book take its present form and title. I am also greatly indebted to Professor Felix E. Schelling, Head of the Department of English in the University of Pennsylvania, for that inspiration which caused me first to think of plac- ing such a work before the world; and I should not forget the further enthusiastic encouragement that was given me by Francis F. Browne, formerly editor of The Dial. I also wish to thank Philip B. McDonald, Professor of English in the University of Colorado, for some sugges- tions made on the political novel when he was in my Seminar in English Fiction in Toledo University. Robert Naylor Whiteford. Toledo University, Toledo, Ohio, November 10, 1917. CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. — From Sir Thomas Malory to Sir Francis Bacon ....... i II. — From John Bunyan to Jonathan Swift . 52 III. — Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Sarah Fielding, and Tobias Smollett . . 86 IV. — Robert Paltock, Charlotte Lennox, Thomas Amory, and Laurence Sterne . . . 119 V. — Samuel Johnson, Charles Johnstone, John Hawkesworth, Frances Brooke, Horace Walpole, Oliver Goldsmith, Henry Brooke, Henry Mackenzie, Richard Graves, and Clara Reeve . . . 133 VI. — Frances Burney, Robert Bage, Sophia Lee, Thomas Day, William Beckford, John Moore, Charlotte Smith, and Ann Rad- cliffe . . . . • • x 55 VII.— Elizabeth Inchbald, William Godwin, Matthew Lewis, and Maria Edgeworth . 192 VIII.— Amelia Opie, Jane Porter, Lady Morgan, Anna Maria Porter, Charles Robert Maturin, Elizabeth Hamilton, Hannah More, Mary Brunton, and Jane Austen . 218 IX.— Sir Walter Scott, Thomas Love Peacock, Lady Caroline Lamb, Susan Edmonstone ix Contents Ferrier, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Thomas Hope, and Mary Russell Mit- ford ....... 246 X. — A Glance at English Fiction from Miss Mitford to Charles Dickens . . . 297 Index ........ 367 MOTIVES IN ENGLISH FICTION Motives in English Fiction CHAPTER I From Sir Thomas Malory to Sir Francis Bacon IN the year that Henry of Richmond found hanging on a hawthorn-bush the crown of the last of the Plan- tagenets who had gone down fighting like a demon on Bosworth Field occurred the birth of great English prose fiction. On July 31, 1485, Caxton published Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur, of which we possess no manu- script. We know little about Sir Thomas Malory except that he was the son of Sir John Malory and was a native of Newbold Re veil, Warwickshire, and was in his youth companion-in-arms to Richard Beauchamp, the Earl of Warwick, w T ho died in 1439. It is said that the good knight Sir Thomas completed his novel in 1469; and some believe that he died on March 14, 1471, fourteen years before the publication of his success in intellectualizing the French romances that for centuries had been extolling King Arthur and the Knights of the Table Round. A marvelous unity holds together the protasis, epitasis, katabasis, and catastrophe, of this dramatic epic-romance of the Morte Darthur. With short and incisive strokes of genius Malory illuminates his preliminary matter. The initial landscape revealed is near Tintagil's towers. Uther 2 Motives in English Fiction ';. Pendragon by Merlin's magic passed himself off as Igraine's husband Cornwall to beget in deceit at midnight' the child Arthur, who. after the marriage of Uther^and Igraine, was gnren over into the keeping of Sir Ector; and then upon the canvas are splashed the colorings' pi English scenery of the region about London. After years had sped, one New Year's day in the churchyard against the high altar from the anvil of steel, placed on a great stone, Arthur pulled out a sword, naked by the point, that made him righteous king of all England. This sword which he had drawn was destined for use at once against Lot, who brake out against him from behind, and those who would not easily brook his kingship. Thus the custom of striking at him from behind began; and the smiting-down process lasted for some time until Arthur's chivalry overcame the eleven kings. Shortly after Arthur's first sight of Guene- ver, Merlin announced the king's doom, which would come from his child Mordred whom he had had by his own sister, Lot's wife, the mother of Gawaine, Gaheris, Agravaine, and Gareth. Merlin said to Arthur: "your sister shall have a child that shall destroy you and all the knights of your realm." Also at this time our attention is called to another sister of Arthur's, Morgan le Fay, Igraine's daughter, trained in necromancy who afterwards worked him woe in all manner of treachery. After Rome asked truage and before the babe Mordred escaped the slaughter of all May-day children, Arthur was strength- ened for coming troubles by the gift of the sword from the Lady of the Lake. The remainder of the protasis seems to be only a series of pronouncements of the slow-coming, certain catas- trophe. We hear the doom of Balin pronounced as he draws and keeps the sword that afterwards will kill him and the trumpeting of Arthur's far-off doom at Salisbury. There is also a forecast of the subsequent loss of the Holy Malory's " Morte Darthur" 3 Graile as Balin, with the spear of Longinus, is seen piercing Pell am, in whose veins flows the sacred blood of Joseph of Arimathea : and shortly after this episode is pronounced the doom of Gawaine, that he should be slain by Balin's sword in the hands of Launcelot; then Arthur's doom, that he would tie himself to Guenever, against whom Merlin had warned him ; and then the fate of Sir Pellinore that, when he would be in greatest distress, his best friend should fail him. This foreboding note sounded in the protasis is to be heard throughout the entire narrative of the Morte Darthur. We feel that the majority of the Table Round are destined to be destroyed by those they least think will play them false. Malory arranges that Merlin, earthly wisdom applied to spiritual matters, is trapped by Nimue into the rock, which proves to be his sarcophagus. When Morgan le Fay sent her Dejanira- like gift, the mantle, to Arthur he could very well have exclaimed, "Near and dear are my friends, but nearer and deadlier are my relatives." When Gawaine plays Pelleas false with Ettard, there is a shudder as we feel the coldness of the steel that has been placed at the throat of false knighthood, for the great Gawaine has descended to the level of Lady Hermel's vilest knight. Then comes the widening of Roman influence with the determination on the part of Arthur to pay no tribute to Rome. Before Arthur moves into Italy to be crowned at Rome, Malory announces to his readers that Sir Constantine, son to Sir Cador of Cornwall will come to kingship after the death of Arthur, that Sir Tristram will soon be making love to La Beale Isoud, the wife of King Mark, and that it is noised throughout England that Launcelot loves Guenever. It is at this point in the Sixth Book that the protasis passes into the epitasis. The epitasis accentuates the dangers lurking within and without Arthur's noble order; for Gaheris and Gareth Motives in English Fiction £> are no longer loyal to Gawaine ; and Sir Lamorak is killed from behind by the false knights Mordred and Gawaine. We are told by Malory that the knights following Launce- lot were jealous lest Launcelot's prowess would suffer by the rise of Tristram who had been made a knight of the Table Round. After Sir Launcelot, assotted, had taken Elaine, King Pelles's daughter, for Guenever, and thus had made possible the birth of Galahad, there came to the knights the vision of the 'dove at the window, in her mouth a little censer of gold,' and a rapidly following pronouncement that the Table Round should be broken. After Sir Palamides, the foreign knight, was christened, proving that those outside the order of the Table Round were still susceptible to its goodness, Galahad came into the feast and sat in the Siege Perilous. The Thirteenth Book gives one the sensation of a pause without a stop as the epitasis is gathering strength for the turning-point. The adventures of the Sangreal begin on Whitsunday. Every one of the knights knows that at this quest of the Sangreal ' should all of the Table Round depart and never should be again whole together.' After the appearance of the covered Graile at the high feast of Pentecost, it is realized, if God be against a knight, who can be for him? The new law of the Holy Church is faith, good hope, belief, and baptism. The glory of this world is not worth a pear, if one like Launcelot belongs to the order of black knights. Soon Malory causes our deadly flesh to tremble as it beholds things spiritual at Sarras, where Percivale's sister lay buried in the spiritual place. Sir Galahad, the blend- ing of the virgin lily with the rose, representing the virtu- ous fire of life, finds the Holy Graile, that had forever departed from Logris (England), at Sarras where, as he dies, the Graile and spear are taken up into heaven. Sir Percivale and Sir Bors look on aghast as the multitude of angels carry Galahad's soul aloft. Percivale remained a Malory's " Morte Darthur" 5 recluse at Sarras for a year until death destined him to be buried in the spiritualities. Sir Bors came back to Logris. Sir Gawaine's "untruest life" had marred his quest; and the barren fig-tree repentant Launcelot had passed the lions at Carbonek by making a sign of the cross at his forehead, and had been charred on trying the chamber wherein had glowed the Sangreal. The epitasis slips into the katabasis at the beginning of the Eighteenth Book, when Guenever is suspected of destroying, even poisoning, good knights. The queen was suspected of having had her hand on the poisoned apple, which Sir Pinel gave to Gawaine, but which, however, Sir Patrise ate, and she would have been burned had it not been for Sir Launcelot 's coming to the rescue. The last chance is at this time given Launcelot to forget his love for Guenever by marrying the maiden of Astolat at Gilford who by nursing him at the hermitage had saved his life, but this he does not choose to do; and, when this Elaine comes in the barge to London to show King Arthur that innocence is dead in his city and that she might have saved his noblest knight, "she lay as though she had smiled." Guenever, after Launcelot's blood was found on her chamber-floor by Sir Meliagraunce, was no longer sus- pected of poisoning knights but of being false to Arthur. At this point in the narrative Malory for a moment gives us a glimpse of Tristram in the act of making love to Isoud and of his being thrust through from behind with a glaive in the hands of King Mark, her husband. At last Sir Launcelot is espied in the queen's chamber; and the katabasis has merged into the catastrophe in the Twentieth Book, when Sir Agravaine and Sir Mordred come with twelve knights to slay him. Launcelot saves himself by means of ensconcing himself in Sir Colgrevance's armor, which protects him so that he is able to kill thirteen knights with his tremendous buffets. Mordred, however, 6 Motives in English Hction escapes to tell Arthur. The queen is sent to the fire at Carlisle by Arthur, but is rescued by Launcelot who takes her to Joyous Gard to which Arthur lays siege. The mighty Gawaine then swears to kill Launcelot, who had slain Gareth during the rescue of the queen at Carlisle. The Pope would stay all this internecine strife by having Launcelot return Guenever to Arthur. After the gallant giving-up of the queen, Launcelot goes to Joyous Gard and from thence over the seas to France. Arthur and Gawaine pursue him, leaving Mordred regent of England with power over Guenever. During Arthur's absence occurred Mordred 's defection. Mordred spread the news that Arthur had been slain in the war with Launcelot and asked Guenever to be his wife. She cunningly checkmated him by going to London, provisioning the Tower, ensconcing herself therein, and by sending a message overseas for help. Arthur and Gawaine returned to wage war against Mordred. In the conflict which ensued Gawaine came to his death by the re-opening of the old wound which had been given him by Launcelot. Before his death he sent a letter to Launce- lot imploring him to come quickly if he would save Arthur and the queen, and that, as for himself, Launcelot could take satisfaction in the thought that one Gawaine was dying of the old wound given him by a Launcelot. Not long after the death of Gawaine, on Trinity Sunday night there appeared to Arthur Gawaine's ghost to stay the doom by preventing a conflict with Mordred the next day. But fate had decreed otherwise, for on this day, when both armies had determined an armistice, a little adder crept from a heath bush and stung a knight on his foot. This knight drew his sword wherewith to kill the snake and thousands of swords flashed from their scabbards, and Arthur and Mordred upon a down by the seaside, westward toward Salisbury, went to their doom. After- Malory's "Morte Darthur" 7 wards when Launcelot too late came over the seas he found the great Gawaine sleeping in his tomb in the castle of Dover and the mighty Arthur lying sleeping at Glaston- bury. At Almesbury he met Guenever who told him that they, both of them, were the cause of all the disaster that had overtaken Arthur and the destruction of the Table Round, and that she had determined to remain in Almes- bury as a nun. Launcelot decided that a similar fate should be his and went back to Glastonbury to become a monk. After having been a holy man for a little over seven years, and shortly after having buried Guenever beside King Arthur at Glastonbury, he died; and after he was prepared for burial "he lay as though he had smiled," and he was interred, as he had requested, at Joyous Gard. Sir Constantine became king and a few knights left of the Table Round retired to their lands as holy men, and some, such as Sir Bors and Sir Ector, according to what had been advised by Launcelot, went to the Holy Land to fight against the Turks. Thus Malory brings to a close a plot that consists of a well- compacted series of events marvelously marshaled in the march of protasis, epitasis, katabasis, and catastrophe, by the formal unity of continuous pronouncements that in life "ever the latter ende of joye is wo. " Sir Thomas Malory felt in his old age that his gray hairs would rest more quietly on his pillow at night, if he could put in fiction something that might stay the doom of English chivalry and the disintegration of the finest part of feudalism by holding up again the noblesse that once had made knighthood leaven the English land. The good knight Sir Thomas would have the Lancastrians and the Yorkists respiritualize themselves by dipping their knight- hood into the living well that bubbled forth the gentleness, the courtesy, the truth, and the steadfast honor, extant in the old days of King Arthur when all the land according 8 Motives in English Fiction to Chaucer was "fulfild of fayerye. " The civil broil be- tween the Red Rose and the White — the want of fealty to England — "This maketh that ther been no fayeryes. " The old knight's whole epic-romance embodies what Shakespeare injected into his ethical phrase, coined by considering the evils existing in the days of Henry VI : Thrice is he armed that hath his quarrel just, And he but naked, though lock'd up in steel, Whose conscience with injustice is corrupted. Malory believed that men in armor should be religious gentlemen capable of no "vileinye"; and to his order of the white knights belong the good knights and chivalrous gentlemen of Scott and Thackeray, who recognize religion as the only antidote to the poison of sin. He avers that a good man is never in danger but when he is in danger of a coward, and that Apollyon is to be most dreaded when he tempts a knight in woman's likeness. He would have again moving in England a clean knighthood animated with love of man for man and with the spirit of ready for- giveness ; not being hasty in judgment ; feeling itself dis- honored if envious; at no time speaking fair and being false thereunder; and above all things loving chastely. A knighthood moving otherwise he believed to be in danger of the curse of book, bell, and candle. His romance shows that "the noblest mind the best contentment has"; "for soule is forme, and doth the bodie make. " Freedom of the soul comes from within as man is master of his own passions. Finest law and finest government are of no avail, for self-control may be lacking under the freest government. The gloom of the dim religious light, in which knights spiritual mistily move to be overcome by knights temporal, fills with pessimism the soul of Malory, who, when he sees that on earth there is no stability anywhere, cries out, 'If existence is the road to death, Malory's " Mortc Darthur" 9 who can trust this life?' But he believes also along with his Sir Pellinore that "God may well fordo destiny." And when one has read this novel, every word of which is illuminated with the light of action and darkened with the shadow of nave, crypt, and cloister, one reverently presses to his heart, as if in a land of paynims, this priceless missal in which have been written down all the sins that, if practised, would lead to a hell on earth, and all the virtues which, if practised, would make mortals, save wings, all fit for heaven. Malory must have greatly grieved and sorely yearned after his kith and kin, the knights, who ruled not England with the virtues of their ancestors. By fancy's flight we can imagine that Malory, as he neared the close of his romance, wandered sadly through his manorial-hall to seat himself at his study-window to weep as he felt forced to give Sir Launcelot his inevitable fate; and we can also fancy that Malory, to check this weeping over the down- fall of the greatest of the knights of the Table Round, fell upon a great laughter, such as straightway he forced the bishop at Glastonbury in his dream to give, which caused all the fellowship of the holy men to rush to the bedside of the bishop to hear the good news that "houseled and eneled" Sir Launcelot had so prevailed that the gates of heaven had opened against him. In Phantastes: a Faerie Romance for Men and Women (1858) George Macdonald caught the contagious mirth of this great laughter of Malory's dreaming bishop at Glastonbury, when he has his valorous knight say to all modern knights (who are no whit different from those in the Morte Darthur) : Somehow or other . . . notwithstanding the beauty of this country of Faerie, in which we are, there is much that is wrong in it. If there are great splendors, there are corre- sponding horrors ; heights and depths; beautiful women and io Motives in English Fiction awful fiends; noble men and weaklings. All a man has to do, is to better what he can. And if he will settle it with himself that even renown and success are in themselves of no great value, and be content to be defeated, if so be that the fault is not his, and so go to his work with a cool brain and a strong will, he will get it done; and fare none the worse in the end that he was not burdened with provisions and precaution. Malory maintains a marvelous unity throughout the romance not only in plot, but in characterization which is sustained by a rapid moulding of materials and interest as the spotlight is shifted from Arthur, Balin, Gawaine, and Gareth, to a Tristram — and from a Tristram to Launcelot, Galahad, Percivale, and Bors, and from these again to a Launcelot about whom its mirage-like gleam stays longest and strongest in humanizing power. It may be added that the masterly way in which Malory- manages individual spotlighting is enhanced by his art of casting into the circle already illuminated the shadow of the next character whose greatness is to be. From an inventive point of view Malory is most original in the description of the coming of the corpse of the maiden of Astolat in the barge to the court of King Arthur. Pollard avers that for this scene no source has been found in any French romance. It is in this twentieth chapter of the Eighteenth Book that Malory's poetic prose moves with more vigor and pathos than Tennyson's poetic adaptation used to make artistic the ending of the epi- tasis, in The Idylls of the King, at the close of Lancelot and Elaine, where the guilty knight perceives that for Guinevere he has tossed away the chance of a lifetime as he gazes upon the body of dead innocence in the barge at Camelot. A comparison of the two passages forces an acceptance of the fact that Tennyson's poetry has not Malory's "Morte Darthur ii quite come up to the level of the simple pathos of Malory's poetic prose. And it is to be noted that the world will remember among the women of Malory not so much Guenever as the maiden of Astolat, who saved Launcelot's life at the her- mitage and who could not survive loving him in vain. Another girl in great English fiction was not to die in agony of unrequited affection until in 1584 Robert Greene's Myrania, who had saved Arbasto's life, turned on her left side in bed to die of a broken heart because Arbasto preferred the love of Doralicia, her elder sister. The halo of religious pathos, gathered about the maiden of Astolat from the time that she shrieked shrilly, fell in a swoon, and was carried into her chamber, to the time that she gave heart-rending directions as to what should be done with her body after death, moved on after a hundred years to illumine the beautiful features of Sidney's in- tensely religious Parthenia about to go to her Argalus in heaven. And then this halo of the pathetic glided in 1748 to where it could hover over the death-bed of Richardson's Clarissa Harlowe to suffuse with bright religious rays the clouds through which the maid of nine- teen, on whose coffin by her own order had been placed the symbol of a white lily "snapt short off," prayed to God for the forgiveness of Lovelace and the salvation of her own soul through her Saviour, the Lord Jesus: "and — now — and now (holding up her almost lifeless hands for the last time) come— O come— blessed Lord— Jesus!" And as Belford wrote to Robert Lovelace: "And with these words, the last but half-pronounced, expired :— such a smile, such a charming serenity overspread her sweet face at the instant, as seemed to manifest her eternal happiness already begun." Downwards farther in our fiction in Bulwer's The Caxtons (1849) loom and gloom in pathos the follow- 12 Motives in English Fiction ing passages animated with the spirit of Malory's ideals : Then, in details, there, in stout oak shelves, were the books on which my father loved to jest his more imaginative brother, — there they were, Froissart, Barante, Joinville, the Mort d 'Arthur, Amadis of Gaul, Spenser's Fairy Queen, a noble copy of Strutt's Horda, Mallet's Northern Antiquities, Percy's Reliques, Pope's Homer, books on gunnery, archery, hawking, fortification — old chivalry and modern war together cheek- by-jowl. Old chivalry and modern war! — look to that tilting helmet with the tall Caxton crest, and look to that trophy near it, a French cuirass — and that old banner (a knight's pennon) surmounting those crossed bayonets. And over the chimney- piece there — bright, clean, and, I warrant you, dusted daily — are Roland's own sword, his holsters and pistols, yea, the saddle, pierced and lacerated, from which he had reeled when that leg — I gasped — I felt it all at a glance, and I stole softly to the spot, and, had Roland not been there, I could have kissed that sword as reverently as if it had been a Bayard's or a Sidney's. On the wall above the cradle were arranged sundry little articles, that had, perhaps, once made the joy of a child's heart — broken toys with the paint rubbed off, a tin sword and trumpet, and a few tattered books, mostly in Spanish — by their shape and look, doubtless children's books. Near these stood, on the floor, a picture with its face to the wall. Juba had chased the mouse that his fancy still insisted on creating, behind this picture, and, as he abruptly drew back, the picture fell into the hands I stretched forth to receive it. I turned the face to the light, and was surprised to see merely an old family portrait; it was that of a gentleman in the flowered vest and stiff ruff which referred the date of his existence to the reign of Elizabeth — a man with a bold and noble countenance. On Malory's "Mortc Darthur" 13 the corner was placed a faded coat-of-arms, beneath which was inscribed, "HERBERT De Caxton, Eq: Aur: JEtat: 35." On the back of the canvas I observed, as I now replaced the picture against the wall, a label in Roland's handwriting, though in a younger and more running hand than he now wrote. The words were these : " The best and bravest of our line. He charged by Sidney's side on the field of Zutphen; he fought in Drake's ship against the armament of Spain. If ever I have a — " The rest of the label seemed to have been torn off. King Arthur's Excalibur, Sir Galahad's white shield, on which was the cross of the blood of Joseph of Arimathea, and the swords of all the white knights of the Table Round, are the weapons not only of the good knights in the Waverley Novels and the chivalrous gentlemen in Thackeray but of those heroes who in all our fiction fight the Battle of Life; and it was one of these untarnished Arthurian swords that Malory extended to Bulwer to give to Captain Roland Caxton who, after much suffering, lived to see his only son, a craven knight, redeem a dis- graceful life by grasping the guerdon of an honorable death on a field of battle fought with sword for England's empire. And, as at the close of the Morte Darthur, the shield to this sword proves to be the Bible, so at the close of The Caxtons the sword of Captain Roland Caxton is sheathed in the scabbard of his tear-blistered Bible. Bulwer like Malory implants the idea in the minds of modern knights whether young or old that no fate is quite as happy as a glorious death such as overtook the perhaps mythical Sir William de Caxton on Bosworth Field; and that all modern houses should remember their ancestral heroes, even if it be quite impossible to trace an exact lineage back to a Sir Herbert de Caxton — the bravest of the line — who charged with Sir Philip Sidney at Zutphen. Between Malory's Le Morte Darthur (1485) and Lyly's 14 Motives in English Fiction Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit (1579) no great piece of fiction appeared except More's Utopia which was written in Latin and published in Louvain in 1 516. In 155 1 Ralph Robynson translated the novel into English, and in 1556 the second edition of this translation was published. In the days of Henry VIII Sir Thomas More, an Oxford University man, and a sage at Chelsea centuries before Carlyle's residence there, hiding himself behind the interesting form of a tale told by a long-bearded adven- turer who had been on three voyages with Amerigo Ves- pucci, whimsically and humorously attacked the social and political evils of his times. The setting of Utopia is reality, for More makes use of the time when, in 15 15, he visited Flanders as one of the commission to confer with the ambassadors of Charles V about the renewal of his alliance with Henry VIII. Reality becomes romance when one day on his way home from mass in Antwerp he accidentally meets Raphael Hythloday, the man of the Ancient Mariner type. The story that issued from the lips of this tanned-faced man was that he had been for five years on the crescent-shaped island of Utopia, which had fifty-four cities and its capital at Amaurote. Utopia was a place where every man was a philosopher and there- fore fit to be a king. Few were its laws, because the law of the inner life prevailed. 'Equalitie was the cause that every man had enoughe. ' Its government was in the hands of a Prince and its Tranibores and Siphograuntes, corresponding to our Senate and House of Representatives; and the state was strongly affiliated with priests to whom the minds of children were entrusted to be moulded in manners conducive to preserve the peace of right-opin- ioned government. The Utopians were all compelled to learn some trade at which they worked six hours a day; and, when not at work, were obliged to read and attend public lectures. Their games were pieces of virtue moving More's "Utopia" 15 on chess-boards to checkmate opposing pieces of vice. There were no ill-smelling streets. The public hospitals were many. The whole endeavor of the inhabitants was to ease the misery of their co-workers. They were an aesthetic folk not only supping to music but giving an easy death to those who had become useless members of their social unit. Such an action, as when Justine Trent in Mrs. Edith Wharton's The Fruit of the Tree (1907) gives an extra dose of morphine to her life-long friend Bessie Westmore (Mrs. John Amherst) when her spinal malady is considered hopelessly incurable, would have been re- garded by the Utopians as a high course of ethical conduct ; and, if Mrs. Edith Wharton had been living in Utopia, she never could have acridly written The Custom of the Country (1913) because divorces were only granted on the grounds of infidelity and desertion. There were no law- yers, for every man pled his own case. The Utopians seldom if ever went to war, believing that it was "better either with money or by pollicie to avoyde warre than with muche losse of man's bloud to fight." And all, whether Christian or heathen, worshiped the Divine Essence ; for, from the time of their first king Utopus, they had con- formed to his decrees that all religions inspired men to the worship of the true God. And their Chief Priest was given as much honor om public occasions as the Prince, the Tranibores, and the Ambassadours. The story within the story, told by the long-bearded stranger, delightfully and humorously conveying to the reader the estimate which was set on money and jewels by the Utopians, who looked upon precious stones as "toyes for yonge children to playe withall, " makes its conclusion worth quoting: So there came in III. Ambassadours with c. (an hundred) servauntes all apparelled in chaungeable colours: the moste 1 6 Motives in English Fiction of them in silkes : the Ambassadours themselves (for at home in their owne countrey they were noble men) in cloth of gold, with great cheines of gold, with golde hanginge at their eares, with gold ringes upon their ringers, with brouches and aglettes of gold upon their cappes, which glistered ful of peerles and precious stones: ... to the e}^es of all the Utopians, excepte very fewe, which had bene in other countreys for some reson- able cause, al that gorgeousness of apparrel seemed shamefull and reprocheful. In so muche that they most reverently saluted the vilest and most abject of them for lordes : passing over the Ambassadoures themselves without any honour: judging them by their wearing of golden cheynes to be bond- men. Yea you shoulde have sene children also, that had caste away their peerles and pretious stones, when they sawe the like sticking upon the Ambassadours cappes: digge and pushe theire mothers under the sides, sainge thus to them. Loke mother how great a lubber doth yet were peerles and precious stoones, as though he were a litel child stil. O wittie head. But the mother, yea and that also in good earnest; peace sone, saithe she: I thinke he be some of the Ambassadours fooles. Ezekiel in the last eight chapters of his remarkable contribution to the Bible believes in a grand state which can only be effected by an educated priesthood working toward a Holy State in which the brotherhood of man would receive ethical support always from a righteous hierarchy. Plato in The Republic fell back on the morally educated few who know. He advanced from Ezekiel's theocracy to an aristocracy of highly trained minds. These minds believed in a system of education that came from within and not from the external world. By the power of his own inner ethical education each citizen would obtain from the state that justice which gave him the opportunity to practise the one thing for which his nature was adapted. What was theoretically thought out by Ezekiel and Plato on the perfectibility of human government More and Bacon practically applied to a More's "Utopia" 17 grand state already existing and working for the ame- lioration of its social unit. More believes in the educa- tion that comes from within and Bacon believes that the better education of the world within is secured by its being combined with a more thorough knowledge of the world without, i.e., by an acquaintance with the pheno- mena of great nature itself. H. G. Wells in A Modern Utopia and Marriage shows us that there is a collective mind in society which has developed "artistic socialism" that is constructive of the whole social unit subordinating individuals to episodes in synthetic welfare. When in A Far Country a Winston Churchill's erring Krebs and in The Harbor an Ernest Poole's erring Kramer clasp hands with an erring Carnegie and an erring Rockefeller for the redemption of the suffering poor and the suffering rich upon whom at present no constructive cultural imagina- tion is playing, then perhaps all the Utopias in English fiction will be realized. Swift, when laughing at the Academy of Projectors in Gulliver's Travels, was retro- actively laughing at Bacon's noble scheme of scientific investigation which on the island of the New Atlantis was to be carried on by Solamona's College of the Six Days Works. The law of the making of all Utopias has been the cult of following scientific achievements that in their infancy or beginnings were cynically sneered at; for the scientific point of view is the only point of view in all researches carried on by the educated few who know. Some time in the future science may secure from a weak mentality, such as Swift mocked with a low laugh, an invention which, when perfected by a stronger mentality projected from a progressive humanity, may enable one to extract sunbeams even out of cucumbers. All the creators of Utopias in English fiction are prophetic of the time when the scientifically educated few shall have become the scientifically educated all. 18 Motives in English Fiction More's Utopia helped to frame John Barclay's Argents (1621), Bacon's New Atlantis (1627), Bishop Francis Godwin's The Man in the Moone (1638), Bishop John Wilkins's The Discovery of a World in the Moone (1638), James Harrington's Oceana (1656), certain parts of Nathaniel Ingelo's Bentivolio and Urania (1660), Henry Neville's The Isle of Pines (1668), Mrs. Mary Manley's The New Atalantis (1709), Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719), Mrs. Eliza Haywood's The Memoirs of a Certain Island Adjacent to Utopia (1725), Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726), Robert Paltock's Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins (1751), Lytton's The Coming Race (1871), Samuel Butler's Erewhon; or, Over the Range (1872), Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888), Morris's News from Nowhere (1890), and H. G. Wells's The First Men in the Moon (1901) and A Modern Utopia (1905). John Lyly, another Oxford man, working over material taken from North's Diall of Princes (1557), the English translation of Antonio de Guevara's El Relox de Principes, established a good pedagogical novel, Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit in 1579. Lyly was not only indebted for his style to Guevara and to George Pettie's A Petite Pallace of Pettie his Pleasure (1576) but also to Roger Ascham for the same phrasal power and for the idea of the characterization of Euphues who, in The Scholemaster (1570), represents a man physically, mentally, and morally perfect, — a veritable Sidney. Out of Ascham's The Scholemaster, written for the instruction of boys in the preparatory schools, grew this novel created with the serious purpose of showing how a young man after leav- ing the English schools might receive further polish and education by traveling on the continent, and of warning him against the fashionable dissipations existing in the great cities. Euphues, an Athenian youth, went to Naples which was at that time perhaps the most dissolute city Lyly's Euphues 19 in Europe. It was there that he met the beautiful Lucilla, the betrothed of his friend Philautus, with whom he fell violently in love at first sight. On one occasion finding this damsel alone, Euphues eloquently tendered her the utmost passion of his heart in this fashion : Gentlewoman, my acquaintance being so little, I am afraid my credit will be less, for that they commonly are soonest believed, that are best beloved, and they liked best whom we have known longest, nevertheless the noble mind suspecteth no guile without cause, neither condemneth any wight without proof: having therefore notice of your heroical heart, I am the better persuaded of my good hap. So it is Lucilla, that coming to Naples but to fetch fire, as the byword is, not to make my place of abode, I have found such flames that I can neither quench them with the water of free will, neither cool them with wisdom. For as the hop, the pole being never so high, groweth to the end, or as the dry beech kindled at the root, never leaveth until it come to the top : or as one drop of poison disperseth itself into every vein, so affection having caught hold of my heart, and the sparkles of love kindled my liver, will suddenly, though secretly, flame up into my head, and spread itself into every sinew. It is your beauty (pardon my abrupt boldness) Lady, that hath taken every part of me prisoner, and brought me unto this deep distress, but seeing women when one praiseth them for their deserts, deem that he flattereth them to obtain his desire, I am here present to yield myself to such trial, as your courtesy in this behalf shall re- quire. Yet will you commonly object this to such as serve you, and starve to win your good will, that hot love is soon cold: that the Bauin though it burn bright, is but a blaze: that scalding water if it stand a while turneth almost to ice : that pepper though it be hot in the mouth, is cold in the maw: that the faith of men, though it fry in their words, it freezeth in their works: which things (Lucilla) albeit they be sufficient to reprove the lightness of some one, yet can they not convince every one of lewdness: neither ought the constancy of all, to 20 Motives in English Fiction be brought in question through the subtlety of a few. For although the worm entereth almost into every wood, yet he eateth not the cedar tree. Though the stone Cylindrus at every thunder clap, roll from the hill, yet the pure sleek stone mounteth at the noise: though the rust fret the hardest Steele, yet doth it not eat into the emerald: though polypus change his hue, yet the salamander keepeth his colour: though Proteus trans- form himself into every shape, yet Pygmalion retaineth his old form: though ^Eneas were too fickle to Dido, yet Troilus was too faithful to Cressid : though others seem counterfeit in their deeds, yet Lucilla, persuade yourself, that Euphues will be always current in his dealings. But as the true gold is tried by the torch, and the pure flint by the stroke of the iron, so the loyal heart of the faithful lover, is known by the trial of his Lady : of the which trial (Lucilla) if you shall accompt Euphues worthy, assure yourself, he will be as ready to offer himself a sacrifice for your sweet sake, as yourself shall be willing to employ him in your service. Neither doth he desire to be trusted any way, until he shall be tried every way: neither doth he crave credit at the first, but a good countenance, till time his desire shall be made manifest by his deserts. Thus not blinded by light affection, but dazzled with your rare perfection, and boldened by your exceeding courtesy: I have unfolded mine entire love, desiring you having so good leisure, to give so friendly an answer, as I may receive comfort, and you com- mendation. The subdued alliteration and the delicate arabesque antitheses in this proposal aid in oiling the machinery of euphuism so that it loses its monotonous click and re- sponds to a vibratory warmth of an emotion that is genu- ine. The form and tone of the speech make it perhaps the finest example of Lyly's prose; but, unfortunately, there is a slight sweep of homiletics in the movement of the soul-rhythm that helps to create a lurking suspicion on the part of a listener that Lucilla will ultimately jilt such a forensic knight tilting in the tournament of love. By such Scott's Sir Piercie Shafton 21 a declaration Euphues failed to win Lucilla's undying love just as the Reverend Mr. Collins by a long-winded proposal failed to win Elizabeth Bennet in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1813); and, like these gallants, so fared Scott's Sir Piercie Shafton in trying to win the admiration of Mary Avenel by saying : "Nay, but see now, . . . how you are startled! even as the unbroken steed, which swerves aside from the shaking of a handkerchief, though he must in time encounter the waving of a pennon. This courtly exchange of epithets of honour is no more than the compliments which pass between valour and beauty, wherever they meet and under whatever circumstances. Elizabeth of England herself calls Philip Sidney her Courage, and he in return calls that princess his Inspiration. Wherefore, my fair Protection, for by such epithet it shall be mine to denominate you — . . . ." "Fear not, fairest Protection, . . . that I can be provoked by this rustical and mistaught juvenal to do aught misbecom- ing your presence or mine own dignity; for as soon shall the gunner's linstock give fire unto the icicle, as the spark of pas- sion inflame my blood, tempered as it is to serenity by the respect due to the presence of my gracious Protection. ..." " Fairest Protection, . . . doubt not that thy faithful Affa- bility will be more commoved by the speech of this rudesby than the bright and serene moon is perturbed by the baying of the cottage cur, proud of the height of his own dunghill, which, in his conceit, lifteth him nearer unto the majestic luminary." "Credit me, fairest Protection, . . . your Affability is less than capable of seeing or hearing, far less of reciting or reiterating, aught of an unseemly nature which may have chanced while I enjoyed the Elysium of your presence. The winds of idle passion may indeed rudely agitate the bosom of the rude; but the heart of the courtier is polished to resist 22 Motives in English Fiction them, as the frozen lake receives not the influence of the breeze so — " Naturally the question arises: Was Scott in this por- trayal of Sir Piercie Shafton poking fun at the last phases of Elizabethan euphuism, when it was decadent? Scott insisted that in his mode of treating Sir Piercie he had made no mistake but rather had been unfortunate in choosing what was stale to modern readers. We care no longer for a Don Armado, a Holofernes, or a Malvolio, or a Bobadil. Scott was loth to admit that Sir Piercie was a failure except on the ground of his being an example of an obsolete affectation. If The Monastery had been pub- lished in 1 58 1, Sir Piercie by many Elizabethans would have been considered a worthy successor to Euphues. There is much that binds Sir Piercie Shafton to Euphues ; for, as Scott says in defense of his dethroned Elizabethan knight, ' ' the language of the lovers to their ladies was still in the exalted terms which Amadis would have addressed to Oriana, before encountering a dragon for her sake." Lyly's Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit was a book reflect- ing the literary influences of a young graduate fresh from Oxford University. It is a series of dissertations on love and education; and its didacticism, of which the letters of Eubulus are the finest examples, makes the piece of prose a purpose-novel which was always acceptable to Elizabethans because of their love for introspection and philosophizing. They liked to phrase their feelings and indulge in psychological expatiation, thus making a side-play of characterization. The atmosphere of the novel is that of elucidation of ideas arising from Lyly's study of the manners and customs of his epoch. Lyly sacrificed the loyalty and honor story of Euphues and Philautus because his one desire was to give delicate Robert Greene 23 characterization to shadows by means of a graceful style which would captivate the noblemen and ladies ifloving to and fro in the court of Queen Elizabeth. He seized exactly upon that style that appealed to the educated, emotional public of his day. The nearest approach to the style of Lyly's in our time is that of Henry James which in its subtleties illumines the manners and customs of one class, — painters, sculptors, musicians, and dilettanti. Euphues was a popular novel even with that very class for whose reprobation it was intended. Doubtless the ad- monitions in it were heeded by those who observed Euphues returning from Athens a man so morally changed as to write in the style of his friend Eubulus ethical letters to Philautus. In the second part Euphues and his Eng- land (1580) Euphues and Philautus come to England so that the author can apply his teachings to society around him and incidentally satirize some of the follies of the age. If Lyly had only continued to write novels from 1580 to 1590, no doubt we would have found in them as in his dramas a steady decrease in his employment of euphuism. It was a good thing that Lyly sensed a need for style ; for, by his rich, decorative phrases the language of English fiction became capable of infinite modulation of which Fielding and Thackeray are the greatest masters. This euphuistic style helped to adorn Munday's Zelauto (1580), Robert Greene's novels (1 583-1 592), Thomas Lodge's novels (1 584-1 596), and Sir Philip Sidney's The Arcadia (1590), besides many minor pieces of Elizabethan fiction too numerous to mention. When in her chamber Mamillia, debating as to whether she will be true to her father or to her lover Pharicles, soliloquizes, "no misling mists of misery, no drenching showers of disasterous fortune, nor terrible tempests of adversity shall abate my love or wrack my fancy against the slippery rocks of inconstancy : yea if my lands will buy 24 Motives in English Fiction his ransom or my life purchase his freedom, he shall no longer lead his life in calamity, " we are at once aware that Robert Greene, a graduate of Cambridge, has begun to write fiction in 1583 in the style of John Lyly. The most noteworthy euphuistic novels of Robert Greene's are Mamillia (1583), Gwydonius (1584), Arbasto (1584), Pandosto, the Triumph of Time (1588), Perimcdes, the Blacksmith (1588), Alcida (1589). Menaphon (1589), Mourning Garment (1590), Never Too Late (1590), Philo- mela (1592), A Disputation Between a He Conny-Catcher and a She Conny-Catcher (1592), The Black Bookes Messen- ger, Laying Open the Life and Death of Ned Browne, One of the Most Notable Cutpurses, Crosbiters, and Conny-Catcher s That Ever Lived in England (1592), and Groatsworth of Wit Bought with a Million of Repentance (1596). In Mamillia there is the slight autobiographic flavor of Greene's acquaintance with the slum-banditti of Europe. In Saragossa Pharicles fascinated by its under- world fell into the net spread by the wiles of a courtesan, Clarynda, dwelling therein. Mamillia, to whom he had pledged his love, at once in Padua puts on the apparel of disguise and runs like Shakespeare's Portia to the Sara- gossan courtroom to save the life of Pharicles who had been accused by Clarynda of being a public spy. Mamil- lia before the magistrate of Saragossa revealing her identity pleads his cause so well that she is rewarded by having a faithless wooer thrown into her arms for a husband. Pharicles, not at all ashamed of his previous conduct, asks that all his forepassed follies be forgiven and forgotten; and Mamillia quickly assures him that she has no ill things to remember at his hands. In Arbasto: the Anatomie of Fortune (1584) we listen to Arbasto, once King of Denmark, but now a hermit residing in a cave near Sidon, who insists on relating how his life had been ruined by his love for Doralicia, daughter of Greene's "Arbasto" 25 Pelorus, King of France. During a truce in the war waged with France he had met Doralicia in the camp, where at the same time without his knowledge he was looked upon and loved by Myrania, the youngest daughter of Pelorus. At length Pelorus seized Arbasto and Egerio, his friend, and cast both of them into prison from which they escaped by the strategy of Myrania. At this time Arbasto in- fluenced by the feeling of gratitude pledged himself to Myrania in spite of the fact that his heart belonged to Doralicia. Myrania, finding out his double dealing from the correspondence he had been carrying on with her elder sister, pines away and is on her death-bed when Arbasto comes to comfort her with hypocritical words which intimate that he will shortly make her his queen. In hellish fury Myrania started up in her bed gesticulating in a frenzy and, notwithstanding that she was kept down by her ladies, succeeded in articulating and hurling at the head of Arbasto the most hateful curses : "0 hapless Myrania, could not Medea's mishap have made thee beware? Could not Ariadne's ill luck have taught thee to take heed? Could not Phillis misfortune have feared thee from the like folly: but thou must like and love a straggling stranger? Ay me that repentance should ever come too late: for now I sigh and sorrow, but had I wist comes out of time; folly is sooner remembered than redressed, and time may be r jpented, but not recalled. "But I sec it is a practice in men to have as little care of their own oaths, as of their Ladies honors, imitating Jupiter, who never kept oath he sware to Juno: didst thou not false Arbasto protest with solemn vows, when thy life did hang in the balance, that thy love to Myrania should be always loyal, and hast thou not since sent and sued secretly to win the good will of Doralice? Didst thou not swear to take me to thy mate, and hast thou not since sought to contract with her a new match? Thou didst promise to be true unto me, but 26 Motives in English Fiction hast proved trusty unto her? What should I say, thou hast presented her with pleasant drinks, and poisoned me with bitter potions: the more is my penury, and the greater is thy perjury. But vile wretch, doest thou think this thy villany shall be unrevenged? No, no Egerio: I hope the gods have appointed thee to revenge my injuries: thou hast sworn it, and I fear not but thou wilt perform it. And that thou may est know I exclaim not without cause, see here the Letters which have passed between this false traitour and Doralice. " "Clear thyself traitorous Arbasto thou canst not, persuade me thou shalt not, forgive thee I will not, cease therefore to speak, for in none of these thou shalt speed. Egerio I saved thy life, then revenge my death, and so content I die, yet only discontent in this, that I cannot live to hate Arbasto so long as I have loved him. " And with that, turning upon her left side, with a gasping sigh she gave up the ghost. . . . Arbasto in the pangs of remorse did not move to meet the advances of reconciliation on the part of Doralicia. At length, being abandoned by his own people for having broken his promise, he left Denmark for a hermit's cave wherein he could sorrow for the mishap of Myrania and could rejoice over the misery of Doralicia. As Malory's maid of Astolat had looked at Launcelot and had loved him with the love that was her doom, so Robert Greene's Myrania had looked upon and loved Arbasto. They were both such tender-hearted maidens that they could not survive the shock of unrequited love. In Greene's early novels we have tender-hearted women such as Mamillia, Myrania, Bellaria, Isabel, and hard-hearted men such as Pharicles, Arbasto, Pandosto, and Francesco. In Pan- dosto (1588) Bellaria for her faithfulness to Pandosto is rewarded by seeing her husband cast their lawful babe Greene's "Never Too Late" 27 into a boat to have the whistling winds for a lullaby and salt foam for sweet milk and by having him cast her into a prison to pass to a speedy death. In Never Too Late (1590) in the city of Caerbranck, Brittaine, we see Francesco making love to Isabel, the daughter of Seigneur Fregoso. Isabel seems determined to have Francesco even though her father frowned upon the match because her suitor was not rich enough in lands. The lovers secretly eloped together on horseback to Dune- castrum where they were married. Her father pursued and caught them, accusing Francesco of not only stealing his daughter but some plate. Francesco was put into prison and Isabel kept under vigilance in the house of the Mayor. Francesco was at length freed from custody by the Mayor who had once been young himself and realized "youth would have his swing." After the lovers had lived for five years in the country in the highest kind of connubial bliss, Fregoso forgave the couple and recalled them to his house in Caerbranck, in which for two years they continued to live in all happiness until Francesco was called on business to the city of Troynouant where he met the wicked woman, the siren Infida. Isabel, knowing very well what is keeping her husband in Troynouant, takes the gentlest measure that ever a woman took to reclaim her erring spouse. She writes the following letter filled with tenderest solicitude for Francesco rationally submitting for his perusal just what would make any reasonable husband break off from his inamorata. Isabel to Francesco health. If Penelope longed for her Ulysses, think Isabel wisheth for her Francesco, as loyal to thee as she was constant to the wily Greek, and no less desirous to see thee in Caerbranck, than 28 Motives in English Fiction she to enjoy his presence in Ithaca, watering my cheeks with as many tears, as she her face with plaints, yet my Francesco, hoping I have no such cause as she to increase her cares : for I have such resolution in thy constancy, that no Circes with all her enchantments, no Calipso with all her sorceries, no Syren with all their melodies could pervert thee from thinking on thine Isabel : I know Francesco so deeply hath the faithful promise and loyal vows made and interchanged between us taken place in thy thoughts, that no time how long soever, no distance of place howsoever different, may alter that impres- sion. But why do I infer this needless insinuation to him, that no vanity can alienate from vertue : let me Francesco persuade thee with other circumstances. First my Sweet, think how thine Isabel lies alone, measuring the time with sighs, and thine absence with passions; counting the day dismal, and the night full of sorrows; being every way discontent, because she is not content with her Francesco. The onely comfort that I have in thine absence is thy child, who lies on his mother's knee, and smiles as wantonly as his father when he was a wooer. But when the boy says : ' ' Mam, where is my dad, when will he come home ? " Then the calm of my content turneth to a present storm of piercing sorrow, that I am forced sometime to say: "Unkind Francesco, that forgets his Isabel." I hope Francesco it is thine affaires, not my faults that procureth this long delay. For if I knew my follies did anyway offend thee, to rest thus long absent, I would punish myself with outward and inward penance. But, howsoever, I pray for thy health, and thy speedy return, and so Francesco farewell. Thine more than her owne Isabel. In perusing this letter the reader should note the reference to Isabel's little boy who is quoted as saying, "Mam, where is my dad, when will he come home?" For by it there is caught a glimpse of the sorrows of child- hood which are to be emphasized from this time on in English fiction. Later, in Fielding, another small boy Greene's "Groatsworth of Wit" 29 will cry out to an Amelia as he hears a knock at the door, "There is papa, mama; pray let me stay and see him before I go to bed"; but no papa enters, for he (Booth) is supping with the perfidious Miss Matthews. As Robert Greene continued to write he emphasized more and more the autobiographic as in Never Too Late (1590). As Francesco in Troynouant maltreated Isabel in far Caer- branck by being false to her with the siren Infida, so Greene in London at the time of the composition of this novel no doubt was thinking of his abandoned wife and child in far Norwich. Indeed, in Fielding's Amelia (1751), this Francesco passes into a Booth playing Amelia false with Miss Matthews; and Isabel is a forerunner of Amelia, who clings to her husband (Booth) in spite of her minute knowledge of the fascinating Miss Matthews. Isabel has the Mamillia-like quality of forgiveness in her nature so that, when her husband comes back to her after quarreling with Infida, she royally forgives him for all his trans- gressions with a smile, a tear, and a kiss. Groatsworth of Wit Bought with a Million of Repentance (1596), published after Greene's death and written per- haps by Chettle, contains the simple story of an old miser, Gorinius, w T ho had two sons, the elder of w r hom was Lu- canio and the younger Roberto. When the old man felt death approaching he bequeathed his whole estate to Lucanio because he had executive ability and to Roberto he gave a groat so that by it the younger son could never contaminate himself with the accumulation of tainted wealth. A flauntingly gay young damsel Lamilia of the Elizabethan underworld appears. With the fickleness of her type she first aided Roberto in plundering Lucanio and then veered to the side of the elder brother to push Roberto hopelessly to the bottom of the quagmire. At this point in the story Roberto, robbed of everything, girl and brother, contemplates suicide. The novel is strongly 30 Motives in English Fiction autobiographic. In Never Too Late Francesco is referred to as a university scholar who teaches school amid the beauties of a rural district in order to support Isabel. In Groatsworth of Wit Roberto is such a fine scholar that he is advised by a player to turn his knowledge into money by writing dramas. One can read between the lines that this Roberto is Robert Greene; and, towards the end of the narrative, there is the pathetic reference to the gentle woman his wife who labored to recall him from the nips, foysters, coney-catchers, crossbiters, lifts, high lawyers, and all the rabble of that unclean generation of vipers. It would seem that Greene's wife was compelled to give her husband over to all lewdness. The perfect image of dropsy, the loathsome scourge of lust, without one groat was so sunk in the depths of heartless misery that he communicated his wife's sorrowful lines among his loose trulls that jested at her bootless laments. And at the close of the novel Robert Greene interrupts his own narrative in this manner, "Here (Gentlemen) break I off Roberto's speech; whose life in most parts agreeing with mine found one self-punishment as I have done. Hereafter suppose me the said Roberto . . . ," thus pronouncing it to be all autobiography. Just as Christopher Marlowe humanized cruel, erring Tamburlaine as he stalks throughout tragedy an almost insane figure instinctively striking out at the uncontrol- lable circumstances which have balked and blighted him, so Robert Greene humanized the terrible Elizabethan underworld, of which he was a part, and into which, from the mouth of the murthering-piece of his own remorse, he shot ethical pellets in the form of pamphlet- fiction for the redemption of its inmates and himself. It is well to remember that Robert Greene enriched fiction with disguise of personality and embellished it with the romance of elopement for lovers ; foreshadowed that sable Greene's "Pandosto" 3 1 land wherein would exist the sorrows of childhood; and emphasized autobiography. By comparing and contrasting Fawnia's speech, uttered when passionate and alone, just after she has consented to be wooed by Dorastus, if he will turn shepherd, with that uttered by Rosalynde, when passionate and alone, after her brisk dialogue with Rosader in Arden Forest, we feel that Greene's chronological, euphuistic successor was Lodge, who must have perused the pages of Pandosto (1588) before constructing Rosalynde's soliloquy that is strangely similar in atmosphere, motivation, and char- acterization, to that which had been constructed by Greene for Fawnia. And with that the presence of his men broke off their parle, so that he went with them to the palace and left Fawnia sitting still on the hill side, who, seeing that the night drew on, shifted her folds, and busied herself about other work to drive away such fond fancies as began to trouble her brain. But all this could not prevail; for the beauty of Dorastus had made such a deep impression in her heart, as it could not be worn out without cracking, so that she was forced to blame her own folly in this wise: "Ah, Fawnia, why dost thou gaze against the sun, or catch at the wind? stars are to be looked at with the eye, not reached at with the hand : thoughts are to be measured by fortunes, not by desires : falls come not by sitting low, but by climbing too high. What then, shall all fear to fall because some hap to fall? No, luck cometh by lot, and fortune windeth those threads which the destinies spin. Thou art favoured, Fawnia, of a prince, and yet thou art so fond to reject desired favours : thou hast denial at thy tongue's end, and desire at thy heart's bottom; a woman's fault to spurn at that with her foot, which she greedily catcheth at with her hand. Thou lovest Dorastus, Fawnia, and yet seemest to lour. Take heed: if he retire thou wilt repent; for unless he love, thou canst but die. Die then, Fawnia, for Dorastus doth but jest: the lion never 32 Motives in English Fiction preyeth on the mouse, nor falcons stoop not to dead stales. Sit down then in sorrow, cease to love and content thyself that Dorastus will vouchsafe to flatter Fawnia, though not to fancy Fawnia. Heigh ho ! ah fool, it were seemlier for thee to whistle, as a shepherd, than to sigh as a lover." And with that she ceased these perplexed passions, folding her sheep and hieing home to her poor cottage. With that they put their sheep into the cotes, and went home to her friend Corydon's cottage, Aliena as merry as might be that she was thus in the company of her Rosalynde; but she, poor soul, that had love her lodestar, and her thoughts set on fire with the flame of fancy, could take no rest, but being alone began to consider what passionate penance poor Rosader was enjoined to by love and fortune, that at last she fell into this humour with herself: "Ah Rosalynde, how the Fates have set down in their synod to make thee unhappy: for when passionate J \^ J alone. Fortune hath done her worst, then Love comes in to begin a new tragedy : she seeks to lodge her son in thine eyes, and to kindle her fires in thy bosom. Beware, fond girl, he is an unruly guest to harbour; for cutting in by entreats, he will not be thrust out by force, and her fires are fed with such fuel, as no water is able to quench. Seest thou not how Venus seeks to wrap thee in her labyrinth, wherein is pleasure at the entrance, but within, sorrows, cares, and dis- content? She is a Siren, stop thine ears to her melody; she is a basilisk, shut thy eyes and gaze not at her lest thou perish. Thou art now placed in the country content, where are heavenly thoughts and mean desires: in those lawns where thy flocks feed, Diana haunts: be as her nymphs chaste, and enemy to love, for there is no greater honour to a maid, than to account of fancy as a mortal foe to their sex. Daphne, that bonny wench, was not turned into a bay tree, as the poets feign: but for her chastity her fame was immortal, resembling the laurel that is ever green. Follow thou her steps, Rosalynde, and the rather, for that thou art an exile, and banished from Lodge's "Rosalynde" 33 the court; whose distress, and it is appeased with patience, so it would be renewed with amorous passion. Have mind on thy forepassed fortunes; fear the worst, and entangle not thyself with present fancies, lest loving in haste, thou repent thee at leisure. Ah, but yet, Rosalynde, it is Rosadcr that courts thee; one who as he is beautiful, so he is virtuous, and harboureth in his mind as many good qualities as his face is shadowed with gracious favours; and therefore, Rosalynde, stoop to love, lest, being either too coy or too cruel, Venus wax wroth, and plague thee with the reward of disdain." Rosalynde, thus passionate, was wakened from her dumps by Aliena, who said it was time to go to bed. It is evident that Lodge in technique of euphuistic style has made an improvement on that of Greene. It seems as if Lodge, fascinated by Greene's shepherdess Fawnia, who is a princess by birth but is not aware of it, has lifted the sweet girl with her passionate language of humility into the more powerful characterization of his own princess Rosalynde, who speaks a language that befits her proud mentality. Rosalynde when compared with Fawnia seems always to have a holier nimbus about her head. After examining the elements of style applied by Lodge to Rosalynde's speech, we feel that it is ready for the leaven-like ornamentation of respiritualized euphuism such as delicately and rhythmically falls in perfect char- acterizing power from the lips of Shakespeare's Rosalind, the wonderful composite of Helen, Atalanta, Cleopatra, and Lucrece. Thomas Lodge, 'a graduate of Oxford, and a one-time fellow-student with John Lyly, wrote such novels as The Delectable Historic of Forbonius and Priscera (1584); Rosalynde, Enphues 1 Golden Legacy (1590); Life and Death of William Longbeard (1593), and A Mar gar ite of America (1596). While on a free-booting expedition to the Azores and Canaries he wrote a classic, which is flavored / 34 Motives in English Fiction with the wildness of the tossing surge that he said wetted every line of his forest-of-Arden story into which, as I think, there crept something too of his own marauder, outlaw life. The source of Rosalynde is the Tale of Gamelyn, a Robin Hood ballad of the fourteenth century. Lodge's original contributions to the old tale are the plot of the two kings and an enthralling story of love, which is vitalized by its idyllic atmosphere. His pastoral romance is a little picture of ideal life realized, with nature in the background presenting the antithesis of the homely and the heroic. As Robert Greene in his romances and lyrics cried out for simple country life remembered from boy- hood days so Thomas Lodge in Rosalynde voiced this longing, on the part of cultured Elizabethans in artificial court and city, for the genuine. One-fourth of the action of Lodge's masterpiece takes place away from the forest of Arden; and, in Shakespeare's As You Like It, there are only three or four indoor scenes which carry the onlooker away from the forest of Arden. Everything is so skilfully managed by both artists that, under the wand waved of their enchantment, we feel every second as if the entire action in both productions is taking place under the um- brageous boughs of their magical forest. In his classic, Lodge is at his best where Rosalynde for the first time since she had gazed upon Rosader in the wrestling-match meets him in the forest of Arden; and, in their ensuing dialogue, the thrust of rapier-like repartee is far ahead of anything of the kind that we have had in Greene's fiction. Even the characterizing dialogue in Pandosto which de- picts Dorastus in his wonderful love-making with Fawnia does not quite equal it. When Lodge is writing at a white heat of inspiration he surpasses Greene in pointing language with an euphuistic stiletto. Lodge is also superior to Greene in the artistic handling of the disguise of per- sonality; for Rosalynde, in page's apparel, is far ahead of Sidney's "Arcadia" 35 Mamillia in her garb of disguise in the court room of Saragossa. In plot there is little that is intricate in RosaJynde; therefore, the novel is a marked advance upon the tortuous that is prevalent in Greene's romance. Thus we can understand how Shakespeare out of Lodge's Rosalynde created As You Like It a play much greater than the other drama that he afterwards fashioned from Greene's Pandosto which he called The Winter's Tale. In 1590, the year that Lodge's Rosalynde appeared, Sir Philip Sidney, an Oxford University man, published the Arcadia, which he had written in 1580 for his sister's eye alone when fallen under the Queen's displeasure he had withdrawn from the court to reside in Wilton near Salis- bury. The plot of the novel, a mixture of pastoral and heroic romance, consisting of the adventures of Musidorus, Prince of Thessaly, and Pyrocles, Prince of Macedon, as they play for the love of Pamela and Philoclea, daughters of King Basilius of Arcadia and his wife Gynecia, shows that its author largely used Jacopo Sannazaro's Arcadia (1504) for a model as well as George de Montemayor's Diana Enamorada (1552). Sidney, in this piece of fiction containing digressions sufficient for a dozen novels, was susceptible to the pressure of a heavy pastoral atmosphere which had settled down over the works of the decade permeating such novels as Greene's Pandosto (1588), Menaphon (1589), and Never Too Late (1590). In Mena- phon Sephestia (Samela) conforms to the background of pastoral life just as Rosalynde in Lodge's Rosalynde (1590). In these four novels, as well as in Sidney's Ar- cadia, breezes are constantly blowing from "the dales of Arcady. " The Arcadia, when it appeared, was adorned in a style more flowery than that which had been used by any of Sidney's predecessors and contemporaries. For its strength and weakness it fell back upon the old euphuistic devices and conceits. Still, in spite of stylistic faults at 36 Motives in English Fiction times appearing, when Sidney's language moves in the power of the pathetic to delineate the constancy of the love between Argalus and Parthenia and the beauty of their fate, it is not as some suppose "poetry gone mad" but poetic prose sublimed by a simplicity that has shorn it of all concettism. After Musidorus (Palladius) arrived in Arcadia the Kalander's steward began to tell him a story which was to be the most delicate and at the same time richest vein in the gold mine of Sidney's Arcadia. When Gynecia had been married to Basilius there had come with her into Arcadia Argalus, a young knight, her cousin germane, who fell in love with the beautiful girl, Parthenia, whose mother, like Scott's Lady Ashton, had coerced her daughter into an engagement with Demagoras of Laconia. Parthenia with more will-power than that possessed by ill-fated Lucy Ashton resisted her mother and would marry Argalus, the man she loved. Then Argalus, happy in his approaching marriage with Parthenia, went into his own country to bring friends to the wedding. While Argalus was absent, Demagoras seized Parthenia and rubbed a poison over her face so that it destroyed her beauty making her uglier than the most loathsome leper. When Argalus returned, he was still willing to have Parthenia for his wife but she, resolving not to blight his career by such a marriage, rejected his entreaties and fled the country. Argalus sought her in many places but could not find her. At length he made his way to the house of the Kalander; and it is at this point that the story of Argalus and Parthenia connects itself with the major thread of the narrative of the Arcadia. It was here in the Kalander's home that a beautiful woman came claiming that she was kinswoman to the fair Helen, Queen of Corinth, and told Argalus, who did not recognize her at all, that once, when she had been left in command of the court Sidney's "Arcadia" 37 of Corinth because of Queen Helen's absence, there had come into her presence the disfigured Parthenia, for whose misery she had been most compassionate, and from whom she had been able to obtain an account of her whole tragical history. Then, after relating such, Parthenia had requested her to carry a certain ring to Argalus and to tell him that it was Parthenia's dying wish that he should marry the bringer of the ring. This beautiful woman after relating all this informed Argalus that Parthenia was dead. Argalus was not responsive to this beautiful kinswoman of Queen Helen because he could not befoul his undying love for Parthenia by marrying her. Then it was that the beauty before him disclosed herself as the long-lost Parthenia who further explained how her beauty had been restored by the miraculous treatment of Queen Helen's physician. Straightway the long-separated lovers became one in the nuptial ceremony that was per- formed in the Kalander's house. It was not a great while after this until Argalus was summoned to the war in which he was killed by Amphialus. As a result Parthenia was plunged into the depths of despair. Soon Amphialus was challenged by the Knight of the Tomb; Amphialus accepted, and the jousting immediately took place, the Knight of the Tomb keeping as silent as the ghastly figure of death at the close of Tennyson's Gareth and Lynette. At last Amphialus gave the Knight of the Tomb a great mortal wound in the neck; and, as the victor, proceeded to unhelmet his victim. But the head-piece was no sooner off, but that there fell about the shoulders of the overcome Knight the treasure of fair golden hair, which with the face (soon known by the badge of excellency) witnessed that it was Parthenia, the unfortunately virtuous wife of Argalus: her beauty then even in despite of the passed sorrow, or coming death, assuring all beholders, that it was nothing short of perfection. For her 38 Motives in English Fiction exceeding fair eyes, having with continual weeping gotten a little redness about them; her roundly sweetly swelling lips a little trembling, as though they kissed their neighbor death; in her cheeks the whiteness striving by little and little to get upon the rosiness of them; her neck, a neck indeed of alabaster, displaying the wound, which with most dainty blood laboured to drown his own beauties; so as here was a river of purest red, there an island of perfittest white, each giving lustre to the other; with the sweet countenance (God knows) full of an unaffected languishing: though these things to a grossly conceiving sense might seem disgraces; yet indeed were they but appareling beauty in a new fashion, which all looked upon thorough the spectacles of pity, did ever increase the lines of her natural fairness, so as Amphialus was astonished with grief, compassion, and shame, detesting his fortune, that made him unfortunate in victory. Therefore, putting off his head-piece and gauntlet; kneeling down unto her and with tears testifying his sorrow, he offered his (by himself accursed) hands to help her : protesting his life and power to be ready to do her honour : But Parthenia (who had inward messengers of the desired death's approach) looking upon him, and straight away her feeble sight, as from a delightless object, drawing out her words, which her breath (loath to part from so sweet a body) did faintly deliver, Sir (said she) I pray you (if prayers have place in enemies) to let my maids take my body untouched by you: the only honour I now desire by your means, is, that I have no honour of you. Argalus made no such bargain with you, that the hands which killed him, should help me. I have of them (and I do not only pardon you, but thank you for it) the service which I desired. There rests nothing now, but that I go live with him, since whose death I have done nothing but die. Then pausing, and a little fainting, and again coming to herself, O sweet life, welcome (said she) now feel I the bands untied of the cruel death, which so long hath held me. And life, O death, answer for me, that my thoughts have not so much as in a dream tasted any comfort ; since they were deprived of Argalus. I come, my Argalus, I come: And, O God hide my Sidney's "Arcadia" 39 faults p. thy mercies, and grant ( as I feel thou dost grant) that in thy eternal love, we may love each other eternally. And this O Lorde: But there Atropos cut oil her sentence: for with' that, casting up both eyes and hands to the skies, the noble soul departed (one might well assure himself) to heaven, which left the bodie in so heavenly a demeanor. It seems to me from the point of view of style that there is no finer narrative in all the Arcadia than that which contains the description of the death of Parthenia. It seems as if Sidney had at last accidentally stumbled upon a fluidity of fine form and tone as an outcome of his experimenting with a vernacular, the capacities of which could be unfolded into the rich, the plastic, and the imaginative. Not since the utterances of Malory's dying maid of Astolat had there been such an exquisite craping of poetic prose. Technically the whole novel is a series of blows — a series of steady pressures on points emphasizing surprise and contrast — to throw the reader into a pastoral fairyland of stage delight. By means of posing as the kinswoman of the Queen of Corinth, Parthenia tests the sincerity of Argalus's love. This feminine love of disguise is reminis- cent of Greene's Mamillia and Lodge's Rosalynde. We also see Prince Pyrocles disguising himself as the Amazon Zelmane. Another surprise noticed at the end of the Arcadia is Sidney's ethical trick which has been so often employed by our modern novelists to bring a woman or a man morally dead back to life. Gynecia determines to check her guilty love for Pyrocles and promises to become a dutiful wife to her husband King Basilius, who does not refuse ivory the chance of turning from black to everlasting white. Another thing noticeable in the novel is the mark of the lion's paw upon the neck of a certain man, whose birth and identity are thus revealed; this projects us as 40 Motives in English Fiction far as to Fielding's Joseph Andrews, who ceases to be an unknown foundling when his father recognizes the straw- berry birthmark on his breast. This device for the identi- fication of a hero is worked to a nicety in Mrs. Ann Radcliffe's Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789) and in Mrs. Charlotte Lennox's Euphemia (1790), where the birth- mark happens to be a bow and arrow on the boy's left breast due to the scare that his mother received from the North American Indians. A greater thing to note, how- ever, is the pornographic work which caused Nat Ingelo to write in his preface to Bentivolio and Urania (1660) "but this sort of book is most to be blamed. . . . For some such reason, I suppose, the great Sidney before his death charg'd his friend Sir Fulk Grevill, who had the onely copy of his Arcadia, that he should never permit it to be made publick. ' ' Still this sensuous beauty of workman- ship had always been in English fiction. Ascham had averred that Malory's Le Morte Darthur was filled with nothing but slaughters and adulteries. The waves that are jealous of their position in the river Ladon when the bathing Philoclea fascinates them with the beauty of her flesh at least do not turn as red as the blush that suffuses our cheeks when we are reading a certain part of Emanuel Ford's Parismus, the Renowned Prince of Bohemia (1598) or become as crimson as when we are reading to-day Mrs. Harrison's Adrian Savage (191 1), where the pornographic is all the worse because of the morbid veil concealing it. In fact Sidney's Arcadia has never ceased to influence our fiction for good and for ill; and it was thus that it affected Henry Chettle's Piers Plainness seaven yeres Prentiskip (1595), Lady Mary Wroth's Urania (1621). George Mackensie's Aretina (1661), Roger Boyle's Par- thenissa (1664, 1665, 1677), and John Crowne's Pandion and Amphigeneia (1665). In final retrospect it seems to me that the Arcadia shows how Sidney with his many- Nash's "Life of Jack Wilton" 4* sided brain teeming with imagination viewed things from all sides at once. The novel is too infinite in its relations between cause and consequence to make one regard Sidney as a scientific novelist; and its interspersed experimenta- tions in grafting contemporary Italian metrical forms on to English verse in all probability kept him from being a greater poet ; but its flowing and graceful style will always endear the grandson of the Duke of Northumberland and nephew of Leicester to those who sense the need of the restoration of some of the excellence of such a style to modern fiction. Thomas Nash, dramatist and pamphleteer, in 1594 created The Unfortunate Traveller, or the Life of Jack Wilton, a picaresque, historical novel, the hero of which is Jack Wilton, a gentleman of fortune, who is first seen serving as page in the camp of Henry VIII at the siege of Tournay. Throughout the story there is an occasional streak of sunshine of genial humor as when swaggering Jack bamboozles the purveyor of drink or when, with Diamante, the Venetian beauty, he travels palming himself off as Lord Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey; but generally the sky is dark lending a blood-and-thunder background to reveal such an appalling scene as that in which Cut wolf wreaks vengeance on Esdras of Granada. As Hamlet killed Claudius in a trick in which there was no relish of salvation so Cutwolf murdered Esdras at the moment, when, praying to God to have his life spared, he had been forced by the assassin to deny his Creator. Some of this same bloodthirstiness is found in Defoe's Bob Singleton and in Stevenson's James Durie, who, after escaping from the pirates of whom he had been the leader, kills one of his companions in the slough for no other reason than that he considered him as a somewhat excessive bit of baggage to carry. The meritorious, his- trionic part of Nash's novel is the description of how the 42 Motives in English Fiction real Earl of Surrey overtakes Jack Wilton and Diamante at Florence, where they are supping like Antony and Cleopatra. Jack is in a cold sweat bestilled to jelly but defends himself well because the Earl and he had agreed at Wittenberg to exchange names so that Surrey could have "more liberty of behaviour without danger of reproach." Then, too, how could the enraged Earl creep around behind the rampart of the defense thrown up by Jack, who avers that he was highly honoring the Earl by traveling in this style on the Continent since it was being conducted with more splendor than that which he had ever seen the Earl put on. At one time the Earl had made poetic love to Diamante in the Venetian prison when Jack and he had been confined there together on the charge of counterfeiting. Surrey had then called this Diamante his poetic Geraldine, but now it was too much for him to see this wife of Castaldo's perpetually clinging to Jack, whom the public thought to be the real Earl. In a most humorous way Jack concedes to the Earl's request, giving up the assumed earldom and retaining his bene- factress, who by means of her husband's gold had made possible the successful posing of himself as the Earl of Surrey. Thereafter, throughout the novel, he and Dia- mante refuse to be separated. The adventurous Jack who makes the Continent his field of action is an antici- pator of Defoe's Captain Singleton, who at the end of the seventeenth century not only visits Italy, but Africa, South America, and even Bassorah and Bagdad, to pre- pare the way for Asia to be visited by Hope's Anastasius and Morier's Hajji Baba at the end of the eighteenth and at the beginning of the nineteenth century. At the close of the novel Jack Wilton, a good deal like Stevenson's Captain Silver, emerged from all his deviltries to live in wealth and seeming happiness. Nash ventured into that district, in which moved the Deloney's "Thomas of Reading" 43 coney-catching canaille with whom Greene had lived and whom no man knew better, and came forth to hang in the rogues' gallery next to the sketches of Clarynda, Infida, and Lamilia the picture of Diamante; and high above these female rogues he framed the portrait of Jack Wilton, standing on the boundary line between personage and personality, a chevalier of fortune, such as the gallery heretofore had not possessed. Thus Nash helped to develop the rogu e who was to thrive in English fiction from Richard Head and Francis Kirkman's The English Rogue (1665-80) and Bunyan's The Life and Death of Mr. Badman (1680) down to Fielding's great man Jonathan Wild, who went to the gallows amid a mass of debris shot at him by an enraged community, and who afterwards leaped from his grave to electrify the elements that Thackeray put into Barry Lyndon and Lord Steyne. The web of the historical with its thread of Gothicism made red by Esdras's blood serves to move us on to the study of the texture of The Pleasant Historic of Thomas of Reading (1596). The silk- weaver Thomas Deloney after composing this novel wrote Jack of Newbury (1597) and Gentlccraft (1597), which consists of six stories: (1) "Sir Hugh " ; (2) " Crispine and Crispinus " ; (3) " Simon Eyre ' ' ; (4) "Richard Casteler"; (5) "Master Peachey and His Men"; and (6) "Anthony Now-now. " In Thomas of Reading Deloney first portrays nine clothiers, six from the West of England and three from the North, who are under the special favor of Henry I, and then being fond of old London, especially that part which supported his trade, he reveals Cheapside, with its shops of the goldsmiths and the silk-merchants, and Watling Street with its drapers and St. Martin's with its shoemakers. At St. Nicholas Church there is a brief inspection of the flesh- shambles ; and at the old Change there is a glimpse caught of the fish-mongers. Weavers are seen rushing along 44 Motives in English Fiction Candleweak Street and clothiers congregating at Black - wel-hall. Proceeding from this place to St. Paul's Church Deloney stops to point out the weather-cock on the steeple, and passing from thence he asks us to contemplate the Tower of London. Then the novelist shifts the scenery from the city to Gloucestershire so as to individualize fair Margaret, the banished Earl of Shrewsbury's daugh- ter, as in a red petticoat she trips along under a broad straw hat and with a hayfork in her hand to the harvest field. As she goes to the haymaking we see her accosted by Duke Robert, the King's brother, who had been making love to the rural maiden. We then accompany them to the field to listen to the wooing that finally made Mar- garet trust her heart to Duke Robert. The King is at last aware that Duke Robert intends to make Margaret his wife and orders that his eyes be put out and that Margaret be put in prison under sentence of death. A little later as she passes to execution a pardon comes from the King, but she is not to pass to liberty without one punishment, that of seeing her lover's eyes put out. And in Cardiffe Castle she sees Robert brought forth to lose his eyes; and the next scene which closes the novel is that which shows Margaret in the act of taking the veil in the Abbey at Gloucester. Thomas Deloney elaborates her becoming a nun with all the pomp and ceremony of the Catholic Church at that time. There is no better scenic description of taking the veil until we come to Ellena di Rosalba about to take the veil in the .convent of San Stefano in Mrs. Radcliffe's The Italian (1797) or to Emily Arundel, taking it in all gorgeousness in the chapel of St. Valerie near Naples in Letitia Landon's Romance and Reality (1831). The description of the murder of Thomas Cole of Reading at Colebrooke preceded by all kinds of ill omens and solemn music is Thomas Deloney's masterpiece in Dcloney's "Thomas of Reading" 45 scenic technique, though it is not at all characteristic of the type of his bourgeois fiction. Thomas Deloney in the Inn at Colebrooke depicts a wicked host and hostess who made their living by cutting the throats of their fat pigs, — transient patrons. By a tremendous flashlight of genius we see weaver Cole going willy-nilly from his bed to the cauldron of boiling liquor. . . With that certaine Musicians of the towne came to the Chamber, and knowing Master Cole was there, drue out their instruments, and very solemnly began to play. This musicke comes very well (said Cole) and when he had listned a while thereunto, he said, Me thinks these instrumets sound like the ring of St. Mary Oueries bells, but the Base drowns all the rest: and in my eare it goes like a bell that rings a forenoones knell, for Gods sake let them leaue off, and beare them this simple reward. The Musicians being gone, his Oast asked if now it would please him to goe to bed; for (quoth he) it is welneere eleuen of the clocke. With that Cole beholding his Oast and Oastesse earnestly, began to start backe, saying, what aile you to looke so like pale death? good Lord, what haue you done, that your hands are thus bloody? What my hands, said his Oast? Why, you may see they are neither bloody nor f oule : either your eyes doe greatly dazell, or else fancies of a troubled minde doe delude you. Alas, my Oast, you may see, said hee, how weake my wits are, I neuer had my head so idle before. Come, let me drinke once more, and then I will to bed, and trouble you no longer. With that hee made himself e vnready, and his Oastesse was very diligent to warme a kerchiffe, and put it about his head. Good Lord, said he, I am not sicke, I praise God, but such an alteration I finde in my selfe as I neuer did before. With that the scritch-owle cried pitiously, and anon after the night-rauen sate croaking hard by his window. Iesu haue mercy vpon me, quoth hee, what an ill-fauoured cry doe yonder carrion birds make, and therewithall he laid him downe in his bed, from whence he neuer rose againe. 46 Motives in English Fiction His Oast and Oastesse, that all this while noted his troubled mind, began to commune betwixt themselues thereof. And the man said, he knew not what were best to be done. By my consent (quoth he) the matter should passe, for I thinke it is not best to meddle on him. What man (quoth she) faint you now? haue you done so many and do you shrinke at this? Then shewing him a great deale of gold which Cole had left with her, she said, Would it not grieue a bodies heart to lose this? hang the old churle, what should he doe liuing any longer? he hath too much, and we haue too little: tut husband, let the thing be done, and then this is our owne. Her wicked counsell was followed, and when they had listned at his chamber doore, they heard the man sound asleepe: All is safe, quoth they, and downe into the kitchin they goe, their seruants being all in bed, and pulling out the yron pins, downe fell the bed, and the man dropt out into the boyling caldron. He being dead, they betwixt them cast his body into the riuer, his clothes they made away, and made all things as it should be. . . . In this part of the novel is seen the birth of the horrible Gothic romance spider which spins the red thread w T hich was to run its course of increasing terror past the inn- keeperess and the robbers, who made midnight interesting for the Count in Smollett's Adventures of Ferdinand, Count Fathom (1753), past the vacant stare in Melmoth's eye until it made out of itself the many threads in the gigantic web of wholesale murder in the roadhouse, where Gerard and his companions saved themselves by phos- phorescent La Mort in Charles Reade's The Cloister and the Hearth (1861). The New Atlantis (1627) of Sir Francis Bacon's retroacts through Barclay's Argenis (1621) to More's Utopia (1516) and swings one past Harrington's Oceana (1656) to Swift's ' ' A Voyage to Laputa ' ' in Gulliver's Travels ( 1 726) . Bacon Bacon's "New Atlantis" 47 selects an island, the New Atlantis imaginatively situated between America and China, and upon it stages ideas and moods on the moral sciences, which are under the control of a government of knowledge that sought nature as a means by which to relieve and cure evils afflicting hu- manity. Bacon left his novel a mighty torso because the policy of the court of the Stuarts was antagonistic to such a humanitarian scheme as founding a college of scientific research. By means of this legacy of the New Atlantis, however, the scientific men in England after- wards founded the Royal Society. Bacon's style in this fragment, the pattern of which is stamped everywhere with the sign of the cross, attains the level of excellence of Defoe and Swift when they are at their best in circumstantial description. A vast gain has been made by Bacon in subtly modifying the first person method of narration; and the closeness of detail work in coloring and numbering objects has been most skilfully attended to so as not to interfere in the slightest degree with the movement of the incidents. The temporal element moves with a punctuality that has been secured by a consultation of the hours on the face of a clock. Sailing from Peru we are hurried with the utmost rapidity to the island in the Pacific, to the cross, and to the sub- sequent question "Are ye Christians?" The ship is not long in quarantine, and by the name of Jesus and his merits we pass ashore to visit the Strangers' House wherein we are led to the Infirmary for sick persons. We see a small red cross on the top of a white turban and by the Christian priest under it with tears of tenderness in his eyes are reminded of our modern Red Cross Society. We swiftly pass to the account from the Governor of Ben- salem of how the island was Christianized twenty years after the ascension of our Saviour; and it is then that the narrative leaps resplendcntly high as it moves us out to 48 Motives in English Fiction sea to observe the great pillar of light on top of which is a flaming cross. About twenty Yeares after the Ascension of our Saviour, it came to passe, that ther was seen by the People of Renfusa, (a Citty upon the Easterne Coast of our Island,) within Night, (the Night was Cloudy, and Calme,) as it might be some mile into the Sea, a great Pillar of Light; Not sharp, but in forme of a Columne, or Cylinder, rising from the Sea, a great way up towards Heaven; and on the topp of it was seene a large Crosse of Light, more bright and resplendent then the Body of the Pillar. Upon which so strange a Spectacle, the People of the Citty gathered apace together upon the Sands, to wonder; And so after put themselves into a number of small Boates, to goe nearer to this Marveilous sight. But when the Boates were come within (about) 60 yeards of the Pillar, they found themselves all bound, and could goe no further; yet so as they might move to goe about, but might not approach nearer: So as the Boates stood all as in a Theater, beholding this Light, as an Heavenly Signe. It so fell out, that ther was in one of the Boates one of our Wise Men, of the Society of Salomons House; which House, or Colledge (my good Brethren) is the very Eye of this Kingdome; Who having a while atten- tively and devoutly viewed and contemplated this Pillar and Crosse, fell downe upon his face; And then raysed himselfe upon his knees, and lifting up his Hands to Heaven, made his prayers in this manner. Lord God of Heaven and Earth; thou hast vouchsafed of thy Grace, to those of our Order, to know thy Workes of Creation, and the Secretts of them; And to discerne (as farre as appertaineth to the Generations of Men) Between Divine Miracles, Workes of Nature, Works of Art, and Impostures and Illusions of all sorts. I doe here acknowledge and testifie before this People, that the Thing which we now see before our eyes, is thy Finger, and a true Miracle. And for-as-much, as we learne in our Bookes, that thou never workest Miracles, but to a Divine and Excellent End, (for the Lawes of Nature are thine owne Lawes, and thou exceedest them not but upon Bacon's "New Atlantis" 49 great cause) wee most humbly beseech thee, to prosper this great Signe; And to give us the Interpretation and use of it in Mercy; Which thou docst in some part secretly promise, by sending it unto us. When he had made his Prayer, hec presently found the Boate he was in, moveable and unbound; whereas all the rest remained still fast; And taking that for an assurance of Leave to approach, he caused the Boate to be softly, and with silence, rowed towards the Pillar. But ere he came neere it, the Pillar and Crosse of Light brake up, and cast it selfe abroad, as it were, into a Firmament of many Starres; which also vanished soone after, and there was nothing left to be seen, but a small Arke, or Chest of Cedar, dry, and not wett at all with water, though it swam. And in the Fore-end of it, which was towards him, grew a small greenc Branch of Palme; And when the wise Man had taken it, with all reverence, into his Boate, it opened of it selfe, and there were found in it, a Booke, and a Letter; Both written in fine Parchment, and wrapped in Sindons of Linnen. The Booke conteined all the Canonicall Bookes of the Old and New Testament, according as you have them; (For we know well what the Churches with you receive) ; And the Apocalypse it selfe, And some other Bookes of the New Testament, which were not at that time written, were never- thelesse in the Booke. And for the Letter, it was in these words. I Bartholomew, a Servant of the Highest, and Apostle of Iesus Christ, was warned by an Angell, that appeared to me, in a vision of Glory, that I should commit this Arke to the flouds of the Sea. Therefore, I doe testifie and declare, unto that People, where God shall ordaine this Arke to come to Land, that in the same day, is come unto them Salvation and Peace and Good Will, from the Father, and from the Lord Iesus. While pondering over the Governor's story in which is the marvelous disintegration of pillar and cross our atten- tion is momentarily called to a study of charity organiza- 50 Motives in English Fiction tions and Solamona's House, which was instituted for the finding out of the true nature of all things. Profound amazement is aroused at Bacon's great scheme for "the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effect- ing of all things possible, ' ' and by the realization that he anticipates nearly all of the modern scientific inventions such as the submarine vessel and the aeroplane. Sir Francis Bacon was as prophetic in the New Atlantis as Lord Lytton in The Coming Race (1871) ; and, perhaps, the most noteworthy thing about this novel is that it is the first bit of fiction in which religion and science clasp hands in perfect harmony beneath a permanent rainbow that they have created and set in the firmament for progressive humanity. Would that Bacon had completed his eloquent fable; for, if he had, we might have had the realization of Sir Thomas More's Utopian dream of things! On Bacon's New Atlantis we would have observed the turning of the wheels of a code of laws "of the best state or mould of commonwealth"; and, as it is, the fragment shows that an enlightened people were working under what must have been an ideal code of laws. These inhabitants of Bacon's island hated impostures and illusions in every department of knowledge and most of all in the field of education. Profound pity for the results of unsound education permeates the novel. Bacon, who long before at the University of Cambridge had felt the lack of room for free inquiry, holds out practicable methods by which the inhabitants of his isle could re-educate themselves every twelve years by comparing their light from within with the light that was without — which was the light of the world's educational growth; but first before there could be any cross-pollination in education they must seek the Kingdom of Heaven that was within. By this it can readily be seen that Bacon is looking through the Bacon's "New Atlantis" 51 eyes of Ezekiel, Plato, and More, upon a state safely placed in the hands of the righteous few, whose wonderful scientific achievements had come about by reason of the constant adjustment and re-adjustment of imported theories and methods to the theories and methods already in vogue. In this novel of ideas there is scarcely any characteri- zation; but the thumb-nail sketch of the merchant Joabin, "the good Jew," in vibratory dialogue projects a well-rounded figure. On the other hand, the delineation of the father of Solamona's House "sinks i' the scale" because of the detraction caused by overdisplay of the trappings and suits, which were given this officer by Bacon who all his life bent his knees to those worshiping in the temple of Mammon. Bacon believed in putting the aristocratic few who knew how to investigate the truths of nature in dress-parade costume. In this respect there is a cap-and-gown anti-democratic presentation of ideal demo- cratic ideas. More's Utopian children, if they had been permitted to look at these Joseph-coated dignitaries, strutting through the streets of the capital of New At- lantis, would have cried out to their mothers, "Look! Look ! are not these tinseled lubbers of Bensalem the wise men's fools?" The New Atlantis was intended to be a reinterpretation of More's Utopia — ideal democracy be- coming possible only through the efforts of an educated, aristocratic oligarchy. Solamona's House is anticipative of Swift's Academy of Royal Projectors in A Voyage to Laputa and of the Bureaus of Public Research con- ducted by municipal universities in which are the Samurai, "the collective-minded aristocracy," to whom H. G. Wells has entrusted all the scientific, psychological apparati by which the whole problem of artistic, extra- governmental socialism in all its aspects may find a happy solution. CHAPTER II From JoHn Bunyan to Jonathan Swift BETWEEN Bacon's purpose-novel New Atlantis (1627) and Bunyan's realistic, heroic allegorical romance Pilgrim' 's Progress, Part I (1678), no classic in prose fiction was created by the novelists who were trying to mould material after the manner of Sidney, Greene, Nash, and the French heroico-historical romance writers. Many were the reversions to Sidney's masterpiece such as Ford's Ornatus and Artesia (1607?), Lady Mary Wroth's Urania (1621) and Crowne's Pandion and Am- phigeneia (1665). Richard Head and Francis Kirkman's The English Rogue (1665-80) appeared in four volumes, reminiscent in the fortunes of Meriton Latroon of "the conny-catching " pamphlets of Greene and The Unfor- tnnate Traveller; or the Life of Jack Wilton of Nash's. Over in France in 1641, Madeleine de Scudery in Ibrahim emphasized imagination as a means to force belief on the reader of historical romance. In 1649, appeared her Clelie, which covers ten volumes before Aronce can marry the heroine. And soon over in England, out at the house of Cardigan, the home of Catherine Philips, and in the country home of the Duchess of Newcastle, a coterie of savants gathered together to analyze aesthetically the Scudery-Calprenede heroico-historical romances in which artful imagination had tied itself to the lie of the realism of false historical data or manuscripts. These long-winded 52 Ingelo's "Bentivolio" 53 romances, in which is always the touch of a Sidney, helped to fashion the mould of Boyle's Parthenissa (1664), Mackensie's Arctina (1661), and Crowne's Partition and Amphigcncia (1665). English fiction during the forty years preceding Bunyan was still fond of adventuring into Arcadia, still bent on encountering perils with Amadis for an Oriana and on taking pleasurable strolls in Troynouant with Francesco and Infida, or of supping in Florence with Jack Wilton and Diamante, and on being stupidly happy in braving the shadows cast by the French heroico- historical romances. In 1653 a reaction had set in against heroic romances. Caricature work, however, failed to deviate the heroic from its thorough-paced path of the tedious, the absurd, and the objectionable. The heroic romance, because of the hue and cry against it, tried to better itself by incor- porating religion to enliven its allegory and to remove absurdities, blood and thunder, and the pornographic. Nathaniel Ingelo's Bentivolio and Urania, in two parts of four and two books (1660-64), is a religio-heroic allegori- cal romance prophetic in some respects of Bunyan 's Pilgrim's Progress with, however, the many missing x's all supplied at the end in the index. Bentivolio and Urania, with its Theoprepia (an ideal state worthy of God) to which pilgrims, retarded by the temptations of this life, are journeying, is an example of the soldering of religion to heroic romance; and, though the novel is poor, Ingelo's experiment charged the air with the current that electrified Bunyan to succeed in the field wherein a good clergyman had failed. In Ingelo's heroic allegory with Bentivolio we are happy to escape from Lady Inganna (Fraud) and the vile country of Argentora ; with Urania and Panaretus we walk with fear in the court and grounds of Hedonia, Queen of Piacenza; and with Urania we flee the inhabi- tants of Vanasembla, where beautiful speculations prevail 54 Motives in English Fiction and logomachists ape the Theoprepians, and are terrified by the net of evils cast over us by Theriagene's natives and the usurper Antitheus living in Polistherium (the city of beasts). Glad, indeed, are we to end this pilgrimage of human life in Theoprepia, and there is rejoicing as its Prince Theosebes blesses the marriage of Bentivolio and Agape (Love) and permits us, if it is desired, to reside in the house of Phronesia (Prudence), who once had en- countered all kinds of dangers in the land of Argentora. For the most part the pages of Bentivolio and Urania are filled with allegory that is banal, but twice in the flotsam and jetsam, we find jewels which have been cut into shape, and it might have been possible that Bunyan picked up one of these allegorical gems with which to add luster to the presentation of Christian and Pliable, es- pecially Pliable, in the Slough of Despond. If Bunyan glimpsed at Borborites as he was traveling toward Theo- prepia and saw him in the foul mire of the lake to which Hyla the serpent had lured him, and observed him after- wards dropping wet with water and mud, he might have kept the scene as a piece of workmanship to be used in the construction of the initial episode in part first of Pilgrim's Progress (1678). These courteous people conducted the Travailers to the House of their chief Governour, whom they call'd Gnothisauton : His seat and garb was such as became the Prince of Humility. He was at that time discoursing with two Young men, who travailing towards Theoprepia, had lost their way ; one of them aiming at the higher part of the Country, had made more haste then good speed, and the other neglecting his directions miscarried fouly. Both of them having wandred a good while, for fear of perpetual erring, were come to be better inform'd by Gnothisauton. One was call'd Megalophron, who, as he came from Vana- sembla, finding the way dirty which led towards Borborus, Ingelo's "Bcntivolio" 55 inclin'd so much to the other hand that he went up to the Top of Hypsocardes, never making question but that the noble Theoprepia lay beyond the rais'd Height of those lofty Hills: . . . As Gnothisauton was about to perfect his advises, he was fore'd to break off his talk in meer pity to Borborites, for that was the other wanderers name; and seeing him dropping wet with water and mud, he ask'd him how he came in that sad case. I was travailing, quoth Borborites, towards Theoprepia, and kept my way till I met a Serpent, call'd Hyla, in the Road; and I was so taken with the beauty of her Skin, the comeliness of her Shape, and those various forms into which she would wind her self, that I went very near unto her; though I had good reason to have taken better heed, since I saw that she did eate dust, and went upon her belly. She taking the advantage of my heedlesness, twin'd her self about one of my leggs, and then hiss'd and pointed with her head which way she would have me go, and for my life, I thought, I could go no other. In a while I was come to the borders of the muddy Lake ; and though I saw my danger, I could not but step into the edges of it. But when I found my self ready to sink into the foul mire, I began to think that it was very probable, if I should go a little further, I should never come back; and thereupon I resolv'd to return: but finding my self disabled so long as the Serpent inclasp'd my leg, I laid hold of my sword; and the wily Snake suspecting to what end I would draw it, unloos'd her self, and crept away with as much haste as I could desire. I rejoye'd at the flight of my enemy, but pursued her no further, not knowing but the false guide might yet serve me some treacherous trick, and repeated my way back with a speedy pace; which having continued some houres, I arrived here, though in such an unhandsome manner, that I am heartily asham'd of my self. One other scene stands out in the novel, and that is the naval engagement in Book Six. Ingelo's head must have been enveloped in a halo of allegorical fire as he made 56 Motives in English Fiction spirited action sustain the splendid attack of the Theo- prepians upon Hipponyx, the principal haven of Theriagene, the capital of which was Polistherium (city of beasts). One should pause to observe it, for in this scene is the working of the machinery of religio-heroico, allegorical narrative fourteen years before Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress and eighteen before The Holy War. The great fleet of the Theoprepians under the commandership of such heroes as Alethion, Aristander, Amyntor, and Bentivolio, came sailing into the harbor and at once laid siege to the forts, built upon each side of the port, which were filled with the best soldiers of Antitheus and Atheo- philus. While the forts were being assailed, the great bridge, composed of the hulks of old barks fastened to- gether with chains, which the Antitheans had stretched across the harbor as a protection, was gradually blown to pieces by means of the fireboats and hand-grenados. The forts had now been taken and the unchained barges that had formed the bridge were driven by the tide towards Hipponyx, so that smoking firebrands from these burning wrecks were flying everywhere in the air. Then it was that Atheophilus advanced with his fleet from the inner harbor past the forts being subjected to a hot fire from his own guns directed by the victorious Theopre- pians, and at half-flood tide the two fleets came together. At the beginning of the engagement a chain-shot from the Theoprepian admiral cut off the mainmast of the admiral under the command of Atheophilus. In retaliation Atheo- philus tried to board the admiral commanded by Alethion. The two admirals came together, were hooked, and the terrific naval" engagement was on. Once the Theoprepians succeeded in boarding the admiral on which was Atheo- philus who fiercely repulsed them, driving them into the sea and back into their own ship. Atheophilus now suc- ceeded in climbing aboard the Theoprepian admiral and Initio's "Bentivolio" 57 •6 there followed such a mincing of men with swords and a battering of them with muskets that blood ran out of the water-holes. Then ensued a hand-to-hand fight between Alethion and Atheophilus, who was thrust through the heart and fell dead at the feet of his soldiers. Alethion, having cleared his own ship, made a second boarding upon that of his enemies and killed and threw everyone of the Antitheans into the sea. And then we watch the great boat which had been commanded by Atheophilus go down. Whilst this tragedy was acting, the other ships of the Theoprepians annihilated the entire Antithean fleet. It is a splendid description of a sea fight. We see ships sinking by reason of "incurable leaks, some blowing up their decks voluntarily, and some being fired against their wills. The air was filled with the noise of guns, cries of dying persons, and the shouts of conquerors; the light of the day being obscured with clouds of smoke, and the sea discolored with the blood of wounded men, and made dis- mal with the bodies of the slain." The description of Aristandcr's taking of the forts, which were under the command of Atheophilus, shows how goodness militant triumphs as when in Bunyan's Holy War (1682) Mansoul, under the commandership of Emmanuel, held out thrice against the attacks of Diabo- lus. The accurate knowledge of sea fighting displayed by Ingelo in the description of the naval conflict would have pleased Defoe, Smollett, Michael Scott, and even Cooper. The two men-of-war hooked together in the harbor of Hipponyx carry us on to where the English man-of-war Aurora overcomes the Russian frigate in precisely the same manner in Marryat's Midshipman Easy ( 1 836) . And then, too, the whole sea-fight fingers forward to William De Morgan's An Affair of Dishonor (1910), in which through a telescope held to the eyes of Sir Oliver Raydon are seen English men-of-war demolishing the fleet of the 58 Motives in English Fiction Dutch in 1665 in the days of Charles II and Nathaniel Ingelo. Whether or not the Bible, Concordance, and Foxe's Book of Martyrs, were the only books that Bunyan used in composing his Pilgrim 's Progress we will never know, but this we do know that the age in which Bunyan lived had already produced Ingelo's Bentivolio and Urania (1660) in which everyone desirous of respiritualization of character is traveling toward Theoprepia. It seems to me that what Ingelo breathed in little from the religious, allegorical atmosphere of the time Bunyan blew out large in Pil- grim's Progress, First Part (1678), The Holy War (1682), and Pilgrim's Progress, Second Part (1684). By these productions Bunyan set a great puritanic boulder in the path of the great hybrid monster of fiction which fed on blood and thunder, the indecent, and the absurd and improbable. English fiction did not adopt the abstrac- tions of Bunyan's fiction, but it did adopt the real life of this world in which his allegorical figures walk. Christian, beset by Apollyon and innumerable Jack Wiltons, is after all an abstraction that can be called a personality, because he is every man on the road of life who wants to pass over it to an honorable death. Thus Bunyan helped to make subsequent English fiction truer in its romanticism and more serious in its realism. No blood and thunder, no indecency, and no absurdities or improbabilities, are in the Pilgrim's Progress. Bunyan, however, made some slight excursions into the field of the picaresque as in the autobiographical parts of Grace Abounding (1666) that reveal him as chief of sinners in a regrettable past ; and in the Life and Death of Mr. Badman (1680) which is a bridge over which a sort of Nash's Jack Wilton walks to shake hands with Fielding's Jonathan Wild. In the form of a dialogue carried on between neighbor Wiseman and Mr. Attentive, the lying, Bunyan's "Life of Mr. Badman" 59 stealing, Sabbath-breaking, swearing Mr. Badman, who had just been buried, seems to be living his life over again, so vivid is the analytic review of his past as it falls from their lips. When Mr. Badman was a boy his father had put before him good books and good associates, but the youth had assiduously read "beastly romances" and "books full of ribaldry" and had chosen for companions the swashbucklers of the period. On reaching manhood he looks about for a wife and will have none other than an heiress. The moneyed woman he selects happens to be extremely religious, therefore to win her he conducts a hypocritical courtship by temporarily putting on religion. After leading her to the altar he quickly doffs religion and finds pleasure only in taverns and brothels. In his house there is presented the constant struggle between the atheistical man of the world and the woman of God and the home. His wife fights for her soul, loving religion more than her husband; but she does not desert him as Matthew Arnold's Margaret deserted her merman and mer-children. This woman clings to her husband because of her seven children even though three of them are thoroughly bad and four are mongrels. Her husband goes on feathering his nest with other men's goods and money, availing himself of bankruptcy proceedings in order to cheat his creditors. This master cheat who could even cheat his wife felt false remorse once or twice in his life. On one occasion after having broken a leg, and on another occasion when he was sick and expecting death, he sought the consolation of false conversion. When he had been thrown from a horse with the fear of death upon him he had cried out, "Lord help me! Lord have mercy upon me ! Good God deliver me. " It is the picture of a man whose conscience was choked before his leg was healed. He had lain crying out all night for fear, "lam undone. I am undone. My vile life has undone me." 60 Motives in English Fiction The bed had shaken under him as thoughts of eternal judgment racked his conscience. He called to his wife addressing her as "duck and dear," coming to believe that he had an honest, godly wife, who at last had the best of him. He had said that, if God would let him recover this once, he would be a penitent man towards God and a loving husband to his wife. These insincere utterances of Mr. Badman are precursors of those of his feminine counterpart Defoe's Moll Flanders, when she is under sentence of death in Newgate. Mr. Badman, with the memory of the affecting death of his wife and with her dying admonishments to the children still ringing in his ears, went forth to choose a harlot for a second wife ; and soon, with the seeds of consumption in him, he rotted above ground before his flesh could stink in it. Bunyan brings out the fact that this proud, envious, wrathful man died "like a lamb " ; but the tinker of Bedford at the same time Calvinistically suggests that, though Mr. Badman's faculties were so clouded at the time of his exit as to have made him die like a lamb, yet inwardly this tiger-man's soul must have quaked as it contemplated its entrance into a red-hot cage, the door of which was to be clicked to by Apollyon. The Life and Death of Mr. Badman seems to have been inspired by the same motives as prompted Thackeray to write Catherine (1839-40) to support a hypothesis that true wickedness should gain no sympathy since it has no heroic quality or ideality. Bunyan long before Thackeray wished to check the appetite on the part of the public for fiction deifying heroic criminals and commented on the bad children resulting from the mismating of a good woman with a bad man. Defoe's Moll Flanders is a criminal by the law of heredity, and Thackeray's Tom, the condensed continuation of the combined wickedness of both parents Catherine and the Count, salutes Thomas Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress" 61 Hardy's criminal child Little Father Time who, in Judc the Obscure, to relieve the tragedy of his poverty-stricken father and mother, hangs the two children and himself, leaving behind the placard on which is written "Done because we are too menny. " Thus, in The Life and Death of Mr. B adman, an ethical supplement to the First Part of the Pilgrim's Progress, Bunyan anticipates many points emphasized by the modern school of realism. The Second Part of the Pilgrim's Progress (1684) while it has not the bold originality or virility of the First Part possesses a softer, tenderer tone. There is a divinity not of this world that doth hedge Part First making it invul- nerable to attack ; but there is a humanizing element in the Second Part that makes it dearer than cold divinity to the reader. Life presents few pleasures in Part First; but in the Second Part there are "the wild joys of living" even in this harsh world. Rough Bunyan was tender enough not to compel a woman, Christiana, with her four boys, in the wilderness of life to encounter such terrific perils as had assailed her husband. For the sake of her and the children Bunyan all along the old line of march re-arranged the bits of scenery so that their effects tended to give cheer and comfort. Why is it that to-day a mother will invariably place Part Second in the hands of her eight- year old children? It is because Bunyan appreciated the beauty of a maternity that knew how to bring up Cal- vinistic children who would be human, not little immacu- late gods such as Mark Twain always had die young. Matthew suffers from stomachache by eating too many green plums plucked from the devil's garden. Samuel, next in age to Matthew, wants to know the whereabouts of the battlefield where his father had fought with Apoll- yon and is precocious enough to promote the marriage of his brother Matthew to Mercy. Joseph comes next who is invulnerable to any attacks made upon his cate- 62 Motives in English Fiction i> J chism which he has thoroughly mastered. And last of all comes James, the youngest, who is sick with fear in the Valley of the Shadow. These sanctified, humanized boys pass through all experiences such as seldom sager men experience from the cradle to the grave; they are on the qui vive for every new emergency in the race of life and keep us alive to each new experience with evil which comes early in life. They sometimes suffered greatly, but most of the time they enjoyed greatly, believing in looking around for much to pick up by which to make Calvinistic life pleasurable. They were optimists all along the way. Thus they plead well for a special form of creed by which to find salvation. Their early tears are all dried from their eyes as they march to nuptial joys in the town of Vanity Fair: for here Matthew is married to Mercy; Samuel, to Grace; Joseph, to Martha; and James, to Phcebe. These boys and girls are left immortal in this life on Bunyan's page. They are left on this side of the River of Death, not because they have not had enough experience with life, but because, I think, Bunyan hated to deprive them of the best joys that earth can give. Forever will these youthful husbands love and forever will their young wives be fair. Later in English fiction, when we come to Field- ing, Godwin, Mrs. Trollope, Disraeli, Dickens, and De Morgan, we will meet boys who at the beginning of the race of life were not so fortunate or so well provided with guardians. The play of religion upon the heroic moved English fiction to turn into a larger, saner path leading to that stile on the steps of which Defoe and Swift stood to view the promised land, into which Richardson and Fielding shortly were to enter. In English fiction this moral quality of John Bunyan's is so strong that I think it had its effect even on Mrs. Aphra Behn who, ten years after the publication of the Mrs. Bchn's "Oroonoko" 63 Pilgrim's Progress, portrayed a black heathen prince surrounded in Surinam by such white villains as Newgate never transported. It is surprising, indeed, to see Mrs. Behn taking any delight in unfolding an ethical charac- terization; for in all her other pieces of fiction she lays great emphasis on the unethical. Oroonoko, as the Royal Slave, at all times refused to be whitewashed by an Euro- pean code of laws, since he believed his own to be better. Oroonoko's ethics, anticipatory of that of Defoe's man Friday, does not make him take much stock in a white man's god, whose worshipers continually make pledges and oaths that they never keep. Mrs. Behn was thor- oughly original in creating such a Prince of the Amadis type and especially when she colored him black and added to the sheen of jet the colors of a tropical landscape to make more pathetic the great scene in which Oroonoko, after sacrificing his wife, the brave, the beautiful, and the constant Imoinda, buries her under the coverlid of Na- ture's leaves and flowers. The whole novel makes us blush at the conduct of the social savages who took great pleasure in slowly chopping to pieces such a divine, natural savage. But had he always been such a divine savage? In Coramantien Oroonoko had been depicted as a hero in love and war, but it is as a hero of the harem. One third of the story of his adventures centres around the Otan (harem) with its frequenters such as Aboan and Onahal who helped Oroonoko and Imoinda to their nuptial joys by means of trickery and lies. Prince Oroonoko sug- gested to Imoinda in order to save her life that she should tell the King that Oroonoko, unknown to her, had broken into her apartments and had ravished her ; and Aboan and Onahal assured him of " a lye that should be well enough contrived to secure Imoinda." Oroonoko should have gladly and willingly made his marriage contract with Imoinda legal by gaining the consent of the King, his 64 Motives in English Fiction grandfather, who had always been most favorably dis- posed to all his plans. Oroonoko without cause ignored the King and the law of his country. In Coramantien Oroonoko and Imoinda had been susceptible to all the intrigues and double dealings of their race; and, after being transplanted to Surinam, they become by far all at once too angelic. Oroonoko has been given a sort of unethical coloring in character caught by his having stood too long in the shadow of the Otan ; and by the fact that Mrs. Behn was susceptible to the liaison life in the London court of Charles II and allowed it to creep into the Cora- mantien part of her nouvelle; therefore, his characteriza- tion as an Amadis in Surinam is somewhat inconsistent as it conspicuously shines in honorable qualities above those found in any of the white men on the plantations. The descendants of this Oroonoko are Defoe's man Friday of 17 19; Shebbeare's Indian Canassatego in Lydia (1755); the Indians living near Lake Erie who rescue a white woman whose honor is threatened by a white European gentleman of quality in The Fair American (1767); and the philosophic Cherokee chief in Macken- zie's Man of the World (1773) who would have Annesly believe that the aborigines were far better than the Europeans, who at their best were worse than the worst of the Cherokees. In Thomas Day's Sandjord and Mer- ton (1783-89) "the honest Black" who saves Tommy Merton's life in the bull-fight, the Indians in Mrs. Len- nox's Euphemia (1790), the Iroquois named Wolf-hunter in Mrs. Charlotte Smith's Old Manor House (1793), Caesar on the Jamaican plantation in Maria Edgeworth's The Grateful Negro (1802), and Mesty the negro prince, an authority on skulls when he had been in Ashantee, serving as simple sailor in Marryat's Mr. Midshipman Easy (1836), possess characteristics of Oroonoko; and some, as the last two mentioned, are replicas. The heroic Oroonoko, Mrs. Behn's "The Fair Jilt" 65 who passed on his stoicism to Cooper's Chingachgook dying true to the faith of his ancestors, paraded in the uniform of Toussaint L'Ouverture in Harriet Martineau's The Hour and the Man (1840) and walked in the garb of Uncle Tom in Harriet Beecher Stowe's masterpiece of 1852. The most recent replica of Oroonoko has been G. W. Cable's Bras Coupe in The Grandissimes (1880) who, though he had been a prince in Africa, at New Orleans as a slave is beaten, mutilated, and dies knowing that he is going back as he says "to Africa. " In Oroonoko; or, the Royal Slave (1688) Mrs. Behn, even though latest research shows that she never visited the tropics, or met a Caesar (Oroonoko) on a Surinam planta- tion, did contribute to English fiction local color which depends not on unicity but on multiplicity of details described such as orange trees, lemon trees, marmosets, armadillos, parakeets, and electric eels. She was too small an artist, however, to achieve atmosphere. She loiters here and there throughout the short novel, painting things with a small brush but with a fuller brush than that which was used by Sir Francis Bacon to color the clothes of the dignitaries on the island of New Atlantis whereby he almost but not quite achieved local color. The ingenious Mrs. Behn in Oroonoko tells us that she was fond of telling stories of nuns to "the brave, the beautiful, and the constant Imoinda"; therefore, in The Fair Jilt and The Lucky Mistake (1689) there is no surprise when Mrs. Behn entertains us by displaying somewhat of a nunnery outfit. In The Fair Jilt Miranda is an un- inclosed nun, tall, admirably shaped, with bright hair, and with hazel eyes full of love and sweetness. She is eighteen years of age and moves dangerously in a black dress to ruin a man of God in a confessional box. Here is the duel of sex, a woman of the world versus a man of God. She reminds one of Matilda, creeping into the convent to 66 Motives in English Fiction ruin Ambrosio in Lewis's The Monk (1795); and she appears in modern form as Gloria Quayle ruining John Storm in Hall Caine's The Christian. Having tempor- arily ruined the man of quality and rectitude, Miranda passes on to the conquest of Tarquin, who is as much like Nash's Jack Wilton as Miranda is like Nash's Dia- mante. At the end of the nouvelle, however, she is a penitent, prefiguring Defoe's Moll Flanders. In The Lucky Mistake at Orleans Rinaldo first sees his sweetheart the thirteen-year-old Atlante at the Church of Our Lady at the altar just as Vincentio di Vivaldi sees lovely Ellena di Rosalba in the Church of San Lorenzo at Naples in Mrs. Ann Radcliffe's The Italian (1797). Just as Algernon Lorraine first sees Francisca in a church at Naples in Letitia E. Landon's Romance and Reality (1831), and just as Angus Dalrymple at Subiaco is entranced by the singing of the beautiful nun Maria Adolorata in Marion Crawford's Casa Braccio (1894) so Rinaldo meets his fate in the "dim religious light. " In The Lucky Mis- take Chariot, fancying that she loves Rinaldo and being out of love with a nunnery life, tries to trick her sister Atlante by slipping out of the convent walls to enter Rinaldo's coach that had been driven up in order to effect Atlante 's escape. This thing of carrying on an amour at a convent carries us back to King Arthur's with Angellica in the Elizabethan pamphlet-romance, Tom a Lincolne, the Red Rose Knight; and the bravoes of Count Vernole who interfere at the convent with Rinaldo's scheme of carrying off Atlante anticipate the banditti in Dr. Moore's Zeluco (1786) and the condottieri in Lewis's The Monk. Thus the convent and the coach have come into English fiction to stay. Samuel Richardson in 1740 has Pamela carried in a coach to Mr. B's estate and Harriet Byron carried off in one by the villain Pollexfen in Sir Charles Grandison (1753). Another minor matter to be noted in Congreve's "Incognita" 67 Mrs. Bchn's fiction is that in The Fair Jilt there is the inset story of Prince Henrick which is nothing technically new, since an example of such greets us on the pages of Tom a Lincolnc, the Red Rose Knight. The inset story is mentioned simply to prepare the reader for what in ex- tenso will be done with it in the shape of "The Man of the Hill" by Fielding in Tom Jones (1749). Three years after the death of Mrs. Aphra Behn, the gay young William Congreve produced his first and only novel, Incognita: or Love and Duty Reconciled (1692). The most dramatic part of his realistic romance is where the beautiful Incognita, disguised in man's apparel, at night among the ruins of an old monastery, is unexpectedly found and rescued by Aurelian after he has first pistoled a man who, he later learns, would have been her ravisher. The romance is brilliantly dramatic showing most em- phatically why Congreve abandoned the novel for the drama, in which any such happily devised and strikingly humorous plot full of Spanish and Italian disguise and intrigue could be given fuller scope. The many issues of Incognita during Congreve's lifetime show how popular it was. Its puzzling plot still appeals to the reader of to-day who likes to be thrilled by a series of unexpected situa- tions even though these may at times almost verge on the impossible. Some of us ere long may see it having a great run as a photoplay. Aurelian, the only son of Don Fabio, a gentleman of Florence, had been educated at Siena where he had formed a strong friendship with a young man by the name of Hippolito whose home was in Toledo, Spain. After Aurelian had left Siena, Hippolito had accompanied him to Florence; and, it was here at a masked ball at court that Aurelian met the beautiful Incognita. Hippolito was also at the fete and met Leonora who made the mis- take of taking him for her cousin, Don Lorenzo. By listen- 68 Motives in English Fiction ing to Leonora's conversation with Hippolito we learn that Don Fabio to patch up a quarrel had decreed that Aurelian should marry Juliana, the daughter of the Mar- quis of Viterbo. After the ball was over, Aurelian when asked by the Incognita for his name replied that it was Hippolito and temporarily removed his mask, whereupon she removed hers. Her beautiful face threw him into a thousand ecstasies so that a declaration of love at once issued from his lips. That night upon returning home the two gallants in talking over the experiences of the evening confessed their love for the two girls. Aurelian advised Hippolito to write a letter to Leonora and to sign his name as Aurelian. Deceived by the letter, Leonora now fell in love with her supposed Aurelian whose face she had never seen. Shortly after this the two heroes tilted in the lists and amid a plume of feathers on Hippolito's helmet could be seen fluttering Leonora's handkerchief. Don Fabio, who was present at the tournament, at once surmised that they were his son and friend. Later, Don Fabio ordered that a search should be made for Aurelian so that he could carry out his purpose of having Juliana married to him. Leonora, upon hearing the report about Juliana's marriage to Aurelian, now loved her supposed Aurelian all the more wildly, since she thought she might lose him. One day a lady entered Aurelian's chamber and asked Hippolito, who was there alone, if she could see Hippolito on business. Hippolito seeing her mistake excused himself to go out and find Aurelian. The lady stayed in the room to await the return of Hippolito, and while writing a letter was interrupted by the entrance of Don Fabio and the Marquis of Viterbo from whose presence she fled in a coach after tearing her letter to pieces. Hippolito came back without Aurelian and blinded Don Fabio and the Marquis of Viterbo as to Aurelian's whereabouts. After the old gentlemen left Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe" 69 the apartment Aurelian came and discovered the torn letter which was signed with the name "Incognita." Piecing the letter together he ascertained that he could affect a meeting with her that night at twelve o'clock at a convent gate, but alas ! the name of the convent was on a missing piece of paper. That he was successful in finding her we already know; and this Incognita turns out to be the Juliana whom his father had decreed that he must marry. Professor H. S. Canby has this to say of the novel: "It is a replica in style and atmosphere with added wit, if lessened vigor, of Cervantes 's exemplary novel of the two students of Bologna and the unfortunate Cornelia." I think that this novel, written not so much in the style of the heroic drama as in the manner of the Fletcherian plays, puzzlingly full of almost impossible deeds of heroes and heroines, goes back to Mrs. Behn's The Lucky Mistake: a New Novel (1689). It is interesting to compare and contrast the machinery of disguise and denoument employed by Mrs. Behn at the conclusion of her nouvelle with that used by William Congreve in the middle of his nouvelle. Congreve's plot structure of Incognita is a decided advance upon that of Mrs. Behn's The Lucky Mistake. Incognita is certainly Behnesque; and, in leaving these two stories, one feels that Spanish, French, and Italian intrigue and disguise lie back of the fiction of the gay Congreve and the "divine Astrea." It is somewhat of a relief to see the novel at the end of the seventeenth century turn away from these realists in love with romance to a romanticist in love with realism who often on his sordid characters focused an ethical light issuing from a torch that he had snatched from the hand of John Bunyan. In the masterpiece, of 17 19, which Defoe defines as historical allegory, Robinson Crusoe, alone and beyond the pale of man's law on the island, never forgets that he is responsible to the God above and 70 • Motives in English Fiction constantly tries to convert his anthropomorphic man Friday, who is determined that he will have nothing to do with a divinity apparently weaker than Apollyon. Man Friday says, "If God much strong, much might as the Devil, why God no kill the Devil, so make him no more do wicked?" And Crusoe not only finds out that he can not escape his own conscience but ascertains that nowhere in this universe, not even on a desert island, can any man escape seeing the fearful footprint of an Apollyon and meeting his Jack Wilton-like devotees who (in Crusoe's case) have donned the disguise of cannibals. Then again Defoe was susceptible to the biblical when in The Adven- tures of Captain Singleton (1720) he makes William Walters, the Pennsylvania Quaker, turned pirate, apply sophistry as a salve to ease the conscience of Bob Singleton who, in remorse for being a thief, a pirate, and a murderer, was about to shoot himself. William the Quaker entered upon a long and serious discourse with Bob about the nature of repentance, counseling that he should confess to God his crimes, that he should ask His pardon and cast himself upon His mercy, that he should ever hold before him the thought of restitution if it should please God to put that in his power, that he should not despair of God's mercy, for that was no part of repentance, but was putting oneself in the condition of the devil, and finally above all things that he should not be so frightened in his dreams at the devil as to talk out loud in English lest it being heard by others might cause all their devil- tries to be divulged, since this would compel a certain Quaker to save himself at once by shooting such a good man as Bob. One of the greatest scenes in Defoe's novels is permeated with the atmosphere of the morality of Pilgrim's Progress and of that which we have seen marshaling itself into form about the bed of Mr. Badman when he thought he was Defoe's "Moll Flanders" 71 dying. In Moll Flanders (1722), Moll in Newgate re- pented heartily of all her past life, but her repentance yielded her no satisfaction because she analyzed it as repenting after the power of further sinning had been taken away. What worried her was not that her crimes were an offense against God, but that on account of them she was to be punished; and thus having no comfort in repentance, Newgate hell became not only tolerable but even agreeable. She was impudently cheerful and merry in her misery because sadness and tears held out no happiness but more of a hell, when she thought of God. Defoe says, "to think is one real advance from hell to heaven ' ' ; and, as he had predestined Moll Flanders for a penitent at the end of the novel, he must not make her a piece of total depravity, not even in Newgate. When she is under imminent sentence of death Defoe cleverly brings into prison one who is to be hanged — whom she tearfully recognizes as one of her former husbands who had turned highwayman on her account. This causes Moll to realize that when one sins one does not only hurt oneself but hurts others even to the point of infinity. And very soon we find her in the night lying awake saying her prayers, "Lord have mercy upon me. Lord what will become of me? Lord what shall I do?" And though Moll Flanders is not absolutely repentant yet, by watching her as she instinctively puts on the garb of true repentance to lace it about her heart as tightly as a corset, we are gradually made to feel that it is facilitating that inward amendment which afterwards thoroughly rehabilitated even this most hardened criminal. God "rides in the whirlwind and directs the storm" bursting in fury upon the most in- teresting characters in Defoe. Dieu le veut is boomed into the ears of Moll Flanders and Captain Robert Singleton in order that they may understand, as well as the reader, that right thinking and right doing are usually followed 72 Motives in English Fiction by right being, and that there is nothing so despicable in this world as casuistry. This strong moral fibre in the fabric of the fiction of Bunyan twisted itself through the pattern of Defoe's novels to where Thackeray in 1846 re- established Bunyan's Britain Row in the town of Vanity Fair for Becky Sharp at No. 201 Curzon Street, May Fair. Now how did Moll Flanders become one of the horrid crew of Newgate to converse with, and gaze upon, one of her own sex dancing and singing, " If I swing by the string/ I shall hear the bell ring" at St. Sepulchre's on execution- day? On account of stealing some silk brocade from a broker's shop she had been sent to prison — that Newgate which in some shape is shadowed in the fiction of Fielding, Smollett, Goldsmith, and Henry Brooke. It is also present in the pages of William Godwin, where he de- scribes the horrors of the prison in which Caleb Williams was confined ; and it erects itself in that Fleet gaol wherein Dickens's Pickwick sojourned and Thackeray's Barry Lyndon died. And when Moll, with the fear of death forcing her to feign penitence, is seen in Newgate, we must realize that she is there because she was born the child of criminals. Moll, from the age of eighteen to sixty, committed all crimes except those of treason and murder. In leaving the greatest scene constructed by Defoe, we should remember that he thoroughly advocated that the state should educate the children of criminals. In the dawn of life little Moll had wept in childish fear at the thought of the workhouse ahead of her on the rough road of life. This spectre of child-labor that terri- fied Moll became substance to little Rurfigny as he was compelled to work in agony in M. Vaublanc's silk-manu- factory at Lyons; and little Ruffigny's sad experience portrayed by Godwin in Fleetwood (1805) made possible the larger pictures of the sufferings of Charles Dickens's poor Oliver Twist and Mrs. Frances Trollope's Michael Defoe's "Life of Colonel Jack" 73 Armstrong, the maltreated factory boy of 1840. And, in speaking of unfortunate children and in recalling how Defoe framed fiction to favor reforms in the social system as it was in his day, we must not forget Colonel Jack in The Life of Colonel Jack (1722). This little illegitimate boy from his birth to the age of ten was brought up by a nurse who had not only taken care of her own child named Captain Jack, but had adopted another illegitimate boy whom she called Major Jack. At her death, these three boys were thrown out on the streets of London to live by their wits and sleep in ash-holes. Captain Jack soon adopted the profession of a child-snatcher, and Colonel Jack under the Major's instruction became an artful pickpocket. The training in thievery which the little Colonel received from the bigger boy Major Jack points to the poor little youngsters who were taken out to receive similar instruction at the hands of the Artful Dodger of Fagin's in Dickens. It will be recalled that the Artful Dodger could not seduce Oliver; but the bigger boy in Defoe easily ruins Colonel Jack, because of his not having the Oliver Twist marrow of honesty in his bones. Later in life, however, Colonel Jack becomes a penitent and is good enough to forgive and marry again his extravagant, divorced wife who appears before him as one of his slaves on his plantation in Virginia. Thus we see how Defoe was interested in, and how his heart went out to, the ragamuffin, the child without a chance, living in squalor in London in such a district as to remind us of Tom-All- Alone's frequented by the forlorn figure of little Jo in Bleak House. So far in the development of English fiction there has been much of the pathetic but little of the humorous. Occasionally a flickering smile came as when we noted the reception given the foreign ambassadors by More's Utopian children and the treatment given the purveyor of 74 Motives in English Fiction drinks by Nash's Jack Wilton; but it is safe to say that from More to Congreve, who in Incognita figured out a formula of humor that later was applied to his comic situations in drama, the eye-strings have been twitched by the serious more than by the comic. It is not until one reads Defoe that one feels the spontaneous outburst of genuine humor. In The Adventures of Captain Singleton (1720) we chuckle as we listen to William Walters the Quaker, possibly from Philadelphia, cleverly using his tongue to play with the pirates for a whole skin and a safe retreat. Without him Singleton never could have successfully kept the Jolly Roger flying. In fact the crafty Quaker emerges as the leader of the leader of the pirates, a delightful figure of fun in hypocrisy. And in The Life of Colonel Jack (1722) we fairly roar as we see Colonel Jack, whose clothes have holes for pockets, putting his money in the hole in the tree that turns out to be hollow. Pathos for a time is paramount on one side of the tree, but comedy soon rampantly reigns, when Defoe takes Jack to the other side of the tree to see at the bottom the cavity wherein lies his money. The reader dances to the happy fling of the feet and arms of the boy who has recovered his ill-gotten treasure. Tear-compelling laughter scenes had occasionally been created before Defoe's time, but from these there can not be selected any just like this light, tear-compelling laughter scene in which moves the raga- muffin Colonel Jack; for never before had a similar com- posite scene had the good fortune to fall into the hands of such a constructive visualizer as Defoe. Little Colonel Jack's dole and delight are real and will survive to all ages, because tradesman Defoe chose to gain verisimilitude by using a vernacular which fell from the lips of any ordinary reader of fiction at that time, who naturally could and would appreciate a simple collocation of words and sentences reflecting his own limited vocabulary. Swift's "The Battle of the Books" 75 To conclude, Defoe can be satirical in his pathos as when he depicts tears in the eyes of Moll and Roxana; and he can be satirical in the quality of humor meted out to the rapid rise of Walters the Quaker, turned pirate. We are also aware of this satiric strain, when along with Jack we are tickled beyond measure at the recovery of the money that he had never any right to possess. We pass severe judgment on Jack up to the time he lodges the money in the tree; but we, from the moment the tree is detected as being hollow to its base, are his most ardent friends in trying to help him recover the stolen loot. And it is this striking power of flinging satirical pathos and satirical humor into existence that connects the fiction of Defoe with that of Jonathan Swift. What can we say of the fiction of the mad parson of Button's whose private life was as romantically tragical as that which occasionally illumines greatest fiction itself? What can we say about the fiction of him who, after being graduated by special favor from Trinity College, Dublin, became a protege of Sir William Temple's at Sheen and at Moor Park, where he made love to Esther Johnson (Stella), and afterwards went to London to dine with the Vanhomrighs and make love to Vanessa while his Stella was in Ireland, and later in life rushed furiously to Marley Abbey to confront and crush Miss Vanhomrigh (Vanessa) with that black frown of contemptuous silence and an abrupt departure? Jonathan Swift satirically picked his way into English fiction by giving us The Battle of the Books (1704) in which there is an encounter between the learned ancients and the learned moderns on the plain in St. James's library. The dialogue of the spider and the bee and the noble disserta- tion thereon by ^Esop the world would be loth to lose. Swift, in believing that ancient learning surpassed the modern, shows his hatred of the spider that could spin out 76 Motives in English Fiction of its poisonous belly a mathematically constructed web of sophistry in which was neither honey (sweetness) nor wax (light). He believed for the time being in love so working as to bring forth truth with its element of higher seriousness, which was woefully lacking in any modern masterpiece. Swift in the woods of pessimism found what afterwards he subjected to a private process that produced not quasi-diluted stuff but a kind of strong wild honey which was flavored by his own barbaric personality. Therefore, we like his satire in spite of the taste of the formic acid. Swift was not the spider but the bee giving to mankind what it most needs, honey and wax: "the two noblest of things, which are sweetness and light." Swift in The Battle of the Books endeavored to show eighteenth- century authors that they must not decapitate the higher hill topping Parnassus which obstructed the Moderns in their view towards the East. In fiction Swift was determined to walk serenely on the top of this hill of the classics, which derive their strength from the Ancients, who, like the mad Dean, never lapsed into the Gothic strain, or barbarity of pedantry, to show that they knew the world, but clung to that style (simplex munditiis), which is never to be obtained for a language that sooner picks up affected modes of speech from court, city, and theatre than from the classics and the "unfashionable books in the university." The Homeric burlesque style of The Battle of the Books is in the manner of that seized upon by Henry Fielding to make laughable Parson Adams's encounter with the dogs in Joseph Andrews (1742), and similar to that used by Washington Irving to make vivid the capture of Fort Christina in Knickerbocker's History of New York (1809). In A Tale of a Tub (1704), an allegorical romance of wit and humor, three brothers, Peter, Martin, and Jack, in medieval times came up to town each one hoping, like Swift's "A Tale of a Tub" 77 Amadis, to find an Oriana; but soon they grew into wicked young knights and their Orianas proved to be Duchess d'Argent, Madame de Grands Titres, and Countess d ' Orgueil . To these brothers men were but clothes labeled with names; conscience was a pair of breeches; and the soul the outward dress. These knights, Peter (the Church of Rome), Martin (the Church of England), and Jack (the Dissenters), were fond of externalizing their coats, the result of misinterpreting and disobeying the positive injunction imposed by their father's will. They decorated their coats with the fopperies of their respective religions according to the vain shows and conceits of this world. Peter selling pardons to Newgate birds became rich, but was subject to fits throwing his brothers from his house. Martin and Jack plucked away the feathers, fastened to their coats by Peter, thus trying to reduce their religions to the primitive simplicity of Christianity. Martin is conservative, phlegmatic, sedate, inclining after all to much of the decoration which Peter had put on his coat. Thus a contrast is effected between him and his two out- rageously acting brothers, — the wrathful Peter and the seolistic Jack. Swift believes that fiction is stronger than truth and that the concrete must always be "conveyed in the vehicle of delusion." One third of A Tale of a Tub is fiction and that, too, of the excellence of Bunyan's. In the Hints for an Essay on Conversation Swift says: "a little grain of romance is no ill ingredient to preserve and exalt the dignity of human nature, without which it is apt to degenerate into everything that is sordid, vicious, and low. " In A Tale of a Tub Swift is original in opening new scenes and in discovering "a vein of true and noble thinking, which never entered into any imagination before." Unforgettable are the faintly individualized self-indulgent Martin, the bullying, drinking, evicting 78 Motives in English Fiction Lord Peter, and the martyrologic, aeolistic, ass-skulled Jack, who are more than thumb-nail sketches or ab- stractions. In a lighter vein of graveyard humor have The " Bicker •- staff" Papers (1708) been composed. There are few readers whose lungs are not "tickle o' the sere" as they on the night of the twenty-eighth of March, 1708, inhale the atmosphere in the ill-lighted room into which its owner Partridge (Hewson, the well-known quack and almanack-maker) goes to engage in sprightly, ghastly dialogue with the obsequious, dapper man, who, as a delegate from the company of undertakers, with a two- foot rule in his hands, is standing on a table measuring the apartment for royal mourning cloth which was to be put there to honor Mr. Partridge whom Swift and all London had determined needs must be ready for a rich burial. By writing A Tale of a Tub Swift had lost the favor of Queen Anne so far as being advanced to suitable office in the Church. In 1714, by the death of Queen Anne and the consequent downfall of the Tory party, he lost all further chance for court favor and was forced to be content with the deanery of St. Patrick's which for a year he had possessed. As the years sped along under Hanoverian rule with no political preferment in sight he fell back for solace on the strength of his own erroneous statement that "nice men are those that have nasty ideas"; and to prove that all human beings are nice animals with nasty ideas he flung from the press Gulliver's Travels (1726). On almost every page of this political, allegorical novel he jabs his pen through the souls of all his species and be- spatters the pates of Europeans who possess the "infernal habit of lying, shuffling, deceiving, and equivocating." Swift holds up fancy's show box so that one beholds therein the miserable intriguers and intrigantes of the court of Swift's "Gulliver's Travels" 79 George I. By observing the vices of the Georgian court- lings placed in Lilliput we are led to deduce that humanity in general is polluted by the vices prevailing among the Lilliputians. Just as we are recognizing how infinitesi- mally small humanity is all at once we behold ourselves and all our faults magnified. Lemuel Gulliver, walking as a Lilliputian in the land of the Brobdingnagians, is the embodiment of our insignificant selves contemplating with disgust the magnified ulcers on our body-politic. Dean Swift, like Sir Francis Bacon, hated men who were in speculation and so "rapt withal" as to need flappers: he hated men, political projectors and educators, who imposed chimeras of false science on others in their academies. Therefore, he carries us to Laputa to gaze at the Flying Island and laugh at Sir Isaac Newton and the scientific men of the Royal Academy and at all those inventors and political projectors, who seem to be pos- sessed of the melancholy of the mad astronomer in Dr. Samuel Johnson's Rasselas. On the island of Glubbdub- drib the intimate conversation that Gulliver has with the shades of the great dead is a forecast of the same manner of greeting given us by "the dead, but sceptred sover- eigns, who still rule our spirits from their urns" on the pages of Fielding's A Journey from This World to the Next (1743). Then we leave the foregoing islands to go to another to follow Swift to his last sad picture of the human race. On the canvas is seen an intellectualized animal (Gulliver) that can speak like a Houyhnhnm. This is the man who, on further examination, is regarded by the race of horses as being even worse than a Yahoo. These intelligent horses could never understand why Gulliver refused to claim relationship with the Yahoos since he was continually saying ' ' the thing which was not ' ' ; and, moreover, they were convinced he was a living lie, since he was not the same thing when he slept stripped 80 Motives in English Fiction as when he was awake dressed. On this island there is a feeling that we are in another Utopia, for all Houyhnhnms incited no one to vice ; and, on leaving this land, we readily fall in with Swift to one conclusion that all Yahoos should be exterminated from the face of the earth. With a touch of Shavianism Swift says, "a soldier is a Yahoo hired to kill in cold blood as many of his own species, who have never offended him, as possibly he can"; thus, like Ber- nard Shaw, he avers that brass buttons shine better when cut off. Then, too, he softly rings the tocsin loudly sounded by Ibsen in Ghosts and by Brieux in Damaged Goods. Thus, it is to be reasoned along with a Schopen- hauer that the human race like poisoned rats in a hole should will to die. The only redeeming feature in the analysis of the disagreeable in Swift's fiction is that this coarseness of sardonic, diabolical humor in portraying the pathos of human life is the strength of the shaft of Field- ing's or Smollett's satirical spear, when it pricks the side of the reader to provoke hilarious, unhallowed laughter that dies away in tears, which flow because of the realiza- tion of the meanness, badness, and madness of the rogue called man ; and this strange mingling of humor and pathos in satirical caricature, characterization, and dialogue, Swift largely inherited as a legacy from Daniel Defoe. Would that Swift had only cared to write his auto- biography — then we would have had Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in the eighteenth century ! If he had only given us the Mr. Hyde that he played with Stella and Vanessa, or, in the realistic, historical novel, had built something on that Duke of Hamilton-Mohun duel of 1 712, about which he so succinctly wrote in the Journal to Stella in November, 1712, perhaps a masterpiece excelling Thackeray's Henry Esmond would have been given to the world. Swift left the mark of his purpose and style on the novels Samuel Butler's "Erewhon" 81 of Fielding, Smollett, Peacock, Thackeray, and in our time upon Samuel Butler and H. G. Wells. Samuel Butler in Erewhon or Over the Range (1872) takes us to a Utopia which he places, probably, in New Zealand. The Erewhonians believed that poverty was crime, and that character was perfect physique. These eugenic inhabit- ants suffered from fits of immorality in which they forged and raised checks. Bad conduct they understood to be the result of pre-natal or post-natal (influence) misfortune. The Erewhonians were hypochondriacs on fancied evil conduct, for they regarded ill-luck as an offense against society. They employed " straighteners " to rectify or cure mental indisposition. In Erewhon there were many Colleges of Unreason in which were professors of evasion and inconsistency. A course in "hypothetics" was abso- lutely necessary before a degree was granted. Promi- nent educators endeavored to teach everybody to suppress originality, to effect a complete obliteration of the past, to avoid the sin of intellectual indulgence, to abandon hope of achieving absolute sanity because it would drive one mad if he reached it, to abandon hope of being cured of the fear-of-giving-one's-self-away disease, to learn the art of gracefully sitting on the fence, to check exuberance of mental development, to avoid being immoral by being ahead of one's epoch, and above all things to strive to be a work of art, — an individual worth £20,000. In Erewhon Revisited (1901) Higgs the hero of the former novel goes back to the Erewhonians to find himself worshiped as a god ; and a bad god he knows he had been twenty years before when he had seduced Yram and had escaped from the country with beautiful Arowhena in a balloon, which he had manufactured to the astonishment of the natives. Soon after his return Higgs went into a tabernacle, which had been erected in his honor, and heard his own words read out to him as being the divine 6 82 Motives in English Fiction £> J utterances of the Sunchild, a god, who was now respon- sible for an illegitimate George whom he had recently met for the first time after he had crossed over the range into Erewhon. In Erewhon all faith in experience had been shattered by a balloon ascension. Sunchildism had become the religion of the land. The country had im- proved somewhat since his absence because the natives had been obeying one of the Sunchild 's sayings: "Resist good, and it will fly from you." They knew that "truth is found out through the falling out of thieves" and "That there is no mistake so great as being always right. " They were fond of taking spiritual indigestion tabloids guaran- teed to give lamb-like tempers in twenty minutes. They employed professional mind-dressers and had learned much from a text-book on The Art of Obscuring Issues, which had been compiled by Dr. Downie, Professor of Logomachy. In The Way of All Flesh (1903), Samuel Butler bids us peer inside of the cup of the communion service of the Anglican Church. Ernest, son of Theobald Pontifex, for many years was unable to extricate himself from a gang of spiritual thieves. Ernest was early lost in London somewhere between the proposed site of the College of Spiritual Pathology, about to be established by his con- frere whose philosophy of life was that ' ' one touch of the unnatural makes the whole world more kindred still," and his hatred for a cold-hearted curate-father who had goaded his slave-son into the church and rated him only according to the amount of money he could earn. Ernest, with his reputation lost, never would have emerged tri- umphant over his slave-master father to take an honor- able place in the world, if it had not been for his aunt's legacy. Butler would show that without money no man can be rehabilitated. In this world all things are forgiven a man who is all things to all men, provided he has a full Swift, Butler, and H. G. Wells 83 pocketbook, or, peradventure, a god-father who can at all times stake him for another venture in the poker-game of life. Throughout the novel the hypocrisy of the priest- hood of the Anglican Church receives such gruesome vivisection as to remind us of that given it by Swift in A Tale of a Tub. Butler, the grandson of a Bishop in the Anglican Church, has never received the recognition that he deserves. A few men such as Augustine Birrell and Bernard Shaw had read his fiction, but it was not until after his death in 1902 that he began to come into his own. To-day Butler is rapidly being recognized as our modern Dean Swift because he takes such great pleasure in saying what everybody would rather had not been said at all, but which, of course, all admit for the welfare of the world should be said by some genius even if society almost invariably flays him alive for daring to state that the sins of any individual arise from lack of money and from a nonconformity to conventionality. To-day the continuer of the radicalism of Butler is Herbert George Wells who expresses himself in Kipps (1905) as believing that environment for every man is a fixed round on the social ladder ; therefore, if one would be happy he should not endeavor to pull himself up to the round above. Wells, in The Research Magnificent (191 5), urges the world to free itself from fear, indulgence, jealousy, and prejudice, and from false generalizations, for by willing itself so to do the world would then achieve the Great State as it followed the dictates of a new non- elastic conscience of the collective-minded philosophers constituting the aristocracy of the few who knew how to govern an educated democracy, in which would be neither high class, nor middle class, nor low class. Interesting, indeed, are the Swiftian touches in The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) and The Food of the Gods (1904); but it is, however, rather in The First Men in the Moon (1901) 84 Motives in English Fiction that we catch Wells in his most successful adaptation of Swift's subject matter and style. The First Men in the Moon absorbs attention just as Swift's Voyage to Lilliput. There are two Gullivers who are captured: one, Bedford, is fortunate enough to escape the Selenites to come back to earth; the other, Cavor, remains to send messages to earth until a horrible death overtakes him. The novel is written in the humorously tragical cynical spirit of Swift; for, though the moon is a satellite of the earth, yet its inhabitants have progressed much further in all scientific achievements, have bigger brains, and war is undreamed of. These Selenites live within the surface of the moon on such a high plane of morality that there is not the slightest trace of the irra- tional violence of the internecine races of the earth. Reason is sovereign in the form of a Grand Lunar sur- rounded by an aristocracy of those who know. At birth each one of the Grand Lunar's subjects specialized only on that for which he seemed most fitted, and those who were unfit were put to sleep until they were needed in the Selenites' activities. The Grand Lunar is so appalled by Cavor's historical account of man's advancement and cruelty that he desires no interplanetary tragedy such as might come through man's coming to the moon. To seize, to slay, to get more land — this seems to be man's slogan and nothing can arise of good from any intercourse with him; therefore, all wires between moon and earth should be cut. The Grand Lunar has no time to educate his subjects for war, when nothing but peace has been in the lunar caves. Cavor must go to his untimely fate. That civilization on the moon is far ahead of ours is the con- clusion; and further, that no unity has been achieved on earth is the Swiftian laugh of H. G. Wells at our whole life for the last six thousand years. A satellite has put us to shame. The other planets want none of us, because Wells's "First Men in the Moon'' 85 they are all moving mentally and physically to the majes- tic law of order. The Grand Lunar' s luminous idea was this: if man is not fit to dwell among Selenites and is antagonistic to their best, then it would be best for stellar creatures to unite in his extinction lest at some time man's inventions should bring chaos into the order prevailing at present in the starry universe. The novel reads almost as if Swift were again writing: Resolved, That all Yahoos should be exterminated from the face of the earth. And we must remember that Gulliver was considered by the Houyhnhnms as being far worse than a Yahoo. CHAPTER III Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, SaraK Fielding, and Tobias Smollett ON the road from Swift to Richardson there is no escaping the "character" writings of Steele and Addison who, though they can not be termed novelists, yet contributed material which, when some of it was accepted by Richardson and his successors, helped give modern tone and form to the English novel. Before the publication of The Tatler (i 709-11) and The Spectator (1711-12), in the preceding century there had appeared Bishop Joseph Hall's The Characters of Vices and Virtues (1608), Sir Thomas Overbury's Characters (1614), John Earle's Microcosmographie, a Piece of the World Dis- covered in Essays and Characters (1628), and, across the Channel in France, Jean La Bruyere's Les Caracteres, ou Les Mceurs de ce Siecle (1688- 1694). Some scholars claim that Steele and Addison were not so much affected by the generalized "characters" of the type of Overbury's as by the individualized character-essays of La Bruyere, and point to Steele who patterned many of his essays after the genre of those found in Les Caracteres. But in contem- plating Sir Roger de Coverley, who was first introduced to us by Steele, one feels that such a characterization was not brought across the Channel in the type of a personage packed in French gold-foil to be later unfolded into per- sonality by the great Addison. Sir Roger is a true born 86 Addison's Sir Roger de Coverley 87 Englishman who, in his birth, probably received no touch of characterization from La Bruyere. Even in such a generalized character-essay as Overbury's A Franklin are floating the attributes of a rural gentleman that could have suggested to Steele and Addison the creation of Sir Roger de Coverley who, in 171 1, was to take his station in the hall in Worcestershire and be as much within the type of country-gentleman as Matthew Bramble, of Bramble- ton-hall, Monmouthshire, in Smollett's Humphry Clinker (i77i)- In the "Characters of the Members of the Club at 'The Trumpet,'" in The Tatler (1709-10) Steele presented class types moving into faint individualization. Then, too, we should remember that it was Steele who created the perverse, beautiful creature "in a widow's habit" that had a hand too fine to give to Sir Roger. This widow, behind whose fan is concealed the agony of forty years of old Sir Roger's life and on whose fine finger never sparkled the diamond ring for which he had parted with a hundred acres of his lands, was later to pass from per- sonage to personality and receive a heart, when far down in English fiction on the pages of Thackeray we see Madame de Florae kneeling by the bed of the dying Colonel Newcome, whose life had been darkened for forty years by the cruel fate that had sent his sweetheart into the arms of a French nobleman and himself out to India — the land of the new-killed, living restless dead. But we must also recall the fact that it was Addison who, to finish this novel in serial form, took upon himself the honor of killing Sir Roger saying, "By God! I'll kill Sir Roger that nobody else may murder him"; and the pathetic account of the passing of the good knight shifts us all the way to the "Adsum" of Colonel Newcome, and to the descent of Thackeray from his study solemnly to enunciate with tears in his eyes the words, "My God! 88 Motives in English Fiction &' I've killed Colonel Newcome." Just a year before com- pleting his masterpiece Addison composed "The Vision of Mirza," in The Spectator , in which is the oriental bridge on which Samuel Johnson built his Rasselas (1759). No happiness came to any mortal who tried to cross the arches erected in the hollow valley of Bagdad, nor was it to be found in or outside of the Prince of Abyssinia's happy valley. Addison's The Adventures of a Shilling (1710) in The Taller perhaps gave the hint for Charles Johnstone's Adventures of a Guinea (1760-65). Steele not only aided Addison in shifting individualiza- tion into characterization in his character-essays, but in his own original way gave tone and form to what was later scenically enlarged upon by so great a master work- man as Samuel Richardson. In ' ' The Story of Unnion and Valentine," "Philander and Chloe," and "Upon the Death of My Father," in The Tatler (1709-10), Steele helped to give the power to feel and live miniature scenes which tower in pathos of climactic incidents on a field of battle, in a burning theatre, and in a coffin that reverberates with the sound of a battledore in the hands of a five-year-old child. Steele at the end of "Philander and Chloe" as the flames in the theatre are consuming the hero and his sweetheart says, "I can't go on"; thus he actually feels his pathos. And by means of a tenderly depicted death-bed scene, such as that wherein Steele in 1709 bids us briefly linger to take farewell of a young wife, is prepared the long stay in a room in which Richardson in 1748 is seen solicitously bending over a coffin morbidly to analyze the gradual dissolution and death of the ill-fated Clarissa Harlowe. While Defoe, Swift, Steele, and Addison were writing, Mrs. Mary Manley had been manufacturing fiction which could be called an " Open Sesame " to the court of scandal, and which had a pernicious effect on the earlier novels of Mrs. Eliza Haywood. When not copying Mrs. Manley's Richardson's Pamela 89 manner, Mrs. Haywood was modeling her work after that of Defoe and Mrs. Behn as in the study of an unfortunate mistress in Idalia (1723). Then, like a chameleon, as Samuel Richardson with his Pamela and Clarissa passed by her, Mrs. Haywood took the color of the pressure of his sentiment to shade and reshade the misfortunes of the fourteen-year-old virtuous Miss Betsy Thoughtless in 1 75 1, and crawled as far as to Sir Charles Grandison in Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy (1753). Now who was this Pamela of 1740 who set the pattern for heroines in English fiction to become whiter or blacker as they came into contact with fascinating, designing gentlemen of quality? Pamela can be regarded as a dis- satisfied nun tantalizing a man to real marriage in his own seraglio. At the age of fifteen she possesses a free, easy, charming style of writing, and is well read in the Bible and Shakespeare, and is fond of dress. In fact she is a beautiful feminine mongoose, thus proving herself to be an antidote to the poison of the frequent pressure of her master's lips and to the bribery of his gifts. At times, when we think that she is going to become a George Eliot's Hetty Sorrel, she passes into a Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre beating Mr. B. into virtuous conduct in precisely the same manner as Jane parried the passionate attacks of Rochester. She is a tricksy little piece of femininity; and, when she is not scribbling between blubbering and kissing, her heart is always fluttering as she falls into opportune fits. Pamela is a puzzling puss like Emily Bronte's Catharine Linton or Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, because she can at all times hold to her bosom a sword of innocence so that she can show an untarnished marriage ring to Lady Davers. But at the same time there is a feeling that, if it had not been for some of her attributes of character, Mrs. Inchbald in A Simple Story (1791) could never have made Miss Milner 90 Motives in English Fiction to fall or Thackeray his Beatrix Esmond to err. In the great scene between Pamela and Lady Davers in Mr. B.'s house, situated on his rural estate in Lincolnshire, the onlooker senses the fact that there is life to this little creature who, though compelled to flee through the parlor window by the force of the virago's tongue and threatened personal violence, comes back from a whist game in company with the loyal ally of a husband to bring Lady Davers, the sister of Mr. B.'s, to bay, to submission, and to the actual bestowal of affection upon herself. English fiction, after 1740, no longer dwelt in the shadow and the dumb show of the rhetoric of the chimerical characteriza- tions of its heroines. Convincing feminine personality had arrived by means of a gigantic duel of sex. In Mrs. Behn's nouvelle The Fair Jilt it had been the woman of the world trying to destroy the man of God; in Pamela it is the woman of God pitted against the man of the world. In Clarissa Harlowe (1747-48) the problem presented is the man of the world vs. the woman of God. Plebeian Pamela Andrews of 1740 came out victorious in her long fight with aristocratic Mr. B.; but aristocratic Clarissa Harlowe of 1748 went down before the onslaught of Robert Lovelace, a man of quality. This Lovelace is a character on the order of Ranger, in Hoadley's The Sus- picions Husband (1747), who, whenever he saw a rope dangling from, or a ladder leaning against, a balcony, was impelled by the madcap spirit of intrigue to climb to find what surely he knew would be there to be captured — a woman. Lovelace was a veteran of many successful amours ; and that in one he should be balked this he could not brook. He was a well-dressed, handsome, college- bred man who moved with such grace as to appeal to Clarissa, since she could look upon him as being an adorn- ment to the social set in which she walked. At first he thought that Clarissa would quickly succumb to his Richardson's Clarissa Harlowe 91 charms, but soon he felt that it would be necessary to break the backbone of her pride. This view of the situa- tion he took after his attacks for many months had all been foiled by her. Lovelace did not love her: it was simply the love-chase as he had always conceived it — a chase that was only rightly run when it ended at the place where the quarry was cut and quartered. Clarissa never during her entire association with Lovelace told him to his face that she actually loved him ; and this cold- ness of her frozen virtue — this lack of passion — led him on to break pride's backbone. For the first time in his life he became susceptible to the lure of the impossible ; and any other man of his type would have abandoned such a hopeless chase, for the genuine man of the world persists not so long in wasting his time in endeavoring dishonestly to capture a woman's citadel. Later in 1751 Smollett presented Peregrine Pickle in the role of Lovelace who, however, when repulsed was thereby piqued from passion into proper love for Emilia Gauntlet, whom he was as mad to marry as he had been to seduce; and Peregrine throws himself into matrimonial bonds, because otherwise the chase would have been hopeless. Lovelace was daring, conniving, arrogant, but not quite a snob, and well re- presented what many of the noblemen of that time were. Clarissa was fascinated; and it is too bad that in encour- aging the snake to manoeuvre she had not the Pamela- mongoose teeth or the Jane Eyre-Catharine Linton shield and sword with which to protect purity when attacked. Why did she not flee to Anna Howe who would have gladly taken her in? And, even if she was not in control of her moneys and estate, money could have been advanced when she needed it most to carry herself beyond Lovelace's power. Clarissa is depicted as colorless and passionless by reason of the cruel home treatment that had been given 92 Motives in English Fiction her; and Lovelace is portrayed almost as an unmoral abstraction. Never at any time is there any evidence of remorse on the part of the scoundrel for the iniquity committed. His ' ' Let this expiate ! " is in accord with the view of life such as an eighteenth-century man of his type took. Lovelace deemed that his offer of marriage and the manner of his death atoned for all that he had done to Clarissa; and he was as certain that he would meet her in heaven as that his suffering after the duel with Colonel Morden would restore his name to the book from which it had been canceled. He had always been forgiven all along the way by the divine Clarissa — heavenly purity — and why should he not expect that Clarissa's God of purity would extend everlasting forgiveness to him? He who had not treated Clarissa generously thought that he had acted most generously in offering her marriage and his life on the point of the sword in the hand of Colonel Morden, the avenger of the house of Harlowes. He died as he had lived. His old excuse — the trump card the only one he had ever used in his dark, sure game with Clarissa — would surely carry weight in the next world's game as in this. Lovelace, when compelled 'even to the teeth and forehead of his faults to give in evidence' before the judgment seat of eternal justice, would probably have spoken much in this fashion: "Surely such a refined, polished gentleman as Robert Lovelace you could not suspect of being at the bottom of such a pernicious plot as that of drugging the divine Clarissa, but now, seeing that all my mistakes have been made manifest in the purlieus of heaven, I ask that God forgive one who expects to be forgiven; for I am such a splendid fellow that you will not have the heart to refuse me any more than Clarissa was able to refuse to forgive me, as for example, after she found out that I had plotted setting fire to the house so as to drive her in undress costume into my arms. Stevenson's James Durie 93 And after she ascertained that I ruined her did she not on her death-bed ask that I should repent so that I might come to where she was going? She always forgave me after I had hurt her most. I promise to behave myself handsomely hereafter — for the rest of eternity." This is Lovelace — almost if not quite a piece of consistent characterization of unmorality — in whose heart always an almighty devil is singing small. Robert Louis Stevenson's James Durie in The Master of Ballantrae (1889) has more of the genuine devil in him and stands ethically, though not artistically, twice as high in our estimation. It was this college-bred Durie that in the middle of the Atlantic with the air of a connoisseur turned over the pages of Richardson to interpret with rare grace to old Mackellar all the sinuous beauties of the characterization of Lovelace. Mackellar could not help but admire Durie even when trying to kick him overboard ; and we too can applaud this devil to a certain extent because, having been foiled by his brother's beautiful wife, this man was man enough not to stoop to drug a woman so as to capture her virtue. Can one imagine Milton's Satan thus losing caste in hell? The true Apollyon meets you face to face in the Valley of Humilia- tion; and when he is defeated, the valley belongs to you and yours. When repulsed by a woman who actually loved him, James Durie fled the amour and the country; and we somewhat respect this devil, even though he is not magnetized by the ten commandments, because he has the ruined Archangel's blood in his bones. And similar to Durie in Gilbert Parker's Seats of the Mighty (1896) is handsome Monsieur Devil Doltaire, half -prince and half- peasant, who quotes Moliere, Shakespeare, and the poets, with the persuasive tongue of Milton's Belial, yet with all his fascinating qualities is unable to win Alixe, the wife of Robert Moray. Doltaire is as sure as Lovelace that he 94 Motives in English Fiction will capture the virtue of a woman who emotionally is at all times his ; but, at the critical moment as Alixe is sinking forward into his arms, he overdoes his part by daring to quote "till death us do part" from the marriage ritual. Forever will sing in his memory Alixe 's hauntingly sweet words, "Monsieur, if you had been honest, I could have worshipped you." And Doltaire retreats bewildered, wondering why before he had not known that honesty in man is the greatest quality a woman hopes to find before she flings him her heart to keep. This small devil Doltaire was as fascinating in death as he had been in life; for Robert Moray is afraid as he looks upon his corpse, upon the breast of which is gleaming in the light of the candles the Star of Louis, lest it might rise up and be this time successful with Alixe. Let us for a moment return to the nineteen-year-old Clarissa whose one great weakness was seeking Lovelace as a refuge. Difficult indeed is it to find an excuse for this action and its constant recurrence, and one must not throw the entire blame of her downfall on her family. It seems that at any time, if she had had Pamela's spunk, she could have handled Lovelace; for Clarissa finally, after many experiences, among which was that of the fearful agony undergone in Rowland's den in which she was imprisoned for the debt of £150, was no more in- experienced than Pamela and surely should have baffled the recalcitrant rover, especially one who moved within the circle of her own class. She seems to be a beautiful bit of allegory supported on a pageant boat moving on the surface of the slow current that makes for the precipice, on either side of which we see eighteenth-century women standing and shrieking out, as the radiant angel goes over minus her virtue, "How could you after all our entreaties destroy such an ornament of our sex and of the human race?" We see Samuel Richardson advancing with Richardson's Harriet Byron 95 Pamela to comfort his friends by saying, "This girl, if she had been an abstraction, would have perished exactly like Clarissa. What Mr. B. could not kill, I could not kill— a woman with a heart." It is always easier for an author to kill a symbolic figure than one of real flesh and blood. There are some who consider Clarissa not an entity of mirage morality; but to most of us, she is simply an ala- baster cast of pride demanding the coup de grace, which it was imperative that Richardson should give her. In this respect Clarissa is a piece of consistent characterization. Another attractive heroine of Richardson's is the curly- headed, carmine-cheeked, rosy-lipped, dimpled-chinned, twenty-year-old Miss Harriet Byron, of Northampton- shire, who has a smattering of French and Italian and can palm off as if original second-hand opinions about Homer, Milton, Swift, Addison, and Pope. It takes the reader three hundred and twenty-eight pages in Sir Charles Grandison to know whether Miss Byron will prove imper- vious to "the gay Greville, the adulative Fen wick, the obsequious Orme, the imploring Fowler, and the shocking Sir Hargrave"; that is, the reader is at the end of volume one before Harriet is entangled in a hopeless passion for Sir Charles Grandison, who is to become a Daniel Deronda so far as the pattern of perfection is concerned in English fiction. In reality, throughout the seven volumes, Miss Byron carries superbly only one great scene in which as an Arcadian princess she is carried off from the Haymarket Theatre by Sir Hargrave Pollexfen to be gallantly rescued at Lissom Green, about two miles this side of Hounslow, by Sir Charles in a chariot-and-six. This stirring scene influenced subsequent English novelists such as Regina Maria Roche in The Children of the Abbey (1796?) and Mary Brunton in Self-Control (1810) to give their heroines the thrilling sensation derived from such an episodic bit of excitement. 96 Motives in English Fiction The Italian girl Lady Clementina della Porretta, visible at the beginning of the third volume of Sir Charles Grandi- son, is perhaps a greater finger-tip thriller than Pamela and is far more interesting than Harriet Byron. Not long after rescuing Harriet, Sir Charles had gone to Bologna, Italy, to see this girl Clementina whom he had once taught English, and who had gone mad on account of love for him. The pathos of her delirium is the fierce conflict between religion and love. She says to Sir Charles, "Oh, sir, could you have been a Catholic?" Parental control and nunnery walls had not been able to stifle her affection for her old instructor, so that the Porretta family had drawn up religious regulations whereby the poor girl could have her heart's darling. Then suddenly she comes to realize that, if he had really loved her, he would have turned Catholic, and spurns his real compassion, bidding him go back to his own country and marry an English woman. That she had given him the utmost passion of her heart one never questions as he listens to the pathetic words, "But will you, must you, will you go?" uttered by her to Sir Charles as they part on the stairs. Sir Charles returns to England and swiftly carries out her request by marrying Miss Harriet Byron. Then Richardson an artist in effecting the unexpected permits the sweet, languorous, wild, black-eyed enthusiast Clementina to make a dash across the English Channel to catch a glimpse of Harriet in the midst of domestic joys; and at this point he could very well have ended the novel by taking us inside of a convent to take an everlasting farewell of Clementina as a mad nun, but instead he chooses to make us imaginatively construct a church with its marriage altar, before which is standing the shadow of Count Bel- vedere. All that we know in regard to the future of Clementina is that she seems to yield to this Count from motives of duty to her parents. Strange, indeed, is this Richardson's Clementina 97 Italian woman's action when from motives of religion she had rejected a man a thousand times the weight of Belvedere. The great novel closes with Sir Charles away from Harriet at Calais giving final injunctions to Clemen- tina which must have made his wife a little uneasy. Perhaps after all Clementina was happy and intended to marry the Count because Sir Charles had not married the Italian Olivia who had been chasing him all over Europe. Clementina is a splendid study in the pathology of madness; and as there is a doctor to attend Lady Macbeth so is there one to diagnose and report on Clementina's delirium. Raving in talking fits and holding out a lovely bloody arm she glides before us; and, when she is in the keeping of Lady Sforza and her daughter Laurana in their palace at Milan, we see the dreadful strait-jacket put on to break the religious melancholia and dementia. Clementina, the tour de force that carries the interest of the seven volumes of Sir Charles Grandison, will always reign regnant as the first of our great mad women in Eng- lish fiction, surpassing her direct descendant Laurentini di Udolpho, the mad nun in Mrs. Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). It is interesting to observe Clementina della Porretta beckoning to certain mad ladies to make a formation before her. We see in Henry Mackenzie's Man of Feeling (1771) a Bedlam in which an imbecile girl is extending a gold-threaded ring to tearful Harley; we see Sophia Lee's insane Ellinor in The Recess (1783-86) denouncing Queen Elizabeth for the murder of the Earl of Essex; Mrs. Ann Radcliffe's Laurentini in the throes of remorse for having poisoned the Marchioness de Villeroi; Maria Edgeworth's hysterical Lady Delacour threatening Belinda Portman; Scott's Madge Wildfire on the straw singing, "In the bonny cells of Bedlam," Lucy Ashton in the fireplace gibbering as she glances at her blood-stained nightgown, 98 Motives in English Fiction Ulrica in flames dancing down Torquilstone Castle, Noma studying the fitful clouds above the Orkney Islands; Letitia Landon's mad wife of Zoridos's in Romance and Reality (1831), and Lady Marchmont, in Ethel Churchill or the Two Brides (1837), giving prussic acid to detested husband and faithless lover, Sir George Kingston; the mad wife of Rochester's tearing to pieces Jane Eyre's bridal veil; and Emily Bronte's Catharine Linton. Clem- entina, in delirium recalling her happier days with Sir Charles, is only surpassed by mad Catharine Linton, at Thrushcross Grange in her bed-chamber, picking from her pillow feathers with which to decorate the coverlet for fancy's flight along that rough road by which her sad heart travels back to childhood, when she breathed the fresh air up at the Heights in her oak-paneled bed beside the lattice scraped by the firs and romped over the moors with her black gipsy boy lover, Heathcliff, and dared the ghosts of Gimmerton kirkyard by moonlight. We glance again at the formation and see other de- mented creatures such as Charles Dickens's the mad little Miss Flite in Bleak House who is counting up the wards in Jarndyce or the caged birds that she has named Hope, Joy, Youth, Peace, Rest, Life, Dust, Ashes, Waste, Want, Ruin, Despair, Madness, Death, Cunning, Folly, Words, Wigs, Rags, Sheepskin, Plunder, Prece- dent, Jargon, Gammon, and Spinach; and Miss Havisham in Great Expectations sitting in a bride-to-be banquet hall watching the clock, which had stopped at the hour that told that her bridegroom would never come, and observing the moldy bridecake still on the table. Not a thing in the room has been disturbed; the guests have long since fled, but she remains an inexorable figure of fate pointing in madness to one of the greatest calamities that can come to a human being. In the long line one also sees Mrs. Hum- phry Ward's Louie, sister of David Grieve, seeking escape Mad Women in English Fiction 99 from a loveless world just as her mother had done years before, and in Eleanor Manisty's sister terrifying Lucy Foster; William De Morgan's Old Jane in Alice- For-Short in Bedlam from whom for forty-five years broken-hearted Verrinder had been waiting for a look or word of recogni- tion; and Mrs. Harrison's the neurotic Joanna Smyrth- waite in Adrian Savage relieving herself from the painful pressure of a Victorian code of conventional conduct by taking the deadly sleeping potion. And for all this painful display of shattered intellects Samuel Richardson paved the way. By means of Richardson's sentiment artificially used to breathe life into shadowy characterizations, which seem to delight in clandestine letters buried somewhere near a sunflower in a garden, or preserved under a brick, or thrust under a door, Fielding made sentiment genuine with the strength of satire and animated sub- stantial characterizations whose environment is not hazily localized. Fielding's characters are not imprisoned in a country garden chasing Clarissa Harlowe's poultry. They seem to be all on the move from the country to the city that on the way or after they reach the city they may be endowed with the nakedness of clear-cut characteriza- tion and be given a scenery as a lodestone to draw big places for them to stand on and do big things as the large coarse life of the eighteenth century passes by with its ozone to redden their blood corpuscles. Fielding possessed a fine dramatic instinct that is detectable not so much in his plays as in his novels. In Joseph Andrews (1742) in putting the ridiculous on the canvas Fielding, as he proclaims himself in the Introduc- tion, is a follower of Ben Jonson by taking the hypocritical affectation of the world as an attractive theme. Fielding believes that the analysis of vices arising from foibles lends vigor to the portrayal of affectation in characteriza- ioo Motives in English Fiction tion. In studying the source of the ridiculous he clearly shows by means of his pocket-theatre that it is possible to make detestable the vice which provokes laughter; and not only this but also that the character wearing the mask of hypocritical affectation may in time learn to detest it as much as the onlooker. Out of the coarse laughter and above this low comedy, caused by the antics of characters carrying hypocrisy, arises that serious humor or thought- ful laughter which not only makes all the contemplators better but also all the characters parading in the vestments of hypocritical affectation, who perhaps by seeing them- selves held up to ridicule may redeem their faults by flinging aside the garments of hypocrisy picked up on life's enchanted ground. Fielding in Joseph Andrews taught man to laugh at his own true caricature as the poet Shelley smiled at Scythrop in Peacock's Nightmare Abbey (1818). Scythrop should have made a better man out of Shelley, since to have seen his own hypocritical dual nature portrayed in all its unpleasant weaknesses and idiosyncrasies should have made him detest such charac- teristics and desire to become the genuine man whom Peacock, his friend, so much admired. The key to the character of Parson Adams is the carica- ture of the curacy of England; and thus many an English parson must have laughed at himself. And many an English clergyman who had been pleased with the duck- ing of the curate Mr. Williams in the mill pond in Pamela must have been delighted with the pleasing continuation of him as the absent-minded, pugnacious, near-sighted Parson Adams going up to London with a crabstick in hand and a copy of ^Eschylus, instead of his own sermons, in his pocket, to become acquainted with sharpers, rakes, jail-birds, and women on the order of Mrs. Slipslop, who plunge him into experiences far worse than those that can come by being dipped into a mill pond. Fielding, in Fielding's "Joseph Andrews" 101 delineating Parson Adams, keeps nearer tq Congreve than to Jonson, who believes that humor is a dominant jnood , derived from some mixture of the blood, physiologically gaining the ascendancy over a character. Jonson 's creatures are not well rounded or human because their superficial qualities are stressed; they are external por- traitures. Congreve believes that humor is possessed by a man who acts according to the characteristics which are peculiar to him only and which do not belong to any other man in all the world. This man while he never seems humorous to himself yet is always humorous to everybody else. Thus Congreve believes that humor is from Nature. Parson Adams's characteristics have been born with him. His humor is not a picture of what he would be, if he were in disguise. He is life and not an affectation ; nor is he the portrayal of wit, or folly, or foible, or habit, or biliousness. He is quite unconscious of the idiosyncrasies which set us into a roar of laughter. He is human ; for, as a caricature, the characteristics are not so pronounced as to destroy the species. Parson Adams is a real humorous personality moved about by Fielding among opposing personages so that out of this Parson's honest life and the best in the onlooker's there arises the wholesome detestation of the vices of the assailing puppets that elicit laughter. Abra- ham Adams never spoke ill of anybody in all his trying situations. He seems to be as oblivious of others' foibles as of his own. Thus, in looking through his large eyes, we gain a larger view of life, and have more respect for Mrs. Slipslop, Lady Booby, Joseph, and Fanny "who can neither read nor write," than for Parson Trulliber or the lady and gentlemen who tried to keep the coach door shut against Joseph Andrews's naked body. Joseph Andrews and Parson Adams are a means by which Fielding makes one gaze upon the naked hypocriti- cal affectation of the world. Fielding by means of foot- 102 Motives in English Fiction pads strips • Joseph Andrews to the skin and leaves him lying. by the roadside. Later there comes along a stage- coacn in' which are sitting a woman and many so-called gentlemen, one of whom is a lawyer. As we listen to their conversation about the disposal of Joseph Andrews, who has advanced indelicately toward the coach, and see the woman's face behind her fan, we feel assured that a frozen corpse will be the result of the hideous situation, but charity in this world comes from a point where it is least expected. In this case, it came from the postilion who had sacked a henroost. This entire scene is the most typical of all Fielding's fiction, since it is big with hatred directed against conventional morality which, according to Henry Fielding, is far worse than the immorality and brutal conduct of all the inmates of our Newgates. In passing on to Tom Jones we can stop for a few seconds with Jonathan Wild (1743) to state that it is a melodram- atic display of the world's ruthless, materialistic great men on their way to Newgate (Hell) . There are tears to be dropped for Jonathan Wild when he is twitching the corkscrew from the sheriff's pocket to show us how a great man can die true to his predatory instincts. The tears fall, if we grant Fielding's premise; for thus in this world every great man, whose outer success has been attended by a corresponding inner contraction of the soul, must dance on air to the tune of the clink of the corkscrew stolen from the sheriff. We also sigh for another figure the good Heartfree as he is arrested in the presence of his little children. When the officer lays hold on the father, the elder daughter, quitting her play and running to him and bursting into tears, cries out, "You shall not hurt poor papa. " She is a little pioneer standing on the border of the sable land of the sorrows of girlhood pointing to what will overtake Dickens's Little Nell and De Morgan's Lizarann in // Never Can Happen Again. The last thing Fielding's "Tom Jones" 103 Heartfree does before going to answer the charge of felony is tenderly to kiss his little children. As minor personages these little children later in Amelia will receive better characterization within the scenes. In Tom Jones (1749) Fielding achieved high comedy, the plot of which is a perfect pattern in which have been woven the strands of human experience. Enthralling are the intrigues and adventures that befall Tom on his way to London. It was Blifil who caused Tom's flight, and it was because Sophia Western would not marry Blifil that she at length ran away to London. As one sees Jones moving among the characters of high society and carrying on an intrigue with Lady Bellaston, and Sophia being rescued from Lord Fellamar, the agent of Lady Bellaston 's plot, by her father the good squire Western who had come up in hot haste out of Somersetshire, there is the percep- tion of a change in the English novel to a modern tone. Fielding has knocked over the candle the flames of which had been fed by Richardson's never-ending pile of letters and presses the electric button of modern plot contrivance. Thus in Tom Jones the one line taken by Tom and the other line taken by Sophia out of Somersetshire cross each other in the house of Lady Bellaston. These lines cross and blend with each other to move from London back again to pierce the centre of Blifil's machinations. No modern novel carries within its structure a better re- pressed culminating climax. All through the pages of this wonderful novel the readers' constant cry is "Who is this Tom?" And after Fielding has taken the bandage from their eyes and they think that they see, he cleverly re- places it to make the darkness momentarily greater before revealing the true facts connected with the birth of the hero. The greatest scene in Fielding's high comedy of 1749 is the play within the play wherein Tom and Partridge see 104 Motives in English Fiction David Garrick in the role of Hamlet. As we think of the relation of Partridge to Garrick and the ghost and hear Partridge contemptuously saying, "He the best player! Why I could act as well as he myself. I am sure if I should have seen a ghost I would have looked in the very same manner and done just as he did, " there is the provokement of thoughtful laughter. In Amelia (1751) there is very little humor except that contributed by Colonel Bath, who embraces a friend one minute and fights with him the next. In Tom Jones there had been very little of the pathetic except the craping in black of the description of the beautiful Sophia Western with the touching sentence, "She resembled one whose image never can depart from my heart. " Fielding bestowed upon Sophia all the graces of Charlotte Cradock, his first wife, whose death he still mourned, and he had tenderly named her in the invocation to Book XIII. And he was still thinking of her as he put Amelia into scenes written in his own tears and in ours. It would seem as if Fielding, aware of his rapidly approach- ing death, felt called upon to give to the world as a parting gift a deeper analysis of life's sorrows than any that he hitherto had been able to construct and in 1751 created a high tragi-comedy full of domestic woes. Amelia was written by a man whose heart was big enough to recognize that "crimes, they are human errors and signify but little; nay, perhaps the worse a man is by nature, the more room there is for grace, " and that "a good heart will at all times betray the best head in the world. " In observing what happens to Booth, a believer in the doctrines of passions, there is sadly taught a means whereby any one may be enabled to "retrieve the ill consequences of a foolish conduct and by struggling man- fully with distress to subdue it," since this is one of the noblest efforts of wisdom and virtue. Fielding, under- standing that "a wicked soul is the greatest object of Fielding's "Amelia" 105 compassion in the world, " creates an Amelia as a redemp- tive agent ; and what Fielding had of ideal love in his first wife he gives over to the keeping of Booth in the form of Amelia, who constantly shows that 'there is no crime that a woman will not forgive when she can derive it from love.' At all times Amelia gave to Booth "a caress so tender that it seemed almost to balance all the malice of his fate." It is a very sad picture of a good woman training her little children to cling to the love of one good person who, if he is not to be found on earth, can be found in the One in heaven. These little folk often weep for their mama, threatened with starvation, and there is no pleasure even at Vauxhall for Amelia. There seems to be no happi- ness anywhere for her by reason of the voice of the siren Miss Matthews and the lure of the gaming table which threatened destruction to her husband. Nothing sadder in all our fiction can be found than that pathos which depicts Booth rejecting her hard-earned feast as he says, "I can't sup with you to-night"; and, as he staggers away into the gloom to meet Miss Matthews, his healthy little children try to comfort their mama. And later in the evening, when Booth does not return at the promised hour, the little boy cries out, "But why doth not Papa love us? I am sure we have none of us done anything to disoblige him." Fielding considered it his business "to describe human nature as it is, not as we would wish it to be, " and clearly shows that all the inci- dents tending to catastrophe could have been stopped by Booth at any time if he had sooner grasped at "the best of all things which is innocence. " This ability of stopping when one is half way down the hill of perdition "is always within thy own power; and though fortune may make thee often unhappy, she can never make thee completely and irreparably miserable without thy own consent. " Amelia by her irreproachable qualities of virtue at last conquers 106 Motives in English Fiction the total depravity of her husband and takes him to a country estate where the fascinations of the world no longer can touch him. "Art and industry, chance and friends, have often relieved the most distressed circum- stances, and converted them into opulence, " says Fielding. Then the reader adds this can indeed happen to any Booth if he possesses an Amelia. The high tragi-comedy vibrates to the tone of the doctor's voice in Macbeth. "God, God, forgive us all!" as Amelia constantly forgave Booth. Fielding was aging as he concluded Amelia. It was his last great view of this sadly mad life of ours mixed with so much good and evil for little folk and big folk. After passing through the sable land of Amelia one takes down from the shelf that sadly delightful Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon and turns to the entry Wednesday, June 16, 1754. ' ' On this day the most melancholy sun I ever beheld arose and found me awake at Fordhook, " and reads where with death in his heart Fielding has written, "at twelve pre- cisely my coach was at the door which was no sooner told me than I kissed my children round, and went into it with some little resolution." The reader then sees on the out- side of Amelia written these words, " 'hie finis chartceqtie viceque," that I think Fielding gladly wrote as an accept- ance of that cure which was so soon to come to him in the Portuguese city on the hills, that cure which ends the sad mortalia — the disintegration of our friends and of ourselves. In Amelia there are incomparable prison scenes such as will be again set up to form Fleet for Dickens's Pickwick and Thackeray's Captain Shandon, the caricature in Pendennis of the borrowing, brilliant William Maginn, the founder of Fraser's Magazine in 1830. Shandon's wife, who is always forgiving her husband seventy times seventy- seven, with her child Mary depicted as praying that God bless poor spendthrift drunken papa, is Thackeray's re- Fielding and Thackeray, 107 creation of the tender-hearted Amelia. In Fielding's last novel is noticeable the beginning of the Vauxhall vignettes. Amelia can not enjoy a few hours in the Gardens because sparks as roisterers insult her ; and within a year after the publication of Amelia we see Arabella in the same locality jeered at by the rakes in Mrs. Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote (1752). Fanny Bolton, too, in Thackeray's Pendennis (1849-50) is rescued from the boorish treatment at Vauxhall by Pen; and one remembers that Fanny Burney's Evelina in 1778 also had passed through Vaux- hall to be followed by Cecilia in 1782. In taking farewell of Fielding we should never forget the big asides that present themselves at the beginning of the various books in Tom Jones; for these will in time form the spacious foyer in which between the acts Thack- eray will tell how he has pulled the wires of his puppets, and how we ought to like this virtue and hate that vice. It is not until we come to Fielding that the action of narrative is retarded in this manner on so large a scale. In final summary then we can say that Fielding successfully moulded for the English novel a correct form of atmos- phere, motivation, and characterization, and manufactured a dialogue that characterizes by avoiding the method of letting things get cold on the pages of a report as was the custom of Richardson. Once Richardson succeeded in making reported dialogue as vivid as if it were going on in the present time as in the duel of words between Pamela and Lady Davers, but he was only able to do the trick rarely. It was Fielding who moved English fiction for the first time into the dramatic touch of tone that made great the farce and low comedy in Joseph Andrews, the melo- drama in Jonathan Wild, the high comedy in Tom Jones, and the high tragi-comedy in Amelia. One year after the publication of Jonathan Wild ap- peared The Adventures of David Simple by Sarah Fielding, 108 Motives in English Fiction the sister of the great Henry who contributed a most excellent preface to the book when it came out in its second edition in 1744. The central character of the novel is the boy David whose home life has been darkened by a villainous brother and a mother-in-law that would have been a fit wife for a Jonathan Wild. Upon the death of his father, David finds that his brother has nefariously suc- ceeded to the estate and with a mind misanthropically inclined starts out on his journey in the world in search of a real friend. In the peregrinations in London David finds none at the Royal Exchange, none in Fleet Street, or in the Strand, or in Covent Garden, or at the Pall Mall. Everything in these localities seems to be spattered over with deceit. There is nothing but misery at whist tables ; pseudo-culture is rampant at all literary conversa- tions ; and criticism, as he sees it at the taverns, is inspired by the animus of spleen. All London life in the coffee- houses and at St. James's Park is veneer and varnish, but at last David learns that human nature, bad as it is in little meannesses, should be trusted and pins his whole faith to the lovable Camilla, the good Cynthia, and the true Valentine. Shakespeare is writ large in this little masterpiece. This was the opinion of Henry Fielding; and, we are sure that he is right in his judgment, when we examine the pages which are padded full of aphorisms satirically thrust into our hearts, the firstlings of which are our friends. According to Sarah Fielding the whole species of mankind would be happy if they were "contented to exert their own faculties for the common good, neither envying those who in any respect have a superiority over them, nor despising such as they think their inferiors." The novel ends with the good which is to be found in human nature which Sarah's big brother never failed to find in his great world of rascality. The main action of the plot is tech- Sarah Fielding's "David Simple" 109 nically marred by the insertion of four inset stories : the history of Cynthia; the history of Camilla; the history of Isabelle; and Cynthia's story of Corinna. The third story told by Isabelle is a composite containing the sub- story of the Marquis de Stainville and that of Chevalier Dumont. Thus, along with the general story as told by Sarah Fielding, we have four stories constantly to carry in our minds. But in spite of the glut of inset tales which spoil plot, we are compelled to see that what is actually best in delicacy of characterization has been attained by Sarah Fielding in the inset story portraying Dumont in the tragic snare set for his innocence. Isabelle's tale of Dorimene, the wife of the Marquis de Stainville, morbidly in love with Dumont and plotting the murder of Isabelle to keep her from marrying Dumont, is a vast improvement on the Leonora-Horatio story, in Joseph Andrews (1742), which could have suggested to Smollett the insertion of the episode relating to Miss Williams in Roderick Random (1748). Sarah Fielding's cluster of inset stories might have encouraged her brother to put the Man of the Hill in Tom Jones (1749). And Smollett was just as fond of a story within a story as Henry Fielding or his sister Sarah. In Roderick Random the history of Miss Williams which is interrupted to give us a glimpse of the interior of the Marshalsea (with which we are to become better acquainted later when we see Roderick Random there for bilking his tailor and see in it the dove-girl Little Dorrit in Dickens) ties us to Fielding by forecasting Miss Matthews in Amelia (1751) a more finished portraiture of the courte- san. The flogging of Smollett's Mr. Syntax by Lieutenant Tom Bowling, aided by Roderick and Strap, foreshadows the thrashing of Dickens's Squeers by Nicholas Nickleby and the clearing of Dotheboys Hall in 1838. The school- teacher had appeared before 1748 in English fiction in the shape of him who was stabbed with a bodkin through no Motives in English Fiction the bowels by Robert the Devil, and in the form of the pedagogue that George A Green flung over his head to be damaged by a somersault. Mr. Syntax appears again as Mr. Vindex in Henry Brooke's The Fool of Quality (1766) with a pin piercing the pivotal centre of his extremities. Smollett gave an impetus to the creation of the school life appearing in Frank Coventry's Pompey the Little (1751). In Smollett's atmosphere bacchanalian students go in and out of Oxford University in Godwin's Fleetwood (1805); and its pressure is felt in Godwin's Mandeville (18 1 7), when the boys of Winchester College so unjustly treat the hero as to aid in the subsequent dethronement of his reason, and in Lockhart's Reginald Dalton (1823) in which Reginald because of his escapades is expelled from Oxford. Smollett's work in the schoolroom helped depict the experiences of Jane Eyre at Lowood and the treatment the pedagogue received at the hands of the boys led by Steerforth in David Copper field (1850). It also aided in portraying what went on at the pension at Brussels in Charlotte Bronte's Villette (1853), and helped to make the excellent cross-section of Oxford University life in Cuth- bert Bede's (Rev. Edward Bradley's) Mr. Verdant Green (1857). And the shadow of Smollett's schoolroom fell upon Thomas Hughes's Tom Brown's School Days (1857) and upon John Ridd's big fight at school in Blackmore's Lorna Doone (1869). The sea-fighting in Nat Ingelo's Bentivolio and Urania, and the overhauling of boats by Captain Singleton and Quaker William Walters as portrayed by Defoe, helped to make big the seafaring life that is so finely put on in Roderick Random. It was such naval work that prepares us for Lieutenant Jack Bunce's overtaking the brig in the sloop, Fortune's Favorite, in Scott's The Pirate (1822). Smollett's Lieutenant Tom Bowling helped Cooper in The Pilot (1823) create the fascinating Long Tom Coffin; Smollett's " Peregrine Pickle" in and old salt Bowling in his yawing on the ocean wave to foreign countries made possible Michael Scott's Tom Cringle s Log (1829), The Cruise of the Midge (1834), and the exciting episodes contained in the novels of Frederick Marry at. Another thing to be noted in Roderick Random is that in the study of the hero, who is bandied around the world like a tennis ball, or like a Barry Lyndon hazarding everything on card-game throws in life, Smollett empha- sizes that the truest university for enlarging the under- standing is that of adversity. This is an idea that Goldsmith will make much of in The Vicar of Wakefield (1766) ; and Strap faithful in his dirt and tears to his mas- ter Roderick is the forerunner of Fielding's Partridge and Amory's John Buncle's O'Fin. Strap endears himself to our hearts; and when, on the way to London at the inn he is frightened at the raven and its owner the insane old man, somehow the bird and the idiot boy in Dickens's Barnaby Rudge come to mind, for Dickens in his youth was very fond of Smollett's fiction. The most striking scene in the Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751) consists in the coming of Commodore Trunnion, Lieutenant Hatchway, and the boatswain's mate Tom Pipes to the Inn. This striking introduction of three eccentric seamen is similar to the way in which the old scarred-cheeked, red-nosed pirate, with treasure-chest on wheel-barrow, comes to the old Admiral Benbow Inn in Treasure Island to take command of its inmates. Com- modore Trunnion with a patch on his eye, Lieutenant Hatchway with his wooden leg, and the boatswain's mate Tom Pipes, must have been running in the mind of Stevenson as he portrayed the old rum-drunken, nose- blowing seaman, on whom was the print of Flint's fist, eternally piping up his "Fifteen men on the dead man's chest, " the horrid blind man Pew, with a green shade on his eye, tapping with that dreadful stick of his, and the ii2 Motives in English Fiction bland, smiling, obsequious, one-legged Captain Silver so agile on and with his crutches. So saying he (Trunnion) lifted up one of his crutches intend- ing to lay it gently across Mr. Hatchway's pate; but Jack, with great agility, tilted up his wooden leg with which he warded off the blow, to the no small admiration of Mr. Pickle, and utter astonishment of the landlord, who, by-the-bye, had expressed the same amazement at the same feat, at the same hour, every night for three months before. The description of the memorable ride of Commodore Trunnion to the church he never reached to be married to Mrs. Grizzle, the possessor of the virago-like qualities of Richardson's Lady Davers and the temperament of Mrs. Tabitha Bramble in Humphry Clinker, and the great characterization that is given him when he at last comes to port will always make him stand out as a masterpiece in caricature. But after the death of the Commodore the succeeding incidents fail to hold our interest. Smollett straightway asks us to study the stressed digressions of a long inset story The Memoirs of a Lady of Quality which is nothing but the history of Miss Williams done over again. The fit of ennui seems to pass away as we come upon Peregrine imprisoned in Fleet, for there is the reali- zation that what Dickens's Pickwick was to see is all pre- figured. The ways and doings and goings-on of Fleet prison are all unfolded. Then we are called upon to marvel at Emilia as she adroitly keeps Peregrine from becoming a successful Lovelace. But the yawn of weari- ness returns as we are compelled to step in the tracks of Peregrine in his wanderings and be relieved only by listen- ing to the coarse humor of Pipes as he shouts, " I'll be d— n'd if I do" and by hearing the thump of Hatchway's wooden leg. All this is but the further accentuation of Smollett's "Count Fathom" 113 our disgust with an ad nauseum method of writing fiction to the point of tedious tenuity. Smollett in the Adventures of Ferdinand, Count Fathom (1753) presents the problem of heredity in the study of Ferdinand, the son of an English woman a vivandiere in the army of the Duke of Marlborough's who was killed in the act of robbing a corpse. This maternal predatory instinct guided the son into avenues of great villainy. As a soldier in Alsace, Ferdinand stumbled into French service from which by a ruse he succeeded in getting himself honorably discharged for the purpose of visiting Paris. As he continued on the road he suddenly discovered that he had been fleeced by the wily Tyroleze of all the jewels which they together had taken from their dupes. In spite of this setback Ferdinand continued his journey on horseback until at nightfall in the midst of lightning, thunder, and rain, in a dense forest he brings his horse to a standstill at the door of a lone cottage, into which he is admitted by a withered Hecate. And the nocturnal adventure which followed is not equaled in Gothic mag- nificence until we come to Gerard by means of phosphor- escent La Mort escaping death from the outlaws in the road house in Charles Reade's The Cloister and the Hearth. Such a scene of Smollett's not only harks back to Thomas Deloney's Thomas Cole, "the next fat pig, " at the mercy of his inn-keeperess at Colebrooke, but it is also a near forward cry to the auburn-tressed Mary in the hands of the banditti in the ruined abbey through which are seen vivid flashes of lightning in Mrs. Radcliffe's Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789) ; to the vault of the brigands in A Sicilian Tale (1790); and to the beldame flourishing the glittering knife at Geraldine Verney, who is rescued at the critical moment by Desmond from the fierce out- laws of Auvergne in Mrs. Charlotte Smith's Desmond (1792). ii4 Motives in English Fiction In The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771) we see Matthew Bramble, age fifty-five, in company with his vinegar-faced sister Tabitha, age forty-five, his niece Lydia Melford, his nephew Jery Melford, his sister's attendant-woman Winifred Jenkins, and Tabitha's filthy Newfoundland cur Chowder afflicted with dropsy. We are at once fascinated with genial Mat who is a lineal descendant of Parson Adams, Uncle Toby, Dr. Primrose, and Henry Brooke's Mr. Fenton. Matthew Bramble passes on the legacy of a tender heart to Bulwer-Lytton's Captain Roland Caxton and Thackeray's Colonel New- come; and in the study of Tabitha there is a link action between Mrs. Grizzle and Becky Sharp, whose lighter counterpart is Trollope's Lizzie Eustace in The Eustace Diamonds (1872). Even the dog Chowder barks his way to the pug in Susan E. Ferrier's Marriage (18 18), to Dora's Jip in Dickens's David Copperfield, and to the only friend Bill Sikes had. After leaving London the Brambles journeyed northward to York and Scarborough. They crossed the Tees at Stockton and at Durham met the disputatious Lismahago. Tabitha unmasked her powerful batteries concentrating an awful fire upon the citadel of his heart. It is sufficient to say that Commodore Trunn- ion had safely passed through all the horrors of battles on sea, and that Lieutenant Lismahago had suffered all kinds of barbarous Indian tortures on land, but neither could escape from his Becky Sharp. As Mrs. Grizzle gladly took all that was left of Hawser Trunnion so Mrs. Tabitha eagerly lassoed the remnant of a hero that had been the dainty morsel relinquished by the squaw Squin- kinacoosta. Another thing to be noticed is that surely Washington Irving went all the way to Durham to observe the dramatic harmony existing between Obadiah Lismahago and his horse, "a resurrection of dry bones," before describing Ichabod Crane on Gunpowder; and Smollett's Caricature Work 115 possibly Smollett, seeing Dr. Primrose in prison preaching to the felons, decided to give such an experience to Clinker in Clerkenwell. By the wealth of caricature work bestowed on the Welshman Morgan in Roderick Random (1748) and on the Caledonian Lismahago in Humphry Clinker (1771) Smol- lett shows a retroaction to Fielding's Englishman Jonathan Wild (Walpole?) of 1743. Smollett is superior to Richard- son and Fielding in moving the muscles of the mouth to unholy laughter. There are smudge fires burning all over the field of his fiction obscuring true characterization, as when Uncle Mat, intoxicated by these noxious vapors, is seen falling in a dead faint to the floor in a pump-hall at Bath. Amid the exhalations arising from this smudge- field at midnight a Lismahago in pyrotechnic display is seen descending a ladder to be rescued at the foot by his inamorata Tabitha; and a Winifred Jenkins is rescued from a fire in a similar manner by Humphry Clinker. All of these individuals go from the fire to the smother of marriage in Smollett's greatest novel, in which the machinery of all this coarseness of caricature is seen to contain the same cogs which caught certain characters such as Fielding's Joseph Andrews and Parson Adams and tore their clothes off. This salad of Smollett's broad caricature however was necessary so that Thomas Love Peacock could pepper it so as to make it a seasonable dish, which would further be made palatable for English readers by Disraeli, Dickens, and Thackeray. Before we leave Tobias Smollett, who was the peer of any of his contemporaries, it is well to remember that he drew finer lines on a more extensive scale than any pre- decessor or contemporary had done on the cosmopolite map of the world, and adorned his fiction here and there with scenic work that was destined to make beautiful the filigree slides of quickly moved transitional bits of scenery n6 Motives in English Fiction in Mrs. Ann Radcliffe's novels. We must remember that Thomas Amory in 1756 had taken his John Buncle to Harrigate and Scarborough to appreciate the natural beauties of these northern watering places; and Smollett's southern Bath scenes move one on through certain pages of Graves's Spiritual Quixote (1772) to where these will live forever in the vivisection given them by Jane Austen. And not only has Smollett enriched English fiction with miniature photographs of the external world, but with minute descriptions of interior accessories that help readers to visualize so as to dispel the vague and illusive Indian summer haze hanging over this kind of work in the fiction of his great contemporaries. In Humphry Clinker Smollett occasionally has adorned his pages with excellent examples of out-of-door and indoor pictures, such as Matthew Bramble's portrayal of Loch Lomond and Jery Melford's description of the great hall in Dougal Camp- bell's habitation in Argyleshire and of the breakfast he partook therein. I have seen the Laga di Garda, Albano, De Vico, Bolsena, and Geneva, and, upon my honour, I prefer Lough-Lomond to them all ; a preference which is certainly owing to the verdant islands that seem to float upon its surface, affording the most inchanting objects of repose to the excursive view. Nor are the banks destitute of beauties, which even partake of the sublime. On this side they display a sweet variety of wood- land corn-field, and pasture, with several agreeable villas emerging as it were out of the lake, till, at some distance, the prospect terminates in huge mountains covered with heath, which, being in the bloom, affords a very rich covering of purple. Everything here is romantic beyond imagination. . . . What say you to a natural basin of pure water, near thirty miles long, and some places seven miles broad, and in many above a hundred fathoms deep, having four and twenty habitable islands, some of them stocked with deer, and all of Smollett's "Humphry Clinker" 117 them covered with wood; containing immense quantities of delicious fish, salmon, pike, trout, perch, flounders, eels, and powans, the last a delicate kind of fresh water herring peculiar to this lake; and finally, communicating with the sea, by sending off the Leven, through which all those species (except the powan) make their exit and entrance occasionally? . . . There is an idea of truth in an agreeable landscape taken from nature, which pleases me more than the gayest fiction, which the most luxuriant fancy can display. Our landlord's house-keeping is equally rough and hospit- able and favours much of the simplicity of ancient times : the great hall, paved with flat stones, is above forty-five feet, by twenty-two, and serves not only for a dining-room, but also a bed-chamber to gentlemen-dependents and hangers on of the family. At night, half a dozen occasional beds are ranged on each side along the wall. These are made of fresh heath, pulled up by the roots, and disposed in such a manner as to make a very agreeable couch, where they lie, without any other covering than the plaid — My uncle and I were indulged with separate chambers and down-beds, which we begged to exchange for a layer of heath; and, indeed, I never slept so much to my satisfaction. It was not only soft and elastic, but the plant being in flower, diffused an agreeable fragrance, which is wonderfully refreshing and restorative. The following articles formed our morning's repast: one kit of boiled eggs; a second, full of butter; a third, full of cream; an entire cheese, made of goat's milk; a large earthern pot full of honey; the best part of a ham; a cold venison pasty; a bushel of oat-meal, made in thin cakes and bannocks, with a small wheaten loaf in the middle for the strangers; a large stone bottle full of whisky, another of brandy, and a kilder- kin of ale. There was a ladle chained to the cream kit, with curious wooden bickers, to be filled from this reservoir. The spirits were drank out of a silver quaff, and the ale out of horns: great justice was done to the collation by the guests in n8 Motives in English Fiction general ; one of them in particular ate above two dozen of hard eggs, with a proportionable quantity of bread, butter, and honey ; nor was one drop of liquor left upon the board. But Smollett's greatest gift to our fiction was that caricature work which made Michael Scott in Tom Cringle's Log (1829) mention Trunnion and when relating about Carthagena exclaim, "but all this sort of thing, is it not written in Roderick Random?" Certainly when creating Tom Cringle and Obed, the Yankee seaman who had turned pirate, Michael Scott had his eye on Roderick Random and Commodore Trunnion, Hatchway, Pipes, and Obadiah Lismahago; and Pickwick, Quilp, Pecksniff, Captain Cuttle, Micawber, Heep, and Skimpole, created between 1836 and 1853, never would have been so farci- cally and humorously fine if Dickens had not in his youth chuckled over the caricatures created by Smollett. CHAPTER IV Robert PaltocK, CKarlotte Lennox, Thomas Amory, and Laurence Sterne WHILE the great triumvirate Richardson, Field- ing, and Smollett, were producing masterpieces Robert Paltock in minor fiction penned The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins, a Cornish Man (1751), which is reminiscent of Robinson Crusoe and Swift's Gulliver's Travels, and which runs back beyond the Yahoos, Houyhnhnms, the Flying Island in The Voyage to Laputa, Brobdingnagians, Lilliputians, and Defoe's cannibals, to Bacon's New Atlantis where aerial navigation is seen as a blessing to mankind. Paltock's style is unusually pleasurable as Peter Wilkins on the island takes the flying beauty Youwarkee, adorned with her whale-boned, hair-colored silk garment, into his grotto to make her his wife; and it is not at all surprising that his Youwarkee should have appealed to Charles Lamb, Scott, and Leigh Hunt, and that Robert Southey should have gone to her to obtain his beautiful conception of the angel Ereenia, of the Glendoveers, who carries Kailyal to the grove of Casyapa, the sire of the gods, in The Curse of Kehama. Vivid is Paltock's description of how Wilkins crept down to the verge of the wood to gaze upon the lake, the bridge, and the boats from which over the waters came 119 120 Motives in English Fiction undulating the sound of merry speech and laughter. Wilkins marvels at the disappearance of the fleet and at the sudden flight of the happy creatures in a long train down the length of the lake. As Crusoe was aghast at the footprint on the shore so was Peter Wilkins at the presence of spirits on the island of Graundevolet ; and, Crusoe-like, Wilkins in his grotto falls back for deliverance upon prayer to an Almighty Power. That night his prayer was answered in the form of a soothing dream in which it seemed as if he were back in Cornwall for a moment to gain knowledge of the death of his wife Patty who, before dying, had told her aunt to tell her husband, if ever he should return, that she had only gone to the lake, where he could find her. As Peter in his dream ran to find her at the lake he seemed to hear these words: "Whither so fast, Peter? I am your wife, your Patty." And as he was clasping the most beautiful creature to his breast the dream ceased and he awoke. Then Almighty Providence sends Youwarkee to Wilkins as if to fulfil the desire of his dream. i ... I then heard a sort of shriek, and a rustle near the door of my apartment; all which seemed very terrible. But I, having before determined to see what and who it was, reso- lutely opened my door and leaped out. I saw nobody; all was quite silent, and nothing that I could perceive but my own fears a-moving. I went then softly to the corner of the building, and there, looking down by the glimmer of my lamp, which stood in the window, I saw something in human shape lying at my feet. I gave the word, "Who is there?" Still no one answered. My heart was ready to force a way through my side. I was for a while fixed to the earth like a statue. At length, recovering, I stepped in, fetched my lamp, and, re- turning, saw the very beautiful face my Patty appeared under in my dream; and not considering that it was only a dream, I verily thought I had my Patty before me, but she seemed to Paltock's " Peter Wilkins" 121 be stone dead. Upon viewing her other parts ( for I had never yet removed my eyes from her face) , I found she had a sort of brown chaplet, like lace round her head, under and about which her hair was tucked up and turned; and she seemed to me to be clothed in a thin hair-coloured silk garment, which, upon trying to raise her, I found to be quite warm, and therefore hoped there was life in the body it contained. I then took her into my arms, and treading backwards with her, I put out my lamp; however, having her in my arms I conveyed her through the doorway in the dark to my grotto. Here I laid her upon my bed, and then ran out for my lamp. "This," thinks I, "is an amazing adventure. How could Patty come here, and dressed in silk and whalebone too? Sure that is not the reigning fashion in England now? But my dream said she was dead. Why, truly," says I, "so she seems to be. But be it so, she is warm. Whether this is the place for persons to inhabit after death or not, I can't tell (for I see there are people here, though I don't know them); but be it as it will, she feels as flesh and blood; and if I can but bring her to stir and act again as my wife, what matters it to me what she is ? it will be a great blessing and comfort to me; for she never would have come to this very spot but for my good." I then spoke to her, and asked divers questions, as if she had really been Patty, and understood me; in return of which, she uttered a language I had no idea of, though in the most musical tone, and with the sweetest accent I ever heard. It grieved me I could not understand her. However, thinking she might like to be on her feet, I went to lift her off the bed, when she felt to my touch in the oddest manner imaginable; for, while in one respect it was as though she had been cased up in whalebone, it was at the same time as soft and warm as if she had been naked. It is in the inspired essay on Christ's Hospital Five-and- 122 Motives in English Fiction Thirty Years Ago that Charles Lamb extols Paltock's story : We had classics of our own, without being withholden to "insolent Greece or haughty Rome," that passed current among us — Peter Wilkins — the Adventures of the Hon. Capt. Robert Boyle — the Fortunate Blue Coat Boy — and the like. In Mrs. Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote (1752), the delightful Lady Arabella, a monomaniac on the sub- ject of romance, talks in episodes of Greek and Roman history and proclaims that no man can possess her hand until he has wooed her for ten years with all the witchery of incidents contained in Sidney's Arcadia and the volumes of Madeleine de Scudery. In 1751, Fielding had given a charming vignette of the gentle Amelia at Vauxhall ; and, in the last part of her novel, Mrs. Lennox humorously portrays Arabella in Spring Gardens playing the romantic role of a heroine attempting to rescue a distressed drunken courtesan, disguised in a suit of boy's clothes, from the city rakes. "Oh Heavens!" cried Arabella, "this must certainly be a very notable adventure. The lady has doubtless some extra- ordinary circumstances in her story, and haply upon enquiry, her misfortunes will be found to resemble those which obliged the beautiful Aspasia to put on the same disguise, who was by that means murdered by the cruel Zenodorus in a fit of jealousy at the amity his wife expressed for her. But can I see this unfortunate fair one," added she, pressing in spite of Mr. Glanville's intreaties through the crowd — "I may haply be able to afford her some consolation. " Afterwards Arabella continues to make a fool of herself over the lovely unknown, in front of whom the swords of two roisterers are crossed for possession, and refuses to be comforted by her lover Mr. Glanville who, bitterly Mrs. Lennox's "The Female Quixote" 123 regretting he had ever carried her to the gardens, tells her that the common girl has been rescued by her favorite lover. "But are you sure," said Arabella, "it was not some other of her ravishers who carried her away, and not the person whom she has haply favoured with her affection? May not the same thing have happened to her, as did to the beautiful Candace, Queen of Ethiopia; who, while two of her ravishers were fighting for her, a third whom she took for her de- liverer came and carried her away. "... "If she went away willingly with him, . . . 'tis probable it may not be another ravisher: and yet if this person that rescued her happened to be in armour, and the visor of his helmet down, she might be mistaken as well as Queen Candace. " Then Arabella begins to doubt Glanville because he had been loth to spring to the incognita's aid. Perhaps he at some point in his career might have met this pretty girl and therefore had weighty reasons for his heartless conduct. After acting thus to the mortification of Mr. Glanville and later, after plunging into the Thames "intending to swim over it, as Clelia did the Tyber," she awakens from her romantic dreams, which had led to ridicule and sufferings in Bath, London, and Richmond, to accept his love in a world of sanity. This Arabella points all the way to Catherine Morland emerging from the mists of murder in romance in Jane Austen's North- anger Abbey (18 18), and bears some resemblance to Miss Cherry Wilkinson (Cherubina de Willoughby) in Eaton Barrett's The Heroine (18 13). The other novels of Mrs. Charlotte Lennox are The Life of Harriet Stuart (1751) ; Henrietta (1758); Sophia (1762); Euphemia (1790), and The History of Sir George Warring- ton, or the Political Quixote (1797). These novels scarcely deserve recognition; Euphemia, however, shows that Mrs. Lennox was influenced by the fiction of Henry Mackenzie, 124 Motives in English Fiction Thomas Holcroft, and Robert Bage. She pictures a new Arcadia in the wilderness of military life at Albany, Schenectady, and at the other forts and posts on the frontier in America. Respectable Indians glide before us in the forest and in camp. Their virtues are extolled as tears are seen in the eyes of the savage old Mohawk when he politely expressed his grief to Mrs. Bellenden for the death of the great White Chief, the late Commandant. Also Indians on snowshoes help frame a picture of the tra- gedy of being ' ' snowed-in ' ' in the wilds near Schenectady. The Life of John Buncle, Esq. (1756-66) was written by Thomas Amory, in all probability a native of Ireland who, at the time of the publication of the first volume, was thirty-two years of age. This young man, possibly a doctor of medicine, destined to live until ninety-seven years of age, was a scholar and an omnivorous reader of books in every field of human knowledge. Amory (Buncle), if one judge from his novel which, in my opinion, is largely autobiographic, fascinated by Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding, fond of mathematics as William De Morgan's father, partial to Amadis de Gaul and Mrs. Behn's Oroonoko and Agnes de Castro, was as eccentric in his writings as Laurence Sterne, and in depicting a Protes- tant girl under the thumbscrews of a Roman Catholic husband as bitter against Catholicism and as enamored of the gipsy life and of winds blowing over lonely moors and links as George Borrow the author of Romany Rye and Lavengro. John Buncle, after leaving Trinity College, University of Dublin, quarrels with his father, who opposed Unitarian tenets, and with his mother-in-law who desired that her nephew should supplant him in the family. It is religion that drives him out a wanderer on the face of the earth, and Buncle, in this respect, is a forerunner of Richard Graves's Geoffry Wildgoose, graduate of Oxford, trying Amory's "John Buncle" 125 to find fixity of religious faith in evangelic Methodism. After passing through the grandeur of a storm at sea, Buncle finds himself upon English soil in Stainmore, Westmoreland, where he gazes upon scenery surpassing the Alps and Apennines. As he listens to Mr. Price's story, the reader gathers that Price is the glimmer of Charlotte Bronte's Rochester, because having had ex- periences in Paris with the demimonde, he had returned to marry a plain, honest woman, who reformed and con- formed him. Buncle likes to describe a thunder-storm in the mountains, and a water-fall that can be compared to a Niagara. He becomes enraptured with "sweet rural scenes, " and contributes a dissertation on the beauties of nature, clearly demonstrating that such tend to help man in conforming to reform, and cites an example in the case of a certain John Orton. Life is analyzed as all vanity except as it is practised in the virtue of charity. In Yorkshire there is a hunting scene in which is seen Juliet Berrisfort, resembling Scott's Di Vernon, losing her heart to John. In the activity of his married life Buncle always keeps to the centre of the wilds of Westmoreland at Orton Lodge; and, when ever he wishes a skeleton to be a memento mori of connubial bliss, there is always one happily presented. When he does not find grinning bones, he finds a good country girl with a little more money. John is very fond of describing just what kind of trees are on his estate and just what varieties of flowers are in the neighborhood of his bower. And he is not a bad botanist when he shows us the jessamine, honeysuckle, purple bistorta, acanthus, aconus, white cacalia, blue campanula, cassia, the double daisy, crimson dianthus, and the red fruximella. He fairly revels in the pretty rock-rose, the cassine, the sea-green coromilla, woodbine, sweet briar, and violets. In paying close attention to the details of landscape omitting no minute accessories 126 Motives in English Fiction Amory is almost the equal of Smollett. Buncle meets six Irish gentlemen that are fond of love and a bottle. One of these Gallaspy is a prototype of any one of the unfortunate masters of Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent. The reader runs across Eliza Hunt as pitiable an object as the fallen woman Martha in David Copperfield. Buncle is fond of health resorts ; therefore he can not tell us enough about Harrigate, Oldfield Spa, and the famous Knares- borough dropping- well. Things are well modernized in this novel. Miss Spence, John's sweetheart, died because of the ignorance of four learned physicians. When this happened, he married Miss Turner. The reader sees Miss Dunk buried alive; he sees Carola Bennet, a fallen woman, rehabilitating herself by marriage and the beauties of nature. It is certainly a region of miraculous occurrences. In this marital district violent death is hard to escape. If small- pox spares one, a more dreadful pest seems to take its place. Dr. Stanvil is done to death by the explosion of his stomach; and, all at once, by this convenient happen- ing, his wife discloses herself as the reanimated corpse of Miss Dunk, so that she can fall into the arms of John Buncle as his seventh wife. But alas! John can not hold her long, because she is wrested from his arms by the destined dreaded disease smallpox. Perhaps the most wonderful occurrence in the novel is the conversion of Buncle's father, who had come to detest the Athanasian creed and accept Unitarianism because of his eccentric son's written remarks of genius jotted down in a manu- script. The whole novel in its crotchet, digressive method is precursory of Sterne's Tristram Shandy. Thomas Amory has a place among such literary eccentrics as James I of England, George Wither, Thomas Day, Wil- liam Beckford, Crabbe Robinson, Douglas Jerrold, Charles Lamb, and Walter Savage Landor. And this crotchety Sterne's "Tristram Shandy" 127 Amory appealed to eccentric Lamb who in The Two Races of Men says: Here stood the Anatomy of Melancholy, in sober state. — There loitered the Complete Angler; quiet as in life, by some stream side. — In yonder nook, John Buncle, a widower- volume, with "eyes closed, " mourns his ravished mate. Laurence Sterne has indeed beguiled us of our pain and has created the smile, adding something to "this fragment of life," as we listen to Uncle Toby whistling his Lilli- bullero and see his character leisurely unfolding itself day by day here and there throughout Tristram Shandy (1759-67). Parson Adams has become the man who would scarcely "retaliate upon a fly, " who is the type of an honest man "with as good and as upright heart as ever God created." Uncle Toby can not appear too often "in his old fringed chair with his chin resting upon his crutch," or gaze too often at his collection of books on military architecture, or speak too often to Corporal Trim, ' ' 'T would be a pity, Trim, thou shouldst ever feel sorrow of thy own, — thou feelest it so tenderly for others." The death of Le Fevre, the poor army officer, who died in an inn near the Shandy home, and the tender sympathy bestowed by Toby on Le Fevre's son form pathetic scenes as genuine as those humorous ones presenting Toby and Trim from day to day following and carrying out the Duke of Marlborough's campaigns on bowling-green and in garden. Sterne saves his best salable sentimentalism for Maria and her goat, and continues it in his farewell taken of her in Sentimental Journey (1768); but in the underlying sadness of the Maria story, one never quite loses the flavor of the genuine pathos of Le Fevre's which pervades it all, just as it permeates that episode in Senti- mental Journey in which the well-known starling from the 128 Motives in English Fiction wires of its Bastille says to all heart-broken men and women, "I can't get out. " In 1766 tender-hearted twins were born, namely, Goldsmith's Vicar and Henry Brooke's Mr. Fenton (Mr. Clinton, uncle of Harry Clinton). These philanthropic gentlemen afterwards introduced their old kinsmen Parson Adams and Uncle Toby to Matthew Bramble and Uncle Roland Caxton, so that all might unite in throwing the richly embroidered mantle of their perfections around the shoulders of Colonel Newcome. It was in 1849 that the reincarnation of Sterne occurred most strikingly when The Caxtons of Bulwer-Lytton was published. Le Fevre and his son became Captain Roland and his boy. Maria and her goat were re-embodied in the smiling Savoyard and the white mice, which danced on the hurdy-gurdy suspended over a grave. In The Caxtons Uncle Roland with his cork leg and his younger brother Augustine Caxton possess all the charming idiosyncrasies of Sterne's Uncle Toby. In Tristram Shandy, after perusing the campaigns of Toby and Trim, the death of Le Fevre, the pathetic Maria story, and the Cervantic amours that Toby has with Mrs. Wadman, the reader is much exasperated as Sterne forces him to sit down to feast elsewhere amid the nine books. As a banqueter he sees the waiters of poor plotting, hobby-horse crotchet characterization, and over- strained sentiment, setting before him black dishes in which are salmagundi-chapters on knots, on whiskers, on wishes, on noses, on sash-windows, on an ass-nibbled macaroon, and on Toby's modesty. There is a proper protest on the part of a guest against such tidbits, for these are the "sallets" that Sterne has thrust into the lines "to make the matter savoury." Sterne reminds his auditors that he is not in a hurry ; and no reader, who is in a hurry, should ever be given Tristram Shandy. Sterne throughout his work is continually giving Carlylean gasps Sterne's Uncle Toby 129 of sensibility. He has a very sane view of life when he is in such moods. He shows that man languishes under wounds that he has the power to heal, that reason simply sharpens his sensibilities, multiplies his pains, and makes out of him a melancholy Hamlet; and, as a character antithetical to the pessimistic Dane ("for O! for O! the hobby-horse is forgot"), Sterne makes step from this hobby-horse a man who has an elastic structure within that can counter- balance the evil of the universe. Toby's conscience is the secret spring of a well-ordered machine that by means of religion combatively beats back chronic troubles that come in like ghosts to bother the modern Hamlet on the barren promontory of life. Toby set upon himself the imperative duty of digging a trench in his garden just as under the sense of military duty he had dug a trench at Namur. And the broad smile of optimism is just as broad in the former capacity as it had been in the latter. Life is the religion of resignation. If one does his duty, then God will not inquire whether it has been done in a red coat or a black. A naked sword bequeathed by a valiant, poverty-stricken father is all the patrimony a young knight needs — if he will only wield it — in this beautiful, sad world of fairy-land. All the malignant, eldritch, faun-eyed elves burst forth from their confines to cajole the pen of Sterne when he did not trust to God to guide it in sequence; but, when Provi- dence seizes the pen, we never get away from the shadow cast by poor Lieutenant Le Fevre's regimental coat, on which is written, "the best hearts are ever the bravest." Sometimes these dark sprites seem to sting the hand of Providence so that it swings the pen into an ironic jab that tries to kill the English starling because it ought to have been taught to say, "I can get in" to the Bastille of English political preferment. In playful trick this pen works a suspense structure for the Le Fevre story: it 130 Motives in English Fiction describes the circle around the fire and scratches a place for us to sit down to listen to the tale that apparently never is to be completed; but, for our sakes, sorrowing Providence seizes the pen and inscribes satisfactory climac- tic lines of sincerity (or insincerity as some think) in a sentiment that reaches back of Richardson to Steele. Sterne says, "Shall I go on? — No," when Le Fevre dies; and Steele says, "I can't go on," when Philander and Chloe are to be burned to a cinder in the theatre in The Tatler. Does Sterne in the death of Le Fevre feel his pathos as Steele did in his short story? For my part I am inclined to think that Sterne does. Sometimes we feel as if afrits were responsible for raising the sirocco that blows almost imperceptibly about Uncle Toby's charac- terization to make it relax into satiric caricature. Some- times, especially when Toby is working his buccinatory cheek muscles and the orbicular muscles around his lips, and counting on his fingers Mrs. Wadman's virtues, we think of the same kind of fretwork bestowed by Pea- cock in Nightmare Abbey on Scythrop (the caricature of Shelley), as he dejectedly sits with his finger on his nose pondering over his dual love exposure. In spite of this occasional slight touch of caricature Toby emerges from his clouds of tobacco smoke so triumphant in characterization that one involuntarily breaks out into the exclamation, "O, Toby! in what corner of the world shall I seek thy fellow?" Upon closing Tristram Shandy, one is sure that it will swim down the gutter of time along with Swift's Tale of a Tub, and past it to take a permanent place with the greatest novels that exist. As Sterne says: I will not argue the matter: time wastes too fast: every letter I trace tells me with what rapidity life follows my pen; the days and hours of it, more precious, my dear Jenny! than the rubies about thy neck, are flying over our heads like Sterne, Thackeray, and Bulwer 131 clouds of a windy day, never to return more — everything presses on — whilst thou art twisting that lock, — see! it grows grey; and every time I kiss thy hand to bid adieu, and every absence that follows it, are preludes to that eternal separation which we are shortly to make. — Heaven have mercy upon us both! And when one closes the Sentimental Journey with De Quincey-like veneration for an apostrophe he recites : Dear sensibility! source inexhausted of all that is precious in our joys, or costly in our sorrows ! Thou chainest thy martyr down upon his bed of straw — and it is thou that liftest him up to heaven. — Eternal Fountain of our feeling! — 'Tis here I trace thee — "and this is thy divinity which stirs within me.'' And it was Sterne that kicked over the vase from which crept the genius of sensibility enveloped in clouds equally distributed of sincerity and insincerity. Subsequent writers of English fiction have had their pages smoked by these clouds, but the genius crept back always to remain in Sterne's vase. Mackenzie tried to steal the vase, but the clouds that chased him are simply the clouds of insincerity and they well-nigh choked him to death. The vase still is puffing its clouds on the shore by the sea of tears; and many have tried to kick the vase into the sea, but it is fixed there by adamantine chains, and the clouds above it reach to the heavens and the savors thereof are acceptable to the nostrils of Ahriman and Ormuzd. Thackeray in On a Peal of Bells says : Yonder lean, shambling, cadaverous lad, who is always borrowing money, telling lies, leering after the housemaids, is Master Laurence Sterne — a bishop's grandson, and himself intended for the Church; for shame, you little reprobate! But what a genius the fellow has! Let him have a sound flogging, and as soon as the young scamp is out of the whipping- 13 2 Motives in English Fiction room give him a gold medal. Such would be my practice if I were Doctor Birch, and master of the school; and, in De Finibus, he said: What if some writer should appear who can write so en- chantingly that he shall be able to call into actual life the people whom he invents? Thereupon Thackeray names some of the great charac- ters in fiction that he wishes could step in at the open window by the garden. And as these imaginatively line up for his inspection, he expresses no permanent satisfac- tion with the fancied formation until there are seen ad- vancing to join it dearest Amelia Booth {leaning) on Uncle Toby's arm; . . . the Gil Bias troop; and Sir Roger de Coverley ; and the greatest of all crazy gentlemen, the Knight of La Mancha, with his blessed squire. I say to you, I look rather wistfully towards the window, musing upon these people. Were any of them to enter, I think I should not be very much frightened. Dear old friends, what pleasant hours I have had with them! We do not see each other very often, but when we do, we are ever happy to meet. And it seems to me that I can see leaning on Uncle Toby's other arm — not a tender-hearted woman, but the composite of Fielding's Parson Adams, Goldsmith's Dr. Primrose, Brooke's Uncle Fenton, and Smollett's Uncle Matthew Bramble — Colonel Thomas Newcome behind whom is standing in the shadow Captain Roland Caxton, with one hand on his cork leg, as if to remind us that, if Uncle Toby w T as wounded at the siege of Namur, he had been maimed at Waterloo, and the other hand on the sword that he is sheathing in his tear-blistered Bible. CHAPTER V Samuel Johnson, CHarles JoHnstone, John Hawhesworth, Frances Broohe, Horace Walpole, Oliver GoldsmitK, Henry BrooKe, Henry Mackenzie, RAcHard Graves, and Clara Reeve IT was in the year of the creation of Tristram Shandy that Rasselas and his sister Nekayah, longing "to see the miseries of the world, since the sight of them is necessary to happiness," in the company of the poet Imlac, escaped from their valley to find ideal happiness. On their journey they find that perseverance rather than strength makes for happiness; that living next to nature is not happiness; that "retiring from exercise of virtue does not mean happiness"; and that life is largely sour grapes, for each person is trying to get what he thinks the other has. Out in the world they find that "much is to be endured and little to be enjoyed"; and that "knowledge is nothing until it is communicated." The task at one time becomes so difficult that a division of labor is neces- sary. Rasselas searches for joy amid the splendor of courts and Nekayah pursues the will-o'-the-wisp in the shades of humbler life. The prince and princess find only misery in their search; and they increase this misery by taking different points of view in a controversy as to whether marriage or celibacy promotes greater happiness. The querulous, cocksure note sounded by each as the argument advances shows how innately selfish all of us are 133 134 Motives in English Fiction in maintaining our own views as being always right and never wrong. Thus constituted as we are, how dare we even define happiness when our definition of it may mean utmost misery to others. Even Imlac is forced to analyze the poet as one who can not be happy since his heaven is to be given him by posterity. If, however, we were compelled to be one of the three, we would certainly choose to be Imlac who easily carries the honor of the chief charac- terization in the novel. We would be Imlac because he is the creator of images that make the poet the least un- happy of mortals, and because the poet helps redeem humanity by giving to it the highest form of art. The nearest that the reader comes to solving the riddle of human happiness is when he sees the three at last meeting the mad astronomer and the old sage. Into the humorous characterization of the astronomer there is thrown the pathos of Johnson's own half-mad existence; and in the painful words of the old sage, who had found quasi- happiness in the philosophy that looks through death, Johnson bespeaks his own life-long unhappiness that had just dipped itself into deeper darkness by depriving him of a mother. "I have neither mother to be delighted with the reputation of her son, nor wife to partake of the honors of her husband. I have outlived my friends and my rivals. ' ' "There is a pleasure, sure,/ In being mad, which none but mad men know"; and so far as Dryden's utterance rings true, the mad astronomer is happy, since he believes that he has given an ' ' impartial dividend of rain and sunshine" to the nations of the earth; and as one sees him unhappily happy in his visionary schemes, which were to be worked out for the benefit of humanity, he is almost ready to believe with Johnson that all men are as mad as the astronomer and as sadly happy. This astronomer is an idealist in an unreal and real world; and, like Rostand's Chantecler, the illusionist thoroughly believes that he can Johnstone's "Chrysal" 135 make dappled dawn appear by the mad crowings with which the sun comes up every day to scatter the clouds full of miseries threatening mankind. The great Cham of literature warns us not to be pheasant-hens in our attitude toward this Chantecler. We should not laugh at the mad astronomer as did the pheasant-hens, — Nekayah and Pekuah. We must hug our illusions (lap up the stars in the night time) since they are the only actual bits of happiness that life contains. Johnson would have no one destroy these illusions, since we are all in a sense mad astronomers, lapping up the stars; and, if we are not mad star-and-sun gazers, we can only remain miserable until we find ourselves in that sage state, where we can have a confident belief in a hope that happiness can be found in a life beyond the grave. Though illusions are shattered we are always to remain idealists, believing that things might have been worse and that man's discontent has created everything worth while that we cherish. Thus Johnson, in his contemplation of the problem of happiness, gave to humanity that hope which lies behind the silver clouds at the end of the long, hollow valley of Bagdad in The Vision of Mirza. In the orientalization of the novel, Johnson carries the reader on to Dr. Hawkesworth's Almoran and Harriet (1761) to make consummate such atmosphere in William Beckford's Vathek (1786). The body of Charles Johnstone's Chrysal, or the Ad- ventures of a Guinea (1760-65) is malodorous scandal connected with the orgies of Medmenham Abbey, and its perusal is a bath in Smollettian smut; but the birth of Chrysal from the flame in the vase of gold is graphically described, and interesting indeed is Traffic, the plunger, who, contrary to the dying injunction of his father "to wrong no individual and defraud no public," is seen scheming the financial ruin of Amelia whom he had promised to marry. Amelia throws him into Chancery 136 Motives in English Fiction and goes to Jamaica. Traffic pursues, and there is con- demned by her own words in open court to dig out in the mines what had dug his own ruin. Chrysal, the female of the soul, presiding over memory to sting to sadness any bit of happiness in the life of the individual, is the soul of the piece of gold which from the hand of unhappy Traffic had been thrown into the vessel, that drew it up from the bottom of the mine so that it could have adventures in the world as a guinea. The adventures of this guinea after its transfer from Jamaica to England as it passed from miser to author, to general's gentleman, to a celebrated female, etc., are after the manner of Addi- son's " Adventures of a Shilling " in The Taller (1710) and the adventures of the dog in Coventry's Pompey the Little (1751). 1 Such a method of satirizing society can be traced back to John Taylor's A Shilling, or the Trauiles of Twelvepence (1622). During the same year that Mrs. Frances Sheridan portrayed the much afflicted heroine Sydney Biddulph, crying out in her innocence under the pressure of Richard- sonian thumbscrews, was published John Hawkesworth's Almoran and Hamet, an Oriental Tale (1761). It is very hard for a snake to remain a snake when, by changing itself into a dove, it can more covertly carry its designs into 1 G. H. Rodwell's Memoirs of an Umbrella (1846) is a nineteenth-century return to Johnstone's Chrysal. An umbrella tells the tragi-comic experi- ences arising out of its being transferred from one person to another. The plot centres round Mr. Stutters, who after an absence of many years in India returns to establish himself as Mr. Quickly, to find his lawful daugh- ter Ellen, and to right all wrongs; but we are more interested in following the fortunes of the villain, whom Rodwell averred no reader wanted to be. This character Herbert Trevillian, the handsomest man in London, by his cruel treatment of Alice finds his Nemesis in Bedlam posing as an Adonis before a bit of broken mirror and later receives proper burial in the grounds of a private asylum with one female for a mourner. The novel is filled with caricature work reminiscent of Dickens and the Gothic, that is prevalent in Bulwer; and its most interesting pages are those which Phiz (Browne) decorated with sixty-eight engravings. Hawkesworth's "Almoran and Hamet ,, 137 effect. Such a serpent was the Persian Almoran who, in order to gain the Circassian beauty Almeida, by the power of the talisman changed himself into the form of his brother the good Hamet, whom she loved, and transformed Hamet into the likeness of himself. The sixteen-year-old Almeida is subjected to two attacks from evil at the height of all its supernatural manifestations. By the power of the talisman Almoran in Hamet's form glides before Almeida to seduce her; but Almeida, although she thinks that it is her beloved Hamet, rejects his advances. Then, hard upon Almoran's departure, there enters Hamet retaining under the spell the form of Almoran. Hamet asks Al- meida if she has surrendered her virtue, to which question addressing him as Almoran she replies that she will have nothing more to do with Hamet since he had tempted her virtue. Actuated by the evil nature of the spell Hamet, in the form of Almoran, tries to force a marriage with the girl he sincerely loves; but at this critical moment the touchstone of the Coleridgean Christabel-like innocence of Almeida seems to restore to Hamet his former virtues and form. Thus Almoran failed to ruin Almeida and Hamet; and he was changed into a stone as 'a memorial of the truths which his life had taught.' This Almoran, whose heart is similar to that which is within Hawthorne's Ethan Brand, is a masculine Geraldine or Lamia embody- ing the only evil which, as Milton affirms, walks invisible except to God alone. The novels of Mrs. Frances Brooke are The History of Lady Julia Mandeville (1763); Emily Montague (1769); and Excursion (1777). It has now been some four or five years since I first read that short novel of crisp, re- freshing letters highly polished in style called Julia Mandeville. I thoroughly enjoyed myself as I walked in a romantic wood amid the singing of birds to the arbor of jessamines and roses, or out to the acres where Mr. and 138 Motives in English Fiction Mrs. Herbert dwelt in connubial felicity. As I remember it, Mrs. Frances Brooke gives us fine scenes in natural description, adorations for the Creator, quotations from Cowley, and the examination of butterflies' wings. Into all this quiet, delightful rural life, which supplied happi- ness to the lovers Lady Julia and Harry Mandeville, suddenly rushed the fatal duel, coffins, and a double funeral. The descriptions of the country scenes serve as precursors of those in Miss Mitford's Our Village (1819- 32) ; and, when we go out to visit Mr. and Mrs. Herbert, we are again strolling over the hundred flowery acres and through the groves of Basil to see John Buncle in 1756 aesthetically propose in biblical language to the rural Statia. In Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764) the fatal helmet nodding its plumes at the windows and the sighing portrait, which quits its panel, re-emphasize the stressing of Gothicism, which had been present in Thomas De- loney's Thomas of Reading and Smollett's Adventures of Ferdinand, Count Fathom, and which is afterwards found in Mrs. Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho, Mat- thew Lewis's The Monk, Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland, C. R. Maturin's Melmoth, Sir Walter Scott's The Monastery, Mrs. Shelley's Frankenstein, Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, Bulwer Lytton's Zanoni, George Mac- donald's David Elginbrod, S. R. Crockett's The Black Douglas, and William De Morgan's Alice-F or -Short. In De Morgan's novel there is the lady with the spots who appears not only to Alice in "the airey way," but even to Charles in what had once been a Queen Anne ballroom in which the toupeed, wicked beauty had stooped to pick up the fatal family ring. Aside from the pathetic story of old Jane, the absorbing interest of this master- piece centres around this real ghost lady with the spots who has had pain in her heart from the time of the birth of Oliver Goldsmith. Goldsmith's " Vicar of Wakefield " 139 Oliver Goldsmith on March 27, 1766, by Johnson's aid published The Vicar of Wakefield by which he not only measured arms with the dead Richardson and Fielding but also with the living Sterne and Smollett. This dra- matic bit of fiction can be considered almost as an ac- cident of Goldsmith's genius. Its greatest defect is its tendency to break into farce. Goldsmith was always weak when it came to constructing plots ; and we can see very readily from the farcical exaggerations of his simple story what will happen to him in 1768 in the staging of The Good-Natured Man and what, in 1773, when Act V Scene II was on (where Mrs. Hardcastle supposes herself to be forty miles from home) in She Stoops to Conquer, almost damned his play at Covent Garden. As She Stoops to Conquer is a comedy showing characters in farcical situations, and as the excellence of The Good- Natured Man depends entirely upon the way in which an actor can shade and reshade the delineation of Croaker, so likewise is The Vicar of Wakefield perhaps the greatest farce and at the same time the greatest melodramatic, tragi-comic novel that we possess. The Vicar of Wakefield (1766) in reality contained with- in itself the melodramatic tragi-comic elements of The Good-Natured Man and the farcical comic strength of She Stoops to Conquer, which were yet to be written by Goldsmith. What carried the histrionic, idyllic novel to greatness was characterization endowed with that peculiar quality of humor which no other man except Goldsmith possessed. Goldsmith for sentiment and plot devices fell back upon Richardson. Mr. B.'s purposed sham marriage of himself to Pamela by aid of the broken attorney, who was to personate the minister, has been artfully adapted by Goldsmith so that it serves as a boomerang to Thorn- hill who thought he had safely tricked Olivia by a sham marriage and never dreamed that Jenkinson had tricked 140 Motives in English Fiction him by securing a true license and a true priest. Now these Richardsonian borrowings including the post-chaise all sink into subservient insignificance as by them is perfected an optimist who takes woe and weal with equal grace and thanks; and, as long as there is no danger of losing the Vicar, we do not greatly care whether the story in technique goes far afield or not. All the minor charac- ters are but foils to set off the virtues of him who by "an habitual acquaintance with misery" went through "the truest school of fortitude and philosophy," and even the ethical phrases bend in proper support to this clear con- ception of the character of Dr. Primrose: "... the nakedness of the indigent world might be clothed from the trimmings of the vain. " / "That virtue which requires to be ever guarded is scarce worth the sentinel."/". . . never strike an unnecessary blow at a victim, over whom Providence holds the scourge of its resentment."/ "Con- science is a coward; and those faults it has not strength enough to prevent, it seldom has justice enough to ac- cuse."/". . .that single effort by which we stop short in the downhill path to perdition, is itself a greater ex- ertion of virtue than a hundred acts of justice." / "Good counsel rejected, returns to enrich the giver's bosom." The Vicar is a compact composite of Addison's Sir Roger de Coverley, Fielding's Parson Adams, and Sterne's Uncle Toby. He is the optimistic Job of our times being portrayed in simplicity of narrative to set off the good individual in life for whom the snares are set. In taking farewell of Goldsmith's tour de force one can never forget the perennial charm of Moses taken in by sharpers at the fair, and the ironical announcement of Olivia's flight with young Thornhill to the Vicar just at the moment when he is congratulating his wife, Deborah, on the fact that there is no blot on the family escutcheon, for these two scenes form the crescendo of comedy and tragedy in Goldsmith's fiction. Brooke's "The Fool of Quality" 141 From the year 1766 to 1770 in the schoolhouse of ad- versity Henry Brooke's big-hearted Mr. Fenton remained in the same seat that had been occupied by Dr. Primrose sadly conning and blotting the exercise-book with tears, and that which he has learned out of the book of life he resolves into a unique method which he thinks can be employed in educating his nephew Harry Clinton into a manly, happy English youth. Thus The Fool of Quality presages such pedagogical fiction as Day's Sandford and Merton wherein the spoiled, aristocratic boy Tommy Merton receives a wonderful education from Mr. Barlow and the honest, plebeian boy Harry Sandford. The History oj Henry Earl of Mor eland by its methodization of pedagogy connects Lyly's Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit with Sand- ford and Merton, which was inspired by Rousseau's Emile. Almost the first thing that this wonderful boy Harry does is to lay the ghost of Walpole's Castle of Otranto, and Brooke adds to Harry's bloody disposal of the horrible apparition by citing the story of how hot soup was fed to a gibbeted corpse on Hallow-tide eve. When the brave individual extended the broth in a spoon to the mouth of the dead, the man clinging to the back of the corpse in a tone deep as hell said, "It i-is too ho-t," to which the man with the spoon replied, "And confound you, why don't you blow it then?" It is such as this that makes one think of Eaton Barrett's ghost which sneezes and says, "Damn and all is blown" in The Heroine (1813). Harry is taught by Mr. Fenton that selfishness hinders all happiness in life. The uncle believes that his nephew Harry should be taught athletics so as to become a punching, fighting hero. He believes in the doctrine of benevolence, and that not only should a boy be benevolent and charitable, but especially a school-teacher; and he is very proud of the fact that the boys flog Mr. Vindex out of his profession. Like Roger Ascham he believes that no Udalls should rule 142 Motives in English Fiction with the rod in England. It took an experience in Fleet prison before Mr. Vindex learned to become a model schoolmaster. Mr. Fenton believes that a child must have faults. He teaches Harry that every little devil can only become an angel when he is permitted all alone by himself to discover the devil inside of himself. Thus Harry was to understand that there are always two boys in every one boy, and that it is the angel, or spirit of God, that makes a gentlemanly boy. Harry at an early age was prompted by his uncle to escape from the hell of his own nature. He was taken by Mr. Fenton to debtors' prisons in order that he might listen to his uncle's invec- tive against such an unjust method of punishment. He mourned with his uncle for sorrow-stricken humanity as he visited Newgate and Fleet prison ; and was quite over- come, when he emerged from the horrors of Bethlehem Hospital. It was a rare education which he received as he heard his uncle wax eloquent upon the Britannic constitution; liberties of the English people; remedial legislation for bankrupts; and schemes for the ameliora- tion of the pariahs of the day such as the founding of Magdelene House for repentant courtesans. In England and on the continent the uncle would show the nephew that suffering is an antidote to the poison of sin. Thus it can readily be seen that Henry Brooke entered the field of poverty that long afterwards proved to be such fertile soil for Charles Dickens to till. Brooke at every turn anticipates Dickens's humanitarianism. Brooke, as a socialist of the eighteenth century, believes that the money amassed by the wealthy is extracted from the earnings of the poor ; and in sympathizing with the down- trodden masses is like Dickens in dwelling on the joyous side of their woes as when poverty assailed the good, faithful, and optimistic Mr. Clement and his wife Ara- bella. Brooke does not over-accentuate poverty's joy- Brooke's "The Fool of Quality" 143 lessness as does George Gissing in Unclassed (1884), Demos (1886), and New Grub Street (1891). Brooke does not stand for Demos grasping the sceptre; nor does he ask the appalling question: "What has a hungry Demos to do with the beautiful?" Nowhere in the pages of The Fool of Quality is expressed the "supreme passion of revolt," felt "in the heart of a poet," who must be "subdued by poverty to the yoke of ignoble labor." Nor is there conveyed such a message as that of Gissing's curate Wyvern in Demos; I have a profound dislike and distrust of this same progress. Take one feature of it — universal education. That, I believe, works patently for the growing misery I speak of. Its results affect all classes, and all for the worse. I said that I used to have a very bleeding of the heart for the half-clothed and quarter-fed hangers-on to civilization ; I think far less of them now than of another class in appearance much better off. It is a class created by the mania of education, and it consists of those unhappy men and women whom unspeakable cruelty endows with intellectual needs whilst refusing them the sus- tenance they are taught to crave. Another generation, and this class will be terribly extended, its existence blighting the whole social state. Every one of these poor creatures has a right to curse the works of those who clamour progress, and pose as benefactors of their race. Gissing gives poverty at times a sense of humor such as makes it send up to heaven miserable laughter; but Brooke and Dickens cut a large mouth on the figure of squalor so that from it can come happy child-like laughter — which makes life in the slums no ugly, ignoble gift at the hands of an "unspeakable cruelty." Throughout Brooke's novel we sink under the weight of sentiment. Present pathos is always meeting with past pathos; and if it is not on the lips of the characters, it is enfolding the speakers. It knocks most unexpectedly at 144 Motives in English Fiction their doors in the form it had taken to crush the characters who were under discussion. Major characters rush out- side to embrace this pathos, and those left behind have not long to wait before the sublimity of suffering begins for themselves or for others. There are large tears and small tears continually changing into great drops of joy and little drops of joy. Among these large-framed ex- amples of the beauty of fate, there is the unforgettable picture of Mr. Fenton meeting his long-lost Fanny Good- all with whom in the days beyond recall he had played at bob-cherry. Mr. Fenton, after the death of his first wife, in order to solace himself, was extravagant in his affection toward his little cousin Fanny Goodall, who, though ten years of age, fostered within her heart for him the true passion of love of which he was entirely ignorant. Mr. Fenton married again and when he returned from France there was nothing more pathetic than the words of this little girl, who said to her mamma, "If he does not first unmarry himself, I will never see him any more," and refused him admission to her presence; but the little girl still loved him, as she continued to do all her life, though fate, contrary to her choice of heart, compelled her to marry twice. The picture now revealed is that of his meeting her as the beautiful widow, the Countess of Maitland. At the close of the novel we see her no longer framed as such, but as one who had married Marquess D'Aubigny the brother of Louisa, who had been the second wife of Mr. Fenton. Thus Fanny Goodall appears as the grandaunt of the young Moor Abenamin, who, when the disguise is torn from him, proves to be the grand- daughter of Mr. Fenton's dead wife Louisa. Harry, the hero, marries his uncle's granddaughter, who is the grand- niece of Mr. Fenton's long-lost Fanny Goodall. There- fore Mr. Fenton did not quite lose Fanny Goodall ; nor did she quite lose him, creeping as sister-in-law much closer to Brooke's Mr. Fenton 145 Mr. Fenton than Thackeray's Madame de Florae was able to creep in the bonds of flesh to Colonel Newcome. Another picture adorned with crape hangs in Henry Brooke's gallery of pathos. In Richardson's Clarissa Harlowe (1747-48) there are the morbid scenes in which the heroine day after day arranges her coffin and keeps it by her for the hour of the funeral, and the picture before us gives a similar sensational effect, for it is a portrayal of Harry Clinton in his room with a casket in which is the body of his beautiful Pierre (Maria de Lausanne) that he day after day agonizingly can not give to the grave. In order to appreciate the pathos of the picture one must understand that Mr. Fenton, after the death of his second wife Louisa, with Harry had set out to find his dear Fanny Goodall and D'Aubigny. After arriving in Paris, Harry one night attended the theatre to see one of Racine's tragedies; and, at the close of the performance, entering what was supposed to be his own carriage, he was whirled away to what he took to be the edifice in which he and his uncle were staying. Upon entering Harry was ushered into a sumptuous apartment in which he was confronted by a most beautiful princess, an intimate friend of Ma- dame de Maintenon's, who told him that he would have to love her or never be heard of again. From this dreadful dilemma he was rescued by a well-dressed, handsome youth who was named Pierre. Harry and Pierre fled to Mr. Fenton, and the three of them with all the haste possible escaped from France by way of Calais to Dover, under the cliffs of which, as Harry was shot at by a ruffian, Pierre threw himself between the two and received a fatal wound. As Pierre was dying he disclosed his identity as that of Maria de Lausanne, the niece of the bad woman back in Paris. Maria gave up her life for Harry just as Thenardier's daughter sacrificed her life for Marius at the barricades in Victor Hugo's Les 146 Motives in English Fiction Miserables, but with this difference that it was given to Maria to die upon a kiss, while in Hugo the poor girl said, "Kiss me after I am dead, I shall feel it." Thus tragedy sweeps in with sceptred pall until one begins to believe that even Mr. Fenton's philanthropy and purse of For- tunatus do not seem big enough to rid the world of all its manifold miseries. Straying among the minor pictures perhaps one is startled by seeing Fielding's Amelia living again as Mr. Clement's Arabella, who is rushing to share her husband's fate at Fleet prison; and Mr. Clement shows us what Booth ought to have been. Pondering over life's strange vicissitudes made bitter-sweet by Brooke's touch of pathos, we stop before the picture of the old Earl of More- land, the father of Harry Clinton, on the night of his death. The old Earl is revealed on the canvas in strokes prophetic of William De Morgan. In Alice- For -Short one night Old Jane said that her one wish was to die in a dream of the days when she and her husband had walked hand-in-hand in the Paddington fields listening to the carol- ing of the larks. Next morning Old Jane was found dead in bed. In the picture before us the old Earl is saying, ' ' 0, that I were this night, this very moment, to be dissolved and to be with my Christ ! ' ' and this was the night on which "the Earl was quite happy and pleasant and affectionate even beyond his custom. ' ' In the morning he was found dead and his last words had been about the resurrection which was the only part of the Bible Old Jane had cared to read. Henry Brooke produced one other novel Juliet Grenville, or the History oj the Human Heart (1774) which is of little weight. In bridging the gap from Brooke to Mackenzie there is a little piece of fiction in two volumes that can not fail to delight one as he skims along over a minor current of a tendency that was to be one of the contributors to the formation of the formidable rapids in which were "Emmera, or the Fair American" 147 whirled the barks of the revolutionary novelists. The Adventures of Emmera, or the Fair American (1767) cap- tivates the reader by the descriptions of the romantic beauty of the back country near Lake Erie. In a rural bower under jessamines Chetwyn an European man of quality reads a passage about Adam and Eve in Milton to Emmera who has never before met an European except her father. Passionately in love with this beautiful girl, who is unacquainted with the evils of the polished world of civilization, Chetwyn farther reads to her Plutarch and The Spectator in pavilion or boat. Emmera had always remembered how reluctantly her father upon his death- bed in the wilderness had given her over into the guardian- ship of Chetwyn; and, upon reading the newly discovered narrative of her father's life, she remembered his words, "If accident discovers you to an European, the Indians will nobly defend you." Thus the more Chetwyn tries to persuade her, the more Emmera refuses to leave the valley for the environment of Europe that ruined her father. For a long time after this Emmera and Sir Philip Chetwyn hold heated discussions upon the evil and the good aspects of European civilization. At length Colonel Forrester, who hates Chetwyn, comes over to America and succeeds in kidnapping Emmera who had always been safe from any such molestation by the Indians. It is these heroic aborigines who rescue her from Forrester at the critical moment. Therefore, by reason of this ex- perience, she despises more than ever a man of the world. Finally, after listening to Chetwyn 's pleadings, Emmera consents to go back to England. Here at Chetwyn Manor under his guardianship she beholds the craze of English men and women for gambling, observes cruelty to animals, and sees a poacher, who has a wife and three helpless children, sent to prison for life for killing a hare. Filled with the spirit of humanitarianism she ironically exclaims : 148 Motives in English Fiction "These are the people that call the American savages! . . . I have quitted the neighborhood of men to become the com- panion of brutes ! ' ' The ultimatum that at this point is given Chetwyn is that, if he will leave this England of intolerable wickedness, she will become his wife. And Sir Philip capitu- lates returning to live with her in rural bliss in America with virtuous Indians always to be their companions. I must confess that I can not conceive any great liking for the novels of that graduate of the University of Edin- burgh and barrister Henry Mackenzie. His fiction is steeped in the style of the "weeps" dropped by Sterne. It is indeed a painful journey to walk by the side of Mr. Harley who saturates all handkerchiefs, and it is a great relief when the poor fellow falls into a decline. Positive pleasure arises when there is thrust upon him Miss Walton who strikes him stone dead by her unexpected reciproca- tion of love. There is little in The Man of Feeling (1771) but this gossamer plot of sensibility in which is the old trick of the inset story, such as that of Emily Atkins. Nor in Julia de Roubigne (1777) can one take much interest either in the marionettes Savillon and Julia that jump up and down in sentimentalism or in the major puppet Count de Montauban that out of jealousy Othello-like gnaws his nether lip and poisons Julia his wife, who is the angelic doll heroine suspected of infidelity in the melo- drama. In Julia de Roubigne what attracts the reader is buried in the subsidiary episode that tells of Savillon 's humanitarian experiment with negro slaves on the planta- tion in Martinique. Savillon freed his slave Yambu for the purpose of having him direct negroes that had once saluted him as prince in Africa. These negroes under humane treatment and infused with the spirit of their liberty did more than almost double their number subject to the whip of an overseer. Savillon's experiment was successful; for they worked "with the willingness of Mackenzie's "Man of the World" 149 freedom," yet were his "with more than the obligation of slavery." Mackenzie's account of Savillon in Martinique was anticipated in 1 722 by Defoe in the narrative of Colonel Jack, who tells us how as overseer on a Virginia planta- tion he succeeded in the experiment of treating his slaves humanely. Colonel Jack ends his vivid account by saying, we found the fear of being turned out of the plantation had as much effect to reform them, that is to say, make them more diligent, than any torture would have done; and the reason was evident, namely, because in our plantation they were used like men, in the other like dogs. It is in The Man of the World (1773) that one finds Mackenzie's highest grade of work as it centres about the death of the old philosophic Cherokee chief, who, like Cooper's Delaware Chingachgook, dies true to the faith of his ancestors. As one listens to his rhapsody on how death can have no terrors for an Indian who has led no ignoble life, there is a tacit consent to Annesly's comment, "I blushed for the life of Christians." In The Man of Feeling Mackenzie had given his readers an old Indian, who saved the life of Edwards his benefactor, and who reduced his life to poverty for the sake of this man that had freed him from the lash. The farewell words of this old Indian are, "You are an Englishman, but the Great Spirit has given you an Indian heart." In The Man of the World, by an idealization of the Cherokees as they lived a paradisaical existence in the American Colonies, Mackenzie was a precursor of the revolutionary group of novelists such as Thomas Holcroft, Robert Bage, and Mrs. Charlotte Smith. Annesly was so enraptured with his Indian life that it was with great reluctance that he returned to England; and, when he did return, he was shipwrecked on the southwest coast and there almost lost his life as he was beaten back into the surf by the 150 Motives in English Fiction bludgeons in the hands of the wreckers. This part of the novel is a powerful contrast study of the American Indians and the Europeans that endeavors to demonstrate that the French and the English were the real "pauvres sau- vages" who were worse than the worst of the Cherokees. Thus, it can be seen how susceptible Mackenzie was to that revolutionary atmosphere, the pressure of which had been palpable in Emmera, or the Fair American (1767). In The Vicar of Wakefield there are astonishing ad- ventures that tragically involve the good curate who feels called upon to preach a gospel of repentance to sinners even when he is jailed as one of them himself. Generally Dr. Primrose is a good evangelist when he is on the road ; and this Goldsmithian gleefulness of dancing to the tune of tragedy creating comedy is not felt again in English fiction until the rector of Claverton wrote a comic romance in which Mr. Geoffry Wildgoose, a graduate of Oxford, with Jeremiah Tugwell rambles over the western part of England imitating the great revivalist Whitefield to bring about primitive piety, the doctrines of the Reformation, and a new system of religion favorable to Nonconformists and partial to the Methodists. In the Reverend Richard Graves's The Spiritual Quixote (1772) Wildgoose and Jerry set out on their spiritual adventures from their native village on a beauti- ful summer morning. There was an extensive prospect of the rich vale of Evesham, bounded at a distance by the Malvern hills. The towers and spires, which rose amongst the tufted trees, were strongly illuminated by the sloping rays of the sun: and the whole scene was enlivened by the music of the birds ; the responsive notes of the thrushes from the neighboring hawthorns, and the thrilling strains of the skylark, who, as she soared towards the heavens, seemed to be chanting forth her matins to the great Creator of the universe. Graves's "The Spiritual Quixote" 151 But never again on these knights-errant did nature smile so auspiciously. All the way from the Cotswold hills to Bristol in evil report Wildgoose preached to the folk that they should be converted by moving from repentance to faith; and it was high time that he should meet the great Whitefield, who preached from faith to repentance. One of the cleverest strokes in the novel is where Graves takes Wildgoose and the one-toothed cobbler into an upper room at Bristol to interview the confrere of John Wesley's, and his own one-time acquaint- ance at Pembroke College, Oxford, the spiritual White- field, who is revealed to the eyes of his proselytes adorned in a purple nightgown and velvet cap with a plate of well- buttered muffins and a basin of chocolate before him. The knights advance and Tugwell expresses the desire that they wish a little more of his gospel lingo. White- field is at first reluctant to have anything to do with them, and only warms to the situation when he finds out that Wildgoose is an opulent convert. He is then con- vinced that they have received the new birth which, in the case of Jerry, had been produced by colic superinduced by higry-pigry cider. Whitefield then announced that he felt that they were peculiarly called to redeem the poor colliers in Stafford and Shropshire, who certainly belonged to the devil by their subterraneous employment. Before they go, however, Whitefield is determined to show them all the tricks of the profession. Wildgoose is taught that only rich men and ladies are stars of the first magnitude in this kind of evangelistic work. He hears the great Whitefield preach, and imitates his style of oratory. What was natural in Whitefield's speaking became utterly ridiculous as it proceeded from the mouth of Wildgoose. The only genuine convert that he has is a thirteen-year- old girl who claims that she has been "pricked through and through with the word," and at last Wildgoose's 15 2 Motives in English Fiction eloquence causes the meeting to break up in riotous dis- order. After leaving Bristol, Wildgoose, as a revivalist, is un- successful in public and in private, and spiritual bene- dictions rain in upon him in the form of rotten apples ; and, when he is among the colliers, even John Wesley dissuades him from going on in his mad career. To show how far gone Wildgoose is in his delusions, Richard Graves at one place in the novel takes him to the house of Shenstone who had been his old friend at Oxford. Wildgoose and Jerry open the poet's sluices, destroy his cataracts, rural faun, and other bits of inanimate beauties adorning the estate. They believe that Shenstone worships these objects. They can not last out the night in Shenstone' s " Folly," for the whole place reeked of unspiritualization of ideas. At last the summer rambles of Wildgoose, crazy for the light of Methodism as was Smollett's Clinker of 1771, come to an end as he delivers a farewell sermon that comes to an abrupt close by the thump of a decanter which finds the soft spot on his head. The decanter, Dr. Greville, and Julia Townsend, deter him from further continuance in a wrong course of life. He marries Julia Townsend, who more than any one else had been instrumental in pulling him from a death-bed of religious delirium into a sane view of life. This Julia Townsend had had a very unhappy home life, had fed on the romances of the time, knew all about fauns, satyrs, knights, savages, and romantic heroines who because of domestic unhappiness ran away from home to return always in triumph. Miss Townsend, with her head stuffed full of these things, ran away to London, there to find out, by her experience with Mr. Blackman, how few romantic heroines returned to a world of sanity and happiness. Miracles were worked in behalf of Miss Townsend in order that she might be disillusionized so as to become a fit bride for the man she helped restore to Clara Reeve's "Old English Baron" 153 sanity — Mr. GeofTry Wildgoose. This Julia, reminiscent of Mrs. Lennox's Arabella, gives the reader premonitory thrills of those experiences which fell to the lot of Eaton Barrett's extraordinarily romantic Cherubina de Wil- loughby of 1 8 13. It is not at all surprising that Dodsley should have issued the second edition of The Spiritual Quixote with illustrations in three volumes in 1774. Some of the novels of Clara Reeve are The Champion of Virtue, a Gothic Story (1777) (The Old English Baron); The Two Mentors: a Modern Story (1783); The Exiles, or Memoirs of Count de Cronstadt (1788); and The School for Widows: a Novel (1791). Clara Reeve wrote The Old English Baron to remove the toggery of the clap-trap paraphernalia of Gothicism so that the supernatural might be reduced to its proper dimensions. With a pen-knife sharp with simplicity she pared away from the helmet the black feathers, which nodded by moonlight at the window to scare Walpole's Manfred and Isabella, so that one feather remained to be afterwards fastened by Scott over the head of Edgar Ravenswood in the castle of Wolfs- crag; and she cut into ribbons the canvas on which was painted the portrait of Manfred's grandfather, so that he could not heave his chest or jump to the floor, and she took the hinges off all doors that were clapped to by invisible hands. Her postulate of Gothicism seemed to be this: a ghost should be seen once or twice; and a groan, preceding such a visitation, should not be more than thrice repeated. Clara Reeve made it possible for Mrs. RadclirTe to create on the borderland of the supernatural the many groans that make the reader stand by in expectancy of apparitions destined never to disturb the stage of action. The plot of Walpole's Castle of Otranto is a hodge-podge of shudders. Clara Reeve did away with Walpole's shivers and moulded into shape an orderly plot. Arthur Lord Lovel was assassinated by his kinsman Lord Walter 154 Motives in English Fiction Lovel, who in this way secured the coveted estates. After the murder Lord Walter confined his victim's wife in the east apartment in the castle, where within a month she died. From this time on this part of the castle was haunted by the ghosts of Lord Arthur and his wife. It was for this reason that Lord Walter soon sold the castle and estates to his brother-in-law, Fitz-Owen, in whose service was a boy by the name of Edmund Twyford. At length it happened that Baron Fitz-Owen ordered Edmund to sleep three nights in the east apartment. Being an obedient youth Edmund on the second night went thither accompanied by the servant old Joseph and his preceptor Father Oswald ; and it was on this occasion that heaven revealed to the three of them by means of a groan thrice repeated how murder had been committed upon the person buried beneath the floor. Edmund knelt beside the grave and in solemn prayer dedicated his life to finding out the perpetrator of the villainy. At last it is wholly revealed that this Edmund was the lawful heir to the estates, since he was the son of Lord Arthur Lovel. Thus it can be felt that the novel, barring the groans and the ghost, is a tedious story of the days of Henry VI ; but it seems to the reader that Sir Walter Scott with his electric pen must have touched this corpse of prolix stuff so that it jumped to its feet to wander throughout his novels animated with a soul because of his knowing how to blend with an exact sense of proportion that which is genuinely historical with that which is the so-called super- natural as in The Monastery. In other words, Scott took Clara Reeve's apparently dead-born offspring The Old English Baron, chafed its cold body, and breathed the breath of life into it ; and lo ! it leaped up to fold its moon- light wings crosswise on its breast to do obeisance before the "Wizard of the North" as the full-grown, genuine Gothic historical romance. CHAPTER VI Frances Bvirney, Robert Bag'e, Sophia Lee, Thomas Day, "William BecKford, JoKn Moore, Charlotte Smith, and Ann Radcliffe FRANCES BURNEY, in spite of her own expressed wishes, walks through the same field in which Richardson and Fielding left their footprints, and culls the same variety of flowers. In the seizure of Evelina by Sir Clement Willoughby we are back again at Lissom Green with Harriet Byron and Sir Hargrave Pollexfen; and Evelina's adventures as depicted at Vauxhall are only a feeble reproduction of Fielding's vigorous sketch of Amelia's experiences in the Gardens. The spirited quarrel, which occurs in the garden when virtuous Lord Orville sees the rake Sir Clement Willoughby caressing Evelina's hand, and which conveys to the full understanding of the reader that Lord Orville's jealousy from now on means true love, foreshadows the finer technique of that fierce quarrel which ensues when noble Dorriforth sees profligate Lord Frederick Lawnly smothering Miss Milner's hand with kisses and strikes him in Mrs. Inchbald's A Simple Story (1791). Evelina is an improvement upon Mrs. Haywood's The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless. Eve- lina is a thoughtful Betsy, for she never loses her head in the fashionable world at Ranelagh, the Pantheon, Pic- cadilly, Hyde Park, and Kensington Gardens. Though seeming to spend most of her time dressing for balls or i55 156 Motives in English Fiction going to see Garrick at Drury Lane or Congreve's play Love for Love put on, Evelina always has time to pay attention to the advice of Mr. Villars, who can write letters as fine as those written by Jery Melford in Smol- lett's Humphry Clinker (1771); therefore she always favors the gallant Lord Orville and repels the alarming Sir Clement Willoughby. It has been said that Evelina has been poorly plotted, but it seems to the present writer that the story in its warp and woof is as good as anything we have up to 1778 outside of the ordering of the action in Fielding's Tom Jones. And in 1778 literary London applauded Evelina or The History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World because the novel held its readers from first page to last by the excitatory episodes of a plot beclouding the birth of its heroine. Mr. Evelyn, the grandfather of Evelina, married a waiting girl at a tavern. In two years he dies leaving his daughter Caroline to the care of Mr. Villars. Afterwards her mother, who had married Monsieur Duval, sent for her daughter whom she tried to force into marriage with one of her nephews. In this predicament Miss Caroline Evelyn without a witness privately married Sir John Belmont, who, disappointed at the fortune he ex- pected, burned the certificate of marriage, and denied that they had ever been united. His wife threw herself on the mercy of Mr. Villars who tried to help her estab- lish the validity of the marriage, but in vain. She died in giving birth to a daughter, Evelina, who was carefully brought up by her guardian Mr. Villars. At the time of Evelina's birth, the nurse sent her own infant daughter to France to Sir John Belmont, who never suspected the fraud. This changeling was raised as Miss Belmont, the lawful daughter of Sir John. This girl finally appeared at Bristol. Mr. Villars and Evelina's friends cleared up the mystery. By the confession of the nurse, Evelina was Frances Burney's " Evelina" 157 proved to be the legitimate daughter of Caroline Evelyn (Lady Belmont). The movement of this excellent plot however lags by reason of excessive characterization given within the scenes. Frances Burney has endeavored to stage moods according to Congrevian humor exemplified in the peculi- arities of Evelina's suitors. The novel is filled with romanticism and realism. When we are not suffering cardiac depression on account of the frequency of the fainting spells of Evelina, and fearing imminent death as we listen to the pathetic effusions of Macartney the poet, who points pistols at our heads, we transfer our attention to the transactions of the vulgar Branghtons the family living on Snow Hill. From a theatrical point of view the finest scene in the novel is where Evelina is upon her knees before her father. Frances Burney as a histrionic artist gives an excellent example in dramatic hedging so as to make a transfer of sympathy to Sir John Belmont; and, as a represser of denouement in all her novels, she can keep a surprise in store for her reader until the last pages. She seems never to be in a hurry and when the proper time comes she reveals Macartney, the pistol-pointing poet, as Sir John Belmont's illegitimate son. Thirty-six years after Frances Burney had taken literary London by storm, it was not until the fourth volume of The Wanderer (18 14) that she established Ellis or Juliet as the half-sister of Lady Aurora Granville. Evelina had direct influence upon Maria Edge worth, whose Miss Nugent, in The Absentee (18 12), suffered aspersion until the clouds surrounding her birth mystery had been dissipated; and Evelina's sensibility, presaging Cecilia's and Camilla's, was used by Jane Austen to color that of Marianne Dashwood, Catherine Morland, Fanny Price, and Anne Elliot. Also Mrs. Ann Radclifle went to Frances Burney for excessive weepings and blushings ; and 158J Motives in English Fiction these exuberant exhibitions of sensibility continued until Jane Austen quietly soothed these pathological outbursts by the application of the compress of sane sentiment to the skulls of supersensitive heroines. Cecilia; or Memoirs of an Heiress was published in 1782. Cecilia, the heroine of this novel, is deeper substance given to the shadow Evelina by reason of being placed from time to time at the centres of various groups of minor characters, whose excessive obeisance to the queen of the lined-up circles lends a false greatness to the concep- tion of her character. By a kind of legerdemain Frances Burney makes us plunge through great minor charac- ters to an ordinary heroine, who is only extraordinary when she is studied in the light of their extraordinary characteristics. When Cecilia is continually lending money to Mr. Harrel, the gambler, whose wife is given to luxury and society, or when in contact with Mr. Briggs the miser, or Mr. Delvile the devotee of high lineage, or under the pressure of Mr. Monckton, the adjuster, whose old wife refuses to die and leave him her money so that he can marry Cecilia, our heroine seems to be playing up to a part far above all of them. Wonderful pieces of minor characterization are brought to play about her. Through- out the other three novels of Frances Burney there are not such healthy little personalities as Sir Robert Floyer, the despicable gallant, who would marry Cecilia so as to pay off gambling debts incurred by Mr. Harrel; the vivacious, gift-of-gab Miss Larolles; the imperious Miss Leeson; the tell-tale Lady Honoria Pemberton; the ob- sequious Morrice; the lackadaisical Meadows; the ambi- tious Mr. Belfield who never knows how to get on in life ; and the lovable Albany who is always descanting on the vices of the rich and moving in regions of poverty to relieve its victims. The scenic work in Cecilia is an improvement on that Frances Burney's "Cecilia" 159 in Evelina. The suicide of Harrel at Vauxhall after he has given a banquet to his creditors is intensely dramatic; and Cecilia steps forward from the box in the Gardens as much the mistress of the situation as Jane Austen's Anne Elliot when Miss Musgrove fell from the Cobb at Lyme. The storm scene is also good; and, as the external world thus draws two lovers closer together, there is the pre- figurement of the thunder-roll that affected Charlotte Bronte's Rochester and Jane Eyre and George Eliot's Ladislaw and Dorothea, who, in the library as the light- ning flashes, child-like approaches Ladislaw to tell him that she loves love and even his poverty, and that above everything she has learned to hate her own wealth. The marriage ceremony of Delvile and Cecilia that is inter- rupted in the church by a feminine voice is a hasty- pudding affair when it is contrasted with that in Jane Eyre. Any girl with spirit in her would have gone on with the ceremony and would have become the wife of Delvile because no explanation at the time is given by the woman who protests against it. The greatest scene of all according to Fanny Burney's opinion is that of the great appeal that Mrs. Delvile makes for the renunciation of Cecilia's happiness. She makes a tremendous fight for her son bursting a blood-vessel in order to gain her point. The lovers are to be sacrificed for the sake of pride and prejudice. Mrs. Radcliffe was susceptible to the same idea in The Italian (1797) when she has the Marchesa di Vi- valdi go so far as to attempt the removal of Ellena di Rosalba to save her boy from what she thought would be a misalliance. The mad scene at the end of the novel in which Cecilia goes distraught, because of being misunder- stood by her husband, is singularly effective. In delirium, locked in a room until Albany brings Delvile to the rescue, she almost classifies herself as one of the mad ladies in English fiction. But she manages to survive this fit of i6o Motives in English Fiction temporary insanity to gain Lady Delvile's affection and round out a happy married life. It seems to me that the last part of Cecilia is an episodic series of fireworks going off in pin wheel fashion. One can not escape the conclusion that the merit of the whole novel lies not so much in the depiction of Cecilia as in the extended characterization given the minor characters within the scenes. Camilla; or, A Picture of Youth in five volumes was published in London in 1796. Fanny D'Arblay's dedica- tion to the Queen and a long list of the names of sub- scribers form prefatory matter to the first volume; thus, the Queen might have whiled away an idle hour as requested in the dedication. The novel is a strange med- ley. In the parsonage-house of Etherington, Hampshire, Camilla Tyrold lives with her two sisters, Eugenia and Lavinia, and a brother called Lionel. Camilla's uncle Sir Hugh Tyrold, of Yorkshire, comes into the neighbor- hood bringing with him his niece Indiana Lynmere and his nephew Clermont. We are straightway introduced to a young man Edgar Mandlebert, a ward of Camilla's father. Then begin the startling small occurrences of the novel. Eugenia takes the smallpox to be pitted for life. A mad bull secretly tormented by Lionel causes a panic among the women. Indiana flees to the arms of Melmond, a handsome young fop, who blurts out, "Alas! I trespass . . . I blush"; and, as he gazed upon Indiana, "passionate devotion was glaring from his look," and the reader can not help but make a comparison between this Oxonian and the bull previously mentioned. In volume two there is little of consequence except the humorous way in which Othello is put on by an illiterate troupe who are exceedingly effective in their dialect. The rustic Moor of Venice, as he bends with his candle to slay his slattern Des- demona, brings down the house by having his hair catch on fire just at the point where he is putting out the light Frances Burney's "Camilla" 161 of his life. But at this terrible moment the audience is hurled into still deeper tragedy by the announcement of the fact that Camilla's uncle is dying. In volume three we take a walk by moonlight near Tunbridge to gaze at a fair incognita upon a wild, roman- tic common. A lane is also traversed which is rendered beautiful "by the strong masses of shades with which the trees intercepted the resplendent whiteness of the moon." Not long after this Camilla becomes strangely interested in a cage containing a bullfinch around which is floating a sentiment such as encircled Sterne's starling. Then Lionel steals the draft that throws his sister into debt which ultimately causes Edgar's desertion of Camilla and the imprisonment of her father. Lionel was the com- piicator of the tragedy of little boresome things. Im- prudence and suspicion cause Camilla and Edgar to be separated; and, as a result, as the heroine approaches Southampton, she refuses even Mrs. Radcliffe's tonic. She does indeed observe the beauties of nature, but will not by these agencies dispel disappointment. Camilla is almost a sublimated Radclifnan heroine, for Madame D'Arblay writes, "A fine country, and diversified views, may soften even the keenest affliction of decided misfor- tune, and tranquillize the most gloomy sadness into resig- nation and composure; but suspense rejects the gentle palliative." Mrs. Berlinton of romantic sentiment with a copy of Collins from which she is reading an ode shows that Madame D'Arblay was susceptible to the Radcliffian breeze that was blowing at the time of the composition of Camilla. At Southampton there is a culminating series of small tragic episodes such as sweep one on to Jane Austen's territory. A bull-dog becomes much interested in Edgar and Melmond. Haider and Lord Vilhurst make an attack on a bath-house. A waiter is switched in public. Yachting and dancing constitute the life of insipid women 162 Motives in English Fiction and men. A forced marriage takes place when Bellamy makes Eugenia believe that he will kill himself, if she does not go to the altar with him. Melodrama becomes bathos as the reader with Camilla looks at the blood-stained body of Bellamy to rejoice that Eugenia is a widow. Melmond, having learned the difference between a beautiful face in front of a marred mind such as Indiana possessed and a pitted face behind which was a soul not contracted at the center, was glad to fling aside Indiana to take Eugenia whom he had at first rejected. Indiana marries Macder- sey, the light counterpart of herself; and Edgar, notwith- standing all that Dr. Marchmont his adjuster and adviser had said against Camilla, finally decides to take in wedlock this bundle of sensibility, this bucket of tears, this well full of faintings, shudderings, and deliriums. Camilla and Cecilia, so far as the tragedy of being misunderstood is concerned, are the forerunners of Fanny Price and Anne Elliot. From 1802 to 18 12 Madame D'Arblay was in France where undisturbed in any way by the course of political movements she seems to have been able to complete one half of The Wanderer; or Female Difficulties, which, after her return to England, was finished and published in five volumes in 18 14. This novel, if it is not so good as Evelina or Cecilia, is superior to Camilla. There is acceler- ated motion as one flits with Ellis, the fair incognita, from France to Dover and to Brighthelmstone, where Elinor Joddrel with new systems on education, religion, and the rights of women, acquired from imbibing French revolutionary doctrines, proposes to Albert Harleigh in the presence of the beautiful incognita who, to prevent Elinor's poniarding herself, says that she never can accept the hand of Harleigh. Albert, thinking that it was a ruse on the part of Ellis, is sure that he has won the heart of the wanderer and with consternation receives the surprise- Frances Burney's "The Wanderer" 163 blow of the ultimatum delivered by the incognita who would have him flee her presence as one would flee destruction. The reader is hurried on to Vanbrugh and Cibber's The Provoked Husband put on as a private theatrical to which Sussex ladies and gentlemen have been invited to see Ellis assume the part of Lady Townley. She proved to be such a good actress that certain gentlemen fell in love with her; and Lord Melbury's attack on Ellis is as good a piece of guesswork as the tense Act III in Pinero's The Gay Lord Quex; for in each of these great scenes we do not know whether the girl to preserve herself from a rake is going to ring the bell or not. To save herself, Ellis flees from her fast manoeuvring lovers to set herself up as a professor of music. She possesses a good voice, but fares worse than Mirah in Daniel Deronda. In a hotel concert room the crazed Elinor in disguise advances before the audience to stab herself in order to have the pleasure of having Ellis witness a sought-for death in Harleigh's arms. The desire on the part of a girl to die in the arms of the man she loves seems to have been in the air. The suspected wife dies in her husband's arms in this manner in Mrs. Opie's Valentine's Eve (1816); Emily Arundel dies convulsively in Edward Lorraine's arms in Letitia Landon's Romance and Reality (1831) ; and Catha- rine Linton has her last conscious moment of happiness and of agony in Heathcliff's arms in Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights (1847). This farcically formal Elinor on a sick bed quoting "Glory, Love, . . . and Harleigh" from Addison's Cato is the exponent of those who, at that time, would set aside long, old, and hereditary prejudices by atheistical and suicidal doctrines. In a delirium of delusions she represents those who lamented that stupid rationality reigned instead of Robespierre's bodkins, poniards, and 164 Motives in English Fiction & j guillotines. She plays splendidly the role of a tragi- comedy queen. She is Sophia Lee's frenzied Ellinor playing the part of the hysterical Lady Delacour of Maria Edgeworth's in the disguise of Cherubina of Eaton Bar- rett's novel of 1 8 13. Nursing an erroneous idea that Juliet (Ellis) and Harleigh intended to elope, Elinor is seen shrouded as a ghost in a graveyard; and, when detected by Juliet and Harleigh, flees to the altar in the church where she has secreted two pistols with which she nearly kills herself so that the lovers can have "sweet reciproca- tion." Possibly Lady Morgan's The Wild Irish Girl (1806) in which the hero proposes to Glorvina in a church- yard may have had something to do with the production of such romantic melodrama. This fair incognita (Ellis- Juliet) weeps oftener than Camilla or any of Mrs. Radcliffe's heroines and her cheeks are oftener crimson with sensibility. As a result of being continually pursued by Lord Melbury and Albert Har- leigh she flees to London, to Soho to her beloved Gabriella's arms and a milliner's shop. It is at this time that the reader from the lips of the magnificent old beau Sir Jaspar learns that Juliet may possibly be the daughter of the late Lord Granville and a granddaughter of the late Earl of Melbury. And while pondering over the legiti- macy of the birth of Juliet and as to whether or not she is a married woman, the reader becomes aware that the im- pulsive heroine has abandoned London to exhale the "odoriferous salubrity" of the New Forest. On a hillock, Juliet, chastened by the loneliness and silence of the gay luxuriance of scenery, watches the zephyrs "agitate the verdant foliage" of aged oaks whose venerable branches offer shelter from the storms of life. She looks toward the "benignant west" and listens to the "extatic wild notes of the feathered race." Nature, reflection, and heaven were all her own. Nature and religion become one in Frances Burney's "The Wanderer" 165 restoring tranquillity and cheerfulness to this troubled innocent. Later, after a Radcliffian experience in a peasant's hut that causes Juliet to "bathe her bloody- hand in dew," Madame D'Arblay takes the heroine into the region of lonely, mystic beauty in the neighborhood of a Gothic church around which is blowing a ' ' salubrious breeze" that seems to be permeated with the primitive integrity and fragrant serenity of the well-disposed rustics living in the adjacent parts. At this place Fanny D'- Arblay would show that English farmers are oblivious of the beauties of nature. After a careful study of shep- herd life in rural England the authoress sees no earthly paradise in the pastoral walks. Nature is zero to torpid swains. No one can enjoy nature in the country unless one goes there with culture and money. At last we are ready to pick up volume five to have the mystery of Juliet rapidly explained in a few pages. At an inn Juliet is seized by her French husband in the presence of Albert Harleigh, who is permitted for the first time to comprehend that his ideal beauty is in the bonds of a hateful marriage. Juliet is rescued from her husband by the humorous old beau Sir Jaspar, to whom she tells the terrible story of how she had been forced to marry the French commissary. It is here that Madame D'Arblay produces the guillotine. We see the executioner holding aloft the head of one unfortunate victim. Among those who are bound prepared for the knife is the good bishop, the brother of Juliet's good friend the Marchioness; and in order to save him Juliet submits to a hurly-burly French Revolutionary marriage. After this marriage ceremony she had succeeded in escaping from her husband and had fled to England in the manner which the reader already knows. At the end of the novel this dutiful heroine is ready to go back to France to this hated husband to save the bishop who seems not to have received his pass- 166 Motives in English Fiction port to safety according to agreement. All at once the hurried execution of her husband relieves the situation. Thus the "citoyenne Julie," the wanderer, after many female difficulties, having been proved to be the lawful half-sister of Lady Aurora Granville, is married to Har- leigh. Poor Elinor resignedly accepts the fate of unre- quited love, since she had been won over by Harleigh to accept a belief in a life beyond the grave and was no longer the wild enthusiast believing in "there is no God" of Robespierre. Mrs. Charlotte Smith in 1792 in Desmond had balked the guillotine; in 18 14 Madame D'Arblay brings us to the scaffold, but we do not actually see the knife descend ; and it was not to descend until Bulwer in 1842 and Dickens in 1859 placed under it the necks of Zanoni and Sidney Carton. In passing from Frances Burney's first novel to the first published novel of Robert Bage's, one is compelled to notice that Thomas Holcroft had attempted fiction in Alwyn (1780), which is a pastiche of Smollett and Fielding. This Thomas Holcroft was a kind of an English Marat, an electric spark illuminating a thin bag of filth. He was a revolutionary who extolled free-thinking, free-living, and advocated dancing to ca ira on English soil. His radical views, socialistic and anarchistic, were the result of reading Rousseau and plunging into studies on French social theories. Alwyn was followed by Anna St. Ives (1792) and Hugh Trevor (1794-97). In the same year that his doctrinaire novel Anna St. Ives was published, there appeared his drama The Road to Ruin wherein is old Dornton the banker spoiling his son by alternate indul- gence and sternness. As a dramatist Holcroft was a success, but not as a novelist. His helpfulness to English fiction was little only as one concedes that, without his anarchistical ideas, the great William Godwin could not have promulgated doctrines antagonistic to the noblesse Robert Bage's "Hermsprong" 167 represented by the moneyed aristocrat Falkland in Caleb Williams (1794). The novels of Robert Bage according to dates of pub- lication are Mount Henneth (1781); Barham Downs (1784); The Fair Syrian (1787); James Wallace (1788); Man As He Is (1792); and Hermsprong; or, Man As He Is Not (1796). Hermsprong, in two volumes, has been regarded for many years as the most typical production of Bage's. It seems to the present writer that any one of the other novels of Bage is its superior. There is tediousness everywhere in dull Devonshire on the borders of Cornwall. There is a Sir Henry Campinet who, at the age of sixty, becomes Lord Grondale. There are three girls, Sir Henry's daughter Miss Caroline, a Harriet Sumelin, and a Char- lotte Sumelin, who have plenty of money and nothing to do. At length Miss Caroline finds that she has something to do to save her own life at a ledge of rocks. Her pre- server is Hermsprong, the great discourser on comparative happiness and the rights of man. All at once Lord Grondale becomes Hermsprong's enemy. When volume two is opened there stalks forth the figure of Sir Philip Chestrum, who seems to be violently in love with Miss Caroline. The reader then is told that Miss Caroline will lose her fortune, if she marries Hermsprong ; and that she will get it all, if she marries Sir Philip. Caroline rejects Philip ; then the awe-inspiring picture is presented of Lord Grondale striking his daughter, preferring this kind of blow to that of riveting her to the man he most detests. Hermsprong is then accused of being a spy and a prime mover of the late sedition and riot. Denouement — Hermsprong is ascertained to be the son of Sir Charles Campinet, elder brother of Lord Grondale. Hermsprong's uncle is quickly removed by means of a dishonorable death. The estate and Caroline are thrown into the arms of Hermsprong. The whole novel is a thing of shreds and 168 Motives in English Fiction & j patches, and it is to Barhatn Downs that the reader must turn to see Bage at his best. Robert Bage in Barham Downs (1784), which is in the form of letters, gives us such natural characters as Justice James Whitaker and his two daughters Peggy and Anna- bella, Lord Winterbottom, Sir Ambrose Archer, Mr. Delane the parson, Thomas Parrett the keeper of St. George, and Polly Parrett his plump, black-eyed daughter. Annabella in one place in the novel lies concealed in her father's closet for a long period, by this method making her father think that she had run away from home in order to escape Lord Winterbottom. Later, after a month's stay in Lord Winterbottom 's house, she comes forth quite untainted by the atmosphere; and, as one further pursues her, he gets good glimpses of fashionable resorts and bits of London high-life as he paces by her side to see her at length tumble headlong, in spite of her father's wishes, into the marital arms of Sir George Os- mond. But it is not in the story of these individuals that Bage proves himself a talented novelist. It is rather in the sad story Kitty Ross told to Isaac Arnold, the shrewd Quaker, of how she was ruined at the hands of the honor- able Mr. Corrane that there is the realization of a move- ment of revolutionary ideas on woman's honor and the marriage problem. Kitty relates how she was betrayed, and the auditor is a Quaker as shrewd as Defoe's William Walters. This kindly Isaac Arnold is the author, Bage in disguise, who would reconstruct a girl's life without consulting society. He philosophically shows that a woman with a past can rehabilitate herself in another country, and that sometimes this restored honor can safely pass muster even if the woman comes back to the land that knows her past. Bage makes one realize in a startling manner how a betrayed woman can be honest, remain pure, and thereby regain a place in respectable society. Robert Bage's "Barham Downs" 169 After Mr. Arnold had heard all that Kitty had to tell him, he placed her in the keeping of a family in Dublin, thus making it possible for her to become not only the best woman in Ireland, but the happiest woman in England when she married Mr. William Wyman. It was by this introduction of such a daring theme that Mrs. Charlotte Smith could venture to portray in a deli- cate manner the purity of the love that Mrs. Geraldine Verney, a married woman, had for Mr. Desmond in Desmond (1792). The repentance of the honorable Mr. Corrane when he was dying at St. Lucia, and the legacy of two thousand pounds left by him to Kitty, show the "Let this expiate!" of Richardson's Lovelace. It was such a novel as Barham Downs that possibly caused Mary Brunton to write Self-Control (1810) which closes with a dying rascal repentantly writing from foreign parts. Bage sees everything from the easy-going foreigner's liberal point of view in regard to woman ; and his ideas at the time he wrote were regarded as inimical to any code of morality, especially when he says, "Thy error, Kitty, is of little magnitude, " and aids her in retrieving herself by averring that, when no one knows when honor is lost, honor never has been lost at all. Everything is kept under cover and that is why Kitty emerges as a respectable member of society. Bage in 1784 anticipated the French Revolutionists in carrying aloft the fallen woman, and endeavored to inculcate the idea that the social unit, instead of killing her, should give her another chance. While Bage was producing novels there appeared The Recess; or a Tale of Other Times (1783-86) of Sophia Lee's which in many respects is similar to Scott's Kenilworth (1821). Matilda, the daughter of the Duke of Norfolk and Mary Stuart, and the twin sister of Ellinor's, like Amy Robsart, was secretly married to Lord Leicester. Only once was Matilda permitted to see the matchless 170 Motives in English Fiction beauty of her mother who had been imprisoned for eigh- teen years. At Coventry through a grated window the reader sees Mary Queen of Scots walking in the garden with her arms around the necks of the two attendant maids. In pale purple the Queen moves regally in suffering and resignation, bearing well her only ornaments — the beads and the cross. Matilda and Ellinor receive one blessed look from the fine eyes that fail to recognize the daughters ; and the reader, as Matilda swoons in her sister's arms, in imagination passes from this prison at Coventry to the fair face seen in Lochleven Castle when Lindesay forces Mary to abdicate the throne of Scotland in Scott's The Abbot. Then Sophia Lee carries one to Kenil worth Castle in which Queen Elizabeth is holding court. In the hall, adorned with high-arched Gothic windows through which can be seen a beautiful lake covered with ornamented boats, moves the haughty, smiling, sharp-eyed Elizabeth. The onlooker examines the countenance of the amiable Sidney and the troubled features of the great Leicester. Along with Matilda the reader leaves this room of purple drapings fringed with gold and the statues to go to the grotto inlaid with shells and mirrors to see the Nereids receive the Lady of the Lake (Queen Elizabeth) as she comes to them seated on a throne in a boat scooped out like a shell. The scene reminds one of that in which Queen Elizabeth suddenly stumbles upon Amy Robsart in the grotto in Kenilworth. Then comes unhappiness at Elizabeth's court. Matilda is compelled to flee to the Recess which opportunely is revealed by a heaven-sent flash of lightning. Hard upon the news of the death of Mary Stuart, Queen Elizabeth is seen in one of her tantrums hitting Ellinor on the temple with a violently flung book. Ellinor, though loving Essex, had been forced to marry Lord Arlington. Upon being Sophia Lee's "The Recess" 171 sent to the block by Queen Elizabeth, Essex had given his final blessing to Ellinor. In consequence of this dastardly- deed of Elizabeth's Ellinor lost her reason, and in madness one night glided into the closet to confront and denounce Elizabeth for the murder of Essex. This denunciation of Elizabeth by mad Ellinor anticipates by forty years the strength of the great denunciation of Leicester by angry Elizabeth in Kenilworth. Mad Ellinor disappears from the novel in a very sensational manner, dying in front of the picture that represented Essex at the storming of Cadiz. Matilda with her daughter Mary after many sad wanderings returned from France to England, hoping to marry this girl of hers to Henry, the son of James I. But Mary became a widow ere yet a wife by Henry's early death. Then, in ecstasy of domestic joy of anticipa- tion of favors from an interview with James I, Matilda dressed up her Mary to go before the monarch. The coach in which mother and daughter were riding was not, however, driven to court, but to prison. Thus Matilda unexpectedly awaked from her dream of bliss to be plunged into the utmost woes of maternal pathos. It at length is revealed that this daughter Mary by reason of her connection with Somerset had been responsible for the death of Henry, and retributive justice forced this grand- daughter of the Duke of Norfolk and Mary Stuart to find death in the arms of her mother Matilda who sub- sequently died of a broken heart in France, where her own mother had once been extremely happy. Thus Sophia Lee shows the force of heredity which carries us back to Moll Flanders, the daughter of a criminal. Ma- tilda's daughter had the ill-fated Stuart blood in her veins. Sophia Lee then deserves recognition, even though she moves miserably in history, because there had been no historical novel of note since Thomas Leland's Longsword, Earl of Salisbury (1762), and for the contribution of a 172 Motives in English Fiction mad heroine and for the use she made of the law of heredity. As Susan E. Ferrier in a small way went over the Scott territory of studies in Scotch life, and because of this can be considered a poor after-runner of Scott, so Sophia Lee as a poor forerunner of Scott went over his historical territory, making it possible for him to erect Kenilworth Castle on the ruins of the same structure as seen in The Recess. In passing from Sophia Lee to William Beckford there is Sandjord and Merton (1783-89) that was written by that eccentric Thomas Day, who, by imposing the educa- tional system, inspired by Rousseau, upon the young girl that he had adopted and was training in his own house- hold with the view of eventually making her his wife, lost her by the mistake of a muslin dress. Sandjord and Merton was not, however, written for this girl, but was written for the purpose of inculcating manliness in any British boy by sending him back to study the simplicity of his own nature and that of the external world. The good Mr. Barlow and young Harry Sandford at last succeeded in developing the spoiled Tommy Merton into a perfect character. Thomas Day's high educational ideal which was attained by Tommy Merton seems to have been this, that it is better "to be useful than rich or fine, ' ' and that it is far better "to be good than to be great." Another noticeable feature of the book is the figure of ' ' the honest Black ' ' who emerges as a hero in the bullfight to project the reader past Maria Edgeworth's story The Grateful Negro (1802) to Harriet Martineau's The Hour and the Man (1840). Vathek is an oriental tale "before which, " as Lord Byron has said, "even Rasselas must bow." William Beckford hurriedly wrote the novel in French in 1782, and contrary to his injunction it was published in English in 1786 by the Reverend Samuel Henley. After Vathek was published, William Beckford's "Vathek" 173 William Beckford at Fonthill Abbey was shunned by those living outside his high walls. People gradually spread the rumor that he was like his own Giaour, and that he was guilty of all the sins committed by his Caliph. After 1822 when he retired to Bath to Lansdowne House, which had a tower that he erected to the height of one hundred and fifty feet, and which had a magnificent museum containing works of art, and an adjacent garden adorned with beautiful statuary, it is not to be wondered at that even the poet Tennyson, who had become sus- ceptible to the public opinion of that day, deemed him as a kind of superman or Gottmensch typifying that art culture which is all failure, when a dilettante sits in his gallery or at the top of his tower as a god "holding no form of creed, but contemplating all." To-day, however, thanks to the studies of Lewis Melville, we know that all these evil reports about Beckford were without founda- tion and that he was a noble artist, never at any time liv- ing sans moral obligations. In Beckford's masterpiece, Caliph Vathek and the princess Nouronihar gave them- selves up completely to the pleasures of the sense world. Eblis and the accursed Dives lured the two sinners on to the entrance of the infernal world beyond the mountains of Istakar. From the seventh heaven not even Mahomet by the music of the good genius could from these portals turn back, "the one, with the thousand of the blackest crimes, the thousand projects of impious ambition, . . . the other with the desolation of her family and the perdition of the amiable Gulchenrouz." All their goodness of heart had died away with the sad strains of the flute. The doom of Vathek and Nouronihar is unshunnable. When in the hall of Eblis we see the unfortunate couple putting their hands over their hearts, in which are visible terrible bonfires fanned by the breezes of their past vol- uptuous loves, there is the realization that for similar 174 Motives in English Fiction workings of wicked human hearts we must wait until in Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter there comes along the scene in which little Pearl throws burs from the graveyard at the breast of Arthur Dimmesdale, who instinctively puts his hand over his heart, into the crystal of which Roger Chillingworth at his side for some time has been looking and adding fuel to the flames, which are burning it up as well as his own in endless misery. In the same year that Vathek was published, Dr. John Moore sent forth Zeliico which he warned everybody not to read. By this clever ruse the public for a time centred its attention upon the villain Zeluco, who carried tragedy with him wherever he went in Sicily, Madrid, and in Cuba. In Havana this cruel and avaricious Sicilian was an inhuman slaveholder, believing that the Bible author- izes slavery. His whole career up to the time that he re- turned to Palermo and Naples had been that of a breaker of women's hearts. The scene of his last and worst crime was at Naples where he made love to Laura, the daughter of Madame de Seidlits. This heroine for a time repelled his advances. Zeluco tried to enlist the services of the church in this matrimonial venture and was aided by a monk who subtly helped him to save Laura from manu- factured banditti on the slopes of Vesuvius. By the loss of the Seidlits money Laura was compelled to change her tactics to please her own mother and the church, and reluctantly consented to be married privately to the scoundrel to whom she shortly bore a son. Nerina, a wicked wench, so contrived circumstantial evidence as to make the monster Zeluco believe that his boy was not his babe but the child of Laura and Captain Seidlits, his wife's half-brother. Then the melodramatic scene is presented of Zeluco in the act of strangling to death his little son in the presence of his wife. As a breaker of women's hearts Zeluco lends clarity to the characteriza- Dr. John Moore's "Zeluco" 175 tion of Thomas Hope's Greek cut-throat Anastasius, whose atrocious deeds caused the death of his darling boy Alexis; and Moore's monk, who astutely contrived schemes whereby Zeluco could win Laura, faintly fore- shadows the diabolic Ambrosio of Matthew Lewis's and the terrible Schedoni of Mrs. Ann Radcliffe's. Zeluco in his earlier years had learned the art of murder by strang- ling a sparrow. In George Eliot's Daniel Deronda we see young Gwendolen Harleth strangling a canary because of its disagreeable voice, and by such an act learning later how to strangle her husband in the waters of the Medi- terranean off Genoa. No rope could be thrown by Gwen- dolen to Grandcourt for his doom had been arranged at the time of the cruel exit of the canary. Dr. Moore's other novels Edward (1796) and Mordaunt (1800) have become half-forgotten bits of inconsequential stuff; but Zeluco is still read. It is wholesome to note the anti-revolutionary idea of separation instead of divorce extended by Dr. Moore to the women of the year 1786. Laura determined to bide her time until the death of Zeluco so that Heaven could happily marry her to Baron Carolstein. In this respect Laura is the prototype of Mrs. Geraldine Verney who remained faithful to her brutal husband until his death freed her for the expectant, wor- shiping, good man Desmond, created in 1792 by Mrs. Charlotte Smith. The writings in fiction of the reactionary Mrs. Char- lotte Smith are Emmeline, the Orphan of the Castle (1788) ; Ethelinde, the Recluse of the Lakes (1789) ; Celestina (1792) ; Desmond (1792); The Old Manor House (1793); and The Wanderings of Warwick, The Banished Man, and Montal- bert, which were published between 1794 and 1795. In 1796 she ceased her fictional work by producing her last novel Marchmont. In Desmond the French Revolution is discussed by the characters, but it does not involve them 176 Motives in English Fiction in its thrilling incidents. In this respect Mrs. Charlotte Smith lost a great opportunity, since she easily could have turned the novel into A Tale of Two Cities. It is too bad that we can get no more than Month 1 euri's preachments on the Revolution as procuring peasant happiness, and that La Guillotine never appears. Desmond loves a married woman just as Charles Dickens's Sidney Carton does, and always flees from the object of his love as far as he is able. One can not keep from asking this question : Did the drunken, debauched Verney insulting his wife and children while execution on chatties is going on in his house suggest to Dickens the dissolute Sidney Carton? After Desmond heard of the total ruin of Verney he has a conference with Geraldine, but his sober judgment and high ideal of manhood make him leave Hertfordshire for Bath and France. Not long after this, as Louis and Marie Antoinette were in flight to Varennes, Desmond heard that Verney had sold his wife so that the Due de Romagne- court, like a Pollexfen, could carry her off to Paris. It is at this point of the novel that Mrs. Geraldine Verney in the wildest part of Auvergne is seen stepping forth from a chaise to enter a solitary posthouse filled with fierce banditti, male and female, who were the agents of the Due de Romagnecourt ; and, as Geraldine was about to be killed by a long knife in the hands of a terrible-eyed beldame, a figure covered with blood rushed into the room, staggered toward the chimney and fell at her feet. Then another form entered the room recognizable as Lionel Desmond, who has gallantly rescued the heroine by pis- toling the banditti. As has already been suggested this scene reminds us of Count Fathom when he escaped from the banditti in the solitary cottage on the road to Paris, of Mary amid flashes of lightning rescued by Alleyn in the ruined abbey from the outlaws in Mrs. RadclifTe's The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789); and by it we are Mrs. Charlotte Smith's "Desmond" 177 prepared for a similar scene in the cave of the pirates in The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). The novel closes with the death of the brute Verney and with Desmond im- patiently awaiting the end of his year of probation so that he can be married to the angelic widow. Mrs. Charlotte Smith in this novel shows that the nobility in England believed that a counter-revolution in France would severely punish the canaille and set all to rights. She hints at the fact that no woman in distress in England could gain a living as a beggar on the street because at once it would be thought that she had come from France. Lionel was set down as a country squire for taking sides with the revolution. Mrs. Charlotte Smith wished for the success of a cause which, as she saw it in its consequences, involved the freedom and the happiness, not merely of a great people, but of the universe. She clearly depicts a priest-trodden people. She did not believe that the church had any right to extort money from ignorant peasants to keep alive aching hearts behind stone walls. Mrs. Smith points to Montrleuri as an ideal chdteau-er whose menial system was fine, since the deserted convent was put to use as an abode for the superannuated. She portrays a count who had determined to leave France because the drawing of his great genealogical tree had been pruned of all its visionary honors by the National Assem- bly. Mrs. Smith is fearless enough to state that Burke's Thoughts on the Revolution could be regarded as "a trea- tise in favor of despotism, written by an Englishman." Through the mouth of the puppet character Montfleuri Mrs. Smith eloquently defends the doctrines of the Revolutionists. Her boldness of 1792 makes for a realiza- tion of what it meant for William Godwin to be forced to withdraw his revolutionary and sanguinary preface to the first edition of Caleb Williams (1794). By 1795 Godwin felt that he was in no danger of being regarded as a traitor, 178 Motives in English Fiction and so the preface, finding no opposition, was printed in the second edition of Tilings As They Are (1796). In The Old Manor House the heroine is Monimia an orphan who since the age of four had been taken care of by her great-aunt Mrs. Lennard at Rayland Hall, which was occupied by its owner Mrs. Rayland, the only survivor of the three co-heiresses of Sir Hildebrand Rayland. Orlando, the youngest son of Mr. Somerive, had been Monimia's playmate at the Hall. This association of Monimia and Orlando was frowned upon and hindered as much as possible by the withered, eccentric, little Mrs. Rayland, who boasted that her family blood had never except in one case mingled itself with that of tradespeople, and by Mrs. Lennard who possessed the wonderful ability of flinging Billingsgate into the ears of the youthful lovers. The first volume of the novel is largely filled with the clandestine meetings between Orlando and Monimia in the octagon turret. Then things are livened up a little by a ghost that walks in the chapel that can say "now- now, " and by a human face that seems to be a super- natural agent bent on disturbing their nocturnal happiness. This part of the novel is illuminated at times by the torch- light that was flourished by Mrs. Radcliffe, when she wished to make a brilliant excursion into the crypts of her castles. When Orlando captures Jonas Wilkins and swings him into the light, the human face is revealed as that of this smuggler. Monimia is an unusually quiet and demure heroine, at one time enduring the mutilation of her arm and at another time scorching both arms because, forsooth, she had become impervious to pain by reason of the magic of the modulated tones of her lover's voice. At this juncture pressure is brought to bear on Orlando so that he is com- pelled to enlist in the army to go to America to fight against the Colonists; and, in Orlando's agony about Mrs. Smith's "Old Manor House" 179 giving up Monimia, the reader is forced into depression of spirits along with the hero. As the moon throws a long line of trembling radiance on the water, Orlando is re- vealed in front of a forest of black firs attuning himself to the dull pausing of nature in November to relieve himself by delivering an autumnal soliloquy one page in length. Mrs. Smith manages the pathetic fallacy with some skill so that the reader somehow creates within himself a somnolent sympathy for Orlando as nature shrouds him with a solemnity not unpleasant, since it comes from a mixture of the dusk of sunset and moonlight. It furnishes a recollection of Mary in Mrs. Radcliffe's The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789), when she received the back- ground of a "wood whose awful glooms well accorded with the pensive tone of her mind." In the study of Orlando as he is on the way to America Mrs. Smith, pointing to the ill-fed soldiers on the trans- ports, some of which went down in a storm because of their unseaworthiness, blushes for an ill-managed, unjust war which England was waging against the Colonies. When Orlando, who served with General Burgoyne, was captured by the Indians to be saved by the kindness of Wolf-hunter, a sort of Oroonoko, and when the colonists were scalped and killed by the Indians basely employed by the British, Mrs. Smith blushes for England's tactics toward her own flesh and blood. In this novel Mrs. Smith's hostile attitude toward her bloody countrymen, who fought against the Americans simply because of the King's money, is an echo of the same principles that were advocated in Desmond; and not only was she an adverse critic of England's political ideas, but endeavored within the field of her own profession to write novels that would be an antidote to the poison of the soft semblance of refined sentiment extant in novels which were apologies for suicide, conjugal infidelity, the derision of parental 180 Motives in English Fiction authority, and attacks against religion. Moreover, Mrs. Smith was wholly unlike Fanny Burney since she believed that young girls of that time, if at all meditative, should never pick up the hurtful volumes of Richardson and Fielding. In leaving Mrs. Charlotte Smith, I am firmly convinced that she established a modern tone setting for the natural description of the external world as early as 1788. When Emmeline, the orphan, for the first time leaves Mowbray Castle in Wales, and casts one longing, lingering look be- hind from the chaise, there bursts upon her sight through the gradually withdrawing autumnal mists a perfect blend of the circumstantial, the connotative, and the impres- sionistic in description. The road lay along the side of what would in England be called a mountain; at its feet rolled the rapid stream that washed the castle walls, foaming over fragments of rock, and bounded by a wood of oak and pine, among which the ruins of the monastery, once an appendage to the castle, reared its broken arches ; and marked by grey and mouldering walls, and mounds covered with slight vegetation, it was traced to its connection with the castle itself, still frowning in gothic magnificence, and stretching over several acres of ground: the citadel, which was totally in ruins and covered with ivy, crowning the whole. Farther to the West, beyond a bold and rocky shore, appeared the sea; arid to the East, a chain of mountains which seemed to meet the clouds; while on the other side, a rich and beautiful vale, now variegated with the mellowed tints of the declining year, spread its enclosures, till it was lost again among the blue and barren hills. In the year 1789, when Richard Cumberland produced Arundel, which was followed by Henry (1794), * both of 1 Saintsbury says: "Henry is Joseph; Susan May is a much more elaborate and attractive Betty; the doctor's wife a vulgarised and repulsive Lady Booby; Ezekiel Daw, whom Scott admired, a dissenting Adams — the full force of the outrage of which variation Sir Walter perhaps did not feel." Mrs. Radcliffe's "Highland Story" 181 which were written in direct imitation of Fielding, there was published in London by T. Hookham a small volume entitled The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne. A Highland Story. The novel shows not the influence of Fielding, but the influence of a Horace Walpole; and its author, whose name was not on the title-page, was Mr. William Radcliffe's beautiful young wife, who had been born in 1764, the year of the publication of The Castle of Otranto. In this first piece of fiction Mrs. Radcliffe uses the word "gothic" excessively. It was not a new word for it had been used by Swift and Steele in The Tatler (17 10), by Fielding in the description of the palace of death in A Journey from this World to the Next (1743), and it had been used by Thomas Amory in John Buncle (1756) and by the Reverend Richard Graves in The Spiritual Quixote (1772). Mrs. Radcliffe in A Highland Story makes things ' ' gothically " magnificent on a small scale, such as when Alleyn rescues Mary from the banditti in the ruined abbey amid flashes of lightning ; when in the underground passage he grasps the cold hand of a corpse; and when the Earl from the terrace contemplates the shipwreck by moonlight. Mrs. Radcliffe in this novel gives us the type of heroines who were to be in all her subsequent fiction. Mary and blue-eyed Laura are auburn-tressed girls who anxiously run to the Lethe of Nature to dip therein their wounded minds. A Sicilian Tale (1790) presents a study of Italian life of the upper classes at the close of the sixteenth century. There are constantly set before us monastic walls, ban- ditti, jealousies, stilettos, and death. There are two girls, Emilia with flaxen hair and dark blue eyes and Julia with dark eyes and dark auburn hair profusely curled about her neck. Both of these girls are just as fond of poetry, refined conversation, and the sensibilities of polished life, as Mary and Laura in the novel previously referred to. 182 Motives in English Fiction Julia weeps copiously over the miniature of her mother just as M. St. Aubert in The Mysteries of Udolpho weeps over the miniature of his sister, the Marchioness de Villeroi. Julia's mother, the first wife of the Marquis di Mazzini, at the end of the novel, by emerging from the south tower explains all the mysterious occurrences in that part of the castle. Mrs. Radcliffe likes to cloak identity and thereby increase suspense as in the case of Adeline whose mystery of birth is not revealed until one reaches the concluding pages of The Romance of the Forest. Mrs. Radcliffe throws the same mantle about Laurentini di Udolpho in The Mysteries of Udolpho; and we are fairly taken off our feet, when Ellena di Rosalba's mystery of birth is cleared up in The Italian. At the beginning of the third volume of The Italian the reader still is confident that Ellena di Rosalba is Schedoni's daughter; for has not one gazed on Schedoni's features revealed in the miniature, which Schedoni to his con- sternation discovered on the bosom of Ellena when he was about to stiletto her as she lay sleeping. But Ellena is not Schedoni's daughter, for she is the daughter of his brother, the lawful Count di Bruno, whom Schedoni had murdered to gain an estate and this brother's wife. These revealments in the fiction of Mrs. Radcliffe are always kept until the last pages of her two and three- decker novels. At the end of A Sicilian Tale the wicked Marquis and his perfidiously false second wife Maria receive retribution for their ' ' lawless indulgence in violent and luxurious passions. " The two volumes of A Sicilian Tale are full of groans more than thrice repeated. There is a splendid description of a shipwreck in a storm at sea ; and in the second volume Mrs. Radcliffe se'ttles down to a fervid style in the descrip- tion of nature that was her greatest gift to contemporaries and successors. Richly poetic is such a passage as this : Mrs. RadclifTe's "Sicilian Tale" 183 The rich colouring of evening glowed through the dark foliage, which spreading a pensive gloom around, offered a scene congenial to the present temper of her mind, and she entered the shades. Her thoughts, affected by the surround- ing objects, gradually sunk into a pleasing and complacent melancholy, and she was insensibly led on. ... A group of wild and grotesque rocks rose in semicircular form, and their fantastic shapes exhibited Nature in her most sublime and striking attitudes. Here her vast magnificence elevated the mind of the beholder with high enthusiasm. Fancy caught the thrilling sensation, and at her touch the towering steeps became shaded with unreal glooms; the caves more darkly frowned — the projecting cliffs assumed a more terrific aspect, and the wild overhanging shrubs waved to the gale in deeper murmurs. The scene inspired Madame with reverential awe, and her thoughts involuntarily rose "from Nature up to Nature's God." At the end of this novel there is an ethical tidbit which is to be found at the end of each one of Mrs. RadclifTe's pieces of fiction. To the innocent the enduring of mis- fortune is but a trial of virtue. All those who have not lead in their consciences to drag them down are extricated from their difficulties according to the axiom of ethics that right doing is always followed by right being and triumphantly sing, "0/ giorno jelice! " Sir Walter Scott, who was much influenced by Mrs. Radcliffe's style, must have been thinking of these ethical after- thrusts, when he reminds the reader who has perused The Heart of Mid- lothian that the course of the iniquitous great is not to be envied, since the paths of humbler characters, who have walked in rectitude, are those of peace. The Romance of the Forest (1791) presents Adeline, another blue-eyed, dark auburn-tressed heroine living in the forest of Fontainville in the ruined abbey of St. Clair, which somehow resembles Sir Walter Scott's 184 Motives in English Fiction Wolfscrag by reason of its isolation and its tower and occupant the melancholy Pierre de la Motte, the ruined gambler, who had fled to its recesses to escape the fever of high-life dissipation in Paris. The gloom of his misery is lifted at times by the quips and cranks of his valet Peter who is as firm a forager for victuals as Scott's Caleb Balderstone. Early in the novel we stumble upon a skeleton, and at the end we are confronted by a burial- urn, which is not to be avoided even in the Alps. There are, however, many bright clouds that float over the graveyard from which leap spectres of past bad lives. In grief and solitude Adeline receives comfort from a pet fawn that lifts the reader to serenity as when reading Wordsworth's White Doe of Rylstone. Adeline can sing a sonnet sweetly when awake, and her fondness for the pathetic in music increases so much that one is not at all surprised when he finds her singing a melancholy air even when asleep. She is a beauty who is at all times the exponent of anything but dissimulation, yet for the pur- pose of self-preservation she can practise deception just as Jeanie Deans, whose characterization is made incon- sistent by Scott, who, having portrayed her as not willing to lie to save her sister's honor and life, makes her at Muschat's Cairn readily tell a lie to Ratcliffe to save her own honor and life. The rejection of drugs by Adeline and the way in which she withstands all seductions in the seralgio of the Marquis de Montalt forecast a similar scene in Maturin's The Albigenses (1824), in which the beautiful brunette Genevieve passes triumphantly through the subjection of the same seductions in the Saracenic seralgio of the Bishop of Toulouse. La Motte in weakness, moving in the net of the machinations of the Marquis, is not a study in total depravity, but serves as an example of slow deterioration caused by environment, over the ramparts of which his trembling soul can not climb. In Mrs. Radcliffe's "Udolpho" 185 his going down the steps from folly to vice, he serves as a prototype of George Eliot's Tito Melema, who plunged with a conscience absolutely dead into the abyss at the bottom of the last step of his gradual deterioration. De la Motte, however, is more like Charles Dickens's Mr. Dombey, since he is able, though almost morally dead, to come back to life thoroughly rehabilitated. He barely escapes the Tito Melema fate which always comes to one who has loved pleasure and the avoidance of the disagree- able. This man La Motte perhaps suggested to William Godwin the characterization of Reginald St. Leon who went much farther than La Motte in sacrificing and murdering those he loved because of the monomania of gambling and multiplying gold. St. Leon, too, lived to learn and to say, ' ' My life was all a lie." The fourth novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho, of Mrs. Radcliffe's presents wonderful effects in handling tran- sitional scenery which reveals the beauties of nature in Languedoc, in the Pyrenees, on Mt. Cenis, along the banks of the Brenta, the Po, and among the Apennines. Mrs. Radcliffe also conveys the sense of great distance in description; and in the temporal effects of contrasting the past with the present showing that years have elapsed since happiness moved among abandoned colonnades, she is admirable. In the contrivances of Gothicism, Mon- toni's locked-up wife is an improvement upon the secreted wife of Mazzini's; and thus the two Italian husbands were to teach an English husband Rochester in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre how to imprison a wife. Madame Montoni melodramatically dies amid peals of thunder. A face is seen in bed under a black pall. Later we find that the lineaments of this face are those of a pirate's. St. Elmo lights are seen on lances. And as we are en- thralled by The Prove?ical Tale the thought comes how similar its atmosphere is to that of Washington Irving's 1 86 Motives in English Fiction "The Spectre Bridegroom" in The Sketch Book. As Ludo- vico is reading this ghastly Provencal Tale the atmos- phere is as heavy as any felt swirling in Poe's melancholy House of Usher; and indeed it is so dense throughout the entire novel that it is felt that, if we dragged from the fungus-fog festooning the ruined galleries and di- lapidated rooms the inmates, they would cease breathing. We seem to know this and therefore leave them alone in the gloomy vapors. There are jars at times, as when the reader feels the inartistic transfer of Ludovico from the haunted chamber to the rendezvous of the pirates who have Blanche in their clutches. In characterization there is nothing new with the exception of Count Morano, who seems to be ready to reform his life for the woman he loves, unless one fancies he finds something novel in the figure of the mad Agnes (Laurentini di Udolpho), who thinks that Emily is the avenging ghost of the March- ioness de Villeroi. The best scene in the whole novel is that which portrays this mad nun dying after having been pursued for twenty years by the spectres of conscience. In Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey Catherine Morland thinks that General Tilney is a Montoni, and modern readers have adversely judged the good Mrs. Radcliffe by clinging to opinions formed after perusing the parody on The Mysteries of Udolpho. They are inclined to believe that all characters of Mrs. Radcliffe partake of Montoni. It is to The Italian, or the Confessional of the Black Penitents that readers must go to see Gothicism in the grasp of the graces of style and the triumph of con- vincing characterization. Mrs. Radcliffe never surpassed the delineation of Ellena di Rosalba, the Marchesa di Vivaldi, and Schedoni whose mind is so gloomy that majestic nature was not able to penetrate it with any ray of sunshine. This monk Schedoni plays for the deteriora- tion of a woman's soul. With cunning reserve he tries to Mrs. Radcliffe's "The Italian" 187 grasp control of a fluctuating mind which always tries to keep itself within the field of the safety of the law. In the shades of the cloisters of San Nicolo, as the organ plays a dirge, the cold intellect of this monster tries to stifle conscience by sophistry. Murder is fanned into action in front of a confessional box. He puts the Marchesa into a squirrel-cage and with indented glides coils himself about it, mentally manoeuvring it, so that it turns so fast that when the woman leaves the cage she has become imbued with such snake-like rascality as to be no longer able to reject his plausible falsehoods; therefore, she consents to the murder of Ellena which is to take place in a lone house far away on the shores of the Adriatic. The Marchesa's mind is as subtle as Schedoni's. She logically confutes Schedoni in each one of his fallacies, but is unable to disentangle herself from the web of his seductive sophistry. Not even the inscription over the confessional box in black letters "God hears thee!" or the requiem sounded on the organ can cause tears of sorrow but only tears of deterioration to flow from the eyes of the guilty Marchesa. The brisk dialogue presents characters considering earthly nemesis as the only obstacle to be feared on the road to murder, thus for twenty pages causing the reader to be held spellbound as if in a mental gymnasium watching two malignant minds engaging in a psychological sparring match. When at the end of the third volume Schedoni, driven to bay by the Inquisitors of the Church whose every law he had violated, is stretched on the mattress, his audacity elicits admiration reminding us of Eugene Sue's Rodin; and after he passed poison to himself, he skilfully managed to pass it on to his enemy Nicola in order to carry the basilisk satisfaction of revenge into the next world. In Mrs. Radcliffe's The Italian (1797) Ellena di Rosalba about to take the veil at San Stefano serves to connect 188 Motives in English Fiction Margaret taking the veil in Thomas Deloney's Pleasant Historie of Thomas of Reading (1596) with the auburn- haired Emily Arundel taking the veil in the chapel of the convent of St. Valerie in Letitia Landon's Romance and Reality (1831). The interrupted marriage ceremony of Vincent ; o di Vivaldi and Ellena in the chapel on the shores of Lake Celano harks back through Cecilia (1782) to The Adventures of Emmera, or the Fair American (1767) where is sensationally revealed the full- winged villainy of Edgerton by Miss Hervey, who cried out just as the clergyman had begun the marriage ceremony that Edgerton had a wife. After altercation and denial on Edgerton's part at the altar, Miss Hervey unmasks his wife who had all the while been present in disguise. It is such a scene as this that hurries us on to similar experi- ments such as are made at the close of Lady Morgan's The Wild Irish Girl (1806), in Jane Eyre (1847), and in Charles Reade's Hard Cash (1863). Emily Bronte in Wuthering Heights (1847) was in- debted for minor accessories of the supernatural to The Romance of the Forest. When Mr. Lockwood in Catharine Earnshaw's paneled bed peruses the marginal notes that Cathy had jotted down about the brutal treatment her deified, black hero had received from Hindley, the reader feels that Mr. Lockwood is examining the manuscript which Adeline scrutinized in the abbey of St. Clair; and, when Mr. Lockwood in his dream cuts the hand of the ghost-waif (Catharine Earnshaw or Catharine Linton) on the pane of glass in order to detach his fingers from its icy grasp, the reader knows that Mr. Lockwood is dream- ing the dream that Adeline dreamed in the abbey. In circumstantial and connotative descriptions of na- tural scenery which in sublimity subjectively supports heroines and heroes in the agonizing crises of their careers, the good Mrs. Ann Radcliffe is superb. By the poetical Mrs. Radcliffe as a Stylist 189 beauties of landscape all her heroines are inspired with reverential awe so that their thoughts involuntarily arise from "Nature up to Nature's God." No matter what past afflictions a girl has had she can be chastened of them by being carried to the Alps or the Apennines and can in these regions still continue to revel in the luxury of grief, for the anodyne by which to "soften the asperities of affliction" is always within reach. Mrs. Ann Radcliffe possesses a clear and beautiful style that fringes the white color of joy with jet. As her heroines always obtain a pleasurable melancholy from their scenic surroundings, so the reader secures a mournful happiness from the language with which she exquisitely colors emotions and moods. If Thomas Amory in John Bunch (1756) had not written, "It is a vast craggy precipice, that ascends till it is almost out of sight, and by its gloomy and tremendous air, strikes the mind with a horror that has something pleasing in it, " and if Mrs. Charlotte Smith, in Emmeline, the Orphan of the Castle (1788) had not written, "Emmeline in silent admiration beheld this beautiful and singular scene (a defile in France on the Mediterranean shore), and with the pleasure it gave her, a soft and melancholy sensation was mingled," Mrs. Radcliffe could not have written in The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789), "the soft serenity of evening, and the still solemnity of the scene, conspired to lull her mind into a pleasing forgetfulness of its troubles," and Mrs. Charlotte Lennox in Euphemia (1790) could not have written, "The awful gloom from the surrounding shades, the solemn stillness, inspired a soft and pleasing melan- choly." And if Mrs. Radcliffe in The Romance of the Forest (1791) had not written: At the decline of day she quitted her chamber to enjoy the sweet evening hour, but strayed no farther than an avenue 190 Motives in English Fiction near the abbey which fronted the west. She read a little, but finding it impossible any longer to abstract her attention from the scene around, she closed the book, and yielded to the sweet, complacent melancholy which the hour inspired. The air was still, the sun, sinking below the distant hill, spread a purple glow over the landscape and touched the forest glades with softer light. A dewy freshness was diffused upon the air. As the sun descended, the dusk came silently on, and the scene assumed a solemn grandeur. . . . Letitia Landon in Romance and Reality (1831) never could have written : It was now the shadowy softness of twilight — that one Eng- lish hour whose indistinct beauty has a vague charm which may compensate for all the sunshine that ever made glorious the vale of Damascus; and as she emerged from the yew-tree walk, the waving wind and the dim light gave the figures cut in their branches almost the appearance of reality, and their shadows flung huge semblances of humanity far before them. . . . The room into which she meant to go fronted full west. The sun had set some time, and his purple pagean- try, like that of a forgotten monarch, had departed; but cne or two rich clouds, like faithful hearts, retaining the memory of his gifts to the last, floated still on the air. The language of Letitia Landon's is at times almost a replica of that of Mrs. Radcliffe's, the only difference being that Letitia Landon is more of a colorist going to a fatal excess, as when we find ourselves amid 'red-rose leaves falling to the ground like rain ' as Edward Lorraine returns home to find Algernon dead. She delights too much in warm crimson sunsets and rich rose stains falling on the wall and floor, is too fond of purple obscurities and purple twilights, and too fond of a "crimson pelisse" that "had quite illuminated the deck." But Letitia Landon by means of copying Mrs. Ann Radcliffe's style, char- Mrs. Radcliffe and Disraeli 19 1 acterizations, and situations, almost emerged as a feminine Keats writer of prose fiction. She lacks the masculinity of restraint that makes Mrs. Radcliffe one of the greatest of stylists among our novelists. It was the sureness of this touch of Mrs. Radcliffe, who knew so well how to mingle the lights and shades of darkness, that made Disraeli in 1845 reveal his Sybil in the habit of a Religious flashing her dark eyes from the window of Marney Abbey "in the rosy sunset and twilight star" to dazzle the eyes of Egremont. The divine melody ceased; the elder stranger arose; the words were on the lips of Egremont, that would have asked some explanation of this sweet and holy mystery, when in the vacant and star-lit arch on which his glance was fixed, he beheld a female form. She was apparently in the habit of a Religious, yet scarcely could be a nun, for her veil, if indeed it were a veil, had fallen on her shoulders, and revealed her thick tresses of long fair hair. The blush of deep emotion lingered on a countenance which, though extremely young, was im- pressed with a character of almost divine majesty; while her dark eyes and long dark lashes, contrasting with the bright- ness of her complexion and the luxuriance of her radiant locks, combined to produce a beauty as rare as it is choice; and so strange, that Egremont might for a moment have been par- doned for believing her a seraph, that had lighted on this sphere, or the fair phantom of some saint haunting the sacred ruins of her desecrated fane. CHAPTER VII ElizabetH IncHbald, "William God-win, MattHew Lewis, and Maria Edg£ewortH THE heroine of Mrs. Inchbald's A Simple Story (1791) is like the wild thing Kitty (Lady Caroline Lamb) in Mrs. Ward's The Marriage of William Ashe. Miss Milner is an exasperating bit of femininity whose sole desire is to see how far a woman can go in testing a man's love. Dorriforth, condoning all her caprices and whims and eschewing his own fatal passion, sweeps on to the posses- sion of Miss Milner just as Edgar Linton in Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights clings to Catharine Earnshaw in spite of his better judgment. When Miss Milner cries out from the battlements of fate, "That which impels all my actions" is "an unsurmountable instinct, a fatality, that will forever render me the most miserable of human beings," we peer into the evil Shad water Weir into which Hardy's Eustacia Vye was to plunge, and at the scaffold upon which Tess was to step. In minor technique the quarrel between Frances Burney's Lord Orville and Sir Clement Willoughby over Evelina is vastly inferior to that between Dorriforth and Sir Frederick Lawnly over Miss Milner. Mrs. Inchbald passed by Frances Burney's Evelina (1778) to pick up the strength of the setting and dialogue of its quarrel scene. When in the garden Lord Orville makes Sir Clement drop Evelina's hand, Fanny 192 Mrs. Inchbald's "A Simple Story" 193 Burney for the first time makes us realize that Orville has actually given his heart to Evelina; and, in a stronger scene, when Mrs. Inchbald has Lord Frederick kiss Miss Milner's hand and Dorriforth strike him a violent blow in the face we are for the first time sure that Dorriforth loves Miss Milner. The parallelism of dialogue with character in action occurs because Fanny Burney and Mrs. Inchbald have together touched one of the most delicate of the wires in the mainspring of life's passions to show that jealousy often brings the realization of true love. A beautiful heroine's hand caressed by the hand of a lord who is a rake hastens a declaration of love on the part of a noble hero. And Frances Burney has produced nothing in poignant pathos equal to Mrs. Inchbald's greatest stroke of genius, the meeting of Dorriforth (Lord Elmwood) and his daughter Matilda on. the stair- case, when the father unconsciously admits that he still loves the quondam wife who had once said that she loved him with all the tenderness of a wife and with all the passion of a mistress. But this scene, great as it is, fails to effect a reconciliation between father and daughter. It takes an excursion into Richardsonian territory to bring the novel to a close; for Mrs. Inchbald presents a Pollexfen in the shape of Viscount Margrave, who carries off the symbol (Matilda) of Dorriforth 's marriage to Miss Milner. With pistols in his hands, Lord Elmwood, with Grandisonian chivalry, proves himself a dutiful father. After a general survey of the novel, it is evident that Mrs. Inchbald was perhaps thrusting fragments of her own histrionic career into the complex characterization of Miss Milner. Nature and Art (1796) is the expansion of Goldsmith's line, "Near her betrayer's door she lays lier head." Further pathos is added by the scene which presents William, the ruiner of Agnes, as judge in a court room 13 194 Motives in English Fiction unwittingly sentencing her to the gallows. 1 As to style Mrs. Inchbald is fond of antithetically placing her patches of pathos as for example, ' ' Rebecca's heart bounded with joy at the prospect. Poor Agnes felt a sinking, a forebod- ing tremor that wholly interrupted the joy of her expecta- tions." Throughout the novel there is constant contrast and antithesis of well-alliterated phrases and sentences used to drive truths home. The balanced statements while pleasing are quite too many for the reader who becomes keenly aware of the tone of artificiality. This parallelism is not only confined to style but it is used in the presentation of the position of characters, such as the parallelism of the position of Rebecca and Henry. The plot is at times as cheaply melodramatic as the charac- terization that it supports. When Rebecca, bluffed into lying to get out of a tight corner, accuses Henry of being the father of Agnes's child, and accepts herself as its mother, when she actually loves and adores Henry, there is cast on the plot an atrocious blot. Mrs. Inchbald's heart-to-heart talks with the reader are poignantly keen, and it is these that lift the low tragedy into high tragedy. Agnes and her boy are prophetic of Hester Prynne and little Pearl. Mrs. Inchbald seems to know every step down the ladder of degradation that a woman can take in London town. No one could have told her anything new about the pangs of criminal conscience; and she parades upon the stage worldly-minded curates who are 1 Another variation of the same theme is Thomas Nelson Page's "The Outcast" in The Land of the Spirit (1913). In the story a judge in his reckless youth had ruined Antoinette Lapine, whose daughter and his is Netta Thome the defendant. The counsel for Netta, who has murdered a gay youth in first-class society, pleads with the judge to have Netta's father step forward to save her from the gallows. The judge is caught by his past, wild life; for he had toyed with Antoinette Lapine just as the youth, who had been murdered, had toyed with Netta Thorne whom he as an upright judge should acknowledge as his daughter before all in the court room. Mrs. Inchbald's "Nature and Art" 195 hypocritical adepts in hushing up things. In this novel Mrs. Inchbald was mildly revolutionary against the shams of her age, being as antagonistic to the high-class life of hypocrisy as Henry Arthur Jones in his dramas of our own immediate time. Nature and Art closes with an invective against the rich, for according to her view only money in 1796 was respected and this doctrine was taught to the young. Mrs. Inchbald believed that the poor should no longer pay homage to wealth, that they should break the bonds of their thralldom. And at the end of A Simple Story there is the unforgettable innuendo of a sneer at a system of education that made a wreck of Miss Milner's life. The Wordsworthian pathos in these two novels helped to contribute to the sentimentality of such a simple story as Mrs. Amelia Opie's Father and Daughter (1801), which caused the good Sir Walter Scott to shed tears. William Godwin's Things As They Are; or the Adven- tures of Caleb Williams (1794) was filled with such re- volutionary doctrines that the publishers in the first edition omitted Godwin's preface of May 12, 1794, which contained ominous sentences directed against aristocracy. By 1795-6 when Godwin was in no further danger of being called a traitor, since rioting had ceased and no sanguinary plots had been detected which might deprive Englishmen of their liberties, the original preface was printed in full in the second edition of the novel. In this masterpiece the honest plebeian without money cannot escape the aristocrat aided by lucre, which at all times buys out the law. Caleb possessed his master's secret. He knew that Falkland, not the Hawkinses, had mur- dered Tyrrel; and Falkland, becoming aware of this, tried to grind his Roger Chillingworth-like secretary to the lowest position in the social order. Thus Caleb becomes the "victim of man dressed in the gore-dripping robes of 196 Motives in English Fiction authority." He is convicted of robbery by artificial, circumstantial evidence. In the dreadful prison life experienced by Caleb the influence of the French Revolution is felt. France had torn down her Bastille, but England still thrust men with souls into underground cells 7>2 x 6K", with no windows, light, or air, except what could creep in through a few holes bored in the doors. As Caleb in his Newgate life dreams of palaces in Spain, Godwin spends his time in denouncing artificial society which lives in them. Godwin had been reading Howard on prisons and accordingly sounded a new note that of social and political reform leaving to Charles Dickens to better what he ardently desired to effect. Godwin endeavored to show that in- iquitous laws compel men to be devils, precluding any return to the angelic. One wicked act is punished no matter what saint-like purity has intervened between it and the court room. He demonstrates that a den of robbers offers a finer atmosphere than that which sur- rounds a "d — d aristocrat." Money in the hands of the aristocratic villain Falkland makes even Gines, the leader of a cut-throat band, become a Javert who relentlessly pursues Caleb from London to Wales causing society everywhere to set a face of flint against him. Gines blasts all chances of his acquiring a new character of integrity. Even Collins will not listen to Caleb or have any faith in an ingrate's story directed against his benefactor, the noble Falkland. In one place in the novel Caleb is forced to disguise himself as a thief in order to evade injustice. The philosophy of the whole novel is built upon that of Rousseau and that of the Enquiry concerning Political Justice, which Godwin had published in 1793. Godwin takes the side of the individualist advocating that any government that does not secure liberty of action to the individual is an evil, usurpatory power that seeks to Godwin's "Caleb Williams" 197 destroy the individual conscience of humanity. Laws are set up by fallible men who instituted them and or- ganized them for the purpose of gratifying their own selfish desires. Thus laws are not infallible and therefore the judgment of one individual is just as good as the collec- tive judgment of all mankind. If Caleb had had money, his life would never have been in jeopardy, nor would he have suffered injustice for years. If Bulwer Lytton's Eugene Aram had had money, he and Houseman never would have murdered the worthless Clark the father of Walter. Society, according to Godwin, is responsible for what happened to Caleb and to Eugene Aram. It is all in keeping with what he had written in Political Jtistice, My neighbor has just as much right to put an end to my existence with a dagger or poison as to deny me that pecuni- ary assistance without which my intellectual attainments or my moral exertions will be materially injured. The reader feels sorry for Caleb, who is somewhat of a Roger Chillingworth ; he feels sorry for educated Falkland because one almost justifies his murdering Tyrrel; and likewise there is grief over Eugene Aram because there can be found extenuating circumstances for his crime, since by it he believed that he could advance himself brilliantly in the intellectual and scholarly sphere. If Godwin had changed the main title of this novel to Things As They Sometimes Are, the reader could then somewhat pardon the padding of the many erroneous deductions. Who of us can answer this question: At the close of Godwin's novel who is the greater villain Falkland or Caleb? St. Leon (1799) is the exposition of the deterioration of a monomaniac. Reginald St. Leon possessed the passion for the gaming-table as Mrs. Radcliffe's La Motte. In 198 Motives in English Fiction the year 1544 in Switzerland he was seduced into alchemy by Signor Francesco Zampieri who communicated to him the art of multiplying gold and the secret of living for- ever. St. Leon then, in all probability, killed Zampieri, and at once proceeded to murder his own wife and chil- dren by the monomania of his ideas to make money and to become an evil-eyed necromancer in Italy and Spain. After the death of his sweet wife Marguerite, who is thought to be Godwin's portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft, in order to escape from the pursuing agents of the In- quisition, in the house of a Jew at Valladolid, he swallows the elixir of immortality which transforms him mentally and physically from the age of fourscore to twenty. This scene from the point of view of description surpasses any other that can be selected from Godwin's novels. There was only one bit of happiness given the villain and that was he lived to see his son marry a woman of in- tegrity and beauty. That which was lacking in St. Leon, the father, seemed to be supplied in the son who moved in the path of virtue through a highly honored career. Heredity counted for naught, for the son had taken the fighting chance against a father who had violated life's dearest ties, causing the death of his wife and daughter Julia, the direct result of his having transformed himself into an intellectual machine. It is important to remember that Reginald St. Leon, the necromancer, raised into existence Mrs. Shelley's (Godwin's daughter's) Franken- stein, who created the monster who begot in 1820 that half-human and half-divine devil Melmoth the Wanderer of Charles Robert Maturin's. On picking up Fleetwood (1805) the critic can note many contributions to English fiction. North Wales scenery lifts Fleetwood to a poetic pitch of sensualism; and the influence of Oxford landscape drops him to a prosaic flat of animalism. Thus we see how Godwin Godwin's "Fleetwood" 199 shifted environment so as to make a setting determine action and character. We observe Fleetwood as a student with other Oxonians quizzing a freshman and applauding his tragedy of The Five Labors of Hercules. At length, by reason of brutal jeering and hazing, they drive this freshman to insanity and suicide. This delineation of Oxford University life carries us to the escapades of Reginald in Lockhart's Reginald Dalton (1823), to Cuth- bert Bede's (Rev. Edward Bradley's) The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green (1853-57), an d to Thomas Hughes's Tom Brown's School Days (1857) and Tom Brown at Oxford. The agonies of little eight-year-old Ruffigny as he was compelled to watch every day fifty-six swifts of thread in M. Vaublanc's silk-manufactory at Lyons are prophetic of the greater tortures which will come to Mrs. Trollope's Michael Armstrong, the Lancashire factory boy of 1840. Some of these little associates of Ruffigny were three or four years of age, and a few of the little living skeletons in order to reach the swifts had to wear iron buskins which would elevate them to the proper height after they had climbed on top of the stools. Fifty-six swifts were assigned to each child who was compelled to adjust such from six in the morning to six at night with the exception of half an hour for breakfast and an hour for dinner. Godwin strongly arraigns child-labor and demands an exemption from such up to a certain age. Godwin cries out, "I know that the earth is the great Bridewell of the universe where spirits descended from heaven are com- mitted to drudgery and hard labor." These little emaci- ated children resembling old men (the older men died before they were forty) were to be delineated further by Charles Dickens and Mrs. Frances Trollope. If it had not been for Colonel Jack, Ruffigny, Oliver Twist, and Michael Armstrong, it would not have been possible for 200 Motives in English Fiction Disraeli to have created Devilsdust working up the refuse from the cotton mills into counterpanes and coverlids in the Wadding Hole. Though sympathetic to the suffer- ings of children in the toils of child-labor, Disraeli in Sybil (1845) felt that it was his duty to transfer the delineation of such to men who were encountering all manner of evil in the British factories. Fleetwood, like Rochester in Jane Eyre, comes to his marriage after a life of debauchery with the Countess De B. in Paris. Later he is seen in temporary madness on the continent which shows that Godwin was to pass from the study of marital jealousy and bickerings to the psycho- logical analysis of the pathology of permanent madness in Mandeville. On concluding the novel the reader carries away with him the portrait of a languishing Magdalene of extravagance Mrs. Gifford who, like George Eliot's Rosamond Vincy, found a Dr. Lydgate in Mr. Kenrick a surgeon. Mrs. Gifford accomplishes the tragical destruc- tion of Kenrick and herself at Bath. In Mandeville (181 7) there is the tragedy of misguided paternal instinct that has ruined the life of deformed poetic Audley, the uncle of Mandeville. In Mandeville there is at first shown intermittent insanity which had been caused by the shock of seeing his father and mother butchered in Ireland when he was a little boy. When Mandeville goes to Winchester College there is an enlarge- ment upon what has already been seen in the experiences that came to Fleetwood at Oxford. It is here that Man- deville in saving his schoolmate Waller by taking upon himself the whole disgrace of the transaction of the cari- cature of Charles I creates within himself a deadly hatred for Clifford the finest, noblest of all the Wintonians. Throughout the narrative Mandeville and Clifford march like Siamese twins of hate and love. The weight of Clif- ford's personality and the disgrace at school send Mande- Godwin's " Mandeville " 201 ville to the madhouse at Cowley. When the reader sees his sister Henrietta by his bedside bringing him back out of his hereditary lunacy to sanity by the touch of a soul that is keenly attuned to his, he readily falls into the opinion of the poet Shelley who averred that it was the most touching scene in the novel. Mandeville had been tutored into a religion of hate by the curate Hilkiah, and he had been tutored into a religion of love by Henrietta. Hen- rietta makes a study of her brother's madness, and brings Clifford into his presence so that aversion and antipathy can gradually be overcome. There is a fine scene of reconciliation, but things come out psychologically wrong effecting disaster to Henrietta's experiment. Henrietta falls in love with Clifford and finally decides to go to her bridal couch over the body of a brother. When Mande- ville suspects this, Clifford and Henrietta become one poison tree of Java in his sight. The whole novel is the psychological autobiography of a madman. In the duel that Mandeville has with Clifford he receives from the sword of his adversary a deep gash on his face that makes it perpetually wear a distorted smile, which Mandeville recognizes as being the badge or brand of his own broken mind. Clifford had won the day in becoming the husband of Henrietta and the conqueror of Mandeville. The mark on Mandeville's face was as plain as the horseshoe on the frowning brow of Scott's Sir Robert Redgauntlet and is as symbolic of degradation as the scarlet A was to Hawthorne's Hester Prynne. The reader plainly sees the influence of Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland. Godwin in his preface readily avowed his indebtedness by saying that his subject was derived from " Wieland, written by a person certainly of distin- guished genius, who, I believe, was born and died in the province of Pennsylvania in the United States of North America, and who calls himself C. B. Brown." This bit 202 Motives in English Fiction of information is interesting since it shows how the influence of Mrs. Ann Radclifle journeyed across the Atlantic in 1798 to be called back again by Godwin in 18 1 7. Mandeville under the influence of Clifford de- generates into a madman just as Wieland of Charles Brockden Brown's becomes a dangerous maniac under the pressure of the influence of Carwin. St. Leon was a depraved monomaniac. Fleetwood was temporarily deranged by reason of the contamination of courtesans. Godwin established a thorough-paced trail for future mad- men in English fiction. Along this beaten path were to step Sir Walter Scott's Balfour of Burley and Habak- kuk Mucklewrath, Charles Dickens's Uncle Dick, Robert Louis Stevenson's Master of Ballantrae's brother, Enoch Arnold Bennett's Darius Clayhanger, and such decadent specimens as Mrs. Harrison's Rene Dax and Bibby mor- bidly portrayed in Adrian Savage. Cloudesley (1830) the worst novel, with the exception of Deloraine, that Godwin wrote is the narrative of the exposition of this question: What did it profit a man to gain the whole world of aristocracy at the expense of his brother's son, who was the rightful Baron Alton and Earl Danvers? Most of the time in the novel, when alive to action in narrative, we are with St. Elmo the brigand defying Florence, Venice, and Genoa, from the heights of the Apennines. If we are not moving with condottieri on the shores of Lake Celano, we are their constant asso- ciates in Sicily. The bravoes in Mrs. Behn's The Lucky Mistake, the banditti in Zeluco, The Mysteries of Udolpho, The Monk, The Bravo of Venice, and Hie Albigenses, are on dress parade in Cloudesley; and the kindly brigand St. Elmo was destined to live again in S. R. Crockett's The Silver Skull. As for the last novel of Godwin's Deloraine (1833) it is nothing but the study of the murder of an Enoch Arden. His murderer is Deloraine who is pursued Matthew Lewis's "The Monk" 203 through the remainder of the novel by Travers, the friend of the murdered victim, who proves a weak edition of Gines. Travers forgives Deloraine at the end of the novel and marries his sister. Matthew Lewis in 1795 succeeded at the age of twenty in dashing off with somewhat of the swiftness of a Beck- ford a novel, the morality of which shocked his father. Its chief expository transaction supplied a hypothesis in controversion of which Maturin reached a magnificent Gothic height of genius in the use of the charnel-house and the supernatural. In one respect Lewis was unlike his predecessor and contemporary Mrs. Radcliffe since there are no monitions or tricks of suspense used by him to keep one anticipating ghosts who decline to enter. When perusing The Monk the reader actually sees the Bleeding Nun at Don Raymond's bedside kissing his lips; and trembles as he sees and hears speak a real sheeted ghost of Antonia's mother Elvira. The onlooker is terrified when at Matilda's summons the beautiful angel Lucifer enters; and again he is appalled when the ugly Apostate angel with his dragon wings suddenly materializes in the cell of Ambrosio to trick the monk into abandoning the God that seemingly had abandoned him. In other re- spects Lewis was susceptible to the work that had been done by Mrs. Radcliffe. He was an expert not only in purloining substance but in attuning his style to the melancholy quality of Mrs. Radcliffe's as felt in the following excerpt from The Monk : While I sat upon a broken ridge of the hill, the stillness of the scene inspired me with melancholy ideas not altogether unpleasing. The castle, which stood full in my sight, formed an object equally awful and picturesque. Its ponderous walls, tinged by the moon's solemn brightness; its old and partly ruined towers, lifting themselves into the clouds, and seeming 204 Motives in English Fiction to frown on the plains around them; its lofty battlements, overgrown with ivy, and folding gates, expanding in honour of the visionary inhabitants; made me sensible of a sad and reverential horror. In The Monk the mob and conflagration which destroy St. Clare convent predetermine the destruction of Letitia Landon's convent of St. Valerie in Romance and Reality (1831). When confronted by the figures of the Inquisi- tion, we recall certain pages in Mrs. Radcliffe's The Italian and pick up Maturin's Melmoth for comparison. Possibly Poe before portraying Madeline in The Fall of the House of Usher may have watched Lewis's Agnes de Medina confined in the vaults; and by observing her tortures, or those of Moncada in the hands of the churchmen in Mel- moth, Poe may have gathered all the cruel strength that is felt in The Pit and the Pendulum. The great emotional scenes in Lewis's novel are those which depict the devil carrying off the Monk and the Wandering Jew exorcising the Bleeding Nun. It is the first time in English fiction that the Wandering Jew receives a full-length delineation on canvas. Lady Caroline Lamb's Kabkarra of 1823 is the devil Jew. Croly's Salathiel of 1827 is satanic in his majestic powers, and Disraeli's Alroy of 1833 is a Semitic Vathek. Then, in 1844, the Jew lost his Mephistophelian qualities and donned the seraphic robe of Disraeli's Si- donia; and, in 1876, he put on the cherubic raiment be- longing to George Eliot's Daniel Deronda and Mordecai. This reconstruction in favor of the Jew is a return to Scott's Isaac of York of 1820 and Bacon's Joabin of 1627. If it had not been for The Monk, Maturin in all prob- ability never would have written Melmoth, in which was controverted Lewis's idea that in extremity every mortal would sell his soul to the devil. Ambrosio was tricked into resigning all hope of salvation for earthly safety. Mel- Lewis's "The Bravo of Venice" 205 moth the Wanderer said that for one hundred and fifty years he had been experimenting with countless diabolic devices so as to trick to damnation men and women in dire extremity, and had not been able to find any Ambrosios who to gain the whole world would lose their own souls. The Bravo of Venice (1804) is a story cast in the method of drama. The scene is Venice; the time is the middle of the sixteenth century; and the dramatis personce consist of seventeen individuals, since Flodoardo and Abellino are one and the same. In making a scenario the first part of the novel up to where Abellino tells about Matteo's death could be put into Act I of six scenes. Act II, with five scenes, could carry one to where Abellino asks the Doge for Rosabella as his bride. Act III, Scene I, could begin where Prince of Monaldeschi, Rosabella's suitor, is found dead in the garden with a note pinned on his body by Abellino announcing that such would be the fate of all those who pretended to Rosabella's hand. Scene II could commence in the palace where Rosabella confesses her love for Flodoardo. Andreas, Doge of Venice, promises Rosabella to Flodoardo upon condition that Flodoardo capture Abellino. Flodoardo promises to fetch Abellino in twenty-four hours to the palace, and orders that guards should be there to assist in taking the desperado. Scene III could take place in the palace where Flodoardo appears an hour later than the appointed time. He leaves the room to summon Abellino his prisoner. Abellino enters, and doffing his disguise shows to the astonished Doge, courtiers, and conspirators, the features of Flodoardo. Abellino, after the conspirators have been seized, com- municates to all that he is Count Rosalvo who has been kept from his kingdom by Count Monaldeschi; and that it is now possible for him to return to his inheritance since Monaldeschi before his death had confessed all of his treachery. Thus Abellino in his own sweet way won 206 Motives in English Fiction his beautiful and peerless bride Rosabella, the niece of the Doge. The Monk captured the public of Lewis's time just as his Castle Spectre, full of the horrible and the spectacular, enthralled the theatre-goers who clapped their hands at anything melodramatic in those days. Men and women who could extol such plays as Bluebeard (1798) of Colman the Younger and The Stranger of Kotzebue's could easily enjoy the cries of "Abellino! Abellino!" as the stage gradually filled up with stabbed, dead bravoes. Lewis in fiction is precisely what he is in drama. He goes too far in portraying loathsome bits of realism in The Monk. At one time he went too far in his melodramatic monologue The Captive, which, when Mrs. Litchfield recited it at Covent Garden, had the effect of driving the women into hysterics and all into horror because a woman was being driven to insanity before their eyes on the stage. The lurid Websterian touches of cruelty that torture Agnes in The Monk make us feel that Lewis's fiction has exactly the same effect as his drama filled with gruesome and hideous situations. In passing from The Monk (1795) to Castle Rackrent (1800) of Maria Edgeworth's the reader is confronted by Regina Maria Roche who holds extended the popular Children of the Abbey (1796 ?), the opening pages of which are somewhat similar to the beginning of Mary Brunton's Self-Control (1810). Amanda, the heroine, is insulted by Belgrave and is soon seen kneeling at her mother's grave. The poor thing is apparently controlled by an afrit who metes out deception. Things brighten up a little as the pages are turned to where Lord Mortimer in Wales is trying his game to be repulsed, or to where later stands the castle Carberry in Ireland. Perhaps the choice piece of workmanship is the Belgrave closet scene. The re- mainder of the novel is a rechauffe of Richardsonian stuff. Maria Edgeworth's "Castle Rackrent" 207 Belgrave goes a little farther than Pollexfen in his success- ful amour, facilitated by accidental circumstances. The ghost and the interspersed lyrics from Gray, Goldsmith, Akenside, and Burns, together with strains profusely culled from Milton, show how Regina Maria Roche in- effectually re-arranged the stage property and music of "Monk" Lewis's and Mrs. Radcliffe's. Maria Edgeworth the product of an English boarding school was perhaps sixteen years old when she first saw Ireland. After being thoroughly trained in aphorisms by her father Richard, and after seventeen years of association with the people of Ireland, she wrote Castle Rackrent (1800). Maria Edgeworth believed that Eng- lishmen had never seen an Irishman or heard his true dialect except on the London stage; and she averred that they did not know how to depict the Irish any more than the Chinese knew how to paint lions. She had no patience with any one who made fun of the Irishman and his brogue. He should be taken just as seriously as one speaking the cockney dialect of London, the cant of Suffolk, or the wild and uncouth phraseologies of Shrop- shire and Yorkshire. The English could think that an Irishman was a fool, but it was to be emphatically shown by her that all his foolish blunders were never blunders of the heart. An Irishman never becomes a tragical charac- ter except when antagonistic influences are playing upon his good nature and generosity. The estate of Castle Rackrent was fatal to all its warm-hearted possessors. Sir Patrick speedily died a drunken death; Sir Murtagh was killed by lawsuits and a wife's jarring tongue; and gambling, a Jewish wife, and a duel, made a quick demise for Sir Kit. Sir Condy, the last, greatest, and weakest of his race, spun a coin for choice between two girls for a wife, and as bad luck would have it, he was given the woman who spent his money right and left. The expenses 208 Motives in English Fiction in connection with securing the election to Parliament completed his material ruin. As bankruptcy and creditors were closing in upon him, his wife deserted him when he needed her most. After shamming death at a wake, at which he finds that few in this world come to see a bank- rupt die; and after being further taken in even after bankruptcy by Jason, he found a way to a helpful winding sheet by a copious draught of the contents of a great horn of liquor. Sir Condy had been a fool all his days, but he had been beloved by the people and the little children and had generously provided for his wife. In this first piece of fiction Maria Edgeworth made it possible for Lady Morgan to flesh her maiden sword in The Wild Irish Girl (1806) ; for Jane Austen to do the little bow-wow for the middling classes of southern England; for Scott to do the big bow-wow in Waverley, GuyManner- ing, and Rob Roy; and for John and Michael Banim to write The O'Hara Tales (1825-27). Gerald Griffin published The Tales of the Munster Festivals (1827) and The Collegians (1829). William Carleton issued Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry (1830), to be followed by Fardorougha the Miser and Willy Reilly. Samuel Lover's Rory O'More appeared in 1837 and Handy Andy in 1842; and Charles James Lever's Harry Lorrequer was printed in 1837. Maria Edgeworth not only inspired such de- lineation of Irish life, but wafted something of her tech- nique in composition to help the Brontes in their depiction of Yorkshire moor life. Joseph with his splendid charac- terizing dialect of Yorkshire was one of Emily Bronte's marked successes in Wuthering Heights. George Eliot and Enoch Arnold Bennett are also indebted to Maria Edgeworth for their cross-sections of country folk life in Warwickshire and the pottery districts of Staffordshire. Belinda (1801) contains Maria Edgeworth's greatest piece of feminine characterization. Life indeed to Lady Edgeworth's "Belinda" 209 Delacour, who was not yet thirty, had been a long drawn out tragi-comedy. She had lived like a coquette, and she was determined that she would die like one. She had made love to Colonel Lawless, who, because of his mid- night escapade with her and Harriet Freke, had been called out and shot by her husband. By questionable actions Lady Delacour had produced the drinking habit in her husband, and had cultivated hallucinations such as to make herself believe that her daughter Helena had no love for her. In her hypochondriacal moods she had deemed herself as not being a fit mother, and fancied that she was dying of a cancer. Lady Delacour hated gossipers and scandal breeders such as Mrs. Freke and the bad Mrs. Luttridge, when she was no whit better than they. After beautiful Belinda Portman entered her house in London, Lady Delacour soon began to imagine that an intrigue was being carried on between Belinda and her husband; therefore, to spite this husband, Lady Delacour behind the curtain encouraged the advances of young Clarence Hervey. Lady Delacour was a Viscountess who had spent three fortunes in trying to insure felicity and had awakened to find it only ennui. She still endeavored to find domestic happiness in Methodistical books, lauda- num, and visions. Wealth, rank, and beauty being of no avail her only relief was fashionable dissipation. In her had died the source of tears, and it was only when seeing a tragedy that she brought forth the cambric handkerchief of sensibility. Her head was full of crape petticoats, horses, carriages, Harriet Freke, and Mrs. Luttridge. Hervey's scheme for the redemption of this hypochondriac was to have her love Helena and cultivate the acquaint- ance of Lady Anne Percival who might win her from her associates — the ceremonious fops and belles who possessed no real affections. The one great scene in the novel is where Lady Delacour, without love in her heart, is 14 210 Motives in English Fiction insanely jealous of Belinda, who, she thinks, is trying to slip into her shoes and shuffle towards her husband's coronet. The characterizing dialogue is superb as Be- linda, with the knife which she had recently found and closed and put in her pocket, stands at the mercy of the hysterical Lady whose rouge is sadly furrowed by tears. Straightway Belinda flees to Oakley Park to see per- manent domestic joys for the first time. The novel is a mixture of fine humor and pathos. Perhaps the keenest anguish in the tragi-comedy is felt by little Helena whose life seems to have been all tragedy until she received the first kind look from her whimsical mother. One is pleased at the inversion of Lady Dela- cour's character which the reader grasps at the end of the novel when he hears her say, "Do not let go your father's hand — Helena, my love." In turning from characteri- zation to motivation there is the realization that Maria Edgeworth was a poor plotter. The portrait of Virginia, sweet and fresh as nature at the beginning of this novel, is soon crumpled between the two sliding iron doors of the plan devised by Maria Edgeworth to entrap and unite Belinda and Hervey in wedlock. The artificial method used is abominable. One might as well kill Virginia as make a Mrs. Freke out of her; and this is precisely what happens, for she falls in love with a picture of nobody. When this picture materializes into somebody he is Captain Sunderland who is nobody after all but a piecing in of a painting of one of Virginia's romantic dreams. At the beginning of the novel Maria Edgeworth depicts Virginia in love with love as a fresher, sweeter child of nature than Belinda; but wantonly for plot device she destroys the girl's characterization. If she had through- out the novel developed this heroine of Bernardin de St. Pierre's by keeping her always in the rural setting that had been determining and moulding the simplicity of her Edgeworth's "The Manufacturers" 211 character, Virginia might have emerged head and shoul- ders above Belinda and Lady Delacour as the strongest personality in the masterpiece. Maria Edgeworth kept the style in Belinda well sus- tained with the Ithuriel spear-like insertion of felicitously ethical phrases which punish Lady Luttridge, Lady Freke, and Lady Delacour for their lawless lives; and, in the short stories and novelettes that she wrote between 1801 and The Absentee (18 12), one is studying characters who are fleeing from disaster along the road of morality to the inn of cure and convalescence. The Grateful Negro (1802), Murad the Unlucky (1802), The Manufacturers (1803), Emilie de Coulanges (1803), Ennui (1804), and Madame de Fleury (1805) form a crescendo of terminal, ethical climaxes to which are nearly always added Maria Edgeworth's fatal postscripts of exposition tending to destroy her connotative bits of narration, since the reader is asked to grasp twice what he has already grasped once. The Grateful Negro, a replica of Mrs. Behn's Oroonoko, shows the evils of negro plantation life in Jamaica. Durant, the overseer, by his cruel treatment of the slaves in time will run into Mrs. Frances Trollope's Whitlaw Senior's son and Harriet Beecher Stowe's Legree. Miss Edgeworth's story shows what a glorious privilege was given to negroes the moment they touched English soil, and is a pathetic salute fired in the direction of black faces serving under English masters on alien shores. Murad the Unlucky is a Turkish tale full of oriental fumes to which De Quincey might have turned before sending in to his publishers the Co?ifessions of an English Opium- Eater. The Manufacturers, an echo of Mrs. Charlotte Smith's The Old Manor House, sounds a warning to trades- people not to marry into circles above them. The manu- facturer, who turned gentleman and changed his name, succeeded in climbing into the frozen circle above him 212 Motives in English Fiction and for a time lived the high life with a wife who had the gambling craze. He lived to learn that children born of marriages of convenience love not their parents, and thus the reader learns to anticipate what Thackeray's Madame de Florae told Ethel Newcome. Such children are brought up to think happiness lies only in making high connections; and pride of place prostrates all plans that are continually being made for economic retrenchment. Do not acquire the habit of aping betters; for habit is a species of moral predestination from which there is no escape. Mr. William Darford, who kept to his cotton business and his own class type, was happy and wealthy, and was only miserable when trying to extricate his friend Charles from his dilemma. At last Darford was successful in turning his penitent friend back again from a miserable gentleman into a manufacturer, destined after the bitter marital experience with Mrs. Germaine to value above all things domestic felicity enjoyed in the common rank and file of life. ' In Emilie de Coulanges there is presented the study of reticulations in the shawl of sensibility tightly drawn around the shoulders of a benefactress, Mrs. Somers, who was so afflicted with vapeurs noirs that she analyzed her protegee as possessing no heart; and Mrs. Somers, after having constantly made Emilie the victim of black-eyed biliousness, came to the conclusion that she herself must have had no heart to have regarded Emilie as an ingrate by supposing that she had an opposing temperament. The story is a triumph in shading with the same shade two feminine temperaments. "There are people who would rather that their best friends should miss a piece of good fortune than that they should obtain it without their 1 H. G. Wells in Kipps (1905) teaches a draper to remain a draper, if he would be happy. On the social ladder one's round is fixed, therefore one should stay on it and not climb to the round above. Edgeworth's " Ennui" 213 intervention." Maria Edgeworth analyzes family jars as resulting from defects of temper, which defects arouse in us the keenest sense of humor, which is not wit, or folly, or habit, or affectation; for it is, as Congreve has written in Concerning Humour in Comedy (1695), 'that which is a characteristic peculiarity that inevitably makes one say a certain thing, which is natural and proper to one individual only, and which distinguishes his discourse and his actions from the discourse and the actions of all others.' 1 Ennui is the analysis of a man possessing the characteristics of a Lady Delacour. Aside from the fact that it is a story of two islands, and apart from the fact that it contains old Ellinor's utterance, "if it plased God, she would like to die on a Christmas-day, of all days; becaase the gates of heaven, they say, will be open all that day; and who knows but a body might slip in unknownst?", and that divorce has crept again into English fiction, and that an ill-bred Irishman can not stand prosperity when elevated to the legal ownership of Glenthorn Castle, because its former unlawful possessor had received the gentlemanly training which should have been his from birth, there is much moral indigestion caused by the ethical fallacy we have swallowed. Adversity has formed the Earl of Glenthorn's character; therefore, prosperity can not fashion for Christy Donoghue an upright, steady character, since adversity has not properly moulded it. The reader justly indignant turns with relief and pleasure to Madame de Fleury to learn that education for children in Paris is more valuable than money; that a Victoire should be taught obedience by having the tender spot of gratitude touched; and that patience should be inculcated by the method of bribing 1 The real words that Congreve used in defining humor are: "A singular and unavoidable manner of doing or saying anything, peculiar and natural to one man only, by which his speech and actions are distinguished from those of other men." 214 Motives in English Fiction to control temper. Manon would not take to this educa- tional system of Madame de Fleury's and was driven out as an exponent of bad education to die an immoral woman in the days of Ca ira and La Guillotine. Victoire lost nothing in the shipwreck of France, because none of the sans-culottes could steal from her head the contents of a good education. Madame de Fleury saved herself and her estate by reason of the gratitude of the lower classes who would not permit a hair of her head to be touched because of their having been aided by her system of charity education. It should be borne in mind that this story appeared a year after the publication of Mrs. Amelia Opie's Adeline Mowbray; or, Mother and Daughter (1804). The opening chapter of The Absentee (1812) is as mas- terly in technique as that of any modern classic novel. It is Maria Edgeworth's best short-cut in dialogue to character in action. In the crush-room of a London opera house Lord Colambre overhears conversation that ana- lyzes the social prominence of his mother and father, Lady Clonbrony and Lord Clonbrony. From the lips of the English aristocracy the son ascertains that Irish hospi- tality has been reluctantly accepted and that all London is ridiculing his mother behind her back because, by means of mimicking cockney dialect and English manners and using money that dishonest agents in Ireland have wrung from the suffering, hungry dwellers on her lands, she has tried to push herself above the best in rank and wealth in London. Lord Colambre comes to the conclusion that an absentee in England is nobody, somewhat like his father whose only business is to stand by and see his wife squan- der money. Out of love for his father, mother, and native country, he resolves to go to Ireland to inquire into the natural condition of their fortune. The part of the novel, where he in disguise of an Englishman interested in mines Edgeworth's "The Absentee" 215 is stranded at the cottage of widow O'Neil, is to show that the door of Irish hospitality is always open to strangers although it may be that a welcome is all that the possessor of a hut may have to offer. The greatest scene, which Macaulay likens unto that contained in the XXII Book of The Odyssey, is that one which occurs when Lord Colambre still in disguise enters the castle of Clonbrony just as the agent is renewing the leases for the tenants. The poor widow is not permitted to renew her lease. The son interferes. The mother and daughter are frightened and try to restrain him. It is then that Lord Colambre steps up and says, "Let the voice of truth be heard"; and "Who the devil are you?" says old Nick Garraghty. Just then some one calls Lord Colambre by name and old Nick and his accomplice are denounced and equity reigns amid consternation. Maria Edgeworth would show that the place for all intelligent Irishmen is in Ireland. Irish lords should not leave their estates to reside in London to ruin the happiness of their families as well as the homes and joys of the peasant tenants left behind in old Ireland. Irish birth should not be denied in order that a living might be gained in London. Lady Clonbrony at last sees the error that well-nigh ruined her good-natured husband, son, and niece Miss Nugent who throughout the entire English experience, sweetly and unselfishly, tactfully and sensibly, had protected her aunt from her follies, and had shielded her from the insults of female dragons in English high life. Lady Clonbrony goes back to the dear old home in the Emerald Isle, where she realizes that love and friendship of family and retainers are the only things worth while in this world. The Semitic humor that is to play about Isaac of York, as he is matched in cunning by Gurth in payment for Ivanhoe's horse and armor, begins to crackle as Sir Terence O'Fay for the saving of Lord Colambre's fortune assumes the role of an Irish Jew in 216 Motives in English Fiction order to outwit the English Jew coachmaker, Mordicai. And Count Halloran is as noble in type of all that is true in Irish quality as King Corny in Ormond (1817). The Absentee (1812) is a trans-Irish-Sea novel; Ormond is a trans-English-Channel novel. Young Ormond is an Irish Tom Jones. After reading Fielding's masterpiece, Ormond is on the point of patterning himself after its hero, when all at once the antidote to the poison of lawless procedure is applied in the form of a poultice of readings from Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison. By imitating Sir Charles Grandison at the Black Islands, he learns the art of controlling that Tom Jones spirit which had been threatening Dora, the daughter of King Corny. Later, as a result of reading Lord Chesterfield's Letters it is all that he can do to keep in abeyance advances toward a married woman Lady Millicent. At the end of the novel Ormond goes to visit Dora who had become the wife of M. Connal; and in the salons, theatres, and boulevards of Paris in the days of Louis XV, when Marie Antoinette was dauphiness, he again feels within his veins pulsating the poison of his Tom Jones nature. He becomes ac- quainted with the writings of such French celebrities as Marivaux, Voltaire, Rousseau, and converses with D'Alembert and Marmontel. If there was any one that saved him at the critical moment from ruining the woman Dora, whom he fancied he loved, it was this Marmontel, who, by the naivete and finesse of his Les Contes Moraux recalled his former veneration for the perfect man Sir Charles Grandison of Samuel Richardson. And if it was not a Marmontel it was the result of listening to the echo of the soft voice of a girl by the name of Annaly. Ormond had always listened to "good sense from the voice of benevolence." Then, too, it was his memory of King Corny whose goodness of heart had never been spoiled by the cunning of the head. Thus Ireland wins back for Edgeworth, Lady Morgan, Scott 217 itself a nobleman that all the blandishment of an impure Parisian court life could not destroy. Lady Morgan made use of the close of this novel in giving the reader a glimpse at another glittering Parisian assemblage of noblemen and ladies gathered about Napo- leon Bonaparte as First Consul, and an Irishman O'Brien, turned French nobleman, upon whose arm is leaning his Irish wife as beautiful as Connal's Dora. Maria Edge- worth, if she had kept the second half of this novel up to the superior excellence of the first half, would have achieved her greatest triumph in Irish characterization, but the discharge of the gun that killed King Corny seems to have paralyzed the hand which held the magic pen. The novel so far as characterization is concerned died a violent death with King Corny. Maria Edgeworth never again successfully was able to mend this pen which had been marred in the explosion which caused King Corny 's death. Helen (1834) is as futile in portraying fashion- able society types as Patronage had been in 18 14. But taking her novels all together, she had made an immense contribution to English fiction. She had handed on the fairy knowes, banshees, wakes, and peasant customs of Ireland, to Sir Walter Scott. The characteristics of such Irish heroes as Lord Colambre, King Corny, and Ormond, became the traits of the Highland chieftains of Scotland who knew no disloyalty, double-dealing, or unkindness. From Castle Rackrent to Ormond we see Irishmen, who as Scotchmen in the hands of Sir Walter Scott were to love their provinces, their clans, and their families, from the centre of their circles to the circumferences thereof. CHAPTER VIII Amelia Opie, Jane Porter, Lady Morgan, Anna Maria Porter, CKarles Robert Mat\irin, ElizabetK Hamilton, Hannah More, Mary Brunton, and Jane Austen MRS. AMELIA OPIE'S Father and Daughter (1801) is plotted according to the Wordsworthian pathos which filled Mrs. Inchbald's Nature and Art (1796). Agnes Fitzhenry, instead of finding herself happily married at Gretna Green to her lover Clifford, awakens from her dream to the reality of seduction in London. The novel seems to be an expository narrative, the key sentence of which is that the consequences of one's virtues or vices can not be confined to one's self alone. When fleeing with her illegitimate babe through a forest on the way back to meet the father she had deserted, she has a melodramatic meeting with a maniac who proves to be her father who had just escaped from the Bedlam he had founded. In the region of her nativity Agnes learns how wide reaching evil is in its influence on others, since Fanny with whom she resided loses three scholars. Her destiny is to live with a mad father, and to become a nurse frequenting the bed of the dying, an occupation which fell to the lot of her descendants, Mrs. Gaskell's Ruth and Hawthorne's Hester Prynne. Agnes on the day of the funeral of her father is compelled to carry an added an- guish, suffering the loss of her little son, Edward, who is 218 Mrs. Opie's "Adeline Mowbray" 219 abducted by Clifford who has now become Lord Mount- carrol. It is not long until Agnes dies by reason of this two-fold shock, and Clifford follows her having been worn out by vices and by the gnawing remorse consequent to his not being able to atone to Agnes or to his boy, who could not claim the parental estate because of illegitimacy. Adeline Mowbray; or, Mother and Daughter (1804) is built on bigger trellis-work. Frederick Glenmurray has written books in favor of free love and against dueling, and acts contrary to the premises therein laid down. After fall- ing in love with Adeline he frowns on union libre and be- comes involved in a duel. In order to escape seduction at the hands of Sir Patrick O' Carrol, who had married her mother, Mrs. Mowbray, Adeline abandons her home and throws herself into the arms of Glenmurray with whom she elopes to France. Glenmurray does his best to influence her to accept the cement that society has for love and honor, but she constantly opposed the marital relationship, since it was contrary to the doctrines of her lover's volumes and to the teachings of a mother who had been wild on the subject of education. At one time she was almost persuaded to go to the altar by reason of seeing a boy burst into tears at being ostracized for his illegiti- macy by his little playmates who claimed all the rights that went with legitimate birth. But when she was delivered of a dead-born child there seemed to be no good reason for putting on the manacles of a marriage ceremony. This stubbornness indirectly caused the death of Glen- murray, who, as he passed away, fully realized it as a retributive action for writing pernicious books. Adeline was now left at the mercy of society that she had defied. Necessity compels her to accept Berrendale as a husband. Then comes what we would expect, persecution and bad treatment; and, after her little daughter Editha is born, Berrendale deserts her and death speedily follows. Just 220 Motives in English Fiction before her exit Adeline gives Editha into the keeping of Mrs. Mowbray with the injunction that Editha must be fed on a different educational diet from that on which she had been nourished. The reader feels that Mrs. Mowbray will not fasten the same educational system on Editha as that which ruined Adeline. The granddaughter will be taught to be slow to call the experience of ages contempt- ible prejudices, so that ultimately the grown-up girl will have no opinions that can destroy her sympathies with general society and make her an alien to the hearts of those among whom she lives. There seems to be no doubt that Mrs. Opie in writing this novel had the influence of Mary Wollstonecraft in mind. The tiny mass of morbid realism in Adeline Mowbray presages the great dark land of its activity in the novels of Thomas Hardy, Hall Caine, and Mrs. Humphry Ward. Glenmurray and Adeline in union libre in France survived as David Grieve and Elise Delaunay in Paris. The deser- tion and death, which came to Adeline for breaking the dearest law set by society, were repeated in worse form in the fate which came to David's sister Louie in the shape of the Algerian dagger by which she escaped from the fierce burden of a self inherited from a mother, who, like daugh- ter, had made herself an alien to the hearts of those among whom she had lived, and had taken her own life. The pernicious system of education by which a mother ruined Adeline is similar to that motivated by a father to engulf George Meredith's Richard Feverel. In 1803 was published Thaddeus of Warsaw, which extolled Poland and deified its heroes who were not dead but living at the time that the novel was written. It was something new to have Jane Porter fling ink from the pot of sentiment upon a bit of stirring current history. The gifted sister of Anna Maria Porter by the machinery of the steady pressure of "weeps" interested both sides of Jane Porter's "Scottish Chiefs" 221 the Atlantic in the cause of freedom, which shrieked louder and better on the pages of Harriet Martineau's The Hour and the Man (1840) and Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). In 1809 appeared Scottish Chiefs which had been prepared in much the same manner as Scott's Border Minstrelsy. In addition to what legendary lore supplied, she consulted the actual data of history. When a comparison is made between Sophia Lee's The Recess, Clara Reeve's The Old English Baron, and Scottish Chiefs there is a feeling that a vast step has been made forward in the technique of the historical novel. Jane Porter's masterpiece is the first noble eminence by which we can measure the altitude of Scott's magnificent moun- tain range. Jane Porter and Sir Walter Scott at times seem to have been congenitally inaccurate so far as following faithfully the outlines of authentic history. If the reader wishes more minute accuracy he must wait until Thackeray writes his Henry Esmond and Charles Reade The Cloister and the Hearth. In spite of the fact that Jane Porter visited all the places that she describes in the Scottish Chiefs, it is not her realistic backgrounds that appeal, but the romantic personages moving in front of them in the mists of history. In the martial, romantic melodrama Lady Mar, quivering under the atrocious passions which lead her on in the guise of the Knight of the Green Plume to plunge a dagger into the breast of Sir William Wallace, is one of the great minor feminine rogues in English fiction. Almost every boy or girl knows or ought to know how Lady Mar, re- jected and baffled in her guilty love, caused the scene on Tower Hill where Helen's bridal bed became the scaffold on which Wallace escaped the hangman's noose and Helen's arms to be forever true to his Marion in heaven. Jane Porter in The Pastor s Fireside (18 15) failed to fascinate the reading public. Perhaps, in collaboration 222 Motives in English Fiction & j with her sister, she penned Sir Edward Seaward' 's Narrative, which shows a return to Daniel Defoe. The novels of Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan) are St. Clair; or, the Heiress of Desmond (1804); The Novice of St. Dominick (1805); The Wild Irish Girl (1806); Ida of Athens (1809); The Missionary (181 1); O'Donnell, a National Tale (18 14); Florence Macarthy (181 8); and The O'Briens and the 0' Flaherty s (1827). Sydney Owen- son, the daughter of an Irish actor, figuratively clasped hands with Maria Edgeworth to arouse Englishmen to have a heartfelt interest toward their brothers across the Irish Sea. Though Lady Morgan began to publish in 1804 it was not until 1806 that she became famous as the author of The Wild Irish Girl. The wild scenery of Connaught, where are seen poverty-stricken peasants, such as are represented by Murtoch O'Shaughnessy and his ready-to-be-sold wife, who are robbed by the heartless friar in the parish mass-house or who are fleeced by the honest priest whose mind was always full of scorpions for so doing, is the setting of realistic misery used for the delightfully absurd romance of the Prince of Inismore and his daughter Glorvina. An ancient feud from Cromwell's time had existed between the House of M. and the House of Inismore. Over in England at the time the story opens the Earl of M., disgusted with his boy Horatio who had become entangled in an intrigue with Lady C, decides to send the wayward boy to Ireland to study Coke and Lyttleton instead of belles-lettres. From Dublin Horatio goes to his father's handsome lodge, which is a Tusculum in savage Connaught. It is not long until by the happy accident of a fall he is conveyed into Inismore Castle to behold a beautiful princess sitting beside him with snowdrops scattered on her lap. This wild Irish girl who kisses the snowdrops and puts them in her bosom is one for whom Lady Morgan's "Wild Irish Girl" 223 art can do nothing since nature has done all. She can play- on the harp, sing Campbell to Erin-go-Bragh, dance, draw, read Latin and Greek; and, on bringing to our hero the first violet of spring, the Irish beauty quotes Tasso, while Horatio replies in French. Within the castle our hero is soon giving Glorvina drawing lessons, and whiles away his time making a philological study of Erse. Princess Glorvina possesses a hand that blushes in order to match her auburn hair, which is richly bedecked with Irish gems. Ossian is her favorite study. In the celebration of the rites of the first of May she gloriously dances an Irish jig ; and gradually, amid quotations from Rousseau, Collins, and Ossian, the lovers are drawn closer and closer together. At times we enter the boudoir where Horatio obtained his first kiss ; and we see the blood of our hero on snowdrops, which had been culled from the spot where he had fallen from the castle wall. At length there is seen a paper-mark on which there is a mysterious masculine scrawl; and, disturbed by it as much as Horatio, to keep from fainting we rush from the castle to find ourselves in a rustic church- yard just in time to see an Irish funeral and hear our hero propose to Glorvina beneath a cypress tree. Feeling that the precincts of the castle afford a better refuge than the graveyard we rush back to the paper-mark about which must lurk the mysterious unknown. All at once Horatio is seen writhing in the throes of jealousy on a sick bed, for there is no doubt now that Glorvina is carrying on a secret correspondence with a male. At last the wild Irish girl tells Horatio that she never can be his, and the parting scene takes place. On top of all these woes that had descended upon the head of Horatio there comes a letter from his father, who tells him that he has selected an Eng- lish girl whom he is bringing over to have straightway married to his beloved son. Led by curiosity Horatio rushes away to Dublin to take one look at the face of his 224 Motives in English Fiction future fate. Then it is he feels that he must once more see Glorvina, so back to Inismore Castle he goes, arriving just in time to see a mysterious stranger leading his sweet- heart to the altar, behind which stood the priest. The first words of the marriage ritual are being pronounced, when the ghastly Horatio rushes forward to recognize the incognito as his own father, who long before under a fictitious name had entered Inismore Castle to relieve the Prince from bankruptcy. The glorious Glorvina had been part of the compact, and she was nobly keep- ing her promise to her father to take the man who had saved the family from degradation. Of course the father of Horatio steps aside and leaves the altar to the boy. In 1827, in the surety of a style at last happily acquired, Lady Morgan flung forth a novel that delineated a then recent stirring bit of Irish history. In Phoenix Park, Dublin, where in our time Lord Cavendish was murdered, attention is focused upon a military review to be followed by a runaway in which Lady Knocklofty is rescued by Murrogh O'Brien. This chariot episode is followed by a riot in which the gallant rescuer is a prominent figure disgracing the sacred vestments which pronounce him to be a student enrolled in the University of Dublin. After such excitement we are carried to the castle of Dublin, where the female oligarchy, doing the King's business, is lined up for inspection. At the rout the eminent pa- triot Lord Walter Fitz waiter is a pleasing figure. After Murrogh O'Brien is expelled from Trinity, Lord Walter becomes an animated piece of flesh and blood as we gather from his views that he stands for reform in Parliament and Catholic emancipation and the Society of the United Irishmen, into which Murrogh is initiated. This Lord Walter is a portrait of Lord Edward Fitzgerald who was so ill-fated as to have all his plans interpreted as leading Lady Morgan's Murrogh O'Brien 225 to a separation of Ireland from England; and for the advocacy of which, he afterwards lost his life. Lady Morgan's insertion of romance into this national tale is highly commendable. A fair incognita at intervals throughout the novel appears to Murrogh to save him from the United Irishmen and the dangerous flirtation with Countess Knocklofty. This beautiful unknown is a religieuse who had assumed the role of providence in order to be a guardian angel to Murrogh in Italy and elsewhere at the most critical moments of his life. Murrogh now acquires the title of Lord Arranmore by reason of the death of his relapsed Papist father and travels through the beautiful scenery of Connemara to meet his divine aunts living in Bog Moy. Lady Knocklofty unexpectedly ar- rives in the region, and Lord Arranmore still susceptible to her charms plans a gipsy tour of the Arran Isles. It is at this critical moment that the party visit the abbey of Moycullen, of which the presiding goddess proves to be Beavoin O 'Flaherty. In the midnight interview that Murrogh has with this beautiful sibyl we realize that she is a picture torn out of one of Mrs. Radcliffe's novels. It is this creature marked with a black cross on her forehead who even at that very moment at midnight knew that a warrant had been issued for the arrest of Murrogh on the ground of treason. This beautiful divinity oracularly voicing Ireland's wrongs tells Lord Arranmore that she is his cousin and that he must leave the shores of Ireland at once if he would save a life that had always been unques- tionably dear to her. The reader now knows that they love each other. The close of the novel is a strong piece of work especi- ally the tragic episode in the abbey as the men rush for- ward during the divine service to serve the King's writ on Lord Arranmore. The valiant deeds of Shane, the last of the true Irish rapparees, have been exceedingly well done, is 226 Motives in English Fiction & j Shane is one of the most sympathetically drawn char- acters in the four volumes. Arranmore is hunted down and seized as he is bending over the body of one of his pursuers who had been killed by Shane. Murrogh is taken to the state prison of Kilmainham from the lofty wall of which on the day of his trial he succeeded in escap- ing by means of a knotted rope. In Paris, after the First Consul General Bonaparte, in spite of an attempted assassination on the way, is seen entering the box in the opera house with Josephine to hear the oratorio of Haydn, we see among those assembled General Murrogh O'Brien and his beautiful wife who is still playing the role of a guardian angel as on that night when she had taken Lady Knocklofty's ring from the finger of the sleeping Murrogh and had substituted the black, Jesuitic emblematic ring of her own. Lady Morgan in portraying the exciting life of Murrogh O'Brien drew upon the experiences in the ad- venturous life of Thomas Corbet. This novel was not only widely read in England but in France, Galignani the famous Parisian publisher issuing it in English in 1828. Anna Maria Porter's first novel was The Hungarian Brothers (1807) which was followed by Don Sebastian; or, the House of Braganza (1809) and the Knight of St. John (18 1 7). It is interesting to observe Charles and Deme- trius, the Hungarian brothers, as they are pushed back and forth in military tactics on the squares of the chess- board extending from Vienna to Ulm at a time when Napoleon was sacrificing Moreau, and Archduke Charles was frantically floundering in front of his beloved Aus- trians. Charles the level-headed brother loses his balance many times before he succeeds in winning Adelaide Ingersdorf; and Demetrius, who never was head but all heart, after nearly ruining his life because of an infatu- ation with Zaire (Madame de Fontainville) , a married woman, is cured of his passion by the beautiful Princess Anna Porter's "Don Sebastian" 227 Constantia whom he marries. Less watered sentiment and more militarism might have kept the novel alive till this day. As it was, as late as until 1 839 it was regarded as a standard novel; and the hussar life therein depicted brightened the metal on the shakos seen moving on the hills in G. R. Gleig's The Subaltern (1826) and Thomas Hamilton's Cyril Thornton (1827). Don Sebastian, King of Portugal, fell in love with Donna Gonsalva, a fascinating girl his inferior in birth. Announcing to the court that she would become his wife, he placed her in the palace of Xabregas. Soon after this Sebastian engaged in a war with the Moors in Barbary. After the battle of Alcazar he was taken prisoner by the Alarbes who sold him' to the Almocadem, El Hader, the father of the beautiful Kara Aziek. This heroine, in order to free Sebastian, whom she loved, pledged herself to marry a hated bashaw. Sebastian does not know the price that she had agreed to pay for purchasing his free- dom. Before Sebastian leaves Barbary, Kara Aziek gives him a lock of her jetty tresses and lifts her veil not so much to reveal her sadly wondrous beauty as to bid him look into her heart for that feminine truth which she thinks he will never find in the Portuguese Donna Gonsalva. Upon returning to Portugal, Sebastian rushes into the apartments in the palace of Xabregas to meet the woman whom he intended to make his wife; and as Dumas makes Catalane Mercedes false to Edmond Dantes so Anna Maria Porter makes the Portuguese Donna Gonsalva false to Don Sebastian. It is a tremendous scene in which Don Sebastian gazes upon a tiny form in the cradle and then looks wildly upon her who had become the mistress of his trusted friend, Don Antonia de Crato. The child in the cradle and the mother enceinte give him a fate much worse than that which was given to the prisoner of the Chateau D'If. The occidental woman has deceived Sebastian, but 228 Motives in English Fiction the oriental woman never; and soon Sebastian is in Bar- bary where is seen in the moonlit sky a speck which, as it gradually approaches, proves to be the silver- winged, milk-white dove Babec bearing a message of eternal love from Kara Aziek. The divine Kara gave up the faith of Mahomet for the sake of Sebastian. Their flight from the bashaw, their grief in Brazil as they were compelled to give up their daughter Blanche for the welfare of Portugal, and the death of this faithful eastern woman who had been worn out by many sufferings, make Anna Maria Porter's novel the equal of her sister Jane's Scottish Chiefs. Charles Robert Maturin, the Irish clergyman living in Dublin, in the year that Miss Porter brewed the broth of sentiment served up in European barracks, experimented in the Radcliffe Gothic romance. The Fatal Revenge; or, The Family of Montorio is a study in the sources of vision- ary terror. In a land where "the soul trembles on the verge of the unlawful and the unhallowed" Montorio stands persuading his brother's sons to murder their father. After the pressure of the occult has been removed and the revenge has been consummated the nephews stand forth as Montorio's own sons. The Wild Irish Boy (1808) is a stroll through Lady Morgan's and Maria Edgeworth's well-traversed country as is also The Milesian Chief (18 12). It seems to me that the great Sir Walter must have glanced at the pages of The Milesian Chief before writing The Bride of Lammermoor. The description of the castle of the O'Morvens on the coast of Connaught, Ireland, strangely tallies with that given Wolfscrag on the east coast of Scotland. Armida, the heroine, as the carriage approaches the entrance to the one-time O'Morven strong- hold, in a runaway is rescued from going over the precipice by a man with "a long curl of raven hair" who afterwards proves to be Connal, the rightful owner of the castle and the Milesian chief. The moods and passions of Connal, Maturin's "Milesian Chief" 229 as he courts Arrrrida of the usurping occupants of his lands, form the embryons which animate Edgar Ravens- wood as he despairingly wooes Lucy Ashton. Lady Montclare browbeats her daughter Armida so as to force her to marry Desmond, the brother of Connal's, duping her into believing that by such a course only could she save Connal's life. Seeing no other way to avert catas- trophe from descending on the head of the man she loved, Armida took a slow poison and then appeared at the marriage altar. Just as she was about to be married to Desmond the ceremony was interrupted by the entrance of mad Ines the wife of Desmond, who by Lady Montclare had been fooled into thinking Ines long since dead. This scene in the chapel could have suggested to Scott how far in the variations of marital madness he could go with Lucy Ashton. Lady Montclare is another Lady Ashton; but somewhat more repentant since she spends the rest of her days in a convent. Pride of house and accession of lands and material motives had led her on to a cruel sacrifice of Ines and Armida her two daughters. Armida, after Connal had been shot, in the paroxysms of the poi- son and mental anguish died in his arms ; and Ines, in the agonies of delirium, babbling forth gibberish reminiscent of love for Desmond, had shortly preceded her sister. Thus the ruin of both houses resulted, since the success of one had been temporarily built on the abasement of the other. A new melodramatic figure in fiction to be noted in this novel is Endymion, a girl who has been brought up as a boy and to whom there had been no revealment at any time of her sex. Maturin presents in a most tender manner the way in which Endymion gradually feels the approaching dawn of her sex. It comes about by the gradual association with Desmond. The scene where Desmond tells her that she is not a boy but a girl is absorbing. That virtue is born in a woman has never 230 Motives in English Fiction been more clearly proved than in that tense moment when Endymion flees to preserve her honor from the man to whom she would have given all that she held most dear. Desmond's mad wife kept a prisoner in the chapel is a reminder of Laurentini di Udolpho and the low gurgle of sounds which are to be heard in Rochester's manor. In passing from the Milesian Chief (1812) to Melmoth (1820) there is in Women, or Pour et Contre (18 18) the bewitching, Italianized Irish prima donna Zaira who represents the theatre of the time in conflict with Metho- distic religion such as Eva Went worth had embraced. The novel is the struggle of the woman of the world with the woman of God ; the theatre with the church. Maturin creates excellent pathos such as that which fills the eyes of Eva, when in the Dublin Theatre, she hears Zaira sing in Arne's Artaxerxes and sees De Courcy, the man she loves, waiting expectantly in the wings for the exit of the famous Zaira who is afterwards to be revealed as being her own mother. The dual-hearted De Courcy follows the operatic star to Paris, where he soon heeds the warning given him by his French friend that "genius makes a woman a charming mistress, but the devil of a wife, " and swinging from a contemplated marriage with Zaira he frantically rushes back to Ireland to his abandoned Eva. There then occur two death-bed scenes which are necessary to make Zaira, who had followed De Courcy, realize that she must live in Ireland with her hand over her heart since it had unconsciously murdered her daughter Eva, and had caused De Courcy to wend his way to the tomb in the throes of remorse. This figure of Zaira on the stage in English fiction had come to stay. In Letitia Landon's Ethel Churchill; or the Two Brides (1837) Zaira became Lavinia Fenton who, in spite of constant unrequited love, helped support Maynard, who loved Ethel, and was faithful to him even to the Stage Types in English Fiction 231 moment of his death. When this actress, famous as Polly Peachum in Gay's The Beggar's Opera, afterwards marries the Duke of Bolton we know that it is a mariage de con- venance, against which the whole force of the novel has been directed. In 1842 Lytton's Zanoniin a box of a Nea- politan theatre gazes upon the beautiful Viola Pisani and makes her an operatic success. In 1853 Charles Reade throws a whole novel into the theatre to portray a Peg Woffington; and in the same year Charlotte Bronte in Villette gives us a glimpse of the wonderful Rachel acting. In 1878 William Black's Macleod of Dare on the yacht went down in insanity and murder in the strife between an actress and himself. And in the nineties Hall Caine's Gloria Quayle destroyed John Storm; and Du Maurier's Svengali sat in a box so as to mesmerize golden notes out of the perfect mouth of Trilby who stood before the foot- lights oblivious of the adoration of Taffy, and the Laird, and Little Billee. It was an annus mirabilis (1818) that saw published Scott's Heart of Midlothian, Rob Roy; Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, Persuasion; Susan E. Ferrier's Marriage; Mrs. Shelley's Frankenstein; Thomas Love Peacock's Nightmare Abbey; and Maturin's Women, or Pour et Contre. By the aid of The Monk Maturin wrote Melmoth (1820), wherein was controverted Lewis's idea that in extremity every mortal would sell his soul to the devil. Ambrosio resigned all hope of salvation for earthly safety. Melmoth the Wanderer said that for one hundred and fifty years he had been experimenting with countless diabolic devices on men and women and had not been able to find Ambrosios who to gain the whole world would lose their souls. In the preface to Melmoth Maturin wrote, "is there one of us who would, at this moment, accept all" that man could bestow, or earth afford, to resign the hope of his salvation ? — No, there is not one — not such a fool on earth, were 232 Motives in English Fiction the enemy of mankind to traverse it with the offer!" Neither Stanton nor Moncada, nor Walberg, nor Elinor Mortimer, succumbed to Melmoth ; and not even Immalee (Isidora), the wife of this Zeluco-Schedoni-Ambrosio- Wandering Jew-of-a-devil, could be coerced in the cell of the Inquisition to barter her soul for an earthly paradise on the Indian isle with the demon she loved. The Wan- derer's appearance to Moncada and to his young relative Melmoth, his dreadful presaging dream, and his awful physical disintegration as the hand on the clock of eternity moves round to strike the completion of one hundred and fifty years, clearly prove Maturin's right to stand supreme, alone, on the pyramid of the Gothic romance, which had for its basic stone the midnight murder of Thomas De- loney's Thomas Cole of Reading. The description of the gradual disintegration of Melmoth as his final hour of doom approaches surely must have been in the mind of Emily Bronte as she portrayed "the queer end" of the monster Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights (1847). The experiences of the sane Stanton in a madhouse, into which he had been thrust by a relative, are a part of the fabric of sworn statements obtained from bribable doctors which compelled Alfred Hardie in Charles Reade's Hard Cash (1863) to battle with his keepers in a private asylum. The escape of Moncada from the Inquisition is a faint after-play of lightning in the Gothic sky that had illuminated Godwin's St. Leon in the house of a Jew. It has always seemed to me that Edgar Allan Poe must have familiarized himself with Moncada's vault, mat, reptiles, and phosphoric demons on the walls in Madrid before going to the city of Toledo for the scene of his cruel story The Pit and the Pendulum. Maturin throws about the auburn -tressed Immalee (Isidora), alone on the island off the mouth of the Ganges, a fine unicity of details such as had orientalized Anna Maria Porter's Kara Aziek in Bar- Maturin's "Melmoth" 233 bary and Persia. It is this girl, who says, "The world that thinks does not feel. I never saw the rose kill the bud," that receives such clear-cut characterization of tenderness that even Melmoth twice abandons his pro- ject. That she should learn to suffer is too much for the monster. In one place where this doomed girl talks we feel that Maturin is fingering forward to the style that was afterwards used by Emily Bronte to doom Catharine Linton in Wuthering Heights. Emily Bronte could be considered as the author of these utterances of Isidora: The presages that visit me are such as never visited mortal- ity in vain. I have always believed, that as we approach the invisible world, its voice becomes more audible to us and grief and pain are very eloquent interpreters between us and eter- nity — quite distinct from all corporeal suffering, even from ail mental terror, is that deep and unutterable impression which is alike incommunicable and ineffaceable — it is as if heaven spoke to us alone, and told us to keep its secret, or divulge it on the condition of never being believed. . . . Paradise ! . . . . Will he be there ! Catharine Linton, who can not escape her Heathcliff doom any more than Immalee (Isidora) can escape her Melmoth, prophetically says: I'm wearying to escape into that glorious world, and to be always there: not seeing it dimly through tears, and yearning for it through the walls of an aching heart ; but really with it, and in it. . . . I shall be sorry for you. I shall be incomparably beyond and above you all. . . . I won der he won't be near me! There is an interrupted marriage ceremony in this novel; and there are in the four volumes evidences of Mrs. Shelley's Frankenstein. Melmoth kills Isidora's brother just as Goethe's Faust kills Valentine. After one has thrown aside the novel there is keen satisfaction taken 234 Motives in English Fiction in the realization that no heart can be so broken that it can not by means of its pieces checkmate the apostate angel. Maturin's last novel The Albigenses (1824) in gorgeous pageant, moving in panoply of war between the Crusaders and the Albegeois, filling four volumes with wolves, were- wolf, maniac, and witchcraft, working woe and weal to Genevieve, Isabelle, Amirald, and Sir Paladour, is plainly modeled after Scott's Ivanhoe. Sir Paladour is Ivanhoe; Isabelle is Rowena; Genevieve is Rebecca; and Marie de Mortemar is Ulrica of Torquilstone Castle; and in the midnight passed by Sir Paladour with the lycanthrope, or werewolf, Maturin paves the way for S. R. Crockett in The Black Douglas to create a wolf-woman, who every night gnaws her husband's throat and breast. De Mon- fort is another Front-de-Bceuf ; Mattathias is similar to Balfour of Burley or Habakkuk Mucklewrath in Scott's Old Mortality; the Bishop of Toulouse is Brian de Bois- Guilbert moving in the mentality of Mrs. Radcliffe's monk Schedoni; and the Lord of Courtenaye meets a Front-de-Bceuf death in flames. As the Blackwood's Magazine once suggested the novel consists of four volumes of "vigor, extravagance, absurdity, and splendor"; and we can add that this is sane criticism. The blast of a horn as in Scott generally stays some villainous proceeding; and after the Bishop of Toulouse has been poisoned by the holy elements at the altar just as Rodin was poisoned by the holy water at the hands of Feringhea, the Indian thug, in Eugene Sue's The Wandering Jew, we are glad, when we hear the bugle blast for the last time just before Marie de Mortemar flings herself from the bartizan to the stony terrace beneath. Mrs. Elizabeth Hamilton by The Cottagers of Glcn- burnie (1808) created a space on the horizon where were to quiver and flicker the lights and shadows of Scottish life as they beacon forth in the fiction of John Gait, John Wilson, Mrs. Hannah More's Mr. Fantom 235 George Macdonald, J. M. Barrie, Dr. John Watson, George Douglas Brown, and S. R. Crockett. "It's the wull of God " that dirt and death should engulf farmer Mac Clarty and his son Sandie. "Ilka place has just its ain gait" and "I canna be fashed" have made for a mid- den inside and outside of Mrs. Mac Clarty's cottage. Mrs. Mason's plea for cleanliness at last prevails and Glen- burnie becomes as beautiful as its name suggests. Mrs. Hamilton's pronunciamento of sanitary and educational ideas materially and morally helped to lift the village folk of Scotland out of that slough into which they have not since fallen. After reading the anti-kailyard House with the Green Shutters (1901) we feel that George Douglas Brown wrote an inverted perversion of The Cottagers of Glenburnie. Mrs. Hannah More, the daughter of a teacher in Gloucestershire, was a west of England girl hailing from Bristol. On coming to London she soon became a close friend of Johnson and Garrick and an active member of the Bas-Bleu coterie. She was a mediocre poetess, a ninth-rate dramatist, an excellent writer of short stories, and succeeded in writing one substantial novel. Her short stories in the Cheap Repository tracts (1795-98) were written for the amelioration of the lower and middle classes. The good woman wrote fiction to hold in check the evil influence of the French Revolution on state, church, and layman. She believed that philanthropy should be exercised for the benefit of the individual rather than for the salvation of the social unit. One poor man on the road to ruin saved in England was worth all benevo- lent ideas wasted on the down-trodden masses in Poland. One Sunday-school kept in thriving condition in England was worth all the Sunday-schools carried out on golden platters of charity to foreign nations. She had no use for the philosophic mind such as fashioned itself after the 236 Motives in English Fiction mental mould of one of her own characters called Mr. Fantom. It will be remembered that while Mr. Fantom was writing a treatise on universal benevolence he was disturbed by seeing a cottage burning near his home. Mr. Fantom did not feel called upon to rescue the child whose life was endangered by the flames since he only concerned himself with cottages burning in distant, dis- mantled lands. According to Mr. Trueman the frontis- piece to Mr. Fantom's treatise should have been Fantom's servant William on the gibbet. It is not surprising that Mr. Fantom's closest servant William should have been hanged for murder, thus serving as a practical illustration of the blessed effects of such a philosopher's life course. Coelebs in Search of a Wife (1809) is a treatise on practi- cal piety which, if any son of Adam will read, he will make no mistake as to the selection of an Eve in the garden thickly populated with questionable Eves. As soon as Lucilla Stanley was born Coeleb's father and Mr. Stanley simultaneously formed a wish that it might be possible to perpetuate their friendship by a future union of the two children. Accordingly Lucilla was carefully trained in all that would make her a fit bride for Coelebs, who by his schooling had become even more ideal than Sir Charles Grandison. When Coelebs, after a course in Miltonic poetry, at the correct moment proposed to Lucilla she said neither yes nor no, but gently referred him to her father. The novel, once widely read, is a morality play with all kinds of religious entertainments going on in the wings ; and it is written in a style that is strongly animated by an ethical movement, the impetus of which is that the "implantation of a virtue is the eradication of a vice." Mrs. Hannah More's Practical Piety applied to the mar- riage problem is the idea floated successfully before the footlights in the biblical Coelebs in Search of a Wife. Lucilla, a feminine Daniel Deronda, made a way for the Mary Brunton's "Self-Control" 237 entrance of such puritanic girls as Hawthorne's Phcebe, Priscilla, and Hilda. In 1 8 10 was published Mary Brunton's Self -Control which shows Fielding's snares set for a heroine in Tom Jones and the survival of Richardsonian sentiment. In the first chapter Hargrave attempts the seduction of the immaculate Laura Montreville ; and afterwards, in London at Lady Pelham's, Laura's honor was again threatened by Colonel Hargrave in much the same manner as Sophia Western's was by Lord Fellamar in the house of Lady Bellaston's. After suffering nearly all the agonies in- flicted on Clarissa Harlowe by Richardson, Laura was abducted to Canada where among the Indians she was compelled always to sleep with a knife in her bosom in order to preserve her integrity. Colonel Hargrave crosses the Atlantic to force a marriage, from which she escapes by an emotional flight in a canoe, compelling nature in its turmoil of rapids to do obeisance to the goddess of self-control. Laura at all times emotionally belonged to Hargrave, but the course of self-control forced a safe marriage of herself to De Courcy. The reader com- forts himself along with Laura at the thought of the future meeting, which would take place between herself and repentant Hargrave (Lovelace) in Heaven. In Discipline (1814) there are recognizable the beauties of the High- lands, which were not appreciated because of the ante- cedent glories of such a background used by Scott in Waverley (1814); and in the unfinished Emmeline (1819) there can be detected a return to Mrs. Amelia Opie's morbidness, since it delineates a girl who can find no hap- piness after marrying her seducer. From 1796 to 1816 Jane Austen wrote novels which contemporaneous critical opinion classified as being equal in quality to those of Frances Burney and Maria Edge- worth. This Hampshire genius saw seventeen years pass 238 Motives in English Fiction after writing her first manuscript Pride and Prejudice before it was published. Ncrthanger Abbey written in 1798 went for £10 to a publisher in Bath who afterwards cheerfully surrendered the manuscript in order to get back his money ; and it saddens one to think that this novel and Persuasion did not see the light of print until after the death of Jane. Sense and Sensibility (181 1), written in 1797, shows that Jane Austen knew Frances Burney's Camilla and Mrs. Ann RadclifFe's Ellena di Rosalba. The delineation of Marianne, the seventeen-year-old heroine, who believed that she would never be happy with a man, whose taste did not correspond to her own, and whose heart must never have had a previous attachment or must never be covered by a flannel waistcoat, was the beginning of that death-dealing blow which was given to girls all "teary" around the eyelashes by Northanger Abbey, written in 1798. Elinor, Marianne's sister, is the antidote to sensi- bility, since she represents common sense controlling all outward emotion, such as is exemplified in the way that she suffers in her love for Ferrars. This Elinor carries two tragedies on her shoulders, suffering for self and the sister who has such distracted love for Willoughby. Elinor seems to be a sign-post upon which knocks continu- ally the hammer of unexpected bad news, so that readers can grasp that sense is a foundation upon which everything good can be built. She helps Marianne pass through the troubled waters of Willoughby's "It is all at an end, my dear," and with prim propriety she delicately awaits the issue of the Edward Ferrars-Lucy affair. Elinor is at last rewarded for her fortitude by seeing Robert Ferrars marry Lucy so that Edward can be hers, and by being able to stop the aquatic flow in the eyes of her sister, who, on becoming clear-eyed, sees how fortunate for herself the Eliza episode was in the life of Willoughby. Marianne Austen's "Sense and Sensibility" 239 philosophically comes to the conclusion that selfishness (Willoughby) could never have made happy a piece of poverty like herself manoeuvring in the guise of beauty. Thus she turns a sensible head to recline upon a flannel waistcoat, beneath which a manly heart caught on the rebound is beating. Out of Richardson's character, Lovelace, Jane Austen created a Willoughby in order to shatter to pieces the sensibility of Marianne. After care- fully considering the seduction of Eliza by Willoughby we ask: Why did not Jane Austen provide death for the scoundrel in the duel with Colonel Brandon as Richardson supplied death to Lovelace at the hands of Colonel Mor- den? The only punishment he received was domestic unhappiness which, in his case, was a kind of tolerable comfort that foreshadows what George Eliot gave to Godfrey Cass in depriving him of the love of his daughter Eppie. Thus, as far back as the year 1797, we see a fore- runner of Godfrey Cass in John Willoughby. In Pride and Prejudice (18 13) witty, sarcastic, sensible, bright-eyed Elizabeth Bennet, whose physical beauty we forget as often as Jane Eyre's plainness in the intellect- ual and spiritual loveliness constantly displayed and emphasized, and whose judgment is as self-condemnatory as Jane Eyre's, breaks the lance of Darcy's pride against the broken wand of her own prejudice. In contrast to Elizabeth is her sister Jane, whose physical beauty is always emphasized. Bingley, the mediocre good-natured lover of Jane, is the shadow of Edward Ferrars in Sense and Sensibility; and Wickham, the handsome rascal, is a connecting link between Willoughby, the seducer of Eliza, and Henry Crawford who in Mansfield Park by losing Fanny Price threw away a pearl richer than all his tribe. Behind the humorous characterizations of Mr. and Mrs. Bennet stands tragedy touching their elbows, and it is tragedy that Jane Austen does not chose to ex- 240 Motives in English Fiction plain. Would that she had done so ! But nothing greater than the Eliza episode, or the tragedy of a twisted ankle, in Sense and Sensibility, or a Louisa Musgrove falling from the Cobb at Lyme in Persuasion, is allowed to creep into Austenic fiction. The details of domestic discord are not for Jane Austen's pen except as these may contri- bute to make readers leave her novels filled with a high quality of mental laughter. We never think of Mr. Ben- net as having been made the worse because of his cackling wife, but as being infinitely better off since by his training he knows how to pile up fun for his troupe of comediennes such as when we see him standing before his daughter Elizabeth, who had just been proposed to by Mr. Collins, saying, "Your mother will never see you again, if you do not marry Mr. Collins, and I will never see you again, if you do." Mansfield Park had its pains, and Portsmouth no pleas- ures, not even a fire, for a heroine who in a tragedy of little boresome things was compelled to endure all kinds of discomfort before securing an Edmund. Mansfield Park (1814) is the tragedy of being misunderstood. At length at a ball Fanny Price is no longer misinterpreted, but is loved and appreciated by all since she loves because she has not the heart to refuse to love everybody. Nor in Emma (18 16) can we forget the countenances and intimate dialogue of those who frequent the roadway between Hartfield and Highbury. Whether we are at Donwell, or Randalls, or at the Crown for the purpose of dancing, or off on an excursion to Box Hill, our associates Knightley, Weston, Churchill, Mrs. Elton, Woodhouse, faithful Perry, Miss Taylor, the guileless Harriet, the talk-a-pace Miss Bates, and Jane Fairfax, are all following their leader, the fascinating, exasperating Emma, who is their life as well as our own. N orthanger Abbey (18 18) demonstrates that one can never Austen's "Northanger Abbey" 241 be tired of Bath even though he is continually listening to Mrs. Allen, who can only talk of dresses and expected dressmakers, and Mrs. Thorpe who can only talk of daugh- ters. The reader, however, feels that the scenery at Bath does not meritoriously measure up to the landscape touches in the first part of The Mysteries of Udolpho; and he is glad as Uncle Mat in Humphry Clinker to leave behind him the pumphalls of Bath in order to go into Gloucestershire to find an abbey in which there may be ' ' some awful memorials of an injured and ill-fated nun. " The reader enters North- anger Abbey before he is aware of its existence, thereby missing the sight of Gothic windows reverentially blessed by the beams of a splendidly dying sun. After entering the Tilney mansion, on a stormy nigljt, he is ensconced in a room so that by candlelight there can be revealed to him Mrs. Ann Radcliffe's furnishings (of course including a manuscript) which make the candle go out to cause terror and a sleepless night. And the next morning the reader is sold again when the re-examined manuscript reveals itself as an inventory of laundry billed goods. Northanger Abbey, written in 1798, after Mrs. Ann Radcliffe had run her course of Gothic terror, though it did not get into print till 1 81 8, shows a sane sentiment directed against the absurdities of the affectations of Gothic heroines in con- temporary romance such as Eaton Barrett had parodied on the pages of a novel The Heroine five years before the Austenic parody came out. Both Barrett and Jane Austen helped Sir Walter Scott to use rightly in romance that which is actually meritorious in Mrs. Radcliffe's fiction. Mrs. Lennox's Lady Arabella, Mrs. Radcliffe's Adeline, Jane Austen's Catherine Morland, and Barrett's Cherubina de Willoughby, were toned down by Scott to create such a heroine as domestic Mary Avenel wedded to romantic Halbert Glendinning at the close of The Monastery. 16 242 Motives in English Fiction Persuasion (1818) with its vignettes of Kellyinch, Bath, and Lyme, presents a mingling of comic and tragic errors. A light setting of moods has been conceived for the Mus- groves and a slightly heavy one for Mrs. Smith. Lady Russell has been selected as the adviser and adjuster of the "uncertainty of all human events and calculations." The recessive heroine of the light tragi-comedy is Anne Elliot "who knew that when she played she was giving pleasure only to herself" and that this was no new sen- sation. Since the death of her mother her lot had been to sigh out when pain was over so that the remembrance of it often was her only pleasure. At twenty-seven she realizes that " a persuadable temper might sometimes be as much in favor of happiness as a very resolute character. " Her manners are as consciously right as they are invariably gentle; and the only flaw momentarily detectable is that of expressing herself as exquisitely gratified because Went- worth for her sake has become jealous of Mr. Elliot. Anne, after listening to the tragedy that came into Mrs. Smith's life at the hands of the villain Mr. Elliot, who had married for money and traveled on Sunday, learns that "there are so many who forget to think seri- ously till it is almost too late." Mrs. Smith was to our unobtrusive heroine an ideal who could help her to step to the front as mistress of every critical situation in life. A submissive spirit might be patient, a strong understanding would supply resolution, but here was something more; here was that elasticity of mind, that disposition to be comforted, that power of turning readily from evil to good, and of finding employment which carried her out of herself, which was from nature alone. It was the choicest gift of Heaven, and Anne viewed her friend as one of those instances in which, by merci- ful appointment, it seems designed to counterbalance almost every other want. Austen's "Emma" 243 This gentle Anne of fortitude who says that a sick chamber may often furnish the worth of volumes is the most pathetic heroine of Jane Austen's; and there have been readers who have wept over her sufferings until she receives at the hands of her Creator the infinite joy of securing Wentworth and all that makes a heaven on earth. Perhaps it is time to slip away from the "exquisite touch" of the "little bow-wow strain" to the "Big Bow- wow strain" of Sir Walter Scott who said in October, 1 815, in The Quarterly Review, that the genius of Chawton had performed one of the most difficult feats in producing a fiction of common occurrences "within the extensive range of criticism which general experience offers to every reader." While confessing that he could never hope to please his readers with a close analysis of common char- acters walking arm in arm with common incidents such as had been created by the author of Emma, Scott seemed to be glad that he had determined in his own fiction to soar above the "ordinary probabilities of life," and that Jane Austen could stand for all he cared alone in the class of such work as Emma, which, though its force of narrative was "conducted with much neatness and point, and a quiet yet comic dialogue, in which the characters of the speakers evolve themselves with dramatic effect," possessed faults necessarily arising out of the minute detail of the plan. "Characters of folly or simplicity, such as those of old Woodhouse and Miss Bates, are ridiculous when first presented; but, if too often brought forward or too long dwelt upon, their prosing is apt to become as tiresome in fiction as in real society." Thus, Scott expressed ad- mirable disapprobation of that class of fiction, the chief function of which seemed to him to be the flinging forth of little boresome things which, as we well know, were the legacy of Fanny Burney and Maria Edgeworth; but in reading Jane Austen, who possessed the narrow, sure 244 Motives in English Fiction Japanese drawing instinct of patterning to perfection, we should always remember that the beauty of the truth of life is often revealed by little, boresome things. And at this point before taking up the Waverley Novels a last word should be said about Austenic fiction to note that in its use of comedy, or tragi-comedy, instead of tragedy, no feeble analysis of life results since Jane Austen Meredith-like makes the Comic Spirit use tragedy as a mask behind which is always concealed the utmost nobility of outlook. Behind the titterings and roarings of folly stands the wisdom of the world ready to forgive and adjust the mistakes of fools; and according to Jane Austen this charity on the part of the wisdom of the few issues out of the largess of love — as for example when Darcy deems it necessary to be present to arrange the marriage of eloping giddy Lydia to lying licentious Wickham. Love compels proud wisdom (Darcy) to move among the boresome things of life so as to bend to pick up for an immortal possession the heart of bright-eyed Elizabeth Bennet, whose reputation must not be tarnished by any opinion further passed by the world on Lydia and Wickham 's conduct which, if wisdom in humility had not chosen to consider, would never have moved toward the marriage- altar for the world's forgiveness. The wisdom of the world must correct the folly of the world : folly gives wis- dom always something to do. Thus wisdom with larger other eyes than ours views our faults; and, when we stoop or fall to be dragged in folly's endless train, it as a redemp- tive agent makes allowance for us all. Providence seems at first to be a stranger, but it is friend Wisdom in disguise entering the arena at love's beck and call to put the monster Folly hors de combat. Jane Austen at the bound- aries of comedy's domain just where tragedy's territory of pain begins turns her characters back into life's smooth paths of peace. They are driven back by the wisdom Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" 245 of others who love them. We learn by comedy; whereas by tragedy it is almost too late to learn. In Persuasion Anne Elliot sees that most people do not learn to think seriously until it is almost too late, until after they have crossed the dead-line. In Pride and Prejudice Darcy hav- ing discarded pride finds it easy to become a brother-in-law to foolish Lydia. Folly serves wisdom at every turn; for even the folly of Lady Catherine de Bourgh makes wisdom (Darcy) certain of the fact that it has won the utmost passion of Elizabeth's heart. And all that the virago, who has opposed the marriage of Darcy to Elizabeth, can do is at last to condescend to enter the polluted precincts of Pemberley to visit her nephew out of curiosity to see how Elizabeth as a wife is wearing to him. Thus, inasmuch as her tragi-comedy proves to be the comic side of wisdom, Jane Austen goes back to Henry Fielding and forward to George Meredith, who by causing us intellectually to laugh at fools and eccentric individuals makes us later learn to love them all the better; and thus the simpletons (even a Wickham) profit by seeing how others have laughed at their past idiotic conduct and turn as best they can to worship thereafter at wisdom's shrine. CHAPTER IX Sir "Walter Scott, Thomas Love PeacocK, Lady Caroline Lamb, Svrsan Edmonstone Ferrier, Mary Wollstonecraft SHelley, Thomas Hope, and Mary Rvissell Mitford ON the day that Scott in rummaging for fishing tackle chanced to find the manuscript of Waverley which he had written in 1805, it was figuratively the disinterment of the corpse of Gothic romance that had been so humorously buried by Eaton Barrett in The Heroine (1813). When Waverley was published in 1814, it was the restoration of II Castello di Grimgothico; and on the ice covering the moat beneath its frowning towers ap- peared the "Wizard of the North" with a Highland clay- more with which he drove ashore Jane Austen and Eaton Barrett, who with their skates had been derisively decorat- ing the ice-field with precise and fanciful figures of com- mon sense and nonsense. And shortly thereafter the sun arose, the ice melted, the drawbridge was lowered, and medievalism disguised as a bandit chief of sixty years since appeared beneath the portcullis. Waverley at first glance seems to be a romance of chivalry inimical to a tale of manners, but this is not true. It is rather a clever blending of the two. The passions of men and women are analyzed in a barbaric garb which, when thrown aside, is picked up as the recognizable rai- ment which for ages has clothed them. In 18 14 a novel 246 Scott's "Waverley" 247 of Scott's did not have to be a tale of other times, because according to Scott's idea, a tale of the present is always similar to a tale of other times when it presents present passions in one halo of romanticism and realism. Waverley is romanticism of manners and sentiment in modern every- day life. The romantic manners, habits, and feelings in Waverley, so far as its fictitious characters are concerned, are precisely those which have a foundation in fact. In the Highlands of Scotland ordinary life had fairly bristled with extraordinary banditti hidden behind bracken bush and broom. Scott whistled back through sixty years and substantial romanticism sprang up such as one never dreamed the time could have concealed or revealed. These actual, romantic banditti in realistic detail of dia- logue and environment act far differently from those infest- ing the Apennines around Udolpho's turrets. We know that Dr. John Moore's banditti on the slopes of Vesuvius are manufactured, for they were impostors hired for the occasion by Zeluco, but Mrs. Radcliffe's are genuine, possessing the marrow of the barbarity of Gothicism in their bones. The trouble, however, is that Mrs. Rad- cliffe fails to make people feel that these extraordinary fellows are real. She cannot live her scenes, or live in her banditti, thus making her readers view them as tin-toy outlaws. Scott came along, took them and threw them over into Scotland so that the magic touch of heather caused them with renewed Gothic vigor Antaeus-like to spring up not as dwarfs but as giants of outlaw life. Scott makes us feel that the extraordinary, the Gothic, is true. In Waverley there is Gothicism all the way from the Highlands to the prison in Carlisle. The Frenchified, Catholicized Flora Mac-Ivor bids us look at a waterfall to listen not only to its music but to that of her harp ; and when sweeter music is heard it is that of her own tongue reciting Ariosto's page. Not only is she recognizable as a 248 Motives in English Fiction figure pulled from the tomes of Mrs. Radcliffe, but as one who, on her way to rebirth in Scotland, had passed by Lady Morgan's wild Irish girl Glorvina from whom substance was given for the creation of a true, wild Scotch girl. Scott, too, made use of Maria Edgeworth's banshee making it the Grey Spirit bidding Fergus Mac-Ivor acknowledge his coming death. In The Monastery this Grey Spirit assumes the form of the White Lady of Avenel sighing in the breeze the dissolution of Dame Glendinning. Moreover, Scott goes back to Fielding to procure a Jonathan Wild who is redeemed by being thrown into the Highlands, and by having such devoted love as that given him by a sister, Flora Mac-Ivor. In Guy Mannering (1815), whether with sentimental Julia Mannering or musically inclined Bertram "dreeing his weird, " we are never very far removed from the gipsy or smuggler banditti. From the placid lakes of Cumber- land and Westmoreland to the ruined castle of Ellangowan echoing the roar of the Solway no man's life is safe. Guy Mannering is a folk-ballad put into action in the eighteenth century. The knight returns from India to reclaim an estate and a lady fair. The enveloping action is astrology. Second-sight, fate, and predestination, frame the sibylline utterances of Meg Merrilies to make the might of Bertram right on Ellangowan's height. The notes of the flageolet sounded by Bertram somehow marshal us to the climax of the ballad narrative as the peasant damsel sings, Are these the links of Forth, she said, Or are they the crooks of Dee, Or the bonnie woods of Warroch Head That I so fain would see? These lyrical lines roll away the mists of sixteen years, so that Bertram recognizes where he was when kidnapped by Scott's "The Antiquary" 249 Dirk Hatteraick. This unlinking one's fate by music near the Solway Scott kept in mind for fuller range on Wandering Willie's fiddle in Redgauntlet. Upon our looking at the novel after a hundred years have passed away, outside of Meg a-cursing and Meg a-dying, there are other evidences of great characterization, such as that given to Dominie Sampson and to the bullet-headed Dandie Dinmont whom, with his wife Ailie, alas ! we do not see often enough. Dandie Dinmont has a right to belong to Scott's triumvirate, the other two members of which are Rob Roy and Claverhouse. The Antiquary (18 16) by many critics, among them Ruskin, has been considered the best of Scott's novels. How such good critics could arrive at such an estimate is not beyond comprehension; for Jonathan Oldbuck in the acidity of his humorous characterization is a master- piece, and Lovel is interesting especially when he is being perilously swung to and fro against the side of the precipice after the rescue of Sir Arthur Wardour and daughter has been effected, or when he is gazing upon the tapestry in the Green Room and at the apparition which glides before him. The old blue-gowned beggar Edie Ochiltree on the sands at high-tide gives promise of becoming a most vitalized character as he determines to face death with Sir Arthur Wardour and daughter. He flashes out as a hero in the words, "At the back o' a dyke, in a wreath o' snaw, or in the wame o' a wave, what signifies how the auld gaber- lunzie dies"; but, afterwards in the narrative, he fails to live up to the promise of great action. Scott had destined him for the chimney corner and therefore tears of inertia are to flow from his eyes down his white beard. As a wandering vagabond he serves as a good preparatory sketch for Wandering Willie. In The Black Dwarf (18 16) we make a psychological study of the baneful effects of disappointed love as caused 250 Motives in English Fiction by deformity in Elshie (Sir Edward Mauley) . From the time that we first see his pixie figure on Mucklestane Moor by moonlight till he gives the rose to Isabella Vere, he seems to be a Lilliputian king reigning over all that is vile in human passions ; but from this time on he begins to grow in ethical stature, and in the chapel of the castle of Ellies- law, as he glides from behind the tomb of her to whom he had been affianced to interrupt the forced marriage cere- mony taking place between Sir Frederick Langley and Isabella Vere, he becomes the exponent of all that is noble in generous action. "What Sir Edward Mauley was not able to secure in life Earnscliff receives at his hands. Love forces a renunciation of all revenge, for Isabella was the daughter of the woman the dwarf had loved and lost. Thus the tragedy of physical barriers was re-emphasized in the realm of love-making in English fiction. Scott in Old Mortality (1816) transfers us to a regiou where we are surrounded by fanatical Cameronian out- laws, who are as bad as the troopers clinging to Claver- house. Balfour of Kinloch and Habakkuk Muckle wrath at Loudon Hill and Bothwell Brig are as formidable ap- paritions of Apollyon as Viscount Dundee and Dalzell. Morton lying on the table to be tortured to death as a sacrifice to the God of Israel is balanced by Macbriar whose leg is fixed in the boot to be tapped by the mallet at the Duke of Lauderdale's cruel mandate. Edith Bel- lenden, Lady Bellenden, Mause Headrigg, and Cuddie Headrigg, are fine portraits, but Claverhouse is fearfully alive just as we see him in Wandering Willie's tale with his long dark curls hanging down over his laced buff-coat at the gate of hell. And the burning marie colors bestow the terrific on the insane bigot Balfour even to the moment that he compels Morton to hover in mid-air above the chasm in front of the cave. Morton is the embodiment of Scott's loyalty to the high church. When threatened Scott's ''Heart of Midlothian" 251 with the frightful death by the Covenanters Morton does the worst thing imaginable, unconsciously mumbling words from the English prayer-book. He could be no apostate to the church of his ancestors by reason of his blue-blooded training. Who can forget what the terrified Reverend Reuben Butler saw, as he glanced over his shoulder as he was mak- ing his way to the gate of Edinburgh, on the night that the Porteous mob stormed the old Tolbooth, or who can forget the first appearance of the aquiline-nosed, black- eyed girl dressed in a blue riding- jacket with tarnished lace? Her petticoat of scarlet camlet embroidered with tarnished flowers, and her Highland bonnet, and a bunch of broken feathers, can never fade from memory. Whether we are listening to her singing ballads out at Muschat's Cairn to warn Geordie Robertson, or are with her when she is near her father's grave, or with Jeanie sitting next to her in the church, or when hoping that she will escape from the mob that bring about her death, we are compelled to acknowledge that Madge Wildfire is Scott's pathological masterpiece. Her last words are about mercy at the house of the Interpreter's and she does not forget to utter mysterious words about the missing child of EfhVs. On her deathbed Scott gives to Madge the wish of many years. Mr. Staunton will come and take her by the hand and give her a pomegranate, a piece of honeycomb, and a small bottle of spirits to stay her fainting, and the good times will come back again and she will be the happiest girl one ever saw in the bridal bed that the sexton has made in the kirkyard. There are other scenes that linger long in our memory. One is the interview that Jeanie had with Effie in the Tolbooth the day before the trial. This meeting between the two sisters was so pathetic that the reformed ruffian Ratcliffe with the gentleness that had something of reverence in it partly closed the shutter in 252 Motives in English Fiction order to throw a veil over a scene so sorrowful. Nor can the great scene of the trial of Effie with the groans of her broken-hearted father, who fell prostrate as the blow of the verdict "Guilty" pierced his ears, be effaced. Two other scenes also make us quiver with pent up emotions. The first is the interview that Jeanie Deans has with Queen Caroline in the gardens with the Duke of Argyle standing by. The pathos of the Scotch dialect like a tempered rapier finds its way behind the shield of the Queen's conventional English to the Queen's womanly heart. Thus it was that Jeanie saved the life of her sister in spite of the misgivings of the Duke of Argyle and our- selves. The second is the last sad scene in the novel, where Sir George Staunton is shot by his own son whom he had been trying for years to find. At the close of The Heart of Midlothian (1818) Sir Walter Scott, contrary to his custom, furnishes an ethical postscript in the manner of Hawthorne to show us that sin not only separated Sir George Staunton and wife from their illegitimate child but also separated Jeanie and Effie driving them farther and farther apart as the years went on. So far as style is concerned Scott never surpassed the description in Rob Roy of Diana Vernon by moonlight bidding a seeming eternal farewell to her lover Frank Osbaldistone. There are three pages spaced most admir- ably to setting and characterizing dialogue, supported on the surface of a rapidly passing wave of narrative. One lives a thousand years in such a parting; and one, after such a parting, sits down for what seems another thousand years. Narrative momentarily stands still refusing to move because of its being engulfed in the tears of the immovable, frigid Frank. There is another novel even more dramatic than the one that contains fulminating episodes in which villain Rashleigh, hero Frank, Rob Roy, and Bailie Jarvie are seen dashing to and fro, now in Scott's ''Bride of Lammcrmoor" 253 Glasgow and now among the MacGregors and soldiers in the Highlands; and this novel is The Bride of Lammermoor , which was published in 1819, possessing as its predecessor a Jacobitic enveloping action. It is a veritable Romeo and Jidiet which at times measure? arms with Hamlet, where humor and pathos throttle each other in Ophelia's grave. Its passion movement superbly and remorselessly marches through the supernatural, blood, madness, and the grave- yard, to the sands of the Kelpie's Flow where with Caleb Balderstone we pick up the black feather of him who had been pushed out of sight by the awful pressure of human existence at its worst. The golden-haired Lucy Ashton, who can sing and play on the lute, has been plucked by Scott from the ill-fated throng of Gothic heroines; and Edgar Ravenswood may have been suggested to Scott by the characterization of Maturin's Milesian chief Connal of 1 812, and Lady Ashton by Lady Montclare, the brow- beating cruel mother who sacrificed her daughters Armida and the mad Ines. When in the ruinous tower over- looking the stormy German Ocean and the Kelpie's Flow are seen for the first time the thin, gray hairs and the sharp, high features of Caleb Balderstone, we realize that here is the strong character of the novel. He is to the novel what Polonius, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Osric, and the grave- diggers are to Hamlet. When Caleb comes in to announce to the Ashtons and his master in Wolfscrag that the thunder has destroyed the victuals there are such strokes of decisive humor that even Ravenswood is forced for once and the only time to laugh. And when the old man for- ages for food at Gibbie Girder's the whole village as well as the reader embraces the humor of the situation ; and when, later, on hearing that the Marquis of A — is to visit his master, he sets fire to the castle in order to conceal the poverty and save the honor of his house, we exclaim, "Great is Scott in consistent characterization!" Scott's 254 Motives in English Fiction servant in delineation is as great as any of Scott's kings. When in Ivanhoe Richard Cceur de Lion, in the cell of Copmanhurst facing an outlaw in the carousal of a night, removes his helmet disclosing laughing blue eyes and flaxen hair he is every inch a king, but no more human than the kingly servant Caleb Balderstone in The Bride of Lammer- moor. There is only one figure outside of the McAulay and MacGregor banditti that rivets attention in The Legend of Montrose (1819) and that is the Scotch mercenary sol- dier, Dugald Dalgetty, who comes riding in on his horse Gustavus. Dalgetty is a caricature resurrection of Smollett's Lismahago. Something seems to ail Dalgetty, perhaps it is the lack of a woman. Scott should have given him a running chance with a woman on the order of Mistress Tabitha Bramble. As he stands alone on the pages of Scott's novel he produces little laughter from one who has the disputatious Caledonian lieutenant of Smollett's in mind. Dugald Dalgetty, however, is as strong a piece of caricature as Sir Piercie Shafton in The Monastery; and there have been those who have loved him. It is Thackeray who says: "What if . . . Dugald Dal- getty and Ivanhoe were to step in at that open window by the little garden yonder?" . . . " Amo Major Dalgetty. Delightful Major. To think of him is to desire to jump up, run to the book, and get the volume down from the shelf." The moonlight fairy on the turf called Annot Lyle is interesting only at the moment that she loses former self in being ascertained as the lawful daughter of Sir Duncan Campbell by reason of a Gothic mark dis- covered on her left shoulder. Thus one feels that Scott, in 1 8 19, had profited little by any reading of Eaton Bar- rett's The Heroine, in which the author makes fun of any bruised gooseberry birthmark found on a babe's elbow. Also Scott is ready to admit in this bit of fiction that even Scott's "Ivanhoe" 255 a Highlander Allan McAulay can make a mistake in the realm of second sight and prophecy. Ivanhoe (1820) is a series of brilliantly conceived epi- sodes, many of which are large and well colored. In no other novel does Scott furnish us with so many panoramic historical scenes, each of which seems to have sprung Pallas-like from Scott's brain full-grown and already endowed with such marvelous objective strength as to be able to take care of the artistic beauties of its own atmos- phere, motivation, dialogue, and characterization. These scenes are all rightly numbered, rightly coupled, and are on a carefully constructed track, so that, when with watch in hand Scott throws open the throttle, the train of cars of complication arrives on time for all characters on board to witness the demolition of Torquilstone Castle. There is a proper subordination throughout the novel of subsidiary episodes. Minor coincident actions are allowed to gain such ascendancy that it seems as if the main action had been stopped, but it has been going on all the while. The omniscient eyes of Scott are fixed upon four couples who are situated in different parts of Torquilstone Castle. We listen to the fiery utterances of Cedric and the replies of sluggish Athelstane. We descend into the dungeon where we see Isaac of York confronted with Front-de-Bceuf . We follow Scott to the apartment where the fair Rowena is being wooed by De Bracy; and then we are transferred to where Rebecca is standing upon the parapet bidding defiance to the threatening Knight Templar. All these incidents have been going on at the same time ; and from the angle point of view, where we have our eyes fixed upon all of them, our ears hear one bugle blast which calls the curtain to fall on all the four scenes. Four chapters have been employed by Scott wherein to stage the four minor coincident actions. The bugle blast is to tell us that the main action that has been going on seemingly without our 256 Motives in English Fiction knowledge must absorb from now on our whole attention. From the internal-angle point of view Scott bids us en- sconce ourselves behind Rebecca's shield so that we can see the main action, and listen to its interpretation as the convalescent Ivanhoe speaks when Rebecca fails to com- prehend all its dubious movements. Then Scott picks us up and carries us through the air to place us in front of the castle to secure a splendid external-angle point of view from which to watch Locksley shoot his cloth-yard arrow, which would have killed De Bracy on the battlements had it not been for the accursed Spanish mail beneath his armor, and to clap our hands with glee as we see flames shooting upwards from Norman turrets. When will come another Scott to give us the tournaments of Ashby- de-la-Zouche, a Robin Hood splitting the wand, a Gurth cheating Isaac of York, a king and a friar outlaw eating and drinking in the cell of Copmanhurst, such a frightful death as Ulrica gave to Front-de-Bceuf , bidding him as the flames and smoke creep around to be of good cheer, because this which he was now enduring was but a foretaste of that agony which they would both enjoy together in a spiritual hell, and a Brian de Bois-Guilbert dying by the excess of his own conflicting passions in the lists of Templestowe? The atmosphere of The Monastery (1820) is darkened in the Melrose Abbey district not only by the shadows of churchmen but by the forms of marauders and robber chieftains on the order of Julian Avenel, whom we see after he has seized the castle of his sister-in-law's as he stands therein hand-fasted to a beautiful maiden called Kate. Modified Protestantism is swaying for mastery with compromising Catholicism; and decaying monks seem to realize that they are losing their power. Halbert Glen- dinning is permitted to win Mary Avenel largely because he is a knight-errant of militant Protestantism and his bro- ther Edward loses gracefully because of the solacing pull Scott's "The Monastery" 257 of monastic life. Scott under the influence of Fouque's Undine created the White Lady of Avenel who wields her power over earth, air, fire, and water. This supernatural creature in a constant recurrence of panoramic slides works in beneficent action for the welfare of Glendinning and Mary Avenel; and at the end of The Abbot (1820), which is a sequel to The Monastery, Scott reminds us that the White Lady has succeeded in binding up the wounds of the two houses and the two combatant religions in the balsam bandage of the marriage of young Roland Graeme to Catherine Seyton. Sir Piercie Shafton, prior to fight- ing the duel with Halbert, is an excellent caricature of Lyly's Euphues, but becomes a most vitalized Elizabethan knight as soon as he gazes upon the bodkin, which re- veals to the reader that his ancestors were tailors, and thereafter flings from his mouth a proper modification of the enchanting harmony of vain conceits. The description of Julian Avenel's castle, jutting out into the mountain lake and approached by a causeway and drawbridge, is one of the best things in The Monastery; and there is a repetition of this scenery in The Abbot, because it is in this castle that the childless wife of Halbert Glendinning adopts Roland Graeme after he has been rescued by the dog from the lake. After some years this young Roland rescues Seyton on the streets of Edinburgh from the banditti noblemen and is selected by the unsuspi- cious Earl of Murray to go in the cause of Protestantism to Lochleven Castle to watch and to serve Queen Mary. It is here that Scott furnishes us the scene of the forced abdication. It is one of Scott's best strokes where the brown-haired, hazel-eyed Mary holds extended her beauti- ful arm whereon are seen the black and blue marks of Lindesay's gauntlet. Then there is the successful escape of Mary to the mainland to the Seytons and Hamiltons who unfurl her banner at Langside. It is here that Mary 17 258 Motives in English Fiction ruins all that she loves; and over the body of handsome George Douglas she recognizes her own basilisk power. Throughout the novel there is a fine portrayal of the kindlier side of the Earl of Murray among whose retain- ers is Halbert Glendinning. We enter Holyrood and see Rizzio's blood spot on the floor. There is everywhere the glamour of the failure of intrigues carried on by Gothic methods in palace and monastery. Mary Stuart could not get her throne of Scotland back any more than Ed- ward Glendinning could hold a Mary Avenel because the cloister was not winning its way in London and Edinburgh. Beautiful, tantalizing Catherine Seyton for a while kept secrets from her lover and made him jealous of an impos- sible rival just as Di Vernon in Rob Roy. But she is a help- ful girl just as Margaret Ramsay in The Fortunes of Nigel. Indeed all of Scott's women, even the aged ones, help the men they like as Margaret Trapbois aided Nigel. Very few of Scott's women are not on the firing line when the situation is life or death for the man loved. Fenella in Peveril of the Peak penetrates to the centre of the Newgate web to see Julian and be with him though she knows his heart is Alice Bridgenorth's. Women do not desert their lovers in Scott unless they have been deserted without cause; and, if they have a cause for action against those who have abandoned them, they cling close and long to climb to vengeance. Meg Murdockson avenged her daughter Madge Wildfire by killing Sir George Staunton through the agency of his own boy. Sir Walter Scott is at his best perhaps when portraying great historical characters at the climaxes of their careers. In this respect Kenilworth (1821) in one scene rises to a splendid height in the dramatic and analytic presentation of enraged Elizabeth denouncing the Earl of Leicester. The emotional situation contains qualities transmitted from Ravenswood's denunciation of Lucy Ashton and Scott's "The Pirate" 259 Meg's anathemas hurled at the head of the Laird of Ellangowan. Besides the graphic description of the pa- thetic death of Amy Robsart the reader fails to find else- where anything that makes Kenilworth an extraordinary masterpiece. The Pirate (1822) is somewhat disappoint- ing in spite of the attractiveness of the melancholy Minna, the blithe Brenda, and Noma of the Fitful Head, who, as a Meg Merrilies on the Orkney Islands, is a magnificent queen of the elements. If Scott had told the story of old Vaughan's life in Hispaniola, Tortuga, and Port Royal, The Pirate would have been a narrative of two pirates in action on the high seas, and not a study of them ashore, the father in remorse, and the son so reformed as finally to be accepted in the British naval service. If Scott had begun the novel by enlarging on the data that he supplies at the end, it would undoubtedly have been a greater piece of work than Charles Kingsley's Westward Ho! or Steven- son's Treasure Island. Banditti once more surround us in The Fortunes of Nigel (1822). Apprentices whack us with their clubs in the opening chapters and bravoes pursue us with knives in Alsatia, a resort of debtors and criminals in London. The murder of the old miser Trapbois by the Alsatian ruffians to get the sign manual belonging to Nigel, who by it only could secure his manorial rights in Scotland, has been magnificently managed in the Gothic style even to Nigel's reading of God's Revenge Against Murther, prior to the shrieks issuing from the sleeping apartment of the old man to whose rescue Nigel goes by the secret passage- way. In the moonlight there follows a fine piece of pistol and rapier action with the daughter of the usurer as a witness who rewards Nigel for his victory by giving over into his keeping her father's heavy chest of ducats. At intervals throughout the narrative we glimpse at the excellent portrait of toddling, doddering James I talking 260 Motives in English Fiction in dialect, ever manifesting some trait of hereditary- cowardice; and we peer into the Tower of London to see Margaret Ramsay, attired as a boy, a lover of Nigel when he is at the lowest ebb of his fortune. Lord Dalgarno in his amour with the wife of honest Christie is in keeping with the purpose of Scott to show us the condition of the dissolute court. When we are not in Derbyshire or on the Isle of Man in The Peveril of the Peak (1822) we are in the apartment of Charles II, or in the penetralia of Newgate, or entering the Traitor's Gate to occupy a dungeon in the Tower. The enveloping action is the Popish Plot. Fenella (Zarah) , daughter of the villain Christian, who hopelessly loves Julian Peveril and plays the mute to gain her ends is modeled after Mignon in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister. In London of the Restoration, when Alice Bridgenorth is exposed to the advances of the Duke of Buckingham in the King's apartments and throws herself on the mercy of Charles II, we are surprised that she emerges from the banditti of the seraglio with her virtue intact. Young America nowadays is more or less required to make a study of the wily Louis XI and the impetuous Charles of Burgundy and shake hands with all the iniquit- ous barons and vavasours filling the courts of the two, but young America can never come away from Louis XI in the novel with the feeling that he has been enthralled by the real Sir Walter. And I think that those of us who are older, if we would but confess our true feelings, would admit that the only place in Quentin Durward (1823) where Scott is writing in his warm, comfortable style is in the opening pages which, it will be recalled, are devoted to just how one Scotchman can rescue another Scotchman under the dismal corpse-sprinkled trees in front of the castle of Plessis-les-Tours. Still, if one is susceptible as young America always is to the exuberant rush and sweep Scott's "St. Ronan's Well" 261 of heroic action in historical melodrama on foreign soil, where Scott seems always weak because bereft of his happy-at-home feeling of certainty and strength, one can readily fall into the fervor of the praise of Thackeray who says, "Amo Quentin Durward, and specially Quentin's uncle, who brought the Boar to bay. I forget the gentle- man's name." St. Ronan's Well (1824) was written as Scott said, " Celebrare domestica facta." Scott thought that he would make a trial at such fiction as had been produced by Frances Burney, Charlotte Smith, Maria Edgeworth, Jane Austen, and Susan E. Ferrier. He created a Spa and a Cleikum Inn, with an excellent low comedy char- acter the virago Meg Dods as its keeperess. The fashion- able figures who frequented this health resort are Clara Mowbray, Mr. Mowbray her brother, Francis Tyrrel her lover, and Lord Ethrington, the gambler and impostor, who tries to force a marriage with Clara. We undoubtedly see in the novel plain traces of Smollett, Frances Burney, and Jane Austen, but in spite of the help afforded by his great predecessors the book fell flat, especially on the southern side of the Tweed. Scott confessed that he was a failure when it came to shooting folly as it flies. In the original draft of the plot Scott had Hannah Irwin confess to success in having made Bulmer marry Clara to find out that he had gained nothing but his brother's paramour. Scott had arranged it so that Tyrrel was to have been Clara's seducer and that Bulmer, Tyrrel's brother, was not to know what he so readily asseverated until after marry- ing Clara. James Ballantyne made Scott keep Clara virtuous prior to marriage because of her silk petticoat. Scott held out for a time claiming that what could occur to a girl in gingham could happen to a girl in silk, but finally yielded to his publisher's injunction thus perplexing the narrative of the novel and weakening its denouement. 262 Motives in English Fiction Redganntlet (1824) suffers by reason of the methodi- zation employed in relating the narrative which is chroni- cled by two letter writers who are the agents of the action. The novel, however, will always be treasured for the sake of Wandering Willie's tale about Steenie and Sir Robert Redgauntlet, for imminent death always stalking on the Solway Sands, for the amount of music Wandering Willie can get out of his fiddle and the snatches of the old ballads he sings, and for the affecting conclusion in which one sees Charles the Pretender leaving England's shores forever and a Jacobite cause behind which is no longer a cause but only a name. The Betrothed (1825) , though in parts weak, as a whole is redeemed by the wonderful way in which Scott has conjured into being the bahr-geist of the mur- dered Vanda. Because of adverse criticism meted out to him on this tale of the Crusaders which turned out to be a tale of Welsh banditti, Scott with some reluctance about invading the orient that had been accurately used as a background in Hope's Anastasius (18 19) and James Morier's Hajji Baba (1824) carried the plot of his next novel all the way to the mysterious East and called it The Talisman (1825) which is indeed a tale of the Crusaders. It sinks in comparison with Ivanhoe yet here and there rises to a great height of descriptive power as in the open- ing chapter in which is the spirited fight between Sir Kenneth and Saladin on the sands near the Dead Sea. Woodstock (1826) was being written by Scott when Smith's Brambletye House came out. Scott went on writ- ing studiously avoiding the new book lest his own territory might by the perusal of it be made somewhat similar to that of Horace Smith's. Both novels cover somewhat the same period of English history and are excellent. In Woodstock Scott follows the fortunes of Charles Stuart from the battle of Worcester to the restoration of him as Charles II in 1660. In the romance there are interesting Scott's "Woodstock" 263 passages such as those containing the supernatural tricks played in the ruined castle. The attempted assassination of Oliver Cromwell stands out ; and such characters as the irascible old Sir Henry Lee, his sweet daughter Alice, and the noble Markham Everard, refuse to be blotted out on memory's page. Old Sir Henry, as if through a horn, blows such fiery blasts as to cause from the Waverley Novels a hurried entrance of his predecessors, the peppery old people, such as Baron Bradwardine from Waverley, Lady Bellenden from Old Mortality, Cedric from Ivanhoe, and Sir Geoffrey from The Peveril of the Peak. And unforgettable, too, is The Surgeon's Daughter (1827) which seems to have been written by Scott to show that he could go farther east than Palestine to get a new background for banditti; and since 'there was as much shooting and stabbing in India as in the Highlands' of Scotland, Scott sent his muse of fiction to the land of Clive to Mysore, to watch the movements of Hyder Ali, and Tippoo, and the heroine Menie Gray as Hartley saves her from the machi- nations of Richard Middlemas. From the smouldering fire of Scott's genius there shot forth one flame before it was extinguished which revealed a beautiful "landscape lying in the lap of terror." The Fair Maid of Perth (1828) is the story of how Catharine Glover saved herself from the Duke of Rothsay, the son of Robert III, and how she did her best to save her would-be ravisher from being murdered by Ramorney in Falkland, and how afterwards she called Douglas to the castle to hang the assassins. Henry Gow and Conachar as wooers of Catharine are exceedingly well delineated, especially Conachar who, afterwards as Eachin the Highland Chief in the big fight between the two clans, seeing that his own was being exterminated by reason of his own cowardice, committed suicide. The Fair Maid of Perth is Scott's last powerful glance at Highland kilts. In Anne of Geier- 264 Motives in English Fiction stein (1829), in Count Robert of Paris (1831), and in Castle Dangerous (1 831), we hear the swish of the waters lapping the sides of an English man-of-war which was to carry the mentally paralyzed great Sir Walter to Naples, and from activity in the field of fiction forever. Scott was somewhat indebted to Mrs. Radcliffe and Maria Edge worth, as has been shown ; but the true Scott touches, as manifested in Bertram's home-coming in Guy Mannering and in Darsie's dialogue carried on by means of the answering notes of Wandering Willie's fiddle, were inspired by no predecessor, and no successor has ever caught the power of imitating such inimitable outbursts of genius. The only novelists who have succeeded in approaching the great Sir Walter in such a white heat of inspiration have been Robert Louis Stevenson, in certain balladized passages in Kidnapped and The Master of Ballantrae, and Sir Gilbert Parker in The Seats of the Mighty and in that strangely poetic account in When Valmond Came to Pontiac, which presents a man, the illegitimate son of Napoleon Bonaparte, impersonating himself not only in his life but most of all in the manner of his death. Scott measured his ordinary flights in fiction most accurately when, in The Quarterly, January, 181 7, after commenting on flimsiness, incoherence, lack of reader's interest in insipid young heroes, prevalent in Waverley, Guy Mannering, and The Antiquary, he had this to say about his own defective Waverley: His chief characters are never actors, but always acted upon by the spur of circumstances, and have their fates uniformly determined by the agency of the subordinate persons. . . . The insipidity of this author's heroes may be also in part referred to the readiness with which he twists and turns his story to produce some immediate and perhaps temporary effect. This Peacock's "Maid Marian" 265 could hardly be done without representing the principal char- acter either as inconsistent or flexible in his principles. The ease with which Waverley adopts, and afterwards forsakes, the Jacobite party in 1745 is a good example of what we mean. Had he been painted as a steady character, his conduct would have been improbable. The author was aware of this; and yet, unwilling to relinquish an opportunity of introducing the interior of the Chevalier's military court, the circumstances of the battle of Preston-pans, and so forth, he hesitates not to sacrifice poor Waverley, and to represent him as a reed blown about at the pleasure of every breeze. A less careless writer would probably have taken some pains to gain the end pro- posed in a more artful and ingenious manner. But our author was hasty, and has paid the penalty of his haste. In conclusion, in spite of Scott's faults, the greatest of which is perhaps incoherence or inconsistency of char- acterization, we must quite agree with what Gifford, the editor of The Quarterly, to improve Scott's anonymous review of his own novels, put into Scott's own mouth: "The characters of Shakespeare are not more exclu- sively human, not more perfect men and women as they live and move, than are those of this mysterious author." Two years after Scott's Ivanhoe was published, Thomas Love Peacock, in spite of being inimical to Scott's fiction, because, as he said, it was written in a dialect the worst in the world and in a phrasal power sustaining nothing quot- able, published the comic romance Maid Marian (1822), (written in 18 18), in which is the figure of Friar Tuck continuing his delightful existence as Father Michael. The initial, medial, and terminal mass slides, used to push tall Father Michael to the centre of action, make the militant churchman fully the equal of Scott's animated rotundity of herculean humor. Peacock strolled into Gothic castles and Sherwood Forest as did Scott; and, 266 Motives in English Fiction when under Robin Hood's trees, he was inspired to such original outbursts of balladry as: For the slender beech and the sapling oak That grow by the shadowy rill, You may cut down both at a single stroke, You ma}'' cut down which you will. But this you must know, that as long as they grow, Whatever change may be, You never can teach either oak or beech, To be aught but a greenwood tree. Maid Marian, however, is not quite a typical romance of Peacock's; for in his other novels upon entering Gothic castles we find Greek furnishings. Classicism in Maid Marian is lacking unless one considers himself Greek enough to be "rich in the simple worship of a day" in Sherwood Forest, against the trees of which satirical, Peacockian arrows are always seen glancing. When in the novels written by Peacock before and after Maid Marian we cut the knot of reticular envelopment of eighteenth century classicism and nineteenth century romanticism, an odd fish flounders therefrom by the name of Mr. Toobad of Nightmare Abbey (1818). Mr. Toobad and his devil dominating nineteenth century society are Thomas Love Peacock and his laughable Mumbo Jumbo scaring the whole family with a boy's delight. In 1837 Peacock wrote: " the great principle of the Right of Might is as flourishing now as in the days of Maid Marian : the array of false pretentions, moral, political, and literary is as imposing as ever. " To the end of his long life covering three generations Peacock was a mentally modified Mr. Toobad who could see "the little more" classicism in Mr. Asterias and "the little less" romanticism in Mr. Aster- ias's mermaid. What could be expected of a century that Peacock's "Melincourt" 267 had knelt in the dust to do reverence to Mr. Cypress, Mr. Sackbut, Mr. Paperstamp, Mr. Mystic, Mr. Anyside Antijack, and Lord Michin Malicho (Lord John Russell) ! Peacock was Shelley's friend in North Wales and at Marlow and was writing poetry and fiction in the days of Byron, Keats, Wordsworth, and Coleridge. As Byron began his poetic career by English Bards and Scotch Reviewers so Peacock began his fiction by flinging it into the form of satire. He trounced Southey as Nightshade in Headlong Hall (1816) and in the same volume attacked The Quarterly by chiseling the critic Giflord as Gall, and con- tinued his wormwood work in the long and tedious Melin- court or Sir Or an Haut-Ton (18 17). In this burlesque Giflord appears as Mr. Vamp, Southey as Mr. Feather- nest, Wordsworth as Mr. Paperstamp, and Canning as Mr. Anyside Antijack. Perhaps the most delightful part of the satirical allegory is where, after going over the Ocean of Deceitful Form to the Isle of Pure Intelligence, with Mr. Mystic (Coleridge) we go through a fog thicker than that which encompassed the Ancient Mariner to enter Cimmerian Lodge to be nearly killed by the metaphysical explosion of the smoke of Mr. Mystic's transcendental triad, — mystery, jargon, and superstition. The gallant hero who puts out the fire to effect our rescue is primitive man, Sir Oran Haut-Ton, Bart. The reader afterwards perchance lingers at Mainchance Villa to watch the dance of the political mannikins who sing, "We'll all have a finger in the Christmas Pie." What little plot there is in the novel centres around Anthelia Melincourt, ensconced in a Peter Pan Land of the Lake District, who is at times violently threatened with Richardsonian kidnappings, from which Mr. Forester the enthusiastic emancipator always succeeds in rescuing her. In 1818, when Frankenstein of Mrs. Shelley's was published, Nightmare Abbey was issued to lay the ghost (a 268 Motives in English Fiction t> j bloody-turbaned one) of Cimmerian Lodge, of Melincourt, in which Mr. Mystic (Coleridge) had floated in the explo- sive fog of his own smoke, and to help Percy Bysshe Shelley exorcise himself from the phantoms and "chimaeras dire" of his illusory world. In Nightmare Abbey Ferdinando Flosky (Coleridge) is belittled, Mr. Sackbut (Southey) is allusively derided, and Cypress (Byron) is diatribed as basely deserting England. The denouement of the novel is the scene where the two-hearted Scythrop receives dual exposure and a dual checkmate. When Celinda his air castle-building affinity says, "He is not my choice, Sir. This lady has a prior claim; I renounce him," to which frivolous Marionetta his exoterical affinity adds, "And I renounce him, " we laugh so much that we feel that surely here is the top-notch work of all that Peacock dramatically attempted in comic romance. This caricature of Shelley (Scythrop) was keenly enjoyed by Shelley who along with his friend Peacock laughed at Scythrop, since this external and internal portraiture was kindly meant as a means by which restored respectability to sanity could be effected. It will be recalled that Peacock made Scythrop refuse the pistol extended by Raven and choose the glass of sparkling Madeira. This esoterical, exoterical Shelleyan-brained Scythrop with erratic gesticulations and wild enthusiasms in 1844 re-appeared in Disraeli's Coningsby as Lucian Gay (Theo- dore Hook) . The most of us are well acquainted with the peculiarities of the poet Shelley; but those of the man, who from 1823-25 was in custody because of "a little disorder in the chest," have been forgotten. Theodore Hook was at one time regarded as one of the most brilliant conversationalists, musicians, and wits in London. Per- haps no other literary lounger knew so well the social life of Englishmen under George IV ; and his light skits in the drama, opera, and fiction made him in a certain sense a Peacock, Disraeli, Dickens 269 literary lion to all young men coming up to London. If it had not been for Hook's Kekewich, would Charles Dickens have been able to give the world an Alfred Jingle ? If it had not been for Mrs. Fuggleston, would Mr. Pickwick have had the exquisite pleasure of holding Mrs. Bardell for some time in his arms? If there had been no Devil Daly in the same room with the sleeping woman, perhaps Pickwick would not have been appalled by the execrable shape of the middle- aged lady in his bedroom. If Hook in Gilbert Gurney (1835) had not portrayed the farce of trials in the Old Bailey, would Dickens in 1836-37 have had strength enough to delineate Bardell versus Pickwick, or the pro- ceedings of the Chancery officials in Bleak House (1853)? If the swearing, bacchanalian " I-told-you-so " Reverend Wells and his wife had not come in upon Gilbert Gurney as, under the influence of Wells's whiskey, he was sealing the preliminaries of a proposal on the lips of Harriet Wells, whose head was on his shoulder, and was saying, "Your father is mistaken, you will not — I know you will not accept me!" perhaps the good club-friends of Pickwick when they stumbled into his apartment would not have been embarrassed by the heaving, heavy scene that met their eyes. According to Disraeli, Lucian Gay is portrayed as the President of the Grumpy Club who could sing, speak, and indulge in the art of parliamentary debate, who was inimitable in mimicry, being able to pass from the or- dinary man he was to the genius when he portrayed the full mastery over the style and intellect of all the speakers in both houses of Parliament. Gay could on such occasions treat a heavy subject with all the volatility of a Lord Palmerston. When under influence of toddy his ebullitions were flashes of genius; and he could dance a Tarantella like a Lazzaroni and execute a Cracovienne with all the mincing graces of an opera heroine. 270 Motives in English Fiction In Thackeray's Pendennis (1848-50), Mr.Wagg (Theodore Hook) likes Beauty, Burgundy, Venus, and Venison, above all stale jokes. According to Thackeray, Mr. Wagg seized on minutice in spite of himself. With tongue in jowl he always leered at his companion. Possessed with a soul of a butler he made fun in the drawing-room. Any volume of his droll books was worth £300 to any publisher. He paraded in a white waistcoat. He had a burly, red face and a mouth on the lookout for florid, Gothic styles of repasts. He could insolently push a pun to putridity and familiarly pound a tattoo on any man's backbone. Such was Wagg, one of the rulers of Paternoster Row, who condescended to look favorably on young reviewer Pendennis. By the time Scythrop had passed through the Gay and Wagg stage he was destined to be the large caricature Harold Skimpole (Leigh Hunt) in Dickens's Bleak House (1853). Skimpole was such a powerful caricature of Leigh Hunt, sponging off his friends, that Dickens could never quite forgive himself for having tossed out into the world for all time as a figure of scorn the tag-priced poet bristling with innumerable meal-tickets pinned on his bor- rowed clothes by generous friends. It seems to me that Dickens took savage satisfaction in jabbing his pen into the vitals of the little bright creature, with a rather large head, delicate face, and sweet voice, who had no idea of detail, time, or money, and whose program for each day's delight was papers, conversation, music, mutton, coffee, landscape, fruit, and a little claret. This man lived that others might enjoy the luxury of generosity, and the chief end of his existence was a cool calculation as to how he could cultivate new and old flowers in a new soil of gener- osity. He believed that the world should not deny to him what it conceded to the butterflies, and was an advocate of drone philosophy by which a lazy buzzer could always be Peacock's Caricature Work 271 on good terms with working bees. Skimpole took some stock in Sterne's starling, because he fancied that he was that same starling only different in so much as by some- body's sympathy he always "got out." He was a theo- rizer on the responsibility of debt, considering himself as irresponsible and blameless as those who irresponsibly lent money to such as himself. He never went anywhere for pain, because he was made for pleasure. Who of us has forgotten this bon vivant parasite, with his daughters three, living in the shabby luxury of dilapidated Polygon, in Somerstown, who finally died to go to his cloudland leav- ing behind an autobiography in which he had analyzed himself as "the victim of a combination on the part of mankind to ruin an amiable child," and his chief bene- factor Jarndyce as the incarnation of selfishness. Thomas Love Peacock sang 'since fools are my theme, let satire be my fiction' ' ; thus, by caricaturing prominent politicians, philosophers, and poetic savants, as they dis- coursed on the governmental policies and fads of their day, he connects Fielding and Smollett with Disraeli and Dickens. Peacock helped people fiction with such crea- tures as Lady Caroline Lamb's Glenarvon (Byron), Lady Caroline Lamb's Zamohr (Bulwer-Lytton) in Ada Reis; Disraeli's Vivian Grey (Byron) writhing in the arms of Mrs. Felix Lorraine (Lady Caroline Lamb) ; Lady Mont- eagle (Lady Caroline Lamb), Lord Cadurcis (Lord Byron), and Marmion Herbert (Shelley) in Venetia; and such pictures of Byron and Shelley as Mrs. Shelley drew in The Last Man (1826) and Lodore (1835) . Bulwer Lytton 's Falkland of 1827 is a snap-shot of Byron, as is also Sir Reginald Glanville in Pelham (1828). Disraeli in Con- in gsby (1844) created the magnificent Jew Sidonia (Baron A. de Rothschild) and an elegant Henry Sydney (Lord John Manners) ; and later, in 1866, George Eliot portrayed the fascinating Felix Holt (Gerald Massey) addressing 2J2 Motives in English Fiction the workingmen ; in 1876, George Meredith sketched Admiral Maxse one of his friends as Nevil Beauchamp, parading in the glamour of English political life; and in 1905, Mrs. Humphry Ward, in The Marriage of William Ashe, in the delineation of the wild thing Kitty, was think- ing of the antics of Lord Melbourne's wife, and in 1906, before depicting Fenwick, went to Romney who for art's sake had sacrificed his wife. Peacock followed up immortal Scythrop with the drunken god-butler Prince Seithenyn (Canning), Lord High Commissioner of Royal Embankment in The Mis- fortunes of Elphin (1829), who defended the dyke (the English Constitution) by saying, " It was half rotten when I was born, and that is a conclusive reason why it should be three parts rotten when I die. . . . There is nothing so dangerous as innovation." In Crotchet Castle (1831) Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Southey appear as the much abused Mr. Skionar, Mr. Wilful Wontsee, and Mr. Rumblesack Shantsee. Scott and Brougham are not spared but come in for ridicule and denunciation. Outside the mirage of allegory in slight characterization in a dialogue, interspersed with lyrics (Peacock's characteristic method), moves Lady Clarinda by the slow drift of canal-pinnace experiences until she gives away her heart to Captain Fitzchrome who, unlike the rich Crotchet, Junior, does not represent the price of a rotten borough. Miss Susannah Touchandgo, who is cast off by Crotchet, Junior, and afterwards is caught and kept by Mr. Chainmail, is one of Peacock's best examples of filigree work by reason of the fact that she was delicately pieced together from recollections of his early sweetheart, who through a misunderstanding threw herself by mar- riage into the arms of another man. Dr. Folliott, the Tory abettor of abuses and the denouncer of whimwhams and mumbo jumbos, will be remembered perhaps longer than Peacock's "Gryll Grange" 273 his double, Dr. Opimian in Gryll Grange (i860). Gryll Grange, outside of the Aristophanic comedy, put on in London representing Circe, Gryllus, and three spirit - rappers, seems to me a repetition of Peacock's ideas on scientific, moral, educational, and political reform. In i860 Peacock would seem to admit that the march of mind had accomplished little, that everything was wrong and wanted mending. Obstreperous scientists seemed to be threatening the whole race with suicide. The world seemed to be under the domination of a Panto- pragmatic Society whose President was Lord Facing- both-ways. This organization had divided its work into departments which were to meddle with everything from the highest to the lowest. To old Peacock it seemed as if even those ghosts formerly seen on the stage in Lewis's Castle Spectre had deteriorated, since they refused to appear unless summoned by rappings. The devil, who had walked up and down England in 1818, was the same old devil in i860; but even Apollyon had deteriorated by the contamination of modernity since the days of Mr. Toobad, the Manichaean Millenarian. Now caricature work that, in 18 16, attracted Peacock also appealed to Lord Melbourne's wife who in fiction and actual life pushed herself to the foreground as a most interesting serio-comic heroine of romance. The wildly impulsive Lady Caroline Lamb picked up the pen of caricature in 18 16, the year in which Headlong Hall of Peacock's was published. Glenarvon is an autobiographi- cal account of the flirtation which she carried on with Lord Byron who, as "the spirit of evil," united "the malice and petty vices of a woman to the perfidy and villainy of a man." Calantha, the wife of Lord Avon- dale, succumbs to the piratic attacks of Glenarvon and lives to learn that "that which causes the tragic end of a woman's life is often but a moment of amusement and folly 18 274 Motives in English Fiction in the history of a man " ; and her added sorrow is that she compelled her noble-minded husband to take back what a poetical Lothario had abandoned. Miss Monmouth (Miss Milbanke) and the Princess of Madagascar (Lady- Holland) are interesting abstractions who may have acted and spoken as the individuals whom they represent. Perhaps the best scene in the novel is that of the murder of Lady Margaret Buchanan. The general plot is wretched containing only one cleverly repressed climax, the dis- closure of the way in which Glenarvon played two roles. The background conforming tq and controlling characters in tragical action is the militant societies of Irishmen ready to die for the cause. The trouble with the whole novel is that we are not satisfied with the portrait of Lord Byron as Glenarvon. We feel certain that Lady Caroline Lamb did not know the true Lord Byron, for, as he himself said, he did not sit long enough for the picture. Graham Hamilton (1822) is the story of a Scotch hero who, after ruining his life in London, flees to America as an asylum of remorse. At the pivotal moment of his career his fine old uncle Sir Malcolm had tried to save him from the passionately admired Lady Orville by arranging a marriage with his cousin the sweet and gentle Gertrude, but the old uncle's tactics failed because young Graham felt that he must see Lady Orville once more to say farewell. At the end of the great ball at the Orville mansion there was a seizure of the household goods by the sheriff, and Graham, overcome by emotions, followed Lady Orville to her boudoir to offer to pay off the debt; and, as the officers of the law entered, they caught him in the act of pressing his arm too far about Lady Orville's waist in the endeavor to aid her at this hard hour of her life. The public scandal that ensued ruined Lady Orville and killed Gertrude and the dear old uncle. And America loomed on the horizon for the man who could never make Lady Caroline Lamb's "Ada Reis" 275 reparation for the sufferings he had inflicted. Lady- Caroline Lamb in the characterization of the old miser Sir Malcolm achieved success. He is humorously and pathetically drawn in an eccentric blindness to the faults and bad habits of his nephew. He stood by Graham to the last and his love for him was not shaken even to his last breath. Sir Malcolm as a type-portraiture shows that Lady Caroline Lamb knew Scotch men and their proverbial stinginess, and that once in a while a close- fisted Scotchman can be found who can exemplify the adage "near is my shirt, but nearer is my kin." Ada Reis, A Tale (1823), the third, last, and best of Lady Caroline Lamb's novels, relates the experiences of Ada Reis, a Georgian, who in Italy, Spain, Tripoli, and South America, lived as a Don Juan and as a cut-throat. In Calabria, in 1729, maddened by jealousy, he murdered Bianca di Castamela and seized Fiormonda, his own and Bianca's daughter, compelling her to be brought up in the atmosphere of his wild career of crime which was the in- evitable result of the worship of the Jew Kabkarra, the evil afrit. Zamohr, the half-brother of Kabkarra' s, a good genius and a guardian angel, watched over the growing Fiormonda and constantly waged war with Kabkarra for the possession of her soul. By reason of the vanity, levity, and love of the world which seemed to control Fiormonda, Zamohr was temporarily compelled to aban- don her to the counsels of Kabkarra. After some time Fiormonda fell in love with Condulmar, and in South America became the mistress of this wicked son of Zuban- yann. Her punishment was death, after which she was made Queen of the underworld in the palace of Zuban- yann where she sat on a throne with Condulmar as her consort by her side. Lady Caroline Lamb's hell is in an up-to-date hall in a modern mansion in which move all kinds of sinners from 276 Motives in English Fiction the suffragette, who had meddled in politics, to her who was being given a Parisian diet because she had lived on the English passion and fashion plan in profligate London. At the request of Fiormonda and the assembled multitude, Condulmar decided to give to all his miserable devotees one chance of regaining kindness, love, purity, and truth in Zamohr's realm, provided they should be able to resist the terrible temptations which first had led them to be- come worshipers of Kabkarra. These temptations were subtly presented to each and all. With the power of a Beckford Lady Caroline Lamb shows that there was no escape from the hell of their own natures, since on the day of probation each yielded to his particular ruling passion. Before the evening had concluded, the pretended patriot had sold himself for hire; the minister had betrayed his king; the king, in his resolves, had oppressed his country; the son had forsaken his parent; the parent had misspent the heritage of his children; the virgin had renounced her honour; the wife had forgotten her vow; the ambitious man had become mean; and the infidel, after enjoying all the blessings of a long life in a fair and wonderful world, denied his Creator ! Ada Reis was given the chance to refuse to kill Bianca di Castamela, but he savagely re-murdered her. Condulmar in all beauty and seductiveness asked that Fiormonda should forgive him. She looked upon him and love, more dangerous than an infectuous fever, caught from his glance new fuel wherewith to consume her; — she hesitated; she had forgotten his cruelty — his wickedness: she adored him, and she saw that her attach- ment was returned. She felt again with all the confiding innocence, the ardor, the enthusiasm of first youth, for to that period had she returned. The moment of temptation had Susan Ferrier's "Marriage" 277 recurred and human frailty could scarcely resist: suddenly springing from its delusions she knelt and prayed for support. At this supreme moment, Fiormonda's soul passed into the keeping of Zamohr who carried her spirit and body to the banks of the Orinoco, where among the Jesuits her life was reconstructed so that she died a Christian, but out of her grave there forever grew the poisonous manzanillo. Beckford's Vathek, Lewis's The Monk, and Scott's The Monastery, undoubtedly influenced the creation of certain parts of Ada Reis. Ada Reis, a devotee of voluptuous, sinful Kabkarra, is another Caliph Vathek, another Zeluco, an Ambrosio, or a Schedoni, or a Thomas Hope's Anastasius. This Georgian rascal, in oriental duplicity, was the immediate predecessor of James Morier's crafty, subtle Hajji Baba of Ispahan. Fiormonda allegorically represents Lady Caroline Lamb; Count Condulmar is Lord Byron; and Zamohr, Zevahir, Phaos, the beautiful guardian angel, who saves Fiormonda from Condulmar and Ada Reis, is Bulwer, who at one time burned some incense before the shrine in which was the admired image of Lady Caroline Lamb. Since Lord Melbourne's wife tagged allegorical fiction with ethical admonishments for those who by their idleness are in "constant danger of becoming the prey of wicked feelings and corrupt pas- sions," and was large and charitable in her judgment of others on the pages of her three novels, we should be sympathetic as we feel the uneven literary pulse of that personality that revealed all her weaknesses for the ameli- oration not only of herself, but of all women with water- nixy souls. One moves easily from Peacock and Lady Caroline Lamb into the Smollettian caricature work of Susan E. Ferrier the Scotch Jane Austen. What reader can fail to chuckle to his heart's content as he sees a pair of worsted 278 Motives in English Fiction stockings and black shoes resembling buckets stepping from a high-roofed, square-bottomed, pea-green chariot in front of Glenfern Castle? And as these extremities begin to move, the reader glancing higher notes the large- flowered chintz raiment drawn through the pocket holes and a faded red cloth jacket and, moreover, he sees on the head of this formidable apparition a stupendous fabric in the form of a cap on the summit of which is perching a black beaver hat & la poissarde. This Lady Maclaughlan, advancing toward the castle waving in one hand a small black satin muff and in the other a gold-headed walking- stick, to be entertained by the troubled sisters Miss Grizzie, Miss Jacky, and Miss Nicky, in honor of Lady Juliana, who had just come from London, is the central figure of fun in the most ludicrous scene constructed anywhere in Susan Ferrier's fiction. Sir Sampson, Lady Maclaughlan's invalid husband, who is carried about and deposited at will by a Philistine lacquey, and who is stuttering with rage because of the treatment given him by his virago wife and by being compelled by Miss Grizzie to swallow a dose of her own stomach lotion instead of his Lady's cough-tincture, is in dramatic language "a perfect scream"; and at the card-table at whist they are all "screams." In this novel Marriage (1818) Juliana, the spoiled daughter of Lord Courtland's, who had run away to Scotland to be married to Henry Douglas, and who is refused support by her father, is an original creation in the matter of being a heartless, spoiled child-wife at all times quite unconscious of her own perfidious actions. Lady Juliana with her pugs, squirrel, and macaw, became in 1849-50 Dickens's Dora with Jip. Before the year 18 18, however, Lady Juliana had been portrayed by Daniel Defoe. Colonel Jack had just such a wife, who ruined him by her extravagances. The Colonel, how- ever, had sense enough to divorce her. Driven across the Susan Ferrier's Lady Juliana 279 Atlantic to Virginia by reason of his wife's debts, Colonel Jack began life anew. Finally among his slaves his divorced wife appeared. They moved toward each other in the glory of a reconciliation, for divorce had brought her to her senses. Jack then married her for the second time. Henry Douglas by Lady Juliana was driven into the army to die in a foreign land because he had not the determi- nation of assertive Colonel Jack. Defoe divorced Colonel Jack from his wife to give him happiness; Susan Ferrier killed Henry Douglas to give him his ; and Charles Dickens gently removed Dora so that David could try conclusions with the sensible Agnes. The whimsical Lady Juliana with perverted tastes wickedly abandoned one of her twin daughters at Glenfern Castle so that she might re-enter fashionable society in London. She not only lived to see her husband disgraced, but Adelaide the daughter, whom she had kept and trained, dishonor the house. Lady Juliana's most exquisite punishment must have been that of seeing Mary the daughter, who had been brought up by her husband's Scotch relative, restore honor to the house by a happy marriage, which was indeed one of love in spite of all hindrances that had been set in the way by a mother without a heart. Rosamond Vincy in George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871- 72) is the nearest likeness to Lady Juliana that we have had in our own times. Rosamond, spoiled by the luxu- rious bringing up of her father's, and Doctor Lydgate plunged into marriage on debt and kept it up. She was a basil plant that grew out of Lydgate's murdered brains. Her happiness in married life consisted in having the small details go her way. Her unruffled gaudier ie is what ex- asperates the reader as he sees her walking along oblivi- ous of the great issues of life. Her ethical make-up is realized by listening to the phrases which fall from her lips. These phrases correspond to her embroidered collar 280 Motives in English Fiction and her hands set off with rings. Self -consciousness of manner is always an expensive substitute for simplicity. Rosamond loses her baby by not obeying her husband. She is a mild creature with a terrible tenacity insisting that good housekeeping is simply ordering the best of everything. Under the pressure of the didacticism of such a shallow brain Dr. Lydgate runs up bills, neglects his work, and becomes a small doctor. Dr. Lydgate became a mental degenerate by reason of trying to carry the burden of a marriage that stayed with him like murder. Believing in the regeneration of Rosamond by marriage transportation, he was duped to the end of his career, and could only become a moderate success because of the drawback of a second-rate wife who had always been ashamed of his profession. The reader feels as if the fate which came to Susan E. Ferrier's Henry Douglas would have been a happy one for George Eliot's Dr. Lydgate; and the wonder is that Lydgate stood by his proposition to the end of his days. If, however, he had divorced her, one feels sure that such a procedure would never have rehabilitated Rosamond so that Lydgate like Defoe's Colonel Jack would have married his former wife a second time. Another success in caricature greater than any to be found in Marriage is that of the ubiquitous, spying, lying, imaginative Miss Pratt in Inheritance (1824). For forty years Miss Pratt with vibrating rabbit's ears, desultory gabble, and gnat-like attacks had pestered Lord Rossville; and she was a meddler with the lovers, being a constant thorn in the side of the heroine Gertrude St. Clair. By continually quoting the sayings of her nephew, Anthony Whyte, who has never had any existence at all, Miss Pratt is a forerunner of Sairey Gamp, of Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit, whose mythical Mrs. Harris, a friend of thirty- five years' standing, is punctured into total collapse by Susan Ferrier's "Destiny" 281 Mrs. Prig's sarcastic stab, "I don't believe there's no sich person." This Miss Pratt is a descendant too of Clarissa Harlowe's as she morbidly manages inside of a hearse to beat her way into the stronghold of her much-fearing, sore-afraid Lord Rossville that she may thus sensationally murder him. The novels of Susan E.Ferrier are sluggish in movement, are poorly plotted, and are filled with old and prolix situ- ations in which characterization resolves itself largely into external portraiture. Sometimes a subordinate char- acter needs to be studied before it is instinctively felt that a masterpiece has been produced by a second-rate genius. For example in Destiny (1831) the hilarity of the black- eyed, provincial, little thick-bodied representative of the fag-end of Glenroy's clan enheartens the reader to go on to a final dissipation of the Glenroy woes. Dear Mrs. Ma- cauley, the feminine Dominie Sampson, who avers that 11 Hieland blood " can not be bought and that we are all bad creatures — the best of us, is a fine type of Scotch woman who at the age of seventy by her constant life of sacrifice shows that happiness consists in passing it on to others. "At no age are we unable to serve God in some shape or other" is one of the aphorisms of "dear Macky " ; and, for the happiness emanating to others from her rural cottage and from the mean house that she was compelled to live in while in London, we feel that an all- wise Providence gave it all back to Mrs. Macauley and twice as much as the reward came in the Highland reel of joy danced by her at the wedding of Glenroy's daughter to Ronald Malcolm. Readers of the Ferrier fiction, when asked what novel is their favorite, almost invariably reply, ''Destiny, because of the pathos of its emotional situations " ; but, when these situations are analyzed, they are branded with the trade- mark of the Mackenzie manufactory, even such as that of Ronald drenched by a geyser of tears as he approaches 282 Motives in Enelish Fiction & J Inch Orran and departs therefrom. Susan E. Ferrier went over Scotland in a small way attempting to do for the Scotch people of her time what the great Sir Walter had done for the Scotch living in the mid-eighteenth century ; and Destiny is the last good glimpse at the feudal sway of one of the nineteenth century prodigal, Highland chief- tains who were to pass from Scottish life forever. At best Miss Ferrier was a sister shadow of Scott's assuming at times the shape of Jane Austen's or Maria Edgeworth's or Fanny Burney's. Mary, the gifted daughter of Godwin and Mary Woll- stonecraft's, who was half-sister of the ill-fated Fanny Imlay and also a half-sister of that still more wretched Jane Clairmont (Shelley's Constantia, over whose grave in Campo Santo della Misericordia di Sta. Maria d'Antello is written "She passed her life in suffering, expiating not only her faults, but also her virtues"), gave to the world Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus (1818) which is a direct connecting link between her father's (Godwin's) St. Leon and Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer. St. Leon, the necromancer, developed into Frankenstein who created that monster, who burned himself to ashes in the Polar regions only that he might afterwards be raised phcenix- like for more crimes by Maturin, who in 1820 re-named the fiend Melmoth the Wanderer. We all know how Mrs. Shelley's novel has been adversely criticized because of the chronicle method of narration. Perhaps it would have been better if there had been no Captain Walton to mar the narrative, but we forget all about Captain Walton when we listen to his story of Frankenstein's pursuit of the monster, polar sufferings, and death, and the remorse which seized the monster for having caused the agonies and death of his creator Frankenstein. The heart-broken utterances of the fiend, prior to his leaping through the cabin-window to the raft on which he disappears among Mrs. Shelley's "Frankenstein" 283 the ice-floes into darkness and distance, are singularly effective in emotionalizing a scene which, from the point of view of style, is nowhere else equaled in Mrs. Shelley's fiction. The nearest approach to such style moving in the pathetic is the story that the monster tells to Franken- stein at Geneva which makes the reader feel that Mil- ton's Satan was infinitely better off than this creation of Frankenstein's who had been thrown out into the world of civilization a grown-up man to rear himself as a child- savage without receiving directly from anyone except through his own efforts the benefits of the traditions of the human race. Valperga; or the Life and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca (1823), as a historical study of Guelph and Ghibeline, is almost as much of a failure as Perkin Warbeck (1830) the disastrous portrayal of the times of Henry VII in England. In Valperga there is only one interesting character the priestess Beatrice who believes in the oracular utterances of herself; and, when she is disillusion- ized, the process is as painful as that ordeal of fire, which opened the eyes of George Eliot's priest Savonarola. Mrs. Shelley in 1826 was still suffering from the effects of the twenty-minute squall which had drowned her husband and friend Williams in the Bay of Spezzia off Lerici ; and the gloom of this catastrophe pervades The Last Man (1826) . In the novel, Adrian, the second Earl of Windsor and son of an ex-queen of England, is a sketch of the poet of Adonais; Clara is the daughter of Lord Raymond (Lord Byron) ; and Lionel Verney, the narrator of the inci- dents of the plot, is probably Mrs. Shelley looking at her husband through the eyes of a man. The novel except in the characterization of Adrian is of little worth until we reach the closing pages which describe the world-destroy- ing plague that drives the few remaining characters from England to Switzerland. The poetic prose swings us 284 Motives in English Fiction from the Alps to Venice where we see Clara, Adrian, and Verney, the only inhabitants in the world, set sail in a frail bark lured by Adrian's wish to seek Athens and a home in the Cyclades whereby they may escape universal death. The voyage is not successful, for in a terrible storm Adrian and Clara are drowned and Lionel Verney survives as the last man. When one has read Byron's "I had a dream which was not all a dream," and has recited Campbell's weirdly fanciful poem The Last Man, he quotes the pro- phetic close of Adonais as a sidelight by which to appreci- ate how Mrs. Shelley gave to Adrian exactly the beautiful death which her husband had always desired, and which Providence had assigned in 1822. The last two novels written by Airs. Shelley were Lodore (1835) and Falkner (1837). The latter is worthless, but the former deserves a cursory glance by reason of the concealed allegory of the characters. Lord Lodore is Lord Byron ; Cornelia Santerre, age sixteen, whom Lodore had met in Wales and afterwards had married in Berkeley Square, London, is the embodiment of the combined qualities of Lady Byron and Harriet Shelley. Lady Santerre, the mother of Cornelia, also possesses the attri- butes of Lady Byron. Horatio Saville is the poet Shelley ; Clorinda, of marmoreal grace, is the Emilia Viviani, the beautiful Neapolitan inmate of the convent of St. Anna, whose beauty Shelley incarnated in Epipsy chid ion; and Edward Villiers who marries Ethel, the daughter of Lord Lodore, is also a slight sketch of the poet of The Ode to a Skylark. The plot of the novel is wretched by reason of excessive crayfish movement which always mars coherent sequence even in a good novel such as George Eliot's Daniel Deronda. On opening Lodore we are with Lodore (Lord Byron) and his daughter on the plains of Illinois; then there is crayfish action to explain what sent them to America to spend twelve years until Lady Santerre dies Hope's "Anastasius" 285 in England; and then it is that Lord Lodore decides to return to Europe, but unfortunately for the novel is killed in New York in a duel by moonlight. After his death there is no life in the narrative. Lord Byron once said to the Countess of Blessington that Anastasius, or Memoirs of a Greek (18 19) by Thomas Hope had made him weep twice — one that he had not writ- ten it, the other that Hope had. Sydney Smith also praised it highly claiming that its merit was extraordinary, since the piece of fiction had been written by a gentleman composed of chairs, tables, and sofas. The opinion of a few critics in our own time has been that readers are likely to become somewhat wearied before reaching the close of the last volume. The present writer feels that nearly every page of the novel has been charmingly written in such polished English that one would almost give his right eye to possess its fluent accuracy and phrasal orna- mentation. Thomas Hope's style has the grace of fine writing, the trick of which is so concealed that it baffles a rhetorician to analyze its captivating qualities which successfully support a fictitious superstructure that is conformable to the manners of the nations through which Anastasius, the modern Ulysses of Chios, traveled. The historical and statistical parts pertaining to eighteenth century affairs in the Orient are correct. We become well acquainted with the customs of the islanders of Greece, visit Constantinople, Cairo, Mecca, Damascus, Bucharest, admire the Albanians, then wheel from European shores to Symrna, Bagdad, and thence to the desert, to Acre, to Alexandria, to Naples, to Trieste, and to the Carinthian mountains. Such was the scenery on the sides of the stream on which Anastasius's life-boat was afloat. For thirty-five years Anastasius's vessel scudded down the stream of Epicureanism yawing by reason of the sudden side-puffs of ambition. Anastasius was everything from 286 Motives in English Fiction a quack doctor, an interpreter, a Turkish saint, a mer- chant, an adopted son of a Bey, a governor of a province, to a mercenary soldier. Anastasius, of the Zeluco type, at the end of his atrocious career endures the agony of knowing that he has been the chief agent in bringing about the death of his beautiful little boy Alexis, his only son by Euphrosyne, whom he had ruined in Smyrna as he had ruined Helena in Chios. When this cannibal Anastasius on the felucca, bearing toward Trieste, hugs to his breast his little dying Alexis, we feel as sorry for him as for Heathcliff when emaciated Catharine Linton dies to all purposes in his arms, or for dark, sternly-featured Guy Livingstone of George A. Lawrence's when for the last time he tightly presses to his heart his darling Constance Brandon, who had been slowly moved to the mausoleum by the artifices of himself and his hated accomplice Flora Bellasys. Emily Bronte says that even Heathcliff could weep on great occasions, and tears such as angels weep burst forth as Anastasius clings to the little cold body of Alexis as his all in the world is being buried in the Laza- retto. None of the death-bed scenes in our fiction is more pregnant with pathos than that of Alexis. Anastasius by the first person method of narration thus describes his agony : Lest he might feel ill at ease in my lap, I laid him down upon my cloak, and kneeled by his side to watch the growing change in his features. The present now was all to me: the future I knew I no longer should reck. Feeling my breath close to his cheek, he half opened his eye, looked as if after a long absence again suddenly recognizing his father, and — putting out his little mouth — seemed to crave one last token of love. The temptation was too powerful : I gently pressed my lip upon that of my babe, and gathered from it the proffered kiss. Life's last faint spark was just going forth, and I caught it on the threshold. Scarce had I drawn back my face, when all respir- Morier's "Hajji Baba" 287 ation ceased. His eye-strings broke, his features fell, and his limbs stiffened for ever. All was over: Alexis was no more — Euphrosyne avenged, — and Anastasius the wretch he had long deserved to be! Barry Lyndon's grief over his boy Bryan has not received better exposition on the pages of Thackeray. There is great similarity between Anastasius and Hajji Baba. James Morier's production, however, seldom causes us to weep but almost always to laugh. Thomas Hope's novel is written in a more serious vein. The scene of Morier's novel is pitched farther East than Hope's, in Persia, and for the most part is not taken out of that country. At times, however, Hajji Baba meets the Ye- zeedis, the devil-worshipers, as Anastasius does; and he experiences camp-life among the Turcomans and the Curds which is balanced by the same kind of existence that Anastasius led among the Wahhabees with whom he allied himself by marrying the Bedoween beauty, Aische. The tragical love story of Hajji Baba and the Curdish slave Zeenab is balanced by that of Anastasius and Helena. One would venture to say that James Morier had carefully read Thomas Hope's three volumes before penning Hajji Baba. If Hajji Baba of Ispahan is superior to Anastasius, it is because Morier had a greater sense of humor than Hope; for there is no episode in Anastasius that can equal that where Hajji, trying to get his money on the death of his father, is embarrassed by the presence of a mother who, even when subjected to the rice ordeal, shows us that it is a wise son that can outwit his mother in Persia. Nor has Hope anything that humorously equals that episode which presents Hajji, after he had married the Emir's widow, denounced and driven out by his wife's relatives because he had lied about his wealth. Another difference between the two novelists lies in an ethical 288 Motives in English Fiction point of view. Morier has his barber-sub-executioner rascal emerge as an unconscionable confidant of the Grand Vizier from his oriental duplicities and crimes, while Thomas Hope throws his hero, rich in the possession of the loot of the eastern world, on his knees to appease that retributive God who had lost patience with one who had been the epitome of all the questionable methods sanc- tioned by the oriental life of the eighteenth century. It was a good thing for English fiction that lovers should love like Kara Aziek and Don Sebastian of Anna Maria Porter's, like Aische and Anastasius, and like the Armenian Mariam and Yusuf of Morier's. With Thomas Hope accurate, realistic orientalization came in to take the place of the inset work of those artists who had never been on eastern ground. Anastasius not only helped Morier in Hajji Baba (1824), Zohrab the Hostage (1832), Ayesha, the Maid of Kars (1834), Du t aided Disraeli to orientalize in Contarini Fleming (1832), Alroy (1833), Tancred (1847), and Julia Pardoe in the Romance of the Harem (1839). In the year that Anastasius was published, Mary Russell Mitford began to contribute to The Lady's Maga- zine sketches of rural character and scenery which were afterwards published under the title of Our Village in five series from 1824 to 1832. The centre of the rural district in which Miss Mitford worked was Three Mile Cross, a cluster of houses on the Basingstoke Road, near Reading, in Berkshire "where the scenery, without rising into grandeur or breaking into wildness, is so peaceful, so cheerful, so varied, and so thoroughly English." Miss Mit- ford in her strolls throughout this region holds up for in- spection the country folk of the middling classes who seem to be living in simple honesty and for the most part happy. The rural characters are far removed from "man- stifled town" and factory-frowning cities. There is no Miss Mitford's "Our Village" 289 seamy side of life to show, because Miss Mitford absolutely refuses to go slumming. When death falls on any member of the community, it falls upon such as lightly as a shadow from a cloud as when the vicar's maid is stricken in her returned lover's arms; or, as when little Harry Lee is carried to heaven without knowing it in the chalk-pit. Miss Mitford's soft and soothing method of characteri- zation transfers itself readily to the melancholy manner of her descriptions of natural scenery. The whole park in front of the old house at Aberleigh creates a sweet sadness by reason of the "noweriness amidst such desolation; it seems the triumph of nature over the destructive power of man." There is lavished upon the scene that peculiarly pleasing tone of pathos that was inherited from the descrip- tions of natural scenery in the novels of Charlotte Smith which had been read by Miss Mitford when a young girl. Readers are aware of this atmosphere of modified sorrow in Tom Cordery and in Modern Antiques. In the latter, after we have smiled at the exterior of the quaint old lady Mrs. Frances, who had once walked in Richardson's flower-garden and still doted on his Sir Charles Grandison, and extended our smile to a grin as we see her blushing, fidgeting with her mittens on her apron, flirting a fan nearly as tall as herself, and holding her head on one side with that peculiar air which one has noted in shyer birds, and ladies in love, in order to attract the attention of her old beau to whom fifty years before she had been engaged, we suddenly feel moisture on our eyelids and the grin subsides, for Miss Mitford herself can not go on with ex- ternalities, but plunges beneath the exterior to abandon a humor that must not be pushed further and says: Rather let me sigh over the world of woe, that in fifty years of hopeless constancy must have passed through that maiden heart ! The timid hope ; the sickening suspense ; the slow, slow 290 Motives in English Fiction fear; the bitter disappointment; the powerless anger; the relenting; the forgiveness; and then again, that interest, kinder, truer, more unchanging than friendship, that linger- ing woman's love — Oh how can I jest over such feelings? They are passed away — for she is gone, and he — but they clung by her to the last, and ceased only in death. It is just as when at the circus, after we have been watch- ing the favorite clown giving his thrills of fun, we are all at once called to view his dead body behind the cur- tains: true humor and true pathos clasp hands always across the coffin and refuse to be separated. Other sketches which have become favorites are My School- fellows, Jack Hatch, and An Admiral on Shore. The cabinet pictures moving in "our market town" of Belford Regis (1835), and those in Atherton, and Other Tales (1854), are in every way inferior to those in Our Village. Miss Mitford for the plan of Our Village, so far as describing the various seasons of the year, is indebted to Gilbert White's Natural History and Antiquities of Sel- borne, and for the possession of fluent English went to Jane Austen "the most perfect of female writers" whose precise diction she acquired even to the use of such an adverb as "deedily" current in Hampshire. Miss Mit- ford 's Our Village in conception and style is reminis- cent of Steele, Addison, Goldsmith, Mrs. Frances Brooke, Mrs. Charlotte Smith, and Washington Irving; and her influence on subsequent writers has by no means been small. Mrs. S. C. Hall (Anna Maria Fielding) in Sketches of Irish Character (1829), and Lights and Shadows of Irish Life (1838) copied the manner of Miss Mitford. In 1835, Tennyson wrote Dora an unfigurative, almost monosylla- bic, simple piece of pathetic blank verse, the austerity of which moved Wordsworth to say that he had been trying all his life to write a poem like Dora but had failed. Its Miss Mitford and Mrs. Gaskell 291 simple, poetical language was inspired by the simple prose of Miss Mitford's "DoraCreswell" in Our Village; and its plan was changed because Miss Mitford's pastoral like all her stories is a novel in miniature without a plot. Dora is a child in Miss Mitford's sketch. Tennyson was com- pelled to work out a new conclusion to Miss Mitford's story, in which the farmer falls at once into his niece's gentle snare. Dickens, in 1836, perhaps fell back upon the strength of Miss Mitford in the excellent Sketches by Boz. Harriet Martineau not only turned to Maria Edgeworth, but to Miss Mitford in Deerbrook (1839); and touches of Miss Mitford can be detected in Mrs. Gaskell' s Moor- land Cottage (1850) ; and there is a still closer affinity between Our Village and Cranford (1853) . Miss Mitford's Three Mile Cross, Berkshire, becomes Mrs. Gaskell's Knutsford, Cheshire. The characters in Our Village all come to life again as they sadly and humorously strut up and down the streets of Mrs. Gaskell's village. There is the same gentle management of the pathetic as when Captain Brown is struck down by the new-fangled machin- ery of the railroads just after he had flung aside Pickwick Papers to save the life of a little girl; and then, too, there is a similarity in the way in which the woes of former times surge in like the tide which once brought in English men- of-war to carry away the young brother of Matty to fight against Boney and to seek the far Orient and thus cause the death of his mother and the end of all domestic joys for the family. Shadows do not stay long in sunny Berkshire; nor do they flicker forever in Cheshire, for Mrs. Gaskell by the pen of genial humor causes the tidal wave to recede farther and farther, assuring us that goodness and happiness may be found in "the fresh air, the shade, and the sunshine of nature." After the falling of the leaves of many years, Matty's sorrows are dispelled by the sunny home-coming of her long-lost brother, Mr. Peter, 292 Motives in English Fiction The influence of Miss Mitford's Our Village with its cross-sections of village and country life was felt by Harriet Martineau when she wrote Deerbrook (1839), in which we breathe the still air on Dingleford Road and walk in the yellow glow through Deerbrook the village near Birmingham. It is a community given over to flower- shows and water-parties: picnickers stroll among the wild hyacinths and meadow narcissus to where children are gathering cowslips and come back with wild-flowers past the corner-house, the home of Edward Hope who had married Hester Ibbotson instead of her sister Margaret whom he really loved. As nothing can be kept a secret in Deerbrook, this Margaret is in love with Philip Enderby who, she thinks, will shortly marry a Miss Mary Bruce. Facing the winds in the uplands effects no cure for Mar- garet. As the season advances, Harriet Martineau covers the meadows with snow and on the frozen river glides Margaret in snow-boots on skates. Falling through the thin ice, after being rescued, she hears Edward Hope say "0 God! My Margaret." These words are passed on to Enderby who fears the situation. Margaret lives in the corner-house and, when Philip questions her love, tries to solace herself by loving the little child born to Hester and Edward. At length poverty pinches the family as well as all the poor people of Deerbrook. Edward Hope, a good surgeon, had been accused by Sir William Hunter— a forecast of George Eliot's Bul- strode in Middlemarch — of being a body-snatcher, and the corner-house had been attacked by a mob which had been dispersed by an illuminated skeleton. Har- riet Martineau anticipates Mrs. Gaskell in the dreadful picture of the starving community that resorts to rob- beries and which is finally stricken with the plague, the fever. Deerbrook in the shadow is seen mak- ing coffins by candle-light. Margaret attends the sick, Miss Mitford and Mrs. Gaskell 293 the dying, and visits the graveyard as it fills up with new-made graves. Edward Hope regains his good repu- tation by gallant conduct during the epidemic ; and Mar- garet Ibbotson leaving a death-bed scene meets Philip Enderby who gently leads her to the marriage altar. The heroine, knowing that Edward and Hester are prosperous and that all whom she loved are in sunshine, feels that she can leave the dear old country village of Deerbrook, among whose hedge-rows she had often rambled, to come again to see it thrice as fair. This modified grief slowly passing into permanent joy on the pages of Deerbrook animates Mrs. Gaskell' s The Moorland Cottage (1850). Beneath a thorn-tree, "where never tumult of the world came to disturb the peace, and the quiet of whose heights was never broken by the loud passionate cries of men," sits Maggie Browne gazing into the blue air above the summits of the hills and at the dark-brown purple streak of moor where a yellow gleam of lights reveals a pond. Here in this retreat Maggie is as calm an object as the white speck of the distant sheep; and it is to this spot that she has fled as a refuge from her mother's dwelling near Combehurst. The life of brown- haired, dark-eyed Maggie in the Moorland Cottage had been pathetic. No sympathy had ever come to her from a cold-hearted mother and a selfish brother Edward. The querulous mother believed only in education for her son and even disapproved of her daughter's admiration for nature. This was Maggie's past; and, at the thorn-tree, she is pondering over saving her brother Edward, because Mr. Buxton objected to his son Frank's marrying the sister of a forger. If she would give up Frank, then Mr. Buxton would not prosecute Edward, who then could begin life anew in America. The novel toward the end is melo- dramatic, for Maggie moves from the thorn-tree to sacri- fice her love for Frank for the duty of accompanying 294 Motives in English Fiction scapegrace Edward to the new life to be constructed be- yond the Atlantic. On the ship a fire breaks out. Edward is drowned, but she is rescued by Frank who, without her knowing it, had been on board all the time. Thus, after much sorrow we return with the happy lovers to pass by the lyke-gate at Combehurst church, to cross the wooden bridge over the brook to take the path through the pasture and the field of purple heather from which we emerge to pass down hill to the basin, where stands the cottage in which is the only sorrow still remaining for Maggie — a mother who values a dead son more than a thousand daughters. George Eliot was inspired by Elizabeth Gaskell's idyllic story to construct the plot of The Mill on the Floss (i860), the threads of which are for the most part entirely of a different color; but still dark-haired Maggie Browne, in the clutches of her hard-hearted mother and brother Edward, is in the pathetic plight of Maggie Tulliver who was unappreciated by a querulous mother and stormed at by a brother, of whom Maggie had been afraid all of her life. Befriended only by a father, Maggie at last was deprived even of his solicitude by the Wakem trouble which engrossed all his thoughts and eventually caused his death. Maggie Tulliver' s troubles are set off by a back- ground of the beautiful scenery around Dorlcote Mill along the Floss, the flood-eddies of which at last pulled Maggie down to give her surcease from living a misunderstood, broken life. Subdued sorrow with an idyllic setting such as is por- trayed by Harriet Martineau or by Mrs. Gaskell for a moment is emphasized at the end of Wuthering Heights (1847). Young Cathy the second in the hands of Heath- cliff, who forced her to marry his milksop son Linton, enlists our sympathy until even Emily Bronte must needs have Linton Heathcliff die so as to give Cathy, the second, Miss Mitford and George Eliot 295 happiness by presenting her with the love of Hareton Earnshaw with whom she walks in the moonlight dreaming of the ecstasy to be on New Year's day when the Lintons and the Earnshaws shall be at one with heaven and them- selves. Wuthering Heights, with Cathy the first's oak- paneled bed beside the lattice near the firs, will be shut up forever; for the troubles of the House of Earnshaw and the House of Linton are over. Mr. Lockwood and Mrs. Dean have served their r61e as chorus to explain the fall and rise of the Earnshaws and the Lintons. The old order has passed away ; and happiness for the Earnshaws and Lintons has at last been effected for the lovers, strolling in the moonlight, who are going down to live at Thrushcross Grange. In all our fiction there is no more pleasing sight than this idyllic picture emerging from the shadows at the end of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights; and a simi- lar idyllic setting closes George Eliot's Middlemarch, (1871-72), where we see self-sacrificing Mary Garth happy with her gentleman-farmer, Fred Vincy, as she had been on that day in her youth when she had pledged herself to him over the umbrella ring. Mary had always believed as her father Caleb, in patiently awaiting gifts from God, who had always been at her side in the bitter days of earn- ing her wages at Stone Court in the service of old Feather- stone, and who had prevented her from putting through the sordid deal of burning Featherstone's second will which, if she had so done, she well knew would have made the man she loved, Fred Vincy, richer by £10,000. What George Eliot did for greater groups of individuals, arranged in settings of rural life, made it possible for Enoch Arnold Bennett to pass from the analyzation of one man, or one woman, to the microscopical sectioning of a whole community and the environment thereof, namely, the atmosphere of the Five Towns of Hanbridge, Bursley, Knype, Longshaw, and Turnhill, in the pottery districts 296 Motives in English Fiction of Staffordshire, whose people we feel very near to as we sift their joys and sorrows, their hopes and aspirations, their disappointments and failures. In Anna of the Five Towns, the souls of Anna and William crept close together by means of the strength and beauty of renunciation and the sustaining power of memory. The love of money on the part of Anna's father tried to destroy such aesthetic natures as they both possessed, but William's body in the shaft and Anna's in the prison of a loveless marriage are only material reminders of the fact that their souls had constantly communed in a sphere in which Anna's miserly, tyrannical father had been balked in his scheme of aes- thetic, spiritual murder. Bennett's type-portraitures are always intensely human, buoyant with the tumultuous emotions of life; and, often, by their peaceful ways and simple contentedness, they set an example of the love and friendship of community life which is an ideal for all to seek and accept. And the touches, such as those closely binding together Miss Mitford's Our Village, Harriet Martineau's Deerbrook, Mrs. Gaskell's The Moorland Cottage and Cranford, George Eliot's Adam Bede, Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, and Middlemarch, and Enoch Arnold Bennett's Anna of the Five Towns and The Old Wives 1 Tale, have all clearly been put together again on this side of the Atlantic by Mrs. Mary Wilkins Freeman's sketches of rural New England. CHAPTER X A. Glance at E-nglisH Fiction from Miss Mitford to CKarles DicKens SOME of the novels of John Gait are The Ayrshire Legatees (1820); The Annals of the Parish (182 1); The Steamboat (1822); The Provost (1822); Sir Andrew Wylie (1822); The Entail (1823); Ringan Gilhaize (1823) ; and Lawrie Todd; or, the Settlers in the Woods (1832). The first novel, a series of letters written by the members of a Scotch family who travel to London to obtain a legacy, in form is a direct imitation of Smollett's Humphry Clinker; and the second is somewhat of a local history of Scotland in the time of George III from the point of view of a Scotch Dr. Primrose— the Reverend Micah Balwhidder, who writes in the king's English, plentifully sprinkled with good pure Ayrshire dialect. We could praise Gait's description of the death of poor daft Meg Gaffaw, if she were not recognized as a shaving of that figure which Scott had already whittled into the shape of Madge Wildfire. The Provost is another Annals of the Parish giving glimpses of Scotch life down past the time of the battle of Waterloo. One scene among the sketches is that of the execution of Jeanie, who had murdered her own babe. Her brother Willie ascends the scaffold to be a solace during her last moments. It is plainly suggestive of what would have happened to Effie Deans, if Jeanie, her sister, had not won a pardon from Queen Caroline. Ringan Gilhaize, the 297 298 Motives in English Fiction attempt of Gait, a third-rate artist, to get on second-rate ground to clutch Scott's coat-tails, hoping thus to be dragged on to first-rate soil, was a grievous failure. In The Entail Gait succeeded in getting one foot over the line into the great Sir Walter's territory. Scott enjoyed this novel, and it is said that Byron read it three times; and certainly Claud Walkinshaw bending all his energies as a peddler, then as a merchant, to regain his father's estate, is a strong piece of characterization as well as his " bairnswoman " Maudge, who never received any help and died in poverty. Possibly the attributes of Cuddie Headrigg in Scott's Old Mortality helped Gait to create Maudge. To make a study of The Entail is to analyze why a man marries his cousin, why a man sacri- fices his sons — to get lands and money. It is indeed a sordid study of disinheriting and entailing which arc schemes whereby to get more of this world's goods. Per- haps the most tragical episode in the novel is the sea- storm in which George meets his death; and the most humorous episode that of the marriage of the mentally deficient Walter to Betty Bodle. After the "sicker knot" has been tied under a tree near the manse, we march to the barn to spend the greater part of the night in celebrating the Scotch wedding. We see the famous Leddy Grippy, the beautiful Isabella of nobility, the aged Lady of Plee- lands, and the whinstone-minded Claud, gathered together to sanction all the foolish revelry which is capped in non- sense by the remarks of the bride, "Are ye fou' already, Watty Walkinshaw? If ye mudge out o' that seat again this night, I'll mak' you as sick o' pies and puddings as ever a dog was o' het kail." Mrs. Elizabeth Hamilton in The Cottagers of Glenburnie (1808) and John Gait in his novels helped establish what William Ernest Henley in 1895 termed "the kailyard school." John Gibson Lockhart wrote Valerius (1821), Lockhart's "Adam Blair" 299 which has been called a weak Roman Old Mortality, and Adam Blair (1822) which shows the scenic power of Scott when Lockhart describes Loch-Fine. Lockhart nowhere presses into service parochial dialect. The whole novel is a casting forward to a variation of J. M. Barrie's The Little Minister (1891) in which there is another kind of Babbie who does not love a big minister enough to keep from ruining him. Black-eyed Charlotte Bell (Mrs. Campbell), similar to Meredith's Diana of the Crossways, who, however, does not emerge from confronting the changes of the various stages of her marital hell ready for heaven, comes to the manse of Cross-Meikle to fascinate its inmate, the widower Adam Blair. After sensationally plunging into the river to save Adam Blair and his daugh- ter from drowning, she runs away to answer the summons of her incompatible, brutal husband whose castle is on the shore of Loch-Fine. It is life for a life, so the Reverend Mr. Blair follows his pale green satin-dressed Sataness to the scene of her imprisonment and falls on the first night of their meeting into the web of her powerful seductive charms. The novel has been exceedingly well done and should be read oftener nowadays. There is symbolic work in it such as where Charlotte tries to phrase her feelings in making the black mere, into which she had been throwing stones, represent the depths of calmness that she had ruffled and polluted ; and symbolism is not only one of the last phases of our fiction, but is one of the most difficult to create and pass over to the full understanding of readers. Charlotte conveniently dies of the fever she contracted from nursing her fallen lover; but Adam is saved by the author from delirium to be rehabilitated not, however, until after a scene of degradation before the General Assembly in Glasgow and after ten years of remorse and misery have been meted out to him with the members of his former kirk as daily witnesses. 300 Motives in English Fiction In 1822 Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life by John Wil- son (" Christopher North ") was published ; and, in 1823, ap- peared his The Trials of Margaret Lindsay, a tale of "piety, submission, and active exertion," which caused Letitia Landon's Emily Arundel to weep more copiously than was her wont. The Foresters came out in 1825. In some of his stories Wilson possessed the power of the gruesome as in that one that has been carried by the present writer through the tract of many years. It is A Tale of Expi- ation, that short barbaric narrative which relates how a father ruined and murdered his son's sweetheart. David Macbeth Moir, the "Delta" of Blackwood's Magazine, in Mansie Wauch (1828) presents the biography of a Dal- keith tailor. Mrs. Margaret Oliphant wrote Margaret Maitland (1849), which the great Jeffrey praised and com- pared to Gait's Annals of the Parish. The fisher-folk of Scotland stalk about in Charles Reade's Christie Johnstone (1853). Then within the next fifteen years were pub- lished the fine studies of Scotch life in George Mac- donald's David Elginbrod (1863), Alec Forbes of Tlowglen (1865), and Robert Falconer (1868). Macdonald later added to the series Malcolm (1875), Marquis of Lossie (1877), Sir Gibbie (1879), and Donal Grant (1883), con- taining masterly delineations of Scottish character. At this point in the production of kailyard material, we can conveniently pass from the Aberdeenshire of George Macdonald's to northern Scotland and the Hebrides de- picted in the novels of William Black, and from thence to Fifeshire to study the fiction of David Storran Meldrum. J. M. Barrie entered this field in 1888 with the delightful Auld Licht Idylls. Then from Barrie's Kirriemuir there was the shift to Drumtochty to the pleasurable Beside the Bonnie Briar Bush (1894) °f Dr. John Watson's, and to Gait's Ayrshire that causes us to stand aghast at its hard and bitter peasant life in The Kailyard School 301 The House with the Green Shutters (1901), which was written by George Douglas Brown in a reactionary spirit strong to demolish any happiness that existed in any kailyard. S. R. Crockett, whom death not long ago called from his labors in fiction, should not be forgotten, for he has entertained us for many years by his de- lightful stories, the scenes of which are generally placed in Galloway. It is sincerely to be regretted that J. M. Barrie since 1900 has felt the call of the drama rather than the tug of the heather. Our fiction has lost much by reason of his being no longer susceptible to Heimatkunst or "Home was home then, happy for the child. " Robert Louis Stevenson, in Kidnapped and The Master of Ballant- rae, caught the spirit of cold and hot kail; but never to convey such does he technically press to breaking a dialect that was not made for such falsity. He is not a kailyarder because his work is not parochial, but is national. Steven- son only of all the Scotch novelists has put on the histori- cal, romantic garb dropped by Scott in 1832; but a pigmy is a dwarf, though wrapped in a giant's robe. Pierce Egan's Life in London; or the Day and Night Scenes of Jerry Hawthorn, Esq. (1821) and his Finish to the Adventures of Tom, Jerry, and Logic, in their Pursuits through Life in and out of London (1828) in substance matter, form, diction sprinkled with cockney English, and in manner of being published in monthly parts, formed the prototype of Dickens's Pickwick Papers. In 1824 the first part of Theodore Hook's Sayings and Doings was published which, when completed between 1826 and 1829, was to have a strong influence on Charles Dickens. Mrs. Catherine Gore's first novel Theresa Marchmont, or the Maid of Honour appeared in 1824 to be followed by a host of her other pieces of fiction dealing with fashionable life. Cecil, or the Adventures of a Coxcomb (1841) was composed as an antidote to the poison in Disraeli's Vivian 302 Motives in English Fiction Grey and Bulwer's Falkland; and The Banker 's Wife; or Court and City (1843) holds up Mr. Hamlyn the banker as an awful example of what awaits those who secretly squander the hard-earned money that friends have put into their safe-keeping. When the long-deferred crash comes, the wounded, dying banker kisses his son for the first time since childhood, realizing that the loss of money has brought about the birth of love not only to himself but to all the members of his family. Colonel Hamilton, who had made his fortune in India to lose the major part of it by placing it in the Hamlyn bank, from the beginning to the end of the novel is a lovable character reminding us of Colonel Newcome who was soon to be created by Thackeray. Passing away from the woman who makes the money- dealer stand out in English fiction, we come to another second-rate novelist, Anna Eliza Bray, who, in 1825, began to write novels in imitation of her master Sir Walter Scott. She went about with notebook in hand making memoranda pertaining to ancient ruins. Like Charles Reade she believed in accuracy of data, and she believed that one should visit the territory which was to be the background. Her novels fill a long shelf, but if they were compressed to their real worth they would rise no higher than a hassock on which the great Sir Walter might rest his lame foot. One of them The Protestant (1828) caught the favor of the public by reason of the attitude of the English people toward Catholic emanci- pation; but Mrs. Bray had written no purpose novel to help in any religious controversy. The novel was simply a study of the fires at Smithfield that Queen Mary kept fanning during the five-year nightmare that she gave England. The Talba, or Moor of Portugal is better; but Trelawny of Trelawne; or the Prophecy: a Legend of Cornwall, dealing with the rebellion of Monmouth, is perhaps the The Banims' "O'Hara Tales" 303 best, since Cornwall was the place which she knew most about because of her exceedingly painstaking research into the legends thereof. Ireland again thrust itself into English fiction in John Banim and Michael Banim's Tales by the O'Hara Family (1825-27). In the Banim fiction brotherly love can pass into jealousy, into hate, into apostasy, into faith in the world, and into the recognition that the greatest thing in it is love. When the Banims wish it their peasants live in an Arcadia that makes for primeval integrity, for loyalty to friend and foe, and for learning that duty must be done at any cost. Their Irishmen in the midst of poverty and suffering are frolicsome and witty. It is a wonder that these men could ever smile, could ever be pure and sweet in their relations with one another, or possess any triumphant hope for themselves or for their country, when we consider them as victims of the cruel laws extant everywhere on the island. The Banim Celt seems seldom to die in his bed. He was a fighter but somehow or other his children, some of them, appear to the reader as if they were going to die in their beds. At times it is felt that the Celt should die out entirely since futile is the struggle of each generation which ended in transportation or death. It seems as if all these generous, warm-hearted Irishmen were fighting battles not for themselves but for others. Disaster was always the reward for generosity. About the only thing that they do receive is the beauty of renun- ciation. This is the only silver lining to the cloud of Banim pathos that the onlooker can see. Let us turn to Michael Banim's The Croppy a story of the rebellion of 1 798 which was an attempt to establish an Irish republic. The plot manoeuvres into shape by means of poetic prose that depicts Irish landscape at sunset. Eliza Hartley, heiress of Hartley court, is musing aloud with Nanny the knitter, a go-between for all members 304 Motives in English Fiction of the love-making community, listening with all the solid- ity of the rotundity of her quaint figure. The dramatis personae are then revealed. Harry Talbot has loved Eliza from childhood. Sir William Judkin, a fascinating stranger, bribes Nanny to help in his suit to Eliza. This Judkin is the nephew of a baronet, whose lands he had inherited. He had been educated in foreign parts as a gentleman. The father of Eliza prefers Harry Tal- bot, but the girl is fascinated by the stranger. There appears on the scene Belinda St. John, Eliza's dearest school friend, who is tall, dark, and beautiful, even in the wreck of her former self, as she tells the story of her ruin to Eliza. Then we pass from this apparently mad woman Belinda to the military review and to the out- break on account of the soldiers' abuse. Lands are de- vastated, homes are burned, prisoners are tortured for information in the effort to quell the rebellion. Then comes the scene where Belinda saves Sir William, who had murdered her child and married Eliza Hartley only to desert her. Talbot saves Eliza's father and rescues Eliza from the burning prison. Sir William, in an encounter, falls from his horse, is crushed, and is rescued again by Belinda to die in the churchyard of Dunbrody Abbey so that Nemesis can be uniquely appeased. A moonlight scene ensues in which Eliza is present in order to gaze upon Sir William, whose head is resting on the cofhn of the child he had murdered, and whose eyes are glazing as he sees before him for the last time the two women he had wronged. There is another girl in the plot who is a wonderful deline- ation of the peasant type. But the sorrows of Kitty, the daughter of Shawn-a-Gow the smith, are only martial. There is great scenic power in one place in the tale where the half-savage Shawn-a-Gow in the fire of primitive passions is unconsciously gazing upon the silhouetted form of his beloved son who, by the light of the burning village, Michael Banim's "The Croppy" 305 is dangled up and down in a mad dance from ground to limb of tree — a victim of torture to confess conspiracy. Later, with the corpse of this idolized son in his arms he says, In the darkness o' the night I swore to burn for burnin' done on me. In the light o' mornin' I swear over again. By the sowl o' that boy that was as harmless an' as innocent as when he smiled from his mother's breast. Him that is now in Heaven listening to my oath, I'll have blood for his blood — an' that in plenty. Ay, Tom ! in plenty. On the hillside, as he had watched the roof of his home fall in, this tortured pikeman had said, By the ashes o' my cabin and I stanin' a houseless beggar on the hillside lookin' at it ! — While I can get an Orangeman's house to take the blaze and a wisp to kindle the blaze up I'll burn ten houses for that one. As a comic relief action for all this tragedy Michael Banim has nothing better to offer the reader than Nanny the knitter inside the chest, which the robbers had carried off on a perilous journey to open and find all the Hartley wealth. All the treasure that they got was Nanny. The question naturally arises: What caused all this internecine warfare and misery? Some say it was brought about by Pitt. O'Connell says, "It was brought about by the most base, open, and profligate corruption that ever stained the annals of any country." According to Ban- im's introductory chapter in The Croppy, the origin of the civil strife dates back to 1777 when England had sent all her soldiers to fight against the American Colonies. There was no army in Ireland and, when there seemed to be danger of a French invasion, Irish regiments were mustered into service. The Irish were proud of their soldiery and it was permitted to remain after the French war scare died away. In 1782 Ireland had an independent parliament 3o6 Motives in English Fiction and free trade. After the war was over in America, England began a despotic course of action suppressing the volunteers. Ireland tried to work out her salvation by means of political clubs and secret societies, and as the Catholics had been strong supporters of the volunteer movement, and by nature of their religion could not belong to secret societies, the island was rent in twain, animosity of race and creed being rampant everywhere. Thus their rebellion of 1 798 was ushered in which streaked with blood not only Banim's The Croppy, but Lady Morgan's The O'Briens and 0' Flaherty s (1827), with which we have already familiarized ourselves. There are few Irishmen to- day who have not at some time or other read John Banim's The Peep 0' Day: or John Doe and The Nowlans, and Michael Banim's Father Connell and Crohoore of the Billhook. Another Irish fiction writer who was acquainted with the Banim fiction was Gerald Griffin whose chief productions are: Tales of the Munster Festivals (1827); The Collegi- ans (1829); The Invasion (1832); Tales of My Neighbor- hood (1835) ; Duke of Monmouth (1836) ; and Talis Qualis, or Tales of the Juryroom (1842). If a man has read Suil Dhuv, the Coiner and The Hand and Word, which power- fully portrays the horrible murders committed by the terrible Yamon Dhu, and The Collegians; or, Colleen Bawn, he has a full grasp of the Griffin fiction. The Collegians has been praised beyond what it deserves per- haps on account of Dion Boucicault's dramatization of it. For the most part the novel is nothing but rank melo- drama in which we see Hardress working out murder as the solution of a situation that is ages old. When a college man like Hardress Cregan has kept from the world the secret of his marriage to a beautiful peasant girl, and a chance comes of his securing the beautiful, cultured Anne Chute of the moneyed class, and he is too mean to lift his wife up to his intellectual level, and is so selfish that he Gerald Griffin's "Collegians" 307 thinks that she will continually drag him down and keep him away from money and what he conceives to be his true social status, and the wife seems healthy and refuses to die, there is only one way out of the tangle and that is delivering the precious jewel of his soul into the keeping of the common enemy of mankind. Hardress decides that girl number one must be put out of the way, and not hay- ing the heart to do it himself he employs an agent. When Hardress is brought to bay by the baying of the hounds which had come upon the shattered corpse of his Eily, the reader shudders. Hardress breaks into the crowd, gath- ered around the body of his murdered wife, crying out in the frenzy of his guilt, Keep off the dogs! They will tear her if ye let them pass! Good sir, will you suffer the dogs to tear her? I had rather be torn myself than look upon such a sight. ... Do you hear them now? Do you hear that yell for blood? . . . Who put the hounds upon that horrid scent — that false scent? I am going mad, I think. I say, sir, do you hear that yelling now? ... I tell you there is. If this ground should open before me, and I should hear the hounds of Satan yelling upward from the deep, it could not freeze me with a greater fear. Thus, Griffin probes criminal conscience touching it to the quick as Francis J. Thompson in his poem wherein a sinner cries out in terror as he is being chased down by the Hound of Heaven. Another novelist who knew better than the Banim brothers or Grifnn the virtues and the faults of the Irish- men of the first half of the nineteenth century was William Carle ton. It made no difference to him whether an Irish- man was a saint or a fool in the woeful environment that was his. Carleton favored nobody in his delineations. His pen was as true as the touch of Ithuriel's spear; and thus, when touched, Catholics, Orangemen, agents, land- 308 Motives in English Fiction lords, ribbonmen, rapparees, a paddy go-easy, a mid- wife, and a tithe proctor, are revealed in the truest traits of their race. In 1828, in The Christian Examiner, appeared The Pilgrimage to Lough Derg. In the following year Father Butler and The Lough Derg Pilgrim found their way into a volume. Then was published his greatest fiction such as Traits arid Stories of the Irish Peasantry (1830), (second series three years later); Tales of Ireland (1834); Fardo- rougha the Miser (1837-38); Valentine McClutchy (1845); Parra Sasthia, or the History of Paddy Go-Easy and his Wife Nancy (1845) ; The Black Prophet (1847) ; The Emigrants of Ahadarra (1847); The Tithe Proctor (1849); and Willy Reilly (1855). Of these the greatest in my opinion are Fardorougha the Miser, showing the great struggle be- tween paternal love and the love of money, and Valentine McClutchy, which is the most realistic picture of the Irish people suffering from the oppressive landlaws and Orange conservatism that our fiction possesses. This novel is perhaps better than Fardorougha. Carleton was well acquainted with hard-hearted land- lords and agents, with criminally negligent absentees, and with armed civilians whose gunshots were still ringing a tocsin in his ears. Carleton knew what his country had been from the time of Cromwell's siege of Drogheda. He knew the penal code provisions that had come up out of the laws of the seventeenth century which accord- ing to Burke had reduced the Catholics to a miserable population without property, without estimation, with- out education. As late as 1829 Catholics were excluded from parliament, the magistracy, corporations, the uni- versity, the bar, from the right of voting at parliament elections, from holding office, and from being school- masters or tutors. Carleton knew that one half of the Irish nation was composed of Gibeonites and that the other half had all the franchises, all the property, Carleton's "Valentine McClutchy" 309 and all the education, and that the English in their attitude toward the Irish were almost as bitter as they had been in the days of Cromwell. The penal laws extant tended to support Carleton's hypothesis. Carle- ton would show in his fiction that the Irish as the English lived first for religion; secondly, for country; and thirdly, for family; and that opposition on these points made the Irish stand all the more for them. Rightly to understand Valentine McClutchy the above historical facts must be kept in mind. In the plot the dark, sallow, hook-nosed, knock-kneed agent McClutchy who is an illegitimate and the father of a degenerate son, together with Solomon McShine, or McSlime, who shines in all that is illegally legal, and Lord Cumber the absentee, form the trio that move in deviltry against the benevolent Bryan O'Laughlin, his daughter Mary, and her promised husband Francis Harman. Val had desired that Mary should become the wife of his degenerate son, and when this proposal is persistently refused by O'Laughlin, the vulture hunts for carrion. First of all he ruins O'Laugh- lin's business. Then he manages it so that his degenerate son is secreted in Mary's bedchamber by which act he causes Francis Harman to desert her. The brothers of Mary in an oath of blood become self-appointed avengers to destroy Val's confederates. Val in the novel grows in colossal villainy, evicting the dying from their homes, destroying more than a score of cabins belonging to those who had dared vote for an unacceptable candidate, until the earth groans for his removal when armed civilians present themselves at the door of the 0' Regan family. In the process of the eviction father and child are killed and the mother is turned into a maniac. It is for such a crime as this that the black soul of Val meets its doom. The Emigrants of Ahadarra shows the beauty of loyalty, patience, love, and patriotism of those who 310 Motives in English Fiction suffer eviction and wrongs. Here as everywhere Carleton is sympathetic toward those who have suffered injustice. After the eviction, the old grandfather over his wife's grave sobs forth a beautiful bit of Celtic pathos : I see her and I think I hear her voice on the top of Lisbane singing sweetly across the valley of Mountain Wathur as I often did; there on the hillside is the roofless house where she was born and there's not a field or hill that her feet did not make holy ground to me. Would you take the old grand- father away from them that wait for him at Carndhu where they sleep? Carndhu's a holy churchyard. Ay, Carndhu's holy ground and 'tis there that I must sleep. Pathos is the dominant feature of Carleton's fiction; humor as in the Banim and Griffin fiction we seldom have. The Tithe Proctor is greed creeping from poverty to broad- cloth to top-boots to vaulting into the saddle and falling on the other side. The background of the story is the Tithe imposts and the Tithe Rebellion taking the reader back to the years 1808 to 1832. Willy Reilly, which has been generally regarded as his masterpiece since 1855, * s sensational melodrama of the worst kind. Willy a Catholic, thought well of by every Protestant, is trans- ported for seven years because, forsooth, he has a rival on the order of McClutchy. Willy's sweetheart's reason is dethroned and Willy's return fails not to restore it. Carleton like Henry Arthur Jones, the dramatist, can not keep from breaking into melodrama. Henry Arthur Jones, however, at times could emerge from it, but Car- leton never could; and so at the close of his career in fiction, we are not surprised when at the conclusion of Willy Reilly the hangman says to Whitecraft the coward, "Yes, I hang you with the white flag of the Lord Lieu- tenant's pardon for you wavin' in the distance. And listen again, remember Willy Reilly. 1 ' Disraeli: The Political Novel 311 In the Banim-Griffin-Carleton fiction we are always in- clined to take the Celt seriously rather than humorously and he was not made a laughingstock until Samuel Lover and Charles Lever falsely caricatured him in their novels of the thirties and forties. That Thackeray should have caricatured Lever in Phil Fogarty shows the attitude of a master novelist toward the creator of such an overdrawn rollicking Irish dragoon as Charles O'Malley. While the Banim brothers had been busy with The O'Hara Tales, Horace Smith had written Brambletye House (1826), G. Robert Gleig had written The Subaltern (1826), and in that year had been published Sir John Chiverton by William Harrison Ainsworth who had been helped in his composi- tion by John Aston. When Bulwer's Paul Clifford (1830) and Eugene Aram (1832) were published, Ainsworth was at once influenced by romance exploiting the criminal, and straightway were published Rookwood (1834) an d Jack Sheppard (1839). And when Bulwer turned into the field of the historical novel, Ainsworth followed him with Crichton (1837), The Tower of London (1840), Guy Fawkes (1841), Windsor Castle (1843), and Tower Hill (1871). Ainsworth in his historical novels was always spacing for place and not for the figures that were in and around the place. If his pictures only possessed less canvas and more characterization, he would not be rated to-day as twice the inferior of Bulwer. The English political novel re-shaped itself in 1826 when Disraeli's Vivian Grey was published. The hero Vivian Grey with raven tresses is Byronic Disraeli who is trying by means of genius to be taken in tow by aristocracy. Political and social problems float around in a plotless plot. It was regarded in its day as a dangerous novel because of its possible influence on young men who, since they possessed neither blue blood nor money, might ruin their lives in trying by means of fancied genius to get into 312 Motives in English Fiction the upper circles. Its atmosphere of politics was always to have a place in English fiction from 1826 to George Mere- dith's Beauchamp's Career (1876) and Mrs. Humphry Ward's fiction. What Oscar Wilde has been to the drama, Disraeli was to our fiction. Disraeli knew the celebrities of court and parliament, and his pen was an epigrammatic, ironic one, similar in construction to Peacock's, just the kind of instrument to set in caricature the political men and women of his time. Disraeli in this respect flings himself forward to Mrs. Humphry Ward who moves across the same upper ten parterre wherein walk fine ladies imagining that they can govern England by their political influence. If it had not been for Disraeli, I do not believe that we would have so many smoking, staring, monocled young fellows with parliamentary aspirations, flocking into the salons of these political, feminine Solons in whose hands are flattering magazine articles, which had been written by these young political savants, and which, of course, will be used by these female lobbyists to get them just what political plums they desire. Coningsby (1844) is a purpose novel, since it portrays the Tory party as the popular confederation of the country. It shows us just what Disraeli's conservative idea of a great government is. He believes that England already by its House of Commons had made a phantom of the House of Lords, and that its future success would be assured if its laws could be kept in a pyramidal mass resting upon municipal and local government. More- over, this pyramid, in addition to possessing an apex of free monarchy, should at all times be sustained in bulk by an educated nation truthfully represented by a free and intellectual press. Disraeli did not wholly believe in the Reform Bill of 1832, 'since one of the things the people had been asked to do was that of contributing to taxes by a system that makes a beggar with a quid in his mouth Trollope's "Michael Armstrong" 313 sweeping a crossing give to the imposts.' Coningsby in the novel feels that the Reform Bill of 1832 has caused "reverence" to become "a galvanized corpse," govern- ments to be hated, and religions despised. Disraeli's slogan was elevate the condition of the laboring class. A parochial constitution was far more important than a political constitution, since the order of peasantry was indeed an order of nobility. Mrs. Frances Trollope had considered the problem of African slavery as it existed in the United States in The Life and Adventures of Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw (1836). Charles Dickens had considered child slavery in Oliver Twist (1838), and the further slavery of youth in the pernicious private schools of England in Nicholas Nickleby ( x 839)- Harriet Martineau had written about the social welfare and advancement of the negro in St. Domingo under his great leader Toussaint L'Ouverture in The Hour and the Man (1840). And it was in 1840 that Mrs. Frances Trollope's Adventures of Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy had been published. In this novel Mary Brotherton, a precursor of Mrs. Humphry Ward's Mar- cella, tries to answer this question : " How comes it that all the people, young and old, who work in the factories are classed as ignorant and depraved? " In the cotton factory in Ashleigh, Lancashire, each of the little children attend- ing to thousands of threads a day receives two shillings a week. These little folk are slaves liable to be sold at any time to another Legree-like mill-owner over at Deep Valley in Derbyshire. Sir Matthew Dowling, who owns the Lancashire mill, employs a Doctor Crockley who is in the graft system at two hundred pounds a year for which he has pledged himself to say that there are no sick chil- dren in the factory. These little children are frequently beaten with a billy-roller. Mary Brotherton's father had drunk Wilberforce's health while his own mills had "daily 314 Motives in English Fiction sent millions of groans to be registered in heaven." At home in his easy armchair he had sent to heaven prayers for the sable sons of Africa, but he had never given a thought to those little white slaves down at the factory whose souls he had blackened. He believes as others that all factory people are miserable because they are wicked. Mary Brotherton goes a-slummingto find out why degrada- tion follows as a reward for honest labor. She wants to get data respecting the system by which factory labor is regulated. She meets girls in the wage system who have not tasted meat for years ; girls five years old who are too tired to learn to read; and she finds out why it is child labor drives fathers to drink. Over at Deep Valley 'prentice prison house, we see Michael working fifteen hours a day, and eating from the sty what pigs have rejected. Mrs. Trollope shows us how in the excess of weariness children fall to sleep standing ; fall on the machinery and are called to life by its lacerating touch. She believed that in less than half a century during which the factory system had been in operation the lineaments of the race involved in it had deteriorated, that the manufacturing population were of a lesser and weaker growth than their agricultural countrymen, and their intellectual faculties weaker than those of the Esqui- maux. Mrs. Trollope musters up enough courage to ask that ten hours' work a day be the maximum for laborers. It is all a frightful picture. It is impossible for fac- tory children to attend Sunday School. Infectious fever breaks out at Deep Valley. Little Michael runs away, attempts suicide, and is hunted down just as the slaves were in the South. The novel is much overdrawn, but much of it was true to the facts ; and the reader, whoever he may be, sits down by the death-bed of Sir Matthew Dowling with peculiar satisfaction as the five hundred ghosts of the little children that he had killed in the fac- Child-labor in English Fiction 3 J 5 tories glide in to demonstrate that he was far worse than Richard III. This boy Michael, a descendant of Defoe's Colonel Jack, Godwin's Ruffigny, and Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist, was reincarnated in Disraeli's Devilsdust in 1845, in Dickens's David Copperfield in 1850, and Little Jo in 1853, and in Hugo's Gavroche in 1862. Charles Kingsley, in Alton Locke (1845-50), avers that ten thou- sand boys and girls every year in England were kidnapped into hell, because of theft and prostitution licensed by the government. There is in the chapter on "How Folks Turn Chartists" in Alton Locke a paragraph of two sentences, the second of which I quote for the inspirational, wrathful utterances which make plain the condition of the English workingman from 1845 to 1850. Those, on the other hand, who really wish to ascertain what workingmen actually do suffer — to see whether their political discontent has not its roots, not merely in fanciful ambition, but in misery and slavery most real and agonizing — those in whose eyes the accounts of a system, or rather barbaric absence of all system, which involves starvation, nakedness, prostitution, and long imprisonment in dungeons worse than the cells of the Inquisition, will be invested with something at least of tragic interest, may, I hope, think it worth their while to learn how the clothes which they wear are made, and listen to a few occasional statistics, which though they may seem to the wealthy mere lists of dull figures are to the workingmen symbols of terrible physical realities — of hunger, degradation, and despair. The deplorable labor conditions in England do not seem to be much better as they are probed by the pen of Dis- raeli in Sybil (1845) than they had been when tented to the quick by the pen of Mrs. Trollope in Michael Arm- strong (1840). Referring to Devilsdust, Disraeli says, 316 Motives in English Fiction They gave him no food: he foraged for himself, and shared with the dogs the garbage of the streets. But still he lived; stunted and pale, he defied even the fatal fever which was the only inhabitant of his cellar that never quitted it. And slumbering at night on a bed of mouldering straw, his only protection against the plashy surface of his den, with a dung- heap at his head and a cesspool at his feet, he still clung to the only roof which shielded him from the tempest. Such was the life of this factory boy, whose woes were directly traceable to Lord Marney's landlord system. The condition of the grown-up laborer, like weaver Warner, was not much better. Disraeli, describing Warner's abode, says: It was a single chamber of which he was tenant. In the centre, placed so as to gain the best light which the gloomy situation could afford was a loom. In two corners of the room were mattresses placed on the floor, a check curtain hung upon a string if necessary concealing them. In one was his sick wife; in the other, three young children: two girls, the eldest about eight years of age; between them their baby brother. An iron kettle was by the hearth and on the mantle- piece some candles, a few lucifer matches, two tin mugs, a paper of salt, and an iron spoon. In such a habitation Warner worked on his hand-loom twelve hours a day for a penny an hour. No wonder he welcomed Sybil, when she came from the convent with her basket full of the necessaries of life. Disraeli shows that in the factories English girls were standing on their feet working from twelve to sometimes sixteen hours a day; and, in the collieries, were employed to haul tubs of coal up subterranean plashy roads, a cir- cumstance which Disraeli states seems to have escaped the notice of the Society for the Abolition of Negro Slavery. He further asseverates that the Wodgate apprentices were Disraeli's " Sybil" 317 continually beaten with sticks, knotted ropes, hammers, their ears pulled until the blood ran, that they were worked from sixteen to twenty hours a day, were fed on carrion, and were sold from one master to another. It was no wonder that Dandy Mick said that a strike, a good one, only could save the nation, and that, in the meantime, by means of a trades union, he would assassinate tyranni- cal masters and demolish mills, works, and shops, where young men were treated in the brutal manner prevailing throughout the nation. Disraeli worked out a bit of social reform by present- ing to the reader what Mr. Trafford and Sybil gave to the English workingman — an ideal factory, homes, public baths, and schools under the curate of the church. The working people were encouraged to buy land, to build cottages, and have gardens. Disraeli believed that prox- imity to the employer meant cleanliness, order, and en- couragement. In the settlement of Traff ord crime was positively unknown : and the offences very slight. There was not a single person in the village of a reprobate character. The men were well- clad; the women had a blooming cheek; drunkenness was unknown; while the moral condition of the softer sex was proportionately elevated. Disraeli shows that English Radicalism is pretending that people can be better off than they are. Social felicity was what people needed; and statesmen who wished to retain tenure of office and power could never expect it unless they first secured the communal happiness of the people. The girl Sybil in the novel allegorically represents the convent aiding the cottage, or the church vitally connect- ing itself with the people. The church had a sense of the feeling of degradation because of the loss of faith; and what faith could the people have in either cold Church or 318 Motives in English Fiction in- state holding itself aloof. The sub-title of Sybil is Or, the Two Nations. Disraeli comprehended these to be the rich and the poor who had always been ignorant of each other's wants. He believed that there should be a sympathetic cord binding together the two nations who, however, should not be governed by the same laws. Sybil believed that the gulf could never be bridged ; but, by her acts of charity, she was bridging it, for the church in charity was leading the way for the State to adopt the same method. The trouble was, as Disraeli says, from 1839 to 1842, that oligarchy had been liberty; exclusive priesthood, a national church ; sovereignty something that had no dominion; the sceptre, a pageant; and a subject had been a serf. The ideal condition of the nation would come about when free monarchy and a privileged people would exist. Disraeli pointedly says, "the claims of the future are represented by suffering millions." With a gift of prevision he believed that the youth of the nation as trustees of posterity would work it all out, when an ideal church and state would clasp sociable hands in effecting remedial legislation for the welfare of the workman. In Sybil Disraeli goes farther than Mrs. Trollope, who had asked for ten hours of work for factory-hands, when he insists upon "a fair day's wage for a fair day's work, " and that a laborer for honestly working eight hours a day should receive "a fair day's wage. " Disraeli wrote Coningsby and Sybil to explain himself to his electorate so that he would be better understood as a political leader and be permitted to grasp as substance his dream of triumph. On ascertaining that Lord Mon- mouth's fortune has been left to some one else Coningsby as he walks along the streets of London soliloquizes thus : Whether he inherited or forfeited fortunes, what was it to the passing throng? They would not share his splendor, or Disraeli's "Sybil" 319 his luxury, or his comfort. But a word from his lip, a thought from his brain, expressed at the right time, at the right place, might turn their hearts, might influence their passions, might change their opinions, might affect their destiny. Nothing is great but the personal. . . . You must give men new ideas, you must teach them new words, you must modify their manners, you must change their laws, you must root out prejudices, subvert convictions, if you wish to be great. Though Disraeli believed that Downing Street governed England, still this soliloquy of Coningsby's all the way through echoes Disraeli's philosophy of life; and his political philosophy is contained in the surprise of Sybil who had come to London to handle the labor problem. Sybil ascertained "that great thoughts have very little to do with the business of the world, that human affairs, even in an age of revolution, are the subject of compromise ; and that the essence of compromise is littleness." England's states-general selected by the people "turned out to be a plebeian senate of wild ambitions and sinister and selfish ends"; and Sybil turned from it to the opposing faction which, when analyzed, proved to be conservatives well- organized and well "supported by the interests, the sym- pathies, the honest convictions, and the strong prejudices of classes influential not merely from their wealth but even by their numbers. " Thus Disraeli tried to make his character Sybil and his readers see that England was naturally inclined to conservatism, and that the people should readily see that they could not hope for much, if they chose wild-eyed, inefficient delegates from the lower and middle class. The people must choose their leaders from a rejuvenated aristocracy; and, as we have said before, then state, church, and masses, would have the sense of feeling better off as all three clasped hands for social felicity, thus making England a strong and puissant 320 Motives in English Fiction nation by virtue of its aristocracy of monarch and charch, the rich and the poor — and the aristocracy of the poor was to be obtained for them by satisfying their cravings for aesthetic and ethical ideals. Compromise between the two classes meant "littleness," but this "littleness" spelled "greatness" as it took proper care of the nation's monarchical, religious, and economic welfare. The key by which Disraeli would open all doors of difficulty was compromise. It was the key that in turning gave him the heartache and he would gladly have seen it rusty, brt he was compelled always to keep it bright by use. The frames of the spectacles, through which are seen economic conditions becoming significant enough in their phases to attract the attention of leaders in political life, had been bent into shape by Henry Brooke's Fool of Quality (1766), by Charlotte Smith's Desmond (1792), Hol- croft's Anna St. Ives (1792), Godwin's Caleb Williams (1794), Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent (1800), Absen- tee (1812), and Patronage (1814), Scott's Waverley Novels, Lady Morgan's Florence Macarthy (1818) in which Con Crawley, one of the group of political adventurers, is the caricature of John Wilson Croker, the "Rigby" of Dis- raeli's Coningsby, and "The O'Briens and the O'Flahertys " (1827), by the Banims' pictures of the dark administration of government in Ireland, and by Bulwer's Disowned ( 1 829) in which democracy Wolfe wages war upon aristo- cracy Lord Ulswater resulting in republican Wolfe's kill- ing the hero Algernon Mordaunt, who lived in England of the eighteenth century prior to the time of the French Revolution, and Paul Clifford (1830) which urges the humanizing of criminal laws advocated by Romilly, and Ernest Maltr avers (1837) an d its sequel Alice (1838) in which is seen the villain Lumley Ferrers fingering the red tape of ministerial duties for the mushroom English peerage. Bulwer in Alice says, "We talk of education Disraeli, Bulwer, and Kingsley 321 for the poor, but we forget how much it is needed by the rich " ; ..." the more the Municipal Spirit pervades every vein of the vast body, the more certain may we be that re- form and change must come from universal opinion, which is slow, and constructs ere it destroys," and points to France, under Louis Philippe, where an aristocracy had been demolished by excluding the people. France pos- sessed thirty-three million people and less than two hundred electors; and the United States were not set up as an ideal form of government, since if "People have no other tyrant, their own public opinion becomes one." Bulwer in Alice strongly advocates the abolishment of the death penalty for inadequate offence and the substitution of the "morality of atonement, " giving to the criminal in Error "the reward of submission to its suffering." We have already enlarged upon Mrs. Trollope's Michael Arm- strong (1840). But it is not until we come to Coningsby and Sybil that we can apply W. F. Monypenny's high estimate set on these two novels and say these indeed are "the creation of the political novel," since we are looking through the two great magnifying lenses in the spectacles, the frames of which had been fashioned by Disraeli's predecessors mentioned above. A chapel door opens in Charles Kingsley 's Yeast (1848) from which comes forth Argemone Lavington with eyes shining like "twin lakes of still azure beneath a broad marble cliff of polished forehead," and her rich chestnut hair rippling downward round a towering neck, to go up to the fever patient at Ashy to contract typhus. Kings- ley breaks forth into his customary violent statements such as, "and then they wonder why men turn Chartists" . . . "Wash Ashy clean with the nun-pool." Kingsley has no use for Catholicism when "a cathedral is, " accord- ing to Coleridge, "a petrified religion." All in England must help the poor in the spirit of the nuns of Whitford ; for 322 Motives in English Fiction otherwise all the English as the Lavingtons would receive the punishment of the curse of the nuns. The problem of social welfare is after all a church problem. And so we see in this respect that Kingsley does not differ from Dis- raeli in Sybil. The punishment that comes to the state for refusing to give to a working community proper sani- tary conditions is that fate that came to Lydia's father, in Mrs. Humphry Ward's The Mating of Lydia (191 3), who would not spend his money on the houses of the working- men around his estate but on curios. The fierce old man was assassinated by one of the peasantry he had insanely refused to help or care for. The time had come in English fiction, as Disraeli states, when no longer the Turkey merchant, or the West India planter, or the Nabob, or the loanmonger, was to receive analytic study, but the manufacturer. Mrs. Gaskell in the preface of Mary Barton in October, 1848, writes, "I know nothing of political economy, or the theories of trade. " In her novel her idea of interdependence of rich and poor by a knowledge of and love for each other is strongly reminiscent of Disraeli's theory in Sybil. Mrs. Gaskell makes a study of destitution in the manufacturing districts, especially Manchester, and flourishes in our faces the petition of 1839 in which workmen appealed to Parlia- ment for a sympathetic inspection of their woes. The voice of the people as she hears it is "machines is the ruin of poor folk. " She likens the uneducated masses to the lonely creature of Frankenstein's. The people rise up to life; they irritate us, they terrify us, and we become their enemies. Then, in the sorrowful moment of our triumphant power, their eyes gaze on us with a mute reproach. Why have we made them what they are; a powerful monster, yet without the inner means for peace and happiness. Disraeli: Mrs. Gaskell 323 John Barton, Chartist, Communist, Trades Unionist, murders Harry Carson, whose father is left to figure out the crime as the result of "they did not know what they did." The elder Carson always had a cold and hard exterior for those who were his distant friends, but by the loss of his son in the strike his dearest wish is to create a perfect understanding, respect, and affection, between masters and workingmen who seemed only to be ac- quainted with each other through the money transactions affecting their material welfare. Therefore, Carson be- lieved that he should have under his supervision educated workers capable of judging, not automata. Thus we see how manufacturers by means of suffering may be led into sympathetically managing wage-earners. Accord- ing to Mrs. Gaskell the spirit of Christ should be the regu- lating law between the two nations — the rich and the poor. Esther in this novel is a pitiable object flickering a shadow forward to Dickens's Martha in David Copper- field. Mrs. Gaskell in North and South (1855) echoes the note already sounded in Mary Barton. Personal inter- course between masters and workmen was the solution. Both parties should understand each other's tricks of temper and modes of speech. Above all, the employer should understand and appreciate the intense mental labor and forethought required to perfect a complete plan that emerges like a piece of machinery when the employee co-operates with him in making it. Mr. Thornton is a pleasing picture of an honest, kindly disposed mill-owner from the North who is rewarded after the failure by receiv- ing another start with the money thrust into his hands by Margaret Hale from the South. Henry Senior in Charles Vernon (1848) shows the ill treatment of slaves in the West Indies. Charlotte Bronte, in Shirley (1849), makes us hear again the cry of "ma- chines is the ruin of poor folk"; and, the mill-owner, 324 Motives in English Fiction Mr. Moore, furnishes a prototype for Mrs. Gaskell's Mr. Thornton. Dickens in Hard Times (1854), delineates Mr. Gradgrind, parceling out human nature, and Bounderby so as to give orthodox political economy a good pounding. He opens the Coketown mills wherein are ' ' a race who would have found more favor with some people, if Providence had seen fit to make them only 'hands'." Dickens describes the mill-workers in all realism to arouse sym- pathy for such "hands" as Stephen Blackpool and Ra- chael, whom Stephen loves with no illicit passion but with all the integrity of his nature. All of us feel bitter against Bounderby, the bull of humility with iron stare and metal- lic laugh, the owner of such "hands." Dickens in Little Dorrit (1855-7) delineates William Dorrit in the Mar- shalsea as having received such treatment as not to bring the peace and happiness that his friends had expected would be his after being released from the prison. One of Dickens's purposes was to prove that a debtors' prison unfits men for becoming social beings, since it fits them rather for a greater care and burden to be carried by the state and society. Dinah Mulock Craik, in John Halifax, Gentleman (1856) stirs the reader with an exciting bread riot. Charles Reade, in It is Never Too Late to Mend (1856), from his scrapbook full of terrible up-to-date happenings in prisons, takes the reader back through Dickensian Fleet and the Godwinian cell to Defoe's Newgate. In this novel there is seen Robinson enduring horrible tortures at the hands of Hawes, who is the abuser of prisoners; and we are behind Eden, the curate, who brings about an investigation in the prison, and put our shoulders to his as he is triumphant in finally removing Hawes. In Hard Cash (1863) the horrible abuses in pri- vate lunatic asylums were revealed ; and in Put Yourself in his Place (1870) he delineates the vile actions of trade unions. Disraeli : Anthony Trollope 325 Anthony Trollope in Can You Forgive Her? (1864), Phineas Finn (1869), Phineas Redux (1874), The Prime Minister (1876), and Duke's Children (1880) presents an interesting group of politicians holding the reins of English government. These politicians are almost as fascinating as his curates, who are portrayed in the series from The Warden (1855) to The Last Chronicle of Bar set (1867). In fact it was his success in satirically depicting clergymen that made him think of doing just as much for those aspiring to be leaders in parliamentary life. There is no big life or big love or big politics in Can You Forgive Her? but young blue-eyed Lady Glencora and her husband Plantagenet Palliser, whom she does not love, but the dissolute Fitzgerald, are fashioned in good form, as well as George Vavasor's taking his seat in the House of Commons on Alice's money and the ride to fox-hounds. In Phineas Finn the hero Phineas, from Ireland, rides into politics on debt's back and is thrown into the Palliser set. We watch him fail to make success in his maiden speech in the House, but at length he reappears to succeed in oratory. Trollope shoves us into the "semi-purple of ministerial influences"; and his delineation of politics in its forms and technicalities is so correct that it would take a cabinet member to convict Trollope of any error. Proceedings in the House are interestingly portrayed; and we try to get the hang of parliamentary procedure just as Phineas Finn, and somehow seem to feel that there is nothing beyond our comprehension in the way a nation's salvation is secured. Phineas loves Laura, then Violet, and at last after resigning from Parliament goes back to Ireland to marry his first love, Mary Flood, and to become an inspector of county poor-houses for Cork. At thirty he was so " politicianized " that nobody trusted him to make a penny at his barristry work. In The Prime Minister, there is the pleading attitude of Trollope toward 326 Motives in English Fiction the grinding despicableness of Ferdinand Lopez, who is calmly wicked in the strangling hold he has on persever- ance. In a cold-blooded, lifeless manner he suavely fas- tens himself to Emily Wharton to love her. And the question is : Did he love her? The only redeeming quality he possesses is that courage which stayed with him to carry him to a horrible death. Throughout the massive volumes of the commonplace great action consequent to great passion never occurs. There are no great outbursts from Lopez; there is not even screaming or stamping of the foot on the part of his wife Emily, who sits back to watch events, and who is quite different from Lady Glen- cora who creates them. Lady Glencora Palliser and Ferdinand Lopez hold the reins of government ; Emily and the Duke are passively and coldly content in being at the mercy of such drivers. Lady Glencora is the centre of any energy that a Trollopian reader wishes to work off; and Emily patiently submits to the process that will slowly well-nigh kill her; and as for the Duke he is absorbed in the Nirvana of "decimal coinage." Every- where like a fox, Trollope always keeps his nose to the ground of the elaboration of details that serve him in compiling his events. There is the prevalence of patron- age and pull ; and occasionally we look up from the pages to ask if such circumstances and such environment could produce so much blackness that is the pall covering the hatching of villainy. Why in life should so much tragedy follow upon the interference of a third party? Why should Lady Glencora's life at its beginning have been intrusted to meddlers who helped her to fame but not to true love. One is angry enough to demolish the whole political series by altering Can You Forgive Her ? so as to make Lady Glencora marry the dissolute Fitzgerald. But alas! Trollope wants as elsewhere in his political series only to show that politics makes debtors, villains, and Disraeli: Anthony Trollope 327 often deprives a noble young woman of the proper man upon whom she has bestowed the treasure of her heart. Thus Trollope, though well-qualified by his own experi- ence as Post Office official, and as a one-time candidate for Parliament, and by his missions in behalf of the Post Office which sent him to Ireland, Egypt, United States, and West Indies, to contribute variations to the political novel that Disraeli created, lacked the perspective of the view of the statesman such as his great predecessor pos- sessed; therefore his novels, though similar to Disraeli's in being poorly plotted and weak in characterization, can not at all be compared in excellence to those of Disraeli, who, while not a great novelist, was however a great political-novelist since he, and not Trollope, knew every great phase of the economic conditions that attained to political significance and that make the world's heart still throb as it contemplates all that the nineteenth century ethically did for the welfare of England's body-politic through the agency of Disraeli and Gladstone. There is something larger in Disraeli's fiction than the picture of peers drinking tea in a manorial hall or a Dandy Mick joining a trades-union dedicated to the purpose of assassi- nating all tyrannical mill-owners. It is to be remembered that Disraeli's tea-tippling characters in a castle in their conversation are generally trying to promote empire- building ; and that nothing constructive for the expansion of England's economic welfare grows out of any table-talk indulged in by Lady Glencora and her husband, who only has to reach out a hand to receive the great offices of State that he does not greatly deserve. George Eliot also saw the possibility of using politics in her fiction as a means of regenerating mankind and eagerly studied the radicalism of her day and the Reform Bill of 1832, which forms the enveloping action of Felix Holt (1866). In this novel we see the Treby Riot and 328 Motives in English Fiction attend the trial of Felix Holt, the Radical (Gerald Massey), for his participation in it. George Eliot emphasizes Esther Lyon in the act of developing a heart by reason of Felix's lecturing to the workingmen. Twenty-one years after Disraeli's Sybil (1845) it is interesting indeed to see how similar George Eliot's view of conservatism is to that of the statesman Jew. Felix Holt is a faint replica of Egremont, in Sybil, who believed in the aristocracy of the conservative element in English politics and who wanted political preferment only that by it he might advance the cause of the poor people. Felix Holt, the apprentice to a watchmaker and teacher of small boys, is a socialistic reformer, who as a suspicious character is asked by Mr. Chubb to leave the "Sugar Loaf," the inn where the Sproxton colliers talked local politics. George Eliot is at home in handling the lower classes in their political talk in the "Sugar Loaf" or in the steward's room of Treby Manor; and she is equally at home when manipulating the political conversation of the upper classes such as that occurring between Harold Transome, who is standing as radical for Parliament, and political agent Johnson, who knows all that a radical orator should tell on the platform in order to trick his audience. Felix Holt along with his creator George Eliot believed there was not much difference between a Liberal and a Tory; and George Eliot further asseverates that the radicalism which Felix voiced could not hurt the country very much. Felix says: I'm a radical myself, and mean to work all my life long against privilege, monopoly, and oppression ... I shall go away as soon as I can to some large town, some ugly, wicked, miserable place. I want to be a demagogue of a new sort; an honest one, if possible, who will tell the people they are blind and foolish, and neither flatter them nor fatten on them. Disraeli and George Eliot 329 George Eliot echoes Disraeli most strongly when she asks for amelioration of public opinion and conscience; and states that laws are as reeds to be bent or broken with impunity unless people ethically believe in the statutes they are called upon to frame and support. Disraeli did not believe much in the ethics of the administration that set in motion the Reform Bill of 1832, but he did believe in an administration that would exorcise the spectres of poverty, ignorance, and injustice. George Eliot psycho- logically understood the man of the masses better than Disraeli, and in Felix Holt was successful in presenting a fascinating study of the erstwhile factory-laborer and poet Gerald Massey, spokesman of the people, swimming on the crest of the new democratic wave of her time; but she understood Disraeli's Toryism enough to know that nothing good could come out of violent reforms, and therefore she was a conservative not much believing in the Reform Bill of 1832 yet strange to say sympathiz- ing with the best in the new democracy advocated by Felix Holt and that radicalism that plays such a promi- nent part in Meredith's Beauchamp's Career (1876). The likeness of a woman-conservative, such as was George Eliot, is found to-day in Mrs. Humphry Ward, whose Marcella gradually disentangled herself from the arms of the socialistic orator to cast herself into the arms of Raeburn, the conservative, who at first had been repellent because according to her belief he was one of those who allowed the mill-owner to abuse the factory hand, the sweater in the slums to impoverish the home-worker, and the landlord to starve the farm-laborer. Mrs. Humphry Ward in Robert Elsmere (1888) shows the failure of a good clergyman in settlement work; in Marcella (1894) the uselessness of a woman's soiling her skirts by slumming; in Sir George Tressady (1895) the parliamentary strife, the strike, and the disaster in the coal-mine into which Sir 330 Motives in English Fiction George descends as a hero to die ; in The Case of Richard Meynell (191 1) and The Mating of Lydia (1913) touches slightly upon important social problems; in The Coryston Family (191 3) stresses the burning divorce problem; and in Delia Blanchflower (1914) the futility of the suffragette movement. For a moment let us glance again at Disraeli's novels for the purpose of putting away in memory's box the fact already noted that Lord Beaconsfield considered noble religion as playing as important a role for his country's welfare as noble politics. After Tancred, full of religious life in Palestine, was published in 1847, Disraeli wrote two novels: Lothair, published in 1870, and Endymion, published in 1880. Disraeli in his novels always had something to say about the religion of the Jew, and there had been an intensely conventual, religious fervor in Sybil; therefore, it is not surprising to find that in Lothair he considers the fascinating attacks made upon Lothair to pull him into the Catholic Church. The religious element had always been a strong dominating factor in English fiction from Malory's Le Morte Darthur to Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison, and down to the beginning of the Victorian era, as any one can judge if he has read the preceding pages of this book with discernment. Religion and its controversies were not to be neglected by the great novelists of the greatest epoch of fiction that we have had. It is an easy crayfish movement from the Catholicism of Lothair to the Puseyism in Coningsby (1844) and to the denunciation of the Anglican Church in Mrs. Frances Trollope's The Vicar of Wrexhill (1837). Lady G. Fullerton's Ellen Middleton (1844) is a first- rate thesis on the High Church feeling against Catholic Emancipation. Kingsley's Alton Locke (1845-50) and Yeast (1848), to which we have already referred, were theses on Christian socialism. Ilypatia (1853) was Religion in Victorian Fiction 331 another whack of the muscular Christianity of Kingsley's on the back of the Anglo-Catholic Church which, since 1847, by means of Keble, Newman, and Pusey, had been trespassing on the territory of the Anglican Church to blindfold and kidnap some of its most brilliant disciples. The old church of the fifth century in Africa was under the control of rabid and militant monks and leaders like Peter, and Kingsley in striking at it and its foes uncon- sciously was striking not only the Catholic Church but was cruelly rapping all the weak spots on the body of his own church that he was pugnaciously defending. The reader feels after perusing Hypatia that he should ask Kingsley, Where could a thinking man obtain peace and rest amid the chaos of religious thought which was lodged behind the ivied walls of England's cathedrals? In the novel there is a feeling on the part of the reader that it was not Philammon, or Hypatia, or Pelagia, who obtained happiness, but Miriam's son, the Jew, who with his philo- sophy of cynicism throughout the greater part of the novel would have none of the manifestations of Christ, or Zeus on Calvary, or the sensual paganism of the followers of the Amal the lover of Pelagia. Thus is depicted in form of fiction the internecine strife in the religious life of England following upon the Oxford move- ment. Also the Keble breeze sweeps around the High Church in Charlotte Yonge's Heir of Redely ffe (1853) . Anthony Trollope in Barchester Towers (1857), the se- quel to The Warden, uses as a keynote for his fiction the words of Sydney Smith : ' ' In these recreant days you can not find the majesty of St. Paul beneath the cassock of a curate." We are all well acquainted with Dr. Proudie, the consecrated bishop of Barchester, who, in a liberal manner endured "the idolatry of Rome, tolerated the infidelity of Socinianism, and was hand and glove with the Presbyterian synods of Scotland and Ulster." And we 33 2 Motives in English Fiction are better acquainted with his wife, the despotic virago, who managed all of her husband's ecclesiastical affairs. At the end of the novel Dr. Proudie gets a seat in the House of Lords, and the reader learns that autocratic, diocesan authority only could be successful when it emerged from the petticoats of a Mrs. Proudie's wardrobe. In the first part of the novel he had continually rebelled and had even banged a door in the face of his enraged spouse, but at last he gave up the fight for he had been repetticoated. The Reverend Mr. Slope dances forward to find a partner in Trollope's Ferdinand Lopez, but in stealth and avarice used to obtain power Slope is many shades lighter in villainy than the subtle scoundrel in The Prime Minister. Slope in spite of his weakness arouses our secret satisfaction when he is strong enough to array him- self against Mrs. Proudie. He and Madeline Neroni, the one-legged siren, who had in her the mischief of a centi- pede, are made out of the same clay as Hall Caine's John Storm and Gloria Quayle. In 1857 appeared George Eliot's Scenes of Clerical Life; in 1859, Adam Bede which gives a view of the Methodists with whom we have already become acquainted in the Reverend Richard Graves's The Spiritual Quixote (1772) and in Maturin's Women, or Pour et Contre (1818); in 1863, Romola in which Savona- rola, the morning star of the Reformation in Italy, tells the wife of Tito that the Catholic Church refuses to dissolve marriage by sanctioning either desertion or divorce; and in 1876, Daniel Deronda which champions the cause of orthodox Judaism against the melting-pot idea which Zangwill has recently made prominent. Charles Reade's The Cloister and the Hearth (1861) presents the conflict between church and home. It is the reversal of Matthew Arnold's poem The Forsaken Merman. It is the woman forsaken by her husband. What does it profit a man, if he gain the whole world of religion, if it is Reade and Shorthouse 333 gained at the expense of his wife? The Cloister and the Hearth, presenting the spiritual tragedy of monk Gerard and Margaret Brandt with the Middle Ages for a back- ground, not many years ago was attuned to another variation of the same theme by Mrs. Voynich in The Gadfly, wherein a Cardinal has gained the whole world of honors in his church by sacrificing his boy. Mrs. Margaret Oliphant and George Macdonald kept religion alive in their novels of the sixties and seventies. Joseph Henry Shorthouse's John Inglesant, Gentleman (1881) was an artistic expression of a High Churchman against the materialism of his age. The impressive scene in the novel is that of the trap set in a moonlighted forest for the cap- ture of Inglesant' s soul. The sylvan arcades seemed like a painful scene-piece upon a satanic stage, supernaturally alight to further deeds of sin, and silent and unpeopled, lest the wrong should be interrupted or checked. To Inglesant's excited fancy evil beings thronged its shadowy paths, present to the spiritual sense, though concealed of set purpose from the feeble human sight. . . .The rustling breeze was like a whisper from heaven that reminded him of his better self. It would seem hell overdid it ; the very stillness for miles around, the almost concerted plan, sent flashing through his brain the remembrance of another house, equally guarded for a like purpose, into which years ago he had forced his way to render help in such a case as this. The long- past life of those days rushed into his mind— the sacramental Sundays, the repeated vows, the light of heaven in the soul, the kneeling forms in Little Gidding Chapel, the face of Mary Collet, the loveliness that blessed the earth where she walked, her death -bed, and her dying words. Hell overdid itself; the miasma of temptation was lifted and Inglesant and Lauretta were saved. In Hardy's novels hell never overdoes itself; it knows just how far to go in tone setting to determine that a man 334 Motives in English Fiction and a woman under such circumstances as Inglesant and Lauretta can not escape, since they are integral parts of the whole devilish machinery of tone setting and must conform and move to its inexorable pressure. Hardy had been publishing novels for ten years prior to Short- house's John Inglesant and he has continued to write fiction to A Changed Man, and Other Tales (19 13), but no religion save that of antagonistic nature has crept into his major volumes and no vision of a Little Gidding Chapel or of a Mary Collet glides in to save his victims wriggling in the net of blind necessity. One could say even if such a vision had, it would have proved ineffectual in saving the situation; for always in any moonlighted forest of Hardy's on the tips of boughs sit faint cloven tongues. The philosophy in the Hardy-Caine fiction is the non- religious spirit that animates its heroines and heroes caus- ing them to voice such sentiment as : How I have lived and tried to be a splendid woman, and how Destiny has been against me. I do not deserve my lot. Oh, the cruelty of putting me into this bad, ignorant, stupid world! I was capable of much: but I have been injured and blighted and crushed by things beyond my control, and There are moments when life seems like the blind swirl of a bat in the dusk, irresponsible, not to be counted with, the swift creature of evil chance. We see a little child's white face at a hospital window, — the innocent suffering with the guilty. What, after all, is God doing in this His world? And the evil breezes that move the tips of boughs in the forest at Little Hintock in Hardy's The Woodlanders (1887) blow hard in Phillpotts's The Three Brothers (1909) upon Shaugh Moor, Hen Tor, and the combes of Dart- moor, Devonshire, and shake in storm the foliage of trees Hardy, Caine, Mrs. Humphry Ward 335 to proclaim elemental strife in Nature that seems to say that it was natural for Humphrey Baskerville's son Mark to have hanged himself at the end of the tenor-bell rope for love of Cora Lintern, and that Priscilla Lintern should have been secretly a mistress of Nathan Baskerville's for thirty years. All that the terrible old man Humphrey, of Hawk House, who is one with the setting of diabolical Dartmoor, can find for solace as he stoically endures the suicide of son is the wisdom of his own philosophic analysis of life expressed in: "To have bred an immortal soul, mark you, is something, even if it gets itself damned." Even Mrs. Humphry Ward has felt "the sovereign sway and masterdom" of this antitheistic fiction of Hardy and Hall Caine in the majority of her novels. Nature is prophetic ; it is instinct with life that conspires along with God and man to pelt down the individual. Mrs. Ward in Fenwick's Career (1906) bids us drop tears ... for this duped, tortured, struggling life of ours — for the "mortalia" which grip all hearts, which none escape — pain, and separation, and remorse, hopes deceived, and promise mocked, decadence in one's self, change in others, and that iron gentleness of death which closes all. Her Robert Elsmere (1888) rebukes the modern church for not properly handling the housing problem. In David Grieve (1892) Louie throws the remnant of a maimed life into the keeping of Catholicism; and David in his sorrows tries to grasp something substantial in the gospel account of the resurrection, but all to no purpose because of the shafts of higher criticism. Helbeck of Bannisdale (1898) and Eleanor (1900) form an arena in which Catholicism and Modernity are combatants. Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson (son of the late Archbishop of Canterbury) who died October 19, 1914, at Salford, in Initiation (1914) gives us another variation of the struggle in which Catholi- 336 Motives in English Fiction cism (atonement by suffering) wins over a Modernity that he thinks secures its converts by means of tempting them with all the pleasures of the sense-world. The Case of Richard Meynell (191 1) is Mrs. Ward's lecture on Robert Elsmere. It is a study of the Anglican Church arrayed against the Nonconformists. The Reverend Richard Mey- nell is hostile toward the political and religious privileges of a close corporation like the Anglican Church. As a Nonconformist his dream of a church was ' ' a church of free men co-extensive with the nation, gathering into the fold every English man, woman, and child." Like Dr. Arnold of Rugby he strides before us endeavoring to pour a polity of soul filled with Modernism into the old church bottle. The central theme of the novel is that brutalizing a man's conscience is worse than murdering his body. As Richard in the church arena is righting back the enraged prelates, brutalized in conscience by having clung to their creeds, which are only chaotic private opinions that have always been the landmarks in the church's life, we feel, since a surrender means the brutalization of his conscience, that Richard will fare worse than his predecessor Robert Elsmere. The good man goes down in the struggle, being compelled in the hour of seeming triumph to give up all that he thought he had won to save Hester from Meryon in France, and is left in the possession of Mary Elsmere the head and heart cham- pion of one whose bruised conscience had not been brutal- ized or made elastic. Though defeated, Richard with Mary as his wife sees on the horizon's edge a future where Modernism might be crowned in the new church of faith, the ideals of which have all been realized. After one has closed The Case of Richard Meynell one thinks of Mrs. Oliphant's Salem Chapel (1863), in which the Reverend Vincent was abandoned as a Dissenter martyr by his con- gregation at the moment he became original, just when he The Jew in Victorian Fiction 337 knew enough about sin from first-hand contamination to make it stick in the throats of his parishioners. Mrs. Oliphant in concluding her study of the spiritual tragedy occurring at Carlingford anticipates Airs. Ward's view of what still lies ahead of the Anglican Church : A Church of the Future — an ideal corporation, grand and primitive, not yet realized, but surely real, to be come at one day — shone before his eyes, as it shines before so many; but, in the meantime, the Nonconformist (the Reverend Vincent) went into literature, as was natural, and was, it is believed in Carlingford, the founder of the Philosophical Review, that new organ of public opinion. George Croly's Salathiel (1827) calls attention to the continuance of the figure of the Jew in our fiction. There had been the thumb-nail sketch of the gcod Jew Joabin in Bacon's New Atlantis (1627), and we have already noted the portrait of the Wandering Jew in Lewis's The Monk (1795), Mordicai, the English Jew, outwitted by Sir Terence O'Fay in Maria Edgeworth's The Absentee (1812), Isaac of York hugging his shekels in Scott's Ivanhoe (1820), and the evil Jew Kabkarra in Lady Caroline Lamb's Ada Rets (1823). In George Croly's masterpiece Salathiel manoeuvres in evil passions and vengeance. Disraeli in The Wondrous Tale of Alroy (1833) throws Alroy, the prince of captivity, into the oriental atmosphere of Bagdad of the twelfth century. Alroy found the sceptre of Solomon in the cavern of Genthesma, but he dis- appointed the expectation of his race and incurred at- tempted assassination at the hands of the prophetess Esther, who was disgusted with the man who had flung away the sacred sceptre for worldly power as Caliph to reign with his princess, — the Rose of the World. There finally came the inevitable fall which was followed by torture and decapitation. Alroy, when he might have 33 8 Motives in English Fiction built a new Jerusalem, deserted Israel for false power and a woman's kisses. In 1844 in Coningsby appeared the good Sidonia of utmost wisdom whom Lord Beaconsfield created for the pattern of the perfect Israelites to be delineated as George Eliot's Daniel Deronda and Mordecai in 1876. The supposed nephew of Sir Hugo Mallinger's who has the attributes of Disraeli's Sidonia is the ideal man all Israelites and Gentiles should be. Daniel Deronda is the exponent of George Eliot's orthodox Judaism which looks to Palestine as a future Belgium, an arbitration point and buffer between the East and West, when a new Jerusalem shall be restored by the Jews who stand for separateness. It was in 1827, the year after Disraeli's Vivian Grey had appeared, that Bulwer's Falkland was published which is too Wertherian. It was a tale the morality of which made Bulwer's experienced judgment condemn it so that he never sanctioned its being reprinted during his lifetime. In its romantic, Gothic plot indolent, handsome, chestnut- haired Falkland passionately loves beautiful, dark-eyed Emily Mandeville, a young married woman, to whom he lends Maturin's Melmoth and whom he Melmoth-like resolves to lure to ruin. Falkland and Emily at half-an- hour past midnight consummate their guilty passion ; and when, upon returning home, Emily is confronted by her husband the blood-vessel that had broken before now bursts again causing her instant death. To Falkland upon returning that night to his bed there appears a ghost with lip trickling blood ; it is that of Emily, whom he had pol- luted and had destined to carry from her husband and son to a Tuscan heaven. Bulwer by means of the blessed blood-vessel keeps Emily from repentance and conceals her guiltiest secret and buries it with her, and avers that "her virtues are yet recorded in the memories of the Poor." Unrepentant Falkland still loves Emily to the Bulwer's "Falkland" and "Pelham" 339 death that meets him in Spain as he is fighting for the constitutionalists. Thus it can be readily seen how the English public in 1827 regarded Falkland as more harmful than Disraeli's Vivian Grey. As a contrast to Falkland in the next novel Pelham (1828) Bulwer thrust between its covers a character of sentimental gaity. Bulwer wanted to have his major character a clever man corrupted by the world as we have seen in Mackenzie's The Man of the World, Moore's Zeluco, and Richardson's Clarissa Har- lowe. In other words, Henry Pelham is intended to be a gay Lovelace who, however, always by the process of clever corruption is to be continually evolved into a better character. Bulwer endeavored to show that a young man, with Pelham's foibles, corrupted by society, does not invariably become a misanthrope. By means of a nar- rative romance constructed according to the plan set by Smollett, Fielding, Le Sage, and with no purloinings from Scott, Bulwer tried to end what he called "the Satanic mania" which was making young men bilious and yellow- necked as they played the role of the Corsair and acquired mawkish vices. Bulwer presented to the young man of England Sir Reginald Glanville and Henry Pelham, desir- ing that the youthful reader should shun the Byronic Glanville and cleave to the foibles of Pelham. All the women in the novel are fond of oyster pates or Lord Byron's Corsair. Such high living produces disastrous results. Gertrude Douglas in ruin and madness fares worse than Clarissa Harlowe. Tyre 11 is the Lovelace, but Glanville is no better. Pelham marries Ellen, the sister of Glanville. The lot of Glanville is to die tragically after the celebration of the marriage of his sister to Pelham ; and his last wish is to be buried by the side of Gertrude Doug- las, one tombstone covering both. Glanville is always good when there is a graveyard Gothically back of him. And the inset story, which was padded into Pelham from 340 Motives in English Fiction an earlier piece of fiction written by Bulwer entitled Mortimer; or Memoirs of a Gentleman, shows the essence of style, which Bulwer was never able to get away from the remainder of his career, and which relegated him always to a position a little less than the greatest of the English novelists. This inset story of the history of Sir Reginald Glanville is good, especially the mad scene; but this mad scene is in better condition as it stands in the original and therefore I will quote it from Mortimer; or the Memoirs of a Gentleman, where Ellen Morland is drugged by Mortimer and is afterwards taken to a private mad- house to which Mortimer in anguish comes to see the wreck of her whom he had purposed to ruin. After hear- ing shrieks silenced by the lash, a doctor opens the door and Mortimer tells the rest. Oh, God! who but myself could have recognized her! Her long and raven hair fell over her face in wild disorder; she put it aside ; her cheek was as the cheek of the dead ; the hue- less skin clung to the bone; her eye was dull; not a ray of intellect illumined its glance; she looked long at me. "I am very cold," she said, "but if I complain you will beat me": she fell down again upon the straw and wept. ... I did not stay longer in the room. I bribed the doctor to allow me to carry my victim to my home. Night and day for six weeks I was by her side; she knew me not — Not till one night; the moon, which was at its full, shone into the chamber — we were alone — she turned her face to me — and a bright ray shot across her eye and played in smiles upon her lip. " It is over, " she said, "God forgive you, Henry Mortimer, as I do!" I caught her in my arms. I am choking at this moment with the recollection — I can not tell you — you can guess! — We buried her that week by the side of her mother. Thus we see how stuff made by Richardson, Sterne, Mackenzie, Lewis, and Mrs. Radcliffe, was carried on by Bulwer's "Disowned" and "Devereux" 341 Bulwer into nineteenth century fiction ; and Letitia Lan- don was to carry some of it as far as to when Dickens began to write and later. Pelham at its best is a piece of Horatian coxcombry which was produced as a direct result of Disraeli's Vivian Grey. In Disowned (1829), as in all of Bulwer's earlier fiction, there is an outburst of such metaphysical rhapsody as this : For them, Nature unfolds her hoarded poetry and her hidden spells: for their steps are the lonely mountains, and the still woods have a murmur for their ears : for them there is strange music in the wave, and in the whispers of the light leaves, and the rapture in the voices of the birds; their souls drink, and are saturated with the mysteries of the Universal Spirit, which the philosophy of old times believed to be God himself. They look upon the sky with a gifted vision, and its dove-like quiet descends and overshadows their hearts: the Moon and the Night are to them wells of Castalian inspiration and golden dreams; and it was one of them, who, gazing upon the Evening Star, felt in the inmost sanctuary of his soul, its mysterious harmonies with his worshipped hope, his most passionate desire, and dedicated it to — Love. The time of the novel is the eighteenth century, and the scene is in England prior to the French Revolution. The theme of interest is Wolfe vs. Lord Ulswater, or Democ- racy vs. Aristocracy. The slight enveloping action is politics, but the literati are floated in the personages meant to represent Samuel Johnson, Boswell, Goldsmith, and Sir Joshua Reynolds the artist. In Devereux (1829) in the eighteenth century is depicted Abbe Montreuil, the Jesuitic villain, who pits brother against brother, thus well-nigh ruining Morton Devereux, whose beautiful wife Isora is sacrificed for the benefit of the order of Loyola. In London of the time of Queen Anne the hero Devereux has his round of pleasure, meeting at times the beau-rake 342 Motives in English Fiction Colley Cibber, Lord Bolingbroke, and at Will's Coffee- house Dick Steele, Addison, and the Duchess of Cleve- land's Beau Fielding. He listens to the toasts at the Kit-Cat Club ; sees St. John in power hating Harley, who is in his way ; is absorbed by Dr. Swift's conversation ; and gazes upon Alexander Pope behind Lady Mary at the theatre. Then Morton goes to France to see Louis XIV, Massillon the preacher, Anthony Hamilton, Fontenelle, Voltaire, and Madame de Maintenon; in Russia he observes Peter the Great and Catherine; and in Italy among the Apennines finds his brother Aubrey, the hermit, who explains everything in the unnatural plot that had involved Morton in tragedy. In this novel Bulwer spreads a fog over the historical which afterwards was lifted by Thackeray to reveal such beauties as greet us on the pages of Esmond (1852). The episode of a visit to Alexander Pope in his grotto is enlarged upon by Letitia Landon in Ethel Churchill; or the Two Brides (1837), the enveloping action of which is the times of Sir Robert Walpole and his circle. Paul Clifford (1830) and Eugene Aram (1832), which had such an influence on Ainsworth, were written in the ink of Juvenal. The subsequent novels of Bulwer can be grouped into the historical, such as The Last Days of Pompeii (1834), The Last °f the Barons (1843), and Harold (1848), which prove him to be a romanticist, weakly imitating Scott; the political such as Ernest Maltr avers (1837) and Alice; or the Mysteries (1838) ; the realistically domestic such as The Caxtons (1849) and My Novel (1853) which show the influence of Sterne ; and such as A Strange Story (1862) and the short story The Haunted and the Haunters (1859) in which is the halo of mysticism and the supernatural early irridescent in Zicci (1838), that was later expanded into Zanoni (1842). The atmosphere of the first twelve chapters of Ernest Maltravers is anticipatory of that which Dickens used in Bulvver's "Ernest Maltravers" 343 his novels from 1838 to 1841 . Little Alice Darvil has been brought up in the association of such vice as benetted Oliver Twist at Fagin's, and somehow in her father's house has maintained the purity of a Little Nell. She saves Ernest from being murdered by her father; but to escape capture and a possible death from her father she throws herself into the keeping of Maltravers, and in her inno- cence at no time understands the meaning of the illicit love meted out to her by Maltravers. Little Alice is only an exemplifier of the aphorism "Seduction of love hardly ever conducts to a life of vice." The difference between Bulwer and Dickens can at once be understood when we ponder over the questions : Why did not Dickens permit a similar fate to overtake Little Nell in her grandfather's shop or later when on her w r eary wanderings? Who could have taken advantage of such angelic purity? Why was no aristocratic Maltravers created for Little Nell by Charles Dickens in Old Curiosity Shop ? It is too dreadful even to contemplate Little Nell as a fallen girl ; but if she had fallen, would she not have acted much like Bulwer's Alice, who never fell again and ultimately after years of suffering and atonement married her seducer, who never had abandoned her or the hope of finding her? Would Dickens have cut his throat before he would have had happen to Little Nell what Bulwer determined to have happen to little Alice Darvil ? Why did Dickens in David Copperfield (1849-50) give to aristocratic Steerforth beau- tiful little Emily who, however, did not marry her seducer, but survived his death to find a haven of rehabilitation in Australia? Bulwer's novels are sometimes tawdrily cheap; the situ- ations are exaggerated; motivation is overstrained; and the characters grope about in an atmosphere of artificial morality. Theatrical effect demands that truth to life be sacrificed. The body of his fiction is like a top, which is 344 Motives in English Fiction in constant danger of falling flat by reason of unconvincing characterization and grandiloquent phraseology of dia- logue gyrating about on the pin-point of sensational situ- ation. Bulwer whipped his fiction into action with the sentiment of a wobbling, gyrating public. Bulwer fre- quently broke away from the rigidity of the stratifications of Richardson, Sterne, and Mackenzie, because there was moral protest or perhaps mental reaction on the part of the public against the eighteenth century form of fiction- making. He frequently broke away from Disraeli, from Scott, to flee back to Sterne, and to the supernatural. At times he escaped from all, but he never could escape from himself; for, in spite of all his efforts, his fiction reflected the insincere, emotional public which clamored so hungrily for it. One must make allowance then for Bulwer by taking into consideration the period of readjust- ment that was going on in the days of his fiction-writing. And after a man has done this he will salute with more respect this greatest acrobat of adjustment and readjust- ment who felt compelled to go through his antics to please a public that did not know that a period of readjustment was going on. There were times when the sentimental public were absolutely sure that he was the coming novel- ist, who would in time be hailed as greater than either Dickens or Thackeray. He was able to forge ahead of Disraeli, but Bill Sikes and Steerforth, Barry Lyndon and Lord Steyne, must have been revealments to him of the impassable gulf that lay between the romantic world, in which moved his own puppet-criminals, Paul Clifford and Eugene Aram, and that realistic world, in which moved the humanized criminals created by Dickens and Thack- eray. Bulwer could not instill personality into characters ; he went to other novelists to borrow this elixir vita. What man ever stopped an individual on the street to say, " Do you see that old fellow over there? He reminds me of Za- Bulwer's "The Caxtons" 345 noni. He not only looks like Zanoni, but he acts like him. " There are only two characters of Bulwer's whom you feel as if you had met in real life. You are not so sure about it, but you venture to say, "Those two old fellows over there remind me of the genial Caxton brothers." But the man on the street surprises you by replying, "No. You are mistaken. Those old fellows over there remind me of Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim!" In speaking of Bulwer as a second-rate novelist of first-rate importance there come back to me the memories of the summer of 1898, when I was privileged to have a pleasant afternoon chat with General Lew Wallace on the porch of his old home in the city of my nativity. Natur- ally the causerie was about books with an occasional digression to the war which we were carrying on at that time with Spain. That afternoon the old General told me that he considered Longfellow's The Building of the Ship as the greatest American poem, that Emma Lazarus was our greatest poetess, and that Ivanhoe and The Bride of Lammermoor were the greatest of Scott's novels. And while speaking of Scott he suddenly veered in a wrathful change of voice to discuss the mistake Americans had recently been making in feting and dining on their shores a certain Anthony Hope Hawkins whose only merit had been in producing a poor piece of fiction called The Prisoner of Zenda. Lew Wallace believed that Anthony Hope was receiving honors far beyond those which he deserved, and I can never forget the satisfied look on the General's face as he said, "We have not had any great novels since Bulwer and Dickens." From his further talk about Bulwer I found out that back of the birth of the chariot- race in Ben Hur was the strength of Bulwer's arena-scene in The Last Days of Pompeii, and that back of the birth of the scenic power in The Fair God was the inspiration which had come to him from reading the younger Maturin's 34 6 Motives in English Fiction Malmistic, the Last of the Toltecs, which from my boyhood days I can recall as holding me from first page to last as I followed the thrilling adventures of the prince, the lawful heir to the throne of the Aztecs, along the shores of Lake Tezcuco and in the beautiful city of Tenochtitlan. I came away from the gray-haired General that golden afternoon feeling that in Ben Hur it was to Bulwer he had turned and that I was never to forget an Arbaces in the act of saving himself from the lions in the amphitheatre by pointing to the cloud shaped like a pine-tree floating over Vesuvius or this Egyptian priest and prince as he was struck down by the column broken by the electrical pheno- mena at the moment Glaucus deemed lone as good as lost to him forever in the subtle arch-villain's arms. Nor was I to forget blind Nydia's awful mistake in trying to force Glaucus to love her by means of a love-potion, nor her subsequent angelic sacrifice in saving Glaucus and lone; therefore, to-day, even when I see these characters dancing before me in a photoplay, I try to readjust my opinion of this author so as to come to Lew Wallace's conclusion that we have not had any novels since Bulwer and Dickens. Between Bulwer's Pelham (1828) and the publication of Charles Dickens's A Dinner at Poplar Walk (in The Monthly Magazine for December 1833), there appeared James Morier's Hajji Baba in England (1828) and Zohrab the Hostage (1832); Mrs. S. C. Hall's Sketches of Irish Character (1829); Gerald Griffin's The Collegians (1829) and The Invasion (1832); Michael Scott's Tom Cringles Log (1829); G. P. R. James's Richelieu (1829); William Carleton's Father Butler and The Lough Derg Pilgrim (1829), Traits and Stories of Irish Peasantry (1830); Frederick Marryat's Frank Mildmay; or, the Naval Officer (1829) and Newton Forster (1832); Theodore Hook's Maxwell (1830) ; Letitia E. Landon's Romance and Reality (1831); and Robert Smith Surtees's New Sporting Maga- Mrs. S. C. Hall's "Sketches" 347 zine (1832-34) in which were portrayed the adventures of the cockney grocer Jorrocks which served to help the plan of Dickens's Pickwick Papers (1836-37), and which later were put in book form under the title of Jorrocks' s Jaunts and Jollities (1838). Morier's Hajji Baba in England and Zohrab, the Hostage were two oriental passage-ways leading one from the fine temple of Hajji Baba of Ispahan (1824) to that of Ayesha, Maid of Kars (1834). Mrs. S. C. Hall kept the Irishman alive in the twenty-eight sketches that serve to connect the Lady Morgan-Banim-Griffin fiction with that of Carleton, Lover, and Lever. In The Last of the Line Sir John Clavis, of Trinity College, marries a Spanish beauty, a Catholic, and later becomes an Orangeman ; he clashes with Denny Dacey, the agent, who is squander- ing the revenues of the estate. There follows a duel in which Clavis is killed. "The party shall fail by Clavis led / And none of the name shall die in their bed. " The story is written according to Maria Edgeworth's con- ception of the villainy of agents. Jack the Shrimp is written in the manner of the modified pathos permeating Miss Mitford's Our Village. In Black Dennis the United Irishman, who has been found to be a traitor, is dying in the dwelling on the "far moor," and his wife, Anne Dennis, braves the wintry night to ask Michael Leahey to go for a priest. Later her child, innocent, harmless Ned, in the Leahey cottage looks up at the window and sees a banshee at the time his mother's ghost flits by. The Rapparee contains a character sketch that is reminiscent of that given the rapparee, the foster-brother of the hero in The O'Briens and the 0' Flaherty s of Lady Morgan's. And Mabel 0' Neil's Curse presents a magistrate caught by the woman whose ruin he had caused. James Johnson at the bar of justice must confront a son as well as a discarded sweetheart of the years that have sped. Mabel the 34 8 Motives in English Fiction wronged woman saves her son from murdering his father, the magistrate Johnson. The story is slightly reminiscent of the most pathetic scene in Mrs. Inchbald's Nature and Art. "The best way to keep off a curse is not to desarve it." Now what can we say in praise of Michael Scott, of Glasgow, who, probably among the Blue Mountains of Jamaica, remembering Smollett's Roderick Random and Peregrine Pickle and his own adventurous experiences by sea and land, penned Tom Cringle's Log. There is the coarse humor of Smollett's used in depicting Cringle's plight at Kingston, Jamaica, when he slips on the ma- hogany floor splitting his lower canvas and is petticoated by beautiful Mary prior to a general introduction to the tittering Creole ladies. Then there is the delightful in- troduction by means of caricature to Obed, the American pirate. Who does not think of Smollett's Obadiah Lis- mahago when Scott says of Obed that he had absolutely no body, his bottom being placed between his shoulders, but what was wanted in corpus was made up in legs, indeed he looked like a pair of compasses, buttoned together at the shoulders, and supporting a yellow phiz, half-a-yard long, thatched with a fell of sandy hair, falling down lank and greasy on each side of his face? And can one fail to think of Commodore Trunnion, when later as a prisoner on Obed's boat Cringle gazes on the Yankee pirate, the only man on deck, who is looking at the schooner and the corvette, the Firebrand, through the magnifying monocle as by magnificent manoeuvres at the tiller he is skilfully outclassing and evading his pursuers? Then caricature is discarded as Scott frames Obed in a picture of pathos prior to his being shot to death in the water in the rendezvous of the pirates. The ghost of Obed haunts Cringle throughout the remaining pages of Scott's "Tom Cringle's Log" 349 the novel. The first half of Torn Cringle's Log is almost as exciting as the first half of Stevenson's Treasure Island; for the Stevensonian atmosphere hovers everywhere over pirates. It seems to me that Treasure Island abates in interest as soon as Jim Hawkins, the Squire, the Doctor, and the pirates under Captain Silver, rush into the boats to see who can reach the stockade first. This shift from sea to island is absolutely necessary, but it produces the tor- tuous in plot which is passing strange when it is recalled how back in England with bated breath we watched Jim's party and Silver's swept along in the thrillingly natural incidents of an orderly narrative. The pellmell tactics of both parties on the island in the Spanish Main produce only one great scene, and to create it Stevenson is com- pelled to go to sea again in a coracle in order that Jim may clamber up on to the bowsprit of the Hispaniola to have his great fight with Israel Hands. And in Tom Cringle's Log after the death of Obed there is disappointment as one feels the jarring shift of interest from Obed to Aaron Bang, from a sea-dog to a land-dog, fond of "high jinks" and a midnight lark. The shift is one that moves from the pathos about Obed to the humor around Bang — and Cringle is bundled into the keeping of Aaron in the last half of the volume to be enveloped in cigar smoke and to be tickled by episodes modeled after the manner of that which describes how Bang is stung on his big red nose by a scorpion. In the last half occasionally there intrudes the pathetic, but it is flavored with the Gothic, as when Maria, the pirate's leman, crimsoning her own fair flesh with arterial blood, dies to the tune of thunder, and as when, after the action with the slaver, and after shooting one half of the survivors as they swim to be taken on board in the blood-red beams of a glorious sunset, Cringle and his confreres from the deck of the Wave watch the slaver-brig go down : 35° Motives in English Fiction The fire increased — her guns went off as they became heated — she gave a sudden heel — and while five hundred human beings, pent up in her noisome hold, split the heavens with their piercing death-yells, down she went with a heavy lurch, head foremost, right in the wake of the setting sun, whose level rays made the thick dun wreaths that burst from her as she disappeared, glow with the hue of the amethyst; and while the whirling clouds, gilded by his dying radiance, called up into the blue sky, in rolling masses, growing thinner and thinner, until they vanished away, even like the wreck whereout they arose — and the circling eddies created by her sinking, no longer sparkled and flashed in the red light, — and the stilled waters where she had gone down, as if oil had been cast on them, were spread out like polished silver, shining like a mirror, while all around was dark blue ripple, — a puff of fat black smoke, denser than any we had yet seen, suddenly emerged with a loud gurgling noise, from out the deep bosom of the calmed sea, and rose like a balloon, rolling slowly upwards until it reached a little way above our mast-heads, where it melted and spread out into a dark pall, that overhung the scene of death, as if the incense of such a horrible and pol- luted sacrifice could not ascend into the pure heaven, but had been again crushed back upon our devoted heads, as a palpable manifestation of the wrath of Him who hath said — "Thou shalt not kill." It is now nearly thirty-five years ago since I first read Tom Cringle's Log which had been given my playmate by his father to make him give up his longing to run away to sea. The father by bestowing the book sealed his son's fate; for, strange to say, the hardships and the horrors as related by Scott seemed in no way to deter my friend from later abandoning his family for a life on the ocean wave. Scott's The Cruise of the Midge (1834), a replica of Tom Cringle's Log, possesses an excellent bit of Rem- brandt art in the picture of the chase of the polacre by the gallant little Midge: Scott, Marryat, and Kingsley 351 The night began to lower again ; the wind fell from a fine working breeze to nearly calm, and the rain soon began to descend in torrents. At length it became stark calm, and as dark as the shrouded moon would let it. But every now and then we could see a tiny flash in the south-east, that for a mo- ment lit up the outline of the black sail of the felucca, mak- ing the sweeps and the figures of the men that pulled them appear as black as ebony between us and the flash of the forwardmost gun, which, on the other hand, glanced brightly against the stern, sparkled in the windows, and lighted up the snow-white sails of the brig, in pursuit of which the felucca had again bore up; the wreaths of smoke rising and surrounding both vessels like a luminous ■ cloud or a bright halo. Michael Scott pays as much attention to nautical details as Cooper or Kipling, but he has none of Cooper's masterly sweep of imagination which created Long Tom Coffin. Imagination is sadly lacking, for the fine de- scriptions, full of local color of the Spanish Main, are massed together as a tropical sense-world to amuse and arouse anguish in every reader who feels that to physical and mental suffering Scott is as inexorable as Nature, or as Emily Bronte when she permits fair Isabella to pluck the knife from behind her ear, thrust there by cannibal Heath- cliff and to flee from the house of the Earnshaws never to return. Michael Scott shouldered Smollett's sea-novel so that it could be carried at a thorough-paced gait by Frederick Marryat and his imitators W. N. Glascock, Frederick Chamier, and James Hannay. The Michael Scott-Marryat fiction was the connecting link between Smollett's Roderick Random and Kingsley's Westward Ho! (1855) and Stevenson's Treasure Island (1883). If one removed "the always wind-obeying deep" from Westward Ho! its historical structure would crumble to pieces. In Kingsley's masterpiece are the wild joys of Amyas Leigh 35 2 Motives in English Fiction as he lives spiritually and materially well in being tossed on billows mountain high and in feeling compelled to answer the call of an El Dorado as he stands beneath the mighty ceiba-tree. Amyas, trained by Sir Francis Drake, displays his physical strength as if a demi-god were showing off his followers to be fully as great in heroic deed as he himself. When watching these Elizabethan sailors in the spirited sea-action with the Spanish vessels, resulting in the sinking of the Madre Dolorosa off La Guayra, or at the nadir of their fortunes in the bay of Higuerote in the mud beneath the mangrove forest, or succumbing to the sense- world of beautiful savage women, among whom walks the white Indian princess Ayacanora, or coming home with the treasure and a greater treasure, the beautiful Ayacanora the bride-to-be for Amyas, or fighting with the Spanish Armada and pursuing Don Guzman de Sota around Scotland to the Irish Sea to the great storm and the lightning-flash that blinds Amyas, then it is we know how the Anglo-Saxon can never pass through another Elizabethan Renaissance; for the far-rolling western seas are no longer unknown, and the league-long rollers no longer lift vessels to such a height as formerly made English mariners see the glittering towers of El Dorados on their imaginative horizon line. Eliza- bethan minds were made by these wonderful voyages of discovery almost as vast in sweep as the seas traversed. And the Polish Joseph Conrad must not be forgotten ; for, though foreign to English traditions, since 1894 in Eng- land he has been our greatest artist in visualizing with precision the grandiose, vague, and illusive atmosphere of the seas that moan and sob about the world. In The Nigger of the Narcissus: A Tale of the Sea (1898) and in Lord Jim: A Tale (1900), Conrad realistically and roman- tically thrusts the weight of waves against the eyeballs so that the brain rocks as if it too were a ship like the Patna Scott, Conrad, William McFee 353 in Lord Jim about to go to sleep on the Indian Ocean. The sea, with its sailing vessels and steamers, has almost reached the end of its service to romantic and realistic fiction. In this respect, it is interesting to compare the romantic realism of Tom Cringle s Log with the sombre realism of McFee' s Book Three of The Casuals of the Sea (1916). It seems now that romanticism may weave itself about the submarine, and go back for inspiration to Cap- tain Nemo and his Nautilus of Jules Verne's Twenty Thou- sand Leagues Under the Sea and The Mysterious Island. The glamor of romantic life under the waves will precede any realistic presentation of submarine life that might be entitled The Casuals of the Under seas. On reperusing the list of the chief novels published between 1829 and 1833 the eye falls upon Letitia E. Lan- don, who was cursorily mentioned in the discussion of Mrs. Ann Radcliffe's fiction. In Romance and Reality (1831) Letitia Landon has one of her characters refer to Mrs. Radcliffe's heroines in this fashion: "I grew so tired of their undeviating sweetness, that I hoped at last some of the dangers they encountered would fairly put an end to their terrors, troubles, and existence together." And Romance and Reality bears out the idea that Letitia Lan- don was determined from the beginning to place an auburn-tressed heroine, possessed of gray eyes "with black pupils," eyelashes curled up, crimson cheeks, a fine ankle, and a hand fit for a duchess, amid such difficulties as from which it would be impossible for her to extricate herself. The catastrophe is so complete that at the close of the novel, after compelling Miss Arundel to leave all her money to Beatrice, of the lonely woods of Andalusia, her successful rival, who gains the heart of Edward Lor- raine the hero she loved, and to die with her head on Beatrice's shoulder and supported by Edward, Letitia Landon brings forth the heroine's will which makes it 354 Motives in English Fiction imperative to pull down Arundel Hall and leave in the village church a marble tablet on which is inscribed "Emily Arundel, The Last Survivor of Her Family, Aged 21." Nothing is allowed to remain on earth to remind us of her sorrows except a picture of her that bore not her name at Etheringhame Castle. The piece of fiction is the study of the gradual dissolution of Emily that proceeds from the awful curse the abbess pronounced upon her ancestor back in the time of Henry the Eighth. Emily loses her uncle and friend Lady Alicia, who might have brought her and Edward together in England, and is forced to abandon Arundel Hall to accept the hospitality of Lady Mandeville and a visit to Italy. At Naples un- requited love drives her to the convent of St. Valerie to become a nun. Within this nunnery the curse demands the added anguish of finding beautiful Beatrice to listen from her lips to how Edward could love when he loved for keeps. After being freed from the convent when it is fired by Zoridos's force, Emily in England in Arundel House must live to learn not to murder Beatrice who is more beautiful than herself, but to love her so as to save her for Edward when he should return ; and when he does, Letitia Landon gives Emily the satisfaction of convulsively dying in his arms. And the reader, if he hates Radclifrlan heroines, can take in Emily's life and death much secret satisfaction; for Emily on Mrs. Radcliffe's pages would have been married to Edward Lorraine and recovered her health, and even Beatrice would have said, "0 giorno felice!" We have already referred to Emily's taking the black veil at St. Valerie when commenting on Margaret's taking it in the Abbey of Gloucester in Thomas Deloney's The Pleasant Historie of Thomas of Reading and when commenting on Vincentio's rescuing Ellena as she was about to take it in San Stefano in Airs. Radcliffe's The Italian. Letitia Landon's description is fully as fine as L. E. Landon's "Ethel Churchill" 355 that of Mrs. Radcliffe's and its perusal will amply repay- any reader. Letitia Landon's Francesco, Carrara (1834) possesses the scenic background of Italy, of England in the time of Cromwell, and of France under Cardinal Mazarin. Ro- bert Evelyn loves Francesca, but he has a brother Francis who befools Francesca into thinking that he Francis is Robert. The story is full of sensational episodes, especi- ally death-bed scenes. Robert and Francesca are at last united to die in each other's arms in a frightful storm at sea. Death in its sudden and lingering horrors seems to fascinate Letitia Landon, who carries such into Ethel Churchill; or the Two Brides (1837) in which we meet Pope in his grotto, see pain inflicted by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and hear Sir Robert Walpole hum- ming airs from Gay's The Beggar's Opera as he is between two pretty charmers; and see Lavinia Fenton, who loves Walter Maynard, suffer as she listens to his constant outbursts of love for Ethel, but she stays with him until his death, and then to forget becomes the Duchess of Bolton. We observe Constance's fate is being married to a man who does not love her. At a public assembly she breaks a blood-vessel streaking her fan with crimson. We watch Lady Marchmont arriving at the bedside of her uncle too late to see him alive and determining, since her detested husband had caused the delay, to be mistress of her fate by means of prussic acid that she makes out of almonds; and, when she is detected by her husband in the tete-a-tete with her lover Sir George Kingston at the masked ball at Lady Townshend's, by means of this prus- sic acid she kills her husband, and Sir George, and then goes violently insane. How prophetic some of this was — when we think of Letitia Landon (Mrs. Maclean) killing herself with prussic acid in Cape Coast Castle, Africa, goaded to it in all probability by her beast of a husband. The 356 Motives in English Fiction authoress of Romance and Reality had read Keats as is evinced by her fondness for quoting him, and her employ- ment of his diction and a sensuous style, that was acquired from her acquaintance with Mrs. Radcliffe's poetic pic- tures of Italian sunsets, woods, and castles, made her a popular novelist in her day, and still a source of delight to one who mourns the loss of this kind of style in modern fiction. When Letitia Landon ceased her work the Bronte sisters were ready to continue it, and to-day the influence of the Brontes is strongly felt in the fiction of May Sin- clair, especially in her The Three Sisters (19 14) in which are the touches of the gruesome that is introduced to pro- duce the effect of sad fatality enveloping the characters — such as the image of old Greatorex which Gwenda sees in the sombre, long gray house at Upthorne lying in the death-bed which was later to become her sister Alice's marriage-bed. The coffin bearing the same image later stuck in the bend of the stairs as it was being carried from the house. And it was such things as these that made timid, little Alice fear to become the bride of young Greatorex at Upthorne. On glancing at the novels from 1829 to 1833 we realize that Sir Walter Scott still had the historical field all to himself. Few indeed were those who could successfully walk on his territory. G. P. R. James by his Richelieu (1829) foisted into English fiction the miserable history that we find in Ainsworth. As we already know Bulwer circled round the edge of the historical in Disowned (1829) and Devereux (1829) ; but he was not to enter it until after his visit to Italy that resulted in The Last Days of Pompeii (1834) and Rienzi (1835), which gave him courage to compose The Last of the Barons (1843) and Harold (1848). W. H. Maxwell's Stories of Waterloo (1834) an d Bivouac or Stories of the Peninsular War (1837) were followed up by Lever's Charles O'Malley (1840), in which the shako and The Victorian Historical Novel 357 Soult's face seen in Spain in Thomas Hamilton's Cyril Thornton (1827) are transferred to the slope of the plateau of Mont St. Jean at Waterloo, and by Tom Burke of Ours (1844) in which Tom follows Napoleon's fortunes from the field of Austerlitz to his farewell to the Old Guard at Fontainebleau. Harriet Martineau enlists our sympa- thies for the woes of Toussaint L'Ouverture in The Hour and the Man (1840). Dickens slightly enveloped Barnaby Rudge (1841) with the history of the Gordon Riots, and Emma Robinson supplied a study of the Popish Plot, Lord Russell and Algernon Sydney's Conspiracy, and the Rye House Plot, in Whitefriars; or the Court of Charles II (1843) in which the Great Fire is colored finely as wel 1 as the district Alsatia in which walk Charles II, Nell Gwyn, Buckingham, and Rochester. When describing the Battle of Bothwell Brig there is just the trace of a suspicion that Emma Robinson went to Scott's Old Mortality, and when Reginald Aumerle is exposed to all the terrors of the haunted mansion, on the Thames-side, in which the miser had been killed and at which Blood and Titus Oates devise their plots, there is a return to the Gothic of Scott's The Fortunes of Nigel. Charles Macfarlane's The Camp of Refuge (1844) is a small smoking bonfire that Charles Kingsley fanned into flames in Hereward the Wake (1866). It is interesting to compare the Hereward of fact of Macfarlane's with the legendary, romantic Hereward of Kingsley's. Macfarlane also tried to apply fact instead of imagination to Stephen and Matilda of the twelfth century in Reading Abbey (1846). Albert Smith touched upon historical romance in The Marchioness of Brin- villiers (1846); and G. H. Rodwell, in Old London Bridge (1849), supplied a Gothic historical romance of the times of Henry the Eighth. The burning of London Bridge and the thieves' fight in the Clink serve to show the in- fluence of Ainsworth. Wilkie Collins's Antonina; or the 35 8 Motives in English Fiction Fall of Rome (1850) and Anthony Trollope's La Vendee (1850) were received with such disapprobation as to make both novelists steer their ships away from the rocks of the historical. After 1850 better historical novels were published such as Thackeray's Esmon d (1852), The Virginians (1857-59); Kingsley's Hypatia (1853), Westward Ho! (1855), Ilere- ward the Wake (1866); Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities (1859); Charles Reade's The Cloister and the Hearth (1861); George Eliot's Romola (1863); George Whyte- Melville's The Gladiators (1863); Blackmore's Lorna Doone (1869) ; and Stevenson's Kidnapped (1886) . Thack- eray, who in realism would have no fiction written in imitation of Scott or Bulwer, or any of the social slumming done by Dickens, in his later novels, such as Esmond and The Virginians, flavored the classicism of the eighteenth century with a melancholy kind of romanticism which, though quite similar to Scott's, was entirely original ; and thus it is seen how it was possible for Blackmore, in Lorna Doone (1869), to become the neo-romantic connecting link between Thackeray's Esmond and Stevenson's Kidnapped. We should remember that between Thackeray's Esmond and Stevenson's Kidnapped among the hundreds of historical novels there are only three or four which have come to be regarded as masterpieces: Kingsley's West- ward Ho! Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Reade's The Cloister and the Hearth, and Blackmore's Lorna Doone. Thackeray for a time in Esmond successfully crossed swords with his instructor Sir Walter Scott; but he was slowly pushed back to the end of the field selected where he gracefully surrendered his bright historical blade to one who had proved to be twice as skilful as himself in thrusts and hits. Henry Esmond sorrows over the sweet memories of his past life and hugs his pathos, and calls for Thackeray, Scott, and Stevenson 359 more wine that has been made bitter-sweet by time's vicissitudes to be fetched from the cellar of Castlewood. Now Scott's pathos is not forced from the head but from the heart; it is not on the order of the intellectualized pathos of the shot that pulls the tigress Beatrix down. No tears are shed by Thackeray over her fall, for Nature is neither ethical nor unethical, neither just nor unjust: "The leopard follows his nature as the lamb does, and acts after the leopard law ; she can neither help her beauty nor her courage, nor her cruelty; nor a single spot on her shining coat; nor the conquering spirit which impels her; nor the shot which brings her down." Thackeray is heartless toward the fallen woman. The pathos around Beatrix, the fallen Queen of the Esmonds, sinks in the scale when it is compared with that encircling the beauti- ful hazel-eyed Mary, the fallen Queen and woman in Scott's The Abbot, because Scott feels from his heart for the fate of Bothwell's mistress as Thackeray feels from his head for Beatrix, when she is caught playing with the fire of the Old Pretender's kisses. Then, too, the humor that is always lurking to show its big manly front in Scott's historical novels in Thackeray has shrunk to dwarfish dimensions as it skips about Henry Esmond, the little Papist, so that he may be hit in the eye with a potato on market-day in Hexton, or centres around the drunken Dick Steele. Also in a larger sense Thackeray failed to acquire the touch of the large beneficence of Scott's that reveals no modified cynicism, caused by viewing the main street of the world as that down which Esmond traveled jostled on this side and on that by those garbed in the livery and insignia of the pride-of-the-eye and the lust- of-the-flesh army of Vanity Fair. The healthful atmos- phere of Scott's beneficence that Thackeray was slow to catch and hold was quickly embraced by Stevenson who Scott-like shows in his historical fiction that the heroic 360 Motives in English Fiction is simply virtue invulnerable in its strength and that the unheroic is merely sin vulnerable in its weakness, such as always stayed with Scott's Front-de-Bceuf in the shape of Ulrica until the end, and that from such weakness in one's past no one can escape; i.e., not from one evil thing that one has ever done. Stevenson went to Scott to show us sinners not in the act of nursing the toothache on Judgment Day as in Thackeray, but suffering from soul- ache at the loss of truth, honor, love, and faith ; for loss of reputation, health, and money, is as nothing in comparison with what the soul suffers when it has by its own acts forfeited the verities of life. Bulwer, Thackeray, Kings- ley, Dickens, Charles Reade, George Eliot, Blackmore, and Stevenson, sound beneficence in a small way on their bugle of the historical, but none of them could blow on Scott's historical horn, the large blasts of which destroyed Torquilstone Castle because beneficence was not pos- sessed by its defenders who had long since given up the verities for ill-fame and money. Nor could even a Thackeray in depicting Marlborough's Campaign borrow the horn long enough to assemble well-organized facts of history; he could not interpret past history in the terms of the present so well as Scott, nor could he on a large scale humanize characters since he lacked the inspiring nobility of outlook — the touchstone of Scott's large god-like bene- ficence. GifTord, the great judicial critic, one hundred years ago said, "The characters of Shakespeare are not more exclusively human, not more perfect men and women as they live and move, than are those of this mysterious author" ; and the world will on this account, as the years go by, move nearer and nearer to the men and women in Scott's Ivanhoe and farther and farther away from the men and women in Thackeray's Esmond. When Charles Dickens all at once turned loose on the streets of London and in its dens a motley throng of Dickens, Thackeray, and De Morgan 361 grotesque slum-banditti as lively and romantic and as real as the Highland bandits in Scott's novels, we come to a stop ; for it is not the purpose of this book to trace all the beautiful designs of interdependence in the flowering period (1 833-1 870) of English fiction which, as Saintsbury says, is fully as great as the Elizabethan drama from 1585 to 1625, or the outbursts of English poetry from 1798 to 1825. But, if we should be tempted to go on, it would be interesting, indeed, for a moment to summon the banditti of William De Morgan, our present-day reminder of Dickens and Thackeray, — the creators of Bill Sikes and Barry Lyndon. In When Ghost Meets Ghost (19 14) there walks the spectral influence of a convict-husband, Thorn- ton Daverill, to whom Old Maisie was true for fifty years. As one looks at the fragile, dying Maisie, whose last thoughts are for the welfare of her devil-possessed son, who, by her money, may escape the pursuers of the law, the reader sees behind the fluttering, aged eyelids a beautiful soul, which had once been in the hell of Botany Bay, and which still retained a full understanding of all the subtle, strategic movements of this hell. For fifty years Maisie had not permitted one ray of the sacred halo of her unsullied soul to be dimmed by this dip into the cesspool of total depravity that had engulfed her husband and son. The convict Abel Magwitch, who craves affec- tion and secretly supports Pip from a Botany Bay fortune in Dickens's Great Expectations (1860-61), when refash- ioned by De Morgan as Daverill in 1914, receives from his creator no heart other than that which moves beneath fibres as inflexible as those of steel ; but Charles Dickens's Nancy, who saved little Oliver from the Sikes she loved and in spite of every inducement held out to her went back to be true to the ruffian in accepting the terrible death that she knew awaited her at his hands, has grown into an older, sweeter angel of loyalty when respiritualized 362 Motives in English Fiction as Maisie by William De Morgan. Aunt M'riar, Uncle Mo's idol, who saved her wicked convict-husband (the son of Daverill) from being seized by the officers of the law is another retrospective glance cast by De Morgan in the direction of Dickens's Nancy. And not only in portraying slum-banditti does Dickens prepare the road to be traveled by De Morgan, but in creating children whose sorrows and joys are greater than those we have seen delineated by Henry Fielding in Amelia (1751) and Henry Brooke in The Fool of Quality (1766) . Dickens from 1838 to 1865 in allotting fate to his angelic children is by far more optimistic than pessimistic. Dickens arranges that better days shall come to Oliver Twist, and that in Nicholas Nickleby even Smike's last condition shall be better than his first. In Old Curiosity Shop Little Nell must die; but the little Marchioness escapes from the service of Sampson Brass by the help and love extended to her by Dick Swiveller. Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol makes it possible for all who are miserable around him to become optimists. Blind Bertha in The Cricket on the Hearth is made happier by being fooled by her father Caleb Plummer and is still contented when disillusionized. Little Paul Dombey dies in a big scene rilled with the pathos of great art, but lonely Florence lives to emerge, her life made sweeter by what she had done for Paul and what at first she could not get from her father. Little David Copperfield escapes the Murdstones, escapes Steerforth, and his doll- wife Dora, to find Agnes and a successful private and public life. Little Emily, after touring the Continent with Steerforth, goes to Australia to rehabilitate herself. Thomas Traddles, in spite of the skeletons which he drew all over his slate in Creakle's school to remind himself that perhaps the canings he received could not last forever, was able to pull through misfortunes to marry beautiful Sophy and Children in Dickens's Novels 363 successfully carve on the ledge of the desk in one of the back rows of the King's Bench a skeleton in a wig. In Bleak House little Jo finds that the only path leading away from Tom- All- Alone' s is that belonging to Death, but Esther Summerson the illegitimate daughter of Lady Dedlock early finds an escape from an unhappy career in being passed by her aunt into the keeping of kind Jarn- dyce. In Hard Times Sissy Jupes, the little waif from Sleary's circus, teaches Louisa Gradgrind, who is ac- quainted with no other education than what is crammed into her as she attends the school of hard facts, that there is no other way of relieving misery and tragedy except by carrying into the corridor of her father's school the torch of imagination revealing something more impor- tant than "facts" in this life. Little Dorrit, the dove of the Marshalsea, born in it and early without a mother's care, toils for father, brother, and sister, and waits until at twenty-two years of age as a seamstress she meets Arthur Clennam — and then escapes from the net of her past by marrying Arthur in the Marshalsea, the prison chaplain performing the ceremony. In Great Expectations little Pip at last gets rid of the convict that he had supposed was his father; and even the convict's daughter, Estella, whose heart Miss Havisham had steeled, finds it melting under the pressure of the warmth of love. In Our Mutual Friend the hopelessly crippled girl- woman "Jenny Wren," the little dolls' dressmaker, who idolizes her drunken father, wins Lizzie Hexam's love and after this radiates twice as much sunshine and love as before. And Lizzie Hexam after her disreputable father, a River Thames body-snatcher, is drowned at his frightful trade, lives to marry Eugene Wrayburn on his seeming death-bed as the heroine orphan Hermy in Jeffery Farnol's The Definite Object (1917) lives to marry Geoffrey Ravenslee in a similar manner. Each girl with the burden of a brother climbs out of Hell's 364 Motives in English Fiction Kitchen, which is always the same whether in London or New York. These little folk of Dickens able or unable to extricate themselves from their difficulties are perhaps too angelic, too much like Charles Lamb's dream children who claimed that they would have to wait on the shores of Lethe "millions of ages " before they could "have existence and a name" ; but this real world of ours has observed them now for over fifty years and would be mournfully reluctant to have them disappear, for by the delineation of their fate it has learned to treat children better so that to-day they do not move with so much agony for any length of time in our factories, tenement houses, private schools, and asylums. These little children of Dickens as they stand lined up before us according to the dates of their birth still seem to say: Look at us, for though shadows we are substance, since the angelic on the face of the earth does exist in all children; therefore, for our sake, if you should meet a De Morgan-like Joseph Vance be a Dr. Thorpe in order to snatch him from the gutter so that he will live to love a Lossie, one whose love he never can have, and gain a spiritual Janey whose love will be something in the overwhelming loss of Lossie. If you should meet in the slums of any great city such a little waif as De Morgan's Alice of "the airey way, " make it possible for her to leave such to be educated and to marry an artist Charles Heath so that she can make him find literature and fit him to it as his real vocation; and, if you should stumble upon a child on the order of De Morgan's Lizarann, do all that you can to make her escape the pathos of the death-bed that her creator feels forced to give her. Life to-day can be changed so that it will be impossible for any future Dickens to kill a Little Nell or any future De Morgan to kill a Lizarann. And, last of all, remember to clothe yourselves with the charity of Dickens which is as that Children in De Morgan's Novels 365 of De Morgan's Widow Thrale, who, with sons at sea and a daughter married, "terribly wanting some [one] to kiss, had hit upon the expedient of taking charge of invalid children." INDEX "Abbot, The," 170, 257, 359 "Absentee, The," 157, 211, 214- 216,320,337 "Adam Bede, " 296, 332 "Adam Blair," 299 "Ada Reis," 271, 275-277, 337 Addison, Joseph, 86-88, 140, 290 "Adeline Mowbray," 214, 219-220 "Admiral on Shore, An," 290 "Adonais," 283, 284 "Adrian Savage, " 40, 99, 202 "Adventures of a Guinea," 88, 135-136 "Adventures of A Shilling, " 88, 136 "Adventures of Captain Singleton, The," 70, 74 "Adventures of David Simple," 107-109 "Adventures of Ferdinand, Count Fathom," 46, 113, 138 "Adventures of Michael Arm- strong, 313-315, 321 "Adventures of Peregrine Pickle," I 1 1-113,348 "Affair of Dishonor, An," 57 Ainsworth, William H., 311, 342, 356,357 "Albigenses, The," 184, 202, 234 "Alcida," 24 "Alec Forbes," 300 "Alice," 320-321, 342 "Alice-For-Short," 99, 138, 146 "Almoran and Harriet," 135, 136- 137 "Alroy," 288, 337-338 "Alton Locke," 315, 330 "Alwyn," 166 "Amelia," 29, 103, 104-107, 109, 362 Amory, Thomas, III, 116, 124-127, 181, 189 "Anastasius," 262, 285-288 "Annals of the Parish," 297, 300 " Anna of the Five Towns, " 296 "Anna St. Ives, " 166, 320 "Anne of Geierstein," 263 "Antiquary, The," 249, 264 "Antonina," 357-358 " Arbasto, " 24-26 "Arcadia, The," 23, 35-4 1 , I22 "Aretina," 40, 53 "Argenis," 18, 46 Arnold, Dr., 336 Arnold, Matthew, 59, 332 "Arundel," 180 Ascham, Roger, 18, 40, 141 "A Shilling," 136 "As You Like It," 34, 35 "Atherton, and Other Tales," 290 "Auld Licht Idylls," 300 Austen, Jane, 21, 123, 157, 158, 159, 161, 186, 208, 231, 237-245, 246, 261, 277, 282, 290 "Ayesha, the Maid of Kars, " 288, 347 "Ayrshire Legatees, 297 B Bacon, Sir Francis, 16, 17, 18, 46- 51,52,65,79, ii9, 204,337 Bage, Robert, 124, 149, 166, 167- 169 Ballantyne, James, 261 Banim, John, 208, 303, 306, 310, 311, 320, 347 Banim, Michael, 208, 303-306, 310, 311, 320, 347 "Banished Man," 175 "Banker's Wife, The," 302 "Barchester Towers," 331-332 Barclay, John, 18, 46 "Barham Downs," 167, 168-169 "Barnaby Rudge," m, 357 367 3 68 Index Barrett, Eaton, 123, 141, 153, 164, 241, 246, 254 Barrie, J. M., 235, 299, 300, 301 "Battle of the Books, The," 75-76 "Beauchamp's Career," 312, 329 Beckford, William, 126, 135, 172- 174, 203, 276, 277 Bede, Cuthbert (Rev. Edward Brad- ley), no, 199 Behn, Mrs. Aphra, 62-67, 69, 90, 202, 211 "Belford Regis," 290 "Belinda," 208-211 Bellamy, Edward, 18 "Ben Hur," 345, 346 Bennett, Enoch A., 202, 208, 295- 296 Benson, Robert Hugh, 335-336 "Bentivolio and Urania," 18, 40, 53-58,110 "Beside the Bonnie Briar Bush," 300 "Betrothed, The," 262 Bible, The, 16, 58, 89 " ' Bickerstaff ' Papers, The," 78 Birrell, Augustine, 83 "Bivouac, "356 "Black Bookes Messenger," 24 "Black Dennis," 347 "Black Douglas, The," 138, 234 "Black Dwarf, The," 249-250 Blackmore, Richard, no, 358, 360 " Black Prophet, The, " 308 Black, William, 231, 300 "Blackwood's Magazine," 234, 300 "Bleak House," 73, 98, 269, 270, 363 "Book of Martyrs," 58 "Border Minstrelsy," 221 Borrow, George, 124 Boucicault, Dion, 306 Boyle, Roger, 40, 53 "Brambletye House," 262, 311 "Bravo of Venice, The," 202, 205 Bray, Anna E., 302-303 "Bride of Lammermoor, The," 228, 253-254, 345 Brieux, Eugene, 80 Bronte, Charlotte, 89, no, 125, 159, 185, 231,323,356 Bronte, Emily, 89, 98, 138, 163, 188, 192, 208, 232, 233, 286, 294- 295,35 T .356 Brooke, Henry, 72, no, 114, 128, 132, 141-146, 320, 362 Brooke, Mrs. Frances, 137-138, 290 Brougham, 272 Brown, C. B., 138, 201, 202 Brown, George Douglas, 235, 301 Brunton, Mary, 95, 169, 206, 237 "Building of the Ship, The," 345 Bulwer, Edward, Lord Lytton, n, 13, 18, 50, 114, 128, 136, 138, 166, 197, 231, 271, 277, 302, 311, 320, 338-346, 356, 358, 360 Bunyan, John, 43, 52, 53, 54, 56, 57, 58-62, 69, 72, 77 Burke, Edmund, 177, 308 Burney, Frances (Madame d'Ar- blay), 107, 155-166, 180, 192, 193, 237, 238, 243, 261, 282 Butler, Samuel, 18, 81-83 Byron, Lady, 284 Byron, Lord, 172, 267, 268, 271, 273, 274, 277, 283, 284, 285, 298, 339 Cable, G. W., 65 Caine, Hall, 66, 220, 231, 332, 334, 335 "Caleb Williams" ("Things As They Are"), 167, 177, 178, 195- 197, 320 Calprenede, 52 "Camilla," 160-162 Campbell, Thomas, 284 "Camp of Refuge, The," 357 Canby, H. S., 69 Canning, 267, 272 "Can You Forgive Her?" 325, 326 "Captive, The," 206 Carleton, William, 208, 307-310, 311,346,347 "Casa Braccio," 66 "Case of Richard Meynell, The," 330. 336 "Castle Dangerous," 264 "Castle of Otranto, The," 138, 141, I53,i8i "Castle Rackrent," 206, 207, 217, 320 "Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne, " 40, 113, 176, 179, 181, 189 "Castle Spectre, " 206, 273 "Casuals of the Sea, The, " 353 " Catherine, " 60 "Caxtons, The," n-13, 128, 342 Caxton, William, 1 "Cecil, "301 "Cecilia," 158-160, 162, 188 "Celestina," 175 Cervantes, 69 Index 369 Chamier, Frederick, 351 "Changed Man, and Other Tales, " 334 "Characters of Vices and Virtues, " 86 "Characters" (Overbury's), 86 "Charles O'Malley, " 356 "Charles Vernon," 323 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 8 "Cheap Repository," 235 Chesterfield, Lord, 216 Chettle, Henry, 29, 40 "Children of the Abbey, The," 95, 206-207 "Christian Examiner, The," 308 "Christian, The," 66 "Christie Johnstone, " 300 "Christmas Carol, A," 362 "Christ's Hospital Five-and-Thirty Years Ago," 122 "Chrysal,"88, 135-136 Churchill, Winston, 17 Cibber, Colley, 163 Clairmont, Jane, 282 "Clarissa Harlowe, " 90-95, 145, 339 "Clelie,"52 "Cloister and the Hearth, The," 46, 113, 221, 332-333. 358 " Cloudesley, " 202 "Coelebs in Search of a Wife," 236-237 Coleridge, S. T., 267, 268, 272, 321 "Collegians, The," 208, 306-307, 346 Collins, Wilkie, 357 Colman the Younger, 206 "Coming Race, The, "18, 50 "Concerning Humour in Comedy," 213 "Confessions of an English Opium- Eater,"2ii Congreve, William, 67-69, 74, 101, 157.213 "Coningsby," 268, 271, 312-313, 318-319, 320, 321, 330, 338 Conrad, Joseph, 35 2 -353 "Contarini Fleming," 288 Cooper, James F., 57, 65, no, 149, 35i "Corsair, The," 339 "Coryston Family, The," 330 "Cottagers of Glenburnie, The," 234-235. 298 Countess of Blessington, 285 "Count Robert of Paris, " 264 Coventry, Frank, no, 136 Craik, Dinah Mulock, 324 "Cranford," 291, 296 Crawford, Marion, 66 "Crichton,"3ii "Cricket on the Hearth, The, " 362 Crockett, S. R., 138, 202, 234, 235, 301 "Crohoore of the Billhook," 306 Croker, John Wilson, 320 Croly, George, 204, 337 "Croppy, The," 303-306 "Crotchet Castle," 272 Crowne, John, 40, 52, 53 "Cruise of the Midge, The," m, 350-351 Cumberland, Richard, 180 "Curse of Kehama, The, " 119 "Custom of the Country, The," 15 "Cyril Thornton," 227, 357 D " Damaged Goods, " 80 "Daniel Deronda," 163, 175, 284, 332 "David Copperfield, no, 114, 126, 323, 343 "David Elginbrod," 138, 300 "David Grieve, " 335 Day, Thomas, 64, 126, 141, 172 "Deerbrook," 291, 292-293, 296 "De Finibus," 132 "Definite Object, The," 363 Defoe, Daniel, 18, 41, 42, 57, 60, 62, 63, 64, 66, 69-75, 80, 88, no, 119, 149, 168, 278, 279, 280, 315, 324 , . "Delectable Historie of Forbonius and Priscera, " 33 "Delia Blanchflower, " 330 Deloney, Thomas, 43~4 6 > IJ 3. 138, 188, 232, 354 "Deloraine," 202 De Morgan, William, 57, 62, 99, 102, 138, 146, 361-362, 364-365 "Demos," 143 De Quincey, Thomas, 131, 211 "Desmond," 113, 166, 169, 175- 177. 179. 320 "Destiny, "281-282 "Devereux," 341-342, 35 6 "Diall of Princes," 18 "Diana Enamorada," 35 Dickens, Charles, 62, 72, 73, 98, 102, 106, 109, in, 112, 114, 115, 118, 136, 142, 143, 166, 176, 185, 196, 199, 202, 269, 270, 271, 278, 3?o Index Dickens, Charles — Continued 279, 280, 291, 301, 313, 315, 323, 324, 341, 343, 344, 345, 346, 347, 357, 358, 360, 361, 362-364 " Dinner at Poplar Walk, A, " 346 "Discipline, " 237 "Discovery of a World in the Moone, " 18 "Disowned," 320, 341, 356 " Disputation Between a He Conny- Catcher and a She Conny- Catcher, " 24 Disraeli, Benjamin, 62, 115, 191, 200, 204, 268, 269, 271, 288, 301, 3H-330,337-338, 341,344 Dodsley, 153 "Donal Grant," 300 "Don Sebastian," 226, 227-228 "Dora, "290 "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," 80 Dryden, John, 134 "Duke of Monmouth," 306 "Duke's Children," 325 Dumas, Alexandre, 227 Du Maurier, 231 E Earle, John, 86 Edgeworth, Maria, 64, 97, 126, 157, 164, 172, 206, 207-217, 222, 237, 243, 248, 261, 264, 282, 291, 320, 337,347 "Edward," 175 Egan, Pierce, 301 "Eleanor," 99,335 Eliot, George, 89, 159, 175, 185, 200, 204, 208, 239, 271, 279, 280, 283, 284, 292, 294, 295, 296, 327- 329, 332, 338, 358, 360 "Ellen Middleton," 330 "El Relox de Principes," 18 "Emigrants of Ahadarra, The," 308,309-310 "Emile, " 141 "Emilie de Coulanges," 211, 212- 213 "Emily Montague," 137 "Emma," 240, 243 "Emmeline, " 175, 180, 189 "Emmeline" (Brunton's), 237 "Emmera, or the Fair American," 64, 147-148, 150, 188 " Endymion, " 330 "English Bards and Scotch Re- viewers, " 267 ''English Rogue, The, " 43, 52 "Ennui, " 211, 213 "Entail, The," 297, 298 " Epipsychidion, " 284 "Erewhon," 18, 81 "Erewhon Revisited," 81-82 "Ernest Maltravers," 320, 342- 343 "Esmond," 80, 342, 358-360 "Ethel Churchill," 98,230, 342, 355 "Ethelinde, " 175 " Eugene Aram, " 311, 342 "Euphemia, " 40, 64, 123-124, 189 "Euphues, " 14, 18-23, 141 "Euphues and his England," 23 "Eustace Diamonds, The," 114 "Evelina," 155-158, 159, 162, 192 "Excursion," 137 "Exiles, The," 153 Ezekiel, 16, 51 'Fair God, The," 345 ' Fair Jilt, The, " 65-66, 67, 90 ' Fair Maid of Perth, The, " 263 'Fair Syrian, The," 167 'Falkland," 302, 338-339 'Falkner, " 284 'Fall of the House of Usher, The," 204 'Far Country, A," 17 'Fardorougha the Miser, " 208, 308 Farnol, Jeffery, 363 'Fatal Revenge, The," 228 'Father and Daughter," 195, 218- 219 'Father Butler," 308, 346 'Father Connell," 306 'Felix Holt," 327-329 'Female Quixote, The," 107, 122- 123 "Fenwick's Career," 335 Ferrier, Susan E., 114, 172, 231, 261, 277-282 Fielding, Henry, 23, 28, 29, 40, 43, 58, 62, 67, 72, 76, 79, 80, 81, 99- 107, 108, 109, in, 115, 119, 122, 132, 139, 140, 146, 155, 156, 166, 180, 181, 216, 237, 245, 248, 271, 339-362 Fielding, Sarah, 107-109 "Finish to the Adventures of Tom, Jerry, and Logic," 301 "First Men in the Moon," 18, 83- 85 Fitzgerald, Lord Edward, 224 "Fleetwood," 72, no, 198-200 Index 371 Fletcher, John, 69 "Florence Macarthy, " 222, 320 " Food of the Gods, The, " 83 "Foolpf Quality, The," no, 141- 146,320,362 Ford, Emanuel, 40, 52 " Foresters, The, " 300 "Forsaken Merman, The," 332 "Fortunesof Nigel, The, " 258, 259- 260,357 Fouque, 257 Foxe, 58 "Franceses Carrara," 355 "Frankenstein," 138,233, 267,282, 283 "Franklin, A," 87 "Frank Mildmay," 346 "Fraser's Magazine, " 106 Freeman, Mrs. Mary Wilkins, 296 " Fruit of the Tree, The, " 15 Fullerton, Lady G., 330 "Gadfly, The," 333 Galignani, 226 Gait, John, 234, 297-298, 300 "Gareth and Lynette, " 37 Garrick, 235 Gaskell, Mrs., 218, 291, 292, 293- 294,296,322-323,324 "Gay Lord Quex, The," 163 " Gentlecraf t, " 43 "Ghosts, "80 Gifford, 265, 267, 360 "Gilbert Gurney, " 269 Gissing, George, 143 "Gladiators, The, "358 Gladstone, W. E., 327 Glascock, W.N. ,351 Gleig.G. R.,227, 311 " Glenarvon, " 273-274 Godwin, Bishop Francis, 18 Godwin, William, 62, 72, no, 166, 177. 185, 195-203, 232, 282, 315, 320,324 Goethe, 233, 260 Goldsmith, Oliver, 72, in, 128, 132, 139-140, 290, 297 "Good-Natuied Man, The," 139 Gore, Mrs. Catherine, 301-302 "Grace Abounding, " 58 "Graham Hamilton," 274-275 "Grandissimes, The," 65 " Grateful Negro, The, " 64, 172,211 Graves, Richard, 116, 124, 150-153, 181,332 "Great Expectations," 98, 361, 363 Greene, Robert, II, 23-33, 34, 35, 39. 43, 52 Griffin, Gerald, 208, 306-307, 310, 346,347 "Groatsworth of Wit, 24, 29-30 "Gryll Grange," 273 Guevara, 18 "Gulliver's Travels," 17, 18, 46, 78-85,119 "Guy Fawkes," 311 "Guy Mannering, " 208, 248-249, 264 "Gwydonius, " 24 H "Hajji Baba, " 262, 287-288 "Hajji Baba in England," 346, 347 Hall, Bishop Joseph, 86 Hall, Mrs. S. C. (Anna Maria Fielding), 290, 346 Hamilton, Mrs. Elizabeth, 234-235, 298 Hamilton, Thomas, 227, 357 "Hamlet, "253 "Hand and Word, The," 306 "Handy Andy, " 208 Hannay, James, 351 "Harbor, The," 17 "Hard Cash," 188, 232, 324 " Hard Times, " 324, 363 Hardy, Thomas, 61, 192, 220, 334, 335 "Harold," 342, 356 " Harriet Stuart, " 123 Harrington, James, 18, 46 Harrison, Mrs., 40, 99, 202 "Harry Lorrequer, " 208 "Haunted and the Haunters, The," 342 Hawkesworth, John, 135, 136-137 Hawkins, Anthony Hope, 345 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 136, 174, 201,218,237,252 Haywood, Mrs. Eliza, 18, 88, 89, 155 "Headlong Hall," 267, 273 Head, Richard, 43, 52 "Heart of Midlothian, The," 183, 231, 251-252 "Heir of Redclyffe,"33i "Helbeckof Bannisdale, " 335 "Helen," 217 Henley, Samuel, 172 Henley, William Ernest, 298 "Henrietta," 123 372 Index "Henry," 180 "Hereward the Wake," 357, 358 "Hermsprong; or, Man As He Is Not," 167 "Heroine, The," 123, 141, 241, 246, 254 'Hints for an Essay on Conversa- tion," 77 "History of Miss Betsy Thought- less, The, " 155 Hoadley, 90 Holcroft, Thomas, 124, 149, 166, 320 Holland, Lady, 274 "Holy War, The," 56, 57, 58 Hookham, 181 Hook, Theodore, 268-270, 301 , 346 Hope, Thomas, 42, 175, 262, 277, 285-288 "Hour and the Man, The, " 65, 172, 221,313,357 "House with the Green Shutters, The," 235,301 Howard, John, 196 Hughes, Thomas, no, 199 " Hugh Trevor, " 166 Hugo, Victor, 145, 315 "Humphry Clinker, " 87, 112, 114- 118, 156,241,297 "Hungarian Brothers, The," 226- 227 Hunt, Leigh, 119, 270-271 "Hypatia," 33<>-33i, 35« T "Ibrahim," 52 Ibsen, Henrik, 80 "Idalia, "89 " Ida of Athens, " 222 " Idylls of the King, "10 Imlay, Fanny, 282 Inchbald, Mrs. Elizabeth, 89, 155, 192-195.218,348 "Incognita," 67-69, 74 Ingelo, Nathaniel, 18, 40, 53-58, 1 10 " Inheritance, " 280-281 " Initiation, " 335-336 " Invasion, The, " 306, 346 Irving, Washington, 76, 114, 185, 290 "Island of Doctor Mdreau," 83 "Isle of Pines," 18 "Italian, The," 44, 66, 159, 182, 186-188, 204, 354 "It is Never Too Late to Mend," 324 "It Never Can Happen Again," 102 "Ivanhoe," 234, 254, 255-256, 262, 263, 265, 337, 345, 360 J "Jack Hatch," 290 " Jack of Newbury, " 43 "Jack Sheppard, "311 "Jack the Shrimp, " 347 James I of England, 126 James, G. P. R., 346, 356 James, Henry, 23 "James Wallace," 167 "Jane Eyre," 159, 185, 188, 200 Jeffrey, Lord, 300 "Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy, " 89 Jerrold, Douglas, 126 "John Buncle," 124-127, 181, 189 "John Halifax, Gentleman," 324 "John Inglesant, Gentleman," 333- 334 Johnson, Dr. Samuel, 79, 88, 133- 135-235 Johnstone, Charles, 88, 115-136 "Jonathan Jefferson WhiJaw, "313 "Jonathan Wild," 102, 107 Jones, Henry A., 195, 310 Jonson, Ben, 99, 101 "Jorrocks's Jaunts and Jollities," 347 "Joseph Andrews," 76, 99-102, 107, 109 "Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon," 106 "Journal to Stella," 80 "Journey from This World to the Next, A," 79, 181 " Jude the Obscure, " 61 "Julia de Roubigne, " 148-149 "Julia Mandeville," 137-138 "Juliet Grenville, " 146 Juvenal, 342 Keats, 267, 356 Keble, 33 1 " Kenilworth, " 169, 170, 171, 258- 259 "Kidnapped," 264, 301, 358 Kingsley, Charles, 259, 315, 321, 330-331, 351-352, 357, 358, 360 Kipling, Rudyard, 351 "Kipps," 83, 212 Kirkman, Francis, 43, 52 Index 373 "Knickerbocker's History of New- York, "76 "Knight of St. John," 226 Kotzebue, 206 L La Bruyere, 86, 87 "Lady's Magazine, The," 288 Lamb, Charles, 1 19, 126, 127, 364 Lamb, Lady Caroline, 192, 204, 271,272,273-277,337 "Lancelot and Elaine," 10 " Land of the Spirit, The, " 194 Landon, Letitia E. (Mrs. Maclean), 44, 66, 98, 163, 188, 190, 191 , 204, 230, 34i. 342, 346, 353-356 Landor, Walter Savage, 126 "Last Chronicle of Barset, The," 3 2 5 . m „ "Last Days of Pompeii, The, 342, 345, 346, 356 "Last Man, The," 271, 283-284 "Last Man, The " (Campbell's), 284 " Last of the Barons, The, " 342, 356 " Last of the Line, The, " 347 " La Vendue, 358 "Lavengro, " 124 Lawrence, George A., 286 " Lawrie Todd, " 297 Lazarus, Emma, 345 Lee, Sophia, 97, 164, 169-172, 221 " Legend of Montrose, The, " 254- 255 Leland, Thomas, 171 Lennox, Mrs. Charlotte, 40, 64, 107, 122-124, 153, 189, 241 Le Sage, 339 "Les Caracteres, " 86 "Les Contes Moraux," 216 "Les Miserables, " 146 "Letters, "216 Lever, Charles J., 208,311,347,356 Lewis, Matthew, 66, 138, 175, 203- 206, 207, 273, 277, 337, 34° "Life and Death of Mr. Badman," 43,58-61 "Life and Death of William Long- beard, "33 "Life of Colonel Jack, The," 73~75 " Life in London, " 301 " Lights and Shadows of Irish Life, " 290 "Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life," 300 Litchfield, Mrs., 206 "Little Dorrit," 324 "Little Minister, The," 299 Lockhart, J. G., 1 10, 199, 298-299 Lodge, Thomas, 23, 31-35. 39 "Lodore," 271, 284-285 Longfellow, H. W., 345 "Longsword,"i7l " Looking Backward, " 18 "Lord Jim, "352-353 "Lorna Doone, " no, 35S "Lothair, " 330 "Lough Derg Pilgrim," 308, 346 Lover, Samuel, 208, 311, 347 "Lucky Mistake, The," 65, 66, 69, 202 "Lydia, "64 Lyly, John, 13, 18-23, 24, 33, 14 1 . 257 M "Mabel O'Neil's Curse," 347~34 8 Macaulay, T. B., 215 "Macbeth," 106 Macdonald, George, 9, 138, 235, 300,333 Macfarlane, Charles, 357 Mackensie, George, 40, 53 Mackenzie, Henry, 64, 97, 123, 131, 146, 148-150, 281, 339, 340, 344 " Madame deFleury," 211, 213-214 Maginn, William, 106 "Maid Marian," 265-266 "Malcolm, "300 "Malmistic,"346 Malory, Sir Thomas, 1-13, 26, 39, 40,330 "Mamillia,"24 "Man As He Is," 167 " Mandeville, " no, 200-202 " Man in the Moone, The," 18 Manley, Mrs. Mary, 18, 88, 89 Manners, Lord John, 271 "Man of Feeling," 97, 148, 149 " Man of the World, The, " 64, 149- 150,339 "Mansfield Park," 239, 240 "Mansie Wauch, " 300 "Manufacturers, The," 211 " Marcella, " 329 "Marchioness of Brinvilliers, The," 357 "Marchmont, ' 175 " Margaret Maitland, " 300 "Margarite of America," 33 Marlowe, Christopher, 30 Marmontel, 216 374 Index "Marquis of Lossie," 300 "Marriage" (Ferrier's), 114, 231, 278-280 "Marriage of William Ashe, The," 192,272 "Marriage" (Wells's), 17 Marryat, Frederick, 57, 64, in, 346,351 "Martin Chuzzlewit, " 280 Martineau, Harriet, 65, 172, 221, 291, 292-293, 294, 296, 313, 357 Massey, Gerald, 271, 328, 329 "Master of Ballantrae, The," 93, 264,301 "Mating of Lydia, The, " 322, 330 Maturin, C. R., 138, 184, 198, 204, 228-234, 253, 282, 332, 338 Maturin the Younger, 345 Maxse, Admiral, 272 "Maxwell, "346 Maxwell, W. H., 356 McFee, William, 353 Melbourne, Lord, 272, 273, 277 Meldrum, D. S., 300 "Melincourt," 267, 268 "Melmoth," 138, 204, 230, 231- 234, 282, 338 Melville, Lewis, 173 "Memoirs of a Certain Island Adjacent to Utopia, " 18 "Memoirs of an Umbrella," 136 " Menaphon, " 24, 35 Meredith, George, 220, 244, 245, 272,299,312,329 "Microcosmographie," 86 "Middlemarch," 279-280, 292, 295, 296 "Midshipman Easy," 57, 64 Milbanke, Miss, 274 "Milesian Chief, The, " 228-230 "Mill on the Floss, The, " 294, 296 Milton, John, 93, 137 "Misfortunes of Elphin, The," 272 "Missionary, The," 222 Mitford, Mary Russell, 138, 288- 296, 347 "Modern Antiques," 289-290 "Modern Utopia, A," 17, 18 Moir, D. M., 300 "Moll Flanders," 71-72 "Monastery, The," 22, 138, 154, 241, 248, 254, 256-258, 277 "Monk, The," 66, 138, 202, 203- 206, 277, 337 "Montalbert," 175 Montemayor, George de, 35 "Monthly Magazine," 346 Monypenny, W. F., 321 Moore, Dr. John, 66, 174-175, 247, 339 "Moorland Cottage," 291, 293- 294, 296 " Mordaunt," 175 More, Mrs. Hannah, 235-237 More, Sir Thomas, 14-18, 46, 50, 51, 73, 74 Morier, James, 42, 262, 277, 287- 288, 346, 347 Morris, William, 18 "Morte Darthur, " 1-13, 40, 330 "Mortimer, "340 "Mount Henneth," 167 "Mourning Garment," 24 "Mr. Verdant Green," no, 199 Munday, 23 "Murad the Unlucky, " 211 "My Novel," 342 "My School-fellows, " 290 "Mysteries of Udolpho, The," 97, x 3 8 » ^ll* l82 , 185-186, 202, 241 " Mysterious Island, The, " 353 N Nash, Thomas, 41-43, 52, 58, 66, 74 . , Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, 290 "Nature and Art," 193-195, 218, 348 "Never Too Late," 24, 27-29, 30, 35 Neville, Henry, 18 "New Atalantis, The," 18 "New Atlantis," 18, 46-51, 52, 119,337 " New Grub Street, " 143 Newman, 331 "News from Nowhere," 18 "New Sporting Magazine," 346- 347 "Newton Forster, " 346 "Nicholas Nickleby, " 313, 362 "Nigger of the Narcissus, The," 352 "Nightmare Abbey, " 100, 130,231, 266, 268 North, 18 " North and South, " 323 "Northanger Abbey," 123, 186, 231, 238, 240-241 "Novice of St. Dominick," 222 "Nowlans, The," 306 Index 375 "O'Briens and the O'Flahertys, The," 222, 224-226, 306, 320, 347 "Oceana," 18, 46 0'Connell,305 " Ode to a Skylark, " 284 "0'Donnell,"222 "Odyssey, The," 215 "O'Hara Tales, The," 208, 303, 3 11 " Old Curiosity Shop," 343, 362 "Old English Baron, The" (Cham- pion of Virtue), 1 53-154. 221 "Old London Bridge," 357 "Old Manor House," 64, 175, 178- 179,211 "Old Mortality," 234, 250-251, 263, 298, 299, 357 "Old Wives' Tale, The," 296 Oliphant, Mrs. Margaret, 300, 333, 336-337 . "Oliver Twist, 313 "On a Peal of Bells," 131 Opie, Mrs. Amelia, 163, 195, 214, 218-220,237 " Ormond, " 2 16-2 1 7 "Ornatus and Artesia," 52 "Oroonoko, " 63-65, 211 "Our Mutual Friend, " 363 " Our Village, " 138, 288-296, 347 "Outcast, The," 194 Overbury, Sir Thomas, 86, 87 Owenson, Sydney (Lady Morgan), 164, 188, 208, 217, 222-226, 248, 306, 320, 347 Page, Thomas Nelson, 194 Paltock, Robert, 18, 1 19-122 "Pamela," 89-90, 100 "Pandion and Amphigeneia," 40, 52,53 "Pandosto,"24, 25,31-33,34,35 Pardoe, Julia, 288 Parker, Gilbert, 93, 264 "Parismus,"40 " Parra Sasthia, " 308 " Parthenissa, " 40, 53 "Pastor's Fireside, The," 221 "Patronage," 217, 320 "Paul Clifford," 311, 3 2 °, 342 Peacock, Thomas Love, 81, 100, 115. 130, 231, 265-273, 277, 312 "Peep o' Day, The," 306 "Pelham," 271, 339~34i, 346 "Pendennis," 106, 107, 270 "Perkin Warbcck," 283 "Perimedes, the Blacksmith," 24 "Persuasion," 231, 238, 240, 242- 243,245 "Peter Wilkins," 18, 1 19-122 "Petite Pallace of Pettie his Pleasure," 18 Pettie, George, 18 " Peveril of the Peak, " 258, 260, 263 " Phantastes, " 9 " Philander and Chloe," 88 "Phil Fogarty," 311 Phillpotts, Eden, 334~335 "Philomela, "24 "Phineas Finn," 325 "Phineas Redux," 325 Phiz (Browne), 136 "Pickwick Papers," 301, 347 "Piers Plainnes Seaven Yeres Pren- tiship, " 40 "Pilgrim's Progress," 52, 53, 54, 56, 58, 61-62, 63, 70 "Pilot, The," no Pinero, A. W., 163 "Pirate, The," no, 259 " Pit and the Pendulum, The, " 204, 232 Pitt, 305 Plato, 16, 51 Poe, Edgar A., 186, 204, 232 "Political Justice," 196, 197 "Political Quixote, The," 123 Pollard, A. W., 10 " Pompey the Little, " no, 136 Poole, Ernest, 17 Porter, Anna, 220, 226-228, 232, 288 Porter, Jane, 220-222, 228 "Practical Piety," 236 "Pride and Prejudice," 21, 238, 239-240, 244-245 "Prime Minister, The, 325-327, 332 " Prisoner of Zenda, The, 345 "Protestant, The," 302 "Provencal Tale, The," 185-186 "Provoked Husband, The," 163 "Provost, The," 297 Pusey, 330, 331 . , "Put Yourself in his Place, 324 Q "Quarterly Review," 243, 264, 265, 267 "Quentin Durward," 260-261 376 Ind ex R Radcliffe, Mrs. Ann, 40, 44, 66, 97, 113, 116, 138, 153, 157, 159, 161, 164, 175, 176, 178, 179, 181-191, 197, 202, 203, 204, 207, 225, 234, 238, 241, 247, 248, 264, 340, 353, 354, 355, 356 "Rapparee, The," 347 "Rasselas," 79, 88, I33~i35. *7- Reade, Charles, 46, 113, 188, 221, 231, 232, 300, 302, 324, 332-333, 358,360 "Reading Abbey," 357 "Recess, The," 97, 169-172, 221 Redgauntlct, 249, 262 Reeve, Clara, 153-154, 221 "Reginald Dal ton," no, 199 "Republic, The," 16 "Research Magnificent, The, " 83 Richardson, Samuel, 11, 62, 66, 86, 88, 89-99, 103, 107, 112, 119, 130, 139. I45» 155, 169, 180, 193, 206, 216, 237, 239, 267, 281, 289, 330, 339, 340, 344 "Richelieu" (G. P. R. James's), 346,356 "Rienzi,"356 "Ringan Gilhaize, " 297, 298 "Road to Ruin, The, " 166 "Robert Elsmere, " 329, 335, 336 "Robert Falconer," 300 Robinson, Crabbe, 126 "Robinson Crusoe," 18, 69-70, 119 Robinson, Emma, 357 "RobRo}', "208,231,252-253,258 Robynson, Ralph, 14 Roche, Regina M., 95, 206-207 "Roderick Random," 109-111, 115, "8,348,351 Rodwell, G. H., 136, 357 "Romance and Reality," 44, 66, 98, 163, 188, 190, 204, 346, 353- 356 "Romance of the Forest, The," 182, 183-185, 188, 189 "Romance cf the Harem," 288 "Romany Rye," 124 "Romeo and Juliet, " 253 Romilly, 320 Romney, 272 "Romola,"332, 358 "Rookwood, "311 "Rory O'More, " 208 " Rosalynde, " 32-35 Rostand, Edmond, 134 Rothschild, Baron A. de, 271 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 141, 166, 172, 196 Ruskin, John, 249 Russell, Lord John, 267 S "St. Clair," 222 "St. Leon," 197-198, 282 St. Pierre, 210 "St. Ronan's Well," 261 Saintsbury, 180, 361 "Salathiel,"337 "Salem Chapel," 336-337 "Sandford and Merton," 64, 141, 172 Sannazaro, Jacopo, 35 "Sayings and Doings," 301 "Scarlet Letter, The," 174 "Scenes of Clerical Life, " 332 " Scholemaster, The, " 18 "School for Widows, "153 Schopenhauer, 80 "Scottish Chiefs," 221, 228 Scott, Michael, 57, III, 118, 346, 348-351 Scott, Sir Walter, 8, 21, 22,97, IIO > 119, 125, 138, 153, 154, 169, 170, 172, 183, 184, 195, 201, 202, 204, 208, 217, 221, 228, 229, 231, 234, 241, 243, 246-265, 272, 277, 281, 282, 297, 298, 301, 302, 320, 337, 339, 342, 344, 345, 356, 357, 358-360,361 Scudery, Madeleine de, 52, 122 " Seats of the Mighty, " 93, 264 "Self-Control," 95, 169, 206, 237 Senior, Henry, 323 "Sense and Sensibility," 238-239, 240 "Sentimental Journey, " 127, 131 Shakespeare, William, 8, 24, 33, 34, 35,89 Shaw, G. Bernard, 80, 83 Shebbeare,64 Shelley, Harriet, 284 Shelley, Mrs. Mary Wollstonecraft, 138, 198, 231, 233, 267, 282-285 Shelley, Percy B., 100, 130, 201, 267, 268, 271, 283-284 Sheridan, Mrs. Frances, 136 "She Stoops to Conquer," 139 "Shirley, "323 Shorthouse, J. H., 333~334 "Sicilian Tale, A," 113, 1 81-183 Sidney, Sir Philip, 11, 18, 23, 35- 41, 52, 53, 122 Index 377 "Silas Marner, " 296 " Silver Skull, The, " 202 "Simple Story, A," 89, 155, 192- 193.195 Sinclair, May, 356 " Sir Andrew Wylie, " 297 "Sir Charles Grandison," 66, 89, 95-99,216,289,330 " Sir Edward Seaward's Narrative, " 222 "Sir George Tressady, " 329 " Sir Gibbie, " 300 " Sir John Chiverton, "311 " Sketch Book, The, " 186 " Sketches by Boz, " 291 " Sketches of Irish Character, " 290, 346,347-348 Smith, Albert, 357 Smith, Horace, 262, 311 Smith, Mrs. Charlotte, 64, 113, 149, 166, 169, 175-180, 189, 211, 261,289,290, 320 Smith, Sydney, 285, 331 Smollett, Tobias, 46, 57, 72, 80, 81,87,91, 109-118, 119, 126, 132, 138, 139, 152, 156, 166, 254, 261, 27i,297»339,348»35i "Sophia," 123 Southey, Robert, 119, 267, 268, 272 "Spectator, The," 86-88 "Spectre Bridegroom, The," 186 " Spiritual Quixote, The," 116, 150- 153, 181,332 "Steamboat, The," 297 Steele, Richard, 86-88, 130, 290 Sterne, Laurence, 126, 127-132, 139, 140, 148, 161, 340, 342, 344 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 41, 42, 80, 93, in, 202, 259, 264, 301, 349,351,358,359-360 "Stories of Waterloo," 356 "Story of Unnion and Valentine, The," 88 _ Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 65, 211, 221 "Stranger, The, " 206 " Strange Story, A," 342 " Subaltern, The, " 227, 31 1 Sue, Eugene, 187, 234 " Suil Dhuv, the Coiner, " 306 "Surgeon's Daughter, The," 263 Surtces^ Robert Smith, 346-347 "Suspicious Husband, The," 90 Swift, Jonathan, 17, 18, 46, 51, 62, 75-85,86,88,119 "Sybil," 200, 315-320, 321, 322, 328 "Talba, The," 302 "Tale of a Tub, A," 76-78, 83, 130 " Tale of Expiation, A, " 300 " Tale of Gamelyn, " 34 " Tale of Two Cities, " 176,358 " Tales of Ireland, " 308 "Talcs of My Neighborhood," 306 "Tales of the Munster Festivals, The," 208, 306 "Talisman, The," 262 " Talis Qualis," 306 "Tancred," 288, 330 "Tatler, The, " 86, 87, 88, 130, 136, 181 Taylor, John, 136 Tennyson, Alfred, 10, 37, 173, 290, 291 Thackeray, William M., 8, 13, 23, 43, 60, 72, 80, 81 , 87, 90, 106, 107, 114, 115, 131, 132, 145, 212, 221, 254, 261, 270, 287, 302, 311, 342, 344,358-36o,36i " Thaddeus of Warsaw, " 220 "Theresa Marchmont," 301 "Thomas of Reading," 43-46, 138, 188,354 Thompson, Francis J., 307 "Thoughts on the Revolution," 177 "Three Brothers, The," 334-335 "Three Sisters, The, " 356 "Tithe Proctor, The," 308, 310 "Tom a Lincolne, " 66, 67 "Tom Brown at Oxford," 199 "Tom Brown's School Days," no, 199 "Tom Burke of Ours, " 357 "Tom Cordery," 289 "Tom Cringle's Log," ill, 118, 346, 348-350, 353 "Tom Jones," 67, 102, 103-104, 107, 109, 156, 237 "Tower Hill," 311 "Towerof London, The," 311 "Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry," 208, 308, 346 "Treasure Island," in, 259, 349, 351 "Trelawny of Trelawne, " 302-303 " Trials of Margaret Lindsay, The, " 300 "Tristram Shandy," 126, 127-132, 133 Trollope, Anthony, 114, 325-327, 331-332,358 37* Index Trollope, Mrs. Frances, 62, 72, 199, 211, 313-315, 3iS, 321, 330 Twain, Mark, 61 " Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, "353 "Two Mentors, The," 153 " Two Races of Men, The, " 127 U "Unclassed," 143 "Uncle Tom's Cabin," 221 "Undine, "257 "Unfortunate Traveller, The," 41- 43,52 "Upon the Death of My Father,' 88 "Urania," 40, 52 "Utopia," 14-18, 46 V "Valentine McClutchy," 308, 309 " Valentine's Eve, " 163 "Valerius, "298 "Valperga,"283 Vanbrugh, 163 "Vathek," 135, 172-174, 277 "Venetia,"27I Verne, Jules, 353 "Vicar of Wakefield; The," in, 139-140, 150 "Vicar of Wrexhill, The," 330 "Villette," 110,231 " Virginians, The, " 358 "Vision of Mirza, The," 88, 135 "Vivian Grey," 301, 311-312, 338, .339,341 . Viviani, Emilia, 284 "Voyage to Laputa, A," 46, 51, 119 "Voyage to Lilliput," 84 Voynich, Mrs., 333 W Wallace, General Lew, 345 - 34 6 Walpole, Horace, 138, 141, 153, 181 "Wanderer, The," 157, 162-166 "Wandering Jew, The," 234 "Wanderings of Warwick, " 175 "Warden, The, "325, 331 Ward, Mrs. Humphry, 98, 192, 220, 272, 312, 313, 322, 329-330, 335- 336,337 Watson, Dr. John, 235, 300 "Waverley," 208, 237, 246-248, 263, 264 "Way of All Flesh, The," 82-83 Wells, H. G., 17, 18, 51, 81, 83-85, 212 "Westward Ho! " 259, 351-352, 35^ Wharton, Mrs. Edith, 15 "When Ghost Meets Ghost," 361- 362 "When Valmond Came to Pontiac, " 264 "White Doe of Rylstone," 184 " Whitef riars, " 357 White, Gilbert, 290 Whyte-Melville, George, 358 "Wieland, " 138, 201 Wilberforce,3i3 Wilde, Oscar, 312 "Wild Irish Boy, The," 228 "Wild Irish Girl, The," 164, 188, 208,222-224 "Wilhelm Meister, " 260 Wilkins, Bishop John, 18 "Willy Reilly, " 208, 308, 310 Wilson, John, ("Christopher North"), 234,300 "Windsor Castle," 311 "Winter's Tale, The," 35 Wither, George, 1 26 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 198, 220, 282 "Women, " 230, 231, 332 " Woodlanders, The, " 334 "Woodstock," 262-263 Wordsworth, William, 184, 195, 218, 267, 272, 290 Wroth, Lady Mary, 40, 52 "Wuthering Heights," 138, 163, 188, 192, 208, 232, 233, 294-295 y "Yeast," 321-322 Yonge, Charlotte, 331 "Zanoni," 138, 342 "Zelauto," 23 "Zeluco," 66, 174-175, 202, 339 "Zicci,"342 "Zohrab the Hostage," 288, 346, 347 14 DAY USE RETURN TO DESK FROM WHICH BORROWED LOAN DEPT. This book is due on the last date stamped below, or on the date to which renewed. Renewed books are subject to immediate recall. MAY 2 2 1368 18 *E^ ^„3- m\& 68^^ LD 21A-10m-l,'68 (H7452sl0)476B General Library University of California Berkeley S 1 195! Or OK \J\JS w» IN STACKS LD 21-100m-12 I '46(A2012sl6)412 JAN 2 5 1963 JR.Y elow. erdue. TOB CD REC'D LD :T7 '64-4 PM fk*A*~*4 R£C'D LD APR 2 7 '65 -2 PM YD 47708 OCT 13 1962 LD 9-20m-4,'62 (0789984) 4185 86302 I i •** 5M UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY «>•' J tStttD