“Another Century, and then ...”

There is a certain sort of dull criticism which Dr. Johnson admirably stigmatized when he said that “there is no great merit in telling how many plays have ghosts in them and how this ghost is better than that.” A great deal of American (not to speak of German) academic criticism belongs to this category; and especially those theses which are written by postgraduate students and candidates for the doctor’s degree. These persons, when they are not exhuming dead reputations from well-deserved sepulchres, show an uncanny ingenuity in inventing original classifications and instituting unnecessary comparisons. But now and again such students manage to produce some enlightening piece of “research” work, and The French Revolution and the English Novel (Putnams) is one of the best of its kind. It is by Allene Gregory; and as I cannot tell from the name whether she is a gentleman or a lady, I shall call him Miss.

“This study in the tendenz novel was begun with the idea of paralleling Dr. Hancock’s book, The French Revolution and the English Poets.” That is the first sentence of the preface, and it has a strictly academic flavour about it. The book is a “scientific” treatise; it would not have been written, so to say, either by a French Revolutionary or by an English novelist. If it dealt with the purely literary merits, which are few, of its subjects, it would be a useless sort of book. But its real purpose is to supply a chapter to the history of ideas, and especially Liberal political and social ideas. Many people talk as though they thought that the novel which canvasses the “problems” of sex, property, and religion were an invention of the last thirty years; and many others are under the impression that Charles Dickens was the first person to use fiction—though not, of course, the first person to employ fictions—for the promotion of legislation. Books about Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft are occasionally written; and quite recently Thomas Holcroft, one of the chief of our Revolutionary novelists, was given considerable notice in Mr. Brailsford’s excellent little book in the Home University Library. But, as far as my experience goes, there seem to be very few who know that England produced a century ago a whole group of novelists whose principal aim was not to “tell a straightforward story” or make the flesh creep, but to blow up the foundations of society with the gunpowder in the jam.

Miss Gregory’s book is very comprehensive. Her principal figures are Holcroft, Godwin, and Robert Bage; and she gives synopses of all their novels, with extracts illustrating their doctrines. Holcroft, one of the most lovable figures in the history of English democracy, was the sort of man who is regarded as an obscure crank in his lifetime, then forgotten for a time, and ultimately recognized as a person of historical importance. He lived a long life, and harmed nobody in the course of it. As a stable-boy in a racing stable he read Addison, Bunyan, and Swift (whose tribute to the Houyhnhnms must have had a local colour for him); he was afterwards a strolling actor, a hack writer, translator, novelist, and playwright, one of his plays being The Road to Ruin. When the Society for Constitutional Reformation was raided Holcroft was arrested with Thomas Hardy and Horne Tooke, and it was alleged against him, as justification for a charge of high treason, that he had extolled moral as against physical force. His associates being acquitted, he was never brought to trial: there comes a point at which even a Government begins to feel it is making an ass of itself. Holcroft’s courage never weakened “when Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, and even Blake had recanted, and Godwin and Paine had fallen silent, and all the world seemed to have forgotten its vision of democracy.” He himself stated in terms: “Whenever I have undertaken to write a novel I have proposed to myself a specific moral purpose.” His best novels are Hugh Trevor and Anna St. Ives. In the latter the hero, Frank Henley, who shocks the orthodox by taking service rather than self-interest as his guiding principle, remarks:

“Let men look around and deny if they can that the present wretched system of each providing for himself instead of the whole for the whole does not inspire suspicion, fear, and hatred. Well, well!—another century, and then....”

Just a century has passed.

Of Godwin’s novels Caleb Williams is the only one that is at all read nowadays. In spite of its impossibilities of character and action, it is a very good tract, especially where it deals with the prison system. Miss Gregory’s extracts from Caleb Williams might have been more profuse; but she gives interesting accounts of St. Leon and Fleetwood. In the first of these a gentleman who possesses the philosopher’s stone breaks into long reflections on “gold versus actual wealth”; in the other there are eloquent passages about the horrors of child-slavery in factories which anticipate the factory reports of a generation later, and which were so much in advance of their time that they still hold good in reference to certain of the States of America. Godwin saw the whole thing very clearly: the pale, emaciated child given the free man’s right of selling his labour at his own price in the open market and, as Godwin put it, able to earn salt to his bread at four, but unable to earn bread to his salt at forty. The placid Bage’s novels were admired by Walter Scott. The most original is Hermsprong, or Man as he is not, the hero of which—who enters civilized society after being brought up among the Red Indians, and quails at the change—criticizes institutions with something of the tone of the versatile Mr. Smilash in An Unsocial Socialist.

Shelley’s Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne are only interesting, if interesting at all, because they were written by their author. Miss Gregory ploughs through them, and also through the novels of Charlotte Smith, Mrs. Inchbald, and Mrs. Opie. She has a very interesting chapter on Mary Wollstonecraft and the early Women’s Rights authors. I find most alluring the bare mention made of a certain Ann Plumptre, a novelist of whom I had never previously heard, who admired Napoleon enthusiastically. In 1810, according to Crabb Robinson,

“she declared she would welcome him if he invaded England because he would do away with aristocracy and give the country a better government.”

Finally Miss Gregory has given space to the anti-revolutionary novelists, especially George Walker and Charles Lucas, of The Infernal Quixote. Ridicule of visionaries and demagogues through the medium of novels was a recognized sport then as now; and Lucas instituted an elaborate comparison between political and religious revivalists. A good bibliography rounds off a very laudable compilation which should interest all persons of subversive views and direct the reading of the curious into some very agreeable channels.