Thackeray might lose sadly in the years to come could it be demonstrated that, as some would have it, he deserved the title of cynic. Here is the most mooted point in Thackeray appreciation: it interests thousands where the nice questions concerning the novelist's art claim the attention of students alone. What can be said with regard to it? It will help just here to think of the man behind the work. No sensible human being, it would appear, can become aware of the life and personality of Thackeray without concluding that he was an essentially kind-hearted, even soft-hearted man. He was keenly sensitive to praise and blame, most affectionate and constant with his friends, generous and impulsive in his instincts, loving in his family, simple and humble in his spiritual nature, however questioning in his intellect. That is a fair summary of Thackeray as revealed in his daily walk—in his letters, acts and thoughts. Nothing could be sweeter and more kindly than the mass of his writings in this regard, pace "The Book of Snobs"—even in such a mood the satire is for the most part unbitter. The reminiscential essays continually strike a tender note that vibrates with human feeling and such memorials as the paper he wrote on the deaths of Irving and Macaulay represent a frequent vein. Thackeray's friends are almost a unit in this testimony: Edward Fitzgerald, indeed—"dear old Fitz," as Tennyson loved to call him—declares in a letter to somebody that he hears Thackeray is spoiled: meaning that his social success was too much for him. It is true that after the fame of "Vanity Fair," its author was a habitue of the best drawing-rooms, much sought after, and enjoying it hugely. But to read his letter to Mrs. Brookfield after the return home from such frivolities is to feel that the real man is untouched. Why Thackeray, with such a nature, developed a satirical bent and became a critic of the foibles of fashion and later of the social faults of humanity, is not so easy perhaps to say—unless we beg the question by declaring it to be his nature. When he began his major fiction at the age of thirty-seven he had seen much more of the seamy side of existence than had Dickens when he set up for author. Thackeray had lost a fortune, traveled, played Bohemian, tried various employments, failed in a business venture—in short, was an experienced man of the world with eyes wide open to what is light, mean, shifty and vague in the sublunary show. "The Book of Snobs" is the typical early document expressing the subacidulous tendency of his power: "Vanity Fair" is the full-length statement of it in maturity. Yet judging his life by and large (in contrast with his work) up to the day of his sudden death, putting in evidence all the testimony from many sources, it may be asserted with considerable confidence that William Makepeace Thackeray, whatever we find him to be in his works, gave the general impression personally of being a genial, kind and thoroughly sound-hearted man. We may, therefore, look at the work itself, to extract from it such evidence as it offers, remembering that, when all is said, the deepest part of a man, his true quality, is always to be discovered in his writings.

First a word on the books secondary to the four great novels. It is necessary at the start in studying him to realize that Thackeray for years before he wrote novels was an essayist, who, when he came to make fiction introduced into it the essay touch and point of view. The essay manner makes his larger fiction delightful, is one of its chief charms and characteristics. And contrariwise, the looseness of construction, the lack of careful architecture in Thackeray's stories, look to the same fact.

It can not justly be said of these earlier and minor writings that, taken as a whole, they reveal a cynic. They contain many thrusts at the foolishness and knavery of society, especially that genteel portion of it with which the writer, by birth, education and experience, was familiar. When Thackeray, in the thirties, turned to newspaper writing, he did so for practical reasons: he needed money, and he used such talents as were his as a writer, knowing that the chances were better than in art, which he had before pursued. It was natural that he should have turned to account his social experiences, which gave him a power not possessed by the run of literary hacks, and which had been to some extent disillusioning, but had by no means soured him. Broadly viewed, the tone of these first writings was genial, the light and shade of human nature—in its average, as it is seen in the world—was properly represented. In fact, often, as in "The Great Hoggarty Diamond," the style is almost that of burlesque, at moments, of horse-play: and there are too touches of beautiful young-man pathos. Such a work is anything rather than tart or worldly. There are scenes in that enjoyable story that read more like Dickens than the Thackeray of "Vanity Fair." The same remark applies, though in a different way, to the "Yellowplush Papers." An early work like "Barry Lyndon," unique among the productions of the young writer, expresses the deeper aspect of his tendency to depict the unpleasant with satiric force, to make clear-cut pictures of rascals, male and female. Yet in this historical study, the eighteenth century setting relieves the effect and one does not feel that the author is speaking with that direct earnestness one encounters in "Pendennis" and "The Newcomes." The many essays, of which the "Roundabout Papers" are a type, exhibit almost exclusively the sunnier and more attractive side of Thackeray's genius. Here and there, in the minor fiction of this experimental period, there are premonitions of he more drastic treatment of later years: but the dominant mood is quite other. One who read the essays alone, with no knowledge of the fiction, would be astonished at a charge of cynicism brought against the author.

And so we come to the major fiction: "Vanity Fair," "Pendennis," "The Newcomes," and "Esmond." Of "The Adventures of Philip" a later word may be said. "The Virginians" is a comparatively unimportant pendant to that great historical picture, "Henry Esmond." The quartet practically composes the fundamental contribution of Thackeray to the world of fiction, containing as it does all his characteristic traits. Some of them have been pointed out, time out of mind: others, often claimed, are either wanting or their virtue has been much exaggerated.

Of the merits incontestable, first and foremost may be mentioned the color and motion of Life which spread like an atmosphere over this fiction. By his inimitable idiom, his knowledge of the polite world, and his equal knowledge of the average human being irrespective of class or condition, Thackeray was able to make his chronicle appear the very truth. Moreover, for a second great merit, he was able, quite without meretricious appeals, to make that truth interesting. You follow the fortunes of the folk in a typical Thackeray novel as you would follow a similar group in actual life. They interest because they are real—or seem to be, which, for the purposes of art, is the same thing. To read is not so much to look from an outside place at a fictive representation of existence as to be participant in such a piece of life—to feel as if you were living the story. Only masters accomplish this, and it is, it may be added, the specialty of modern masters.

For another shining merit: much of wisdom assimilated by the author in the course of his days is given forth with pungent power and in piquant garb in the pages of these books: the reader relishes the happy statements of an experience profounder than his own, yet tallying in essentials: Thackeray's remarks seem to gather up into final shape the scattered oracles of the years. Gratitude goes out to an author who can thus condense and refine one's own inarticulate conclusions. The mental palate is tickled by this, while the taste is titillated by the grace and fitness of the style.

Yet in connection with this quality is a habit which already makes Thackeray seem of an older time—a trifle archaic in technique. I refer to the intrusion of the author into the story in first-personal comment and criticism. This is tabooed by the present-day realist canons. It weakens the illusion, say the artists of our own day, this entrance of an actual personality upon the stage of the imagined scene. Thackeray is guilty of this lovable sin to a greater degree than is Dickens, and it may be added here that, while the latter has so often been called preacher in contrast with Thackeray the artist, as a matter of fact, Thackeray moralizes in the fashion described fully as much: the difference being that he does it with lighter touch and with less strenuosity and obvious seriousness: is more consistently amusing in the act of instruction.

Thackeray again has less story to tell than his greatest contemporary and never gained a sure hand in construction, with the possible exception of his one success in plot, "Henry Esmond." Nothing is more apparent than the loose texture of "Vanity Fair," where two stories centering in the antithetic women, Becky and Amelia, are held together chronicle fashion, not in the nexus of an organism of close weave. But this very looseness, where there is such superlative power of characterization with plenty of invention in incident, adds to the verisimilitude and attraction of the book. The impression of life is all the more vivid, because of the lack of proportioned progress to a climax. The story conducts itself and ends much as does life: people come in and out and when Finis is written, we feel we may see them again—as indeed often happens, for Thackeray used the pleasant device of re-introducing favorite characters such as Pendennis, Warrington and the descendants thereof, and it adds distinctly to the reality of the ensemble.

"Vanity Fair" has most often been given precedence over the other novels of contemporary life: but for individual scenes and strength of character drawing both "Pendennis" and "The Newcomes" set up vigorous claims. If there be no single triumph in female portraiture like Becky Sharp, Ethel New-come (on the side of virtue) is a far finer woman than the somewhat insipid Amelia: and no personage in the Mayfair book is more successful and beloved than Major Pendennis or Colonel Newcome. Also, the atmosphere of these two pictures seems mellower, less sharp, while as organic structures they are both superior to "Vanity Fair." Perhaps the supremacy of the last-named is due most of all to the fact that a wonderfully drawn evil character has more fascination than a noble one of workmanship as fine. Or is it that such a type calls forth the novelist's powers to the full? If so, it were, in a manner, a reproach. But it is more important to say that all three books are delightfully authentic studies of upper-class society in England as Thackeray knew it: the social range is comparatively restricted, for even the rascals are shabby-genteel. But the exposure of human nature (which depends upon keen observation within a prescribed boundary) is wide and deep: a story-teller can penetrate just as far into the arcana of the human spirit if he confine himself to a class as if he surveyed all mankind. But mental limitations result: the point of view is that of the gentleman-class: the ideas of the personal relation to one's self, one's fellow men and one's Maker are those natural to a person of that station. The charming poem which the author set as Finis to "Dr. Birch and His Young Friends," with its concluding lines, is an unconscious expression of the form in which he conceived human duty. The "And so, please God, a gentleman," was the cardinal clause in his creed and all his work proves it. It is wiser to be thankful that a man of genius was at hand to voice the view, than to cavil at its narrow outook. In literature, in-look is quite as important. Thackeray drew what he felt and saw, and like Jane Austen, is to be understood within his limitations. Nor did he ever forget that, because pleasure-giving was the object of his art, it was his duty so to present life as to make it somehow attractive, worth while. The point is worth urging, for not a little nonsense has been written concerning the absolute veracity of Thackeray's pictures: as if he sacrificed all pleasurableness to the modern Moloch, truth. Neither he nor any other great novelist reproduces Life verbatim et literatim. Trollope, in his somewhat unsatisfactory biography of his fellow fictionist, very rightly puts his finger on a certain scene in "Vanity Fair" in which Sir Pitt Crawley figures, which departs widely from reality. The traditional comparison between the two novelists, which represents Dickens as ever caricaturing, Thackeray as the photographer, is coming to be recognized as foolish.

It is all merely a question of degree, as has been said. It being the artist's business to show a few of the symbols of life out of the vast amount of raw material offered, he differs in the main from his brother artist in the symbols he selects. No one of them presents everything—if he did, he were no artist. Thackeray approaches nearer than Dickens, it is true, to the average appearances of life; but is no more a literal copyist than the creator of Mrs. Gamp. He was rather one of art's most capable exemplars in the arduous employment of seeming-true.

It must be added that his technique was more careless than an artist of anything like his caliber would have permitted himself to-day. The audience was less critical: not only has the art of fiction been evolved into a finer finish, but gradually the court of judgment made up of a select reading public, has come to decide with much more of professional knowledge. Thus, technique in fiction is expected and given. So much of gain there has been, in spite of all the vulgarization of taste which has followed in the wake of cheap magazines and newspapers. In "Vanity Fair," for example, there are blemishes which a careful revision would never have suffered to remain: the same is true of most of Thackeray's books. Like Dickens, Thackeray was exposed to all the danger of the Twenty Parts method of publication. He began his stories without seeing the end; in one of them he is humorously plaintive over the trouble of making this manner of fiction. While "Vanity Fair" is, of course, written in the impersonal third person, at least one passage is put into the mouth of a character in the book: an extraordinary slip for such a novelist.

But peccadilloes such as these, which it is well to realize in view of the absurd claims to artistic impeccability for Thackeray made by rash admirers, melt away into nothing when one recalls Rawdon Crawley's horsewhipping of the Marquis; George Osborn's departure for battle, Colonel Newcome's death, or the incomparable scene where Lady Castlewood welcomes home the wandering Esmond; that "rapture of reconciliation"! It is by such things that great novelists live, and it may be doubted if their errors are ever counted against them, if only they can create in this fashion.

In speaking of Thackeray's unskilful construction the reference is to architectonics; in the power of particular scenes it is hard to name his superior. He has both the pictorial and the dramatic sense. The care with which "Esmond" was planned and executed suggests too that, had he taken his art more seriously and given needed time to each of the great books, he might have become one of the masters in that prime excellence of the craft, the excellence of proportion, progress and climax. He never quite brought himself to adopt the regular modern method of scenario. "Philip," his last full length fiction, may be cited as proof.

Yet it may be that he would have given increased attention to construction had he lived a long life. It is worth noting that when the unfinished "Denis Duval" dropt from a hand made inert by death, the general plan, wherefrom an idea of its architecture could be got, was among his effects.

To say a word now of Thackeray's style. There is practical unanimity of opinion as to this. Thackeray had the effect of writing like a cultivated gentleman not self-consciously making literature. He was tolerant of colloquial concessions that never lapsed into vulgarity; even his slips and slovenlinesses are those of the well-bred. To pass from him back to Richardson is to realize how stiffly correct is the latter. Thackeray has flexibility, music, vernacular felicity and a deceptive ease. He had, too, the flashing strokes, the inspirational sallies which characterize the style of writers like Lamb, Stevenson and Meredith. Fitness, balance, breeding and harmony are his chief qualities. To say that he never sinned or nodded would be to deny that he was human. He cut his cloth to fit the desired garment and is a modern English master of prose designed to reproduce the habit and accent of the polite society of his age. In his hortatory asides and didactic moralizings with their thees and thous and yeas, he is still the fine essayist, like Fielding in his eighteenth century prefatory exordiums. And here is undoubtedly one of his strongest appeals to the world of readers, whether or no it makes him less perfect a fictionist. The diction of a Thackeray is one of the honorable national assets of his race.

Thackeray's men and women talk as they might be expected to talk in life; each in his own idiom, class and idiosyncrasy. And in the descriptions which furnish atmosphere, in which his creatures may live and breathe and have their being, the hand of the artist of words is equally revealed. Both for dialogue and narration the gift is valid, at times superb. It would be going too far to say that if Thackeray had exercised the care in revision bestowed by later reputable authors, his style might not have been improved: beyond question it would have been, in the narrow sense. But the correction of trifling mistakes is one thing, a change in pattern another. The retouching, although satisfying grammar here and there, might have dimmed the vernacular value of his speech.

But what of Thackeray's view, his vision of things? Does he bear down unduly upon poor imperfect humanity? and what was his purpose in satire? If he is unfair in the representation his place among the great should suffer; since the truly great observer of life does general justice to humankind in his harmonious portrayal.

We have already spoken of Thackeray's sensitive nature as revealed through all available means: he conveys the impression of a suppressed sentimentalist, even in his satire. And this establishes a presumption that the same man is to be discovered in the novels, the work being an unconscious revelation of the worker. The characteristic books are of satirical bent, that must be granted: Thackeray's purpose, avowed and implicit in the stories, is that of a Juvenal castigating with a smiling mouth the evils of society. With keen eye he sees the weaknesses incident to place and power, to the affectations of fashion or the corruptions of the world, the flesh and the devil. Nobody of commonsense will deny that here is a welcome service if performed with skill and fair-mindedness in the interests of truth. The only query would be: Is the picture undistorted? If Thackeray's studies leave a bad taste in the mouth, if their effect is depressing, if one feels as a result that there is neither virtue nor magnanimity in woman, and that man is incapable of honor, bravery, justice and tenderness—then the novelist may be called cynic. He is not a wholesome writer, however acceptable for art or admirable for genius. Nor will the mass of mankind believe in and love him.

Naturally we are here on ground where the personal equation influences judgment. There can never be complete agreement. Some readers, and excellent people they are, will always be offended by what they never tire of calling the worldly tone of Thackeray; to others, he will be as lovable in his view of life as he is amusing. Speaking, then, merely for myself, it seems to me that for mature folk who have had some experience with humanity, Thackeray is a charming companion whose heart is as sound as his pen is incisive. The very young as a rule are not ready for him and (so far as my observation goes) do not much care for him. That his intention was to help the cause of kindness, truth and justice in the world is apparent. It is late in the day to defend his way of crying up the good by a frank exhibition of the evil. Good and bad are never confused by him, and Taine was right in calling him above all a moralist. But being by instinct a realist too, he gave vent to his passion for truth-telling so far as he dared, in a day when it was far less fashionable to do this than it now is. A remark in the preface to "Pendennis" is full of suggestion: "Since the author of 'Tom Jones' was buried, no writer of fiction among us has been permitted to depict to his utmost power a Man. We must drape him and give him a certain conventional simper. Society will not tolerate the Natural in our Art."

It will not do to say (as is often said) that Thackeray could not draw an admirable or perfect woman. If he did not leave us a perfect one, it was perhaps for the reason alleged to have been given by Mr. Howells when he was charged with the same misdemeanor: he was waiting for the Lord to do it first! But Thackeray does no injustice to the sex: if Amelia be stupid (which is matter of debate), Helen Warrington is not, but rather a very noble creature built on a large plan: whatever the small blemishes of Lady Castlewood she is indelible in memory for character and charm. And so with others not a few. Becky and Beatrix are merely the reverse of the picture. And there is a similar balance in the delineation of men: Colonel Newcome over against Captain Costigan, and many a couple more. Thackeray does not fall into the mistake of making his spotted characters all-black. Who does not find something likable in the Fotheringay and in the Campaigner? Even a Barry Lyndon has the redeeming quality of courage. And surely we adore Beatrix, with all her faults. Major Pendennis is a thoroughgoing old worldling, but it is impossible not to feel a species of fondness for him. Jos. Sedley is very much an ass, but one's smile at him is full of tolerance. Yes, the worst of them all, the immortal Becky (who was so plainly liked by her maker) awakens sympathy in the reader when routed in her fortunes, black-leg though she be. She cared for her husband, after her fashion, and she plays the game of Bad Luck in a way far from despicable. Nor is that easy-going, commonplace scoundrel, Rawdon, with his dog-like devotion to the same Becky, denied his touch of higher humanity. Behind all these is a large tolerance, an intellectual breadth, a spiritual comprehension that is merciful to the sinner, while never condoning the sin. Thackeray is therefore more than story-teller or fine writer: a sane observer of the Human Comedy; a satirist in the broad sense, devoting himself to revealing society to itself and for its instruction. It is easy to use negations: to say he did not know nor sympathize with the middle class nor the lower and outcast classes as did Dickens; that his interest was in peccadilloes and sins, not in courageous virtues: and that he judged the world from a club window. But this gets us nowhere and is aside from the critic's chief business: which is that of an appreciative explanation of his abiding power and charm. This has now been essayed. Thackeray was too great as man and artist not to know that it was his function to present life in such wise that while a pleasure of recognition should follow the delineation, another and higher pleasure should also result: the surprising pleasure of beauty. "Fiction," he declared, "has no business to exist, unless it be more beautiful than reality," And again: "The first quality of an artist is to have a large heart." With which revelatory utterances may be placed part of the noble sentence closing "The Book of Snobs": "If fun is good, truth is better still, and love best of all." To read him with open mind is to feel assured that his works, taken in their entirety, reflect these humane sentiments. It is a pity, therefore, for any reader of the best fiction, through intense appreciation of Dickens or for any other reason, to cut himself off from such an enlightening student of humanity and master of imaginative literature.



CHAPTER X

GEORGE ELIOT

George Eliot began fiction a decade later than Thackeray, but seems more than a decade nearer to us. With her the full pulse of modern realism is felt a-throbbing. There is no more of the ye's and thous with which, when he would make an exordium, Thackeray addressed the world—a fashion long since laid aside. Eliot drew much nearer to the truth, the quiet, homely verity of her scenes is a closer approximation to life, realizes life more vitally than the most veracious page of "Vanity Fair." Not that the great woman novelist made the mistake of a slavish imitation of the actual: that capital, lively scene in the early part of "The Mill on the Floss," where Mrs. Tulliver's connections make known to us their delightsome personalities, is not a mere transcript from life; and all the better for that. Nevertheless, the critic can easily discover a difference between Thackeray and Eliot in this regard, and the ten years between them (as we saw in the case of Dickens and Thackeray) are partly responsible: technique and ideal in literary art were changing fast. George Eliot was a truer realist. She took more seriously her aim of interpreting life, and had a higher conception of her artistic mission. Dickens in his beautiful tribute to Thackeray on the latter's death, speaks of the failure of the author of "Pendennis" to take his mission, his genius, seriously: there was justice in the remark. Yet we heard from the preface to "Pendennis" that Thackeray had the desire to depict a typical man of society with the faithful frankness of a Fielding, and since him, Thackeray states, never again used. But the novelist's hearers were not prepared, the time was not yet ripe, and the novelist himself lacked the courage, though he had the clear vision. With Eliot, we reach the psychologic moment: that deepest truth, the truth of character, exhibited in its mainsprings of impulse and thought, came with her into English fiction as it had never before appeared. It would hardly be overstatement to say that modern psychology in the complete sense as method and interest begins in the Novel with Eliot. For there is a radical difference, not only between the Novel which exploits plot and that which exploits character: but also between that which sees character in terms of life and that which sees it in terms of soul. Eliot's fiction does the latter: life to her means character building, and has its meaning only as an arena for spiritual struggle. Success or failure means but this: have I grown in my higher nature, has my existence shown on the whole an upward tendency?

If so, well and good. If not, whatever of place or power may be mine, I am among the world's failures, having missed the goal. This view, steadily to be encountered in all her fiction, gives it the grave quality, the deep undertone and, be it confessed, at times the almost Methodistic manner, which mark this woman's worth in its weakness and its notable strength. In her early days, long before she made fiction, she was morbidly religious; she became in the fulness of time one of the intellectually emancipated. Yet, emotionally, spiritually, she remained to the end an intensely religious person. Conduct, aspiration, communion of souls, these were to her always the realities. If Thackeray's motto was Be good, and Dickens', Do good, Eliot's might be expressed as: Make me good! Consider for a moment and you will see that these phrases stand successively for a convention, an action and an aspiration.

The life of Mary Ann Evans falls for critical purposes into three well-defined divisions: the early days of country life with home and family and school; her career as a savant; and the later years, when she performed her service as story-teller. Unquestionably, the first period was most important in influencing her genius. It was in the home days at Griff, the school days at Nuneaton nearby, that those deepest, most permanent impressions were absorbed which are given out in the finest of her fictions. Hence came the primal inspiration which produced her best. And it is because she drew most generously upon her younger life in her earlier works that it is they which are most likely to survive the shocks of Time.

The experiences of Eliot's childhood, youth and young womanhood were those which taught her the bottom facts about middle-class country life in the mid-century, and in a mid-county of England; Shakspere's county of Warwick. Those experiences gave her such sympathetic comprehension of the human case in that environment that she became its chronicler, as Dickens had become the chronicler of the lower middle-class of the cities. Unerringly, she generalized from the microcosm of Warwickshire to the life of the world and guessed the universal human heart. With utmost sympathy, joined with a nice power of scrutiny, she saw and understood the character-types of the village, when there was a village life which has since passed away: the yeoman, the small farmer, the operative in the mill, the peasant, the squire and the parson, the petty tradesman, the man of the professions: the worker with his hands at many crafts.

She matured through travel, books and social contact, her knowledge was greatly extended: she came to be, in a sense, a cultured woman of the world, a learned person. Her later books reflected this; they depict the so-called higher strata of English society as in "Middlemarch," or, as in "Romola," give an historical picture of another time in a foreign land. The woman who was gracious hostess at those famous Sunday afternoons at the Priory seems to have little likeness to the frail, shy, country girl in Griff—seems, too, far more important; yet it may be doubted whether all this later work reveals such mastery of the human heart or comes from such an imperative source of expression as do the earlier novels, "Adam Bede" and "The Mill on the Floss." For human nature is one and the same in Griff or London or Florence, as all the amplitude of the sky is mirrored in the dewdrop. And although Eliot became in later life a more accurate reporter of the intellectual unrest of her day, and had probed deeper into the mystery and the burden of this unintelligible world, great novels are not necessarily made in that way and the majority of those who love her cleave to the less burdened, more unforced expression of her power.

In those early days, moreover, her attitude towards life was established: it meant a wish to improve the "complaining millions of men." Love went hand in hand with understanding. It may well be that the somberly grave view of humanity and of the universe at large which came to be hers, although strengthened by the positivistic trend of her mature studies, was generated in her sickly youth and a reaction from the narrow theologic thought with which she was then surrounded. Always frail—subject through life to distressing illness—it would not be fair to ask of this woman an optimism of the Mark Tapley stripe. In part, the grave outlook was physical, temperamental: but also it was an expression of a swiftly approaching mood of the late nineteenth century. And the beginning can be traced back to the autumn evenings in the big farmhouse at Griff when, as a mere child, she wrestled or prayed with what she called her sick soul. That stern, upright farmer father of hers seems the dominant factor in her make-up, although the iron of her blood was tempered by the livelier, more mundane qualities of her sprightly mother, towards whom we look for the source of the daughter's superb gift of humor. Whatever the component parts of father and mother in her, and however large that personal variation which is genius, of this we may be comfortably sure: the deepest in the books, whether regarded as presentation of life or as interpretation, came from the early Warwickshire years.

Gradually came that mental eclaircissement which produced the editor, the magazinist, the translator of Strauss. The friendship with the Brays more than any one thing marks the external cause of this awakening: but it was latent, this response to the world of thought and of scholarship, and certain to be called out sooner or later. Our chief interest in it is due to the query how much it ministered to her coming career as creative author of fiction.

George Eliot at this period looked perilously like a Blue Stocking. The range and variety of her reading and the severely intellectual nature of her pursuits justify the assertion. Was this well for the novelist?

The reply might be a paradox: yes and no. This learning imparted to Eliot's works a breadth of vision that is tonic and wins the respect of the judicious. It helps her to escape from that bane of the woman novelist—excessive sentiment without intellectual orientation. But, on the other hand, there are times when she appears to be writing a polemic, not a novel: when the tone becomes didactic, the movement heavy—when the work seems self-conscious and over-intellectualized. Nor can it be denied that this tendency grew on Eliot, to the injury of her latest work. There is a simple kind of exhortation in the "Clerical Scenes," but it disappears in the earliest novels, only to reappear in stories like "Daniel Deronda." Any and all culture that comes to a large, original nature (and such was Eliot's) should be for the good of the literary product: learning in the narrower, more technical sense, is perhaps likely to do harm. Here and there there is a reminder of the critic-reviewer in her fiction.

George Eliot's intellectual development during her last years widened her work and strengthened her comprehensive grasp of life. She gained in interpretation thereby. There will, however, always be those who hold that it would have been better for her reputation had she written nothing after "Middlemarch," or even after "Felix Holt." Those who object on principle to her agnosticism, would also add that the negative nature of her philosophy, her lack of what is called definite religious convictions, had its share in injuring materially her maturest fiction. The vitality or charm of a novel, however, is not necessarily impaired because the author holds such views. It is more pertinent to take the books as they are, in chronologic order, to point out so far as possible their particular merits.

And first, the "Scenes from Clerical Life." It is interesting to the student of this novelist that her writing of fiction was suggested to her by Lewes, and that she tried her hand at a tale when she was not far from forty years old. The question will intrude: would a genuine fiction-maker need to be thus prodded by a friend, and refrain from any independent attempt up to a period so late? Yet it will not do to answer glibly in the negative. Too many examples of late beginning and fine fiction as a consequence are furnished by English literature to make denial safe. We have seen Defoe and Richardson and a number of later novelists breaking the rules—if any such exist. No one can now read the "Clerical Scenes" without discovering in them qualities of head and heart which, when allowed an enlarged canvas and backed by a sure technique, could be counted on to make worthy fiction. The quiet village life glows softly under the sympathetic touch of a true painter.

A recent reading of this first book showed more clearly than ever the unequalness of merit in the three stories, their strong didactic bent, and the charmingly faithful observation which for the present-day reader is their greatest attraction. The first and simplest, "The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton," is by far the best. The poorest is the second, "Mr. Gilfil's Love Story," which has touches of conventional melodrama in a framework reminiscent of earlier fictionists like Disraeli. "Janet's Repentance," with its fine central character of the unhappy wedded wife, is strong, sincere, appealing; and much of the local color admirable. But—perhaps because there is more attempt at story-telling, more plot—the narrative falls below the beautiful, quiet chronicle of the days of Amos: an exquisite portrayal of an average man who yet stands for humanity's best. The tale is significant as a prelude to Eliot's coming work, containing, in the seed, those qualities which were to make her noteworthy. Perusing the volume to-day, we can hardly say that it appears an epoch-making production in fiction, the declaration of a new talent in modern literature. But much has happened in fiction during the half century since 1857, and we are not in a position to judge the feeling of those who then began to follow the fortunes of the Reverend Amos.

But it is not difficult for the twentieth century reader, even if blase, to understand that "Adam Bede," published when its author was forty, aroused a furore of admiration: it still holds general attention, and many whose opinion is worth having, regard it with respect, affection, even enthusiasm.

The broader canvas was exactly what the novelist needed to show her power of characterization, her ability to build up her picture by countless little touches guided by the most unflinching faith in detail and given vibrancy by the sympathy which in all George Eliot's fiction is like the air you breathe. Then, too, as an appeal to the general, there is more of story interest, although neither here nor in any story to follow, does plot come first with a writer whose chief interest is always character, and its development. The autobiographic note deepens and gives at once verity and intensity to the novel; here, as in "The Mill on the Floss" which was to follow the next year, Eliot first gave free play to that emotional seizure of her own past to which reference has been made. The homely material of the first novel was but part of its strength. Readers who had been offered the flash-romantic fiction of Disraeli and Bulwer, turned with refreshment to the placid annals of a village where, none the less, the human heart in its follies and frailties and nobilities, is laid bare. The skill with which the leisurely moving story rises to its vivid moments of climactic interest—the duel in the wood, Hetty's flight, the death of Adam's father—is marked and points plainly to the advance, through study and practice, of the novelist since the "Clerical Scenes"; constructive excellencies do not come by instinct. "Adam Bede" is preeminently a book of belief, written not so much in ink as in red blood, and in that psychic fluid that means the author's spiritual nature. She herself declared, "I love it very much," and it reveals the fact on every page. Aside from its indubitable worth as a picture of English middle-class country life in an earlier nineteenth century than we know—the easy-going days before electricity—it has its highest claim to our regard as a reading in life, not conveyed by word of mouth didactically, but carried in scene and character. The author's tenderness over Hetty, without even sentimentalizing her as, for example, Dumas sentimentalizes his Camille, suggests the mood of the whole narrative: a large-minded, large-hearted comprehension of humankind, an insistence on spiritual tests, yet with the will to tell the truth and present impartially the darkest shadows. It is because George Eliot's people are compounded with beautiful naturalness of good and bad—not hopelessly bad with Hetty, nor hopelessly good with Adam—that we understand them and love them. Here is an element of her effectiveness. Even her Dinah walks with her feet firmly planted upon the earth, though her mystic vision may be skyward.

With "Adam Bede" she came into her own. The "Clerical Scenes" had won critical plaudits: Dickens, in 1857 long settled in his seat of public idolatry, wrote the unknown author a letter of appreciation, so warm-hearted, so generous, that it is hard to resist the pleasure of quoting it: it is interesting to remark that in despite the masculine pen-name, he attributed the work to a woman. But the public had not responded. With "Adam Bede" this was changed; the book gained speedy popularity, the author even meeting with that mixed compliment, a bogus claimant to its authorship. And so, greatly encouraged, and stimulated to do her best, she produced "The Mill on the Floss," a novel, which, if not her finest, will always be placed high on her list of representative fiction.

This time the story as such was stronger, there was more substance and variety because of the greater number of characters and their freer interplay upon each other. Most important of all, when we look beyond the immediate reception by the public to its more permanent position, the work is decidedly more thoroughgoing in its psychology: it goes to the very core of personality, where the earlier book was in some instances satisfied with sketch-work. In "Adam Bede" the freshness comes from the treatment rather than the theme. The framework, a seduction story, is old enough—old as human nature and pre-literary story-telling. But in "The Mill on the Floss" we have the history of two intertwined lives, contrasted types from within the confines of family life, bound by kin-love yet separated by temperament. It is the deepest, truest of tragedy and we see that just this particular study of humanity had not been accomplished so exhaustively before in all the annals of fiction. As it happened, everything conspired to make the author at her best when she was writing this novel: as her letters show, her health was, for her, good: we have noted the stimulus derived from the reception of "Adam Bede"—which was as wine to her soul. Then—a fact which should never be forgotten—the tale is carried through logically and expresses, with neither paltering nor evasion, George Eliot's sense of life's tragedy. In the other book, on the contrary, a touch of the fictitious was introduced by Lewes; Dinah and Adam were united to make at the end a mitigation of the painfulness of Hetty's downfall. Lewes may have been right in looking to the contemporary audience, but never again did Eliot yield to that form of the literary lie, the pleasant ending. She certainly did not in "The Mill on the Floss": an element of its strength is its truth. The book, broadly considered, moves slow, with dramatic accelerando at cumulative moments; it is the kind of narrative where this method is allowable without artistic sin. Another great excellence is the superb insight into the nature of childhood, boy and girl; if Maggie is drawn with the more penetrating sympathy, Tom is finely observed: if the author never rebukes his limitations, she states them and, as it were, lifts hands to heaven to cry like a Greek chorus: "See these mortals love yet clash! Behold, how havoc comes! Eheu! this mortal case!"

With humanity still pulling at her heart-strings, and conceiving fiction which offered more value of plot than before, George Eliot wrote the charming romance "Silas Marner," novelette in form, modern romance in its just mingling of truth and idealization: a work published the next year. She interrupted "Romola" to do it, which is suggestive as indicating absorption by the theme. This story offers a delightful blend of homely realism with poetic symbolism. The miser is wooed from his sordid love of gold by the golden glint of a little girl's hair: as love creeps into his starved heart, heartless greed goes out forever: before a soulless machine, he becomes a man. It is the world-old, still potent thought that the good can drive out the bad: a spiritual allegory in a series of vivid pictures carrying the wholesomest and highest of lessons. The artistic and didactic are here in happy union. And as nowhere else in her work (unless exception be made in the case of "Romola") she sees a truth in terms of drama. To read the story is to feel its stage value: it is no surprise to know that several dramatizations of the book have been made. Aside from its central motive, the studies of homely village life, as well as of polite society, are in Eliot's best manner: the humor of Dolly Winthrop is of as excellent vintage as the humor of Mrs. Poyser in "Adam Bede," yet with the necessary differentiation. The typical deep sympathy for common humanity—just average folks—permeates the handling. Moreover, while the romance has a happy issue, as a romance should according to Stevenson, if it possibly can, it does not differ in its view of life from so fatalistic a book as "The Mill on the Floss"; for circumstances change Silas; if the child Eppie had not come he might have remained a miser. It was not his will alone that revolutionized his life; what some would call luck was at work there. In "Silas Marner" the teaching is of a piece with that of all her representative work.

But when we reach "Romola" there is a change, debatable ground is entered upon at once. Hitherto, the story-teller has mastered the preacher, although an ever more earnest soul has been expressing itself about Life. Now we enter the region of more self-conscious literary art, of planned work and study, and confront the possibility of flagging invention. Also, we leave the solid ground of contemporary themes and find the realist with her hang for truth, essaying an historical setting, an entirely new and foreign motive. Eliot had already proved her right to depict certain aspects of her own English life. To strive to exercise the same powers on a theme like "Romola" was a venturesome step. We have seen how Dickens and Thackeray essayed romance at least once with ringing success; now the third major mid-century novelist was to try the same thing.

It may be conceded at the start that in one important respect this Florentine story of Savonarola and his day is entirely typical: it puts clearly before us in a medieval romantic mis-en scene, the problem of a soul: the slow, subtle, awful degeneration of the man Tito, with its foil in the noble figure of the girl Romola. The central personality psychologically is that of the wily Greek-Italian, and Eliot never probed deeper into the labyrinths of the perturbed human spirit than in this remarkable analysis. The reader, too, remembers gratefully, with a catch of the breath, the great scenes, two of which are the execution of Savonarola, and the final confrontation of Tito by his adoptive father, with its Greek-like sense of tragic doom. The same reader stands aghast before the labor which must lie behind such a work and often comes to him a sudden, vital sense of fifteenth century Florence, then, as never since, the Lily of the Arno: so cunningly and with such felicity are innumerable details individualized, massed and blended. And yet, somehow it all seems a splendid experiment, a worthy performance rather than a spontaneous and successful creative endeavor: this, in comparison with the fiction that came before. The author seems a little over-burdened by the tremendousness of her material. Whether it is because the Savonarola episode is not thoroughly synthetized with the Tito-Romola part: or that the central theme is of itself fundamentally unpleasant—or again, that from the nature of the romance, head-work had largely to supplant that genial draught upon the springs of childhood which gave us "Adam Bede" and "The Mill on the Floss";—or once more, whether the crowded canvas injures the unity of the design, be these as they may, "Romola" strikes one as great in spots and as conveying a noble though somber truth, but does not carry us off our feet. That is the blunt truth about it, major work as it is, with only half a dozen of its kind to equal it in all English literature. It falls distinctly behind both "A Tale of Two Cities" and "Esmond." It is a book to admire, to praise in many particulars, to be impressed by: but not quite to treasure as one treasures the story of the Tullivers. It was written by George Eliot, famous novelist, who with that anxious, morbid conscience of hers, had to live up to her reputation, and who received $50,000 for the work, even to-day a large sum for a piece of fiction. It was not written by a woman irresistibly impelled to self-expression, seized with the passionate desire to paint Life. It is, in a sense, her first professional feat and performance.

Meanwhile, she was getting on in life: we saw that she was seven and thirty when she wrote the "Clerical Scenes": it was almost a decade later when "Felix Holt, Radical" appeared, and she was nearing fifty. I believe it to be helpful to draw a line between all her fiction before and after "Felix Holt," placing that book somewhat uncertainly on the dividing line. The four earlier novels stand for a period when there is a strong, or at least sufficient story interest, the proper amount of objectification: to the second division belong "Middlemarch" and "Daniel Deronda," where we feel that problem comes first and story second. In the intermediate novel, "Felix Holt," its excellent story places it with the first books, but its increased didactic tendency with the latest stories. Why has "Felix Holt" been treated by the critics, as a rule, as of comparatively minor value? It is very interesting, contains true characterization, much of picturesque and dramatic worth; it abounds in enjoyable first-hand observation of a period by-gone yet near enough to have been cognizant to the writer. Her favorite types, too, are in it. Holt, a study of the advanced workman of his day, is another Bede, mutatis mutandis, and quite as truly realized. Both Mr. Lyon and his daughter are capitally drawn and the motive of the novel—to teach Felix that he can be quite as true to his cause if he be less rough and eccentric in dress and deportment, is a good one handled with success. To which may be added that the encircling theme of Mrs. Transome's mystery, grips the attention from the start and there is pleasure when it is seen to involve Esther, leading her to make a choice which reveals that she has awakened to a truer valuation of life—and of Felix. With all these things in its favor, why has appreciation been so scant?

Is it not that continually in the narrative you lose its broader human interest because of the narrower political and social questions that are raised? They are vital questions, but still, more specific, technical, of the time. Nor is their weaving into the more permanent theme altogether skilful: you feel like exclaiming to the novelist: "O, let Kingsley handle chartism, but do you stick to your last—love and its criss-cross, family sin and its outcome, character changed as life comes to be more vitally realized." George Eliot in this fine story falls into this mistake, as does Mrs. Humphry Ward in her well-remembered "Robert Elsmere," and as she has again in the novel which happens to be her latest as these words are written, "Marriage a la Mode." The thesis has a way of sticking out obtrusively in such efforts.

Many readers may not feel this in "Felix Holt," which, whatever its shortcomings, remains an extremely able and interesting novel, often underestimated. Still, I imagine a genuine distinction has been made with regard to it.

The difference is more definitely felt in "Middlemarch," not infrequently called Eliot's masterpiece. It appeared five years later and the author was over fifty when the book was published serially during 1871 and 1872. Nearly four years were spent in the work of composition: for it the sum of $60,000 was paid.

"Middlemarch," which resembles Thackeray's "Vanity Fair" in telling two stories not closely related, seems less a Novel than a chronicle-history of two families. It is important to remember that its two parts were conceived as independent; their welding, to call it such, was an afterthought. The tempo again, suiting the style of fiction, is leisurely: character study, character contrast, is the principal aim. More definitely, the marriage problem, illustrated by Dorothea's experience with Casaubon, and that of Lydgate with Rosamond, is what the writer places before us. Marriage is chosen simply because it is the modern spiritual battleground, a condition for the trying-out of souls. The greatness of the work lies in its breadth (subjective more than objective), its panoramic view of English country life of the refined type, its rich garner of wisdom concerning human motive and action. We have seen in earlier studies that its type, the chronicle of events as they affect character, is a legitimate one: a successful genus in English-speaking fiction in hands like those of Thackeray, Eliot and Howells. It is one accepted kind, a distinct, often able, sympathetic kind of fiction of our race: its worth as a social document (to use the convenient term once more) is likely to be high. It lacks the close-knit plot, the feeling for stage effect, the swift progression and the sense of completed action which another and more favored sort of Novel exhibits. Yet it may have as much chance of permanence in the hands of a master. The proper question, then, seems to be whether it most fitly expresses the genius of an author.

Perhaps there will never be general agreement as to this in the case of "Middlemarch." The book is drawn from wells of experience not so deep in Eliot's nature as those which went to the making of "Adam Bede" and "The Mill on the Floss," It is life with which the author became familiar in London and about the world during her later literary days. She knows it well, and paints it with her usual noble insistence upon truth. But she knows it with her brain; whereas, she knows "The Mill on the Floss" with her blood. There is surely that difference. Hence, the latter work has, it would seem, a better chance for long life; for, without losing the author's characteristic interpretation, it has more story-value, is richer in humor (that alleviating ingredient of all fiction) and is a better work of art. It shows George Eliot absorbed in story-telling: "Middlemarch" is George Eliot using a slight framework of story for the sake of talking about life and illustrating by character. Those who call it her masterpiece are not judging it primarily as art-work: any more than those who call Whitman the greatest American poet are judging him as artist. While it seems necessary to make this distinction, it is quite as necessary to bear down on the attraction of the character-drawing. That is a truly wonderful portrait of the unconsciously selfish scholar in Casaubon. Dorothea's noble naturalness, Will Ladislaw's fiery truth, the verity of Rosamond's bovine mediocrity, the fine reality of Lydgate's situation, so portentous in its demand upon the moral nature—all this, and more than this, is admirable and authoritative. The predominant thought in closing such a study is that of the tremendous complexity of human fate, influenced as it is by heredity, environment and the personal equation, and not without melioristic hope, if we but live up to our best. The tone is grave, but not hopeless. The quiet, hesitant movement helps the sense of this slow sureness in the working of the social law:

"Though the mills of God grind slowly, Yet they grind exceeding small."

In her final novel, "Daniel Deronda," between which and "Middlemarch" there were six years, so that it was published when the author was nearly sixty years old, we have another large canvas upon which, in great detail and with admirable variety, is displayed a composition that does not aim at complete unity—or at any rate, does not accomplish it, for the motive is double: to present the Jew so that Judenhetze may be diminished: and to exhibit the spiritual evolution through a succession of emotional experiences of the girl Gwendolen. This phase of the story offers an instructive parallel with Meredith's "Diana of the Crossways." If the Jew theme had been made secondary artistically to the Gwendolen study, the novel would have secured a greater degree of constructive success; but there's the rub. Now it seems the main issue; again, Gwendolen holds the center of the stage. The result is a suspicion of patchwork; nor is this changed by the fact that both parts are brilliantly done—to which consideration may be added the well-known antipathy of many Gentile readers to any treatment of the Jew in fiction, if an explanation be sought of the relative slighting of a very noble book.

For it has virtues, many and large. Its spirit is broad, tolerant, wide and loving. In no previous Eliot fiction are there finer single effects: no one is likely to forget the scene in which Gwendolen and Harcourt come to a rupture; or the scene of Deronda's dismissal. And in the way of character portrayal, nothing is keener and truer than the heroine of this book, whose unawakened, seemingly light, nature is chastened and deepened as she slowly learns the meaning of life. The lesson is sound and salutary: it is set forth so vividly as to be immensely impressive. Mordecai, against the background necessary to show him, is sketched with splendid power. And the percentage of quotable sayings, sword-thrusts, many of them, into the vitals of life, is as high perhaps as in any other of the Novels, unless it be "Middlemarch." Nevertheless those who point to "Deronda" as illustrating the novelist's decadence—although they use too harsh a word—have some right on their side. For, viewed as story, it is not so successful as the books of the first half of George Eliot's career. It all depends whether a vital problem Novel is given preference over a Novel which does not obtrude message, if it have any at all. And if fiction be a fine art, it must be confessed that this latter sort is superior. But we have perfect liberty to admire the elevation, earnestness and skill en detail that denote such a work. Nay, we may go further and say that the woman who wrote it is greater than she who wrote "The Mill on the Floss."

With a backward glance now at the list, it may be said in summary that the earlier fiction constitutes George Eliot's most authoritative contribution to English novel-making, since the thinking about life so characteristic of her is kept within the bounds of good story-telling. And the compensation for this artistic loss in her later fiction is found in its wider intellectual outlook, its deeper sympathy, the more profound humanity of the message.

But what of her philosophy? She was not a pessimist, since the pessimist is one who despairs of human virtue and regards the world as paralyzing the will nobly to achieve. She was, rather, a meliorist who hoped for better things, though tardy to come; who believed, in her own pungent phrase, "in the slow contagion of good." Of human happiness she did in one of her latest moods despair: going so far in a dark moment as to declare that the only ideal left her was duty. In a way, she grew sadder as she grew older. By intellect she was a positivist who has given up any definite hope of personal immortality—save that which by a metaphor is applied to one's influence upon the life of the world here upon earth. And in her own career, by her unconventional union with Lewes, she made a questionable choice of action, though from the highest motives; a choice which I believe rasped her sensitive soul because of the way it was regarded by many whom she respected and whose good opinion she coveted. But she remained splendidly wholesome and inspiring in her fiction, because she clung to her faith in spiritual self-development, tested all life by the test of duty, felt the pathos and the preciousness of inconspicuous lives, and devoted herself through a most exceptional career to loving service for others. She was therefore not only a novelist of genius, but a profoundly good woman. She had an ample practical credo for living and will always be, for those who read with their mind and soul as well as their eyes, anything but a depressing writer. For them, on the contrary, she will be a tonic force, a seer using fiction as a means to an end—and that end the betterment of mankind.



CHAPTER XI

TROLLOPE AND OTHERS

Five or six writers of fiction, none of whom has attained a position like that of the three great Victorians already considered, yet all of whom loomed large in their day, have met with unequal treatment at the hands of time: Bulwer Lytton, Disraeli, Reade, Trollope, Kingsley. And the Brontes might well be added to the list. The men are mentioned in the order of their birth; yet it seems more natural to place Trollope last, not at all because he lived to 1882, while Kingsley died seven years earlier. Reade lived two years after Trollope, but seems chronologically far before him as a novelist. In the same way, Disraeli and Bulwer Lytton, as we now look back upon them, appear to be figures of another age; though the former lived to within a few years of Trollope, and the latter died but two years before Kingsley. Of course, the reason that Disraeli impresses us as antiquated where Trollope looks thoroughly modern, is because the latter is nearest our own day in method, temper and aim. And this is the main reason why he has best survived the shocks of time and is seen to be the most significant figure of an able and interesting group. Before he is examined, something may be said of the others.

In a measure, the great reputation enjoyed by the remaining writers was secured in divisions of literature other than fiction; or derived from activities not literary at all. Thus Beaconsfield was Premier, Bulwer was noted as poet and dramatist, and eminent in diplomacy; Kingsley a leader in Church and State. They were men with many irons in the fire: naturally, it took some years to separate their literary importance pure and simple from the other accomplishments that swelled their fame. Reade stood somewhat more definitely for literature; and Trollope, although his living was gained for years as a public servant, set his all of reputation on the single throw of letters. He is Anthony Trollope, Novelist, or he is nothing.

I

Thinking of Disraeli as a maker of stories, one reads of his immense vogue about the middle of the last century and reflects sagely upon the change of literary fashions. The magic is gone for the reader now. Such claim as he can still make is most favorably estimated by "Coningsby," "Sybil" and "Tancred," all published within four years, and constituting a trilogy of books in which the follies of polite society and the intimacies of politics are portrayed with fertility and facility. The earlier "Henrietta Temple" and "Venetia," however fervid in feeling and valuable for the delineation of contemporary character, are not so characteristic. Nor are the novels of his last years, "Lothair" and "Endymion," in any way better than those of his younger days. That the political trilogy have still a certain value as studies of the time is beyond argument. Also, they have wit, invention and a richly pictorial sense for setting, together with flamboyant attraction of style and a solid substratum of thought. One recognizes often that an athletic mind is at play in them. But they do not now take hold, whatever they once did; an air of the false-literary is over them, it is not easy to read them as true transcripts from life. To get a full sense of this, turn to literally contemporaneous books like Dickens' "David Copperfield" and "Hard Times"; compared with such, Disraeli and all his world seem clever pastiche. Personal taste may modify this statement: it can hardly reverse it. It would be futile to explain the difference by saying that Disraeli was some eight years before Dickens or that he dealt with another and higher class of society. The difference goes deeper: it is due to the fact that one writer was writing in the spirit of the age with his face to the future and so giving a creative representation of its life; whereas the other was painting its manners and only half in earnest: playing with literature, in sooth. A man like Dickens is married to his art; Disraeli indulges in a temporary liaison with letters. There is, too, in the Lothair-Endymion kind of literature a fatal resemblance to the older sentimental and grandiose fiction of the eighteenth century: an effect of plush and padding, an atmosphere of patchouli and sachet powder. It has the limitation that fashion ever sets; it is boudoir novel-writing: cabinet literature in both the social and political sense. As Agnes Repplier has it: "Lothair is beloved by the female aristocracy of Great Britain; and mysterious ladies, whose lofty souls stoop to no conventionalities, die happy with his kisses on their lips." It would be going too far perhaps to say that this type never existed in life, for Richardson seems to have had a model in mind in drawing Grandison; but it hardly survives in letters, unless we include "St. Elmo" and "Under Two Flags" in that denomination.

To sum it all up: For most of us Disraeli has become hard reading. This is not to say that he cannot still be read with profit as one who gives us insight concerning his day; but his gorgeous pictures and personages have faded woefully, where Trollope's are as bright as ever; and the latter is right when he said that Lord Beaconsfield's creatures "have a flavor of paint and unreality."

II

Bulwer Lytton has likewise lost ground greatly: but read to-day he has much more to offer. In him, too, may be seen an imperfectly blent mixture of by-gone sentimentality and modern truth: yet whether in the romance of historic setting, "The Last Days of Pompeii," or in the satiric study of realism, like "My Novel," Bulwer is much nearer to us, and holds out vital literature for our appreciation. It is easy to name faults both in romance and realism of his making: but the important thing to acknowledge is that he still appeals, can be read with a certain pleasure. His most mature work, moreover, bears testimony to the coming creed of fiction, as Disraeli's never does. There are moments with Bulwer when he almost seems a fellow of Meredith's. I recall with amusement the classroom remark of a college professor to the effect that "My Novel" was the greatest fiction in English literature. While the freshmen to whom this was addressed did not appreciate the generous erraticism of the judgment, even now one of them sees that, coming as it did from a clergyman of genial culture, a true lover of literature and one to inspire that love in others—even in freshmen!—it could hardly have been spoken concerning a mere man-milliner of letters. Bulwer produced too much and in too many kinds to do his best in all—or in any one. But most of us sooner or later have been in thrall to "Kenelm Chillingly" or thrilled to that masterly horror story, "The House and the Brain." There is pinchbeck with the gold, but the shining true metal is there.

III

To pass to Kingsley, is like turning from the world to the kingdom of God: all is religious fervor, humanitarian purpose. Here again the activity is multiple but the dominant spirit is that of militant Christianity. Outside of the Novel, Kingsley has left in "Water Babies" a book deserving the name of modern classic, unless the phrase be a contradiction in terms. "Alton Locke," read to-day, is felt to be too much the tract to bear favorable comparison with Eliot's "Felix Holt"; but it has literary power and noble sincerity. Kingsley is one of the first to feel the ground-swell of social democracy which was to sweep later fiction on its mighty tide. "Westward Ho!" is a sterling historical romance, one of the more successful books in a select list which embraces "The Cloister and the Hearth," "Lorna Doone," and "John Inglesant." "Hypatia," examined dispassionately, may be described as an historical romance with elements of greatness rather than a great historical romance. But it shed its glamour over our youth and there is affectionate dread in the thought of a more critical re-reading.

In truth, Kingsley, viewed in all his literary work, stands out as an athlete of the intellect and the emotions, doing much and doing it remarkably well—a power for righteousness in his day and generation, but for this very reason less a professional novelist of assured standing. His gifted, erratic brother Henry, in the striking series of stories dealing prevailingly with the Australian life he so well knew, makes a stronger impression of singleness of power and may last longer, one suspects, than the better-known, more successful Charles, whose significance for the later generation is, as we have hinted, in his sensitiveness to the new spirit of social revolt,—an isolated voice where there is now full chorus.

IV

An even more virile figure and one to whom the attribution of genius need not be grudged, is the strong, pugnacious, eminently picturesque Charles Reade. It is a temptation to say that but for his use of a method and a technique hopelessly old-fashioned, he might claim close fellowship for gift and influence with Dickens. But he lacked art as it is now understood: balance, restraint, the impersonal view were not his. He is a glorious but imperfect phenomenon, back there in the middle century. He worked in a way deserving of the descriptive phrase once applied to Macaulay—"a steam engine in breeches;" he put enough belief and heart into his fiction to float any literary vessel upon the treacherous waters of fame. He had, of the more specific qualities of a novelist, racy idiom, power in creating character and a remarkable gift for plot and dramatic scene. His frankly melodramatic novels like "A Terrible Temptation" are among the best of their kind, and in "The Cloister and the Hearth" he performed the major literary feat of reconstructing, with the large imagination and humanity which obliterate any effect of archeology and worked-up background, a period long past. And what reader of English fiction does not harbor more than kindly sentiments for those very different yet equally lovable women, Christie Johnstone and Peg Woffington? To run over his contributions thus is to feel the heart grow warm towards the sturdy story-teller. Reade also played a part, as did Kingsley, in the movement for recognition of the socially unfit and those unfairly treated. "Put Yourself in His Place," with its early word on the readjustment of labor troubles, is typical of much that he strove to do. Superb partisan that he was, it is probable that had he cared less for polemics and more for his art, he would have secured a safer position in the annals of fiction. He can always be taken up and enjoyed for his earnest conviction or his story for the story's sake, even if on more critical evaluations he comes out not so well as men of lesser caliber.

V

The writer of the group who has consistently gained ground and has come to be generally recognized as a great artist, a force in English fiction both for influence and pleasure-giving power, is Anthony Trollope. He is vital to-day and strengthening his hold upon the readers of fiction. The quiet, cultivated folk in whose good opinion lies the destiny of really worthy literature, are, as a rule, friendly to Trollope; not seldom they are devoted to him. Such people peruse him in an enjoyably ruminative way at their meals, or read him in the neglige of retirement. He is that cosy, enviable thing, a bedside author. He is above all a story-teller for the middle-aged and it is his good fortune to be able to sit and wait for us at that half-way house,—since we all arrive. Of course, to say this is to acknowledge his limitations. He does not appeal strongly to the young, though he never forgets to tell a love story; but he is too placid, matter-of-fact, unromantic for them. But if he do not shake us with lyric passion, he is always interesting and he wears uncommonly well. That his popularity is extending is testified to by new editions and publishers' hullabaloo over his work.

Such a fate is deserved by him, for Trollope is one of the most consummate masters of that commonplace which has become the modern fashion—and fascination. He has a wonderful power in the realism which means getting close to the fact and the average without making them uninteresting. So, naturally, as realism has gained he has gained. No one except Jane Austen has surpassed him in this power of truthful portrayal, and he has the advantage of being practically of our own day. He insisted that fiction should be objective, and refused to intrude himself into the story, showing himself in this respect a better artist than Thackeray, whom he much admired but frankly criticized. He was unwilling to pause and harangue his audience in rotund voice after the manner of Dickens, First among modern novelists, Trollope stands invisible behind his characters, and this, as we have seen, was to become one of the articles of the modern creed of fiction. He affords us that peculiar pleasure which is derived from seeing in a book what we instantly recognize as familiar to us in life. Just why the pleasure, may be left to the psychologists; but it is of indisputable charm, and Trollope possesses it. We may talk wisely and at length of his commonplaceness, lack of spice, philistinism; he can be counted on to amuse us. He lived valiantly up to his own injunction: "Of all the needs a book has, the chief need is that it is readable." A simple test, this, but a terrible one that has slain its thousands. No nineteenth century maker of stories is safer in the matter of keeping the attention. If the book can be easily laid down, it is always agreeable to take it up again.

Trollope set out in the most systematic way to produce a series of novels illustrating certain sections of England, certain types of English society; steadily, for a life-time, with the artisan's skilful hand, he labored at the craft. He is the very antithesis of the erraticisms and irregularities of genius. He went to his daily stint of work, by night and day, on sea or land, exactly as the merchant goes to his office, the mechanic to his shop. He wrote with a watch before him, two hundred and fifty words to fifteen minutes. But he had the most unusual faculty of direct, unprejudiced, clear observation; he trained himself to set down what he saw and to remember it. And he also had the constructive ability to shape and carry on his story so as to create the effect of growth, along with an equally valuable power of sympathetic characterization, so that you know and understand his folk. Add to this a style perfectly accordant with the unobtrusive harmony of the picture, and the main elements of Trollope's appeal have been enumerated. Yet has he not been entirely explained. His art—meaning the skilled handling of his material—can hardly be praised too much; it is so easy to underestimate because it is so unshowy. Few had a nicer sense of scale and tone; he gets his effects often because of this harmony of adjustment. For one example, "The Warden" is a relatively short piece of fiction which opens the famous Chronicles of Barset series. Its interest culminates in the going of the Reverend Septimus Harding to London from his quiet country home, in order to prevent a young couple from marrying. The whole situation is tiny, a mere corner flurry. But so admirably has the climax been prepared, so organic is it to all that went before in the way of preparation, that the result is positively thrilling: a wonderful example of the principle of key and relation.

Or again, in that scene which is a favorite with all Trollope's readers, where the arrogant Mrs. Proudie is rebuked by the gaunt Mr. Crawley, the effect of his famous "Peace, woman!" is tremendous only because it is a dash of vivid red in a composition where the general color scheme is low and subdued.

In view of this faculty, it will not do to regard Trollope as a kind of mechanic who began one novel the day he finished another and often carried on two or three at the same time, like a juggler with his balls, with no conception of them as artistic wholes. He says himself that he began a piece of fiction with no full plan. But, with his very obvious skill prodigally proved from his work, we may beg leave to take all such statements in a qualified sense: for the kind of fiction he aimed at he surely developed a technique not only adequate but of very unusual excellence.

Trollope was a voluminous writer: he gives in his delightful autobiography the list of his own works and it numbers upwards of sixty titles, of which over forty are fiction. His capacity for writing, judged by mere bulk, appears to have been inherited; for his mother, turning authoress at fifty years of age, produced no less than one hundred and fourteen volumes! There is inferior work, and plenty of it, among the sum-total of his activity, but two series, amounting to about twenty books, include the fiction upon which his fame so solidly rests: the Cathedral series and the Parliamentary series. In the former, choosing the southern-western counties of Wiltshire and Hants as Hardy chose Wessex for his peculiar venue, he described the clerical life of his land as it had never been described before, showing the type as made up of men like unto other men, unromantic, often this-worldly and smug, yet varying the type, making room for such an idealist as Crawley as well as for sleek bishops and ecclesiastical wire-pullers. Neither his young women nor his holy men are overdrawn a jot: they have the continence of Nature. But they are not cynically presented. You like them and take pleasure in their society; they are so beautifully true! The inspiration of these studies came to him as he walked under the shadow of Salisbury Cathedral; and one is never far away from the influence of the cathedral class. The life is the worldy-godly life of that microcosm, a small, genteel, conventional urban society; in sharp contrast with the life depicted by Hardy in the same part of the land,—but like another world, because his portraiture finds its subjects among peasant-folk and yeoman—the true primitive types whose speech is slow and their roots deep down in the soil.

The realism of Trollope was not confined to the mere reproduction of externals; he gave the illusion of character, without departing from what can be verified by what men know. His photographs were largely imaginary, as all artistic work must be; he constructed his stories out of his own mind. But all is based on what may be called a splendidly reasoned and reasonable experience with Life. His especial service was thus to instruct us about English society, without tedium, within a domain which was voluntarily selected for his own. In this he was also a pioneer in that local fiction which is a geographical effect of realism. And to help him in this setting down of what he believed to be true of humanity, was a style so lucid and simple as perfectly to serve his purpose. For unobtrusive ease, idiomatic naturalness and that familiarity which escapes vulgarity and retains a quiet distinction, no one has excelled him. It is one reason why we feel an intimate knowledge of his characters. Mr. Howells declares it is Trollope who is most like Austen "in simple honesty and instinctive truth, as unphilosophized as the light of common day"—though he goes on to deplore that he too often preferred to be "like the caricaturist Thackeray"—a somewhat hard saying. It is a particular comfort to read such a writer when intensely personal psychology is the order of the day and neither style nor interpretation in fiction is simple.

If Trollope can be said to be derivative at all, it is Thackeray who most influenced him. He avows his admiration, wrote the other's life, and deemed him one who advanced truth-telling in the Novel. Yet, as was stated, he did not altogether approve of the Master, thinking his satire too steady a view instead of an occasional weapon. Indeed his strictures in the biography have at times a cool, almost hostile sound. He may or may not have taken a hint from Thackeray on the re-introduction of characters in other books—a pleasant device long antedating the nineteenth century, since one finds it in Lyly's "Euphues." Trollope also disliked Dickens' habit of exaggeration (as he thought it) even when it was used in the interests of reform, and satirized the tendency in the person of Mr. Popular Sentiment in "The Warden."

The more one studies Trollope and the farther he recedes into the past, the firmer grows the conviction that he is a very distinctive figure of Victorian fiction, a pioneer who led the way and was to be followed by a horde of secondary realistic novelists who could imitate his methods but not reproduce his pleasant effect.

VI

The Brontes, coming when they did, before 1850, are a curious study. Realism was growing daily and destined to be the fashion of the literary to-morrow. But "Jane Eyre" is the product of Charlotte Bronte's isolation, her morbidly introspective nature, her painful sense of personal duty, the inextinguishable romance that was hers as the leal descendant of a race of Irish story-tellers. She looked up to and worshipped Thackeray, but produced fiction that was like something from another world. She and her sisters, especially Emily, whose vivid "Wuthering Heights" has all the effect of a visitant from a remote planet, are strangely unrelated to the general course of the nineteenth century. They seem born out of time; they would have left a more lasting impress upon English fiction had they come before—or after. There are unquestionable qualities of realism in "Jane Eyre," but it is romantic to the core, sentimental, melodramatic. Rochester is an elder St. Elmo—hardly truer as a human being; Jane's sacrificial worship goes back to the eighteenth century; and that famous mad-woman's shriek in the night is a moment to be boasted of on the Bowery. And this was her most typical book, that which gave her fame. The others, "Villette" and the rest, are more truly representative of the realistic trend of the day, but withal though interesting, less characteristic, less liked. In proportion as she is romantic is she remembered. The streak of genius in these gifted women must not blind us to the isolation, the unrelated nature of their work to the main course of the Novel. They are exceptions to the rule.

VII

This group then of novelists, sinking all individual differences, marks the progress of the method of realism over the romance. Scarcely one is conspicuous for achievement in the latter, while almost all of them did yeoman service in the former. In some cases—those of Disraeli and Bulwer—the transition is seen where their earlier and later work is contrasted; with a writer like Trollope, the newer method completely triumphs. Even in so confirmed a romance-maker as Wilkie Collins, to whom plot was everything and whose cunning of hand in this is notorious, there is a concession to the new ideal of Truth. He was touched by his time in the matter of naturalness of dialogue, though not of event. Wildly improbable and wooden as his themes may now seem, their manner is realistic, realism of speech, in fact, being an element in his effectivism. Even the author of "The Moonstone" is scotched by the spirit of the age, and in the preface to "Armsdale" declares for a greater freedom of theme—one of the first announcements of that desire for an extension of the subject-matter which was in the next generation to bring such a change.

It seems just to represent all these secondary novelists as subsidiary to Dickens, Thackeray and Eliot. Fascinating isolated figures like Borrow, who will always be cherished by the few, are perforce passed by. We are trying to keep both quality and influence in mind, with the desire to show the writers not by themselves alone but as part of a stream of tendency which has made the English Novel the distinct form it is to-day. Even a resounding genius, in this view, may have less meaning than an apparent plodder like Trollope, who, as time goes by, is seen more clearly to be one of the shaping forces in the development of a literary form.



CHAPTER XII

HARDY AND MEREDITH

We have seen in chapter seventh, how the influence of Balzac introduced to modern fiction that extension of subject and that preference for the external fact widely productive of change in the novel-making of the continent and of English-speaking lands. As the year 1830 was given significance by him, so, a generation later, the year 1870 was given significance by Zola. England, like other lands cultivating the Novel, felt the influence. Balzac brought to fiction a greater franchise of theme: Zola taught it to regard a human being—individual or collectively social—as primarily animal: that is, he explains action on this hypothesis. And as an inevitable consequence, realism passed to the so-called naturalism. Zola believed in this view as a theory and his practice, not always consistent with it, was sufficiently so in the famous Rougon-Macquart series of novels begun the year of the Franco-Prussian war, to establish it as a method, and a school of fiction. Naturalism, linking hands with l'art pour art—"a fine phrase is a moral action—there is no other morality in literature," cried Zola—became a banner-cry, with "the flesh is all" its chief article of belief. No study of the growth of English fiction can ignore this typical modern movement, however unpleasant it may be to follow it. The baser and more brutal phases of the Novel continental and insular look to this derivation. Zola's remarkable pronunciamento "The Experimental Novel," proves how honestly he espoused the doctrine of the realist, how blind he is to its partial view. His attempt to subject the art of fiction to the exact laws of science, is an illustration of the influence of scientific thought upon a mind not broadly cultured, though of unusual native quality. Realism of the modern kind—the kind for which Zola stands—is the result in a form of literature of the necessary intellectual unrest following on the abandonment of older religious ideals. Science had forced men to give up certain theological conceptions; death, immorality, God, Man,—these were all differently understood, and a period of readjustment, doubt and negation, of misery and despair, was the natural issue. Man, being naturally religious, was sure sooner or later to secure a new and more hopeful faith: it was a matter of spiritual self-preservation. But realism in letters, for the moment, before a new theory had been formulated, was a kind of pis aller by which literature could be produced and attention given to the tangible things of this earth, many of them not before thoroughly exploited; the things of the mind, of the Spirit, were certain to be exploited later, when a broader creed should come. The new romanticism and idealism of our day marks this return. Zola's theory is now seen to be wrong, and there has followed a violent reaction from the realistic tenets, even in Paris, its citadel. But for some years, it held tyrannous sway and its leader was a man of genius, his work distinctive, remarkable; at its best, great,—in spite of, rather than because of, his principles. It was in the later Trilogy of the cities that, using a broader formula, he came into full expression of what was in him; during the last years of his life he was moving, both as man and artist, in the right direction. Yet naturally it was novels like "Nana" and "L'Assomoir" that gave him his vogue; and their obsession with the fleshly gave them for the moment a strange distinction: for years their author was regarded as the founder of a school and its most formidable exponent. He wielded an influence that rarely falls to a maker of stories. And although realism in its extreme manifestations no longer holds exclusive sway, Zola's impulse is still at work in the modern Novel. Historically, his name will always be of interest.