[24] Some will have it that this was really Charlotte's: but not with much probability.

Charles Kingsley is one of the most precious documents for the cynics who say that while, if you please the public in only one way, you may possibly meet with only tolerable ingratitude; if you attempt to please it in more ways than one, you are certain to be suspected, and still more certain to have the defects of your weakest work transferred to your best. He was a novelist, a poet, an essayist, a preacher, a historian, and a critic. His history, though less positively inaccurate than the "dead set" against him of certain notorious persons chose to represent it, was uncritical: and his criticism, sometimes acute and luminous, was decidedly unhistorical. But he was a preacher of remarkable merit, a charming and original essayist, a poet of no wide range but of true poetical quality, and a novelist of great variety and of almost the first class. He let his weakest qualities go in with his strongest in his novels, and had also the still more unfortunate tendency to "trail coats" of the most inconceivably different colours for others to tread upon. Liberals, Radicals, and Tories; Roman Catholics, High Churchmen, Low Churchmen, and No-Churchmen; sentimentalists and cynics; people who do not like literary and historical allusion, and people who are meticulous about literary and historical accuracy—all these and many others, if they cannot disregard flings at their own particular tastes, fancies, and notions, are sure to lose patience with him now and then. Accordingly, he has met with some exacerbated decriers, and with very few thorough-going defenders.

Yet almost thoroughing-going defence is, as far as the novels (our only direct business) are concerned, far from difficult; and the present writer, though there are perhaps not a dozen consecutive pages of Kingsley's novels to which, at some point or other, he is not prepared to append the note, "This is Bosh," is prepared also to exalt him miles above writers whose margins he would be quite content to leave without a single annotation of this—or any other—kind. In particular the variety of the books, and their vividness, are both extraordinary. And perhaps the greatest notes of the novel generally, as well as those in which the novel of this period can most successfully challenge comparison with those of any other, are, or should be, vividness and variety. His books in the kind are seven; and the absence of replicas among them is one of their extraordinary features. Yeast, the first (1848), and Alton Locke, the second (next year), are novels of the unrest of thought which caused and accompanied the revolutionary movement of the period throughout Europe. But they are quite different in subject and treatment. The first is a sketch of country society, uppermost and lowermost:[25] the second one of town-artisan and lower-trade life with passages of university and other contrast. Both are young and crude enough, intentionally or unintentionally; both, intentionally beyond all doubt, are fantastic and extravagant; but both are full of genius. Argemone Lavington, the heroine of Yeast, is, though not of the most elaborately drawn, one of the most fascinating and real heroines of English fiction; an important secondary character of the second book, the bookseller Sandy Mackaye, is one of its most successful "character-parts." Both, but especially Yeast, are full of admirable descriptive writing, not entirely without indebtedness to Mr. Ruskin, but very often independently carried out, and always worthy of a "place on the line" in any gallery. There is much accurate and real dialogue, not a little firm character-drawing. Above all, both are full of blood—of things lived and seen, not vamped up from reading or day-dreaming—and yet full of dreams, day and other, and full of literature. Perhaps "the malt was a little above the meal," the yeast present in more abundant quality than the substances for fermentation, but there was no lack even of these.

[25] It is curious to compare this (dealing as it does largely with sport) and the "Jorrocks" series of Robert Surtees (1803-1864). Kingsley was nearly as practical a sportsman as Surtees: but Surtees's characters and manners have the old artificial-picaresque quality only.

Hypatia—which succeeded after some interval (1853) and when the writer's Christian Socialist, Churchman-Chartist excitement had somewhat clarified itself—is a more substantial, a more ambitious, but certainly also an even more successful book. It has something of—and perhaps, though in far transposed matter, owes something to—Esmond in its daring blend of old and new, and it falls short of that wonderful creation. But it is almost a second to it: and, with plenty of faults, is perhaps the only classical or semi-classical novel of much value in English.

But it was in the next year, 1854, that Kingsley's work reached its greatest perfection in the brilliant historical novel of Westward Ho! where the glories of Elizabethan adventure and patriotism were treated with a wonderful kindred enthusiasm, with admirable narrative faculty, with a creation of character, suitable for the purpose, which is hardly inferior to that of the greatest masters, and with an even enhanced and certainly chastened exercise of the descriptive faculty above noticed. The book to some extent invited—and Kingsley availed himself of the opportunity in a far more than sufficient degree—that "coat-trailing" which, as has been said, inevitably in its turn provokes "coat-treading": and it has been abused from various quarters. But that it is one of the very greatest of English novels next to the few supreme, impartial and competent criticism will never hesitate to allow. Of his remaining books of novel kind one was of the "eccentric" variety: the others, though full of good things, were perhaps on the whole failures. The first referred to (the second in order of appearance), The Water Babies (1863), is a half Rabelaisian though perfectly inoffensive fatrasie of all sorts of things, exceedingly delightful to fit tastes. But Two Tears Ago (1857), though containing some fine and even really exquisite things, shows a relaxing hand on the crudity and promiscuousness which had been excusable in his two first books and had been well restrained in Hypatia and Westward Ho! by central and active interests of story and character. "Spasmodic" poetry, the Crimean War, Pre-Raphaelitism, Tractarianism, the good and bad sides of science, and divers other things make a mixture that is not sufficiently concocted and "rectified." While in the much later Hereward the Wake (1866), though the provocation offered to the Dryasdust kind of historian is no matter, there is a curious relapse on the old fault of incorporating too much history or pseudo-history, and the same failure as in Two Tears Ago, or perhaps a greater one in degree, to concoct the story (which is little more than a chronicle) together with a certain neglect to conciliate the sympathies of the reader. But the whole batch is a memorable collection; and it shows, rather exceptionally, the singular originality and variety of the novel at this time.

This remarkable pair may be supplemented by an in some ways more remarkable trio, all of them pretty close contemporaries, but, for different reasons in each case, coming rather late into the novel field—Charles Reade (b. 1814), Anthony Trollope (b. 1815), and Mary Ann Evans (b. 1819). It would be difficult to find three persons more different in temperament; impossible to find more striking instances of the way in which the new blend of romance and novel lent itself to the most various uses and developments. Reade—who thought himself a dramatist and wasted upon drama a great deal of energy and an almost ideal position as a possessor of an unusually rich fellowship at Magdalen College, Oxford, with no duties—came rather closer to Dickens than to any novelist previously named, not merely in a sort of non-poetic but powerful imagination, but also in the mania for attacking what seemed to him abuses—in lunatic asylums (on which point he was very nearly a monomaniac himself), prisons, and many other things. But he is almost more noteworthy, from our point of view, because of his use—it also must, one fears, be called an abuse—of a process obviously invited by the new demand for truth to life, and profitable up to a certain point. This was the collection, in enormous scrapbooks, of newspaper cuttings on a vast variety of subjects, to be worked up into fiction when the opportunity served. Reade had so much genius—he had perhaps the most, in a curious rather incalculable fashion, of the whole group—that he very nearly succeeded in digesting these "marine stores" of detail and document into real books. But he did not always, and could not always, quite do it: and he remains, with Zola, the chief example of the danger of working at your subject too much as if you were getting up a brief, or preparing an article for an encyclopedia. Still, his greatest books, which are probably It is Never too Late to Mend (1856) and The Cloister and the Hearth (1861), have immense vigour and, in the second case, an almost poetic attraction which Dickens never reaches, while over all sparks and veins of genius are scattered. Moreover, he is interesting because, until his own time, he would have been quite impossible; and, even at that time, without the general movement which we are describing, very unlikely.

There is not so much object here in discussing the much discussed question of the merits and defects of "George Eliot" (Mary Ann Evans or Mrs. Cross) as a novelist, as there is in pointing out her relations to this general movement. She began late, and almost accidentally; and there is less unity in her general work than in some others here mentioned. Her earliest and perhaps, in adjusted and "reduced" judgments, her best work—Scenes of Clerical Life (1857-1858), Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861)—consists of very carefully observed and skilfully rendered studies of country life and character, tinged, especially in Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss, with very intense and ambitious colours of passion. The great popularity of this tempted her into still more elaborate efforts of different kinds. Her attempt in quasi-historical romance, Romola (1865), was an enormous tour de force in which the writer struggled to get historical and local colour, accurate and irreproachable, with all the desperation of the most conscientious relater of actual history. Felix Holt the Radical (1866), Middle March (1872), and Daniel Deronda (1876) were equally elaborate sketches of modern English society, planned and engineered with the same provision of carefully laboured plot, character, and phrase. Although received with enthusiasm by the partisans whom she had created for herself, these books have seemed to some over-laboured, and if not exactly unreal, yet to a certain extent unnatural. But the point for us is their example of the way in which the novel—once a light and almost frivolous thing—had come to be taken with the utmost seriousness—had in fact ceased to be light literature at all, and begun to require rigorous and elaborate training and preparation in the writer, perhaps even something of the athlete's processes in the reader. Its state may or may not have advanced in grace pari passu with the advance in effort and in dignity: but this later advance is at least there. Fielding himself took novel-writing by no means lightly, and Richardson still less so: but imagine either, imagine Scott or even Miss Austen, going through the preliminary processes which seemed necessary, in different ways, to Charles Reade and to Mary Ann Evans!

In a certain sense, however, the last of the three, though he may give less impression of genius than the other two (or even the other four whom we have specially noticed), is the most interesting of all: and qualms may sometimes arise as to whether genius is justly denied to him. Anthony Trollope, after a youth, not exactly orageuse, but apparently characterised by the rather squalid yet mild dissipation which he has described in The Three Clerks (1858) and The Small House at Allington (1864), attained a considerable position in the Post Office which he held during great part of his career as a novelist. For some time that career did not look as if it were going to be a successful one, though his early (chiefly Irish) efforts are better than is sometimes thought. But he made his mark first with The Warden (1855), and then, much more directly and triumphantly, with its sequel Barchester Towers (1857). When the first of these was published Dickens had been a successful novelist for nearly twenty years and Thackeray had "come to his own" for nearly ten. The Warden might have been described at the time (I do not know whether it was, but English reviewing was only beginning to be clever again) as a partial attempt at the matter of Dickens in a partial following of the manner of Thackeray. An "abuse"—the distribution in supposed unjust proportion of the funds of an endowed hospital for aged men—is its main avowed subject. But Trollope indulged in no tirades and no fantastic-grotesque caricature—in fact he actually drew a humorous sketch of a novel a la Dickens on the matter. His real object was evidently to sketch faithfully, but again not without humour, the cathedral society of "Barchester" as it actually spoke, dressed, thought, and lived: and he did it. The first book had a little too much talk about the nominal subject, and not enough actual action and conversation. Barchester Towers remedied this, and presented its readers with one of the liveliest books in English fiction. There had been nothing like it (for Thackeray had been more discursive and less given to small talk) since Miss Austen herself, though the spirits of the two were extremely different. Perhaps Trollope never did a better book than this, for variety and vigour of character drawing. The masterful wife of Bishop Proudie, the ne'er-do-weel canon's family (the Stanhopes), and others stand out against an interest, not intense but sufficient, of story, a great variety of incident, and above all abundant and lifelike conversation. For many years, and in an extraordinary number of examples, he fell little below, and perhaps once or twice went above, this standard. It was rather a fancy of his (one again, perhaps, suggested by Thackeray) to run his books into series or cycles—the chief being that actually opened as above, and continuing through others to the brilliant Last Chronicle of Barset (1867), which in some respect surpasses Barchester Towers itself, with a second series, not quite disconnected, dealing with Lady Glencora Palliser as centre, and yet others. His total production was enormous: it became in fact impossibly so, and the work of his last lustrum and a little more (say 1877-1882), though never exactly bad or painful to read, was obvious hack-work. But between The Warden and The American Senator, twenty-two years later, he had written nearer thirty than twenty novels, of which at least half were much above the average and some quite capital.[26] Moreover, it is a noteworthy thing, and contrary to some critical explanations, that, as his works drop out of copyright and are reprinted in cheap editions, they appear to be recovering very considerable popularity. This fact would seem to show that the manners, speech, etc., represented in them have a certain standard quality which does not—like the manner, speech, etc., of novels such as those of Hook and Surtees—lose appeal to fresh generations; and that the artist who dealt with them must have had not a little faculty of fixing them in the presentation. In fact it is probably not too much to say that of the average novel of the third quarter of the century—in a more than average but not of an extraordinary, transcendental, or quintessential condition—Anthony Trollope is about as good a representative as can be found. His talent is individual enough, but not too individual: system and writer may each have the credit due to them allotted without difficulty.

[26] His most ambitious studies in strict character are the closely connected heroines of The Bertrams (1859) and Can you Forgive Her? (1864-1865). But the first-named book has never been popular; and the other hardly owes its popularity to the heroine.

A novelist who might have been in front of the first flight of these in point of time, and who is actually put by some in the first flight in point of merit, is Mrs. Gaskell. Born in 1810, she accumulated the material for her future Cranford at Knutsford in Cheshire: but did not publish this till after Dickens had, in 1850, established Household Words, where it appeared in instalments. She had a little earlier, in 1848, published her first novel, Mary Barton—a vivid but distinctly one-sided picture of factory life in Lancashire. In the same year with the collected Cranford (1853) appeared Ruth, also a "strife-novel" (as the Germans would say) though in a different way: and two years later what is perhaps her most elaborate effort, North and South. A year or two before her death in 1865 Sylvia's Lovers was warmly welcomed by some: and the unfinished Wives and Daughters, which was actually interrupted by that death, has been considered her maturest work. Her famous and much controverted Life of Charlotte Bronte does not belong to us, except in so far as it knits the two novelists together.

From hints dropped already, it may be seen that the present writer does not find Mrs. Gaskell his easiest subject. There is much in her work which, in Hobbes's phrase, is both "an effect of power and a cause of pleasure": but there appears to some to be in her a pervading want of actual success—of reussite—absolute and unquestionable. The sketches of Cranford are very agreeable and very admirable performances in the manner first definitely thrown out by Addison, and turned to consummate perfection in the way of the regular novel (which be it remembered Cranford is not) by Miss Austen. But the mere mention of the last name kills them. The author of Emma would have treated Miss Matty and the rest much less lovingly, but she would have made them persons. Mrs. Gaskell has left them mere types of amiable country-townishness in respectable if not very lively times. Excessive respectability cannot be charged against Mary Barton and Ruth, but here the "problem"—the "purpose"—interposes its evil influence: and we have got to take a side with men or with masters, with selfish tempters of one class and deluded maidens of another. North and South is perhaps on the whole the best place in which to study Mrs. Gaskell's art: for Wives and Daughters is unfinished and the books just named are tentatives. It begins by laying a not inconsiderable hold on the reader: and, as it is worked out at great length, the author has every opportunity of strengthening and improving that hold. It is certain that, in some cases, she does not do this: and the reason is the same—the failure to project and keep in action definite and independent characters, and the attempt to make weight and play with purposes and problems. The heroine's father—who resigns his living and exposes his delicate wife and only daughter, if not exactly to privation, to discomfort and, in the wife's case, fatally unsuitable surroundings, because of some never clearly defined dissatisfaction with the creed of the Church (not apparently with Christianity as such or with Anglicanism as such), and who dies "promiscuously," to be followed, in equally promiscuous fashion, by a friend who leaves his daughter Margaret a fortune—is one of those nearly contemptible imbeciles in whom it is impossible to take an interest. In respect to the wife Mrs. Gaskell commits the curious mistake of first suggesting that she is a complainer about nothing, and then showing her to us as a suffering victim of her husband's folly and of hopeless disease. The lover (who is to a great extent a replica of the masterful mill-owner in Shirley) is uncertain and impersonal: and the minor characters are null. One hopes, for a time, that Margaret herself will save the situation: but she goes off instead of coming on, and has rather less individuality and convincingness at the end of the story than at the beginning. In short, Mrs. Gaskell seems to me one of the chief illustrations of the extreme difficulty of the domestic novel—of the necessity of exactly proportioning the means at command to the end to be achieved. Her means were, perhaps, greater than those of most of her brother-and-sister-novelists, but she set them to loose ends, to ends too high for her, to ends not worth achieving: end thus produced (again as it seems to me) flawed and unsatisfactory work. She "means" well in Herbert's sense of the word: but what is meant is not quite done.

To mention special books and special writers is not the first object of this survey, though it would be very easy to double and redouble its size by doing this, even within the time-limits of this, the last, and the next chapters. It may, however, be added that in this remarkable central period, and in the most central part of it from 1840 to 1860, there appeared the first remarkable novel of Mr. George Meredith, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859), first of a brilliant series that was to illustrate the whole remaining years of the century; and the isolated masterpiece of Phantastes, which another prolific writer, George Macdonald, was never to repeat; while Mrs. Oliphant and Mrs. Craik, both of whom will also reappear in the next chapter, began as early as 1849. In 1851 appeared the first of two remarkable books, Lavengro and The Romany Rye, in which George Borrow, if he did not exactly create, brought to perfection from some points of view what may be called the autobiographic novel.

Indeed the memory of the aged and the industry of the young could recall or rediscover dozens and scores of noteworthy books, some of which have not lost actual or traditional reputation, such as the Paul Ferroll (1855) of Mrs. Archer Clive, a well-restrained crime-novel, the story of which is indicated in the title of its sequel, Why Paul Ferroll killed his Wife. Henry Kingsley, George Alfred Lawrence, Wilkie Collins, and others began their careers at this time. The best book ever written about school, Tom Brown's School Days (1857), and the best book in lighter vein ever written about Oxford, Mr. Verdant Green (1853-1856), both appeared in the fifties.

Although, indeed, the intenser and more individual genius of the great novelists of this time went rather higher than the specialist novel, it was, in certain directions, well cultivated during this period. Men likely to write naval novels of merit were dying out, and though Lever took up the military tale, at second hand, with brilliant results, the same historical causes were in operation there. But a comparatively new kind—the "sporting" novel—developed itself largely and in some cases went beyond mere sport. Such early books as Egan's Tom and Jerry (1821) can hardly be called novels: but as the love of sport extended and the term itself ceased to designate merely on the one side the pleasures of country squires, and on the other the amusements (sometimes rather blackguard in character) of men about town, the general subject made a lodgment in fiction. One of its most characteristic practitioners was Robert Smith Surtees, who, before Dickens and perhaps acting as suggester of the original plan of Pickwick (not that which Dickens substituted), excogitated (between 1831 and 1838) the remarkable fictitious personage of "Mr. Jorrocks," grocer and sportsman, whose adventures, and those of other rather hybrid characters of the same kind, he pursued through a number of books for some thirty years. These (though in strict character, and in part of their manners, deficient as above noticed) were nearly always readable—and sometimes very amusing—even to those who are not exactly Nimrods: and they were greatly commended to others still by the admirable illustrations of Leech. There is not a little sound sport in Kingsley and afterwards in Anthony Trollope: while the novels of Frank Smedley, Frank Fairlegh (1850), Lewis Arundel (1852), and Harry Coverdale's Courtship (1855), mix a good deal more of it with some good fun and some rather rococo romance. The subject became, indeed, very popular in the fifties, and entered largely into, though it by no means exclusively occupied, the novels of George John Whyte-Melville, a Fifeshire gentleman, an Etonian, and a guardsman, who, after retiring from the army, served again in the Crimean War, and, after writing a large number of novels, was killed in the hunting field. Some of Whyte-Melville's books, such as Market Harborough (1861), are hunting novels pure and simple, so much so that it has been said (rashly) that none but hunting men and women can read them. Others, such as Kate Coventry (1856), a very lively and agreeable book, mix sport with general character and manners-painting. Others, such as Holmby House (1860), The Queen's Maries (1862), etc., attempt the historical style. But perhaps this mixed novel of sport, society, and a good deal of love-making reached its most curious development in the novels of George Alfred Lawrence, from the once famous Guy Livingstone (1857) onwards—a series almost typical, which was developed further, with touches of original but uncritical talent, which often dropped into unintentional caricature, by the late "Ouida" (Louise de La Ramee). All the three last writers mentioned, however, especially the last two, made sport only an ingredient in their novel composition ("Ouida," in fact, knew nothing about it) and at least endeavoured, according to their own ideas and ideals, to grapple with larger parts of life. The danger of the kind showed less in them than in some imitators of a lower class, of whom Captain Hawley Smart was the chief, and a chief sometimes better than his own followers. Some even of his books are quite interesting: but in a few of them, and in more of other writers, the obligation to tell something like a story and to provide something like characters seems to be altogether forgotten. A run (or several runs) with the hounds, a steeplechase and its preparations and accidents, one at least of the great races and the training and betting preliminary to them—these form the real and almost the sole staple of story; so that a tolerably intelligent office-boy could make them up out of a number or two of the Field, a sufficient list of proper names, and a commonplace book of descriptions. This, in fact, is the danger of the specialist novel generally: though perhaps it does not show quite so glaringly in other cases. Yet, even here, that note of the fiction of the whole century—its tendency to "accaparate" and utilise all the forms of life, all the occupations and amusements of mankind—shows itself notably enough.

So, too, one notable book has, here even more than elsewhere, often set going hosts of imitations. Tom Brown's School Days, for instance (1857), flooded the market with school stories, mostly very bad. But there is one division which did more justice to a higher class of subject and produced some very remarkable work in what is called the religious novel, though, here as elsewhere, the better examples did not merely harp on one string.

A very interesting off-shoot of the domestic novel, ignored or despised by the average critic and rather perfunctorily treated even by those who have taken it as a special subject, is the "Tractarian" or High-Church novel, which, originating very shortly after the movement itself had began, had no small share in popularising it. The earlier Evangelicals had by no means neglected fiction as a means of propagating their views, especially among the young. Mrs. Sherwood in Little Henry and his Bearer and The Fairchild Family (1818) and "Charlotte Elizabeth" (Browne or Tonna) are examples. But the High-Church party, in accordance with its own predecessors and patterns in the seventeenth century, always maintained, during its earlier and better period, a higher standard of scholarship and of general literary culture. Its early efforts in fiction—according to the curious and most interesting law which seems to decree that every subdivision of a kind shall go through something like the vicissitudes of the kind at large—were not strictly novels but romance, and romance of the allegorical kind. In the late thirties and early forties the allegorists, the chief of whom were Samuel Wilberforce and William Adams, were busy and effective. The future bishop's Agathos (before 1840) is a very spirited and well-written adaptation of the "whole armour of God" theme so often re-allegorised: and Adams's Shadow of the Cross is only the best of several good stories—of a rather more feminine type, but graceful, sound enough in a general way, and combining the manners of Spenser and Bunyan with no despicable skill. If, however, the Tractarian fiction-writers had confined themselves to allegory there would be no necessity to do more than glance at them, for allegory, on the obvious Biblical suggestion, has been a constant instrument of combined religious instruction and pastime. But they went much further afield. Sometimes the excursions were half satirical, as in the really amusing Owlet of Owlstone Edge and The Curate of Cumberworth and the Vicar of Roost of Francis Paget, attacking, the slovenly neglect and supineness which, quite as much as unsound doctrine, was the bete noire of the early Anglo-Catholics. William Gresley and others wrote stories mostly for the young. But the distinguishing feature of the school, and that which gives it an honourable and more than an honorary place here, was the shape which, before the middle of the century, it took in the hands of two ladies, Elizabeth Sewell and Charlotte Mary Yonge.

The first, who was the elder but survived Miss Yonge and died at a very great age quite recently, had much less talent than her junior: but undoubtedly deserves the credit of setting the style. In her novels (Gertrude, Katharine Ashton, etc.) she carried, even farther than Miss Austen, the principle of confining herself rigidly to the events of ordinary life. Not that she eschews the higher middle or even the higher classes: though, on the other hand, Katharine Ashton, evidently one of her favourite heroines, is the daughter of a shopkeeper. But the law of average and ordinary character, incident, atmosphere, is observed almost invariably. Unfortunately Miss Sewell (she was actually a schoolmistress) let the didactic part of her novels get rather too much the upper hand: and though she wrote good English, possessed no special grace of style, and little faculty of illustration or ornament from history, literature, her own fancy, current fashions, even of the most harmless kind, and so forth. The result is that her books have a certain dead-aliveness—that the characters, though actually alive, are neither interestingly alive nor, as Miss Austen had made hers, interesting in their very uninterestingness. Sometimes, for a scene or two, her truth to nature and fact is rewarded by that curious sense of recognition which the reader feels in the presence of actual mimesis—of creation of fictitious fact and person. But this is not common: and the epithet "dull," which too commonly only stigmatises the person using it, may really suggest itself not seldom in reference to Miss Sewell. A "success of esteem" is about the utmost that can be accorded her.

With Miss Yonge the case was very different. She was a lady of wide reading and, even according to the modern rather arbitrary restrictions of the term, something of an historical scholar; she had humour, of which there was scarcely a particle in Miss Sewell's composition; she had a very considerable understanding, and consequently some toleration of the infinite varieties, and at least the more venial foibles, of human temperament. She possessed an inexhaustible command of dialogue which was always natural and sometimes very far from trivial; and if she had no command of the greater novelists' imagination in the creation of character and story, she had an almost uncanny supply of invention, of what may be called the second or third class, in these respects. She wrote too much and too long; but it cannot be said that she ever merely repeated herself. And her best books—the famous Heir of Redclyffe (1853), which captivated William Morris and his friends at Oxford, and which, with a little unnecessary sentimentality and a little "unco-guidness," is full of cleverness, nature, good sense, good taste, and good form; Heartsease (1854), perhaps the best of all; Dynevor Terrace (1857), less of a general favourite but full of good things; and the especially popular Daisy Chain (1856), with not a few others—are things which no courageous and catholic critic of fiction will ever be tired of defending or (which is not always the same thing) of reading. Some of her early tales, before these, were a little "raw": and most of her later work showed (as did Anthony Trollope's and that of other though not all very prolific novelists) that the field had been overcropped. But she was hardly ever dull: and she always had that quality—if not of the supreme artist, of the real craftsman—which prevents a thing from being a failure. What is meant is done: though perhaps it might have been meant higher.

The comparison, backwards and forwards, of this great company of novels is of endless interest; perhaps one of many aspects of that interest may be touched on specially, because it connects itself with much else that has been said. If we read, together or in near sequence, three such books as, say, Emilia Wyndbam, Pendennis, and Yeast, all of which appeared close together, between 1846 and 1849, the differences, in quality and volume of individual genius, will of course strike every one forcibly. But some will also be struck by something else—the difference between the first and the other two in style or (as that word is almost hopelessly ambiguous) let us perhaps say diction. Both Thackeray and Kingsley are almost perfectly modern in this. We may not speak so well to-day, and we may have added more slang and jargon to our speech, but there is no real difference, except in these respects, between a speech of Pen's (when not talking book) or one of Colonel Bracebridge's, and the speech of any gentleman who is a barrister or a guardsman at this hour. The excellent Mrs. Marsh had not arrived at that point; what some people call the "stilted" forms and phrases of fifty or almost a hundred years earlier clung to her still. The resulting lingo is far better than that part of the lingo of to-day where literary and linguistic good manners have been forgotten altogether: but it is distinctly deficient in ease. There are endless flourishes and periphrases—the colloquialisms which Swift and others had denounced (and quite properly) in their ugliest and vulgarest forms are not even permitted entrance in improved and warranted varieties. You must never say "won't" but always "will not," whereas the ability to use the two forms adds infinite propriety as well as variety to the dialogue. You say, "At length a most unfortunate accident aggravated (if aggravation were possible) the unfortunate circumstances of the situation." You address your own characters in the oratorical manner of Mr. Burke and other great men, "Ah, Mr. Danby! if instead, etc." In short, instead of reserving the grand manner (and a rather different grand manner) for grand occasions, you maintain a sort of cheap machine-made kind of it throughout. The real secret of the novel was not found out till this was discarded. Perhaps that real secret does not lie so much anywhere else as here.

A few words may not improperly be said about some of the circumstances and details of novel-appearance and distribution, etc., at this palmy day of English fiction. At what time the famous "three-decker" was consecrated as the regular novel line-of-battle-ship I have not been able to determine exactly to my own satisfaction. Richardson had extended his interminable narrations to seven or eight volumes: Miss Burney latterly had not been content with less than five. From the specimens I have examined, I have an idea that with the "Minerva Press" and its contemporaries and successors at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century, four was a very favourite if not the most usual number. But these volumes were usually small—not much larger than those of the Belgian reprints of Dumas which, as one remembers, used to run into the dozen or something like it in the case of his longer books. Three, however, has obvious advantages; the chief of them being the adjustment to "beginning, middle, and end," though there is a corresponding disadvantage which soon developed itself—and in fact, finally, I have no doubt helped to ruin the form—the temptation to make the second volume a place of mere padding. But the actual popularity of "the old three-decker" continued for quite two generations, if not more, and was unmistakable. Library subscriptions were generally adjusted to it; and any circulating-library keeper would tell you that, putting this quite aside, even subscribers to more or fewer volumes than three would take the three-volume by preference. More than this, still, there is a curious fact necessarily known to comparatively few people. Although it was improper of Mr. Bludyer to sell his novel, and dine and drink of the profits before "smashing" it, there were probably not many reviewers who did not get rid of most of their books of this kind, if for no other reasons than that no house, short of a palace, would have held them all. And, in the palmy days of circulating libraries, the price given by second-hand booksellers for novels made a very considerable addition to the reviewer's remuneration or guerdon. But these booksellers would not pay, in proportion, for two or one volume books—alleging, what no doubt was true, that the libraries had a lower tariff for them. Further, the short story, now so popular, was very unpopular in those days: and library customers would refuse collections of them with something like indignation or disgust. Indeed, there are reviewers living who may perhaps pride themselves on having done something to drive the dislike out and the liking in.

The circulating library itself, though not the creation of the novel, was very largely extended by it, and helped no doubt very largely to extend the circulation of the novel in turn. Before it, to some extent, and long before so-called "public" or "free" libraries, books in general and novels in particular had been very largely diffused by clubs, "institutions," and other forms of co-operative individual enterprise, the bookplates of which will be found in many a copy of an old novel now. Sometimes these were purely private associations of neighbours: sometimes they belonged to more or less extensive establishments, like that defunct "Russell Institution in Great Coram Street," which a great author, who was its neighbour, once took for an example of desolation; or the still existing and flourishing "Philosophical" examples in Edinburgh and Bath. In these latter cases, of course, novels were not allowed to be the main constituents of the library; in fact in some, but few, they may have been sternly excluded. On the other hand, the private-adventure circulating libraries tended more and more, with few exceptions, to rely on novels only—"Mudie's" and a few more being exceptions. Very few people, I suppose, ever bought three-volume novels; and the fact that they went almost wholly to the libraries, and were there worn to pieces, accounts for the comparative rarity of good copies. The circulating library has survived both the decease of the three-volume novel and the competition of the so-called free library. But it is pretty certain that it was a chief cause—and almost the whole sustaining cause—of the three-volume system itself. Nor was the connection between nature of form and system of distribution limited to England: for the single-volume novel, though older in France than with us, is not so very old.

But a very considerable proportion of these famous books made appearances previous to that in three volumes, and not distantly connected with their popularity. For the most part these previous appearances were either in magazines or periodicals of one kind and another, or else in "parts."

Neither process was exactly new, though both were largely affected by changed conditions of general literature and life. The magazine-appearance traces itself, by almost insensible gradations, to the original periodical-essay of the Steele-Addison type—the small individual bulk of which necessitated division of whatsoever was not itself on a very small scale. If you run down the "Contents" of the British Essayists you will constantly find "Continuation of the story of Alonso and Imoinda" and the like. But when, in the early years of the nineteenth century, the system of newspapers and periodicals branched out into endless development, coincidently with the increase of demand and supply in regard to the novel, it was inevitable that this latter should be drawn upon to supply at once the standing dishes and the relishes of the entertainment. Blackwood and the London, the first fruits of the new kind, did not at once take to the novel by instalments: and the London had no time to do so. But Blackwood soon became celebrated—a reputation which it has never lost—for the excellence of its short stories, and by degrees took to long ones; while its followers—Fraser, Bentley's Miscellany, The Dublin University Magazine, the New Monthly, and others—almost from the first bated their hooks with this new appat. A very large proportion of the work of the novelists mentioned in the last chapter, as well as of Lever, appeared in one or other of these. Fraser in particular was Thackeray's chief refuge in the Days of Ignorance of the public as to his real powers and merits, while, just as he was going off, the very different work of Kingsley came on there. And the tradition, as is well known, has never been broken. The particular magazines may have died in some cases: but the magazine-appearance of novels is nearly as vivacious as ever.

Publication in parts is nearly as old, but has a less continuous history, and has seen itself suffer an interruption of life. There are scattered examples of it pretty far back both in France and England. Marivaux had a particular fancy for it: with the result that he left not a little of his work unfinished. Such volume-publication as that of Tristram Shandy, in batches really small in quantity and at fairly regular if long intervals, is not much different from part-issue. As the taste for reading spread to classes with not much ready money, and perhaps, in some cases, living at a distance from libraries, this taste spread too. But I do not think there can be much doubt that the immense success of Dickens—in combination with his own very distinct predilection for keeping the ring himself and being his own editor—had most to do with its prevalence during the period under present consideration. Thackeray took up the practice from him: as well as others both from him and from Thackeray. The great illustrators, too, of the forties, fifties, and sixties, from Cruikshank and Browne to Frederick Walker, were partly helped by the system, partly helped to make it popular. But the circulating libraries did not like it for obvious reasons, the parts being fragile and unsubstantial: and the great success of cheap magazines, on the pattern of Macmillan's and the Cornhill, cut the ground from under its feet. The last remarkable novel that I remember seeing in the form was The Last Chronicle of Barset. Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda came out in parts which were rather volumes than parts.

This piece-meal publication, whether in part or periodical, could not be without some effects on the character of the production. These were neither wholly good nor wholly bad. They served to some extent to correct the tendency, mentioned above, of the three-volume novel to "go to seed" in the middle—to become a sort of preposterous sandwich with meat on the outsides and a great slab of ill-baked and insipid bread between. For readers would not have stood this in instalments: you had to provide some bite or promise of bite in each—if possible—indeed to leave each off at an interesting point. But this itself rather tended to a jumpy and ill-composed whole—to that mechanical shift from one part of the plot to another which is so evident, for instance, in Trollope: and there was worse temptation behind. If a man had the opportunity, the means, the courage, and the artistic conscience necessary to finish his work before any part of it appeared, or at least to scaffold it thoroughly throughout in advance, no harm was done. But perhaps there is no class of people with whom the temptation—common enough in every class—of hand-to-mouth work is more fatal than with men of letters. It is said that even the clergy are human enough to put off their sermon-writing till Saturday, and what can be expected of the profane man, especially when he has a whole month apparently before him? It is pretty certain that Thackeray succumbed to this temptation: and so did a great many people who could much less afford to do so than Thackeray. It was almost certainly responsible for part of the astonishing medley of repetitions and lapses in Lever: and I am by no means sure that some of Dickens's worst faults, especially the ostentatious plot-that-is-no-plot of such a book as Little Dorrit—the plot which marks time with elaborate gesticulation and really does not advance at all—were not largely due to the system.

Let it only be added that these expensive forms of publication by no means excluded cheap reprints as soon as a book was really popular. The very big people kept up their prices: but everybody else was glad to get into "popular libraries," yellow-backed railway issues, and the like, as soon as possible.

It will have been seen that the present writer puts the novel of 1845-1870 very high: he would indeed put it, in its own compartment, almost on a level with the drama of 1585-1625 or the poems of 1798-1825. Just at the present moment there may be a pretty general tendency to consider this allowance exaggerated if not preposterous: and to set it down to the well-known foible of age for the period of its own youth. There is no need to do more than suggest that those who were young when Shakespeare, or when Byron, died, would not have been exactly in their dotage if, forty years later, they had extolled the literature of their nonage. One does not care to dwell long on such a point: but it may just be observed that the present writer's withers are hardly even pinched, let alone wrung, by the strictest application, to his case, of this rather idle notion. For some of what he is praising as the best novels were written before he was born; many while he was in the nursery; most before he had left school, and practically all before he had ceased to be an undergraduate. Now acute observers know that what may be called the disease of contemporary partisanship rarely even begins till the undergraduate period, and is at its severest from twenty-five to thirty-five. I would undertake that most of our reviewers who discover Shakespeares and Sainte-Beuves, improved Thackerays and bettered Molieres, week by week or day by day, count their years between these limits. Beati illi from some points of view, but from others, if they go on longer, Heaven help them indeed!

But all this is really idle. A critic is not right or wrong because he is young or old as the case may be; because he follows the taste of his age or runs counter to it; because he likes the past or because he likes the present. He is right or wrong according as he does or does not like the right things in the right way. And it is a simple historical fact, capable now of being seen in a proper perspective, and subjected to the proper historical tests, that, in the large sense, the two generations from the appearance of Scott and Miss Austen to the death of Dickens (and considering the ebb which followed Scott and Miss Austen themselves, specially the latter of these two), supplied the spring tide of the novel-flood, the flower-time of its flowering season, the acme of its climax.

The comparison, both in the longer and shorter time, to the great summer of the drama may be too complimentary—I do not think it is, except in so far as that drama necessarily involved poetry, a higher thing by far than either drama itself or novel—but it is certainly not an altogether comfortable one. For we know that the drama, thereafter, has never had a more than galvanised life, except in the imagination of the gentlemen who discover Shakespeares and Molieres as aforesaid. And there are those who say that, not only at the moment, but for some time past, the state of the novel is, and has been, not much more promising. The student who is thoroughly broken to the study of literary history is never a pessimist, though he may be very rarely an optimist: for the one thing of which he should be thoroughly convinced is its incalculableness. But he might admit—while reserving unlimited trust in the Wind of the Spirit and its power to blow exactly as it listeth, and to awaken the dryest of dry bones—that circumstances are not incompatible with something like a decay in the novel: just as they were with a decay in the drama. The state of society and temper in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century—not too well regulated; stirred at once by the sinking force of the mediaeval and the rising force of the modern spirit; full of religious revival which had happily not gone wholly wrong, as it had in some other countries; finding ready to its hand a language which had cast most of its sloughs of accidence and prosody, and was fresh, limber, ready for anything; enterprising but not buried in business—was favourable to the rise and flourishing of this disorderly abundance of dramatic creation—tragic, comic, and in all the varieties that Hamlet catalogues or satirises. The mid-nineteenth century had something of the same hot-bed characteristic, though sufficiently contrasted and fitted to produce a different growth. It had, if at a little distance, the inspiriting memory of a great war, where the country had taken the most glorious part possible. It also had a great religious revival, which had taken no coarse or vulgar form. Although the middle class had seized, and the lower classes were threatening to seize, the government, even the former had not monopolised the helm. There was in society, though it was not strait-laced or puritanical, a general standard of "good form." Scholarship and knowledge of literature had not yet been exchanged for "education" and ignorance of letters. The national fancy for sport was in about its healthiest condition, emerging from one state of questionableness and not yet plunged in another. The chair of the chief of the kinds of literature—poetry—which always exercises a singular influence over the lower forms, was still worthily occupied and surrounded. And, above all, the appetite for the novel was still eager, fresh, and not in the least sated, jaded, or arrived at that point when it has to be whetted by asafoetida on the plates or cigarettes between the courses. Few better atmospheres could be even imagined for the combined novel-romance—the story which, while it did not exclude the adventurous or even the supernatural in one sense, insisted on the rational in another, and opened its doors as wide as possible to every subject, or combination of subjects, that would undertake to be interesting. That the extraordinary reply made by genius and talent to the demand thus created and encouraged should last indefinitely could not be expected: that the demand itself should lead to overproduction and glut was certain. But, as we shall see, there was no sudden decadence; the period even of best or nearly best production went on with no important intermission; and was but yesterday still represented by two great names, is still represented by one, among the older writers, by more than one or two names of credit among the middle-aged and younger. To these in some degree, and to those who have finished their career in the last thirty years to a greater, we must now turn.



CHAPTER VIII

THE FICTION OF YESTERDAY—CONCLUSION

In regard to a large part of the subject of the present chapter the present writer possesses the knowledge of a reviewer, week by week and almost day by day, of contemporary fiction between 1873 and 1895. It so happened that the beginning of this period coincided very nearly with the beginning of that slightly downward movement of the nineteenth-century novel which has been referred to at the end of the last chapter: and he thus had opportunities of observing it all along its course, till we parted company. It must again, and most strongly, be insisted that this "downward movement," like such movements generally in literature, is only so to be characterised with considerable provisos and allowances. Literary "down-grades" are not like the slopes of an inclined plane: they are like portions of a mountain range, in which isolated peaks may shoot up almost level with the very highest of the central group, but in which the table lands are lower, the average height of the hills inferior, and the general sky-line a nearer and nearer approximation to the plain. At the actual death of Dickens there was no reason for any one less hopelessly pessimist than Peacock's Mr. Toobad, or Sydney Smith's Tuxford waiter, to take a gloomy view of the future of the novel. Of the greater novelists mentioned in the last chapter Charlotte Bronte and Mrs. Gaskell were indeed dead, and if Kingsley had not wholly ceased writing novels, he had, before ceasing, given signs that he had better do so. Yet, at least to the admirers of "George Eliot," she was at her most admirable; some of the very best stuff of Trollope was but just past, and some of all but his best was still to appear; Charles Reade was writing busily with that curious unsatisfactory genius of his; others were well at work.

There was also no lack of newer comers. Mr. Meredith had been writing for some dozen years: and though he had achieved no general popularity, though even critics might make reserves as to points in his procedure, there could be no competent doubt of his great powers. Mr. Blackmore had made his late beginning some time before: and had just caught the public ear unmistakably with Lorna Doone (1869). Mr. Hardy was on the eve of catching it with the new and powerful attractions of Under the Greenwood Tree (1872). In the heart of the sixties (1863-4-6), the Chronicles of Carlingford had seemed the promissory notes of a novelist of the absolutely first class in Mrs. Oliphant, though somehow the bills were rather renewed than met. Others to be noticed immediately had come or were coming on. Let us take a little more detailed notice of them.

In the cases of Mr. Meredith and of Mr. Hardy—not to speak of others on whom the bar still luckily rests—the "great ox" was, until the original composition of this book was actually finished, "on the tongue" of any one who does not disregard the good old literary brocard "de vivis nil nisi necessarium." You may and must criticise, with as much freedom as consists with courtesy, the successive stages of the work of the living master as he submits it to your judgment by publication. But justice no less than courtesy demands that, until the work is finished, and sealed as a whole—till the ne varietur and ne plus ultra of death have been set on it—you shall abstain from a more general judgment, which can hardly be judicial, and which will have difficulty in steering between the fulsome if it be favourable and the uncivil if it be adverse. Fortunately there was little difficulty in any of our three excepted cases. As has been already hinted in one case, the chorus of praise, ever since it made itself heard, has not been quite unchequered. It has been objected both to Mr. Meredith and to Mr. Hardy that there is in them a note, perhaps to be detected also generally in the later fiction which they have so powerfully influenced—the note of a certain perversity—of an endeavour to be peculiar in thought, in style, in choice of subject, in handling of it; in short in general attitude. And with this has been connected—not in their cases with any important or really damaging effect, though undoubtedly so in regard to some of their followers—a suggestion that this "perversity" is the note of a waning period—that just as the excessive desire to be like all the best models is the note of Classical decadence, so the excessive desire to be unlike everything else is the note of Romantic degeneration.

There is truth in this, but it damages neither Mr. Meredith nor Mr. Hardy on the whole; though it may supply a not altogether wholesome temptation to some readers to admire them for the wrong things, and may interpose a wholly unnecessary obstacle in the way of their full and frank enjoyment by others. The intellectual power and the artistic skill which have been shown in the long series that has followed The Ordeal of Richard Feverel; the freshness and charm of the earlier, the strenuous workmanship and original handling of the later, novels of the author of Far from the Madding Crowd and of Tess of the D'Urbervilles, simply disable off-hand the judgment of the critic—and in fact annul his jurisdiction—if he fails to admire them; while in some cases universal, in many general, in all considerable and not trivial delight has been given by them to generations of novel readers. Above all, it may be said of both these veterans that they have held the standard high, that—in Mr. Meredith's case more specially and for a longer preliminary period, but virtually in both—they have had to await the taste for their work: and that in awaiting it they have never stooped for one moment to that dastardly and degrading change of sail to catch the popular breeze, which has always been the greatest curse of politics and of literature—the two chief worldly occupations and ends of the mind of man—that they have been and are artists who wait till the world comes to them, and not artisans who haunt the market places to hire themselves out to the first comer who will pay their price, or even bate their price to suit the hirer. If it were possible to judge the literary value of a period by its best representatives—which is exactly what is not possible—then the period 1870-1908 might, as far as novel-writing is concerned, point to these two names and say, "These are mine; what does it matter what you choose to say against me?"

The foregoing remarks were actually written before Mr. Meredith's death: and I have thought it better to leave them exactly as they then stood with hardly any correction; but it may justly be expected that they should now be supplemented. The history of Mr. Meredith's career and reputation, during the half century which passed between the appearance of Richard Feverel and his death, has a certain obvious resemblance to that of Browning's, but with some differences. His work at once arrested attention, but it did not at once in all, or in many, cases fix it, even with critical readers: and for a long time the general public turned an obstinately deaf ear. He followed The Ordeal itself—a study of very freely and deeply drawn character; of incident sometimes unusual and always unusually told; of elaborate and disconcerting epigram or rather of style saturated with epigrammatic quality; and of a strange ironic persiflage permeating thought, picture, and expression in the same way—unhastingly but unrestingly with others. Evan Harrington (1861) is generally lighter in tone; and should be taken in connection with the ten years later Harry Richmond as an example of what may be called a sort of new picaresque novel—the subjects being exalted from the gutter—at least the street gutter—to higher stories of the novel house. Emilia in England (1864), later called Sandra Belloni, and its sequel Vittoria (1866), embody, especially the latter, the Italomania of the mid-century. Between them Rhoda Fleming (1865), returning to English country life, showed, with the old characteristics of expression, tragic power superior perhaps to that of the end of Feverel. In fact some have been inclined to put Rhoda at the head. In 1875 Beauchamp's Career showed the novelist's curious fancy for studying off actual contemporaries; for it is now perfectly well known who "Beauchamp" was: and four years later came what the true Meredithian regards as the masterpiece, The Egoist. Two other books followed, to some extent in the track of Beauchamp's Career, Diana of the Crossways (1886), utilising the legend of Mrs. Norton's betrayal of secrets, and The Tragic Comedians (1881), the story of the German socialist Lassalle. The author's prediction, never hurried, now slackened, and by degrees ceased, but the nineties saw three books, One of Our Conquerors (1891), Lord Ormont and his Aminta (1894), and The Amazing Marriage (1895).

No bibliography of Mr. Meredith being here necessary or possible, smaller and miscellaneous things need not detain us; and we are not concerned with his sometimes charming verse. It is the character, and especially the "total-effect" character, of the major novels with which we have to do. This has been faintly adumbrated above, but the lines must be a little deepened and the contour filled in to some extent here.

By invoking (practically at the outset of his work) "the Comic Spirit" as the patron of his endeavours and the inspirer of his art, Mr. Meredith of course did no more than assert his claim to place himself in the right race and lineage of Cervantes and Fielding. Nor, though the claim be a bold one, can there be much dispute among competent judges that he made it out. To the study, not in a frivolous or even merely satirical, but in a gravely ironic mode, of the nature of humanity he addicted himself throughout: and the results of his studies undoubtedly enlarge humanity's conscious knowledge of itself in the way of fictitious exemplification. In a certain sense no higher praise can be given. To acknowledge it is at once to estate him, not only with Cervantes and Fielding themselves, but with Thackeray, with Swift, with Moliere, with Shakespeare. It places him well above Dickens, and, in the opinion of the present writer, it places him above even Balzac. But there are points wherein, according to that same opinion, he approaches much nearer to Balzac and Dickens than to the other and greater artistic creators: while in one of these points he stands aloof even from these two, and occupies a position—not altogether to his advantage—altogether by himself in his class of artistic creation. All the six from Thackeray to Shakespeare—one might even go farther back and, taking a more paradoxical example, add Rabelais—are, even in extravaganza, in parody, in what you please, at once pre-eminently and prima facie natural and human. To every competent human judgment, as soon as it is out of its nonage, and barring individual disqualifications of property or accident, this human nature attests itself. You may dislike some of its manifestations; you may decline or fail to understand others; but there it is, and there it is first. In Balzac and Dickens and Mr. Meredith it is not first. Of course it is there to some extent and even to a large one: or they would not be the great writers that they are, or great writers at all. But it is not merely disguised by separable clothings, as in Rabelais wholly and in parts of others, or accompanied, as in Swift and others still, by companions not invariably acceptable. It is to a certain extent adulterated, sophisticated, made not so much the helpmeet, or the willing handmaid, of Art as its thrall, almost its butt. I do not know how early criticism, which now seems to have got hold of the fact, noticed the strong connection-contrast between Dickens and Meredith: but it must always have been patent to some. The contrast is of course the first to strike:—the ordinariness, in spite of his fantastic grotesque, of Dickens, and the extraordinariness of Meredith; the almost utter absence of literature in Dickens, and the prominence of it in Meredith—divers other differences of the same general kind. But to any one reflecting on the matter it should soon emerge that a spirit, kindred in some way, but informed with literature and anxious "to be different," starting too with Dickens's example before him, might, and probably would, half follow, half revolt into another vein of not anti- but extra-natural fantasy, such as that which the author of The Ordeal of Richard Feverel actually worked.

"Extra- not anti-" that is the key. The worlds of Dickens, of Balzac, and of Meredith are not impossible worlds: for the only worlds which are impossible are those which are inconsistent with themselves, and none of these is that. Something has been said of the "four dimensions" which are necessary to work Dickens's world, and our business here is not with Balzac's. But something must now be said of the fourth dimension—some would say the fifth, sixth, and almost tenth dimensions—which is or are required to put Mr. Meredith's in working order. I do not myself think that more than a fourth is needed, and I have sometimes fancied that if Mohammedan ideas of the other world be true, and an artist is obliged to endow all his fictitious creations with real life, it will be by the reduction and elimination of this dimension that Mr. Meredith will have to proceed. There will be great joy in that other world when he has done it: and, alarming as the task looks, I think it not impudent to say that no one who ever enjoyed his conversation will think it impossible.

The intrusive element can, however, only be designated singly by rather enlarging the strict and usual sense of the term Style so as to include not merely diction, but the whole manner of presentation—what, in short, is intended by the French word faire. For this, or part of this, he made, in relation to his poems, a sort of apology-explanation in the lines prefixed to the collected edition, and entitled "The Promise in Disturbance." I am not sure that there is any single place where a parallel excuse-defiance musters itself up in the novels: but there are scores (the prelude to The Egoist occurs foremost) where it is scattered about all of them; and it is certainly much more required there. Indeed as far as the narrow sense of "style" goes, the peculiarity, whether they admit it to be a fault or not, is practically admitted as a fact by all but Meredith-monomaniacs. Here is a sors Meredithiana, taken from Rhoda Fleming, one of the simplest of the books:—

"Algernon waited dinnerless until the stealthy going minutes distended and swelled monstrous and horrible as viper-bitten bodies, and the venerable Signior Time became of unhealthy hue."

To match that—it would be exceedingly easy to match and beat it out of the author himself—you must go to the maddest of the seventeenth-century metaphysicals—say to Edward Benlowes himself. But this is nothing: it is at worst an obvious playful exaggeration, very like some things of Dickens's own transposed into another key. But take this opening of the fifteenth chapter of Diana of the Crossways:—

"The Gods of this world's contests, against whom our poor stripped individual is commonly in revolt, are, as we know, not miners, they are reapers; and if we appear no longer on the surface, they cease to bruise us: they will allow an arena character to be cleansed and made presentable while enthusiastic friends preserve discretion. It is of course less than magnanimity; they are not proposed to you for your worship; they are little Gods, temporary as that great wave, their parent human mass of the hour. But they have one worshipful element in them, which is, the divine insistency upon there being two sides to a case—to every case. And the People so far directed by them may boast of healthfulness. Let the individual shriek, the innocent, triumphant, have in honesty to admit the fact. One side is vanquished according to decree of Law, but the superior Council does not allow it to be extinguished."

Here undoubtedly there is something more than a simile, an image, or a pointe; there is a thought, and the author's admirers would, I suppose, rely triumphantly on it as a marriage of original thought and phrase. But is it so? Is the thought really anything more than the perfectly correct and obvious one that, if you let scandal alone it will die, or at least go into abeyance? Does that thought really gain anything from being tricked out with not always very congruously arranged paraphernalia of Gods, and arenas, and reapers, and miners, and the People with a large P, and shrieks, and innocency, and the rest? A palate or an appetite so jaded that it cannot appreciate thought put before it plainly, or so sluggish that it requires to be stung or puzzled into thinking, may derive some advantage. But are these exactly the tastes and appetites that should be accepted as arbiters?

Again, partly through this perpetual mirage and steam-cloud of style, partly by other methods, Mr. Meredith manages, with consummate cleverness no doubt, to colour his whole representation of character and story in the same extra-natural way. Take the rick-burning at the beginning of Feverel; take the famous wine scene (a very fascinating one, though I never heard anywhere else, in some researches on the subject, of port that would keep ninety years) in The Egoist. The things may have happened this way in some Georgium Sidus, where the Comic Spirit has arranged the proper Fourth Dimension: but that is not the way they happen here. The Wise Youth, Diana, Edward Blancove, Roy Richmond—but why begin a list which would never end?—are inhabitants of the same region. They are not impossible: they could be translated into actual tellurian beings, which the men and women of the bad novelist never can be. But at present they are not translated: and you must know a special language, in a wide sense, in order to translate them. I do not say that the language is impossible or even very hard to learn: but it is required. And Meredithians say you ought to learn it. An extremely respectable book of reference before me rebukes "those who lack the intelligence and sensibility that can alone admit them to the charmed circle of appreciative readers" and who "have not patience to apply themselves to the study of the higher fiction with the same ardour that they think necessary in the case of any other art."

Now "Fudge!" is a rude word: but I fear we must borrow it from Goldsmith's hero, and apply it here. As for "charmed circles" there is uncommonly good company outside them, where, as Beatrice says, we may "be as merry as the day is long," so that the Comic Spirit cannot entirely disdain us. And as for art—the present writer will fight for its claims as long as he has breath. But the proof of the art of the novelist is that—at first hand or very shortly—he "enfists," absorbs, delights you. You may discover secrets of his art afterwards with much pleasure and profit: but the actual first-hand delight is the criterion. There ought to be no need of sitting down before the thing with tools and dynamite like burglars at a safe; of mustering crucibles and reagents like assayers at some doubtful and recalcitrant piece of ore. Now these not very adept defenders of Mr. Meredith seem to assert that these processes are desirable in any case, and necessary in his. As a matter of fact the necessity is not omnipresent: but it is present far too frequently. It is the first duty of the novelist to "let himself be read"—anything else that he gives you is a bonus, a trimming, a dessert.

It is not unamusing to those who regarded Mr. Meredith during almost his whole career with those mingled feelings of the highest admiration and of critical reserve which this notice has endeavoured to express, to note a new phase which seems to be coming over the youngest criticism. The original want of appreciation has passed, never, one may hope, to return; and the middle engouement, which was mainly engineered by those doughty partisans, Mr. Stevenson and Mr. Henley, is passing likewise. But the most competent and generous juniors seem to be a little uncomfortable, to have to take a good deal on trust, and not quite to "like the security." To those who know the history of critical opinion these signs speak pretty clearly, though not so as to authorise them to anticipate the final judgment absolutely. Genius, all but of the highest, can hardly be denied to Mr. Meredith: but it is genius marred, perhaps by unfortunate education, certainly by undue egotism, by a certain Celtic tapage, and by a too painful and elaborate endeavour to be unlike other people.

A very interesting subject for examination from the present point of view is Mr. Blackmore, because, on the one hand there is complete parrhesia, and on the other (here at least) enthusiastic admiration. Few of our modern novelists have combined so much scholarship with so much command of mother wit and racy English, so much close study of minor character and local speech with such wealth of romantic fancy; such a thorough observance of "good form" with so complete a freedom from priggishness and prudery. To this day there are lively controversies whether he worked up the Doone story from local tradition or made it "out of his own head." But whichever he did (and the present historian owns that he cares very little about the point) the way in which he has turned a striking, but not extraordinary, and certainly not very extensive West Country glen into an Arabian Nights valley, with the figures and action of a mediaeval romance and the human interest of a modern novel, is really wonderful. And there is hardly a book of his last thirty years' production, from Clara Vaughan to Perlycross, which has not vigour, variety, character, "race" enough for half a dozen. In such books, for example, as The Maid of Sker and Cripps the Carrier the idiosyncrasy is extraordinary: the quaint and piquant oddity of phrase and apophthegm is as vivid as Dickens, rather more real, and tinged somehow with a flavour of literature, even of poetry, which was Dickens's constant lack.

And yet when one comes to consider the books critically, either one by one, or in pairs and batches, or as a whole, it is somehow or other difficult to pronounce any one exactly a masterpiece. There is a want of "inevitableness" which sometimes amounts to improbability, as in the case particularly of that most vivid and racy of books, Cripps the Carrier, where the central incident or situation, though by no means impossible, is almost insultingly unlikely, and forces its unlikeliness on one at almost every moment and turn. Never, perhaps, was there a better instance of that "possible-improbable" which contrasts so fatally with the "probable-impossible." In not a few cases, too, there is that reproduction of similar denouements and crucial occurrences which is almost necessary in a time when men write many novels. In almost all there is a want of central interest in the characters that should be central; in some an exaggeration of dialect; or of quaint non-dialectic but also non-catholic locutions on the author's part. One rather hates oneself for finding such faults—no one of which is absolutely fatal—in a mass of work which has given, and continues to give, so much pleasure: but the facts remain. One would not have the books not written on any account; but one feels that they were written rather because the author chose to do so than because he could not help it. Now it is possible to exaggerate the necessity of "mission" and the like: but, after all, Ich kann nicht anders must be to some extent the mood of mind of the man who is committing a masterpiece.

Something of the sort is still more noticeable in the work of other writers of the period. We have seen that two ladies of great talent, Mrs. Oliphant and Mrs. Craik, began to write, long before Mr. Meredith published Richard Feverel and very little later than the time of Vanity Fair. They produced, the one in Salem Chapel (1863), a book which contemporaries might be excused for thinking likely to herald a new George Eliot at least; the other, in John Halifax, Gentleman (1857), a book of more sentimentalism, but of great interest and merit. Both were miracles of fecundity, Mrs. Craik producing, in the shorter life of the two, not much fewer than fifty novels; Mrs. Oliphant, besides a great deal of work in other departments, a tale which did not stop very far short of the hundred. The latter, moreover, gave, at a comparatively late period of her career, evidences of being able to start new lines—the supernatural stories of her last stages are only inferior to the Chronicles of Carlingford themselves. Yet, once more, we look for a masterpiece in vain: in fact in Mrs. Oliphant's case we ask, how could any human being, on such a system of production, be expected to produce masterpieces? Scott, I think, once wrote four or nearly four novels in a year: and the process helped to kill him. Mrs. Oliphant did it over and over again, besides alternating the annual dose still more frequently with twos and threes. In her case the process only killed her novels.

Three remarkable novelists of the other sex may be mentioned, in the same way, together. They were all acquaintances of the present writer, and one of them was his friend: moreover, he is quite certain that he could not write as good a novel as the worst of theirs, and only takes credit to himself for not having attempted to do so. These are James Payn, William Black, and Sir Walter Besant. Mr. Payn was an extremely agreeable person with a great talent for amusing, the measure of which he perhaps took pretty early—consoling himself for a total absence of high pretension by a perhaps not quite genuine affectation of good-natured but distinctly Philistine cynicism, and a half serious, half affected belief that other men's delight in their schools, their universities, the great classics of the past, etc., was blague. He never made this in the least offensive; he never made any one of his fifty or sixty novels anything but interesting and (when the subject required it) amusing. There never was any novelist less difficult to read a first time: I really do not know that it would be extremely difficult to read him a second; but also I have seldom come across a novelist with whom I was so little inclined to try it. It is a great thing, no doubt, as has been said, from a certain point of view—that of pastime—that the reading of a novel should be easy and pleasant. But perhaps this is not all that you are entitled to ask of it. And as Mr. Payn began with Poems, and some other suggestive books, I am inclined to think that perhaps he did not always regard literature as a thing of the kind of a superior railway sandwich.

It is quite certain that, in his beginning, Mr. William Black entertained no such idea; for his actual debuts were something like what long afterwards were called problem-novels, and In Silk Attire (1869), Kilmeny (1870), and the charming Daughter of Heth (1871) attempted a great deal besides mere amusement. It is true that no one of them—not even the last—could be called an entire success: a "little more powder" was wanted to send the shots home, and such flight as they achieved did not even seem to be aimed at any distinct and worthy object. But fortunately for his pocket, unfortunately for his fame, he hit the public taste of the time with a sort of guidebook-novel in The Strange Adventures of a Phaeton (1872) and A Princess of Thule (1873), and was naturally tempted to continue it, or to branch off only into not very strong stories of society. Once he made an effort at combining tragic romance with this latter kind in Macleod of Dare (1878), but, though this was nearer to a success than some of his critics admitted, it was not quite a success: and though he wrote fully a score of novels after it, he never came nearer the actual bull's eye. In fact his later work was not up to a very good average.

Neither of these writers, except, as has been said, perhaps Black in his earliest stage, had taken novel-writing very seriously: it was otherwise with the third of the trio. Mr., afterwards Sir Walter, Besant did not begin early, owing to the fact that, for nearly a decade after leaving Cambridge, he was a schoolmaster in Mauritius. But he had, in this time, acquired a greater knowledge of literature than either of the other two possessed: and when he came home, and took to fiction, he accompanied it with, or rather based it upon, not merely wide historical studies, which are still bearing fruit in a series of posthumous dealings with the history of London, but rather minute observation of the lower social life of the metropolis. For some ten years his novel production was carried on, in a rather incomprehensible system of collaboration, with James Rice, a Cambridge man like himself and a historian of the turf, but one to whom no independent work in fiction is attributed, except an incredibly feeble adaptation of Mr. Verdant Green, entitled The Cambridge Freshman and signed "Martin Legrand." During the seventies, and for a year or two later, till Rice's death in 1882, the pair provided along series of novels from Ready-Money Mortiboy (1871) to The Chaplain of the Fleet (1881), the most popular book between being, perhaps, The Golden Butterfly (1876). These belonged, loosely, to the school of Dickens, as that school had been carried on by Wilkie Collins (v. inf.), but with less grotesque than the original master, and less "sensation" than the head pupil; with a good deal of solid knowledge both of older and more modern life; with fairly substantial plots, good character-drawing of the more external kind, and a sufficient supply of interesting incident, dialogue, and description.

It was certain that people would affect to discover a "falling off" when the partnership was dissolved by Rice's death: but as a matter of fact there was nothing of the kind. Such books as the very good and original Revolt of Man (which certainly owed nothing to collaboration), as All Sorts and Conditions of Men (1882), the first of the kind apparently that Besant wrote alone, as Dorothy Forster (1884), and as the powerful if not exactly delightful Children of Gibeon (1886) were perhaps more vigorous than anything earlier, and certainly not less original. But the curse of the "machine-made" novel, which has been already dwelt upon, did not quite spare Besant: and in these later stories critics could point, without complete unfairness, to an increasing obsession of the "London" subject, especially in regard to the actual gloom and possible illumination of the East End, and on the other to a resort to historical subjects, less as suggestions or canvases than as giving the substance of the book. The first class of work, however (which actually resulted in a "People's Palace" and was supposed to have obtained his knighthood for him), is distinctly remarkable, especially in the light of succeeding events. Most of the unfavourable criticisms passed upon Besant's novel-work were in the main the utterances of raw reviewers, who thought it necessary to "down" established reputations. But it would be impossible for any competent critic, however much he might be biassed off the bench by friendship, not to admit, on it, that he also shows the effect, which we have been illustrating from others, of the system of novel-production a la douzaine. In such a case, and on the, in themselves, salutary conditions of the new novel, the experiences and interests of life may or must come to be regarded too regularly as supplying "grist for the mill"; nay, the whole of life and literature, which no doubt ought in all cases to furnish suggestion and help to art and inspiration, are too often set to a sort of corvee, a day-task, a tale of bricks. It is, one allows, hard to prevent this: and yet nothing is more certain that bricks so made are not the best material to be wrought into any really "star-y-pointing pyramid" that shall defy the operations of time.

A very curious and characteristic member of this group, Wilkie Collins, has not yet been mentioned except by glances. He was a little older than most of them, and came pretty early under the influence of Dickens, whose melodramatic rather than his humorous side he set himself to work to develop. In fact Collins was at least as much melodramatist as novelist: and while most of his novels are melodrama in narrative form, not a few of them were actually dramatised. He began as early as 1850—the dividing year—with Antonina: but his three great triumphs in the "sensation" novel (as it was rather stupidly called) were The Dead Secret (1857), The Woman in White (1860), and No Name (1862). Throughout the sixties and a little later, in Armadale (1866), The Moonstone (1870), perhaps The New Magdalen (1873), and even as late as 1875 in The Law and the Lady, his work continued to be eagerly read. But the taste for it waned: and its author's last fifteen years or so (he died in 1889), though fairly fruitful in quantity, certainly did not tend to keep it up in quality. Although Collins had a considerable amount of rather coarse vigour in him (his brother Charles, who died young, had a much more delicate art) and great fecundity in a certain kind of stagy invention, it is hard to believe that his work will ever be put permanently high. It has a certain resemblance in method to Godwin and Mrs. Radcliffe, exciting situations being arranged, certainly with great cleverness, in an interminable sequence, and leading, sometimes at any rate, to a violent "revolution" (in the old dramatic sense) at the end. Perhaps the best example is the way in which Magdalen Vanstone's desperate and unscrupulous, though more than half justifiable, machinations, to reverse the cruel legal accident which leaves her and her sister with "No Name" and no fortune, are foiled by the course of events, though the family property is actually recovered for this sister who has been equally guiltless and inactive. Of its kind, the machinery is as cleverly built and worked as that of any novel in the world: but while the author has given us some Dickensish character-parts of no little attraction (such as the agreeable rascal Captain Wragge) and has nearly made us sympathise strongly with Magdalen herself, he only succeeds in this latter point so far as to make us angry with him for his prudish poetical or theatrical justice, which is not poetical and hardly even just.

The specialist or particularist novel was not likely to be without practitioners during this time: in fact it might be said, after a fashion, to be more rife than ever: but it can only be glanced at here. Its most remarkable representatives perhaps—men, however, of very different tastes and abilities—were Richard Jefferies and Joseph Henry Shorthouse. The latter, after attracting very wide attraction by a remarkable book—almost a kind to itself—John Inglesant (1880), a half historical, half ecclesiastical novel of seventeenth-century life, never did anything else that was any good at all, and indeed tried little. The former, a struggling country journalist, after long failing to make any way, wrote several three-volume novels of no merit, broke through at last in the Pall Mall Gazette with a series of studies of country life, The Gatekeeper at Home (1878), and afterwards turned these into a peculiar style of novel, with little story and hardly any character, but furnished with the backgrounds and the atmosphere of these same sketches. His health was weak, and he died in early middle age, leaving a problem of a character exactly opposed to the other. Would Mr. Shorthouse, if he had not been a well-to-do man of business, but obliged to write for his living, have done more and better work? Would Jefferies, if he had been more fortunate in education, occupation, and means, and furnished with better health, have co-ordinated and expanded his certainly rare powers into something more "important" than the few pictures, as of a Meissonier-paysagiste, which he has left us? These inquiries are no doubt idle: but, once more, one may draw attention to the way in which two men, so different in tastes and fortune, neither, it would seem, with a very strong bent towards prose fiction as the vehicle of his literary desires and accomplishments, appear to have been forced, by the overpowering attraction and popularity of the kind, to adopt the novel as their form of literature, and to give the public, not what they wanted in the form which they chose, but something at least made up in the form that the public wanted, and disguised in the wrappers which the public were accustomed to purchase.

The principal development of mid-nineteenth-century fiction had been, as we have seen, in the direction of the novel proper—the character-study of modern ordinary life. But, even as early as Esmond and Hypatia, signs were not wanting that the romance, historical or other, was not going to be content with the rather pale copies of Scott, and the rococo-sentimental style of Bulwer, which had mainly occupied it for the last quarter of a century. Still, though we have mentioned other examples of the fifties and sixties, and have left ever so many more unmentioned, it was certainly not as popular[27] as its rival till, towards the end of the latter decade, Mr. Blackmore's Lorna Doone gave it a fresh hold on the public taste. Some ten years later again there came to its aid a new recruit of very exceptional character, Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson. He was a member of the famous family of light-house engineers, and was educated for the Bar of Scotland, to which he was actually called. But law was as little to his taste as engineering, and he slowly gravitated towards literature—the slowness being due, not merely to family opposition or to any other of the usual causes (though some of these were at work), but to an intense and elaborate desire to work himself out a style of his own by the process of "sedulously aping" others. It may be very much doubted whether this process ever gave any one a style of perfect freedom: and it may be questioned further whether Stevenson ever attained such a style.

[27] Anthony Trollope, in one of the discursive passages in his early books, has left positive testimony to the distaste with which publishers regarded it.

But there could be no question that he did attain very interesting and artistic effects, and there happened to be at the time a reaction against what was called "slovenliness" and a demand for careful preparation and planned effect in prose-writing. Even so, however, it was not at once that Stevenson took to fiction. He began with essays, literary and miscellaneous, and with personal accounts of travel: and certain critical friends of his strongly urged him to continue in this way. During the years 1878 and 1879, in a short-lived periodical called London, which came to be edited by his friend the late Mr. Henley and had a very small staff, he issued certain New Arabian Nights which caught the attention of one or two of his fellow-contributors very strongly, and made them certain that a new power in fiction-writing had arisen. It did not, however, at first much attract the public: and it was the kind of thing which never attracts publishers until the public forces their hands. For a time he had to wait, and to take what opportunity he could get of periodical publication, "boy's book"-writing, and the like. In fact Treasure Island (1883), with which he at last made his mark, is to this day classed as a boy's book by some people who are miserable if they cannot classify. It certainly deals with pirates, and pieces of eight, and adventures by land and sea; but the manner of dealing—the style and narrative and the delineation of the chief character, the engaging villain John Silver—is about as little puerile as anything that can be imagined. From that time Stevenson's reputation was assured. Ill health, a somewhat restless disposition, and an early death prevented him from accomplishing any great bulk of work: and the merit of what he did varied. Latterly he took to a teasing process of collaboration, which his sincerest admirers could have willingly spared. But his last completed book, Catriona (1893), seemed to some judges of at least considerable experience the best thing he had yet done, especially in one all-important respect—that he here conquered either an unwillingness to attempt or an inability to achieve the portraiture of feminine character, which his books had previously displayed. The general opinion, too, was that the unfinished Weir of Hermiston (1897), which he left a fragment at his death, was the best and strongest thing he had done, while it showed in particular a distinct relinquishment, for something freer and more spontaneous, of the effective but also rather affected and decidedly laboured style in which he had hitherto written. For us, however, his style is of less importance than the fact that he applied it almost wholly to the carrying out of that rejuvenescence of romance of which we have been speaking, and which may be taken, as anybody pleases, either for a mere alternative to the domestic novel or as a definite revolt against it. It was speedily taken up by writers mostly still living, and so not to be dwelt on now.