THE NOVEL SINCE 1850
Certain novelists who were mentioned at the end of chapter iii., though
they all lived far into the last half of the century, not only belonged
essentially to its first division, but strictly speaking fell out of
strict chronological arrangement of any kind, being of the class of more
or less eccentric men of genius who may appear at any time and belong to
none in particular; and certain others of the earlier time, less
eccentric, lived on far towards our own. About 1850 however, a little
before or a little after it, there appeared a group of novelists of
great talent, and in some cases of genius itself, who were less
self-centred, and exemplified to a greater degree the special tendencies
of the time. These tendencies were variously connected with the Oxford
or Tractarian Movement; the transfer of political power from the upper
to the middle classes by the first Reform Bill; the rise of what is for
shortness called Science; the greater esteem accorded to and the more
general practice of what is, again for shortness, called Art; the
extension in a certain sense of education; the re-engagement of England,
long severed from continental politics, in those politics by the Crimean
war; the enormous development of commerce by the use of steam navigation
and of railways; the opening up of Australia and its neighbourhood; the
change effected in the East by the removal, gradual for some time, then
rapid and complete after the Indian Mutiny, of the power of the East
India Company; and the "Liberal" movement generally.
To work and counterwork out the influence of these various causes on
separate authors, and the connection of the authors with the causes,
would take a volume in itself. But on the scale and within the limits
possible here, the names of Charlotte Bronte, Marian Evans (commonly
called George Eliot), Charles Kingsley, Anthony Trollope, and Charles
Reade will give us such central points as can be most safely utilised.
Another, Miss Charlotte Yonge, the chief practitioner of the religious
novel, was contemporary with almost the earliest of these, but falls out
of this book as still living.
The members of this group were, as happens with a repeated coincidence
in literary history too distinct to be altogether neglected, born within
a very few years of each other: Reade in 1814, Trollope in 1815, Miss
Bronte next year, Kingsley and Miss Evans in 1819; but as generally
happens likewise, their appearance as authors, or at least as novelists,
did not follow in exact sequel. The first-renowned, the shortest-lived,
and though by no means the most brilliant or powerful, in a certain way
the freshest and most independent, was Charlotte Bronte, the daughter of
a Yorkshire clergyman of eccentric and not altogether amiable character
and of Irish blood. She was born on 21st April 1816. The origin of the
Brontes or Pruntys has, as well as their family history generally, been
discussed with the curiously disproportionate minuteness characteristic
of our time; but hardly anything need be said of the results of the
investigation, except that they were undoubtedly Irish. Charlotte's
mother died soon after the Rev. Patrick Bronte had received the living
of Haworth, and Charlotte herself was sent to school at a place called
Cowan's Bridge, her experiences at which have in the same way been the
subject of endless inquiry into the infinitely little, in connection
with the "Lowood" of _Jane Eyre_. After two of her sisters had died, and
she herself had been very ill, she was taken away and educated partly at
home, partly elsewhere. Her two surviving sisters, who were her juniors,
Emily by two years and Anne by four, were both of more or less literary
leanings, and as they were all intended to be governesses, the sole
profession for poor gentlewomen in the middle of the century, Emily and
Charlotte were sent to Brussels to qualify. In 1846 the three published
a joint volume of _Poems_ under the pseudonyms (which kept their
initials) of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, and to people over middle
age Charlotte Bronte is still perhaps most familiar as Currer Bell.
Emily's poems are elsewhere commented upon. The eldest and youngest
sister had no poetical vocation, and Anne had not much for prose. But
she, like the others, attempted it after the failure of their verse in a
triad of novels, _The Professor_, by Charlotte; _Wuthering Heights_
(very much praised by those who look first for unconventionality and
force), by Emily, who followed it with _The Tenant of Wildfell Hall_;
and _Agnes Grey_, by Anne. But Charlotte could not get _The Professor_
published--indeed it is anything but a good book--and set to work at the
famous _Jane Eyre_, which after being freely refused by publishers, was
accepted by Messrs. Smith and Elder and published in 1847, with the
result of violent attacks and very considerable popularity. Death the
next year and the year after robbed her of both her sisters and of her
brother Patrick, a ne'er-do-weel, who, on the strength of his
Bohemianism and his sisters, is sometimes supposed to have had genius.
_Shirley_ appeared in 1849, and _Villette_ in 1852. In 1854 Charlotte
married her father's curate, Mr. Nicholls, but died next year, on 31st
March 1855.
Perhaps the most interesting way of looking at Charlotte Bronte, who, as
has been said, has been violently attacked, and who has also been
extravagantly praised (though not so extravagantly as her sister Emily),
is to look at her in the light of a precursor or transition-novelist,
representing the time when the followers of Scott had wearied the public
with second-rate romances, when Thackeray had not arisen, or had only
just arisen, and when the modern domestic novel in its various kinds,
from the religious to the problematic, was for the most part in embryo,
or in very early stages. This latter novel she in fact anticipated in
many of its kinds, and partly to the fact of this anticipation, partly
to the vividness which her representation of personal experiences gave
to her work, may the popularity which it at first had, and such of it as
has survived, be assigned. In this latter point, however, lay danger as
well as safety. It seems very improbable that if Charlotte Bronte had
lived, and if she had continued to write, her stock of experiences would
have sufficed her; and it would not appear that she had much else. She
is indeed credited with inventing the "ugly hero" in the Mr. Rochester
of _Jane Eyre_, but in the long-run ugliness palls almost as much as
beauty, perhaps sooner. Except in touches probably due to suggestions
from Emily, the "weirdness" of the younger sister was not exhibited by
the elder. The more melodramatic parts of the book would not have borne
repetition, and its main appeal now lies in the Lowood scenes and the
character of Jane herself, which are both admittedly autobiographical.
So also Shirley is her sister Emily, the curates who pester her appear
to have been almost in case to enter libel actions if they thought
proper, and _Villette_ is little more than an embroidered version of the
Brussels sojourn. How successful an appeal of this kind is, the
experience of Byron and many others has shown; how dangerous it is,
could not be better shown than by the same experience. It was Charlotte
Bronte's good fortune that she died before she had utterly exhausted her
vein, though those who fail to regard Paul Emanuel with the affection
which he seems to inspire in some, may think that she went perilously
near it. But fate was kind to her: some interesting biographies and
brilliant essays at different periods have revived and championed her
fame: and her books--at least _Jane Eyre_ almost as a whole and parts of
the others--will always be simply interesting to the novel-reader, and
interesting in a more indirect fashion to the critic. For this last will
perceive that, thin and crude as they are, they are original, they
belong to their own present and future, not to their past, and that so
they hold in the history of literature a greater place than many books
of greater accomplishment which are simply worked on already projected
and accepted lines. Emily's work, though too small in bulk and too
limited in character to be put really high, has this original character
in intense equality.
The mantle of Charlotte Bronte fell almost directly from her shoulders
on those of another novelist of her sex. The author of _Jane Eyre_ died,
as has been said, in the spring of 1855. In the autumn of the next year
was written, and in the January issue of _Blackwood's Magazine_ for 1857
appeared, the first of a series of _Scenes of Clerical Life_. The
author, then and for some time afterwards unknown, was Mary Ann or
Marian Evans, who took various styles during her life, but wrote
habitually under the _nom de guerre_ of "George Eliot." Miss Bronte had
not been a very precocious novelist; but Miss Evans did not begin to
write novels till she was nearly as old as Miss Bronte was when she
died. Her time, however, had been by no means wasted. Born on 22nd
November 1819, at Arbury in Warwickshire, where her father was
land-steward to Mr. Newdigate, she moved, after twenty years' life in
the country or at school, with her father into Coventry, and became
acquainted with a set of Unitarians who had practically broken all
connection with Christianity. She accepted their opinions with the
curious docility and reflexiveness which, strong as was her mind in a
way, always distinguished her; and as a sign of profession she undertook
the translation of Strauss' _Leben Jesu_. In 1849 she went abroad, and
stayed for some time at Geneva, studying hard, and not returning to
England till next year. Then establishing herself in London, she began
to write for the _Westminster Review_, which she helped to edit, and
translated Feuerbach's _Wesen des Christenthums_. It is highly probable
that she would never have been known except as an essayist and
translator, if she had not formed an irregular union with George Henry
Lewes, a very clever and versatile journalist, who was almost a
philosopher, almost a man of science, and perhaps quite a man of letters
of the less creative kind. Under his influence (he had been a novelist
himself, though an unsuccessful one, and was an excellent critic) the
docility above remarked on turned itself into the channel of
novel-writing, with immediate and amazing success.
Some good judges have thought that Miss Evans never exceeded, in her own
special way, the _Scenes of Clerical Life_. But it was far exceeded in
popularity by _Adam Bede_, which, oddly enough, was claimed by or at
least for an impostor after its triumphant appearance in 1858. The
position of the author may be said to have been finally established by
_The Mill on the Floss_ (1860), though the opening part of _Silas
Marner_ (1861) is at least equal if not superior to anything she ever
did. Her later works were _Romola_, a story of the Italian Renaissance
(1863); _Felix Holt, the Radical_ (1866); some poems (the _Spanish
Gypsy_, _Jubal_, etc., 1868-74); _Middlemarch_ (1871); and _Daniel
Deronda_ (1876). This last was followed by a volume of essays entitled
the _Impressions of Theophrastus Such_. Mr. Lewes having died in 1878,
Miss Evans, in May 1880, married Mr. John Cross, and died herself in
December of the same year. Her _Life and Letters_ were subsequently
published by her husband, but the letters proved extremely disappointing
to her admirers, and the life was not very illuminative, except as to
that docility and capacity for taking colour and pressure from
surroundings which have been noticed above.
As a poet George Eliot has been noticed elsewhere. She merely put some
of the thoughtful commonplaces of her time and school into wooden verse,
occasionally grandiose but never grand, and her purple passages have the
purple of plush not of velvet. Nor is she very remarkable as an
essayist, though some of her early articles have merit, and though
_Theophrastus Such_, appearing at a time when her general hold on the
public was loosening, not commending itself in form to her special
admirers, and injured in parts by the astonishing pseudo-scientific
jargon which she had acquired, was received rather more coldly than it
deserved. But as a novelist she is worthy of careful attention. Between
1860 and 1870, a decade in which Thackeray passed away early and during
which Dickens did no first-class work, she had some claims to be
regarded as the chief English novelist who had given much and from whom
more was to be expected; after Dickens' death probably four critics out
of five would have given her the place of greatest English novelist
without hesitation. Nevertheless, even from the first there were
dissidents: while at the time of the issue of _Middlemarch_ her fame was
at the very highest, the publication of _Daniel Deronda_ made it fall
rapidly; and a considerable reaction (perhaps to be reversed, perhaps
not) has set in against her since her death.
The analysis of George Eliot's genius is indeed exceedingly curious.
There are in her two currents or characters which are more or less
mingled in all her books, but of which the one dominates in those up to
and including _Silas Marner_, while the other is chiefly noticeable in
those from _Romola_ onward. The first, the more characteristic and
infinitely the more healthy and happy, is a quite extraordinary faculty
of humorous observation and presentation of the small facts and oddities
of (especially provincial) life. The _Scenes of Clerical Life_ show this
strongly, together with a fund of untheatrical pathos which scarcely
appears in so genuine a form afterwards. In _Adam Bede_ and _The Mill on
the Floss_ it combines with a somewhat less successful vein of tragedy
to make two admirable, if not faultless, novels; it lends a wonderful
charm to the slight and simple study of _Silas Marner_. But, abundant as
it is, it would seem that this is observation, not invention, nor that
happiest blending of observation and invention which we find in
Shakespeare and Scott. The accumulated experiences of her long and
passive youth were now poured out with a fortunate result. But in
default of invention, and in presence of the scientific or
pseudo-scientific spirit which was partly natural to her and partly
imbibed from those who surrounded her, she began, after _Silas Marner_,
to draw always in part and sometimes mainly upon quite different
storehouses. It is probable that the selection of the Italian
Renaissance subject of _Romola_ was a very disastrous one. She herself
said that she "was a young woman when she began the book and an old one
when she finished it." It is a very remarkable _tour de force_, but it
is a _tour de force_ executed entirely against the grain. It is not
alive: it is a work of erudition not of genius, of painful manufacture
not of joyous creation or even observation. And this note of labour
deepened and became more obvious even when she returned to modern and
English subjects, by reason of the increased "purpose" which marked her
later works. It has been noted by all critics of any perception as
extremely piquant, though not to careful students of life and letters at
all surprising, that George Eliot, whose history was always well known,
is in almost every one of her books the advocate of the strictest union
of love and marriage--no love without marriage and no marriage without
love. But she was not satisfied with defending this thesis, beneficial,
comparatively simple, and, in the situations which it suggests, not
unfriendly to art. In her last book, _Daniel Deronda_, she embarked on a
scheme, equally hopeless and gratuitous, of endeavouring to enlist the
public sympathies in certain visions of neo-Judaism. In all these books
indeed, even in _Deronda_, the old faculty of racy presentation of the
humours of life recurred. But it became fainter and less frequent; and
it was latterly obscured, as has been hinted, by a most portentous
jargon borrowed from the not very admirable lingo of the philosophers
and men of science of the last half of the nineteenth century. All these
things together made the later books conspicuously, what even the
earlier had been to some extent, lifeless structures. They were
constructed no doubt with much art and of material not seldom precious,
but they were not lively growths, and they were fatally tinged with
evanescent "forms in chalk," fancies of the day and hour, not less
ephemeral for being grave in subject and seeming, and almost more jejune
or even disgusting to posterity on that account.
Almost as much of the time, though curiously different in the aspect of
it which he represented, was Charles Kingsley, who was born in the same
year as George Eliot, on the 18th of June 1819. A fanciful critic might
indulge in a contrast between the sober though not exactly dull scenery
of the Midlands which saw her birth, and that of the most beautiful part
of Devonshire (Holne, on the south-eastern fringe of Dartmoor) where, at
the vicarage which his father held, Kingsley was born. He was educated
at King's College, London, and Magdalene College, Cambridge, took a very
good degree, and very soon after his appointment to the curacy of
Eversley, in Hampshire, became rector thereof in 1844. He held the
living for the rest of his life, dying there on the 23rd January 1875.
It was not, however, by any means his only preferment. In 1860 he was
made Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, not the most fortunate of
appointments; for, with a tendency to small slips in fact at least equal
to that of his friend and brother-in-law Mr. Froude, Kingsley, though
capable of presenting separate aspects and facets of the past admirably,
had not the general historic grasp which redeemed Froude. Nine years
later he resigned the post and was made a Canon of Chester, while in
1873 this was exchanged for a Canonry at Westminster and a Chaplaincy to
the Queen. Otherwise Kingsley's private life was happy and uneventful,
its chief incident being a voyage to the West Indies (which, though
unvisited, he had long before so brilliantly described) in 1871.
His literary work was very large, much varied, and of an excellence
almost more varied than its kinds. He began, of course, with verse, and
his _Saint's Tragedy_ (1848), a drama on the story of St. Elizabeth of
Hungary, was followed by shorter poems (far too few) at different times,
most of them previous to 1858, though the later books contain some
charming fragments, and some appeared posthumously. Of all men who have
written so little verse during as long a life in our time, Kingsley is
probably the best poet. The _Saint's Tragedy_ is a little "viewy" and
fluent. But in _Andromeda_ he has written the very best English
hexameters ever produced, and perhaps the only ones in which that alien
or rebel takes on at least the semblance of a loyal subject to the
English tongue. The rise of the breeze after the passage of the Nereids,
the expostulation of Andromeda with Perseus, and the approach of the
monster, are simply admirable. "The Last Buccaneer" and "The Red
King"--call them "Wardour Street," as some critics may--are among the
best of their kind; and scores of songs, snatches, etc., from "The Three
Fishers" and "The Starlings" of a very early date to the "When all the
world is young" ballad of the _Water Babies_ and the posthumous fragment
in rhyme of "Lorraine, Lorraine, Lorree"--one of the triumphs of that
pure poetry which has the minimum of meaning, yet enough--are of
extraordinary vigour, freshness, and charm.
But Kingsley was one of those darlings--perhaps the rarest--of the Muses
to whom they grant the gift not only of doing a little poetry
exquisitely, but the further gift of abstaining from doing anything ill;
and he seems to have recognised almost at once that "the other harmony,"
that of prose, was the one meant for him to do his day's work in. An
enthusiast for the people, and an eager disciple of Carlyle, he produced
in the fateful year 1849 two novels, _Alton Locke_ and _Yeast_, a little
crude, immature, and violent, but of wonderful power and beauty as
literature, and putting current ideas of Chartism, the Tractarian
movement, the woes of the working classes, and what not, with that most
uncommon touch which takes out of the expression all its ephemerality.
He had joined Maurice in the "Christian Socialist" movement, and was a
frequent newspaper writer in the same sense as that of his novels; while
he soon began to contribute to _Fraser's Magazine_ a series of extremely
brilliant essays, since collected in various forms, on literature,
scenery, sport (he was an ardent fisherman), and things in general. His
next novel, _Hypatia_, is still shot with Christian Socialism, but is
much less crude; and a further sobering down without any loss of force
appears in the great Elizabethan novel of _Westward Ho!_ usually, and
perhaps rightly, thought his masterpiece (1855). _Two Years Ago_ (1857),
the title of which refers to the Crimean War, is much more unequal, and
exhibits signs of a certain declension, though to a level still very
high. His last novel, _Hereward the Wake_ (1866), was and is very
variously judged.
But even the poems, the essays, and the novels, do not by any means fill
up the list of the results of Kingsley's activity. He was a constant,
and at his best a very good, sermon-writer for publication. He produced
in the first flush of the rage for seashore studies (1854) a very
pleasant little book called _Glaucus_; he collected some of his
historical lectures in _The Roman and the Teuton_; and he wrote in 1863
the delightful nondescript of _The Water Babies_, part story, part
satire, part Rabelaisian _fatrasie_, but almost all charming, and
perhaps the latest book in which his powers appear at their very best.
These powers, as exhibited in his novels, with a not dissimilar
exhibition in little in his essays, are so remarkable that in certain
senses Kingsley may, with a little kindness, be put in the very first
class of English novelists, and might be put there by the sternest
critical impartiality were it not for his concomitant defects. These
defects are fairly numerous, and they are unfortunately of a kind not
likely to escape attention. He was a rather violent, though a very
generous partisan, and was perpetually going out of his way to provoke
those on the other side by "flings" of this or that kind. He was
extremely fond of arguing, but was a most poor and unhappy logician. One
of the best known and most unfortunate episodes of his literary life was
the controversy into which he plunged with Newman in 1864. Kingsley had
before on various occasions spoken enthusiastically of Newman's genius
and character: the reference to the peculiar estimate of truth held by
some Roman Catholics, and approved, or supposed to be approved, by
Newman, which was the text for the latter's wrath, was anything but
offensive, and it afterwards became certain, through the publication of
the _Apologia_, that the future Cardinal, with the inspiration of a born
controversialist, had simply made Kingsley the handle for which he had
been waiting. A very little dialectical skill would have brought
Kingsley out of the contest with honours at least divided; but, as it
was, he played like a child into Newman's hands, and not only did much
to re-establish that great man in public opinion, but subjected himself
at the time, and to some extent since, to an obloquy at least as unjust
as that which had rested upon Newman. This maladroitness appears
constantly in the novels themselves, and it is accompanied not merely by
the most curious and outrageous blunders in fact (such as that which
represents Marlowe as dying in the time of James the First, not that of
Elizabeth), but by odd lapses of taste in certain points, and in some
(chiefly his later) books by a haphazard and inartistic construction.
We must, of course, allow for these things, which are the more annoying
in that they are simply a case of those which _incuria fudit_. But when
they are allowed for, there will remain such a gallery of scenes,
characters, and incidents, as few English novelists can show. The best
passages of Kingsley's description, from _Alton Locke_ to _Hereward_,
are almost unequalled and certainly unsurpassed. The shadows of London
low life and of working-class thought in _Alton Locke_, imitated with
increasing energy for half a century, have never been quite reached, and
are most brilliantly contrasted with the lighter Cambridge scenes.
_Yeast_, perhaps the least general favourite among his books, and
certainly the crudest, has a depth of passion and power, a life, an
intensity, the tenth part of which would make the fortune of a novel
now; and the variety and brilliancy of _Hypatia_ are equalled by its
tragedy. Unequal as _Two Years Ago_ is, and weak in parts, it still has
admirable passages; and _Hereward_ to some extent recovers the strange
panoramic and phantasmagoric charm of _Hypatia_. But where _Westward
Ho!_ deserves the preference, and where Kingsley vindicates his claim to
be the author not merely of good passages but of a good book, is in the
sustained passion of patriotism, the heroic height of adventure and
chivalry, which pervades it from first to last. Few better historical
novels have ever been written; and though, with one exception, that of
Salvation Yeo, the author has drawn better characters elsewhere, he has
nowhere knitted his incidents into such a consistent whole, or worked
characters and scenes together into such a genuine and thorough work of
art.
Anthony Trollope, one of the most typical novelists of the century, or
at least of the half-century, in England, if not one of the greatest,
was a member of a literary family whose other members, of more or less
distinction, may for convenience' sake best be mentioned here. Little is
recorded of his father, who was, however, a barrister, and a Fellow of
New College, Oxford. But Anthony's mother, the "Mrs. Trollope" of two
generations ago, who was born a Miss Milton in 1780, was herself very
well known in print, especially by her novel of _The Widow Barnaby_
(1839), which had sequels, and by her very severe _Domestic Manners of
the Americans_, which appeared in 1832, after she had qualified herself
to write it by a three years' residence in the United States. She wrote
a great deal at this period, and survived till 1863; but her work hardly
survived as long as she did. It has, however, been said, and not without
justice, that much of the more vivid if coarser substance of her younger
son's humour is to be traced in it. The elder son, Thomas Adolphus, who
was born in 1810, and lived from 1841 for some half-century onwards in
Italy, was also a prolific novelist, and wrote much on Italian history;
while perhaps his best work was to be found in some short pieces,
combining history with a quasi-fictitious interest, which he contributed
to the periodicals edited by Dickens.
But neither mother nor elder brother could vie with Anthony, who was
born in 1815, was educated at Winchester and Harrow, spent the greater
part of his life as an official of the Post Office, and died in December
1882, leaving an enormous number of novels, which at one time were the
most popular, or almost the most popular, of their day, and to which
rather fastidious judges have found it difficult to refuse all but the
highest praise. Almost immediately after Trollope's death appeared an
_Autobiography_ in which, with praiseworthy but rather indiscreet
frankness, he detailed habits of work of a mechanical kind, the
confession of which played into the hands of those who had already begun
to depreciate him as a mere book-maker. It is difficult to say how many
novels he wrote, persevering as he did in composition up to the very
time of his death; and it is certain that the productions of his last
decade were, as a rule, very inferior to his best. This best is to be
found chiefly, but not entirely, in what is called the "Barsetshire"
series, clustering round a county and city which are more or less
exactly Hampshire and Winchester, beginning in 1855 with _The Warden_, a
good but rather immature sketch, and continuing through _Barchester
Towers_ (perhaps his masterpiece), _Doctor Thorne_, _Framley Parsonage_,
and _The Small House at Allington_ (the two latter among the early
triumphs of the _Cornhill Magazine_), to _The Last Chronicle of Barset_
(1867), which runs _Barchester Towers_ very hard, if it does not surpass
it. Other favourite books of his were _The Three Clerks_, _Orley Farm_,
_Can You Forgive Her_, and _Phineas Finn_--nor does this by any means
exhaust the list even of his good books.
It has been said that Trollope is a typical novelist, and the type is of
sufficient importance to receive a little attention, even in space so
jealously allotted as ours must be. The novel craved by and provided for
the public of this second period (it has also been said) was a novel of
more or less ordinary life, ranging from the lower middle to the upper
class, correctly observed, diversified by sufficient incident not of an
extravagant kind, and furnished with description and conversation not
too epigrammatic but natural and fairly clever. This norm Trollope hit
with surprising justness, and till the demand altered a little or his
own hand failed (perhaps there was something of both) he continued to
hit it. His interests and experiences were fairly wide; for, besides
being active in his Post Office duties at home and abroad, he was an
enthusiastic fox-hunter, fairly fond of society and of club-life,
ambitious enough at least to try other paths than those of fiction in
his _Thackeray_ (a failure), his _Cicero_ (a worse failure), and other
things. And everything that he saw he could turn into excellent
novel-material. No one has touched him in depicting the humours of a
public office, few in drawing those of cathedral cities and the
hunting-field. If his stories, as stories, are not of enthralling
interest or of very artfully constructed plots, their craftsmanship in
this respect leaves very little to complain of. And he can sometimes, as
in the Stanhope family of _Barchester Towers_, in Mrs. Proudie _passim_,
in Madalina Demolines, and in others, draw characters very little
removed from those who live with us for ever. It is extremely improbable
that there will ever be a much better workman of his own class; and his
books are certainly, at their best, far better than all but one or two
that appear, not merely in any given year nowadays, but in any given
lustrum. Yet the special kind of their excellence, the facts that they
reflect their time without transcending it, and that in the way of
merely reflective work each time prefers its own workmen and is never
likely to find itself short of them, together with the great volume of
Trollope's production, are certainly against him; and it is hard even
for those who enjoyed him most, and who can still enjoy him, to declare
positively that there is enough of the permanent and immortal in him to
justify the hope of a resurrection.
In Charles Reade, on the other hand, there is undoubtedly something of
this permanent or transcendent element, though less perhaps than some
fervent admirers of his have claimed. He was born on June 1814 at Ipsden
in Oxfordshire, where his family had been some time seated as squires.
He had no public school education, but was elected first to a Demyship
and then to a Fellowship at Magdalen College, Oxford. He was called to
the Bar in 1842; but his Fellowship made him independent, and he pursued
many crazes--he was one of the most eccentric of those English authors
who are noticed in this volume--but no profession. He did not even begin
to write very early, and when he did it was drama, not prose or fiction.
He was not very successful with the stage, though he never quite gave it
up. It was about 1852 when he began to write, or at least to publish,
novels; and between the _Peg Woffington_ of that year and his death on
1st April 1884 he produced nearly a score, diversifying the publication
with law-suits, eccentric newspaper correspondences, and other things.
Indeed he has in more than one of his books introduced mental delusions
with such startling subtlety and truth, and was so entirely odd in the
ordinary relations of life, that some have not hesitated to insinuate a
slight want of sanity.
If there was any madness in him, the hackneyed alliance of great wits
was certainly not refused. A novelist of violent likes and dislikes
himself, he has found violent partisans and scornful pooh-poohers. Among
the former there is perhaps hardly one of his chief books--the quaint
and brilliant _Peg Woffington_, the pathetic _Christie Johnstone_, _Hard
Cash_, _Griffith Gaunt_, _Put Yourself in his Place_, _A Terrible
Temptation_, and the rest--which has not special sectaries. But catholic
criticism would undoubtedly put _It is Never too Late to Mend_ (1856)
and _The Cloister and the Hearth_ (1861) at the head of all. The former
is a tale of the moment, based chiefly on some stories which had got
abroad of tyranny in gaols, and on the Australian gold fever of a few
years earlier. The latter is a pure romance, purporting to tell the
adventures of Erasmus' father in the fifteenth century. The contrast of
these subjects illustrates admirably a curious combination in Reade's
genius which, for the matter of that, might be independently exemplified
from either book. On the one side he was one of the earliest and one of
the most industrious of those who have been called the "document" or
"reporter" novelists--now collecting enormous stores of newspaper
cuttings and busying himself with keenest interest in the things of the
day; now, as in _The Cloister and the Hearth_, not disdaining to impart
realism and vividness to his pictures by adapting and almost translating
whole passages from Erasmus' own _Colloquies_. On the other, he was a
poetic seer and dreamer, of the strongest romantic force, and capable of
extraordinary flights of power, passion, and pathos. But there was
another thing that he was _not_, and that was a critic. His taste and
judgment were extremely deficient; he had no sense of general proportion
in his work; and was quite as likely to be melodramatic as to be
tragical, to be coarse as to be strong, to be tedious as to be amusing,
to be merely revolting as to purify by pity and terror. Both the books
just specially mentioned may be thought too long: it is certain that
_The Cloister and the Hearth_ is. That a freshness still evident in
_Christie Johnstone_ has been lost in both (having been killed by "the
document") is also true. But still, Reade undoubtedly had genius, and to
genius most things can without much trouble be forgiven.
The chief novelist of what is rather loosely called the School of
Dickens, was Wilkie Collins, son of the painter of that name, who was
born in London on 8th January 1824, and died in 1889. His greatest
popularity was in the decade between 1857 and 1866, when _The Dead
Secret_, _The Woman in White_, _No Name_, and _Armadale_, especially the
second, had an immense vogue. Perhaps _The Moonstone_, which is later,
is also better than any of these. The strictly literary merit of none
could be put high, and the method, that of forwarding the result by a
complicated intertwist of letters and narratives, though it took the
public fancy for a time, was clumsy; while the author followed his
master in more than one aberration of taste and sentiment. His brother
Charles Collins, who had a much shorter life, had a much more delicate
style and fancy; and the _Cruise upon Wheels_, a record of an actual
tour slightly embellished and thrown into fictitious form, is one of the
books which have, and are not, unless they drop entirely out of sight,
likely to lose, a firm following of friends, few perhaps but faithful.
Mortimer Collins, a contemporary, but no relation of these, whose poems
have already been mentioned, was born in 1827 and died in 1876, the last
twenty years of his life having been occupied by various and voluminous
literary work. He was one of the last of the so-called Bohemian school
in letters and journalism, something of a scholar, a fertile novelist,
and a versatile journalist in most of the kinds which make up modern
journalism.
Henry Kingsley, younger brother of Charles, was himself a prolific and
vigorous novelist; and though a recent attempt to put him above his
brother cannot possibly be allowed by sound criticism, he had perhaps a
more various command of fiction, certainly a truer humour, and if a
less passionate, perhaps a more thoroughly healthy literary temperament.
But his life was not long, and he was unfortunately compelled during
most of it to write for a living. Born in 1830, he was educated at
King's College, London, and Worcester College, Oxford, on leaving which
latter he went to Australia and lived there for five years. Returning in
1859, he wrote the admirable Australian story of _Geoffrey Hamlyn_,
which, with _Ravenshoe_ two years later, contains most of his work that
can be called really first rate. He returned to Australia for his
subject in _The Hillyars and the Burtons_, and wrote several other
novels before his death in 1876, having been during part of the time a
newspaper editor, a newspaper correspondent, and a journalist generally.
The absence of composition, which Flaubert deplored in English novels
generally, shows at its height in Henry Kingsley, whose _Ravenshoe_, for
instance, has scarcely any plot at all, and certainly owes nothing to
what it has; while he was a rapid and careless writer. But he had, in a
somewhat less elaborate form, all his brother's talents for description
of scene and action, and his characters, if more in the way of ordinary
life, are also truer to that life. Also he is particularly to be
commended for having, without the slightest strait-lacedness, and indeed
with a good deal of positive Bohemianism, exhibited the nineteenth
century English notion of what constitutes a gentleman perhaps better
than any one else. "There are some things a fellow _can't_ do"--the
chance utterance of his not ungenerous scamp Lord Welter--is a memorable
sentence, whereon a great sermon might be preached.
A little older than Henry Kingsley (he died in the same year), much more
popular for a time, and the exerter of an influence which has not ceased
yet, and has been on the whole distinctly undervalued, was George Henry
Lawrence, who was educated at Rugby and Balliol, was called to the Bar,
but was generally known in his own time as Major Lawrence from a militia
commission which he held. He also fought in, or at least was present
during, the war of independence of the southern states of America.
Lawrence, who was born in 1827, published in his thirtieth year a
novel, _Guy Livingstone_, which was very popular, and much denounced as
the Gospel of "muscular blackguardism"--a parody on the phrase "muscular
Christianity," which had been applied to and not unwelcomed by Charles
Kingsley. The book exhibited a very curious blend of divers of the
motives and interests which have been specified as actuating the novel
about this time. Lawrence, who was really a scholar, felt to the full
the Prae-Raphaelite influence in art, though by no means in religion, and
wrote in a style which is a sort of transition between the excessive
floridness of the first Lord Lytton and the later Corinthianism of Mr.
Symonds. But he retained also from his prototype, and new modelled, the
tendency to take "society" and the manners, especially the amatory
manners, of society very much as his province. And thus he rather
shocked the moralists, not only in _Guy Livingstone_ itself, but in its
successors _Sword and Gown_, _Barren Honour_, _Sans Merci_, etc. That
Lawrence's total ideal, both in style and sentiment, was artificial,
false, and flawed, may be admitted. But he has to a great extent been
made to bear the blame of exaggerations of his own scheme by others; and
he was really a novelist and a writer of great talent, which somehow
came short, but not so very far short, of genius.
Mrs. Gaskell was older than most of those hitherto mentioned in this
chapter, having been born in 1810; but she did not begin to write very
early. _Mary Barton_, her first and nearly her best book, appeared in
1848, and its vivid picture of Manchester life, assisted by its great
pathos, naturally attracted attention at that particular time.
_Cranford_ (1853), in a very different style, something like a blend of
Miss Mitford and Miss Austen, has been the most permanently popular of
her works. _Ruth_, of the same year, shocked precisians (which it need
not have done), but is of much less literary value than _Mary Barton_ or
_Cranford_. Mrs. Gaskell, who was the biographer of Charlotte Bronte,
produced novels regularly till her death in 1865, and never wrote
anything bad, though it may be doubted whether anything but _Cranford_
will retain permanent rank.
The year 1857, which saw _Guy Livingstone_, saw a book as different as
possible in ideal, but also one of no common merit, in _John Halifax,
Gentleman_. The author of this was Dinah Maria Mulock, who afterwards
became Mrs. Craik. She was born at Stoke-upon-Trent in 1826, and had
written for nearly ten years when _John Halifax_ appeared. She died in
1888, having written a very great deal both in prose and verse; the
former part including many novels, of which the best perhaps is _A Life
for a Life_. Mrs. Craik was an example of the influence, so often
noticed and to be noticed in the latter part of our period, of the great
demand for books on writers of any popularity. Her work was never bad;
but it was to a very great extent work which was, as the French say, the
"small change" for what would probably in other circumstances have been
a very much smaller quantity of much better work. How this state of
things--which has been brought about on the one hand by the printing
press, newspapers, and the spread of education, on the other by the
disuse of sinecures, patronage, pensions, and easy living generally--is
to be prevented from affecting literature very disastrously is not
clear. Its negative or rather privative effect cannot but be bad; if its
positive effect is always as good as the works of Mrs. Craik, it will be
fortunate.
It is difficult, in a book of this kind, to know how far to attempt the
subdivisions of specialist novels which have been common, such as for
instance the sporting novel, the practitioners of which have been
innumerable. The chief perhaps were Robert Surtees, the author of the
facetious series of which "Mr. Jorrocks" is the central and best figure,
and Major Whyte-Melville. The former, about the middle of the century,
carried out with much knowledge, not inconsiderable wit, and the
advantage of admirable illustrations from the pencil of John Leech,
something like the original idea of _Pickwick_ as a sporting romance,
and there is a strong following of Dickens in him. Major Whyte-Melville,
born near St. Andrews in 1821 and heir to property there, was educated
at Eton, served for some years in the Guards, and with the Turkish
Contingent in the Crimean War, and was killed in the hunting-field in
1878. He touched various styles, chiefly those of Lever and Bulwer,
while he had a sort of contact with George Lawrence. He was never
happier than in depicting his favourite pastime, which figures in most
of his novels and inspired him with some capital verse. But in _Holmby
House_, _Sarchedon_, the _Gladiators_, etc., he tried the historical
style also.
Nor must the brief life, embittered by physical suffering, but
productive of not a little very cheerful work, of Francis Edward
Smedley, a relation of the poetess mentioned in the last chapter, be
forgotten. He, born in 1818, went to Cambridge, and then became a
novelist and journalist, dying in 1864. His best work belongs to exactly
the period with which this chapter begins, the early fifties, and had
the advantage, like other novels of the time, of illustration by "Phiz."
The three chief books are _Frank Fairleigh_ (1850), _Lewis Arundel_
(1852), and _Harry Coverdale's Courtship_ (1854). With a touch of
Bulwerian romance, something of the sporting novel, and a good deal of
the adventure story, Smedley united plenty of pleasant humour and
occasionally not a little real wit.
It will have been observed that more than one of the more distinguished
novelists of this time attempted, and that at least one of them
achieved, the historical novel; nor was it at all likely that a kind so
attractive in itself, illustrated by such remarkable genius, and
discovered at last after many centuries of futile endeavour, should
immediately or entirely lose its popularity. Yet it is certain that for
about a quarter of a century, from 1845 to 1870, not merely the
historical novel, but the romance generally, did lose general practice
and general attention, while, though about the latter date at least one
novel of brilliant quality, Mr. Blackmore's _Lorna Doone_, vindicated
romance, and historical romance, it was still something of an exception.
Those who are old enough, and who paid sufficient attention to
contemporary criticism, will remember that for many years the advent of
a historical novel was greeted in reviews with a note not exactly of
contempt, but of the sort of surprise with which men greet something out
of the way and old fashioned.
This was the inevitable result of that popularity of the domestic and
usual novel which this chapter has hitherto described, and it was as
natural and as inevitable that the domestic and usual novel should in
its turn undergo the same law. Not that this, again, was summarily, much
less finally displaced; on the contrary, the enormous and
ever-increasing demand for fiction--which the establishment of public
free libraries, and the custom of printing in cheaper form for sale, has
encouraged _pari passu_ with the apparent discouragement given to it by
the fall of circulating libraries from the absolutely paramount place
which they occupied not long ago--maintained the call for this as for
other kinds of story. But partly mere love of change, partly the
observations of those critics who were not content to follow the fashion
merely, and partly also the familiar but inexplicable rise at the same
time of divers persons whose talent inclined in a new direction, brought
in, about 1880 or later, a demand for romance, for historical romance,
and for the short story--three things against which the taste of the
circulating-library reader during the generation then expiring had
distinctly set itself. The greater part of the results of this change
falls out of our subject; but one remarkable name, perhaps the most
remarkable of all, is given to us by the Fates.
For one of the pillars of this new building of romance was only too soon
removed. Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson (more commonly known to the
public by the first two, and to his friends by the second of his
Christian names) belonged to the famous family of lighthouse architects
who so long carried on the traditions of Smeaton in that department of
engineering; and he was to have been an engineer himself. But he was
incurably literary; and after school and college at Edinburgh, was
called to the Bar, with no more practical results in that profession
than in the other. Born on 13th November 1850, he was not extremely
precocious in publication; and it was not till nearly the end of the
seventies that his essays in the _Cornhill Magazine_ and his stories in
a periodical called _London_, short lived and not widely circulated,
but noteworthy in its way, attracted attention. He followed them up
with two volumes of somewhat Sternian travel, _An Inland Voyage_ (1878)
and _Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes_ (1879); next collecting his
_Cornhill Essays_ in two other volumes, _Virginibus Puerisque_ (1881)
and _Familiar Studies of Men and Books_ (1882), and his _London_ stories
in _The New Arabian Nights_ (1882). But he did not get hold of the
public till a year later than the latest of these dates, with his famous
_Treasure Island_, the best boys' story since Marryat, and one of a
literary excellence to which Marryat could make no pretensions. The vein
of romance which he then struck, and the older and more fanciful one of
_The New Arabian Nights_, were followed up alternately or together in an
almost annual succession of books--_Prince Otto_ (1885), _The Strange
Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_ (1886), _Kidnapped_ (1886), _The Black
Arrow_ (a wonderfully good, though not very generally popular,
York-and-Lancaster story) (1888), _The Master of Ballantrae_ (1889), the
exquisite _Catriona_ (1893). It also pleased him to write, in
collaboration with others, _The Dynamiter_, _The Wrecker_, _The Ebb
Tide_, etc., where the tracing of the several shares is not unamusing.
Stevenson also attempted poetry, and his _Child's Garden of Verse_
(1885) has very warm admirers, who are often more doubtful about
_Underwoods_ (1887) and _Ballads_ (1891). The list of his work is not
exhausted, and one of the latest additions to it was _A Footnote to
History_ (1892), containing an account of the intestine troubles of the
island of Samoa, where Mr. Stevenson, long a victim to lung disease,
latterly fixed his abode, and where he died suddenly in the winter of
1894.
As has been the case with most of the distinguished writers of recent
years, Mr. Stevenson has been praised by some of his contemporaries and
juniors with an uncritical fervour which has naturally provoked
depreciation from others; and the charm of his personality was so great
that it is extremely difficult for any one who knew him to hold the
scales quite even. As the most brilliant and interesting by far,
however, of those English writers whose life was comprised in the last
half of the century he absolutely demands critical treatment here, and
it so happens that his method and results were extremely typical of the
literary movement and character of our time. He has left somewhat minute
accounts of his own apprenticeship, but they are almost unnecessary: no
critic of the slightest competence could fail to divine the facts.
Adopting to the full, and something more than the full, the modern
doctrine of the all-importance of art, of manner, of style in
literature, Mr. Stevenson early made the most elaborate studies in
imitative composition. There is no doubt that he at last succeeded in
acquiring a style which was quite his own: but it was complained, and
with justice, that even to the last he never attained complete ease in
this style; that its mannerism was not only excessive, but bore, as even
excessive mannerism by no means always does, the marks of distinct and
obvious effort. This was perhaps most noticeable in his essays, which
were further marred by the fact that much of them was occupied by
criticism, for which, though his taste was original and delicate,
Stevenson's knowledge was not quite solid enough, and his range of
sympathies a little deficient in width. In his stories, on the other
hand, the devil's advocate detected certain weak points, the chief of
them being an incapacity to finish, and either a distaste or an
incapacity for introducing women. This last charge was finally refuted
by _Catriona_, not merely in the heroine, but in the much more charming
and lifelike figure of Barbara Grant; but the other was something of a
true bill to the last. It was Stevenson's weakness (as by the way it
also was Scott's) to huddle up his stories rather than to wind them off
to an orderly conclusion.
But against this allowance--a just but an ample one--for defects, must
be set to Stevenson's credit such a combination of literary and
story-telling charm as perhaps no writer except Merimee has ever
equalled; while, if the literary side of him had not the golden
perfection, the accomplished ease of the Frenchman, his romance has a
more genial, a fresher, a more natural quality. Generally, as in the
famous examples of Scott, of Dumas, and of Balzac, the great
story-tellers have been a little deficient in mere style; the fault in
Stevenson, if it could be called a fault, was that the style was in
excess. But this only set off and enhanced, it did not account for, the
magic of his scene and character, from John Silver to Barbara Grant,
from "The Suicide Club" to the escapes of Alan Breck. Very early, when
most of his critical friends were urging him to cultivate the essay
mainly, others discerned the supremacy of his story-telling faculty,
and, years before the public fell in love with _Treasure Island_, bade
him cultivate that. Fortunately he did so; and his too short life has
left a fairly ample store of work, not always quite equal, seldom quite
without a flaw, but charming, stimulating, distinguished as few things
in this last quarter of a century have been.
Nearly all of Mr. Stevenson's contemporaries in novel-writing, as well
as many distinguished persons far his seniors whose names will occur to
every one, lie outside our limits. And in no chapter of this book,
perhaps, is it so necessary to turn the back sternly on much interesting
performance once famous and popular--not once only of interest to the
reader of time and chance but put by this cause or that out of our
reach. We cannot talk here of _Emilia Wyndham_ or _Paul Ferroll_, both
emphatically novels of their day, and that no short one; and in the
latter case, if not in the former, books deserving to be read at
intervals by more than the bookworm. The exquisite _Story without an
End_, which Sarah Austin half adapted, half translated, and which, with
some unusually good translations from Fouque and others, set a whole
fashion fifty years ago, must pass with mere allusion; the abundant and
not seldom excellent fiction of the earlier High Church movement pleads
in vain for detailed treatment. For all doors must be shut or open; and
this door must now be shut.