CHAPTER XIX. THE MODERN NOVELISTS. Prose iction The Romance: Walpole, Mrs. Radcliffe, Lewis, Maturir, and Mr. Shelley-James, Ainsworth, and Bulwer-The Novel: Miss Burney -Godwin - Miss Edgeworth-Local Novels: Galt, Wilson, Banim, &c. Fashionable Novels: Ward, Lister, &c. - Miss Austen-Hook Mrs. Trollope-Miss Mitford-Warren-Dickens-Novels of Foreign Life: Beckford, Hope, and Morier - Naval and Military Novels: Marryat and R. Scott. THE department of English literature which has been cultivated during the latter half of the last and the commencement of the present century with the greatest assiduity and success is undoubtedly that of prose fiction-the romance and the novel. This branch of our subject is so extensive, and it embraces such a multitude of works and names, that the only feasible method of treating it so as to give an idea of its immense riches and fertility will be to classify the authors and their productions into a few great general species: and though there are some names (as that of Bulwer, for example) which may appear to belong to several of these subdivisions, our plan will be found, we trust, to secure clearness and aid the memory. The divisions which we propose are as follows: I. Romances properly so called; i. e. works of narrative fiction, embodying periods of ancient or middle-age history, the adventures of which are generally of a picturesque and romantic character, and the personages (whether taken from history, or invented so as to accord with the time and character of the action) of a lofty and imposing kind. II. The vast class of pictures of society, whether invented or not. These are generally novels, i. e. romans de vie intime, though some, as those of Godwin, may be highly imaginative, and even tragic. This class contains a great treasury of what may be called pictures of local manners, as of Scottish and Irish life. III. Oriental novels—a branch almost peculiar to English fiction; and originating partly in the acquaintance with the East derived by Great Britain from her gigantic Oriental empire, and partly from th Englishman's restless, inappeasable passion for travelling. Naval and military novels; giving pictures of striking adventure, and containing records of England's innumerable triumphs, by sea and land, together with sketches of the manners, habits, and feelings of our soldiers and sailors. IV The history of modern prose fiction in England will be found to accord pretty closely with the classification we have just adopted. We have spoken in another place of the three patriarchs of the English novel-Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett: and the immense class of works we are about to consider may be looked upon as totally distinct from the immortal productions of these great men, though the first impulse given to prose fiction will be found to have been in no sense communicated by 'Clarissa,' 'Tom Jones,' or 'Roderick Random.' This impulse was given by Horace Walpole, the fastidious dilettante and brilliant chronicler of the court scandal of his day, a man of singularly acute penetration, of sparkling epigrammatic style, but of a mind devoid of enthusiasm and elevation. Rather a French courtier in taste and habits than an English nobleman, he retired early from political life, veiling a certain consciousness of political incapacity under an effeminate and affected contempt for a parliamentary career, and shut himself up in his little fantastic Gothic castle at Strawberry Hill, to collect armour, medals, manuscripts, and painted glass, and to chronicle with malicious assiduity, in his vast and brilliant correspondence, the absurdities, follies, and weaknesses of his day. 'The Castle of Otranto' is a short tale, written with great rapidity and without any preparation, in which the first successful attempt was made to take the Feudal Age as the period, and the passion of mysterious, superstitious terror as the prime mover, of an interesting fiction. The supernatural machinery consists of a gigantic armed figure dimly seen at midnight in the gloomy halls and huge staircases of this feudal abode-of a colossal helmet which finds its way into the court-yard, filling everybody with dread and consternation - of a picture which descends from its frame to upbraid a wicked oppressor-of a vast apparition at the end-and a liberal allowance of secret panels, subterranean passages,. breathless pursuit and escape. The manners are totally absurd and unnatural, the heroine being one of those inconsistent portraits in which the sentimental languor of the eighteenth century is superadded to the female character of the Middle Ages-in short, one of those incongruous contradictions which we meet in all the romantic fictions before Scott. 6 The immense success of Walpole's original and cleverly-written tale encouraged other and more accomplished artists to follow in the same track. After mentioning Clara Reeve, whose Old English Baron' contains the same defects without the beauties of Walpole's haunted castle, we come to the great name of this class, Anne Radcliffe, whose numerous romances exhibit a very high order of genius, and a surprising power (perhaps never equalled) over the emotions of fear and undefined mysterious suspense. Her two greatest works are, The Romance of the Forest,' and 'The Mysteries of Udolpho." The scenery of her predilection is that of Italy and the south of France; and though she does not place the reader among the fierce 6 and picturesque life of the Middle Ages, she has, perhaps, rather gained than lost by choosing the ruined castles of the Pyrenees and Apennines for the theatre, and the dark passions of profligate Italian counts for the principal moving power, of her wonderful fictions. The substance of them all is pretty nearly the same; and the author's total incapacity to paint individual character only makes us the more admire the power by which she interests us through the never failing medium of suspense. Mystery is the whole spell. Nothing can be poorer and more conventional than the personages: they are not human beings, nor even the types of classes; they have no more individuality than the pieces of a chess-board; they are merely counters; but the skill with which the author juggles with them gives them a kind of awful necromantic interest. The characters are mere abstract algebraical expressions, but they are made the exponents of such terrible and intense fear, suffering, and suspense, that we sympathise with their fate as if they were real. Her repertory is very limited: a persecuted sentimental young lady, a wicked and myterious count, a haggard monk, a tattling but faithful waitingmaid,—such is the poor human element out of which these wonderful structures are created. Balzac, in one of his tales, speaks with great admiration of an artist who, by a few touches of his pencil, could give to a most commonplace scene an air of overpowering horror, and throw over the most ordinary and prosaic objects a spectral air of crime and blood. Through a half-opened door you see a bed with the clothes confusedly heaped, as in some death-struggle, over an undefined object which fancy whispers must be a bleeding corpse ; on the floor you see a slipper, an upset candlestick, and a knife perhaps; and these hints tell the story of blood more significantly and more powerfully than the most tremendous detail, because the imagination of man is more powerful than art itself:- "Over all there hung a cloud of fear, A sense of mystery the spirit daunted, A great defect of Anne Radcliffe's fictions is not their tediousness af description, nor even the somewhat mawkish sentimentality with which they may be reproached, nor the feebly-elegant verses which the heroines are represented as writing on all occasions (indeed all these things indirectly conduce to the effect by contrast and preparation); but the unfortunate principle she had imposed upon herself, of clearing up, at the end of the story, all the circumstances that appeared supernatural-of carrying us, as it were, behind the scenes at the end of the play, and showing us the dirty ropes and trapdoors, the daubed canvas, the Bengal fire, by which these wonderful impressions had been produced. If we had supped after the play with the "blood-bolter'd Banquo," or the "majesty of buried Den mark," we should. not probably be able to feel a due amount of terror the next time we saw them on the stage; but in Mrs. Radcliffe, where the feeling of terror is the principal thing aimed at, this discovery of the mechanism deprives us of all future interest in the story; for, after all, pure fear-sensual, not moral, fear-is by no means a legitimate object of high art. A class of writing apparently so easy, and likely to produce so powerful and universal an effect an effect even more powerful on the least critical minds - was, of course, followed by a crowd of writers. Most of these have descended to oblivion and a deserved neglect. We may say a few words of Lewis, Maturin, and Mrs. Shelley. The first of these, a good-natured effeminate man of fashion, the friend of Byron, and one of the early literary advisers of Scott, was the first to introduce into England a taste for the infant German literature of that day, with its spectral ballads and diablerie of all kinds. He was a man of lively and childish imagination; and besides his metrical translations of the ballads of Bürger, and other of the same class, he published a prose romance called 'The Monk,' full of horrible crimes and diabolic agency. It contains several passages of considerable power, particularly the episode of 'The Bleeding Nun,' in which the wandering Jew-that godsend for all writers, good, bad, and indifferent, of the "intense" or demoniac school-is introduced with picturesque effect; but the book owes its continued popularity (though, we are happy to say, only among half-educated young men and ecstatic milliners) chiefly to the licentious warmth of many of its scenes. Maturin was a young Irishman of great promise and still greater vanity, who carried the intellectual merits and defects of his countrymen to an extreme little short of caricature: his imagination was vivid, and he possessed a kind of extravagant and convulsive eloquence, but his works are full of the most outrageous absurdities. He perpetually mistakes monstrosity for power, and lasciviousness for warmth. His life was short and unhappy, and his chief work is 'Melmoth,' a farrago of impossible and inconceivable adventures, without plan or coherence, in which the Devil (who is represented as an Irish gentleman of good family in the eighteenth century) is the chief agent. Mrs. Shelley is known also, in this department, as the authoress of the powerful tale of Frankenstein,' in which a young student of physiology succeeds in constructing, out of the horrid remnants of the churchyard and dissecting-room, a kind of monster, to which he afterwards_gives, apparently by the agency of galvanism, a kind of spectral and convulsive life. This existence, rendered insupportable to the monster by his vain cravings after human sympathy, and by his consciousness of his own deformity, is employed in inflicting (in some cases involuntarily) the most dreadful retribution on the guilty philoso pher; and some of the chief appearances of the monster, particu larly the moment when he begins to move for the first time, and, towards the end of the book, among the eternal snows of the arctio circle, are managed with a striking and breathless effect, that makes us for a moment forget the childish improbability and melodramatic extravagance of the tale. To this subdivision will belong the works of that most easy and prolific writer, James-the most industrious, if not always most successful, imitator of Scott, in revival of chivalric and middle-age scenes. The number of James's works is immense, but they bear among themselves a family likeness so strong, and even oppressive, that it is impossible to consider this author otherwise than as an ingenious imitator and copyist-first of Scott, and secondly of himself. The spirit of repetition is, indeed, carried so far, that it is possible to guess beforehand, and with perfect certainty, the principal contents, and even the chief persons, of one of James's historical novels. His heroes and heroines, whose features are almost always gracefully and elegantly sketched in, have more of the English than continental character. We are sure to have a nondescript grotesque as a secondary personage-a half-crazy jester, ever hovering between the harebrained villain and the faithful retainer: we may count upon abundance of woodland scenery (often described with singular delicacy and tenderness of language) and moonlight rendezvous of robbers and conspirators. But whereas Scott has all these things, it must be remembered how much more he has beside. He looks through all things "with a learned spirit:" James stops short here, unless we notice his innumerable pictures of battles, tournaments, huntingscenes, and old castles, where we find much more of the forced and artificial accuracy of the antiquary, than of the poet's all-embracing, all-imagining eye. James is particularly versed in the history of France, and some of his most successful novels have reference to that country, among which we may mention Richelieu.' His great deficiency is want of real, direct, powerful human passion, and consequently of life and movement in his intrigues. There is thrown over his fictions a general air of good-natured, frank, and well-bred refinement, which, however laudable, cannot fail to be found rather tiresome and monotonous. This difference between the works of Scott and those among his imitators who have endeavoured to revive the phantoms of past ages with "the very form and pressure of the time," is also perceptible in the works of Ainsworth and Bulwer: of course we allude only to those in which are depicted the manners of by-gone society. Both of these authors have enjoyed a very high degree of popularity; and though it would be an injustice to the author of Eugene Aram' to compare him, in a general sense, with the writer of 'Rookwood' and Jack Sheppard,' yet we may with advantage establish a parallel between these two novelists as far as they are historical. Several of |