Edward George Bulwer Lytton (1803-1873) was (perhaps after Robert

Chambers, but far more conspicuously) the most versatile man of letters

of his age. He entered Parliament very early, before the passing of the

Reform Bill, and already he had impressed Scott by his novel "Pelham".

Sir Walter wrote to Lockhart, curious about "Pelham" and its author.

Lockhart, replied curtly that "Pelham is a puppy," and its author,

like Disraeli, certainly aimed at being a dandy, and had a Byronic

pose. Perhaps for this reason Thackeray regarded Lytton as a mass of

affectations in thought and style, with his pretensions to classical

learning and Neo-Platonic lore, and mysticism, and his affection for

virtuous criminals as in "Eugene Aram". Thackeray's burlesque of

Lytton, "George de Barnwell," was his favourite among his own works,

and is a joy for ever with its sham history, sham classics, and sham

sentiment. When Lytton, in a satire, attacked Tennyson as "Miss Alfred"

the poet finished the fight in a single round. However, Lytton's novels

continued to win admiration, whether they were historical romances (of

these "The Last Days of Pompeii" is probably the best of all tales

which introduce early Christians, and is still very readable) or

whether they were stories of modern life. "Zanoni" has several times

defeated the present writer; but "The Caxtons" is full of interest.

There is no better romance of the supernormal than "A Strange Story";

and perhaps a kind of sketch for it, "The Haunted and the Haunters,"

is at least as good. The marvels, we may say, are "spread too thick,"

but Lytton manifestly had in his mind the well-authenticated story

of Willington Mill. To the last Lytton kept changing his manner and

working, with wonderful freshness, in new fields. He missed being in

the first rank of novelists, and the bloom is very early off the rye of

novelists who fall short of that rank.

Of Lockhart's novels, though he tried his hand four times (once in the

unlucky early Christian period with "Valerius"), only one is read,

"Adam Blair," a vigorous and gloomy study of the temptation and fall of

a Scottish parish minister. Hogg's "Confessions of a Justified Sinner"

is a most astonishing work, when once it gets under way, anticipating

R. L. Stevenson's handling o the terrible in a lonely upland parish

(see "Thrawn Janet"). But if the story is tardy in its earlier

chapters, in the later, it rivals not only Stevenson but Hawthorne, yet

few people can be induced to give it a trial.

Captain Frederick Marryat (1792-1848) is a novelist of the days of

Nelson's fleet, and nothing is more surprising, nothing in the same

field more distressing, than the neglect into which the nautical novels

of the creator of "Peter Simple," "Mr. Midshipman Easy," "Masterman

Ready" and "Snarley-yow" appear to have fallen. They are full of

humour, high spirits, genuine adventures, and sound honest views of

life and duty. Carlyle ungratefully called them "nonsense," but he

read them when under the blow of the destruction of his manuscript of

the French Revolution. They are the best sort of boys' books, but the

inexplicable taste of boys leads them to prefer the works of Mr. Henty

to those which their grandfathers read, the books of Scott, Dumas,

Thackeray, Dickens, and Captain Marryat.

They were not so fond of Michael Scott's "Tom Cringle's Log," and "The

Cruise of the Midge," but they did read and shudder over Mrs. Shelley's

best novel, "Frankenstein". Of infinitely more merit than these

novelists are the glories of the Victorian period, Dickens, Thackeray,

and Charlotte Brontë.

Dickens.

"A star danced and under that was he born" might have been the

astrological explanation of the genius of Charles Dickens (born at

Portsmouth, 1812). Explorers of "heredity" can find no source of the

humour and art of Dickens in his father (Mr. Micawber), a dockyard

clerk whose fortunes were never so high as his buoyant hopes; and who

was in prisons often for debt. As Mrs. Dickens, the mother, confessedly

lent traits to Mrs. Nickleby, we need not look for genius on that side.

Dickens's early literary education was mainly derived from some old

books which he found in a cupboard. There were "The Arabian Nights,"

for example, and Fielding's novels (he played at being Tom Jones, a

child's Tom Jones, an innocent creature), stories of shipwrecks (he

went about in fear of savages and determined to sell his life dearly),

in fact there was plenty of good reading. He seems also to have had a

nurse who told stories delightfully "frightening". We see many traits

of his fantastic childish thoughts and dreams in the early Pip of

"Great Expectations"; there are memories, too, in Little Dombey, and in

the infancy of David Copperfield. He was, in short, born with an elfish

imagination; always he retained the primitive habit of giving souls

and characters to lifeless things. His power of minute observation was

precocious, and he was a dreamer of day-dreams till the poverty, and

negligence, of his family sent him to win his tiny wages and choose his

own poor meals, in the service of a warehouse.

All this bitter part of his life made him a close observer of poverty;

a schemer of expedients; a little man of a child. The improvement of

his family's affairs gave him some rather irregular schooling; it

was enough to teach him to draw inimitably well the various kinds of

schoolboy, except the cruel bully, whom he would have found rampant

and abominable at any public school. Like David Copperfield he learned

shorthand, was a reporter in Parliament, and conceived a contempt for

Parliamentary institutions. We all know how he felt when his first

magazine article was published: in 1836 papers of his appeared as

"Sketches by Boz," and in them his peculiar humour, not without debt to

Theodore Hook and other well forgotten comic contemporaries, is already

conspicuous.

In 1836 he was asked to write papers of the comic and sporting sort,

for illustrations of the adventures of a club of citizens. "I thought

of Mr. Pickwick," he says, and, though Mr. Pickwick did not often run,

he ran away with Dickens's fancy as Dugald Dalgetty ran away with

Scott's. The peripatetic Socrates of his younger companions, Messrs.

Snodgrass, Winkle, find Tracy Tupman, Mr. Pickwick kept on improving

as _vir pietate gravis_, chivalrous as Don Quixote, adventurous as

he, benevolent, and innocent as a child, yet dignified, and to be

trifled with by no man or cabman. We remember Mr. Pickwick's idea of

an attitude of self-defence! The influence of Smollett is on Dickens

as on Fanny Burney; "Pickwick" is a sequel of adventures of the road

and of the inn, filled full of the highest animal-spirits, witness the

adventure of The Lady with Yellow Curl-papers! Some extraneous stories

are placed in the middle of the tale, as by Fielding and Smollett: the

book is not a novel, it is something better, it is "Pickwick"!

Already, like Fielding, and with more pertinacity, Dickens was

attacking social abuses, imprisonment for debt, the Fleet Prison,

the Law, as represented by Messrs. Dodson and Fogg and Mr. Justice

Stareleigh. Accidental happy thoughts occurred to him, Mr. Samuel

Weller for one, as the tale went on appearing in monthly numbers,

and the author was never much ahead of the printer. This mode of

publication is responsible for the length and diffuseness of many of

the novels both of Dickens and Thackeray. The sheets had to be filled:

compression and construction could not be attained; and, in later

works, when Dickens did labour hard to construct a plot, we find it,

often, as involuted and obscure as the plots of Congreve's comedies.

"Pickwick" was an overwhelming success; Dickens found himself famous

and entangled in engagements to produce more concurrent fictions than

even Scott could have kept up simultaneously. Yet his high animal

spirits and glowing fancy poured themselves out in "Nicholas Nickleby,"

"Oliver Twist," "The Old Curiosity Shop," "Barnaby Rudge," and "Martin

Chuzzlewit" (the American scenes are due to his experiences of the

United States), between 1838 and 1843. Consider the immense variety,

the humour, the crowd of eternally amusing characters; caricatures, if

any one pleases, but the most laughable of caricatures. The Squeerses,

the Crummleses, the Dodger, Mrs. Nickleby, Mr. Pecksniff, Bailey

junior, Mrs. Gamp, Mr. Richard Swiveller, the Marchioness--he who loves

them not knows them not! The melodramatic and pathetic characters and

scenes are less universally admired; Ralph Nickleby, Monk, and Jonas

Chuzzlewit rather try our belief, and all the world does not weep over

Little Nell. To say, with R. L. Stevenson, that Dickens, in delineating

Little Dombey, Tiny Tim, Little Nell, and Dora in "David Copperfield,"

"wallowed naked in the pathetic," is to offend many devout admirers. We

can take Chaucer's counsel and "turn the other page".

In "David Copperfield" (1849-1850), with the charm of the infancy

of David, the pain of his days in the warehouse, with Mr. and Mrs.

Micawber, Spenlow and Jorkins, Peggotty, Mr. Dick, Betsy Trotwood, and

the rest, Dickens reached, perhaps, the highest mark of his genius. In

"Bleak House" (1852-1853), despite the Jellybys, and Harold Skimpole,

he was too much engaged in the work of reform, and trysted with too

difficult a plot, to reach similar success. The plot of "Little Dorrit"

(1855-1857) is not readily intelligible; the book was disappointing.

In "A Tale of Two Cities" he won the votes of very many readers who do

not care for his lighter works: In "Great Expectations" he was himself

again, and the plot is the best that he ever constructed, his Pip, from

childhood onwards, is a masterpiece; Mr. Wopsle, and Mr. Pumblechook

are joys for ever; and Miss Havisham, though severely criticized, is

not, perhaps, untrue to nature, or at least to the actual facts of the

case on which Dickens worked.

Of "Our Mutual Friend," it must be confessed that the plot is

difficult: in "Dombey and Son" (1846-1848) Dickens appears to have

deserted his idea, on an important point, as Scott did in "St. Ronan's

Well," in deference to the wishes of a friend, and the same change

seems to have been made, for a similar reason, in the fortunes of

Estella, in "Great Expectations".

In "Edwin Drood," written in the last year of Dickens's life,

(1869-1870), when he was outworn by the feverish energy of his nature,

and by the fatigues of travel and of giving readings in hospitable

America, Dickens at least left an unsolved puzzle to his students. What

_was_ "the Mystery" of Edwin Drood? Did Jasper murder him, or fail to

murder him? Some external and some internal evidence favours the idea

that Jasper succeeded, but we have seen that Dickens was very capable

of relenting at the last moment. In this novel, as in some of his

short stories, Dickens shows that leaning to the "supernormal" which

he usually kept well in hand; so much, indeed, that in his "Child's

History of England," he treats Jeanne d'Arc as a conceited, hysterical

little prig. Dickens had none of the qualities of a historian, and all

the contempt of a Liberal of his day for the Middle Ages. He was not a

man of much bookish knowledge: he was a unique genius presenting, as

in a magic mirror, worlds that appeared to himself alone, but that all

were rejoiced to see as he saw them.

He did not see the world of "Society" as others see it who live in

it (he avoided it), but then what world did he see as other people

do? Other worlds he beheld with more sympathy, indeed, but all things

presented a kind of fantastic vividness in that enchanted crystal of

his imagination. That some of his mannerisms are vexatious is not to

be denied: that there are moments of want of balance, of excitement

born of fatigue, of breaking into unconscious blank verse, in the great

mass of his work is too manifest in his letters we see the causes and

occasions of these defects. But it is ill work, in so brief a sketch,

to find faults in the productions of a genius so unique that it has,

in our literature, no parallel, and can never be an example. Dickens

had imitators, but he could not found a school: he was "the only Boz".

His defects were perfectly visible to the critics of his own day, who

did not spare them, but the world did not suffer its pleasure to be

darkened by the spots on the sun. We flatter ourselves that Dickens is

peculiarly English, and so he is in his idealization of punch and other

creature comforts; yet he is remarkably popular, even in translations,

among the French, and by the Poles he is, among our authors, the most

admired.

Thackeray.

It has been the lot of Thackeray to be constantly pitted against

Dickens, like Gray against Collins, and Browning against Tennyson.

People have taken sides for one or another, as taste and fancy led, for

they were contemporaries, they were novelists, humorists, satirists.

But while Dickens, like the minstrel of Odysseus, was "self-taught,"

and was never a man of books, Thackeray (born at Calcutta in 1811)

was educated at Charterhouse, and, with Tennyson, at Trinity College,

Cambridge, where his career was not unlike that of his Arthur

Pendennis, though he took no degree. To Thackeray, Charterhouse was

what Christ's Hospital was to Lamb, a constant rather rueful memory; a

memory, in Thackeray's case, of fagging, fights (in one he received an

honourable scar), of idleness, story-telling, rhyming, caricaturing,

and of the classics, stupidly taught. But, like Fielding, he did not

forget his classics. His bent was to the art of design: many of his

sketches, though often out of drawing, are very humorous; his Becky

Sharp, carrying a coal scuttle, is the actual Becky, and Emmy, in the

dance at Pumpernickel, wears the charming face that haunted his pencil.

On leaving Cambridge he visited Germany and met Goethe: he lost his

patrimony, partly to Mr. Deuceace, partly in the attempt to found a

newspaper. In Paris, and in London, after an early marriage (1836),

broken by a lifelong sorrow (Mrs. Thackeray survived him), he wrote

for the press, continuing the vein of his scribbling in undergraduate

papers like "The Snob," and of his comic prize poem, "Timbuctoo," with

its dominant note "Africa for the Africans".

I see her sons the hill of glory mount

And sell their sugars on their own account.

His Parisian miscellanies in "The Paris Sketchbook" (1840) are of

varied quality, but are all characteristic. He had found his style,

with its harmonies, as in the essay on George Sand: and his British

scorn of some French vagaries is offensive to many cosmopolitan minds.

Unlike Dickens he is unpopular in France; he trod the soil with an air

of remembering Agincourt and Waterloo. He wrote for "The Times," and in

"Fraser," published the "Yellowplush Papers" of that great menial whose

Christian names, Charles James, reveal the Stuart "mistry" in which his

"ma" wrapped up his "buth". Jeames was a critic, much too personal,

of Bulwer Lytton and Dionysius Lardner, that encyclopædist; and, as

a momentary capitalist, as de la Pluche, is a satirist of the age of

rapid railway-made fortunes. The simple humours of his spelling recall

Smollett's Winifred Jenkins in "Humphry Clinker"; while Thackeray's

Major Gahagan is a delightful Irish Captain Bobadil. "Catherine" was a

burlesque on the heroes and heroines of novels of virtuous criminals,

showing that knowledge of the eighteenth century which was Thackeray's

favourite period ("Barry Lyndon," "Esmond," "The English Humorists,"

"Denis Duval," "The Four Georges").

Thackeray was much inclined to historical studies. "I like History, it

is so gentlemanly," he said, but a man, not being a professor, cannot

live by history alone, and he never finished, probably never began, his

contemplated "Reign of Queen Anne".

Everywhere among his early essays and burlesques, his tenderness

peeps out, his pathos, his love of children, and of goodness; and

his haunting melancholy. These are especially conspicuous in "The

Shabby Genteel Story," written at a time of great sorrow and struggle

with poverty. "Barry Lyndon" was overlooked, despite its masterly

ironic study of the vain-glorious Irish adventurer of the eighteenth

century; its pictures, from the gambler's point of view, of Berlin

under Frederick the Great, of the little German duchies, of the wild

half-ruined Irish gentry; of the Chevalier de Balibari, so perfect as

a Catholic, a disillusioned Jacobite, a gentleman, and a swindler.

The later adventures of Barry are drawn from Robertson, and the

Dowager Lady Strathmore, and their squalid romance. This book, among

Thackeray's, corresponds to Fielding's "Jonathan Wild," though the

irony is broken by the author's comments, which are deemed inartistic.

There are moments when Barry's blackguardism breaks down, and he yields

to what some may call sentiment, and others, the soul of good in things

evil. Nothing so great and nothing more unlike Dickens, had appeared

since Fielding's day, but "Barry Lyndon" passed without a welcome.

"The Irish Sketchbook" (1843) was the best Irish sketchbook since that

of Giraldus Cambrensis, but neither that, nor "From Cornhill to Cairo"

(1846) "caught this great stupid public by the ears". "Mrs. Perkins's

Ball" (1847), a Christmas trifle, contains the immortal figure of The

Mulligan, to think of whom is to laugh as one writes. He was sketched

from a well-known Irishman of the day. The little vignettes of other

guests of Mrs. Perkins are worthy of Addison, down to the greengrocer

butler.

In "Punch," Thackeray had been writing and drawing things good and

things commonplace. His burlesques of novelists include "George de

Barnwell" (Lytton) which he is said to have thought his masterpiece,

and "Codlingsby" (Disraeli), which is hardly inferior; but Lever was

annoyed by his "Phil Fogarty of the Fighting Onety Oneth". Thackeray

is the classic parodist; his gift of imitation is as wonderful in the

"Burlesques" as in "Esmond". Scott, who was privately on the side of

Rebecca, in "Ivanhoe," and who had deliberately made Rowena "very

English," would not have been vexed, like Lever, by Thackeray's "Rowena

and Rebecca," wherein, on false news of Wilfrid's death, the English

princess espouses Athelstane.

It was "The Book of Snobs," with its cruel satire of our British

vice, that came home, when republished from "Punch," to men's bosoms.

Thackeray avowed that _de me fabula_, that he was a snob himself: and,

to some readers, it is matter for regret that he dwelt so long and so

intensely on the mean admiration of things mean. He told Motley (1858)

that he could not read "The Book of Snobs".

At last, in "Vanity Fair," which appeared, like Dickens's novels,

in monthly parts (with yellow covers), Thackeray, after so many

vain endeavours, "took this great stupid public by the ears". Here

was another epic, like "Tom Jones," of English life, from the year

preceding Waterloo: though the Marquis of Steyne was too closely

studied from a contemporary wicked Marquis. From the first chapter,

the scene of Becky with the Dictionary, to the end where (quite out

of character, say Becky's admirers) she appears as a melodramatic

Clytæmnestra, the author "never stoops his wing". Never, surely, did

man create, in a single novel, characters so many, so varied, so justly

conceived, so immortal. Fielding has not a quarter of Thackeray's

variousness, does not see so wide a vision of life. Think of them; all

the Crawleys, the two Sir Pitts, Rawdon (_amo_ Rawdon), Jim Crawley;

Miss Crawley, the old patrician Whig and sceptic; the two Osbornes,

the little boys, Osborne III. and little Rawdon; Mrs. O'Dowd; the

spunging-house keeper; Mr. Wenham, Ensign Stubble, Lord Steyne, the

Misses Pinkerton, Briggs, Waterloo Sedley, the Belgian courier,

Glorvina, the Lady Bareacres,--the catalogue is endless. Dobbin is

as good as that honest gentleman can be made: we can only say that

Thackeray's good women are not at once as human and as angelic as

Fielding's Sophia and Amelia. Emmy is not clever; Emmy can be jealous;

a vice from which Mrs. Rawdon Crawley is nobly free. The nearest woman

to Sophia in Thackeray is Theo in "The Virginians". But Sophia is a

paragon.

Thackeray was now, by no fault of his, set up as the rival of Dickens,

whose works he constantly praised, in season and out of season, in

public and in private. But as every man is born an Aristotelian or a

Platonist, a Whig or a Tory, so men are born to take one side or other

about the Great Twin Brethren of English fiction, in place of admiring

and enjoying both. Each has his masterpieces, Dickens with "Pickwick,"

"David Copperfield," and "Great Expectations"; Thackeray with "Vanity

Fair," "Esmond," "The Newcomes," and "Pendennis". That admirable but

lengthy picture of the life of school, of the University, literature,

and Society, and of Mr. Henry Foker, bears traces, in discrepancies and

fatigue, of a severe illness which affected the author's memory of part

of the tale, as a malady swept from Scott's the whole of "The Bride of

Lammermoor".

The noble _tour de force_ of "Esmond" (1852) was, for the most part,

dictated in disturbing conditions, which makes yet greater the marvel

of its style of Queen Anne's date; not uniform, to be sure, not all

antique (any more than Colonel Esmond's political views are all antique

or uniform), but still, a kind of prodigy. Beatrix Esmond is indeed, as

her lover said, a "paragon," and it is historically impossible that,

in the end, she should have betrayed "the blameless king," King James

III., whom Thackeray converted from a melancholy Quietist into a witty

and profligate prince. There was no "Queen Oglethorpe". Scott never

took _this_ kind of liberty with an historical character, in fiction;

and Thackeray rivalled Scott's other licences by making the Duke of

Hamilton an unmarried man. But nobody thinks of these things when

"Esmond" admits him into the society of the Augustan age, and when

Bolingbroke hiccups about Jonathan's readiness to command the fleet.

"The Newcomes" (1855) revived the public taste for Thackeray; the

public did not, it is said, quite understand "Esmond". Like all novels

published in parts throughout two years, "The Newcomes" is too long,

and has its languors, but every one wept over the good Colonel, loathed

the Campaigner, delighted in Fred Bayham, wished "to beat Barnes

Newcome on the nose," was afraid of Lady Kew; sighed with Clive, was

more or less in love with Ethel, and was anxious, vainly anxious, to

see no more of Laura Pendennis: an angel perhaps, but a recording angel.

At Rome, in winter, 1853, Thackeray, to amuse some children, wrote "The

Rose and the Ring," a classic of the nursery, of the schoolroom, and of

the "grown up". He who writes was a child in 1855, and to him Bulbo,

Hedzoff, King Valoroso, and the Countess Gruffanuff, with the usual

contrasted heroines, Angelica and Rosalba, were not dearer then than

they are now. Even then the equation was plain:--

{Angelica Rosalba}

Fair and {Becky Emmy } Dark and

false {Blanche Amory Laura } true and

{Rowena Rebecca} tender.

Thackeray's naughty women are "fair and false," his good women are

"dark, and true, and tender".

The novelist's is a "dreadful trade". He has to raise ever new crops

from soil more or less exhausted. Dickens had his "Dombey," his "Little

Dorrit," his "Mutual Friend"; and Thackeray had his "Virginians," the

grandsons of Colonel Esmond, with their kinswoman, Beatrix Esmond,

fallen into an old age of cards, and rouge and powder. Beatrix, for her

beauty's sake, should have been translated, like the fairest woman of

the ancient world, Helen, to the plain Elysian. We do not want to see

her in old age, or to hear her last wild words, "Mesdames, Je suis la

----" _La Reine_, the Queen.

"The Virginians" is full of excellent things, wonderful studies of

the later eighteenth century; and Harry is a deal, brave, stupid lad,

and George is a sardonic, melancholy descendant of Colonel Esmond, and

ancestor of "Stunner Warrington" in Pendennis; and Will Esmond and

Chaplain Sampson are worthy of Fielding, but the author was tired;

after "Vanity Fair" he was always tired, and the book has barren

expanses and languors. "'The Virginians,'" he said to Motley, "is

devilish stupid, but at the same time most admirable." Thackeray's

health was worn out; as a change of work he founded, but soon wearied

of editing, "The Cornhill Magazine"; was at his lowest level in "Lovel

the Widower"; was so weary in "Philip" that he styled the hero "Clive"

by inadvertence, though he endowed his clumsy Philip with one of his

best women, Charlotte. He ventured into melodrama, which he liked, but

could not write well; yet his "Roundabout Papers" show that he was, as

an essayist, equal to his younger self.

His "Denis Duval" seemed to promise a return of his genius, but

Christmas Day, 1863, was a black Christmas, for the author had died,

suddenly and alone, in the night of Christmas Eve.

He had a great faculty of enjoyment, a generous heart sorely tried,

a melancholy that was not causeless: immense kindness and love of

the young, in short the character, in these respects, of Molière and

of Charles Lamb. Let us confess that he was unjust to Becky Sharp

and Beatrix Esmond. But he had a Shakespearean tenderness for his

rogues, and having conceived the draconic design of hanging Colonel

Altamont, he respited that bold adventurer. From boyhood he had his own

originality of style.

In the cultivated town of Highbury

My father kept a circulating library,

are boyish lines of his, and we recognize him even there, beginning

to be what he is in his "Book of Ballads," so various, so merry, so

melancholy, so fresh as they are. Though the influences of the prose

of Queen Anne and of Fielding helped to form his style, it is entirely

his own; with the blended accents of his own humour and pathos, and

harmonies before unheard; exquisite passages of verbal music.

The Brontë Sisters.

Concerning the Brontë sisters much, mainly personal, has been

written, in proportion to the amount of their works. Their novels,

especially those of Charlotte ("Jane Eyre," "Shirley," "Villette,"

"The Professor"), seem like the extraordinary and almost automatic

products of their parentage and surroundings. The father, the Rev.

Patrick Prunty or Brontë, was an Irish Protestant of County Down, who,

after struggles with circumstances, was educated at St. John's College,

Cambridge, and took holy orders. His Protestantism and politics were

those of an Orangeman: his hero (who could have a better?) was the

Duke of Wellington, and he was addicted to the composition of verse.

His wife, a Cornish woman, was of feeble health, and died after giving

birth to six children, two of whom, Maria and Elizabeth, died in early

youth; the others were Charlotte (1816), Branwell (1817), Emily (1818),

and Anne (1820). On the mother's death the father lived a sequestered

studious life in a bleak parsonage on the Yorkshire moors, and the

children were entirely devoted to drawing, reading books and magazines

meant for their elders, to writing, day-dreaming, and to wandering from

the grim rectory over the open moors. Their health was blighted by the

conditions of the school called Lowood in "Jane Eyre"; their tempers

were hardened and sharpened by poverty and the white slave's life of

the governess, so much dreaded and so well understood by Miss Austen's

Jane Fairfax in "Emma". The unhappy Branwell, in the end, haunted the

rectory, an awful presence of intellect degraded, and while Emily

wrapped herself up in a kind of Christian stoicism, Charlotte was left

to the contrast between the dreams of her fiery genius, and the facts

of her narrow life. In 1842 Charlotte and Emily became inmates of the

school of Monsieur and Madame Heger at Brussels, which later afforded

to Charlotte the scene and two characters in "Villette". In 1846 the

three sisters published "Poems, by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell". Of

this book two copies were sold, of the poems Emily's alone are still

admired for their sombre energy and resolute spirit.

The sisters now wrote novels, Emily, "Wuthering Heights," Charlotte,

"The Professor"; Anne, "Agnes Grey". In August, 1846, Charlotte began

"Jane Eyre," which, when finished, came into the hands of Thackeray's

publishers, Messrs. Smith & Elder, and filled them with amazement and

enthusiasm. The book appeared in autumn, 1847, pleased Lockhart, then

editor of "The Quarterly Review," no less than it pleased Mr. Smith,

and at once became the "daughter of debate," discussed everywhere,

praised and reviled, and, in some unintelligible way, most reviled by

"The Quarterly". The critic detected in the author an unregenerate,

violent rebel against society, and a woman who was a dishonour to her

sex! Certainly--

A wounded human spirit turns

Here on its bed of pain.

The unparalleled vigour and genius of the early scenes, the cruelties

which the lonely child supports with unconquered spirit, were things

new in fiction, while the repressed passion of the plain yet seductive

governess during the wooing of the too Byronic Mr. Rochester, and in a

house as terrible as the castle of Mrs. Radcliffe's "Sicilian Romance,"

excited a lively romantic interest, accompanied by a tendency to smile

at an ignorant imagination. Borrowed romance combined with instinctive

realism, bitter experience blended with the day-dreams of a life, a

frankness long forgotten by early Victorian fiction, made the novel a

strange and triumphantly successful combination. That mentor of young

novelists, George Lewes, recommended to the author the study of Miss

Austen, whose novels Charlotte Brontë was not happy enough (because she

never had been happy) to appreciate. That she had no humour we cannot

say, but she had none of the kindly humour of her great predecessor.

Meanwhile "Wuthering Heights," that strange and strenuous study of

violent characters, was eclipsed by "Jane Eyre," though it has now

come to its own, thanks to the appreciations of Mr. Matthew Arnold and

Mr. Swinburne. The author did not live to find herself famous; Anne

Brontë also died, leaving their sister in deeper solitude. Charlotte's

"Shirley" (1849), with its caricatures of the local curates, caused the

discovery of her authorship: the curates were forgiving, and the novel

was welcomed. Miss Brontë visited London, a shy and tameless lioness,

and met Thackeray, whom she had regarded as a Saul among the prophets,

and discovered to be something rather different. Her shyness permitted

her to rebuke him in good set terms, but blighted his guests. Her

last novel, "Villette" (1852), with romantic situations, is a record

of her personal experiences at Brussels; unfortunate for her hosts,

and a cause of much gossip and personal discussion. The book is not

destitute of the hungry bitterness which Matthew Arnold detected and

disliked; and we ask how in the nature of things it could be otherwise?

Her experience had been narrow, atrocious, and on her experience and

from her experience she always drew when she did not borrow from her

day-dreams. In life she did not find the love of which she dreamed:

in 1854 (she had rejected several other suitors) she married the Rev.

Mr. Nicholls, her father's curate, and died in the following year. Her

life, her character, and her books were one, and were unique. "This

little Jeanne d'Arc," as Thackeray called her, this eager rebel and

ardent Tory, broke into the placidity of the contemporary novel, and

opened a pathway unto many, who had little or none of her genius.

The best estimate of the Brontës, clear of and contemptuous of

trivialities and gossip, is in French, "Les Sœurs Brontë," by the Abbé

Dimnet.

Nathaniel Hawthorne.

The end of all that Greeks and Trojans suffered for Helen's sake

was "that there might be a song in the ears of men of after times".

In the view of the interests of art (and in no other) the end of

Puritanism in New England was to inspire the novels of Nathaniel

Hawthorne (1804-1864). He was more certainly the classical author of

American fiction than either Thackeray or Dickens is in England. They

were prodigal of their genius, giving "as rich men give who care not

for their gifts," or, if you please, as poor men when the printer's

devil is at the door, even as did Sir Walter, who never thought about

"art". But Hawthorne hoarded his inspirations, and when he used them

gave them in the best form which was within his means. The inspiration

was always moral, and usually bizarre. In his published note-books

we see his method; he conceived some strange situations; over some

of these he brooded till the characters disengaged themselves and

lived before his eyes, and worked out their _wyrd_ under stress of

sin and remorse. He thought of the effect of a sudden homicidal act

on a character gay, innocent, and faunlike, and we have Donatello in

"The Marble Faun" (or "Transformation"). He thought of the amour of

a Puritan preacher (like Lockhart in "Adam Blair") and the idea grew

into "The Scarlet Letter". He thought of the beautiful poisonous girl

(an old legend) and we have "Rappacini's Daughter". The Puritan sense

of sin, and the old New England sorrows of the witchcraft trials, and

the shadows of the woods, and the fear of the Indians, among whom

Meikle John Gibb (a Covenanter who went too far even for the Rev. Mr.

Cargill) was a great medicine-man, dwelt in his imagination. He felt

acutely, though not a man of religion, the horrors of the Genevan

creed, which did not make the people who believed in it more unhappy

than their Episcopalian neighbours. They were accustomed to the

doctrines which horrified Hawthorne's contemporaries in America, and,

like the Black Laird of Ormistoun, hanged for Darnley's murder, and

richly deserving to be hanged for his daily misdeeds, they saw their

way out of a doom of eternal fire which Hawthorne supposed them always

to anticipate. Nervousness had not set in, the climate had not produced

its effect on the sturdy Puritans of New England. By Hawthorne's time

the climate had produced its effect, and he brooded blackly over what

his ancestors should have felt--but did not feel. The Black Laird of

Ormistoun had only to convince himself that he was of the Elect, as

he did, and death, to him, meant, as he said, that he should sup that

night in Paradise. Not understanding this buoyancy of temperament,

Hawthorne dwelt on the horrors which he supposed his ancestors to have

fed full of, and, in his stories, expressed his emotions in terms of

imperishable art. Though he had no theological basis he remained a

Puritan. He, to whom beauty was everything, talked of "the squeamish

love of beauty". In Europe he is said (like an excellent Pope who had

tin aprons made for the classic nude figures of Graeco-Roman sculpture)

to have been horrified by the innocent nudities of ancient art. They

had never seen anything so improper at Salem, Massachusetts, a decaying

seaport where he was born, and lived for fourteen years after taking

his degree at Bowdoin in 1825. Here he wrote short tales with little

acceptance; and he did not till 1849-1854, publish his best known

novels, "The Scarlet Letter," "The House of the Seven Gables," and (a

result of a stay at a peaceful and purely amateur socialist settlement,

Brook Farm) "The Blithedale Romance". His "Tanglewood Tales," from

Greek myths (in which Hermes is called "Quicksilver") at first repel,

for obvious reasons, but, in fact and on reflection, have much charm,

and with Kingsley's "The Heroes" ought not to be neglected by parents

and guardians, but rather "placed in the hands" of children. Though

some amateurs may prefer "The House of the Seven Gables," haunted as it

is by the blood which chokes the Justice, and a little enlivened by the

dusty humour of Hepzibah, a decayed gentlewoman, and pervaded by the

pretty charm of Phoebe, "The Scarlet Letter" is probably Hawthorne's

masterpiece. It may be, and has been, denied by specialists that the

hectic and craven Rev. Mr. Dimmesdale could possibly have been the

father of the elf-like child Pearl, but these are "oppositions of

science, falsely so called". Hester's avenging husband may be, in

conception, Dickenslike, but the treatment is far from suggesting

Dickens, while the passion of Hester is a masterpiece of poetical

fiction. Knots may be sought and found in any reed of fictitious

narrative, but "The Scarlet Letter" remains, in its human characters

and its dim lights, in its purposeful limitations, and hints at

something unrevealed, a masterpiece of romance written under classical

conditions. "The Marble Faun" (the plot and mystery were suggested

by the murder, by a French duke, of his wife; Miriam is the British

governess in that unholy affair) has noble moments and passages, and

unconsciously reveals what his Note Books publicly avow, that Hawthorne

was terribly ill at ease in Europe, and among monuments of classic and

mediaeval art. He had some scruple about enjoying them--they were not

at all American, and he was rather bitterly patriotic, one might almost

say parochial, in certain moods. But he had lived for most of his life

in Salem, Massachusetts; he had, for several years, been American

consul at Liverpool; he was a genius of the most exquisite nature, and

no more is needed to explain some acerbities and some misappreciations,

while we can all sympathize with his criticisms of the adiposity of

some British matrons.

Oliver Wendell Holmes.

What has been said about Longfellow may be whispered about Oliver

Wendell Holmes, who was at once poet, essayist, and novelist. Both

authors should be read first while the reader is young, and can enjoy

their books with the freshness of an unsophisticated taste. This is not

true of the very great things in literature, in these with advancing

experience we ever find new merits, while in studying some early

favourites we can scarcely recapture our original delight.

Holmes was born in the same year as Edgar Allan Poe (1809) at

Cambridge in New England, where his father was "Orthodox minister

of the First Church". This appears to mean that he was a Calvinist,

while Harvard, where the son was educated, was devoted to the

Unitarian creed, of which the Articles are, to the writer, unknown.

Holmes accepted them. Medicine was his profession, he held for some

time a Chair of Anatomy; in Boston, where he lived for the greater

part of his life, he practised for some time, but his productions

in verse and prose gradually caused him to occupy himself mainly

with letters. In 1831 he first produced part of his "Autocrat of

the Breakfast Table," monologues with rare interruptions from the

fellow guests of a _pension._ In 1857 he returned to this pleasant

form of discursive essays, the other guests breaking in occasionally

according to their ages and characters. Hitherto Holmes had been best

known for "occasional verses," especially verses written for the Phi

Beta Kappa Society of his University, and for college anniversaries.

The "One Hoss Shay" is, in England, with "The Nautilus," the best

known of these social feats. In his discursive essays he frequently

breaks a lance with his old enemy, Calvinistic theology. This is not

very exhilarating; at least to readers who never learned, or if they

learned never attached any meaning to the Shorter Catechism. Holmes,

who, to be sure, had a minister as his tutor, and Hawthorne, appear

to have understood the doctrines, which were useful to Holmes as a

butt, and to Hawthorne as a background in his novels, gloomy and

alarming,--"The ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir". Naturally Holmes found

the sciences to which he was bred very useful in supplying anecdotes

and illustrations to his essays and romances. In "Elsie Venner," the

heroine, on good Calvinistic principles, is of the seed of the Serpent,

and inherits its nature, owing to some mishap of her mother with a

rattlesnake. Whether this be scientifically conceivable or not, Elsie

is, by inheritance, a perfectly original young woman in an ordinary

environment of New England. We do not expect to meet Melusine so far

from Lusignan. In "The Guardian Angel" the heroine has several complex

personalities, derived from different ancestors, one of them a Red

Indian. These devices are in Hawthorne's manner of fantastic invention,

without Hawthorne's grasp and power, but the heroines are surrounded by

characters more humorous and natural than Hawthorne's people, and the

stories are extremely good reading, as are the discursive essays. There

is abundance of knowledge of the world, of wit, of humour, and of kind

good-humour. There is plenty of strange lore from old books of mystic

medicine, and Holmes confessed to being "a little superstitious". Near

the house of his boyhood there were "Devil's Footsteps" in a field, and

a house from which a portion of the wall had been carried away "from

within outward". The marks were associated with a story of a diabolical

apparition at a Hell Fire Club, just as at Brasenose College, Oxford.

The terrors of his childhood left their mark on his books. There was

the faintest touch of Cotton Mather in this foe of Cotton's creed,

which, out of fashion or not, was the nurse of many virtues inherited

by its tireless opponent. His enduring fame rests on his "Autocrat" and

other essays. "No man in England," said Thackeray in 1858, "can write

with his charming mixture of wit, pathos, and imagination."

Charles Kingsley.

Charles Kingsley (1819-1875) was a novelist "by way of by-work," and

had intellect and energy which might have found for themselves other

fields; born thirty years earlier he might have distinguished himself

under Wellington or Nelson. But in piping times of peace, after living

the life of an athlete, sportsman, and reading man at Magdalene,

Cambridge, he took holy orders, as Colonel Gardiner might have done,

had he been earlier converted. As Rector of Eversley in Hampshire, he

was an energetic parish priest, and had opportunities of angling for

those uneducated trout which he commemorates in his pleasant "Chalk

Stream Studies," for he was a born naturalist and observer of nature.

The agitation among the labouring classes in the times of the Chartists

awakened him to social questions and "Christian Socialism"; but as the

excitement of the populace lulled, his interest slackened. The fruits

of it were the novels of "Yeast" and "Alton Locke" (1848, 1850) which

well deserve to be read, and repay the reader. It is almost incredible

that Cambridge crews, in Kingsley's day, rowed in the May week after

wine-parties and much eating of ices; but the sympathy with "sweated"

artisans and the delineation of rural scenes and sports, are fiery,

forcible, and sincere, whatever the truth may be about Cambridge

training at that distant date. In 1853 he produced "Hypatia," a romance

of the pagan girl-philosopher, torn to pieces by the Christian mob of

Alexandria. The advent of Goths who cut up these beasts is a welcome

relief, but the Jew who attempts humorous philosophy is merely a proof

of Kingsley's lack of humour and an example of his characteristically

strenuous efforts to be humorous. The book is, indeed, a boy's book,

and has something in it, Kingsley's preoccupation with sexual ethics,

which is not so agreeable to reflective seniors. Somewhat of this, with

an aggressive Protestantism, and the sin of "jocking wi' deeficulty,"

mar the otherwise delightful romance of "Westward Ho!" the adventures

of Amyas Leigh on the Spanish Main and in tropical forests in the

great days of Elizabethan adventure. Kingsley hates and execrates the

Spaniards. We have ourselves exterminated some savage peoples, and

nearly exterminated others, and have no right to throw the first stone

at the Spanish conquerors in America, odious beyond words as their

dealings with Aztecs and Incas were; while the Privy Council, under

Cecil, could give points in cruelty to the Spanish Inquisition of the

day. But the boy who reads, or ought to read, "Westward Ho!" has none

of these chilling reflections, nor had Kingsley. Taking the facts as

Kingsley saw them, in the old English way, the novel is a superlatively

excellent romance of English virtue and valour; and there is no doubt

as to the valour and the adventurers had no doubts as to their own

virtues. The whole is the work of a poet--for a poet Kingsley was,--and

of a patriot, sympathizing with Drake's England in the crucial trial

whence she emerged a victor. "Where are the galleons of Spain?"

"Two Years Ago," a novel of the Crimean War, must take its chances with

the historical facts; and, in "Hereward the Wake," the bloodthirsty

hero, despite the glory of his final fight, which rivals that of the

brave Bussy or of Grettir the Strong in the Saga, in places awakes

the smile even of the reflective schoolboy, to whom however, it may

be recommended. "The Water Babies" is not always defective in humour,

and would be excellent as a tale for children were it not for satire

directed at the parents of the period. "The Heroes" initiate the young

into the glories of the romance of Minyans and Minoans, and can only be

spoken of by those who read it in early boyhood with entire gratitude

and the remembrance of delight. Indeed, no one who has read Kingsley

after the age of 16 is a fair critic of an author who, like R. L.

Stevenson, was always at heart a boy; to appreciate him we must put

away grown-up things; while, as to his verse, his songs and ballads, in

"Andromeda" (1858), and even his hexameters, deserve immortality. He

was not fitted for the Chair of History at Cambridge.

Froude thinks that Kingsley's a divine,

And Kingsley goes to Froude for history,

said the poet. His controversy with Cardinal Newman brought him into

contact with a prettier fighter, and he did not come up to time against

the author of the "Apologia". His essays, especially that on the

Puritan aversion to the Caroline drama, are vigorous, and well worth

reading.

The brother of Charles Kingsley, Henry (1830-1876) either wanted

leisure or lacked care and constructive faculty, but in his earlier

works he displayed high spirits, and kind humour, with a good deal of

skill in drawing character, and an engaging reckless manner. His most

careful book, "Geoffrey Hamlyn," though promising, is not so dear

to its readers as "Ravenshoe," a delightful topsy-turvy romance. The

children in Henry Kingsley's books are especially fascinating.

Here we may briefly advert to two writers who with remarkable

originality of character and outlook as novelists appeal to but

small but devoted audiences. Thomas Love Peacock (1785-1866) was an

almost self-made classical scholar, and a friend of Shelley's. His

contributions to Shelley's biography are those of a rather candid

though intensely admiring friend. His novels, from the early "Headlong

Hall" and "Melincourt," and "Nightmare Abbey," to "Gryll Grange," at

the end of his career, are not so much romances as discursive and

satirical studies of, and dialogues about, contemporary society,

opinion, and taste. Some of the characters are drawn, in part, from

real personages, for example, from Shelley himself. The wit which

Shelley called so keen, occasionally yields place to somewhat florid

burlesque. The interest of Peacock is partly that which we feel in his

own character and satiric views of life; partly it is historical.

George Borrow (1803-1881), a Norfolk man, who in childhood had followed

his father's regiment as Sterne had done, can be best estimated by

a study of his "Lavengro," really a sort of autobiography. Here he

paints himself as a genius in the study of many languages, a friend of

gypsies and their fellow-wanderer; an expert in the art of boxing, and

altogether as a character equally vigorous and eccentric, and a sturdy

Low Churchman who hates Papists, snobs, and Sir Walter Scott. Whether

on the moors with the Viper-catcher; or at horse-fairs with jockeys and

thimble-riggers; or as the hack of a niggardly publisher; or fighting

the Flaming Tinman under the eyes of the lovely but unconvincing

Isopel Berners, Borrow is always the strong, wild, tameless heroic

figure. As an agent for the Bible Society in Spain he was in a place

which suited his genius, and his "The Bible in Spain" is at least as

romantic as evangelical. "The Romany Rye" is of the same fantastically

autobiographical form as "Lavengro"; brilliantly capricious and

picturesque. Other books are "The Gypsies in Spain," and "Wild Wales".

Borrow plumed himself much on his wide range of philological learning,

from Welsh to Manchu, but the strict modern science does not regard

him as a very great scholar. There are dull stagnant places in his

books, and there are passages aflame with genius.

Mrs. Oliphant (Mary Margaret Wilson (1828-1897)) was a woman of letters

who heroically undertook incessant labour for the sake of others who

were dependent on her pen. Consequently her gifts were diluted, and

she must always be best known for the novels styled "The Chronicles of

Carlingford," which are remarkable for their placid unstrained humour.

More than once she displayed a very unusual power of dealing with the

supernatural, especially in "A Beleaguered City," and "Old Lady Mary".

In these pieces her manner is unique for tenderness and sympathy.

In her historical biographies, as of Molière and Jeanne d'Arc, she

suffered from want of strict training, and if she found a good thing

of apocryphal source, inserted it on its literary merits. Her work

on the publishing "House of Blackwood" is valuable to the student of

literature and literary lives in the days of Wilson and Lockhart. Few

who have written so much have written so well.

Wilkie Collins (1824-1889), a close associate of Dickens, was an

assiduous professional novelist, who strenuously did his best and

achieved two or three immense popular successes. His main strength lay

in the construction of plots which powerfully excited curiosity, as

in "The Woman in White," "No Name," and "The Moonstone"; the former

was apparently suggested by the mystery of a French law suit, which

dragged on from before the Revolution to the reign of Louis Philippe.

The central puzzle, a question of identity, never was solved. Collins

did his best to create characters, as well as to tell stories, but

his humour was laboured (Captain Wragge is his chief success), and he

shared with Dickens the mannerism of constantly dwelling on the tricks

and hobbies of his people. For a long and warm appreciation of Collins,

Mr. Swinburne's essay may be consulted. The work of his later years and

overtasked fancy, such as "Poor Miss Finch" and "The Haunted Hotel,"

may be neglected; some of his short stories are good.

Popular novelists were Major Whyte-Melville, best in tales of sport and

the affections, but ranging all fields from ancient Assyria to "The

Queen's Maries"; George Lawrence, the author of that joy of boyhood,

"Guy Livingstone," "Sword and Gown," and other tales military and

sporting. He was the intellectual father of "Ouida" (Miss de la Ramée)

with her magnificent guardsmen, and innocent descriptions of racing and

of field sports. She was for long very prolific and very popular, she

lashed the vices of society, and was the constant friend of animals.

Gorgeous is the epithet that may be applied to her style, and humour

did not enter into her genius, which may be called "heroic" in the

manner of the seventeenth century tragedies.

James Payn, on the other hand, had almost too much humour for the

purposes of a novelist, accompanied by the most delightful high

spirits. These would have interfered with the success of his novels,

from "Lost Sir Massingberd" onwards, in which he provided the public

with highly wrought melodramas,--the style of the serious characters

being "heroic" in a high degree,--had the public perceived that he was

laughing in his sleeve. But his domestic sentiment, and his spirited

heroes and heroines, carried the serious reader on, while light-hearted

readers were convulsed with laughter. His best novels proper are

perhaps "By Proxy" and "Halves". He was one of the best and kindest

of men, and most hospitable, as editor of "The Cornhill Magazine,"

to the work of younger authors, such as Mr. Stanley Weyman and R. L.

Stevenson. The "John Inglesant" of Mr. Shorthouse, a dignified and

thoughtful novel of the Great Rebellion, which had a resonant success,

Mr. Payn declined when it came before him in manuscript; he also took

no pleasure in the works of Æschylus.

George Meredith.

George Meredith, novelist and poet, was, in his literary fortunes, a

somewhat mysterious power; a somewhat thwarted force. His early novels,

the comic Oriental tale of "The Shaving of Shagpat," "The Ordeal of

Richard Feverel," "Evan Harrington," "Rhoda Fleming," were full of

humour, wit, pathos, the charm of Love's young dream; were peopled by

delightful heroines, whose heroes were appropriate, brave, and not

too staid. Rose Jocelyn, Lucy, the Countess, the dark Rhoda Fleming,

the beautiful hapless Dahlia, certainly very young readers in those

old days of the early' sixties were in love with them--thought the

aphorisms of "The Pilgrim's Scrip" the acme of witty wisdom; rejoiced

in Mrs. Berry as in the Nurse of Julia, delighted in the hypochondriac

Hippy, and in Adrian, the Wise Young Man; nearly shed tears over Clare

Doria Forey, who let concealment, like the worm i' the bud, feed on her

damask cheek; admired the Glorious Mel; laughed sympathetically over

Algernon, the Young Fool, and his Derby day, and generally were a most

favourable public. But the general public was unfavourable. Meredith's

"Evan Harrington" nearly ruined "Once a Week,"--even aided by Charles

Keene's designs it was a failure; and the editor had to call in Shirley

Brooks, with "The Silver Cord," which no man remembereth, perhaps,

except him who writes. Those early novels were not obscure, even to

the reading boy; the wit was net too subtle and alembicated, or too

profuse; the humour was English--beer and cricket were provided--there

was pathos, comedy, character in abundance, but the novels did not

appeal to that happy reading public which had still Thackeray and

Dickens; and George Eliot for the thoughtful, and Miss Braddon, in the

full flush of her early genius, for all who liked a plain tale well

told, a humorous melodrama (such as "The Doctor's Wife"); or while Mrs.

Henry Wood poured forth romances that deans and princes and everybody

could appreciate. It is said to be a fact that Her Majesty Queen

Victoria took pleasure in Mrs. Wood's novels; and it is quite certain

that another lady, believed by many to be the great granddaughter of

Charles III. (better known as Prince Charlie) shared the royal taste.

Possibly this competition caused Meredith's grace to be hid; possibly,

curious as it may seem, he was best appreciated by readers in extreme

youth. This is probably the truth, for, in much later years, the

writer has seen quite unaffected young girls absorbed in "The Egoist"

or "Diana of the Crossways," while he, after gallant efforts, was

defeated by both in a very early round, tripped up on every page by

the Leg of Sir Wilfrid, the Egoist. Too much seemed to be made of that

limb. But with "The Egoist," which is doubtless a triumph in wit and

knowledge of human nature (as such it was rapturously hailed by R.

L. Stevenson), Meredith's fortunes turned. The enthusiasm of young

critics at last communicated itself to the more cultured public, and

to the public which wished to seem cultured, a lucrative circle. It

was like the success of Mr. Browning, which came so many years after

"Men and Women". People then turned back on Meredith's early novels,

and discovered the manifold virtues which had been overlooked by

contemporaries. They who had been boys in the 'sixties might think that

by the 'eighties an over-excessive straining after wit and epigram,

and a subtlety which was too near neighbour to obscurity, with a

mannerism of style too precious and too easily imitable, had overtaken

the Master. The truth may be that age had dulled the wits of these

critics; that they had lost wit and zest. To them the English prose

of "One of Our Conquerors" seemed darkling and decadent, and in "The

Amazing Marriage" the baby was the most astonishing element. Whether

they were in the right or in the wrong, the admiration of Meredith,

like the admiration of FitzGerald's "Omar Khayyám," had become, not

only a "cult" (it had already, as in Omar's case, been a cult with the

few), but a cult with mysteries open to what Coleridge did not love,

"the reading public". Be it as it may, the Master came to his own, as a

novelist who to wit, fancy, humour, and power of creating characters,

added the still rarer qualities of a true though decidedly difficult

poet.

Anthony Trollope.

"The pace is too good" in the world of novel-writing and of novel

readers to inquire deeply into the characteristics of the genius of

Anthony Trollope, who was born in the year of Waterloo, held a place

in the Post Office, pursued the fox; knew much of many sides of life

in London, and much of a cathedral town, but did not make a great

impression on public taste till, in 1855, he began his series of

tales of Barchester. The Bishop, Dr. Proudie, his termagant wife, his

chaplain, his Archdeacon Grantley, with the loves and marriages of

their children, and the ecclesiastical politics of the age, were the

_farrago libelli._ Trollope had a good deal of humour, his heroines,

Lily Dale and Lucy Robartes and the rest were, in various degrees,

"nice girls," his political characters and Dukes were of their date; he

was extremely fluent; and he stamped his own ideas of his art and of

the true method of composition on his brief life of Thackeray.[1]

People who have read Trollope will probably bear witness that many of

his characters live in memory, and are friendly inmates of her cell.

This can scarcely be said of the characters of Lytton, for example, and

in his power of creating characters Trollope comes before any novelist

of his own rank, and of his now neglected age. It would be easy to

write a long catalogue of Trollope's memorable people, mainly, but by

no means solely, dwellers in Barchester. The Grantleys, the Proudies,

Bertie Stanhope and his sister, "the last of the Neros," the Crawleys

(not of Queen's Crawley) Adolphus Crosby, Johnny Eames, Amelia Roper,

"Planty Pal" (so justly driven back to the path of virtue by Griselda),

Mr. Slope, these are only a few of his creations. With this creative

gift, Trollope, though not refined, or "daring," or emancipated, or

passionate, has a claim to be remembered; and the right readers will

still find in his works abundance of entertainment.

George Eliot.

In 1857 "Blackwood's Magazine," always notable for discovering good

new hands, began to publish "Scenes from Clerical Life," which at once

attracted notice by their humour, tenderness, and quiet accomplished

style. Were they by a man or a woman? Dickens voted that "George

Eliot" was a woman; he was right. She was Miss Mary Ann Evans, born

in Warwickshire in 1819. Familiar from childhood with the rural

characters whom she drew so admirably (perhaps this art was her true

_forte_, in other fields her humour was inconspicuous or absent), she

went to London, associated with advanced philosophers, such as Mr.

Herbert Spencer, changed her theological views and made her home with

George Henry Lewes, author of a "Life of Goethe," and of a surprising

"History of Philosophy". He was a married man, separated from his

wife with no chance of a divorce, and he was the constant mentor of

the new novelist, though his own essays in the art of fiction were

absolute failures. In 1859 George Eliot made a very great success with

"Adam Bede," which, to the merits of her "Scenes from Clerical Life",

added a plot and a story of a not heartless seducer who fights and is

knocked out of time by a hardy carpenter, his rival, the hero. The

little victim, Hetty, is like a more heartless Effie Deans, and her

crime, not committed by poor Effie, caused many sympathetic tears.

The Jeanie Deans of the story is a female preacher, with considerable

strength of character. "The Mill on the Floss," which followed, is

excellent in the humorous parts, and the heroine, Maggie Tulliver, is

delightful as a child, less interesting when she falls in love with a

distasteful admirer. "Silas Marner," a much shorter is perhaps a still

better tale, and marks the central period of the author's genius. In

"Romola" (1863), a story of the Florentine Renaissance, the author was

out of the environment which she knew, and was thought to be too moral

and didactic. In "Middlemarch" her heroes were, to men, distasteful,

and they preferred her pretty to her noble heroine, while Mr. Casaubon,

of the "Key to All Mythologies," was held to be too closely studied

from the life. "Daniel Deronda" was very long, and a kind of scientific

jargon had been taking the place of the old rustic humours. Moreover

people felt that they were being preached at, and Mr. Swinburne,

contrasting Charlotte Brontë with George Eliot, helped to turn the tide

from worship of the living to adoration of the dead woman of genius.

George Eliot (Mrs. Cross after Lewes's death, and her own marriage

to Mr. Cross in 1880) wrote no more than a book of reflections, "The

Opinions of Theophrastus Such". She died in 1880. "Culture," which had

exaggerated her merits, began unjustly to disparage them. To understand

the injustice it is only necessary to read her books written before

"Romola". There has been no better novelist since the death of Dickens.

Robert Louis Stevenson.

To Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) no one who found his works were

sympathetic will deny the title of a man of genius. It is unnecessary

to dwell on the details of his life; the essence of them is to be

gathered from his own essays and from his published correspondence.

From his earliest childhood his health was so unstable that he appeared

to live on his astonishing intellectual and moral energy rather than on

his physical basis. His education was casual and frequently interrupted

by recurrent maladies; from childhood a dreamer of dreams and teller

of tales, he educated himself, by study of great models mainly in old

French and English, in the formation of style and the choice of words.

His contributions to magazines, essays and short stories, revealed

the last successor of the school of Lamb and Hazlitt, a scholar with

a philosophy of life of his own, the philosophy of youth: see the

Essays collected and published in "Virginibus Puerisque" (1881), and

"Familiar Studies of Men and Books" (1882). At the same time such

brief tales of his as "A Lodging for the Night," and "The Sire de

Malétroit's Door," and "Thrawn Janet," in periodicals, proved him to

be a master of romance, and a master with a thorough understanding of

historical characters, surroundings, superstition, and the power of

communicating the ancestral thrill of superstition. His interest in

history was intense and sympathetic, and was even a danger in his path,

as he would willingly have engaged himself in that unpopular study.

But he was, as Johnson told Boswell that _he_ was, "longer a boy than

other people," and in 1878 he wrote for an obscure periodical "The New

Arabian Nights," a fantasy of humour and of perilous adventure, "in a

spirit of mockery" like his own "Young Man with the Cream Tarts". In

1881, in a boy's paper, he wrote "Treasure Island," a story meant for

boys, but delightful to a critic so little apt to notice his juniors

as Mr. Matthew Arnold. "Prince Otto" (1885) is a Court romance of the

eighteenth century, full of brilliant passages, but confessedly written

and rewritten again and again under the influence of George Meredith.

In 1886 "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," a fantasy not

uninfluenced, perhaps, by Edgar Poe, but rich in his own philosophy,

humour, and style, at last captured public attention, caused "a new

shudder," and was rapturously welcomed, as a moral allegory, from the

pulpits "of all denominations". The story, or at least the mechanism

of the story, came, like "Kubla Khan," to the author in a dream.

What is probably his best novel (without a woman in it), "Kidnapped"

was suggested by his studies of Highland history after 1745. It was

planned on a much larger scale, but now, as sometimes occurred,

the pen simply dropped from the author's hand, in one of his many

maladies. Such studies of Highland and Lowland character as he gave

in "Kidnapped" (though the evil uncle is, in his own phrase, "too

steep") are only equalled or excelled in those of Sir Walter Scott,

while the pictures of Highland and Lowland life and society at a period

(just after Culloden) untouched by Scott, are historically accurate.

The same period is again viewed in that bitter study of almost insane

fraternal hatred, "The Master of Ballantrae" (1889), supposed to be

narrated by a loyal servitor who is also a constitutional coward. There

is little relief in this romance except that which comes from one of

Prince Charles's Irish officers, the inimitable Chevalier Bourke. In

1893 appeared "Catriona," the sequel to "Kidnapped," in which (for the

first time except in the exotic "Prince Otto," and in a short story,

"The Pavilion on the Links") Stevenson introduced "the love-interest,"

and drew an admirably chivalrous and amiable heroine, Catriona

herself; with her even more attractive foil, the daring and dominating

Barbara Grant. Alan Breck in this sequel is worthy of himself in

"Kidnapped," and James More Macgregor is a masterly historical portrait.

"The Wrong Box" (1889) is a humorous fantasy somewhat in the manner

of "The New Arabian Nights," with many scenes which provoke laughter

unquenchable. "The Wrecker" (1892) is rich in reminiscences of the

author's youth in Paris and of Fontainebleau, and the plot, up to a

certain point, strongly excites curiosity, but, despite the brilliance

of some oceanic adventures, the story is not well constructed, and

is rather disappointing. "The Ebb Tide" (1894) was spoken of by the

author as "his blooming failure," for his colloquial style was not

classical.[2] "St. Ives" (1897), left unfinished, and completed by

Sir Arthur Quiller Couch, shows signs of fatigue, but the fragment of

"Weir of Hermiston," in which his foot is on his native heath, gave

all promise of a masterpiece in its many delineations of character. In

all his work, in whatever kind, the charm of his style accompanied the

reader like the murmur of a burn that runs by the wayside.

Of his verses, "A Child's Garden of Verses" (1885) is the most like

himself: a few of his serious poems in English have noble effects,

but perhaps the best of his poems in the Lowland vernacular are to be

preferred. His plays, written in collaboration with Mr. W. E. Henley,

were too literary, or for some other reason were unsuccessful on the

stage ("Deacon Brodie," "Beau Austin," "Admiral Guinea").

When we consider the great variety of Stevenson's works, their wide

range, their tenderness, their sympathy, their mastery of terror and

pity, their gloom and their gaiety; when we remember that his sympathy

and knowledge are as conspicuous in his tales of the brown natives of

the Pacific ("The Beach of Falesa") as of Highlanders and Lowlanders,

and the French of the fifteenth century; we can have little doubt

concerning his place in literature.

Minor Novelists.

Among other novelists not hitherto named, the author of Charlotte

Brontë's biography, Mrs. Gaskell (_née_ Stevenson) was born at

Chelsea, but lived and married in Manchester, and in 1848 rendered

the life of a manufacturing population, with their strikes and grimy

lives, then a new theme for fiction, in her story of "Mary Barton"

(1848). Her "Cranford" (1853), in a very different field, pictures the

placid existence of maiden ladies in a quiet village. Her "Sylvia's

Lovers," "North and South," and her delightful (unfinished) "Wives and

Daughters" (1866) (the author died in 1865), all deservedly hold their

place among the classics of our fiction.

With them "a little clan" would place novels unjustly forgotten, "The

School for Fathers," by Talbot Gwynne, and "The Initials," by the

Baroness Tautphœus.

Charles Reade (1814-1884) was a very prominent and emphatic character

of his age, a kind of Lawrence Boythorn, engaged in fiction and the

drama. He was a Fellow of Magdalen, Oxford, a barrister who did not

practise, a philanthropist, some of whose novels had a purpose, a

combatant whose lance was ever in rest, and as kind and generous as

he was pugnacious. For a thoroughly appreciative study of Reade a

characteristic essay by Mr. Swinburne should be read. His "Never too

Late to Mend," a study, very painful, of the torture of prisoners

in jails, and a much more pleasant picture of adventurous life in

Australia (Jacky, the black fellow, is a jewel), was most successful

(1856), and some reckon "The Cloister and the Hearth," a moving

romance of latest mediaeval life in Germany and Italy, a masterpiece

of historical fiction. The tone is perhaps too modern and certainly

too "robustious". "Peg Woffington" (1852) is perhaps really better

as a historical tale. "Griffith Gaunt" and "A Terrible Temptation,"

with "Foul Play" and "The Wandering Heir" (the claimant in the

great Annesley case of 1743) have but few to praise them, and the

last mentioned is too manifestly made up of the materials in the

never-decided law case; itself stranger than fiction, but destitute of

a single sympathetic character.

Space affords room for no more than a grateful mention of Mr. William

Black, whose pictures of Scottish characters, sport, and landscape gave

much pleasure to his contemporaries; and of Sir Walter Besant whose

gift of humour in character and incident was combined, on occasion,

with a singular power of fantasy, while his "Dorothy Forster," a tale

of the Rising of 1715, is probably the best historical romance of that

period after "Rob Roy".

[1] "English Men of Letters Series."

[2] In these three books Mr. Stevenson's stepson, Mr. Lloyd Osbourne,

collaborated.

CHAPTER XXXVII.

HISTORIANS.

After the appearance of the works of Hume and Robertson, History

became, as we have heard Gibbon say, the most popular theme with the

reading public. His own monumental work gave new impetus to historical

study. Sharon Turner (1768-1847) devoted himself mainly to Anglo-Saxon

researches. Sir Francis Palgrave (1788-1861) distinguished himself by

research into the institutions and events of England and of English

history from the Conquest to the days of the Plantagenets. Dr. Lingard,

a Catholic priest (1771-1851), produced a general history of the

country up to 1688, which perhaps has not yet been superseded by any

book of similar scope, and which is the more valuable as indicating

the aspect of events in the eyes of a Catholic. Necessarily the works

of these authors lack much information, contained in manuscripts not

then accessible to them, but now opened to students by the better

arrangement and cataloguing of State Papers. The historians of the end

of the eighteenth and the first thirty or forty years of the nineteenth

century, were not so heavily laden with documents as historical writers

of to-day, and they had leisure enough to assimilate their less

ponderous materials and to arrange them with more of reflection and of

art than is now common.

The historian who wears best is decidedly Henry Hallam (1777-1859). The

son of a Canon of Windsor, he was educated at Eton and Christ Church.

He entered the Middle Temple, but obtained a fairly lucrative post

in the Civil Service, had property of his own, and devoted himself,

in his leisure, to literary and historical study. His "View of the

State of Europe during the Middle Ages" holds its ground, despite the

absence of materials now made common coin by Stubbs, Maitland, and

others. Considering the immensity of the ground which Hallam surveys,

his accuracy is remarkable (for example he corrects, all in vain, an

important if minute error of detail which still infests the latest

works on Jeanne d'Arc), and, though he is compelled to be concise, we

see in his pages, for instance on Charlemagne, that he can combine

spirit and interest with brevity. The same praise must be given to his

"Constitutional History of England" (Henry VII.--George II.). It is

commonly said that an impartial historian cannot be interesting. On

the other hand, Hallam's conscientious efforts to be impartial lend

much interest to his books. He has no flights of impetuous rhetoric; he

is the last man to let his imagination transfigure prosaic facts into

glittering fancies. We see an honourable, learned, and sober-minded

man, who sums up life like a judge and does not plead like an advocate.

"Eulogy and invective may be had for the asking. But for cold rigid

justice, the one weight and the one measure, we know not where else

to look," says Macaulay in his review of Hallam's book, a review

even unusually rich in the unmeasured invective of the more popular

historian. If we think Hallam "dull," the dullness is in ourselves.

Hallam has not the current delusion that the Protestant reformers, from

1550 to 1688, were friends of freedom of conscience.

His last important book "An Introduction to the Literature of Europe"

(fifteenth to seventeenth centuries) is very deficient in taste for

the early works of _les primitifs_: "we cannot place the 'Iliad' on

a level with the Jerusalem of Tasso," in some essential respects. On

the other hand, Hallam speaks thus of Christopher North (Professor

Wilson): "A living writer of the most ardent and enthusiastic genius,

whose eloquence is as the rush of mighty waters," with more to the same

effect. Spenser's stanza "is particularly inconvenient and languid in

narration". Hallam has, in fact, very little space for inspiriting

literary criticism, on account of the vast scope of his theme. He has

to treat of Scioppius, his "Infamia Famiani," and of Ubbo Emmius, of

Grævius and Spanheim, Camerarius and Grew. The encyclopædic nature of

Hallam's task made it impossible for him to avoid aridity, and to

mingle much pleasure with instruction. He is otherwise associated with

poetry, as his son Arthur was the friend of Tennyson, and dying early,

inspired the long elegy of "In Memoriam," and the beautiful lines on

"The Valley of Cauteretz".

Thomas Babington Macaulay.

Thomas Babington Macaulay, born at Rothley Temple in Leicestershire, on

25 October, 1800, is an ideal representative of one mood of the English

mind and character during the first half of the nineteenth century.

Though the Mac in his patronymic be Gaelic, he and his forefathers had

little in them of the typical Celt. The name Macaulay means MacOlaf

(Olafson) and the Norseman rather than the Celt predominated in

Macaulay. His great grandfather, the Rev. Aulay, and his grandfather

the Rev. John, are reported by Bishop Forbes (in "The Lyon in

Mourning") to have been personally and peculiarly active in attempting

to gain the prize of £30,000 offered by the English Government for

Prince Charles. Their enterprise did not suit the Celtic character.

Macaulay's father, Zachary, was a deeply religious man, a member of the

so-called "Clapham Sect" of Evangelicals. Though he was at one time

prosperous in business, so much of his time and energy were given to

negro emancipation that misfortunes came, and Macaulay had to work hard

for his livelihood.

There are no more delightful chapters in Biography than those in which

Sir George Trevelyan describes Macaulay's childhood. His intelligence

was precocious; his memory was a marvel. At the age of 9 he read

once through "The Lay of the Last Minstrel," and was able to repeat

the whole of the poem. This exceeds even Scott's feat of repeating

the whole of a ballad of eighty verses which he had heard read once

by the author. Macaulay's memory lasted throughout his life, and

gave him, naturally, that amazing readiness and richness in literary

and historical allusions which have made his Essays and History

popular beyond rivalry. No doubt like Scott he relied on memory too

confidently; styling Claverhouse, for example, "James Graham". He

read with a rapidity inconceivable; and he read everything, from

Plato, Herodotus, and Æschylus to the worst novels, forgetting nothing

in them that was accidentally good or exquisitely absurd. Even in

childhood he was a copious and accomplished writer, his "Family Epic

on Olaf, King and Saint," presents a remarkably successful imitation

of Scott's style in "The Lady of the Lake". With these intellectual

gifts he combined intense affection, good humour, and a turn for

loud and vehement argument. Going from a private school to Trinity

College, Cambridge, Macaulay regretted that he had not chosen Oxford;

for mathematics were his abomination. He twice gained, as Tennyson

did once, the Chancellor's medal for a prize poem, but in the Tripos

of 1822 "Macaulay of Trinity was gulfed," by "the cross-grained Muses

of the cube and square". They did not prevent him from obtaining a

Fellowship at Trinity. He won a prize essay on William III., which

is written in the very cadences of style that mark his History; and,

at intervals, in the same short sentences. "He knew where to pause.

He outraged no national prejudice. He abolished no ancient form. He

altered no venerable name." Possibly it is a pity that these sentences

do not describe William's conduct in Scottish affairs.

His early pieces, Macaulay contributed to "Knight's Quarterly

Magazine". At the age of 25 he wrote in "The Edinburgh Review," that

essay on poetry in general and on Milton as poet, man, and politician

in particular, which took the world as suddenly and as completely as

Byron's "Childe Harold" had done. "The family breakfast-table was

covered with cards of invitation to dinner from every quarter of

London." To readers who in our day read the essay this enthusiasm seems

creditable to the world, but rather surprising. Of Æschylus, Macaulay

wrote: "considered as plays, his works are absurd; considered as

choruses, they are above all praise". Milton's admiration of Euripides

reminds him of "Titania kissing the long ears of Bottom".

Grateful as every reader is to Macaulay for the vivid and lucid

expression of his knowledge and thought in his essays, we must admit

that, like Charles Lamb, he was a man of "imperfect sympathies".

Miss Edgeworth, delighted to find her own name in a footnote to his

"History of England," expressed to him her regret that Scott, who had

written with entire impartiality about Macaulay's period, was not

once mentioned. In truth, after reading Lockhart's "Life of Scott,"

with its magnificent and melancholy close in the "Journal" of a man

working himself to death for honour's sake, Macaulay wrote thus of

Sir Walter: "In politics a bitter and unscrupulous partisan; profuse

and ostentatious in expense; agitated by the hopes and fears of a

gambler,... sacrificing the perfection of his compositions to his

eagerness for money... in order to satisfy wants which were produced

by his extravagant waste or rapacious speculations; this is the way in

which he appears to me". Scott was a Tory: and from Macaulay's remarks

we understand the justice of his studies of historical characters.

The rapacious speculator, in fact, had shown "extravagant waste" in

publishing books (not his own) of disinterested research; when he was

ruined he gave away his work, because he had not money to give; the

"bitter and unscrupulous partisan" as a historian of his country was

more than scrupulously fair. Of Brougham's essays Macaulay wrote: "All

the characters are either too black or too fair. The passions of the

writer do not suffer him even to maintain the decent appearance of

impartiality." These are the very charges brought against Macaulay's

own "characters" of William Penn the Quaker, and Claverhouse the

Cavalier; while no historian, perhaps, can defend his account of Sir

Elijah Impey. Had a Stuart King behaved as William III. did in the

matter of the Darien enterprise, we can easily imagine the style in

which Macaulay would have "dusted the varlet's jacket". But with lapse

of time his bias, his prejudices, can be discounted. As early as 1828

he wrote "a perfect historian must possess an imagination sufficiently

powerful to make his narrative affecting and picturesque". That power

of imagination he possessed and exercised so delightfully that his

History was at once purchased more eagerly than a poem or romance. Both

as a collector of materials and as a traveller to the scenes of which

he was to write, Macaulay toiled with his own unexampled energy and

rapidity. It is well worth while to read his account of his own methods

both in study and in composition.[1]

It is not the good fortune of most historians to possess even

Macaulay's private means, the savings of five years passed in India as

legal member of the Indian Council. Nor can his practical knowledge

of politics and of the world be often found among students, while his

natural gifts of imagination and of expression are almost unexampled.

His intellect had the limits of his class, his age, and his robust and

hasty temperament.

His poems, "The Lays of Ancient Rome," have been as popular as his

prose. He tried at 40 to write such ballads as he conceived the

folk-songs of republican Rome to have been, and nobody can deny that

the "Lays" have abundance of spirit and "go". The ballad of the Armada,

and of "The Last Buccaneer" possess the same virtues and will always

be dear to young people of spirit. Arrived at the age of 50, Macaulay

wrote, in the very words of the dying Hazlitt, "Well, I have had a

happy life!" It was extended to 1859, he died on 28 December, leaving a

name justly honourable and a cherished memory.

Thomas Carlyle.

Carlyle (1795-1881), with Burns, Knox, and Scott, is the chief

representative in letters of "the good and the not so good" (in his

own words applied to Sir Walter) of the Scottish character. Unlike the

other three, Carlyle was "thrawn," a word not easily translated, but

implying a certain twist, or perversion, towards the whole nature of

things. The apostle of silence was the most voluble of mortals; the

peasant stoic felt the pain of the pea beneath a heap of mattresses as

keenly as the delicate princess of the fairy tale.

Carlyle was first of all a Scottish humorist; that peculiar humour of

which Southrons deny the existence underlay the fateful gloom of the

philosopher and historian who beheld his country "shooting Niagara,"

who saw that society was rotten and doomed, and who found no remedy

except in the arrival of a Cromwell or a Frederick. He "praised the

keen unscrupulous force" of such heroes: though he did not use the

term "superman," he believed in the idea. It is quite certain that he

had great tenderness and friendliness; his affection for Lockhart,

so unlike him superficially (though Lockhart, too, was tender,

melancholy, and "thrawn") is really touching. Carlyle had "our Scottish

kindness," in Knox's phrase, that is attachment to kin and clan. Even

in his dourest moods of personal invective his bark was worse than his

bite, but there was a great deal of bark. The conclusion of the whole

matter in the long dispute as to the relations of Carlyle and Mrs.

Carlyle is that, with a deep mutual affection, theirs was a life of cat

and dog.

Born in 1795 at Ecclefechan in Dumfriesshire, Carlyle was the son

of a stone mason, though his genealogy traces him back behind the

Conquest to the Carlyle Lords of Torthorwald. Educated at the Grammar

School of Annan, and the University of Edinburgh, Carlyle was for some

years a dominie, much at odds with himself and the universe. He found

guidance in Goethe and other Germans; wrote in "Fraser's Magazine,"

and elsewhere, essays often historical; in London met Coleridge and

Lamb, who was in one of his wildest moods; wrote a "Life of Schiller"

in the style of a man of this world; married in 1826, and for six years

was brooding, grumbling, studying, writing, and "making himself," in

the bitter solitude of his wife's little lairdship, Craigenputtock.

Here he produced, in his own characteristic manner, "Sartor Resartus,"

a disguised autobiography, a humorous and mournful version of his

own struggles to find bottom in a universe apparently bottomless.

That most things are shams, and that shams are doomed, was Carlyle's

message. The fate of shams was illustrated in the fiery pages of his

"French Revolution," written after he went to his life-long home in

Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, where it could not be said that, as in Kilmeny's

fairy-land, "the cock never crew". When, despite cocks and other

disturbances, Carlyle, with heroic efforts of study, had finished the

first volume, John Stuart Mill lent it to a lady, and it was never seen

again. Her cook may have been a Betty Barnes. Carlyle returned to his

task, and in 1837 the book astonished the world. It had all the colour

of romance, and despite the discoveries of recent research, it seems

substantially accurate in detail.

"Heroes and Hero-Worship," and the "Past (mediaeval) and Present,"

preluded to his very laborious "Letters and Speeches of Oliver

Cromwell" (1845). With many a groan over the confusion of his

materials, and with many a shout of applause to the orator of the

speeches, Carlyle set Oliver in the light of day, interpreting the

studied ambiguities of such speeches of the hero as he makes to the

puzzled Wildrake in "Woodstock". Sir Walter's Cromwell is probably as

correct a portrait of the Protector as Carlyle's, and Carlyle's must

be compared with the less enthusiastic study by Mr. S. R. Gardiner.

Carlyle took conscientious pains with the military part of his history,

visiting the battlefields, and becoming epic in the fiery spirit of his

description of the defeat of his countrymen at Dunbar. A chart-picture

of the battle evaded his research, and his account is not absolutely

correct. After another prophetic cry of doom in "Latter Day Pamphlets"

(1850) Carlyle plunged for many years into the labour of studying

"Frederick the Great". The toil outwore his force, and it may be

complained that he did not focus his subject. Yet none of his books

is of greater interest, and he is the prophet of the modern greatness

of Germany. We see how _fortis Etruria crevit_; through discipline,

patriotism, self-sacrifice, "enduring hardness," and obedient to

her greatest men. No other than Carlyle could have told the story

with so much alluring animation; his military history, too, is most

conscientiously studied. His native gift of observing and divining, and

describing (in his own words on a singularly private scene, witnessed

by him) "with perhaps some humorous exaggeration," found ample scope in

his work on Frederick, as well as in his "French Revolution". No doubt

he overdid the trick of reiterating traits in Dickens's manner;--for a

truly candid censure of his style an essay by his obliged friend, Leigh

Hunt, may be consulted (see remarks on Leigh Hunt).

Occasionally, as in his essays on "Cagliostro" and "The Diamond

Necklace," Carlyle's freedom of style, and his attacks on his

authorities, are somewhat infuriating; the reader wants to be told a

plain tale without these excursions, exclamations, and imaginations.

Carlyle regarded imagination as one of the wings of history, and

perhaps encouraged the too freely imaginative narrations of his friend

Froude.

To him, unhappily, he bequeathed the autobiographical papers of himself

and his wife, which Froude handled, to the best of his power, as he

understood that Carlyle had desired that they should be treated. There

followed outcries from the more ferocious admirers of Carlyle, though

Froude had done his best to obey his master! That he could not be

absolutely accurate is certain; but disloyal he never was. There is no

doubt that Carlyle, irritable, absorbed in his work, and taking his

wife's exemplary care of him for granted, was "gey ill to live wi',"

while "she had a tongue with a tang". These facts have produced a

jungle of deplorable writings; but of Carlyle's genuine goodness and

kindness no one who saw him could reasonably doubt.

The style of Carlyle was unique, unimaginable except by himself, the

worst of models for others, and exquisitely fitted to embody his own

idiosyncrasies--in short, it is, in prose, not wholly unlike that of

Browning in many of his poems. To address the world in this voice,

when he was almost unknown, demanded a courage and confidence in which

Carlyle was not deficient. One is occasionally reminded of the methods,

illegitimate but effective, of the author of "Tristram Shandy," and,

again, of Rabelais.

James Anthony Froude.

In one way, as a historian, Froude (1818-1894) may be called the pupil,

as he was the devoted friend, of Carlyle. That sage worshipped force

in men, and Froude, failing a Cromwell or a Frederick, made a hero of

Henry VIII., "that blot of blood and grease on the pages of English

history," as Dickens called the king who found "the gospel light in

Boleyn's eyes". It is not from Carlyle that a young historian can learn

the unpopular grace of impartiality. To read Froude you would suppose

that the Protestant party in the sixteenth century were innocent of

the blood shed by political assassins; whereas the godly slayers of

Beaton, Riccio, and the Duc de Guise, like Elizabeth when she bade

Paulet murder Mary Stuart, were precisely on a level with the would-be

murderers of Elizabeth; and Henry VIII. was burning martyrs of all

shades in England, while the Beatons were doing the same thing to

heretics in Scotland. Henry was perhaps even more treacherous than

he was lustful and cruel, but it is in the original sources, not in

Froude's History, that you discover the fact.

However, impartial history is notoriously dull, whereas that of Froude

is so entertaining that to take up a volume is to go on reading,

fascinated by his charm, and delighted by a style remote as the poles

from Carlyle's. It is as simple as Swift's, admirably lucid, excelling

in the gift of narrative, without imitable peculiarities, and as

entirely spontaneous as if the author were writing an ordinary letter.

Froude, with his brother Richard, was at Oxford when Newman was the

great influence among the junior Fellows (Exeter was Froude's College),

and Froude went so far with the Movement as to work at the Lives of

some early English Saints. But the innocent legends of their miracles

were too much for his belief, despite the excellent evidence for some

of those of St. Thomas of Canterbury. His scepticism extended, and his

short anti-religious novel, "The Nemesis of Faith" (1849), is said to

have been thrown into the fire by a don of his own college.

He turned to History--that of England from the reign of Henry VIII. to

the defeat of the Armada, and he resolutely attacked the great masses

of Spanish contemporary manuscripts at Simancas. It was a knightly

deed, when we think of the handwriting of the period, and the sometimes

inextricably bad grammar of the writers. Different modern historians,

in one case, give diverse translations of one crucial passage, and it

seems that all of them are wrong. But Froude committed many errors

which were not perceived by his furious assailant, Freeman (who did not

know where to have him), but are conspicuous when we compare his work

with his authorities. He is quite untrustworthy; he has taken fragments

from three letters of three different dates, and printed them, with

marks of quotation, as if they occurred in a single letter. He accuses

Mary Stuart of a certain action, on the authority of the English

ambassador, and when we read his letter we find him saying that rumour

charges Mary with the fact, but that he does not believe it.

Froude describes a dramatic scene in which Elizabeth triumphs over the

Scottish envoys sent to plead for Mary's life; and when we examine the

authorities, to which an erroneous reference is given, we find in them

no such matter, no such scene. The impression given is that Froude

read his authorities, let what he read simmer in his mind, let his

fancy play freely over it, and then wrote in picturesque and alluring

fashion, on the dictates of romance, without ever comparing what he

wrote with what his authorities recorded. They are uninteresting,

Froude is extremely interesting: as a maker of literature he is in the

first rank; as a chronicler of the truth he is not always trustworthy.

He did not know his subject "all round"; of Scotland he knew little,

and was wedded to the belief that James I. was the first of the Stuart

line. He gravely repeats and embellishes Knox's mythical account of the

disaster of Solway Moss, but probably the English despatches of the day

were not accessible to him. How much of the interest of his book would

survive if it were reduced to the sober verities one cannot estimate,

but his wonderful power of giving a kind of bird's-eye views of most

complicated European situations in politics must remain unmatched.

Froude, against his bias, made it seem almost certain that Elizabeth

had guilty foreknowledge of the death of Amy Robsart. He leaned on a

letter of the Spanish ambassador, and reading the Spanish for "last

month" as "the present month," he left an erroneous impression. At the

moment (1856-1869) there seems to have been no English reviewer who had

the necessary knowledge; for Freeman merely picked holes in the fringes

of Froude's work. Froude wrote "The English in Ireland," wrote books of

political observations made in our colonies, and, succeeding Freeman

as Professor of Modern History at Oxford, lectured on Erasmus and

published his lectures, which were flown upon by the critics. He also

wrote a good "Life of Bunyan," and a longer biography of Cæsar. His

"Short Studies" are as interesting as his History, which is not likely

to be superseded. As a literary view of a great period of history, it

has no rival. It is as rich in original research as in portraits of

characters. All that it lacks is a final comparison of the results with

the authorities.

Edward Augustus Freeman.

Freeman (1823-1892) will always be best known by his long "History

of the Norman Conquest," a work which embraces most of our island

story before the great event of 1066. The author, a Fellow of

Trinity, Oxford, was also a squire in Somerset, and could afford to

devote his time to a gentlemanly but usually unremunerative form

of literature. His work is protracted, minute, and influenced by a

passion for the ideal English in the national character. Prodigiously

industrious in his study of the original sources in print; he had a

kind of dislike of research in manuscripts. He was well versed in

architecture, topography, and local history; he was as much at home

in Sicily as in England, with Graeco-Roman as with Norman remains; he

was combative, and, in an earlier age, would probably have invited

Mr. Robertson to settle the question of the English overlordship

of Scotland in the lists. His great work is more profitable to the

serious student than interesting to the general reader. He wrote much

in "The Saturday Review" without adding to the popularity of that

periodical. He was constantly correcting the errors of others, and

died during a controversy with Mr. Horace Round on the existence or

non-existence of a palisade at the Battle of Hastings (or Senlac).

His friend and pupil, J. R. Green (1837-1883), is celebrated for his

"Short History of the English People" (1874), a work written in a style

rather acrocorinthian, and in its first edition rich in errors, later

corrected. The book is written with so much spirit and sympathy that

it may tempt many a reader to go more deeply into books less popular.

Green had the power of exciting interest in topics generally deemed

arid, and, with Freeman, contributed to the success of the History

School at Oxford, though even more was due to the work of Bishop Stubbs

on charters and constitutional history, and to the tutorial lectures

and influence of the late Bishop of London, Mandell Creighton, author

of a history of the Popes.

William Hickling Prescott.

William Hickling Prescott (1796-1859), the celebrated historian of the

two greatest adventures of the modern world, was born, like Hawthorne,

at Salem, and was educated at Harvard. Here some student threw a piece

of bread at him in hall, his eye was struck, and his sight was so much

injured that he could only write by aid of a kind of framework with

cross lines; while his reading, whether from books or manuscripts, was

almost wholly done by proxy. The works were read aloud, he listened;

probably had notes made of the passages which he meant to use in his

histories, composed his periods and then dictated them to a copyist.

His "Ferdinand and Isabella," the history of Spain in her glory, is of

1837. Six years later he published "The Conquest of Mexico" (1843),

"The Conquest of Peru" in 1847, and, up till his death in 1859, he was

at work on the first decadence of Spain, under Philip II.

In glancing over the list of historical writers in English, from Gibbon

downwards, we remark that almost all were men who could afford to deal

with a theme so generally unpopular as the past. Hume and Robertson

and Gibbon were all, when they worked at history, men in possession

of a competence, or more than a competence. So was Hallam, so was

Sir Walter Scott; Grote, Prescott, Freeman, Macaulay, were at least

equally fortunate, while Carlyle, by dint of the strictest economy,

was at least able to wait for years before reaping the emoluments of

his labours. The man of letters who must live by his pen must live

by hackwork of various kinds, and cannot afford the time to collect

and digest his information, to select the little ore from the quarry

of documents, and then present in an artistic form the result of

his researches. Professors of history who must employ their days by

lecturing to and correcting the essays of pupils, "live from the altar"

of history, but are almost never great and are never popular historians.

The chief American and English historical writers of 1840-1890 were

fortunate in another way; of which Prescott took full advantage. They

might dare to be interesting, to describe striking events with what

eloquence they had at command, and venture to dwell on the characters

and fortunes of historical persons, famous or obscure. Science, through

the lips of a hundred professors, did not then insist that historical

writers must be dry, impersonal, impartial weighers of anise and

cummin, students of economics. Scores of unread specialists were not

lying in wait to pounce upon every slip, and blot out every touch of

colour. Indeed, Mr. Froude could, and did, go as he pleased, and his

most unfriendly critics did not know the period of which he wrote.

Nobody, like Mr. Gardiner later, gave a whole year of study to the

documents of a single year. Now accuracy is a precious thing, but

historians who live in constant fear of making a slip have not hitherto

produced books which stand high as literature, books which are read

"for human pleasure". Again, in the last golden age of history which

was literature, "the reading public," always a minute minority, was not

wholly absorbed in new novels. Thus the historians of that time had

many advantages, and they were men who deserved their opportunities.

Once more, when Prescott set to work, the States of Europe at last

began to permit men of letters to make free use of their collections

of old public documents, letters, despatches, books of accounts, while

the Royal Academy of History at Madrid gave the greatest facilities

to the assistants of Prescott,--a favour denied, in the eighteenth

century, to Dr. Robertson. The President of the Academy placed his

own fine collection of documents at the disposal of the American

historian, as did Sir Thomas Phillipps in England, and the archives

of Mexico were opened to him, while he read, of course, through the

remarkable book composed, after the Conquest, from the evidence of the

learned Aztecs, by Sahagun; and the delightful chronicle of one of the

conquerors, Bernal Diaz. New materials may since have come to light,

but Prescott, rejoicing in the rich mine of true romance; writing with

zest and spirit and wide erudition, produced his two books on the two

great adventures of Cortes and Pizarro in such a form that his works

cannot be superseded. It is said by an American critic that "the

Imperial palaces which he saw in an imagination kindled by that of the

Spanish conquerors have dwindled to large communal houses inhabited by

barbarians," and that "he lived too early to make use of the results of

archæological research". But any one who looks at the scanty relics of

ancient Anahuac in the British Museum knows what kind of "barbarians"

produced such objects of art. Moreover, the Spaniards came from a land

of palaces, the land of the Alhambra, and of glorious cathedrals! it is

not possible to believe that they were deceived, and described Aztec

buildings as palaces, while they were merely "long houses" like those

of the Iroquois. This appears to the writer to be a vain imagination,

and the works of Prescott, though romantic, are not romances.

John Lothrop Motley.

The chief historical writers of the United States occur in a group,

between the years of Macaulay and Froude. One of the most popular,

and deservedly popular, is John Lothrop Motley (1814-1877). He chose

neither American nor English history for his theme, but, in selecting

the Dutch Republic, found a topic exciting to republicans in one

country and to Protestants and friends of Freedom's cause in both.

Motley, who was born near Boston, had a father of substantial wealth

who liked literature. He went to Harvard, and then studied at Berlin

and Göttingen, where he became the friend of the great Bismarck.

Like Macaulay, Hallam, and others, he spent his leisure in the most

intellectual society, whether abroad or in America, and in constant

touch with men of literary genius, Lowell, Holmes, Longfellow,

Thackeray; and also with diplomatists occupied with national affairs.

He was not a student and recluse, who can scarcely ever be a historian,

in the literary sense, however serviceable he may be as an archivist, a

collector and critic of the materials of history.

Motley, returning to America, tried to write novels, without success;

then chose his subject, for years toiled at the massive printed books

of the Dutch, and for some four years worked at manuscript documents in

Holland, Belgium, and elsewhere.

Between 1851 and 1856 he accomplished his task, "The Rise of the Dutch

Republic". The firm of Murray declined to embark in it, and might rue

their caution, for, once published, the book was received with acclaim,

both by critics, including Mr. Froude, and by the purchasing public,

who found it "as interesting as a novel". "The Saturday Review," then

in the academic and educated arrogance of its youth, was unfriendly;

perhaps partly because the author was an American, partly because of

his Protestant enthusiasm. Prescott, who was working at the same

period, and generously welcomed the enterprise of the younger man, told

Motley that he had "whittled away" Philip II., and that he saw the

events "through Dutch spectacles". But these were popular spectacles;

and few persons know the Spanish and Catholic side of the shield. Dutch

critics, while they praised, made their reserves; and an old feud

reawoke when, later, Motley wrote on the Arminian, not the Calvinist

side of the great party quarrel in Holland, and on the career of John

Barneveld.

As a diplomatist (in 1869 American Minister in England) Motley knew

the nature of the inmost political councils; he knew European society;

he had, in much the same measure as Froude, the art of making the

dry bones of the past clothe themselves in flesh and blood, in steel

armour, or in satins and velvets. He had access to many despatches,

often in cipher, always in the hardest of all handwritings (that of the

sixteenth century before the "Roman hand" was adopted), and he laboured

at these with iron endurance, turning his results "to favour and to

prettiness" by the graces of his pictorial style.

His continuation of his work, "The History of the United Netherlands"

(published by Mr. Murray) was completed in 1865; his "Life of John of

Barneveld" in 1874. He died in England (1877) and there is buried.

His work has not been, and for English readers is never likely to be,

superseded, though it would gain by addition of notes from eminent

Dutch critical historians. He was of a beautiful presence, and,

according to Lady Byron, had a "most wonderful" likeness to the poet.

His letters are full of amusing gossip about the world of Thackeray and

Macaulay.

Other Historians.

Sir William Napier (1785-1860) who fought with distinction under

Wellington in the Peninsula, combined with his great personal knowledge

of the war conscientious research in documents, and a style of the most

brilliant eloquence. Impartial he was not, and he had the fiery temper

of the Napiers; but modern research, as in Mr. Oman's great work, now

corrects him, and now complements his information.

The great work of George Grote (1794-1871), a Radical in politics, a

banker by profession, is "The History of Greece". It is too well known

to need description. Though Grote's aim was to set Athenian democracy

in what he held to be its true light, he laboured not less assiduously

among the mythic legends and the heroic poetry of Hellas; he was most

erudite in every fragment of Greek records, and his work, though

destitute of much new light recently discovered by excavations of Greek

sites and from inscriptions, yet holds its place, unsurpassed, as a

general history of Hellas.

Henry Hart Milman (1791-1868) was educated at Eton and Brasenose

College, Oxford, and began his literary career as a writer of verse.

The poet-priest Milman

So ready to kill man,

is thus mentioned by Byron, who thought that Milman had attacked

him, or Shelley, or both, in "The Quarterly Review". He later wrote

"The History of the Jews," now out of date, and his chief and very

meritorious work "The History of Latin Christianity" (1855).

Space, and the nature of his subjects, logical, philosophical,

political, and social, forbid more than a mention of a man so prominent

and influential as John Stuart Mill (1806-1873). Mill was privately

educated and forced into precocity by his father, James Mill, a Liberal

_doctrinaire._ In 1843 he gave to the world his "System of Logic," in

1848 his "Political Economy"; the former, at least, was for many years

read almost as much as the "Ethics" of Aristotle by competitors for

honours at Oxford. His "Liberty" (1859) was an extremely advanced book

in its day; as was his "Subjection of Women". Mill sowed large handfuls

of the seed of the dragon's teeth. He was an earnest, precise, and

lucid writer; but not successful in Parliament.

Newman.

The bearers of some of the greatest literary names of the nineteenth

century produced books which had vast influence on the development of

thought, and yet left little work that, as mere literature, is of the

highest merit. They were concerned with the religious, theological,

social, and political ideas of their own time, which, like all the

ideas personal, as it were, to one or two generations, could not

remain fixed, but glided into protean forms of change. Thus John Henry

Newman (born in London, 1801, educated at Trinity College, Oxford;

Fellow of Oriel, 1822) passed through various phases of religious

and ecclesiastical belief; was a leader with Pusey, Keble, and many

others in the Oxford Anglican Movement; found that his reason led

him into the Roman fold (he was made a Cardinal finally) and wrote

voluminously, and in a style confessedly of the highest merit. Yet no

doubt his most widely and permanently interesting work took the form

of a defensive autobiography ("Apologia pro Vita Sua," 1864), which

is more read for its vivid study of his own mental vicissitudes, and

personal experiences, than for its theological science. It answers, in

his generation, to the "Confessions" of St. Augustine.

Newman describes himself as not only religious but superstitious in

boyhood; he read Law's "Serious Call," and crossed himself when he went

into the dark. His search for truth was earnest, his nature was almost

sceptical but hospitable towards the marvellous, and his own party, to

whatsoever party he belonged at any period, never knew where or how

far his theory of the Development of Doctrine would carry him. As a

tutor of Oriel, and Vicar of St. Mary's, he exercised, as much by his

personality and sanctity of life as by his intellect, an unprecedented

influence over the minds of the young. In 1843-4 he began to publish

"Lives of the English Saints" from the earliest period: many of these

were done by Newman's disciples. The narratives abound in miracles of

all sorts which proved too much for the faith of J. A. Froude. Newman's

doctrine developed in a way which puzzled himself and others. His

heart and his tastes drew him towards Catholicism; his earlier ideas

caused him to preach against the old faith; at last his reason sided

with his "secret longing love of Rome," his "Tract 90" in "Tracts for

the Times," alarmed the academic authorities. "I hardly knew where

I stood... when I wanted to be in peace and silence I had to speak

out, and I incurred the charge of weakness from some men, and of

mysteriousness, shuffling, and underhand dealing from the majority". He

retired from the University pulpit, and after a period of retreat and

reflection, crossed the Rubicon. There was a long and bitter period of

trials, of broken friendships, of charges of duplicity and so forth.

In reviewing Froude's "History," Charles Kingsley spoke as if more

than doubtful of Newman's respect for truth as such; a correspondence

followed; Kingsley wrote an offensive pamphlet: "What then does Dr.

Newman Mean?" Newman, by this time a man of 63, answered the question

in his "Apologia"; first making a terrible display of acute personal

irony, and then giving a narrative of the development of his opinions.

In later editions he omitted the polemical pages, and when Kingsley

died said a Mass for his soul. The book was received with almost

universal applause--yet it had not been easy for Kingsley to understand

what Newman meant. His "Grammar of Assent" was so many times rewritten

as to leave the impression that he himself did not easily ascertain his

own meaning. It is curious to find him quoting a writer in "The Penny

Cyclopædia" as an authority on the religion of the Australian tribes;

the writer was not correctly informed.

Newman's works range from twelve volumes of sermons, through treatises

and essays, historical and critical, and polemical works, to novels

of which "Callista," a tale of the early Christians in Africa, is the

best, and to poetry. In this, "The Dream of Gerontius" displays intense

imaginative power; and "Lead, Kindly Light" is the most admired of his

religious lyrics. Perhaps this great and good man is most intelligible

in his "Life," by Mr. Wilfrid Ward (1912).

In his love of truth, and in his courage and natural independence of

mind, Newman was what we call "thoroughly English". "I am as little

able to think by any mind but my own as to breathe by another's

lungs," he wrote. As much might be said for two authors who differed

from him so widely as Charles Darwin (1809-1882) and Thomas Huxley

(1825-1895). The nature of their studies was, as a rule, remote from

the literary, and must find record and criticism in the History of

Science. The greatness of Darwin's character and intellect is among

the chief intellectual glories of his country. Huxley, apart from his

own special researches, was the Thangbrand of Evolution, the popular

fighting man, of a brisk humorous pugnacity; his mental lungs expanding

in an atmosphere which would have asphyxiated Newman. He had very wide

general reading; of his more literary works his "Life of David Hume"

in the series of "English Men of Letters" is an admirable example.

He is not to be accepted as an impeccable authority on the religions

of the more backward races. The same caution must be extended to the

anthropological works of Herbert Spencer, a single-hearted seeker after

truth, with a very peculiar scientific style of his own. Of all men who

wrote much, and earnestly, and persuasively, Spencer was the least of

a reader; to much good literature he was even antipathetic. His tastes

may be studied in his autobiography.

W. E. H. Lecky.

Among historians of the later Victorian age, W. E. H. Lecky (1838-1903)

held a position which was all his own. He was not an explorer among

difficult and ancient archives like Froude; he had not Froude's

imaginative and pictorial genius, and power of bringing dead times

and personages vividly before the inner eye. He had neither the wide

general historical knowledge of Freeman, nor Green's combination of

effective rhetoric with very considerable learning. The minute and

laborious accuracy of Gardiner, focused on a space comparatively

limited, was not his; it was said of him at the moment when, still

very young, he produced his "History of the Rise and Influence of the

Spirit of Rationalism in Europe" (1865) that he seemed infinitely more

familiar with Latin and French than with Greek and German, and so

he continued to be. But he gave, to the general reader, the results

of wide reading; he was as lucid as he was fluent; his style was

unborrowed, but descended from that of the eighteenth century; and so

candid was he, that he spoke of the honesty of "The Old Pretender"

(James VIII and III) as "heroic". Few historians have been so

precocious; few more popular. Born in 1838, of a landed Irish family of

Scottish descent, he was educated at Cheltenham College, and Trinity

College, Dublin. In his twenty-third year he was already a published

historical writer ("Leaders of Public Opinion in Ireland"). He

travelled in Spain, Italy, and France, and in 1865 published his work

on the "History of Rationalism," which was warmly welcomed, and remains

a justly popular book. But, in accordance with the nature of historical

science, it is such a history of Rationalism, beginning with a study of

the belief in witchcraft and the attendant cruelties, as a young man

of talent, taking up the subject to-day, could no longer write. Much

is adopted from Michelet, Maury, and Guerinet; the psychology of the

topic was, in 1865, unknown: and to-day only a very daring youth could

aver that the Rev. Mr. Kirk published "A Secret Commonwealth" in 1691

or at any other date. But the work is full of interest for the general

reader: the author won a deserved success, and was 31 years of age when

he followed it up with his "History of European Morals," a topic that

might have taxed the erudition of the maturity of Gibbon. It involved a

philosophical dissertation on the origin of morality, Lecky professing

a theory of "intuition," which, though opposed to "rationalistic"

ideas, is not unsympathetic to some anthropologists; though in

knowledge of the ethics of savages, he could not, at the period

when he wrote, be accomplished. Again, a study of Neoplatonism was

involved, and had to be written without the aid of much psychological

inquiry, posterior to the date of the work. The researches of the

future antiquate works on such large subjects as the History of Morals

with ruthless rapidity. Lecky's works, so far, were in the manner of

Montesquieu and other great French _philosophes_, but, while severe

enough on the errors of the clergy, he had none of Gibbon's mischievous

love of degrading the early Christian ideal.

The central part of Lecky's literary career, till 1890, was engaged

with his great work "The History of England in the Eighteenth Century".

This vast and important book is the useful successor of Macaulay's

History, and is written with much fairness, though, as usual, a

considerable mass of information has since accrued from materials not

accessible to the author. This work is not only valuable as a political

record, but for its close attention to the changes in thought, manners,

literature, and society. Lecky was not, as an Irishman, likely to

neglect the affairs of his native island where he had access to the

Archives in Dublin public offices. He was in politics a Unionist, but

did not conceal his dislike of "the manner of the wooing". His other

best-known works are "Democracy and Liberty," and "Historical and

Political Essays". He sat in Parliament as the representative of his

University; was the friend of all the most eminent men of letters of

his time; and, thanks to the amiability of his character, he probably

never had an enemy.

With the name of Lecky this work must close, leaving in such brief

record much excellent work unchronicled, as too recent to have passed

into history.

[1] Sir George Trevelyan's "Life of Lord Macaulay," Chapter XI.

End of Project Gutenberg's History of English Literature, by Andrew Lang