SOURCE: "The Technique of Her Novels" and "The Art of Her Novels," in Elizabeth Inchbald: Novelist, The Catholic University of America, 1935, pp. 55-74 and 75-102.

[In the excerpt that follows, McKee examines the plot design and character development of A Simple Story and Nature and Art. (Only those footnotes pertaining to the excerpt below have been reprinted.)]

The Broken Plot of A Simple Story

We turn now to an examination of those theories set forth by critics in explanation of what they consider Mrs. Inchbald's sacrifice of unity in A Simple Story. The reader will remember that, in reviewing events of this novel, attention was called to a break in the narrative and to the lapse of seventeen years between the first and second half of the work. The first to undertake an explanation of this cesura was James Boaden. In various parts of the Memoirs he has suggested several solutions. He tells us that Mrs. Inchbald intended to write a novel and its sequel and then decided to combine them into one story.⁵ Again he offers another explanation: in excusing the long lapse of time between the two parts of a novel he is praising, he recalls a like lapse of time in Shakespeare's A Winter's Tale and, assuming that this play was well known to Mrs. Inchbald since she frequently played Shakespearean parts, he immediately jumps to the conclusion that A Winter's Tale served as a model for A Simple Story.⁶ There are, it is true, certain points of similarity between these works, but had there been no seventeen-year lapse perhaps Boaden would not have noticed them, for the parallel between the play and the novel is far from complete. With as much reason, he might have suggested the original of A Winter's Tale, Robert Greene's Pandosto, as the source of A Simple Story. Pandosto was almost as well known in Mrs. Inchbald's day as was A Winter's Tale, and seems to have been extremely popular in England throughout the century. The fact that there are at the present time in the British Museum alone ten editions dated before 1800⁷ is proof of the favor in which Dorastus and Fawnia, the title under which Pandosto was issued, was held by the eighteenth century reader. Mrs. Inchbald could have been familiar with this love tragedy. I do not mean here to put forth any claim for Pandosto as the source of A Simple Story, but I do wish to point out that Boaden's claim for A Winter's Tale as its source is not convincing. Evidently he does not take his own explanation too seriously, for in another place and in another connection he seems to imply that the years were passed over by Mrs. Inchbald in order to avoid the necessity of describing a seduction scene.

S. R. Littlewood approaches the problem in a different way and suggests that the death of Joseph Inchbald, during the period of the novel's composition, may explain the hiatus.⁸ He does not emphasize this claim, nor does he stress the point, and therefore, he may not have been entirely convinced that his theory was valid.

Now, we know that the novel was completed in 1779, three months after the death of Mrs. Inchbald's husband. Just how much of the tale, as we have it today, was included in that first draft there is no way of telling. If Mrs. Inchbald originally wrote the work in four volumes, and if the break came between the second and third volumes, then the theory which Littlewood advances is hardly sound. It puts too great a burden upon the author, for it necessitates her writing two volumes in the time between the death of her husband and the date three months later, when she was looking for a publisher. But if, on the other hand, there was in the original only that part of the story dealing with Miss Milner, such a theory might be plausible. We have already seen how A Simple Story originated in Mrs. Inchbald's fancy when she met John Kemble; how she saw herself and Kemble as the heroine and hero of the tale, and built her plot around that idea. All this romancing took place before the death of Joseph Inchbald. It well could be that when her husband died Mrs. Inchbald's wounded conscience would not permit her to carry the story further with herself as heroine, and so she broke off and began with a new generation. At any rate Littlewood's solution is a more reasonable one than that advanced by Boaden.

One might, taking a hint from Littlewood, advance still another theory. It could be assumed that the latter half of the novel was written during one of those periodic estrangements between the author and John Kemble, and that she, in a spirit of vindictiveness toward her friend, transformed Dorriforth into a tyrant. Perhaps one would not like to go so far as to say that Mrs. Inchbald was capable of this, but her treatment of William Godwin at the time of Mary Wollstonecraft's death does show that she could harbor the bitterest resentment.⁹

I am not convinced by any of these theories. If one is to make a fair judgment upon A Simple Story and its plot one should endeavor to discover the author's point of view and approach the question from that angle. Some of the critics, I fear, have not done this, because they have accepted the common opinion that A Simple Story is a purpose novel, which primarily it is not, as I shall show in a subsequent chapter. If one remembers that the plot of the novel is built around Mrs. Inchbald and her friend, John Kemble, and forgets for the moment the didactic material which was added at a later date, the problem of the broken plot does not offer such great difficulty. One may now view it in an entirely different light. As I see it, Mrs. Inchbald began her novel with the idea in mind that if she and John Kemble had been free to marry and had done so, they could never have lived together in peace and happiness, regardless of how much love there may have existed between them. From this starting point she worked out her theory that the marriage of two irreconcilable characters, such as herself and Kemble, must inevitably bring disaster and end in tragedy. As the idea of the novel grew in her mind she may have seen that the whole theory would be strengthened and the tragedy made the greater if she demonstrated that disaster would fall not only upon the first but upon the second generation as well. To do this she introduced a second heroine and a second hero.¹⁰ The fact that she used a like device in Nature and Art, to show the development of an idea in two generations, gives strength to this point. Perhaps the scheme does not lend itself to an artistic treatment but that need not concern us here. The thing to be noted is that if such were Mrs. Inchbald's purpose, and if she handled her plot logically, then many of the objections raised against her workmanship are not entirely justified. Let us examine the objections.

Littlewood has this to say:

There does not seem to be any exact reason for this double generation of heroines. The moral remains the same, and the character of the daughter, though it does not repeat that of the mother, hardly intensifies the point of view. In short, the whole of the second part is something of an anti-climax.¹¹

This same writer then adds:

None the less, it is indubitably to the second part that we owe the Charlotte Brontë inspiration [in Jane Eyre]. So—if for that alone—it was worth having.¹²

Edith Birkhead expresses a similar opinion. She says:

Because of her imperfections, Miss Milner is much more interesting and life-like than that pallid waxwork, her daughter, who observes the emotional etiquette prescribed for the sentimental heroine with painful exactitude.¹³

These of course are points of view arising from the notion that A Simple Story is a treatise upon the education of women. If it were a novel of this type, such objections would be reasonable; for the kind of education received by a mother does not necessarily determine the kind the daughter is to receive; and therefore, "the double generation" would be superfluous and the broken plot would be inexcusable.

There is, however, another critic who commented upon the novel at the time of its publication, and who, in my opinion, saw the work as the author intended it should be understood. This anonymous reviewer says of the broken plot:

To give a picture of Lord Elmwood, in all these trying circumstances, as well in his conduct to his wife, who has dishonored him, as to his daughter, who was his issue by that wife, is the main design of Mrs. Inchbald's Simple Story. It is this that gives unity of design to the whole fable and makes it one unbroken narrative; not two stories woven together, which has been erroneously observed.¹⁴

Unity in the Novels

This brings us now to a discussion of unity in the novels. In A Simple Story is the break in the middle destructive of unity, or is the early reviewer correct in his contention? Before answering the question it is desirable that we have a statement of the method by which unity must be obtained. I choose Professor Hamilton's declaration upon the subject, because the rule which he lays down is comprehensive enough to include any work of fiction, while at the same time it is sufficiently limited as not to admit of license in plot construction. He says:

Unity in any work of art can be attained only by a definite decision of the artist as to what he is trying to accomplish, and by a rigorous focus of attention on his purpose to accomplish it,—a focus of attention so rigorous as to exclude consideration of any matter which does not contribute, directly or indirectly, to the furtherance of his aim.¹⁵

On a preceding page I stated what I considered was Mrs. Inchbald's aim in writing her first novel. If my contention is correct, and I believe that it is, that she meant to show how marriage between two irreconcilable characters brings tragedy, not only upon the first but upon the second generation as well, then the break in plot hardly seems to be destructive of unity. The plot is simple and straightforward. Nothing, with the exception of the didactic material, and that is small in extent and foreign to the novel, is introduced to distract from the author's purpose. The plot moves forward with no digressions, and without hesitation. Mrs. Inchbald carries the reader from the first to the second part of the novel in such a way that he is scarcely conscious of the lapse of time, for the interest is immediately centered upon Lord Elmwood and his daughter as it had been earlier upon Lord Elmwood and the mother of that daughter. The author might have filled up the intervening time with narrative, but the events she would have recorded would have contributed little intensity to her point of view. Certainly, the seduction of the heroine would have added nothing to the furtherance of the plot. Besides, Richardson had already given the world an abundance of such scenes, and it is refreshing to find Mrs. Inchbald independent enough to pass over this favorite expedient of her time. The only other event of interest in the seventeen years was Lord Elmwood's dismissal of his daughter. Presenting this before the reader would have given opportunity for showing the inflexible tyranny of the hero, but Mrs. Inchbald treats this fully in another connection and therefore, there is no necessity of the revelation at this point.

What the author does it simply to ignore time and to center attention upon causality. By this she succeeds in doing what she set out to do. She focuses attention upon her purpose so "as to exclude consideration of any matter which does not contribute" to the furtherance of her aim. She introduces only such incidents as are intended to emphasize the cause of the tragedy. Since the exchange of heroines and the break in the plot in no way violate the author's original intention, the plot of A Simple Story has unity, and those who have attacked it have missed the whole point of the tale.

In the case of Nature and Art, strangely enough, there has been no serious attack upon the plot. It is precisely here that the attack should have been made, rather than upon the plot of A Simple Story, for it is here that Mrs. Inchbald violates her original intention. She begins with Rousseau's idea of the man of nature and the man of art. She undertakes to show through the working out of the plot that the man of nature is superior to the man of art. When she is half way through the novel the fate of the heroine so absorbs her interest that she largely forgets her sociological intent, and, instead of making the novel a treatise upon the disasters resulting from a false system of education, she makes it a tragedy of an outcast in the London streets. In other words, Mrs. Inchbald saw from the beginning what situations she would introduce into the plot, but as the story unfolded itself she became engrossed in a single situation and allowed her plot to fall into the background and to be forgotten. At the very end of the novel she tried to remedy this by gathering up the threads and finishing as she had intended, but the effect is anything but pleasing. Whatever interest one may have had at the beginning in the complication of events is lost as the author follows the misfortunes of Hannah Primrose. When the plot is again taken up, it is too late to re-arouse that interest. One does not care what becomes of the Henrys, the Williams, and Rebecca Rymer. Unity of design has been destroyed. In spite of the fact that Mrs. Inchbald accounts for time in this novel, and in spite of the fact that she carries her heroine through from her introduction until she is disposed of, nevertheless, from the standpoint of plot construction she shows herself a better workman in her first novel than in her second. In A Simple Story the reader feels that the novelist is leading him to a definite culmination, while in Nature and Art he is never quite certain where he is being conducted. This is because the author, in wandering away from her original design, failed to build up to a totality of effect in her plot, and therefore, she violated a fundamental principle of unity.

Relation of Character to Plot

In introducing characters into plot Mrs. Inchbald is hardly more skillful than she is in securing unity. What originality she shows is in the type of character chosen, rather than in the position given to the character. She follows the conventions of her time in A Simple Story and presents a hero and his friend, a heroine and her confidante, and a villain. When in this novel she departs from the conventional form in the use made of characters she frequently exhibits a weakness in technique and confuses the reader. One expects that the hero and heroine will be the important and unifying characters, but this is not the scheme followed. The task of unifying the plot is given almost exclusively to the hero. He is carried through from beginning to end, and in him Mrs. Inchbald works out her theory that the passion of love in the human heart may be a tyrant. Instead of exalting the heroine, as might be expected, she gives the next place of importance to the heroine's confidante. This is especially true in the latter half of the novel, although in the first half the confidante plays an important rôle as well.¹⁶ She is assigned a place of importance from beginning to end, and shares honors with the hero in bringing order out of chaos. Of course, the position of the heroine is not minimized to any great extent, but her significance grows less and less as the theme is worked out until she is finally dismissed when the novel is about half complete. With the introduction of a new heroine the position of this character is somewhat altered. Instead of being the complement to the hero, she is now a character of no great importance, being simply one in whom is exhibited the ultimate disaster of misdirected love. However, the greatest inconsistency is shown in the function given to the hero's friend. In the earlier part of the story this character, and not the villain as might be expected, represents a retarding force to the smooth succession of events. In fact one is never quite sure whether he is not more villainous than the villain himself. At least one is sure that he is usurping the prerogative of the villain. All this is changed in the later development when the friend is transformed into an accelerating force and becomes a kind of second hero. With the change in rôle played by the hero's friend, Mrs. Inchbald divides the responsibility of retarding the action between the unyielding will of the hero and a second villain, whom she introduces in this part of the novel. In the clash of these two forces she brings A Simple Story to its culmination.

In Nature and Art, Mrs. Inchbald shows no advance in mastery of technique. As a matter of fact her technique is more faulty than in her earlier novel. Perhaps it was necessarily so, since she was writing a novel in which she had nothing more than an academic interest, and therefore, she had no vital theme to present. To work out a plan whereby she might emphasize Rousseau's theory of a decadent culture and its deleterious effects upon the individual, puzzled her and led her into difficulties. In advancing the theory, she formulated no clearly defined plan. She neither reasoned from cause to effect, nor from effect to cause. She saw the effect which she wished to emphasize, but instead of working back in a logical manner to the cause, she jumped to the cause immediately; and then ignoring logic she attempted to bridge the gap between cause and effect and failed, with the net result that the two ends of the novel do not meet.

Specifically, Mrs. Inchbald works in this way: to give force to Rousseau's doctrine she introduces two characters of equal gifts, and develops them under different influences, with the intention of revealing the man of nature as a superior being to the man of art. She sees that the characters when introduced are mature and that their habits of life are pretty well fixed. It would be more forceful, therefore, if two characters were to be subjected from youth to the influences of nature and art, and their careers traced. This scheme our author adopts and introduces a second generation of sons. The art generations, father and son, she intends to develop into villains, and the nature generations, likewise father and son, into heroes. The presence of the sons gives occasion for the female characters. Two are brought forward, both of whom Mrs. Inchbald calls heroines.¹⁷ She then discovers, according to her plan, that she has two villains, two heroes, and two heroines. This immediately constitutes the difficulty of giving proper space in the novel to six major characters. The author surmounts this by reducing one villain, two heroes, and one heroine to the rôle of minor characters, at the same time raising the remaining villain to the rôle of hero, and throwing him into conflict with the remaining heroine. By this scheme she loses sight of her original intention, and ends by representing respectability as tyrannizing over love. It is here that Mrs. Inchbald fails to make the two ends of the novel meet, and as a result she is compelled to carry her other characters through to the end and to dispose of them in a huddled manner, much as Goldsmith disposed of his characters at the end of The Vicar of Wakefield.

In the disposal of characters Mrs. Inchbald leaves much to be desired in both novels. She introduces many with the intention of giving them a prominent place, and then leaves them at loose ends when they cannot be used effectively. For example, in A Simple Story Rushbrook is introduced as a child, obviously with the idea of making him, as he grows up, a second Dorriforth, without Dorriforth's faults. The novel offers no opportunity for doing this, and as a consequence Mrs. Inchbald has to carry him through the entire work in order to have a proper man at hand for the heroine to marry at the denouement. In Nature and Art the two Henrys and Rebecca Rymer are brought into the story and then "go dead while the author is at work."¹⁸ This lack of facility in manipulating the people of her novels led Mrs. Inchbald to compel some of her characters to do double duty. We have seen in A Simple Story that Dorriforth is both hero in and antagonist to the plot. The Dean in Nature and Art is villain first and hero afterwards. In other words, when these characters are disposed of, it is in a manner contrary to what the novelist had led the reader to expect, and therefore, the reader is to be pardoned if he feels that the writer of the tales has permitted some of the characters to wander into ways not marked out for them.

The reason for Mrs. Inchbald's failure in this respect is not difficult to find. Her experience as an actress and playwright made her always the dramatist but never the novelist. She thought of her novels in terms of the drama. She manipulated her characters as on a stage rather than in the broad expanse of life. The drama demands that the dramatis personae be introduced early in the play and that their relationships be pointed out. They may then be dismissed and called in when needed. We find that in both A Simple Story and Nature and Art, this scheme was followed. What to do with them after they were introduced our author did not always know. She could not dismiss them to the wings. If the characters were to be used again she had one expedient which she most frequently fell back upon,—that was, an indefinite place called a farmhouse in the country. For example, in A Simple Story, Harry Rushbrook, during the displeasure of his uncle Dorriforth, is sent to a farmhouse in the country; Lady Elmwood and her daughter Matilda flee to a farmhouse in northern England; at the time of Matilda's second exile she is sent to a farmhouse at some distance from Elmwood castle; the elder Henry, in Nature and Art, goes first to an island but when he returns to England he, with his son Henry and his son's wife Rebecca, retires to a farm. There they are left to meditate. Occasionally the scheme was varied, some characters being disposed of by death and others being forgotten, but all in all the farmhouse was the most important wing in Mrs. Inchbald's theatre. Of course, her major characters she carried through to the end and disposed of them naturally, but only her major characters.

Locale and Style

There are two other respects in which Mrs. Inchbald's dramatic experience shows itself in her technique. The first is in the relation of locale to plot, and the second, in her style of writing. As for locale it has almost no influence upon plot. The scene of both works is laid in England, but the scene might have been laid almost anywhere in Europe without affecting seriously the train of events. She takes her reader from city to country and back again, but the reader is hardly conscious of the change. There is nothing in locale to color or affect the action. It is confined to the limits of a stage, which in the novel, is usually a drawing or dining room. This is especially true in A Simple Story, and true to a limited degree in Nature and Art. In the latter novel there is less confinement to the inside of houses, but there is no more expanse of the field of action than in the former. One may say, therefore, that locale is completely ignored in the construction of plot and for it is substituted names, such as London, Elmwood castle, the country, an island. None of these places is presented to the reader's consciousness, but, on the contrary, they appear rather as a notice of location which one might read on a playbill.

In Mrs. Inchbald's style of writing we see again the influence of her stage experience. E. M. Forster has said that "the specialty of the novel is that the writer can talk about his characters as well as through them or can arrange for us to listen when they talk to themselves".¹⁹ This, naturally, the dramatist cannot do to the same extent as the novelist, and this our author does not do. Her novels are made up almost exclusively of dialogue. The plot is worked out in the give and take of the characters in conversation. When, upon occasions, she attempts to talk about her characters she is ill at ease. It is as if the novelist, as an actress, has turned to her audience, and in some embarrassment is explaining what to expect when next the actor appears. The explanations are stilted and self-conscious. What is true of such explanations is equally true of the running narrative between scenes of the novel. The narration is out of place and awkward. As a workman Mrs. Inchbald has but one tool, dialogue, and this only she knows how to use with any degree of skill.

As a technician, Mrs. Inchbald never advanced beyond the apprentice stage in novel writing. The intensity of her theme in A Simple Story enabled her to write a unified novel, but not a good one. In Nature and Art the absence of a theme in which she was vitally interested caused her to violate the first principle of unity. She tried to subject her characters to plot, with the result that they never quite fitted into the life she had prepared for them. She saw the novel as an extended drama, but knew not how to handle it because it was extended. She began as an amateur, and finished as she had begun, without ever having mastered the mechanics of novel writing.

The Art of Her Novels

Mrs. Inchbald as an artist is little better than she is as a technician. Her achievement in this particular bears the marks of the amateur writer. In her use of materials she scarcely produces the illusion of reality. She does not seem to be able to manipulate her characters or control her situations. Professor Home has said of A Simple Story that

The book offers a most interesting study of an unconscious power, of a half-formed art.²⁰

In order to illustrate the truth of this statement we shall examine our author's finished product.

Character Portrayal

The male characters in A Simple Story and Nature and Art are semi-strangers to their creator. These she does not understand. Dorriforth and Sandford, the Henrys and the Williams present a problem with which she is not able to cope. As a result she treats them almost entirely from an objective point of view. She judges man by his actions; motives she leaves untouched, or when, on occasions, she tries to analyze them, her analysis is inaccurate.

The reason for this difficulty becomes clear when one looks into the life of the author. Mrs. Inchbald was never particularly successful in judging the characters of the various men who came into her life. There was scarcely a woman of her day who had more admirers, many of whom wished to marry her,²¹ and yet one may say that all these admirers remained strangers to her. Perhaps she understood John Kemble best of all, but even that understanding did not enable her to continue in unbroken friendship with him. It may be that her childish conduct toward William Godwin arose from a belief that she knew him so well that she could direct his actions. Even though she would not herself marry him, she evidently believed he would not marry without consulting her. When he did, she acted with a petulance that was unworthy of her. In one of her suitors, Sir Charles Bunbury, she placed all confidence, but he proved a trifler in the end. A Colonel Glover was the most worthy of all her friends. Although he was a man of family and wealth, she, nevertheless, treated him with indifference, while at the same time she continued to be friendly with men who were, in no sense, deserving of her. When her friends warned her against any bad associates she disregarded their warnings, ending an unhappy friendship usually in tears and heartaches. She never seemed able to distinguish between the sincere man and the trifler. Mrs. Inchbald was a woman of contradictions. In her life she was sceptical toward the Colonel Glovers, but toward the Bunburys she was charitable. This inability to understand character is reflected in her novels.

The characters of A Simple Story admirably illustrate this peculiarity. For example, Dorriforth's outstanding traits are pride and selfishness, yet in the novel these are called integrity. Mrs. Inchbald does not succeed in convincing the reader that he is good, although she insists that he is. Sanford, on the other hand, is intended to be a man of rough exterior and generous heart, but he appears for the most part as an unmannered boor. The author calls him a holy man, but only his faults are apparent. Even the villain, Lord Frederick, is not villainous. Although the fact is emphasized that he is a gallant and therefore bad, the evil in his character appears to be the result of unfair treatment, and consequently, in spite of all Mrs. Inchabald's efforts, he wins the sympathy of the reader. None of these characters fits effectively into the place prepared for it by the author.

In Nature and Art there is some improvement. The characters talk like men even though they do not always act like men. While the love which the elder Henry bears for his brother William is introduced naturally and with genuine pathos, Henry is never quite the man of nature he is intended to be. Young Henry shines for a time and then degenerates into a nonentity. The younger William, in the few glimpses afforded the reader, never rises to a position of reality. By far the best of all the male characters in this second novel is the Dean and Bishop. He is not an individual, but as a type he is well drawn, and he serves to keep alive a story that might otherwise have expired from sheer debility.

A more careful examination of the character of Dorriforth in A Simple Story will suffice to illustrate Mrs. Inchbald's deficiency in the portrayal of male character.

The hero is introduced to the reader with an appropriate description of his appearance. In fact, he is the only character so described, but the novel loses nothing by the omission. In spite of Mrs. Inchbald's efforts Dorriforth remains indistinct in appearance, and moves about as if behind a thin veil, without once giving the reader a full view of his countenance. The author says of him:

But that the reader may be interested in what Dorriforth says and does, it is necessary to give some description of his person and manners. His figure was tall and elegant, but his face, except a pair of dark bright eyes, a set of white teeth, and a graceful fall in his clerical curls of brown hair, had not one feature to excite admiration—yet such a gleam of sensibility was diffused over each, that many people mistook his face for handsome, and all were more or less attracted by it—in a word, the charm, that is here meant to be described, is a countenance—on his [sic] you read the feelings of his heart—saw all its inmost workings—the quick pulses that beat with hope and fear, or the gentle ones that moved in a more equal course of patience and resignation. On this countenance his thoughts were pourtrayed; and as his mind was enriched with every virtue that could make it valuable, so was his face adorned with every expression of those virtues—and they not only gave a lustre to his aspect, but added a harmonious sound to all he uttered; it was persuasive, it was perfect eloquence; whilst in his looks you beheld his thoughts moving with his lips, and ever coinciding with what he said.²²

Such a description in itself might be considered meritorious and sufficient for the author's purpose, but an intimate knowledge of the character as it is developed compels me to assert that it is no description at all, since it is at complete variance with the Dorriforth represented in the novel. In other words, the character Mrs. Inchbald has in mind never finds its way into the story. The eighteenth century writers were fond of the man of sensibility, and this somewhat mythical figure has ever since resisted all attempts at analysis.²³ Certainly this novel adds nothing to an understanding of him. Black eyes, white teeth, and clerical curls of brown hair do not make of any person a man of sensibility. Such an idea is absurd, but it is not more absurd than the qualities attributed to the hero. Nor does a face which gives away every thought of the mind make a man all that the author seems to imply. She hardly thought so herself, for throughout the novel she labors her character to make him "Dorriforth the pious, the good", and in spite of all that she says he remains from introduction to conclusion a contradiction of Mrs. Inchbald's declaration. In this character, and likewise in the others, she lacks the power of so directing the action that the good and evil will emerge into the light and be seen in proper relief. It is this weakness that accounts for her forever telling the reader what qualities are to be admired and what detested.

Two passages of A Simple Story will illustrate the point just made. Both are intended to throw light upon the character of the hero. The first represents him as Mrs. Inchbald conceived him, but not as she succeeded in presenting him to the reader. She says:

Every virtue which it was his vocation to preach, it was his care to practice; nor was he in the class of those of the religious, who, by secluding themselves from the world, fly the merit they might have in reforming mankind. He refused to shelter himself from the temptations of the layman by the walls of a cloister, but sought for, and found that shelter in the center of London, where he dwelt, in his own prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance.²⁴

Such is the man presented by the author for the admiration of the reader. But the reader is not to be blamed if he does not admire, for that "virtue which it was his care to practice" makes Dorriforth refuse to see his sister when she is dying, and to neglect her orphan child; it causes him to place prohibitions upon his ward's actions for no other reason than his own selfish satisfaction; it makes him publicly insult Lord Frederick Lawnley whose only crime is an ardent love for Miss Milner; it makes him feared by every servant in his house; it makes him bend to his own will the will of every person near him; in short, it makes of him such a person as no one would wish to live with, and no woman should wish to marry. All that may be said in his behalf is that he is extremely polite to those who never cross him, and kind to those who accept his opinions. This gentleman is intended to represent the admirable hero of the first half of the story and not the tyrant of the second.

Now the passage which accurately describes the man is this:

Although Dorriforth was the good man that he has been described, there were in his nature shades of evil—there was an obstinacy which he himself, and his friends termed firmness of mind; but had not religion and some opposite virtues weighed heavily in the balance, it would frequently have degenerated into implacable stubbornness.²⁵

No doubt the latter passage was introduced to foreshadow the character in its later development; as such it is good art with which we can have no quarrel. But why does Mrs. Inchbald insist on the first description, presenting Dorriforth, so she believes, as a model gentleman? In spite of her constant protests that he is good he acts always as the man described in the second passage. Dorriforth, the guardian and priest, is in reality as stubborn as Lord Elmwood, the husband and tyrant. He does not change, but only develops the intensity of his essential character. All through the early chapters he strains at the leash and tries to express himself as he is, and all through these chapters the author holds him in check. Never once does she depict him as giving free rein to his passions until the last half of the novel. In this part of the work Dorriforth seems to break loose and run away from the writer. It might be argued that since Mrs. Inchbald had introduced this man as a priest she felt that she should represent him as noble and good, so long as he remained in that office. But the point is that she only called him good while she portrayed him on the page as bad. What is true in this instance is true of all Mrs. Inchbald's male characters. She could not make them behave as she wished. She failed to understand the inner workings of the minds of these gentlemen she had created, and failed because she had little knowledge of male psychology.

When we turn to an analysis of female characters we find that Mrs. Inchbald is more at home in their company, although even here not quite at ease. She approaches these characters subjectively and analyzes their motives, thus giving to her females a greater plausibility than is to be found in the male characters. Miss Milner, Miss Woodley, Mrs. Horton, Lady Matilda, and Hannah Primrose, while not admirably drawn, are at least not poorly drawn. They stand out as human beings, but with the exception of Mrs. Horton, they are hardly individualized, hardly living. As for poor Rebecca Rymer, she is too anemic to be noticed. Miss Milner and Hannah Primrose touched the author's own life and for this reason she understood their personal peculiarities. Even Miss Woodley, the over-conscientious Catholic, she must have observed in some English boarding-house. Mrs. Inchbald's greatest weakness in the delineation of female characters seems to be that she understood more of the source of woman's foibles than she did of her deeper feelings. It may be that for this reason she was a successful writer of comedy of manners²⁶ and a failure as a novelist.

Just as the treatment of the hero in A Simple Story served to illustrate Mrs. Inchbald's handling of male character in general, so an analysis of the heroine in the same novel will illustrate her method with female character. Here we find a trace of Richardson's influence in that the author attempts to lay bare the heart of Miss Milner and to assign motives for her actions. Immediately she gets into a difficulty similar to the one experienced with Dorriforth. This time it is Miss Milner's appearance and personality that get in the way, just as Dorriforth's goodness got in her way. She insists that the heroine is beautiful and charitable, but fails to make the reader aware of that beauty and charity. But in spite of this fault she does develop the character of Miss Milner logically, and makes her actions the result of what she is essentially. The reason she is able to do this is that now she is writing of the kind of person whom she knows. One may go so far as to say that Miss Milner is about the only kind of person whom the author does know. Generally speaking, the heroine is Mrs. Inchbald with a new name. She was herself a coquette, and she likewise makes Miss Milner a coquette, as passages culled here and there will, I hope, make clear. The first one I have chosen refers to a time before Dorriforth has seen his ward. Inquiring of an acquaintance what he should expect of this young lady he is told that

. . . she's young, idle, indiscreet, and giddy, with half a dozen lovers in her suite; some coxcombs, others men of gallantry, some single, and others married.²⁷

In commenting upon the shortcomings of the heroine Mrs. Inchbald says:

.. . if she had more faults than generally belong to others, she had likewise more temptations.²⁸

And again:

She was beautiful; she had been too frequently told the high value of that beauty, and thought every moment passed in wasteful idleness during which she was not gaining some new conquest. She had a quick sensibility, which too frequently discovered itself in the immediate resentment of injuries or neglect.²⁹

An illustration of how these qualities show themselves in the heroine's actions is to be found in her conduct toward Dorriforth soon after she learns that he is in love with her. She gambles with his affections in the hope of arousing his jealousy, mistaking it for love:

Are not my charms even more invincible than I ever believed them to be? Dorriforth, the grave, the pious, the anchorite Dorriforth, by their force, is animated to all the ardour of the most impassioned lover—while the proud priest, the austere guardian is humbled, if I but frown, into the veriest slave of love. She then asked, "Why did I not keep him longer in suspense? He could not have loved me more, I believe; but my power over him might have been greater still. I am the happiest of women in the affection he has proved to me, but I wonder whether it would exist under ill-treatment? If it would not, he still does not love me as I wish to be loved—if it would, my triumph, my felicity, would be enhanced."³⁰

The author's comment upon this passage is:

These thoughts were phantoms of the brain, and never, by system, put into action; but, repeatedly indulged, they were practiced by casual occurrences; the dear-bought experiment of being loved in spite of her faults, (a glory proud women ever aspire to) was, at present, the ambition of Miss Milner. Unthinking woman! she did not reflect, that to the searching eye of Lord Elmwood, she had faults, with her utmost care to conceal or overcome them, sufficient to try all his love, and all his patience. But what female is not fond of experiments? To which, how few do not fall a sacrifice!³¹

Miss Milner, acting upon her theory of proving a true lover, puts Lord Elmwood to the test. She attends a masquerade in defiance of his prohibition. Upon her return her lover threatens to release her from the engagement between them. A quarrel ensues and Miss Milner observes to her confidante:

"That after what had passed between her and Lord Elmwood, he must be the first to make a concession, before she herself would condescend to be reconciled." "I believe I know Lord Elmwood's temper," replied Miss Woodley, "and I do not think he will be easily induced to beg pardon for a fault which he thinks you have committed." "Then he does not love me . . . tenderness, affection, the politeness due from a lover to his mistress demands his submission."³²

The passages quoted reveal one side of the heroine's nature; but there is another side which is equally important. After Mrs. Inchbald has described her beauty, she says of her:

She had, besides, acquired the dangerous character of a wit; but to which she had no real pretentions, although the most discerning critic, hearing her converse, might fall into this mistake. Her replies had all the effect of repartee . . . Her words were but the words of others, and, like those of others, put into common sentences; but the delivery made them pass for wit, as grace in an ill-proportioned figure will often make it pass for symmetry.

Miss Milner had the quality peculiar to wits, of hazarding the thought that first occurs, which thought, is generally truth.³³

The thing that Mrs. Inchbald here says passed for wit in the heroine is the thing that passed for wit in Mrs. Inchbald's own life. In reality this so-called wit is nothing more than a quickness in repartee, a cleverness in conversation. Its use in the development of character is infrequent in the novels. In fact, the quality is given to but two of the characters, and is confined to the period of youth. Probably Mrs. Inchbald did not consider it as a quality belonging to youth alone, but as she carried her characters along in the complication she neglected to emphasize this particular side of the personality. At any rate, she did make use of it in the early development of Miss Milner's character in A Simple Story, and in the early development of young Henry's character in Nature and Art. One passage from A Simple Story will suffice to illustrate Mrs. Inchbald's use of this quality in her novels.

The occasion of the following conversation is the guardian's attempt to force an admission or a denial from his ward that she loves Lord Frederick. Sandford is by to assist at the inquisition, and Miss Woodley has been called in as a witness. Dorriforth begins:

"Under this consideration, I wish once more to hear your thoughts in regard to matrimony, and to hear them before one of your sex, that I may form an opinion by her constructions." To all this serious oration, Miss Milner made no other reply than by turning to Mr. Sandford, and asking, "if he was the person of her own sex, to whose judgment her guardian was to submit his own?" "Madam," cried Sandford angrily, "you are come hither upon serious business." "Any business must be serious to me, Mr. Sandford, in which you are concerned; and if you had called it sorrowful, the epithet would have suited as well." "Miss Milner," said her guardian, "I did not bring you here to contend with Mr. Sandford." "Then why, Sir, bring him hither? for where he and I are, there must be contention." "I brought him hither, Madam, or I should rather say, brought you to this house, merely that he might be present on this occasion, and with his discernment relieve me from a suspicion, that my own judgment is neither able to suppress nor to confirm." "Are there any more witnesses you may wish to call in, Sir, to remove your doubts of my veracity? if there are, pray send for them before you begin your interrogations."³⁴

Little more of Miss Milner's character is revealed in the novel than may be gleaned from these passages. Occasionally there are glimpses of noble sentiment and genuine charity, but these are far too few to convince the reader of the nobility of the heroine. The general impression that remains after a reading of the novel is that she was foolish, vain, and extremely susceptible to flattery. It was a combination of these qualities that brought on her ultimate tragedy, and the modern reader after being treated to an excess of silly caprices in this woman, sheds not a tear when she is finally eliminated from the second half of the tale. This overemphasis upon the caprices of Miss Milner leads me to say that Mrs. Inchbald was better acquainted with woman's foibles than with her soul. In other words, she was a poor psychologist in her character drawing.

Such criticism of the characters in Mrs. Inchbald's novels, particularly those in A Simple Story, does not mean that as they were conceived, they had nothing of greatness about them. Some of them were great, but not sufficiently developed to leave a lasting impression on the reader. Dorriforth, Miss Milner, the Dean, and Hannah Primrose could have taken their places with the great figures of fiction had they received a more thorough treatment. Even Miss Woodley, with her kind heart and charity, reminds one of Goldsmith's Dr. Primrose. Mrs. Horton, had her character been more fully treated, would have been the equal of Fielding's minor characters. It seems that Mrs. Inchbald had the power of inventing great figures of fiction, but that she lacked the ability to draw them as she conceived them. They always remain indistinct and static. They are individuals, but are not humanized. They remind one of the figures in a Hogarth painting, for, like Hogarth's characters, they have the stamp of the eighteenth century upon them; they are caught and held fast in a pose or an attitude, and seem never to have been live, dynamic individuals.

Furthermore, the characters in A Simple Story have no purpose in life. The men seem to exist for no other reason than to spend their time in the company of fine ladies, and the ladies' chief function appears to be to listen to the wisdom of the men, and to stand in awe of them. One would like to feel there was some business in life outside the four walls of a house, but Mrs. Inchbald affords the reader no such opportunity. Her people are always in the drawing or dining room in earnest conversation. When this conversation breaks up the heroine with her confidante retires to her apartment to sigh, sew, weep, or talk of love; the hero with his friend goes to his study to read or talk upon some point of philosophy. The characters do not, in any sense, live in the fullness of life.

In Nature and Art the characters are slightly more concerned with living than are those in the earlier novel, but the extra-literary purpose in this work serves to destroy their naturalness. This is seen in the characters of the two brothers. Mrs. Inchbald ignores inherent traits in order to show that her people are the product of environment. The two brothers at their introduction are said to have the qualities of "honesty, sobriety, and humility", but William is returned from the university a proud, haughty, and selfish man, the transformation, of course, being attributed to an artificial training. In treating the characters of the cousins the author at times makes character depend upon heredity, at other times upon environment and training. As a sensible woman of wide experience she knew that character is not entirely dependent upon environment and training, that heredity plays its rôle,—and so, forgetting her didactic intent for the moment, she occasionally permitted her good judgment to dictate what she wrote. However, such evidence of good judgment appears too infrequently to allow her to present living individuals.

On the whole the characters in Mrs. Inchbald's novels are stiff and artificial. Their affectation is a constant annoyance to the reader. Frequently their very names have an unpleasant sound and do not invite one to an intimate acquaintance. One may read through the whole of A Simple Story without once meeting the Christian name of Miss Milner. The sound of Dorriforth is harsh and unpleasant. In Nature and Art the multiplying of the Williams and Henrys leads to confusion, and leaves the impression that the characters themselves are a heterogeneous lot, and in reality that is what they are. . . .

Notes

. . .⁵ James Boaden, Memoirs of Mrs. Inchbald, Vol. I, p. 264.

⁶Ibid., Vol. I, p. 277.

⁷ P. G. Thomas (Editor), Greene's Pandosto—The Original of Shakespeare's Winter's Tale. Introduction, p. ix.

⁸ Samuel Richardson Littlewood, Elizabeth Inchbald and Her Circle, p. 75.

⁹ J. Boaden, op. cit., Vol. II, p. 30.

¹⁰ Apparently Mrs. Inchbald introduced Rushbrook with the idea of making of him a second hero but failed to carry out her purpose.

¹¹ S. R. Littlewood, op. cit., p. 76.

¹²Loc. cit.

¹³ Edith Birkhead, "Sentiment and Sensibility in the Eighteenth-Century Novel." English Association—Essays and Studies, Vol. XI, p. 108.

¹⁴Monthly Review, Enlarged Edition, April 1791, Vol. IV, p. 436. G. L. Joughin expresses a similar opinion when he says: "If A Simple Story is a fusion of two novels it must be a fundamental one. The identity of the characterizations precludes the possibility of the two parts representing two early separate works." The Life and Work of Elizabeth Inchbald, p. 302.

¹⁵ Clayton Hamilton, A Manual of the Art of Fiction, p. 61.

¹⁶ It will be recalled that Defoe again and again in the pages of Moll Flanders attributes the downfall of his heroine to the fact that she had never had a confidante. The importance which Mrs. Inchbald gives to this character suggests that she was taking Defoe's dictum seriously.

¹⁷Nature and Art (Philadelphia, 1796), Vol. I, p. 78.

¹⁸ Edward Morgan Forster, Aspects of the Novel, p. 143.

¹⁹Ibid., p. 127.

²⁰ Charles F. Horne, The Technique of the Novel, p. 176.

²¹ In spite of Mrs. Shelley's assertion that Mrs. Inchbald's admirers were unwilling to take a poor actress and playwright as a wife, Boaden insists again and again that Mrs. Inchbald had frequent proposals of marriage.

²²A Simple Story (1908), pp. 9-10.

²³ Edith Birkhead, "Sentiment and Sensibility in the Eighteenth-Century Novel." English Association—Essays and Studies, Vol. XI, pp. 96-97.

²⁴A Simple Story (1908), p. 5.

²⁵Ibid., p. 31.

²⁶ Allardyce Nicholl, A History of Late Eighteenth Century Drama, Preface, p. vi.

²⁷A Simple Story (1908), p. 11.

²⁸Ibid., p. 15.

²⁹Loc. cit.

³⁰Ibid., p. 123.

³¹Loc. cit.

³²Ibid., p. 147.

³³Ibid., pp. 15 and 16.

³⁴Ibid., pp. 49-50.

Works Cited

Birkhead, Edith, "Sentiment and Sensibility in the Eighteenth-Century Novel." English Association—Essays and Studies, Vol. 11, pp. 92-116, Oxford, 1925.

Boaden, James, Memoirs of Mrs. Inchbald, Vols. 1 and 2, London, 1833.

[Defoe, Daniel], Moll Flanders, New York, 1929.

Ernie, Lord (Prothero, Rowland Edmund), The Light Reading of Our Ancestors, London, 1927.

Forster, Edward Morgan, Aspects of the Novel, New York, 1927.

Gregory, Aliene, The French Revolution and The English Novel, New York, 1915.

Hamilton, Clayton, A Manual of the Art of Fiction, New York, 1922.

Horne, Charles F., The Technique of the Novel, New York, 1908.

[Inchbald, Mrs. Elizabeth], A Simple Story, London, 1908.

, Nature and Art, Philadelphia, 1796.

Joughin, G. Louis, The Life and Work of Elizabeth Inchbald. (Unpublished manuscript in the Harvard University Library.)

Littlewood, Samuel Richardson, Elizabeth Inchbald and Her Circle, London, 1921.

Monthly Review. Enlarged Edition, April, 1791, Vol. 4, pp. 434-38.

[Nicoli, Allardyce], A History of Late Eighteenth Century Drama, Cambridge, 1927.

Thomas, P. G. (Editor), Greene's Pandosto—The Original of Shakespeare's Winter's Tale, New York, 1907.