CHAPTER III

THE NEW FICTION

Although, as was shown in the first chapter, the amount of novel writing

in the last decades of the eighteenth century was very considerable, and

the talent displayed by at least some of the practitioners of the form

distinctly great, it can hardly have been possible for any careful

observer of it, either during the last ten years of the old age or the

first fifteen of the new, to be satisfied with it on the whole, or to

think that it had reached a settled or even a promising condition. Miss

Burney (now Madame d'Arblay), whose brilliant debut with _Evelina_ was

made just before the date at which this book begins, had just after that

date produced _Cecilia_, in which partial and contemporary judges

professed to see no falling off. But though she was still living and

writing,--though she lived and wrote till the present century was nearly

half over,--_Camilla_ (1796) was acknowledged as a doubtful success, and

_The Wanderer_ (1814) as a disastrous failure; nor after this did she

attempt the style again.

The unpopularity of Jacobinism and the growing distaste for the

philosophy of the eighteenth century prevented much attempt being made

to follow up the half political, half philosophical novel of Godwin,

Holcroft, and Bage. No such causes, however, were in operation as

concerning the "Tale of Terror," the second founder of which, Monk

Lewis, was indeed no inconsiderable figure during the earlier part of

the great age of 1810-30, while Charles Robert Maturin improved

considerably upon Lewis himself. Maturin was born in Ireland (where he

principally lived) in 1782, and died there in 1824. He took orders, but

was too eccentric for success in his profession, and his whole heart was

set on literature and the drama. Befriended by Scott and Byron, though

very severely criticised by Coleridge, he succeeded in getting his

tragedy of _Bertram_ acted at Drury Lane with success; but his later

theatrical ventures (_Manuel_, _Fredolpho_) were less fortunate. He also

published sermons; but he lives in literature only by his novels, and

not very securely by these. He produced three of them--_The Fatal

Vengeance: or, The Family of Montorio_, _The Wild Irish Boy_, and the

_Milesian Chief_--under a pseudonym before he was thirty; while after

the success of _Bertram_ he avowed _Women_ (1818), _Melmoth the

Wanderer_ (1820), and _The Albigenses_ (1824), the last in a sort of

cross style between his earlier patterns and Scott. But his fame had

best be allowed to rest wholly on _Melmoth_, a remarkable book dealing

with the supposed selling of a soul to the devil in return for prolonged

life; the bargain, however, being terminable if the seller can induce

some one else to take it off his hands. Although far too long,

marvellously involved with tales within tales, and disfigured in parts

by the rant and the gush of its class, _Melmoth_ is really a powerful

book, which gave something more than a passing shudder to its own

generation (it specially influenced Balzac), and which has not lost its

force even now. But the usual novel of this kind, which was written in

vast numbers, was simply beneath contempt.

The exquisite artist who, as mentioned formerly, had taken these tales

of terror as part subject of her youthful satire, had begun to write

some years before the close of the eighteenth century. But Miss Austen's

books were long withheld from the press, and she was considerably

preceded in publication by Maria Edgeworth. These last are the only

novels of the first decade of the nineteenth century which have held any

ground, though they were but few among the crowds not merely of tales of

terror but of fashionable novels, "Minerva Press" inanities, attempts

in the bastard and unsuccessful kind of historical romance which

preceded Scott's, and others. Miss Edgeworth, who was born in 1767, the

daughter of an eccentric busybody of good family and property in

Ireland, and who lived till 1848, had a great fame in her own day,

deserved it, never entirely lost it, and has lately had it revived;

while Scott declared (but in such matters Scott was a little apt to let

his good-nature and his freedom from personal vanity get the better of

strict critical truth) that her Irish novels had supplied the suggestion

of his Scotch ones. Her chief works in this kind were _Castle Rackrent_

(1801), a book with little interest of the strictly "novel" kind, but a

wonderful picture of the varieties of recklessness and misconduct which

in the course of a generation or two ruined or crippled most of the

landlords of Ireland; _Belinda_ (1803), her most ambitious and elaborate

if not her most successful effort, which includes a very vivid and

pregnant sketch of the feminine dissipation of the end of the last

century; _Tales of Fashionable Life_, including the admirable

_Absentee_; and _Ormond_, the most vivid of her Irish stories next to

_Castle Rackrent_. She continued to write novels as late as 1834

(_Helen_), while some very charming letters of hers, though privately

printed a good many years ago, were not published till 1894. Miss

Edgeworth's father, Richard, was himself something of a man of letters,

and belonged to the class of Englishmen who, without imbibing French

freethinking, had eagerly embraced the "utility" doctrines, the

political economy, and some of the educational and social crazes of the

French _philosophes_; and he did his daughter no good by thrusting into

her earlier work a strain of his own crotchet and purpose. Indirectly,

however, this brought about in _The Parent's Assistant_, in other books

for children, and in the _Moral Tales_, some of her most delightful

work. In the novels (which besides these mentioned include _Leonora_,

_Harrington_, _Ennui_, and _Patronage_, the longest of all) Miss

Edgeworth occupies a kind of middle position between the eighteenth

century novelists, of whom Miss Burney is the last, and those of the

nineteenth, of whom Miss Austen is the first. This is not merely,

though no doubt it is partly, due to the fact that the society which she

saw (and she mixed in a great deal, from the highest downwards) was

itself in a kind of transition state: it was at least as much owing to a

certain want of distinct modernness and distinct universality in her own

character, thought, and style. Miss Edgeworth, though possessed of

delightful talents falling little short of genius, and of much humour

(which last is shown in the charming _Essay on Irish Bulls_, as well as

in her novels and her letters), missed, as a rule, the last and greatest

touches; and, except some of her Irish characters, who are rather types

than individuals, she has not created many live persons, while sometimes

she wanders very far from life. Her touch, in short, though extremely

pleasant, was rather uncertain. She can tell a story to perfection, but

does not often invent it perfectly; and by herself she can hardly be

said to have originated anything, though of course, if we could accept

the above quoted statement of Scott's, she indirectly originated a very

great deal.

Very different is the position occupied by Jane Austen, who was born at

Steventon in Hampshire on 16th December 1775, being the daughter of the

rector of that place, lived a quiet life chiefly at various places in

her native county, frequented good society in the rank of not the

richest country squires, to which her own family belonged, and died at

Winchester unmarried on 24th July 1817. Of her six completed novels,

_Sense and Sensibility_, _Pride and Prejudice_, _Mansfield Park_, and

_Emma_ were published during the last seven years of her life, while

_Northanger Abbey_ and _Persuasion_ appeared, for the first time with an

author's name, the year after her death. They had no enormous or sudden

popularity, but the best judges, from Scott downwards, at once

recognised their extraordinary merit; and it is not too much to say that

by the best judges, with rare exceptions, that merit has been

acknowledged with ever increasing fulness at once of enthusiasm and

discrimination to the present day. With Scott, Miss Austen is the parent

of nineteenth century fiction; or, to speak with greater exactness, she

is the mother of the nineteenth century novel, just as he is the father

of the nineteenth century romance.

One indeed of the most wonderful things about her is her earliness. Even

the dates of publication of her first books precede those of any

novelist of the same rank and the same modernity; but these dates are

misleading. _Northanger Abbey_ was written more than twenty years before

it appeared, and the bulk of _Pride and Prejudice_ (which some hold to

be the best and most characteristic of all) is known to have been as old

at least as _Northanger Abbey_. That is to say, almost at the very time

of the appearance of _Camilla_ (to which, by the way, Miss Austen was an

original subscriber), a book not strikingly more nineteenth century in

tone than the novels of Richardson, though a little more so in manners,

a girl even younger than Miss Burney herself had been when she wrote

_Evelina_ was drawing other girls, who, putting aside the most trivial

details of dress, speech, and so forth, might be living girls to-day.

The charm and the genius of Miss Austen are not universally admitted;

the touch of old fashion in external detail apparently discontenting

some readers, the delicate and ever-present irony either escaping or

being distasteful to others, while the extreme quietness of the action

and the entire absence of excitement probably revolt a third class. But

the decriers do not usually attempt formal criticism. However, they

sometimes do, and such an attempt once came under the notice of the

present historian. It was urged that to extol Miss Austen's method is a

masculine delusion, that method being nothing but the throwing into

literature of the habit of minute and semi-satiric observation natural

to womankind. It did not apparently occur to this critic that he (or

she) was in the first place paying Miss Austen an extraordinarily high

compliment--a compliment almost greater than the most enthusiastic

"Janites" have ventured--inasmuch as no higher literary triumph can be

even conceived than thus to focus, formulate, and crystallise the

special talent and gift of an entire sex into a literary method. Nor did

it probably occur to him that he was laying himself open to the

damaging, or rather ruinous retort, "Then how is it that, of all the

women who have preceded and followed Miss Austen as novelists, no other

has displayed this specially and universally feminine gift?"

It is no doubt true that there is something feminine about the method,

which, with the addition of a certain _nescio quid_, giving it its

modern difference, may be said to combine the peculiarities of Fielding

and of Richardson, though it works on a much smaller scale than either.

It has the intense and pervading, though not the exuberant and

full-blooded, _livingness_ of Fielding, and it also has something not

unlike a feminine counterpart and complement of his pervading irony;

while it is not unlike Richardson in building up the characters and the

stories partly by an infinity of tiny strokes of detail, often

communicated in conversation, partly by the use of an exceedingly nice

and delicate analysis of motive and temperament. It is in the former

respect that Miss Austen stands apart from most, if not from all, women

who have written novels. Irony is by no means a frequent feminine gift;

and as women do not often possess it in any great degree, so they do not

as a rule enjoy it. Miss Austen is only inferior among English writers

to Swift, to Fielding, and to Thackeray--even if it be not improper to

use the term inferiority at all for what is after all not much more than

difference--in the use of this potent but most double-edged weapon. Her

irony indeed is so subtle that it requires a certain dose of subtlety to

appreciate it, and it is not uncommon to find those who consider such

personages as Mr. Collins in _Pride and Prejudice_ to be merely

farcical, instead of, as they are in fact, preachers of the highest and

most Shakespearian comedy. But there would be no room here to examine

Miss Austen's perfections in detail; the important thing for the

purposes of this history is to observe again that she "set the clock,"

so to speak, of pure novel writing to the time which was to be

nineteenth century time to this present hour. She discarded violent and

romantic adventure. She did not rely in the very least degree on

describing popular or passing fashions, amusements, politics; but

confined herself to the most strictly ordinary life. Yet she managed in

some fashion so to extract the characteristics of that life which are

perennial and human, that there never can be any doubt to fit readers in

any age finding themselves at home with her, just as they find

themselves at home with all the greatest writers of bygone ages. And

lastly, by some analogous process she hit upon a style which, though

again true to the ordinary speech of her own day, and therefore now

reviled as "stilted" and formal by those who have not the gift of

literary detachment, again possesses the universal quality, and, save in

the merest externals, is neither ancient nor modern.

For the moment, however, Miss Austen's example had not so much little

influence as none at all. A more powerful and popular force, coming

immediately afterwards and coinciding with the bent of general taste,

threw for the time the whole current of English novel writing into quite

a different channel; and it was not till the first rush of this current

had expended itself, after an interval of thirty or forty years, that

the novel, as distinguished from the romance and from nondescript styles

partaking now of the romance itself, now of something like the

eighteenth century story, engaged the popular ear. This new development

was the historical novel proper; and the hand that started it at last

was that of Scott. At last--for both men and women had been trying to

write historical novels for about two thousand years, and for some

twenty or thirty the attempts had come tolerably thick and fast. But

before Scott no one, ancient or modern, Englishman or foreigner, had

really succeeded. In the first place, until the eighteenth century was

pretty far advanced, the conception and the knowledge of history as

distinguished from the mere writing and reading of chronicles had been

in a very rudimentary condition. Exceedingly few historians and no

readers of history, as a class and as a rule, had practised or acquired

the art of looking at bygone ages with any attempt to realise and revive

the ideas of those ages themselves, or even, while looking at them with

the eyes of the present, to keep in mind that these were quite different

eyes from those of contemporaries. In the same way no attempt at getting

"local colour," at appropriateness of dialect, and so forth, had been

made. These negligences in the hands of genius had been as unimportant

as the negligences of genius always are. If Shakespeare's "godlike

Romans" are not entirely free from anachronism, nobody of sense would

exchange them for anything else than themselves; and though Dante

practically repeated in the _Commedia_ the curious confusion which in

less gifted _trouveres_ and romances mixed up Alexander with Charlemagne

and blended Greek and Gothic notions in one inextricable tangle, this

also was supremely unimportant, if not even in a manner interesting. But

when, at the end of the eighteenth century, writers, of secondary powers

at best, engaging in a new and unengineered way, endeavoured to write

historical novels, they all, from Godwin and Mrs. Radcliffe to Miss

Reeves and the Misses Lee, made the merest gallimaufries of inaccurate

history, questionable fiction, manners heedlessly jumbled, and above all

dialogue destitute of the slightest semblance of verisimilitude, and

drawn chiefly from that of the decadent tragic and comic drama of the

time.

It is not possible--it never is in such cases--to give a very exact

account of the causes which led Walter Scott, when the public seemed to

be a little tiring of the verse-romances which have been discussed in

the last chapter, to take to romances in prose. The example of Miss

Edgeworth, if a true cause at all, could affect only his selection of

Scotch manners to illustrate his histories, not his adoption of the

historical style itself. But he did adopt it; and, fishing out from an

old desk the beginnings of a story which he had left unfinished, or

rather had scarce commenced, years earlier, he fashioned it into

_Waverley_. This appearing in the year 1814 at a serious crisis in his

own affairs, opened at once a new career of fame and fortune to him,

and a previously unknown field of exploit and popularity to the English

novel.

The extraordinary greatness of Scott--who in everything but pure style,

and the expression of the highest raptures of love, thought, and nature,

ranks with the greatest writers of the world--is not better indicated by

any single fact than by the fact that it is impossible to describe his

novels in any simple formula. He practically created the historical

novel; and, what is more, he elaborated it to such an extent that no

really important additions to his scheme have been made since. But not

all his novels are historical. The two which immediately succeeded

_Waverley_, and which perhaps the best judges consider his best,--_Guy

Mannering_ and _The Antiquary_,--have only the faintest touch of history

about them, and might have none at all without affecting their

excellence; while one of the most powerful of his later books, _St.

Ronan's Well_, is almost absolutely virgin of fact. So also, though his

incomparable delineation of national manners, speech, and character, of

the _cosas de Escocia_ generally, is one of the principal sources of his

interest, _Ivanhoe_, which has perhaps been the most popular of all his

books, _Kenilworth_, which is not far below it in popularity or in

merit, and one or two others, have nothing at all of Scotland in them;

and the altogether admirable romance of _Quentin Durward_, one of his

four or five masterpieces, so little that what there is plays the

smallest part in the success. So yet again, historical novelist as Scott

is, and admirably as he has utilised and revivified history, he is by no

means an extremely accurate historical scholar, and is wont not merely

to play tricks with history to suit his story,--that is probably always

allowable,--but to commit anachronisms which are quite unnecessary and

even a little teasing.

There is no doubt that the single gift underlying all these and other

things--the gift which enabled Scott not merely, as has been said, to

create the historical novel, but to give the novel generally an entirely

new start and direction, to establish its popularity, to clear its

reputation from the smirch of frivolity on the one side and immorality

on the other, to put it in the position occupied at other times or in

other countries by the drama and the sermon, and to make it a rival of

the very newspaper which was being refashioned at the same moment, while

providing opportunities for the production of literature proper not

inferior to those of any literary kind except poetry--that this was a

gift of higher scope, if of vaguer definition, than any of those

referred to. It was that gift which no one except Shakespeare has ever

possessed in larger measure, though others have possessed it in greater

partial intensity and perfection--the gift of communicating life to the

persons, the story, the dialogue. To some extent Scott had this treasure

in an earthen vessel. He could not, like Thackeray, like Fielding, like

Miss Austen even, make everybody that he touched alive: his heroes very

generally are examples to the contrary. And as a rule, when he did

perform this function of the wizard,--a name given to him by a more than

popular appropriateness,--he usually did it, not by the accumulation of

a vast number of small strokes, but by throwing on the canvas, or rather

panel, large outlines, free sweeps of line, and breadths of colour,

instinct with vivacity and movement. Yet he managed wholly to avoid that

fault of some creative imaginations which consists in personifying and

individualising their figures by some easily recognisable label of

mannerism. Even his most mannered characters, his humourists in the

seventeenth century sense, of whom Dugald Dalgetty is the prince

and chief--the true commander of the whole _stift_ of this

_Dunkelspiel_--stand poles asunder from those inventions of Dickens and

of some others who are ticketed for us by a gesture or a phrase repeated

_ad nauseam_. And this gift probably is most closely connected with

another: the extraordinary variety of Scott's scene, character, and--so

far as the term is applicable to his very effective but rather loose

fashion of story-telling--plot. It is a common and a just complaint of

novelists, especially when they are fertile rather than barren, that

with them scene, plot, and character all run into a kind of mould, that

their stories with a little trouble can be thrown into a sort of common

form, that their persons simply "change from the blue bed to the brown,"

and that the blue and brown beds themselves are seen, under their

diverse colours, to have a singular and not very welcome uniformity of

pattern and furniture. Even Scott does not escape this almost invariable

law of the brain-artist: it is one of the sole Shakespearian

characteristics that Shakespeare does escape it entirely and altogether.

A certain form of huddled and not altogether probable catastrophe, a

knack of introducing in the earlier part of the story, as if big with

fate, personages who afterwards play but a subordinate part, and one or

two other things, might be urged against Sir Walter. But, on the whole,

no artist is less chargeable with stereotype than he. His characters are

hardly ever doubles; their relationships (certain general connections

excepted, which are practically the scaffolding of the romance in

itself) do not repeat themselves; the backgrounds, however much or

however little strict local colour they may have, are always

sufficiently differentiated. They have the variety, as they have the

truth, of nature.

No detailed account can here be attempted of the marvellous rapidity and

popularity of the series of novels from the appearance of _Waverley_

till just before the author's death eighteen years later. The anecdotage

of the matter is enormous. The books were from the first anonymous, and

for some time the secret of their authorship was carefully and on the

whole successfully preserved. Even several years after the beginning, so

acute a judge as Hazlitt, though he did not entertain, thought it

necessary seriously to discuss, the suggestion that Godwin wrote

them,--a suggestion which, absurd as, with our illegitimate advantage of

distance and perspective, we see it to be, was less nonsensical than it

seems to those who forget that at the date of the appearance of

_Waverley_ there was no novelist who could have been selected with more

plausibility. After a time this and that were put together, and a critic

of the name of Adolphus constructed an argument of much ingenuity and

shrewdness to show that the author of _Marmion_ and the _Lady of the

Lake_ must be the author of _Waverley_. But the secret was never

regularly divulged till Sir Walter's misfortunes, referred to in the

section on his poetry, made further concealment not so much useless as

impossible in the first place, and positively detrimental in the second.

The series was dauntlessly continued, despite the drag of the

_Napoleon_, the necessity of attempting other work that would bring in

money, and above all the strain on the faculties both of imagination and

labour which domestic as well as pecuniary misfortunes imposed. Nor did

Scott, it may be fearlessly, asserted, though it is not perhaps the

general opinion, ever publish any "dotages," with the possible exception

of _Castle Dangerous_, which was not only finished but begun when the

fatal disease of the brain which killed him had got the upper hand. The

introduction to the _Chronicles of the Canongate_, written in 1827, is

one of the most exquisite and masterly things that he ever did, though,

from its not actually forming part of one of the novels, it is

comparatively little known. The _Fair Maid of Perth_, a year later, has

been one of the most popular of all abroad, and not the least so at

home; and there are critics who rank _Anne of Geierstein_, in 1829, very

high indeed. Few defenders are found for _Count Robert of Paris_, which

was in fact written in the valley of the shadow; and it may be admitted

that in his earlier days Scott would certainly have been able to give it

a fuller development and a livelier turn. Yet the opening scene, though

a little too long, the escape from the vaults of the Blachernal, and not

a few other things, would be recognised as marvellous if they could be

put before a competent but unbiassed taste, which knew nothing of Sir

Walter's other work, but was able to compare it not merely with the work

of his predecessors but with that of his imitators, numerous and

enterprising as they were, at the time that _Count Robert_ appeared.

In such a comparison Scott at his worst excels all others at their best.

It is not merely that in this detail and in that he has the mastery, but

that he has succeeded in making novel writing in general turn over a

completely new leaf, enter upon a distinctly different competition.

With the masterpieces of the eighteenth century novel he does not enter

into comparison at all: he is working on a different scene, addressing a

different audience, using different tools, colours, methods. Every

successful novelist up to his time had, whatever his ostensible "_temp._

of tale," quietly assumed the thoughts, the speech, the manners, even to

a great extent the dress and details of his own day. And in this

assumption all but the greatest had inevitably estranged from them the

ears and eyes of days that were not their own, which days, no doubt,

were in turn themselves rapidly hastening to change, but never to revert

to the original surroundings. Scott had done in prose fiction what the

poets and the dramatists had sometimes done, what very rare philosophers

had sometimes done likewise. Ostensibly going to the past, and to some

extent really borrowing its circumstances, he had in reality gone

straight to man as man; he had varied the particular trapping only to

exhibit the universal substance. The Baron of Bradwardine, Dandie

Dinmont, Edie Ochiltree, Mause Headrigg, Bailie Jarvie, and the long

list of originals down to Oliver Proudfute and even later, their less

eccentric companions from Fergus MacIvor to Queen Margaret, may derive

part of their appeal from dialect and colouring, from picturesque

"business" and properties. But the chief of that appeal lies in the fact

that they are all men and women of the world, of life, of time in

general; that even when their garments, even when their words are a

little out of fashion, there is real flesh and blood beneath the

garments, real thought and feeling behind the words. It may be urged by

the Devil's Advocate, and is not wholly susceptible of denial by his

opponent, that, after the first four or five books, the enormous gains

open to Scott first tempted, and the heroic efforts afterwards demanded

of him later compelled, the author to put not quite enough of himself

and his knowledge into his work, to "pad" if not exactly to "scamp" a

little. Yet it is the fact that some of his very best work was not only

very rapidly written, but written under such circumstances of bodily

suffering and mental worry as would have made any work at all

impossible to most men. And, on the whole, it is perhaps as idle to

speculate whether this work might have been better, as it is ungenerous

to grumble that it ought to have been. For after all it is such a body

of literature as, for complete liberation from any debts to models,

fertility and abundance of invention, nobility of sentiment, variety and

keenness of delight, nowhere else exists as the work of a single author

in prose.

It was certain that an example so fascinating in itself, and of such

extraordinary profit in fame and fortune to the author, would be

followed. It was said with sufficient accuracy that Scott's novels, at

the best of his career, brought him in about L15,000 a year, a sum

previously undreamt of by authors; while their reputation overshadowed

not only all others in England, but all others throughout Europe. And it

is rather surprising, and shows how entirely Scott had the priority in

this field, that it was not for six or seven years at least that any

noteworthy attempts in his manner appeared, while it can scarcely be

said that in England anything of very great value was published in it

before his death. In the last ten years of his life, however,

imitations, chiefly of his historical style, did appear in great

numbers; and he has left in his diary an extremely interesting, a very

good-natured, but a very shrewd and just criticism upon them in general,

and upon two in particular--the _Brambletye House_ of Horace Smith, one

of the authors of the delightful parodies called _Rejected Addresses_,

and the first book, _Sir John Chiverton_, of an author who was to

continue writing for some half century, and at times to attain very

great popularity. This was Harrison Ainsworth, and G. P. R. James also

began to publish pretty early in the third decade of the century. James'

_Richelieu_, his first work of mark, appeared in 1825, the same year as

_Sir John Chiverton_; but he was rather the older man of the two, having

been born in 1801, while Ainsworth's birth year was 1805. The latter,

too, long outlived James, who died in 1860, while holding the post of

English Consul in Venice, while Ainsworth survived till 1882. Both were

exceedingly prolific, James writing history and other work as well as

the novels--_Darnley_, _Mary of Burgundy_, _Henry Masterton_, _John

Marston Hall_, and dozens of others--which made his fame; while

Ainsworth (_Jack Sheppard_, _The Tower of London_, _Crichton_,

_Rookwood_, _Old St. Paul's_, etc.) was a novelist only. Both,

especially between 1830 and 1850, achieved considerable popularity with

the general public; and they kept it much longer (if indeed they have

yet lost it) with schoolboys. But while the attempt of both to imitate

Scott was palpable always, the success of neither could be ranked very

high by severe criticism. James wrote better than Ainsworth: his

historical knowledge was of a much wider and more accurate kind, and he

was not unimbued with the spirit of romance. But the sameness of his

situations (it became a stock joke to speak of the "two horsemen" who so

often appeared in his opening scenes), the exceedingly conventional

character of his handling, and the theatrical feebleness of his

dialogue, were always reprehended and open to reprehension. Harrison

Ainsworth, on the other hand, had a real knack of arresting and keeping

the interest of those readers who read for mere excitement: he was

decidedly skilful at gleaning from memoirs and other documents scraps of

decoration suitable for his purpose, he could in his better days string

incidents together with a very decided knack, and, till latterly, his

books rarely languished. But his writing was very poor in strictly

literary merit, his style was at best bustling prose melodrama, and his

characters were scarcely ever alive.

The chief follower of Sir Walter Scott in "Scotch" novels--for Miss

Ferrier, the Scottish counterpart of Miss Edgeworth and Miss Austen,

was, though his friend, hardly his follower, and _Marriage_ was mainly

written before _Waverley_--was John Galt, who also has some claim to

priority. He was born (2nd May 1779) at Irvine in Ayrshire, the scene of

his best work, but passed most of his youth at Greenock. His father was

a retired West India captain; and Galt's biographers do not make it very

clear whence he obtained the capital for the various travels and

enterprises which occupied his not exactly eventful, but busy and

varied life. He had entered the Custom-house; but went to London in

1804, and tried literature in many forms, and for the most part with

very little success. While travelling in the Levant he met Byron, of

whom long afterwards he published a rather absurd life; and after his

return home his _Ayrshire Legatees_ found welcome and popularity in

_Blackwood_. This was in 1821, and after five years' busy writing Galt

went to Canada in charge of a great scheme of colonisation and commerce

called the Canada Company. This, after fair prospects, broke down

completely. He came back again, wrote hard, and schemed incessantly. But

fortune was not kind to him; and he died, in a way a broken man, at

Greenock on 11th April 1839.

Galt, though with some of the national characteristics which have not

always made Scotchmen popular, appears to have been a person of worth

and amiability. He got on well with Byron, a very uncommon thing; and

from Carlyle, whom he met when they were both on the staff of _Fraser_,

he receives unwontedly amiable notice. His literary production was vast

and totally uncritical; his poems, dramas, etc., being admittedly

worthless, his miscellaneous writing mostly book-making, while his

historical novels are given up by all but devotees. He had, however, a

special walk--the delineation of the small humours and ways of his

native town and county--in which, if not exactly supreme, he has seldom

been equalled. The _Ayrshire Legatees_ is in main scheme a pretty direct

and not very brilliant following of _Humphrey Clinker_; but the letters

of the worthy family who visit London are read in a home circle which

shows Galt's peculiar talent. It is shown better still in his next

published work, _The Annals of the Parish_, which is said to have been

written long before, and in the pre-Waverley days to have been rejected

by the publishers because "_Scotch_ novels could not pay." It is not

exactly a novel, being literally what its title holds out--the annals of

a Western Parish by its minister, the Rev. Mr. Balwhidder, a

Presbyterian Parson Adams of a less robust type, whose description of

himself and parishioners is always good, and at times charming. _Sir

Andrew Wylie_ (a fantastic book of much good fun and much good feeling),

_The Entail_, and _The Provost_ (the last two sometimes ranked next to

the _Annals_), followed rapidly, and are all good in a way which has

been oddly revived of late years by some of our most popular novelists.

A better writer than Galt, though a less fertile, was Dr. Moir

("Delta"), another _Blackwood_ man, whose chief single performance is

_Mansie Wauch_, but who wrote both prose and verse, both tales and

essays, with considerable accomplishment of style, and with a very

agreeable mixture of serious and comic power.

Meanwhile, the historical novel did not by any means absorb the

attention of the crowds of aspirants who hurried to try their fortune in

the wake of Scott. Lady Morgan (or rather Miss Sydney Owenson) did, in

_The Wild Irish Girl_ (1806) and other things, some "rattling Hibernian

stories" quite early; John Banim (1798-1842) coincided with the two

Englishmen and exceeded them in _gout du terroir_; and the _Fairy

Legends_ (1826) of Crofton Croker (1798-1854) are at their best simply

exquisite. But the older styles continued after a fashion, or underwent

slight changes, before the novel of purely ordinary life, on a plan

midway between Scott and Miss Austen, triumphed in the middle of the

century. One of the most popular of novelists in the reigns of George

IV. and William IV. was Theodore Hook (1788-1841), a man of respectable

connections and excellent education, who, having made himself a

favourite with the Regent and many persons of quality as a diner-out and

improvisatore, received a valuable appointment at the Mauritius, laid

himself open by carelessness to a prosecution for malversation, and,

returning to England, never entirely escaped from the effects of this,

though he was extremely successful both as a novelist, and as a

newspaper writer and editor, in the _John Bull_ chiefly. Some of Hook's

political squibs and light verses still retain attraction; and the

tradition of his extraordinary faculties in improvising both words,

music, and dramatic arrangement remains. But his novels (_Sayings and

Doings_, _Gilbert Gurney_, _Gurney Married_, _Maxwell_, etc.) have

become very dead-alive. They have little plot; a sort of rattling

adventure in a modernised following of Smollett, which is their chief

source of interest; manners true enough to their own day to be

out-of-date now, but not handled with sufficient art ever to regain the

attraction of revived antiquity; and a very careless and undistinguished

style.

The first series of Hook's _Sayings and Doings_ appeared in 1824, the

year before that of the novels of James and Ainsworth above noticed.

Three years later, and five before Scott's death, appeared _Falkland_,

the first (anonymous) novel of a writer far surpassing any of the hour

in talent, and credited by some with positive genius. Edward George

Earle Lytton Bulwer, afterwards Sir Edward Lytton-Bulwer, and later

still Lord Lytton (born in 1800), was the youngest son of General Bulwer

of Wood Dalling and Haydon in Norfolk, while he on his mother's side

represented an ancient Hertfordshire family seated at Knebworth. He was

a Cambridge man: he obtained the Chancellor's prize for English verse in

1825, and his first books were in poetical form. He became a Member of

Parliament, being returned in the Whig interest for St. Ives before the

Reform Bill passed, and in the first Reform Parliament for Lincoln, and

he held this seat for a decade, receiving his baronetcy in 1835. For

another decade he was out of the House of Commons, though he succeeded

to the Knebworth estate in 1844. He was returned for Hertfordshire in

1852, and, joining Lord Derby's reconstituted party, ranked for the rest

of his life as a Conservative of a somewhat Liberal kind. In the second

Derby administration he was Colonial Secretary, but took no part in that

of 1867, and died just before the return of the Tories to power in 1873.

This sufficiently brilliant political career was complicated by literary

production and success in a manner not equalled by any Englishman of his

time, and only approached by Macaulay and by Mr. Disraeli. _Falkland_

was succeeded by _Pelham_, which was published with his name, and which

was the first, perhaps the most successful, and by far the most

brilliant, of the novels in which authors have endeavoured to secure

the rank of man of the world even more than that of man of letters,

taking the method chiefly of fashionable, and therefore somewhat

ephemeral, epigram. Nor did Bulwer (as he was known in the heyday of his

popularity) ever cease novel writing for the forty-five years which were

left to him, while the styles of his production varied with fashion in a

manner impossible to a man of less consummate versatility and talent,

though perhaps equally impossible to one of a very decided turn of

genius. The fashionable novel, the crime novel, the romance of mystery,

the romance of classical times, the historical novel, by turns occupied

him; and it is more easy to discover faults in _Paul Clifford_, _Eugene

Aram_, _The Pilgrims of the Rhine_, _The Last Days of Pompeii_, _Ernest

Maltravers_, _Zanoni_, _Rienzi_, _The Last of the Barons_, and _Harold_,

than to refuse admiration to their extraordinary qualities. Then their

author, recognising the public taste, as he always did, or perhaps

exemplifying it with an almost unexampled quickness, turned to the

domestic kind, which was at last, more than thirty years after Miss

Austen's death, forcing its way, and wrote _The Caxtons_, _My Novel_,

and _What will he do with it?_--books which to some have seemed his

greatest triumphs. The veering of that taste back again to tales of

terror was acknowledged by _A Strange Story_, which, in 1861, created an

excitement rarely, if ever, caused by the work of a man who had been

writing for more than a generation; while _The Haunted and the

Haunters_, a brief ghost-story contributed to _Blackwood's Magazine_,

has always seemed to the present writer the most perfect thing that he

ever did, and one of the most perfect things of its kind ever done. In

the very last years of his life, the wonderful _girouette_ of his

imagination felt other popular gales, and produced--partly as novels of

actual society, partly as Janus-faced satires of what was and what might

be--_The Coming Race_, _Kenelm Chillingly_, and the posthumous

_Parisians_.

But this list of novels, which does not include by name much more than

two-thirds of his actual production, by no means exhausts Lord Lytton's

literary work. For some years, chiefly before he had passed middle

life, he was an active dramatist, and at least three of his plays--_The

Lady of Lyons_, _Richelieu_, and _Money_--had a success (not merely

passing, and in the first case at least permanent) which few if any

other plays of the century have had. He was always returning to verse,

though never with real poetical success; the exceptions which may be

urged most forcibly being his translations from Schiller, a congenial

original. He was at one time editor of the _New Monthly Magazine_. He

translated freely, he wrote much criticism,--which is often in isolated

passages, if not so often in general drift and grasp, extremely

good,--and he was a constant essayist in very various kinds. It is

probable that if his entire works were ever collected, which is not

likely, few, if any, authors of the nineteenth century, though it be one

of unbridled writing and printing, could equal him in volume; while it

is certain that very few indeed could produce more numerous testimonials

of the kind given by the immediate, and not merely immediate, success of

separate works.

Yet it has been sometimes complained, sometimes boasted, that "with the

critics Bulwer is dead"; and it is not very certain that with the

faithful herd of uncritical readers the first Lord Lytton keeps any

great place. Even many years ago he had ceased to be, if he ever was, a

general favourite with those who specially loved literature; and it is

rather doubtful whether he will ever regain even a considerable vogue of

esteem. Perhaps this may be unjust, for he certainly possessed ability

in bulk, and perhaps here and there in detail, far surpassing that of

all but the very greatest of his contemporaries. Even the things which

were most urged against him by contemporary satirists, and which it is

to be feared are remembered at second-hand when the first-hand knowledge

of his work has declined, need not be fatal. A man may write such things

as "There is an eloquence in Memory because it is the nurse of Hope"

without its being necessary to cast up his capital letters against him

in perpetuity, or to inquire without ceasing whether eloquence is an

inseparable property of nurses. But he had two great faults--want of

concentration and want of reality; and the very keenness, the very

delicacy of his appreciation of the shiftings of popular taste may seem

without unfairness to argue a certain shallowness of individual soil, a

literary compost wherein things spring up rapidly because they have no

depth of earth, but also because they have no depth of earth, rapidly

vanish and wither away. The novel and the magazine have beyond all doubt

given us much admirable work which without them we should not have had;

they have almost as certainly, and in no case much more certainly than

in Bulwer's, over-forced and over-coaxed into hasty and ephemeral

production talents which, with a little more hardening and under less

exacting circumstances, might have become undoubted genius. Sentimental

grandiloquence is not by itself fatal: the fashion which tempts to it,

which turns on it, may return to it again; and it is never impossible to

make allowance for its excesses, especially when, as in the case under

discussion, it is accompanied by a rare and true satiric grasp of life.

In these early externals of his, Bulwer was only the most illustrious of

the innumerable victims of Byron. But his failure to make his figures

thoroughly alive is more serious; and this must be put down partly to

incapacity to take pains.

It was nearly ten years after the first success of Bulwer, and more than

half as much after the death of Scott, that a novelist greater than any

the century had seen, except Scott himself and Miss Austen, appeared.

Charles Dickens and Lord Lytton became rather intimate friends; but

their origins and early experiences were curiously different. Dickens'

father had been in a government office; but after the Peace he took to

the press, and his son (born in 1812), after some uncomfortable early

experiences which have left their mark on _David Copperfield_, fled to

the same refuge of the destitute in our times. He was a precocious, but

not an extraordinary precocious writer; for he was four and twenty when

the _Sketches by Boz_ were printed in a volume after appearing in the

_Morning Chronicle_. But the _Sketches_ _by Boz_, though containing

some very sprightly things, are but as farthing candles to sunlight when

compared with the wonderful and wholly novel humour of _The Pickwick

Papers_, which (Dickens having been first (1836) employed to write them

as mere letter-press to the sporting sketches of the caricaturist

Seymour) appeared as a book in 1838. From that time their author had a

success which in money came second to that of Scott, and which both

pecuniarily and otherwise enabled him to write pretty much as he

pleased. So to the last the style of his novels never bore much

reference to any public taste or demand; and he developed himself more

strictly according to his own bent than almost any writer of English who

was not born to fortune. During the last twenty years of his life, which

ended suddenly on 9th June 1870, he was a newspaper editor--first of

_Household Words_, then of _All the Year Round_; but these very

periodicals were of his own making and design. He made two journeys to

America: one very early in 1842, with a literary result (_American

Notes_) of very sharp criticism of its people; the other late in 1867,

when he made large sums by reading from his works--a style of

entertainment which, again, was almost of his own invention, and which

gave employment to a very strong dramatic and histrionic faculty that

found little other vent. But his life was extremely uneventful, being

for its last two and thirty years simply one long spell of hard though

lavishly rewarded literary labour.

The brilliancy and the originality of the product of this can never be

denied. True to his general character of independence, Dickens owes

hardly anything to any predecessor except Smollett, to whom his debts

are rather large, and perhaps to Theodore Hook, to whom, although the

fact has not been generally recognised, they exist. He had had no

regular education, had read as a boy little but the old novelists, and

never became as a man one of either wide learning or much strictly

literary taste. His temperament indeed was of that insubordinate

middle-class variety which rather resents the supremacy of any classics;

and he carried the same feeling into art, into politics, and into the

discussion of the vague problems of social existence which have so much

occupied the last three-quarters of the century. Had this iconoclastic

but ignorant zeal of his (which showed itself in his second novel,

_Nicholas Nickleby_, and was apparent in his last completed one, _Our

Mutual Friend_) been united with less original genius, the result must

have been infinitely tedious, and could not have been in any way

profitable. For Dickens' knowledge, as has been said, was very limited;

his logical faculties were not strong; and while constantly attempting

to satirise the upper classes, he knew extremely little about them, and

has never drawn a single "aristocrat," high government official, or

"big-wig" generally, who presents the remotest resemblance to a living

being. But he knew the lower and lower middle classes of his own day

with wonderful accuracy; he could inform this knowledge of his with that

indefinable comprehension of man as man which has been so often noted;

and over and above this he possessed an imagination, now humorous, now

terrible, now simply grotesque, of a range and volume rarely equalled,

and of a quality which stands entirely by itself, or is approached at a

distance, and with a difference, only by that of his great French

contemporary Balzac. This imagination, essentially plastic, so far

outran the strictly critical knowledge of mankind as mankind just

mentioned that it has invested Dickens' books and characters with a

peculiarity found nowhere else, or only in the instance just excepted.

They are never quite real: we never experience or meet anything or

anybody quite like them in the actual world. And yet in their own world

they hold their position and play their parts quite perfectly and

completely: they obey their own laws, they are consistent with their own

surroundings. Occasionally the work is marred by too many and too

glaring tricks of mannerism: this was especially the case with the

productions of the period between 1855 and 1865. The pathos of Dickens

was always regarded as slightly conventional and unreal by critical

judges. But his humour, though never again attaining the same marvellous

flow of unforced merriment which the _Pickwick Papers_ had shown, was

almost unfailing; and, thanks to the gift of projecting imaginative

character, above noticed, it was never exactly the same.

These and other gifts were shown in a long line of novels covering just

thirty years, from _Boz to Our Mutual Friend_; for the last few years of

his life, disturbed by his American tour, by increasing ill-health, and

other things, produced nothing but the beginnings of an unfinished

novel, _Edwin Drood_. He attempted little besides novels, and what he

did attempt outside of them was not very fortunate, except the

delightful _Uncommercial Traveller_, wherein in his later days he

achieved a sort of mellowed version of the _Boz_ sketches, subdued more

to the actual, but not in the least tamed or weakened. Although a keen

lover of the theatre and an amateur actor of remarkable merit, he had

the sense and self-denial never to attempt plays except in an indirect

fashion and in one or two instances, nor ever in his own name solely.

His _Child's History of England_ (1854) is probably the worst book ever

written by a man of genius, except Shelley's novels, and has not, like

them, the excuse of extreme youth. His _Pictures from Italy_ (1845),

despite vivid passages, are quite unworthy of him; and even the

_American Notes_ could be dispensed with without a sigh, seeing that we

have _Martin Chuzzlewit_. But his novels, despite their many faults,

could not be dispensed with,--no one who understands literary value

would give up even the worst of them,--while his earlier "Christmas

Books" (during the fancy for these things in the forties) and his later

contributions to the Christmas numbers of his periodicals contain some

of his best fantastic and pathetic work. _Pickwick_ was immediately

followed by _Oliver Twist_,--a very popular book, and in parts a very

powerful one, but containing in germ most of the faults which afterwards

developed themselves, and, with the exception of the "Artful Dodger,"

not bringing out any of his great character-creations. _Nicholas

Nickleby_ (1838) is a story designed to fix a stigma on cheap private

schools, and marred by some satire as cheap as the schools themselves on

the fashionable and aristocratic society of which to his dying day

Dickens never knew anything; but it is of great interest as a story, and

full of admirable humoristic sketches, which almost if not quite excused

not merely the defect of knowledge just referred to, but the author's

unfortunate proneness to attempt irony, of which he had no command, and

argument, of which he had if possible less. His next two stories, _The

Old Curiosity Shop_ and _Barnaby Rudge_, were enshrined (1840-41) in an

odd framework of fantastic presentation, under the general title of

_Master Humphrey's Clock_,--a form afterwards discarded with some

advantage, but also with some loss. _The Old Curiosity Shop_, strongly

commended to its own public and seriously hampered since by some rather

maudlin pathos, improved even upon _Nicholas Nickleby_ in the humoristic

vein; and while Dick Swiveller, Codlin and Short, Mr. Chuckster, and

others remain as some of the best of Dickens' peculiar characters of the

lighter sort, the dwarf Quilp is perhaps his only thoroughly successful

excursion into the grimmer and more horrible kind of humour. _Barnaby

Rudge_ is in part a historical novel, and the description of the riots

of Eighty is of extraordinary power; but the real appeal of the book

lies in the characters of the Varden family, with the handmaid Miss

Miggs and the ferocious apprentice Tappertit. Sir John Chester, a sort

of study from Chesterfield, is one of the most disastrous of this

author's failures; but Dennis the Hangman may have a place by Quilp.

Then (1843) came _Martin Chuzzlewit_, which, as observed, embodied his

American experiences in a manner which may or may not have been fair,

but which was exquisitely funny. It also added the immortal figure of

Mrs. Gamp (not unattended by any means) to the glorious list of his

comic creations. It was in _Dombey and Son_ (1846-48) that the Dickens

of the decadence first appeared; the maudlin strain of _The Old

Curiosity Shop_ being repeated in Paul Dombey, while a new and very

inauspicious element appeared in certain mechanical tricks of phrase,

and in a totally unreal style of character exemplified in the Bagstocks,

the Carkers, and so forth. Yet Captain Cuttle, his friend Bunsby, Miss

Nipper, and the inestimable Toots put in ample bail for this also. And

it was followed (1849-50) by _David Copperfield_, one of the capital

books of English fiction. This was to some extent obviously

autobiographic; but, setting some questions of taste aside, not unduly

so. Even the hero is too real to be frigid; and of the two heroines,

Dora, if an idiot, is saved by pathos different from that of Paul and

Nell, while the insipidity of Agnes does not greatly spoil the story,

and the commonplace theatricality of the Steerforth and Little Em'ly

episode can be neglected. On the other hand, Miss Trotwood, David

Copperfield's schools and schoolfellows, Uriah Heap (not wholly good as

he is), and above all the priceless Mr. Micawber, would suffice to keep

twenty books alive.

But this book, though by no means Dickens' Corunna or even his

Malplaquet, was certainly the climax of his career, and no impartial and

competent critic could ever give him the same praise again. In two long

stories, _Bleak House_ and _Little Dorrit_, and in a shorter one, _Hard

Times_, which appeared between 1852 and 1857, the mania of "purpose" and

the blemish of mechanical mannerism appeared to a far worse degree than

previously, though in the first named at any rate there were numerous

consolations of the old kind. The _Tale of Two Cities_ (1859) has been

more differently judged than any other of his works; some extolling it

as a great romance, if not quite a great historical novel, while others

see in it little more than mixed mannerism and melodrama. Something of

the same difference prevails about _Great Expectations_ (1860-61), the

parties as a rule changing sides, and those who dislike the _Tale of Two

Cities_ rejoicing in _Great Expectations_, Dickens' closest attempt at

real modern life (with a fantastic admixture of course), and in its

heroine, Estella, his almost sole creation of a live girl. _Our Mutual

Friend_ (1864-65), though not a return to the great days, brought these

parties somewhat together again, thanks to the Doll's Dressmaker and

Rogue Riderhood. And then, for it is impossible to found any sound

critical judgment on the fragment of _Edwin Drood_, the building of the

most extraordinary monument of the fantastic in literature ceased

abruptly.

That exactly the same fate befell the great successor, rival, and foil

of Dickens in novel writing during the middle of the century was due to

no metaphysical aid but to the simple and prosaic fact that at the time

publication in parts, independently or in periodicals, was the usual

method. Although the life of William Makepeace Thackeray was as little

eventful as Dickens' own, their origin and circumstances were as

different as their work. Dickens, as has been said, was born in

distinctly the lower section of the middle class, and had, if any

education, a very irregular one. Thackeray, who was born at Calcutta in

1811, belonged to a good family, regularly connected with English public

schools and universities, inherited a small but comfortable fortune, and

was himself educated at the Charterhouse and at Trinity College,

Cambridge, though he took no degree. Unsuccessful as an artist (it is

one of the chief pieces of literary anecdote of our times that he

offered himself fruitlessly to Dickens as an illustrator), and having by

imprudence or accident lost his private means, he began to write,

especially in the then new and audacious _Fraser's Magazine_. For this,

for other periodicals, and for _Punch_ later, he performed a vast amount

of miscellaneous work, part only of which, even with the considerable

addition made some ten years ago, has ever been enshrined in his

collected works. It is all very remarkable, and can easily be seen now

to be quite different from any other work of the time (the later

thirties); but it is very unequal and distinctly uncertain in touch.

These qualities or defects also appear in his first publications in

volume--the _Paris_ (1840) and _Irish_ (1843) _Sketch Books_, and the

novels of _Catherine_ and _Barry Lyndon_. The _Punch_ work (which

included the famous _Book of Snobs_ and the admirable attempts in

misspelling on the model of Swift and Smollett known as the _Memoirs of

Mr. Yellowplush_, with much else) marked a distinct advance in firmness

of handling and raciness of humour; while the author, who, though now a

very poor man, had access to the best society, was constantly adding to

his stock of observation as well as to his literary practice. It was

not, however, till 1846, when he began _Vanity Fair_, that any very

large number of persons began to understand what a star had risen in

English letters; nor can even _Vanity Fair_ be said to have had any

enormous popularity, though its author's powers were shown in a

different way during its publication in parts by the appearance of a

third sketch book, the _Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo_, more

perfect than either of its forerunners, and by divers extremely

brilliant Christmas books. _Vanity Fair_ was succeeded in 1849 (for

Thackeray, a man fond of society and a little indolent, was fortunately

never a very rapid writer) by _Pendennis_, which holds as autobiography,

though not perhaps in creative excellence, the same place among his

works as _Copperfield_ does among those of Dickens. Several slighter

things accompanied or followed this, Thackeray showing himself at once

an admirable lecturer, and an admirable though not always quite judicial

critic, in a series of discourses afterwards published as a volume on

_The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century_. But it was not till

1852 that the marvellous historical novel of _Esmond_--the greatest book

in its own special kind ever written--appeared, and showed at once the

fashion in which the author had assimilated the Queen Anne period and

his grasp of character and story. He returned to modern times in _The

Newcomes_ (1853-55), which some put at the head of his work as a

contemporary painter of manners. After this he had seven years of life

which were well filled. He followed up _Esmond_ with The _Virginians_

(1857-58), a novel of the third quarter of the eighteenth century, which

has not been generally rated high, but which contains some of his very

best things; he went to America and lectured on _The Four Georges_

(lectures again brilliant in their kind); he became (1860) editor of the

_Cornhill Magazine_ and wrote in it two stories, _Lovel the Widower_ and

_Philip_; while he struck out a new line in a certain series of

contributions called _The Roundabout Papers_, some of which were among

his very last, and nearly all of them among his most characteristic and

perfect work. He had begun yet another novel, _Denis Duval_, which was

to deal with the last quarter of the century he knew so well; but he

died suddenly two days before Christmas 1863, leaving it a mere

fragment. He had unsuccessfully attempted play writing in _The Wolves

and the Lamb_, an earlier and dramatic version of _Lovel the Widower_.

And during almost his whole literary career he had been a sparing but an

exquisite writer of a peculiar kind of verse, half serious half comic,

which is scarcely inferior in excellence to his best prose. "The Ballad

of Bouillabaisse" and "The Age of Wisdom," to take only two examples,

are unmatched in their presentation of pathos that always keeps clear of

the maudlin, and is wide-eyed if not dry-eyed in view of all sides of

life; while such things as "Lyra Hibernica" and "The Ballads of

Policeman X" have never been surpassed as verse examples of pure, broad,

roaring farce that still retains a certain reserve and well-bred

scholarship of tone.

But his verse, however charming and unique, could never have given him

the exalted and massive pedestal which his prose writings, and

especially his novels, provide. Even without the novels, as without the

verse, he would still occupy a high place among English writers for the

sake of his singular and delightful style, and for the attitude both to

life and to letters, corresponding with that style, which his essays and

miscellanies exhibit. This style is not by any means free from minor

blemishes, though it discarded many of these as time went on. But it has

an extraordinary vivacity; a manner entirely its own, which yet seldom

or never approaches mannerism; a quality of humour for which no word

would be so fit as the old-fashioned "archness," if that had not been so

hopelessly degraded before even the present century opened; at need, an

unsurpassed pathos which never by any chance or exception succumbs to

the demon of the gushing or maudlin; a flexibility and facility of

adaptation to almost all (not quite all) subjects which is hard to

parallel.

And this style reflects with more than common exactness, even in these

minor works, the attitude above spoken of, which is not less unique and

not less inestimable than the style itself. Towards some of the "great

subjects" Thackeray indeed adopts not quite a Shakespearian silence, but

a slightly uneasy respect. Never irreligious as he was, there was

something in him of his own beloved eighteenth century's dislike and

discomfort in face of religious dogma and religious enthusiasm; he had

no metaphysical head; his politics (he once stood for Parliament) were a

little childish. It was his, in short, not so much to argue as to

observe, to feel, to laugh with no unkindness but with infinite

comprehension, to enjoy, to suffer. Of all the innumerable cants that

ever were canted, the cant about Thackeray's "cynicism" was the silliest

and the most erroneous. He knew the weakness of man, and laughed at it

as the wise knows and laughs, "knowing also," as the poet says, "that he

himself must die." But he did not even despise this weakness, much less

is he harsh to it. On the contrary, he is milder not only than Swift,

but even than Addison or Miss Austen, and he is never wroth with human

nature save when it is not only weak but base.

All these good gifts and others, such as incomparable power of

presenting scene and personage to the necessary extent and with telling

detail, appear in his novels, with the addition of a greater gift than

any of them--the gift most indispensable of all others to the

novelist--the gift of creating and immortalising character. Of mere

story, of mere plot, Thackeray was not a great master; and he has made

himself appear a less great master than he was by his fancy for

interlarding his narratives with long addresses to the reader, and by

his other fancy for extending them over very great spaces of time. The

unities are no doubt in fiction, if not in drama, something of a

caricature; but it is seldom possible to neglect them to the extent of

years and decades without paying the penalty; and Thackeray is not of

those who have evaded payment. But in the creation of living character

he stands simply alone among novelists: above even Fielding, though his

characters may have something less of massiveness; much above Scott,

whose consummate successes are accompanied by not a few failures; and

out of sight of almost every one else except Miss Austen, whose world is

different, and, as a world, somewhat less of flesh and blood. In _Vanity

Fair_ he is still in this respect not quite at his acme; and the

magnificent character of Becky Sharp (the attempt to rival whom by her

almost exact contemporary, Valerie Marneffe, is a singular critical

error), supported as it is by the lesser successes of Jos and Rawdon, of

George Osborne and Lord Steyne, does not find itself, save now and then,

especially in the crowning scene of the scandal in Curzon Street,

completely parted or completely put in scene. And so at the other end of

the list, from _The Virginians_, fine as much of that is, onwards, it is

permissible, without unreason or want of generosity, to discern a

slight, a very slight, flagging, not in the quality or kind of the

power, but in the vigour and freshness with which it is applied. But in

_Pendennis_, in _Esmond_, and in _The Newcomes_, it appears as it does

nowhere else in English, or in any literature. It is not so much the

holding up of the mirror to life as the presentation of life itself.

Although the figures, the scheme of thought and sentiment and sense,

differ from what we find in Shakespeare by the whole difference between

poetry and prose, there is, on the lower level, a positive gain in

vividness by the absence of the restraints and conventions of the drama

and the measured line. Every act, every scene, every person in these

three books is real with a reality which has been idealised just up to

and not beyond the necessities of literature. It does not matter what

the acts, the scenes, the personages may be. Whether we are at the

height of romantic passion with Esmond's devotion to Beatrix, and his

transactions with the duke and the prince over diamonds and title deeds;

whether the note is that of the simplest human pathos, as in Colonel

Newcome's death-bed; whether we are indulged with society at Baymouth

and Oxbridge; whether we take part in Marlborough's campaigns or assist

at the Back Kitchen--we are in the House of Life, a mansion not too

frequently opened to us by the writers of prose fiction. It was

impossible that Thackeray should live long or write very many novels

when he had once found his way. The lesson of the greatest imagination

of his great contemporary and master settles that. Not the "Peau de

Chagrin" itself could have enabled any man to produce a long succession

of novels such as _Vanity Fair_ and _Esmond_.

During the time before the century reached its middle, in which Bulwer

and Dickens were the most popular of novelists, while Thackeray was

slowly making his way to the place that was properly his, the demand for

novels, thoroughly implanted in the public by the success of Scott, was

constantly met by work of all sorts, very little of which survives

except in country circulating libraries and on the shelves of houses the

ownership of which has not changed hands for some considerable time.

Very little of it, indeed, much deserved to survive. Lockhart, an

exceedingly judicious critic, thought it necessary not long after the

appearance of _Vanity Fair_ to apologise for the apparent extravagance

of the praise which he had given to his friend Theodore Hook by

observing that, except Dickens, there was no novelist of the first class

between the death of Scott and the rise of Thackeray himself. But about

the time of that rise, and for a good many years after it, what may be

called the third generation of the novelists of the century began to

make its appearance, and, as has been partly observed above, to devote

itself to a somewhat different description of work, which will be

noticed in a future chapter.

The historical novel, though some of its very best representatives were

still to make their appearance, ceased to occupy the first place in

popular esteem; and the later varieties of the novel of more or less

humorous adventure, whether in the rather commonplace form of Hook or in

the highly individual and eccentric form of Dickens, also ceased to be

much cultivated, save by Dickens himself and his direct imitators. The

vogue set in for a novel of more or less ordinary life of the upper

middle class, and this vogue lasted during the whole of the third

quarter, if not of the second half, of the century, though about 1870

the historical novel revived, and, after some years of uncertain popular

taste, seems in the last decade to have acquired almost as great

popularity (with its companion study of purely fantastic adventure) as

ever. Yet we must, before passing to other departments, and interrupting

the account of fiction, notice not a few other writers of the time

previous to 1850.

The descent, in purely literary merit, from Dickens and Thackeray, and

perhaps from Bulwer, to some of those who must now be mentioned, is

great. Yet the chief naval and the chief military novelist of England

need surely not appear by allowance; and if affection and frequent

reading count for anything, it is not certain that some technically much

greater names might not shine with lesser lustre than those of Marryat

and Lever. Frederick Marryat, the elder of the pair, was born in 1792,

early enough to see a good deal of service in the later years of the

Great War, partly under the brilliant if eccentric leadership of Lord

Cochrane. His promotion was fairly rapid: he became a commander in 1815,

and afterwards distinguished himself as a post captain in the Burmese

War, being made a C.B. in 1825. But the increasing dearth of active

service was not suitable to a character like that of Marryat, who,

moreover, was not likely to be popular with "My Lords"; and his

discovery of a faculty for writing opened up to him, both as novelist

and magazine editor, a very busy and profitable literary career, which

lasted from 1830 to 1848, when he died. Marryat's works, which are very

numerous (the best being perhaps _Peter Simple_, _Mr. Midshipman Easy_,

and _Jacob Faithful_, though there is hardly one that has not special

adherents), resemble Smollett's more than those of any other writer, not

merely in their sea-scenes, but in general scheme and character. Some of

Smollett's faults, too, which are not necessarily connected with the

sea--a certain ferocity, an over-fondness for practical jokes, and the

like--appear in Marryat, who is, moreover, a rather careless and

incorrect writer, and liable to fits both of extravagance and of

dulness. But the spirit and humour of the best of his books throughout,

and the best parts of the others, are unmistakable and unsurpassed. Nor

should it be forgotten that he had a rough but racy gift of verse, the

best, though by no means the only good example of which is the piece

beginning, "The Captain stood on the carronade."

The range of Charles Lever, who was born in 1806, was as much wider than

Marryat's as his life was longer and his experience (though in a purely

literary view oddly similar) more varied. He was educated at Trinity

College, Dublin, and after some sojourn both on the Continent and in

America became (1837) physician to the British Embassy at Brussels. At

this time the Continent was crowded with veterans, English and other, of

the Great War; while Lever's Irish youth had filled him with stories of

the last generation of madcap Irish squires and squireens. He combined

the two in a series of novels of wonderful _verve_ and spirit, first of

a military character, the chief of which were _Harry Lorrequer_,

_Charles O'Malley_ (his masterpiece), and _Tom Burke of Ours_. He had,

after no long tenure of the Brussels appointment, become (1842) editor

of the _Dublin University Magazine_, where for many years his books

appeared. After a time, when his stores of military anecdote were

falling low and the public taste had changed, he substituted novels

partly of Irish partly of Continental bearing (_Roland Cashel_, _The

Knight of Gwynne_, and many others); while in the early days of Dickens'

_All the Year Round_ he adventured a singular piece entitled _A Day's

Ride, a Life's Romance_, which the public did not relish, but which was

much to the taste of some good judges. He had by this time gone to

Florence, became Vice-Consul at Spezzia in 1852, whence, in 1867, he was

transferred as British Consul to Trieste, and died there in 1872.

For some years before his death he had been industrious in a third and

again different kind of novel, not merely more thoughtful and less

"rollicking," but adjusted much more closely to actual life and

character. Indeed Lever at different times of his life manifested almost

all the gifts which the novelist requires, though unfortunately he never

quite managed to exhibit them all together. His earlier works, amusing

as they are and full of dash and a certain kind of life, sin not only by

superficiality but by a reckless disregard of the simplest requirements

of story-telling, of the most rudimentary attention to chronology,

probability, and general keeping. His later, vastly amended in this

respect, and exhibiting, moreover, a deeper comprehension of human

character as distinguished from mere outward "humours," almost

necessarily present the blunted and blurred strokes which come from the

loss of youth and the frequent repetition of literary production. Indeed

Lever, with Bulwer, was the first to exemplify the evil effects of the

great demand for novels, and the facilities for producing them given by

the spread of periodicals.

To descend to the third, or even the lower second class in fiction is

almost more dangerous here than a similar laxity in any other

department; and we can no more admit Lord John Russell because he wrote

a story called _The Nun of Arrouca_, than we can exhume any equally

forgotten production of writers less known in non-literary respects. It

can hardly, however, be improper to mention in connection with Marryat,

the greatest of them all, some other members of the interesting school

of naval writers who not unnaturally arose after the peace had turned

large numbers of officers adrift, and the rise of the demand for essays,

novels, and miscellaneous articles had offered temptation to writing.

The chief of these were, in order of rising excellence, Captains

Glascock, Chamier, and Basil Hall, and Michael Scott, a civilian, but by

far the greatest writer of the four. Glascock, an officer of

distinction, was the author of the _Naval Sketch Book_, a curious

olla-podrida of "galley" stories, criticisms on naval books, and

miscellanies, which appeared in 1826. It is not very well written, and

in parts very dull, but provides some genuine things. Chamier, who was

born in 1796 and did not die till 1870, was a post captain and a direct

imitator of Marryat, as also was Captain Howard, Marryat's sub-editor

for a time on the _Metropolitan_, and the part author with him of some

books which have caused trouble to bibliographers. Chamier's books--_Ben

Brace_, _The Arethusa_, _Tom Bowling_, etc.--are better than Howard's

_Rattlin the Reefer_ (commonly ascribed to Marryat), _Jack Ashton_, and

others, but neither can be called a master.

Captain Basil Hall, who was born of a good Scotch family at Edinburgh in

1788 and died at Haslar Hospital in 1844, was a better writer than

either of these three; but he dealt in travels, not novels, and appears

here as a sort of honorary member of the class. His _Travels in America_

was one of the books which, in the second quarter of the century,

rightly or wrongly, excited American wrath against Englishmen; but his

last book, _Fragments of Voyages and Travels_, was his most popular and

perhaps his best. Captain Basil Hall was a very amiable person, and

though perhaps a little flimsy as a writer, is yet certainly not to be

spoken of with harshness.

A very much stronger talent than any of these was Michael Scott, who was

born in Glasgow in 1789 and died in 1835, having passed the end of his

boyhood and the beginning of his manhood in Jamaica. He employed his

experiences in composing for _Blackwood's Magazine_, and afterwards

reducing to book shape, the admirable miscellanies in fiction entitled

_Tom Cringle's Log_ and _The Cruise of the Midge_, which contain some of

the best fighting, fun, tropical scenery, and description generally, to

be found outside the greatest masters. Very little is known of Scott,

and he wrote nothing else.

One unique figure remains to be noticed among novelists of the first

half of the century, though as a matter of fact his last novel was not

published till within twenty years of its close. Benjamin Disraeli, Earl

of Beaconsfield, belongs, as a special person, to another story than

this. But this would be very incomplete without him and his novels. They

were naturally written for the most part before, in 1852, he was called

to the leadership of the House of Commons, but in two vacations of

office later he added to them _Lothair_ (1870) and _Endymion_ (1881). It

is, however, in his earlier work that his chief virtue is to be found.

It is especially in its first division,--the stories of _Vivian Grey_,

_The Young Duke_, _Contarini Fleming_, _Alroy_, _Venetia_, and

_Henrietta Temple_,--published between 1827 and 1837. They are more like

Bulwer's than like anybody else's work, but _Vivian Grey_ appeared

in the same year with _Falkland_ and before _Pelham_. Later

novels--_Coningsby_ (1844), _Sybil_ (1845), and _Tancred_ (1847)--are

more directly political; while certain smaller and chiefly early

tales--_Ixion_, _The Infernal Marriage_, _Popanilla_, etc.--are pure

fantasy pieces with a satirical intent, and the first of them is, with

perhaps Bedford's _Vathek_ as a companion, the most brilliant thing of

its kind in English. In these more particularly, but in all more or

less, a strong Voltairian influence is perceptible; but on the whole the

set of books may be said to be like nothing else. They have grave

faults, being sometimes tawdry in phrase and imagery, sometimes too

personal, frequently a little unreal, and scarcely ever finally and

completely adjusted to the language in which and the people of whom they

are written. Yet the attraction of them is singular; and good judges,

differing very widely in political and literary tastes, have found

themselves at one as to the strange way in which the reader comes back

to them as he advances in life, and as to the marvellous cleverness

which they display. Let it be added that _Henrietta Temple_, a mere and

sheer love story written in a dangerous style of sentimentalism, is one

of the most effective things of its kind in English, and holds its

ground despite all drawbacks of fashion in speech and manners, which

never tell more heavily than in the case of a book of the kind; while in

_Venetia_ the story of Byron is handled with remarkable closeness, and

yet in good taste.

Two other novelists belonging to the first half of the century, and

standing even further out of the general current than did Disraeli, both

of them also possessing greater purely literary genius than his, must

also be mentioned here. Thomas Love Peacock, the elder of them, born a

long way within the eighteenth century (in 1785), passed a studious

though irregularly educated youth and an idle early manhood, but at a

little more than thirty (1817) produced, after some verse, the curious

little satirical romance of _Headlong Hall_. This he followed up with

others--_Melincourt_, _Nightmare Abbey_, _Maid Marian_, _The Misfortunes

of Elphin_, and _Crotchet Castle_--at no great intervals until 1830,

after which, having in the meantime been appointed to a valuable and

important office under the East India Company, he published no other

book for thirty years. Then in 1860 he put forth _Gryll Grange_, and

some five years later died, a very old man, in 1866. Peacock at all

times was a writer of verse, and the songs which diversify his novels

are among their most delightful features; but his more ambitious

poetical efforts, which date from his earlier years, _The Genius of the

Thames_ and _Rhododaphne_, are not of much mark. The novels themselves,

however, have a singular relish, and are written in a style always

piquant and attractive and latterly quite admirable. They may all be

described as belonging to the fantastic-satirical order of which the

French tale-tellers (instigated, however, by an Englishman, Anthony

Hamilton) had set the example during the previous century. Social,

political, economic, and other fads and crazes are all touched in them;

but this satire is combined with a strictly realistic presentation of

character, and, except in the romances of _Maid Marian_ and _Elphin_,

with actual modern manners. Peacock's satire is always very sharp, and

in his earlier books a little rough as well; but as he went on he

acquired urbanity without losing point, and became one of the most

consummate practitioners of Lucianic humour adjusted to the English

scheme and taste. More than thirty years after date _Gryll Grange_ is

not obsolete even as a picture of manners; while _Crotchet Castle_,

obsolete in a few externals, is as fresh as ever in substance, owing to

its close grasp of essential humanity. In verse Peacock was the last,

and one of the best, of the masters of the English drinking-song; and

some of his examples are unmatched for their mixture of joviality,

taste, sense, and wit.

George Borrow, who was eighteen years Peacock's junior, and outlived him

by fifteen, was a curious counterpart-analogue to him. Like Peacock, he

was irregularly educated, and yet a wide and deep student; but, unlike

Peacock, he devoted himself not so much to the ancient as to the more

out-of-the-way modern tongues, and became a proficient not merely in

Welsh, the Scandinavian tongues, Russian, Spanish, and other literary

languages, but in Romany or Gipsy, having associated much with the "folk

of Egypt" during his youth. After some very imperfectly known youthful

experiences, which formed at least the basis of his later novels,

_Lavengro_ (1851) and _The Romany Rye_ (1857), he received an

appointment as colporteur to the Bible Society, first in Russia, then in

Spain; and his adventures in the latter country formed the basis of a

study called _The Gipsies of Spain_ (1840), which has much, and a volume

of travel and autobiography, _The Bible in Spain_ (1843), which has

unique interest. Returning home, he married a wife with some money, and

spent the remainder of a long life in his native county of Norfolk,

producing, besides the books just named, _Wild Wales_ (1862), and dying

in 1881. There is, in fact, not very much difference between Borrow's

novels and his travel-books. The former had at least some autobiographic

foundation, and the latter invest actual occurrences with the most

singular flavour of romance. For his mere style Borrow was a little

indebted to Cobbett, though he coloured Cobbett's somewhat drab canvas

with the most brilliant fantastic hues. But his attitude, his main

literary quality, is quite unique. It might be called, without too much

affectation, an adjustment of the picaresque novel to dreamland,

retaining frequent touches of solid and everyday fact. Peacock's style

has found a good many, though no very successful, imitators; Borrow's is

quite inimitable.

Harriet Martineau, one of the numerous writers, of both sexes, whom the

polygraphic habits of this century make it hard to "class," was born at

Norwich in 1802, and belonged to one of the families that made up the

remarkable literary society which distinguished that city at the end of

the last century and the beginning of this. She began as a religious

writer according to the Unitarian persuasion; she ended as a tolerably

active opponent of religion. But she found her chief vocation (before,

as she did in her middle and later days, becoming a regular journalist)

in writing stories on political economy, a proceeding doubtless

determined by the previous exercises in didactic story-telling of Miss

Edgeworth and Mrs. Marcet. These _Illustrations of Political Economy_

(1832) exactly hit the taste of their time and were very popular. Her

less adulterated children's books (of which the best perhaps is _Feats

on the Fiord_) and her novel _Deerbrook_ (1839), owing much to Miss

Edgeworth in conception, display a good faculty of narrative, and she

did a great deal of miscellaneous work. As she became less religious she

became more superstitious, and indulged in curious crazes. She lived

latterly at the Lakes, and died on 27th June 1876. Harriet Martineau was

the object of rather absurd obloquy from Conservative critics as an

advanced woman in her day, and of still more absurd eulogy by Liberal

sympathisers both in that day and since. Personally she seems to have

been amiable and estimable enough. Intellectually she had no genius; but

she had a good deal of the versatile talent and craftsmanship for which

the literary conditions of this century have produced unusual stimulus

and a fair reward.

There was something (though not so much as has been represented) of the

masculine element about Miss Martineau; a contemporary Miss M. was

delightfully feminine. Mary Russell Mitford, born at Alresford, the town

of Wither, on 16th December 1786, was the daughter of a doctor and a

rascal, who, when she was a child, had the incredible meanness to

squander twenty thousand pounds which she won in a lottery, and later

the constant courage to live on her earnings. She published poems as

early as 1810; then wrote plays which were acted with some success; and

later, gravitating to the _London Magazine_, wrote for it essays only

second to those of Elia--the delightful papers collectively called _Our

Village_, and not completed till long after the death of the _London_ in

1832. The scenery of these is derived from the banks of the Loddon, for

the neighbourhood of Reading was in various places her home, and she

died at Swallowfield on 10th January 1855. Latterly she had a civil-list

pension; but, on the whole, she supported herself and her parents by

writing. Not much, if anything, of her work is likely to survive except

_Our_ _Village_; but this is charming, and seems, from the published

_Life_ of her and the numerous references in contemporary biography, to

express very happily the character and genius of its author--curiously

sunny, healthy, and cheerful, not in the least namby-pamby, and

coinciding with a faculty of artistic presentation of observed results,

not very imaginative but wonderfully pleasing.

To these authors and books, others of more or less "single-speech" fame

might be added: the vivid and accurate Persian tale of _Hajji Baba_ by

James Morier, the _Anastatius_ of Thomas Hope, excellently written and

once very much admired, the fashionable _Granby_ and _Tremaine_ of

Lister, the famous _Frankenstein_ of Mrs. Shelley, are examples. But

even these, and much more other things not so good as they, compose in

regard to the scheme of such a book as this the _numerus_, the crowd,

which, out of no disrespect, but for obvious and imperative reasons,

must be not so much neglected as omitted. All classes of literature

contribute to this, but, with the exception of mere compilations and

books in science or art which are outgrown, none so much as prose

fiction. The safest of life (except poetry) of all literary kinds when

it is first rate, it is the most certain of death when it is not; and it

pays for the popularity which it often receives to-day by the oblivion

of an unending morrow.