Note (return) — Chapter V · SCOTT AND MISS AUSTEN

In the few words just used lies, as far as it can be comprehended in any few words, the secret both of Miss Austen and of Scott. It has been said—more than once or twice, I fear—that hardly until Bunyan and Defoe do we get an interesting story—something that grasps us and carries us away with it—at all. Except in the great eighteenth-century Four the experience is not repeated, save in parts of Miss Burney and Miss Edgeworth later—it is simulated rather than actually brought about by the Terror-novel—except in the eternal exception of Vathek—for Maturin did not do his best work till much later. The absence of it is mainly due to a concatenation of inabilities on the part of the writers. They don't know what they ought to do: and in a certain sense it may even be said that they don't know what they are doing. In the worst examples surveyed in the last chapter, such as A Peep at Our Ancestors, this ignorance plumbs the abyss—blocks of dull serious narrative, almost or quite without action, and occasional insertions of flat, insipid, and (to any one with a little knowledge) impossible conversation, forming their staple. Of the better class of books, from the Female Quixote to Discipline, this cannot fairly be said: but there is always something wanting. Frequently, as in both the books just mentioned, the writer is too serious and too desirous to instruct. Hardly ever is there a real projection of character, in the round and living—only pale, sketchy "academies" that neither live, nor move, nor have any but a fitful and partial being. The conversation is, perhaps, the worst feature of all—for it follows the contemporary stage in adopting a conventional lingo which, as we know from private letters as early as Gray's and Walpole's, if not even as Chesterfield's and those of men and women older still, was not the language of well-bred, well-educated, and intelligent persons at any time during the century. As for the Fourth Estate of the novel—description—it had rarely been attempted even by the great masters. In fact it has been pointed out as perhaps the one unquestionable merit of Mrs. Radcliffe that—following the taste for the picturesque which, starting from Gray and popularised by Gilpin, was spreading over the country—she did attempt to introduce this important feature, and did partly, in a rococo way, succeed in introducing it. As for plot, that has never been our strong point—we seem to have been contented with Tom Jones as payment in full of that demand.17