THE MID-VICTORIAN NOVEL
At about the very middle of the nineteenth century--say from 1845 to
1855 in each direction, but almost increasingly towards the actual
dividing line of 1850--there came upon the English novel a very
remarkable wind of refreshment and new endeavour. Thackeray and Dickens
themselves are examples of it, with Lever and others, before this
dividing line: many others yet come to join them. A list of books
written out just as they occur to the memory, and without any attempt to
marshal them in strict chronological order, would show this beyond all
reasonable possibility of gainsaying. Thackeray's own best accomplished
work from _Vanity Fair_ (1846) itself through _Pendennis_ (1849) and
_Esmond_ (1852) to _The Newcomes_ (1854); the brilliant centre of
Dickens's work in _David Copperfield_ (1850)--stand at the head and have
been already noticed by anticipation or implication, while Lever had
almost completed the first division of his work, which began with _Harry
Lorrequer_ as early as the year of _Pickwick_. But such books as _Yeast_
(1848), _Westward Ho!_ (1855); as _The Warden_ (1855); as _Jane Eyre_
(1847) and its too few successors; as _Scenes of Clerical Life_ (1857);
as _Mary Barton_ (1848) and the novels which followed it, with others
which it is perhaps almost unfair to leave out even in this allusive
summary by sample, betokened a stirring of the waters, a rattling among
the bones, such as is not common in literature. Death removed Thackeray
early and Dickens somewhat less prematurely, but after a period rather
barren in direct novel work. The others continued and were constantly
reinforced: nor was it till well on in the seventies that any distinct
drop from first- to second-growth quality could be observed in the
general vintage of English fiction.
One is not quite driven, on this occasion, to the pusillanimous
explanation that this remarkable variety and number of good novels was
simply due to the simultaneous existence of an equally remarkable number
of good novelists. The fact is that, by this time, the great example of
Scott and Miss Austen--the great wave of progress which exemplified
itself first and most eminently in these two writers--had had time to
work upon and permeate another generation of practitioners. The
novelists who have just been cited were as a rule born in the second
decade of the century, just before, about, or after the time at which
Scott and Miss Austen began to publish. They had therefore--as their
elders, even though they may have had time to read the pair, had
not--time to assimilate thoroughly and early the results which that pair
had produced or which they had first expressed. And they had even
greater advantages than this. They had had time to assimilate, likewise,
the results of all the rest of that great literary generation of which
Scott and Miss Austen were themselves but members. They profited by
thirty years more of constant historical exploration and realising of
former days. One need not say, for it is question-begging, that they
also _profited_ by, but they could at least avail themselves of, the
immense change of manners and society which made 1850 differ more from
1800 than 1800 had differed, not merely from 1750 but from 1700. They
had, even though all of them may not have been sufficiently grateful for
it, the stimulus of that premier position in Europe which the country
had gained in the Napoleonic wars, and which she had not yet wholly lost
or even begun to lose. They had wider travel, more extended occupations
and interests, many other new things to draw upon. And, lastly, they had
some important special incidents and movements--the new arrangement of
political parties, the Oxford awakening, and others--to give suggestion
and impetus to novels of the specialist kind. Nay, they had not only the
great writers, in other kinds, of the immediate past, but those of the
present, Carlyle, Tennyson, latterly Ruskin, and others still to
complete their education and the machinery of its development.
The most remarkable feature of this _renouveau_, as has been both
directly and indirectly observed before, is the resumption, the immense
extension, and the extraordinary improvement of the domestic novel. Not
that this had not been practised during the thirty years since Miss
Austen's death. But the external advantages just enumerated had failed
it: and it had enlisted none of the chief talents which were at the
service of fiction generally. A little more gift and a good deal more
taste might have enabled Mrs. Trollope to do really great things in it:
but she left them for her son to accomplish. Attempts and "tries" at it
had been made constantly, and the goal had been very nearly reached,
especially, perhaps, in that now much forgotten but remarkable _Emilia
Wyndham_ (1846) by Anne Caldwell (Mrs. Marsh), which was wickedly
described by a sister novelist as the "book where the woman breaks her
desk open with her head," but which has real power and exercised real
influence for no short time.
This new domestic novel followed Miss Austen in that it did not
necessarily avail itself of anything but perfectly ordinary life, and
relied chiefly on artistic presentment--on treatment rather than on
subject. It departed from her in that it admitted a much wider range and
variety of subject itself; and by no means excluded the passions and
emotions which, though she had not been so prudish as to ignore their
results, she had never chosen to represent in much actual exercise, or
to make the mainsprings of her books.
The first supreme work of the kind was perhaps in _Vanity Fair_ and
_Pendennis_, the former admitting exceptional and irregular developments
as an integral part of its plot and general appeal, the latter doing for
the most part without them. But _Pendennis_ exhibited in itself, and
taught to other novelists, if not an absolutely new, a hitherto little
worked, and clumsily worked, source of novel interest. We have seen how,
as early as Head or Kirkman, the possibility of making such a source out
of the ways of special trades, professions, employments, and vocations
had been partly seen and utilised. Defoe did it more; Smollett more
still; and since the great war there had been naval and military novels
in abundance, as well as novels political, clerical, sporting, and what
not. But these special interests had been as a rule drawn upon too
onesidedly. The eighteenth century found its mistaken fondness for
episodes, inset stories, and the like, particularly convenient here: the
naval, military, sporting, and other novels of the nineteenth were apt
to rely too exclusively on these differences. Such things as the
Oxbridge scenes and the journalism scenes of _Pendennis_--both among the
most effective and popular, perhaps _the_ most effective and popular,
parts of the book--were almost, if not entirely, new. There had been
before, and have since been, plenty of university novels, and their
record has been a record of almost uninterrupted failure; there have
since, if not before, _Pendennis_ been several "press" novels, and their
record has certainly not been a record of unbroken success. But the
employment here, by genius, of such subjects for substantial _parts_ of
a novel was a success pure and unmixed. So, in the earlier book, the
same author had shown how the most humdrum incident and the minutest
painting of ordinary character could be combined with historic tragedy
like that furnished by Waterloo, with domestic _drame_ of the most
exciting kind like the discovery of Lord Steyne's relations with Becky,
or the at least suggested later crime of that ingenious and rather
hardly treated little person.
Most of the writers mentioned and glanced at above took--not of course
always, often, or perhaps ever in conscious following of Thackeray, but
in consequence of the same "skiey influences" which worked on him--to
this mixed domestic-dramatic line. And what is still more interesting,
men who had already made their mark for years, in styles quite
different, turned to it and adopted it. We have seen this of Bulwer, and
the evidences of the change in him which are given by the "Caxton"
novels. We have not yet directly dealt with another instance of almost
as great interest and distinction, Charles Lever, though we have named
him and glanced at his work.
Lever, who was born as early as 1806, had, it has been said, begun to
write novels as early as his junior, Dickens, and had at once developed,
in _Harry Lorrequer_, a pretty distinct style of his own. This style was
a kind of humour-novel with abundant incident, generally with a somewhat
"promiscuous" plot and with lively but externally drawn characters--the
humours being furnished partly by Lever's native country, Ireland, and
partly by the traditions of the great war of which he had collected a
store in his capacity of physician to the Embassy at Brussels. He had
kept up this style, the capital example of which is _Charles O'Malley_
(1840), with unabated _verve_ and with great popular success for a dozen
years before 1850. But about that time, or rather earlier, the general
"suck" of the current towards a different kind (assisted no doubt by the
feeling that the public might be getting tired of the other style) made
him change it into studies of a less specialised kind--of foreign
travel, home life, and the like--sketches which, in his later days
still, he brought even closer to actuality. It is true that in the long
run his popularity has depended, and will probably always depend, on the
early "rollicking" adventure books: not only because of their natural
appeal, but because there is plenty of the other thing elsewhere, and
hardly any of this particular thing anywhere. To almost anybody, for
instance, except a very great milksop or a pedant of construction,
_Charles O'Malley_ with its love-making and its fighting, its
horsemanship and its horse-play, its "devilled kidneys"[23] and its
devil-may-care-ness, is a distinctly delectable composition; and if a
reasonable interval be allowed between the readings, may be read over
and over again, at all times of life, with satisfaction. But the fact of
the author's change remains not the less historically and
symptomatically important, in connection with the larger change of which
we are now taking notice, and with the similar phenomena observable in
the work of Bulwer. At the same time it has been pointed out that the
following of Miss Austen by no means excluded the following of Scott:
and that the new development included "crosses" of novel and romance,
sometimes of the historical kind, sometimes not, which are of the
highest, or all but the highest, interest. Early and good examples of
these may be found in the work of the Brontës, Charlotte and Emily (the
third sister Anne is but a pale reflection of her elders), and of
Charles Kingsley. Charlotte (b. 1816) and Charles (b. 1819) were
separated in their birth by but three years, Emily (b. 1818) and
Kingsley by but one.
[23] Edgar Poe has a perfectly serious and very characteristic
explosion at the prominence of these agreeable viands in the
book.
The curious story of the struggles of the Brontë girls to get published
hardly concerns us, and Emily's work, _Wuthering Heights_,[24] is one of
those isolated books which, whatever their merit, are rather ornaments
than essential parts in novel history. But this is not the case with
_Jane Eyre_ (1847), _Shirley_ (1849), _Villette_ (1852), and _The
Professor_ (1857) (but written much earlier). These are all examples of
the determination to base novels on actual life and experience. Few
novelists have ever kept so close to their own part in these as
Charlotte Brontë did, though she accompanied, permeated, and to a
certain extent transformed her autobiography and observation by a
strong romantic and fantastic imaginative element. Deprive Thackeray and
Dickens of nearly all their humour and geniality, take a portion only of
the remaining genius of each in the ratio of about 2 _Th_. to 1 _D_.,
add a certain dash of the old terror-novel and the German fantastic
tale, moisten with feminine spirit and water, and mix thoroughly: and
you have something very like Charlotte Brontë. But it is necessary to
add further, and it is her great glory, the perfume and atmosphere of
the Yorkshire moors, which she had in not quite such perfection as her
sister Emily, but in combination with more general novel-gift. Her
actual course of writing was short, and it could probably in no case
have been long; she wanted wider and, perhaps, happier experience, more
literature, more man-and-woman-of-the-worldliness, perhaps a sweeter and
more genial temper. But the English novel would have been incomplete
without her and her sister; they are, as wholes, unlike anybody else,
and if they are not exactly great they have the quality of greatness.
Above all, they kept novel and romance together--a deed which is great
without any qualification or drawback.
[24] Some will have it that this was really Charlotte's: but not
with much probability.
Charles Kingsley is one of the most precious documents for the cynics
who say that while, if you please the public in only one way, you may
possibly meet with only tolerable ingratitude; if you attempt to please
it in more ways than one, you are certain to be suspected, and still
more certain to have the defects of your weakest work transferred to
your best. He was a novelist, a poet, an essayist, a preacher, a
historian, and a critic. His history, though less positively inaccurate
than the "dead set" against him of certain notorious persons chose to
represent it, was uncritical: and his criticism, sometimes acute and
luminous, was decidedly unhistorical. But he was a preacher of
remarkable merit, a charming and original essayist, a poet of no wide
range but of true poetical quality, and a novelist of great variety and
of almost the first class. He let his weakest qualities go in with his
strongest in his novels, and had also the still more unfortunate
tendency to "trail coats" of the most inconceivably different colours
for others to tread upon. Liberals, Radicals, and Tories; Roman
Catholics, High Churchmen, Low Churchmen, and No-Churchmen;
sentimentalists and cynics; people who do not like literary and
historical allusion, and people who are meticulous about literary and
historical accuracy--all these and many others, if they cannot disregard
flings at their own particular tastes, fancies, and notions, are sure to
lose patience with him now and then. Accordingly, he has met with some
exacerbated decriers, and with very few thorough-going defenders.
Yet _almost_ thoroughing-going defence is, as far as the novels (our
only direct business) are concerned, far from difficult; and the present
writer, though there are perhaps not a dozen consecutive pages of
Kingsley's novels to which, at some point or other, he is not prepared
to append the note, "This is Bosh," is prepared also to exalt him miles
above writers whose margins he would be quite content to leave without a
single annotation of this--or any other--kind. In particular the variety
of the books, and their vividness, are both extraordinary. And perhaps
the greatest notes of the novel generally, as well as those in which the
novel of this period can most successfully challenge comparison with
those of any other, are, or should be, vividness and variety. His books
in the kind are seven; and the absence of _replicas_ among them is one
of their extraordinary features. _Yeast_, the first (1848), and _Alton
Locke_, the second (next year), are novels of the unrest of thought
which caused and accompanied the revolutionary movement of the period
throughout Europe. But they are quite different in subject and
treatment. The first is a sketch of country society, uppermost and
lowermost:[25] the second one of town-artisan and lower-trade life with
passages of university and other contrast. Both are young and crude
enough, intentionally or unintentionally; both, intentionally beyond
all doubt, are fantastic and extravagant; but both are full of genius.
Argemone Lavington, the heroine of _Yeast_, is, though not of the most
elaborately drawn, one of the most fascinating and real heroines of
English fiction; an important secondary character of the second book,
the bookseller Sandy Mackaye, is one of its most successful
"character-parts." Both, but especially _Yeast_, are full of admirable
descriptive writing, not entirely without indebtedness to Mr. Ruskin,
but very often independently carried out, and always worthy of a "place
on the line" in any gallery. There is much accurate and real dialogue,
not a little firm character-drawing. Above all, both are full of
blood--of things lived and seen, not vamped up from reading or
day-dreaming--and yet full of dreams, day and other, and full of
literature. Perhaps "the malt was a little above the meal," the yeast
present in more abundant quality than the substances for fermentation,
but there was no lack even of these.
[25] It is curious to compare this (dealing as it does largely
with sport) and the "Jorrocks" series of Robert Surtees
(1803-1864). Kingsley was nearly as practical a sportsman as
Surtees: but Surtees's characters and manners have the old
artificial-picaresque quality only.
_Hypatia_--which succeeded after some interval (1853) and when the
writer's Christian Socialist, Churchman-Chartist excitement had somewhat
clarified itself--is a more substantial, a more ambitious, but certainly
also an even more successful book. It has something of--and perhaps,
though in far transposed matter, owes something to--_Esmond_ in its
daring blend of old and new, and it falls short of that wonderful
creation. But it is almost a second to it: and, with plenty of faults,
is perhaps the only classical or semi-classical novel of much value in
English.
But it was in the next year, 1854, that Kingsley's work reached its
greatest perfection in the brilliant historical novel of _Westward Ho!_
where the glories of Elizabethan adventure and patriotism were treated
with a wonderful kindred enthusiasm, with admirable narrative faculty,
with a creation of character, suitable for the purpose, which is hardly
inferior to that of the greatest masters, and with an even enhanced and
certainly chastened exercise of the descriptive faculty above noticed.
The book to some extent invited--and Kingsley availed himself of the
opportunity in a far more than sufficient degree--that "coat-trailing"
which, as has been said, inevitably in its turn provokes "coat-treading":
and it has been abused from various quarters. But that it is one of
the very greatest of English novels next to the few supreme, impartial
and competent criticism will never hesitate to allow. Of his remaining
books of novel kind one was of the "eccentric" variety: the others,
though full of good things, were perhaps on the whole failures. The
first referred to (the second in order of appearance), _The Water
Babies_ (1863), is a half Rabelaisian though perfectly inoffensive
_fatrasie_ of all sorts of things, exceedingly delightful to fit tastes.
But _Two Tears Ago_ (1857), though containing some fine and even really
exquisite things, shows a relaxing hand on the crudity and
promiscuousness which had been excusable in his two first books and had
been well restrained in _Hypatia_ and _Westward Ho!_ by central and
active interests of story and character. "Spasmodic" poetry, the Crimean
War, Pre-Raphaelitism, Tractarianism, the good and bad sides of science,
and divers other things make a mixture that is not sufficiently
concocted and "rectified." While in the much later _Hereward the Wake_
(1866), though the provocation offered to the Dryasdust kind of
historian is no matter, there is a curious relapse on the old fault of
incorporating too much history or pseudo-history, and the same failure
as in _Two Tears Ago_, or perhaps a greater one in degree, to concoct
the story (which is little more than a chronicle) together with a
certain neglect to conciliate the sympathies of the reader. But the
whole batch is a memorable collection; and it shows, rather
exceptionally, the singular originality and variety of the novel at this
time.
This remarkable pair may be supplemented by an in some ways more
remarkable trio, all of them pretty close contemporaries, but, for
different reasons in each case, coming rather late into the novel
field--Charles Reade (b. 1814), Anthony Trollope (b. 1815), and Mary Ann
Evans (b. 1819). It would be difficult to find three persons more
different in temperament; impossible to find more striking instances of
the way in which the new blend of romance and novel lent itself to the
most various uses and developments. Reade--who thought himself a
dramatist and wasted upon drama a great deal of energy and an almost
ideal position as a possessor of an unusually rich fellowship at
Magdalen College, Oxford, with no duties--came rather closer to Dickens
than to any novelist previously named, not merely in a sort of
non-poetic but powerful imagination, but also in the mania for attacking
what seemed to him abuses--in lunatic asylums (on which point he was
very nearly a monomaniac himself), prisons, and many other things. But
he is almost more noteworthy, from our point of view, because of his
use--it also must, one fears, be called an abuse--of a process obviously
invited by the new demand for truth to life, and profitable up to a
certain point. This was the collection, in enormous scrapbooks, of
newspaper cuttings on a vast variety of subjects, to be worked up into
fiction when the opportunity served. Reade had so much genius--he had
perhaps the most, in a curious rather incalculable fashion, of the whole
group--that he very nearly succeeded in digesting these "marine stores"
of detail and document into real books. But he did not always, and
could not always, quite do it: and he remains, with Zola, the chief
example of the danger of working at your subject too much as if you were
getting up a brief, or preparing an article for an encyclopedia. Still,
his greatest books, which are probably _It is Never too Late to Mend_
(1856) and _The Cloister and the Hearth_ (1861), have immense vigour
and, in the second case, an almost poetic attraction which Dickens never
reaches, while over all sparks and veins of genius are scattered.
Moreover, he is interesting because, until his own time, he would have
been quite impossible; and, even at that time, without the general
movement which we are describing, very unlikely.
There is not so much object here in discussing the much discussed
question of the merits and defects of "George Eliot" (Mary Ann Evans or
Mrs. Cross) as a novelist, as there is in pointing out her relations to
this general movement. She began late, and almost accidentally; and
there is less unity in her general work than in some others here
mentioned. Her earliest and perhaps, in adjusted and "reduced"
judgments, her best work--_Scenes of Clerical Life_ (1857-1858), _Adam
Bede_ (1859), _The Mill on the Floss_ (1860), _Silas Marner_
(1861)--consists of very carefully observed and skilfully rendered
studies of country life and character, tinged, especially in _Adam Bede_
and _The Mill on the Floss_, with very intense and ambitious colours of
passion. The great popularity of this tempted her into still more
elaborate efforts of different kinds. Her attempt in quasi-historical
romance, _Romola_ (1865), was an enormous _tour de force_ in which the
writer struggled to get historical and local colour, accurate and
irreproachable, with all the desperation of the most conscientious
relater of actual history. _Felix Holt the Radical_ (1866), _Middle
March_ (1872), and _Daniel Deronda_ (1876) were equally elaborate
sketches of modern English society, planned and engineered with the
same provision of carefully laboured plot, character, and phrase.
Although received with enthusiasm by the partisans whom she had created
for herself, these books have seemed to some _over_-laboured, and if not
exactly unreal, yet to a certain extent unnatural. But the point for us
is their example of the way in which the novel--once a light and almost
frivolous thing--had come to be taken with the utmost seriousness--had
in fact ceased to be light literature at all, and begun to require
rigorous and elaborate training and preparation in the writer, perhaps
even something of the athlete's processes in the reader. Its state may
or may not have advanced in grace _pari passu_ with the advance in
effort and in dignity: but this later advance is at least there.
Fielding himself took novel-writing by no means lightly, and Richardson
still less so: but imagine either, imagine Scott or even Miss Austen,
going through the preliminary processes which seemed necessary, in
different ways, to Charles Reade and to Mary Ann Evans!
In a certain sense, however, the last of the three, though he may give
less impression of genius than the other two (or even the other four
whom we have specially noticed), is the most interesting of all: and
qualms may sometimes arise as to whether genius is justly denied to him.
Anthony Trollope, after a youth, not exactly _orageuse_, but apparently
characterised by the rather squalid yet mild dissipation which he has
described in _The Three Clerks_ (1858) and _The Small House at
Allington_ (1864), attained a considerable position in the Post Office
which he held during great part of his career as a novelist. For some
time that career did not look as if it were going to be a successful
one, though his early (chiefly Irish) efforts are better than is
sometimes thought. But he made his mark first with _The Warden_ (1855),
and then, much more directly and triumphantly, with its sequel
_Barchester Towers_ (1857). When the first of these was published
Dickens had been a successful novelist for nearly twenty years and
Thackeray had "come to his own" for nearly ten. _The Warden_ might have
been described at the time (I do not know whether it was, but English
reviewing was only beginning to be clever again) as a partial attempt at
the matter of Dickens in a partial following of the manner of Thackeray.
An "abuse"--the distribution in supposed unjust proportion of the funds
of an endowed hospital for aged men--is its main avowed subject. But
Trollope indulged in no tirades and no fantastic-grotesque
caricature--in fact he actually drew a humorous sketch of a novel _à la
Dickens_ on the matter. His real object was evidently to sketch
faithfully, but again not without humour, the cathedral society of
"Barchester" as it actually spoke, dressed, thought, and lived: and he
did it. The first book had a little too much talk about the nominal
subject, and not enough actual action and conversation. _Barchester
Towers_ remedied this, and presented its readers with one of the
liveliest books in English fiction. There had been nothing like it (for
Thackeray had been more discursive and less given to small talk) since
Miss Austen herself, though the spirits of the two were extremely
different. Perhaps Trollope never did a better book than this, for
variety and vigour of character drawing. The masterful wife of Bishop
Proudie, the ne'er-do-weel canon's family (the Stanhopes), and others
stand out against an interest, not intense but sufficient, of story, a
great variety of incident, and above all abundant and lifelike
conversation. For many years, and in an extraordinary number of
examples, he fell little below, and perhaps once or twice went above,
this standard. It was rather a fancy of his (one again, perhaps,
suggested by Thackeray) to run his books into series or cycles--the
chief being that actually opened as above, and continuing through others
to the brilliant _Last Chronicle of Barset_ (1867), which in some
respect surpasses _Barchester Towers_ itself, with a second series, not
quite disconnected, dealing with Lady Glencora Palliser as centre, and
yet others. His total production was enormous: it became in fact
impossibly so, and the work of his last _lustrum_ and a little more (say
1877-1882), though never exactly bad or painful to read, was obvious
hack-work. But between _The Warden_ and _The American Senator_,
twenty-two years later, he had written nearer thirty than twenty novels,
of which at least half were much above the average and some quite
capital.[26] Moreover, it is a noteworthy thing, and contrary to some
critical explanations, that, as his works drop out of copyright and are
reprinted in cheap editions, they appear to be recovering very
considerable popularity. This fact would seem to show that the manners,
speech, etc., represented in them have a certain standard quality which
does not--like the manner, speech, etc., of novels such as those of Hook
and Surtees--lose appeal to fresh generations; and that the artist who
dealt with them must have had not a little faculty of fixing them in the
presentation. In fact it is probably not too much to say that of the
_average_ novel of the third quarter of the century--in a more than
average but not of an extraordinary, transcendental, or quintessential
condition--Anthony Trollope is about as good a representative as can be
found. His talent is individual enough, but not too individual: system
and writer may each have the credit due to them allotted without
difficulty.
[26] His most ambitious studies in strict _character_ are the
closely connected heroines of _The Bertrams_ (1859) and _Can you
Forgive Her?_ (1864-1865). But the first-named book has never
been popular; and the other hardly owes its popularity to the
heroine.
A novelist who might have been in front of the first flight of these in
point of time, and who is actually put by some in the first flight in
point of merit, is Mrs. Gaskell. Born in 1810, she accumulated the
material for her future _Cranford_ at Knutsford in Cheshire: but did not
publish this till after Dickens had, in 1850, established _Household
Words_, where it appeared in instalments. She had a little earlier, in
1848, published her first novel, _Mary Barton_--a vivid but distinctly
one-sided picture of factory life in Lancashire. In the same year with
the collected _Cranford_ (1853) appeared _Ruth_, also a "strife-novel"
(as the Germans would say) though in a different way: and two years
later what is perhaps her most elaborate effort, _North and South_. A
year or two before her death in 1865 _Sylvia's Lovers_ was warmly
welcomed by some: and the unfinished _Wives and Daughters_, which was
actually interrupted by that death, has been considered her maturest
work. Her famous and much controverted _Life of Charlotte Brontë_ does
not belong to us, except in so far as it knits the two novelists
together.
From hints dropped already, it may be seen that the present writer does
not find Mrs. Gaskell his easiest subject. There is much in her work
which, in Hobbes's phrase, is both "an effect of power and a cause of
pleasure": but there appears to some to be in her a pervading want of
actual success--of _réussite_--absolute and unquestionable. The sketches
of _Cranford_ are very agreeable and very admirable performances in the
manner first definitely thrown out by Addison, and turned to consummate
perfection in the way of the regular novel (which be it remembered
_Cranford_ is not) by Miss Austen. But the mere mention of the last
name kills them. The author of _Emma_ would have treated Miss Matty and
the rest much less lovingly, but she would have made them persons. Mrs.
Gaskell has left them mere types of amiable country-townishness in
respectable if not very lively times. Excessive respectability cannot be
charged against _Mary Barton_ and _Ruth_, but here the "problem"--the
"purpose"--interposes its evil influence: and we have got to take a side
with men or with masters, with selfish tempters of one class and deluded
maidens of another. _North and South_ is perhaps on the whole the best
place in which to study Mrs. Gaskell's art: for _Wives and Daughters_ is
unfinished and the books just named are tentatives. It begins by laying
a not inconsiderable hold on the reader: and, as it is worked out at
great length, the author has every opportunity of strengthening and
improving that hold. It is certain that, in some cases, she does not do
this: and the reason is the same--the failure to project and keep in
action definite and independent characters, and the attempt to make
weight and play with purposes and problems. The heroine's father--who
resigns his living and exposes his delicate wife and only daughter, if
not exactly to privation, to discomfort and, in the wife's case, fatally
unsuitable surroundings, because of some never clearly defined
dissatisfaction with the creed of the Church (_not_ apparently with
Christianity as such or with Anglicanism as such), and who dies
"promiscuously," to be followed, in equally promiscuous fashion, by a
friend who leaves his daughter Margaret a fortune--is one of those
nearly contemptible imbeciles in whom it is impossible to take an
interest. In respect to the wife Mrs. Gaskell commits the curious
mistake of first suggesting that she is a complainer about nothing, and
then showing her to us as a suffering victim of her husband's folly and
of hopeless disease. The lover (who is to a great extent a replica of
the masterful mill-owner in _Shirley_) is uncertain and impersonal: and
the minor characters are null. One hopes, for a time, that Margaret
herself will save the situation: but she goes off instead of coming on,
and has rather less individuality and convincingness at the end of the
story than at the beginning. In short, Mrs. Gaskell seems to me one of
the chief illustrations of the extreme difficulty of the domestic
novel--of the necessity of exactly proportioning the means at command to
the end to be achieved. Her means were, perhaps, greater than those of
most of her brother-and-sister-novelists, but she set them to loose
ends, to ends too high for her, to ends not worth achieving: end thus
produced (again as it seems to me) flawed and unsatisfactory work. She
"means" well in Herbert's sense of the word: but what is meant is not
quite done.
To mention special books and special writers is not the first object of
this survey, though it would be very easy to double and redouble its
size by doing this, even within the time-limits of this, the last, and
the next chapters. It may, however, be added that in this remarkable
central period, and in the most central part of it from 1840 to 1860,
there appeared the first remarkable novel of Mr. George Meredith, _The
Ordeal of Richard Feverel_ (1859), first of a brilliant series that was
to illustrate the whole remaining years of the century; and the isolated
masterpiece of _Phantastes_, which another prolific writer, George
Macdonald, was never to repeat; while Mrs. Oliphant and Mrs. Craik, both
of whom will also reappear in the next chapter, began as early as 1849.
In 1851 appeared the first of two remarkable books, _Lavengro_ and _The
Romany Rye_, in which George Borrow, if he did not exactly create,
brought to perfection from some points of view what may be called the
autobiographic novel.
Indeed the memory of the aged and the industry of the young could recall
or rediscover dozens and scores of noteworthy books, some of which have
not lost actual or traditional reputation, such as the _Paul Ferroll_
(1855) of Mrs. Archer Clive, a well-restrained crime-novel, the story of
which is indicated in the title of its sequel, _Why Paul Ferroll killed
his Wife_. Henry Kingsley, George Alfred Lawrence, Wilkie Collins, and
others began their careers at this time. The best book ever written
about school, _Tom Brown's School Days_ (1857), and the best book in
lighter vein ever written about Oxford, _Mr. Verdant Green_ (1853-1856),
both appeared in the fifties.
Although, indeed, the intenser and more individual genius of the great
novelists of this time went rather higher than the specialist novel, it
was, in certain directions, well cultivated during this period. Men
likely to write naval novels of merit were dying out, and though Lever
took up the military tale, at second hand, with brilliant results, the
same historical causes were in operation there. But a comparatively new
kind--the "sporting" novel--developed itself largely and in some cases
went beyond mere sport. Such early books as Egan's _Tom and Jerry_
(1821) can hardly be called novels: but as the love of sport extended
and the term itself ceased to designate merely on the one side the
pleasures of country squires, and on the other the amusements (sometimes
rather blackguard in character) of men about town, the general subject
made a lodgment in fiction. One of its most characteristic practitioners
was Robert Smith Surtees, who, before Dickens and perhaps acting as
suggester of the original plan of _Pickwick_ (_not_ that which Dickens
substituted), excogitated (between 1831 and 1838) the remarkable
fictitious personage of "Mr. Jorrocks," grocer and sportsman, whose
adventures, and those of other rather hybrid characters of the same
kind, he pursued through a number of books for some thirty years. These
(though in strict character, and in part of their manners, deficient as
above noticed) were nearly always readable--and sometimes very
amusing--even to those who are not exactly Nimrods: and they were
greatly commended to others still by the admirable illustrations of
Leech. There is not a little sound sport in Kingsley and afterwards in
Anthony Trollope: while the novels of Frank Smedley, _Frank Fairlegh_
(1850), _Lewis Arundel_ (1852), and _Harry Coverdale's Courtship_
(1855), mix a good deal more of it with some good fun and some rather
rococo romance. The subject became, indeed, very popular in the fifties,
and entered largely into, though it by no means exclusively occupied,
the novels of George John Whyte-Melville, a Fifeshire gentleman, an
Etonian, and a guardsman, who, after retiring from the army, served
again in the Crimean War, and, after writing a large number of novels,
was killed in the hunting field. Some of Whyte-Melville's books, such as
_Market Harborough_ (1861), are hunting novels pure and simple, so much
so that it has been said (rashly) that none but hunting men and women
can read them. Others, such as _Kate Coventry_ (1856), a very lively and
agreeable book, mix sport with general character and manners-painting.
Others, such as _Holmby House_ (1860), _The Queen's Maries_ (1862),
etc., attempt the historical style. But perhaps this mixed novel of
sport, society, and a good deal of love-making reached its most curious
development in the novels of George Alfred Lawrence, from the once
famous _Guy Livingstone_ (1857) onwards--a series almost typical, which
was developed further, with touches of original but uncritical talent,
which often dropped into unintentional caricature, by the late "Ouida"
(Louise de La Ramée). All the three last writers mentioned, however,
especially the last two, made sport only an ingredient in their novel
composition ("Ouida," in fact, knew nothing about it) and at least
endeavoured, according to their own ideas and ideals, to grapple with
larger parts of life. The danger of the kind showed less in them than in
some imitators of a lower class, of whom Captain Hawley Smart was the
chief, and a chief sometimes better than his own followers. Some even of
his books are quite interesting: but in a few of them, and in more of
other writers, the obligation to tell something like a story and to
provide something like characters seems to be altogether forgotten. A
run (or several runs) with the hounds, a steeplechase and its
preparations and accidents, one at least of the great races and the
training and betting preliminary to them--these form the real and almost
the sole staple of story; so that a tolerably intelligent office-boy
could make them up out of a number or two of the _Field_, a sufficient
list of proper names, and a commonplace book of descriptions. This, in
fact, is the danger of the specialist novel generally: though perhaps it
does not show quite so glaringly in other cases. Yet, even here, that
note of the fiction of the whole century--its tendency to "accaparate"
and utilise all the forms of life, all the occupations and amusements of
mankind--shows itself notably enough.
So, too, one notable book has, here even more than elsewhere, often set
going hosts of imitations. _Tom Brown's School Days_, for instance
(1857), flooded the market with school stories, mostly very bad. But
there is one division which did more justice to a higher class of
subject and produced some very remarkable work in what is called the
religious novel, though, here as elsewhere, the better examples did not
merely harp on one string.
A very interesting off-shoot of the domestic novel, ignored or despised
by the average critic and rather perfunctorily treated even by those who
have taken it as a special subject, is the "Tractarian" or High-Church
novel, which, originating very shortly after the movement itself had
began, had no small share in popularising it. The earlier Evangelicals
had by no means neglected fiction as a means of propagating their views,
especially among the young. Mrs. Sherwood in _Little Henry and his
Bearer_ and _The Fairchild Family_ (1818) and "Charlotte Elizabeth"
(Browne or Tonna) are examples. But the High-Church party, in accordance
with its own predecessors and patterns in the seventeenth century,
always maintained, during its earlier and better period, a higher
standard of scholarship and of general literary culture. Its early
efforts in fiction--according to the curious and most interesting law
which seems to decree that every subdivision of a kind shall go through
something like the vicissitudes of the kind at large--were not strictly
novels but romance, and romance of the allegorical kind. In the late
thirties and early forties the allegorists, the chief of whom were
Samuel Wilberforce and William Adams, were busy and effective. The
future bishop's _Agathos_ (before 1840) is a very spirited and
well-written adaptation of the "whole armour of God" theme so often
re-allegorised: and Adams's _Shadow of the Cross_ is only the best of
several good stories--of a rather more feminine type, but graceful,
sound enough in a general way, and combining the manners of Spenser and
Bunyan with no despicable skill. If, however, the Tractarian
fiction-writers had confined themselves to allegory there would be no
necessity to do more than glance at them, for allegory, on the obvious
Biblical suggestion, has been a constant instrument of combined
religious instruction and pastime. But they went much further afield.
Sometimes the excursions were half satirical, as in the really amusing
_Owlet of Owlstone Edge_ and _The Curate of Cumberworth and the Vicar of
Roost_ of Francis Paget, attacking, the slovenly neglect and supineness
which, quite as much as unsound doctrine, was the _bête noire_ of the
early Anglo-Catholics. William Gresley and others wrote stories mostly
for the young. But the distinguishing feature of the school, and that
which gives it an honourable and more than an honorary place here, was
the shape which, before the middle of the century, it took in the hands
of two ladies, Elizabeth Sewell and Charlotte Mary Yonge.
The first, who was the elder but survived Miss Yonge and died at a very
great age quite recently, had much less talent than her junior: but
undoubtedly deserves the credit of setting the style. In her novels
(_Gertrude, Katharine Ashton_, etc.) she carried, even farther than Miss
Austen, the principle of confining herself rigidly to the events of
ordinary life. Not that she eschews the higher middle or even the higher
classes: though, on the other hand, Katharine Ashton, evidently one of
her favourite heroines, is the daughter of a shopkeeper. But the law of
average and ordinary character, incident, atmosphere, is observed almost
invariably. Unfortunately Miss Sewell (she was actually a
schoolmistress) let the didactic part of her novels get rather too much
the upper hand: and though she wrote good English, possessed no special
grace of style, and little faculty of illustration or ornament from
history, literature, her own fancy, current fashions, even of the most
harmless kind, and so forth. The result is that her books have a certain
dead-aliveness--that the characters, though actually alive, are neither
interestingly alive nor, as Miss Austen had made hers, interesting in
their very uninterestingness. Sometimes, for a scene or two, her truth
to nature and fact is rewarded by that curious sense of recognition
which the reader feels in the presence of actual _mimesis_--of creation
of fictitious fact and person. But this is not common: and the epithet
"dull," which too commonly only stigmatises the person using it, may
really suggest itself not seldom in reference to Miss Sewell. A "success
of esteem" is about the utmost that can be accorded her.
With Miss Yonge the case was very different. She was a lady of wide
reading and, even according to the modern rather arbitrary restrictions
of the term, something of an historical scholar; she had humour, of
which there was scarcely a particle in Miss Sewell's composition; she
had a very considerable understanding, and consequently some toleration
of the infinite varieties, and at least the more venial foibles, of
human temperament. She possessed an inexhaustible command of dialogue
which was always natural and sometimes very far from trivial; and if she
had no command of the greater novelists' imagination in the creation of
character and story, she had an almost uncanny supply of invention, of
what may be called the second or third class, in these respects. She
wrote too much and too long; but it cannot be said that she ever merely
repeated herself. And her best books--the famous _Heir of Redclyffe_
(1853), which captivated William Morris and his friends at Oxford, and
which, with a little unnecessary sentimentality and a little
"unco-guidness," is full of cleverness, nature, good sense, good taste,
and good form; _Heartsease_ (1854), perhaps the best of all; _Dynevor
Terrace_ (1857), less of a general favourite but full of good things;
and the especially popular _Daisy Chain_ (1856), with not a few
others--are things which no courageous and catholic critic of fiction
will ever be tired of defending or (which is not always the same thing)
of reading. Some of her early tales, before these, were a little "raw":
and most of her later work showed (as did Anthony Trollope's and that of
other though not all very prolific novelists) that the field had been
overcropped. But she was hardly ever dull: and she always had that
quality--if not of the supreme artist, of the real craftsman--which
prevents a thing from being a failure. What is meant is done: though
perhaps it might have been meant higher.
The comparison, backwards and forwards, of this great company of novels
is of endless interest; perhaps one of many aspects of that interest may
be touched on specially, because it connects itself with much else that
has been said. If we read, together or in near sequence, three such
books as, say, _Emilia Wyndbam, Pendennis_, and _Yeast_, all of which
appeared close together, between 1846 and 1849, the differences, in
quality and volume of individual genius, will of course strike every one
forcibly. But some will also be struck by something else--the difference
between the first and the other two in _style_ or (as that word is
almost hopelessly ambiguous) let us perhaps say _diction_. Both
Thackeray and Kingsley are almost perfectly modern in this. We may not
speak so well to-day, and we may have added more slang and jargon to our
speech, but there is no real difference, except in these respects,
between a speech of Pen's (when not talking book) or one of Colonel
Bracebridge's, and the speech of any gentleman who is a barrister or a
guardsman at this hour. The excellent Mrs. Marsh had not arrived at that
point; what some people call the "stilted" forms and phrases of fifty or
almost a hundred years earlier clung to her still. The resulting lingo
is far better than that part of the lingo of to-day where literary and
linguistic good manners have been forgotten altogether: but it is
distinctly deficient in _ease_. There are endless flourishes and
periphrases--the colloquialisms which Swift and others had denounced
(and quite properly) in their ugliest and vulgarest forms are not even
permitted entrance in improved and warranted varieties. You must never
say "won't" but always "will not," whereas the ability to use the two
forms adds infinite propriety as well as variety to the dialogue. You
say, "At length a most unfortunate accident aggravated (if aggravation
were possible) the unfortunate circumstances of the situation." You
address your own characters in the oratorical manner of Mr. Burke and
other great men, "Ah, Mr. Danby! if instead, etc." In short, instead of
reserving the grand manner (and a rather different grand manner) for
grand occasions, you maintain a sort of cheap machine-made kind of it
throughout. The real secret of the novel was not found out till this was
discarded. Perhaps that real secret does not lie so much anywhere else
as here.
A few words may not improperly be said about some of the circumstances
and details of novel-appearance and distribution, etc., at this palmy
day of English fiction. At what time the famous "three-decker" was
consecrated as the regular novel line-of-battle-ship I have not been
able to determine exactly to my own satisfaction. Richardson had
extended his interminable narrations to seven or eight volumes: Miss
Burney latterly had not been content with less than five. From the
specimens I have examined, I have an idea that with the "Minerva Press"
and its contemporaries and successors at the end of the eighteenth and
beginning of the nineteenth century, _four_ was a very favourite if not
the most usual number. But these volumes were usually small--not much
larger than those of the Belgian reprints of Dumas which, as one
remembers, used to run into the dozen or something like it in the case
of his longer books. Three, however, has obvious advantages; the chief
of them being the adjustment to "beginning, middle, and end," though
there is a corresponding disadvantage which soon developed itself--and
in fact, finally, I have no doubt helped to ruin the form--the
temptation to make the _second_ volume a place of mere padding. But the
actual popularity of "the old three-decker" continued for quite two
generations, if not more, and was unmistakable. Library subscriptions
were generally adjusted to it; and any circulating-library keeper would
tell you that, putting this quite aside, even subscribers to more or
fewer volumes than three would take the three-volume by preference. More
than this, still, there is a curious fact necessarily known to
comparatively few people. Although it was improper of Mr. Bludyer to
sell his novel, and dine and drink of the profits before "smashing" it,
there were probably not many reviewers who did not get rid of most of
their books of this kind, if for no other reasons than that no house,
short of a palace, would have held them all. And, in the palmy days of
circulating libraries, the price given by second-hand booksellers for
novels made a very considerable addition to the reviewer's remuneration
or guerdon. But these booksellers would not pay, in proportion, for two
or one volume books--alleging, what no doubt was true, that the
libraries had a lower tariff for them. Further, the short story, now so
popular, was very _un_popular in those days: and library customers would
refuse collections of them with something like indignation or disgust.
Indeed, there are reviewers living who may perhaps pride themselves on
having done something to drive the dislike out and the liking in.
The circulating library itself, though not the creation of the novel,
was very largely extended by it, and helped no doubt very largely to
extend the circulation of the novel in turn. Before it, to some extent,
and long before so-called "public" or "free" libraries, books in general
and novels in particular had been very largely diffused by clubs,
"institutions," and other forms of co-operative individual enterprise,
the bookplates of which will be found in many a copy of an old novel
now. Sometimes these were purely private associations of neighbours:
sometimes they belonged to more or less extensive establishments, like
that defunct "Russell Institution in Great Coram Street," which a great
author, who was its neighbour, once took for an example of desolation;
or the still existing and flourishing "Philosophical" examples in
Edinburgh and Bath. In these latter cases, of course, novels were not
allowed to be the main constituents of the library; in fact in some, but
few, they may have been sternly excluded. On the other hand, the
private-adventure circulating libraries tended more and more, with few
exceptions, to rely on novels only--"Mudie's" and a few more being
exceptions. Very few people, I suppose, ever bought three-volume novels;
and the fact that they went almost wholly to the libraries, and were
there worn to pieces, accounts for the comparative rarity of good
copies. The circulating library has survived both the decease of the
three-volume novel and the competition of the so-called free library.
But it is pretty certain that it was a chief cause--and almost the whole
_sustaining_ cause--of the three-volume system itself. Nor was the
connection between nature of form and system of distribution limited to
England: for the single-volume novel, though older in France than with
us, is not so very old.
But a very considerable proportion of these famous books made
appearances previous to that in three volumes, and not distantly
connected with their popularity. For the most part these previous
appearances were either in magazines or periodicals of one kind and
another, or else in "parts."
Neither process was exactly new, though both were largely affected
by changed conditions of general literature and life. The
magazine-appearance traces itself, by almost insensible gradations, to
the original periodical-essay of the Steele-Addison type--the small
individual bulk of which necessitated division of whatsoever was not
itself on a very small scale. If you run down the "Contents" of the
_British Essayists_ you will constantly find "Continuation of the story
of Alonso and Imoinda" and the like. But when, in the early years of the
nineteenth century, the system of newspapers and periodicals branched
out into endless development, coincidently with the increase of demand
and supply in regard to the novel, it was inevitable that this latter
should be drawn upon to supply at once the standing dishes and the
relishes of the entertainment. _Blackwood_ and the _London_, the first
fruits of the new kind, did not at once take to the novel by
instalments: and the _London_ had no time to do so. But _Blackwood_
soon became celebrated--a reputation which it has never lost--for the
excellence of its short stories, and by degrees took to long ones; while
its followers--_Fraser, Bentley's Miscellany, The Dublin University
Magazine_, the _New Monthly_, and others--almost from the first bated
their hooks with this new _appât_. A very large proportion of the work
of the novelists mentioned in the last chapter, as well as of Lever,
appeared in one or other of these. _Fraser_ in particular was
Thackeray's chief refuge in the Days of Ignorance of the public as to
his real powers and merits, while, just as he was going off, the very
different work of Kingsley came on there. And the tradition, as is well
known, has never been broken. The particular magazines may have died in
some cases: but the magazine-appearance of novels is nearly as vivacious
as ever.
Publication in parts is nearly as old, but has a less continuous
history, and has seen itself suffer an interruption of life. There are
scattered examples of it pretty far back both in France and England.
Marivaux had a particular fancy for it: with the result that he left not
a little of his work unfinished. Such volume-publication as that of
_Tristram Shandy_, in batches really small in quantity and at fairly
regular if long intervals, is not much different from part-issue. As the
taste for reading spread to classes with not much ready money, and
perhaps, in some cases, living at a distance from libraries, this taste
spread too. But I do not think there can be much doubt that the immense
success of Dickens--in combination with his own very distinct
predilection for keeping the ring himself and being his own editor--had
most to do with its prevalence during the period under present
consideration. Thackeray took up the practice from him: as well as
others both from him and from Thackeray. The great illustrators, too, of
the forties, fifties, and sixties, from Cruikshank and Browne to
Frederick Walker, were partly helped by the system, partly helped to
make it popular. But the circulating libraries did not like it for
obvious reasons, the parts being fragile and unsubstantial: and the
great success of cheap magazines, on the pattern of _Macmillan's_ and
the _Cornhill_, cut the ground from under its feet. The last remarkable
novel that I remember seeing in the form was _The Last Chronicle of
Barset. Middlemarch_ and _Daniel Deronda_ came out in parts which were
rather volumes than parts.
This piece-meal publication, whether in part or periodical, could not be
without some effects on the character of the production. These were
neither wholly good nor wholly bad. They served to some extent to
correct the tendency, mentioned above, of the three-volume novel to "go
to seed" in the middle--to become a sort of preposterous sandwich with
meat on the outsides and a great slab of ill-baked and insipid bread
between. For readers would not have stood this in instalments: you had
to provide some bite or promise of bite in each--if possible--indeed to
leave each off at an interesting point. But this itself rather tended to
a jumpy and ill-composed whole--to that mechanical shift from one part
of the plot to another which is so evident, for instance, in Trollope:
and there was worse temptation behind. If a man had the opportunity, the
means, the courage, and the artistic conscience necessary to finish his
work before any part of it appeared, or at least to scaffold it
thoroughly throughout in advance, no harm was done. But perhaps there is
no class of people with whom the temptation--common enough in every
class--of hand-to-mouth work is more fatal than with men of letters. It
is said that even the clergy are human enough to put off their
sermon-writing till Saturday, and what can be expected of the profane
man, especially when he has a whole month apparently before him? It is
pretty certain that Thackeray succumbed to this temptation: and so did a
great many people who could much less afford to do so than Thackeray.
It was almost certainly responsible for part of the astonishing
medley of repetitions and lapses in Lever: and I am by no means
sure that some of Dickens's worst faults, especially the ostentatious
plot-that-is-no-plot of such a book as _Little Dorrit_--the plot which
marks time with elaborate gesticulation and really does not advance at
all--were not largely due to the system.
Let it only be added that these expensive forms of publication by no
means excluded cheap reprints as soon as a book was really popular. The
very big people kept up their prices: but everybody else was glad to get
into "popular libraries," yellow-backed railway issues, and the like, as
soon as possible.
It will have been seen that the present writer puts the novel of
1845-1870 very high: he would indeed put it, in its own compartment,
almost on a level with the drama of 1585-1625 or the poems of 1798-1825.
Just at the present moment there may be a pretty general tendency to
consider this allowance exaggerated if not preposterous: and to set it
down to the well-known foible of age for the period of its own youth.
There is no need to do more than suggest that those who were young when
Shakespeare, or when Byron, died, would not have been exactly in their
dotage if, forty years later, they had extolled the literature of their
nonage. One does not care to dwell long on such a point: but it may just
be observed that the present writer's withers are hardly even pinched,
let alone wrung, by the strictest application, to his case, of this
rather idle notion. For some of what he is praising as the best novels
were written before he was born; many while he was in the nursery; most
before he had left school, and practically all before he had ceased to
be an undergraduate. Now acute observers know that what may be called
the disease of contemporary partisanship rarely even begins till the
undergraduate period, and is at its severest from twenty-five to
thirty-five. I would undertake that most of our reviewers who discover
Shakespeares and Sainte-Beuves, improved Thackerays and bettered
Molières, week by week or day by day, count their years between these
limits. _Beati illi_ from some points of view, but from others, if they
go on longer, Heaven help them indeed!
But all this is really idle. A critic is not right or wrong because he
is young or old as the case may be; because he follows the taste of his
age or runs counter to it; because he likes the past or because he likes
the present. He is right or wrong according as he does or does not like
the right things in the right way. And it is a simple historical fact,
capable now of being seen in a proper perspective, and subjected to the
proper historical tests, that, in the large sense, the two generations
from the appearance of Scott and Miss Austen to the death of Dickens
(and considering the ebb which followed Scott and Miss Austen
themselves, specially the latter of these two), supplied the spring tide
of the novel-flood, the flower-time of its flowering season, the acme of
its climax.
The comparison, both in the longer and shorter time, to the great summer
of the drama may be too complimentary--I do not think it is, except in
so far as that drama necessarily involved poetry, a higher thing by far
than either drama itself or novel--but it is certainly not an altogether
comfortable one. For we know that the drama, thereafter, has never had a
more than galvanised life, except in the imagination of the gentlemen
who discover Shakespeares and Molières as aforesaid. And there are those
who say that, not only at the moment, but for some time past, the state
of the novel is, and has been, not much more promising. The student who
is thoroughly broken to the study of literary history is never a
pessimist, though he may be very rarely an optimist: for the one thing
of which he should be thoroughly convinced is its incalculableness. But
he might admit--while reserving unlimited trust in the Wind of the
Spirit and its power to blow exactly as it listeth, and to awaken the
dryest of dry bones--that circumstances are not incompatible with
something like a decay in the novel: just as they were with a decay in
the drama. The state of society and temper in the late sixteenth and
early seventeenth century--not too well regulated; stirred at once by
the sinking force of the mediæval and the rising force of the modern
spirit; full of religious revival which had happily not gone wholly
wrong, as it had in some other countries; finding ready to its hand a
language which had cast most of its sloughs of accidence and prosody,
and was fresh, limber, ready for anything; enterprising but not buried
in business--was favourable to the rise and flourishing of this
disorderly abundance of dramatic creation--tragic, comic, and in all the
varieties that _Hamlet_ catalogues or satirises. The mid-nineteenth
century had something of the same hot-bed characteristic, though
sufficiently contrasted and fitted to produce a different growth. It
had, if at a little distance, the inspiriting memory of a great war,
where the country had taken the most glorious part possible. It also had
a great religious revival, which had taken no coarse or vulgar form.
Although the middle class had seized, and the lower classes were
threatening to seize, the government, even the former had not
monopolised the helm. There was in society, though it was not
strait-laced or puritanical, a general standard of "good form."
Scholarship and knowledge of literature had not yet been exchanged for
"education" and ignorance of letters. The national fancy for sport was
in about its healthiest condition, emerging from one state of
questionableness and not yet plunged in another. The chair of the chief
of the kinds of literature--poetry--which always exercises a singular
influence over the lower forms, was still worthily occupied and
surrounded. And, above all, the appetite for the novel was still eager,
fresh, and not in the least sated, jaded, or arrived at that point when
it has to be whetted by asafoetida on the plates or cigarettes between
the courses. Few better atmospheres could be even imagined for the
combined novel-romance--the story which, while it did not exclude the
adventurous or even the supernatural in one sense, insisted on the
rational in another, and opened its doors as wide as possible to every
subject, or combination of subjects, that would undertake to be
interesting. That the extraordinary reply made by genius and talent to
the demand thus created and encouraged should last indefinitely could
not be expected: that the demand itself should lead to overproduction
and glut was certain. But, as we shall see, there was no sudden
decadence; the period even of best or nearly best production went on
with no important intermission; and was but yesterday still represented
by two great names, is still represented by one, among the older
writers, by more than one or two names of credit among the middle-aged
and younger. To these in some degree, and to those who have finished
their career in the last thirty years to a greater, we must now turn.