DIY History | Transcribe | Scholarship at Iowa | The Ethical Tendency of the English Novel by Helen M. Harney, 1897 | The Ethical Tendency of the English Novel by Helen M. Harney, 1897, Page 16

Transcribe
Translate

The Ethical Tendency of the English Novel by Helen M. Harney, 1897

The Ethical Tendency of the English Novel by Helen M. Harney, 1897, Page 16

if not morality, is not absent from the loose sayings of Sterne, and Swift in his malignant half insane way, at least had reforms in view. Goldsmith's picture of virtuous rural life are still beloved because in Taine's phrase, "the chief of them writes and harmonizes in one character the best features of the manners and morals of the time and country, and creates an admiration and love for pious and orderly domestic and disciplined laborians and rural life; Protestant and English virtue has not a more approved exemplar." Sheer romance prevailed with Mrs. Radcliffe, Horace Walpole, Miss Porter and the forgotten novelists of chivalry and mediaeval history, whose fame was overshadowed by that of Scott, who is a romancer pure and simple.
I think it undeniable that as a whole the fiction of the nineteenth century compared with that of the eighteenth, the ethical element in
13.

Saving...

if not morality, is not absent from the loose sayings of Sterne, and Swift in his malignant half insane way, at least had reforms in view. Goldsmith's picture of virtuous rural life are still beloved because in Taine's phrase, "the chief of them writes and harmonizes in one character the best features of the manners and morals of the time and country, and creates an admiration and love for pious and orderly domestic and disciplined laborians and rural life; Protestant and English virtue has not a more approved exemplar." Sheer romance prevailed with Mrs. Radcliffe, Horace Walpole, Miss Porter and the forgotten novelists of chivalry and mediaeval history, whose fame was overshadowed by that of Scott, who is a romancer pure and simple. I think it undeniable that as a whole the fiction of the nineteenth century compared with that of the eighteenth, the ethical element in 13.