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contrived with a sincere but not too subtle art, so as to throw into relief the nature of this terrible and oppressive but, nevertheless, majestic woman. In all the unhappiness that she causes, she is never altogether hateful; but, at the close, the author refrains from exaggerating her punishment. The book shows a fitness and justice that make it comparable to the work of Jane Austen, though it is quite unlike that work in its gravity, its didactic tone and its use of incident.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon, the poet, scarcely survives now as a novelist, although Ethel Churchill, her last and best attempt in fiction (1837), may take its place among the second-rate novels of the day. So, too, may the Granby (1826) of Thomas Henry Lister. Lister was a rather ladylike novelist, which, perhaps, accounts for the erroneous attribution to him of Mrs Cradock's novel, Hulse House. But there is good work in Granby, with its fine, manly hero and its baseborn, reckless, but not unattractive villain. Lister moves easily among titles of nobility, and, in the course of this story, presents us with an aristocratic coxcomb whom it is difficult not to regard as a perverted Darcy. Lister is clever at smart conversation, which seems to have been much valued in its own day, however tiresome it may appear now; and he succeeds in conveying an impression of a real world, inhabited by real people. He has his interest, therefore, for the student of external manners.

Meanwhile, the novel of terror, of which Jane Austen had made fun in Northanger Abbey, continued to flourish, though in a modified form; and women were prominent among those who wrote this kind of fiction. It was a woman, and a woman of a later period in its history, who produced the finest work of genius to be found in this class of writings, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818).

Its author, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, has left on record the circumstances of its production. With her husband, Byron and Polidori, she occupied part of a wet summer in Switzerland in reading volumes of ghost stories translated from German into French. Byron suggested that each member of the party should write a ghost story. Mary Shelley waited long for an idea. Conversations between Shelley and Byron about the experiments of Darwin and the principle of life at length suggested to her the subject of Frankenstein.

At first I thought but of a few pages or of a short tale; but Shelley urged me to develop the idea at greater length. I certainly did not owe the

suggestion of one incident, nor scarcely of one train of feeling, to my husband, and yet but for his incitement it would never have taken the form in which it was presented to the world. From this declaration I must except the preface. As far as I can recollect, it was entirely written by him.

It has been held, nevertheless, that Mary Shelley, unaided, was incapable of writing so fine a story. 'Nothing,' wrote Richard Garnett, 'but an absolute magnetising of her brain by Shelley's can account for her having risen so far above her usual self as in Frankenstein.' Comparison of Frankenstein with a later work by Mary Shelley, The Last Man (1826), may, perhaps, temper that judgment. The Last Man is a much longer work than Frankenstein. It describes the destruction, spread over many years, of the entire human race, all but one man, by an epidemic disease. The book shows many signs of effort and labour. The imaginative faculty often runs wild, and often flags. The social and political foresight displayed is but feeble. The work is unequal and extravagant. Yet, in The Last Man, there are indubitable traces of the power that created Frankenstein; and, if Mary Shelley, working in unhappy days at a task too comprehensive for her strength, could produce such a book as The Last Man, there is no reason for doubting her capacity, while in stimulating society and amid inspiring conversation, to reach the imaginative height of Frankenstein. To a modern reader, the introductory part, which relates to the Englishmen who met Frankenstein in the Polar seas, seems too long and elaborate; when the story becomes confined to Frankenstein and the monster that he created, the form is as pure as the matter is engrossing. And, unlike most tales of terror, Frankenstein is entirely free from anything absurd. The intellectual, no less than the emotional, level is maintained throughout. In Mary Shelley's other principal novels, Valperga (1823), a romance of medieval Italy, to which her father Godwin gave some finishing touches, and Lodore (1835), a partly autobiographical story, there is clear evidence of a strong imagination and no little power of emotional writing, though both lack sustained mastery.

Frankenstein is founded upon scientific research, as if the time had come when it was necessary to give some rational basis to the terror which novel-readers had been content to accept for its own sake. A later writer, Catherine Crowe, went further than Mary Shelley in this direction. Mrs Crowe not only delighted in ghosts and similar occasions of terror; in The Night Side of Nature (1848), she attempted to find a scientific, or, as we should now call

it, a 'psychic' explanation of such things; and the result is an engaging volume of mingled story and speculation. In her two novels, Adventures of Susan Hopley; or Circumstantial Evidence (1841) and The Story of Lilly Dawson (1847), the horrors owe but little to the supernatural. Robberies, murders and abductions are the chief ingredients. Mrs Crowe had some power of imagination, or, rather, perhaps, of ingenuity in spinning tales of crime. But her work is very ragged. She introduces so many characters and so many unrelated episodes, that any skill which she may show in weaving them together at the close of the book comes too late to console the still bewildered reader.

Though the fiction of George Croly deals but little with the supernatural, it has, on one side, a distinct affinity with the novel of terror. The principal aim of his chief novel, Salathiel (1829), is to overwhelm the reader with monstrous visions of terror and dismay. The theme of the story is the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans under Titus; and here, as in Marston (1846), a romance of the French revolution and the subsequent European warfare, Croly touches, on another side, the historical novelists. But he has not more affinity with Scott than with Mrs Radcliffe. His models are two: Byron, from whom he takes the character of his heroes, persons who do terrific deeds and seldom cease complaining of their dark and tragic fate; and De Quincey, on whom he modelled his prose. Often turgid, often extravagant, often vulgar in its display, like that of his exemplar, Croly's prose not seldom succeeds in impressing the reader by its weight and volume; and he had a large vision of his subject. A dash of humour might have made him a great novelist. Yet it will remain strange that anyone writing historical romances in the heyday of the fame of Walter Scott could write so wholly unlike Scott as did Croly. The difference between them was due partly to a sturdy and pugnacious independence in Croly of which there is much further evidence in his life and writings.

Another cause must be sought for the difference between Scott and George Payne Rainsford James. As a historical novelist, James was a professed follower of Scott. In the preface to the third edition of his first novel, Richelieu (1829), James relates how he sent the MS to Scott, who, after keeping it for some months, returned it with a letter full of kindness and encouragement. Without a particle of Scott's genius, James was a quick, patient, indefatigable worker. He poured forth historical novel after historical novel, all conscientiously accurate in historical

fact, all dressed in well-invented incident, all diffuse and pompous in style, and all lifeless, humourless and characterless. James fell an easy victim to Thackeray's gift for parody; but the modern reader will wonder why Thackeray took the trouble to parody James, unless it were that the task was agreeably easy and that James's popularity was worth a shaft of ridicule.

There is far more life and spirit about another author of fiction half-historical, half-terrific, who also owed not a little to the encouragement of Scott. William Harrison Ainsworth has kept some of his popularity, while that of James has faded, because Ainsworth, as little able as was James to unite history with the study of character, had a vigorous imagination and wrote with gusto. Rookwood (1834), Jack Sheppard (1839), The Tower of London (1840), Guy Fawkes (1841), Old St Paul's (1841), The Lancashire Witches (1848), The South Sea Bubble (1868): these and others in a very long list of romances can still delight many grown men as well as boys, thanks to their energetic movement and their vivid though rough style of

narration.

The coming of Scott did not suffice to divert certain older channels of fiction that were still, if feebly, flowing. And, in the work of Frederick Marryat, a stream that had sprung from Smollett received a sudden access of volume and power. At one time, it was customary to regard captain Marryat as a genial amateur, a sea-captain who wrote sea-stories for boys. The fact that, from 1806 to 1830, Marryat served actively and ably in the navy did not prevent him from being a novelist of very near the first rank. He had little mastery over the construction of plot; his satire (as exhibited, for instance, in Mr Easy's expositions of the doctrines of liberty) is very thin and shallow. But, in the deft delineation of oddity of character he is worthy of mention with Sterne or with Dickens; and, in the narration of stirring incident, he was unrivalled in his day. Indeed, excepting Walter Scott, Marryat was the only novelist of his period who might lay claim to eminence. To read the novels of his prime: Peter Simple (1834), Mr Midshipman Easy (1836), Japhet in search of a Father (1836) or Jacob Faithful (1837), is to find a rich humour, a wide knowledge of men and things, intense and telling narrative, an artistic restraint which forbids extravagance or exaggeration and an all but Tolstoy-like power over detail. Within his narrower limits, captain Marryat, at his best, is a choicer artist than Defoe, whom, in many points, he resembles-among others, in having had his

finest work regarded, for a time, as merely reading 'for boys.' From that implied reproach, Marryat's best novels, like Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, have, ultimately, escaped. Indeed, the stories that Marryat himself intended for boys-Masterman Ready (1841), The Settlers in Canada (1844) and others--are found to have qualities that make them welcome to grown men. In Marryat, there are touches here and there of the lower humour of Smollett, but these occur almost entirely in his early work, written before he had learned his business as novelist'. His mind, moreover, was finer in quality than that of another writer, to whom, doubtless, he owed something, Theodore Hook.

Of Hook's fiction, it is difficult to write. It had a wide influence; and it is of little value. It lacks all the higher qualities, but suggested possibilities to many a later writer. The nine volumes of Hook's novels, Sayings and Doings (1826-9), were, in their own day, very popular: to a modern reader, even the best of them, Gervase Skinner, seems flimsy, vulgar and trivial. However, there is a lively spirit in them; and Hook's value to English fiction seems to lie in his very freedom and 'modernity.' He reminded fiction-for, indeed, she seemed to have forgotten what Fielding had made clear-that all life was her province. He showed that it was possible to be 'up-to-date,' free (and also easy), without degrading the art; thus, he opened a way to minds like Marryat's which had a truer originality and a fresher vision. Before long, Dickens was to appear, to make supreme use of the lately won liberty.

Before this chapter is brought to a close, two Scottish novelists should not be left without mention. John Galt, in The Ayrshire Legatees, The Entail and The Annals of the Parish, gave admirably minute and real studies of rural life in Scotland, full of strong delineation of character and forcible detail. As imaginative pictures of homely life under perfectly known conditions, Galt's novels occupy an important place in fiction. The fame of the Waverley novels tempted him later to compete with Scott in historical fiction, in which he succeeded but moderately.

David Macbeth Moir wrote for his friend, Galt, the last chapters of a novel, The Last of the Lairds, and was the author of The Life of Mansie Wauch, Tailor in Dalkeith (1828), a partly satirical, and very amusing, study of humble Scottish

1 In connection with Marryat and the sea-novel two other writers of the time are worth mention: William Nugent Glascock and Frank Chamier.

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