It is a pure Behnesque nouvelle, merely describing the plots and outrage which ruin the heroine (The Unfortunate Mistress is the second title), but attempting no character-drawing (the only hint at such a thing is that Idalia, instead of being a meek and suffering victim, is said to have a violent temper), and making not the slightest effort even to complete what story there is.  For the thing breaks off with a sort of “perhaps to be concluded in some next,” about which we have not made up our minds.  Very rarely do we find such a curious combination or succession of styles so early:  but the novel, for pretty obvious reasons, seems to offer temptations to it and facilities for it.

For Idalia’s above-named juniors, while not bad books to read for mere amusement, have a very particular interest for the student of the history of the novel.  Taken in connection with their author’s earlier work, they illustrate, for the first time, a curious phenomenon which has repeated itself often, notably in the case of Bulwer, and of a living novelist who need not be named.  This is that the novel, more almost than any other kind of literature, seems to lend itself to what may be called the timeserving or “opportunism” of craftsmanship—­to call out the adaptiveness and versatility of the artist. Betsy and Jenny are so different from Idalia and her group that a critic of the idle Separatist persuasion would, were it not for troublesome certainties of fact, have no difficulty whatever in proving that they must be by different authors.  We know that they were not:  and we know also the reason of their dissimilarity—­the fact that Pamela and her brother and their groups ont passe par la.[9] This fact is most interesting:  and it shows, among other things, that Mrs. Eliza Haywood was a decidedly clever woman.

    [9] The elect ladies about Richardson joined Betsy with
    Amelia, and sneered at both.

At the same time the two books also show that she was not quite clever enough:  and that she had not realised, as in fact hardly one of the minor novelists of this time did realise, the necessity of individualising character.  Betsy is both a nice and a good girl—­“thoughtless” up to specification, but no fool, perfectly “straight” though the reverse of prudish, generous, merry, lovable.  But with all these good qualities she is not quite a person.  Jenny is, I think, a little more of one, but still not quite—­while the men and the other women are still less.  Nor had Eliza mastered that practised knack of “manners-painting” which was to stand Fanny Burney, and many another after her, in the stead of actual character-creation.  Her situations are often very lively, if not exactly decorous; and they sometimes have a real dramatic verisimilitude, for instance, the quarrel and reconciliation of the Lord and the Lady in Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy; but the higher verisimilitude of prose fiction they lack.  Neither again (though Smollett had given her a lead here) had she attained that power of setting and furnishing a scene which is so powerful a weapon in the novelist’s armoury.  Yet she had learnt much:  and her later work would have been almost a wonder in her own earlier time.