HAPTER XI 291
IV-CHAPTER XII 293

INTRODUCTION

_A Simple Story_ is one of those books which, for some reason or other,
have failed to come down to us, as they deserved, along the current of
time, but have drifted into a literary backwater where only the
professional critic or the curious discoverer can find them out. "The
iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy;" and nowhere more
blindly than in the republic of letters. If we were to inquire how it
has happened that the true value of Mrs. Inchbald's achievement has
passed out of general recognition, perhaps the answer to our question
would be found to lie in the extreme difficulty with which the mass of
readers detect and appreciate mere quality in literature. Their judgment
is swayed by a hundred side-considerations which have nothing to do with
art, but happen easily to impress the imagination, or to fit in with the
fashion of the hour. The reputation of Mrs. Inchbald's contemporary,
Fanny Burney, is a case in point. Every one has heard of Fanny Burney's
novels, and _Evelina_ is still widely read. Yet it is impossible to
doubt that, so far as quality alone is concerned, _Evelina_ deserves to
be ranked considerably below _A Simple Story._ But its writer was the
familiar friend of the greatest spirits of her age; she was the author
of one of the best of diaries; and her work was immediately and
immensely popular. Thus it has happened that the name of Fanny Burney
has maintained its place upon the roll of English novelists, while that
of Mrs. Inchbald is forgotten.

But the obscurity of Mrs. Inchbald's career has not, of course, been the
only reason for the neglect of her work. The merits of _A Simple Story_
are of a kind peculiarly calculated to escape the notice of a
generation of readers brought up on the fiction of the nineteenth
century. That fiction, infinitely various as it is, possesses at least
one characteristic common to the whole of it--a breadth of outlook upon
life, which can be paralleled by no other body of literature in the
world save that of the Elizabethans. But the comprehensiveness of view
shared by Dickens and Tolstoy, by Balzac and George Eliot, finds no
place in Mrs. Inchbald's work. Compared with _A Simple Story_ even the
narrow canvases of Jane Austen seem spacious pictures of diversified
life. Mrs. Inchbald's novel is not concerned with the world at large, or
with any section of society, hardly even with the