Alton Locke was no doubt more popular, more passionately in earnest, more definite and intelligible than Yeast; and if I fail to hold it quite as the equal of Yeast in literary merit, it is because these very qualities necessarily impair it as a work of art. It was written, we well know, under violent excitement and by a terrible strain on the neuropathic organism of the poet-preacher. It is undoubtedly spasmodic, crude, and disorderly. A generation which has grown fastidious on the consummate finish of Esmond, Romola, and Treasure Island, is a little critical of the hasty outpourings of spirit which satisfied our fathers in the forties, after the manner of Sybil, the Last of the Barons, or Barnaby Rudge. The Tennysonian modulation of phrase had not yet been popularised in prose, and spasmodic soliloquies and melodramatic eloquence did not offend men so cruelly as they offend us now.

As Yeast was inspired by Sartor Resartus, so Alton Locke was inspired by Carlyle's French Revolution. The effect of Carlyle upon Kingsley is plain enough throughout, down to the day when Carlyle led Kingsley to approve the judicial murder of negroes in Jamaica. Kingsley himself tells us, by the mouth of Alton Locke (chap. ix.), "I know no book, always excepting Milton, which at once so quickened and exalted my poetical view of man and his history, as that great prose poem, the single epic of modern days, Thomas Carlyle's French Revolution." Kingsley's three masters were—in poetry, Tennyson; in social philosophy, Carlyle; in things moral and spiritual, Frederick D. Maurice. He had far more of genius than had Maurice; he was a much more passionate reformer than Tennyson; he was far more genial and social than Carlyle. Not that he imitated any of the three. Yeast is not at all copied from Sartor, either in form or in thought; nor is Alton Locke in any sense imitated from the French Revolution. It is inspired by it; but Yeast and Alton Locke are entirely original, and were native outbursts from Kingsley's own fierce imagination and intense human sympathy.

And in many ways they were amongst the most powerful influences over the thought of the young of the last generation. In the early fifties we were not so fastidious in the matter of style and composition as we have now become. Furious eloquence and somewhat melodramatic incongruities did not shock us so much, if we found them to come from a really glowing imagination and from genuine inspiration, albeit somewhat unpruned and ill-ordered. Now Kingsley "let himself go," in the way of Byron, Disraeli, Bulwer, and Dickens, who not seldom poured out their conceptions in what we now hold to be spasmodic form. It is possible that the genteeler taste of our age may prevent the young of to-day from caring for Alton Locke. But I can assure them that five-and-forty years ago that book had a great effect and came home to the heart of many. And the effect was permanent and creative. We may see to-day in England widespread results of that potent social movement which was called Christian Socialism, a movement of which Kingsley was neither the founder nor the chief leader, but of which his early books were the main popular exponents, and to which they gave a definiteness and a key which the movement itself sadly lacked.

I was not of an age to take part in that movement, but in after years at the Working Men's College, which grew out of it, I gained a personal knowledge of what was one of the most striking movements of our time. Nowadays, when leading statesmen assure us "we are all Socialists now," when the demands of the old "Chartists" are Liberal common form, when trades-unionism, co-operation, and state-aided benefits are largely supported by politicians, churchmen, journals, and writers, it is difficult for us now to conceive the bitter opposition which assailed the small band of reformers who, five-and-forty years ago, spoke up for these reforms. Of that small band, who stood alone amongst the literary, academic, and ecclesiastical class, Charles Kingsley was the most outspoken, the most eloquent, and assuredly the most effective. I do not say the wisest, the most consistent, or the most staunch; nor need we here discuss the strength or the weakness of the Christian Socialist reform. When we remember how widely this vague initiative has spread and developed, when we read again Alton Locke and Yeast, and note how much has been practically done in forty years to redress or mitigate the abuses against which these books uttered the first burning protest, we may form some estimate of all that the present generation of Englishmen owes to Charles Kingsley and his friends.

I have dwelt last and most seriously upon Kingsley's earliest books, because they were in many respects his most powerful, his typical works. As he grew in years, he did not develop. He improved for a time in literary form, but his excitable nerve-system, his impulsive imagination, drove him into tasks for which he had no gift, and where he floated hither and thither without sure guide. From the time of his official success, that is, for the last fifteen years of his life, he produced nothing worthy of himself, and much that was manifest book-making—the mere outpouring of the professional preacher and story-teller. Of his historical and philosophical work I shall not speak at all. His shallow Cambridge Inaugural Lecture, given by him as Professor of History, was torn to pieces in the Westminster Review (vol. xix. p. 305, April 1861), it is said, by a brother Professor of History. Much less need we speak of his miserable duel with Cardinal Newman, wherein he was so shamefully worsted. For fifteen years he poured out lectures, sermons, tales, travels, poems, dialogues, children's books, and historical, philosophical, theological, social, scientific, and sanitary essays—but the Charles Kingsley of Yeast, of Alton Locke, of Hypatia, of Westward Ho! of the Ballads and Poems, we never knew again. He burnt out his fiery spirit at last, at the age of fifty-five, in a series of restless enterprises, and a vehement outpouring of miscellaneous eloquence.

Charles Kingsley was a man of genius, half poet, half controversialist. The two elements did not blend altogether well. His poetic passion carried away his reason and often confused his logic. His argumentative vehemence too often marred his fine imagination. Thus his Saint's Tragedy is partly a satire on Romanism, and his ballad in Yeast is mainly a radical pamphlet. Hardly one of his books is without a controversial preface, controversial titles, chapters, or passages on questions of theology, churches, races, politics, or society. Indeed, excepting some of his poems, and some of his popular or children's books (but not even all of these), all his works are of a controversial kind. Whatever he did he did with heart, and this was at once his merit and his weakness. Before all things, he was a preacher, a priest of the English Church, a Christian minister. He was, indeed, a liberal priest, sometimes even too free and easy. He brings in the sacred name perhaps more often than any other writer, and he does so not always in a devout way. He seemed at last to use the word "God" as if it were an expletive or mere intensive like a Greek ge [gamma epsilon], meaning "very much" or "very good," as where he so oddly calls the North-East wind "the wind of God." And he betrays a most unclerical interest in physical torture and physical voluptuousness (Hypatia, The Saint's Tragedy, Saint Maura, Westward Ho!), though it is true that his real nature is both eminently manly and pure.

As we have done all through these estimates of great writers, we have to take the great writer at his best and forget his worst. It is a melancholy reflection that we so often find a man of genius working himself out to an unworthy close, it is too often feared, in the thirst of success and even the attraction of gain. But at his best Charles Kingsley left some fine and abiding influences behind him, and achieved some brilliant things. Would that we always had men of his dauntless spirit, of his restless energy, of his burning sympathy, of his keen imagination! He reminds us somewhat of his own Bishop Synesius, as described in Hypatia (chap. xxi.), who "was one of those many-sided, volatile, restless men, who taste joy and sorrow, if not deeply or permanently, yet abundantly and passionately"—"He lived . . . in a whirlwind of good deeds, meddling and toiling for the mere pleasure of action; and as soon as there was nothing to be done, which, till lately, had happened seldom enough with him, paid the penalty for past excitement in fits of melancholy. A man of magniloquent and flowery style, not without a vein of self-conceit; yet withal of overflowing kindliness, racy humour, and unflinching courage, both physical and moral; with a very clear practical faculty, and a very muddy speculative one"—and so on. Charles Kingsley must have been thinking of his own tastes when he drew the portrait of the "squire-bishop." But he did more than the Bishop of Cyrene, and was himself a compound of squire-parson-poet. And in all three characters he showed some of the best sides of each.



[1] Amongst other difficulties it may be observed that such words as "and," "is," "are," "the," "who," "his," "its," "have," "been"—words without which few English sentences can be constructed—do not form the short syllables of a true dactyl.



IX

ANTHONY TROLLOPE

Some of our younger friends who read the name which heads this essay may incline to think that it ought to be very short indeed, nay, be limited to a single remark; and, like the famous chapter on the snakes in Iceland, it should simply run—that Anthony Trollope has no place at all in Victorian literature. We did not think so in England in the fifties, the sixties, and the seventies, in the heyday of Victorian romance; and I do not think we ought to pass that judgment now in this last quinquennium of our century. I shall have to put our friend Anthony in a very moderate and prosaic rank; I shall not conceal my sense of his modest claims and conspicuous faults, of his prolixity, his limited sphere, his commonplace. But in view of the enormous popularity he once enjoyed, of the space he filled for a whole generation, I cannot altogether omit him from these studies of the Victorian writers.

I have, too, a personal reason for including him in the series. I knew him well, knew his subjects, and his stage. I have seen him at work at the "Megatherium Club," chatted with him at the "Universe," dined with him at George Eliot's, and even met him in the hunting-field. I was familiar with the political personages and crises which he describes; and much of the local colouring in which his romances were framed was for years the local colouring that I daily saw around me. Most of the famous writers of whom I have been speaking in this series (with the exception of Charlotte Bronte) I have often seen and heard speak in public and in private, but I cannot be said to have known them as friends. But Anthony Trollope I knew well. I knew the world in which he lived, I saw the scenes, the characters, the life he paints, day by day in the same clubs, in the same rooms, and under the same conditions as he saw them. To re-read some of his best stories, as I have just done, is to me like looking through a photographic album of my acquaintances, companions, and familiar reminiscences of some thirty years ago. I can hear the loud voice, the honest laugh, see the keen eyes of our old friend as I turn to the admirable vignette portrait in his posthumous Autobiography, and I can almost hear him tell the anecdotes recounted in that pleasant book.

Does the present generation know that frank and amusing book—one of the most brisk and manly autobiographies in our language? Of course it is garrulous, egoistical, self-complacent in a way. When a famous writer, at the close of a long career of varied activity, takes up his pen to tell us how he has lived, and how his books were written, and what he has loved, seen, suffered, and striven for—it is his business to be garrulous; we want him to talk about himself, and to give us such peeps into his own heart and brain as he chooses to unlock. That is what an "autobiography" means. And never did man do this in a more hearty, manly, good-tempered spirit, with more good sense, with more modest bonhomie, with a more genial egoism. He has been an enormous worker; he is proud of his industry. He has fought his way under cruel hardships to wealth and fame: and he is well satisfied with his success. He has had millions of readers; he has been well paid; he has had good friends; he has enjoyed life. He is happy in telling us how he did it. He does not overrate himself. He believes some of his work is good: at least it is honest, pure, sound work which has pleased millions of readers. Much of his work he knows to be poor stuff, and he says so at once. He makes no pretence to genius; he does not claim to be a hero; he has no rare qualities—or none but industry and courage—and he has met with no peculiar sufferings and no cruel and undeserved rebuffs. He has his own ideas about literary work—you may think them commonplace, mechanical, mercenary ideas—but that is a true picture of Anthony Trollope; of his strong, manly, pure mind, of his clear head, of his average moral sense: a good fellow, a warm friend, a brave soul, a genial companion.

With all his artless self-complacency in his own success, Trollope took a very modest estimate of his own powers. I remember a characteristic discussion about their modes of writing between Trollope and George Eliot at a little dinner party in her house.[1] "Why!" said Anthony, "I sit down every morning at 5.30 with my watch on my desk, and for three hours I regularly produce 250 words every quarter of an hour." George Eliot positively quivered with horror at the thought—she who could write only when she felt in the vein, who wrote, re-wrote, and destroyed her manuscript two or three times, and as often as not sat at her table without writing at all. "There are days and days together," she groaned out, "when I cannot write a line." "Yes!" said Trollope, "with imaginative work like yours that is quite natural; but with my mechanical stuff it's a sheer matter of industry. It's not the head that does it—it's the cobbler's wax on the seat and the sticking to my chair!" In his Autobiography he has elaborately explained this process—how he wrote day by day, including Sundays, whatever his duties, his amusements, or the place; measuring out every page, counting the words, and exacting the given quantity hour by hour. He wrote continuously 2500 words in each day, and at times more than 25,000 words in a week. He wrote whilst engaged in severe professional drudgery, whilst hunting thrice a week, and in the whirl of London society. He wrote in railway trains, on a sea voyage, and in a town club room. Whether he was on a journey, or pressed with office reports, or visiting friends, he wrote just the same. Dr. Thorne was written whilst he was very sea-sick in a gale at sea, or was negotiating a treaty with Nubar Pasha; and the day after finishing Dr. Thorne he began The Bertrams. It is one of the most amazing, and one of the most comical, records of literary activity we have. No one can suppose that work of a very high class can be so produced at all. Nor does Trollope pretend that it is of a high class. He says it is honest work, the best he could do.

He takes a strange pleasure in recounting these feats of literary productiveness. He poses as the champion of the age in quantity and rapidity. This lightning novelist could produce a volume in two or three weeks; and thus he could easily turn out three novels of three volumes each in a year. He gives us an exact list of sixty works produced in about thirty-five years, and a total of about 70,000 pounds as the earnings of some twenty-four years. He insists that he never neglected his Post-Office work, but was an invaluable and energetic public servant; he insists that, much as he enjoyed his literary profits, he was never misled by the desire of money; and he insists that he could have done no better work if he had written much less, or if he had given more time to each book. In all this he does not convince us. He certainly showed transcendent force of will, of nerve, and of endurance. "It's dogged as does it!" says Giles Hoggett to Mr. Crawley, in The Last Chronicle of Barset; and if "dogged" could make a great novelist, Anthony Trollope was pre-eminently "dogged." But a great novelist needs other gifts. And to tell us that he would not have done better work if his whole life had been given to his work, if every book, every chapter of every book, were the fruit of ample meditation and repeated revision, if he had never written with any thought of profit, never written but what he could not contain hidden within him—this is to tell us palpable nonsense.

Trollope's sixty works no doubt exceed the product of any Englishman of our age; but they fall short of the product of Dumas, George Sand, and Scribe. And, though but a small part of the sixty works can be called good, the inferior work is not discreditable: it is free from affectation, extravagance, nastiness, or balderdash. It never sinks into such tawdry stuff as Bulwer, Disraeli, and even Dickens, could indite in their worst moods. Trollope is never bombastic, or sensational, or prurient, or grotesque. Even at his worst, he writes pure, bright, graceful English; he tells us about wholesome men and women in a manly tone, and if he becomes dull, he is neither ridiculous nor odious. He is very often dull: or rather utterly commonplace. It is the fashion with the present generation to assert that he is never anything but commonplace; but this is the judgment of a perverted taste. His besetting danger is certainly the commonplace. It is true that he is almost never dramatic, or powerful, or original. His plots are of obvious and simple construction; his characters are neither new, nor subtle, nor powerful; and his field is strictly limited to special aspects of the higher English society in town and country. But in his very best work, he has risen above commonplace and has painted certain types of English men and women with much grace and consummate truth.

One of Trollope's strong points and one source of his popularity was a command over plain English almost perfect for his own limited purpose. It is limpid, flexible, and melodious. It never rises into eloquence, poetry, or power; but it is always easy, clear, simple, and vigorous. Trollope was not capable of the sustained mastery over style that we find in Esmond, nor had he the wit, passion, and pathos at Thackeray's command. But of all contemporaries he comes nearest to Thackeray in easy conversations and in quiet narration of incidents and motives. Sometimes, but very rarely, Trollope is vulgar—for good old Anthony had a coarse vein: it was in the family:—but as a rule his language is conspicuous for its ease, simplicity, and unity of tone. This was one good result of his enormous rapidity of execution. His books read from cover to cover, as if they were spoken in one sitting by an improvisatore in one and the same mood, who never hesitated an instant for a word, and who never failed to seize the word he wanted. This ease and mastery over speech was the fruit of prodigious practice and industry both in office work and in literary work. It is a mastery which conceals itself, and appears to the reader the easiest thing in the world. How few out of many millions have studied that subtle mechanism of ear and thought which created the melodious ripple of these fluent and pellucid words.

His work has one special quality that has not been sufficiently noticed. It has the most wonderful unity of texture and a perfect harmony of tone. From the first line to the last, there is never a sentence or a passage which strikes a discordant note; we are never worried by a spasmodic phrase, nor bored by fine writing that fails to "come off." Nor is there ever a paragraph which we need to read over again, or a phrase that looks obscure, artificial, or enigmatic. This can hardly be said of any other novelist of this century, except of Jane Austen, for even Thackeray himself is now and then artificial in Esmond, and the vulgarity of Yellowplush at last becomes fatiguing. Now Trollope reproduces for us that simplicity, unity, and ease of Jane Austen, whose facile grace flows on like the sprightly talk of a charming woman, mistress of herself and sure of her hearers. This uniform ease, of course, goes with the absence of all the greatest qualities of style; absence of any passion, poetry, mystery, or subtlety. He never rises, it is true, to the level of the great masters of language. But, for the ordinary incidents of life amongst well-bred and well-to-do men and women of the world, the form of Trollope's tales is almost as well adapted as the form of Jane Austen.

In absolute realism of spoken words Trollope has hardly any equal. His characters utter quite literally the same words, and no more, that such persons utter in actual life. The characters, it is true, are the average men and women we meet in the educated world, and the situations, motives, and feelings described are seldom above or below the ordinary incidents of modern life. But within this very limited range of incident, and for this very common average of person and character, the conversations are photographic or stenographic reproductions of actual speech. His letters, especially his young ladies' letters, are singularly real, life-like, and characteristic. We have long got rid of the artificial eloquence and the studied witticisms of the older school. Richardson, Fielding, Goldsmith, and Scott put into the mouths of their heroes and heroines elaborate speeches, poetry, eloquence, and epigrams which are no more like real speech than the allocutions of kings and queens in Shakespeare are like natural talk. That has long been discarded. Jane Austen and Thackeray make their men and women discourse as men and women do. But perhaps with Thackeray, the talk is too racy, too brilliant, too rich with wit, humour, and character, to be quite literally truthful. Now, Trollope, taking a far lower and simpler line, makes his characters talk with literal truth to nature.

This photographic realism of conversation is common enough now: but it has too often the defects of photography; it is bleared, coarse, and ill-favoured. As we all know, in the new realism a young woman and her lover talk thus: "Old gal! why so glum?" said he—"It's my luck!" says she, and flings her straw hat on the floor. That is the new photographic style, but it does not please us of an older generation. Now Trollope makes his people utter such phrases as the characters he presents to us actually use in real life—or rather such phrases as they did use thirty years ago. And yet, although he hardly ever rises into eloquence, wit, brilliancy, or sinks into any form of talk either unnaturally tall, or unnaturally low,—still, the conversations are just sufficiently pointed, humorous, or characteristic, to amuse the reader and develop the speaker's character. Trollope in this exactly hits the happy mean. Like Mr. Woodhouse's gruel, his conversations are "thin—but not so very thin." He never attempts grandiloquence; but then he never sinks into the fashionable bathos of—"Sugar in your tea, dear?"—"Another lump, if you please,"—nor does he fall into the fashionable realism of—"Dry up, old man!" No! Trollope's characters speaks with literal nature; and yet with enough of point, humour, vigour, to make it pleasant reading.

We may at once confess to his faults and limitations. They are plain enough, constant, and quite incapable of defence. Out of his sixty works, I should be sorry to pick more than ten as being worth a second reading, or twenty which are worth a first reading. Nor amongst the good books could I count any of the last ten years. The range of characters is limited to the clergy and professional men of a cathedral city, to the county families and the respectabilities of a quiet village, to the life of clubs, public offices, and Parliament in London, and to the ways of "society" as it existed in England in the third quarter of the present century. The plots are neither new nor ingenious; the incidents are rarely more than commonplace; the characters are seldom very powerful, or original, or complex. There are very few "psychologic problems," very few dramatic situations, very few revelations of a new world and unfamiliar natures. There are some natural scenes in Ireland; now and then a cook-maid, a farmer, a labourer, or a clerk, come on the stage and play their short parts with faultless demeanour. But otherwise, the entire company appear in the frock-coats and crinolines of the period, and every scene is played in silk hats, bonnets, and regulation evening toilette.

But within this limited range of life, this uniformity of "genteel comedy," Trollope has not seldom given us pieces of inimitable truthfulness and curious delicacy of observation. The dignitaries of the cathedral close, the sporting squires, the county magnates, the country doctors, and the rectory home, are drawn with a precision, a refinement, an absolute fidelity that only Jane Austen could compass. There is no caricature, no burlesque, nothing improbable or over-wrought. The bishop, the dean, the warden, the curate, the apothecary, the duke, the master of fox-hounds, the bishop's wife, the archdeacon's lady, the vicar's daughter, the governess, the undergraduate—all are perfectly true to nature. So, too, are the men in the clubs in London, the chiefs, subordinates, and clerks in the public offices, the ministers and members of Parliament, the leaders, and rank and file of London "society." They never utter a sentence which is not exactly what such men and women do utter; they do and they think nothing but what such men and women think and do in real life. Their habits, conversation, dress, and interests are photographically accurate, to the point of illusion. It is not high art—but it is art. The field is a narrow one; the actors are ordinary. But the skill, grace, and humour with which the scenes are caught, and the absolute illusion of truthfulness, redeem it from the commonplace.

The stage of Trollope's drama is not a wide one, but it is far wider than that of Jane Austen. His plots and incidents are sufficiently trite and ordinary, but they are dramatic and original, if contrasted with those of Emma or Mansfield Park. No one will compare little Jane's delicate palfrey with Anthony's big-boned hunter; nor would any one commit the bad taste of treating these quadrupeds as if they were entered for a race; but a narrow stage and familiar incidents are not necessarily fatal to true art. If Trollope had done nothing more than paint ordinary English society with photographic accuracy of detail, it would not be a great performance. But he has done more than this. In the Barsetshire series, at any rate, he has risen to a point of drawing characters with a very subtle insight and delicate intuition. The warden, the bishop, Mrs. Proudie, Dr. Thorne, Mary Thorne, Lily Dale, Lady Arabella, and, above all, Mr. Crawley, are characters definitely conceived, profoundly mastered, and truly portrayed. Trollope evidently judged Crawley to be his greatest creation, and the Last Chronicle of Barset to be his principal achievement. In this he was doubtless right. There are real characters also in the two Phineas Finn tales. Chiltern, Finn, Glencora Palliser, Laura Kennedy, and Marie Goesler, are subtly conceived and truly worked out. This is enough to make a decent reputation, however flat be the interminable pot-boilers that precede and follow them.

The list of Trollope's real successes is not very long. The six tales of the Barsetshire cycle, The Warden, Barchester Towers, Doctor Thorne, Framley Parsonage, The Small House at Allington, The Last Chronicle of Barset, are unquestionably his main achievements; and of these either Doctor Thorne or The Last Chronicle is the best. The Crawley story is undoubtedly the finest thing Trollope ever did; but for myself, I enjoy the unity, completeness, and masterly scheme of Doctor Thorne, and I like Mary Thorne better than any of Trollope's women. If, to the six Barset tales, we add Orley Farm, The Claverings, the two Phineas Finns, and the Eustace Diamonds, we shall include, perhaps, more than posterity will ever trouble itself about, and almost exactly one-fifth of the novels he left behind. The ten or twelve of Trollope's best will continue to be read, and will, in a future generation, no doubt, regain not a little of their early vogue. This will be due, in part, to their own inherent merit as graceful, truthful, subtle observation of contemporary types, clothed in a style of transparent ease. Partly, it will be due to this: that these tales will reproduce for the future certain phases of life in the nineteenth century in England with minute fidelity and the most literal realism.

This is no doubt the cause of the revulsion of opinion by which in some English circles Trollope has suffered of late. If there are fashions, habits, and tastes which the rising generation is certain to despise, it is such as were current in the youth of their own parents about thirty or forty years before them. The collars, the bonnets, the furniture, the etiquette, the books of that age always seem to the young to be the last word of all that is awkward and "bad form," although in two or three generations these very modes regain a certain quaint charm. And for the moment poor Anthony represents to the emancipated youth of our time all that was "banal" and prosy some thirty years ago. The taste of our youth sets hard for a new heaven, or at least a new earth, and if not that, it may be a new hell. Novels or poems without conundrums, without psychologic problems, with no sexual theorems to solve, with no unique idiosyncrasies to fathom, without anything unnatural, or sickening, without hospital nastinesses,—are all, we are assured, unworthy the notice of the youth of either sex who are really up to date. In the style of the new pornographic and clinical school of art, the sayings and doings of wholesome men and women who live in drawing-rooms and regularly dress before dinner are "beastly rot," and fit for no one but children and old maids.

But we conservatives of an older school are grateful to Anthony that he produced for the last generation an immense collection of pleasant tales without a single foul spot or unclean incident. It was his boast that he had never written a line which a pure woman could not read without a blush. This is no doubt one of the grounds on which he is so often denounced as passe. His tales, of course, are full of love, and the love is not always discreet or virtuous. There are cases of guilty love, of mad love, of ungoverned and unreasoning passion. But there is not an impure or prurient passage in the whole library of tales. Much more than this: in the centre of almost every tale, we are taken to the heart of a spotless, loving, refined, brave English girl. In nothing does Anthony Trollope delight more than when he unveils to us the secret thoughts of a noble-hearted maiden who loves strongly but who has a spirit as strong as her love, a clear brain and a pure will. In nothing is he more successful; nowhere is he more subtle, more true, more interesting. In this fine gift, he surpasses all his contemporaries, and almost all other English novelists. Mary Thorne, Lily Dale, Lucy Roberts—I would almost add, Martha Dunstable—may not be heroines of romance, and are certainly not great creations. But they are pure, right-minded, delicate, brave women; and it does one good to be admitted to the sacred confessional of their hearts.

It must be admitted that they are "young ladies," nurtured in the conventional refinement of the last generation, high-bred, and trained in the jealous sensitiveness of what was thought to be "maiden modesty" thirty or forty years ago. That is their misfortune to-day; it is now rather silly to be a "young lady" at all, and the old-fashioned "maiden modesty" of their mothers and grandmothers is become positively ridiculous. Young women of the present date, we are assured in the language of our gilded youth, have to be either "jolly girls" or "crocks"; and Mary Thorne and Lily Dale are certainly not "jolly girls." Their trials and agonies are not different from those which may happen in any ordinary family, and the problems they have to solve are those which may await any girl at any time. But the subtle touches with which we are admitted to their meditations, the delicate weighing of competing counsels and motives, the living pulses of heart and brain, and the essential soundness and reality of the mental and moral crisis—are all told with an art that may be beneath that of Jane Austen, but which certainly is akin to hers, and has the same quality of pure and simple human nature. Pure and simple human nature is, for the moment, out of fashion as the subject of modern romance. But it remains a curious problem how the boisterous, brawny, thick-skinned lump of manhood whom we knew as Anthony Trollope ever came to conceive so many delicate and sensitive country maidens, and to see so deeply and so truly into the heart of their maiden meditations.

Trollope is equally successful with some other social problems and characters of unstable equilibrium. They are none of them very profound or exalted studies in psychology; but they are truthful, natural, and ingenious; and it needed a sure and delicate hand to make them interesting and life-like. The feeble, solemn, timid, vacillating bishop, driven to distraction by some clerical scandal in his tea-cup of a diocese; the pompous ecclesiastic with wounded dignity and family quarrels; the over-sensitive priest whose conscience is more acute than his brain; the weak, generous, cowardly owner of an embarrassed estate; the honest and impulsive youth placed between love and duty; the loving girl who will not sacrifice dignity to love; the public official who is torn between conscience and self-interest; the man in a great position who does not know his own mind; the man with honest principles who is tempted above his strength by love, ambition, or ruin—all of these live in the pages of Trollope with perfect truth to nature and reality of movement. It would be too much to say that any of them are masterly creations, unless it be Crawley and the Proudies, but they are absolutely truthful, real, living portraits. The situations are not very striking, but then they are perfectly natural. And the characters never say or do a thing which oversteps by a hair's-breadth the probable and natural conduct of such persons.

All this is now said to be commonplace, goody-goody, and Philistine. There are no female acrobats, burglars, gutter-urchins, crapulous prostitutes, no pathological anatomy of diseased bodies and carious souls, hardly a single case of adultery in all Trollope. But they who can exist without these stimulants may find pleasant reading yet in his best work. The Last Chronicle of Barset is a really good tale which deserves to live, and the whole Crawley episode rises to the level of fine imaginative work. Doctor Thorne is a sound, pleasant, ingenious story from beginning to end. It has perhaps the best plot of all Trollope's books, and, singularly enough, it is the only plot which he admits not to be his own. I count Mary Thorne as his best woman and Doctor Thorne as one of his best men. The unity of Doctor Thorne is very striking and ingenious. The stage is crowded: there are nearly a score of well-marked characters and five distinct households; but the whole series works into the same plot; the scene is constantly varied, and yet there is no double plot or separate companies. Thus, though the whole story revolves round the fortunes of a single family, the interest and the movement never flag for a page. The machinery is very simple; the characters are of average strength and merit; the incidents and issues are ordinary enough. And the general effect is wholesome, manly, womanly, refined, and true to nature.

The episcopal and capitular group of ecclesiastics round the Cathedral of Barchester is Trollope's main creation, and is destined to endure for some time. It is all in its way inimitably true and subtly graduated from bishop to dean, from dean to canon, and so on through the whole chapter down to the verger and the porter. The relations of these dignitaries to each other, the relation of their woman-kind to each other, the relation of the clerical world to the town world and to the county world, their conventional etiquette, their jealousies, their feuds, their scandals, and their entertainments, are all marked with admirable truth and a refined touch. The relation of the village respectabilities to the county families, the relation of the county families to the great ducal magnate, are all given with curious precision and subtle discrimination. When The Warden appeared just forty years ago, I happened to be a pupil in the chambers of the late Sir Henry Maine, then a famous critic of the Saturday Review; and I well remember his interest and delight in welcoming a new writer, from whom he thought so much might be expected. The relations of London "Society" to the parliamentary and ministerial world as described in Trollope's later books are all treated with entire mastery. It is this thorough knowledge of the organism of English society which specially distinguishes Trollope. It is a quality in which Thackeray alone is his equal; and Thackeray himself has drawn no complex social organism with such consummate completeness as Trollope's Barchester Close. It is of course purely English, locally true to England only. But it is, as Nathaniel Hawthorne said, "solid and substantial," "as real as if it were a great lump out of the earth,"—"just as English as a beefsteak."

What makes all that so strange is this, that when he began to write novels, Trollope had far less experience than have most cultivated men of cathedral closes, rectories, and county families. He had never been to a college, and till past middle life he never had access to the higher grades of English society. He never at any time, and certainly not when the Barchester cycle began, had any footing whatever in clerical circles, and but little intimate acquaintance with young ladies of birth and refinement in country homes. He never was much thrown with the young bloods of the army, of the universities, or of Parliament. He rarely consorted with dukes or county magnates, and he never lived in the centre of the political world. Yet this rough, self-taught busy Post-Office surveyor in Ireland, perpetually travelling about the country on the inspections of his duty, managed to see to the very marrow of the prelates of a cathedral, to the inner histories of the duke's castle and the squire's home, into the secret musings of the rector's daughter, and into the tangled web of parliamentary intrigue. He did all this with a perfectly sure and subtle touch, which was often, it is true, somewhat tame, and is never perhaps of any very great brilliance, but which was almost faultlessly true, never extravagant, never unreal. And, to add to the wonder, you might meet him for an hour; and, however much you might like his bluff, hearty, resonant personality, you would have said he was the last man to have any delicate sympathy with bishops, dukes, or young ladies.

His insight into parliamentary life was surprisingly accurate and deep. He had not the genius of Disraeli, but his pictures are utterly free from caricature or distortion of any kind. In his photographic portraiture of the British Parliament he surpassed all his contemporaries; and inasmuch as such studies can only have a local and sectional interest, they have probably injured his popularity and his art. His conduct of legal intricacies and the ways of lawyers is singularly correct; and the long and elaborate trial scene in Phineas Redux is a masterpiece of natural and faithful descriptions of an Old Bailey criminal trial in which "society" happens to be involved. Yet of courts of law, as of bishops' palaces, rectory firesides, the lobbies of Parliament, and ducal "house parties," Trollope could have known almost nothing except as an occasional and outside observer. The life of London clubs, the habits and personnel of a public office, the hunting-field, and the social hierarchy and ten commandments observed in a country town—these things Trollope knew to the minutest shade, and he has described them with wonderful truth and zest.

There was a truly pathetic drollery in his violent passion for certain enjoyments—hunting, whist, and the smoking-room of his club. I cannot forget the comical rage which he felt at Professor Freeman's attack on fox-hunting. I am not a sporting man myself; and, though I may look on fox-hunting as one of the less deadly sins involved in "sport," I know nothing about it. But it chanced that as a young man I had been charged with the duty of escorting a certain young lady to a "meet" of fox-hounds in Essex. A fox was found; but what happened I hardly remember; save this, that, in the middle of a hot burst, I found myself alongside of Anthony Trollope, who was shouting and roaring out "What!—what are you doing here?" And he was never tired of holding me up to the scorn of the "Universe" club as a deserter from the principles of Professor Freeman and John Morley. I had taken no part in the controversy, but it gave him huge delight to have detected such backsliding in one of the school he detested. Like other sporting men who imagine that their love of "sport" is a love of nature, when it is merely a pleasure in physical exercise, Trollope cared little for the poetic aspect of nature. His books, like Thackeray's, hardly contain a single fine picture of the country, of the sea, of mountains, or of rivers. Compared with Fielding, Scott, Charlotte Bronte, Dickens, George Eliot, he is a man blind to the loveliness of nature. To him, as to other fox-hunters, the country was good or bad as it promised or did not promise a good "run." Though Trollope was a great traveller, he rarely uses his experiences in a novel, whereas Scott, Thackeray, Dickens, Bulwer, George Eliot fill their pages with foreign adventures and scenes of travel. His hard riding as an overgrown heavy-weight, his systematic whist playing, his loud talk, his burly ubiquity and irrepressible energy in everything—formed one of the marvels of the last generation. And that such a colossus of blood and bone should spend his mornings, before we were out of bed, in analysing the hypersensitive conscience of an archdeacon, the secret confidences whispered between a prudent mamma and a love-lorn young lady, or the subtle meanderings of Marie Goesler's heart—this was a real psychologic problem.

There can be no doubt that this constitutional vehemence of his, this hypertrophy of blood and muscle, injured his work and dimmed his reputation. Much of his work he ought to have burnt. His classical studies are worthless, his Life of Thackeray and his Travels are mere book-making. His novels, even the best, are revised and printed with scandalous haste. He speaks of a "toga virile" and of "the husband of his bosom," for wife; and there are misprints in every paragraph. When, in his Autobiography, he let the public into the story of his method, of his mechanical writing so many words per hour, of his beginning a new tale the day after he finished the last, of his having no particular plot, and hardly thinking about a plot, and all the little trade secrets of his factory, the public felt some disgust and was almost inclined to think it had been cheated out of its 70,000 pounds.

Anthony Trollope was not a fraud, nor even a mere tradesman. His reputation may perhaps partially revive, and some of his best work may be read in the next century. His best work will of course be a mere residuum of his sixty books, as is the best of nearly all prolific writers. I am inclined to think the permanent survival may be limited to the Barchester cycle, with Orley Farm and the two Phineas Finns. In any case, his books will hereafter bear a certain historical interest, as the best record of actual manners in the higher English society between 1855 and 1875. That value nothing can take away, however dull, connu, and out of date the books may now seem to our new youth. It is a curious problem why our new youth persists in filling its stomach with the poorest trash that is "new"—i.e. published in 1895, whilst it will not look at a book that is "old "—i.e. published in 1865, though both are equally unknown to the young reader. If our new youth ever could bring itself to take up a book having 1865 on its title-page, it might find in the best of Anthony Trollope much subtle observation, many manly and womanly natures, unfailing purity of tone, and wholesome enjoyment.



[1] This anecdote has been doubted, on the ground that such rapid composition is impossible. But Trollope in his Autobiography asserts this fact, exactly as he told George Eliot, except that the first half hour was occupied by re-reading the work of the previous day. The average morning's work was thus 2500 words, written in two and a half hours.



X

GEORGE ELIOT

It will be the duty of the more serious criticism of another generation in some degree to revive the reputation of George Eliot as an abiding literary force—a reputation which the taste of the hour is rather disposed to reduce. Five-and-twenty years ago the tendency was towards excessive praise: many judges, of trained literary insight, proclaimed her as the greatest genius of the age, one of the brightest stars of English literature, nay, said some of them, quite losing control of their speech—a modern Shakespeare, and so forth. Some cooler heads looked grave, but none save the inveterate cynics ventured to mock; and the great public, as usual, thought it best to follow the lead of so many men and so many women of the higher culture. The inevitable reaction ensued: when, not only were the grave shortcomings of George Eliot ruthlessly condemned, but her noble aim and superb qualities were blindly ignored.

The taste in popular romance sways hither and thither in sudden revulsion, like the taste in hats or in frocks, or the verdict of manhood suffrage. This or that type becomes suddenly the rage, this or that mannerism is voted an offence, as quickly as fashion runs after a new tint, or boycotts an obsolete sleeve. Journalism and all the other forces of the hour stimulate these caprices and carry away the masses by their volubility and noise. It is the business of serious criticism, keeping a cooler head, to correct these fervid impulses of the day—whilst excited audiences in the amphitheatre raise or depress the fatal thumb, awarding life or death to the combatants in the great arena.

The business of criticism is to judge—to judge upon the whole evidence, after hearing counsel on both sides with equal attention, after weighing every shred of argument and every word that any witness has to offer, and after patient study of every aspect of the case, to deliver a complete and reasoned estimate of the whole matter at issue. The true critic is not a mere juryman, who has nothing to do but to pronounce a bare verdict of "guilty" or "not guilty." He is a judge of the supreme court of equity, who may find, in some intricate story unravelled at his bar, a dozen errors in law and as many mistakes of fact, and yet may give substantial relief or may decree onerous penalties. It is easy enough to detect faulty, easy enough to insist on merits: the thing wanted to guide the public is the cool, compensated, equitable judgment that is not seduced by any conspicuous charm, and is not irritated by any incorrigible defect, but which, missing no point of merit and none of failure, finally and resolutely strikes the just balance.

This just balance, with all its intricate adjustments of compensation and equivalence, is peculiarly needed in the case of George Eliot, and at the same time is unusually difficult. George Eliot was most conspicuous as an artist, as a worker in the sphere of imagination and creation. At the same time, she had very rare powers and a really unusual learning quite outside of imaginative art. And these reflective powers and such stores of knowledge are often antagonistic to creative art, and undoubtedly were so not seldom with her. If Aristotle himself had written a dull psychological tragedy, we might read it for his sake, but we should not forgive him, and we ought not to forgive him. And if Shakespeare himself had written the Novum Organum or the Principia, we should not have had Hamlet and Lear as we now know them. There is no compensation between philosophy and poetry. No profundity, no learning, can give beauty to verses which lack the divine fire. If George Eliot's fame has to be based solely on her great powers and endowments, her art would not be worth much. However, it is not so: she was an artist, with true artistic gifts. Her philosophic power and her scientific attainments often ennoble these gifts: yet it is too often evident that they seriously mar and embarrass them.

Turn it the other way. Until nearly the age of forty, George Eliot was known only as a critical and philosophical writer. And in reading, in logical acumen, and in breadth of view, she was the equal of the first minds of her time. But no one of her contemporaries, eminent in philosophy and science, approached her, however remotely, in artistic gifts; and no one of them even attempted to invest ethical and social ideas with high imagination and beautiful ideals. Thus, George Eliot was of a far higher mental plane than any contemporary who has used imaginative prose as an art, and she was also a far greater artist than any contemporary philosopher. It is quite certain that learning and wisdom may be lodged in the same brain with the highest poetry, as Lucretius, Virgil, Dante, Milton, and Goethe may prove. And men of original power have not seldom used imaginative art with signal success to convey the ideas with which they were charged; for this has been done by Cervantes, Rabelais, Swift, Rousseau, Byron, Shelley, and Goethe.

It is therefore legitimate and natural that a powerful and teeming mind should resort to art as its medium, and also that an artist of high aims should be a systematic thinker and an omnivorous student. The combination is very rare and success is singularly difficult. To fail in art is to lose all and to end in utter failure. And to carry ethical purpose and erudition into art is indeed a perilous undertaking, wherein but one or two of the greatest have wholly succeeded. The problem with George Eliot is to judge how far she has succeeded in the all but impossible task. That her success is far from complete is but too obvious. That she has had many incidental successes is also obvious. Her work is not sufficiently spontaneous, not easy or simple, not buoyant enough. But it has great nobility, rare distinction. It may not live as perfect art; but it should not perish as ambitious failures perish.

If George Eliot were not a writer of romance, she was nothing at all in the front ranks of Victorian literature. With all her powers of mind, her mastery of language, her immense stores of knowledge and supreme culture, she gave to the world nothing of great mark, acknowledged and known as hers, except her famous romances; for, as we shall presently see, we cannot count any of the poems as of great mark. But, as a writer of romance, George Eliot differs essentially and for the worse from all the other great writers of romance in her own or preceding generations. Most certainly she was not a born romancer; she had no spontaneous gift of telling stories, no irrepressible genius that way. Now all the great romancers have been born to it, as Robinson Crusoe was born to the sea, or as Turner was born to paint. Though Scott published novels late, he had begun Waverley at thirty-four; his earlier works are romantic ballads and metrical romances; and from boyhood, at home and abroad, he was ever filled with some tale of adventure and character. Jane Austen and Maria Edgeworth "lisped" in novelettes, as Pope said he "lisped in numbers." Though Charlotte Bronte published so little, she wrote stories incessantly from childhood. Lytton, Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, invented tales as part of their daily lives, and from the earliest age. But George Eliot was thirty-nine when her first tales were published, and she was forty before she was known to the public as a novelist at all. And so little was novel-writing her natural gift, that her most intimate friends never suspected her power, nor did she herself altogether enjoy the exercise of her art. To the last her periods of mental gestation were long, painful, and unhopeful. Parturition was a dangerous crisis, and the long-expected infant was reared with misgivings and a superfluity of coddling. The romances of George Eliot came like some enfant de miracle, born late in the mother's life, at the cost of infinite pain, much anxiety, and amidst the wondering trepidation of expectant circles of friends.

Even in her best books we never quite get over the sense of almost painful elaboration, of a powerful mind having rich gifts striving to produce some rare music with an unfamiliar and uncongenial instrument. It reminds us of Beethoven evolving his majestic sonatas on an untuned and dilapidated old piano, the defects of which he could not himself hear. The conventional critic in The Vicar of Wakefield is told to say that "the picture would have been better if the artist had taken more pains." With George Eliot too often we are made to feel that the picture would have been, at any rate, more enjoyable if the artist had taken less pains. To study her more ambitious tales is like an attempt to master some new system of psychology. The metaphysical power, the originality of conception, the long brooding over anomalies and objections—these are all there: but the rapid improvisation and easy invention are not there. Such qualities would indeed be wholly out of place in philosophy, but they are the essence of romance. In romance we want to feel that the piece is only brought to an end by time and our human powers of listening; that there is "plenty more where these come from"; that the story-teller enjoys telling stories for their own sake, and would go on with the tales, though the audience were reduced to a child, an idiot, and a deaf man.

This explains the paradox that the most popular, and most certainly the most praised of George Eliot's works, are the simpler and the shorter. Every one enjoys the Scenes of Clerical Life, short stories of a hundred pages each, with simple plots and a few characters in everyday life. I have no doubt myself that Silas Marner comes nearer to being a great success than any of the more elaborate books. Yet Silas Marner is about one-fifth part of the length of Middlemarch; and its plot, mise-en-scene, and incidents are simplicity itself. There is no science, no book-learning, and but few ethical problems in it from beginning to end; and it all goes in one small volume, for the tale concerns but the neighbours of one quiet village. Yet the quaint and idyllic charm of the piece, the perfection of tone and keeping, the harmony of the landscape, the pure, deep humanity of it, all make it a true and exquisite work of high art.

Modern English (and I am one of those who hold that the best modern English is as good as any in our literature) has few pieces of description more gem-like in its crystalline facets than the opening chapter that tells of the pale, uncanny weaver of Raveloe in his stone cottage by the deserted pit. Some of us can remember such house weavers in such lonesome cottages on the Northern moors, and have heard the unfamiliar rattle of the loom in a half-ruinous homestead. How perfect is that vignette of Raveloe—"a village where many of the old echoes lingered, undrowned by new voices"—with its "strange lingering echoes of the old demon-worship among the grey-haired peasantry"! The entire picture of the village and its village life a hundred years ago, is finished with the musical and reserved note of poetry, such as we are taught to love in Wordsworth and Tennyson. And for quiet humour modern literature has few happier scenes than the fireside at the "Rainbow," with Macey and Winthrop, the butcher and the farrier, over their pipes and their hot potations, and the quarrel about "seeing ghos'es," about smelling them!

Within this most graceful and refined picture of rural life there is a dominant ethical motive which she herself describes as its aim, "to set in a strong light the remedial influences of pure, natural, human relations." This aim is perfectly worked out: it is a right and healthy conception, not too subtle, not too common:—to put it in simpler words than hers, it is how a lonely, crabbed, ill-used old man is humanised by the love of a faithful and affectionate child. The form is poetic: the moral is both just and noble: the characters are living, and the story is original, natural, and dramatic. The only thing, indeed, which Silas Marner wants to make it a really great romance is more ease, more rapidity, more "go." The melody runs so uniformly in minor keys, the sense of care, meditation, and introspection is so apparent in every line, the amount of serious thought lavished by the writer and required of the reader is so continuous, that we are not carried away, we are not excited, inspired, and thrilled as we are by Jane Eyre or Esmond. We enjoy a beautiful book with a fine moral, set in exquisite prose, with consummate literary resources, full of fine thoughts, true, ennobling thoughts, and with no weak side at all, unless it be the sense of being over-wrought, like a picture which has been stippled over in every surface.

A clever French woman said of George Eliot's conversation—elle s'ecoute quand elle parle! Just so, as we read on we seem to see how she held up each sentence into the light as it fell from her pen, scrutinised it to see if some rarer phrase might not be compacted, some subtler thought excogitated. Of all the more important tales, Silas Marner is that wherein we least feel this excessive thoughtfulness. And thus it is the best. Perhaps other born romancers would have thrown into it more life, energy, jollity, or passion. Thackeray would have made the weaver a serio-comic hermit: Dickens would have made Eppie a sentimental angel; Charlotte Bronte would have curdled our blood; Trollope might have made more of Nancy's courting. But no one of them could have given us a more lofty lesson "of the remedial influences of pure, natural, human relations." The only doubt is, whether a novel is the medium for such lessons. On this, opinions are, and will remain, divided. The lesson and the art ought both to be faultless.

When we ask for a romance fully developed and more than a graceful vignette, Adam Bede must be regarded as the principal, and with the wider public it is always the typical, work of George Eliot. She said herself that it seemed to her "impossible that she should ever write anything so good and true again":—and herein she was no doubt right. It is the only one of her works in prose or verse which we feel to be inevitable, spontaneous, written out of the abundance of enjoyment and experience. It is of all her books the heartiest, the wittiest, the most cheerful, or rather the least desponding. In that book it may be that she exhausted herself and her own resources of observation as an eye-witness. She wrote fine things in other veins, in different scenes, and she conceived other characters and new situations. But for all practical purposes Adam Bede was the typical romance, which everything she had thought or known impelled her to write, in which she told the best of what she had seen and the most important of what she had to say. Had she never written anything but Adam Bede, she would have had a special place of her own in English romance:—and I am not sure that anything else which she produced very materially raised, enlarged, or qualified that place.

The Mill on the Floss must always be very interesting to all who knew George Eliot and loved her work, if for no other reason, for its autobiographic and personal touches and its revelation of yearnings and misgivings hardly suspected in life. There are scenes and minor characters in it which hold their own against Adam Bede, but as a whole it is not so strong or so rich in colour, and it can hardly be said to occupy new ground. It has not the pathos of Amos Barton, nor the exquisite style of Silas Marner, nor the breadth and constructive merit of Adam Bede. And except to the chosen band of Eliotists, it is not likely to retain any permanent popularity. It is a book to study for those who have special interest in George Eliot as woman, as teacher, and as artist—but for my own part I find it rather a book to reflect upon than a book to read and to re-read.

With respect to Romola, though we must all agree with Mr. Oscar Browning that it is "replete with learning," "weighed with knowledge in every page," exquisite in art, and so forth, it is really impossible to call it with him "the best historical novel ever written." Even in exact reproduction of another age, it cannot compare with Esmond, and how immeasurably as romance is it beneath the fire and movement of a dozen historical romances that one could name! The beauty of the Florentine pictures, the enormous care, thought, and reading, lavished on the story, the variety of literary resource—all make it a most memorable work, a work almost sui generis, a book which every student of Italy, every lover of Florence must mark, learn, and inwardly digest. But to call it a complete success is to go too far. The task was too great. To frame in a complex background of historical erudition an ethical problem of even greater complexity and subtlety—this was a task which might have sorely tried even greater powers than hers—a task in which Goethe and Scott might have succeeded, but which Goethe and Scott were too truly the born artists to attempt without ample care, and too busy with many things to devote to it the required labour.

Romola is certainly a wonderful monument of literary accomplishments; but it remains a tour de force, too elaborate, too laboured, too intricate, too erudite. As the French say, it has trop de choses, it is too long, too full, over-costumed, too studiously mounted on the stage. We sometimes see nowadays "a Shakespearean revival," with scenery studied by eminent artists on the spot, costumes archaeologically accurate, real armour, "properties" from famous collections, a mise-en-scene of lavish splendour and indefatigable research—and then we ask, how can "Hamlet" or "Lear" live up to such learning, and why is "Romeo" such a melancholy devil? Few men enjoyed the earlier portions of Romola more than I did. Italianissimo and Florentissimo as I was, it was an intense treat. But, though I have read and re-read Romola from time to time, it has always been in sections. I have never read it straight through at one time; and to this hour, I am not quite clear about all the ramifications of the plot and the various cross-purposes of the persons. Could any one say this about Quentin Durward or Ivanhoe, or of the Last Days of Pompeii, or of Esmond or even of Hypatia or Westward Ho!

Romola, we know, tried its author most cruelly in composition, nor need we wonder at this. "I began it,", she said, "a young woman—I finished it an old woman." "It ploughed into her," said her husband, "more than any of her other books." And, in my opinion, it marks the decline of her genius. I cannot count any of the later books as equal to her earlier works. Her great period of production reaches at most over the six years 1858-1863 (aetat. 39-45), in which she produced Scenes of Clerical Life (1858), Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), and Romola (1863). If we measure by strict success in the highest art, this period should not be extended beyond the four years which closed with Silas Marner. Romola is an ambitious, beautiful, altogether noble essay to fly skyward like Icarus, whose ingenious mechanism was melted by the sunlight in mid-career. And I cannot count any of the later pieces, prose or verse, as anything but inferior to Romola. They have great beauties, fine passages, subtle characters, and high conceptions—but they are the artificial products of a brain that showed symptoms of exhaustion, of a great writer who was striving after impossible tasks without freedom and without enjoyment.

I cannot at all agree with those admirers of George Eliot's genius who believe that it grew continuously in power, who even assure us that it reached its zenith in Daniel Deronda. What can they mean? Daniel Deronda, as usual, shows brilliant literary skill in many passages, and its insight into modern Hebraism is a psychological problem. But with all its merits and even beauties, Daniel Deronda has the fatal defect of unpleasant characters who are neither beautiful nor interesting, terrible situations which bore rather than terrify us, a plot which is at once preposterous and wearisome. As to Middlemarch—George Eliot's longest, most crowded, and ethically most elaborated romance—with all its subtlety, its humour, its variety, and its sardonic insight into provincial Philistinism, it becomes at last tedious and disagreeable by reason of the interminable maunderings of tedious men and women, and the slow and reiterated dissection of disagreeable anatomies. At this moment I cannot, after twenty years, recall the indefinite, lingering plot, or the precise relations to each other of the curiously uninteresting families, who talk scandal and fuss about in Middlemarch town.

In Felix Holt I was naturally much interested, having read it in manuscript, and advised upon the point of law, as appears from her published letters in the Life by J. Cross. There are two or three lines—the lawyers' "opinion on the case"—which she asked me to sketch; and I remember telling her when she inserted these lines in the book, that I should always be able to say that I had written at least a sentence which was embodied in English literature. Felix Holt contains some fine characters and scenes, but it cannot be regarded as equal to Adam Bede and Silas Marner. We will not speak of Theophrastus Such, 1879, written just before her death. It was the work of a woman physically and intellectually exhausted. I feel a certain guilty sense of disappointment when I think of the book, for I possibly had some hand in causing it to be written. I had sent her a long letter pointing out that our literature, with all its wealth of achievement in every known sphere, was still deficient in one form of composition in which the French stood paramount and alone. That was what they called Pensees—moral and philosophical reflections in the form of epigrams or rather aphorisms. I thought, and I still think, that this form of composition was peculiarly suited to her genius, at least in her prime. It was not in her prime when she painfully evolved the sour affectations set forth in Theophrastus.

A word or two must be said about the Poems. They have poetic subjects, ideas, similes: they are full of poetic yearning, crowded with poetic imagery; they have everything poetry needs, except poetry. They have not the poet's hall-mark. They are imitation poems, like the forged "ancient masters" they concoct at Florence, or the Tanagra statuettes they make in Germany. With all her consummate literary gifts and tastes, George Eliot never managed to write a poem, and never could be brought to see that the verses she wrote were not poems. It was an exaggeration of the defect that mars her prose; and her verses throw great light on her prose. They are over-laboured; the conception overpowers the form; they are too intensely anxious to be recognised as poems. We see not so much poetic passion, as a passionate yearning after poetic passion. We have—not the inevitable, incalculable, inimitable phrase of real poetry—but the slowly distilled, calculated, and imitated effort to reach the spontaneous.

It is melancholy indeed to have to admit this, after such labour, such noble conceptions, such mastery over language: but it is the truth. And it explains much of kindred failure in her prose work. Great imagination, noble conceptions, mastery over language can do much, but they cannot make a poet. Nothing can, but being a poet. Nor can these gifts make a great romancer or poet in prose. Nothing can, but being born to romance, being a prose poet. As the Gospel has it—"Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature?" George Eliot had not sufficiently meditated on this scripture. She too often supposed that by taking thought—by enormous pains, profound thought, by putting this thought in exquisite and noble words—she might produce an immortal romance, an immortal poem.

And yet let us never forget that the Spanish Gypsy is a very grand conception, that it has some noble scenes, and here and there some stately lines—even some beautiful passages, could we forget the artificial alliteration and the tuneless discords to which the poet's ear seems utterly insensible. The opening lines seem to promise well and have much of mellow thought, in spite of five hissing sibilants in the very first verse—

[Transcriber's note: In the original book, the letters in the poem fragments under discussion were bolded. Here, they are delineated with slashes (/).]

'Ti/s/ the warm /S/outh, where Europe /s/pread/s/ her land/s/. Like fretted leaflets, breathing on the deep:

And then comes in the fourth line an awful cacophony of alliteration—and an alliteration in "c."

A /C/alm earth-goddess /c/rowned with /c/orn and vines.

Then we have a really pretty but artificial line—an alliteration in "m."

On the /M/id Sea that /m/oans with /m/e/m/ories.

The seventh line again is an alliteration of alternate "p" and "d."

/P/ant /d/umbly /p/assionate with /d/reams of youth.

The tenth line is an excruciating alliteration in sibilants.

/F/eed/s/ the /f/amed /s/tream that water/s/ Andalu/s/.

But it must be admitted that the next line is graceful—

And loiters, amorous of the fragrant air.

The whole introduction of some 400 lines is full of beautiful images, fine thoughts, and striking phrases, but it is crowded, artificial, brocaded to excess with trop de choses; and it suddenly breaks into drama, with dialogue in person. This alternation of dramatic form and dialogue with epical narrative, interlarding the tragedy in parts with portentously long explanatory comment, is perhaps the most unlucky novelty which was ever attempted in verse. What would one say if even fine passages out of Wordsworth's Excursion had been accidentally bound up between the pages of Shakespeare's Hamlet?

But it is needless to enlarge on all the metrical and poetic defects of this medley of nearly 10,000 lines, with its lip-twisting, ear-torturing lyrics—(was there ever such a cacophony as—

O the sweet sweet prime Of the past spring-time!)—

with its strange alternations of action and narration, its soliloquies of 150 unbroken lines, and all its other incongruities. The important point is, that it has a really grand scheme, that the characters of Zarca and of Fedalma are lofty, impressive, and nobly dramatic, that the whole poem is, in conception, a work of power and true imagination. Just as Kingsley, who had far greater poetic faculty than George Eliot, mistook in making the Saint's Tragedy a drama, when he might have made it a grand historical romance, so George Eliot made a cruel mistake in writing the Spanish Gypsy as a poem, when she might have written it as an historical romance—a romance, it may be, much superior to Romola, as the subject and the conception were on grander lines.

It is to me a truly melancholy duty to have to admit that so much in the noble conceptions and rich thought of George Eliot was not a complete success in ultimate execution—and that, in great measure, because the conception and aim were so great and the execution so profoundly conscientious. I knew her well, I was amongst those who had the deepest regard for her mental power and her moral insight. I always recognised her as one of the best and most cultured minds of her time. I had great faith in her judgment, and could respect her courage even when I repudiated her opinions. But I never was one of those who exaggerated her gifts as an artist. I never could count anything later than Silas Marner as a complete and unqualified masterpiece. One may have the imaginative power shown by Michael Angelo in his Sistine Chapel, or his Medicean tombs, and yet, if one is not complete master of the brush and the chisel, no imagination, no thought, will produce a masterpiece in fresco or in marble. George Eliot was a most thoughtful artist, but she was more of a thinker than an artist; she was always more the artist when she was least the thinker; and when she conceived a work of art in her sublimest aspirations (as notably in The Spanish Gypsy), she almost makes us doubt if she were an artist at all.

She was an artist; and the younger generations will make an unpardonable error if they fail to do justice to the permanent survival of her best and earliest work. They will also be guilty of unpardonable blindness if they fail to note how completely she stands above all her contemporary rivals in romance, by thought, by knowledge, by nobility of aim. She raised the whole art of romance into a higher plane of thought, of culture, and of philosophic grasp. And when she failed, it was often by reason of the nobility of her aim itself, of the volume of her own learning, of the intensity of her own standard of perfection. Her passages in prose are studied with the care that men usually bestow on a sonnet; her accessories and landscapes are patient and conscientious transcripts of actual spots of country and town; her drama is a problem of ethical teaching, subtly elaborated, and minutely probed. In these high aims and difficult ambitions, she not seldom failed, or achieved a somewhat academic and qualified success. But the task was not seldom such that even to have fallen short of complete success was a far from ignoble triumph.

She raised the whole art of romance to a higher plane, I say; and, although in this ambitious aim she too often sacrificed freshness, ease, and simplicity, the weight of the limits she imposed on herself must fairly be counted in the balance. Romance had never before in England been written with such a sense of responsibility, with such eager subtlety of form, and with such high ethical purpose. The sense of responsibility wearies many readers, and at last crushed the writer; the form became "precious," and at last pedantic; and the ethical purpose was sometimes more visible than the ethical life. In the French drama Corneille had great conceptions, noble types of character, stately verse, and tragic situations; but English readers too often find him mannered, artificial, dull. Corneille, I freely admit, is not Shakespeare: I greatly prefer Shakespeare; but I prefer Corneille to Ibsen. We have plenty of Ibsenites to-day, and rather a plethora than a dearth of ignoble creatures in squalid situations who expose to us their mean lives with considerable truth to nature. In such an age, it is just as well that the lessons of Adam Bede, Romola, Fedalma and Zarca, should not be quite forgotten.

The art of romance, in the widest and loftiest sense of the term, is even yet in its infancy. Ancient literature, mediaeval literature, knew nothing of it. Nor indeed did modern literature entirely conceive it in all its fulness until the days of Le Sage, Richardson, Fielding, and Goldsmith. Nay, we may say that its power was not quite revealed before Scott, Goethe, Manzoni, Jane Austen, Balzac, Thackeray, Dickens, and George Sand. Its subtlety, its flexibility, its capacity for analytic research, its variety of range, and facility for reaching all hearts and all minds—all this is simply incalculable. And we may be sure that the star of romance has not yet reached its zenith. It is the art of the future—and an art wherein women are quite as likely to reign as men. It would be treason to Art to pretend that George Eliot came near to such perfection. But she had certain qualities that none of her predecessors had quite possessed, and she strove for an ideal which may one day become something more than a dream—a dream that as yet eludes and escapes from the mind as it struggles to grasp it and to fix it.

THE END