CHAPTER VIII
THE FICTION OF YESTERDAY--CONCLUSION
In regard to a large part of the subject of the present chapter thepresent writer possesses the knowledge of a reviewer, week by week andalmost day by day, of contemporary fiction between 1873 and 1895. It sohappened that the beginning of this period coincided very nearly withthe beginning of that slightly downward movement of thenineteenth-century novel which has been referred to at the end of thelast chapter: and he thus had opportunities of observing it all alongits course, till we parted company. It must again, and most strongly, beinsisted that this "downward movement," like such movements generally inliterature, is only so to be characterised with considerable provisosand allowances. Literary "down-grades" are not like the slopes of aninclined plane: they are like portions of a mountain range, in whichisolated peaks may shoot up almost level with the very highest of thecentral group, but in which the table lands are lower, the _average_height of the hills inferior, and the general sky-line a nearer andnearer approximation to the plain. At the actual death of Dickens therewas 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 thefuture of the novel. Of the greater novelists mentioned in the lastchapter Charlotte Bronte and Mrs. Gaskell were indeed dead, and ifKingsley 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 beststuff of Trollope was but just past, and some of all but his best wasstill to appear; Charles Reade was writing busily with that curiousunsatisfactory genius of his; others were well at work.
There was also no lack of newer comers. Mr. Meredith had been writingfor 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 hadmade his late beginning some time before: and had just caught the publicear unmistakably with _Lorna Doone_ (1869). Mr. Hardy was on the eve ofcatching it with the new and powerful attractions of _Under theGreenwood Tree_ (1872). In the heart of the sixties (1863-4-6), the_Chronicles of Carlingford_ had seemed the promissory notes of anovelist of the absolutely first class in Mrs. Oliphant, though somehowthe bills were rather renewed than met. Others to be noticed immediatelyhad come or were coming on. Let us take a little more detailed notice ofthem.
In the cases of Mr. Meredith and of Mr. Hardy--not to speak of others onwhom the bar still luckily rests--the "great ox" was, until the originalcomposition of this book was actually finished, "on the tongue" of anyone who does not disregard the good old literary brocard "_de_ vivis_nil nisi_ necessarium." You may and must criticise, with as muchfreedom as consists with courtesy, the successive stages of the work ofthe living master as he submits it to your judgment by publication. Butjustice no less than courtesy demands that, until the work is finished,and sealed as a whole--till the _ne varietur_ and _ne plus ultra_ ofdeath have been set on it--you shall abstain from a more generaljudgment, which can hardly be judicial, and which will have difficultyin steering between the fulsome if it be favourable and the uncivil ifit be adverse. Fortunately there was little difficulty in any of ourthree excepted cases. As has been already hinted in one case, the chorusof praise, ever since it made itself heard, has not been quiteunchequered. It has been objected both to Mr. Meredith and to Mr. Hardythat there is in them a note, perhaps to be detected also generally inthe later fiction which they have so powerfully influenced--the note ofa certain _perversity_--of an endeavour to be peculiar in thought, instyle, in choice of subject, in handling of it; in short in generalattitude. And with this has been connected--not in their cases withany important or really damaging effect, though undoubtedly so in regardto some of their followers--a suggestion that this "perversity" is thenote 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 excessivedesire to be _unlike_ everything else is the note of Romanticdegeneration.
There is truth in this, but it damages neither Mr. Meredith nor Mr.Hardy on the whole; though it may supply a not altogether wholesometemptation to some readers to admire them for the wrong things, and mayinterpose a wholly unnecessary obstacle in the way of their full andfrank enjoyment by others. The intellectual power and the artistic skillwhich have been shown in the long series that has followed _The Ordealof Richard Feverel_; the freshness and charm of the earlier, thestrenuous workmanship and original handling of the later, novels of theauthor of _Far from the Madding Crowd_ and of _Tess of theD'Urbervilles_, simply disable off-hand the judgment of the critic--andin fact annul his jurisdiction--if he fails to admire them; while insome cases universal, in many general, in all considerable and nottrivial 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 thestandard high, that--in Mr. Meredith's case more specially and for alonger preliminary period, but virtually in both--they have had toawait the taste for their work: and that in awaiting it they have neverstooped for one moment to that dastardly and degrading change of sail tocatch the popular breeze, which has always been the greatest curse ofpolitics and of literature--the two chief worldly occupations and endsof the mind of man--that they have been and are artists who wait tillthe world comes to them, and not artisans who haunt the market places tohire themselves out to the first comer who will pay their price, or evenbate their price to suit the hirer. If it were possible to judge theliterary value of a period by its best representatives--which isexactly what is _not_ possible--then the period 1870-1908 might, as faras novel-writing is concerned, point to these two names and say, "Theseare 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 stoodwith hardly any correction; but it may justly be expected that theyshould now be supplemented. The history of Mr. Meredith's career andreputation, during the half century which passed between the appearanceof _Richard Feverel_ and his death, has a certain obvious resemblance tothat of Browning's, but with some differences. His work at once arrestedattention, but it did not at once in all, or in many, cases fix it, evenwith critical readers: and for a long time the general public turned anobstinately deaf ear. He followed _The Ordeal_ itself--a study of veryfreely and deeply drawn character; of incident sometimes unusual andalways unusually told; of elaborate and disconcerting epigram or ratherof style saturated with epigrammatic quality; and of a strange ironicpersiflage permeating thought, picture, and expression in the sameway--unhastingly but unrestingly with others. _Evan Harrington_ (1861)is generally lighter in tone; and should be taken in connection with theten years later _Harry Richmond_ as an example of what may be called asort of new picaresque novel--the subjects being exalted from thegutter--at least the street gutter--to higher stories of the novelhouse. _Emilia in England_ (1864), later called _Sandra Belloni_, andits sequel _Vittoria_ (1866), embody, especially the latter, theItalomania of the mid-century. Between them _Rhoda Fleming_ (1865),returning to English country life, showed, with the old characteristicsof 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 forstudying off actual contemporaries; for it is now perfectly well knownwho "Beauchamp" was: and four years later came what the true Meredithianregards as the masterpiece, _The Egoist_. Two other books followed, tosome 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 socialistLassalle. The author's prediction, never hurried, now slackened, and bydegrees ceased, but the nineties saw three books, _One of OurConquerors_ (1891), _Lord Ormont and his Aminta_ (1894), and _TheAmazing Marriage_ (1895).
No bibliography of
Mr. Meredith being here necessary or possible,smaller and miscellaneous things need not detain us; and we are notconcerned with his sometimes charming verse. It is the character, andespecially the "total-effect" character, of the major novels with whichwe have to do. This has been faintly adumbrated above, but the linesmust 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 inthe right race and lineage of Cervantes and Fielding. Nor, though theclaim be a bold one, can there be much dispute among competent judgesthat he made it out. To the study, not in a frivolous or even merelysatirical, but in a gravely ironic mode, of the nature of humanity headdicted himself throughout: and the results of his studies undoubtedlyenlarge humanity's conscious knowledge of itself in the way offictitious exemplification. In a certain sense no higher praise can begiven. To acknowledge it is at once to estate him, not only withCervantes and Fielding themselves, but with Thackeray, with Swift, withMoliere, with Shakespeare. It places him well above Dickens, and, in theopinion of the present writer, it places him above even Balzac.But there are points wherein, according to that same opinion, heapproaches much nearer to Balzac and Dickens than to the other andgreater artistic creators: while in one of these points he standsaloof even from these two, and occupies a position--not altogether to hisadvantage--altogether by himself in his class of artistic creation. Allthe six from Thackeray to Shakespeare--one might even go farther backand, taking a more paradoxical example, add Rabelais--are, even inextravaganza, in parody, in what you please, at once pre-eminently and_prima facie_ natural and human. To every competent human judgment, assoon as it is out of its nonage, and barring individualdisqualifications of property or accident, this human nature attestsitself. You may dislike some of its manifestations; you may decline orfail to understand others; but there it is, and there it is _first_. InBalzac and Dickens and Mr. Meredith it is not first. Of course it isthere to some extent and even to a large one: or they would not be thegreat writers that they are, or great writers at all. But it is notmerely disguised by separable clothings, as in Rabelais wholly and inparts of others, or accompanied, as in Swift and others still, bycompanions not invariably acceptable. It is to a certain extentadulterated, sophisticated, made not so much the helpmeet, or thewilling handmaid, of Art as its thrall, almost its butt. I do not knowhow early criticism, which now seems to have got hold of the fact,noticed the strong connection-contrast between Dickens and Meredith: butit must always have been patent to some. The contrast is of course thefirst to strike:--the ordinariness, in spite of his fantastic grotesque,of Dickens, and the extraordinariness of Meredith; the almost utterabsence of literature in Dickens, and the prominence of it inMeredith--divers other differences of the same general kind. But to anyone reflecting on the matter it should soon emerge that a spirit,kindred in some way, but informed with literature and anxious "to bedifferent," starting too with Dickens's example before him, might, andprobably would, half follow, half revolt into another vein of notanti- but extra-natural fantasy, such as that which the author of _TheOrdeal 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 areimpossible are those which are inconsistent with themselves, and none ofthese is that. Something has been said of the "four dimensions" whichare necessary to work Dickens's world, and our business here is not withBalzac's. But something must now be said of the fourth dimension--somewould say the fifth, sixth, and almost tenth dimensions--which is or arerequired to put Mr. Meredith's in working order. I do not myself thinkthat more than a fourth is needed, and I have sometimes fancied that ifMohammedan ideas of the other world be true, and an artist is obliged toendow all his fictitious creations with real life, it will be by thereduction and elimination of this dimension that Mr. Meredith will haveto proceed. There will be great joy in that other world when he has doneit: and, alarming as the task looks, I think it not impudent to say thatno one who ever enjoyed his conversation will think it impossible.
The intrusive element can, however, only be designated singly by ratherenlarging the strict and usual sense of the term Style so as to includenot merely diction, but the whole manner of presentation--what, inshort, is intended by the French word _faire_. For this, or part ofthis, he made, in relation to his poems, a sort of apology-explanationin the lines prefixed to the collected edition, and entitled "ThePromise in Disturbance." I am not sure that there is any single placewhere a parallel excuse-defiance musters itself up in the novels: butthere are scores (the prelude to _The Egoist_ occurs foremost) where itis scattered about all of them; and it is certainly much more requiredthere. Indeed as far as the narrow sense of "style" goes, thepeculiarity, whether they admit it to be a fault or not, is practicallyadmitted as a fact by all but Meredith-monomaniacs. Here is a _sorsMeredithiana_, taken from _Rhoda Fleming_, one of the simplest of thebooks:--
"Algernon waited dinnerless until the stealthy going minutes distendedand swelled monstrous and horrible as viper-bitten bodies, and thevenerable Signior Time became of unhealthy hue."
To match that--it would be exceedingly easy to match and beat it out ofthe author himself--you must go to the maddest of the seventeenth-centurymetaphysicals--say to Edward Benlowes himself. But this is nothing: it isat worst an obvious playful exaggeration, very like some things ofDickens's own transposed into another key. But take this opening ofthe fifteenth chapter of _Diana of the Crossways_:--
"The Gods of this world's contests, against whom our poor strippedindividual is commonly in revolt, are, as we know, not miners, they arereapers; and if we appear no longer on the surface, they cease to bruiseus: they will allow an arena character to be cleansed and madepresentable while enthusiastic friends preserve discretion. It is ofcourse less than magnanimity; they are not proposed to you for yourworship; they are little Gods, temporary as that great wave, theirparent human mass of the hour. But they have one worshipful element inthem, which is, the divine insistency upon there being two sides to acase--to every case. And the People so far directed by them may boast ofhealthfulness. Let the individual shriek, the innocent, triumphant, havein honesty to admit the fact. One side is vanquished according to decreeof 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, Isuppose, rely triumphantly on it as a marriage of original thought andphrase. But is it so? Is the thought really anything more than theperfectly correct and obvious one that, if you let scandal alone it willdie, or at least go into abeyance? Does that thought really gainanything from being tricked out with not always very congruouslyarranged paraphernalia of Gods, and arenas, and reapers, and miners, andthe People with a large P, and shrieks, and innocency, and the rest? Apalate or an appetite so jaded that it cannot appreciate thought putbefore it plainly, or so sluggish that it requires to be stung orpuzzled into thinking, may derive some advantage. But are these exactlythe 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 consummatecleverness no doubt, to colour his whole representation of character andstory in the same extra-natural way. Take the rick-burning at thebeginning of _Feverel_; take the famous wine scene (a very fascinatingone, though I never heard anywhere else, in some researches on thesubject, of port that would keep ninety years) in _The Egoist_. Thethings may have happened this way in some Georgium Sidus, where theComic Spirit has arranged the proper Fourth Dimension: but that is notthe way they happen here. The Wise Youth, Diana, Edward Blancove, RoyRichmond--but why begin a list which would never end?--are inhabitantsof the same region. They are not impossible: they could be translatedinto actual tellur
ian beings, which the men and women of the badnovelist never can be. But at present they are not translated: and youmust know a special language, in a wide sense, in order to translatethem. I do not say that the language is impossible or even very hard tolearn: but it is required. And Meredithians say you ought to learn it.An extremely respectable book of reference before me rebukes "those wholack the intelligence and sensibility that can alone admit them to thecharmed circle of appreciative readers" and who "have not patience toapply themselves to the study of the higher fiction with the same ardourthat they think necessary in the case of any other art."
Now "Fudge!" is a rude word: but I fear we must borrow it fromGoldsmith's hero, and apply it here. As for "charmed circles" there isuncommonly good company outside them, where, as Beatrice says, we may"be as merry as the day is long," so that the Comic Spirit cannotentirely disdain us. And as for art--the present writer will fight forits claims as long as he has breath. But the proof of the art of thenovelist is that--at first hand or very shortly--he "enfists,"absorbs, delights you. You may discover secrets of his art afterwardswith much pleasure and profit: but the actual first-hand delight is thecriterion. There ought to be no need of sitting down before the thingwith tools and dynamite like burglars at a safe; of mustering cruciblesand reagents like assayers at some doubtful and recalcitrant piece ofore. Now these not very adept defenders of Mr. Meredith seem to assertthat these processes are desirable in any case, and necessary in his. Asa matter of fact the necessity is not omnipresent: but it is present fartoo frequently. It is the first duty of the novelist to "let himself beread"--anything else that he gives you is a _bonus_, a trimming, adessert.
It is not unamusing to those who regarded Mr. Meredith during almost hiswhole career with those mingled feelings of the highest admiration andof critical reserve which this notice has endeavoured to express, tonote a new phase which seems to be coming over the youngest criticism.The original want of appreciation has passed, never, one may hope, toreturn; and the middle _engouement_, which was mainly engineered bythose doughty partisans, Mr. Stevenson and Mr. Henley, is passinglikewise. But the most competent and generous juniors seem to be alittle uncomfortable, to have to take a good deal on trust, and notquite to "like the security." To those who know the history of criticalopinion these signs speak pretty clearly, though not so as to authorisethem to anticipate the final judgment absolutely. Genius, all but of thehighest, can hardly be denied to Mr. Meredith: but it is genius marred,perhaps by unfortunate education, certainly by undue egotism, by acertain Celtic _tapage_, and by a too painful and elaborate endeavour tobe unlike other people.
A very interesting subject for examination from the present point ofview 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 somuch command of mother wit and racy English, so much close study ofminor character and local speech with such wealth of romantic fancy;such a thorough observance of "good form" with so complete a freedomfrom priggishness and prudery. To this day there are livelycontroversies whether he worked up the Doone story from local traditionor made it "out of his own head." But whichever he did (and the presenthistorian owns that he cares very little about the point) the way inwhich he has turned a striking, but not extraordinary, and certainly notvery extensive West Country glen into an _Arabian Nights_ valley, withthe figures and action of a mediaeval romance and the human interest ofa modern novel, is really wonderful. And there is hardly a book of hislast thirty years' production, from _Clara Vaughan_ to _Perlycross_,which has not vigour, variety, character, "race" enough for half adozen. In such books, for example, as _The Maid of Sker_ and _Cripps theCarrier_ the idiosyncrasy is extraordinary: the quaint and piquantoddity of phrase and apophthegm is as vivid as Dickens, rather morereal, 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 byone, or in pairs and batches, or as a whole, it is somehow or otherdifficult to pronounce any one exactly a masterpiece. There is a want of"inevitableness" which sometimes amounts to improbability, as in thecase particularly of that most vivid and racy of books, _Cripps theCarrier_, where the central incident or situation, though by no meansimpossible, is almost insultingly unlikely, and forces its unlikelinesson one at almost every moment and turn. Never, perhaps, was there abetter instance of that "possible-improbable" which contrasts so fatallywith the "probable-impossible." In not a few cases, too, there is thatreproduction of similar _denouements_ and crucial occurrences which isalmost necessary in a time when men write many novels. In almost allthere is a want of central interest in the characters that should becentral; in some an exaggeration of dialect; or of quaint non-dialecticbut also non-catholic locutions on the author's part. One rather hatesoneself for finding such faults--no one of which is absolutely fatal--ina 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 anyaccount; but one feels that they were written rather because the authorchose to do so than because he could not help it. Now it is possible toexaggerate the necessity of "mission" and the like: but, after all, _Ichkann nicht anders_ must be to some extent the mood of mind of the manwho is committing a masterpiece.
Something of the sort is still more noticeable in the work of otherwriters of the period. We have seen that two ladies of great talent,Mrs. Oliphant and Mrs. Craik, began to write, long before Mr. Meredithpublished _Richard Feverel_ and very little later than the time of_Vanity Fair_. They produced, the one in _Salem Chapel_ (1863), a bookwhich contemporaries might be excused for thinking likely to herald anew 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 shorterlife of the two, not much fewer than fifty novels; Mrs. Oliphant,besides a great deal of work in other departments, a tale which did notstop very far short of the hundred. The latter, moreover, gave, at acomparatively late period of her career, evidences of being able tostart new lines--the supernatural stories of her last stages are onlyinferior to the _Chronicles of Carlingford_ themselves. Yet, once more,we look for a masterpiece in vain: in fact in Mrs. Oliphant's case weask, how could any human being, on such a system of production, beexpected to produce masterpieces? Scott, I think, once wrote four ornearly four novels in a year: and the process helped to kill him. Mrs.Oliphant did it over and over again, besides alternating the annual dosestill more frequently with twos and threes. In her case the process onlykilled her novels.
Three remarkable novelists of the other sex may be mentioned, in thesame way, together. They were all acquaintances of the present writer,and one of them was his friend: moreover, he is quite certain that hecould not write as good a novel as the worst of theirs, and only takescredit to himself for not having attempted to do so. These are JamesPayn, William Black, and Sir Walter Besant. Mr. Payn was an extremelyagreeable person with a great talent for amusing, the measure of whichhe perhaps took pretty early--consoling himself for a total absence ofhigh pretension by a perhaps not quite genuine affectation ofgood-natured but distinctly Philistine cynicism, and a half serious,half affected belief that other men's delight in their schools, theiruniversities, the great classics of the past, etc., was _blague_. Henever made this in the least offensive; he never made any one of hisfifty or sixty novels anything but interesting and (when the subjectrequired it) amusing. There never was any novelist less difficult toread a first time: I really do not know that it would be extremelydifficult to read him a second; but also I have seldom come across anovelist with whom I was so little inclined to try it. It is a greatthing, 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. Butperhaps this is not all that you are entitled to ask of it. And as Mr.Payn began with _Poems_, and some other su
ggestive books, I am inclinedto think that perhaps he did _not_ always regard literature as a thingof the kind of a superior railway sandwich.
It is quite certain that, in his beginning, Mr. William Blackentertained no such idea; for his actual _debuts_ were something likewhat 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 ofthem--not even the last--could be called an entire success: a "littlemore powder" was wanted to send the shots home, and such flight as theyachieved did not even seem to be aimed at any distinct and worthyobject. But fortunately for his pocket, unfortunately for his fame, hehit the public taste of the time with a sort of guidebook-novel in _TheStrange Adventures of a Phaeton_ (1872) and _A Princess of Thule_(1873), and was naturally tempted to continue it, or to branch off onlyinto not very strong stories of society. Once he made an effort atcombining tragic romance with this latter kind in _Macleod of Dare_(1878), but, though this was nearer to a success than some of hiscritics admitted, it was not quite a success: and though he wrote fullya 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 hisearliest stage, had taken novel-writing very seriously: it was otherwisewith the third of the trio. Mr., afterwards Sir Walter, Besant did notbegin early, owing to the fact that, for nearly a decade after leavingCambridge, he was a schoolmaster in Mauritius. But he had, in this time,acquired a greater knowledge of literature than either of the other twopossessed: and when he came home, and took to fiction, he accompanied itwith, or rather based it upon, not merely wide historical studies, whichare still bearing fruit in a series of posthumous dealings with thehistory of London, but rather minute observation of the lower sociallife of the metropolis. For some ten years his novel production wascarried on, in a rather incomprehensible system of collaboration, withJames Rice, a Cambridge man like himself and a historian of the turf,but one to whom no independent work in fiction is attributed, except anincredibly feeble adaptation of _Mr. Verdant Green_, entitled _TheCambridge Freshman_ and signed "Martin Legrand." During the seventies,and for a year or two later, till Rice's death in 1882, the pairprovided 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 theschool 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 knowledgeboth of older and more modern life; with fairly substantial plots, goodcharacter-drawing of the more external kind, and a sufficient supply ofinteresting incident, dialogue, and description.
It was certain that people would affect to discover a "falling off" whenthe partnership was dissolved by Rice's death: but as a matter of factthere was nothing of the kind. Such books as the very good and original_Revolt of Man_ (which certainly owed nothing to collaboration), as _AllSorts and Conditions of Men_ (1882), the first of the kind apparentlythat Besant wrote alone, as _Dorothy Forster_ (1884), and as thepowerful if not exactly delightful _Children of Gibeon_ (1886) wereperhaps more vigorous than anything earlier, and certainly not lessoriginal. But the curse of the "machine-made" novel, which has beenalready dwelt upon, did not quite spare Besant: and in these laterstories critics could point, without complete unfairness, to anincreasing obsession of the "London" subject, especially in regard tothe actual gloom and possible illumination of the East End, and on theother to a resort to historical subjects, less as suggestions orcanvases than as giving the substance of the book. The first class ofwork, however (which actually resulted in a "People's Palace" and wassupposed to have obtained his knighthood for him), is distinctlyremarkable, especially in the light of succeeding events. Most of theunfavourable criticisms passed upon Besant's novel-work were in the mainthe utterances of raw reviewers, who thought it necessary to "down"established reputations. But it would be impossible for any competentcritic, 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 beenillustrating from others, of the system of novel-production _a ladouzaine_. In such a case, and on the, in themselves, salutaryconditions of the new novel, the experiences and interests of life mayor must come to be regarded too regularly as supplying "grist for themill"; nay, the whole of life and literature, which no doubt ought inall cases to furnish suggestion and help to art and inspiration, are toooften set to a sort of _corvee_, a day-task, a tale of bricks. It is,one allows, hard to prevent this: and yet nothing is more certain thatbricks 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 thanmost of them, and came pretty early under the influence of Dickens,whose melodramatic rather than his humorous side he set himself to workto develop. In fact Collins was at least as much melodramatist asnovelist: and while most of his novels are melodrama in narrative form,not a few of them were actually dramatised. He began as early as1850--the dividing year--with _Antonina_: but his three great triumphsin the "sensation" novel (as it was rather stupidly called) were _TheDead Secret_ (1857), _The Woman in White_ (1860), and _No Name_ (1862).Throughout the sixties and a little later, in _Armadale_ (1866), _TheMoonstone_ (1870), perhaps _The New Magdalen_ (1873), and even as lateas 1875 in _The Law and the Lady_, his work continued to be eagerlyread. But the taste for it waned: and its author's last fifteen years orso (he died in 1889), though fairly fruitful in quantity, certainly didnot tend to keep it up in quality. Although Collins had a considerableamount of rather coarse vigour in him (his brother Charles, who diedyoung, had a much more delicate art) and great fecundity in a certainkind of stagy invention, it is hard to believe that his work will everbe put permanently high. It has a certain resemblance in method toGodwin and Mrs. Radcliffe, exciting situations being arranged, certainlywith great cleverness, in an interminable sequence, and leading,sometimes at any rate, to a violent "revolution" (in the old dramaticsense) at the end. Perhaps the best example is the way in which MagdalenVanstone's desperate and unscrupulous, though more than halfjustifiable, machinations, to reverse the cruel legal accident whichleaves her and her sister with "No Name" and no fortune, are foiled bythe course of events, though the family property is actually recoveredfor this sister who has been equally guiltless and inactive. Of itskind, the machinery is as cleverly built and worked as that of any novelin the world: but while the author has given us some Dickensishcharacter-parts of no little attraction (such as the agreeable rascalCaptain Wragge) and has nearly made us sympathise strongly with Magdalenherself, he only succeeds in this latter point so far as to make usangry with him for his prudish poetical or theatrical justice, which isnot poetical and hardly even just.
The specialist or particularist novel was not likely to be withoutpractitioners during this time: in fact it might be said, after afashion, to be more rife than ever: but it can only be glanced at here.Its most remarkable representatives perhaps--men, however, of verydifferent tastes and abilities--were Richard Jefferies and Joseph HenryShorthouse. The latter, after attracting very wide attraction by aremarkable book--almost a kind to itself--_John Inglesant_ (1880), ahalf historical, half ecclesiastical novel of seventeenth-century life,never did anything else that was any good at all, and indeed triedlittle. The former, a struggling country journalist, after long failingto make any way, wrote several three-volume novels of no merit, brokethrough at last in the _Pall Mall Gazette_ with a series of studies ofcountry life, _The Gatekeeper at Home_ (1878), and afterwards turnedthese into a peculiar style of novel, with little story and hardly anycharacter, but furnished with the backgrounds and the atmosphere ofthese same sketches. His he
alth was weak, and he died in early middleage, 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 andexpanded his certainly rare powers into something more "important" thanthe few pictures, as of a Meissonier-_paysagiste_, which he has left us?These inquiries are no doubt idle: but, once more, one may drawattention to the way in which two men, so different in tastes andfortune, neither, it would seem, with a very strong bent towards prosefiction as the vehicle of his literary desires and accomplishments,appear to have been forced, by the overpowering attraction andpopularity 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 theychose, but something at least made up in the form that the publicwanted, and disguised in the wrappers which the public were accustomedto purchase.
The principal development of mid-nineteenth-century fiction had been, aswe have seen, in the direction of the novel _proper_--thecharacter-study of modern ordinary life. But, even as early as _Esmond_and _Hypatia_, signs were not wanting that the romance, historical orother, was not going to be content with the rather pale copies of Scott,and the rococo-sentimental style of Bulwer, which had mainly occupied itfor the last quarter of a century. Still, though we have mentioned otherexamples of the fifties and sixties, and have left ever so many moreunmentioned, it was certainly not as popular[27] as its rival till,towards the end of the latter decade, Mr. Blackmore's _Lorna Doone_ gaveit a fresh hold on the public taste. Some ten years later again therecame to its aid a new recruit of very exceptional character, Mr. RobertLouis Stevenson. He was a member of the famous family of light-houseengineers, and was educated for the Bar of Scotland, to which he wasactually called. But law was as little to his taste as engineering, andhe slowly gravitated towards literature--the slowness being due, notmerely to family opposition or to any other of the usual causes (thoughsome of these were at work), but to an intense and elaborate desire towork 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 anyone a style of perfect freedom: and it may be questioned further whetherStevenson 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 andartistic effects, and there happened to be at the time a reactionagainst what was called "slovenliness" and a demand for carefulpreparation and planned effect in prose-writing. Even so, however, itwas not at once that Stevenson took to fiction. He began with essays,literary and miscellaneous, and with personal accounts of travel: andcertain critical friends of his strongly urged him to continue in thisway. 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 andhad a very small staff, he issued certain _New Arabian Nights_ whichcaught the attention of one or two of his fellow-contributors verystrongly, and made them certain that a new power in fiction-writing hadarisen. It did not, however, at first much attract the public: and itwas the kind of thing which never attracts publishers until the publicforces their hands. For a time he had to wait, and to take whatopportunity he could get of periodical publication, "boy'sbook"-writing, and the like. In fact _Treasure Island_ (1883), withwhich he at last made his mark, is to this day classed as a boy's bookby some people who are miserable if they cannot classify. It certainlydeals with pirates, and pieces of eight, and adventures by land and sea;but the manner of dealing--the style and narrative and the delineationof the chief character, the engaging villain John Silver--is about aslittle puerile as anything that can be imagined. From that timeStevenson's reputation was assured. Ill health, a somewhat restlessdisposition, and an early death prevented him from accomplishing anygreat bulk of work: and the merit of what he did varied. Latterly hetook to a teasing process of collaboration, which his sincerest admirerscould have willingly spared. But his last completed book, _Catriona_(1893), seemed to some judges of at least considerable experience thebest thing he had yet done, especially in one all-importantrespect--that he here conquered either an unwillingness to attempt or aninability to achieve the portraiture of feminine character, which hisbooks had previously displayed. The general opinion, too, was that theunfinished _Weir of Hermiston_ (1897), which he left a fragment at hisdeath, was the best and strongest thing he had done, while it showed inparticular a distinct relinquishment, for something freer and morespontaneous, of the effective but also rather affected and decidedlylaboured style in which he had hitherto written. For us, however, hisstyle is of less importance than the fact that he applied it almostwholly to the carrying out of that rejuvenescence of romance of which wehave been speaking, and which may be taken, as anybody pleases, eitherfor a mere alternative to the domestic novel or as a definite revoltagainst it. It was speedily taken up by writers mostly still living, andso not to be dwelt on now.
Very late in the century the genius of Mr. William Morris turned fromverse to prose tale-telling in a series of romances which caught thefancy neither of the public nor of the critics as a whole, but whichseem to some whom the gods have made not quite uncritical to be, ifrightly taken, of much accomplishment, and of almost more promise andsuggestion. These, seven or eight in number, from _The House of theWulfings_ (1889) to _The Sundering Flood_, published after the author'sdeath in 1898, were actual romances--written in a kind of modernisedfifteenth-century English, and dealing, some with far back incidents ofthe conflict between Romans and "Barbarians," most with the frankno-time and no-place of Romance itself. They came at an unfortunatemoment, when the younger generation of readers were thinking it properto be besotted with crude realism or story-less impressionism, and whensome at least of those who might have welcomed them earlier had lefttheir first faith in poetry or poetic prose. There was, moreover,perhaps some genuine dislike, and certainly a good deal of precisiancondemnation, of the "Wardour Street" dialect. Yet there was no sham inthem: it was impossible for Mr. Morris to have anything to do withshams--even his socialism was not that--and they were in reality arevival, however Rip van Winklish it might seem, of the pure old romanceitself, at the hands of a nineteenth-century sorcerer, who no doubt puta little of the nineteenth century into them. The best--probably thebest of all is _The Well at the World's End_ (1896)--have anextraordinary charm for any one who can taste romance: and are by nomeans unlikely to awake the taste for it in generations to come. But forthe present the thing lay out of the way of its generation, and was notcomprehended or enjoyed thereby. For it is no doubt nearly as annoyingto have bread given to you when you want thistles as to have thistlesgiven to you when you want bread. But just as the ballad is theappointed reviver of poetry, so is romance the appointed reviver ofprose-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 onindividuals. Something has been hinted as to the general presentcondition of the novel, but there is no need to emphasise it or to enterinto particulars about it: indeed, even if such a proceeding wereconvenient in one way it would be very inconvenient in another. Onemight, for instance, have to consider, rather curiously, a remarkablestatement recently attributed to a popular novelist that "the generalstandard of excellence in fiction is higher _to-day_ than ever it wasbefore." But we can take higher ground. Far be it from me to bow to theBaal of "up-to-dateness," for even if I had any such hankering, I thinkI should remember that the surest way of being out-of-date to-morrow isthe endeavour to be up-to-date to-day. Only by keeping perspective canyou hope to confirm and steady your view: only by relinquishing theimpossible attempt to be complete can you achieve a relativecompleteness.
Yet it is well
to remember that Lockhart, one of the best critics whoever lived (when he let himself be so), a novelist too, and not likelyto lose an opportunity of magnifying his office if he could, tookoccasion, in noticing the novels of his friend Theodore Hook at poor"Mr. Wagg's" death, gravely to deplore the decadence of the novelgenerally: and not much later, in reprinting the article, had the wisdomto recognise, and the courage to record, the fact that Thackeray haddisappointed his prognostications. Literature, it has been said, is theincalculable of incalculables: and not only may a new novelist ariseto-morrow, but some novelist who has been writing for almost any numberof years may change his style, strike the vein, and begin theexploitation of a new gold-field in novel-production.
But this does not affect the retrospect of the past. There we are onperfectly 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 ancientand in modern times in all countries--was a specially late andslow-yielding one in English. Although Thoms's _Early English ProseRomances_ is by no means an exhaustive collection, and for this reasonwas not specially referred to in the first chapter, it is impossible notto recognise that its three rather small volumes, of matter for the mostpart exceeding poor and beggarly, contrast in the most pitiful fashionwith the scores and almost hundreds containing Early English Romances inverse. Malory of course brings the prose-scale down very considerablyfrom its uncomfortably _meteoric_ position, and some other things help:but the total of prose and verse before 1500 can be brought level by nopossible sleight of weighing. Still, as we have seen, this did notmatter very much: for the verse got "transprosed" sooner or later, andthe romances and tales of other countries were greedily admitted _adeundem_ in sixteenth and seventeenth century English.
Yet the novel proper lingered: and, except in the single and eccentricmasterpiece of Bunyan, the seventeenth century ended without having seenone real specimen of prose fiction that was thoroughly satisfactory.Nearly half the eighteenth had gone too, with nothing but the lessisolated but still not perfect performances of Defoe, and the once morestill eccentric masterpiece of _Gulliver_, before the novel-periodreally opened. It is literally not more than two long lifetimes ago--itis quite certain that there are now living hundreds, perhaps thousands,of persons born when others were still living who drew their firstbreaths in or before the year when Pamela made her modest, but verydistinctly self-conscious, curtsey to the world. How soon it grew to apopular form of literature, and how steadily that popularity hascontinued and increased, there is not much need to say or to repeat.Statistical persons every year give us the hundreds of novels thatappear from the presses, and the thousands of readers who take them outof, or read them in, public libraries. I do not know whether thereexists anywhere a record of the total number published since 1740, but Idare say it does. I should not at all wonder if this total ran intoscores of thousands: if you were to bring in short stories it wouldcertainly do so. People have almost left off shaking their heads overthe preponderant or exclusive attention to fiction in these publiclibraries themselves: in fact the tendency seems to be rather to makeout that it is decreasing. It may be so; or it may not. But what remainscertain is that there is a very large number of educated people to whom"reading" simply means reading novels; who never think of taking up abook that is not a novel; for whom the novel exhausts even the verymeaning of the word "literature." We know that the romance wasoriginally so called simply because it was the commonest book in"Romance" language. We are less unsophisticated now: but there arecertainly large numbers of His Majesty's subjects by whom a novel onthis principle ought to be called "an english" though it might have toshare that appellation with the newspaper.
Yet, as we have seen, for this or that reason, the _average_ novel didnot come to anything like perfection for a very long time. In a singleexample, or set of examples, it reached something like perfection almostat once. Fielding, Scott, Miss Austen, and Thackeray are the FourMasters of the whole subject, giving the lady the same degree as theothers by courtesy of letters. But in the first (as for the matter ofthat in the last) of the four the success was rather a matter ofindividual and inimitable genius than of systematic discovery of methodpracticable by others. Nobody, except Thackeray himself, has everfollowed Fielding successfully, and that only in parts and touches; asFielding had (unfortunately) no opportunity of following Thackeray, noone has ever followed Thackeray satisfactorily at all. Such reasons aspresented themselves have been given for the fact that nearly half ofthe whole period passed before the two systems--of the pure novel andthe novel-romance--were discovered: and even then they were not at onceput to work. But the present writer would be the very first to confessthat these explanations leave a great deal unexplained.
Yet whatever faults there might be in the supply there could be no doubtabout the demand when it was once started. It was indeed almost entirelyindependent of the goodness or badness of the average supply itself.Allowing for the smaller population and the much smaller proportion ofthat population who were likely to--who indeed could--read, and for theinferior means of distribution, it may be doubted whether the largestsales of novels recorded in the last half century have surpassed thoseof the most trumpery trash of the "Minerva Press" period--the lastdecade of the eighteenth and the first of the nineteenth century. Forthe main novel-public is quite omnivorous, and almost absolutelyuncritical of what it devours. The admirable though certainly fortunateScot who "could never remember drinking bad whisky" might be echoed, ifthey had the wit, by not a few persons who never seem to read a badnovel, or at least to be aware that they are reading one.
At the same time, the failure of the quest for novel-recipes wascompensated by an absence of that working of those recipes to deathwhich the last century--or the last three-quarters of it--has seen. Theaverage work of any one of a dozen nineteenth-century producers ofnovels by the dozen and the score, whom at this place it is notnecessary to name, is probably on the whole a much better turned outthing--one better observing its own purposes, and open to less criticismin detail--than even the best of the works of the earlier divisionoutside of Fielding. But the eighteenth-century books--faulty, onlypartially satisfying as they may be in comparison, say, with awell-succeeded Trollope or one of the better Blackmores--very often havea certain idiosyncrasy, a freedom from machine-work, which suppliessomething not altogether unlike the contrast between the furniture ofthe two periods. Stress and dwelling have been purposely given, to someminor books of this period, for this very reason.
But at the same time the limitations, outside the greatest, arecertainly peculiar. It seems wonderful that a man like Cumberland, forinstance, who had not a little literary talent, should not have beenable to make _Henry_ into a story of real interest that might hold thereader as even second-class Trollope--say a book like _OrleyFarm_--does. We have ungraciously recognised that some of our ladynovelists, who wrote by forties and by fifties, did not always sustainthe interest of their novels. Miss Burney wrote four in all, and couldhardly 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, acontemporary of the eighteenth-century novel from its actual start topractically its finish, could give us thousands and all but tens ofthousands of phrases that want but a little of being novel-conversationready made, why could not the other people make it for their ownpurposes? But we have got no answer to these questions: and probablythere is none.
The way in which Scott and Miss Austen themselves simultaneously foundout the secrets of the two kinds of novel is no doubt, as such waysalways are, in the larger part mysterious: but to a certain extent itcan be explained and analysed, independently of the direct literarygenius of each. One of the greatest gifts of Scott--one with which thenon-historical novelist can dispense as little as his brother thehistorical--was that "genius of history" with which Lord Morley--acritic not likely
to be misled by sympathy in some respects at anyrate--has justly credited him. For unless you have this "historicsense," as it has been more generally and perhaps better termed (thoughto the intense disgust of some professed historians), it is not onlyimpossible for you to delineate scene and character at a distance fromyour time, but you become really disqualified for depicting your owntime itself. You fail to distinguish the temporary from the permanent;you achieve perhaps a fairly faithful copy of actual manners andfashions, but you do nothing more, and as the subject dies so does thepicture. Contrast Hook, say, with Thackeray, and the difference willemerge at once.
Secondly, Scott had, besides this historic sense and the relish forhumanity which must accompany it, a knowledge of literature with whichhe has been too seldom credited to the full. When he published_Waverley_ he had been reading all sorts and conditions of books forsome five-and-thirty years, and assimilating them if, as the pedantswill have it, with a distressing inaccuracy in particulars, with ageneral and genial fidelity of which the pedants do not even dream andcould not comprehend, or they would not be pedants. He was thusfurnished with infinite stores of illustrative matter, never tooverpower, but always to accompany and season, his knowledge of life. Ina few instances this felicity of adoption has been recognised, but not atenth part of it has ever been systematically put on record. The morewidely and the longer a man reads, the more constantly will he find thatScott has been before him, and has "lifted" just the touch that hewanted at the time and in the place.
But perhaps a greater gift (there were still others which it would belong to perscribe--descriptive faculty, humour, pathos, half a dozenother things of the highest importance in themselves, but of lessspecial application) was that which enabled him to discover and applysomething like a universal novel _language_. He did this, not asShakespeare did (and as nobody but Shakespeare, except perhaps Dante tosome extent, ever has done or apparently could do), by making a reallyuniversal language which fits all times and persons because it isuniversal like its creator's soul. Still less did he do it by adoptingthe method which Spenser did consummately, but which almost everybodyelse has justified Ben Jonson by doing very badly:--that is to say byconstructing a mosaic of his own. But his own method was nearer to thislatter. For historical creations (the most important of hisnon-historic, _Guy Mannering_ and the _Antiquary_, were so near his owntime that he had no difficulty) he threw back with remarkable cunning toa period somewhat earlier, and coloured this up to the required tint byactual suggestions from contemporary, or nearly contemporary,literature, where he could get it. He has done this so consummately thatperhaps the only novel of his where the language strikes us asartificial 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 weakestpoint: and we have seen and shall see that it continued to be a weakpoint with others. Some admirers have defended her even here: but proudas I am to be an Austen Friar, a knight (or at least squire) of theorder of St. Jane, I cannot go to this length. She very nearlysucceeded, and sometimes she did quite: but not always. The easydialogue and phrase that we find as early as Horace Walpole, even asChesterfield and Lady Mary, in letters; which, in her own early days,appears in Fanny Burney's diaries but not in the novels, does not seemalways within Miss Austen's grasp. But her advance in this respect isenormous: she is, for instance, far beyond Scott himself in _St. Ronan'sWell_: and when she is thoroughly interested in a character, and engagedin unfolding it and gently satirising it at the same time, she rarelygoes even a hair's-breadth wrong. In almost every other respect she doesnot go wrong to the extent of the minutest section of a hair. The storyis the least part with her: but her stories are always miraculously_adequate_: neither desultory and pillar-to-post, nor elaborated withthe minuteness which seems to please some people, but which is quiteindifferent to the majority, and is certainly a positive nuisance to afew who are not quite of negligible judgment. But the reason of thisadequacy in story contains in itself her greatest triumph. Not being apoet, she cannot reach the Shakespearian consummateness of poeticphrase: though she sometimes comes not so far short of this in the prosevariety. But in the other great province of character, though hers isbut a Rutland to his Yorkshire--or rather to his England or hisworld--she is almost equally supreme. And by her manipulation of it sheshowed, once for all, how the most ordinary set of circumstances, andeven the most ordinary characters in a certain sense, can be made tosupply the material of prose fiction to an absolutely illimitableextent. Her philosopher's stone (to take up the old parable again) doesnot lose its powers even when all the metal in the house isexhausted--if indeed the metal, or anything else, in the House ofHumanity were exhaustible. The chairs and tables, the beds and thebasins--everything--can be made into novel-gold: and, when it has beenmade, it remains as useful for future conversion, by the same or anyother magician of the same class, as ever. One of the most curiousthings about Miss Austen is the entire absence of self-repetition inher. Even her young men--certainly not her greatest successes--are by nomeans doubles of each other: and nature herself could not turn out halfa dozen girls more subtly and yet more sufficiently differentiated thanCatherine and Elizabeth, Marianne and Fanny, Elinor and Emma, andfinally the three sisters of _Persuasion_, the other (quite other)Elizabeth, Mary, and Anne. The "ruts of the brain" in novelists are aby-word. There are none here.
In these two great writers of English novel there is, really for thefirst time, the complementary antithesis after which people have oftengone (I fear it must be said) wool-gathering elsewhere. The amateurs ofcosmopolitan literature, I believe, like to find it in Stendhal andMichelet. They praise the former for his delicate and pitilesspsychological analysis. It had been anticipated a dozen years, nay,nearly twenty years, before he saw the Beresina: and was being given outin print at about the very moment of that uncomfortable experience, andbefore he himself published anything, by a young English lady--a lady ifever there was one and English if any person ever was--in a countryparsonage in Hampshire or in hired houses, quite humdrum and commonplaceto the commonplace and humdrum imagination, at Bath and Southampton.They praise Michelet for his enthusiastic and multiform apprehension ofthe plastic reality of the past, his re-creation of it, his putting ofit, live and active, before the present. The thing had been done, twentyyears earlier again, by a Scotch advocate who had deliberately turnedfrom poetic form, though he retained poetic imagination, and who did notdisdain 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 offictitious creation--Michelet's was not fictitious, but he almost madeit so, and Stendhal's was not historical, but he almost made it solikewise--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 besttitle to the invention--did in another matter three hundred yearsbefore.
That Scott's variety should be taken up first, and should for a timehave the great popularity, the greater number of disciples, the greateracceptance as a mode of pleasing--was, as has been pointed out, naturalenough; it is not a little significant that (to avert our eyes fromEngland) the next practitioner of the psychological style in Europeanliterature, Balzac, went through a long and mostly unsuccessfulprobation in the other kind, and never wholly deserted it, or at leastalways kept looking back to it. But the general shortcomings (as theyhave been admitted to be) in the whole of the second quarter of thecentury (or a little less) with us, were but natural results of theinevitable expatiation, unsystematic and irresolute, over the newlydiscovered provinces. And they gave admirable work of variouskinds--work especially admirable if we remember that there was nogeneral literary uprising with us as there was, in France and elsewhere,about 1830. If it were in any way possible--similar supposings have beenadmitted in literature very often--it would be extremely interesting totake a person _ex hypothesi_ fairly acquainted with the rest
ofliterature--English, foreign, European, and classical--but who knewnothing and had heard nothing of Bulwer, Disraeli, Peacock, Marryat,even Ainsworth and James and others between Scott and the accomplishedwork of Thackeray (Dickens's is, as has been said, mainly a sport ofgenius), and to turn him loose on this work. I do him the justice tosuppose that he would find not a few faults: I shall also do him thejustice 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 minoritiesof the time, such as that very clever Miss Robinson (I think her namewas Emma) who wrote _Whitefriars_ and other historical romances in theforties; such as Charles Macfarlane, who died, like Colonel Newcome, apoor brother of the Charterhouse after writing capital things like _TheDutch in the Medway_ and _The Camp of Refuge_--if, I say, you gave himthese things and he was a good man, but lazy, like Gray, I think hewould vote for a continuance of his life of novels and sofas withoutsighing for anything further. But undoubtedly it might be contended thatsomething further was needed: and it came. This was verisimilitude--theholding of the true mirror to actual society.
This verisimilitude, it should be observed, is not only difficult toattain: it seems not to be easy even to recognise. I have seen it saidthat the reason which makes it "hopeless for many people even to try toget 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 notthe point of the matter. The point is that Dickens depicts no "state ofsociety" that ever existed, except in the _Dickensium Sidus_. What hegives 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 whois real as a whole, in the sense of having possibly existed in thisworld: and the larger whole of the book generally is pure fantasy--asmuch so as one of the author's own favourite goblin-dream stories.
With Thackeray the case is exactly the opposite. It is a testimony nodoubt to Dickens's real power--though perhaps not to his readers'perspicacity--that he made them believe that he intended a "state ofsociety" when, whether he intended it or not, he certainly has not givenit. 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; hispersons are persons who lived or might have lived. And it is thediscovery of this art of creation by him and its parallel diffusionamong 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 neverattempted it. Bulwer, having failed in it for twenty years, struck it atlast about this time, and so did, even before him, Mrs. Marsh, andperhaps others, falteringly and incompletely. But as a general gift--acharacteristic--it never distinguished novelists till after the middleof the century.
It is, I think, impossible to find a better meeting and overlappingplace of the old and the new novel, than that very remarkable book_Emilia Wyndham_, which has been already more than once referred to. Itwas written in 1845 and appeared next year--the year of _Vanity Fair_.But the author was twenty years older than Thackeray, though shesurvived him by nearly a dozen; she had not begun early; and she wasfifty-five when she wrote _Emilia_. The not unnatural consequence isthat there is a great deal of inconsistency in the general texture ofthe 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, beingnot different from the themes of most other novels in that respect. Ahalf-idiotic spendthrift (he ends as very nearly an actual idiot) notmerely wastes his own property but practically embezzles that of hiswife and daughter; the wife dies and the daughter is left alone with anextravagant establishment, a father practically _non compos_, not apenny in her pocket after she has paid his doctor, and a selfishbaronet-uncle who will do less than nothing to help her. She has lovedhalf unconsciously, and been half consciously loved by, a soldier cousinor quasi-cousin: but he is in the Peninsular War. Absolutely no helppresents itself but that of a Mr. Danby, a conveyancer, who, in some waynot very consonant with the usual etiquette of his profession, has beenmixed up with her father's affairs--a man middle-aged, apparently dry ashis own parchments, and quite unversed in society. He helps her clumsilybut lavishly: and her uncle forces her to accept his hand as the onlymeans of saving her father from jail first and an asylum afterwards. Theinevitable disunion, brought about largely by Danby's mother (an awfulold middle-class harridan), follows; and the desk-and-head incidentmentioned above is brought about by her seeing the (false) announcementof 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, afterhighly tragical possibilities, these good gifts triumph. The greatestdanger is threatened, and the actual happy ending brought about, by anauxiliary plot, in which the actors are the old lover (two old loversindeed), his wife (a beautiful featherhead, who has been Emilia'sschool-fellow and dearest friend), and a wicked "Duke of C."
Even from this sketch the tolerably expert reader of novels may discoverwhere the weak points are likely to lie; he will be a real expert if heanticipates the strong ones without knowing the book. As was formerlynoticed, the dialogue is ill supplied with diction. The date of thestory is 1809: and the author had for that period a fairly safe patternin Miss Austen: but she does not use it at all, nor does she make thelingo 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 themoney side of the law), actually discharges, or thinks he isdischarging, hundreds and thousands of Mr. Wyndham's liabilities byhanding his own open cheques, not to the creditors, not to any onerepresenting them, but to a country attorney who has succeeded him inthe charge of the debts and affairs, and whom he knows to be a sharppractitioner and suspects to be a scoundrel. The inhuman uncle and thelicentious duke are mere cardboard characters: and the featherheadedLisa talks and behaves like a mixture of the sprightly heroines ofRichardson (for whom Lady Mary most righteously prescribed a soundwhipping) and the gushing heroines of Lady Morgan. There is too muchchaise-and-four and laudanum-bottle; too much moralising; too much of agood many other things. And yet, somehow or other, there are also thingsvery rarely to be found in any novel--even taking in Bulwer and theserious part of Dickens--up to the date. The scene between Danby and hismother, in the poky house in Charlotte Street, when she discovers thathe has been giving a hundred-pound cheque to a young lady isimpressingly good: it is not absolutely unsuggestive of what Thackeraywas just doing, and really not far from what Trollope was not for someyears to do. There are other passages which make one think of GeorgeEliot, who indeed might have been writing at the very time; there areeven 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, anduncles or fathers) is a miss, and not quite a miss, of a very striking,original, possible, and even probable character. His mother, withsomething more of the Dickensian type-character, can stand by herunpleasant self, and came ten years before "the Campaigner." Susan, herpleasanter servant, is equally self-sufficing, and came five yearsbefore 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 theother, of the book that deserve attention here and justify the placegiven to it: it is the general "chip-the-shell" character. The shell isonly being chipped: large patches of it still hamper the chicken, whichis thus a half develope
d and half disfigured little animal. All sorts ofdidactics, of Byronic-Bulwerish sentiment, of conventionalities ofvarious kinds, still hold their place; the language, as we have said, istraditional and hardly even that; and the characters are partly drawnfrom Noah's Arks of various dates, partly from the stock company of thetoy theatre. On the other hand, besides the touches of modernity alreadymentioned, and assisting them, there is a great attention to"interiors." The writer has, for her time, a more than promising senseof the incongruity between Empire dress and furniture and the style ofGeorge II.: and the shabbiness or actual squalor of Charlotte Street andChancery Lane show that she had either been a very early and forwardscholar of Dickens, or had discovered the thing on her own account. Herage may excuse some of the weak points, but it makes the presence of thestrong ones all the more remarkable: and it shows all the more forciblyhow the general influences which were to produce the great centralgrowth of Victorian novel were at work, and at work almost violently, inthe 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 lastfifty or sixty years of the nineteenth century it did, as it seems tome, very great things--so great that, putting poetry, which is supreme,aside, there is no division of the world's literature within a time atall comparable to its own which can much, if at all, excel it. It didthese great things because partly of the inscrutable laws whichdetermined that a certain number of men and women of unusual powershould exist, and should devote themselves to it, partly of the lessheroic-sounding fact that the general appetite of other men andwomenkind could make it worth while for these persons of genius andtalent not to do something else. But even so, the examination, rightlyconducted, discovers more than a sufficient dose of nobility. For thenovel appeal is not, after all, to a mere blind animal thirst forsomething that will pass and kill time, for something that will drug orflutter or amuse. Beyond and above these things there is something else.The very central cause and essence of it--most definitely and mostkeenly felt by nobler spirits and cultivated intelligences, but alsodimly and unconsciously animating very ordinary people--is the humandelight in humanity--the pleasure of seeing the men and women of longpast ages living, acting, and speaking as they might have done, those ofthe present living, acting, speaking as they do--but in each case withthe portrayal not as a mere copy of particulars, but influenced withthat spirit of the universal which is the secret and the charm of art.It is because the novels of these years recognised and provided thispleasure in a greater degree than those of the former period (except theproductions of a few masters) that they deserve the higher positionwhich has been here assigned them. If the novels of any period, beforeor since or to come, have deserved, may or shall deserve, a lowerplace--it is, and will be, because of their comparative or positiveneglect of the combination of these conditions. Perhaps it is not easyto see what new country there is for the novel to conquer. But, as withother kinds of literature, there is practically no limit to its powersof working its actual domains. In the finest of its already existingexamples it hardly yields in accomplishment even to poetry; in thatgreat secondary (if secondary) office of all Art--to redress theapparent injustice, and console for the apparent unkindness, ofNature--to serve as rest and refreshment between those exactions of lifewhich, though neither unjust nor unkind, are burdensome, it has no equalamong all the kinds of Art itself.