CHAPTER VIII

THE FICTION OF YESTERDAY--CONCLUSION

In regard to a large part of the subject of the present chapter the

present writer possesses the knowledge of a reviewer, week by week and

almost day by day, of contemporary fiction between 1873 and 1895. It so

happened that the beginning of this period coincided very nearly with

the beginning of that slightly downward movement of the

nineteenth-century novel which has been referred to at the end of the

last chapter: and he thus had opportunities of observing it all along

its course, till we parted company. It must again, and most strongly, be

insisted that this "downward movement," like such movements generally in

literature, is only so to be characterised with considerable provisos

and allowances. Literary "down-grades" are not like the slopes of an

inclined plane: they are like portions of a mountain range, in which

isolated peaks may shoot up almost level with the very highest of the

central group, but in which the table lands are lower, the _average_

height of the hills inferior, and the general sky-line a nearer and

nearer approximation to the plain. At the actual death of Dickens there

was no reason for any one less hopelessly pessimist than Peacock's Mr.

Toobad, or Sydney Smith's Tuxford waiter, to take a gloomy view of the

future of the novel. Of the greater novelists mentioned in the last

chapter Charlotte Brontë and Mrs. Gaskell were indeed dead, and if

Kingsley had not wholly ceased writing novels, he had, before ceasing,

given signs that he had better do so. Yet, at least to the admirers of

"George Eliot," she was at her most admirable; some of the very best

stuff of Trollope was but just past, and some of all but his best was

still to appear; Charles Reade was writing busily with that curious

unsatisfactory genius of his; others were well at work.

There was also no lack of newer comers. Mr. Meredith had been writing

for some dozen years: and though he had achieved no general popularity,

though even critics might make reserves as to points in his procedure,

there could be no competent doubt of his great powers. Mr. Blackmore had

made his late beginning some time before: and had just caught the public

ear unmistakably with _Lorna Doone_ (1869). Mr. Hardy was on the eve of

catching it with the new and powerful attractions of _Under the

Greenwood Tree_ (1872). In the heart of the sixties (1863-4-6), the

_Chronicles of Carlingford_ had seemed the promissory notes of a

novelist of the absolutely first class in Mrs. Oliphant, though somehow

the bills were rather renewed than met. Others to be noticed immediately

had come or were coming on. Let us take a little more detailed notice of

them.

In the cases of Mr. Meredith and of Mr. Hardy--not to speak of others on

whom the bar still luckily rests--the "great ox" was, until the original

composition of this book was actually finished, "on the tongue" of any

one who does not disregard the good old literary brocard "_de_ vivis

_nil nisi_ necessarium." You may and must criticise, with as much

freedom as consists with courtesy, the successive stages of the work of

the living master as he submits it to your judgment by publication. But

justice no less than courtesy demands that, until the work is finished,

and sealed as a whole--till the _ne varietur_ and _ne plus ultra_ of

death have been set on it--you shall abstain from a more general

judgment, which can hardly be judicial, and which will have difficulty

in steering between the fulsome if it be favourable and the uncivil if

it be adverse. Fortunately there was little difficulty in any of our

three excepted cases. As has been already hinted in one case, the chorus

of praise, ever since it made itself heard, has not been quite

unchequered. It has been objected both to Mr. Meredith and to Mr. Hardy

that there is in them a note, perhaps to be detected also generally in

the later fiction which they have so powerfully influenced--the note of

a certain _perversity_--of an endeavour to be peculiar in thought, in

style, in choice of subject, in handling of it; in short in general

attitude. And with this has been connected--not in their cases with

any important or really damaging effect, though undoubtedly so in regard

to some of their followers--a suggestion that this "perversity" is the

note of a waning period--that just as the excessive desire to be _like_

all the best models is the note of Classical decadence, so the excessive

desire to be _unlike_ everything else is the note of Romantic

degeneration.

There is truth in this, but it damages neither Mr. Meredith nor Mr.

Hardy on the whole; though it may supply a not altogether wholesome

temptation to some readers to admire them for the wrong things, and may

interpose a wholly unnecessary obstacle in the way of their full and

frank enjoyment by others. The intellectual power and the artistic skill

which have been shown in the long series that has followed _The Ordeal

of Richard Feverel_; the freshness and charm of the earlier, the

strenuous workmanship and original handling of the later, novels of the

author of _Far from the Madding Crowd_ and of _Tess of the

D'Urbervilles_, simply disable off-hand the judgment of the critic--and

in fact annul his jurisdiction--if he fails to admire them; while in

some cases universal, in many general, in all considerable and not

trivial delight has been given by them to generations of novel readers.

Above all, it may be said of both these veterans that they have held the

standard high, that--in Mr. Meredith's case more specially and for a

longer preliminary period, but virtually in both--they have had to

await the taste for their work: and that in awaiting it they have never

stooped for one moment to that dastardly and degrading change of sail to

catch the popular breeze, which has always been the greatest curse of

politics and of literature--the two chief worldly occupations and ends

of the mind of man--that they have been and are artists who wait till

the world comes to them, and not artisans who haunt the market places to

hire themselves out to the first comer who will pay their price, or even

bate their price to suit the hirer. If it were possible to judge the

literary value of a period by its best representatives--which is

exactly what is _not_ possible--then the period 1870-1908 might, as far

as novel-writing is concerned, point to these two names and say, "These

are mine; what does it matter what you choose to say against me?"

The foregoing remarks were actually written before Mr. Meredith's death:

and I have thought it better to leave them exactly as they then stood

with hardly any correction; but it may justly be expected that they

should now be supplemented. The history of Mr. Meredith's career and

reputation, during the half century which passed between the appearance

of _Richard Feverel_ and his death, has a certain obvious resemblance to

that of Browning's, but with some differences. His work at once arrested

attention, but it did not at once in all, or in many, cases fix it, even

with critical readers: and for a long time the general public turned an

obstinately deaf ear. He followed _The Ordeal_ itself--a study of very

freely and deeply drawn character; of incident sometimes unusual and

always unusually told; of elaborate and disconcerting epigram or rather

of style saturated with epigrammatic quality; and of a strange ironic

persiflage permeating thought, picture, and expression in the same

way--unhastingly but unrestingly with others. _Evan Harrington_ (1861)

is generally lighter in tone; and should be taken in connection with the

ten years later _Harry Richmond_ as an example of what may be called a

sort of new picaresque novel--the subjects being exalted from the

gutter--at least the street gutter--to higher stories of the novel

house. _Emilia in England_ (1864), later called _Sandra Belloni_, and

its sequel _Vittoria_ (1866), embody, especially the latter, the

Italomania of the mid-century. Between them _Rhoda Fleming_ (1865),

returning to English country life, showed, with the old characteristics

of expression, tragic power superior perhaps to that of the end of

_Feverel_. In fact some have been inclined to put _Rhoda_ at the head.

In 1875 _Beauchamp's Career_ showed the novelist's curious fancy for

studying off actual contemporaries; for it is now perfectly well known

who "Beauchamp" was: and four years later came what the true Meredithian

regards as the masterpiece, _The Egoist_. Two other books followed, to

some extent in the track of _Beauchamp's Career, Diana of the Crossways_

(1886), utilising the legend of Mrs. Norton's betrayal of secrets, and

_The Tragic Comedians_ (1881), the story of the German socialist

Lassalle. The author's prediction, never hurried, now slackened, and by

degrees ceased, but the nineties saw three books, _One of Our

Conquerors_ (1891), _Lord Ormont and his Aminta_ (1894), and _The

Amazing Marriage_ (1895).

No bibliography of Mr. Meredith being here necessary or possible,

smaller and miscellaneous things need not detain us; and we are not

concerned with his sometimes charming verse. It is the character, and

especially the "total-effect" character, of the major novels with which

we have to do. This has been faintly adumbrated above, but the lines

must be a little deepened and the contour filled in to some extent here.

By invoking (practically at the outset of his work) "the Comic Spirit"

as the patron of his endeavours and the inspirer of his art, Mr.

Meredith of course did no more than assert his claim to place himself in

the right race and lineage of Cervantes and Fielding. Nor, though the

claim be a bold one, can there be much dispute among competent judges

that he made it out. To the study, not in a frivolous or even merely

satirical, but in a gravely ironic mode, of the nature of humanity he

addicted himself throughout: and the results of his studies undoubtedly

enlarge humanity's conscious knowledge of itself in the way of

fictitious exemplification. In a certain sense no higher praise can be

given. To acknowledge it is at once to estate him, not only with

Cervantes and Fielding themselves, but with Thackeray, with Swift, with

Moliere, with Shakespeare. It places him well above Dickens, and, in the

opinion of the present writer, it places him above even Balzac.

But there are points wherein, according to that same opinion, he

approaches much nearer to Balzac and Dickens than to the other and

greater artistic creators: while in one of these points he stands

aloof even from these two, and occupies a position--not altogether to his

advantage--altogether by himself in his class of artistic creation. All

the six from Thackeray to Shakespeare--one might even go farther back

and, taking a more paradoxical example, add Rabelais--are, even in

extravaganza, in parody, in what you please, at once pre-eminently and

_prima facie_ natural and human. To every competent human judgment, as

soon as it is out of its nonage, and barring individual

disqualifications of property or accident, this human nature attests

itself. You may dislike some of its manifestations; you may decline or

fail to understand others; but there it is, and there it is _first_. In

Balzac and Dickens and Mr. Meredith it is not first. Of course it is

there to some extent and even to a large one: or they would not be the

great writers that they are, or great writers at all. But it is not

merely disguised by separable clothings, as in Rabelais wholly and in

parts of others, or accompanied, as in Swift and others still, by

companions not invariably acceptable. It is to a certain extent

adulterated, sophisticated, made not so much the helpmeet, or the

willing handmaid, of Art as its thrall, almost its butt. I do not know

how early criticism, which now seems to have got hold of the fact,

noticed the strong connection-contrast between Dickens and Meredith: but

it must always have been patent to some. The contrast is of course the

first to strike:--the ordinariness, in spite of his fantastic grotesque,

of Dickens, and the extraordinariness of Meredith; the almost utter

absence of literature in Dickens, and the prominence of it in

Meredith--divers other differences of the same general kind. But to any

one reflecting on the matter it should soon emerge that a spirit,

kindred in some way, but informed with literature and anxious "to be

different," starting too with Dickens's example before him, might, and

probably would, half follow, half revolt into another vein of not

anti- but extra-natural fantasy, such as that which the author of _The

Ordeal of Richard Feverel_ actually worked.

"Extra- not anti-" that is the key. The worlds of Dickens, of Balzac,

and of Meredith are not impossible worlds: for the only worlds which are

impossible are those which are inconsistent with themselves, and none of

these is that. Something has been said of the "four dimensions" which

are necessary to work Dickens's world, and our business here is not with

Balzac's. But something must now be said of the fourth dimension--some

would say the fifth, sixth, and almost tenth dimensions--which is or are

required to put Mr. Meredith's in working order. I do not myself think

that more than a fourth is needed, and I have sometimes fancied that if

Mohammedan ideas of the other world be true, and an artist is obliged to

endow all his fictitious creations with real life, it will be by the

reduction and elimination of this dimension that Mr. Meredith will have

to proceed. There will be great joy in that other world when he has done

it: and, alarming as the task looks, I think it not impudent to say that

no one who ever enjoyed his conversation will think it impossible.

The intrusive element can, however, only be designated singly by rather

enlarging the strict and usual sense of the term Style so as to include

not merely diction, but the whole manner of presentation--what, in

short, is intended by the French word _faire_. For this, or part of

this, he made, in relation to his poems, a sort of apology-explanation

in the lines prefixed to the collected edition, and entitled "The

Promise in Disturbance." I am not sure that there is any single place

where a parallel excuse-defiance musters itself up in the novels: but

there are scores (the prelude to _The Egoist_ occurs foremost) where it

is scattered about all of them; and it is certainly much more required

there. Indeed as far as the narrow sense of "style" goes, the

peculiarity, whether they admit it to be a fault or not, is practically

admitted as a fact by all but Meredith-monomaniacs. Here is a _sors

Meredithiana_, taken from _Rhoda Fleming_, one of the simplest of the

books:--

"Algernon waited dinnerless until the stealthy going minutes distended

and swelled monstrous and horrible as viper-bitten bodies, and the

venerable Signior Time became of unhealthy hue."

To match that--it would be exceedingly easy to match and beat it out of

the author himself--you must go to the maddest of the seventeenth-century

metaphysicals--say to Edward Benlowes himself. But this is nothing: it is

at worst an obvious playful exaggeration, very like some things of

Dickens's own transposed into another key. But take this opening of

the fifteenth chapter of _Diana of the Crossways_:--

"The Gods of this world's contests, against whom our poor stripped

individual is commonly in revolt, are, as we know, not miners, they are

reapers; and if we appear no longer on the surface, they cease to bruise

us: they will allow an arena character to be cleansed and made

presentable while enthusiastic friends preserve discretion. It is of

course less than magnanimity; they are not proposed to you for your

worship; they are little Gods, temporary as that great wave, their

parent human mass of the hour. But they have one worshipful element in

them, which is, the divine insistency upon there being two sides to a

case--to every case. And the People so far directed by them may boast of

healthfulness. Let the individual shriek, the innocent, triumphant, have

in honesty to admit the fact. One side is vanquished according to decree

of Law, but the superior Council does not allow it to be extinguished."

Here undoubtedly there is something more than a simile, an image, or a

_pointe_; there is a thought, and the author's admirers would, I

suppose, rely triumphantly on it as a marriage of original thought and

phrase. But is it so? Is the thought really anything more than the

perfectly correct and obvious one that, if you let scandal alone it will

die, or at least go into abeyance? Does that thought really gain

anything from being tricked out with not always very congruously

arranged paraphernalia of Gods, and arenas, and reapers, and miners, and

the People with a large P, and shrieks, and innocency, and the rest? A

palate or an appetite so jaded that it cannot appreciate thought put

before it plainly, or so sluggish that it requires to be stung or

puzzled into thinking, may derive some advantage. But are these exactly

the tastes and appetites that should be accepted as arbiters?

Again, partly through this perpetual mirage and steam-cloud of style,

partly by other methods, Mr. Meredith manages, with consummate

cleverness no doubt, to colour his whole representation of character and

story in the same extra-natural way. Take the rick-burning at the

beginning of _Feverel_; take the famous wine scene (a very fascinating

one, though I never heard anywhere else, in some researches on the

subject, of port that would keep ninety years) in _The Egoist_. The

things may have happened this way in some Georgium Sidus, where the

Comic Spirit has arranged the proper Fourth Dimension: but that is not

the way they happen here. The Wise Youth, Diana, Edward Blancove, Roy

Richmond--but why begin a list which would never end?--are inhabitants

of the same region. They are not impossible: they could be translated

into actual tellurian beings, which the men and women of the bad

novelist never can be. But at present they are not translated: and you

must know a special language, in a wide sense, in order to translate

them. I do not say that the language is impossible or even very hard to

learn: but it is required. And Meredithians say you ought to learn it.

An extremely respectable book of reference before me rebukes "those who

lack the intelligence and sensibility that can alone admit them to the

charmed circle of appreciative readers" and who "have not patience to

apply themselves to the study of the higher fiction with the same ardour

that they think necessary in the case of any other art."

Now "Fudge!" is a rude word: but I fear we must borrow it from

Goldsmith's hero, and apply it here. As for "charmed circles" there is

uncommonly good company outside them, where, as Beatrice says, we may

"be as merry as the day is long," so that the Comic Spirit cannot

entirely disdain us. And as for art--the present writer will fight for

its claims as long as he has breath. But the proof of the art of the

novelist is that--at first hand or very shortly--he "enfists,"

absorbs, delights you. You may discover secrets of his art afterwards

with much pleasure and profit: but the actual first-hand delight is the

criterion. There ought to be no need of sitting down before the thing

with tools and dynamite like burglars at a safe; of mustering crucibles

and reagents like assayers at some doubtful and recalcitrant piece of

ore. Now these not very adept defenders of Mr. Meredith seem to assert

that these processes are desirable in any case, and necessary in his. As

a matter of fact the necessity is not omnipresent: but it is present far

too frequently. It is the first duty of the novelist to "let himself be

read"--anything else that he gives you is a _bonus_, a trimming, a

dessert.

It is not unamusing to those who regarded Mr. Meredith during almost his

whole career with those mingled feelings of the highest admiration and

of critical reserve which this notice has endeavoured to express, to

note a new phase which seems to be coming over the youngest criticism.

The original want of appreciation has passed, never, one may hope, to

return; and the middle _engouement_, which was mainly engineered by

those doughty partisans, Mr. Stevenson and Mr. Henley, is passing

likewise. But the most competent and generous juniors seem to be a

little uncomfortable, to have to take a good deal on trust, and not

quite to "like the security." To those who know the history of critical

opinion these signs speak pretty clearly, though not so as to authorise

them to anticipate the final judgment absolutely. Genius, all but of the

highest, can hardly be denied to Mr. Meredith: but it is genius marred,

perhaps by unfortunate education, certainly by undue egotism, by a

certain Celtic _tapage_, and by a too painful and elaborate endeavour to

be unlike other people.

A very interesting subject for examination from the present point of

view is Mr. Blackmore, because, on the one hand there is complete

_parrhesia_, and on the other (here at least) enthusiastic admiration.

Few of our modern novelists have combined so much scholarship with so

much command of mother wit and racy English, so much close study of

minor character and local speech with such wealth of romantic fancy;

such a thorough observance of "good form" with so complete a freedom

from priggishness and prudery. To this day there are lively

controversies whether he worked up the Doone story from local tradition

or made it "out of his own head." But whichever he did (and the present

historian owns that he cares very little about the point) the way in

which he has turned a striking, but not extraordinary, and certainly not

very extensive West Country glen into an _Arabian Nights_ valley, with

the figures and action of a mediæval romance and the human interest of

a modern novel, is really wonderful. And there is hardly a book of his

last thirty years' production, from _Clara Vaughan_ to _Perlycross_,

which has not vigour, variety, character, "race" enough for half a

dozen. In such books, for example, as _The Maid of Sker_ and _Cripps the

Carrier_ the idiosyncrasy is extraordinary: the quaint and piquant

oddity of phrase and apophthegm is as vivid as Dickens, rather more

real, and tinged somehow with a flavour of literature, even of poetry,

which was Dickens's constant lack.

And yet when one comes to consider the books critically, either one by

one, or in pairs and batches, or as a whole, it is somehow or other

difficult to pronounce any one exactly a masterpiece. There is a want of

"inevitableness" which sometimes amounts to improbability, as in the

case particularly of that most vivid and racy of books, _Cripps the

Carrier_, where the central incident or situation, though by no means

impossible, is almost insultingly unlikely, and forces its unlikeliness

on one at almost every moment and turn. Never, perhaps, was there a

better instance of that "possible-improbable" which contrasts so fatally

with the "probable-impossible." In not a few cases, too, there is that

reproduction of similar _dénouements_ and crucial occurrences which is

almost necessary in a time when men write many novels. In almost all

there is a want of central interest in the characters that should be

central; in some an exaggeration of dialect; or of quaint non-dialectic

but also non-catholic locutions on the author's part. One rather hates

oneself for finding such faults--no one of which is absolutely fatal--in

a mass of work which has given, and continues to give, so much pleasure:

but the facts remain. One would not have the books _not_ written on any

account; but one feels that they were written rather because the author

chose to do so than because he could not help it. Now it is possible to

exaggerate the necessity of "mission" and the like: but, after all, _Ich

kann nicht anders_ must be to some extent the mood of mind of the man

who is committing a masterpiece.

Something of the sort is still more noticeable in the work of other

writers of the period. We have seen that two ladies of great talent,

Mrs. Oliphant and Mrs. Craik, began to write, long before Mr. Meredith

published _Richard Feverel_ and very little later than the time of

_Vanity Fair_. They produced, the one in _Salem Chapel_ (1863), a book

which contemporaries might be excused for thinking likely to herald a

new George Eliot at least; the other, in _John Halifax, Gentleman_

(1857), a book of more sentimentalism, but of great interest and merit.

Both were miracles of fecundity, Mrs. Craik producing, in the shorter

life of the two, not much fewer than fifty novels; Mrs. Oliphant,

besides a great deal of work in other departments, a tale which did not

stop very far short of the hundred. The latter, moreover, gave, at a

comparatively late period of her career, evidences of being able to

start new lines--the supernatural stories of her last stages are only

inferior to the _Chronicles of Carlingford_ themselves. Yet, once more,

we look for a masterpiece in vain: in fact in Mrs. Oliphant's case we

ask, how could any human being, on such a system of production, be

expected to produce masterpieces? Scott, I think, once wrote four or

nearly four novels in a year: and the process helped to kill him. Mrs.

Oliphant did it over and over again, besides alternating the annual dose

still more frequently with twos and threes. In her case the process only

killed her novels.

Three remarkable novelists of the other sex may be mentioned, in the

same way, together. They were all acquaintances of the present writer,

and one of them was his friend: moreover, he is quite certain that he

could not write as good a novel as the worst of theirs, and only takes

credit to himself for not having attempted to do so. These are James

Payn, William Black, and Sir Walter Besant. Mr. Payn was an extremely

agreeable person with a great talent for amusing, the measure of which

he perhaps took pretty early--consoling himself for a total absence of

high pretension by a perhaps not quite genuine affectation of

good-natured but distinctly Philistine cynicism, and a half serious,

half affected belief that other men's delight in their schools, their

universities, the great classics of the past, etc., was _blague_. He

never made this in the least offensive; he never made any one of his

fifty or sixty novels anything but interesting and (when the subject

required it) amusing. There never was any novelist less difficult to

read a first time: I really do not know that it would be extremely

difficult to read him a second; but also I have seldom come across a

novelist with whom I was so little inclined to try it. It is a great

thing, no doubt, as has been said, from a certain point of view--that of

_pastime_--that the reading of a novel should be easy and pleasant. But

perhaps this is not all that you are entitled to ask of it. And as Mr.

Payn began with _Poems_, and some other suggestive books, I am inclined

to think that perhaps he did _not_ always regard literature as a thing

of the kind of a superior railway sandwich.

It is quite certain that, in his beginning, Mr. William Black

entertained no such idea; for his actual _débuts_ were something like

what long afterwards were called problem-novels, and _In Silk Attire_

(1869), _Kilmeny_ (1870), and the charming _Daughter of Heth_ (1871)

attempted a great deal besides mere amusement. It is true that no one of

them--not even the last--could be called an entire success: a "little

more powder" was wanted to send the shots home, and such flight as they

achieved did not even seem to be aimed at any distinct and worthy

object. But fortunately for his pocket, unfortunately for his fame, he

hit the public taste of the time with a sort of guidebook-novel in _The

Strange Adventures of a Phaeton_ (1872) and _A Princess of Thule_

(1873), and was naturally tempted to continue it, or to branch off only

into not very strong stories of society. Once he made an effort at

combining tragic romance with this latter kind in _Macleod of Dare_

(1878), but, though this was nearer to a success than some of his

critics admitted, it was not quite a success: and though he wrote fully

a score of novels after it, he never came nearer the actual bull's eye.

In fact his later work was not up to a very good average.

Neither of these writers, except, as has been said, perhaps Black in his

earliest stage, had taken novel-writing very seriously: it was otherwise

with the third of the trio. Mr., afterwards Sir Walter, Besant did not

begin early, owing to the fact that, for nearly a decade after leaving

Cambridge, he was a schoolmaster in Mauritius. But he had, in this time,

acquired a greater knowledge of literature than either of the other two

possessed: and when he came home, and took to fiction, he accompanied it

with, or rather based it upon, not merely wide historical studies, which

are still bearing fruit in a series of posthumous dealings with the

history of London, but rather minute observation of the lower social

life of the metropolis. For some ten years his novel production was

carried on, in a rather incomprehensible system of collaboration, with

James Rice, a Cambridge man like himself and a historian of the turf,

but one to whom no independent work in fiction is attributed, except an

incredibly feeble adaptation of _Mr. Verdant Green_, entitled _The

Cambridge Freshman_ and signed "Martin Legrand." During the seventies,

and for a year or two later, till Rice's death in 1882, the pair

provided along series of novels from _Ready-Money Mortiboy_ (1871) to

_The Chaplain of the Fleet_ (1881), the most popular book between being,

perhaps, _The Golden Butterfly_ (1876). These belonged, loosely, to the

school of Dickens, as that school had been carried on by Wilkie Collins

(_v. inf._), but with less grotesque than the original master, and less

"sensation" than the head pupil; with a good deal of solid knowledge

both of older and more modern life; with fairly substantial plots, good

character-drawing of the more external kind, and a sufficient supply of

interesting incident, dialogue, and description.

It was certain that people would affect to discover a "falling off" when

the partnership was dissolved by Rice's death: but as a matter of fact

there was nothing of the kind. Such books as the very good and original

_Revolt of Man_ (which certainly owed nothing to collaboration), as _All

Sorts and Conditions of Men_ (1882), the first of the kind apparently

that Besant wrote alone, as _Dorothy Forster_ (1884), and as the

powerful if not exactly delightful _Children of Gibeon_ (1886) were

perhaps more vigorous than anything earlier, and certainly not less

original. But the curse of the "machine-made" novel, which has been

already dwelt upon, did not quite spare Besant: and in these later

stories critics could point, without complete unfairness, to an

increasing obsession of the "London" subject, especially in regard to

the actual gloom and possible illumination of the East End, and on the

other to a resort to historical subjects, less as suggestions or

canvases than as giving the substance of the book. The first class of

work, however (which actually resulted in a "People's Palace" and was

supposed to have obtained his knighthood for him), is distinctly

remarkable, especially in the light of succeeding events. Most of the

unfavourable criticisms passed upon Besant's novel-work were in the main

the utterances of raw reviewers, who thought it necessary to "down"

established reputations. But it would be impossible for any competent

critic, however much he might be biassed off the bench by friendship,

not to admit, on it, that he also shows the effect, which we have been

illustrating from others, of the system of novel-production _à la

douzaine_. In such a case, and on the, in themselves, salutary

conditions of the new novel, the experiences and interests of life may

or must come to be regarded too regularly as supplying "grist for the

mill"; nay, the whole of life and literature, which no doubt ought in

all cases to furnish suggestion and help to art and inspiration, are too

often set to a sort of _corvèe_, a day-task, a tale of bricks. It is,

one allows, hard to prevent this: and yet nothing is more certain that

bricks so made are not the best material to be wrought into any really

"star-y-pointing pyramid" that shall defy the operations of time.

A very curious and characteristic member of this group, Wilkie Collins,

has not yet been mentioned except by glances. He was a little older than

most of them, and came pretty early under the influence of Dickens,

whose melodramatic rather than his humorous side he set himself to work

to develop. In fact Collins was at least as much melodramatist as

novelist: and while most of his novels are melodrama in narrative form,

not a few of them were actually dramatised. He began as early as

1850--the dividing year--with _Antonina_: but his three great triumphs

in the "sensation" novel (as it was rather stupidly called) were _The

Dead Secret_ (1857), _The Woman in White_ (1860), and _No Name_ (1862).

Throughout the sixties and a little later, in _Armadale_ (1866), _The

Moonstone_ (1870), perhaps _The New Magdalen_ (1873), and even as late

as 1875 in _The Law and the Lady_, his work continued to be eagerly

read. But the taste for it waned: and its author's last fifteen years or

so (he died in 1889), though fairly fruitful in quantity, certainly did

not tend to keep it up in quality. Although Collins had a considerable

amount of rather coarse vigour in him (his brother Charles, who died

young, had a much more delicate art) and great fecundity in a certain

kind of stagy invention, it is hard to believe that his work will ever

be put permanently high. It has a certain resemblance in method to

Godwin and Mrs. Radcliffe, exciting situations being arranged, certainly

with great cleverness, in an interminable sequence, and leading,

sometimes at any rate, to a violent "revolution" (in the old dramatic

sense) at the end. Perhaps the best example is the way in which Magdalen

Vanstone's desperate and unscrupulous, though more than half

justifiable, machinations, to reverse the cruel legal accident which

leaves her and her sister with "No Name" and no fortune, are foiled by

the course of events, though the family property is actually recovered

for this sister who has been equally guiltless and inactive. Of its

kind, the machinery is as cleverly built and worked as that of any novel

in the world: but while the author has given us some Dickensish

character-parts of no little attraction (such as the agreeable rascal

Captain Wragge) and has nearly made us sympathise strongly with Magdalen

herself, he only succeeds in this latter point so far as to make us

angry with him for his prudish poetical or theatrical justice, which is

not poetical and hardly even just.

The specialist or particularist novel was not likely to be without

practitioners during this time: in fact it might be said, after a

fashion, to be more rife than ever: but it can only be glanced at here.

Its most remarkable representatives perhaps--men, however, of very

different tastes and abilities--were Richard Jefferies and Joseph Henry

Shorthouse. The latter, after attracting very wide attraction by a

remarkable book--almost a kind to itself--_John Inglesant_ (1880), a

half historical, half ecclesiastical novel of seventeenth-century life,

never did anything else that was any good at all, and indeed tried

little. The former, a struggling country journalist, after long failing

to make any way, wrote several three-volume novels of no merit, broke

through at last in the _Pall Mall Gazette_ with a series of studies of

country life, _The Gatekeeper at Home_ (1878), and afterwards turned

these into a peculiar style of novel, with little story and hardly any

character, but furnished with the backgrounds and the atmosphere of

these same sketches. His health was weak, and he died in early middle

age, leaving a problem of a character exactly opposed to the other.

Would Mr. Shorthouse, if he had not been a well-to-do man of business,

but obliged to write for his living, have done more and better work?

Would Jefferies, if he had been more fortunate in education, occupation,

and means, and furnished with better health, have co-ordinated and

expanded his certainly rare powers into something more "important" than

the few pictures, as of a Meissonier-_paysagiste_, which he has left us?

These inquiries are no doubt idle: but, once more, one may draw

attention to the way in which two men, so different in tastes and

fortune, neither, it would seem, with a very strong bent towards prose

fiction as the vehicle of his literary desires and accomplishments,

appear to have been forced, by the overpowering attraction and

popularity of the kind, to adopt the novel as their form of literature,

and to give the public, not what they wanted in the form which they

chose, but something at least made up in the form that the public

wanted, and disguised in the wrappers which the public were accustomed

to purchase.

The principal development of mid-nineteenth-century fiction had been, as

we have seen, in the direction of the novel _proper_--the

character-study of modern ordinary life. But, even as early as _Esmond_

and _Hypatia_, signs were not wanting that the romance, historical or

other, was not going to be content with the rather pale copies of Scott,

and the rococo-sentimental style of Bulwer, which had mainly occupied it

for the last quarter of a century. Still, though we have mentioned other

examples of the fifties and sixties, and have left ever so many more

unmentioned, it was certainly not as popular[27] as its rival till,

towards the end of the latter decade, Mr. Blackmore's _Lorna Doone_ gave

it a fresh hold on the public taste. Some ten years later again there

came to its aid a new recruit of very exceptional character, Mr. Robert

Louis Stevenson. He was a member of the famous family of light-house

engineers, and was educated for the Bar of Scotland, to which he was

actually called. But law was as little to his taste as engineering, and

he slowly gravitated towards literature--the slowness being due, not

merely to family opposition or to any other of the usual causes (though

some of these were at work), but to an intense and elaborate desire to

work himself out a style of his own by the process of "sedulously aping"

others. It may be very much doubted whether this process ever gave any

one a style of perfect freedom: and it may be questioned further whether

Stevenson ever attained such a style.

[27] Anthony Trollope, in one of the discursive passages in his

early books, has left positive testimony to the distaste with

which publishers regarded it.

But there could be no question that he did attain very interesting and

artistic effects, and there happened to be at the time a reaction

against what was called "slovenliness" and a demand for careful

preparation and planned effect in prose-writing. Even so, however, it

was not at once that Stevenson took to fiction. He began with essays,

literary and miscellaneous, and with personal accounts of travel: and

certain critical friends of his strongly urged him to continue in this

way. During the years 1878 and 1879, in a short-lived periodical called

_London_, which came to be edited by his friend the late Mr. Henley and

had a very small staff, he issued certain _New Arabian Nights_ which

caught the attention of one or two of his fellow-contributors very

strongly, and made them certain that a new power in fiction-writing had

arisen. It did not, however, at first much attract the public: and it

was the kind of thing which never attracts publishers until the public

forces their hands. For a time he had to wait, and to take what

opportunity he could get of periodical publication, "boy's

book"-writing, and the like. In fact _Treasure Island_ (1883), with

which he at last made his mark, is to this day classed as a boy's book

by some people who are miserable if they cannot classify. It certainly

deals with pirates, and pieces of eight, and adventures by land and sea;

but the manner of dealing--the style and narrative and the delineation

of the chief character, the engaging villain John Silver--is about as

little puerile as anything that can be imagined. From that time

Stevenson's reputation was assured. Ill health, a somewhat restless

disposition, and an early death prevented him from accomplishing any

great bulk of work: and the merit of what he did varied. Latterly he

took to a teasing process of collaboration, which his sincerest admirers

could have willingly spared. But his last completed book, _Catriona_

(1893), seemed to some judges of at least considerable experience the

best thing he had yet done, especially in one all-important

respect--that he here conquered either an unwillingness to attempt or an

inability to achieve the portraiture of feminine character, which his

books had previously displayed. The general opinion, too, was that the

unfinished _Weir of Hermiston_ (1897), which he left a fragment at his

death, was the best and strongest thing he had done, while it showed in

particular a distinct relinquishment, for something freer and more

spontaneous, of the effective but also rather affected and decidedly

laboured style in which he had hitherto written. For us, however, his

style is of less importance than the fact that he applied it almost

wholly to the carrying out of that rejuvenescence of romance of which we

have been speaking, and which may be taken, as anybody pleases, either

for a mere alternative to the domestic novel or as a definite revolt

against it. It was speedily taken up by writers mostly still living, and

so not to be dwelt on now.

Very late in the century the genius of Mr. William Morris turned from

verse to prose tale-telling in a series of romances which caught the

fancy neither of the public nor of the critics as a whole, but which

seem to some whom the gods have made not quite uncritical to be, if

rightly taken, of much accomplishment, and of almost more promise and

suggestion. These, seven or eight in number, from _The House of the

Wulfings_ (1889) to _The Sundering Flood_, published after the author's

death in 1898, were actual romances--written in a kind of modernised

fifteenth-century English, and dealing, some with far back incidents of

the conflict between Romans and "Barbarians," most with the frank

no-time and no-place of Romance itself. They came at an unfortunate

moment, when the younger generation of readers were thinking it proper

to be besotted with crude realism or story-less impressionism, and when

some at least of those who might have welcomed them earlier had left

their first faith in poetry or poetic prose. There was, moreover,

perhaps some genuine dislike, and certainly a good deal of precisian

condemnation, of the "Wardour Street" dialect. Yet there was no sham in

them: it was impossible for Mr. Morris to have anything to do with

shams--even his socialism was not that--and they were in reality a

revival, however Rip van Winklish it might seem, of the pure old romance

itself, at the hands of a nineteenth-century sorcerer, who no doubt put

a little of the nineteenth century into them. The best--probably the

best of all is _The Well at the World's End_ (1896)--have an

extraordinary charm for any one who can taste romance: and are by no

means unlikely to awake the taste for it in generations to come. But for

the present the thing lay out of the way of its generation, and was not

comprehended or enjoyed thereby. For it is no doubt nearly as annoying

to have bread given to you when you want thistles as to have thistles

given to you when you want bread. But just as the ballad is the

appointed reviver of poetry, so is romance the appointed reviver of

prose-fiction: and in one form or another it will surely do its work,

sooner or later.

Here it may be best to stop the actual current of critical comment on

individuals. Something has been hinted as to the general present

condition of the novel, but there is no need to emphasise it or to enter

into particulars about it: indeed, even if such a proceeding were

convenient in one way it would be very inconvenient in another. One

might, for instance, have to consider, rather curiously, a remarkable

statement recently attributed to a popular novelist that "the general

standard of excellence in fiction is higher _to-day_ than ever it was

before." But we can take higher ground. Far be it from me to bow to the

Baal of "up-to-dateness," for even if I had any such hankering, I think

I should remember that the surest way of being out-of-date to-morrow is

the endeavour to be up-to-date to-day. Only by keeping perspective can

you hope to confirm and steady your view: only by relinquishing the

impossible attempt to be complete can you achieve a relative

completeness.

Yet it is well to remember that Lockhart, one of the best critics who

ever lived (when he let himself be so), a novelist too, and not likely

to lose an opportunity of magnifying his office if he could, took

occasion, in noticing the novels of his friend Theodore Hook at poor

"Mr. Wagg's" death, gravely to deplore the decadence of the novel

generally: and not much later, in reprinting the article, had the wisdom

to recognise, and the courage to record, the fact that Thackeray had

disappointed his prognostications. Literature, it has been said, is the

incalculable of incalculables: and not only may a new novelist arise

to-morrow, but some novelist who has been writing for almost any number

of years may change his style, strike the vein, and begin the

exploitation of a new gold-field in novel-production.

But this does not affect the retrospect of the past. There we are on

perfectly firm ground--ground which we have traversed carefully already,

and which we may survey in surety now.

We have seen, then, that the prose novel--a late growth both in ancient

and in modern times in all countries--was a specially late and

slow-yielding one in English. Although Thoms's _Early English Prose

Romances_ is by no means an exhaustive collection, and for this reason

was not specially referred to in the first chapter, it is impossible not

to recognise that its three rather small volumes, of matter for the most

part exceeding poor and beggarly, contrast in the most pitiful fashion

with the scores and almost hundreds containing Early English Romances in

verse. Malory of course brings the prose-scale down very considerably

from its uncomfortably _meteoric_ position, and some other things help:

but the total of prose and verse before 1500 can be brought level by no

possible sleight of weighing. Still, as we have seen, this did not

matter very much: for the verse got "transprosed" sooner or later, and

the romances and tales of other countries were greedily admitted _ad

eundem_ in sixteenth and seventeenth century English.

Yet the novel proper lingered: and, except in the single and eccentric

masterpiece of Bunyan, the seventeenth century ended without having seen

one real specimen of prose fiction that was thoroughly satisfactory.

Nearly half the eighteenth had gone too, with nothing but the less

isolated but still not perfect performances of Defoe, and the once more

still eccentric masterpiece of _Gulliver_, before the novel-period

really opened. It is literally not more than two long lifetimes ago--it

is quite certain that there are now living hundreds, perhaps thousands,

of persons born when others were still living who drew their first

breaths in or before the year when Pamela made her modest, but very

distinctly self-conscious, curtsey to the world. How soon it grew to a

popular form of literature, and how steadily that popularity has

continued and increased, there is not much need to say or to repeat.

Statistical persons every year give us the hundreds of novels that

appear from the presses, and the thousands of readers who take them out

of, or read them in, public libraries. I do not know whether there

exists anywhere a record of the total number published since 1740, but I

dare say it does. I should not at all wonder if this total ran into

scores of thousands: if you were to bring in short stories it would

certainly do so. People have almost left off shaking their heads over

the preponderant or exclusive attention to fiction in these public

libraries themselves: in fact the tendency seems to be rather to make

out that it is decreasing. It may be so; or it may not. But what remains

certain is that there is a very large number of educated people to whom

"reading" simply means reading novels; who never think of taking up a

book that is not a novel; for whom the novel exhausts even the very

meaning of the word "literature." We know that the romance was

originally so called simply because it was the commonest book in

"Romance" language. We are less unsophisticated now: but there are

certainly large numbers of His Majesty's subjects by whom a novel on

this principle ought to be called "an english" though it might have to

share that appellation with the newspaper.

Yet, as we have seen, for this or that reason, the _average_ novel did

not come to anything like perfection for a very long time. In a single

example, or set of examples, it reached something like perfection almost

at once. Fielding, Scott, Miss Austen, and Thackeray are the Four

Masters of the whole subject, giving the lady the same degree as the

others by courtesy of letters. But in the first (as for the matter of

that in the last) of the four the success was rather a matter of

individual and inimitable genius than of systematic discovery of method

practicable by others. Nobody, except Thackeray himself, has ever

followed Fielding successfully, and that only in parts and touches; as

Fielding had (unfortunately) no opportunity of following Thackeray, no

one has ever followed Thackeray satisfactorily at all. Such reasons as

presented themselves have been given for the fact that nearly half of

the whole period passed before the two systems--of the pure novel and

the novel-romance--were discovered: and even then they were not at once

put to work. But the present writer would be the very first to confess

that these explanations leave a great deal unexplained.

Yet whatever faults there might be in the supply there could be no doubt

about the demand when it was once started. It was indeed almost entirely

independent of the goodness or badness of the average supply itself.

Allowing for the smaller population and the much smaller proportion of

that population who were likely to--who indeed could--read, and for the

inferior means of distribution, it may be doubted whether the largest

sales of novels recorded in the last half century have surpassed those

of the most trumpery trash of the "Minerva Press" period--the last

decade of the eighteenth and the first of the nineteenth century. For

the main novel-public is quite omnivorous, and almost absolutely

uncritical of what it devours. The admirable though certainly fortunate

Scot who "could never remember drinking bad whisky" might be echoed, if

they had the wit, by not a few persons who never seem to read a bad

novel, or at least to be aware that they are reading one.

At the same time, the failure of the quest for novel-recipes was

compensated by an absence of that working of those recipes to death

which the last century--or the last three-quarters of it--has seen. The

average work of any one of a dozen nineteenth-century producers of

novels by the dozen and the score, whom at this place it is not

necessary to name, is probably on the whole a much better turned out

thing--one better observing its own purposes, and open to less criticism

in detail--than even the best of the works of the earlier division

outside of Fielding. But the eighteenth-century books--faulty, only

partially satisfying as they may be in comparison, say, with a

well-succeeded Trollope or one of the better Blackmores--very often have

a certain idiosyncrasy, a freedom from machine-work, which supplies

something not altogether unlike the contrast between the furniture of

the two periods. Stress and dwelling have been purposely given, to some

minor books of this period, for this very reason.

But at the same time the limitations, outside the greatest, are

certainly peculiar. It seems wonderful that a man like Cumberland, for

instance, who had not a little literary talent, should not have been

able to make _Henry_ into a story of real interest that might hold the

reader as even second-class Trollope--say a book like _Orley

Farm_--does. We have ungraciously recognised that some of our lady

novelists, who wrote by forties and by fifties, did not always sustain

the interest of their novels. Miss Burney wrote four in all, and could

hardly keep up the interest of hers right through the second. Above all,

there is the difficulty of their failure with conversation and, in fact,

with any diction proper for conversation. If Horace Walpole, a

contemporary of the eighteenth-century novel from its actual start to

practically its finish, could give us thousands and all but tens of

thousands of phrases that want but a little of being novel-conversation

ready made, why could not the other people make it for their own

purposes? But we have got no answer to these questions: and probably

there is none.

The way in which Scott and Miss Austen themselves simultaneously found

out the secrets of the two kinds of novel is no doubt, as such ways

always are, in the larger part mysterious: but to a certain extent it

can be explained and analysed, independently of the direct literary

genius of each. One of the greatest gifts of Scott--one with which the

non-historical novelist can dispense as little as his brother the

historical--was that "genius of history" with which Lord Morley--a

critic not likely to be misled by sympathy in some respects at any

rate--has justly credited him. For unless you have this "historic

sense," as it has been more generally and perhaps better termed (though

to the intense disgust of some professed historians), it is not only

impossible for you to delineate scene and character at a distance from

your time, but you become really disqualified for depicting your own

time itself. You fail to distinguish the temporary from the permanent;

you achieve perhaps a fairly faithful copy of actual manners and

fashions, but you do nothing more, and as the subject dies so does the

picture. Contrast Hook, say, with Thackeray, and the difference will

emerge at once.

Secondly, Scott had, besides this historic sense and the relish for

humanity which must accompany it, a knowledge of literature with which

he has been too seldom credited to the full. When he published

_Waverley_ he had been reading all sorts and conditions of books for

some five-and-thirty years, and assimilating them if, as the pedants

will have it, with a distressing inaccuracy in particulars, with a

general and genial fidelity of which the pedants do not even dream and

could not comprehend, or they would not be pedants. He was thus

furnished with infinite stores of illustrative matter, never to

overpower, but always to accompany and season, his knowledge of life. In

a few instances this felicity of adoption has been recognised, but not a

tenth part of it has ever been systematically put on record. The more

widely and the longer a man reads, the more constantly will he find that

Scott has been before him, and has "lifted" just the touch that he

wanted at the time and in the place.

But perhaps a greater gift (there were still others which it would be

long to perscribe--descriptive faculty, humour, pathos, half a dozen

other things of the highest importance in themselves, but of less

special application) was that which enabled him to discover and apply

something like a universal novel _language_. He did this, not as

Shakespeare did (and as nobody but Shakespeare, except perhaps Dante to

some extent, ever has done or apparently could do), by making a really

universal language which fits all times and persons because it is

universal like its creator's soul. Still less did he do it by adopting

the method which Spenser did consummately, but which almost everybody

else has justified Ben Jonson by doing very badly:--that is to say by

constructing a mosaic of his own. But his own method was nearer to this

latter. For historical creations (the most important of his

non-historic, _Guy Mannering_ and the _Antiquary_, were so near his own

time that he had no difficulty) he threw back with remarkable cunning to

a period somewhat earlier, and coloured this up to the required tint by

actual suggestions from contemporary, or nearly contemporary,

literature, where he could get it. He has done this so consummately that

perhaps the only novel of his where the language strikes us as

artificial is the single one in which he actually endeavoured to be

"up-to-date"--_St. Ronan's Well_.

This question of "Lingo," on the other hand, was Miss Austen's weakest

point: and we have seen and shall see that it continued to be a weak

point with others. Some admirers have defended her even here: but proud

as I am to be an Austen Friar, a knight (or at least squire) of the

order of St. Jane, I cannot go to this length. She very nearly

succeeded, and sometimes she did quite: but not always. The easy

dialogue and phrase that we find as early as Horace Walpole, even as

Chesterfield and Lady Mary, in letters; which, in her own early days,

appears in Fanny Burney's diaries but not in the novels, does not seem

always within Miss Austen's grasp. But her advance in this respect is

enormous: she is, for instance, far beyond Scott himself in _St. Ronan's

Well_: and when she is thoroughly interested in a character, and engaged

in unfolding it and gently satirising it at the same time, she rarely

goes even a hair's-breadth wrong. In almost every other respect she does

not go wrong to the extent of the minutest section of a hair. The story

is the least part with her: but her stories are always miraculously

_adequate_: neither desultory and pillar-to-post, nor elaborated with

the minuteness which seems to please some people, but which is quite

indifferent to the majority, and is certainly a positive nuisance to a

few who are not quite of negligible judgment. But the reason of this

adequacy in story contains in itself her greatest triumph. Not being a

poet, she cannot reach the Shakespearian consummateness of poetic

phrase: though she sometimes comes not so far short of this in the prose

variety. But in the other great province of character, though hers is

but a Rutland to his Yorkshire--or rather to his England or his

world--she is almost equally supreme. And by her manipulation of it she

showed, once for all, how the most ordinary set of circumstances, and

even the most ordinary characters in a certain sense, can be made to

supply the material of prose fiction to an absolutely illimitable

extent. Her philosopher's stone (to take up the old parable again) does

not lose its powers even when all the metal in the house is

exhausted--if indeed the metal, or anything else, in the House of

Humanity were exhaustible. The chairs and tables, the beds and the

basins--everything--can be made into novel-gold: and, when it has been

made, it remains as useful for future conversion, by the same or any

other magician of the same class, as ever. One of the most curious

things about Miss Austen is the entire absence of self-repetition in

her. Even her young men--certainly not her greatest successes--are by no

means doubles of each other: and nature herself could not turn out half

a dozen girls more subtly and yet more sufficiently differentiated than

Catherine and Elizabeth, Marianne and Fanny, Elinor and Emma, and

finally the three sisters of _Persuasion_, the other (quite other)

Elizabeth, Mary, and Anne. The "ruts of the brain" in novelists are a

by-word. There are none here.

In these two great writers of English novel there is, really for the

first time, the complementary antithesis after which people have often

gone (I fear it must be said) wool-gathering elsewhere. The amateurs of

cosmopolitan literature, I believe, like to find it in Stendhal and

Michelet. They praise the former for his delicate and pitiless

psychological analysis. It had been anticipated a dozen years, nay,

nearly twenty years, before he saw the Beresina: and was being given out

in print at about the very moment of that uncomfortable experience, and

before he himself published anything, by a young English lady--a lady if

ever there was one and English if any person ever was--in a country

parsonage in Hampshire or in hired houses, quite humdrum and commonplace

to the commonplace and humdrum imagination, at Bath and Southampton.

They praise Michelet for his enthusiastic and multiform apprehension of

the plastic reality of the past, his re-creation of it, his putting of

it, live and active, before the present. The thing had been done, twenty

years earlier again, by a Scotch advocate who had deliberately turned

from poetic form, though he retained poetic imagination, and who did not

disdain not to make a fool of himself, as Michelet, with all his genius,

did again and again. Of all the essentials of the two manners of

fictitious creation--Michelet's was not fictitious, but he almost made

it so, and Stendhal's was not historical, but he almost made it so

likewise--Scott and Miss Austen had set the types, given the methods,

arranged the processes as definitely as Fust, or Coster, or Gutenberg,

or Fust's friend Mephistopheles--who perhaps, on the whole, has the best

title to the invention--did in another matter three hundred years

before.

That Scott's variety should be taken up first, and should for a time

have the great popularity, the greater number of disciples, the greater

acceptance as a mode of pleasing--was, as has been pointed out, natural

enough; it is not a little significant that (to avert our eyes from

England) the next practitioner of the psychological style in European

literature, Balzac, went through a long and mostly unsuccessful

probation in the other kind, and never wholly deserted it, or at least

always kept looking back to it. But the general shortcomings (as they

have been admitted to be) in the whole of the second quarter of the

century (or a little less) with us, were but natural results of the

inevitable expatiation, unsystematic and irresolute, over the newly

discovered provinces. And they gave admirable work of various

kinds--work especially admirable if we remember that there was no

general literary uprising with us as there was, in France and elsewhere,

about 1830. If it were in any way possible--similar supposings have been

admitted in literature very often--it would be extremely interesting to

take a person _ex hypothesi_ fairly acquainted with the rest of

literature--English, foreign, European, and classical--but who knew

nothing and had heard nothing of Bulwer, Disraeli, Peacock, Marryat,

even Ainsworth and James and others between Scott and the accomplished

work of Thackeray (Dickens's is, as has been said, mainly a sport of

genius), and to turn him loose on this work. I do him the justice to

suppose that he would find not a few faults: I shall also do him the

justice to think it likely that he (being, as said, _ex hypothesi_

furnished with the miscellaneous knowledge necessary to enjoy them)

would enjoy them very keenly and thoroughly. If you added the minorities

of the time, such as that very clever Miss Robinson (I think her name

was Emma) who wrote _Whitefriars_ and other historical romances in the

forties; such as Charles Macfarlane, who died, like Colonel Newcome, a

poor brother of the Charterhouse after writing capital things like _The

Dutch in the Medway_ and _The Camp of Refuge_--if, I say, you gave him

these things and he was a good man, but lazy, like Gray, I think he

would vote for a continuance of his life of novels and sofas without

sighing for anything further. But undoubtedly it might be contended that

something further was needed: and it came. This was verisimilitude--the

holding of the true mirror to actual society.

This verisimilitude, it should be observed, is not only difficult to

attain: it seems not to be easy even to recognise. I have seen it said

that the reason which makes it "hopeless for many people even to try to

get through _Pickwick_" (their state itself must be "hopeless" enough,

and it is to be hoped there are not "many" of them) is that it

"describes states of society unimaginable to many people of to-day."

Again, these many people must be somewhat unimaginative. But that is not

the point of the matter. The point is that Dickens depicts no "state of

society" that ever existed, except in the _Dickensium Sidus_. What he

gives is full of intensely real touches which help to create its charm.

But it is difficult to say that there is even a single person in it who

is real as a whole, in the sense of having possibly existed in this

world: and the larger whole of the book generally is pure fantasy--as

much so as one of the author's own favourite goblin-dream stories.

With Thackeray the case is exactly the opposite. It is a testimony no

doubt to Dickens's real power--though perhaps not to his readers'

perspicacity--that he made them believe that he intended a "state of

society" when, whether he intended it or not, he certainly has not given

it. But Thackeray intended it and gave it. His is a "state of society"

always--whether in late seventeenth century, early or late eighteenth,

early or middle nineteenth--which existed or might have existed; his

persons are persons who lived or might have lived. And it is the

discovery of this art of creation by him and its parallel diffusion

among his contemporaries that I am endeavouring to make clear here.

Fielding, Scott to some extent, Miss Austen had had it. Dickens, till

_Great Expectations_ at least, never achieved and I believe never

attempted it. Bulwer, having failed in it for twenty years, struck it at

last about this time, and so did, even before him, Mrs. Marsh, and

perhaps others, falteringly and incompletely. But as a general gift--a

characteristic--it never distinguished novelists till after the middle

of the century.

It is, I think, impossible to find a better meeting and overlapping

place of the old and the new novel, than that very remarkable book

_Emilia Wyndham_, which has been already more than once referred to. It

was written in 1845 and appeared next year--the year of _Vanity Fair_.

But the author was twenty years older than Thackeray, though she

survived him by nearly a dozen; she had not begun early; and she was

fifty-five when she wrote _Emilia_. The not unnatural consequence is

that there is a great deal of inconsistency in the general texture of

the book: and that any clever cub, in the 'prentice stage of reviewing,

could make columns of fun out of it. The general theme is age-old, being

not different from the themes of most other novels in that respect. A

half-idiotic spendthrift (he ends as very nearly an actual idiot) not

merely wastes his own property but practically embezzles that of his

wife and daughter; the wife dies and the daughter is left alone with an

extravagant establishment, a father practically _non compos_, not a

penny in her pocket after she has paid his doctor, and a selfish

baronet-uncle who will do less than nothing to help her. She has loved

half unconsciously, and been half consciously loved by, a soldier cousin

or quasi-cousin: but he is in the Peninsular War. Absolutely no help

presents itself but that of a Mr. Danby, a conveyancer, who, in some way

not very consonant with the usual etiquette of his profession, has been

mixed up with her father's affairs--a man middle-aged, apparently dry as

his own parchments, and quite unversed in society. He helps her clumsily

but lavishly: and her uncle forces her to accept his hand as the only

means of saving her father from jail first and an asylum afterwards. The

inevitable disunion, brought about largely by Danby's mother (an awful

old middle-class harridan), follows; and the desk-and-head incident

mentioned above is brought about by her seeing the (false) announcement

of her old lover's death in the paper. But she herself is consistently,

perhaps excessively, but it is fair to say not ridiculously, angelic;

Danby is a gentleman and a good fellow at heart; and of course, after

highly tragical possibilities, these good gifts triumph. The greatest

danger is threatened, and the actual happy ending brought about, by an

auxiliary plot, in which the actors are the old lover (two old lovers

indeed), his wife (a beautiful featherhead, who has been Emilia's

school-fellow and dearest friend), and a wicked "Duke of C."

Even from this sketch the tolerably expert reader of novels may discover

where the weak points are likely to lie; he will be a real expert if he

anticipates the strong ones without knowing the book. As was formerly

noticed, the dialogue is ill supplied with diction. The date of the

story is 1809: and the author had for that period a fairly safe pattern

in Miss Austen: but she does not use it at all, nor does she make the

lingo frankly that of her own day. There are gross improbabilities--Mr.

Danby, for instance (who is represented as wrapped up in his business,

and exclusively occupied with the legal side of money matters and the

money side of the law), actually discharges, or thinks he is

discharging, hundreds and thousands of Mr. Wyndham's liabilities by

handing his own open cheques, not to the creditors, not to any one

representing them, but to a country attorney who has succeeded him in

the charge of the debts and affairs, and whom he knows to be a sharp

practitioner and suspects to be a scoundrel. The inhuman uncle and the

licentious duke are mere cardboard characters: and the featherheaded

Lisa talks and behaves like a mixture of the sprightly heroines of

Richardson (for whom Lady Mary most righteously prescribed a sound

whipping) and the gushing heroines of Lady Morgan. There is too much

chaise-and-four and laudanum-bottle; too much moralising; too much of a

good many other things. And yet, somehow or other, there are also things

very rarely to be found in any novel--even taking in Bulwer and the

serious part of Dickens--up to the date. The scene between Danby and his

mother, in the poky house in Charlotte Street, when she discovers that

he has been giving a hundred-pound cheque to a young lady is

impressingly good: it is not absolutely unsuggestive of what Thackeray

was just doing, and really not far from what Trollope was not for some

years to do. There are other passages which make one think of George

Eliot, who indeed might have been writing at the very time; there are

even faint and faltering suggestions of Ibsenic "duty to ourselves." Mr.

Danby (the characters regularly call each other "Mr.," "Mrs.," and

"Miss," even when they are husbands and wives, daughters or nieces, and

uncles or fathers) is a miss, and not quite a miss, of a very striking,

original, possible, and even probable character. His mother, with

something more of the Dickensian type-character, can stand by her

unpleasant self, and came ten years before "the Campaigner." Susan, her

pleasanter servant, is equally self-sufficing, and came five years

before Peggotty, to whom she is not without resemblances.[28]

[28] Another novel of Mrs. Marsh-Caldwell's, _Norman's Bridge_,

has strong suggestions of _John Halifax_, and is ten years

older.

But it is not so much the merits on the one hand, or the defects on the

other, of the book that deserve attention here and justify the place

given to it: it is the general "chip-the-shell" character. The shell is

only being chipped: large patches of it still hamper the chicken, which

is thus a half developed and half disfigured little animal. All sorts of

didactics, of Byronic-Bulwerish sentiment, of conventionalities of

various kinds, still hold their place; the language, as we have said, is

traditional and hardly even that; and the characters are partly drawn

from Noah's Arks of various dates, partly from the stock company of the

toy theatre. On the other hand, besides the touches of modernity already

mentioned, and assisting them, there is a great attention to

"interiors." The writer has, for her time, a more than promising sense

of the incongruity between Empire dress and furniture and the style of

George II.: and the shabbiness or actual squalor of Charlotte Street and

Chancery Lane show that she had either been a very early and forward

scholar of Dickens, or had discovered the thing on her own account. Her

age may excuse some of the weak points, but it makes the presence of the

strong ones all the more remarkable: and it shows all the more forcibly

how the general influences which were to produce the great central

growth of Victorian novel were at work, and at work almost violently, in

the business of pulling down the old as well as of building up the new.

Of that new novel it is not necessary to say much more. In the last

fifty or sixty years of the nineteenth century it did, as it seems to

me, very great things--so great that, putting poetry, which is supreme,

aside, there is no division of the world's literature within a time at

all comparable to its own which can much, if at all, excel it. It did

these great things because partly of the inscrutable laws which

determined that a certain number of men and women of unusual power

should exist, and should devote themselves to it, partly of the less

heroic-sounding fact that the general appetite of other men and

womenkind could make it worth while for these persons of genius and

talent not to do something else. But even so, the examination, rightly

conducted, discovers more than a sufficient dose of nobility. For the

novel appeal is not, after all, to a mere blind animal thirst for

something that will pass and kill time, for something that will drug or

flutter or amuse. Beyond and above these things there is something else.

The very central cause and essence of it--most definitely and most

keenly felt by nobler spirits and cultivated intelligences, but also

dimly and unconsciously animating very ordinary people--is the human

delight in humanity--the pleasure of seeing the men and women of long

past ages living, acting, and speaking as they might have done, those of

the present living, acting, speaking as they do--but in each case with

the portrayal not as a mere copy of particulars, but influenced with

that spirit of the universal which is the secret and the charm of art.

It is because the novels of these years recognised and provided this

pleasure in a greater degree than those of the former period (except the

productions of a few masters) that they deserve the higher position

which has been here assigned them. If the novels of any period, before

or since or to come, have deserved, may or shall deserve, a lower

place--it is, and will be, because of their comparative or positive

neglect of the combination of these conditions. Perhaps it is not easy

to see what new country there is for the novel to conquer. But, as with

other kinds of literature, there is practically no limit to its powers

of working its actual domains. In the finest of its already existing

examples it hardly yields in accomplishment even to poetry; in that

great secondary (if secondary) office of all Art--to redress the

apparent injustice, and console for the apparent unkindness, of

Nature--to serve as rest and refreshment between those exactions of life

which, though neither unjust nor unkind, are burdensome, it has no equal

among all the kinds of Art itself.

INDEX

_Adam Bede_

Adams, W.

Addison

_Adeline Mowbray_

Aelfric

_Agathos_

Ainsworth, H.

_Alton Locke_

_Amadis_

_Amelia_

_Amis and Amillion_

Amory, Thomas

_Anabasis, The_

Anglo-Saxon, Romance in

_Anna_

_Anna St. Ives_

_Apollonius of Tyre_

Apuleius

Arblay, Madame d', _see_ Burney, F.

_Arcadia, The_

_Aretina_

_Arthour and Merlin_

Arthurian Legend, the;

its romantic concentration

_Ask Mamma_

_Ass, The Golden_

_Atlantis, The New_

Austen, Miss

_Badman, Mr_.

Bage, R.

Balzac

Banim

_Barchester Towers_

Barrett, E.S.

_Barry Lyndon_

"Barsetshire Novels," the

_Battle of the Books, The_

Beaconsfield, Lord, _see_ Disraeli, B.

Beckford

Behn, Afra

_Belinda_

Bennett, Mrs.

_Bentivolio and Urania_

_Beowulf_

Bergerac, C. de

Berington, S.

Berkeley

Berners, Lord

_Bertrams, The_

_Beryn, The Tale of_

Besaut, Sir W.

_Betsy Thoughtless_

_Bevis of Hampton_

Black, W.

Blackmore, R.D.

Blair

Borrow, George

Boyle, Roger, Lord Broghill and Earl of Orrery

_Brambletye House_

Brontë, Charlotte

Emily and Anne

Brooke, H.

Brunetière, M.

Brunton, Mrs.

Bulwer, Sir E.B. Lytton (1st Lord Lytton)

_Buncle, The life of John_

Bunyan

Burney, F.

Byrne, Mrs.

Byron

_Caleb Williams_

_Cambridge Freshman, The_

_Camilla_

_Canterbury Tales_ (the Misses Lee's)

_Can You Forgive Her?_

_Captain Singleton_

_Castle of Otranto, The_

_Catherine_

_Catriona_

_Caxtons, The_

_Cecilia_

Chamier, Captain

_Charles O'Malley_

"Charlotte Elizabeth"

Chateaubriand, 152

_Children of the Abbey, The_

_Chrestien de Troyes_

_Chronicles of Carlingford, The_

_Chrysal_

Circulating libraries, effort of

_Clarissa_

Clive, Mrs. A.

_Cloister and the Hearth, The_

Coleridge

Collins, Wilkie

_Colonel Jack_

_Complaint of Deor, The_

Congreve

_Convent of Grey Penitents, The_

Coventry, F.

"Coverley Papers," the

Craik, Mrs.

_Cranford_

_Cripps the Carrier_

Crisp, "Daddy"

Croker, Crofton

Croly

_Crotchet Castle_

Crowe, Mrs.

Crowne, John

Croxall, Dr.

Cumberland, R.

_Cyropædia, The_

Dante

_David Simple_

Defoe

Dickens

Diderot

_Discipline_

Disraeli, B.

_Divina Commedia, The_

Dumas

Dunlop

Edgeworth, Miss

Ellis, G., _Early English Romances_

_Emarè_

_Emilia Wyndham_

_Emma_

_English Rogue, The_

_Esmond_

_Euphues_

Eustathius

Evans, Mary Ann ("George Eliot")

_Evelina_

_Fair Quaker of Dea

_Ferdinand Count Fathom_

Ferrier, Miss

Fielding, H.

Fielding, S.

_Florence of Rome_

_Florice and Blancheflour_

_Fool of Quality, The_

Ford, Emmanuel

_Fortunes of Nigel, The_

_Frank_

_Frank Fairlegh_

_Frank Mildmay_

Galt

_Gamekeeper at Home, The_

Gaskell, Mrs.

_Gawain and the Green Knight_

Geoffrey of Monmouth

"George Eliot," _see_ Evans, M.A.

Gilpin

Glascock, Capt.

Godwin, W.

Goldsmith

Gore, Mrs.

Graves, Rev. R.

Gray

_Great Hoggarty Diamond, The_

Green, Sarah

Grey, Mr. W.W.

_Gryll Grange_

_Guadentio di Lucca_

_Gulliver's Travels_

_Guy Livingstone_

_Guy of Warwick_

Hagiology, its effect on Romance

Hamilton, Anthony

Hardy, Mr.

_Haunted and the Haunters, The_

_Havelok the Dam_

Haywood, Eliza

Hazlitt

Head, R.

_Heir of Redclyffe, The_

_Heliodorus_

Henley, Mr. W.E.

_Henrietta Temple_

_Henry_

_Hereward the Wake_

_Hermsprong_

Herodotus

_Heroine, The_

Holcroft, T.

_Holy War, The_

Hook, Theodore

Hope

_Horn, King_

_Humphry Clinker_

Hunt, Leigh

_Hypatia_

_Idalia_

_Ida of Athena_

_Iliad The_

"Imitation" (the Greek=Fiction)

Inchbald, Mrs.

_Incognita_

Ingelo, N.

_Ipomydon_

_Isle of Pines, The_

_Italian, The_

_It is Never too Late to Mend_

_Ixion_

_Jack Wilton_

_Jacob Faithful_

James, G.P.R.

_Jane Eyre_

Jefferies, R.

_Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy_

_John Runcle_

_John Inglesand_

Johnson, Dr.

Johnstone, C.

_Jonathan Wild_

"Jorrocks," Mr.

_Joseph Andrews_

_Journey from This World to the Next, A_

_Kate Coventry_

Kingsley, C.

Kingsley, H.

_King's Own, The_

Kirkman, F.

"Lady Mary" (Wortley-Montagu)

_Lady Susan_

_Lancelot (of the Laik)_, the Scots

_Last Chronicle of Barset, The_

Lawrence, G.A.

Layamon

Lee, the Misses

"L.E.L."

Lennox, Mrs.

_Leoline and Sydanis_

Letter-form in novels

Lever, C.

Lewis, M.G.

_Libertine, The_

Livy

Lockhart

_London_

Longus

_Lorna Doone_

Lucian

_Lybius Disconus_

Lydia

Lyly

Lytton, _see_ Bulwer

Macaulay

Macdonald, George

Macfarlane, C.

Mackenzie, Henry

Mackenzie, Sir George

Malory

_Man as He Is_

_Manley, Mrs._

_Man of Feeling, The_

_Mansfield Park_

Map, W.

_Marianne_ (Marivaux)

_Marivaux_

Marryat, Captain

Marsh, Mrs.

Martineau, Mrs.

_Mary Barton_

Maturin, C.R.

_Melincourt_

_Melmoth the Wanderer_

Melville, Mr. L.

_Memoirs of a Cavalier_

Meredith, Mr. George

_Merlin_

Michelet

_Mill on the Floss, The_

_Misfortunes of Elphin, The_

_Mr. Midshipman Easy_

_Mr. Verdant Green_

_Mrs. Veal_

_Moll Flanders_

_Monk, The_

_Montelion_

Moore, Dr. John

Morgan, Lady

Morier

Morley of Blackburn, Lord

Morris, W.

_Morte d'Arthur_, the alliterative;

the metrical;

Malory's

Mosse, Henrietta

_Mount Henneth_

_Mysteries of Udolpho, The_

Nash, T.

_Nature and Art_

Neville, H.

_Nightmare Abbey_

_No Name_

_North and South_

_Northanger Abbey_

_Novelist, The_

_Novella_, the Italian, influence of

_Oceana_

_Odyssey, The_

_Old English Baron, The_

_Old Manor House, The_

Oliphant, Mrs.

Opie, Mrs.

_Ordeal of Richard Feverel, The_

_Ormond_

_Ornatus and Artesia_

_Oroonoko_

"Ouida"

Ovid

Paget, F.

_Palace of Pleasure_, Painter's

Paltock, R.

_Pamela_

_Pandion and Amphigeneia_

Paris, M. Gaston

_Parismus and Parismenus_

_Parthenissa_

_Paul Ferroll_

Peacock, T.L.

_Peep at Our Ancestors_

_Pendennis_

_Peregrine Pickle_

_Persuasion_

_Peter Simple_

_Peter Wilkins_

Petronius

_Phantasies_

_Pharonnida_

_Pickwick Papers, The_

_Pilgrim's Progress, The_

Plato

Poe, Edgar

_Polite Conversation_ (Swift's)

_Pompey the Little_

Porter, Miss

_Pride and Prejudice_

_Proud King, The_

Publication, system of

_Queenhoo Hall_

_Quixote, The Female_

_Quixote, The Spiritual_

Rabelais

Radcliffe, Mrs.

Raleigh, Professor Sir Walter

_Rasselas_

Reade, C.

_Recess, The_

Reeve, Clara

Rice, James

_Richard Coeur de Lion_

Richardson

Ritson

_Robinson Crusoe_

Robinson, Emma (?)

Roche, R.M.

_Roderich Random_

Romance;

its connection with the "Saint's Life";

not completely separable from novel;

heroic

_Romance Readers and Romance Writers_

_Romola_

"Rosa Matilda"

_Roxana_

_Ruin, The_

_Ruth_

_St. Irvyne_

_St. Leon_

_St. Ronan's Well_

_Sayings and Doings_

"S.G.," _see_ Green, Sarah

Scott, Michael

Scott, Sir W.

_Sense and Sensibility_

_Sentimental Journey, A_

_Seven Wise Masters, The_

Sewell, Miss

_Shabby Genteel Story, A_

_Shadow of the Cross, The_

Shadwell, Charles

Shebbeare

Shelley

Sheridan, Frances

Sherwood, Mrs.

_Shirley_

_Shortest Way with the Dissenters_

_Simple Story, A_

_Sir Amadas_

_Sir Charles Grandison_

_Sir Eglamour_

_Sir Eger, Sir Grame, and Sir Graysteel_

_Sir John Chiverton_

_Sir Isumhras_

_Sir Lancelot Greaves_

_Sir Launfal_

_Sir Orfeo_

_Sir Triamond_

_Sketches by Boz_

Smart, Capt. H.

Smedley, Frank

Smith, Charlotte

Smith, Horace

Smollett

Socrates

_Spiritual Quixote, The_

_Squire of Low Degree, The_

Staël, Mme. de

Steele

Stendhal

Sterne

Stevenson, R.L.

_Strange Story, A_

Stuart, Lady L.

Surtees, R.

Swift

_Sydney Biddulph_

_Tale of a Tub, A_

_Ten Thousand a Year_

Tennyson

Terror-Novel, the

Thackeray

_Thaddeus of Warsaw_

Thorns

Tolstoi, Count

_Tom and Jerry_

_Tom Brown's Schooldays_

_Tom Cringle's Log_

_Tom Jones_

Tourguenief

"Tractarian" Novel, the

_Treasure Island_

_Tristram Shandy_

Tristram story, the

Trollope, Anthony

Trollope, Mrs.

_Two Years Ago_

_Unfortunate Traveller, The_

_Urania_

_Utopia_

_Vanity Fair_

_Vathek_

_Venetia_

_Vicar of Wake field, The_

Virgil

_Vision of St. Paul, The_

_Voyage Round the World_

Wace

Walpole, H.

_Wanderer, The_

_Warden, The_

Ward's _Catalogue of Romances_

Warren, S.

_Water Babies, The_

_Watsons, The_

_Waverley_

Weber

_Well at the World's End_

_Westward Ho!_

Whyte-Melville, G.J.

_Wild Irish Girl, The_

Wilkinson, Sarah

_William of Palerne_

Wortley-Montagu, Lady M., _see_ "Lady Mary"

Wroth, Lady Mary

_Wuthering Heights_

Xenophon

_Yeast_

Yonge, Miss

_Ywain and Gawain_

_Zastrozzi_

Zeluco