A Simple Story | Page 2

which has never been described.
Thus the reader of modern novels is inevitably struck, in A Simple
Story, by a sense of emptiness and thinness, which may well blind him
to high intrinsic merits. The spirit of the eighteenth century is certainly
present in the book, but it is the eighteenth century of France rather
than of England. Mrs. Inchbald no doubt owed much to Richardson;
her view of life is the indoor sentimental view of the great author of
Clarissa; but her treatment of it has very little in common with his
method of microscopic analysis and vast accumulation. If she belongs
to any school, it is among the followers of the French classical tradition
that she must be placed. A Simple Story is, in its small way, a
descendant of the Tragedies of Racine; and Miss Milner may claim
relationship with Madame de Clèves.
Besides her narrowness of vision, Mrs. Inchbald possesses another
quality, no less characteristic of her French predecessors, and no less
rare among the novelists of England. She is essentially a stylist--a
writer whose whole conception of her art is dominated by stylistic
intention. Her style, it is true, is on the whole poor; it is often heavy and
pompous, sometimes clumsy and indistinct; compared with the style of
such a master as Thackeray it sinks at once into insignificance. But the
interest of her style does not lie in its intrinsic merit so much as in the
use to which she puts it. Thackeray's style is mere ornament, existing

independently of what he has to say; Mrs. Inchbald's is part and parcel
of her matter. The result is that when, in moments of inspiration, she
rises to the height of her opportunity, when, mastering her material, she
invests her expression with the whole intensity of her feeling and her
thought, then she achieves effects of the rarest beauty--effects of a kind
for which one may search through Thackeray in vain. The most
triumphant of these passages is the scene on the staircase of Elmwood
House--a passage which would be spoilt by quotation and which no one
who has ever read it could forget. But the same quality is to be found
throughout her work. "Oh, Miss Woodley!" exclaims Miss Milner,
forced at last to confess to her friend what she feels towards Dorriforth,
"I love him with all the passion of a mistress, and with all the
tenderness of a wife." No young lady, even in the eighteenth century,
ever gave utterance to such a sentence as that. It is the sentence, not of
a speaker, but of a writer; and yet, for that very reason, it is delightful,
and comes to us charged with a curious sense of emotion, which is
none the less real for its elaboration. In Nature and Art, Mrs. Inchbald's
second novel, the climax of the story is told in a series of short
paragraphs, which, for bitterness and concentration of style, are almost
reminiscent of Stendhal:
The jury consulted for a few minutes. The verdict was "Guilty".
She heard it with composure.
But when William placed the fatal velvet on his head and rose to
pronounce sentence, she started with a kind of convulsive motion,
retreated a step or two back, and, lifting up her hands with a scream,
exclaimed--
"Oh, not from you!"
The piercing shriek which accompanied these words prevented their
being heard by part of the audience; and those who heard them thought
little of their meaning, more than that they expressed her fear of dying.
Serene and dignified, as if no such exclamation had been uttered,
William delivered the fatal speech, ending with "Dead, dead, dead".

She fainted as he closed the period, and was carried back to prison in a
swoon; while he adjourned the court to go to dinner.
Here, no doubt, there is a touch of melodrama; but it is the melodrama
of a rhetorician, and, in that fine "She heard it with composure", genius
has brushed aside the forced and the obvious, to express, with supreme
directness, the anguish of a soul.
For, in spite of Mrs. Inchbald's artificialities, in spite of her lack of that
kind of realistic description which seems to modern readers the very
blood and breath of a good story, she has the power of doing what, after
all, only a very few indeed of her fellow craftsmen have ever been able
to do--she can bring into her pages the living pressure of a human
passion, she can invest, if not with realism, with something greater than
realism--with the sense of reality itself--the pains, the triumphs, and the
agitations of the human heart. "The heart," to use the old-fashioned
phrase--there is Mrs. Inchbald's empire, there is the sphere of her glory
and her command. Outside of it, her