Читать книгу Woman's Work in English Fiction, from the Restoration to the Mid-Victorian Period - Clara Helen Whitmore - Страница 9

And love is loveliest when embalmed in tears.

During her period of distress Henrietta lodged with a milliner. Her landlady showed her a small collection of books and pointed with especial pleasure to her favourite novels: "There is Mrs. Haywood's Novels, did you ever read them? Oh! they are the finest love-sick passionate stories: I assure you, you'll like them vastly." Henrietta, however, chose Joseph Andrews for her diversion. Mrs. Eliza Haywood was never admitted into that inner circle of highly respectable English ladies who clustered around Richardson. She was more of an adventuress in the domain of letters. In her first novels she followed the fashion set by Mrs. Manley and supplied the public with scandals in high life. Memoirs of a Certain Island Adjacent to Utopia, published in 1725, The Secret Intrigues of the Count of Caramania, published in 1727, are the highly suggestive titles of two of the most popular of her early works.

After Richardson had made Virtue more popular than Vice, Mrs. Haywood followed the literary fashion which he had set, and in 1751 wrote The History of Miss Betsey Thoughtless. This has sometimes been called a domestic novel, but that is a misnomer, since the characters are seldom found at home, but rather are met in the various pleasure resorts of London. As was the fashion in the novels of this time, and probably not an uncommon occurrence in the English capital, the heroine was often forced into a chariot by some lawless libertine, but fortunately was always rescued by some more virtuous lover. The whole story is but a new arrangement of the one or two incidents with which Richardson had wrung the heart of the British public. It has one advantage over the most of the novels which had preceded it. There is little told that does not bear directly on the plot, the characters of the sub-plot being important personages in the main story, and the book has a definite conclusion.

None of the characters, however, are pleasing. The hero, Mr. Trueworthy, a combination of Tom Jones and Sir Charles Grandison, is a hypocrite. The other male characters are insignificant. Miss Betsey, the heroine, is almost charming. Conscious of her own innocence, she repeatedly appears in a light that makes her worldly lover, Mr. Trueworthy, suspect her virtue, until at last he begs to be released from his engagement to her. The author of the book stands as a duenna at Miss Betsey's side, and points out by the misfortunes of the heroine how foolish it is for girls to ignore public opinion, and strives to inculcate the lesson that a husband is the best protection for a young girl. We are properly shocked at Miss Betsey's levity, who, although she had arrived at the mature age of fourteen, cared not a straw for any of the gentlemen who sought her hand, but liked to have them about her only because they flattered her vanity or afforded her a subject for mirth. Miss Betsey's gaiety, wit, and generosity would be very attractive—in fact, she is quite an up-to-date young lady—but we see how much better she would "get on" if she had a little more worldly wisdom. She is punished, as she deserves to be, by losing her lover, and marries a man who makes her very unhappy. Mr. Trueworthy, however, learns of her innocence; her husband fortunately dies, and the author takes the bold step of uniting the widow to her former lover, after a year of mourning and passing through much suffering, brought upon herself by her own thoughtlessness. She is rewarded, however, very much as Pamela was rewarded, by marrying a man of honour, who had judged her formerly by his own conduct, being too willing to believe by appearances that she had lost her chastity, or, at least, had sullied her good name.

In this novel, Mrs. Haywood is very near the line that divides the artist from the artisan. Like a young girl with good health and good spirits, Miss Betsey is ever on the verge of sweeping aside the prejudices of her duenna, and asserting her own individuality, but is constantly held back by the sense of worldly propriety. Had Mrs. Haywood permitted Miss Betsey to carry the plot whither she would without let or hindrance, she would have won for herself an acknowledged place among the heroines of fiction.

The History of Miss Betsey Thoughtless was an epoch-making book. The adventures of its heroine in the city of London took possession of the imagination of Fanny Burney, while little more than a child, and led to the story of Evelina, the forerunner of Jane Austen and her school.

The fashion for weeping heroines was at its height, when, in 1761, Mrs. Francis Sheridan published The Memoirs of Miss Sidney Biddulph. The story is written in the form of letters, in which the heroine reveals to a friend of her own sex all the secrets of her heart. All London rejoiced over the virtues of Sidney Biddulph, and wept over her sorrows. She had been educated "in the strictest principles of virtue; from which she never deviated, through the course of an innocent, though unhappy life." It was so pathetic a story that Dr. Johnson doubted if Mrs. Sheridan had a right to make her characters suffer so much, and Charles James Fox, who sat up all night to read it, pronounced it the best of all novels of his time.

The book, as first written, was in three volumes. The author had brought the story to a most fitting close. Both Sidney's husband and the man whom she had really loved were dead, and the widow could have spent her days in pleasing melancholy, contented with the thought that she had never done a wrong. But the public demanded a continuation of the story. In 1767, two volumes were added, giving the history of Sidney's daughters, who seem to have inherited from their mother the enmity of the fates, for their sufferings were as great as hers.

Authors are prone to draw upon their own history for the emotions they depict. But Mrs. Sheridan's life did not furnish the tragic elements of Sidney Biddulph, although it was not without romance. Before her marriage, she wrote a pamphlet in praise of the conduct of one Thomas Sheridan, the manager of the Theatre Royal in Dublin, during a riot that occurred in the theatre. Sheridan read these words in his praise, sought the acquaintance of their author, and before long married her.

History furnishes a long list of women of talent whose sons were men of genius. Mrs. Sheridan's second son, Richard Brinsley, the author of the light and sparkling Rivals, inherited his mother's talents without her gloom. But Mrs. Sheridan also had some ability as a writer of comedy, and the most famous character of the Rivals was first sketched by her. In a comedy, A Journey to Bath, declined by Garrick, one of the characters was Mrs. Twyford, whom Richard Brinsley Sheridan transformed into that famous blundering coiner of words, Mrs. Malaprop.

Mrs. Sheridan's place in literature rests upon Sidney Biddulph. This novel was an innovation in English fiction. Nearly one hundred years earlier, Madame de Lafayette had written The Princess of Clèves, one of the most nearly perfect novels that has ever been written, and the first that depended for its interest, not alone on what was done, but on the subtle workings of the human heart which led to the doing of it. From that time the novels of French women were largely introspective. English women, however, were either less interested in the inner life, or more reserved in laying bare its secrets. Sidney Biddulph was the first English novel of this kind, and it left no definite trace on fiction, although it was the favourite novel of Charlotte Smith and had some slight effect upon her writings, and Mrs. Inchbald, Mrs. Opie, and Mary Brunton noted the feelings of their characters. Not until Jane Eyre was published, long after Mrs. Sheridan had been forgotten, was there any great English novel of the inner life.

In its day Sidney Biddulph was exceedingly popular on the continent of Europe as well as in England. It was translated into German, and an adaptation of it was made in French by the Abbé Prévost, under the title, Memoirs pour servir a l'histoire de la vertu. But after all, Sidney's sorrows were not real, or she herself was not real; and we of to-day smile or yawn over the pages that drew tears from the eyes of the mighty Dr. Johnson.

Notwithstanding the many excellencies of English fiction during the middle of the eighteenth century, it was held in low repute. There had been many writers attempting to portray real life who, without the genius of the greater novelists, could imitate only their faults. In the preface to Polly Honeycomb, which was acted at Drury Lane theatre in 1760, George Colman, the author, gives the titles of about two hundred novels whose names appeared in a circulating library at that time. Amorous Friars, or the Intrigues of a Convent; Beauty put to its Shifts, or the Young Virgin's Rambles; Bubbled Knights, or Successful Contrivances, plainly evincing, in two Familiar Instances lately transacted in this Metropolis, the Folly and Unreasonableness of Parents Laying a Restraint upon their Children's Inclinations in the Affairs of Love and Marriage; The Impetuous Lover, or the Guiltless Parricide; these are the titles of a few of the popular books of that period. Colman in the character of Polly Honeycomb, an earlier Lydia Languish, attempts to show the moral effects of such reading. Her head had been so turned by these books that her father exclaims, "A man might as well turn his daughter loose in Covent-Garden, as trust the cultivation of her mind to A CIRCULATING LIBRARY."

Fiction at this time lacked delicacy and refinement. The characters lived largely in the streets or taverns, and were too much engrossed in the pleasures of active life to give any heed to thoughts or emotions. Though love was the constant theme of these books, as yet no true love story had been written. The fires of home had not been lighted. The refinements, the pure affections, the high ideals which cluster around the domestic hearth had as yet no place in the novel. It needed the feminine element, which, while no broader than that which had previously made the novel, by its own addition gave something new to it and made it truer to life.

While no woman of marked genius had appeared, the number and influence of women novelists continued to increase throughout the eighteenth century. Tim Cropdale in the novel Humphry Clinker, who "had made shift to live many years by writing novels, at the rate of five pounds a volume," complains that "that branch of business is now engrossed by female authors, who publish merely for the propagation of virtue, with so much ease, and spirit, and delicacy, and knowledge of the human heart, and all in the serene tranquillity of high life, that the reader is not only enchanted by their genius, but reformed by their morality." Schlosser in his History of the Eighteenth Century pays this tribute to the moral influence of the women novelists: "With the increase of the number of writers in England in the course of the eighteenth century, women began to appear as authors instead of educating their children, and their influence upon morals and modes of thinking increased, as that of the clergy diminished."