It has sometimes been thought—perhaps mistakenly—that the exhibition of it in Northanger Abbey is, though a very creditable essay, not consummate. But Pride and Prejudice is known to be, in part, little if at all later than Northanger Abbey: and there can again be very little dispute among judges in any way competent as to the quality of the irony there. Nor does it much matter what part of this wonderful book was written later and what earlier: for its ironical character is all-pervading, in almost every character, except Jane and her lover who are mere foils to Elizabeth and Darcy, and even in these to some extent; and in the whole story, even in the at least permitted suggestion that the sight of Pemberley, and Darcy's altered demeanour, had something to do with Elizabeth's resignation of the old romantic part of Belle dame sans merci. It may further be admitted, even by those who protest against the undervaluation of Northanger Abbey, that Pride and Prejudice flies higher, and maintains its flight triumphantly. It is not only longer; it is not only quite independent of parody or contrast with something previous; but it is far more intricate and elaborate as well as more original. Elizabeth herself is not merely an ordinary girl: and the putting forward of her, as an extraordinary yet in no single point unnatural one, is victoriously carried out. Her father, in spite of (nay, perhaps, including) his comparative collapse when he is called upon, not as before to talk but to act, in the business of Lydia's flight, is a masterpiece. Mr. Collins is, once more by common consent of the competent, unsurpassed, if not peerless: those who think him unnatural simply do not know nature. Shakespeare and Fielding were the only predecessors who could properly serve as sponsors to "this young lady" (as Scott delightfully calls her) on her introduction among the immortals on the strength of this character alone. Lady Catherine is not much the inferior (it would have been pleasing to tell her so) of her protege and chaplain. Of almost all the characters, and of quite the whole book, it is scarcely extravagant to say that it could not have been better on its own scale and scheme—that it is difficult to conceive any scheme and scale on which it could have been better. And, yet once more, there is nothing out of the way in it—the only thing not of absolutely everyday occurrence, the elopement of Lydia, happens on so many days still, with slight variations, that it can hardly be called a licence.

The same qualities appear throughout the other books, whether in more or less quintessence and with less or more alloy is a question rather of individual taste than for general or final critical decision. Sense and Sensibility, the first actually to appear (1811), is believed to have been written about the same time as Pride and Prejudice, which appeared two years later, and Northanger Abbey, which did not see the light till its author was dead. It is the weakest of the three—perhaps it is the weakest of all: but the weakness is due rather to an error of judgment than to a lack of power. Like Northanger Abbey it has a certain dependence on something else: the extravagances of Marianne satirise the Sensibility-novel just as those of Catherine do the Terror-story of the immediate past. But it is on a much larger scale: and things of the kind are better in miniature. Moreover, the author's sense of creative faculty made her try to throw up and contrast her heroine with other characters, in a way which she had not attempted in Northanger Abbey: and good as these are in themselves, they make a less perfect whole. Indeed, in the order of thought, Sense and Sensibility is the "youngest" of the novels—the least self-criticised. Nothing in it shows lack of power (John Dashwood and his wife are of the first order); a good deal in it shows lack of knowledge exactly how to direct that power.

Mansfield Park (1814), though hardly as brilliant as Pride and Prejudice, shows much more maturity than Sense and Sensibility. Much of it is quite consummate, the character of Mrs. Norris especially: and for subtly interwoven phrase without emphasis, conveying knowledge and criticism of life, it has few equals. But it has an elopement. Emma, which has perhaps on the whole been the most general favourite, may challenge that position on one ground beyond all question, though possibly not on all. It is the absolute triumph of that reliance on the strictly ordinary which has been indicated as Miss Austen's title to pre-eminence in the history of the novel. Not an event, not a circumstance, not a detail, is carried out of "the daily round, the common task" of average English middle-class humanity, upper and lower. Yet every event, every circumstance, every detail, is put sub specie eternitatis by the sorcery of art. Few things could be more terrible—nothing more tiresome—than to hear the garrulous Miss Bates talk in actual life; few things are more delightful than to read her speeches as they occur here. An aspiring soul might feel disposed to "take and drown itself in a pail" (as one of Dickens's characters says) if it had to live the life which the inhabitants of Highbury are represented as living; to read about that life—to read about it over and over again—has been and is always likely to be one of the chosen delights of some of the best wits of our race. This is one of the paradoxes of art: and perhaps it is the most wonderful of them, exceeding even the old "pity and terror" problem. And the discovery of it, as a possible source of artistic success, is one of the greatest triumphs and one of the most inexhaustible discoveries of that art itself. For by another paradox—this time not of art but of nature—the extraordinary is exhaustible and the ordinary is not. Tragedy and the more "incidented" comedy, it is well known, run into types and reproduce situations almost inevitably. "All the stories are told." But the story of the life of Highbury never can be told, because there is really nothing in it but the telling: and here the blessed infinity of Art comes in again.

Miss Austen's last book, like her first, was published posthumously and she left nothing else but a couple of fragments. One of these, Lady Susan, does not, so far as it extends, promise much, though it is such a fragment and such an evident first draft even of this, that judgment of it is equally unfair and futile. The other, The Watsons, has some very striking touches, but is also a mere beginning. Persuasion—which appeared with Northanger Abbey and which, curiously enough, has, like its nearly twenty years elder sister, Bath for its principal scene—has also some pretensions to primacy among the books, and is universally admitted to be of its author's most delicate, most finished, and most sustained work. And this, like Emma, resolutely abstains from even the slightest infusion of startling or unusual incident, of "exciting" story, of glaring colour of any kind: relying only on congruity of speech, sufficient if subdued description, and above all a profusion of the most delicately, but the most vividly drawn character, made to unfold a plot which has interest, if no excitement, and seasoned throughout with the unfailing condiment—the author's "own sauce"—of gentle but piquant irony and satire.

It is not to be supposed or inferred that Miss Austen's methods, or her results, have appealed to everybody. Madame de Stael thought her vulgaire—meaning, of course, not exactly our "vulgar" but "commonplace"; Charlotte Bronte was not much otherwise minded; her own Marianne Dashwood would doubtless have thought the same. Readers without some touch of letters may think her style old-fashioned: it has even been termed "stilted." Not merely may amateurs of blood and thunder, of passion and sensation, think her tame, but the more modern devotees of "analysis" may consider her superficial. On the other hand, it is notorious that, from her own day to this, she has never wanted partisans, often of superlative competence, and of the most strikingly different tempers, tastes, and opinions. The extraordinary quietness of her art is only matched by its confidence: its subtlety by its strength. She did not try many styles; she deliberately and no doubt wisely refused to try the other style which was already carrying all before it in her own later days. She seems to have confined herself (with what seems to some high-flying judges an almost ignoble caution) to the strata of society that she knew most thoroughly: and the curious have noted that she seldom goes above a baronet, and hardly even descends to a butler, in her range of personages who are not mere mutes. It is not at all unlikely—in fact it is almost certain—that she might have enlarged this range, and that of her incident, with perfect safety and to the great profit and delight of her readers. But these actual things she knew she could do consummately; and she would not risk the production of anything not consummate.

The value of her, artistically, is of course in the perfection of what she did; but the value of her historically is in the way in which she showed that, given the treatment, any material could be perfected. It was in this way, as has been pointed out, that the possibilities of the novel were shown to be practically illimitable. Tragedy is not needed: and the most ordinary transactions, the most everyday characters, develop into an infinite series of comedies with which the novelist can amuse himself and his readers. The ludicrum humani seculi on the one hand, and the artist's power of extracting and arranging it on the other—these two things supply all that is wanted. This Hampshire parson's daughter had found the philosopher's stone of the novel: and the very pots and pans, the tongs and pokers of the house, could be turned into novel-gold by it.

But even gold is not everything: and only a fanatic, and a rather foolish fanatic, would say that this style of fiction summed up and exhausted all the good that fiction could give and do. Miss Austen's art excludes (it has been said) tragedy; it does not let in much pure romance; although its variety is in a way infinite, yet it is not various in infinite ways, but rather in very finite ones. Everybody who denies its excellence is to be blamed: but nobody is to be blamed for saying that he should like some other excellences as well. The desire is innocent, nay commendable: and it was being satisfied, at practically the same time, by the work of Sir Walter Scott in a kind of novel almost as new (when we regard it in connection with its earlier examples) as Miss Austen's own. This was the Historical novel, which, in a way, not only subsumed many though not quite all varieties of Romance, but also summoned to its aid not a little—in fact a very great deal—of the methods of the pure novel itself.

It is not very long since a critic, probably not very old, sentenced the critical opinions of another critic, certainly not very young, to "go into the melting pot" because they were in favour of the historical novel: and because the historical novel had for some time past done great harm (I think the phrase was stronger) to the imaginative literature of England. Now there are several things which might be said about this judgment—I do not say "in arrest" of it, because it is of itself inoperative: as it happens you cannot put critical opinions in the melting pot. At least, they won't melt: and they come out again like the diabolic rat that Mr. Chips tried to pitch-boil. In the first place, there is the question whether the greater part by far of the imaginative and other literature of any time does not itself "go into the melting pot," and whether it much matters what sends it there. In the second, if this seems too cynical, there is the very large and grave question whether a still larger proportion of the novel of manners, in England, France, and all other countries during the same time, has not been as bad as, or worse than, the romantic division, historical or other. But the worst faults of the judgment remain. In the first place there is the fatal shortness of view. It is with the literature of two thousand, not with the literature of twenty, years that the true critic has to do: and no kind which—in two thousand, or two hundred, or twenty—has produced literature that is good or great can be even temporarily put aside because (as every kind of literature without exception has been again and again) it is for a time barren or fruitful only in weeds. And any one who does not count Scott and Dumas and Thackeray among the makers of good literature must really excuse others if they simply take no further count of him. The historical novel is a good kind, good friends, a marvellous good kind: and it has the advantage over the pure novel of manners that it is much less subject to obsolescence, if it be really well done; while it can practically annex most of the virtues of that novel of manners itself.

This excellent kind, however, had been wandering about in the wilderness—had indeed hardly got so far even as that stage, but had been a mere "bodiless childful of life in the gloom"—for more than two thousand years before Waverley. Of its earlier attempts to get into full existence we cannot say much here:[18] something on the more recent but rather abortive birth-throes has been promised, and is now due. It is not improbable that considerable assistance was rendered to the kind by the heroic romance of the seventeenth century in prose and verse, which often attempted historic, and almost always pseudo-historic, guise. As has been seen in regard to such collections as Croxall's, historical stories were freely mingled with fictitious: and it could not be for nothing that Horace Walpole, the author of the Castle of Otranto, was a rather ardent and even to some extent scholarly student of the romance and the gossip of history. Much earlier, Fielding himself, in his salad days, had given something of an historic turn to the story of A Journey from this World to the Next. And when history itself became more common and more readable, it could not but be that this inexhaustible source of material for the new kind of literature, which was being so eagerly demanded and so busily supplied, should suggest itself. Some instances of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century experiments have been given and discussed in the last chapter: and when Scott (or "the Author of Waverley") had achieved his astonishing success, some of the writers of these put in the usual claim of "That's my thunder." This was done in the case of the Lees, it was also done in the case of Jane Porter, the writer of the once famous and favourite Thaddeus of Warsaw (1803) and Scottish Chiefs (1810): while, as we have seen, there had been historical colour enough in Godwin's novels to make suggestion of his "authorship of Waverley" not absolutely preposterous. Even Mrs. Radcliffe had touched the style; and humbler persons like the egregious Henrietta Mosse had attempted it in the most serious spirit.

[18] Those who are curious about the matter will find it treated in a set of Essays by the present writer, which originally appeared in Macmillan's Magazine during the autumn of 1894, and were reprinted among Essays in English Literature, Second Series, London, 1895.

But with their varying degrees of talent—with, in one or two cases, even a little genius—all these writers had broken themselves upon one fatal difficulty—that of anachronism: not in the petty sense of the pedant, but in the wide one of the critic. The present writer is not prepared, without reading A Peep at Our Ancestors again (which he distinctly declines to do), to say that there are, in that remarkable performance, any positive errors of historic fact worse than, or as bad, as those which pedantry has pointed out in Ivanhoe. But whereas you may be nearly as well acquainted with the actual history of the time as the pedants themselves, and a great deal better acquainted with its literature, and yet never be shocked, disgusted, or contemptuously amused in Ivanhoe by such things as were quoted from the Peep a few pages back—so, to those who know something of "the old Elizabeth way," and even nowadays to those who know very little, and that little at second hand, Miss Lee's travesty of it in The Recess is impossible and intolerable. When Mrs. Radcliffe, at the date definitely given of 1584, talks about "the Parisian opera," represents a French girl of the sixteenth century as being "instructed in the English poets," and talks about driving in a "landau," the individual blunders are, perhaps, not more violent than those of the chronology by which Scott's Ulrica is apparently a girl at the time of the Conquest and a woman, not too old to be the object of rivalry between Front de Boeuf and his father, not long before the reign of Richard I. But this last oversight does not affect the credibility of the story, or the homogeneity of the manners, in the least. Mrs. Radcliffe jumbles up two (or more than two) utterly different states and stages of society, manners, and other things which constitute the very atmosphere of the story itself. Perhaps (we have very few easy conversations of the period to justify a positive statement) a real Bois-Guilbert and still more a real Wamba might not have talked exactly like Scott's personages: but there is no insistent and disturbing reason why they should not. When we hear an Adelaise of the mid-twelfth century asking whether she does not receive her education from her mamma, the necessary "suspension of disbelief" becomes impossible.

But these now most obvious truths were not obvious at all between 1780 and 1810: and it is perhaps the greatest evidence of Scott's genius that half, but by no means quite, unconsciously he saw them, and that he has made everybody see them since. It was undoubtedly fortunate that he began novel-writing so late: for earlier even he might have been caught in the errors of the time. But when he did begin, he had not only reached middle life and matured his considerable original critical faculty—criticism and wine are the only things that even the "kind calm years" may be absolutely trusted to improve if there is any original goodness in them—but he had other advantages. He had read, if not with minute accuracy, very widely indeed: and he possessed, as Lord Morley has well said, "the genius of history" in a degree which perhaps no merely meticulous scholar has ever reached, and which was not exceeded in quality even by the greatest historians such as Gibbon. He had an almost unmatched combination of common sense with poetic imagination, of knowledge of the world with knowledge of letters. He had shown himself to be possessed of the secret of semi-historical narrative itself in half a dozen remarkable verse romances, and therefore had less to do in engineering the prose romance. Last of all, he had seen what to avoid—not merely in his editing of Strutt's Queenhoo Hall (a valuable property-room for the novel, but nothing of a real novel), but in his reading of the failures of his predecessors and contemporaries. The very beginning of Waverley itself (which most people skip) is invaluable, because it shows us that at the time he wrote it (which, it need hardly be said, was a long time before its completion) he had not the knowledge or the courage to strike straight out into the stream of action and conversation, but troubled himself with accumulating bladders and arranging ropes for the possible salvation of his narrative if it got into difficulties. Very soon he knew that it would not get into difficulties: and away he went.

It ought not to be necessary, but from some symptoms it may be desirable, to point out that Scott is very far from being an historical novelist only. An acute French critic, well acquainted with both literatures, once went so far as to say that there were a good many professed "philosophical" novels which did not contain such keen psychology as Scott's: and I would undertake to show a good deal of cause on this side. But short of it, it is undeniable that he can do perfectly well without any historical scaffolding. There is practically nothing of it in his second and third novels, Guy Mannering and The Antiquary, each of which good judges have sometimes ranked as his very best: there is as little or less in St. Ronan's Well, a very fine thing as it is, and one which, but for James Ballantyne's meddling folly and prudery, would have been much finer. The incomparable little conversation—scenes and character-sketches scattered among the Introductions to the novels—especially the history of Crystal Croftangry—show that he could perfectly well have dispensed with all out-of-the-way incident had he chosen. But, as a rule, he did not so choose: and, in the majority of cases, he preferred to take his out-of-the-way incident from historical sources. Not here, unfortunately, can we allow ourselves even a space proportionate to that given above in Miss Austen's case to the criticism of individual novels: but luckily there is not much need of this. The brilliant overture of Waverley as such, with its entirely novel combination of the historical and the "national" elements upon the still more novel background of Highland scenery; the equally vivid and vigorous narrative and the more interesting personages of Old Mortality and Rob Roy; the domestic tragedy, with the historical element for little more than a framework, of the Heart of Midlothian and the Bride of Lammermoor; the little masterpiece of A Legend of Montrose; the fresh departure, with purely English subject, of Ivanhoe and its triumphant sequels in Kenilworth, Quentin Durward, and others; the striking utilisation of literary assistance in the Fortunes of Nigel; and the wonderful blending of autobiographic, historical, and romantic interest in Redgauntlet:—one cannot dwell on these and other things. The magic continued even in Woodstock—written as this was almost between the blows of the executioner's crow-bar on the wheel, in the tightening of the windlasses at the rack—it is not absent, whatever people may say, in Anne of Geierstein, nor even quite lacking in the better parts of Count Robert of Paris. But we must not expatiate on its effects; we must only give a little attention to the means by which they are achieved.

Another of the common errors about Scott is to represent—perhaps really to regard—him as a hit-or-miss and hand-to-mouth improvisatore, who bundled out his creations anyhow, and did not himself know how he created them. The fallacy is worse than a fallacy: for it is down-right false witness. We have numerous passages in and out of the novels—the chief of them being the remarkable conversation with Captain Clutterbuck in the Introduction to the Fortunes of Nigel and the reflections in the Diary on Sir John Chiverton and Brambletye House—showing that Scott knew perfectly well the construction and the stringing of his fiddle, as well as the trick of applying his rosin. But if we had not these direct testimonies, no one of any critical faculty could mistake the presence of consciously perceived principles in the books themselves. A man does not suddenly, and by mere blind instinct, avoid such a pitfall as that of incongruous speech and manners, which has been noticed above. It is not mere happy-go-lucky blundering which makes him invariably decline another into which people still fall—the selection of historical personages of the first importance, and elaborately known, for the central figures of his novels. Not to believe in luck is a mark of perhaps greater folly than to over-believe in it: but luck will not always keep a man clear of such perils as that unskilful wedging of great blocks of mere history into his story, which the lesser historical novelists always commit, or that preponderance of mere narrative itself as compared with action and conversation from which even Dumas, even Thackeray, is not free.

That he knew what he was doing and what he had to do is thus certain; that he did it to an astounding extent is still more certain; but it would not skill much to deny that he did not always give himself time to do it perfectly in every respect, though it is perhaps not mere paradox or mere partisanship to suggest that if he had given himself more time, he would hardly have done better, and might have done worse. The accusation of superficiality has been already glanced at: and it is pretty certain that it argues more superficiality, of a much more hopeless kind, in those who make it. The accusation of careless and slovenly style is not much better: for Scott had, perfectly, the style suited to his own work, and you cannot easily have a better style than that. But there are two defects in him which were early detected by good and friendly judges: and which are in fact natural results of the extraordinary force and fertility of his creative power. One—the less serious, but certainly to some extent a fault in art and a point in which he is distinguished for the worse from Shakespeare—is that he is rather given to allow at first, to some of his personages, an elaborateness and apparent emphasis of drawing which seems to promise an importance for them in the story that they never actually attain. Mike Lambourne in Kenilworth is a good example of this: but there are many others. The fact evidently was that, in the rush of the artist's plastic imagination, other figures rose and overpowered these. It is an excuse: but it is hardly a justification. The other and more serious is a tendency—which grew on him and may no doubt have been encouraged by the astonishing pecuniary rewards of his work—to hurry his conclusions, to "huddle up the cards and throw them into the bag," as Lady Louisa Stuart told him. There is one of the numerous, but it would seem generic and classifiable, forms of unpleasant dream in which the dreamer's watch, to his consternation, suddenly begins to send its hands round at double and ten-fold speed. Scott is rather apt to do this, towards the close of his novels, in his eagerness to begin something else. These defects, however, are defects much more from the point of view of abstract criticism than from that of the pleasure of the reader: while, even from the former, they are outweighed many times by merits. And as regards our present method of estimation, they hardly count at all.

For, in that calculus, the important thing is that Scott, like Miss Austen, at once opened an immense new field to the novelist, and showed how that field was to be cultivated. The complement-contrast of the pair can need emphasising only to those on whom no emphasis would be likely to impress it: but it may not be quite so evident at once that between them they cover almost the entire possible ground of prose fiction. The more striking and popular as well as more strictly novel style of Scott naturally attracted most attention at first: indeed it can hardly be said that, for the next thirty years, much attempt was made to follow in Miss Austen's steps, while such attempts as were made were seldom very good.[19] But there is no need to hurry Time: and he generally knows what he is about. At any rate he had, in and through these two provided—for generations, probably for centuries, to come—patterns and principles for whoso would to follow in prose fiction.

[19] Some work of distinction, actually later than hers in date, is older in kind. This is the case not only with the later books of her Irish elder sister. Miss Edgeworth (see last chapter), but with all those of her Scotch younger one, Miss Ferrier, who wrote Marriage just after Sense and Sensibility appeared, but did not publish it (1818) till after Miss Austen's death, following it with The Inheritance (1824) and Destiny (1831). Miss Ferrier, who had a strong though rather hard humour and great faculty of pronounced character-drawing, is better at a series of sketches than at a complete novel—only The Inheritance having much central unity. And there is still eighteenth-century quality rather than nineteenth in her alternations of Smollettian farce-satire and Mackenziefied sentiment. She is very good to read, but stand a little out of the regular historic succession, as well as out of the ordinary novel classes.



CHAPTER VI

THE SUCCESSORS—TO THACKERAY

A person inexperienced in the ways of life and literature might expect that such developments as those surveyed and discussed in the last chapter must have immediate and unbroken development further. Scott had thrown open, and made available, the whole vast range of history for the romancer: Miss Austen had shown the infinite possibilities of ordinary and present things for the novelist. And such a one might contend that, even if the common idea of definite precursorship and teachership be a mistake, the more subtle doctrine that such work as Scott's, and as Miss Austen's, is really the result of generally working forces, as well as of individual genius, would lead to the same conclusion. But the expectation would show his inexperience, and his ignorance of the fact that Art, unlike Science, declines to be bound by any calculable laws whatsoever.

It was indeed impossible that Scott's towering fame should not draw the nobler sort, and his immense gains the baser, to follow in his track: and they promptly did so. But, as he himself quoted in the remarkable comments (above alluded to) on his early imitators in the Diary, they had "gotten his fiddle, but not his rosin"—an observation the truth of which may be shown presently. Miss Austen's immediate influence in the other direction was almost nil: and this was hardly to be regretted, because a tolerably stationary state of manners, language, etc., such as her kind of novel requires, had not quite, though it had nearly, been reached. At any rate, the kind of ebb or half ebb, which so often, though not so certainly, follows flood-tides in literature, came upon the novel in the twenties and thirties. Even the striking appearance of Dickens and Pickwick in 1837 can hardly be said to have turned it distinctly: for the Dickensian novel is a species by itself—neither strictly novel nor strictly romance, but, as Polonius might say, a picaresque-burlesque-sentimental-farcical-realist-fantastic nondescript. Not till Vanity Fair did the novel of pure real life advance its standard once more: while the historical novel-romance of a new kind may date its revival with—though it should scarcely trace that revival to—Esmond, or Westward Ho! or both.

Between Scott on the earlier side and Dickens and Thackeray on the other, there was an immense production of novels, illustrated by not a few names which should rank high in the second class, while some would promote more than one of them to the first. The lines of development, as well as the chief individual practitioners, may be best indicated by short discussions of Hook, Bulwer, Disraeli, Ainsworth, James, Marryat, and Peacock.

The most probable demur to this list is likely to be taken at the very first name. Theodore Hook has had no return of the immense popularity which his Sayings and Doings (1826-1829) obtained for him; nor, perhaps, is he ever likely to have any; nor yet, further, save in one respect, can he be said to deserve it. Flimsily constructed, hastily written, reflecting indeed the ways and speech of the time after a fashion, but in a distorted mirror and with a thin and superficial representation, nearer to bad drama than to good literature, full of horseplay and forced high jinks—his stories have all the inseparable faults of improvisation together with those of art that is out of fashion and manners-painting (such as it is) of manners that are dead, and when alive were those of a not very picturesque, pleasing, or respectable transition. Yet, for all this, Hook has a claim on the critical historian of literature, and especially of the novel, which has been far too little acknowledged. And this claim does not even consist in the undoubted fact that his influence both on Dickens and on Thackeray was direct and very great. It lies in the larger and more important, though connected, fact that, at a given moment, his were the hands in which the torch of the novel-procession was deposited. He stands to fiction almost exactly as Leigh Hunt stands to the miscellaneous essay. He modernised and multiplied its subjects, attractions, appeals: he "vulgarised" it in the partly good French sense, as well as in the wholly bad English one; he was its journalist and colporteur. He broke up the somewhat stock-and-type moulds of eighteenth-century tale-telling; admitted a plurality, almost an infinity, of interest and incident; gave a sort of universal franchise to possible subjects of novel; and (perhaps most important of all) banished from that novel the tendency to conventional "lingo" which, though never so prevalent in it as in eighteenth-century drama, had existed. It may seem to some readers that there is an exaggerated and paradoxical opposition between this high praise and the severe censure pronounced a little above—that both cannot be true. But both are true: and it is a really natural and necessary cause and proof at once of their truth that Hook never wrote a really good novel, hardly even a really good tale ("Gervase Skinner" is probably the best), and yet that he deserves the place here given to him.

Ainsworth and James perhaps deserve to be taken next, not so much in point of merit as because both, though continuing (especially Ainsworth) very late, began pretty early. Indeed, a book in which Ainsworth had a hand, though it is said to be not wholly his, Sir John Chiverton, was with Horace Smith's Brambletye House (1826), the actual subject of Scott's criticism above quoted. Both Ainsworth and James are unconcealed followers of Scott himself: and they show the dangers to which the historical romance is exposed when it gets out of the hands of genius. Of the two, James had the greater scholarship, the better command of English, and perhaps a nearer approach to command also of character: Ainsworth more "fire in his interior," more variety, somewhat more humour (though neither was strong in this respect), and a certain not useless or despicable faculty of splashy scene-painting and rough but not ineffective stage-management. But of Scott's combination of poetry, humour, knowledge of life, reading, grasp of character, and command of effective dialogue and description, both were utterly destitute: and both fell into the mistake (which even Dumas did not wholly avoid) of attempting to give the historical effect by thrusting in lardings of pure history, by overloading descriptions of dress, etc., and, in short, by plastering the historic colour on, instead of suffusing it, as Scott had managed to do. Popular as they were, not merely with youthful readers, they undoubtedly brought the historical novel into some discredit a little before the middle of the century.[20]

[20] Here and in a good many cases to come it is impossible to particularise criticism. It matters the less that, from Ainsworth's Rookwood (1834) and James' Richelieu (1829) onwards, the work of both was very much par sibi in merit and defect alike.

With Bulwer and Disraeli we get into a different sphere of literature—whether into the same in both cases, and whether, if so, into one of the highest, are questions on which no general agreement has yet been reached—on which, perhaps, no general agreement is even possible.

With regard to the second, it must be remembered that to him, whether as Mr. Disraeli or as Lord Beaconsfield, novel-writing was always a "by-work"—partly a means to his real end of politics, partly a relaxation from the work necessary to that end. He called himself a "gentleman of the press"—with that mixture of sincerity, purpose, and ironical simulation which brought on him, from unintelligent or not very honest opponents, and even from others, the charge of affectation, if not of hypocrisy. And, undoubtedly, he did a good deal of work for the press, and very remarkable work too—almost wholly in the kind of novel-writing, from Vivian Grey (1826) to Endymion (1880). Yet it may be permitted—in the face of some more than respectable opinion on the other side—to doubt whether, except in some curious sports and by-products, he ever produced real novel-work of the highest class. In the satiric-fantastic tale—in a kind of following of Voltaire—such as Ixion, he has hardly a superior, unless it be Anthony Hamilton, who is the superior of Voltaire himself and the master of everybody. For a pure love-novel of a certain kind, Henrietta Temple (1837) is bad to beat—and in a curious cross between the historical, biographical, and the romantic, Venetia (same year) also stands pretty much alone. But all the rest, more or less political, more or less "of society," more or less fantastic—Coningsby (1844) as well as Alroy (1833), Tancred (1847) as well as Vivian Grey, Sybil (1845), as well as The Young Duke (1831), "leave to desire" in a strange way. Like the three which have been excepted for praise, each is in a manner sui generis, while the whole group stands, in a manner also, apart from others and by itself. There is astonishing cleverness everywhere, in regard to almost every point of novel-composition, though with special regard to epigrammatic phrase. But the whole is inorganic somehow, and more than somehow unreal; without (save in the cases mentioned) attaining that obviously unreal but persuasive phantasmagoria which some great writers of fiction have managed to put in existence and motion. How far this is due to the fact that most of the novels are political is a question rather to be hinted than to be discussed. But the present writer has never read a political novel, whether on his own side or on others, that seemed to him to be wholly satisfactory.

Bulwer—for it is perhaps here not impolite or improper still to call the first Lord Lytton by the name under which he wrote for forty years, and solidly niched himself in the novel-front of the minster of English Literature—had not a few points of resemblance to his rival and future chief. But their relations to politics and letters were reversed. Disraeli was a born politician who was also a very considerable man of letters: Bulwer was a born man of letters who was a by no means inconsiderable politician. His literary ability was extraordinarily diversified: but, once more, he was (here also) a born novelist, who was also a not inconsiderable dramatist; a critic who might not impossibly have been great, a miscellanist of ability, and a verse-writer than whom many a worse has somehow or other obtained the name of poet. He began novel-writing very early (Falkland is of 1827), he continued it all his life, and he was the very Proteus-chameleon of the novel in changing his styles to suit the tastes of the day. He never exactly copied anybody: and in all his various attempts he went extremely near to the construction of masterpieces. In the novel of society with Pelham (1828); the novel of crime with Eugene Aram (1832) and Zanoni (1842); the novel of passion and a sort of mystery with Ernest Maltravers and Alice; the historic romance with The Last Days of Pompeii (1834), The Last of the Barons (1843), and Harold (1848), he made marks deep and early. When the purely domestic kind came in he made them, earlier and deeper still, with The Caxtons (1850), My Novel (1853), etc. He caught the "sensation" ball at nearly its first service with his old "mystery" racket, and played the most brilliant game of the whole tournament in A Strange Story (1862). At the last he tried later kinds still in books like The Coming Race (1871), The Parisians (1873), and Kenelm Chillingly. And once, Pallas being kind, he did an almost perfect thing (there is not a speck or a flaw in it except, perhaps, the mechanical death of the bulldog) and produced one of the best examples of one of the best and oldest classes of fiction known to the world, in the ghost-story of The Haunted and the Haunters (1859).

Such a mass, such a length, such a variety of production, with so many merits in it, would be difficult to meet elsewhere in our department. And yet very few critics of unquestionable competence, if any, have accorded the absolute First Class to Lord Lytton as a novelist. That this is partly (and rather unjustly) due to the singular and sometimes positively ridiculous grandiloquence and to the half-mawkish, half-rancid, sentimentality which too often mar his earlier novels is probably true. But it is not all the truth: if it were, it would be almost sufficient to point out that he outgrew the first of these faults completely, the second almost completely; and that from The Caxtons (1850) onward there is hardly any stain on his literary character in any such respect. But other faults—or at least defects—remain. They may be almost summed up in the charge of want of consummateness. Bulwer could be romantic—but his romance had the touch of bad taste and insincerity referred to above. He could, as in The Caxtons, be fairly true to ordinary life—but even then he seemed to feel a necessity of setting off and as it were apologising for the simplicity and veracity by touches—in fact by douches—of Sternian fantastry, and by other touches of what was a little later to be called sensationalism. Even his handling of the supernatural, which was undoubtedly a strong point of his, was not wholly de ban aloi. To pronounce him, as was once done by an acute and amiable judge, "the hummiest of bugs" was excessive in life, and would be preposterous in literature. But there undoubtedly was, with rare exceptions, a suspicion of what is called in slang "faking" about his work. The wine is not "neat" but doctored; the composition is pastiche; a dozen other metaphors—of stucco, veneer, glueing-up—suggest themselves. And then there suggests itself, in turn, a sort of shame at such imputations on the author of such a mass of work, so various, so interesting, so important as accomplishment, symptom, and pattern at once. And perhaps one may end by pronouncing Bulwer one of the very greatest of English novelists who are not of the very greatest.

It is difficult to say whether the usual attitude of criticism to Captain Marryat (1792-1848) is more uncritical than ungrateful or more ungrateful than uncritical. Because he has amused the boy, it seems to be taken for granted that he ought not to amuse the man: because he does not write with the artificial and often extremely arbitrary graces of the composition books, that he is "not literature." If it be so, why in the first case so much the worse for "the man," and in the second so much the worse for literature. As a matter of fact, he has many of the qualities of the novelist in a high degree: and if he were in the fortunate position of an ancient classic, whose best works only survive, these qualities could not fail of recognition. Much of his later work simply ought not to count; for it was mere hack-labour, rendered, if not necessary, very nearly so by the sailor's habit (which Marryat possessed in the highest degree) of getting rid of money. Even among this, Masterman Ready and The Children of the New Forest, "children's books," as they may be called, rank very high in their kind. But he counts here, of course, for his sea-novels mainly: and in them there are several things for us to notice. One is that Marryat had the true quality of the craftsman, as distinguished from the amateur or the chance-medley man who has a lucky inspiration. If it were the case that his books derived their whole attraction from the novelty and (within its limits) the variety of their sea-matter, then the first ought to be the best, as in nearly all such cases is the fact. But Frank Mildmay (1829), so far from being the best, is not far from being the worst of Marryat's novels. Much—dangerously much—as he put of his own experiences in the book, he did not know in the least how to manage them. And if Frank is something of a bravo, more of a blackguard, and nearly a complete ruffian, it is not merely because there was a good deal of brutality in the old navy; not merely because Marryat's own standard of chivalry was not quite that of Chaucer's Knight:—but partly, also, because he was aiming blunderingly at what he supposed to be part of the novelist's business—irregular as well as regular gallantry, and highly seasoned adventure. But, like all good artists (and like hardly anybody who has not the artistic quality in him), he taught himself by his failure, even though he sometimes relapsed. Of actual construction he was never a master. The King's Own, with its overdose of history at the beginning and of melodrama at the end, is an example. But his two masterpieces, Peter Simple (1834) and Mr. Midshipman Easy (1836), are capital instances of what may be called "particularist" fiction—the fiction that derives its special zest from the "colours" of some form of life unfamiliar to those who have not actually lived it. Even Peter Simple is unduly weighted at the end by the machinations of Peter's uncle against him and, at intervals during the book, by the proceedings connected therewith. But Mr. Midshipman Easy is flawless—except for the amiable but surely excessive sentimentalists who are shocked at the way in which Mr. Easy pere quits the greater stage by mounting the lesser. Than this book there is not a better novel of special "humour" in literature; as much may be said of the greater part of Peter Simple, of not a little in Jacob Faithful (a great favourite with Thackeray, who always did justice to Marryat), and Japhet in Search of a Father, and of something in almost all. Nor were high jinks and special naval matters by any means Marryat's only province. Laymen may agree with experts in thinking the clubhauling of the Diomede in Peter Simple, and the two great fights of the Aurora with the elements and with the Russian frigate in Mr. Midshipman Easy, to be extraordinarily fine things:—vivid, free from extravagance, striking, stirring, clear, as descriptive and narrative literature of the kind can be only at its best, and too seldom is at all. An almost Defoe-like exactness of detail is one of Marryat's methods and merits: while it is very remarkable that he rarely attempts to produce the fun, in which Defoe is lacking and he himself so fertile, by mere exaggeration or caricature of detail. There are exceptions—the Dominie business in Jacob Faithful is one—but they are exceptions. Take Hook, his immediate predecessor, and no doubt in a way his model, as (it has been said) Hook was to almost everybody at the time; take even Dickens, his fellow-pupil with Hook and his own greater successor; and you will find that Marryat resorts less than either to the humour of simple charge or exaggeration.

The last name on our present list belongs to the class of "eccentric" novelists—the adjective being used, not in its transferred and partly improper sense so much as in its true one. Peacock never plays the Jack-pudding like Sterne: and his shrewd wit never permits him the sincere aberrations of Amory. But his work is out of the ordinary courses, and does not turn round the ordinary centres of novel writing. It belongs to the tradition—if to any tradition at all—of Lucian and the Lucianists—especially as that tradition was redirected by Anthony Hamilton. It thus comes, in one way, near part of the work of Disraeli; though, except in point of satiric temper, its spirit is totally different. Peacock was essentially a scholar (though a non-academic one) and essentially a humorist. In the progress of his books from Headlong Hall (1816) to Gryll Grange (1860)—the last separated from the group to which the first belongs by more than twice as many years as were covered by that group itself—he mellowed his tone, but altered his scheme very little. Except in Maid Marian and The Misfortunes of Elphin, where the Scott influence is evident, though Peacock was himself a rebel to Scott, the plan is always the same. Headlong Hall and Nightmare Abbey, Melincourt and Crotchet Castle (1831), as well as Gryll Grange itself, all have the uniform, though by no means monotonous, canvas of a party of guests assembled at a country-house and consisting of a number of "originals," with one or more common-sense but by no means commonplace characters to serve as contrast. It is in the selection and management of these foils that one of Peacock's principal distinctions lies. In his earlier books, and in accordance with the manners of the time, there is a good deal of "high jinks"—less later. In all, there is also a good deal of personal and literary satire, which tones and mellows as it proceeds. At first Peacock is extremely unjust to the Lake poets—so unjust indeed as to be sometimes hardly amusing—to the two universities (of which it so happened that he was not a member), to the Tory party generally, to clergymen, to other things and persons. In Crotchet Castle the progress of Reform was already beginning to produce a beneficent effect of reaction upon him, and in Gryll Grange, though the manners and cast are surprisingly modern, the whole tone is conservative—with a small if not even with a large C—for the most prominent and well treated character is a Churchman of the best academic Tory type.

It is not, however, in anything yet mentioned that Peacock's charm consists, so much as in the intensely literary, but not in the least pedantic, tone with which he suffuses his books, the piquant but not in the least affected turn of the phrases that meet us throughout, the peculiar quality of his irony (most quintessenced in The Misfortunes of Elphin, which is different in scheme from the rest, but omnipresent), and the crisp presentation of individual scene, incident, and character of a kind. Story, in the general sense, there is none, or next to none—the personages meet, go through a certain number of dinners (Peacock is great at eating and drinking), diversions, and difficulties, marry to a greater or less extent, but otherwise part. Yet such things as the character of Scythrop in Nightmare Abbey (a half fantastic, half faithful portrait of Shelley, who was Peacock's intimate friend), or of Dr. Folliott (a genial parson) in Crotchet Castle—as the brilliant picture of the breaking of the dyke in Elphin, or the comic one of the rotten-borough election in Melincourt—are among the triumphs of the English novel. And they are present by dozens and scores: while (though it is a little out of our way) there is no doubt that the attraction of the books is greatly enhanced by the abundance of inset verse—sometimes serious, more often light—of which Peacock, again in an eccentric fashion, was hardly less a master than he was of prose.

Here also it has seemed fit to dwell on a single writer, not perhaps generally held to be of the absolutely first class, because these "eccentrics" are of very great importance in the history of the English novel. The danger of the kind—even more than of other literary kinds—lies in the direction of mould and mechanism—of the production, by the thousand, of things of no individual quality and character. This danger has been and is being amply exemplified. But the Peacocks (would the plural were more justified!) save us from it by their own unconquerable individuality in the first place and, in the second, by the fact that even the best in this kind is "caviare to the general," while anything that is not the best has no attraction either for the general or the elect. They are, as it were, the salt of the novel-feast, in more senses than one: and it is cause for thankfulness that, in this respect as in the physical, England has been well off for salt-pits.

Besides these individual names—which in most literatures would be great, and even in English literature are not small—the second quarter of the century added to the history of the novel an infinity of others who can hardly appear here even on the representative or selective system. All the suns of the novel hitherto mentioned had moons and stars around them; all the cadres of the various kinds were filled with privates and non-commissioned officers to follow the leaders. Gait and Moir carried out the "Scotch novel" with something of Scott, but more of Smollett (Gait at least certainly, in part of his work, preceded Scott). Lady Morgan, who has been mentioned already, Banim, Crofton Croker, and others played a similar part to Miss Edgeworth. Glascock, Chamier, and Howard were, as it were, lieutenants (the last directly so) to Marryat. The didactic side of Miss Edgeworth was taken up by Harriet Martineau. Mrs. Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) is among the latest good examples of the "Terror" class, to which her husband had contributed two of its worst, and two of the feeblest books ever written by a man of the greatest genius, in Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne, some seven years earlier. Many women, not unnaturally, encouraged by the great examples of Miss Burney, Miss Edgeworth, Miss Austen, and Miss Ferrier, attempted novels of the most various kinds, sometimes almost achieving the purely domestic variety, sometimes branching to other sorts. The novels of Mrs. Gore, chiefly in the "fashionable" kind, are said to have attained the three-score and ten in number; Mrs. Crowe dealt with the supernatural outside of her novels if not also in them; the luckless poetess "L.E.L." was a novelist in Ethel Churchill (1837) and other books; Mrs. Trollope, prolific mother of a more prolific son, showed not a little power, if not quite so much taste, in The Vicar of Wrexhill (1837) and The Widow Barnaby. Single books, like Morier's Hajji Baba (1824), Hope's Anastasius (1819), Croly's Salathiel (1829), gained fame which they have not quite lost: and the little known Michael Scott (1789-1835) left in Tom Cringle's Log and The Cruise of the Midge a pair of stories of West Indian scenery and adventure which are nearly first rate. In 1839, not long after Pickwick, Samuel Warren's Ten Thousand a Year blended Bulwer and Dickens in a manner which to this day is a puzzle in its near approach to success. Yet he never repeated this approach, though he had earlier done striking things in the Diary of a Late Physician (1830). But in the latest thirties and early forties there arose two writers who were to eclipse every one of their contemporaries in this kind.

The remarkable originality and idiosyncrasy of Dickens have perhaps, to some extent and from not a few persons, concealed the fact that he was not, any more than other people, an earth-born wonder. Scanted of education as he was, he has in several places frankly and eagerly confessed his early acquaintance with the great older novelists, and his special fancy for Smollett—whose influence indeed is traceable on him from first to last, and not least in the famous "interiors" of which he made far more than his example had done. Even in Pickwick the expert will trace suggestions from others. But if the work is read in its proper order, and the Sketches by Boz are taken first, nobody who knows both Leigh Hunt and Theodore Hook will fail to see that Dickens owed a great deal to both. The fact is in no sense discreditable to him: on the contrary, it adds, in the estimation of all reasonable and critical judges, a very great deal of interest, and takes away none. The earth-born prodigy is seldom good for much and never for very much. The genius who fastens on the points in preceding literature most congenial to him, develops them, builds on them with his own matter and form, and turns out something far greater than his originals is the really satisfactory person. Had Leigh Hunt lent to Hook his literature, his fund of trivial but agreeable observation and illustration, and his attractive style; had Hook communicated to Hunt his narrative faculty and his fecundity in character and manners:—neither could have written Pickwick or even the worst of its successors. Had there been no Hunt and no Hook, Dickens would no doubt have managed, in some fashion, to "do for himself." But it would have given him more trouble, he would have done it more slowly, and he would hardly have earned that generous and admirable phrase of his greatest contemporary in fiction which will be quoted shortly.

Neither from Smollett, however, nor from Hook, nor from Hunt, nor from anybody else did Dickens take what makes him Dickens. His idiosyncrasy, already mentioned, is so marked that everybody acknowledges its presence: but its exact character and nature are matter not so much of debate (though they are that also in the highest degree) as matter of more or less questing, often of a rather blind-man's-buff kind. There is probably no author of whom really critical estimates are so rare. He has given so much pleasure to so many people—perhaps there are none to whom he has given more pleasure than to some of those who have criticised him most closely—that to mention any faults in him is upbraided as a sort of personal and detestable ingratitude and treachery. If you say that he cannot draw a gentleman, you are told that you are a parrot and a snob, who repeats what other snobs have told you; that gentlemen are not worth drawing; that he can draw them; and so forth. If you suggest that he is fantastic, it is reproachfully asked if poetry is not fantastic, and if you do not like poetry? If you intimate small affection for Little Nell and Little Paul, you are a brute; if you hint that his social crusades were often quite irrational, and sometimes at least as mischievous as they were beneficial, you are a parasite of aristocracy and a foe of "the people." If you take exception to his repetitions, his mannerisms, his tedious catch-processes of various kinds, you are a "stop-watch critic" and worthy of all the generous wrath of the exemplary and Reverend Mr. Yorick. And yet all these assertions, objections, descriptions, are arch-true: and they can be made by persons who know Dickens and enjoy Dickens a thousand times better—who admire him in a manner a thousand times more really complimentary—than the folk who simply cry "Great is Dickens" and will listen to nothing but their own sweet voices.

The real, the great, the unique merit of Dickens is that he brought to the service of the novel an imagination which, though it was never poetic, was plastic in almost the highest degree: and that he communicated to the results of it a kind of existence which, though distinctly different from that of actual life, has a reality of its own, and possesses the distinguishing mark of genius, so that if it does not exactly force belief in itself, it forces suspension of disbelief. To have done this is not only to have accomplished a wonderful artistic triumph, but to confer an immense benefit on the human race. But in doing it Dickens exhibits various foibles, prejudices, and disabilities: though it is quite open to any one to maintain that these rather assisted the flow of his imagination than hindered it. He began very young; he had curiously little literature; his knowledge of life, extraordinarily alert and acute, was very one-sided, and the organs by which he attained it seem absolutely to shut themselves and refuse communion with certain orders of society and classes of human creatures. The wealth of fantastic imagery which he used to such purpose not infrequently stimulated him to a disorderly profusion of grotesque; he was congenitally melodramatic; and before very long his habit of attributing special catch-words, gestures, and the like to his characters, exaggerated, degenerated, and stereotyped itself in a fashion which it is difficult to think satisfactory to anybody. He was, moreover, a "novelist of purpose" in the highest degree; he had very strong, but very crude—not to say absurd—political ideas; and he was apt to let the great powers of pathos, of humour, of vivid description, which he possessed to "get out of hand" and to land him in the maudlin, the extravagant, and the bombastic.

But—to put ourselves in connection with the main thread of our story once more—he not only himself provided a great amount of the novel pleasure for his readers, but he infused into the novel generally something of a new spirit. It has been more than once pointed out that there is almost more danger with the novel of "getting into ruts" than with any kind of literature. Nobody could charge the Dickens novel with doing this, except as regards mannerisms of style, and though it might inspire many, it was very unlikely to create a rut for any one else. He liked to call himself "the inimitable," and so, in a way, he was. Imitations of him were, of course, tried: but they were all bad and obvious failures. Against the possible tameness of the domestic novel; against the too commonly actual want of actuality of the historic romance; he set this new fantastic activity of his, which was at once real and unreal, but where the reality had a magical touch of the unfamiliar and the very unreality was stimulating. He might have a hundred faults—he was in fact never faultless, except in Pickwick, which is so absolutely unique that there is nothing to compare with it and show up faults (if it has any) by the comparison. But you can read him again and again with unceasing delight, and with delight of a kind given by no other novelist.[21]

[21] It has not been thought necessary to insert criticism of Dickens's individual novels. They are almost all well known to almost everybody: and special discussion of them would be superfluous, while their general characteristics and positions in novel-history are singularly uniform and can be described together.

The position of Thackeray in the history of the novel is as different from that of Dickens as the fortunes of the two were in their own progress and development. In fact, though a sort of pseudo-Plutarchian parallel between them is nearly as inevitable as it is common, it is a parallel almost entirely composed of differences, carried out in matter almost incommensurable. In the first place, Dickens, as we have seen, and as Thackeray said (with the generous and characteristic addition "at the head of the whole tribe"), "came and took his place calmly" and practically at once (or with the preliminary only of "Boz") in Pickwick. Whether he ever went further may at least be questioned. But Thackeray did not take his place at once—in fact he conspicuously failed to take it for some sixteen years: although he produced, for at least the last ten of these, work containing indications of extraordinary power, in a variety of directions almost as extraordinary.

To attempt to assign reasons for this comparative failure would be idle—the fact is the only reasonable reason. But some phenomena and symptoms can be diagnosed. It is at least noteworthy that Thackeray—in this approaching Dickens perhaps nearer than in any other point—began with extravaganza—to adopt perhaps the most convenient general name for a thing which cannot be quite satisfactorily designated by any. In both cases the adoption was probably due to the example and popularity of Theodore Hook. But it was also due, in a higher and more metaphysical sense, to the fact that the romance, which had had so mighty a success in Scott's hands, was for the time overblown, and that the domestic novel, despite the almost equally wonderful, though much quieter and less popular achievement of Miss Austen, was not thoroughly and genuinely ready. From extravaganza in a certain sense Dickens, as has been said, never really departed: and he achieved most of his best work in his own peculiar varieties of it. Thackeray was, if not to leave it entirely aside, to use it in his later days merely as an occasional variation and seasoning. But at first he could not, apparently, get free from it: and he might have seemed unable to dispense with its almost mechanical externalities of mis-spelling and the like. It must also be remembered that circumstances were at first curiously unfavourable to him: and that loss of fortune, domestic affliction, and other things almost compelled him to write from hand to mouth—to take whatever commission offered itself: whereas the, if not immediate, speedy and tremendous success of Pickwick put the booksellers entirely at Dickens's feet. Still, a certain vacillation—an uncertainty of design not often accompanying genius like his—must be acknowledged in Thackeray. For a time he hesitated between pen and pencil, the latter of which implements he fortunately never abandoned, though the former was his predestined wand. Then he could not, or would not, for years, get out of the "miscellaneous" style, or patchwork of styles—reviews, short stories, burlesques, what not. His more important attempts seemed to have an attendant guignon.[22] Catherine (1839-1840), a very powerful thing in parts, was ill-planned and could not be popular. A Shabby Genteel Story (1841), containing almost the Thackerayan quiddity, was interrupted partly by his wife's illness, partly, it would seem, by editorial disfavour, and moreover still failed to shake off the appearance of a want of seriousness. Even The Great Hoggarty Diamond (1841-1842) was apparently cut short by request, and still lay open to an unjust, but not quite inexcusable, question on this same point of "seriousness." In all there was, or might seem to be, a queer and to some readers an unsatisfactory blend of what they had not learnt to call "realism" with what they were quite likely to think fooling. During these years Thackeray was emphatically of the class of writers of whom people "do not know what to make." And it is a true saying of English people—though perhaps not so pre-eminently true of them as some would have it—that "not to know what to make" of a thing or a person is sufficient reason for them to distrust, dislike, and "wash their hands of" it or him.

[22] For this reason, and for the variety of kind of his later novels a little more individual notice must be given to them than in the case of Dickens, but still only a little, and nothing like detailed criticism.

Some would have it that Barry Lyndon (1843) marks the close of this period of indecision and the beginning of that of maturity. The commoner and perhaps the juster opinion is that this position belongs to Vanity Fair (1846-1848). At any rate, after that book there could be no doubt about the fact of the greatness of its writer, though it may be doubted whether even now the quality of this greatness is correctly and generally recognised. It is this—that at last the novel of real life on the great scale has been discovered. Even yet a remnant of shyness hangs on the artist. He puts his scene a little though not very far back; he borrows a little, though not much, historical and romantic interest in the Waterloo part; the catastrophe of the Becky-Steyne business, though by no means outside of the probable contents of any day's newspaper, is slightly exceptional. But on the whole the problem of "reality, the whole reality, and nothing but reality" is faced and grasped and solved—with, of course, the addition to the "nothing but" of "except art."

He had struck his path and he kept to it: even when, as in Esmond (1852) and The Virginians (1858-1859) actually, and in Denis Duval prospectively, he blended the historical with the domestic variety. Pendennis (1849-1850) imports nothing out of the most ordinary experience; The Newcomes (1854-1855) very little; Philip (1861-1862) only its pantomime conclusion; while the two completely historical tales are in nothing more remarkable than in the way in which their remoter and more unfamiliar main subject, and their occasional excursions from everyday life, are subdued to the scheme of the realist novel in the best sense of the term—the novel rebuilt and refashioned on the lines of Fielding, but with modern manners, relying on variety and life, and relying on these only.

There is thus something of similarity (though with attendant differences, of the most important kind) between the joint position of Dickens and Thackeray towards the world of the novel, and the joint position of Scott and Miss Austen. They overlap more than their great forerunners of the preceding generation. Both wrote historical novels: it is indeed Thackeray's unique distinction that he was equally master of the historical novel and of the novel of pure modern society, almost uneventful. In parts of some of his later books, especially Little Dorrit, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend, Dickens at least tried to exchange his picaresque-fantastic cloudland for actual ordinary modern life. But on the whole the method of Thackeray was the method of the novel, though shot with a strong romantic spirit, and the method of Dickens the method of the romance applied, for the most part, to material which could hardly be called romantic. Both, therefore, in a manner, recalled the forces of fiction from the rather straggling and particularist courses which it had been pursuing for the last quarter of a century.

In fact, even in the two mighty men of genius whom we have just been discussing, there may be seen—at their beginnings at least—something of that irresolution, uncertainty, and want of reliance on the powers of the novel, it-by-itself-it, which we have noticed before: and which the unerring craftsmanship of Scott had already pointed out in the "Conversation of the Author of Waverley with Captain Clutterbuck" more than once referred to. They want excuses and pretexts, bladders and spring-boards. Even Dickens, despite his irrepressible self-reliance, burdens himself, at the beginning of Pickwick, with the clumsy old machinery of a club which he practically drops: and, still later, with the still more clumsy framework of "Master Humphrey's Clock" which he has not quietly to drop, but openly to strip off and cast away, before he has gone very far. Thackeray takes sixteen years of experiment before he trusts his genius, boldly and on the great scale, to reveal itself in its own way, and in the straight way of the novel.

Yet in this time also a great advance was made, as is shown not only by the fact that Dickens and Thackeray themselves became possible, but by the various achievements of the principal writers mentioned in this chapter, of one or two who might have been, but are perhaps, on the whole, best postponed to the next, such as Lever, and of the great army of minorities who have been of necessity omitted. In every direction and from every point of view novel is growing. Although it was abused by precisians, the gran conquesta of Scott had forced it into general recognition and requisition. Even the still severe discipline of family life in the first half of the nineteenth century, instead of excluding it altogether, contented itself with prescribing that "novels should not be read in the morning." A test which may be thought vulgar by the super-fine or the superficial, but a pretty good one, is the altered status and position of the writers of novels. In the eighteenth, especially the earlier eighteenth, century the novelist had not merely been looked down upon as a novelist, but had, as a rule, resorted to novel-writing under some stress of circumstance. Even when he was by birth a "gentleman of coat armour" as Fielding and Smollett were, he was usually a gentleman very much out at elbows: the stories, true or false, of Rasselas and Johnson's mother's funeral expenses, of the Vicar of Wakefield and Goldsmith's dunning landlady, have something more than mere anecdote in them. Mackenzie, though the paternity of his famille deplorable of novels was no secret, preserved a strict nominal incognito. Women, as having no regular professions and plenty of time at their disposal, were allowed more latitude: and this really perhaps had something to do with their early prominence in the novel; but it is certain that Scott's rigid, and for a long time successful, maintenance of the mask was by no means mere prudery, and still less merely prudent commercial speculation. Yet he, who altered so much in the novel, altered this also. Of the novelists noticed in the early part of this chapter, one became Prime Minister of England, another rose to cabinet rank, a baronetcy, and a peerage; a third was H.M. consul in important posts abroad; a fourth held a great position, if not in the service directly of the crown, in what was of hardly less importance, that of the East India Company; a fifth was a post-captain in the navy and Companion of the Bath.

And all this had been rendered possible partly by the genius of novel-writers, partly by the appetite of the novel-reader. This latter was to continue unabated: whether the former was to increase, to maintain itself, or slacken must be, to some extent of course, matter of opinion. But we have still two quarter-centuries to survey, in the first of which there may perhaps be some reason for thinking that the novel rose to its actual zenith. Nearly all the writers mentioned in this chapter continued to write—the greater part, in genius, of Thackeray's accomplished work, and the greater part, in bulk, of Dickens's, had still to appear. But these elders were reinforced by fresh recruits, some of them of a prowess only inferior to the very greatest: and a distinct development of the novel itself, in the direction of self-reliance and craftsmanlike working on its own lines, was to be seen. In particular, the deferred influence of Miss Austen was at last to be brought to bear with astonishing results: while, partly owing to the example of Thackeray, the historical variety (which had for the most part been a pale and rather vulgarised imitation of Scott), was to be revived and varied in a manner equally astonishing. More than ever we shall have to let styles and kinds "speak by their foremen"—in fact to some extent to let them speak for themselves with very little detailed notice even of these foremen. But we shall still endeavour to keep the general threads in hand and to exhibit their direction, their crossing, and their other phenomena, as clearly as possible to the reader. For only so can we complete the picture of the course of fiction throughout English literature—with the sole exclusion of living writers, whose work can never be satisfactorily treated in such a book as this—first, because they are living and, secondly, because it is not done.



CHAPTER VII

THE MID-VICTORIAN NOVEL

At about the very middle of the nineteenth century—say from 1845 to 1855 in each direction, but almost increasingly towards the actual dividing line of 1850—there came upon the English novel a very remarkable wind of refreshment and new endeavour. Thackeray and Dickens themselves are examples of it, with Lever and others, before this dividing line: many others yet come to join them. A list of books written out just as they occur to the memory, and without any attempt to marshal them in strict chronological order, would show this beyond all reasonable possibility of gainsaying. Thackeray's own best accomplished work from Vanity Fair (1846) itself through Pendennis (1849) and Esmond (1852) to The Newcomes (1854); the brilliant centre of Dickens's work in David Copperfield (1850)—stand at the head and have been already noticed by anticipation or implication, while Lever had almost completed the first division of his work, which began with Harry Lorrequer as early as the year of Pickwick. But such books as Yeast (1848), Westward Ho! (1855); as The Warden (1855); as Jane Eyre (1847) and its too few successors; as Scenes of Clerical Life (1857); as Mary Barton (1848) and the novels which followed it, with others which it is perhaps almost unfair to leave out even in this allusive summary by sample, betokened a stirring of the waters, a rattling among the bones, such as is not common in literature. Death removed Thackeray early and Dickens somewhat less prematurely, but after a period rather barren in direct novel work. The others continued and were constantly reinforced: nor was it till well on in the seventies that any distinct drop from first- to second-growth quality could be observed in the general vintage of English fiction.

One is not quite driven, on this occasion, to the pusillanimous explanation that this remarkable variety and number of good novels was simply due to the simultaneous existence of an equally remarkable number of good novelists. The fact is that, by this time, the great example of Scott and Miss Austen—the great wave of progress which exemplified itself first and most eminently in these two writers—had had time to work upon and permeate another generation of practitioners. The novelists who have just been cited were as a rule born in the second decade of the century, just before, about, or after the time at which Scott and Miss Austen began to publish. They had therefore—as their elders, even though they may have had time to read the pair, had not—time to assimilate thoroughly and early the results which that pair had produced or which they had first expressed. And they had even greater advantages than this. They had had time to assimilate, likewise, the results of all the rest of that great literary generation of which Scott and Miss Austen were themselves but members. They profited by thirty years more of constant historical exploration and realising of former days. One need not say, for it is question-begging, that they also profited by, but they could at least avail themselves of, the immense change of manners and society which made 1850 differ more from 1800 than 1800 had differed, not merely from 1750 but from 1700. They had, even though all of them may not have been sufficiently grateful for it, the stimulus of that premier position in Europe which the country had gained in the Napoleonic wars, and which she had not yet wholly lost or even begun to lose. They had wider travel, more extended occupations and interests, many other new things to draw upon. And, lastly, they had some important special incidents and movements—the new arrangement of political parties, the Oxford awakening, and others—to give suggestion and impetus to novels of the specialist kind. Nay, they had not only the great writers, in other kinds, of the immediate past, but those of the present, Carlyle, Tennyson, latterly Ruskin, and others still to complete their education and the machinery of its development.

The most remarkable feature of this renouveau, as has been both directly and indirectly observed before, is the resumption, the immense extension, and the extraordinary improvement of the domestic novel. Not that this had not been practised during the thirty years since Miss Austen's death. But the external advantages just enumerated had failed it: and it had enlisted none of the chief talents which were at the service of fiction generally. A little more gift and a good deal more taste might have enabled Mrs. Trollope to do really great things in it: but she left them for her son to accomplish. Attempts and "tries" at it had been made constantly, and the goal had been very nearly reached, especially, perhaps, in that now much forgotten but remarkable Emilia Wyndham (1846) by Anne Caldwell (Mrs. Marsh), which was wickedly described by a sister novelist as the "book where the woman breaks her desk open with her head," but which has real power and exercised real influence for no short time.

This new domestic novel followed Miss Austen in that it did not necessarily avail itself of anything but perfectly ordinary life, and relied chiefly on artistic presentment—on treatment rather than on subject. It departed from her in that it admitted a much wider range and variety of subject itself; and by no means excluded the passions and emotions which, though she had not been so prudish as to ignore their results, she had never chosen to represent in much actual exercise, or to make the mainsprings of her books.

The first supreme work of the kind was perhaps in Vanity Fair and Pendennis, the former admitting exceptional and irregular developments as an integral part of its plot and general appeal, the latter doing for the most part without them. But Pendennis exhibited in itself, and taught to other novelists, if not an absolutely new, a hitherto little worked, and clumsily worked, source of novel interest. We have seen how, as early as Head or Kirkman, the possibility of making such a source out of the ways of special trades, professions, employments, and vocations had been partly seen and utilised. Defoe did it more; Smollett more still; and since the great war there had been naval and military novels in abundance, as well as novels political, clerical, sporting, and what not. But these special interests had been as a rule drawn upon too onesidedly. The eighteenth century found its mistaken fondness for episodes, inset stories, and the like, particularly convenient here: the naval, military, sporting, and other novels of the nineteenth were apt to rely too exclusively on these differences. Such things as the Oxbridge scenes and the journalism scenes of Pendennis—both among the most effective and popular, perhaps the most effective and popular, parts of the book—were almost, if not entirely, new. There had been before, and have since been, plenty of university novels, and their record has been a record of almost uninterrupted failure; there have since, if not before, Pendennis been several "press" novels, and their record has certainly not been a record of unbroken success. But the employment here, by genius, of such subjects for substantial parts of a novel was a success pure and unmixed. So, in the earlier book, the same author had shown how the most humdrum incident and the minutest painting of ordinary character could be combined with historic tragedy like that furnished by Waterloo, with domestic drame of the most exciting kind like the discovery of Lord Steyne's relations with Becky, or the at least suggested later crime of that ingenious and rather hardly treated little person.

Most of the writers mentioned and glanced at above took—not of course always, often, or perhaps ever in conscious following of Thackeray, but in consequence of the same "skiey influences" which worked on him—to this mixed domestic-dramatic line. And what is still more interesting, men who had already made their mark for years, in styles quite different, turned to it and adopted it. We have seen this of Bulwer, and the evidences of the change in him which are given by the "Caxton" novels. We have not yet directly dealt with another instance of almost as great interest and distinction, Charles Lever, though we have named him and glanced at his work.

Lever, who was born as early as 1806, had, it has been said, begun to write novels as early as his junior, Dickens, and had at once developed, in Harry Lorrequer, a pretty distinct style of his own. This style was a kind of humour-novel with abundant incident, generally with a somewhat "promiscuous" plot and with lively but externally drawn characters—the humours being furnished partly by Lever's native country, Ireland, and partly by the traditions of the great war of which he had collected a store in his capacity of physician to the Embassy at Brussels. He had kept up this style, the capital example of which is Charles O'Malley (1840), with unabated verve and with great popular success for a dozen years before 1850. But about that time, or rather earlier, the general "suck" of the current towards a different kind (assisted no doubt by the feeling that the public might be getting tired of the other style) made him change it into studies of a less specialised kind—of foreign travel, home life, and the like—sketches which, in his later days still, he brought even closer to actuality. It is true that in the long run his popularity has depended, and will probably always depend, on the early "rollicking" adventure books: not only because of their natural appeal, but because there is plenty of the other thing elsewhere, and hardly any of this particular thing anywhere. To almost anybody, for instance, except a very great milksop or a pedant of construction, Charles O'Malley with its love-making and its fighting, its horsemanship and its horse-play, its "devilled kidneys"[23] and its devil-may-care-ness, is a distinctly delectable composition; and if a reasonable interval be allowed between the readings, may be read over and over again, at all times of life, with satisfaction. But the fact of the author's change remains not the less historically and symptomatically important, in connection with the larger change of which we are now taking notice, and with the similar phenomena observable in the work of Bulwer. At the same time it has been pointed out that the following of Miss Austen by no means excluded the following of Scott: and that the new development included "crosses" of novel and romance, sometimes of the historical kind, sometimes not, which are of the highest, or all but the highest, interest. Early and good examples of these may be found in the work of the Brontes, Charlotte and Emily (the third sister Anne is but a pale reflection of her elders), and of Charles Kingsley. Charlotte (b. 1816) and Charles (b. 1819) were separated in their birth by but three years, Emily (b. 1818) and Kingsley by but one.

[23] Edgar Poe has a perfectly serious and very characteristic explosion at the prominence of these agreeable viands in the book.

The curious story of the struggles of the Bronte girls to get published hardly concerns us, and Emily's work, Wuthering Heights,[24] is one of those isolated books which, whatever their merit, are rather ornaments than essential parts in novel history. But this is not the case with Jane Eyre (1847), Shirley (1849), Villette (1852), and The Professor (1857) (but written much earlier). These are all examples of the determination to base novels on actual life and experience. Few novelists have ever kept so close to their own part in these as Charlotte Bronte did, though she accompanied, permeated, and to a certain extent transformed her autobiography and observation by a strong romantic and fantastic imaginative element. Deprive Thackeray and Dickens of nearly all their humour and geniality, take a portion only of the remaining genius of each in the ratio of about 2 Th. to 1 D., add a certain dash of the old terror-novel and the German fantastic tale, moisten with feminine spirit and water, and mix thoroughly: and you have something very like Charlotte Bronte. But it is necessary to add further, and it is her great glory, the perfume and atmosphere of the Yorkshire moors, which she had in not quite such perfection as her sister Emily, but in combination with more general novel-gift. Her actual course of writing was short, and it could probably in no case have been long; she wanted wider and, perhaps, happier experience, more literature, more man-and-woman-of-the-worldliness, perhaps a sweeter and more genial temper. But the English novel would have been incomplete without her and her sister; they are, as wholes, unlike anybody else, and if they are not exactly great they have the quality of greatness. Above all, they kept novel and romance together—a deed which is great without any qualification or drawback.