initial commit of ebook 14469HEADmain

6 files changed, 29609 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/old/14469-8.txt b/old/14469-8.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6a35bab
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/14469-8.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,9821 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The English Novel, by George Saintsbury
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The English Novel
+
+Author: George Saintsbury
+
+Release Date: December 26, 2004 [EBook #14469]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ENGLISH NOVEL ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Jonathan Ingram, Riikka Talonpoika and the PG Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE ENGLISH NOVEL
+
+BY
+
+GEORGE SAINTSBURY
+
+PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE
+UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH
+
+LONDON: J.M. DENT & SONS LTD.
+BEDFORD STREET, STRAND  1913
+NEW YORK: E.P. BUTTON & CO.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+It is somewhat curious that there is, so far as I know, no complete
+handling in English of the subject of this volume, popular and important
+though that subject has been. Dunlop's _History of Fiction_, an
+excellent book, dealt with a much wider matter, and perforce ceased its
+dealing just at the beginning of the most abundant and brilliant
+development of the English division. Sir Walter Raleigh's _English
+Novel_, a book of the highest value for acute criticism and grace of
+style, stops short at Miss Austen, and only glances, by a sort of
+anticipation, at Scott. The late Mr. Sidney Lanier's _English Novel and
+the Principle of its Development_ is really nothing but a laudatory
+study of "George Eliot," with glances at other writers, including
+violent denunciations of the great eighteenth-century men. There are
+numerous monographs on parts of the subject: but nothing else that I
+know even attempting the whole. I should, of course, have liked to deal
+with so large a matter in a larger space: but one may and should
+"cultivate the garden" even if it is not a garden of many acres in
+extent. I need only add that I have endeavoured, not so much to give
+"reviews" of individual books and authors, as to indicate what Mr.
+Lanier took for the second part of his title, but did not, I think,
+handle very satisfactorily in his text.
+
+I may perhaps add, without impropriety, that the composition of this
+book has not been hurried, and that I have taken all the pains I could,
+by revision and addition as it proceeded, to make it a complete survey
+of the Novel, as it has come from the hands of all the more important
+novelists, not now alive, up to the end of the nineteenth century.
+
+GEORGE SAINTSBURY.
+
+_Christmas_, 1912.
+
+
+
+
+    CONTENTS
+
+    CHAP.
+
+       I. THE FOUNDATION IN ROMANCE
+      II. FROM LYLY TO SWIFT
+     III. THE FOUR WHEELS OF THE NOVEL WAIN
+      IV. THE MINOR AND LATER EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL
+       V. SCOTT AND MISS AUSTEN
+      VI. THE SUCCESSORS--TO THACKERAY
+     VII. THE MID-VICTORIAN NOVEL
+    VIII. THE FICTION OF YESTERDAY--CONCLUSION
+
+          INDEX
+
+
+
+
+THE ENGLISH NOVEL
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+THE FOUNDATION IN ROMANCE
+
+
+One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts of
+literary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature at any
+rate, of prose fiction, and the comparative absence, in the two great
+classical languages, of what we call by that name. It might be an
+accident, though a rather improbable one, that we have no Greek prose
+fiction till a time long subsequent to the Christian era, and nothing in
+Latin at all except the fragments of Petronius and the romance of
+Apuleius. But it can be no accident, and it is a very momentous fact,
+that, from the foundation of Greek criticism, "Imitation," that is to
+say "Fiction" (for it is neither more nor less), was regarded as not
+merely the inseparable but the constituent property of poetry, even
+though those who held this were doubtful whether poetry must necessarily
+be in verse. It is another fact of the greatest importance that the
+ancients who, in other forms than deliberate prose fiction, try to "tell
+a story," do not seem to know very well how to do it.
+
+The _Odyssey_ is, indeed, one of the greatest of all stories, it is the
+original romance of the West; but the _Iliad_, though a magnificent
+poem, is not much of a story. Herodotus can tell one, if anybody can,
+and Plato (or Socrates) evidently could have done so if it had lain in
+his way: while the _Anabasis_, though hardly the _Cyropædia_, shows
+glimmerings in Xenophon. But otherwise we must come down to Lucian and
+the East before we find the faculty. So, too, in Latin before the two
+late writers named above, Ovid is about the only person who is a real
+story-teller. Virgil makes very little of his _story_ in verse: and it
+is shocking to think how Livy throws away his chances in prose. No:
+putting the Petronian fragments aside, Lucian and Apuleius are the only
+two novelists in the classical languages before about 400 A.D.: and
+putting aside their odd coincidence of subject, it has to be remembered
+that Lucian was a Syrian Greek and Apuleius an African Latin. The
+conquered world was to conquer not only its conqueror, but its
+conqueror's teacher, in this youngest accomplishment of literary art.
+
+It was probably in all cases, if not certainly, mixed blood that
+produced the curious development generally called Greek Romance. It is
+no part of our business to survey, in any detail, the not very numerous
+but distinctly interesting compositions which range in point of
+authorship from Longus and Heliodorus, probably at the meeting of the
+fourth and fifth centuries, to Eustathius in the twelfth. At one time
+indeed, when we may return to them a little, we shall find them
+exercising direct and powerful influence on modern European fiction, and
+so both directly and indirectly on English: but that is a time a good
+way removed from the actual beginning of our journey. Still, _Apollonius
+of Tyre_, which is probably the oldest piece of English prose fiction
+that we have, is beyond all doubt derived ultimately from a Greek
+original of this very class: and the class itself is an immense advance,
+in the novel direction, upon anything that we have before. It is on the
+one hand essentially a "romance of adventure," and on the other
+essentially a "love-story"--in senses to which we find little in
+classical literature to correspond in the one case and still less in the
+other. Instead of being, like _Lucius_ and the _Golden Ass_, a tissue of
+stories essentially unconnected and little more than framed by the main
+tale, it is, though it may have a few episodes, an example of at least
+romantic unity throughout, with definite hero and definite heroine, the
+prominence and importance of the latter being specially noteworthy. It
+is in fact the first division of literature in which the heroine assumes
+the position of a protagonist. If it falls short in character, so do
+even later romances to a great extent: if dialogue is not very
+accomplished, that also was hardly to be thoroughly developed till the
+novel proper came into being. In the other two great divisions, incident
+and description, it is abundantly furnished. And, above all, the two
+great Romantic motives, Adventure and Love, are quite maturely present
+in it.
+
+To pass to the deluge, and beyond it, and to come to close quarters with
+our proper division, the origin of Romance itself is a very debatable
+subject, or rather it is a subject which the wiser mind will hardly care
+to debate much. The opinion of the present writer--the result, at least,
+of many years' reading and thought--is that it is a result of the
+marriage of the older East and the newer (non-classical) West through
+the agency of the spread of Christianity and the growth and diffusion of
+the "Saint's Life." The beginnings of Hagiology itself are very
+uncertain: but what is certain is that they are very early: and that as
+the amalgamation or leavening of the Roman world with barbarian material
+proceeded, the spread of Christianity proceeded likewise. The _Vision of
+St. Paul_--one of the earliest examples and the starter it would seem,
+if not of the whole class of sacred Romances, at any rate of the large
+subsection devoted to Things after Death--has been put as early as
+"before 400 A.D." It would probably be difficult to date such legends as
+those of St. Margaret and St. Catherine _too_ early, having regard to
+their intrinsic indications: and the vast cycle of Our Lady, though
+probably later, must have begun long before the modern languages were
+ready for it, while that of the Cross should be earlier still. And let
+it be remembered that these Saints' Lives, which are still infinitely
+good reading, are not in the least confined to homiletic necessities.
+The jejuneness and woodenness from which the modern religious story too
+often suffers are in no way chargeable upon all, or even many, of them.
+They have the widest range of incident--natural as well as supernatural:
+their touches of nature are indeed extended far beyond mere incident.
+Purely comic episodes are by no means wanting: and these, like the
+parallel passages in the dramatising of these very legends, were sure to
+lead to isolation of them, and to a secular continuation.
+
+But, once more, we must contract the sweep, and quicken the pace to deal
+not with possible origins, but with actual results--not with Ancient or
+Transition literature, but with the literature of English in the
+department first of fiction generally and then, with a third and last
+narrowing, to the main subject of English fiction in prose.
+
+The very small surviving amount, and the almost completely second-hand
+character, of Anglo-Saxon literature have combined to frustrate what
+might have been expected from another characteristic of it--the unusual
+equality of its verse and prose departments. We have only one--not
+quite entire but substantive--prose tale in Anglo-Saxon, the version of
+the famous story of _Apollonius of Tyre_, which was to be afterwards
+declined by Chaucer, but attempted by his friend and contemporary Gower,
+and to be enshrined in the most certain of the Shakespearean
+"doubtfuls," _Pericles_. It most honestly gives itself out as a
+translation (no doubt from the Latin though there was an early Greek
+original) and it deals briefly with the subject. But as an example of
+narrative style it is very far indeed from being contemptible: and in
+passages such as Apollonius' escape from shipwreck, and his wooing of
+the daughter of Arcestrates, there is something which is different from
+style, and with which style is not always found in company--that faculty
+of telling a story which has been already referred to. Nor does this
+fail in the narrative portions of the prose Saints' Lives and Homilies,
+especially Aelfric's, which we possess; in fact it is in these last
+distinctly remarkable--as where Aelfric tells the tale of the monk who
+spied on St. Cuthbert's seaside devotions. The same faculty is
+observable in Latin work, not least in Bede's still more famous telling
+of the Caedmon story, and of the vision of the other world.
+
+But these faculties have better chance of exhibiting themselves in the
+verse division of our Anglo-Saxon wreckage. _Beowulf_ itself consists of
+one first-rate story and one second-rate but not despicable tale,
+hitched together more or less anyhow. The second, with good points, is,
+for us, negligible: the first is a "yarn" of the primest character. One
+may look back to the _Odyssey_ itself without finding anything so good,
+except the adventures of the Golden Ass which had all the story-work of
+two mightiest literatures behind them. As literature on the other hand,
+_Beowulf_ may be overpraised: it has been so frequently. But let
+anybody with the slightest faculty of "conveyance" tell the first part
+of the story to a tolerably receptive audience, and he will not doubt
+(unless he is fool enough to set the effect down to his own gifts and
+graces) about its excellence as such. There is character--not much, but
+enough to make it more than a _mere_ story of adventure--and adventure
+enough for anything; there is by no means ineffectual speech--even
+dialogue--of a kind: and there is some effective and picturesque
+description. The same faculties reappear in such mere fragments as that
+of _Waldhere_ and the "Finnsburgh" fight: but they are shown much more
+fully in the Saints' Lives--best of all in the _Andreas_, no doubt, but
+remarkably also (especially considering the slender amount of
+"happenings") in the _Guthlac_ and the _Juliana_. In fact the very
+fragments of Anglo-Saxon poetry, by a sort of approximation which they
+show to dramatic narrative and which with a few exceptions is far less
+present in the classics, foretell much more clearly and certainly than
+in the case of some other foretellings which have been detected in them,
+the future achievements of English literature in the department of
+fiction. _The Ruin_ (the finest thing perhaps in all Anglo-Saxon) is a
+sort of background study for something that might have been much better
+than _The Last Days of Pompeii_: and _The Complaint of Deor_, in its
+allusion to the adventures of the smith Weland and others, makes one
+sorry that some one more like the historian of a later and decadent
+though agreeable Wayland the Smith, had not told us the tale that is now
+left untold. A crowd of fantastic imaginings or additions, to supply the
+main substance, and a certain common-sense grasp of actual conditions
+and circumstances to set them upon, and contrast them with--these are
+the great requirements of Fiction in life and character. You must mix
+prose and poetry to get a good romance or even novel. The consciences of
+the ancients revolted from this mixture of kinds; but there was no such
+revolt in the earlier moderns, and least of all in our own mediæval
+forefathers.
+
+So few people are really acquainted with the whole range of Romance
+(even in English), or with any large part of it, that one may without
+undue presumption set down in part, if not in whole, to ignorance, a
+doctrine and position which we must now attack. This is that romance and
+novel are widely separated from each other; and that the historian of
+the novel is really straying out of his ground if he meddles with
+Romance. These are they who would make our proper subject begin with
+Marivaux and Richardson, or at earliest with Madame de La Fayette, who
+exclude Bunyan altogether, and sometimes go so far as to question the
+right of entry to Defoe. But the counter-arguments are numerous: and any
+one of them would almost suffice by itself. In the first place the idea
+of the novel arising so late is unnatural and unhistorical: these
+Melchisedecs without father or mother are not known in literature. In
+the second a pedantic insistence on the exclusive definition of the
+novel involves one practical inconvenience which no one, even among
+those who believe in it, has yet dared to face. You must carry your wall
+of partition along the road as well as across it: and write separate
+histories of Novel and Romance for the last two centuries. The present
+writer can only say that, though he has dared some tough adventures in
+literary history, he would altogether decline this. Without the help of
+the ants that succoured Psyche against Venus that heap would indeed be
+ill to sort.
+
+But there is a third argument, less practical in appearance but bolder
+and deeper, which is really decisive of the matter, though few seem to
+have seen it or at least taken it up. The separation of romance and
+novel--of the story of incident and the story of character and
+motive--is a mistake logically and psychologically. It is a very old
+mistake, and it has deceived some of the elect: but a mistake it is. It
+made even Dr. Johnson think Fielding shallower than Richardson; and it
+has made people very different from Dr. Johnson think that Count Tolstoi
+is a greater analyst and master of a more developed humanity than
+Fielding. As a matter of fact, when you have excogitated two or more
+human beings out of your own head and have set them to work in the
+narrative (not the dramatic) way, you have made the novel _in posse_, if
+not _in esse_, from its apparently simplest development, such as
+_Daphnis and Chloe_, to its apparently most complex, such as the
+_Kreutzer Sonata_ or the triumphs of Mr. Meredith. You have started the
+"Imitation"--the "fiction"--and _tout est là_. The ancients could do
+this in the dramatic way admirably, though on few patterns; in the
+poetical way as admirably, but again not on many. The Middle Ages lost
+the dramatic way almost entirely, but they actually improved the
+poetical on its narrative side, and the result was Romance. In every
+romance there is the germ of a novel and more; there is at least the
+suggestion and possibility of romance in every novel that deserves the
+name. In the Tristram story and the Lancelot cycle there are most of the
+things that the romancer of incident and the novelist of character and
+motive can want or can use, till the end of the world; and Malory (that
+"mere compiler" as some pleasantly call him) has put the possibilities
+of the latter and greater creation so that no one who has eyes can miss
+them. Nor _in the beginning_ does it much or at all matter whether the
+vehicle was prose or verse. In fact they mostly wrote in verse because
+prose was not ready.
+
+In the minor romances and tales (taking English versions only) from
+_Havelok_ to _Beryn_ there is a whole universe of situation, scenario,
+opportunity for "business." That they have the dress and the
+scene-backing of one particular period can matter to no one who has eyes
+for anything beyond dress and scene-backing. And when we are told that
+they are apt to run too much into grooves and families, it is sufficient
+to answer that it really does not lie in the mouth of an age which
+produces grime-novels, problem-novels, and so forth, as if they had been
+struck off on a hectograph, possessing the not very exalted gift of
+varying names and places--to reproach any other age on this score. But
+we have only limited room here for generalities and still less for
+controversy; let us turn to our proper work and survey the actual
+turn-out in fiction--mostly as a result of mere fashion, verse, but
+partly prose--which the Middle Ages has left us as a contribution to
+this department of English literature.
+
+It has been said that few people know the treasures of English romance,
+yet there is little excuse for ignorance of them. It is some century
+since Ellis's extremely amusing, if sometimes rather prosaic, book put
+much of the matter before those who will not read originals; to be
+followed in the same path by Dunlop later, and much later still by the
+invaluable and delightful _Catalogue of_ [British Museum] _Romances_ by
+Mr. Ward. It is nearly as long since the collections of Ritson and
+Weber, soon supplemented by others, and enlarged for the last forty
+years by the publications of the Early English Text Society, put these
+originals themselves within the reach of everybody who is not so lazy
+or so timid as to be disgusted or daunted by a very few actually
+obsolete words and a rather large proportion of obsolete spellings,
+which will yield to even the minimum of intelligent attention. Only a
+very small number (not perhaps including a single one of importance)
+remain unprinted, though no doubt a few are out of print or difficult to
+obtain. The quality and variety of the stories told in them are both
+very considerable, even without making allowance for what has been
+called the stock character of mediæval composition. That almost all are
+directly imitated from the French is probable enough, that most are is
+certain: but this matters, for our purpose, nothing at all. That the
+imitation was not haphazard or indiscriminate is obvious. Thus, though
+we have some, we have not very many representatives of the class which
+was the most numerous of all in France--the _chansons de geste_ or
+stories of French legendary history, national or family. Except as far
+as the Saracens are concerned, they would naturally have less interest
+for English hearers. The _Matière de Rome_, again--the legends of
+antiquity--though represented, is not very abundant outside of the
+universally popular Tale of Troy; and the almost equally popular
+Alexander legend does not occupy a very large part of them. What is
+perhaps more remarkable is that until Malory exercised his genius upon
+"the French book," the more poetical parts of the "matter of Britain"
+itself do not seem to have been very much written about in English. The
+preliminary stuff about Merlin and Vortigern exists in several
+handlings; the foreign campaigns of Arthur seem always (perhaps from
+national vanity) to have been popular. The "off"-branches of Tristram
+and Percivale, and not a few of the still more episodic romances of
+adventures concerning Gawain, Iwain, and other knights, receive
+attention. The execrable Lonelich or Lovelich, who preceded Malory a
+little, had of course predecessors in handling the other parts of the
+Graal story. But the crown and flower of the whole--the inspiration
+which connected the Round Table and the Graal and the love of Lancelot
+and Guinevere--though, so far as the present writer's reading and
+opinion are of any weight, the recent attempts to deprive the
+Englishman, Walter Map, of the honour of conceiving it are of no
+force--seems to have waited till the fifteenth century--that is to say
+the last part of three hundred years--before Englishmen took it up. Most
+popular of all perhaps, on the principle that in novels the flock "likes
+the savour of fresh grass," seem to have been the pure _romans
+d'aventures_--quite unconnected or nearly so with each other or with any
+of the larger cycles. Those adventures of particular heroes have
+sometimes a sort of Arthurian link, but they really have no more to do
+with the main Arthurian story than if Arthur were not.
+
+For the present purpose, however, filiation, origin, and such-like
+things are of much less importance than the actual stories that get
+themselves told to satisfy that demand which in due time is to produce
+the supply of the novel. Of these the two oldest, as regards the actual
+forms in which we have them, are capital examples of the more and less
+original handling of "common-form" stories or motives. They were not
+then, be it remembered, quite such common-form as now--the rightful heir
+kept out of his rights, the usurper of them, the princess gracious or
+scornful or both by turns, the quest, the adventure, the revolutions and
+discoveries and fights, the wedding bells and the poetical justice on
+the villain. Let it be remembered, too, if anybody is scornful of these
+as _vieux jeu_, that they have never been really improved upon except by
+the very obvious and unoriginal method common in clever-silly days, of
+simply reversing some of them, of "turning platitudes topsy-turvy," as
+not the least gifted, or most old-fashioned, of novelists, Tourguenief,
+has it. Perhaps the oldest of all, _Havelok the Dane_--a story the age
+of which from evidence both internal and external, is so great that
+people have not quite gratuitously imagined a still older Danish or even
+Anglo-Saxon original for the French romance from which our existing one
+is undoubtedly taken--is one of the most spirited of all. Both hero and
+heroine--Havelok, who should be King of Denmark and Goldborough, who
+should be Queen of England--are ousted by their treacherous
+guardian-viceroys as infants; and Havelok is doomed to drowning by his
+tutor, the greater or at least bolder villain of the two. But the
+fisherman Grim, who is chosen as his murderer, discovers that the child
+has, at night, a _nimbus_ of flame round his head; renounces his crime
+and escapes by sea with the child and his own family to Grimsby.
+Havelok, growing up undistinguished from his foster-brethren, takes
+service as a scullion with the English usurper. This usurper is seeking
+how to rid himself of the princess without violence, but in some way
+that will make her succession to the crown impossible, and Havelok
+having shown prowess in sports is selected as the maiden's husband. She,
+too, discovers his royalty at night by the same token; and the pair
+regain their respective inheritances and take vengeance on their
+respective traitors, in a lively and adventurous fashion. There are all
+the elements of a good story in this: and they are by no means wasted or
+spoilt in the actual handling. It is not a mere sequence of incident;
+from the mixture of generosity and canniness in the fisherman who
+ascertains that he is to have traitor's wages before he finally decides
+to rescue Havelok, to the not unnatural repugnance of Goldborough at
+her forced wedding with a scullion, the points where character comes in
+are not neglected, though of course the author does not avail himself of
+them either in Shakespearean or in Richardsonian fashion. They are
+_there_, ready for development by any person who may take it into his
+head to develop them.
+
+So too is it in the less powerful and rather more cut and dried _King
+Horn_. Here the opening is not so very different; the hero's father is
+murdered by pirate invaders, and he himself set adrift in a boat. But in
+this the princess (daughter of course of the king who shelters him)
+herself falls in love with Horn, and there is even a scene of
+considerable comic capabilities in which she confides this affection by
+mistake to one of his companions (fortunately a faithful one) instead of
+to himself. But Horn has a faithless friend also; and rivals, and
+adventures, and journeys; and returns just in the nick of time, and
+recognitions by rings, and everything that can properly be desired
+occur. In these--even more perhaps than in Havelok's more masculine and
+less sentimental fortunes--there are openings not entirely neglected by
+the romancer (though, as has been said, he does not seem to have been
+one of the strongest of his kind) for digression, expatiation,
+embroidery. Transpose these two stories (as the slow kind years will
+teach novelists inevitably to do) into slightly different keys,
+introduce variations and episodes and _codas_, and you have the
+possibilities of a whole library of fiction, as big and as varied as any
+that has ever established itself for subscribers, and bigger than any
+that has ever offered itself as one collection to buyers.
+
+The love-stories of these two tales are what it is the fashion--exceedingly
+complimentary to the age referred to if not to the age of the fashion
+itself--to call "mid-Victorian" in their complete "propriety."
+Indeed, it is a Puritan lie, though it seems to possess the vivaciousness
+of its class, that the romances are distinguished by "bold bawdry."
+They are on the contrary rather singularly pure, and contrast, in
+that respect, remarkably with the more popular folk-tale. But fiction,
+no more than drama, could do without the [Greek: amarthia]--the
+human and not unpardonable frailty. This appears in, and complicates,
+the famous story of _Tristram_, which, though its present English form
+is probably younger than _Havelok_ and _Horn_, is likely to have existed
+earlier: indeed must have done so if Thomas of Erceldoune wrote on the
+subject. Few can require to be told that beautiful and tragical history
+of "inauspicious stars" which hardly any man, of the many who have
+handled it in prose and verse, has been able to spoil. Our Middle
+English form is not consummate, and is in some places crude in manner
+and in sentiment. But it is notable that the exaggerated and inartistic
+repulsiveness of Mark, resorted to by later writers as a rather
+rudimentary means of exciting compassion for the lovers, is not to be
+found here; in fact, one of the most poetical touches in the piece is
+one of sympathy for the luckless husband, when he sees the face of his
+faithless queen slumbering by her lover's side with the sun on it. "And
+Mark rewed therefore." The story, especially in its completion with the
+"Iseult of Brittany" part and the death of Tristram, gives scope for
+every possible faculty and craftsmanship of the most analytic as of the
+most picturesque novelist of modern times. There is nothing in the least
+like it in ancient literature; and to get a single writer who would do
+it justice in modern times we should have to take the best notes of
+Charles Kingsley, and Mr. Blackmore, and Mr. Meredith, leaving out all
+their faults, and combine. It is not surprising that, in the very
+infancy of the art, nobody in German or French, any more than in English
+(though the German here is, as it happens, the best), should have done
+it full justice; but it is a wonder that a story of such capacities
+should have been sketched, and even worked out in considerable detail,
+so early.
+
+Of the far greater story of which _Tristram_ is a mere episode and
+hardly even that--a chantry or out-lying chapel of the great
+cathedral--the Arthurian Legend, the earlier English versions, or rather
+the earlier versions in English, are, as has been said, not only
+fragmentary but disappointing. There is nothing in the least strange in
+this, even though (as the present writer, who can speak with indifferent
+knowledge, still firmly holds) the conception of the story itself in its
+greatest and unifying stage is probably if not certainly English. The
+original sources of the story of Arthur are no doubt Celtic; they give
+themselves out as being so, and there is absolutely no critical reason
+for disbelieving them. But in these earlier forms--the authority of the
+most learned Celticists who have any literary gift and any appreciation
+of evidence is decisive on this point--not only are the most
+characteristic unifying features--the Graal story and the love of
+Lancelot and Guinevere--completely wanting, but _the_ great stroke of
+genius--the connection of these two and the subordination of all minor
+legends as to the dim national hero, Arthur, with those about him--is
+more conspicuously wanting still. Whether it was the Englishman Walter
+Map, the Norman Robert de Borron, or the Frenchman Chrestien de Troyes,
+to whom this flash of illumination came, has never been proved--will
+pretty certainly now never be proved. M. Gaston Paris failed to do it;
+and it is exceedingly unlikely that, where he failed, any one else will
+succeed, unless the thrice and thirty times sifted libraries of Europe
+yield some quite unexpected windfall. In the works commonly attributed
+to Chrestien, all of which are well known to the present writer, there
+is no sign of his having been able to conceive this, though he is a
+delightful romancer. Robert is a mere shadow; and his attributed works,
+_as_ his works, are shadows too, though they are interesting enough in
+themselves. Walter not only has the greatest amount of traditional
+attribution, but is the undoubted author of _De Nugis Curialium_. And
+the author of _De Nugis Curialium_, different as it is from the
+Arthurian story, _could_ have finally divined the latter.
+
+But at the time when he wrote, Englishmen, with the rarest exceptions,
+wrote only in French or Latin; and when they began to write in English,
+a man of genius, to interpret and improve on him, was not found for a
+long time. And the most interesting parts of the Arthurian story are
+rarely handled at all in such early vernacular versions of it as we
+have, whether in verse or prose. Naturally enough, perhaps, it was the
+fabulous historic connection with British history, and the story of the
+great British enchanter Merlin, that attracted most attention. The
+_Arthour and Merlin_ which is in the Auchinleck MS.; the prose _Merlin_,
+published by the Early English Text Society; the alliterative Thornton
+_Morte d'Arthur_, and others, are wont to busy themselves about the
+antecedents of the real story--about the uninteresting wars of the King
+himself with Saxons, and Romans, and giants, and rival kings, rather
+than with the great chivalric triple cord of Round Table, Graal, and
+Guinevere's fault. The pure Graal poems, _Joseph of Arimathea_, the work
+of the abominable Lonelich or Lovelich, etc., deal mainly with another
+branch of previous questions--things bearable as introductions,
+fillings-up, and so forth, but rather jejune in themselves. The Scots
+_Lancelot_ is later than Malory himself, and of very little interest.
+Layamon's account, the oldest that we have, adds little (though what
+little it does add is not unimportant) to Geoffrey of Monmouth and Wace;
+and tells what it has to tell with nearly as little skill in narrative
+as in poetry. Only the metrical _Morte_--from which, it would appear,
+Malory actually transprosed some of his most effective passages in the
+manner in which genius transproses or transverses--has, for that reason,
+for its dealings with the catastrophe, and for the further opportunity
+of comparison with Tennyson, interest of the higher kind. But before we
+come to Malory himself it is desirable to turn to the branches--the
+chapels, as we have called them, to the cathedral--which he also, in
+some cases at least, utilised in the _magnum opus_ of English prose
+romance.
+
+These outliers were rather more fortunate, probably for no more
+recondite reason than that the French originals (from which they were in
+almost every instance certainly taken) were finished in themselves. Of
+the special Gawain cycle or sub-cycle we have two romances in pure
+metrical form, and more than two in alliterative, which are above the
+average in interest. _Ywain and Gawain_, one of the former, is derived
+directly or indirectly from the _Chevalier au Lyon_ of Chrestien de
+Troyes; and both present some remarkable affinities with the unknown
+original of the "Sir Beaumains" episode of Malory, and, through it, with
+Tennyson's _Gareth and Lynette_. The other, _Lybius Disconus (Le Beau
+Déconnu)_ is also concerned with that courteous nephew of Arthur who, in
+later versions of the main story, is somewhat sacrificed to Lancelot.
+For a "_real_ romance," as it calls itself (though it is fair to say
+that in the original the word means "royal"), of the simpler kind but
+extremely well told, there are not many better metrical specimens than
+_Ywain and Gawain_, but it has less character-interest, actual or
+possible, than those which have been commented on. The hero, King
+Urien's son, accepts an adventure in which another knight of the Table,
+Sir Colgrevance, has fared ill, after it has been told in a conversation
+at court which is joined in first by the Queen and afterwards by the
+King. Sir Kay here shows his usual cross-grainedness; and Guinevere
+"with milde mood" requests to know "What the devil is thee within?" The
+adventure is of a class well known in romance. You ride to a certain
+fountain, pour water from it on a stone, and then, after divers marvels,
+have to do battle with a redoubtable knight. Colgrevance has fared
+badly; Kay is as usual quite sure that he would fare better; but Ywain
+actually undertakes the task. He has a tough battle with the knight who
+answers the challenge, but wounds him mortally; and when the knight
+flies to his neighbouring castle, is so hard on his heels that the
+portcullis actually drops on his horse's haunches just behind the
+saddle, and cuts the beast in two. Ywain is thus left between the
+portcullis and the (by this time shut) door--a position all the more
+awkward that the knight himself expires immediately after he has reached
+shelter. The situation is saved, however, by the guardian damsel of
+romance, Lunet (the Linet or Lynette of the Beaumains-Gareth story), who
+emerges from a postern between gate and portcullis and conveys the
+intruder safe to her own chamber. Here a magic bed makes him invisible:
+though the whole castle, including the very room, is ransacked by the
+dead knight's people and would-be revengers, at the bidding of his
+widow.
+
+This widow, however, is rather an Ephesian matron. The sagacious Lunet,
+whose confidante she is, suggests to her that, unless she enlists some
+doughty knight as her champion, the king will confiscate her fief; and
+that there is no champion like a husband. A very little more finesse
+effects the marriage, even though the lady is made aware of the identity
+of her new lover and her own husband's slayer. (It is of course
+necessary to remember that the death of a combatant in fairly challenged
+and fought single contest was not reckoned as any fault to his
+antagonist.) Ywain actually shows his prowess against the King: and has
+an opportunity of showing Kay once more that it is one thing to blame
+other people for failing, and another to succeed yourself. And after
+this the newly married pair live together happily for a time. But it was
+reckoned a fault in a knight to take too prolonged a honeymoon: and
+Ywain, after what the French call _adieux déchirants_, obtains leave for
+the usual "twelvemonth and a day," at the expiration of which, on St.
+John's Eve, he is without fail to return, the engagement being sealed by
+the gift from his lady of a special ring. He forgets his promise of
+course: and at the stated time a damsel appears, sternly demands the
+ring, and announces her lady's decision to have nothing further to do
+with him. There is in such cases only one thing for any true knight,
+from Sir Lancelot to Sir Amadis, to do: and that is to go mad, divest
+himself of his garments, and take to the greenwood. This Ywain duly
+does, supporting himself at first on the raw flesh of game which he
+kills with a bow and arrows wrested from a chance-comer; and then on
+less savage but still simple food supplied by a benevolent hermit. As he
+lies asleep under a tree, a lady rides by with attendants, and one of
+these (another of the wise damsels of romance) recognises him as Sir
+Ywain. The lady has at the time sore need of a champion against a
+hostile earl, and she also fortunately possesses a box of ointment
+infallible against madness, which Morgane la Faye has given her. With
+this the damsel is sent back to anoint Ywain. He comes to his senses, is
+armed and clothed, undertakes the lady's defence, and discomfits the
+earl: but is as miserable as ever. Resisting the lady's offer of herself
+and all her possessions, he rides off once more "with heavy heart and
+dreary cheer."
+
+Soon he hears a hideous noise and, riding in its direction, finds that a
+dragon has attacked a lion. He succours the holier beast, kills the
+dragon, and though he has unavoidably wounded the lion in the _mêlée_ is
+thenceforth attended by him not merely as a food-provider, but as the
+doughtiest of squires and comrades in fight. To aggravate his sorrow he
+comes to the fountain and thorn-tree of the original adventure, and
+hears some one complaining in the chapel hard by. They exchange
+questions. "A man," he said, "some time I was" (which must be one of the
+earliest occurrences in English of a striking phrase), and the prisoner
+turns out to be Lunet. She has been accused of treason by the usual
+steward (it is _very_ hard for a steward of romance to be good) and two
+brothers--of treason to her lady, and is to be burnt, unless she can
+find a knight who will fight the three. Ywain agrees to defend her: but
+before he can carry out his promise he has, on the same morning, to meet
+a terrible giant who is molesting his hosts at a castle where he is
+guested. Both adventures, however, are achieved on the same day, with
+very notable aid from the lion: and Ywain undertakes a fresh one, being
+recruited by the necessary damsel-messenger, against two half-fiend
+brother knights. They stipulate that the lion is to be forcibly
+prevented from interfering, and he is locked up in a room; but, hearing
+the noise of battle, he scratches up the earth under the door, frees
+himself, and once more succours his master at the nick of time. Even
+this does not expiate Ywain's fault: and yet another task falls to
+him--the championship of the rights of the younger of a pair of sisters,
+the elder of whom has secured no less a representative than Gawain
+himself. The pair, unknowing and unknown, fight all day long before
+Arthur's court with no advantage on either side: and when the light
+fails an interchange of courtesies leads to recognition and the
+settlement of the dispute. Now the tale is nearly full. Ywain rides yet
+again to the magic fountain and performs the rite; there is no one to
+meet him; the castle rocks and the inmates quake. But the crafty Lunet
+persuades her mistress to swear that if the Knight of the Lion, who has
+fallen at variance with his lady, will come to the rescue, she will do
+all she can to reconcile the pair. Which not ill-prepared "curtain" duly
+falls: leaving us comfortably assured that Ywain and his Lady and Lunet
+and the Lion (one wishes that these two could have made a match of it,
+and he must surely have been a bewitched knight) lived happily
+
+    "Until that death had driven them down."
+
+This, it has been said, is a specimen of the pure romance; with little
+except incident in it, and a touch or two of manners. It does not, as
+the others noticed above do, lend itself much to character-drawing. But
+it is spiritedly told; though rougher, it is much more vigorous than the
+French original; and the mere expletives and stock phrases, which are
+the curse of these romances, do not obtrude themselves too much. In this
+respect, and some others, it is the superior of the one coupled above
+with it, _Lybius Disconus_, which is closer, except in names, to the
+Beaumains story. Still, this also is not a bad specimen of the same
+class. The hero of it is a son, not a brother, of Gawain, comes nameless
+or nicknamed, but as "Beaufils," not "Beaumains," to Arthur's court, and
+is knighted at once, not made to go through the "kitchen-knave" stage.
+Accordingly, the damsel Elene (not Lunet), to whom he is assigned as
+champion in the adventure of the Lady of Sinadowne, objects only to his
+novelty of knighthood and is converted by his first victory. The course
+of the adventures is, however, different from that which some people
+know from Malory, and many from Tennyson. One of them is farcical: the
+Fair Unknown rescues a damsel at her utmost need from two giants, a red
+and a black, one of whom is roasting a wild boar and uses the animal as
+a weapon, with the spit in it, for the combat. Moreover, he falls a
+victim to the wiles of a sorceress-chatelaine whom he has also
+succoured: and it is only after the year and day that Elene goads him on
+to his proper quest. But this also is no bad story.
+
+The limits of this volume admit of not much farther "argument" (though
+the writer would very gladly give it) of these minor romances of
+adventure, Arthurian and other. Ellis's easily accessible book supplies
+abstracts of the main Arthurian story before Malory; of the two most
+famous, though by no means best, of all the non-Arthurian romances, _Guy
+of Warwick_ and _Bevis of Hampton_ (the former of which was handled and
+rehandled from age to age, moralised, curtailed, lengthened, and hashed
+up in every form); of the brilliant and vigorous _Richard
+Coeur-de-Lion_; of the less racy Charlemagne romances in English; of the
+_Seven Wise Masters_, brought from the East and naturalised all over
+Europe; of the delightful love story of _Florice and Blancheflour_; of
+that powerful and pathetic legend of the _Proud King_ (Robert of
+Sicily), which Longfellow and Mr. William Morris both modernised, each
+in his way; of those other legends, _Sir Isumbras_ and _Amis and
+Amillion_, which are so beautiful to those who can appreciate the
+mediæval mind, and to the beauty of which others seem insensible; of
+_Sir Triamond_ and _Sir Eglamour_ (examples of the romance at its
+weakest); of the exceedingly spirited and interesting _Ipomydon_, and of
+some others, including the best of Scotch romances, _Sir Eger, Sir
+Grame, and Sir Graysteel_. But Ellis could not know others, and he left
+alone yet others that he might have known--the exquisite _Sir Launfal_
+of Thomas Chester at the beginning of the fifteenth century, where an
+unworthy presentment of Guinevere is compensated by the gracious image
+of Launfal's fairy love; the lively adventures of _William of Palerne_,
+who had a werewolf for his friend and an emperor's daughter for his
+love, eloping with her in white bear-skins, the unusual meat of which
+was being cooked in her father's kitchen; _Sir Orfeo_--Orpheus and
+Eurydice, with a happy ending; _Emarè_, one of the tales of innocent but
+persecuted heroines of which Chaucer's Constance is the best known;
+_Florence of Rome_; the rather famous _Squire of Low Degree; Sir
+Amadas_, not a very good handling of a fine motive, charity to a corpse;
+many others.
+
+Nor does he seem to have known one of the finest of all--the
+alliterative romance of _Gawain and the Green Knight_ which, since Dr.
+Morris published it some forty years ago for the Early English Text
+Society, has made its way through text-books into more general knowledge
+than most of its fellows enjoy. In this the hero is tempted repeatedly,
+elaborately, and with great knowledge of nature and no small command of
+art on the teller's part, by the wife of his host and destined
+antagonist. He resists in the main, but succumbs in the point of
+accepting a magic preservative as a gift: and is discovered and lectured
+accordingly. It is curious that this, which is far above the usual mere
+adventure-story and is novel of a high kind as well as romance, has no
+known French original; and is strongly English in many characteristics
+besides its verse-form.
+
+On the whole, however, one need have no difficulty in admitting that the
+majority of these romances _do_ somewhat content themselves with
+incident, incident only, and incident not merely of a naïf but of a
+stock kind, for their staple. There are striking situations, even striking
+phrases, here and there; there is plenty of variety in scene, and more than
+is sometimes thought in detail; but the motive-and-character-interest is
+rarely utilised as it might be, and very generally is not even suggested.
+There is seldom any real plot or "fable"--only a chain of events: and
+though no one but a very dull person will object to the supernatural
+element, or to the exaggerated feats of professedly natural prowess and
+endurance, it cannot be said that on the whole they are artistically
+managed. You feel, not merely that the picture would have been better if
+the painter had taken more pains, but that the reason why he did not
+is that he did not know how.
+
+Sir Thomas Malory, himself most unknown perhaps of all great writers,
+did know how; and a cynical person might echo the _I nunc_ of the Roman
+satirist, and dwell on the futility of doing great things, in reference
+to the fact that it used to be fashionable, and is still not uncommon,
+to call Malory a "mere compiler." Indeed from the direction which modern
+study so often takes, of putting inquiry into origins above everything,
+and neglecting the consideration of the work as work, this practice is
+not likely soon to cease. But no mistake about the mysterious
+Englishman (the place-names with which the designation is connected are
+all pure English) is possible to any one who has read his book, and who
+knows what prose fiction is. _The Noble Histories of King Arthur, La
+Morte d'Arthur, The Story of the most Noble and Worthy King Arthur, The
+Most Ancient and Famous History of the Renowned Prince Arthur, The
+Birth, Life, and Acts of King Arthur_--call it by whichever name anybody
+likes of those which various printers and reprinters have given it--is
+one of the great books of the world. If they can give us any single
+"French book"--the reference to which is a commonplace of the
+subject--from which it was taken, let them; they have not yet. If they
+point out (as they can) French and English books from which parts of it
+were taken, similar things may be done with Dante and Chaucer, with
+Shakespeare and Milton, and very probably could have been done with
+Homer. It is what the artist does with his materials, not where he gets
+them, that is the question. And Malory has done, with _his_ materials, a
+very great thing indeed. He is working no doubt to a certain extent
+blindly; working much better than he knows, and sometimes as he would
+not work if he knew better; though whether he would work as well if he
+knew better is quite a different point. Sometimes he may not take the
+best available version of a story; but we must ask ourselves whether he
+knew it. Sometimes he may put in what we do not want: but we must ask
+ourselves whether there was not a reason for doing so, to him if not to
+us. What is certain is that he, and he only in any language, makes of
+this vast assemblage of stories one story, and one book. He does it
+(much more than half unconsciously no doubt) by following the lines of,
+as I suppose, Walter Map, and fusing the different motives, holding to
+this method even in parts of the legend with which, so far as one knows,
+Map cannot have meddled. Before him this legend consisted of half a
+dozen great divisions--a word which may be used of malice prepense.
+These were the story of Merlin, that of Arthur's own origin, and that of
+the previous history of the Graal for introduction; the story of
+Arthur's winning the throne, of the Round Table, and of the marriage
+with Guinevere, also endless branchings of special knights' adventures,
+and of the wars with the Saxons and the Romans, and the episode of the
+False Guinevere--with whom for a time Arthur lives as with his
+queen--for middle; and the story of the Graal-quest, the love of
+Lancelot for the Queen, and the rebellion of Mordred with its fatal
+consequences, for close. Exactly how much of this Malory personally had
+before him we cannot of course say: but of any working up of the whole
+that would have spared him trouble, and robbed him of credit, we do not
+know. In fact the favourite term "compiler" gives up the only dangerous
+point. Now in what way did Malory _compile_? In the way in which the
+ordinary compiler proceeds he most emphatically does not. He cuts down
+the preliminaries mercilessly: but they can be perfectly well spared. He
+misses almost all the wars with the Saxons, which are the most tedious
+parts of the originals. He adopts, most happily, the early, not the
+late, placing of those with the Romans. He drops the false Guinevere
+altogether, which is imperative, that the true one may have no right to
+plead the incident--though he does not represent Arthur as "blameless."
+He gives the _roman d'aventures_ side of the Round Table stories, from
+the great Tristram and Palomides romances through the Beaumains episode
+downwards, because they are interesting in themselves and lead up to
+the Graal quest. He gives that Quest as plentifully because it leads up
+to the "dolorous death and departing out of this world of them all." How
+he gives the Lancelot and Guinevere tragedy we shall see presently. And
+the catastrophe of the actual "departing" he gives perfectly; with the
+magnificent final scenes which he has converted, sometimes in almost
+Shakespearean fashion, by the slightest verbal touches from mediocre
+verse to splendid prose. A very remarkable compiler! It is a pity that
+they did not take him and cut him up in little stars for a light to all
+his brethren in compiling thereafter.
+
+For he has what no compiler as such can have--because the moment he has
+it he ceases to be a compiler, and becomes an artist--the sense of
+_grasp_, the power to put his finger, and to keep it, on the central
+pulse and nerve of the story. That he did this deliberately is so
+unlikely as to be practically impossible: that he did it is certain. The
+Arthurian Legend is the greatest of mediæval creations as a subject--a
+"fable"--just as the _Divina Commedia_ is the greatest of mediæval
+"imitations" and works of art. And as such it is inevitable that it
+should carry with it the sense of the greatest medieval _differences_,
+Chivalry and Romance. The strong point of these differences is the way
+in which they combine the three great motives, as Dante isolates them,
+of Valour, Love, and Religion. The ancients never realised this
+combination at all; the moderns have merely struggled after it, or
+blasphemed it in fox-and-grapes fashion: the mediævals _had_ it--in
+theory at any rate. The Round Table stories, merely as such, illustrate
+Valour; the Graal stories, Religion; the passion of Lancelot and
+Guinevere with the minor instances, Love. All these have their [Greek:
+amarthia]--their tragic and tragedy-causing fault and flaw. The knight
+wastes his valour in idle bickerings; he forgets law in his love; and
+though there is no actual degradation of religion, he fails to live up
+to the ideal that he does not actually forswear. To throw the
+presentation--the _mimesis_--of all this into perfectly worthy form
+would probably have been too much for any single genius of that curious
+time (when genius was so widely spread and so little concentrated)
+except Dante himself, whose hand found other work to do. To colour and
+shape the various fragments of the mosaic was the work of scores. To put
+them together, if not in absolutely perfect yet in more than sufficient
+shape, was, so far as we know, the luck of Malory only: though some one
+(Map or another) had done a mighty day's work long before in creating
+the figure and the adventures of Lancelot and imagining the later quest
+of the Graal with the figure of Galahad--that "improved Percivale," as
+the seedsmen say.
+
+But besides this power of shaping (or even of merely combining)
+scattered elements into a story, Malory has another--_the_ other of the
+first importance to the novelist proper--in his attraction to character,
+if not exactly in his making up of it. It has been said above that the
+defect of the pure romances--especially those of continental origin--is
+the absence of this. What the Greeks called [Greek: dihanoia]--"sentiment,"
+"thought," "cast of thought," as it has been variously rendered--is even
+more absent from them than plot or character itself: and of its almost
+necessary connection with this latter they often seem to have no idea.
+Very rare is such a touch as that of Sir Amadas being unable at the feast
+to get rid of the memory of the unburied corpse, kept by enemies from the
+kindly earth that would hide it, and the rites that would help it to peace:
+still rarer that in _Guy of Warwick_ when the hero, at the height of
+his fame and in the full enjoyment of his desires, looks from the tower and
+is struck by the selfishness and earthliness of his career. The first
+notion is not "improved" in the original at all, and the second very badly;
+but in most of the others such things do not even exist. Now the greater
+Legend is full of situations which encourage such thoughts, and even of
+expressed thoughts that only need craftsmanship to turn them into the
+cornerstones of character-building, and the jewels, five or fifty words
+long, of literature. The fate and metaphysical aid that determine the
+relations of Tristram and Iseult; the unconscious incest of Arthur and
+Margause with its Greek-tragic consequence; the unrewarded fidelity of
+Palomides, and (an early instance of the soon to be triumphant allegory)
+his fruitless chase of the Beast Glatissant; all these are matters in
+point. But of course the main nursery of such things is the
+Lancelot-and-Guinevere story itself. Nobody has yet made Guinevere a
+person--nobody but Shakespeare could have done so perhaps, though
+Shakespeare's Guinevere would probably have been the greatest woman in
+all art. But Malory has not been the least successful with her: and of
+Lancelot he has made, if only in study, one of the great characters of
+that fictitious world which is so much truer than the real. And let no
+one say that we are reading Tennyson or any one else into Malory. There
+are yet persons, at least at the time this was written not quite
+Methusalahs, who read the _Morte d'Arthur_ before the _Idylls_ appeared
+and who have never allowed even the _Idylls_ to overlay their original
+idea of the most perfect and most gentle of knights.
+
+It is probable indeed that Malory invented little or nothing in the
+various situations, by which the character of Lancelot, and the history
+of his fatal love, are evolved. We know in most cases that this is so.
+It is possible, too, that at first (probably because the possibilities
+had not dawned on him, as it has been admitted they never did very
+consciously) he has not made the most of the introduction of lover and
+lady. But when the interest becomes concentrated, as in the various
+passages of Guinevere's wrath with her lover and their consequences, or
+in the final series of catastrophes, he is fully equal to the occasion.
+We _know_--this time to his credit--how he has improved, in the act of
+borrowing them, the earlier verse-pictures of the final parting of the
+lovers, and there are many other episodes and juxtapositions of which as
+much may be said. That except as to Lancelot's remorse (which after all
+is the great point) there is not much actual talk about motive and
+sentiment is nothing; or nothing but the condition of the time. The
+important point is that, as the electricians say, "the house is wired"
+for the actual installation of character-novelling. There is here the
+complete scenario, and a good deal more, for a novel as long as
+_Clarissa_ and much more interesting, capable of being worked out in the
+manner, not merely of Richardson himself, but of Mr. Meredith or Mr.
+Hardy. It _is_ a great romance, if not the greatest of romances: it has
+a great novel, if not the greatest of novels, written in sympathetic ink
+between the lines, and with more than a little of the writing sometimes
+emerging to view.
+
+Little in the restricted space here available can be, though much might
+be in a larger, said about the remaining attempts in English fiction
+before the middle of the sixteenth century. The later romances, down to
+those of Lord Berners, show the character of the older with a certain
+addition of the "conjuror's supernatural" of the _Amadis_ school. But
+the short verse-tales, especially those of the Robin Hood cycle, and
+some of the purely comic kind, introduce an important variation of
+interest: and even some of the longer, such as that _Tale of Beryn_,
+which used to be included in Chaucer's works, vary the chivalrous model
+in a useful way. Still more important is the influence of the short
+_prose_ tale:--first Latin, as in the _Gesta Romanorum_ (which of course
+had older and positively mediæval forerunners), then Italian and French.
+The prose saved the writer from verbiage and stock phrase; the shortness
+from the tendency to "watering out" which is the curse of the long verse
+or prose romance. Moreover, to get point and appeal, it was especially
+necessary to _throw up_ the subject--incident, emotion, or whatever it
+was--to bring it out; not merely to meander and palaver about it. But
+language and literature were both too much in a state of transition to
+admit of anything capital being done at this time. It was the great good
+fortune of England, corresponding to that experienced with Chaucer in
+poetry three quarters of a century earlier, that Malory came to give the
+sum and substance of what mediæval fiction could do in prose. For more,
+the times and the men had to come.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+FROM LYLY TO SWIFT
+
+
+During the dying-off of romance proper, or its transference from verse
+to prose in the late fifteenth and earlier sixteenth century, there is
+not very much to note about prose fiction in England. But, as the
+conditions of modern literature fashioned themselves, a very great
+influence in this as in other departments was no doubt exercised with us
+by Italian, as well as some by Spanish in a way which may be postponed
+for a little. The Italian prose tale had begun to exercise that
+influence as early as Chaucer's time: but circumstances and atmosphere
+were as yet unfavourable for its growth. It is a hackneyed truism that
+Italian society was very much more modern than any other in Europe at
+this time--in fact it would not be a mere paradox to say that it was,
+and continued to be till the later sixteenth, much more modern than it
+has ever been since--or till very recently. By "modern" is here meant
+the kind of society which is fairly cultivated, fairly comfortable,
+fairly complicated with classes not very sharply separated from each
+other, not dominated by any very high ideals, tolerably corrupt, and
+sufficiently business-like. The Italian _novella_, of course, admits
+wild passions and extravagant crimes: but the general tone of it is
+_bourgeois_--at any rate domestic. With its great number of situations
+and motives, presented in miniature, careful work is necessary to bring
+out the effect: and, above all, there is abundant room for study of
+manners, for proverbial and popular wisdom and witticism, for
+"furniture"--to use that word in a wide sense. Above all, the Italian
+mind, like the Greek, had an ethical twist--twist in more senses than
+one, some would say, but that does not matter. Manners, morals,
+motives--these three could not but displace, to some extent, mere
+incident: though there was generally incident of a poignant or piquant
+kind as well. In other words the _novella_ was actually (though still in
+miniature) a novel in nature as well as in name. And these _novelle_
+became, as is generally known, common in English translations after the
+middle of the sixteenth century. Painter's huge _Palace of Pleasure_
+(1566) is only the largest and best known of many translations, single
+and collected, of the Italian _novellieri_ and the French tale-tellers,
+contemporary, or of times more or less earlier.
+
+For some time, as almost everybody knows, these collections of
+translated matter served a purpose--great indeed, but somewhat outside
+their proper department--by furnishing the Elizabethan dramatists with a
+large part--perhaps the larger part--of their subjects. But they very
+soon began to exercise it directly by suggesting the fictitious part of
+the prose pamphlet--a department which, though infinitely less well
+known than the plays, and still not very easy to know, holds almost the
+second position as representing the popular literature of the
+Elizabethan time. And they also had--in one case certainly, in the other
+probably--no little influence upon the two great Elizabethan works which
+in a manner founded the modern novel and the modern romance in
+English--the _Euphues_ of Lyly and the _Arcadia_ of Sir Philip Sidney.
+
+The pamphlet stories (which are themselves often play-connected, as in
+the case of Lodge's _Rosalynde_ and Greene's _Pandosto_) do not require
+much notice, with one exception--Nash's _Jack Wilton or the Unfortunate
+Traveller_, to which some have assigned a position equal, or perhaps
+superior in our particular subject, to that of the _Arcadia_ or that of
+_Euphues_. This seems to the present writer a mistake: but as to appear
+important is (in a not wholly unreal sense) to be so, the piece shall be
+separately considered. The rest are mostly marred by a superabundance of
+rather rudimentary art, and a very poor allowance of matter. There is
+hardly any character, and except in a few pieces, such as Lodge's
+_Margarite of America_, there is little attempt to utilise new scenes
+and conditions. But the whole class has special interest for us in one
+peculiarity which makes it perhaps unreadable to any but students, and
+that is its saturation with the Elizabethan conceit and word-play which
+is sometimes called Euphuism. Nor is this wonderful, considering that
+more than one of these "pamphlets" is directly connected with the matter
+and the personages of _Euphues_ itself. To this famous book, therefore,
+we had better turn.
+
+Some people, it is believed, have denied that _Euphues_ is a novel at
+all; and some of these some have been almost indignant at its being
+called one. It is certainly, with _Rasselas_, the most remarkable
+example, in English, of a novel which is to a great extent deprived of
+the _agrémens_ to which we have for some two centuries been accustomed
+in the kind, and, to a still greater, loaded with others which do not
+appeal to us. To put aside altogether its extraordinary and in a way
+epoch-making style, which gives it its main actual place in the history
+of English literature, it is further loaded with didactic digressions
+which, though certain later novelists have been somewhat peccant in the
+kind, have never been quite equalled--no, not in _Rasselas_ itself or
+the _Fool of Quality_. But if anybody, who has the necessary knowledge
+to understand, and therefore the necessary patience to tolerate, these
+knotty knarry envelopes, insertions, and excrescences, will for the
+moment pay no attention to them, but merely strip them off, he will find
+the carcass of a very tolerable novel left behind. The first plot of
+Philautus--Euphues--Lucilla, and the successive jilting of the two
+friends for each other and for Curio, is no mean novel-substance. Not
+Balzac himself, certainly no one of his successors, need disdain it: and
+more than one of them has taken up something like it. The journey from
+Naples to London, and the episode of Fidus and Iffida, could have been
+worked up, in the good old three-volume days, to a most effective second
+volume. And the picture of the court, with the further loves of
+Philautus, Camilla, and the "violet" Frances, would supply a third of
+themselves even if Euphues were left out, though some livelier
+presentation of his character (which Lyly himself was obviously too much
+personally interested to make at all clear) would improve the whole
+immensely. But it was still too early: the thing was not yet to be done.
+Only, I do not know any book in which the possibilities, and even the
+outlines, of this thing were indicated and vaguely sketched earlier in
+any European language, unless it be the _Lucretia and Euryalus_ of Æneas
+Silvius, which is much more confined in its scope.
+
+The fact is that the very confusedness, the many undeveloped sides, of
+_Euphues_, make it much more of an ancestor of the modern novel than if
+it were more of a piece. The _quicquid agunt homines_ is as much the
+province of the novel as of the satire; and there is more than something
+of this as it affected Elizabethan times in _Euphues_. Men's interest in
+morals, politics, and education; their development of the modern idea of
+society; their taste for letters; their conceits and fancies--all these
+appear in it.
+
+The _Arcadia_ stands in a different compartment. _Euphues_ is very much
+_sui generis_: failure as it may be from some points of view, it
+deserves the highest respect for this, and like most other things _sui
+generis_ it was destined to propagate the genus, if only after many
+days. The _Arcadia_ was in intention certainly, and to great extent in
+actual fact, merely a carrying out of the attempt, common all over
+Europe (as a result of the critical searchings of heart of the
+Italians), to practise a new kind--the Heroic Romance of the sub-variety
+called pastoral. The "heroic" idea generally was (as ought to be, but
+perhaps is not, well known) to blend, after a fashion, classical and
+romantic characteristics--to substitute something like the classic unity
+of fable or plot for the mere "meandering" of romantic story, and to pay
+at least as much attention to character as the classics had paid,
+instead of neglecting it altogether, as had recently though not always
+been the case in Romance. But the scheme retained on the other hand the
+variety of incident and appeal of this latter: and especially assigned
+to Love the high place which Romance had given it. As for the
+Pastoral--that is almost a story to itself, and a story which has been
+only once (by Mr. W.W. Greg) satisfactorily, and then not quite
+completely, told. It is enough to say here, and as affecting our own
+subject, that it supplied a new opportunity of gratifying the passion of
+the Renaissance for imitating antiquity, at the same time permitting to
+no small extent the introduction of things that were really romantic,
+and above all providing a convention. The Heroic romance generally and
+the Pastoral in particular went directly back to the Greek romances of
+Heliodorus and Longus: but they admitted many new and foreign elements.
+
+At the same time, bastard as the heroic romance was, it could not but
+exercise an important influence on the future of fiction, inasmuch as it
+combined, or attempted to combine, with classical unity and mediæval
+variety the more modern interest of manners and (sometimes) personality.
+Sidney's attempt (which, it must be remembered, is not certainly known
+to be wholly his as it stands, and _is_ certainly known not to have been
+revised by him for publication) exercised a very great influence in
+English. For its popularity was enormous, and it doubtless served as
+shoehorn to draw on that of the English translations of French and
+Spanish romance which supplied, during the greater part of the
+seventeenth century, the want of original composition of the kind. The
+unconscionable amount of talk and of writing "about it and about it"
+which _Euphues_ and the minor Euphuist romances display is at least as
+prominent in the _Arcadia_: and this talk rarely takes a form congenial
+to the modern novel reader's demands. Moreover, though there really is a
+plot, and a sufficient amount of incident, this reader undoubtedly, and
+to no small extent justly, demands that both incident and plot shall be
+more disengaged from their framework--that they should be brought into
+higher relief, should stand out more than is the case. Yet further, the
+pure character-interest is small--is almost nonexistent: and the
+rococo-mosaic of manners and sentiment which was to prove the curse of
+the heroic romance generally prevents much interest being felt in that
+direction.[1] It would also be impossible to devise a style less suited
+to prose narrative, except of a very peculiar kind and on a small scale,
+than that either of _Euphues_ or of the _Arcadia_, which, though an
+uncritical tradition credits it with driving out Lyly's, is practically
+only a whelp of the same litter. Embarrassed, heavy, rhetorical, it has
+its place in the general evolution of English prose, and a proper and
+valuable place too. But it is bad even for pure romance purposes: and
+nearly hopeless for the panoramic and kaleidoscopic variety which should
+characterise the novel. To the actual successors of the _Arcadia_ in
+English we shall come presently.
+
+    [1] As a work of general literature, the attraction of the
+    _Arcadia_ is of course much enhanced by, if it does not chiefly
+    depend upon, its abundant, varied, and sometimes charming
+    verse-insets. But, as a novel, it cannot count these.
+
+_The Unfortunate Traveller_ is of much less importance than the other
+two. It has obtained such reputation as it possesses, partly because of
+its invention or improvement of the fable of "Surrey and Geraldine";
+more, and more justly, because it does work up a certain amount of
+historical material--the wars of Henry VIII. in French Flanders--into
+something premonitory (with a little kindness on the part of the
+premonished) of the great and long missed historical novel; still more
+for something else. Nash, with his quick wit, seems to have been really
+the first to perceive the capabilities of that foreign travel and
+observation of manners which was becoming common, stripped of the
+special atmosphere of pilgrimage which had formerly enveloped it. Even
+here, he had had the "notion of the notion" supplied to him by Lyly in
+_Euphues_: and a tolerably skilful advocate would not have so very much
+difficulty in claiming the book as one of the tribe of Euphuist
+pamphlets. But Jack Wilton the "traveller" is a little more of a person
+than the pedagogic Euphues and the shadowy Philautus. At any rate he has
+a very strong anticipation of Defoe, whose "Cavalier" was not improbably
+suggested by him. But Nash has neither the patience of Defoe, nor that
+singular originality, which accompanies in the author of _Moll Flanders_
+a certain inability to make the most of it. _The Unfortunate Traveller_
+is a sort of compilation or congeries of current _fabliaux, novelle_,
+and _facetiæ_, with the introduction of famous actual persons of the
+time, from the crowned heads of the period, through Luther and Aretine
+downwards, to give bait and attraction. Sometimes it reminds one of a
+working up of the _Colloquies_ of Erasmus: three centuries earlier than
+_The Cloister and the Hearth_, with much less genius than Charles
+Reade's, and still more without his illegitimate advantage of actual
+novels behind him for nearly half the time. But it gives us "disjectæ
+membra _novellæ_" rather than a novel itself: and the oftener one reads
+it the more clear one is that the time for writing novels had not yet
+come. The materials are there; the desire to utilise--and even a faint
+vague idea of _how_ to utilise--them is there; but the art is almost
+completely absent. Even regarded as an early attempt in the "picaresque"
+manner, it is abortive and only half organised.
+
+The subject of the English "Heroic" Romance, in the wide sense, is one
+which has been very little dealt with. Dunlop neglected it rather
+surprisingly, and until Professor Raleigh's chapter on the subject there
+was little of a satisfactory kind to be found about it anywhere. It
+must, however, be admitted that the abstainers from it have been to some
+extent justified in their abstention. The subject is a curious one: and
+it has an important place in the history of the Novel, because it shows
+at once how strong was the _nisus_ towards prose fiction and how
+surprisingly difficult writers seem, nevertheless, to have found it to
+hit upon anything really good, much more anything really original in
+kind. For it is hardly too much to say that this century of attempt--we
+cannot call it a century of invention--from Ford to Congreve, does not
+add a single piece of any considerable merit to the roll of English
+books. As for a masterpiece, there is nothing in respect of which the
+use of such a word would not be purely ridiculous. And yet the attempts
+are interesting to the historian, and should not be uninteresting to the
+historical student of literature. One or two of them have a sort of
+shadowy name and place in literary history already.
+
+In tracing their progress and character, we must allow for two native
+models: and for three foreign sources, one ancient, two modern, of
+influence. _The Arcadia_ and _Euphues_, the former continuously, the
+latter by revival after an interval, exercised very great effect in the
+first half of the seventeenth century, during at least the earlier part
+of which the vogue of _Amadis_ and its successors, as Englished by
+Anthony Munday and others, likewise continued. The Greek romances also
+had much to do with the matter: for the Elizabethan translators had
+introduced them to the vulgar, and the seventeenth century paid a good
+deal of attention to Greek. Then, when that century itself was on its
+way, the pastoral romance of D'Urfé first, and the Calprenède-Scudéry
+productions in the second place, came to give a fresh impulse, and
+something of a new turn. The actual translations of French and Spanish
+romance, shorter and longer, good, bad, and indifferent, are of immense
+bulk and doubtless excited imitation: but we cannot possibly deal with
+them here. A bare list would fill a chapter. But some work of more or
+less (generally less) originality, in at least adaptation, calls for a
+little individual notice: and some general characterisation may be
+added.
+
+It may be desirable to prelude the story by a reminder to the reader
+that the _general_ characteristics of these various sources were
+"harlequin" in their diversity of apparent colour. The _Amadis_ romances
+and, indeed, all the later examples of that great kind, such as _Arthur
+of Little Britain_, which Berners translated, were distinguished on the
+one side by a curious convention of unsmooth running of the course of
+love, on the other sometimes by a much greater licence of morality than
+their predecessors, and always by a prodigality of the "conjuror's
+supernatural"--witches and giants and magic black and white. The Spanish
+"picaresque" story was pretty real but even less decent: and its French
+imitations (though not usually reaching the licence of the short tale,
+which clung to _fabliau_ ways in this respect) imitated it here also.
+The French heroic romance, on the other hand, observed the most
+scrupulous propriety in language and situation: but aggravated the
+Amadisian troubling of the course of true love, and complicated
+everything, very frequently if not invariably, by an insinuated "key"
+interest of identification of the ancient personages selected as heroes
+and heroines with modern personages of quality and distinction.
+
+Emanuel Ford (whom the British Museum catalogue insists on spelling
+Ford_e_ and of whom very little seems to be known) published _Parismus,
+Prince of Bohemia_, as early as 1598. In less than a hundred years
+(1696) it had reached its fourteenth edition, and it continued to be
+popular in abridged and chap-booked form[2] far into the eighteenth
+century. (It is sometimes called _Parismus and Parismenus_: the second
+part being, as very commonly in romances of the class after the _Amadis_
+pattern, occupied largely with the adventures of the son of the hero of
+the first.) On the whole, _Parismus_, though it has few pretensions to
+elegance of style, and though some delicate tastes have been shocked at
+certain licences of incident, description, and phrase in it, is quite
+the best of our bunch in this kind. It is, in general conception, pure
+_Amadis_ of the later and slightly degraded type. Laurana, the heroine
+(of whom a peculiarly hideous portrait adorns the black-letter editions
+side by side with Parismus himself, who is rather a "jolly gentleman")
+is won with much less difficulty and in much less time than Oriana--but
+separations and difficulties duly follow in "desolate isles" and the
+like. And though Parismus himself is less of an Amadis than Amadis, the
+"contrast of friends," founded by that hero and Galaor, is kept up by
+his association with a certain Pollipus--"a man of his hands" if ever
+there was one, for with them he literally wrings the neck of the
+enchantress Bellona, who has enticed him to embrace her. There is plenty
+of the book, as there always should be in its kind (between 400 and 500
+very closely printed quarto pages), and its bulk is composed of
+proportionately plentiful fighting and love-making and of a very much
+smaller proportion of what schoolboys irreverently call "jaw" than is
+usual in the class. If it were not for the black letter (which is trying
+to the eyes) I should not myself object to have no other reading than
+_Parismus_ for some holiday evenings, or even after pretty tough days of
+literary and professional work. _The Famous History of Montelion, the
+Knight of the Oracle_ (1633?) proclaims its Amadisian type even more
+clearly: but I have only read it in an abridged edition of the close of
+the century. I should imagine that _in extenso_ it was a good deal
+duller than _Parismus_. And of course the comparative praise which has
+been given to that book must be subject to the reminder that it is what
+it is--a romance of disorderly and what some people call childish
+adventure, and of the above-ticketed "conjuror's supernatural." If
+anybody cannot read _Amadis_ itself, he certainly will not read
+_Parismus_: and perhaps not everybody who can manage the original--perhaps
+not even everybody who can manage _Palmerin_--could put up with Ford's
+copy. I can take this Ford as I find him: but I am not sure that I would
+go much lower.
+
+    [2] It is pleasant to remember that one of the chief publishers
+    of these things in the late seventeenth century was _W.
+    Thackeray_.
+
+_Ornatus and Artesia_ (1607?), on the other hand--his second or third
+book--strikes me as owing more to Heliodorus than to Montalvo, or
+Lobeira, or whoever was the author of the great romance of the last
+chivalric type. There are more intricacies in it; the heroine plays a
+rather more important part; there is even something of a nearer approach
+to modern novel-ways in this production, which reappeared at "Grub
+Street near the Upper Pump" in the year 1650. Ornatus sees his mistress
+asleep and in a kind of deshabille, employs a noble go-between, Adellena
+(a queer spelling of "Adelina" which may be intentional), is rejected
+with apparent indignation, of course; writes elaborate letters in vain,
+but overhears Artesia soliloquising confession of her love for him and
+disguises himself as a girl, Silvia. Then the villain of the piece,
+Floretus, to obtain the love of this supposed Silvia, murders a person
+of distinction and plots to poison Artesia herself. Ornatus-Silvia is
+banished: and all sorts of adventures and disguises follow, entirely in
+the Greek style. The book is not very long, extending only to signature
+R in a very small quarto. Except that it is much less lively and
+considerably less "free," it reminds one rather in type of Kynaston's
+verse _Leoline and Sydanis_. In fact the verse and prose romances of the
+time are very closely connected: and Chamberlayne's _Pharonnida_--far
+the finest production of the English "heroic" school in prose, verse, or
+drama--was, when the fancy for abridging set in, condensed into a tiny
+prose _Eromena_. But _Ornatus and Artesia_, if more modern, more
+decent, and less extravagant than _Parismus_, is nothing like so
+interesting to read. It is indeed quite possible that there is, if not
+in it, in its popularity, a set-back to the _Arcadia_ itself, which had
+been directly followed in Lady Mary Wroth's _Urania_ (1621), and to
+which (by the time of the edition noted) Charles I.'s admiration--so
+indecently and ignobly referred to by Milton--had given a fresh
+attraction for all good anti-Puritans. That an anti-Puritan should be a
+romance-lover was almost a necessity.
+
+When the French "heroics" began to appear it was only natural that they
+should be translated, and scarcely less so that they should be imitated
+in England. For they were not far off the _Arcadia_ pattern: and they
+were a distinct and considerable effort to supply the appetite for
+fiction which has been dwelt upon. But except for this, and for
+fashion's sake, they did not contain much that would appeal to an
+English taste: and it is a little significant that one great reader of
+them who is known to us--Mrs. Pepys--was a Frenchwoman. Indeed, save for
+the very considerable "pastime" of a kind that they gave to a time, much
+of which required passing, it is difficult to understand their
+attraction for English readers. Their interminable talk never (till
+perhaps very recently) was a thing to suit our nation: and the "key"
+interest strikes us at any rate as of the most languid kind. But they
+_were_ imitated as well as translated: and the three most famous of the
+imitations are the work of men of mark in their different ways. These
+are the _Parthenissa_ (1654) of Roger Boyle, Lord Broghill and Earl of
+Orrery; the _Aretina_ (1661) of Sir George Mackenzie; and the _Pandion
+and Amphigeneia_ (1665) of "starch Johnny" Crowne.
+
+Boyle was a strong Francophile in literature, and his not inconsiderable
+influence on the development of the heroic _play_ showed it only less
+decidedly than his imitation of the Scudéry romance. I cannot say that I
+have read _Parthenissa_ through: and I can say that I do not intend to
+do so. It is enough to have read Sainte Madeleine of the Ink-Desert
+herself, without reading bad imitations of her. But I have read enough
+to know that _Parthenissa_ would never give me anything like the
+modified satisfaction that is given by _Parismus_: and after all, if a
+man will not take the trouble to finish writing his book (which Orrery
+never did) why should his readers take the trouble even to finish
+reading what he has written? The scene is Parthia, with alternation to
+Syria, and diversions and episodes elsewhere: and though there is a
+certain amount of fighting, the staple is quite decorous but exceedingly
+dull love-making, conducted partly in the endless dialogue (or rather
+automatic monologue) already referred to, and partly in letters more
+"handsome" even than Mr. Frank Churchill's, and probably a good deal
+more sincere in their conventional way, but pretty certainly less
+amusing. The original attraction indeed of this class of novel
+consisted, and, in so far as it still exists, may be said to consist, in
+noble sentiment, elegantly expressed. It deserved, and in a manner
+deserves, the commendatory part of Aramis's rebuke to Porthos for
+expressing impatience with the compliments between Athos and D'Artagnan
+at their first and hostile rencounter.[3] Otherwise there is not much to
+be said for it. It does not indeed deserve Johnson's often quoted remark
+as to Richardson (on whom when we come to him we shall have something
+more to say in connection with these heroic romances), if any one were
+to read _Parthenissa_ for the story he would not, unless he were a very
+impulsive person, "hang himself." He would simply, after a number of
+pages varying with the individual, cease to read it.
+
+    [3] "Quant à moi, je trouve les choses que ces messieurs se
+    disent fort bien dites et tout à fait dignes de deux
+    gentilhommes."
+
+The work of the great Lord Advocate who was traduced by Covenanting
+malice is in a certain sense more interesting: and that not merely
+because it is much shorter. _Aretina_ or _The Serious Romance_, opens
+with an "apology for Romances" generally, which goes far to justify
+Dryden's high opinion of Mackenzie as a critic. But it cannot be said to
+be much--it is a little--more interesting as a story than _Parthenissa_,
+and it is written in a most singular lingo--not displaying the racy
+quaintness of Mackenzie's elder contemporary and fellow-loyalist
+Urquhart, but a sort of Scotified and modernised Euphuism rather
+terrible to peruse. A library is "a bibliotheck richly tapestried with
+books." Somebody possesses, or is compared to "a cacochymick stomach,
+which transubstantiates the best of meats in its own malignant humour."
+And when the hero meets a pair of cannibal ruffians he confronts one and
+"pulling out a pistol, sends from its barrel two balls clothed in
+Death's livery, and by them opens a sallyport to his soul to fly out of
+that nasty prison." A certain zest may be given by these oddities, but
+it hardly lasts out more than 400 pages: and though the lives of Aretina
+and Philaretes are more simply and straightforwardly told than might be
+thought likely--though there are ingenious disguises of contemporary
+politics, and though Mackenzie was both a wise man and a wit--it is more
+certain than ever, when we close his book, that this is not the way of
+the world, nor the man to walk in that way.
+
+_Pandion and Amphigeneia_ is the inferior in importance of both these
+books. Crowne had perhaps rather more talent than it is usual to credit
+him with, but he does not show it here. I think Sir Walter Raleigh is
+quite right in regarding the book as more or less traced over the
+_Arcadia_: and it may be said to have all the defects of Sidney's
+scheme--which, it is fair once more to observe, we do not possess in any
+form definitely settled by its author--with none of the merits of his
+ornament, his execution, and his atmosphere of poetic fancy.
+
+The fact is that this heroic romance was foredoomed to inefficiency. It
+was not a genuine _kind_ at all: but a sort of patchwork of imitations
+of imitations--a mule which, unlike the natural animal, was itself bred,
+and bred in and in, of mules for generations back. It was true to no
+time, to no country, to no system of manners, life, or thought. Its
+oldest ancestor in one sense, though not in another--the Greek
+romance--was itself the growth of the latest and most artificial period
+of the literature to which it belonged. The pure mediæval romance of
+chivalry was another, but of this it had practically nothing left. The
+_Amadis_ class, the late Renaissance pastorals, the immediately
+preceding or accompanying French romances of the Scudéry type, were, in
+increasing degree, hybrid, artificial, and dead-alive. Impotence and
+sterility in every sense could but be its portion. Of the two great
+qualities of the novel--Variety and Life--it had never succeeded in
+attaining any considerable share, and it had now the merest show of
+variety and no life at all. There is hardly anything to be said in its
+favour, except that its vogue, as has been observed, testified to the
+craving for prose fiction, and kept at least a simulacrum of that
+fiction before the public. How far there may be any real, though
+metaphysical, connection between the great dramatic output of this
+seventeenth century in England and its small production in novel is a
+question not to be discussed here. But undoubtedly the fact of the
+contrast is a "document in the case," and one of the most important in
+its own direction; completing the testimony of the mediæval period in
+the other (that as romance dwindled, drama grew) and leading up to that
+of the eighteenth century when drama dwindled and the novel grew. The
+practice of Afra Behn in both, and the fact that Congreve, the greatest
+English dramatist of the close of the century, began with a novel and
+deserted the style for drama, are also interesting, and combine
+themselves very apparently with the considerations just glanced at. But
+Congreve and Afra must be postponed for a moment.
+
+The two last discussed books, with _Eromena_ and some others, are
+posterior to the Restoration in date, but somewhat earlier in type. The
+reign of Charles II., besides the "heroic" romances and Bunyan, and one
+most curious little production to be noticed presently, is properly
+represented in fiction by two writers, to whom, by those who like to
+make discoveries, considerable importance has sometimes been assigned in
+the history of the English Novel. These are Richard Head and Afra Behn,
+otherwise "the divine Astræa." It is, however, something of an injustice
+to class them together: for Afra was a woman of very great ability, with
+a suspicion of genius, while Head was at the very best a bookmaker of
+not quite the lowest order, though pretty near it. Of _The English
+Rogue_ (1665-1680), which earns him his place here, only the first part,
+and a certain section of the fourth, are even attributed to him by
+Francis Kirkman, the Curll of his generation, who published the thing at
+intervals and admittedly wrote parts of it himself. It is quite openly a
+picaresque novel: and imitated not merely from the Spanish originals but
+from Sorel's _Francion_, which had appeared in France some forty years
+before. Yet, if we compare this latter curious book with Head's we shall
+see how very far behind, even with forty years' advantage in time, was
+the country which, in the next century, was practically to create the
+modern novel. _Francion_ is not a work of genius: and it does not
+pretend to much more than the usual picaresque farrago of adventure,
+unmoral and sometimes rather cruel, but comic of a kind, strung together
+with little art in fable, and less in character. But the author is to
+some extent "cumbered about serving." He names his characters, tries to
+give them some vague personality, furnishes them with some roughly and
+sketchily painted scenery, and gives us not merely told tales, but
+occasionally something distantly resembling conversation. Head takes no
+trouble of this kind: and Kirkman does not seem to think that any such
+thing is required of him. Very few of the characters of _The English
+Rogue_ have so much as a name to their backs: they are "a prentice," "a
+master," "a mistress," "a servant," "a daughter," "a tapster," etc. They
+are invested with hardly the slightest individuality: the very hero is a
+scoundrel as characterless as he is nameless:[4] he is the mere thread
+which keeps the beads of the story together after a fashion. These beads
+themselves, moreover, are only the old anecdotes of "coney-catching,"
+over-reaching, and worse, which had separately filled a thousand
+_fabliaux, novelle_, "jests," and so forth: and which are now flung
+together in gross, chiefly by the excessively clumsy and unimaginative
+expedient of making the personages tell long strings of them as their
+own experience. When anything more is wanted, accounts of the manners of
+foreign countries, taken from "voyage-and-travel" books; of the tricks
+of particular trades (as here of piratical book-selling); of anything
+and everything that the writer's dull fancy can think of, are foisted
+in. The thing is in four volumes, and it seems that a fifth was intended
+as a close: but there is no particular reason why it should not have
+extended to forty or fifty, nay to four or five hundred. It could have
+had no real end, just as it has no real beginning or middle.
+
+    [4] He _has_ a name, Meriton Latroon, but it is practically
+    never used in the actual story.
+
+One other point deserves notice. The tone of the Spanish and French
+picaresque novel had never been high: but it is curiously degraded in
+this English example. Furetière honestly called his book _Roman
+Bourgeois_. Head might have called his, if he had written in French,
+_Roman Canaille_. Not merely the sentiments but the very outward
+trappings and accidents of gentility are banished from the book. Yet we
+do not get any real reality in compensation. Head is no Defoe: he can
+give us the company that Colonel Jack kept in his youth and Moll
+Flanders in her middle age: but he makes not the slightest attempt to
+give us Moll or Jack, or even Moll's or Jack's habit, environment,
+novel-furniture of any kind whatsoever. The receipt to make _The English
+Rogue_ is simply this: "Take from two to three dozen Elizabethan
+pamphlets of different kinds, but principally of the 'coney-catching'
+variety, and string them together by making a batch of shadowy
+personages tell them to each other when they are not acting in them."
+Except in a dim sort of idea that a novel should have some bulk and
+substance, it is difficult to see any advance whatever in this
+muck-heap--which the present writer, having had to read it a second time
+for the present purpose, most heartily hopes to be able to leave
+henceforth undisturbed on his shelves.
+
+Not in this fashion must the illustrious Afra be spoken of. It is true
+that--since it ceased to be the fashion merely to dismiss her with a
+"fie-fie!" which her prose work, at any rate, by no means merits--there
+has sometimes been a tendency rather to overdo praise of her, not merely
+in reference to her lyrics, some of which can never be praised too
+highly, but in reference to these novels. _Oroonoko_ or _The Royal
+Slave_, with its celebration of the virtues of a noble negro and his
+love for his Imoinda, and his brutal ill-treatment and death by torture
+at the hands of white murderers, undoubtedly took the fancy of the
+public. But to see at once Rousseau and Byron in it, Chateaubriand and
+Wilberforce and I know not what else, is rather in the "lunatic, lover,
+and poet" order of vision. Even Head and Kirkman, as we have observed,
+had perceived the advantage of foreign scenery and travel to vary their
+matter; Afra had herself been in Guiana; and, as she was of a very
+inflammable disposition, it is quite possible that some Indian Othello
+had caught her fresh imagination. On the other hand, there was the
+heroic romance, with all its sighs and flames, still the rage: and a
+much less nimble intellect than Afra's, with a much less cosmopolitan
+experience, might easily see the use of transposing it into a new key.
+Still, there is no doubt that _The Royal Slave_ and even its companions
+are far above the dull, dirty, and never more than half alive stuff of
+_The English Rogue. Oroonoko_ is a story, not a pamphlet or a mere
+"coney-catching" jest. To say that it wants either contraction or
+expansion; less "talk about it" and more actual conversation; a stronger
+projection of character and other things; is merely to say that it is an
+experiment in the infancy of the novel, not a following out of secrets
+already divulged. It certainly is the first prose story in English which
+can be ranked with things that already existed in foreign literatures.
+Nor is it the only one of the batch in which advance is seen. "The King
+of Bantam," for instance, is the account of an "extravagant," though not
+quite a fool, who is "coney-catched" in the old manner. But it opens in
+a fashion very different indeed from the old manner. "This money is
+certainly a most devilish thing! I'm sure the want of it had been like
+to ruin my dear Philibella!" and the succeeding adventures are pretty
+freshly told. The trick of headlong overture was a favourite with Afra.
+"The Adventure of the Black Lady" begins, "About the beginning of last
+June, as near as I can remember, Bellamira came to town from Hampshire."
+It is a trick of course: and here probably borrowed from the French: but
+the line which separates trick from artistic device is an exceedingly
+narrow and winding one. At any rate, this plunging into the middle of
+things wakes up the reader's attention, and does not permit him to doze.
+"The Lucky Mistake," on the other hand, opens with a little landscape,
+"The river Loire has on its delightful banks, etc." "The Fair Jilt," a
+Bandello-like story, begins with an exaltation of Love: and so on. Now
+these things, though they may seem matters of course to the mere modern
+reader, were not matters of course then. Afra very likely imitated; her
+works have never been critically edited; and have not served as field
+for much origin-hunting. But whether she followed others or not, she led
+her own division. All these things and others are signs of an awakened
+conscience--of a sense of the fact that fiction, to be literature, must
+be something more than the relation of a bare fact, tragic, comic, or
+neutral--that the novelist is a cook, and must prepare and serve his
+materials with a sauce as much his own as possible, of plot,
+arrangement, character-drawing, scenery, conversation, reflection, and
+what not. That conversation itself--the subtlest instrument of all and
+the most effective for constructing character--is so little developed,
+can only, I think, be accounted for by supposing Afra and others to be
+under the not unnatural mistake that conversation especially belonged to
+the drama, which was still the most popular form of literature, and in
+which she herself was a copious practitioner. But this mistake was not
+long to prevail: and it had no effect on that great contemporary of hers
+who would, it is to be feared, have used the harshest language
+respecting her, and to whom we now come.
+
+It is impossible to share, and not very easy even to understand, the
+scruples of those who would not admit John Bunyan to a place in the
+hierarchy and the pedigree of the English novel, or would at best grant
+him an outside position in relation to it. Their exquisite reasons, so
+far as one can discern them, appear to be (or to concern) the facts that
+_The Pilgrim's Progress_ and _The Holy War_ are religious, and that they
+are allegories.[5] It may be humbly suggested that by applying the
+double rule to verse we can exclude _Paradise Lost_ and the _Faerie
+Queene_ from the succession of English Poetry, whereby no doubt we
+shall be finely holden in understanding the same: while it is by no
+means certain that, if the exclusion of allegory be pushed home, we must
+not cancel _Don Quixote_ from the list of the world's novels. Even in
+prose, to speak plainly, the hesitation--unless it comes from the
+foolish dislike to things religious, as such, which has been the bigotry
+of the last generation or two--comes from the almost equally foolish
+determination to draw up arbitrary laws of literary kind. Discarding
+prejudice and punctilio, every one must surely see that, in diminishing
+measure, even _The Holy War_ is a novel, and that _The Pilgrim's
+Progress_ has every one of the four requisites--plot, character,
+description, and dialogue--while one of these requisites--character with
+its accessory manners--is further developed in the _History of Mr.
+Badman_ after a fashion for which we shall look vainly in any division
+of European literature (except drama) before it. This latter fact has
+indeed obtained a fair amount of recognition since Mr. Froude drew the
+attention of the general reader to it in his book on Bunyan, in the
+"English Men of Letters" series, five-and-twenty years ago: but it must
+have struck careful readers of the great tinker's minor works long
+before. Indeed there are very good internal reasons for thinking that no
+less a person than Thackeray must have known _Mr. Badman_. This
+wonderful little sketch, however--the related history of a man who is an
+utter rascal both in family and commercial relations, but preserves his
+reputation intact and does not even experience any deathbed
+repentance--is rather an unconscious study for a character in a novel--a
+sketch of a _bourgeois_ Barnes Newcome--than anything more. It has the
+old drawback of being narrated, not acted or spoken at first hand: and
+so, though it is in a sense Fielding at nearly his best, more than half
+a century before Fielding attempted _Joseph Andrews_, no more need be
+said of it. So, too, the religious element and the allegory _are_ too
+prominent in _The Holy War_--the novelist's desk is made too much of a
+pulpit in large parts of it. Other parts, concerning the inhabitants of
+Mansoul and their private affairs, are domestic novel-writing of nearly
+the pure kind: and if _The Pilgrim's Progress_ did not exist, it would
+be worth while to pick them out and discuss them. But, as it most
+fortunately does exist, this is not needful.
+
+    [5] The heroic kind had lent itself very easily and obviously to
+    allegory. Not very long before Bunyan English literature had
+    been enriched with a specimen of this double variety which for
+    Sir W. Raleigh "marks the lowest depth to which English romance
+    writing sank." I do not know that I could go quite so far as
+    this in regard to the book--_Bentivolio and Urania_ by Nathaniel
+    Ingelo. The first edition of this appeared in 1660: the second
+    (there seem to have been at least four) lies before me at this
+    moment dated 1669, or nine years before the _Progress_ itself.
+    You require a deep-sea-lead of uncommonly cunning construction
+    to sound, register, and compare the profundities of the bathos
+    in novels. The book has about 400 folio pages very closely
+    packed with type, besides an alphabetical index full of Hebrew
+    and Greek derivations of its names--"Gnothisauton," "Achamoth,"
+    "Ametameletus," "Dogmapernes," and so forth. Its principles are
+    inexorably virtuous; there is occasional action interspersed
+    among its innumerable discourses, and I think it not improbable
+    that if it were only possible to read it, it might do one some
+    good. But it would not be the good of the novel.
+
+The only fault with the novel-character of the greater book which might
+possibly be found by a critic who did not let the allegory bite him, and
+was not frightened by the religion, is that there is next to no love
+element in it, though there are wedding bells. Mercy is indeed quite
+nice enough for a heroine: but Bunyan might have bestowed her better
+than on a young gentleman so very young that he had not long before made
+himself (no doubt allegorically) ill with unripe and unwholesome fruit.
+But if he had done so, the suspicions of his brethren--_they_ were acute
+enough as it was not to mistake the character of the book, whatever
+modern critics may do--would have been even more unallayable. And, as it
+is, the "alluring countenance" does shed not a little grace upon the
+story, or at least upon the Second Part: while the intenser character of
+the First hardly requires this. Any other lack is, to the present
+writer, imperceptible. The romance interest of quest, adventure,
+achievement, is present to the fullest degree: and what is sometimes
+called the pure novel interest of character and conversation is present
+in a degree not lower. It must be accepted as a great blessing, even by
+those who regard Puritanism as an almost unmitigated curse, that its
+principles forbade Bunyan to think of choosing the profane and
+abominable stage-play as the form of his creation. We had had our fill
+of good plays, and were beginning to drink of that which was worse:
+while we had no good novels and wanted them. Of course the large amount
+of actual "Tig and Tirry" dialogue (as Dr. Johnson would say) is
+probably one of the things which have made precisians shy of accepting
+the _Progress_ for what it really is. But we must remember that this
+encroachment on the dramatic province was exactly what was wanted to
+remove the reproach of fiction. The inability to put actual conversation
+of a lively kind in the mouths of personages has been indicated as one
+of the great defects of the novel up to this time. Except Cervantes, it
+is difficult to think of any novelist who had shown himself able to
+supply the want. Bunyan can do it as few have done it even since his
+time. The famous dialogue of Christian and By-ends is only the best--if
+it is the best--of scores nearly or quite as good. The curious
+intellectual flaccidity of the present day seems to be "put off" by the
+"ticket" names; but no one who has the true literary sense cares for
+these one way or another, or is more disturbed by them than if they were
+Wilkins and Jones. Just as Coleridge observed that to enjoy some kinds
+of poetry you must suspend disbelief, so, with mere literary fashions,
+you must suspend disagreement. We should not call By-ends By-ends now:
+and whether we should do better or worse nobody, as Plato says, knows
+but the Deity. But the best of us would be hard put to it to make
+By-ends reveal his By-endishness more perfectly than he does by his
+conversation, and without any ticket-name at all.
+
+Not less remarkable, and only a little less new, is the vividness and
+sufficiency of the scene painting and setting. It has been said that
+the great novelists not only provide us with a world of friends more
+real and enjoyable than the actual folk we know, but also with a world
+for those friends to live in, more real and far more enjoyable than the
+world in which we ourselves sojourn. And this is well seen of Christian.
+The Slough of Despond and the terrible overhanging hill; the gateway and
+the Interpreter's House and the House Beautiful; the ups and downs of
+the road, and the arbours and the giants' dens: Beulah and the
+Delectable Mountains:--one knows them as one knows the country that one
+has walked over, and perhaps even better. There is no description for
+description's sake: yet nothing is wanting of the descriptive kind.
+
+Yet all these things are--as they should be--only subsidiary to the main
+interest of the Pilgrimage itself. Once more, one may fear that it is no
+good sign of the wits of the age that readers should be unable to
+discard familiarity with the argument of the story. It is the way in
+which that argument is worked out and illustrated that is the thing. I
+have never myself, since I became thoroughly acquainted with Lydgate's
+Englishing of Deguilevile's _Pilgrimage of the Soul of Man_, had any
+doubt that--in some way or other, direct or indirect, at tenth or
+twentieth hand perhaps--Bunyan was acquainted with it: but this is of no
+importance. He might undoubtedly have got all his materials straight out
+of the Bible. But his working of them up is all his own, and is
+wonderful. Here, to begin with, is the marvel not merely of a
+continuation which is not a falling off, but of a repetition of the same
+general scheme with different but closely connected personages, which is
+entirely free from monotony. One is so accustomed to the facts that
+perhaps it hardly strikes one at first how extraordinarily audacious the
+attempt is: nay, the very success of it may blind all but critics to
+the difficulty. It is no wonder that people tried further continuations
+and further complications: still less wonder that they utterly failed.
+Probably even Bunyan himself could not have "done it a third time." But
+he did it these twice with such vividness of figure and action; such
+completeness of fable; such sufficiency of behaviour and of speech as
+have scarcely ever been equalled. As ideal as Spenser, as real as Defoe:
+such is Bunyan. And he shows this realism and this idealism in a prose
+narrative, bringing the thoughts and actions and characters and speech
+of fictitious human beings before his readers--for their inspection
+perhaps; for their delight certainly. If this is not the being and the
+doing of a novelist this deponent very humbly declareth that he knoweth
+not what the being and the doing of a novelist are.
+
+We must now turn to two small but noteworthy attempts at the kind, which
+have been referred to above.
+
+In 1668 there appeared a very curious little book (entitled at great
+length after the manner of the times, but more shortly called _The Isle
+of Pines_), which is important in the literary ancestry of Defoe and
+Swift and not unimportant in itself. Its author was Henry Neville, of
+the Nevilles of Billingbeare, son of one Sir Henry and grandson of
+another, the grandfather having been of some mark in diplomacy and
+courtiership in late Elizabethan and early Jacobean times. The grandson
+had had a life of some stir earlier. Born in 1620, and educated at
+Merton and University Colleges, he had left Oxford without a degree, had
+taken the Parliamentary side, but as a rigid Republican and
+anti-Cromwellite; had been a member of the Rota, and after the
+Restoration had been arrested in 1663 for supposed treasonable
+practices, but escaped serious punishment. He lived quietly for more
+than thirty years longer and died in 1694. Besides _The Isle of Pines_
+he wrote satirical tracts (the _Parliament of Ladies_ being the best
+known), translated Machiavelli, and was evidently a man of parts,
+though, like his friend Harrington, something of a "crank." He seems
+also to have been, as some others of the extremer Puritans certainly
+were, pretty loose in his construction of moral laws.
+
+_The Isle_ is a very short book of thirty-one quarto pages: but there is
+a good deal in it, and it must have been very carefully written. A
+certain Cornelius van Sloetten writes, "supported by letters from
+Amsterdam," how a Dutch ship, driven far out of reckoning in the
+Southern Ocean, comes to a "fourth island, near Terra Australis
+Incognita," which is inhabited by white people, speaking English, but
+mostly naked. The headman is a certain William Pine, whose grandfather,
+George, has left a written account of the origin of the community. This
+relates how George was wrecked on the island, the ship perishing "with
+man and mouse," except himself, his master's daughter, two white
+maidservants, and a negro girl. The island proves pleasant and
+habitable: and George, to prevent unfairness and ill-feeling, unites
+himself to all his female companions, the quintet living in perfect
+harmony. Thirty-seven children result: and these at first necessarily
+intermarry; but after this first generation, a rule is made that
+brothers and sisters may not unite--the descendants of the four original
+wives forming clans who may marry into the others but not into their
+own. A wider legal code of fair stringency is arranged, with the
+sanction of capital and other punishments: and things go so well that
+the patriarch musters a tribe of 565 persons by the time he is sixty,
+and of 1789 twenty years later, when he departs this life, piously
+praying God "to multiply them and send them the true report of the
+gospel." The multiplication has duly taken place, and there is something
+like a civil war while the Dutch are there; but they interfere with
+fire-arms to restore order, and leave all well. The writer's cunning is
+shown by the fact that he does not stop abruptly: but finishes off with
+some subsequent and quite _verisimilar_ experiences of the Dutch ship.
+The book does not appear to have had a very great popularity in England,
+though it was reprinted and abridged at least once, pretty shortly. But
+it was very popular abroad, was translated into three or four languages,
+and was apparently taken as a genuine account.
+
+Neville's art is in fact not inconsiderable. Earlier voyages and travels
+of course supplied him with his technical and geographical details: and
+the codification of the Isle of Pines suggests the Bacon-Harrington
+tradition. But he has got the vividness and realism which have usually
+been lacking before: and though some of his details are pretty "free" it
+is by no means only through such things that these qualities are
+secured. To Cyrano de Bergerac he bears no likeness at all. In fact,
+though Neville _was_ a satirist, satire does not seem to have been in
+any way his object here. Whatever that object may have been, he has
+certainly struck, by accident or not, on the secret of producing an
+interesting account by ingeniously multiplied and adjusted detail.
+Moreover, as there is no conversation, the book stands--accidentally
+this time almost without doubt--at the opposite pole from the
+talk-deluged romances of the Scudéry type. Whether Defoe actually knew
+it or not matters exceedingly little: that something of his method, and
+in a manner the subject of his first and most famous novel, are here
+before him, seems quite indisputable. Perhaps not the least piquant
+thing to do with _The Isle of Pines_ is to contrast it with _Oceana_. Of
+course the contrast is unfair: nearly all contrasts are. But there is
+actually, as has been pointed out, a slight contact between the work of
+the two friends: and their complete difference in every other respect
+makes this more curiously apparent. And another odd thing is that
+Neville--"Rota"-republican as he was--should have adopted patriarchal
+(one can hardly say _legitimate_) government here.
+
+Congreve's _Incognita_ (1692), the last seventeenth-century novel that
+requires special notice, belongs much more to the class of Afra's tales
+than to that of the heroic romances. It is a short story of seventy-five
+small pages only and of the Italian-Spanish imbroglio type. The friends
+Aurelian and Hippolito take each other's names for certain purposes, and
+their beloveds, "Incognita," Juliana and Leonora, are perplexed
+accordingly: while family feuds, letter assignations at a convent where
+the name of the convent unluckily happens to be torn off, and other
+stock ingredients of the kind are freely used. Most writers have either
+said nothing about the book or have given it scanty praise; with the
+exception, Sir Walter Raleigh, I confess that I cannot here agree. Being
+Congreve's it could not be quite without flashes of wit, but they do not
+appear to me to be either very numerous or very brilliant; the plot,
+such as it is, is a plot of drama rather than of fiction; and there is
+no character that I can see. It is in fact only one of a vast multitude
+of similar stories, not merely in the two languages just referred to,
+but in French, which were but to show that the time of the novel was not
+yet come, even when the time of this century was all but over.
+
+It was quite over, and the first two decades of the next were all but
+over too, before the way was, to any important extent, further explored:
+but important assistance in the exploration was given at the beginning
+of the second of these decades. The history of the question of the
+relations of the Addison-Steele periodical, and especially of the
+"Coverley Papers," to the novel is both instructive and amusing to those
+who have come to appreciate the humours of literary things. It would
+probably have shocked the more orthodox admirers of the _Spectator_,
+during the eighteenth century, to have any such connection or relation
+so much as hinted. But when people began to consider literature and
+literary history in a better arranged perspective, the fact that there
+_is_ such a connection or relation must have been soon perceived. It has
+become comparatively a commonplace: and now the third stage--that in
+which people become uneasy and suspicious of the commonplace and obvious
+and try to turn it topsy-turvy--has begun.
+
+It is of course undeniable that the "Coverley Papers," as they stand,
+are not a novel, even on the loosest conception and construction of the
+term. There is no plot; some of what should be the most important
+characters are merely heard of, not seen; and the various scenes have no
+sort of connection, except that the same persons figure in them. But
+these undeniable facts do not interfere with two other facts, equally
+undeniable and much more important. The first is that the papers could
+be turned into a novel with hardly any important alteration, and with
+only _quantum suff._ of addition and completion. "The widow" is there in
+the background ready to be produced and made a heroine; many of the
+incidents are told novel-fashion already, and more could be translated
+into that fashion by the veriest tyro at novel writing who has written
+at any time during the last one hundred and fifty years. The personages
+of the club have merely to step down and out; the scenes to be
+connected, amplified, and multiplied; the conversation to undergo the
+same process.
+
+But the second point is of greater importance still. Not only could the
+"Coverley Papers," be made into a novel without the slightest
+difficulty, and by a process much of which would be simple enlargement
+of material; but they already possess, in a fashion which requires no
+alteration at all, many of the features of the novel, far more
+successfully hit off than had ever been done before in the novel itself.
+This is true of the dialogue to no small extent, and of the description
+even more: but it is truest of all of the characters. Except Bunyan,
+nobody in prose fiction had ever made personages so thoroughly spirited
+as Sir Roger and even the two Wills, Honeycomb and Wimble; while here
+there was "no allaying Thames" in the shape of allegory, little
+moralising and that of a kind quite human, a plentiful setting of
+ordinary and familiar scene, and a more plentiful and exact adjustment
+of ordinary and familiar manners. It is true that Addison, partly owing
+to the undercurrent of his satirical humour (Steele succeeds rather
+better here), has not attained the astonishing verisimilitude of the
+writer to whom we shall come next and last but one in this chapter. His
+characters are perfectly natural, but we know, all the while, that they
+are works of art. But in most of the points just mentioned he has
+exactly the tricks of the novelist's art that Defoe has not. The smaller
+tales in the _Tatler_ and its followers undoubtedly did something to
+remove the reproach from prose fiction, and more to sharpen the appetite
+for it. But they were nothing new: the short tale being of unknown
+antiquity. The "Coverley Papers" _were_ new and did much more. This new
+kind of treatment may not have suggested beforehand (it is not certain
+that it did not) the extensive novel of character and manners--the play
+lengthened, bodied more strongly, and turned into narrative form. But
+the process was _there_; the instances of it were highly reputed and
+widely known. It must in almost any case have gone hard but a further
+step still would be taken. It was actually taken by the person who had
+suggested the periodical essay itself.
+
+Much has been written about Defoe, but, curiously enough, the least part
+of what has been written about him has concerned the very part of him
+that is read--his novels. Nay, occasional eccentrics, and not only
+these, have shown a sort of disposition to belittle him as a novelist:
+indeed the stock description of Richardson as the Father of the English
+Novel almost pointedly rules Defoe out. Yet further, the most adequate
+and intelligent appreciation of his novel work itself has too often been
+mainly confined to what is no doubt a subject of exceeding interest--the
+special means by which he secures the attention, and procures the
+delight, of his readers. We shall have to deal with this too. But the
+point to which it is wished to draw special attention now is different,
+and we may reach it best by the ordinary "statement of case."
+
+Almost everybody who knows any literary history, knows that the book by
+which, after thirty or forty years of restless publication in all sorts
+of prose and rhyme, Defoe niched himself immovably in English
+literature, was a new departure by almost an old man. He was all but, if
+not quite, sixty when _Robinson Crusoe_ appeared: and a very few
+following years saw the appearance of his pretty voluminous "minor"
+novels. The subject of the first every one knows without limitation: it
+is not so certain, though vigorous efforts have been made to popularise
+the others, that even their subjects are clearly known to many people.
+_Captain Singleton_ (1720), _Moll Flanders_, and _Colonel Jack_ (both
+1722) are picaresque romances with tolerably sordid heroes and heroines,
+but with the style entirely rejuvenated by Defoe's secret. _Roxana_
+(1724), a very puzzling book which is perhaps not entirely his writing,
+is of the same general class: the _Voyage round the World_ (1725), the
+least interesting, but not _un_interesting, is exactly what its title
+imports,--in other words, the "stuffing" of the _Robinson_ pie without
+the game. The _Memoirs of a Cavalier_ (1720) approach the historical
+novel (or at least the similar "stuffing" of that) and have raised
+curious and probably insoluble questions as to whether they are
+inventions at all--questions intimately connected with that general one
+referred to above. One or two minor things are sometimes added to the
+list: but they require no special notice. The seven books just mentioned
+are Defoe's contribution to the English novel. Let us consider the
+quality of this contribution first--and then the means used to attain
+it.
+
+Their novel-quality (which, as has been hinted, has not been claimed so
+loudly or so steadily as it should have been for Defoe) is the quality
+of Story-Interest--and this, one dares say, he not only infused for the
+first time in full dose, but practically introduced into the English
+novel, putting the best of the old mediæval romances aside and also
+putting aside _The Pilgrim's Progress_, which is not likely to have been
+without influence on himself. It may be said, "Oh! but the _Amadis_
+romances, and the Elizabethan novels, and the 'heroics' must have
+interested or they would not have been read." This looks plausible, but
+is a mistake. Few people who have not studied the history of criticism
+know the respectable reluctance to be _pleased_ with literature which
+distinguished mankind till very recent times; and which in fact kept the
+novel back or was itself maintained by the absence of the novel. In life
+people pleased themselves irregularly enough: in literature they could
+not get out of the idea that they ought to be instructed, that it was
+enough to be instructed, and that it was discreditable to ask for more.
+Even the poet was allowed to delight grudgingly and at his peril; was
+suspected because he did delight, and had to pay a sort of heavy
+licence-duty for it, in the shape of concomitant instruction to others
+and good behaviour in himself. In fact he was a publican who was bound
+to serve stodgy food as well as exhilarating drink.
+
+It is impossible to doubt that people were similarly affected to the
+fiction of the Renaissance and the seventeenth century, at least in its
+longer examples--for the smaller _novelle_ could amuse in their own way
+sometimes, though they could hardly absorb. It is equally impossible to
+imagine any one being "enthralled" by _Euphues_. Admiration, of a kind,
+must have been the only passion excited by it. In the _Arcadia_ there is
+a certain charm, but it belongs to the inset verse--to the almost
+Spenserian _visionariness_ of parts--to the gracious lulling atmosphere
+of the whole. If it had been published in three volumes, one cannot
+imagine the most enthusiastic novel-reader knocking up a friend late at
+night for volume two or volume three. I have said that I can read
+_Parismus_ for pastime: but the pastime that it provides is certainly
+not over-stimulating, and the mild stimulant becomes unsweetened and
+unlemoned barley-water in books of the _Parthenissa_ class. If with them
+conversing one forgets all time, it must be by the influence of the
+kind go-between Sleep. We know, of course, that their contemporaries did
+not go to sleep over them: but it was because they felt that they were
+being done good to--that they were in the height of polite society--that
+their manners were being softened and not allowed to be gross. The time,
+in its blunt way, was fond of contrasting the attractions of a mistress
+on one side and "a friend and a bottle" on the other. That a novel could
+enter into competition with either or both, as an interesting and even
+exciting means of passing the time, would have entered very few heads at
+all and have been contemptuously dismissed from most of those that it
+did enter.
+
+Addison and Steele in the "Coverley Papers" had shown the way to
+construct this new spell: Defoe actually constructed it. It may be that
+some may question whether the word "exciting" applies exactly to his
+stories. But this is logomachy: and in fact a well-willing reader _can_
+get very fairly excited while the Cavalier is escaping after Marston
+Moor; while it is doubtful whether the savages have really come and what
+will be the event; while it is again doubtful whether Moll is caught or
+not; or what has become of those gains of the boy Jack, which can hardly
+be called ill-gotten because there is such a perfect unconsciousness of
+ill on the part of the getter. At any rate, if such a reader cannot feel
+excitement here, he would utterly stagnate in any previous novel.
+
+In presence of this superior--this emphatically and doubly
+"novel"--interest, all other things become comparatively unimportant.
+The relations of _Robinson Crusoe_ to Selkirk's experiences and to one
+or two other books (especially the already mentioned _Isle of Pines_)
+may not unfitly employ the literary historian who chooses to occupy
+himself with them. The allegory which Defoe alleges in it, and which
+some biographers have endeavoured to work out, cannot, I suppose, be
+absolutely pooh-poohed, but presents no attractions whatever to the
+present writer. Whether the _Cavalier_ is pure fiction, or partly
+embroidered fact, _is_ a somewhat interesting question, if only because
+it seems to be impossible to find out the answer: and the same may be
+said of the not impossible (indeed almost more than probable) Portuguese
+maps and documents at the back of _Captain Singleton_. To disembroil the
+chronological muddle of _Roxana_, and follow out the tangles of the
+hide-and-seek of that most unpleasant "lady of pleasure" and her
+daughter, may suit some. But, apart from all these things, there abides
+the fact that you can _read_ the books--read them again and again--enjoy
+them most keenly at first and hardly less keenly afterwards, however
+often you repeat the reading.
+
+As has been partly said, the means by which this effect is achieved, and
+also the means by which it is not, are almost equally remarkable. The
+Four Elements of the novel are sometimes, and not incorrectly, said to
+be Plot, Character, Description, and Dialogue--Style, which some would
+make a fifth, being rather a characteristic in another order of
+division. It is curious that Defoe is rebellious or evasive under any
+analysis of this kind. His plots are of the "strong" order--the events
+succeed each other and are fairly connected, but do not compose a
+history so much as a chronicle. In character, despite his intense
+verisimilitude, he is not very individual. Robinson himself, Moll, Jack,
+William the Quaker in _Singleton_, even Roxana the cold-blooded and
+covetous courtesan, cannot be said not to be real--they and almost every
+one of the minorities are an immense advance on the colourless and
+bloodless ticketed puppets of the Middle Fiction. But they still want
+_something_--the snap of the fingers of the artist. Moll is perhaps the
+most real of all of them and yet one has no flash-sights of her
+being--never sees her standing out against soft blue sky or
+thunder-cloud as one sees the great characters of fiction; never hears
+her steps winding and recognises her gesture as one does theirs.
+
+So again his description is sufficient: and the enumerative
+particularity of it is even great part of the _secret de Polichinelle_
+to which we are coming. But it is far from elaborate in any other way
+and has hardly the least decoration or poetical quality. Well as we know
+Crusoe's Island the actual scenery of it is not half so much impressed
+as that even, for instance, of Masterman Ready's--it is either of the
+human figures--Crusoe's own grotesque bedizenment, the savages, Friday,
+the Spaniards, Will Atkins--or of the works of man--the stockade, the
+boat, and the rest--that we think. A little play is made with Jack's
+glass-house squalor and Roxana's magnificence _de mauvais lieu_, but not
+much: the gold-dust and deserts of _Singleton_ are a necessary part of
+the "business," but nothing more. _Moll Flanders_--in some respects the
+greatest of all his books--has the bareness of an Elizabethan stage in
+scenery and properties--it is much if Greenfield spares us a table or a
+bed to furnish it.
+
+Of Dialogue Defoe is specially fond--even making his personages
+soliloquise in this after a fashion--and it plays a very important part
+in "the secret:" yet it can hardly be classed very high _as_ dialogue.
+And this is at least partly due to the strange _drab_ shapelessness of
+his style, which never takes on any brilliant colour, or quaint
+individual form.
+
+Yet it is very questionable whether any other style would have suited
+the method so well, or would even have suited it at all. For this
+method--to leave off hinting at it and playing round it--is one of
+almost endless accumulation of individually trivial incident, detail,
+and sometimes observation, the combined effect of which is to produce an
+insensible but undoubting acceptance, on the reader's part, of the facts
+presented to him. The process has been more than once analysed in that
+curious and convenient miniature example of it, the "Mrs. Veal"
+_supercherie_: but you may open the novels proper almost anywhere and
+discover it in full operation. Like most great processes of art, this is
+an adoption and perfecting of habits usual with the most inartistic
+people--a turning to good account of the interminably circumstantial
+superfluities of the common gossip and newsmonger. Very often Defoe
+actually does not go beyond this--just as in _The Shortest Way with the
+Dissenters_ he had simply reproduced the actual thoughts and wishes of
+those who disliked dissent. But sometimes he got the better of this
+also, as in the elaborate building up of Robinson's surroundings and not
+a little in the other books. And there the effect is not only
+verisimilar but wonderful in its verisimilitude. At any rate, in him,
+and for English prose and secular fiction, we have first that mysterious
+charm of the _real that is not real_--of the "human creation"--which
+constitutes the appeal of the novel. In some of the books there is
+hardly any appeal of any other sort. Moll Flanders, though not unkindly,
+and "improper" rather from the force of circumstances than from any
+specially vicious inclination, is certainly not a person for whom one
+has much liking. Colonel Jack, after his youthful experiences in
+pocket-picking, is rather a nonentity, something of a coward, a fellow
+of no particular wits, parts, or definite qualities of any kind. Singleton
+is a rascal who "plays Charlemagne," as the French gambling term has it,
+and endows his repentance with the profits of his sin. As for Roxana there
+are few more repulsive heroines in fiction--while the Cavalier and the
+chief figure in the _Voyage Round the World_ are simply threads on
+which their respective adventures are strung. Even Robinson himself enlists
+no particular sympathy except of the "put-yourself-in-his-place" kind. Yet
+these sorry or negative personages, of whom, in the actual creation of God,
+we should be content to know nothing except from paragraphs in the
+newspaper (and generally in the police-reports thereof), content us
+perfectly well with their company through hundreds and thousands of
+solid pages, and leave us perfectly ready to enjoy it again after
+a reasonable interval.
+
+This, as has been said, is the mystery of fiction--a mystery partly set
+a-working in the mediæval romance, then mostly lost, and now
+recovered--in his own way and according to his own capacity--by Defoe.
+It was to escape others for a little longer and then to be yet again
+rediscovered by the great quartette of the mid-eighteenth century--to
+slip in and out of hands during the later part of that century, and then
+to be all but finally established, in patterns for everlasting
+pursuance, by Miss Austen and by Scott. But Defoe is really (unless we
+put Bunyan before him) the first of the magicians--not the greatest by
+any means, but great and almost alone in the peculiar talent of making
+uninteresting things interesting--not by burlesquing them or satirising
+them; not by suffusing or inflaming them with passion; not by giving
+them the amber of style; but by serving them "simple of themselves" as
+though they actually existed.
+
+The position of Defoe in novel history is so great that there is a
+temptation to end this chapter with him. But to do so would cause an
+inconvenience greater than any resulting advantages. For the greatest of
+Defoe's contemporaries in English letters also comes into our division,
+and comes best here. One cannot conveniently rank Swift with the great
+quartette of the next chapter, because he is a novelist "by interim" and
+incompletely: to rank him among the minor and later novelists of the
+eighteenth century would be as to the first part of the classification
+absurd and as to the last false. And he comes, not merely in time,
+pretty close to Defoe, incommensurable as is the genius of the two. It
+has even been thought (plausibly enough, though the matter is of no
+great importance) that the form of _Gulliver_ may have been to some
+extent determined by _Robinson Crusoe_ and Defoe's other novels of
+travel. And there is a subtler reason for taking the pair together and
+both close to Addison and Steele.
+
+Swift had shown the general set towards prose fiction, and his own bent
+in the same direction, long before Defoe's novel-period and as early as
+the _Tale of a Tub_ and the _Battle of the Books_ (_published_ 1704 but
+certainly earlier in part). The easy flow of the narrative, and the
+vivid dialogue of the Spider and the Bee in the latter, rank high among
+those premonitions of novel with which, in this place, we should be
+specially busied. In the former Peter, Martin, and Jack want but a
+little more of the alchemist's furnace to accomplish their projection
+into real characters, and not merely allegorical figure-heads. But, of
+course, in both books, the satiric purpose dominates too much to allow
+them to be really ranked among novels, even if they had taken the
+trouble to clothe themselves with more of the novel-garb.
+
+With _Gulliver_ it is different. It is a commonplace on its subject
+(but like many other commonplaces a thing ill to forget or ignore) that
+natural and unsophisticated children always _do_, and that almost
+anybody who has a certain power of turning blind eyes when and where he
+chooses _can_, read it simply as a story of adventure and enjoy it
+hugely. It would be a most preternatural child or a most singularly
+constituted adult who could read _Utopia_ or _Oceana_, or even Cyrano's
+_Voyages_, "for the story" and enjoy them hugely. This means that Swift
+had either learnt from Defoe or--and considering those earlier
+productions of his own much more probably--had independently developed
+the knack of _absorbing_ the reader--the knack of telling a story. But
+of course there is in one sense much more, and in another much less,
+than a story in _Gulliver_: and the finest things in it are independent
+of story, though (and this once more comes in for our present purpose)
+they are quite capable of adaptation to story-purposes, and have been so
+adapted ever since by the greatest masters of the art. These are strokes
+of satire, turns of phrase, little illuminations of character, and
+seasonings of description. But the great point of _Gulliver_ is that,
+like Defoe's work, though in not quite the same way, it is
+_interesting_--that it takes hold of its reader and gives him its
+"peculiar pleasure." When a work of art does this, it is pretty near
+perfection.
+
+There is, however, another book of Swift's which, though perhaps seldom
+mentioned or even thought of in connection with the novel, is of real
+importance in that connection, and comes specially in with our present
+main consideration--the way in which the several parts of the completed
+novel were being, as it were, separately got ready and set apart for the
+use of the accomplished novelist. This is the very curious and
+agreeable piece called _Polite Conversation_ (1738), on which, though it
+was not printed till late in his life and close on _Pamela_ itself,
+there is good reason for thinking that he had been for many years
+engaged. The importance of dialogue in the novel has been often
+mentioned and will scarcely be contested: while frequent occasion has
+been taken to point out that it had hitherto been very ill-achieved.
+Swift's "conversation" though designedly _underlined_, as it were, to
+show up current follies and extravagances of phrase and of fashion
+generally, is yet pretty certainly in the main the real average
+conversation of the society of his time, which he knew well and
+thoroughly. Further, there is a distinct, though it may be almost
+impalpable, difference between it and the conversation of the stage,
+though it is naturally connected therewith. Non-poetical stage dialogue
+in capable hands is either deliberate talking for display of "wit" like
+that of Congreve, or is conditioned and directed by the necessities of
+action and character. Of course, novel conversation may diverge in the
+first direction, and cannot properly neglect the second altogether. But,
+as there is room for very much more of it, it may and should allow
+itself a considerably wider range and imitate, on proper occasions, the
+desultory gossip and small talk of people who live on the "boards" of a
+room-floor and not of a stage.
+
+This is just what Swift's does, and just what there is very little of in
+Defoe; almost necessarily less in Addison and his group because of their
+essay form; and hardly anything elsewhere and earlier. Just as the
+Coverley Papers could, by one process and no difficult one, have been
+thrown into a novel; so by another, a not much more difficult and a much
+less complicated one, could the _Polite Conversation_ be thrown into
+part of a novel--while in each case the incomplete and unintentional
+draft itself supplies patterns for the complete work in new kind such as
+had never been given before. Indeed the _Conversation_ may almost be
+said to _be_ part of a novel--and no small part--as it stands, and of
+such a novel as had never been written before.
+
+But there was something still further all but absolutely necessary to
+the novel, though not necessary to it alone, which Defoe, Addison, and
+Swift, each in his several way, worked mightily to supply: and that was
+a flexible business-like "workaday" prose style. Not merely so long as
+men aimed at the eccentric and contorted styles of _Euphues_ and the
+_Arcadia_, but so long as the old splendid and gorgeous, but cumbrous
+and complicated pre-Restoration style lasted, romances were possible,
+but novels were not. You might indeed pick out of Shakespeare--especially
+from such parts as those of Beatrice, Rosalind, and some of the fools--a
+capital novel-style: but then you can pick almost anything out of
+Shakespeare. Elsewhere the constant presence either of semi-poetic
+phraseology or of some kind of "lingo" was almost fatal. You want what
+Sprat calls a more "natural way of speaking" (though not necessarily a
+"naked" one) for novel purposes--a certain absence of ceremony and parade
+of phrase: though the presence of slang and some other things, the rebuking
+of which was partly Swift's object in the _Conversation_, is _not_
+fatal, and so he, in a manner, blessed and prescribed what he meant to ban.
+
+Thus, by the early years of the reign of George II., or a little later,
+we find, on the one side, an evident, and variously though
+inarticulately proclaimed, desire for novels; on the other, the
+accumulation, in haphazard and desultory way, of almost all the methods,
+the processes, the "plant," necessary to turn novels out; but hardly
+anything except the considered work of Bunyan, Defoe, and Swift which
+really deserves the name of novel. A similar process had been going on
+in France; and, in the different work of Le Sage and Marivaux, had
+actually produced work in the kind more advanced than anything in
+English. But the tables were soon to be turned: and during the rest of
+the century the English Novel was at last to assert itself as a
+distinct, an increasingly popular, and a widely cultivated kind. That
+this was due to the work of the four great novelists who fill its
+central third and will fill our next chapter cannot perhaps be said:
+that their work was the first great desertion of it may be said safely.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE FOUR WHEELS OF THE NOVEL WAIN
+
+
+It does not enter into the plan, because it would be entirely
+inconsistent with the scale, of the present book to give details of the
+lives of the novelists, except when they have something special to do
+with the subject, or when (as in the case of a few minorities who happen
+to be of some importance) even well-informed readers are likely to be
+quite ignorant about them. Accounts, in all degrees of scale and
+competence, of the lives of Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne
+abound. It is sufficient--but in the special circumstances at this point
+perhaps necessary--here to sum the facts very briefly in so far as they
+bear on the main issue. Richardson (1689-1761), not merely the first to
+write, but the eldest by much more than his priority in writing, was the
+son of a Derbyshire tradesman, was educated for some time at
+Charterhouse, but apprenticed early to a printer--which trade he pursued
+with diligence and profit for the rest of his life in London and its
+immediate neighbourhood. After his literary success, he gathered round
+him a circle of ladies and gentlemen interested in literature: but he
+never had any first-hand acquaintance with general society of the
+"gentle" kind, much less with that of the upper classes. Fielding
+(1707-1754), on the contrary, was a member (though only as the son of a
+younger son of a younger son) of a family of great antiquity and
+distinction, which held an earldom in England and another in Ireland,
+and was connected as well as it was derived, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu,
+for instance, being the novelist's cousin. He was educated at Eton and
+Leyden: but his branch of the family being decidedly impecunious, was
+thrown very much on his own resources. These were mainly drawn from
+literature, first as a playwright then as a novelist, journalism and
+miscellanies coming in. But he was called to the Bar: and though he
+probably did not make much money there, he obtained the poorly paid and
+hard-worked but rather important position of "Bow Street Magistrate,"
+which meant that he was head, directly of the London police such as it
+was, and indirectly of that of the whole kingdom. His temper was in some
+ways as aristocratic as his birth: but though Horace Walpole's accounts
+of his fancy for low company are obviously exaggerated, there is no
+doubt that he was a good deal of what has since been called a
+"Bohemian." His experience of variety in scene was much wider than
+Richardson's, although after he came home from Leyden (where he went to
+study law) it was chiefly confined to London and the south of England
+(especially Bath, Dorsetshire, where he lived for a time, and the
+Western Circuit), till his last voyage, in hopeless quest of health, to
+Lisbon, where he died. His knowledge of literature, and even what may be
+called his scholarship, were considerable, and did credit to the public
+school education of those days.
+
+Smollett (1721-1771) differed from his two predecessors in being a
+Scotsman: but in family was very much nearer to Fielding than to
+Richardson, being the grandson of a judge who was a Commissioner of the
+Union, and a gentleman of birth and property--which last would, had he
+lived long enough, have come to Smollett himself. But he suffered in his
+youth from some indistinctly known family jars, was apprenticed to a
+Glasgow surgeon, and escaping thence to London with a tragedy in his
+pocket, was in undoubted difficulties till (and after) he obtained the
+post of surgeon's mate on board a man-of-war, and took part in the
+Carthagena expedition. After coming home he made at least some attempts
+to practise: but was once more drawn off to literature, though
+fortunately not to tragedy. For the rest of his life he was a
+hard-worked but by no means ill-paid journalist, novelist, and
+miscellanist, making as much as £2000 by his _History of England_, not
+ill-written, though now never read. Like Fielding (though, unlike him,
+more than once) he went abroad in search of health and died in the quest
+at Leghorn. Smollett was not ignorant, but he seems to have known modern
+languages better than ancient: though there is doubt about his direct
+share in the translations to which he gave his name. Moreover he had
+some though no great skill in verse.
+
+Lastly Sterne (1713-1768), though hardly, as it is the custom to call
+him, "an Irishman," yet vindicated the claims of the third constituent
+of the United Kingdom by being born in Ireland, from which country his
+mother came. But the Sternes were pure English, of a gentle family which
+had migrated from East Anglia through Nottingham to Yorkshire, and was
+much connected with Cambridge. Thither Laurence, the novelist, after a
+very roving childhood (his father was a soldier), and a rather irregular
+education, duly went: and, receiving preferment in the Church from his
+Yorkshire relations, lived for more than twenty years in that county
+without a history, till he took the literary world--hardly by storm, but
+by a sort of fantastic capful of wind--with _Tristram Shandy_ in 1760.
+Seven or eight years of fame, some profit, not hard work (for his books
+shrink into no great solid bulk), and constant travelling, ended by a
+sudden death at his Bond Street lodgings, after a long course of
+ill-health very carelessly attended to.
+
+One or two more traits are relevant. All the four were married, and
+married pretty early; two of them married twice. Richardson's first wife
+was, in orthodox fashion, his master's daughter: of his second little is
+known. Fielding's first (he had made a vain attempt earlier to abduct an
+heiress who was a relation) was, by universal consent, the model both of
+Sophia and Amelia, almost as charming as either, and as amiable; his
+second was her maid. Of Mrs. Smollett, who was a Miss Lascelles and a
+West Indian heiress in a small way, we know very little--the habit of
+identifying her with the "Narcissa" of _Roderick Random_ is natural,
+inconclusive, but not ridiculous. Sterne's matrimonial relations are the
+most famous of all: and though posterity has, with its usual charity,
+constructed a legend for the pair which is probably much worse than the
+reality, that reality is more than a little awkward. Mrs. Sterne was a
+Miss Lumley, of a good Yorkshire family, some, though small, fortune,
+and more friends who exerted themselves for her husband. By inexcusable
+levity, ignorance, misjudgment, or heartless cupidity their daughter
+Lydia published, after the death of both, letters some of which contain
+courtship of the most lackadaisical sentimentality and others later
+expressions (which occasionally reach the scandalous) of weariness and
+disgust on Sterne's part. Other evidence of an indisputable character
+shows that he was, at least and best, an extravagant and mawkish
+philanderer with any girl or woman who would join in a flirtation: and
+while there is no evidence against Mrs. Sterne's character in the
+ordinary sense, and hardly any of value against her temper, she seems
+(which is perhaps not wonderful) to have latterly preferred to live
+apart from her husband, and to have put him to considerable, if not
+unreasonable, expenses by her fancy for wandering about France with the
+daughter.
+
+Finally, in general character, Richardson seems to have been a
+respectable person of rather feminine temperament and, though
+good-natured to his friends, endowed with a feminine spitefulness.
+Fielding, though by no means answering to the standard of minor and even
+major morals demanded
+
+              "by the wise ones,
+    By the grave and the precise ones."
+
+though reckless and disorderly in his ways and habits, appears to have
+been in the main a thorough gentleman, faithful to truth and honour,
+fearless, compassionate, intolerant of meanness and brutality and of
+treachery most of all--a man of many faults perhaps, but of no really
+bad or disgusting ones. Concerning Smollett's personality we know least
+of all the four. It was certainly disfigured by an almost savage
+pugnacity of temper; by a strange indifference to what ought to be at
+the lowest the conduct of a gentleman, and by a most repulsive
+inclination--perhaps natural, but developed by training--to the merely
+foul and nasty. But he seems to have been brave, charitable though not
+in the most gracious way, honest, and on the whole a much better fellow
+than he might generally seem. Sterne is the most difficult of the four
+to characterise fairly, because of the unlucky revelations to which we
+possess no parallel in the case of the other three, and which, if we had
+them, might probably alter our estimates of a good many now well reputed
+people. It is perhaps enough to say that his letters contain many good
+traits as well as some bad ones; that his unlucky portrait, with its
+combination of leer and sneer, is probably responsible for much; and
+that the parts which, as we shall see further, he chose to play, of
+extravagant humorist and extravagant sentimentalist, not only almost
+necessitate attitudes which may easily become offensive in the playing,
+but are very likely, in practice, to communicate something apparently
+not natural and unattractive to the player.
+
+But enough of the workers, though not too much in the case of such
+remarkable contemporary exponents of a new kind of Human Comedy: let us
+go to the work.
+
+In the long "History of the Unexpected," thick-strewn as it is with
+curiosities, there are few things odder than the appearance and the
+sequels of _Pamela: or Virtue Rewarded_, which, in circumstances to be
+noted presently, is said to have been begun on November 12, 1739, was
+finished (as far as the first part goes) exactly two months later, and
+(there being, in the case of the author's business, no obstacle of the
+kind that has frequently beset the appearance of greater works) was
+published later in the year 1740. That author was over fifty years old:
+though he had had much to do with ushering literature into the world, he
+had never attempted to produce it; he belonged to a class which was apt
+to regard _belles lettres_ with profound suspicion; and his experiences,
+both in literature itself and in life, had been necessarily of the most
+limited kind. But there were certain counterbalancing facts to be taken
+into consideration which, though they can hardly be said to be _causes_
+of the marvel--the cause was the Hour, which hit, as it listed, on the
+Man--were a little more than accidental occasions of it. Richardson, as
+we see from his work, must have been a rather careful student of such
+novels as there were. The name of his first heroine, with the
+essentially English throwing back of the accent added, is the same as
+that of one of Sidney's heroines in the _Arcadia_, which had been not
+long before modernised for eighteenth-century reading by a certain Mrs.
+Stanley. The not very usual form "Laurana," which is the name of a
+character in his latest novel, is that of the heroine of _Parismus_.
+Further, he had had curious early experiences (which we know from his
+own meticulous revelations) of writing love-letters, when he was a mere
+boy, for girl-friends of his to adapt in writing to their lovers. "His
+eye," he says, "had been always on the ladies," though no doubt always
+also in the most honourable way. And, quite recently, the
+crystallisation had been precipitated by a commission from two of his
+bookseller (i.e. publisher) patrons--the founder of the House of
+Rivington and the unlucky Osborne who was knocked down by Johnson and
+picked up (not quite as one would wish to be) by Pope. They asked him to
+prepare a series of "Familiar Letters on the useful concerns of common
+life." Five-and-twenty years before, he had heard in outline something
+like the story of _Pamela_. In shaping this into letters he thought it
+might be a "new species of writing that might possibly turn young people
+into a course of reading different from the pomp and parade of
+romance-writing, and dismissing the improbable and marvellous with which
+novels generally abound, might tend to promote the cause of religion and
+virtue." His wife and "a young lady living with them," to whom he had
+read some of it, used to come into his little closet every night with,
+"Have you any more of _Pamela_, Mr. R.?" Two other female friends joined
+in the interest and eulogy. He finished it (that is, the first two
+volumes which contain the whole of the original idea) and published it,
+though at first with the business-like precaution of appearing to "edit"
+only, and the more business-like liberty of liberal praise of what he
+edited. It became at once popular: and received the often repeated, but
+to the author very annoying, compliment of piratical continuation. So he
+set to work and continued it himself: as usually (though by no means
+invariably) with rather diminished success. On such points as the
+suggestion that he may have owed a debt to Marivaux (in _Marianne_) and
+others, little need be said here. I have never had much doubt myself
+that the indebtedness existed: though it would be rash, and is
+unnecessary, to attempt to determine to what extent and in what
+particular form.
+
+It is by no means so difficult as it may at first sight appear to put
+oneself very much in the situation of a contemporary reader of _Pamela_,
+even if one has read it three or four times, provided that a fairly long
+period has elapsed since the last reading, and that the novels of the
+preceding age are fairly--and freshly--familiar. The thing has been in
+fact done--with unexpected but not in the least deliberate or suspicious
+success--by the present writer, who has read the book after an interval
+of some fifteen years and just after reading (in some cases again, in
+some for the first time) most of the works noticed in the preceding
+chapter. The difference of "the new species of writing" (one is reminded
+of the description of Spenser as "the new poet") is almost startling:
+and of a kind which Richardson pretty certainly did not fully apprehend
+when he used the phrase. In order to appreciate it, one must not only
+leave out the two last volumes (which, as has been said, the first
+readers had not before them at all, and had better never have had) but
+also the second, or great part of it, which they would only have reached
+after they had been half whetted, half satiated, and wholly bribed, by
+the first. The defects of this later part and indeed of the first itself
+will be duly noticed presently. Let it be to us, for the moment, the
+story of Pamela up to and including "Mr. B.'s" repentance and amendment
+of mind: and the "difference" of this story, which fills some hundred
+and twenty or thirty closely printed, double columned, royal octavo
+pages in the "Ballantyne Novels," is (despite the awkwardness of such a
+form for the enjoyment of a novel) almost astounding.
+
+To begin with, the novel-attractions are presented with a completeness
+which, as has been pointed out in the last chapter, is almost entirely
+lacking before. There is, of course, not very much plot, in the martinet
+sense of that word: there never was in Richardson, despite his immense
+apparatus and elaboration. The story is not knotted and unknotted; the
+wheel does not come full circle on itself; it merely runs along
+pleasantly till it is time for it to stop, and it stops rather abruptly.
+The siege of Pamela's virtue ends merely because the besieger is tired
+of assaults which fail, and of offering dishonourable terms of
+capitulation which are rejected: because he prefers peace and alliance.
+But such as it is, it is told with a spirit which must have been
+surprising enough to its readers, and which makes it, I confess, seem to
+me now much the best _story_ in Richardson. The various alarums and
+excursions of the siege itself go off smartly and briskly: there may be
+more sequence than connection--there is _some_ connection, as in the
+case of that most unlucky and ill-treated person the Rev. Mr.
+Williams--but the sequence is rapid and unbroken, and the constituents
+of it as it were jostle each other--not in any unfavourable sense, but
+in a sort of rapid dance, "cross hands and down the middle," which is
+inspiriting and contagious. He lost this faculty later: or rather he
+allowed it to be diluted and slackened into the interminable episodes of
+the not dissimilar though worse-starred plot against Clarissa, and the
+_massacrant_ trivialities of the Italian part of _Grandison_. But he had
+it here: and it is not a fair argument to say (as even in these days I
+have known it said) that Pamela's honour is a commodity of too little
+importance to justify such a pother about it.
+
+This may bring us to the characters. They also are not of the absolutely
+first class--excepting, as to be discussed later, the great attempt of
+Lovelace, Richardson's never are. But they are an immense advance on the
+personages that did duty as persons in preceding novels, even in Defoe.
+"Mr. B." himself is indeed not very capital. One does not quite see why
+a man who went on as long as he did and used the means which he
+permitted himself to use, did not go on longer or use them more
+thoroughly. But Richardson has at least vindicated his much-praised
+"knowledge of the human heart" by recognising two truths: first, that
+there are many natures (perhaps most) who are constantly tempted to
+"over-bid"--to give more and more for something that they want and
+cannot get; and, secondly, that there are others (again, perhaps, the
+majority, if not always the same individuals) who, when they are
+peremptorily told _not_ to do a thing, at once determine to do it. It
+was to Lady Davers mainly that Pamela owed her escape from the fate of
+Clarissa, though she would hardly have taken, or had the chance of
+taking, that fate in the same way. As for the minor characters, at least
+the lower examples are more than sufficient: and Mrs. Jewkes wants very
+little of being a masterpiece. But of course Pamela herself is the
+cynosure, such as there is. She has had rather hard measure with critics
+for the last century and a little more. The questions to ask now are,
+"Is she a probable human being?" and then, "Where are we to find a
+probable human being, worked out to the same degree, before?" I say
+unhesitatingly that the answer to the first is "Yes," and the answer to
+the second "Nowhere." The last triumph of originality and individuality
+she does not indeed reach. Richardson had, even more than other men of
+his century in England, a strong Gallic touch: and he always tends to
+the type rather than the individual. Beatrix Esmond is a coquette of the
+highest--almost of the heroic-poetic--class, but she is first of all
+Beatrix Esmond. Blanche Amory is a middle-class minx, hardly heroic at
+all, but she is first of all Blanche Amory. Becky Sharp is an
+adventuress who would go pretty close to, and perhaps not stop at,
+positive crime, but she is first of all Becky Sharp. Pamela Andrews is
+not first of all--perhaps she is hardly at all--Pamela Andrews. There
+might be fifty or five hundred Pamelas, while there could be only one of
+each of the others. She is the pretty, good-natured, well-principled,
+and rather well-educated menial, whose prudence comes to the aid of her
+principles, whose pride does not interfere with either, and who has a
+certain--it is hardly unfair to call it--slyness which is of the sex
+rather than of the individual. But, as such, she is quite admirably
+worked out--a heroine of Racine in more detail and different
+circumstances, a triumph of art, and at the same time with so much
+nature that it is impossible to dismiss her as merely artificial. The
+nearest thing to her in English prose fiction before (Marianne, of
+course, is closer in French) is Moll Flanders: and good as Moll is, she
+is flat and lifeless in comparison with Pamela. You may call "my
+master's" mistress (actually in the honourable sense, but never in the
+dishonourable) again a minx, though a better minx than Blanche, if you
+like. But there is no animal more alive than a minx: and you will
+certainly not find a specimen of the species in any English novel
+before.
+
+As for description and dialogue, there is not very much of the former
+in _Pamela_, though it might not be unfair to include under the head
+those details, after the manner of Defoe (such as Pamela's list of
+purchases when she thinks she is going home), which supply their own
+measure of verisimilitude to the story. But there are some things of the
+kind which Defoe never would have thought of--such as the touches of
+the "tufts of grass" and the "pretty sort of wildflower that grows
+yonder near the elm, the fifth from us on the left," which occur in the
+gipsy scene. The dialogue plays a much more important part: and may be
+brought into parallel with that in the _Polite Conversation_, referred
+to above and published just before _Pamela_. It is "reported" of course,
+instead of being directly delivered, in accordance with the
+letter-scheme of which more presently, but that makes very little
+difference; to the first readers it probably made no difference at all.
+Here again that process of "vivification," which has been so often dwelt
+on, makes an astonishing progress--the blood and colour of the novel,
+which distinguish it from the more statuesque narrative, are supplied,
+if indirectly yet sufficiently and, in comparison with previous
+examples, amply. Here you get, almost or quite for the first time in the
+English novel, those spurts and sparks of animation which only the
+living voice can supply. Richardson is a humorist but indirectly; yet
+only the greatest humorists have strokes much better than that admirable
+touch in which, when the "reconciliations and forgivenesses of injuries"
+are being arranged, and Mr. B. (quite in the manner of the time)
+suggests marrying Mrs. Jewkes to the treacherous footman John and giving
+them an inn to keep--Pamela, the mild and semi-angelic but exceedingly
+feminine Pamela, timidly inquires whether, "This would not look like
+very heavy punishment to poor John?" She forgives Mrs. Jewkes of course,
+but only "as a Christian"--as a greater than Richardson put it
+afterwards and commented on it in the mouth of a personage whom
+Richardson could never have drawn, though Fielding most certainly could.
+
+The original admirers of _Pamela_, then, were certainly justified: and
+even the rather fatuous eulogies which the author prefixed to it from
+his own and (let us hope) other pens (and which probably provoked
+Fielding himself more than even the substance of the piece) could be
+transposed into a reasonable key. But we ought nowadays to consider this
+first complete English novel from a rather higher point of view, and ask
+ourselves, not merely what its comparative merits were in regard to its
+predecessors, and as presented to its first readers, but what its
+positive character is and what, as far as it goes, are the positive
+merits or defects which it shows in its author.
+
+The first thing to strike one in this connection is, almost of course,
+the letter-form. More agreement has been reached about this, perhaps,
+than about some other points in the inquiry. The initial difficulty of
+fiction which does not borrow the glamour of verse or of the stage is
+the question, "What does all this mean?" "What is the authority?" "How
+does the author know it all?" And a hundred critics have pointed out
+that there are practically only three ways of meeting this. The boldest
+and the best by far is to follow the poet and the dramatist themselves;
+to treat it like one of the magic lions of romance, ignore it, and pass
+on, secure of safety, to tell your story "from the blue," as if it were
+an actual history or revelation, or something passing before the eyes of
+the reader. But at that time few novelists had the courage to do this,
+daunted as they were by the absence of the sword and shield of verse,
+of the vantage-room of the stage. Then there is the alternative of
+recounting it by the mouth of one of the actors in, or spectators of,
+the events--a plan obvious, early, presenting some advantages, still
+very commonly followed, but always full of little traps and pits of
+improbability, and peculiarly trying in respect to the character (if he
+is made to have any) of the narrator himself. Thirdly, there is the
+again easy resource of the "document" in its various forms. Of these,
+letters and diaries possess some prerogative advantages; and were likely
+to suggest themselves very particularly at this time when the actual
+letter and diary (long rather strangely rare in English) had for some
+generations appeared, and were beginning to be common. In the first
+place the information thus obtained looks natural and plausible: and
+there is a subsidiary advantage--on which Richardson does not draw very
+much in _Pamela_, but which he employs to the full later--that by
+varying your correspondents you can get different views of the same
+event, and first-hand manifestations of extremely different characters.
+
+Its disadvantages, on the other hand, are equally obvious: but there are
+two or three of them of especial importance. In the first place, it is
+essentially an artificial rather than an artful plan--its want of
+verisimilitude, as soon as you begin to think of it, is as great as that
+of either of the others if not greater. In the second, without immense
+pains, it must be "gappy and scrappy," while the more these pains are
+taken the more artificial it will become. In the third, the book is
+extremely likely, in the taking of these pains and even without them, to
+become intolerably lengthy and verbose. In the first part at least of
+the first part of _Pamela_, Richardson avoided these dangers fairly if
+not fully; in the second part he succumbed to them; in his two later
+novels, though more elaborate and important plots to some extent bore up
+the expansion, he succumbed to them almost more. Pains have been taken
+above to show how the first readers of _Pamela_ might rejoice in it,
+because of its contrast with the character of the seventeenth-century
+novel which was most read--the Scudéry or "heroic" romance. It is not, I
+think, too severe to say that nothing but the parallel with that
+romance, and the tolerance induced by familiarity with it, could make
+any one put up with the second part of _Pamela_ itself, or with the
+inhumanly prolonged divagation of _Clarissa_ and _Grandison_. Nor, as
+has been hinted, is the solace of the letters--in the opportunity of
+setting forth different tempers and styles--here much taken.
+
+There is no doubt that one main attraction of this letter-plan (whether
+consciously experienced or not does not matter) was its ready adaptation
+to Richardson's own special and peculiar gift of minute analysis of
+mood, temper, and motive. The diary avowedly, and the letter in reality,
+even though it may be addressed to somebody else, is a continuous
+soliloquy: and the novelist can use it with a frequency and to a length
+which would be intolerable and impossible on the stage. Now soliloquy is
+the great engine for self--revelation and analysis. It is of course to a
+great extent in consequence of this analysis that Richardson owes his
+pride of place in the general judgment. It is quite possible to lay too
+much stress on it, as distinguishing the novel from the romance: and the
+present writer is of opinion that too much stress has actually been
+laid. The real difference between romance _per se_ and novel _per se_
+(so far as they are capable of distinct existence) is that the romance
+depends more on incident and the novel more on character. Now this
+minute analysis and exhibition, though it is one way of drawing or
+constructing character, is not the only, nor even a necessary, one. It
+can be done without: but it has impressed the vulgar, and even some who
+are not the vulgar, from Dr. Johnson to persons whom it is unnecessary
+to mention. They cannot believe that there is "no deception"--that the
+time is correctly told--unless the works of the watch are bared to them:
+and this Richardson most undoubtedly does. Even in his 'prentice work,
+every flutter of Pamela's little heart is registered, and registered
+probably enough: nor could the registry have been effected, perhaps, in
+any other way that should be in the least probable so well as by the
+letter and journal method. Of course this analysis was not quite new; it
+had existed in a sort of way in the heroic novel: and it had been
+eminently present in the famous _Princesse de Clèves_ of Madame de la
+Fayette as well as in her French successors. But these stories had
+generally been as short as the heroics had been long: and no one had
+risen (or descended) to anything like the minuteness and fullness of
+Richardson. As was before pointed out in regard to the letter-system
+generally, this method of treatment is exposed to special dangers,
+particularly those of verbosity and "overdoing"--not to mention the
+greater one of missing the mark. Richardson can hardly be charged with
+error, though he may be with excess, in regard to Pamela herself in the
+earlier part of the book--perhaps even not in regard to Mr. B.'s
+intricacies of courtship, matrimonial compliment, and arbitrary temper
+later. But he certainly succumbs to them in the long and monstrous scene
+in which Lady Davers bullies, storms at, and positively assaults her
+unfortunate sister-in-law before she is forced to allow that she _is_
+her sister-in-law. Part of course of his error here comes from the
+mistake with which Lady Mary afterwards most justly reproached
+him--that he talked about fine ladies and gentlemen without knowing
+anything about them. It was quite natural for Lady Davers to be
+disgusted, to be incredulous, to be tyrannical, to be in a certain sense
+violent. But it is improbable that she would in any case have spoken and
+behaved like a drunken fishfag quarrelling with another in the street:
+and the extreme prolongation of the scene brings its impropriety more
+forcibly into view. Here, as elsewhere (a point of great importance to
+which I may invite attention), Richardson follows out, with
+extraordinary minuteness and confidence, a wrong course: and his very
+expertness in the process betrays him and brings him to grief. If he had
+run the false scent for a few yards only it would not matter: in a chase
+prolonged to something like "Hartleap Well" extension there is less
+excuse for his not finding it out. Nevertheless it would of course be
+absurd not to rank this "knowledge of the human heart" among the claims
+which not only gave him but have kept his reputation. I do not know that
+he shows it much less in the later part of the first two volumes
+(Pamela's recurrent tortures of jealous curiosity about Sally Godfrey
+are admirable) or even in the dreary sequel. But analysis for analysis'
+sake can have few real, though it may have some pretended, devotees.
+
+The foregoing remarks have been designed, less as a criticism of
+_Pamela_ (which would be unnecessary here), or even of Richardson (which
+would be more in place, but shall be given in brief presently), than as
+an account and justification of the book's position in the real subject
+of this volume--the History of the English Novel. And this account will
+dispense us from dealing, at corresponding length, with the individually
+more important but historically subordinate books which followed. Of
+these _Clarissa_, as few people can be ignorant, is a sort of enlarged,
+diversified, and transposed _Pamela_, in which the attempts of a
+libertine of more resolution and higher gifts than Mr. B. upon a young
+lady of much more than proportionately higher station and qualities than
+Pamela's, are--as such success goes--successful at last: but only to
+result in the death of the victim and the punishment of the criminal.
+The book is far longer than even the extended _Pamela_; has a much wider
+range; admits of episodes and minor plots, and is altogether much more
+ambitious; but still--though the part of the seducer Lovelace is much
+more important than that of Mr. B.--it is chiefly occupied with the
+heroine. In _Sir Charles Grandison_, on the contrary, though no less
+than three heroines exist after a fashion and are carefully treated, the
+author's principal object is to depict--in direct contrast to Mr. B. and
+Lovelace--a "Good Man"--the actual first title of the book, which he
+wisely altered. This faultless and insufferable monster is frantically
+beloved by, and hesitates long between, two beauties, the Italian
+Clementina della Porretta and the English Harriet Byron. The latter of
+these carries him off (rather because of religious difficulties than of
+any great predilection on his own part) and the piece ends with a
+repetition, extension, and intensification of the bounties showered upon
+Pamela by her husband, and her almost abject gratitude for them. Only of
+course "the good man" could never be guilty of Mr. B.'s meditated
+relapse from the path of rectitude, nor (one may perhaps add) does Miss
+Byron seem to possess the insinuating astuteness by which Pamela once
+more
+
+    "Reconciles the new perverted man,"
+
+to adapt the last line of _A Lover's Complaint_ to the situation.
+
+_Grandison_, like _Clarissa_, has a much wider range of personage and
+incident than _Pamela_, and is again double the length of it. No
+detailed criticism of these enormous books (both of which are conducted
+in the letter-form, though, in the latter case especially, with long
+retrospects and narratives which rather strain the style) is possible
+here. But a few remarks on the characters of Lovelace and Clarissa,
+which have usually been regarded as Richardson's greatest triumphs, may
+fitly precede some on his whole character as a novelist.
+
+Admiration and sympathy, tempered with a few reserves, have been the
+general notes of comment on Clarissa: and--as she goes through the long
+martyrdom of persecution by her family for not marrying the man she does
+not love; of worse persecution from the man whom she does love, but who
+will not marry her, at least until he has conquered her virtue; and of
+perhaps worst when she feels it her duty to resist his repentant and (as
+such things go) honourable proffers after he has treacherously deprived
+her of technical honour--compassion at least is impossible to refuse.
+But "compassion," though it literally translates "sympathy" from Greek
+into Latin, is not its synonym in English. It is a disagreeable thing to
+have to say: but Clarissa's purity strikes one as having at once too
+much questionable prudery in it and too little honest prudence: while
+her later resolution has as much false pride as real principle. Even
+some of her admirers admit a want of straightforwardness in her; she has
+no passion, which rather derogates from the merit of her conduct in any
+case; and though she is abominably ill-treated by almost everybody,
+one's pity for her never comes very near to love.
+
+Towards Lovelace, on the other hand, the orthodox attitude, with even
+greater uniformity, has been shocked, or sometimes even unshocked,
+admiration. Hazlitt went into frequently quoted raptures over the
+"regality" of his character: and though to approve of him as a man would
+only be the pretence of a cheap paradoxer, general opinion seems to have
+gone various lengths in the same direction. There have, however, been a
+few dissenters: and I venture to join myself to them in the very
+dissidence of their dissent. Lovelace, it is true, is a most
+astonishingly "succeeded" blend of a snob's fine gentleman and of the
+fine gentleman of a silly and rather unhealthy-minded schoolgirl. He
+is--it is difficult to resist the temptation of dropping and inserting
+the h's--handsome, haughty, arbitrary, as well as rich, generous after a
+fashion, well descended, well dressed, well mannered--except when he is
+insolent. He is also--which certainly stands to his credit in the bank
+which is not that of the snob or the schoolgirl--no fool in a general
+way. But he is not in the least a gentleman except in externals: and
+there is nothing really "great" about him at all. Even his scoundrelism
+is mostly, if not wholly, _pose_--which abominable thing indeed
+distinguishes him throughout, in every speech and every act, from the
+time when he sighs as he kisses Miss Arabella Harlowe's hand to the time
+when he says, "Let this expiate!" as that hallowed sword of Colonel
+Morden's passes through his rotten heart. Now if Richardson had _meant_
+this, it might be granted at once that Lovelace is one of the greatest
+characters of fiction: and I do not deny that _taken as this_, meant or
+not meant, he is great. But Richardson obviously did _not_ mean it; and
+Hazlitt did not mean it; and none of the admirers mean it. _They_ all
+thought and think that Lovelace is something like what Milton's Satan
+was, and what my Lord Byron would have liked to be. This is very unfair
+to the Prince of Darkness: and it is even not quite just to "the noble
+poet."
+
+At the same time, the acute reader will have noticed, the acknowledgment
+that the fact that Richardson--even not knowing it and intending to do
+something else--did hit off perfectly and consummately the ideal of such
+a "prevailing party" (to quote Lord Foppington) as snobs and
+schoolgirls, is a serious and splendid tribute to his merits: as is also
+the fact that his two chief characters are characters still interesting
+and worth arguing about. Those merits, indeed, are absolutely
+incontestable. His immediate and immense popularity, abroad as well as
+at home, would not necessarily prove much, though it must not be
+neglected, and historically, at least, is of the first importance. But
+he does not need it.
+
+For, as should have been sufficiently shown, he did very great
+things--first by gathering up the scattered means and methods which had
+been half ignorantly hit on by others, and co-ordinating them into the
+production of the finished and complete novel; secondly (though less) by
+that infusion of elaborate "minor psychology" as it may be called, which
+is his great characteristic; and, thirdly, by means of it and of other
+things, in raising the pitch of interest in his readers to an infinitely
+higher degree than had ever been known before. The dithyrambs of Diderot
+are, though not ridiculously, amusingly excessive: but they are only an
+exaggeration of the truth. On the comic side he was weak: and he made a
+most unfortunate mistake by throwing this part of the business on young
+ladies of position and (as he thought) of charm--Miss Darnford, Miss
+Howe, Charlotte Grandison--who are by no means particularly comic and
+who are sometimes very particularly vulgar. But of tragedy positive, in
+the _bourgeois_ kind, he had no small command, and in the middle
+business--in affairs neither definitely comic nor definitely tragic--he
+was wonderfully prolific and facile. His immense and heart-breaking
+lengthiness is not _mere_ verbosity: it comes partly from the artist's
+natural delight in a true and newly found method, partly from a still
+more respectably artistic desire not to do the work negligently. As for
+the unhealthiness of atmosphere which has been generally and not
+unjustly charged upon him, it is, in part, no doubt the result of
+imperfect temperament and breeding: but it is also as closely connected
+with his very method as are the merits thereof. You cannot "consider so
+curiously" without considering too curiously. The drawbacks of his work
+are obvious, and they were likely to be, and were, exaggerated. But they
+might be avoided and the merits kept: nor is it too much to say that the
+triumphs of the English novel in the last century have been not a little
+due to the avoidance of the one and the keeping of the other.
+
+It would be, in the circumstances, peculiarly uncivil and disobliging
+to lay very much stress on the fact that, after all, the greatest
+of Richardson's works is his successor, caricaturist, and
+superior--Fielding. When the memoirs of Miss Pamela Andrews appeared,
+the future biographer of her doubly supposititious brother was a not
+very young man of thirty-three, who had written a good many not very
+good plays, had contributed to periodicals, and had done a little work
+at the Bar, besides living, at least till his marriage and it may be
+feared later, an exceedingly "rackety" life. It is not improbable,
+though it is not certain, that he had already turned his attention to
+prose fiction of a kind. For, though the _Miscellanies_ which followed
+_Joseph Andrews_ were three years later than _Pamela_ in appearance,
+the _Journey from this World to the Next_ which they contain has the
+immaturity of earliness; and we can hardly conceive it as written after
+the adventures and character of Mr. Abraham Adams. It is unequal, rather
+tedious in parts, and in conception merely a _pastiche_ of Lucian and
+Fontenelle: but it contains some remarkable things in the way of shrewd
+satirical observation of human nature. And the very fact that it is a
+following of something else is interesting, in connection with the
+infinitely more important work that preceded it in publication, _The
+Adventures of Joseph Andrews and his Friend Mr. Abraham Adams_ (1742).
+
+Nobody has ever had much difficulty in accounting for the way in which
+Fielding availed himself of the appearance and popularity of _Pamela_.
+And though Richardson would have been superhuman instead of very human
+indeed (with an ordinary British middle-class humanity, and an
+extraordinary vein of genius) if he had done otherwise, few have joined
+him in thinking _Joseph_ a "lewd and ungenerous engraftment." We have
+not ourselves been very severe on the faults of _Pamela_, the reason of
+lenity being, among other things, that it in a manner produced Fielding,
+and all the fair herd of his successors down to the present day. But
+those faults are glaring: and they were of a kind specially likely to
+attract the notice and the censure of a genial, wholesome, and, above
+all, masculine taste and intellect like Fielding's. Even at that time,
+libertine as it was in some ways, and sentimental as it was in others,
+people had not failed to notice that Pamela's virtue is not quite what
+was then called "neat" wine--the pure and unadulterated juice of the
+grape. The _longueurs_ and the fiddle-faddle, the shameless and fulsome
+preface-advertisements and the rest lay open enough to censure. So
+Fielding saw the handles, and gripped them at once by starting a _male_
+Pamela--a situation not only offering "most excellent differences," but
+in itself possessing, to graceless humanity at all times it may be
+feared, and at that time perhaps specially, something essentially
+ludicrous in minor points. At first he kept the parody very close:
+though the necessary transposition of the parts afforded opportunity
+(amply taken) for display of character and knowledge of nature superior
+to Richardson's own. Later the general opinion is that he, especially
+inspirited by his _trouvaille_ of Adams, almost forgot the parody, and
+only furbished up the _Pamela_-connection at the end to make a formal
+correspondence with the beginning, and to get a convenient and
+conventional "curtain." I am not so sure of this. Even Adams is to a
+certain extent suggested by Williams, though they turn out such very
+different persons. Mrs. Slipslop, a character, as Gray saw, not so very
+far inferior to Adams, is not only a parallel to Mrs. Jewkes, but also,
+and much more, a contrast to the respectable Mrs. Jervis and Mrs.
+Warden. All sorts of fantastic and not-fantastic doublets may be traced
+throughout: and I am not certain that Parson Trulliber's majestic
+doctrine that no man, even in his own house, shall drink when he "caaled
+vurst" is not a demoniacally ingenious travesty of Pamela's
+characteristic casuistry, when she says that she will do anything to
+propitiate Lady Davers, but she will not "fill wine" to her in her own
+husband's house.
+
+But this matters little: and we have no room for it. Suffice it as
+agreed and out of controversy that _Joseph Andrews_ started as a parody
+of _Pamela_ and that, whether in addition or in substitution, it turned
+to something very different. It is not quite so uncontroversial, but
+will be asserted here as capable of all but demonstration, that the
+"something different" is also something much greater. There is still not
+very much plot--the parody did not necessitate and indeed rather
+discouraged that, and what there is is arrived at chiefly by the old and
+seldom very satisfactory system of _anagnorisis_--the long-lost-child
+business. But, under the three other heads, Joseph distances his sister
+hopelessly and can afford her much more than weight for sex. It has been
+said that there are doubtfully in Richardson anywhere, and certainly not
+in _Pamela_, those startling creations of personality which are almost
+more real to us than the persons we know in the flesh. It is not that
+Pamela and her meyney are _un_real; for they are not: but that they are
+not personal. The Reverend Abraham Adams is a good deal more real than
+half the parsons who preached last Sunday, and a good deal more
+personal: and the quality is not confined to him, though he has most of
+it. So, too, with the description. The time was not yet for any minute
+or elaborate picture-setting. But here again also that extra dose of
+life and action--almost of bustle--which Fielding knows how to instil is
+present. In _Pamela_ the settings are frequent, but they are "still
+life" and rather shadowy: we do not _see_ the Bedfordshire and
+Lincolnshire mansions, the summer houses where (as she observes with
+demure relish when the danger is over) Mr. B. was "very naughty;" even
+the pond where, if she had been another sort of girl, the _drame_ might
+have become real tragedy. Fielding does not take very much more trouble
+and yet somehow we _do_ see it all, with a little help from our own
+imaginations perhaps, but on his suggestion and start. Especially the
+outdoor life and scenes--the inn-yards and the high roads and the downs
+by night or day; the pig-sty where poor Adams is the victim of live
+pigs and the public-house kitchen where he succumbs to a by-product of
+dead ones--these are all real for us.
+
+But most of all is the regular progress of vivification visible in the
+dialogue. This, as we have seen, had been the very weakest point of the
+weakness of almost all (we might say of all) English novels up to the
+close of the first quarter of the eighteenth century. Richardson had
+done a great deal for it: but it was impossible that, on his method, it
+should not, for the most part, be languid, or at any rate long-winded.
+Here again Fielding spirits the thing up--oxygenates and ozonises the
+atmosphere: while, in even fuller measure than his predecessor and
+victim, he recognises the efficacy of dialogue as the revealer of
+character. He has, assisted no doubt by Shakespeare and his own dramatic
+practice, discovered that you do not want volumes of it to do the
+business--that single moments and single sentences will do that business
+at times, if they are used in the proper way.
+
+In short, Fielding here used his reluctant and indignant forerunner as a
+spring-board, whence to attain heights which that forerunner could never
+have reached: he "stood upon his shoulders" in the most cavalier but
+also the most successful fashion. In the novel as Richardson knew it and
+was thinking of it, when he began _Pamela_, you were, as a rule, in an
+artificial world altogether--a world artificial with an artificiality
+only faintly and occasionally touched with any reality at all. In
+_Pamela_ itself there is perhaps nothing, and certainly not much, that
+is _wholly_ unreal: but the reality is treated and rendered in an
+artificial way. In _Joseph Andrews_, though its professed genesis and
+procedure are artificial too, you break away at once from serious
+artifice. These are all real people who do real things in a real way
+now, as they did nearly two hundred years ago: however much dress, and
+speech, and manners may have changed. And we are told of their doings in
+a real way, too. Exactly how the teller knew it we do not know: but we
+do not think of this at all. And on the other hand there is no perpetual
+reminder of art, like the letter-ending and beginning, to disturb or
+alloy the once and gladly accepted "suspension of disbelief."
+
+A slight digression may not be improper here. Even in their own days,
+when the _gros mot_ was much less shocking than it is now, there was a
+general notion--which has more or less persisted, in spite of all
+changes of fashion in this respect, and exists even now when licence of
+subject as distinguished from phrase has to a great extent
+returned--that Fielding is more "coarse," more "improper," and so forth
+than Richardson. As a matter of fact, neither admits positively indecent
+language--that had gone out, except in the outskirts and fringes of
+English literature, generations earlier. But I am much mistaken if there
+are not in Richardson more than a few scenes and situations the
+"impropriety" of which positively exceeds anything in Fielding.
+Naturally one does not give indications: but readers may be pretty
+confident about the fact. The comparative "bloodlessness," however--the
+absence of life and colour in the earlier and older writer--acts as a
+sort of veil to them.
+
+Yet (to return to larger and purer air), however much one may admire
+_Joseph Andrews_, the kind of _parasitic_ representation which it allows
+itself, and the absence of any attempt to give an original story tells
+against it. And it may, in any case, be regarded as showing that the
+novelist, even yet, was hugging the shore or allowing himself to be
+taken in tow--that he did not dare to launch out into the deep and
+trust to his own sails and the wind of nature to propel him--to his own
+wits and soul to guide. Even Fielding's next venture--the wonderful and
+almost unique venture of _Jonathan Wild_--leaves some objection of this
+sort possible, though, for myself, I should never dream of admitting it.
+Jonathan was (so much the worse for human nature) a real person: and the
+outlines of his story--if not the actual details--are given partly by
+his actual life, partly by Gay's _Beggar's Opera_ and its sequel.
+Moreover, the whole marvellous little book has a purpose--the purpose of
+satire on false ideas of greatness, historical and political. The
+invention and the art of the writer are not even yet allowed frank and
+free course.
+
+But though criticism will allow this, it will, if it be competent and
+courageous, allow no deduction to be made from the other greatness of
+this little masterpiece. It has never been popular; it is never likely
+to be popular; and one may almost say that it is sincerely to be hoped
+that it never will be popular. For if it were, either all the world
+would be scoundrels, which would be a pity: or all the world would be
+philosophers and persons of taste, in which case it would be impossible,
+as the famous story has it, to "look down on one's fellow-creatures from
+a proper elevation." It really is a novel and a remarkable one--superior
+even to _Vanity Fair_, according to Thackeray's own definition, as a
+delineation of "a set of people living without God in the world." But it
+is even more (and here its only parallel is _A Tale of a Tub_, which is
+more desultory and much more of a _fatrasie_ or salmagundy of odds and
+ends) a masterpiece and quintessential example of irony. Irony had come
+in with the plain prose style, without which it is almost impossible:
+and not merely Swift but others had done great things with it. It is,
+however, only here that it reaches the quintessence just spoken of with
+a coherent and substantive purpose to serve as vehicle for it. It is
+possibly too strong for most people's taste: and one may admit that, for
+anything like frequent enjoyment, it wants a certain admixture of the
+fantastic in its various senses--after the method of Voltaire in one
+way, of Beckford in another, of Peacock in a third, of Disraeli in a
+fourth--to make it acceptable to more than a very few. But it shows,
+even from our present limited point of view, of what immense and exalted
+application the novel-method was capable: and it shows also the
+astonishing powers of its author. "Genial," in the usual sense, it
+certainly cannot be called; in the proper sense as equalling "what is
+the production of genius" there are few books which deserve the term
+better. But it is an exercise in a by-way of the novel road-system,
+though an early proof of the fact that such by-ways are endlessly open.
+
+But the time was coming, though it did not (and could hardly) come very
+quickly, when Fielding was to discard all kinds of adventitious aids and
+suggestions--all crutches, spring-boards, go-carts, tugs, patterns,
+tracings--and go his own way--and the Way of the Novel--with no guidance
+but something of the example of Cervantes directly and Shakespeare
+indirectly among the moderns, and of the poetic fiction-writers of old.
+It is perfectly clear that he had thought widely (and perhaps had read
+not a little) on the subject of literary criticism, in a sense not
+common in his day, and that the thinking had led him to a conception of
+the "prose epic" which, though it might have been partly (not wholly by
+any means) pieced out of the Italian and Spanish critics of the late
+sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, had never been worked out as
+a complete theory, much less applied in practice and to prose. The
+Prose Epic aims at--and in Fielding's case has been generally admitted
+to have hit--something like the classical unity of main action. But it
+borrows from the romance-idea the liberty of a large accretion and
+divagation of minor and accessory plot:--not the mere "episode" of the
+ancients, but the true minor plot of Shakespeare. It assumes,
+necessarily and once for all, the licence of tragi-comedy, in that sense
+of the term in which _Much Ado About Nothing_ and _A Winter's Tale_ are
+tragi-comedies, and in which _Othello_ itself might have been made one.
+And it follows further in the wake of the Shakespearean drama by
+insisting far more largely than ancient literature of any kind, and far
+more than any modern up to its date except drama had done, on the
+importance of Character. Description and dialogue are rather subordinate
+to these things than on a level with them--but they are still further
+worked out than before. And there is a new element--perhaps suggested by
+the _parabasis_ of ancient comedy, but, it may be, more directly by the
+peculiar method of Swift in _A Tale of a Tub_. At various places in his
+narrative, but especially at the beginnings of books and chapters,
+Fielding as it were "calls a halt" and addresses his readers on matters
+more or less relevant to the story, but rather in the manner of a
+commentator and scholiast upon it than as actual parts of it. Of this
+more later: for the immediate purpose is to survey and not to criticise.
+
+The result of all this was _Tom Jones_--by practically universal consent
+one of the capital books of English literature. It is unnecessary to
+recapitulate the famous praises of Gibbon, of Coleridge, of Byron, and
+of others: and it is only necessary to deal briefly with the complaints
+which, if they have never found such monumental expression as the
+praises, have been sometimes widely entertained. These objections--as
+regards interest--fasten partly on the address-digressions, partly on
+the great inset-episode of "The Man of the Hill:" as regards morality on
+a certain alleged looseness of principle in that respect throughout, and
+especially on the licence of conduct accorded to the hero himself and
+the almost entire absence of punishment for it. As for the first, "The
+Man of the Hill" was partly a concession to the fancy of the time for
+such things, partly a following of such actual examples as Fielding
+admitted--for it need hardly be said that the inset-episode, of no or
+very slight connection with the story, is common both in the ancients
+and in Cervantes, while it is to be found as long after Fielding as in
+the early novel-work of Dickens. The digression-openings are at least as
+satisfactory to some as they are unsatisfactory to others; it is even
+doubtful whether they annoy anybody half so much as they have delighted
+some excellent judges. The other point is well worn: but the wearing has
+not taken off its awkwardness and unsavouriness. Difference of habit and
+manners at the time will account for much: but the wiser apologists will
+simply say that Fielding's attitude to certain deviations from the
+strict moral law was undoubtedly very indulgent, provided that such
+deviations were unaccompanied by the graver and more detestable vices of
+cruelty, treachery, and fraud--that to vice which was accompanied by
+these blacker crimes he was utterly merciless; and that if he is thus
+rather exposed to the charge of "compounding by damning"--in the famous
+phrase--the things that he damned admit of no excuse and those that he
+compounded for have been leniently dealt with by all but the sternest
+moralists.
+
+Such things are, however (in the admirable French sense),
+_misères_--wretched petty cavils and shallows of criticism. The only
+sensible thing to do is to launch out with Fielding into that deep and
+open sea of human character and fate which he dared so gloriously.
+During the curious phase of literary opinion which the last twenty years
+or so have seen, it has apparently been discovered by some people that
+his scheme of human thought and feeling is too simple--"toylike" I think
+they call it--in comparison with that, say, of Count Tolstoi or of Mr.
+Meredith, that modern practice has reached a finer technique than his or
+even than that of his greatest follower, Thackeray. Far be it from the
+present writer to say, or to insinuate, anything disrespectful of the
+great moderns who have lately left us. Yet it may be said without the
+slightest disrespect to them that the unfavourable comparison is mainly
+a revival of Johnson's mistake as to Fielding and Richardson. It is,
+however, something more--for it comes also from a failure to estimate
+aright the _parabasis_-openings which have been more than once referred
+to. These passages do not perhaps exhibit the by-work and the process in
+the conspicuous skeleton-clock fashion which their critics admire and
+desire, but they contain an amount of acute and profound exploration of
+human nature which it would be difficult to match and impossible to
+surpass elsewhere: while the results of Fielding's working, of his
+"toylike" scheme, are remarkable toys indeed--toys which, if we regard
+them as such, must surely strike us as rather uncanny. One is sometimes
+constrained to think that it is perhaps not much more difficult to make
+than to recognise a thoroughly live character. It certainly must be very
+difficult to do the latter if there is any considerable number of
+persons who are unable to do it in the case of almost every one of the
+personages of _Tom Jones_. With one possible exception they are all
+alive--even more so than those of _Joseph Andrews_ and with a less
+peculiar and limited liveliness than those of _Jonathan Wild_. But it
+certainly is curious that as the one good man of _Jonathan_, Heartfree,
+is the least alive of its personages, so the one bad man of _Tom_,
+Blifil, occupies the same position.
+
+The result of this variety and abundance of life is an even more than
+corresponding opportunity for enjoyment. This enjoyment may arise in
+different persons from different sources. The much praised and seldom
+cavilled at unity and completeness of the story may appeal to some.
+There are others who are inclined towards elaborate plots as Sam Weller
+was to the "'rig'nal" of his subpoena. It was a "gratifyin' sort o'
+thing, and eased his mind" to be aware of its existence, and that was
+all. These latter find _their_ sources of enjoyment elsewhere, but
+everywhere else. The abundance and the vividness of character-presentation;
+the liveliness and the abundance of the staging of that character; the
+variety of scene and incident--all most properly connected with the plot,
+but capable of existing and of being felt without it; the human dialogue;
+the admirable phrase in that dialogue and out of it, in the digressions, in
+the narrative, above, and through, and about, and below it all--these
+things and others (for it is practically impossible to exhaust the
+catalogue) fill up the cup to the brim, and keep it full, for the
+born lover of the special novel-pleasure.
+
+In one point only was Fielding a little unfortunate perhaps: and even
+here the "perhaps" has to be underlined. He came just before the end of
+a series of almost imperceptible changes in ordinary English speech
+which brought about something like a stationary state. His maligner and
+only slightly younger contemporary, Horace Walpole, in some of his
+letters, writes in a fashion which, putting mere slang aside, has hardly
+any difference from that of to-day. Fielding still uses "hath" for "has"
+and a few other things which seem archaic, not to students of literature
+but to the general. In the same way dress, manners, etc., though much
+more picturesque, were by that fact distinguished from those of almost
+the whole nineteenth century and the twentieth as far as it has gone:
+while incidents were, even in ordinary life, still usual which have long
+ceased to be so. In this way the immense advance--greater than was made
+by any one else till Miss Austen--that he made in the pure novel of this
+ordinary life may be missed. But the intrinsic magnificence, interest,
+nature, abundance of _Tom Jones_ can only be missed by those who were
+predestined to miss them. It is tempting--but the temptation must be
+resisted--to enliven these pages with an abstract of its astonishing
+"biograph-panorama." But nothing save itself can do it justice. "Take
+and read" is the only wise advice.
+
+No such general agreement has been reached in respect of Fielding's last
+novel, _Amelia_. The author's great adversary, Johnson--an adversary
+whose hostility was due partly to generous and grateful personal
+relations with Richardson, partly to political disagreement (for
+Fielding was certainly "a vile Whig"), but most of all perhaps to a sort
+of horrified recoil from the novelist's easy handling of temptations
+which were no easy matter to his critic--was nearly if not quite
+propitiated by it: and the enthusiasm for it of such a "cynic" as
+Thackeray is well known. Of the very few persons whom it would not be
+ridiculous to name with these, Scott--whose competence in criticising
+his own art is one of the most wonderful though the least generally
+recognised things about him--inclines, in the interesting
+Introduction-Dialogue to _The Fortunes of Nigel_, to put it on a level
+with _Tom Jones_ itself as a perfectly constructed novel. But modern
+criticism has, rightly or wrongly, been more dubious. Amelia is almost
+too perfect: her very forgiveness (it has been suggested) would be more
+interesting if she had not almost completely shut her eyes to there
+being anything to forgive. Her husband seems to us to prolong the
+irresponsibility of youth, which was pardonable in Tom, to a period of
+life and to circumstances of enforced responsibility which make us
+rather decline to honour the drafts he draws; and he is also a little
+bit of a fool, which Tom, to do him justice, is not, though he is
+something of a scatterbrain. Dr. Harrison, whose alternate wrath and
+reconciliation supply the most important springs of the plot, is, though
+a natural, a rather unreasonable person. The "total impression" has even
+been pronounced by some people to be a little dull. What there is of
+truth in these criticisms and others (which it would be long even to
+summarise) may perhaps be put briefly under two heads. It is never so
+easy to arouse interest in virtue as it is in vice: or in weak and
+watered vice as in vice rectified (or _un_rectified) to full strength.
+And the old requirement of "the quest" is one which will hardly be
+dispensed with. Here (for we know perfectly well that Amelia's virtue is
+in no danger) there is no quest, except that of the fortune which ought
+to be hers, which at last comes to her husband, and which we are told
+(and hope rather doubtfully) that husband had at last been taught--by
+the Fool's Tutor, Experience--not utterly to throw away. But this
+fortune drops in half casually at the last by a series of stage
+accidents, not ill-machined by any means, but not very particularly
+interesting.
+
+Such, however, are the criticisms which Fielding himself has taught
+people to make, by the very excellence of his success in the earlier
+novels: and there is a certain comparative and relative validity in
+them. But consider _Amelia_ in itself, and they begin to look, if not
+positively unfounded, rather unimportant. Once more, the astonishing
+truth and variety of scene and character make themselves felt--even more
+felt--even felt in new directions. The opening prison scenes exceed
+anything earlier even in Fielding himself, much more in any one else, as
+examples of the presentation of the unfamiliar. Miss Matthews--whom
+Fielding has probably abstained from working out as much as he might
+lest she should, from the literary point of view, obscure Amelia--is a
+marvellous outline; Colonels James and Bath are perfectly finished
+studies of ordinary and extraordinary "character" in the stage sense. No
+novel even of the author's is fuller of _vignettes_--little pictures of
+action and behaviour, of manners and society, which are not in the least
+irrelevant to the general story, but on the contrary extra-illustrate
+and carry it out.
+
+While, therefore, we must in no way recede from the position above
+adopted in regard to Richardson, we may quite consistently accord an
+even higher place to Fielding. He relieved the novel of the tyranny and
+constraint of the Letter; he took it out of the rut of confinement to a
+single or a very limited class of subjects--for the themes of _Pamela_
+and _Clarissa_ to a very large extent, of _Pamela_ and _Grandison_ to a
+considerable one, and of all three to an extent not small, are
+practically the same. He gave it altogether a larger, wider, higher,
+deeper range. He infused in it (or restored to it) the refreshing and
+preserving element of humour. He peopled it with a great crowd of lively
+and interesting characters--endowed, almost without regard to their
+technical "position _in_ life," with unlimited possession _of_ life. He
+shook up its pillows, and bustled its business arrangements. He first
+gave it--for in matter of prose style Richardson has few resources, and
+those rather respectable than transporting, and decidedly
+monotonous--the attractions of pure literature in form, and in pretty
+various form. He also gave it the attraction of pure comedy, only
+legitimately salted with farce, in such personages as Adams and
+Partridge; of lower and more farcical, but still admirable comedy in
+Slipslop and Trulliber and Squire Western; of comedy almost romantic and
+certainly charming in Sophia; of domestic drama in Amelia; of satiric
+portraiture in a hundred figures from the cousins (respectable and
+disreputable), Miss Western and Lady Bellaston, downwards. He stocked it
+with infinite miscellanies of personage, and scene, and picture, and
+phrase. As has happened in one or two other cases, he carried, at least
+in the opinion of the present writer, the particular art as far as it
+will go. He did not indeed leave nothing for his successors to do--on
+the contrary he left them in a sense everything--for he showed how
+everything could be done. But if he has sometimes been equalled, he has
+never been surpassed: and it is not easy to see even how he can be
+surpassed. For as his greatest follower has it somewhere, though not of
+him, "You cannot beat the best, you know."
+
+One point only remains, the handling of which may complete a treatment
+which is designedly kept down in detail. It has been hinted at already,
+perhaps more than once, but has not been brought out. This is the
+enormous range of suggestion in Fielding--the innumerable doors which
+stand open in his ample room, and lead from it to other chambers and
+corridors of the endless palace of Novel-Romance. This had most
+emphatically not been the case with his predecessor: for Richardson,
+except in point of mere length, showed little power of expatiation, kept
+himself very much to the same ground and round, and was not likely to
+teach anybody else to make excursions. Indeed Fielding's breaking away
+in _Joseph Andrews_ is an allegory in itself. But, at least with pupils
+and followers of any wits, there was not even any need of such breaking
+away from himself, though no doubt there are in existence many dull and
+slavish attempts to follow his work, especially _Tom Jones_. "Find it
+out for yourself"--the great English motto which in the day of England's
+glory was the motto of her men of learning as well as of her men of
+business, of her artists as well as of her craftsmen--might have been
+Fielding's: but he supplemented it with infinite finger-pointings
+towards the various things that might be found out. Almost every kind of
+novel exists--potentially--in his Four (the custom of leaving out
+_Jonathan Wild_ should be wholly abrogated), though of course they do
+not themselves illustrate or carry out at length many of the kinds that
+they thus suggest.
+
+And in fact it could not be otherwise: because, as has been pointed out,
+while Fielding had no inconsiderable command of the Book of Literature,
+he turned over by day and night the larger, the more difficult, but
+still the greater Book of Life. Not merely _quicquid agunt homines_, but
+_quicquid sentiunt, quicquid cogitant_, whatever they love and hate,
+whatever they desire or decline--all these things are the subjects of
+his own books: and the range of subject which they suggest to others is
+thus of necessity inexhaustible.
+
+If there have been some who denied or failed to recognise his greatness,
+it must be because he has played on these unwary ones the same trick
+that Garrick, in an immortal scene, played on his own Partridge. There
+is so little parade about Fielding (for even the opening addresses are
+not parade to these good people: they may disconcert or even disgust,
+but they do not dazzle them), that his characters and his scenes look
+commonplace. They feel sure that "if they had seen a ghost they would
+have looked in the very same manner and done just as he does." They are
+sure that, in the scene with Gertrude, "Lord, help them! any man--that
+is any good man--that had such a mother would have done exactly the
+same."
+
+Well! in a way no doubt they are right; and one may imitate the wisdom
+of Mr. Jones on the original occasion in not saying much more to them.
+To others, of course, this is the very miracle of art--a miracle, as far
+as the art of prose fiction is concerned, achieved in its fullness for
+practically the first time. This is the true _mimesis_--the re-creation
+or fresh creation of fictitious reality. There were in Fielding's time,
+and probably ever since have been, those who thought him "low;" there
+were, even in his own time, and have been in varying, but on the whole
+rather increased, degree since, those who thought him immoral: there
+appear to be some who think (or would like it to be thought that they
+think) him commonplace and obvious. Now, as it happens, all these
+charges have been brought against Nature too. To embellish, and correct,
+and heighten, and extra-decorate her was not Fielding's way: but to
+follow, and to interpret, and to take up her own processes with results
+uncommonly like her own. That is his immense glory to all those who can
+realise and understand it: and as for the others we must let them alone,
+joined to their own idols.
+
+In passing to the third of this great quartette, we make a little
+descent, but not much of one, while the new peak to which we come is
+well defined and separated, with characters and outlines all its own. It
+may be doubted whether any competent critic not, like Scott, bribed by
+compatriotism, ever put Smollett above Fielding, or even on a level with
+him. Thackeray, in one of the most inspired moments of his rather
+irregularly-inspired criticism, remarks, "I fancy he did not invent
+much," and this of itself would refer him to a lower class. The writer
+of fiction is not to refuse suggestion from his experience; on the
+contrary, he will do so at his peril, and will hardly by any possibility
+escape shipwreck unless his line is the purely fantastic. But if he
+relies solely, or too much, on such experience, though he may be quite
+successful, his success will be subject to discount, bound to pay
+royalty to experience itself. It is pretty certain that most of
+Smollett's most successful things, from _Roderick Random_ to _Humphry
+Clinker_, and in those two capital books, perhaps, most of all, kept
+very close to actual experience, and sometimes merely reported it.
+
+This, however, is only a comparative drawback; it is in a sense a
+positive merit; and it is connected, in a very intimate way, with the
+general character of Smollett's novel-method. This is, to a great
+extent, a reaction or relapse towards the picaresque style. Smollett may
+have translated both Cervantes and Le Sage; he certainly translated the
+latter: and it was Le Sage who in any case had the greatest influence
+over him. Now the picaresque method is not exactly untrue to ordinary
+life: on the contrary, as we have seen, it was a powerful schoolmaster
+to bring the novel thereto. But it subjects the scenes of ordinary life
+to a peculiar process of sifting: and when it has got what it wants, it
+proceeds to heighten them and "touch them up" in its own peculiar
+manner of decoration. This is Smollett's method throughout, even in that
+singular _pastiche_ of _Don Quixote_ itself, _Sir Launcelot Greaves_,
+which certainly was not his happiest conception, but which has had
+rather hard measure.
+
+As used by him it has singular merits, and communicates to at least
+three of his five books (_The Adventures of an Atom_ is deliberately
+excluded as not really a novel at all) a certain "liveliness" which,
+though it is not the life_like_ness of Fielding, is a great attraction.
+He showed it first in _Roderick Random_ (1748), which appeared a little
+before _Tom Jones_, and was actually taken by some as the work of the
+same author. It would be not much more just to take Roderick as
+Smollett's deliberate presentment of himself than to apply the same
+construction to Marryat's not very dissimilar, but more unlucky, _coup
+d'essai_ of _Frank Mildmay_. But it is certain that there was something,
+though exactly how much has never been determined, of the author's
+family history in the earliest part, a great deal of his experiences on
+board ship in the middle, and probably not a little, though less, of his
+fortunes in Bath and London towards the end. As a single source of
+interest and popularity, no doubt, the principal place must be given to
+the naval part of the book. Important as the English navy had been, for
+nearly two centuries if not for much longer, it had never played any
+great part in literature, though it had furnished some caricatured and
+rather conventional sketches. There is something more in a play, _The
+Fair Quaker of Deal_, by Charles Shadwell, nephew or son of Dryden's
+victim, but this was only of third or fourth rate literary value, and an
+isolated example to boot. The causes of the neglect have been set forth
+by many writers from Macaulay downwards, and need not be discussed here;
+the fact is certain. Smollett's employment of "the service" as a
+subject may have been, consciously and intentionally, only one of those
+utilisings of personal experience of which we have spoken. But really it
+was an instance of the great fact that the novelist, on the instigation
+mainly of Fielding himself, was beginning to take all actual life to be
+his province.
+
+Smollett brought to his work peculiar powers, the chief of which was a
+very remarkable one, and almost as much "improved on" Fielding as
+Fielding's exercise of it was improved on Richardson--that of providing
+his characters and scenes with accessories. Roderick is not only a much
+more disagreeable person than Tom, but he is much _less_ of a person:
+and Strap, though (_vice versâ_) rather a better fellow than Partridge,
+is a much fainter and more washed-out character. But in mere interest of
+story and accessories the journey of Roderick and Strap to London is
+quite the equal, and perhaps the superior, of that of Tom and his
+hanger-on after we once leave Upton, where the interest is of a kind
+that Smollett could not reach. It is probable that Fielding might, if he
+had chosen, have made the prison in _Amelia_ as horribly and
+disgustingly realistic (to use a horrible and disgusting word) as the
+ship in _Roderick_, but he at any rate did not choose. Moreover
+Smollett, himself a member of one of the less predominant partners of
+the British and Irish partnership, perhaps for that reason hit on
+utilising the difference of these partners (after a fashion which had
+never been seen since Shakespeare) in the Welshman Morgan. As far as
+mere plot goes, he enters into no competition whatever with either
+Fielding or Richardson: the picaresque model did not require that he
+should. When Roderick has made use of his friends, knocked down his
+enemies, and generally elbowed and shoved his way through the crowd of
+adventures long enough, Narcissa and her fortune are not so much the
+reward of his exertions as a stock and convenient method of putting an
+end to the account of them. The customer has been served with a
+sufficient amount of the commodity he demands: and the scissors are
+applied, the canister shut up, the tap turned off. It almost results--it
+certainly coincides--that some of the minor characters, and some of the
+minor scenes, are much more vivid than the hero (the heroine is almost
+an absolute nonentity) and the whole story. The curate and the exciseman
+in the ninth chapter are, by common consent, among Smollett's greatest
+triumphs; but the curate might be excommunicated and the exciseman
+excised without anybody who read the book perceiving the slightest gap
+or missing link, as far as the story is concerned.
+
+Smollett's second venture, _Peregrine Pickle_ (1751), was more
+ambitious, perhaps rose higher in parts, but undoubtedly contained even
+more doubtful and inferior matter. No one can justly blame him, though
+any one may most justly refrain from praising, from the general point of
+view, as regards the "insets" of Miss Williams's story in _Roderick_ and
+of that of Lady Vane here. From that point of view they range with the
+"Man of the Hill" in _Tom Jones_, and in the first case at least, though
+most certainly not in the second, have more justification of connection
+with the central story. He may so far underlie the charge of error of
+judgment, but nothing worse. Unluckily the "Lady Vane" insertion was, to
+a practical certainty, a commercial not an artistic transaction: and
+both here and elsewhere Smollett carried his already large licence to
+the extent of something like positive pornography. He is in fact one of
+the few writers of real eminence who have been forced to Bowdlerise
+themselves. Further, there would be more excuse for the most offensive
+part of _Peregrine_ if it were not half plagiarism of the main
+situations of _Pamela_ and _Clarissa_: if Smollett had not deprived his
+hero of all the excuses which, even in the view of some of the most
+respectable characters of _Pamela_, attached to the conduct of Mr. B.;
+and if he had not vulgarised Lovelace out of any possible attribution of
+"regality," except of being what the time would have called King of the
+Black Guard. As for Tom Jones, he does not come into comparison with
+"Perry" at all, and he would doubtless have been most willing and
+able--competent physically as well as morally--to administer the proper
+punishment to that young ruffian by drubbing him within an inch of his
+life.
+
+These, no doubt, are grave drawbacks: but the racy fun of the book
+almost atones for them: and the exaltation of the naval element of
+_Roderick_ which one finds here in Trunnion and Hatchway and Pipes
+carries the balance quite to the other side. This is the case even
+without, but much more with, the taking into account of Smollett's usual
+irregular and almost irrelevant _bonuses_, such as the dinner after the
+fashion of the ancients and the rest. No: _Peregrine Pickle_ can never
+be thrown to the wolves, even to the most respectable and moral of these
+animals in the most imposing as well as ravening of attitudes. English
+Literature cannot do without it.
+
+Without _Ferdinand Count Fathom_ (1753) many people have thought that
+English Literature could do perfectly well: and without going quite so
+far, one may acknowledge that perhaps a shift could be made. The idea of
+re-transferring the method (in the first place at any rate) to foreign
+parts was not a bad one, and it may be observed that by far the best
+portion of _Fathom_ is thus occupied. Not a few of these opening
+passages are excellent: and Fathom's mother, if not a person, is an
+excellent type: it is probable that the writer knew the kind well. But
+his unhappy tendency to enter for the same stakes as his great
+forerunners makes it almost impossible not to compare _Ferdinand Fathom_
+with _Jonathan Wild_: and the effect is very damaging to the Count. Much
+of the book is dull: and Fathom's conversation is (to adopt a cant word)
+extremely unconvincing. The fact seems to be that Smollett had run his
+picaresque vein dry, as far as it connected itself with mere rascality
+of various kinds, and he did well to close it. He had published three
+novels in five years: he waited seven before his next, and then eleven
+more before his last.
+
+A qualified apology has been hinted above for _Sir Launcelot Greaves_.
+It is undoubtedly evidence of the greatness of _Don Quixote_ that there
+should have been so many direct imitations of it by persons of genius
+and talent: but this particular instance is unfortunate to the verge of
+the preposterous, if not over it. The eighteenth century was indeed
+almost the capital time of English eccentricity: and it was also a time
+of licence which sometimes looked very like lawlessness. But its
+eccentricities were not at this special period romantic: and its
+lawlessness was rather abuse of law than wholesale neglect of it. A
+rascally attorney or a stony-hearted creditor might inflict great
+hardship under the laws affecting money: and a brutal or tyrannical
+squire might do the same under those affecting the tenure or the
+enjoyment of house or land. "Persons of quality" might go very far. But
+even a person of quality, if he took to riding about the country in
+complete steel, assaulting the lieges, and setting up a sort of
+cadi-justice of his own in opposition to the king's, would probably
+have been brought pretty rapidly, if not to the recovery of his senses,
+to the loss of his liberty. Nor, with rare exceptions, are the
+subordinate or incidental humours of the first class. But I have always
+thought that the opening passage more than entitles the book to an
+honourable place in the history of English fiction. I do not know where
+to look, before it, for such an "interior"--such a complete Dutch
+picture of room and furniture and accessories generally. Even so learned
+a critic as the late M. Brunetière thought that things of the kind were
+not older than Balzac. I have known English readers, not ignorant, who
+thought they were scarcely older than Dickens. Dickens, however,
+undoubtedly took them from Smollett, of whom we know that he was an
+early and enthusiastic admirer: and Scott, who has them much earlier
+than Dickens, not improbably was in some degree indebted for them to his
+countryman. At any rate in that countryman they are: and you will not
+find a much better example of them anywhere than this of the
+inn-kitchen. But apart from it, and from a few other things of the same
+or similar kinds, there is little to be said for the book. The divine
+Aurelia especially is almost more shadowy than the divine Narcissa and
+the divine Emilia: and can claim no sort of sistership in personality
+with Amelia or Sophia, even with Clarissa or Pamela. In fact, up to this
+time Smollett's women--save in the case of Fathom's hell-cat of a
+mother, and one or two more who are "minors"--have done absolutely
+nothing for his books. It was to be quite otherwise in the last and
+best, though even here the heroine _en titre_ is hardly, even though we
+have her own letters to body her out, more substantial than her elder
+sisters. But Lydia, though the _ingénue_, is not the real heroine of
+this book: her aunt and her aunt's maid divide that position between
+them.
+
+A sufficiently ungracious critic may, if he chooses, see in Smollett's
+falling back on the letter-plan for _Humphry Clinker_ (1771) an
+additional proof of that deficiency in strictly inventive faculty which
+has been noticed. The more generous "judge by results" will hardly care
+to consider so curiously in the case of such a masterpiece. For a
+masterpiece it really is. The comparative absence of "character" in the
+higher and literary sense as contrasted with "character-_parts_" in the
+technical meaning of the theatre has been admitted in the other books.
+Here, with the aid of the letters, it is amply supplied, or perhaps (to
+speak with extreme critical closeness) the character-parts are turned
+into characters by this means. There is no stint, because of the
+provision of this higher interest, of the miscellaneous fun and
+"business" which Smollett had always supplied so lavishly out of his
+experience, his observation, and, if not his invention, his combining
+faculty. And there is the setting of interior and exterior "furniture"
+which has been also referred to. Abundant as is the information which
+the eighteenth century has given us as to its justly beloved place of
+pilgrimage, Bath, there is nothing livelier than the Bath scenes here,
+from Chesterfield to Miss Austen, and few things, if any, so vivid and
+detailed. So it is with Clifton earlier, with London later, with
+Scotland last of all, and with the journeys connecting them. Yet these
+things are mere _hors d'oeuvre_, pickles, sauces, condiments, beside the
+solid character-food of the Brambles and Melfords, of Winifred Jenkins
+and of the redoubtable Lismahago. That there is no exaggeration or
+caricature cannot, of course, be said. It was not Smollett's notion of
+art to present the elaborate academies of Richardson, or the almost
+uncanny duplications of Nature which Fielding could achieve. He must
+embolden, in fact grotesque, the line; heighten, in fact splash and
+plaster, the colour. But he has not left Nature behind here: he has only
+put her in a higher light.
+
+One means of doing so has been condemned in him, as in others, as in its
+great earlier master, Swift, and its greatest later one, Thackeray, by
+some purists. They call it cheap and inartistic: but this is mere
+pedantry and prudery. Mis-spelling is not a thing to be employed every
+day or for every purpose: if you do that, you get into the ineffably
+dreary monotony which distinguishes the common comic journalist. But
+thrown in occasionally, and in the proper place, it gives an excellent
+zest: and it has seldom been employed--never, except in the two
+instances quoted--better than in the cases of Tabitha Bramble and her
+maid. For it is employed in the only legitimate way, that of zest, not
+substance. Tabitha and Winifred would still be triumphs of
+characterisation of a certain kind if they wrote as correctly as Uncle
+Matthew or Nephew Jery. Further, Lismahago is a bolder and a much less
+caricatured utilising of the "national" resource than Morgan. If
+Smollett had not been a perfectly undaunted, as well as a not very
+amiable, person he would hardly have dared to "_lacess_ the thistle" in
+this fashion. But there are few sensible Scotsmen nowadays who would not
+agree with that most sensible, as well as greatest, of their
+compatriots, Sir Walter Scott, in acknowledging the justice (comic
+emphasis granted) of the twitch, and the truth of the grip, at that
+formidable plant. The way in which Smollett mixes up actual living
+persons, by their own names, with his fictitious characters may strike
+us as odd: but there is, for the most part, nothing offensive in it,
+and in fact, except a little of his apparently inevitable indulgence in
+nasty detail, there is nothing at all offensive in the book. The
+contrast of its general tone with that especially of his first two; the
+softening and mellowing of the general presentation--is very remarkable
+in a man of undoubtedly not very gentle disposition who had long
+suffered from extremely bad health, and whose chief original works
+recently--the _Journey_ and the _Adventures_--had been, the first a
+tissue of grumbles, the second an outburst of savagery. But though the
+grumbles recur in Matthew Bramble's mouth, they become merely humorous
+there: and there is practically no savagery at all. Leghorn, it has been
+observed more than once, was in a fashion a Land of Beulah: a "season of
+calm weather" had set in for a rather stormy life just before the end.
+
+Whatever may be his defects (and from the mere point of view of Momus
+probably a larger number may be found in him than either in Richardson
+or in Fielding), Smollett well deserves an almost equal place with them
+in the history of the novel. Richardson, though he had found the
+universal as far as certain aspects of it in humanity are concerned, had
+confined it within a very narrow space, or particular envelope, in tone
+and temper: the fact that he has been called "stifling," though the
+epithet may not be entirely just, is almost sufficient evidence of this.
+Fielding had taken the novel into a far larger air and, as has been said
+already, there was hardly anything to which his method might not lead,
+and in which it would not be effective. But he had been exclusively
+English in externals: and the result is that, to this day, he has had
+less influence abroad than perhaps any English writer of equal genius
+and than some of far less.[6] Smollett, by his remarkable utilisation
+of the characteristics of the other members of Magna-Britannia; by his
+excursions into foreign European and even transatlantic scenery, had
+widened the external if not the internal prospect; and had done perhaps
+even more by that chance-medley, as it perhaps was, of attention to the
+still more internal detail which was to be of such importance in the
+novel to come. Taking the three together (not without due allowance for
+the contemporary, if mainly imitative, developments which will be
+described in the next chapter), they had put prose fiction in a position
+which it had not attained, even in Spain earlier, even in France at more
+or less the same time: and had entirely antiquated, on the one hand, the
+mere _fabliau_ or _novella_--the story of a single limited situation--on
+the other, the discursive romance with little plot and next to no
+character. One great further development, impossible at this time, of
+the larger novel, the historical, waited for Scott: but even this was
+soon, though very awkwardly, tried. It could not yet be born because the
+historic sense which was its necessary begetter hardly existed, and
+because the provision of historic matter for this sense to work on was
+rather scanty. But it is scarcely extravagant to say that it is more
+difficult to conceive even Scott doing what he did without Richardson,
+Fielding, and Smollett before him, than it is to believe that, with
+these predecessors, somebody like Scott was bound to come.
+
+    [6] This is said not to have been quite the case at the _very_
+    first: but it has been so since.
+
+Great, however, as the three are, there is no need of any "injustice to
+Ireland"--little as Ireland really has to claim in Sterne's merit or
+demerit. He is not a fifth wheel to the coach by any means: he is the
+fourth and almost the necessary one. In Richardson, Fielding, and
+Smollett the general character and possibilities of the novel had been
+shown, with the exception just noted: and indeed hardly with that
+exception, because they showed the way clearly to it. But its almost
+illimitable particular capabilities remained unshown, or shown only in
+Fielding's half extraneous divagations, and in earlier things like the
+work of Swift. Sterne took it up in the spirit of one who wished to
+exhibit these capabilities; and did exhibit them signally in more than
+one or two ways. He showed how the novel could present, in refreshed
+form, the _fatrasie_, the pillar-to-post miscellany, of which Rabelais
+had perhaps given the greatest example possible, but of which there were
+numerous minor examples in French. He showed how it could be made, not
+merely to present humorous situations, but to exhibit a special kind of
+humour itself--to make the writer as it were the hero without his ever
+appearing as character in _Tristram_, or to humorise autobiography as in
+the _Sentimental Journey_. And last of all (whether it was his greatest
+achievement or not is matter of opinion), he showed the novel of purpose
+in a form specially appealing to his contemporaries--the purpose being
+to exhibit, glorify, luxuriate in the exhibition of, sentiment or
+"sensibility." In none of these things was he wholly original; though
+the perpetual upbraiding of "plagiarism" is a little unintelligent.
+Rabelais, not to mention others, had preceded him, and far excelled him,
+in the _fatrasie_; Swift in the humour-novel; two generations of
+Frenchmen and Frenchwomen in the "sensibility" kind. But he brought all
+together and adjusted the English novel, actually to them, potentially
+to much else.
+
+To find fault with his two famous books is almost contemptibly easy. The
+plagiarism which, if not found out at once, was found out very soon, is
+the least of these: in fact hardly a fault at all. The indecency, which
+_was_ found out at once, and which drew a creditable and not in the
+least Tartuffian protest from Warburton, is a far more serious
+matter--not so much because of the licence in subject as because of the
+unwholesome and sniggering tone. The sentimentality is very often simply
+maudlin, almost always tiresome _to us_, and in very, very few
+cases justified by brilliant success even in its own very doubtful
+kind. Most questionable of all, perhaps, is the merely mechanical
+mountebankery--the blanks, and the dashes, and the rows of stops, the
+black pages and the marbled pages which he employs to force a guffaw
+from his readers. The abstinence from any central story in _Tristram_ is
+one of those dubious pieces of artifice which may possibly show the
+artist's independence of the usual attractions of story-telling, but may
+also suggest to the churlish the question whether his invention would
+have supplied him with any story to tell; and the continual asides and
+halts and parenthetic divagations in the _Journey_ are not quite free
+from the same suggestion. In fact if you "can see a church by daylight"
+you certainly want no piercing vision, and no artificial assistance of
+light or lens, to discover the faults of this very unedifying churchman.
+
+But he remains, for all that, a genius; and one of the great figures in
+our history. There is to his credit in general, as has been already
+pointed out, the great asset of having indicated, and in two notable
+instances patterned, the out-of-the-way novel--the novel eccentric,
+particular, individual. There is to that credit still more the
+brilliancy of the two specimens themselves in spite of their faults;
+their effectiveness in the literature of delight; the great powers of a
+kind more or less peculiar to the artist which they show, and the power,
+perhaps still greater, which they display in the actually general and
+ordinary lines of the novel, though adapted to this extraordinary use.
+
+For though it pleased Sterne to anticipate the knife-grinder's innocent
+confession, "Story? God bless you! I have none to tell, sir!" in a
+sardonic paraphrase of half a score of volumes, he actually possessed
+the narrative faculty in an extraordinary degree. He does not merely
+show this in his famous inset short stories, accomplished as these are:
+he achieves a much greater marvel in the way in which he makes his
+_fatrasies_ as it were novels. After one or two, brief but certainly not
+tedious, volumes of the _Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy_, you know
+that you are being cheated, and are going to be: at the end you know
+still more certainly that you have been. You have had nothing of the
+"Life" but a great deal round rather than about the birth, and a few
+equivocal, merely glanced at, and utterly unco-ordinated incidents
+later. If you have had any "opinions" they have been chiefly those of
+Mr. Tristram Shandy's father and other members of his family, or those
+of its friends and circle, or of those shadowy personages outside the
+pretended story, such as Eugenius and Yorick, besides a few discourses
+which drop the slightest pretension of being Shandean or Tristramic and
+are plainly and simply the author's. In the _Journey_ there is more
+unity; but it is, quite frankly, the unity of the temperament of that
+author himself. The incidents--sentimental, whimsical, fie-fie--have no
+other connection or tendency than the fact that they occur to the
+"gentleman in the black silk smalls" and furnish him with figures as it
+were for his performance. Yet you are _held_ in a way in which nothing
+but the romance or the novel ever does hold you. The thing is a [Greek:
+mythos hamythos]--story without story-end, without story-beginning,
+without story-connection or middle: but a story for all that. A
+dangerous precedent, perhaps; but a great accomplishment: and, even as
+a precedent, the leader of a very remarkable company. In not a few
+noteworthy later books--in a very much greater number of parts of later
+books--as we take our hats off to the success we are saluting not a new
+but an old friend, and that friend Sterne.
+
+On the second great count--character--Sterne's record is still more
+distinguished: and here there is no legerdemain about the matter. There
+is a consensus of all sound opinion to the effect that my Uncle Toby is
+an absolute triumph--even among those who think that, as in the case of
+Colonel Newcome later, it would have been possible to achieve that
+triumph without letting his simplicity run so near to something less
+attractive. It is not the sentiment that is here to blame, because
+Sterne has luckily not forgotten (as he has in the case of his dead
+donkeys and his live Marias) that humour is the only thing that will
+keep such sentiment from turning mawkish, if not even rancid; and that
+the antiseptic effect will not be achieved by keeping your humour and
+your sentiment in separate boxes. Trim is even better: he is indeed next
+to Sancho--and perhaps Sam Weller--the greatest of all "followers" in
+the novel: he supplies the only class-figure in which Sterne perhaps
+beats Fielding himself. About Walter Shandy there is more room for
+difference: and it is possible to contend that, great as he is, he is
+not complete--that he is something of a "humour" in the old one-sided
+and over-emphasised Jonsonian sense. Nothing that he does or says
+misbecomes him: but a good deal that he does not do and say might be
+added with advantage, in order to give us the portrait of a whole as
+well as a live man. As for the other male characters, Sterne's plan
+excused him--as it did not quite in Mr. Shandy's case--from making them
+more than sketches and shadows. But what uncommonly lively sketches and
+shadows they are!
+
+Sterne's unlucky failing prevented him in most cases from touching the
+women off with a clean brush: but the quality of _liveness_ pertains to
+them in almost a higher measure: and perhaps testifies even more
+strongly to his almost uncanny faculty of communicating it by touches
+which are not always unclean and are sometimes slight to an astonishing
+degree. Even that shadow of a shade "My dear, dear Jenny" has a
+suggestion of verity about her which has shocked and fluttered some: the
+maids of the Shandean household, the grisettes and peasant girls and
+ladies of the _Journey_, have flesh which is not made of paper, and
+blood that is certainly not ink. And the peculiarity extends to his two
+chief named heroines, Mrs. Shandy and the Widow. Never were any two
+female personages more unceremoniously treated in the way of scanty and
+incidental appearance. Never were any personages of scanty and
+incidental appearance made more alive and more female.
+
+His details and accessories of all kinds, descriptive, literary, and
+other, would give subject for a separate chapter; but we must turn (for
+this chapter is already too long) to his phrase--in dialogue, narrative,
+whatever you please to call it. For the fact is that these two things,
+and all others in which phrase and expression can be used, melt into
+each other with Sterne in a manner as "flibberti-gibbety" as most other
+things about him. This phrase or expression is of course artificial to
+the highest degree: and it is to it that the reproach of depending on
+mechanical aids chiefly applies. And yet laboriously figured, tricked,
+machined as it is--easy as once more it may be to prove that it is
+artifice and not art--the fact remains that, not merely (perhaps not by
+any means chiefly) in the stock extract-pieces which everybody knows,
+but almost everywhere, it is triumphant: and that English literature
+would be seriously impoverished without it. Certainly never was there a
+style which more fully justified the definition given by Buffon, in
+Sterne's own time, of style as "the _very_ man." Falsetto, "faking,"
+vamping, shoddy--all manner of evil terms may be heaped upon it without
+the possibility of completely clearing it from them. To some eyes it
+underlies them most when it is most ambitious, as in the Le Fevre story
+and the diatribe against critics. It leaves the court with all manner of
+stains on its character. Only, once more, if it did not exist we should
+be ignorant of more than one of the most remarkable possibilities of the
+English language.
+
+Thus, in almost exactly the course of a technical generation--from the
+appearance of _Pamela_ in 1740 to that of _Humphry Clinker_ in 1771--the
+wain of the novel was solidly built, furnished with four main wheels to
+move it, and set a-going to travel through the centuries. In a sense,
+inasmuch as _Humphry Clinker_ itself, though Smollett's best work, can
+hardly be said to show any absolutely new faculties, character, or
+method, the process was even accomplished in two-thirds of the time,
+between _Pamela_ and _Tristram Shandy_. We shall see in the next chapter
+how eagerly the examples were taken up: and how, long before Smollett
+died, the novel of this and that kind had become one of the most
+prolific branches of literature. But, for the moment, the important
+thing is to repeat that it had been thoroughly and finally started on
+its high road, in general by Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett; in
+particular and wayward but promising side-paths by Sterne.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE MINOR AND LATER EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL[7]
+
+    [7] A little of the work to be noticed in this chapter is not
+    strictly eighteenth century, but belongs to the first decade or
+    so of the nineteenth. But the majority of the contents actually
+    conform to the title, and there is hardly any more convenient or
+    generally applicable heading for the novel before Miss Austen
+    and Scott, excluding the great names dealt with in the last
+    chapter.
+
+
+It is at last beginning to be recognised in principle, though it is
+still much too often forgotten in practice, that the minor work of a
+time is at least as important as the major in determining general
+literary characteristics and tendencies. Nor is this anywhere much more
+noticeable than in regard to the present period of our present subject.
+The direct influence of Richardson and Fielding was no doubt very great:
+but the development of the novel during the middle and later century was
+too large and too various to be all mere imitation. As a result,
+however, of their influence, there certainly came over the whole kind a
+very remarkable change. Even before them the _nisus_ towards it, which
+has been noticed in the chapter before the last, is observable enough.
+Mrs. Manley's rather famous _New Atlantis_ (1709) has at least the form
+of a key-novel of the political sort: but the whole interest is in the
+key and not in the novel, though the choice of the form is something.
+And the second, third, and fourth decades of the century saw other work
+testifying to the vague and almost unconscious hankering after prose
+fiction which was becoming endemic. A couple of examples of this may be
+treated, in passing, before we come to the work--not exactly of the
+first class in itself--of a writer who shows both the pre-Richardsonian
+and the post-Richardsonian phases of it most interestingly, and after a
+fashion to which there are few exact parallels.
+
+A book, which counts here from the time of its appearance, and from a
+certain oddity and air of "key" about it, rather than from much merit as
+literature, or any as a story, is the _Adventures of Gaudentio di Lucca_
+by Simon Berington.[8] It appeared in 1737, between Defoe and Swift on
+the earlier, and Richardson on the later side, while the English world
+was to the novel as an infant crying for the light--and the bottle--at
+once. It begins and ends with adventures and discoveries of an ordinary
+romantic type. But the body consists of a revelation to certain Italian
+Inquisitors (who are not at all of the lurid type familiar to the
+Protestant imagination, but most equitable and well-disposed as well as
+potent, grave, and reverend signers) of an unknown country of "the Grand
+Pophar" in the centre of Africa. This country is civilised, but not yet
+Christianised: and the description of it of course gives room for the
+exercise of the familiar game of contrast--in this case not so much
+satiric as didactic--with countries nearer home which are at least
+supposed to be both civilised and Christian. It is a "respectable" book
+both in the French and the English sense: but it is certainly not very
+amusing, and cannot even be called very interesting in any way, save
+historically.
+
+    [8] The not infrequent attribution of this book to Berkeley is a
+    good instance of the general inability to discriminate _style_.
+
+The other example which we shall take is of even less intrinsic
+attraction: in fact it is a very poor thing. There are, however, more
+ways than one in which _corpora vilia_ are good for experiment and
+evidence: and we may find useful indications in the mere bookmaking of
+the time. Lowndes, the fortunate publisher of _Evelina_, some dozen
+years before that windfall came, had issued, or reissued, a collection
+called _The Novelist_ and professedly containing _The select novels of
+Dr. Croxall_ [the ingenious author of _The Fair Circassian_ and the part
+destroyer of Hereford Cathedral] _and other Polite Tales_. The book is
+an unblushing if not an actually piratical compilation; sweeping
+together, with translations and adaptations published by Croxall himself
+at various times in the second quarter of the century and probably
+earlier, most of the short stories from the _Spectator_ class of
+periodical which had appeared during the past two-thirds of a century.
+Most of the rest are obvious (and very badly done) translations from the
+French and even from Cervantes' _Exemplary Novels_; seasoned with
+personal and other anecdotes, so that the whole number of separate
+articles may exceed four-score. Of these a few are interesting attempts
+at the historical novel or novelette--short sketches of Mary Queen of
+Scots (very sympathetic and evidently French in origin from the phrase
+"a _temple_ which was formerly a church"), Jane Shore (an exquisitely
+absurd piece of eighteenth-century middle-class modernising and
+moralising), Essex, Buckingham, and other likely figures. There are cuts
+by the "Van-somethings and Back-somethings" of the time: and the whole,
+though not worthy of anything better than the "fourpenny box," is an
+evident symptom of popular taste. The sweetmeats or _hors d'oeuvre_ of
+the older caterings for that taste are here collected together to form a
+_pièce de résistance_. It is true that _The Novelist_ is only a true
+title in the older sense--that the pieces are _novelle_ not "novels"
+proper. But they are fiction, or fact treated like fiction: and though
+the popular taste itself was evidently ceasing to be satisfied with
+these morsels and demanding a substantial joint, yet the substance was,
+after all, the same.
+
+We rise higher, if not very high, with the novels of Mrs. Eliza Haywood
+(1693-1756), one of the damned of the _Dunciad_, but, like some of her
+fellows in that _Inferno_, by no means deserving hopeless reprobation.
+Every one who has devoted any attention to the history of the novel, as
+well as some who have merely considered it as a part of that of English
+literature generally, has noticed the curious contrast between the
+earlier and the later novels of this writer. _Betsy Thoughtless_ (1751)
+and _Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy_ (1753) could, without much difficulty, be
+transposed into novels of to-day. _Idalia_ (1723) is of an entirely
+different mood and scheme. It is a pure Behnesque _nouvelle_, merely
+describing the plots and outrage which ruin the heroine (_The
+Unfortunate Mistress_ is the second title), but attempting no
+character-drawing (the only hint at such a thing is that Idalia, instead
+of being a meek and suffering victim, is said to have a violent temper),
+and making not the slightest effort even to complete what story there
+is. For the thing breaks off with a sort of "_perhaps_ to be concluded
+in _some_ next," about which we have not made up our minds. Very rarely
+do we find such a curious combination or succession of styles so early:
+but the novel, for pretty obvious reasons, seems to offer temptations to
+it and facilities for it.
+
+For _Idalia's_ above-named juniors, while not bad books to read for mere
+amusement, have a very particular interest for the student of the
+history of the novel. Taken in connection with their author's earlier
+work, they illustrate, for the first time, a curious phenomenon which
+has repeated itself often, notably in the case of Bulwer, and of a
+living novelist who need not be named. This is that the novel, more
+almost than any other kind of literature, seems to lend itself to what
+may be called the _timeserving_ or "opportunism" of craftsmanship--to
+call out the adaptiveness and versatility of the artist. _Betsy_ and
+_Jenny_ are so different from _Idalia_ and her group that a critic of
+the idle Separatist persuasion would, were it not for troublesome
+certainties of fact, have no difficulty whatever in proving that they
+must be by different authors. We know that they were _not_: and we know
+also the reason of their dissimilarity--the fact that _Pamela_ and her
+brother and their groups _ont passé par là_.[9] This fact is most
+interesting: and it shows, among other things, that Mrs. Eliza Haywood
+was a decidedly clever woman.
+
+    [9] The elect ladies about Richardson joined _Betsy_ with
+    _Amelia_, and sneered at both.
+
+At the same time the two books also show that she was not quite clever
+enough: and that she had not realised, as in fact hardly one of the
+minor novelists of this time did realise, the necessity of
+individualising character. Betsy is both a nice and a good
+girl--"thoughtless" up to specification, but no fool, perfectly
+"straight" though the reverse of prudish, generous, merry, lovable. But
+with all these good qualities she is not quite a person. Jenny is, I
+think, a little more of one, but still not quite--while the men and the
+other women are still less. Nor had Eliza mastered that practised knack
+of "manners-painting" which was to stand Fanny Burney, and many another
+after her, in the stead of actual character-creation. Her situations are
+often very lively, if not exactly decorous; and they sometimes have a
+real dramatic verisimilitude, for instance, the quarrel and
+reconciliation of the Lord and the Lady in _Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy_;
+but the higher verisimilitude of prose fiction they lack. Neither again
+(though Smollett had given her a lead here) had she attained that power
+of setting and furnishing a scene which is so powerful a weapon in the
+novelist's armoury. Yet she had learnt much: and her later work would
+have been almost a wonder in her own earlier time.
+
+She had even been preceded in the new line by one, and closely followed
+by another writer of her own sex, both of unblemished reputation, and
+perhaps her superiors in intellectual quality and accomplishment, though
+they had less distinct novel-faculty. Sarah Fielding, the great
+novelist's sister, but herself one of Richardson's literary seraglio,
+had a good deal of her brother's humour, but very little of his
+constructive grasp of life. _David Simple_ (1744), her best known work,
+the _Familiar Letters_ connected with it (to which Henry contributed),
+and _The Governess_ display both the merit and the defect--but the
+defect is more fatal to a novel than the merit is advantageous. Once
+more--if the criticism has been repeated _ad nauseam_ the occasions of
+it may be warranted to be much more nauseous in themselves--one looks up
+for interest, and is not fed. "The Adventures" of David--whose progeny
+must have been rapidly enriched and ennobled if Peter Simple was his
+descendant--were "in search of a Friend," and he came upon nobody in the
+least like O'Brien. It was, in fact, too early or too late for a _lady_
+to write a thoroughly good novel. It had been possible in the days of
+Madeleine de Scudèry, and it became possible in the days of Frances
+Burney: but for some time before, in the days of Sarah Fielding, it was
+only possible in the ways of Afra and of Mrs. Haywood, who, without any
+unjust stigma on them, can hardly be said to fulfil the idea of
+ladyhood, as no doubt Miss Fielding did.
+
+There is an amusing and (in its context) just passage of Thackeray's,
+in which he calls Charlotte Lennox, author of _The Female Quixote_
+(1752), a "figment." But it would be unlucky if any one were thereby
+prevented from reading this work of the lady whom Johnson admired, and
+for whom he made an all-night orgie of apple-pie and bay-leaves. Her
+book, which from its heroine is also called _Arabella_, is clever and
+not unamusing, though it errs (in accordance with the moral-critical
+principles of the time) by not merely satirising the "heroic" romances
+of the Gomberville-La Calprenède-Scudèry type, but solemnly discussing
+them. Arabella, the romance-bitten daughter of a marquis, is, for all
+her delusion, or because of it, rather a charming creature. Her lover
+Glanville, his Richardsonian sister, and the inevitable bad Baronet (he
+can hardly be called wicked, especially for a Baronet) are more
+commonplace: and the thing would have been better as a rather long
+_nouvelle_ than as a far from short novel. It alternately comes quite
+close to its original (as in the intended burning of Arabella's books)
+and goes entirely away from it, and neither as an imitation nor
+independently is it as good as Graves's _Spiritual Quixote_: but it is
+very far from contemptible.
+
+Yet though the aptitude of women for novel-writing was thus early
+exemplified, it is not to be supposed that the majority of persons who
+felt the new influences were of that sex. By far the larger number of
+those who crowded to follow the Four were, like them, men.
+
+That not exactly credit to the Tory party, Dr. John Shebbeare, has had
+his demerits in other ways excused to some extent on the score of
+_Lydia_--whose surname, by the way, was "Fairchild," not unknown in
+later days of fiction. Even one who, if critical conscience would in
+any way permit it, would fain let the Tory dogs have a little the best
+of it, must, I fear, pronounce _Lydia_ a very poor thing. Shebbeare, who
+was a journalist, had the journalist faculty of "letting everything go
+in"--of taking as much as he could from Richardson, Fielding, Smollett,
+etc., up to date (1755); and of throwing back to Afra for an interesting
+Indian, Canassatego. The book (like not a few other eighteenth-century
+novels) has very elaborate chapter headings and very short chapters, so
+that an immoral person can get up its matter pretty easily. A virtuous
+one who reads it through will have to look to his virtue for reward. The
+irony is factitious and forced; the sentiment unappealing; the
+coarseness quite destitute of Rabelaisian geniality; and the
+nomenclature may be sampled from "the Countess of Liberal" and "Lord
+Beef." I believe Shebbeare was once pilloried for his politics. If it
+had been for _Lydia_, I should not have protested.
+
+The next book to be mentioned is an agreeable change. Why Hazlitt
+compared _The Life of John Buncle_ (1756-1766) to Rabelais is a somewhat
+idle though perhaps not quite unanswerable question; the importance of
+the book itself in the history of the English novel, which has sometimes
+been doubted or passed over, is by no means small. Its author, Thomas
+Amory (1691?-1788), was growing old when he wrote it and even when he
+prefaced it with a kind of Introduction, the _Memoirs of several Ladies_
+(1755). It is a sort of dream-exaggeration of an autobiography; at first
+sight, and not at first sight only, the wildest of farragos. The author
+represents himself as a disinherited son who is devoted, with equal
+enthusiasm, to matrimony, eating and drinking as much as he can of the
+best things he can find, discussion of theological problems in a
+"Christian-deist" or Unitarian sense, "natural philosophy" in the vague
+eighteenth-century meaning, and rambling--chiefly in the fell district
+which includes the borders of Lancashire, Yorkshire, Westmoreland,
+"Bishopric" (Durham), and Cumberland. With this district--which even
+now, though seamed with roads and railways, does actually contain some
+of the wildest scenery of the island; which only forty years ago was
+much wilder; and which in Amory's time was a howling wilderness in
+parts--he deals in the characteristic spirit of exaggeration which
+perhaps, as much as anything else, suggested Rabelais to Hazlitt. From
+Malham Cove and Hardraw Scar, through the Wild Boar Fell district to the
+head of Teesdale, you can find at this moment rough and rugged scenery
+enough, some of which is actually recognisable when "reduced" from
+Amory's extravagance. But that extravagance extends the distances from
+furlongs to leagues; deepens the caverns from yards to furlongs; and
+exalts fell and scar into Alps and Andes. In the same way he has to
+marry eight wives (not seven as has been usually, and even by the
+present writer, said), who are distractingly beautiful and wonderfully
+wise, but who seldom live more than two years: and has a large number of
+children about whom he says nothing, "because he has not observed in
+them anything worth speaking about." The courtships are varied between
+abrupt embraces soon after introduction, and discussions on Hebrew,
+Babel, "Christian-deism," and the binomial theorem. In the most
+inhospitable deserts, his man or boy[10] is invariably able to produce
+from his wallet "ham, tongue, potted blackcock, and a pint of cyder,"
+while in more favourable circumstances Buncle takes his ease in his inn
+by consuming "a pound of steak, a quart of green peas, two fine cuts of
+bread, a tankard of strong ale, and a pint of port" and singing cheerful
+love-ditties a few days after the death of an adored wife. He comes down
+the side of precipices by a mysterious kind of pole-jumping--half a
+dozen fathoms at a drop with landing-places a yard wide--like a chamois
+or a rollicking Rocky Mountain ram. Every now and then he finds a
+skeleton, with a legend of instructive tenor, in a hermitage which he
+annexes: and almost infallibly, at the worst point of the wilderness,
+there is an elegant country seat with an obliging old father and a
+lively heiress ready to take the place of the last removed charmer.
+
+    [10] It has been observed, and is worth observing, that the
+    eighteenth-century hero, even in his worst circumstances, can
+    seldom exist without a "follower."
+
+Mad, however, as this sketch may sound, and certainly not quite sane as
+Amory may have been, there is a very great deal of method in his, and
+some in its, madness. The flashes of shrewdness and the blocks of pretty
+solid learning (Rabelaisian again) do not perhaps so much concern us:
+but the book, ultra-eccentric as it is, does count for something in the
+history of the English novel. Its descriptions, rendered through a
+magnifying glass as they are, have considerable power; and are quite
+unlike anything in prose fiction, and most things in prose literature,
+before it. In Buncle himself there is a sort of extra-natural,
+"four-dimension" nature and proportion which assert the novelist's power
+memorably:--if a John Buncle could exist, he would very probably be like
+Amory's John Buncle. Above all, the book (let it be remembered that it
+came before _Tristram Shandy_) is almost the beginning of the Eccentric
+Novel--not of the satiric-marvellous type which Cyrano and Swift had
+revived from Lucian, but of a new, a modern, and a very English variety.
+Buncle is sometimes extraordinarily like Borrow (on whom he probably
+had influence), and it would not be hard to arrange a very considerable
+spiritual succession for him, by no means deserving the uncomplimentary
+terms in which he dismisses his progeny in the flesh.
+
+If there is an almost preposterous cheerfulness about _Buncle_, the
+necessary alternative can be amply supplied by the next book to which we
+come. The curious way in which Johnson almost invariably managed to hit
+the critical nail on the head is well illustrated by his remark to
+Frances Sheridan, author of the _Memoirs of Miss Sydney Bid[d]ulph_
+(1761), that he "did not know whether she had a right, on moral
+principles, to make her readers suffer so much." Substitute "æsthetic"
+for "moral" and "heroine" for "readers," and the remark retains its
+truth on another scheme of criticism, which Johnson was not ostensibly
+employing, and which he might have violently denounced. The book, though
+with its subsequent prolongation too long, is a powerful one: and though
+actually dedicated to Richardson and no doubt consciously owing much to
+his influence, practically clears off the debt by its own earnings. But
+Miss Bidulph (she started with only one _d_, but acquired another),
+whose journal to her beloved Cecilia supplies the matter and method of
+the novel, is too persistently unlucky and ill-treated, without the
+smallest fault of her own, for anything but really, not fictitiously,
+real life. Her misfortunes spring from obeying her mother (but there was
+neither moral nor satire in this then), and husbands, lovers, rivals,
+relations, connections--everybody--conspire to afflict her. Poetical
+justice has been much abused in both senses of that verb: _Sydney
+Biddulph_ shows cause for it in the very act of neglect.
+
+But the eighteenth century, on the whole, loathed melancholy. The
+_Spiritual Quixote_ (1772) of the Reverend Richard Graves (1715-1804)
+has probably been a little injured by the ingenuous proclamation of
+indebtedness in the title. It is, however, an extremely clever and
+amusing book: and one of the best of the many imitations of its
+original, which, indeed, it follows only on broad and practically
+independent lines. During his long life (for more than half a century of
+which he was rector of Claverton near Bath) Graves knew many interesting
+persons, from Shenstone and Whitefield (with both of whom he was at
+Pembroke College, Oxford, though he afterwards became a fellow of All
+Souls) to Malthus, who was a pupil of his; and he had some interesting
+private experiences. He wove a good deal that was personal into his
+novel, which, as may easily be guessed, is a satire upon Methodism, and
+in which Whitefield is personally and not altogether favourably
+introduced. But even on him Graves is by no means savage: while his
+treatment of his hero, Geoffrey Wildgoose, a young Oxford man who,
+living in retirement with his mother in the country, becomes an
+evangelist, very mainly from want of some more interesting occupation,
+is altogether good-humoured. Wildgoose promptly falls in love with a
+fascinating damsel-errant, Julia Townsend; and the various adventures,
+religious, picaresque, and amatory, are embroiled and disembroiled with
+very fair skill in character and fairer still in narrative. Nor is the
+Sancho-Partridge of the piece, Jerry Tugwell, a cobbler (who thinks,
+though he is very fond of his somewhat masterful wife, that a little
+absence from her would not be unrefreshing), by any means a failure.
+Both Scott and Dickens evidently knew Graves well,[11] and knowledge of
+him might with advantage be more general.
+
+    [11] Julia Mannering reminds me a little of Julia Townsend: and
+    if this be doubtful, the connection of Jerry's "Old madam gave
+    me some higry-pigry" and Cuddie's "the leddy cured me with some
+    hickery-pickery" is not. While, for Dickens, compare the way in
+    which Sam Weller's landlord in the Fleet got into trouble with
+    the Tinker's Tale in _Spiritual Quixote_, bk. iv. chap. ii.
+
+The novels that have been noticed since those contrasted ones of Mrs.
+Haywood's, which occupy a position by themselves, all possess a sort of
+traditional fame; and cover (with the proper time allowed for the start
+given by Richardson and Fielding) nearly the same period of thirty
+years--in this case 1744 (_David Simple_) to 1772 (_The Spiritual
+Quixote_)--which is covered by the novels of the great quartette
+themselves. It would be possible to add a great many, and easy and not
+disagreeable to the writer to dwell on a few. Of these few some are
+perhaps necessary. Frank Coventry's _Pompey the Little_--an amusing
+satirical novel with a pet dog for the title-giver and with the
+promising (but as a rule ill-handled) subject of university life treated
+early--appeared in 1751--the same year which saw the much higher flight
+(the pun is in sense not words) of _Peter Wilkins_, by Robert Paltock of
+Clement's Inn, a person of whom practically nothing else is known. It
+would be lucky for many people if they were thus singly yoked to
+history. It was once fashionable to dismiss _Peter_ as a boy's book,
+because it discovers a world of flying men and women, modelled partly on
+Defoe, partly on Swift; it has more recently been fashionable to hint a
+sneer at it as "sentimental" because of its presentment of a sort of
+fantastic and unconventional Amelia (who, it may be remembered, made her
+appearance in the same year) in the heroine Youwarkee. Persons who do
+not care for fashion will perhaps sometimes agree that, though not
+exactly a masterpiece, it is rather a charming book. If anybody is
+sickened by its charm he may restore himself by a still better known
+story which no one can accuse of charm or sentiment, though it is
+clever enough--Charles Johnstone's _Chrysal_ or _The Adventures of a
+Guinea_ (1760). This, which is strongly Smollettian in more ways than
+one, derives its chief notoriety from the way in which the scandalous
+(and perhaps partly fabulous) orgies of Medmenham Abbey are, like other
+scandalous and partly fabulous gossip of the time, brought in. But it
+_is_ clever; though emphatically one of the books which "leave a bad
+taste in the mouth." Indeed about this time the novel, which even in
+clean hands allowed itself not a little freedom, took, in others,
+excursions in the direction of the province of "prohibited literature,"
+and sometimes passed the border.
+
+One rather celebrated book, however, has not yet been mentioned: and it
+will serve very well, with two others greater in every way, as usher to
+a few general remarks on the weakness of this generation of minor
+novelists. Between 1766 and 1770 Henry Brooke, an Irishman of position,
+fortune, and literary distinction in other ways, who was at the time of
+more than middle age, published _The Fool of Quality_ or _The Adventures
+of Henry Earl of Morland_. The hero is a sort of Grandison-Buncle, as
+proper though scarcely as priggish as the one, and as eccentric and
+discursive as the other; the story is chaos: the book is stuffed with
+disquisitions on all sorts of moral, social, and political problems. It
+is excellently written; it is clear from it that Brooke (who was for a
+time actually mad) did not belie the connection of great wits with
+madness. But it is, perhaps, most valuable as an evidence of the
+unconquerable set of the time towards novel.
+
+Of this, however, as of some other points, we have greater evidence
+still in the shape of two books, each of them, as nothing else yet
+mentioned in this chapter can claim to be, a permanent and capital
+contribution to English literature--Johnson's _Rasselas_ (1759) and
+Goldsmith's _Vicar of Wakefield_ (1766).
+
+It is not from the present writer that any one need look for an attempt
+to belittle Johnson: and there is no doubt (for the _Lives of the Poets_
+is but a bundle of essays) that _Rasselas_ is Johnson's greatest _book_.
+But there may be, in some minds, as little doubt that attempts to defend
+it from the charge of not being a novel are only instances of that not
+wholly unamiable frenzy of eagerness to "say _not_ ditto to Mr. Burke"
+which is characteristic of clever undergraduates, and of periods which
+are not quite of the greatest in literature. _Rasselas_ is simply an
+extended and glorified moral apologue--an enlarged "Vision of Mirza." It
+has no real story; it has no real characters; its dialogue is "talking
+book;" it indulges in some but not much description. It is in fact a
+prose _Vanity of Human Wishes_, admirably if somewhat stiffly arranged
+in form, and as true to life as life itself. You will have difficulty in
+finding a wiser book anywhere; but although it is quite true that a
+novel need not be foolish, wisdom is certainly not its determining
+_differentia_. Yet for our purposes _Rasselas_ is almost as valuable as
+_Tom Jones_ itself: because it shows how imperative and wide-ranging was
+the struggle towards production of this kind in prose. The book is
+really--to adapt the quaint title of one of the preceding
+century--_Johnson al Mondo_: and at this time, when Johnson wanted to
+communicate his thoughts to the world in a popular form, we see that he
+chose the novel.
+
+The lesson is not so glaringly obvious in the _Vicar of Wakefield_,
+because this _is_ a novel, and a very delightful one. The only point
+of direct contact with _Rasselas_ is the knowledge of human
+nature, though in the one book this takes the form of melancholy
+aphorism and apophthegm, in the other that of felicitous trait and
+dialogue-utterance. There is plenty of story, though this has not been
+arranged so as to hit the taste of the martinet in "fable;" the book has
+endless character; the descriptions are Hogarth with less of _peuple_
+about them; the dialogue is unsurpassable. Yet Goldsmith, untiring hack
+of genius as he was, wrote no other novel; evidently felt no particular
+call or predilection for the style; would have been dramatist, poet,
+essayist with greater satisfaction to himself, though scarcely
+(satisfactory as he is in all these respects) to us. That he tried it at
+all can hardly be set down to anything else than the fact that the style
+was popular: and his choice is one of the highest possible testimonies
+to the popularity of the style. Incidentally, of course, the _Vicar_ has
+more for us than this, because it indicates, as vividly as any of the
+work of the great Four themselves, how high and various the capacities
+of the novel are--how in fact it can almost completely compete with and,
+for a time, vanquish the drama on its own ground. Much of it, of
+course--the "Fudge!" scene between Mr. Burchell and the town ladies may
+be taken as the first example that occurs--_is_ drama, with all the
+cumbrous accessories of stage and scene and circumstance spared. One may
+almost see that "notice to quit," which (some will have it) has been,
+after nearly a century and a half, served back again on the novel,
+served by the _Vicar of Wakefield_ on the drama.
+
+At the same time even the _Vicar_, though perhaps less than any other
+book yet noticed in this chapter, illustrates the proposition to which
+we have been leading up--that, outside the great quartette, and even to
+a certain extent inside of it, the novel had not yet fully found its
+proper path--had still less made up its mind to walk freely and firmly
+therein. Either it has some _arrière pensée_, some second purpose,
+besides the simple attempt to interest and absorb by the artistic
+re-creation of real and ordinary life: or, without exactly doing this,
+it shows signs of mistrust and misgiving as to the sufficiency of such
+an appeal, and supplements it by the old tricks of the drama in
+"revolution and discovery;" by incident more or less out of the ordinary
+course; by satire, political, social, or personal; by philosophical
+disquisition; by fantastic imagination--by this, that, and the other of
+the fatal auxiliaries who always undo their unwise employers. Men want
+to write novels; and the public wants them to write novels; and supply
+does not fail desire and demand. There is a well-known _locus classicus_
+from which we know that, not long after the century had passed its
+middle, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in Italy regularly received boxes of
+novels from her daughter in England, and read them, eagerly though by no
+means uncritically, as became Fielding's cousin and her ladyship's self.
+But while the kind had not conquered, and for a long time did not
+conquer, any high place in literature from the point of view of serious
+criticism--while, now and long afterwards, novel-writing was the
+Cinderella of the literary family, and novel-reading the inexhaustible
+text for sermons on wasted, nay positively ill-spent, time--the
+novelists themselves half justified their critics by frequent
+extravagance; by more frequent unreality; by undue licence pretty often;
+by digression and divagation still oftener. Except Fielding, hardly any
+one had dared boldly to hold up the mirror to nature, and be content
+with giving the reflection, in his own way, but with respect for it. For
+even Goldsmith, with infinite touches of nature, had not given quite a
+natural whole, and even Johnson, though absolutely true, had failed to
+accommodate his truth to the requirements of the novel.
+
+The turning point in this direction of the kind was to be made by a
+person far inferior in ability to any one of the great quartette, and in
+a book which, _as_ a book, cannot pretend to an equality with the worst
+of theirs--by a person indeed of less intellectual power, and in a book
+of less literary merit, than not a few of the persons and books just
+noticed. There is something, no doubt, paradoxical in this: and the
+paradox is connected, both with a real quality of the subject and with a
+surprising diversity of opinions about it. Frances Burney and her
+_Evelina_ (1778), not to mention her subsequent works and her delightful
+_Diary_, have been the subject of a great deal of writing: but though
+more than a hundred years--more indeed than a century and a
+quarter--have passed since the book insidiously took London by gradual
+storm, it may, without too much presumption, be questioned whether
+either book or author has yet been finally or satisfactorily "placed."
+The immense advantage of not having a history, positively illustrated
+once for all in Shakespeare, could hardly be negatively illustrated
+better than in Madame d'Arblay. She had the curious, and actually very
+unpleasant, experience of being selected for a position at court on the
+strength of her literary achievements, of finding it intolerable, of
+breaking down, and of never doing any really good work after her
+release, through much more than half of her long life. On this fact
+critical biography has fastened almost exclusively. Macaulay, in one of
+his most brilliant and best known essays, represents the world as having
+been deprived of unknown quantities of admirable work by the misplaced
+kindness, and the positive unkindness, of Queen Charlotte. Some have
+agreed with him, some have differed with him. Some, in one of the
+natural if uncritical revulsions, have questioned whether even _Evelina_
+is a very remarkable book. Some, with human respect for the great names
+of its early admirers, have passed it over gingerly--not exactly as
+willing to wound, but as quite afraid or reluctant to strike. Nay,
+actual critical evaluations of the novel-values of Miss Burney's four
+attempts in novel-writing are very rare. I dare say there are other
+people who have read _The Wanderer_ through: but I never met any one who
+had done so except (to quote Rossetti) myself: and I could not bring
+myself, even on this occasion, to read it again. I doubt whether very
+many now living have read _Camilla_. Even _Cecilia_ requires an effort,
+and does not repay that effort very well. Only _Evelina_ itself is
+legible and relegible--for reasons which will be given presently. Yet
+_Cecilia_ was written shortly after _Evelina_, under the same stimulus
+of abundant and genial society, with no pressure except that of friendly
+encouragement and perhaps assistance, and long before the supposed
+blight of royal favour and royal exigences came upon its author. When
+_Camilla_ was published she had been relieved from these exigences,
+though not from that favour, for five years: and was a thoroughly happy
+woman, rejoicing in husband and child. Even when the impossible
+_Wanderer_ was concocted, she had had ample leisure, had as yet incurred
+none of her later domestic sorrows, and was assured of lavish recompense
+for her (it must be said) absolutely worthless labours. Why this steady
+declension, with which, considering the character of _Cecilia_, the
+court sojourn can have had nothing to do? And admitting it, why still
+uphold, as the present writer does uphold, _Evelina_ as one of the
+_points de repère_ of the English novel? Both questions shall be
+answered in their order.
+
+Frances Burney must have been, as we see not merely from external
+testimony, but from the infallible witness of her own diary, a most
+engaging person to any one who could get over her shyness and her
+prudery:[12] but she was only in a very limited sense a gifted one.
+Macaulay grants her a "fine understanding;" but even his own article
+contradicts the statement, which is merely one of his exaggerations for
+the sake of point. She had _not_ a fine understanding: though she was
+neither silly nor stupid, her sense was altogether inferior to her
+sensibility. Although living in a most bookish circle she was, as
+Macaulay himself admits, almost illiterate: and (which he does not say)
+her comparative critical estimates of books, when she does give them,
+are merely contemptible. This harsh statement could be freely
+substantiated: but it is enough to say that, when a girl, she preferred
+some forgotten rubbish called _Henry and Frances_ to the _Vicar of
+Wakefield_: and that, when a woman, she deliberately offended
+Chateaubriand by praising the _Itinéraire_ rather than the _Génie du
+Christianisme_, or _Atala_, or _René_, or _Les Martyrs_. She had very
+little inventive power; her best novel, _Evelina_, has no plot worth
+speaking of. She never wrote really well. Even the _Diary_ derives its
+whole charm from the matter and the _reportage. Evelina_ is tolerable
+style of the kind that has no style; _Cecilia_ is pompous and
+Johnsonian; _Camilla_ was stigmatised by the competent and affectionate
+judgment of Mrs. Delany as "Gallicised;" and _The Wanderer_ is in a
+lingo which suggests the translation of an ill-written French original
+by a person who does not know English.
+
+    [12] Also, perhaps, to one who had not yet discovered that
+    intense concentration on herself and her family with which,
+    after their quarrel, Mrs. Thrale, not quite an impartial judge,
+    but a very shrewd one, charged her, and which does appear in the
+    _Diary_.
+
+What then was it in _Evelina_, and in part in _Cecilia_ (with a faint
+survival even into _Camilla_), which turned the heads of such a "town"
+as Johnson and Burke, Walpole and Windham, and many others--which, to
+persons who can see it, makes the books attractive to-day, and which
+should always give their author a secure and distinguished place in the
+great torch-race of English fiction-writers? It is this--that Miss
+Burney had a quite marvellous faculty of taking impressions of actual
+speech, manners, and to a certain extent character: that she had, at any
+rate for a time, a corresponding faculty of expressing, or at least
+reporting, her impressions. Next (and perhaps most of all) that she had
+the luck to come at a moment when speech and manners were turning to the
+modern; and lastly, that she was content, in parts of her work at any
+rate, to let her faculty of expression work, automatically and
+uninterfered with, on the impressions: and thereby give us record of
+them for all time. Her acute critic "Daddy" Crisp lamented that we had
+not had a series of recorders of successive _tons_ [fashions] like
+Fanny. But she was much more than a mere fashion-monger: and what has
+lasted best in her was not mere fashion. She could see and record life
+and nature: and she did so. Still, fashion had a good deal to do with
+it: and when her access to fashion and society ceased, the goodness of
+her work ceased likewise.
+
+Even this gift, and this even in _Evelina_ and the better parts of
+_Cecilia_, she had not always with her. The sentimental parts of
+_Evelina_--the correspondence with Mr. Villars, the courtship with Lord
+Orville, and others--are very weak: and it cannot be said that Evelina
+herself, though she is a pleasant girl enough, gives the lie to Mr.
+Pope's libel about women. Cecilia has a little more individuality. But
+the great strength of the former book lies in the admirable lower
+middle-class pictures of the Branghtons and Mr. Smith, whom Fanny had
+evidently studied from the life in the queer neighbourhood of Poland
+Street: as also in the justness and verisimilitude of the picture of the
+situation, which in different ways both books present--that of the
+introduction of a young girl to the world.[13] In these points, as in
+others which there is neither space nor need to particularise, Miss
+Burney showed that she had hit upon--stumbled upon one may almost
+say--the real principle and essence of the novel as distinguished from
+the romance--its connection with actual ordinary life--life studied
+freshly and directly "_from_ the life," and disguised and adulterated as
+little as possible by exceptional interests and incidents. It is
+scarcely too much to say that one great reason why the novel was so long
+coming into existence was precisely this--that life and society so long
+remained subject to these exceptional interests and incidents. It is
+only within the last century or so that the "life of 'mergency" (to
+adapt Mr. Chucks slightly) ceased to be the ordinary life. Addison's
+"Dissenter's Diary" with its record of nothing but constitutionals and
+marrow-bones, and Mr. Nisby's opinions, has simply amused half a dozen
+generations. Yet, in a sense, it has nearly as much to do with the
+advent of the novel as Sir Roger de Coverley himself. For these things
+are, not merely in an allegory, the subjects of the novel. Not so very
+much earlier Mr. Nisby would have had a chance of delivering his
+opinions on the scaffold: and his disciple would have had prison bread
+and water for marrow-bones and "Brooks and Hellier." These would have
+been subjects for romance: the others were subjects for novel.
+
+    [13] Dunlop and others have directly or indirectly suggested a
+    good deal of plagiarism in _Evelina_ from _Miss Betsy
+    Thoughtless_: but it is exactly in this _life_-quality that the
+    earlier novelist fails.
+
+All glory, therefore, be to Frances Burney; both that which her
+generous successor and superior gives her in _Northanger Abbey_, and
+more also--for Miss Austen, naturally enough, was not taking the
+view-point of literary history. But it has been said that Fanny herself
+possessed her gift in two senses uncertainly--first, in that she did not
+very clearly perceive what it was, and, secondly, in that she soon lost
+grip of it. It is, therefore, not wonderful that few others caught the
+trick from her for a long time--for indeed fully twenty years, till Miss
+Edgeworth made her appearance. But these twenty years were years of
+extreme fertility in novels of different sorts, while--a phenomenon that
+occurs not seldom--the older kind of fiction made a kind of rally at the
+very time that the newer was at last solidly establishing itself. There
+was, indeed, ample room for both. You cannot kill Romance: it would be a
+profound misfortune, perhaps the profoundest that could befall the human
+race, if you could. But the new romance was of rather a bastard kind,
+and it showed more of the bad blood than of the good till, by a curious
+coincidence, Scott once more found the true strain, just about the same
+time as that at which Miss Austen was making known the true strain of
+the novel proper.
+
+This hybrid new romance had been stumbled upon more than a decade before
+Fanny Burney in her turn stumbled upon the pure novel: and most people
+know in what and by whom. To this day it is by no means easy to be
+certain what Horace Walpole really meant to write, or thought he was
+writing, in _The Castle of Otranto_ (1764). His own references to his
+own writings are too much saturated with affectation and pose to make it
+safe to draw any conclusions from them; there is little or no external
+evidence; and the book itself is rather a puzzle. Taking the Preface to
+the second edition with a very large allowance of salt--the success of
+the first _before_ this preface makes double salting advisable--and
+accommodating it to the actual facts, one finds it hardly necessary to
+go beyond the obvious and almost commonplace solution that _The Castle
+of Otranto_ was simply the castle of Strawberry Hill itself with paper
+for lath and ink for plaster--in other words, an effort to imitate
+something which the imitator more than half misunderstood. Of mediæval
+literature proper, apart from chronicles and genealogies, Walpole knew
+nothing: and for its more precious features he had the dislike which
+sometimes accompanies ignorance. But he undoubtedly had positive
+literary genius--flawed, alloyed, incomplete, uncritical of itself, but
+existing: and this genius showed itself here. His paper-and-ink
+"Strawberry" is quite another guess structure from his lath-and-plaster
+one. For itself in itself--for what it _is_--the present writer, though
+he has striven earnestly and often for the sake of the great things that
+it _did_, has never been able to get up any affection or admiration. It
+is preposterous, desultory, tedious, clumsy, dull. But it made people
+(we know it on such excellent authority as Gray's) shudder: and the
+shudder was exactly what they wanted--in every sense of the verb "to
+want." Moreover, quite independently of this shudder, it pointed the way
+to a wide, fertile, and delightful province of historical, social,
+literary, and other matter which had long been neglected, and which
+people had been assured was not worth exploring. Blair was just using,
+or about to use, "any romance of chivalry" as a hyperbolical
+exemplification of the contemptible in literature. Hume had been arguing
+against, and Voltaire was still sneering at, all sorts of superstition
+and supernaturalism. The common cant of criticism for generations had
+been that "sense" and "reason" were to be the only criteria. Walpole's
+egregious helmet dropped from no one knew (or knows) where on all these
+Philistinisms: and squelched them. How it did this, why it did it, and
+so forth, one knows not much more than one knows why and how all the
+things happened in the novel itself. _Après coup_, the author talked
+about "Shakespeare" (of whom, by the way, he was anything but a fervent
+or thorough admirer) and the like. Shakespeare had, as Sir Walter
+Raleigh has well pointed out, uncommonly little to do with it. But
+Shakespeare at least supplies us with an appropriate phrase for the
+occasion. _The Castle of Otranto_ "lay in" Horace's "way, and he found
+it." And with it, though hardly in it, he found the New Romance.
+
+In Horace's case also, as in that of Frances, though the success was
+even more momentous, the successors were slow and doubtful, though not
+quite so slow. In some dozen years Walpole read Miss Clara Reeve's _Old
+English Baron_ (1777), and as in another celebrated case "thought it a
+bore." It _is_ rather a bore. It has more consecutiveness than
+_Otranto_, and escapes the absurdities of the copiously but clumsily
+used supernatural by administering it in a very minute dose. But there
+is not a spark of genius in it, whereas that spark, though sometimes
+curiously wrapped up in ashes, was always present (Heaven knows where he
+got it!) in Sir Robert's youngest son. And the contagion spread. For
+general and epidemic purposes it had to wait till the Germans had
+carried it over the North Sea and sent it back again. For particular
+ones, it found a new development in one of the most remarkable of all
+novels, twenty years younger than _Otranto_, and a few years older than
+the new outburst of the "Gothic" supernatural in the works of Anne
+Radcliffe and Mat Lewis.
+
+_Vathek_ (1786) stands alone--almost independent even of its
+sponsors--it would be awkward to say godfathers--Hamilton and Voltaire;
+apart likewise from such work as it, no doubt, in turn partly suggested
+to Peacock and to Disraeli. There is, perhaps, no one towards whom it is
+so tempting to play the idle game of retrospective Providence as towards
+the describer of Batalha and Alcobaça, the creator of Nouronnihar and
+the Hall of Eblis. Fonthill has had too many vicissitudes since
+Beckford, and Cintra is a far cry; but though his associations with Bath
+are later, it is still possible, in that oddly enchanted city, to get
+something of the mixed atmosphere--eighteenth century, nineteenth, and
+of centuries older and younger than either--which, _tamisée_ in a
+mysterious fashion, surrounds this extraordinary little masterpiece.
+Take Beckford's millions away; make him coin his wits to supply the want
+of them; and what would have been the result? Perhaps more _Vatheks_;
+perhaps things even better than _Vathek_;[14] perhaps nothing at all. On
+the whole, it is always wiser not to play Providence, in fact or fancy.
+All that need be said is that Anthony Hamilton and Voltaire are
+certainly not by themselves--good as they are, and admirable as the
+first is--enough to account for _Vathek_. Romance has passed there as
+well as persiflage and something like _coïonnerie_; it is Romance that
+has given us the baleful beauty of that Queen of Evil, Nouronnihar, and
+the vision of the burning hearts that make their own wandering but
+eternal Hell. The tendency of the novel had been on the whole, even in
+its best examples, to prose in feeling as well as in form. It was
+Beckford who availed himself of the poetry which is almost inseparable
+from Romance. But it was Horace Walpole who had opened the door to
+Romance herself.
+
+    [14] Since the text was written--indeed very recently--the
+    long-missing "Episodes" of _Vathek_ itself have been at length
+    supplied by the welcome diligence of Mr. Lewis Melville. They
+    are not "better than Vathek," but they are good.
+
+Still, _Vatheks_ are not to be had to order: and as Romance was wanted,
+to order and in bulk, during the late years of the eighteenth century,
+some other kind had to be supplied. The chief accredited purveyors of it
+have been already named and must now be dealt with, to be followed by
+the list of secondary, never quite accomplished, exponents now of novel,
+now of romance, now of the two mixed, who filled the closing years of
+the eighteenth century.
+
+It is, however, unjust to put the author of _The Mysteries of Udolpho_
+and the author of _The Monk_ on the same level. Mat Lewis was a clever
+boy with a lively fancy, a knack of catching and even of anticipating
+popular tendencies in literature, a rather vulgar taste by nature, and
+no faculty of self-criticism to correct it. The famous _Monk_ (1795),
+which he published when he was twenty, is as preposterous as _Otranto_
+and adds to its preposterousness a _haut goût_ of atrocity and indecency
+which Walpole was far too much of a gentleman, and even of a true man of
+letters, to attempt or to tolerate. Lewis's other work in various forms
+is less offensive: but--except in respect of verse-rhythm which does not
+here concern us--hardly any of it is literature. What does concern us is
+that the time took it for literature, because it adopted the
+terror-style in fiction.
+
+Anne Ward (she married a barrister named Radcliffe, of whom we do not
+hear much except that his engagements in journalism threw time on his
+wife's hands for writing) appears to have started on her career of
+terror-novelist, in which she preceded Lewis, with two fixed resolves of
+principle very contrary to his practice. The first was to observe
+strict "propriety" in her books--a point in which the novel had always
+been a little peccant. The second and more questionable, but also more
+original, was a curious determination to lavish the appearance of the
+supernatural, in accordance with the Walpolian tradition and the German
+adoption of it, but never to allow anything _really_ supernatural in
+ultimate explanation or want of explanation. She applied these two
+principles to the working out, over and over again, of practically the
+same story--the persecutions of a beautiful and virtuous heroine, and
+her final deliverance from them. Her first attempt, _The Castles of
+Athlin and Dunbayne_, appeared as early as 1789: and she left a
+posthumous romance, _Gaston de Blondeville_, which did not come out till
+1826, four years after her death. She also wrote some poems and a volume
+of _Travels_ (1794) which is important for a reason to be noticed
+presently. But her fame rests upon four books, which she published in
+seven years, between her own twenty-sixth and thirty-third, _A Sicilian
+Romance_ (1790), _The Romance of the Forest_ (1791), the world-renowned
+_Mysteries of Udolpho_ in 1794-1795, and _The Italian_ two years later.
+
+These stories owed their original attraction to the skill with which, by
+the use of a Defoe-like minuteness of detail, added to a pictorial
+faculty which Defoe had not, an atmosphere of terror is constantly
+diffused and kept up. Very little that is terrible actually happens: but
+the artist succeeds (so long as the trick has not become too familiar)
+in persuading you that something very terrible is _going_ to happen, or
+has just happened. And so the delight of something "horrid," as the
+Catherines and Isabellas of the day put it, is given much more
+plentifully, and even much more excitingly, than it could be by a real
+horror now and then, with intervals of miscellaneous business. In one
+sense, indeed, the process will not stand even the slightest critical
+examination: for it is soon seen to consist of a succession of serious
+mystifications and non-comic much-ados-about-nothing. But these "ados"
+are most cunningly made (her last book, _The Italian_, is, perhaps, the
+best place to look for them, if the reader is not taking up the whole
+subject with a virtuous thoroughness), and Mrs. Radcliffe's great praise
+is that she induced her original readers to suspend their critical
+faculties sufficiently to enable them to take it all seriously. Scott,
+who undoubtedly owed her something, assigned her positive genius: and
+modern critics, while, perhaps, seldom experiencing much real
+delectation from her work, have discovered in it not a few positive and
+many more indirect and comparative merits. The influence on Scott is not
+the least of these: but there is even a more unquestionable asset of the
+same kind in the fact that the Byronic villain-hero, if not Byron
+himself, is Mrs. Radcliffe's work. Schedoni did much more than beget or
+pattern Lara: he _is_ Lara, to all intents and purposes, in "first
+state" and before the final touch has been put by the greater master who
+took the plate in hand.
+
+But there is more to be said for Mrs. Radcliffe than this. Her
+"explained supernatural," tiresome as it may be to some of us nowadays,
+is really a marvel of patience and ingenuity: and this same quality
+extends to her plots generally. The historical side of her novels (which
+she does to some extent attempt) is a failure, as everything of the kind
+was before Scott: that we may leave till we come to Scott himself. But
+one important engine of the novelist she set to work in a fashion which
+had never been managed before, and that is elaborate description. She
+shows an early adaptation of that "picturesque," of which we see the
+beginnings in Gray, when she was in the nursery, which was being
+directly developed by Gilpin, but which, as we may see from her
+_Travels_, she had got not merely from books, but from her own
+observation. She applies it both within and without: at one moment
+giving pages on the scenery of the Apennines, at another paragraphs on
+the furniture of her abbeys and castles. The pine forests and the
+cataracts; the skyline of Udolpho bathed in sunset glow, while a
+"melancholy purple tint" steals up the slopes to its foundations--are
+all in the day's work now; but they were not so then, and it is fair to
+say that Mrs. Radcliffe does them well. The "high canopied tester of
+dark green damask" and the "counterpane of black velvet" which
+illustrate the introduction of the famous chapter of the Black Pall in
+Chateau le Blanc may be mere inventory goods now: but, once more, they
+were not so then. And this faculty of description (which, as noted
+above, could hardly have been, and pretty certainly was not, got from
+books, though it may have been, to some extent and quite legitimately,
+got from pictures) was applied in many minor ways--touches of really or
+supposedly horrible objects in the dark, faint suggestions of sound, or
+of appeals to the other senses--hints of all sorts, which were to become
+common tricks of the trade, but were then quite new.
+
+At any rate, by these and other means she attained that great result of
+the novel which has been noted in Defoe, in Richardson, and in
+others--the result of what the French vividly call _enfisting_ the
+reader--getting hold of his attention, absorbing him in a pleasant
+fashion. The mechanism was often too mechanical: taken with the
+author's steady and honest, but somewhat inartistic determination to
+explain everything it sometimes produces effects positively ridiculous
+to us. With the proviso of _valeat quantum_, it is not quite unfair to
+dwell, as has often been dwelt, on the fact that the grand triumph of
+Mrs. Radcliffe's terrormongering--the famous incident of the Black
+Veil--is produced by a piece of wax-work. But the result resulted--the
+effect _was_ produced: and it was left to those who were clever enough
+to improve upon the means. For the time these means were "improved upon"
+in another sense; we shall glance at some of the caricatures, intended
+and unintended, later. For the present we may turn to other varieties of
+the curiously swarming novel-production of these two last decades of the
+century, and especially of the very last.
+
+If Scott had not established Richard Cumberland's _Henry_ (1795) in the
+fortress of the Ballantyne Novels, it would hardly be necessary to
+notice "Sir Fretful Plagiary's" contributions to the subject of our
+history. He preluded it with another, _Arundel_ (1789), and followed it
+much later with a third, _John de Lancaster_: but there is no need to
+say anything of these. _Henry_ displays the odd hit-_and_-miss quality
+which seems to have attached itself to Cumberland everywhere, whether as
+novelist, dramatist, essayist, diplomatist, poet, or anything else. It
+is, though by no means a mere "plagiarism," an obvious and avowed
+imitation of Fielding, and the writer is so intent on his _pastiche_
+that he seems quite oblivious himself, and appears to expect equal
+oblivion on the part of his readers, of the fact that nearly two
+generations had passed. Henry is Joseph; Susan May is a much more
+elaborate and attractive Betty; the doctor's wife a vulgarised and
+repulsive Lady Booby; Ezekiel Daw, whom Scott admired, a _dissenting_
+Adams--the full force of the outrage of which variation Sir Walter
+perhaps did not feel. There are some good things in the story, but, as a
+whole, it is chiefly valuable as an early example of that great danger
+of modern literature--the influence of the "printed book" itself: and in
+a less degree of that forging ahead of the novel generally in public
+favour which we are chronicling. If the kind had not been popular, and
+if Fielding had not been its great prophet, one may be pretty sure that
+_Henry_ would never have existed. The causes are important: the effect
+not quite so.
+
+There was, however, at this time a novel-school, and not such a very
+small one, which had more legitimate reasons for existence, inasmuch as
+it really served as mouthpiece to the thoughts and opinions of the time,
+whether these thoughts and opinions were good or bad. This may be called
+the "revolutionary school," and its three most distinguished scholars
+were Bage, Holcroft, and Godwin, with Mrs. Inchbald perhaps to be added.
+The first began considerably before the outbreak of the actual French
+Revolution and shows the influence of its causes: the others were
+directly influenced by itself.
+
+One of the most remarkable of English novel-writers who are not absolute
+successes, and one who, though less completely obscured by Fortune than
+some, has never had quite his due, is Robert Bage. It was unfortunate
+for him that he fell in with the crude generation contemporary in their
+manhood with the French Revolution, and so manifested the crudity in
+full. Bage, in fact, except for a certain strength of humour, is almost
+more French than English. He has been put in the school of Richardson,
+but it is certain that Richardson would have been shocked at the
+supposed scholar: and it is not certain that Bage would or need have
+felt complimented by the assignment of the master. He has the special
+laxity of the time in point of "morality," or at least of decency; its
+affectations of rather childish perfectibilism and anti-theism; and the
+tendency of at least a part of it to an odd Calibanic jesting. Bage is
+good-tempered enough as it is: but he rather suggests possible
+Carrier-and-Fouché developments in a favourable and fostering
+atmosphere. One does not quite know why Scott, who included in the
+Ballantyne Novels three of Bage's, _Mount Henneth_ (1781), _Barham
+Downs_ (1784), and _James Wallace_ (1788), did not also include, if not
+_The Fair Syrian_ (1787), two others, _Man as He is_ (1792) and the
+still later _Hermsprong_, or _Man as He is Not_ (1796). This last has
+sometimes been regarded as Bage's masterpiece: but it does not seem so
+to the present writer. It begins by the sketch of an illegitimate child,
+written in Bage's worst vein of hard rasping irony, entirely devoid of
+the delicate spring and "give" which irony requires, and which
+constitutes the triumph even of such things as _A Tale of a Tub_ and
+_Jonathan Wild_. The rather impossibly named Hermsprong himself is not
+really so named at all, but is related (and in fact head-of-the-house)
+to the wicked or at least not good lord of the story. He is of the kind
+of Sir Charles Grandison, Rights-of-Mannified, which infests all these
+novels and is a great bore--as, indeed, to me is the whole book. The
+earlier _Man as He is_ is far better. The hero, Sir George Paradyne,
+though of the same general class, is very much more tolerable and (being
+sometimes naughty) preferable to Grandison himself: while the heroine--a
+certain Miss Colerain, who is a merchant's daughter under a double cloud
+of her father's misfortune and of calumny as regards herself--though not
+an absolute success, is worth a dozen Harriets, with thirteen
+Charlottes thrown in to make "25 as 24" in bookseller's phrase. Bage's
+extravagant or perhaps only too literal manners-painting (for it was an
+odd time) appears not infrequently, as in the anecdote of a justly
+enraged, though as a matter of fact mistaken, husband, who finds a young
+gentleman sitting on his wife's lap, with her arms round him, while he
+is literally and _en tout bien tout honneur_ painting her face--being a
+great artist in that way. _Mount Henneth_ is perhaps the liveliest of
+all: though its liveliness is partly achieved by less merely extravagant
+unconventionalities than this. But as a matter of fact Bage never
+entirely "comes off": though there is cleverness enough in him to have
+made a dozen popular and deservedly popular novelists at a better time
+for the novel. For he was essentially a novelist of manners and
+character at a transition time, when manners and character had come out
+of one stage and had not settled into another. Even Miss Edgeworth in
+_Belinda_ shows the disadvantage of this: and she was a lady of genius,
+while Bage had only talent and was not quite a gentleman.
+
+Thomas Holcroft was not a gentleman at all, never pretended to the
+title, and would probably have been rather affronted if any one had
+applied it to him: for he was a violent Atheist and Jacobin, glorying in
+his extraction from a shoemaker and an oysterseller, and in his
+education as a stable boy. He was, however, a man of considerable
+intellectual power and of some literary gift, which chiefly showed
+itself in his dramas (the best known, _The Road to Ruin_), but is not
+quite absent from his novels _Alwyn_ (1780), _Anna St. Ives_ (1792), and
+_Hugh Trevor_ (1794-1797). The series runs in curious parallel to that
+of Bage's work: for _Alwyn_, the liveliest and the earliest by far of
+the three, is little more than a study partly after Fielding, but more
+after Smollett, with his own experiences brought in. The other two are
+purpose-novels of anarchist perfectibilism, and Holcroft enjoys the
+traditional credit of having directly inspired Godwin. Godwin himself
+acknowledged the obligation; indeed it is well known that--in pecuniary
+matters more particularly--Godwin had no hesitation either in incurring
+or in acknowledging obligations, always provided that he was not
+expected to discharge them. It is possible that Holcroft's rough and
+ready acceptance and exaggeration of the doctrines which Rousseau had
+(as seems most probable) developed from a paradox of Diderot's, gave an
+impetus to the rather sluggish but more systematic mind of Godwin. But
+it is certain that _Political Justice_, though it is not a novel at all,
+is a much more amusing book than _Anna St. Ives_, which is one. And
+though Holcroft (especially if the presence of this quality in his
+_Autobiography_ is not wholly due to Hazlitt--there is some chance that
+it is) possessed a liveliness in narrative to which Godwin could never
+attain, there is no doubt that this enigmatical and many-sided spunger,
+philanderer, and corruptor of youth had a much higher general
+qualification for novel-writing than any one mentioned hitherto in this
+chapter, or perhaps than any to be mentioned, except the curiously
+contrasted pair, of Irish birth, who are to come last in it.
+
+I have sometimes thought that the greatest testimony to Godwin's power
+in this respect is the idea (which even Hazlitt, though he did not share
+it, does not seem to have thought preposterous, and which seems to have
+been held by others who were not fools) that Godwin might be the author
+of _Waverley_. To us, looking back, the notion seems as absurd as that
+Bacon could be the author of Shakespeare or Steele of the _Tale of a
+Tub_: but if, instead of looking back, we throw ourselves back, the
+absurdity does not quite persist as it does in the other two instances.
+There are some who, of course, would say, "Why take this fanciful test
+of Godwin's ability when you have a real one in _Caleb Williams_?" The
+reasons are double: for, historically, such an estimate by
+contemporaries is of the very first value, and to the present writer
+_Caleb Williams_ (1794) has never seemed a very interesting book. It is
+impossible to sympathise with a hero who is actuated by the very lowest
+of human motives, sheer inquisitiveness: and _my_ sense of natural
+justice (which is different from Godwin's) demands not that he shall
+escape, but that he shall be broken on the wheel, or burnt at a slow
+fire, or made to read _Political Justice_ after the novelty of its
+colossal want of humour has palled on him. One could sympathise with
+Falkland, but is not allowed to do so: because he is not human, except
+in his crime. But, as has been said, to those whose sporting interests
+are excited by the pleasures and hazards of the chase, these things no
+doubt do not occur. After all _Caleb_ is, in a sense, the first
+"detective novel": and detective novels have always been popular, though
+they bore some people to extinction. Far, however, be it from me to deny
+that this popularity, especially when, as in the present case, it has
+been continued for four whole generations, is a real and a very
+considerable asset. Even if it were now to cease, it is actually funded
+and vested to Godwin's credit in the _grand livre_ of literary history:
+and it can never be written off. Perhaps _Caleb_ is the one book of the
+later English eighteenth century in novel for which there must always be
+a public as soon as it is presented to that public. And when this is
+said and endorsed by those who do not personally much care for the book,
+it is at once a sufficient testimony to the position of the author, and
+a vindication of the not absolutely imbecile position of those who
+thought that he might have written _Waverley_ and its successors. The
+way in which Godwin in his later novels came down from the mountain-tops
+of theory and paradox just as he came down from those of _Political
+Justice_ itself is interesting and amusing, but not for us. As novels
+they are certainly inferior. The best parts of _St. Leon_ (1799) and
+_Fleetwood_ (1805) are perhaps better than anything in _Caleb:
+Mandeville_ (1817) and _Deloraine_ (1833) are _senilia_.[15] The
+graceful figure of the heroine Marguerite in _St. Leon_ is said to be
+modelled on Mary Wollstonecraft, and there are some fresh pictures of
+youth and childhood in _Fleetwood_. But _St. Leon_, besides its
+historical shortcomings (which, once more, we may postpone), is full of
+faults, from the badly managed supernatural to an only too natural
+dullness and languor of general story: nor has _Fleetwood_ anything like
+the absorbing power which _Caleb Williams_ exercises, in its own way and
+on its own people. Yet again we may perhaps say that the chief interest
+of Godwin, from our point of view, is his repeated and further weighted
+testimony to the importance of the novel as an appeal to public
+attention. In this respect it was in fact displacing, not only the drama
+on one side, but the sermon on the other. Not so very long before these
+two had almost engrossed the domain of _popular_ literature, the graver
+and more precise folk habitually reading sermons as well as hearing
+them, and the looser and lighter folk reading drama much oftener than
+(in then-existing circumstances) they had the opportunity of seeing it.
+With the novel the "address to the reader" became direct and stood by
+itself. The novelist could emulate Burke with his right barrel and
+Lydia Languish with his left. He certainly did not always endeavour to
+profit as well as to delight: but the double power was, from this time
+forward, shared by him with his brother in the higher and older
+_Dichtung_.
+
+    [15] Godwin had written novel-_juvenilia_ of which few say
+    anything.
+
+Next to Godwin may be placed a lady who was much adored by that curious
+professor of philandering, political _in_justice, psychology, and the
+use of the spunge, but who wisely put him off. Mrs. Inchbald's
+(1753-1821) command of a certain kind of dramatic or at least theatrical
+situation, and her propensity to Richardsonian "human-heart"-mongering,
+have from time to time secured a certain number of admirers for _A
+Simple Story_ (1791) and _Nature and Art_ (1796). Some, availing
+themselves of the confusion between "style" and "handling" which has
+recently become fashionable, have even credited her with style itself.
+Of this she has nothing--unless the most conventional of
+eighteenth-century phraseology, dashed with a kind of _marivaudage_
+which may perhaps seem original to those who do not know Marivaux's
+French followers, shall deserve the name. She is indeed very much of an
+English Madame Riccoboni. But her situations--such as the meeting in _A
+Simple Story_ of a father with the daughter whom, though not exactly
+casting her off, he has persistently refused to see, in revenge for her
+mother's unfaithfulness, and the still more famous scene in _Nature and
+Art_ where a judge passes the death-sentence on a woman whom he has
+betrayed--have, as has been allowed, the dramatic or melodramatic
+quality which attracts people in "decadent" periods. There seems,
+indeed, to have been a certain decadent charm about Mrs. Inchbald
+herself--with her beauty, her stage skill, her strict virtue combined
+with any amount of "sensibility," her affectation of nature, and her
+benevolence not in the least sham but distinctly posing. And something
+of this rococo relish may no doubt, with a little good will and
+sympathy, be detected in her books. But of the genuine life and the
+natural language which occasionally inspirit the much more unequal and
+more generally commonplace work of Miss Burney, she has practically
+nothing. And she thus falls out of the main line of development, merely
+exemplifying the revolutionary and sentimental episode.
+
+We must now, for some pages, illustrate the course of the novel by minor
+examples: and we may begin with a brief notice of two writers, one of
+whom might have been taken before Miss Burney and the other just after
+her chronologically: but who, in the order of thought and method, will
+come better here. Both were natives of Scotland and both illustrate
+different ways of the novel. Henry Mackenzie, an Edinburgh advocate, in
+three books--the names of which at least are famous, while his friend
+Sir Walter has preserved the books themselves in the collection so often
+mentioned--produced, in his own youth and in rapid succession, _The Man
+of Feeling_ (1771), _The Man of the World_ (1773), and _Julia de
+Roubigné_ (1777). John Moore, a Glasgow physician, wrote, when he was
+nearly sixty, the novel of _Zeluco_ (1786) and followed it up with
+_Edward_ ten years afterwards and _Mordaunt_ (1800). Mackenzie did good
+work later in the periodical essay: but his fiction is chiefly the
+"sensibility"-novel of the French and of Sterne, reduced to the
+absolutely absurd. From his essay-work, and from Scott's and other
+accounts of him, he must have possessed humour of a kind: but the
+extremely limited character of its nature and operation may be
+exemplified by his representation of a whole press-gang as bursting into
+tears at the pathetic action and words of an old man who offers himself
+as substitute for his son. This is one of the not rare, but certainly
+one of the most consummate, instances of fashion caricaturing itself in
+total unconsciousness. But it _was_ the fashion: and Mackenzie, though
+perhaps he helped to bring it to an end, no doubt caused the shedding,
+by "the fair" of the time, of an ocean of tears as great as the ocean of
+port wine which was contemporaneously absorbed by "the brave."
+
+Moore saw a good deal of continental society--he is indeed one of the
+first-hand witnesses for the events of the French Revolution--and he had
+a more considerable influence on the novel than has always been allowed
+him. _Zeluco_ chiefly survives because of the exquisitely ludicrous and
+human trait of the English sailor who, discussing the French army,
+pronounces white uniforms "absurd" and blue "only fit for the artillery
+and the blue horse." But it is not quite certain that its villain-hero
+had not something, and perhaps a good deal, to do with those of Mrs.
+Radcliffe who were soon to follow, and, through these, with Byron who
+was not to be very long after. The later books are of much less
+importance, if only because they follow the outburst of fiction which
+the French Revolution itself ushered. But Moore, who was intimately
+connected with Smollett, carried on the practice of making national or
+sub-national characteristics important elements of novel interest: and
+is thus noteworthy in more ways than one.
+
+He is a late instance--he was born in 1729 and so was only a few years
+younger than Smollett himself--of the writers who had, for all but half
+a century after Richardson's appearance, accumulated patterns and
+examples of the novel in all sorts of forms, hardly one of which lacked
+numerous and almost innumerable imitators and followers. By these later
+years of the century the famous "Minerva Press" and many others issued
+deluges of novel-work which were eagerly absorbed by readers.
+"Absorbed" in more senses than one: for the institution of circulating
+libraries, while it facilitated reading, naturally tended towards the
+destruction of the actual volumes read. Novels were rarely produced in a
+very careful or sumptuous fashion, and good copies of those that were in
+any way popular are now rather hard to obtain: while even in the British
+Museum it will frequently be found that only the later editions are
+represented. We shall finish this chapter with some instances, taken not
+quite at random, of the work of the last decades of the eighteenth and
+the beginning of the nineteenth century, winding up with more general
+notice of two remarkable writers who represent--though at least one of
+them lived far later--the period before Scott, and who also, as it
+happens, represent the contrast of novel and romance in a fashion
+unusually striking. The description, as some readers will have
+anticipated, refers to Miss Edgeworth and to Maturin. But the smaller
+fry must be taken first.
+
+It is not uninteresting to compare two such books as Mrs. Bennett's
+_Anna_ and Mrs. Opie's _Adeline Mowbray_. Published at twenty years'
+distance (1785 and 1804) they show the rapid growth of the novel, even
+during a time when nothing of the first class appeared. _Anna, or the
+Memoirs of a Welsh Heiress, interspersed with Anecdotes of a Nabob_, is
+a kind of bad imitation of Miss Burney, with a catchpenny
+"interspersion" to suit the day. _Adeline Mowbray_, written with more
+talent, chimes in by infusing one of the tones of _its_ day--Godwinian
+theories of life. The space between was the palmy time of that now
+almost legendary "Minerva Press" which, as has been said, flooded the
+ever-absorbent market with stuff of which _The Libertine_, masterpiece
+of Mrs. Byrne, _alias_ Charlotte Dacre, _alias_ "Rosa Matilda," is
+perhaps best worth singling out from its companions, _Hours of Solitude,
+The Nun of St. Omers, Zofloya_, etc., because it specially shocked the
+censor of the style who will be mentioned presently. It is pure (or
+not-pure) rubbish. Angelo (the libertine) seduces the angelic Gabrielle
+de Montmorency, who follows him to Italy in male attire, saves him from
+the wicked courtesan Oriana and her bravo Fiorenz_a_ (_sic_), is married
+by him, but made miserable, and dies. He continues his misbehaviour to
+their children, and finally blows his brains out. "Bah! it is bosh!" as
+the Master observes of something else.
+
+It may seem iniquitous to say that some tolerably good novel-writers
+must be more summarily treated than some bad ones here: but there is
+reason for it. Such, for instance, as Charlotte Smith and the Miss Lees
+are miles above such others as the just-mentioned polyonymous "Rosa," as
+Sarah Wilkinson, or as Henrietta Mosse-Rouvière. The first three would
+make a very good group for a twenty-page causerie. Charlotte Smith, who
+was tolerably expert in verse as well as prose; who anticipated, and
+perhaps taught, Scott in the double use of the name "Waverley"; and
+whose _Old Manor House_ (1793) is a solid but not heavy work of its
+kind--is something of a person in herself, but less of a figure in
+history, because she neither innovates nor does old things consummately.
+Harriet and Sophia Lee claimed innovation for the latter's _Recess_
+(1783-1786), as Miss Porter did for _Thaddeus of Warsaw_, but the claim
+can be even less allowed. There is nothing of real historical spirit,
+and very little goodness of any kind, in _The Recess. The Canterbury
+Tales_ (1797-1805) (so named merely because they are supposed to be told
+by different persons) were praised by Byron, as he praised the _Percy
+Anecdotes_ and other things--either irresponsibly or impishly. They are
+not exactly bad: but also as far as possible from consummateness.
+
+On the other hand, _The Convent of Grey Penitents_, one of the crops
+which rewarded Miss Wilkinson for tilling the lands of her imagination
+with the spade of her style, _is_ very nearly consummate--in badness. It
+is a fair example of the worst imitations of Mrs. Radcliffe and Mat
+Lewis conjointly, though without the latter's looseness. The Marquis di
+Zoretti was an Italian nobleman--"one of those characters in whose bosom
+resides an unquenchable thirst of avarice" ["_thirst_ of _avarice_" is
+good!], etc. He marries, however, a lovely signora of the odd name of
+Rosalthe, without a fortune, "which circumstance was overlooked by his
+lordship" for a very short time only. He plots to be free of her: she
+goes to England and dies there to the genteelest of slow music. Their
+son Horatio falls in love with a certain Julietta, who is immured by
+wicked arts in the "Convent of Grey Penitents," tormented by the head,
+Gradisca, but rescued, and so forth. The book, if harmless, is about as
+worthless as a book can be: but it represents, very fairly, the ruck, if
+not indeed even the main body, of the enormous horde of romances which
+issued from the press towards the end of the eighteenth century and the
+beginning of the nineteenth, and which, in their different action on
+persons of genius, gave us _Zastrozzi_ on the one side and _Northanger
+Abbey_ on the other.
+
+As for Miss Henrietta Mosse, otherwise Rouvière, she represents the
+other school of abortive historical novel. _A Peep at Our Ancestors_
+(1807) is fairly worthy of its ridiculous name. It is preceded by
+expressions of thanks to the authorities of "the British Museum and the
+Heralds' Office" for the "access to records" vouchsafed to its author.
+As the date of the story is 1146 (it was long before Mr. Freeman wrote)
+access to records would certainly not have been superfluous. The actual
+results of it are blocks of spiritless and commonplace historic
+narrative--it is nearly all narrative, not action--diversified by
+utterances like this of Malcolm III. of Scotland, "O my Edward! the deed
+which struck my son's life has centred [_sic_] thy noble youthful bosom
+also," or this of the heroine (such as there is), "the gentle _elegant_
+Adelaise," "And do I not already receive my education of thee, mamma?"
+It is really a pity that the creator of this remarkable peep-show did
+not give references to her "records," so that one might look up this
+"elegant" young creature of the twelfth century who talked about
+"education" and said "mamma!" But this absolute failure in
+verisimilitude is practically universal before Scott.
+
+The works of the very beautifully named Regina Maria Roche should
+probably be read, as they were for generations, in late childhood or
+early youth. Even then an intelligent boy or girl would perceive some of
+the absurdity, but might catch a charm that escapes the less receptive
+oldster. They were, beyond all question, immensely popular, and
+continued to be so for a long time: in fact it is almost sufficient
+evidence that there is, if I mistake not, in the British Museum no
+edition earlier than the tenth of the most famous of them, _The Children
+of the Abbey_ (1798). This far-renowned work opens with the exclamation
+of the heroine Amanda, "Hail, sweet sojourn of my infancy!" and we are
+shortly afterwards informed that in the garden "the part appropriated to
+vegetables was divided from the part sacred to Flora." Otherwise, the
+substance of the thing is a curious sort of watered-down Richardson,
+passed through successive filtering beds of Mackenzie, and even of Mrs.
+Radcliffe. It is difficult for even the most critical taste to find much
+savour or stimulus in the resulting liquid. But, like almost everybody
+mentioned here, Regina is a document of the demands of readers and the
+faculty of writers: and so she "standeth," if not exactly "crowned," yet
+ticketed.
+
+Work--somewhat later--of some interest, but not of first-class quality,
+is to be found in the _Discipline_ (1811) and _Self-Control_ (1814) of
+Mary Brunton. A Balfour of Orkney on the father's side and a Ligonier on
+the mother's, the authoress had access to the best English as well as
+Scottish society, and seems to have had more than a chance of taking a
+place in the former: but preferred to marry a minister-professor and
+settled down to country manse life. She died in middle age and her
+husband wrote a memoir of her. _Discipline_ seems to represent a sort of
+fancy combination of the life she might have led and the life she did
+lead. Ellen Percy, the heroine, starts in the highest circles; forgets
+herself so far as to "waltz_e_" with a noble ne'er-do-weel, thereby
+earning the "stern disapprobation" of a respectable lover; comes down in
+the world; has Highland experiences which, at the book's early date, are
+noteworthy; marries (like her creatress) a minister; but "retains a
+little of her coquettish sauciness." "Bless her, poor little dear!" one
+can imagine Thackeray exclaiming in his later and mellowed days. Mrs.
+Brunton's letters breathe a lady-like and not unamiable propriety, and
+she is altogether a sort of milder, though actually earlier, Miss
+Ferrier.
+
+Ireland vindicated its claim to comparative liveliness in the work of a
+better known contemporary and survivor. Lady Morgan's (Miss Sydney
+Owenson's) _Wild Irish Girl_ (1806) is one of the books whose titles
+have prolonged for them a kind of shadowy existence. It is written in
+letters: and the most interesting thing about it for some readers now is
+that the heroine supplied Thackeray with the name Glorvina, which, it
+seems, means in Irish "sweet voice," if Lady Morgan is to be trusted _in
+rebus Celticis_. It is to be hoped she is: for the novel is a sort of
+_macédoine_ of Irish history, folk-lore, scenery, and what not, done up
+in a syrup of love-making _quant. suff._ Its author wrote many more
+novels and became a butt for both good- and ill-natured satire with the
+comic writers of the twenties, thirties, and forties. The title was
+actually borrowed by Maturin in _The Wild Irish_ "Boy," and it is fair
+to say that the book preceded Scott's, though not Miss Edgeworth's,
+experiments in the line of the "national" novel. The earlier Reviewers
+were discreditably savage on women-writers, and Lady Morgan had her
+share of their truculence. She did not wholly deserve it: but it must be
+said that nothing she wrote can really be ranked as literature, save on
+the most indiscriminate and uncritical estimate. It is, however,
+difficult to see much harm in her.
+
+_Ida of Athens_, for instance, which shocked contemporaries, and which,
+by the way, has the very large first title of _Woman_, could only bring
+a blush to cheeks very tickle of that sere: a yawn might come much more
+easily. The most shocking thing that the heroine, who is "an attempt to
+delineate woman in her natural state," does (and that not of malice) is
+to receive her lover in a natural bathroom. But her adventures are told
+in a style which is the oddest compound of Romantesque and Johnsonese.
+("The hour was ardent. The bath was cool. _He calculated upon the
+probable necessity of its enjoyment_.") The spirit is the silliest and
+most ignorant Philhellenism--all the beauty, virtue, wisdom, of the
+ancient Greeks being supposed to be inherited by their mongrel
+successors of the early nineteenth century. An English and a Turkish
+lover dispute Ida's affection or possession. There are the elaborate
+pseudo-erudite notes which one has learnt to associate chiefly with
+Moore. The authoress boasts in her preface that she "has already written
+almost as many volumes as she has years," and that she has hardly ever
+corrected her proofs. Perhaps this silliness will make some think her
+not more an example of the savagery of contemporary criticism than a
+justification thereof.
+
+It was in fact not only brutal man who objected to the preposterous
+excesses of pseudo-romance: and serious or jocular parables were taken
+up against it, if not before _Northanger Abbey_ was written, long before
+it was published. In 1810 a certain "G." or "S.G.," whose full name was
+Sarah Green, wrote, besides some actual history and an attempt at the
+historical novel, a very curious and rather hybrid book entitled
+_Romance Readers and Romance Writers_. Its preface is an instance of
+"Women, beware Women," for though it stigmatises male creatures, such as
+a certain Curteis and a certain Pickersgill, it treats Lady Morgan (then
+only Sydney Owenson) and "Rosa Matilda" even more roughly and asks (as
+has been asked about a hundred years later and was asked about a hundred
+years before), "Is it not amazing that the [two] most licentious writers
+of romance are women?" And it starts with a burlesque account of a
+certain Margaret Marsham who exclaims, "What then? to add to my earthly
+miseries am I to be called Peggy? My name is Margari_tt_a!" "I am sure
+that if I am called Peggy again I shall go into a fit." But this promise
+of something to complete the trio with _Northanger Abbey_ and _The
+Heroine_ (to be presently mentioned) is not maintained. Not only does
+the writer force the note of parody too much by making "Margaritta" say
+to herself, "Poor persecuted _dove_ that I am," and adore a labourer's
+shirt on a hedge, but she commits the far more fatal fault of exchanging
+her jest for earnest. Margaritta--following her romance-models--falls a
+victim to an unprincipled great lady and the usual wicked baronet--at
+whose head, one is bound to say, she flings herself with such violence
+as no baronet could possibly resist. Her sister Mary, innocent of
+romance-reading and all other faults, is, though not as guilty, as
+unlucky almost as Margaret: and by far the greater part of the book is
+an unreal presentment, in nearly the worst manner of the eighteenth
+century itself, of virtuous curates, _un_virtuous "tonish" rectors, who
+calmly propose to seduce their curates' daughters (an offence which, for
+obvious reasons, must, in the worst times, have been unusual), libertine
+ladies, and reckless "fashionables" of all kinds. The preface and the
+opening create expectations, not merely of amusement but of power, which
+are by no means fulfilled. It is "S.G." who asserts that _Ida of Athens_
+"has brought a blush to the cheek of many," and one can only repeat the
+suggested substitution.
+
+The only faults that can be found with _The Heroine_ or _The Adventures
+of Cherubina_, by Eaton Stannard Barrett, which appeared in the same
+year, with no very different object and subject, though written in
+lighter vein, are one that it could not help and another that it could.
+Unjustly, but unavoidably, the first is the worst. That it is a
+burlesque rather overdone--a burlesque _burlesqué_--not in the manner of
+Thackeray, but in that of some older and some more recent writers--is
+unfortunate, but not fatal. One can forgive--one can even enjoy--the
+ghost who not only sneezes but says, "D--n, all is blown!" When the
+heroine is actually locked up with a man in a chest one is more
+doubtful: recovering when the Marquis de Furioso, "bowing gracefully to
+the bride," stabs himself to the heart, which is almost "the real
+Mackay" as they say in the North. The slight awkwardness of snow falling
+the day after the characters have been eating strawberries does not
+amuse _us_ much, because this is a comparatively ordinary event of the
+early twentieth century, whatever it might be of the early nineteenth.
+But what is fatal, though the author could not help it, is that the
+infinitely lighter, more artistic, and more lethal dart of _Northanger
+Abbey_ had been launched by the pen, if not the press, more than a dozen
+years before.
+
+There are few more curious and interesting personages in the history of
+the English Novel than Maria Edgeworth. The variety of her
+accomplishment in the kind was extraordinary: and in more than one of
+its species she went very near perfection. One is never quite certain
+whether the perpetual meddling of her rather celebrated father
+Richard--one of the capital examples of the unpractical pragmatists and
+clever-silly crotcheteers who produced and were produced by the
+Revolutionary period--did her more harm than good. It certainly loaded
+her work with superfluous and (to us) disgusting didacticism: but it
+might be contended that, without its stimulus, she would have done much
+less, perhaps nothing. As it was, she lived for more than eighty years
+(till all but the middle of the nineteenth century) and wrote for more
+than sixty. Her work is thus very bulky: but it may be considered, for
+our present purpose, in three groups--her short stories written mainly
+but not wholly for children; her regular novels; and her Irish studies.
+Of these the middle division has been, and no doubt has deserved to be,
+the least popular: but its principal example, _Belinda_ (1801)
+(_Patronage_, a longer and later book, and others are inferior), is
+considerably better than is usually admitted and, by its early date,
+deserves special notice here. It preceded Miss Austen's work in
+publication, and is specially cited by her as a capital example of novel
+in connection with the work of Miss Burney: and it is evidently founded
+on study of the latter, of which, indeed, it is the first really worthy
+continuation. Maria has nothing so good as Fanny's Smiths and
+Branghtons: but the whole book is far superior to _Evelina_. The
+extravagance of the _fin-de-siècle_ society which it represents has
+probably disguised from not a few readers who do not know the facts, the
+other fact that it is a real attempt at realist observation of manners:
+and it has the narrative merit which was Miss Edgeworth's gift of
+nature. But the hero is patchy and improbable: the heroine, a good and
+quite possible girl, is not sufficiently "reliefed out"; and the most
+important figures of the book, Lord and Lady Delacour, almost great
+successes, are not helped by the peculiar academic-didactic moralising
+which she had caught from Marmontel.
+
+The following of that ingenious and now too much under-valued writer
+stood her in better stead in the _Moral Tales_ (1801) (which she
+deliberately called after his[16]), the _Popular Tales_ of the same
+kind, and (though Marmontel did not intentionally write for children)
+the delightful _Parent's Assistant_ (1801) and _Frank_. In the two
+first-named divisions, the narrative faculty just mentioned appears
+admirably, together with another and still greater gift, that of
+character-painting, and even a grasp of literary and social satire,
+which might not be anticipated from some of her other books. The French
+governess (_Mlle. Panache_) and the satire on romantic young-ladyism
+(_Angelina_) are excellent examples of this. As for the pure child's
+stories, generation after generation of competent criticism, childish
+and adult, has voted them by acclamation into almost the highest place
+possible: and the gain-sayers have for the most part been idle
+paradoxers, ill-conditioned snarlers at things clean and sweet, or fools
+pure and simple.
+
+    [16] The peculiar pedantic ignorance which critics sometimes
+    show has objected to this rendering of Marmontel's _Contes
+    Moraux_, urging that it should read "tales _of manners_." It
+    might be enough to remark that the Edgeworths, father and
+    daughter, were probably a good deal better acquainted both with
+    French and English than these cavillers. But there is a
+    rebutting argument which is less _ad hominem_. "Tales of
+    Manners" leaves out at least as much on one side as "Moral
+    Tales" does on the other: and the actual meaning is quite clear
+    to those who know that of the Latin _mores_ and the French
+    _moeurs_. It is scarcely worth while to attempt to help those
+    who do not know by means of paraphrases.
+
+The "Irish brigade" of the work--_Castle Rackrent_ (1800), _Ormond_, and
+_The Absentee_, with the non-narrative but closely-connected _Essay on
+Irish Bulls_--have perhaps commanded the most unchequered applause. They
+are not quite free from the sentimentality and the didacticism which
+were both rampant in the novel of Miss Edgeworth's earlier time: but
+these are atoned for by a quite new use of the "national" element. Even
+Smollett and, following Smollett, Moore had chiefly availed themselves
+of this for its farcical or semi-farcical opportunities. Miss Edgeworth
+did not neglect these, but she did not confine herself to them: and such
+characters as Corny the "King of the Black Isles" in _Ormond_ actually
+add a new province and a new pleasure to fiction.
+
+Her importance is thus very great: and it only wanted the proverbial or
+anecdotic "That!" to make it much greater. "That!" as it generally is,
+was in her case the last fusing touch of genius to accomplish the
+_grand oeuvre_--the perfect projection. She had humour, pathos,
+knowledge of the world, power of drawing it, acquaintance with
+literature, shrewd common sense, an excellent style when she was allowed
+to write in her own way, the feelings of a lady who was also a good
+woman. King Charles is made to say in _Woodstock_ that "half the things
+in the world remind him of the Tales of Mother Goose." It is
+astonishing, in the real complimentary sense, how many things remind one
+of situations, passages, phrases, in Miss Edgeworth's works of all the
+kinds from _Castle Rackrent_ to _Frank_. She also had a great and an
+acknowledged influence on Scott, a considerable and a certainly not
+disavowed influence on Miss Austen. She is good reading always, however
+much we may sometimes pish and pshaw at the untimely poppings-in of the
+platitudes and crotchets (for he was that most abominable of things, a
+platitudinous crotcheteer) of Richard her father. She was a girl of
+fourteen when the beginnings of the domestic novel were laid in
+_Evelina_, and she lived to see it triumph in _Vanity Fair_. But her own
+work, save in some of her short stories, which are pretty perfect,
+represents the imperfect stage of the development--the stage when the
+novel is trying for the right methods and struggling to get into the
+right ways, but has not wholly mastered the one or reached the others.
+
+There are those who would assign what they might call "higher genius,"
+or "rarer gift," or something similar, to her countryman Charles Robert
+Maturin. The present writer is not very fond of these measurings
+together of things incommensurable--these attempts to rank the "light
+white sea-mew" as superior or inferior to the "sleek black pantheress."
+It is enough to say that while Miss Edgeworth very deliberately adopted
+the novel, and even, as we have seen, slightly satirised at least
+pseudo-romance, Maturin was romantic or nothing. His life was hardly
+half hers in length, and his temperament appears to have been as
+discontented as hers was sunny: but he had his successes in drama as
+well as in novel, and one of his attempts in the latter kind had a
+wide-ranging influence abroad as well as at home, has been recently
+printed both in whole and in part, and undoubtedly ranks among the
+novels which any tolerably well instructed person would enumerate if he
+were asked to give a pretty full list of celebrated (and deservedly
+celebrated) books of the kind in English. The others fall quite out of
+comparison. _The Fatal Revenge_ or the _Family of Montorio_ (1807) is a
+try for the "furthest" in the Radcliffe-Lewis direction, discarding
+indeed the crudity of _The Monk_, but altogether neglecting the
+restraint of _Udolpho_ and its companions in the use of the
+supernatural. _The Wild Irish Boy_ (1808), _The Milesian Chief_ (1812),
+_Women_ (1818), and _The Albigenses_ (1824) are negligible, the last,
+perhaps, rather less so than the others. But _Melmoth the Wanderer_
+(1820) is in quite a different case. It has faults in plenty--especially
+a narrative method of such involution that, as it has been said, "a
+considerable part of the book consists of a story told to a certain
+person, who is a character in a longer story, found in a manuscript
+which is delivered to a third person, who narrates the greater part of
+the novel to a fourth person, who is the namesake and descendant of the
+title-hero." Stripped of these tiresome lendings (which, as has been
+frequently pointed out, were a mania with the eighteenth century and
+naturally grew to such intricacy as this), the central story, though not
+exactly new, is impressive: and it is told and worked out in manner more
+impressive, because practically novel, save for, perhaps, a little
+suggestion from _Vathek_. Melmoth has bartered his soul with the devil
+for something like immortality and other privileges, including the
+unusual one of escaping doom if he can get some one to take the bargain
+off his hands. This leads up to numerous episodes or chapters in which
+Melmoth endeavours to obtain substitutes: and in one of these the love
+interest of the book--the, of course, fatal love of Melmoth himself for
+a Spanish-Indian girl Immalee or Isidora--is related with some real
+pathos and passion, though with a good deal of mere sentiment and
+twaddle. Maturin is stronger in his terror-scenes, and affected his own
+generation very powerfully: his influence being so great in France that
+Balzac attempted a variation and continuation, and that there are
+constant references to the book in the early French Romantics. In fact
+for this kind of "sensation" Maturin is, putting _Vathek_ aside, quite
+the chief of the whole school. But it is doubtful whether he had many
+other gifts as a novelist, and this particular one is one that cannot be
+exercised very frequently, and is very difficult to exercise at all
+without errors and extravagances.
+
+The child-literature of this school and period was very large, and, had
+we space, would be worth dealing with at length--as in the instances of
+the famous _Sandford and Merton_ (1783-1789) by Thomas Day, Richard
+Edgeworth's friend, of Mrs. Trimmer's _Story of the Robins_, and others.
+It led up to the definitely religious school of children's books, first
+evangelical, then tractarian, with which we shall deal later: but was
+itself as a rule utilitarian--or sentimental--moral rather than directly
+religious. It is, however, like other things--indeed almost all
+things--in this chapter--a document of the fashion in which the novel
+was "filling all numbers" and being used for all purposes. It was, of
+course, in this case, nearest to the world-old "fable"--especially to
+the moral apologues of which the mediæval sermon-writers and others had
+been so fond. But its popularity, especially when taken in connection
+with the still surviving distrust of fiction, is valuable. It involves
+not merely the principle that "the devil shall not have all the best
+tunes," but the admission that this tune is good.
+
+This point, and that other also frequently mentioned and closely
+connected with it, that the novel at this time overflows into almost
+every conceivable department of subject and object, are the main facts
+of a general historical kind, which should be in the reader's mind as
+the upshot of this chapter. But there is a third, almost as important as
+either, and that is the almost universal coming short of complete
+success--the lack of consummateness, the sense that if the Novel Israel
+is not exactly still in the wilderness, it has not yet crossed the
+Jordan. Even if we take in the last chapter, and its comparative giants,
+with the present and its heroes, ordinary folk, and pygmies, we shall
+scarcely find more than one great master, Fielding, and one little
+masterpiece, _Vathek_, deserving the adjective "consummate." No doubt
+the obvious explanation--that the hour was not because the man had not
+come except in this single case--is a good one: but it need not be left
+in the bare isolation of its fatalism. There are at least several
+subsidiary considerations which it is well to advance. The transition
+state of manners and language cannot be too often insisted upon: for
+this affected the process at both ends, giving the artist in fictitious
+life an uncertain model to copy and unstable materials to work in. The
+deficiency of classical patterns--at a time which still firmly believed,
+for the most part, that all good work in literature had been so done by
+the ancients that it could at best be emulated--should count for
+something: the scanty respect in which the kind was held for something
+more. As to one of the most important species, frequent allusions have
+been made, and in the next chapter full treatment will be given, to the
+causes which made the _historical_ novel impossible until very late in
+the century, and decidedly unlikely to be good even then. Perhaps,
+without attempting further detail, we may conclude by saying that the
+productions of this time present, and present inevitably, the nonage and
+novitiate of a branch of art which hardly possessed any genuine
+representatives when the century was born and which numbered them, bad
+and good, by thousands and almost tens of thousands at its death. In the
+interval there had been continuous and progressive exercise; there had
+been some great triumphs; there had been not a little good and pleasant
+work; and of even the work that was less good and less pleasant one may
+say that it at least represented experiment, and might save others from
+failure.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+SCOTT AND MISS AUSTEN
+
+
+In 1816 Sir Thomas Bernard, baronet, barrister, and philanthropist,
+published, having it is said written it three years previously, an
+agreeable dialogue on _Old Age_, which was very popular, and reached its
+fifth edition in 1820. The interlocutors are Bishops Hough and Gibson
+and Mr. Lyttleton, the supposed time 1740--the year, by accident or
+design, of _Pamela_. In this the aged and revered "martyr of Magdalen"
+is mildly reproached by his brother prelate for liking novels. Hough
+puts off the reproach as mildly, and in a most academic manner, by
+saying that he only admits them _speciali gratiâ_. This was in fact the
+general attitude to the whole kind, not merely in 1740, but after all
+the work of nearly another life-time as long as Hough's--almost in 1816
+itself. Yet when Sir Thomas published his little book, notice to quit,
+of a double kind, had been served on this fallacy. Miss Austen's life
+was nearly done, and some of her best work had not been published: but
+the greater part had. Scott was in his actual hey-day. Between them,
+they had dealt and were dealing--from curiously different sides and in
+as curiously different manners--the death-blow to the notion that the
+novel was an inferior if not actually discreditable kind, suitable for
+weak intellects only, and likely to weaken strong ones, frivolous when
+not positively immoral, giving a distaste for serious reading, implying
+in the writer an inability to do anything more serious, and generally
+presenting a glaring contrast to real "literature."
+
+Interesting as each of these two great novelists is individually, the
+interest of the pair, from our present historical point of view, is
+almost greater; and the way in which they complete each other is hardly
+short of uncanny. Before their time, despite the great examples of prose
+fiction produced by Bunyan, Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and
+Sterne, and the remarkable determination towards the life of ordinary
+society given, or instanced, by Miss Burney; despite the immense
+novel-production of the last half of the eighteenth century and the
+first decade of the nineteenth--it is hardly too much to say that "the
+novel," as such, had not found its proper way or ways at all. Bunyan's
+was an example of genius in a peculiar kind of the novel: as, in a very
+different one, was Sterne's. Defoe, possessing some of the rarest gifts
+of the novelist, was quite lacking in others. Richardson was not only
+_exemplar vitiis imitabile_ and _imitatum_, but it might be doubted
+whether, even when not faulty, he was not more admirable than
+delightful. Smollett, like Defoe, was not much more than part of a
+novelist: and Miss Burney lacked strength, equality, and range. There
+remained Fielding: and it certainly is not here that any restrictions or
+allowances will be insinuated as to Fielding's praise. But Fielding's
+novels are a circle in which no one else save Thackeray has ever been
+able to walk. And what we are looking for now is something rather
+different from this--a masterpiece, or masterpieces, which may not only
+yield delight and excite admiration in itself or themselves, but may
+bring forth fruit in others--fruit less masterly perhaps, but of the
+same or a similar kind. In other words, nobody's work yet--save in the
+special kinds--had been capable of yielding a novel-_formula_: nobody
+had hit upon the most capital and fruitful novel-ideas. And nearly
+everybody had, in the kind, done work curiously and almost
+incomprehensibly faulty. Of these faults, the worst, perhaps, were
+classable under the general head of inverisimilitude. Want of truth to
+nature in character and dialogue, extravagant and clumsy plotting,
+neglect of (indeed entire blindness to) historic colour, unreal and
+unobserved description--all these things might be raised to a height or
+sunk to a bathos in the work of the Minerva Press--but there was far too
+much of them in _all_ the novel work of these sixty or seventy years.
+
+Although the facts and dates are well enough known, it is perhaps not
+always remembered that Miss Austen, while representing what may, using a
+rather objectionable and ambiguous word, be called a more "modern" style
+of novel than Scott's, began long before him and had almost finished her
+work before his really began. If that wonderful Bath bookseller had not
+kept _Northanger Abbey_ in a drawer, instead of publishing it, it would
+have had nearly twenty years start of _Waverley_. And it must be
+remembered that _Northanger Abbey_, though it is, perhaps, chiefly
+thought of as a parody-satire on the school of Mrs. Radcliffe, is, as
+these parody-satires have a habit of being, a great deal more. If
+Catherine had not made a fool of herself about the _Orphan of the Black
+Forest_ and _Horrid Mysteries_ (or rather if everything relating to this
+were "blacked out" as by a Russian censor) there would still remain the
+admirable framework of her presentation at Bath and her intercourse with
+the Tilneys; the more admirable character-sketches of herself--the
+triumph of the ordinary made not ordinary--and the Thorpes; the most
+admirable flashes of satire and knowledge of human nature, not
+"promiscuous" or thrown out _apropos_ of things in general, but acting
+as assistants and invigorators to the story.
+
+In the few words just used lies, as far as it can be comprehended in any
+few words, the secret both of Miss Austen and of Scott. It has been
+said--more than once or twice, I fear--that hardly until Bunyan and
+Defoe do we get an interesting story--something that grasps us and
+carries us away with it--at all. Except in the great eighteenth-century
+Four the experience is not repeated, save in parts of Miss Burney and
+Miss Edgeworth later--it is simulated rather than actually brought about
+by the Terror-novel--except in the eternal exception of _Vathek_--for
+Maturin did not do his best work till much later. The absence of it is
+mainly due to a concatenation of inabilities on the part of the writers.
+They don't know what they ought to do: and in a certain sense it may
+even be said that they don't know what they are doing. In the worst
+examples surveyed in the last chapter, such as _A Peep at Our
+Ancestors_, this ignorance plumbs the abyss--blocks of dull serious
+narrative, almost or quite without action, and occasional insertions of
+flat, insipid, and (to any one with a little knowledge) impossible
+conversation, forming their staple. Of the better class of books, from
+the _Female Quixote_ to _Discipline_, this cannot fairly be said: but
+there is always something wanting. Frequently, as in both the books just
+mentioned, the writer is too serious and too desirous to instruct.
+Hardly ever is there a real _projection_ of character, in the round and
+living--only pale, sketchy "academies" that neither live, nor move, nor
+have any but a fitful and partial being. The conversation is, perhaps,
+the worst feature of all--for it follows the contemporary stage in
+adopting a conventional lingo which, as we know from private letters as
+early as Gray's and Walpole's, if not even as Chesterfield's and those
+of men and women older still, was _not_ the language of well-bred,
+well-educated, and intelligent persons at any time during the century.
+As for the Fourth Estate of the novel--description--it had rarely been
+attempted even by the great masters. In fact it has been pointed out as
+perhaps the one unquestionable merit of Mrs. Radcliffe that--following
+the taste for the picturesque which, starting from Gray and popularised
+by Gilpin, was spreading over the country--she did attempt to introduce
+this important feature, and did partly, in a rococo way, succeed in
+introducing it. As for plot, that has never been our strong point--we
+seem to have been contented with _Tom Jones_ as payment in full of that
+demand.[17]
+
+    [17] The frankness of the ingenious creator of Mr. Jorrocks
+    should be imitated by 99 per cent. of English novelists. "The
+    following story," says he of _Ask Mamma_, "does not involve the
+    complication of a plot. It is a mere continuous narrative."
+
+Now, this was all changed. It is doubtful whether if _Northanger Abbey_
+had actually appeared in 1796 it would have been appreciated--Miss
+Austen, like other writers of genius, had, not exactly as the common but
+incorrect phrase goes, to create the taste for her own work, but to
+arouse the long dormant appetite which she was born to satisfy. Yet,
+looking back a hundred years, it seems impossible that anybody of wits
+should have failed at once to discover the range, the perfection, and
+the variety of the new gift, or set of gifts. Here all the elements come
+in: and something with them that enlivens and intensifies them all. The
+plot is not intricate, but there is a plot--good deal more, perhaps,
+than is generally noticed, and more than Miss Austen herself sometimes
+gave, as, for instance, in _Mansfield Park_. It is even rather artfully
+worked out--the selfish gabble of John Thorpe, who may look to
+superficial observers like a mere outsider, playing an important part
+_twice_ in the evolution. There is not lavish but amply sufficient
+description and scenery--the Bath vignettes, especially the Beechencliff
+prospect; the sketch of the Abbey itself and of Henry's parsonage, etc.
+But it is in the other two constituents that the blowing of the new wind
+of the spirit is most perceptible. The character-drawing is simply
+wonderful, especially in the women--though the men lack nothing. John
+Thorpe has been glanced at--there had been nothing like him before, save
+in Fielding and in the very best of the essayists and dramatists.
+General Tilney has been found fault with as unnatural and excessive: but
+only by people who do not know what "harbitrary gents" fathers of
+families, who were not only squires and members of parliament, but
+military men, could be in the eighteenth century--and perhaps a little
+later. His son Henry, in common with most of his author's _jeunes
+premiers_, has been similarly objected to as colourless. He really has a
+great deal of subdued individuality, and it _had_ to be subdued, because
+it would not have done to let him be too superior to Catherine. James
+Morland and Frederick Tilney are not to be counted as more than "walking
+gentlemen," Mr. Allen only as a little more: and they fulfil their law.
+But Isabella Thorpe is almost better than her brother, as being nearer
+to pure comedy and further from farce; Eleanor Tilney is adequate; and
+Mrs. Allen is sublime on her scale. A novelist who, at the end of the
+eighteenth century, could do Mrs. Allen, could do anything that she
+chose to do; and might be trusted never to attempt anything that she
+could not achieve. And yet the heroine is perhaps--as she ought to
+be--the greatest triumph of the whole, and the most indicative of the
+new method. The older heroines had generally tried to be extraordinary:
+and had failed. Catherine tries to be ordinary: and is an extraordinary
+success. She is pretty, but not beautiful: sensible and well-natured,
+but capable, like most of us, of making a complete fool of herself and
+of doing complete injustice to other people; fairly well educated, but
+not in the least learned or accomplished. In real life she would be
+simply a unit in the thousands of quite nice but ordinary girls whom
+Providence providentially provides in order that mankind shall not be
+alone. In literature she is more precious than rubies--exactly because
+art has so masterfully followed and duplicated nature.
+
+Precisely to what extent the attractive quality of this art is enhanced
+by the pervading irony of the treatment would be a very difficult
+problem to work out. It is scarcely hazardous to say that irony is the
+very salt of the novel: and that just as you put salt even in a cake, so
+it is not wise to neglect it wholly even in a romance. Life itself, as
+soon as it gets beyond mere vegetation, is notoriously full of irony:
+and no imitation of it which dispenses with the seasoning can be worth
+much. That Miss Austen's irony is consummate can hardly be said to be
+matter of serious contest.
+
+It has sometimes been thought--perhaps mistakenly--that the exhibition
+of it in _Northanger Abbey_ is, though a very creditable essay, _not_
+consummate. But _Pride and Prejudice_ is known to be, in part, little if
+at all later than _Northanger Abbey_: and there can again be very little
+dispute among judges in any way competent as to the quality of the irony
+there. Nor does it much matter what part of this wonderful book was
+written later and what earlier: for its ironical character is
+all-pervading, in almost every character, except Jane and her lover who
+are mere foils to Elizabeth and Darcy, and even in these to some extent;
+and in the whole story, even in the at least permitted suggestion that
+the sight of Pemberley, and Darcy's altered demeanour, had something to
+do with Elizabeth's resignation of the old romantic part of _Belle dame
+sans merci_. It may further be admitted, even by those who protest
+against the undervaluation of _Northanger Abbey_, that _Pride and
+Prejudice_ flies higher, and maintains its flight triumphantly. It is
+not only longer; it is not only quite independent of parody or contrast
+with something previous; but it is far more intricate and elaborate as
+well as more original. Elizabeth herself is not merely an ordinary girl:
+and the putting forward of her, as an extraordinary yet in no single
+point unnatural one, is victoriously carried out. Her father, in spite
+of (nay, perhaps, including) his comparative collapse when he is called
+upon, not as before to talk but to act, in the business of Lydia's
+flight, is a masterpiece. Mr. Collins is, once more by common consent of
+the competent, unsurpassed, if not peerless: those who think him
+unnatural simply do not know nature. Shakespeare and Fielding were the
+only predecessors who could properly serve as sponsors to "this young
+lady" (as Scott delightfully calls her) on her introduction among the
+immortals on the strength of this character alone. Lady Catherine is not
+much the inferior (it would have been pleasing to tell her so) of her
+_protégé_ and chaplain. Of almost all the characters, and of quite the
+whole book, it is scarcely extravagant to say that it could not have
+been better on its own scale and scheme--that it is difficult to
+conceive any scheme and scale on which it could have been better. And,
+yet once more, there is nothing out of the way in it--the only thing not
+of absolutely everyday occurrence, the elopement of Lydia, happens on
+so many days still, with slight variations, that it can hardly be called
+a licence.
+
+The same qualities appear throughout the other books, whether in more or
+less quintessence and with less or more alloy is a question rather of
+individual taste than for general or final critical decision. _Sense and
+Sensibility_, the first actually to appear (1811), is believed to have
+been written about the same time as _Pride and Prejudice_, which
+appeared two years later, and _Northanger Abbey_, which did not see the
+light till its author was dead. It is the weakest of the three--perhaps
+it is the weakest of all: but the weakness is due rather to an error of
+judgment than to a lack of power. Like _Northanger Abbey_ it has a
+certain dependence on something else: the extravagances of Marianne
+satirise the Sensibility-novel just as those of Catherine do the
+Terror-story of the immediate past. But it is on a much larger scale:
+and things of the kind are better in miniature. Moreover, the author's
+sense of creative faculty made her try to throw up and contrast her
+heroine with other characters, in a way which she had not attempted in
+_Northanger Abbey_: and good as these are in themselves, they make a
+less perfect whole. Indeed, in the order of thought, _Sense and
+Sensibility_ is the "youngest" of the novels--the least self-criticised.
+Nothing in it shows lack of power (John Dashwood and his wife are of the
+first order); a good deal in it shows lack of knowledge exactly how to
+direct that power.
+
+_Mansfield Park_ (1814), though hardly as brilliant as _Pride and
+Prejudice_, shows much more maturity than _Sense and Sensibility_. Much
+of it is quite consummate, the character of Mrs. Norris especially: and
+for subtly interwoven phrase without emphasis, conveying knowledge and
+criticism of life, it has few equals. But it has an elopement. _Emma_,
+which has perhaps on the whole been the most general favourite, may
+challenge that position on one ground beyond all question, though
+possibly not on all. It is the absolute triumph of that reliance on the
+strictly ordinary which has been indicated as Miss Austen's title to
+pre-eminence in the history of the novel. Not an event, not a
+circumstance, not a detail, is carried out of "the daily round, the
+common task" of average English middle-class humanity, upper and lower.
+Yet every event, every circumstance, every detail, is put _sub specie
+eternitatis_ by the sorcery of art. Few things could be more
+terrible--nothing more tiresome--than to hear the garrulous Miss Bates
+talk in actual life; few things are more delightful than to read her
+speeches as they occur here. An aspiring soul might feel disposed to
+"take and drown itself in a pail" (as one of Dickens's characters says)
+if it had to live the life which the inhabitants of Highbury are
+represented as living; to read about that life--to read about it over
+and over again--has been and is always likely to be one of the chosen
+delights of some of the best wits of our race. This is one of the
+paradoxes of art: and perhaps it is the most wonderful of them,
+exceeding even the old "pity and terror" problem. And the discovery of
+it, as a possible source of artistic success, is one of the greatest
+triumphs and one of the most inexhaustible discoveries of that art
+itself. For by another paradox--this time not of art but of nature--the
+extraordinary is exhaustible and the ordinary is not. Tragedy and the
+more "incidented" comedy, it is well known, run into types and reproduce
+situations almost inevitably. "All the stories are told." But the story
+of the life of Highbury never can be told, because there is really
+nothing in it but the telling: and here the blessed infinity of Art
+comes in again.
+
+Miss Austen's last book, like her first, was published posthumously and
+she left nothing else but a couple of fragments. One of these, _Lady
+Susan_, does not, so far as it extends, promise much, though it is such
+a fragment and such an evident first draft even of this, that judgment
+of it is equally unfair and futile. The other, _The Watsons_, has some
+very striking touches, but is also a mere beginning. _Persuasion_--which
+appeared with _Northanger Abbey_ and which, curiously enough, has, like
+its nearly twenty years elder sister, Bath for its principal scene--has
+also some pretensions to primacy among the books, and is universally
+admitted to be of its author's most delicate, most finished, and most
+sustained work. And this, like _Emma_, resolutely abstains from even the
+slightest infusion of startling or unusual incident, of "exciting"
+story, of glaring colour of any kind: relying only on congruity of
+speech, sufficient if subdued description, and above all a profusion of
+the most delicately, but the most vividly drawn character, made to
+unfold a plot which has interest, if no excitement, and seasoned
+throughout with the unfailing condiment--the author's "own sauce"--of
+gentle but piquant irony and satire.
+
+It is not to be supposed or inferred that Miss Austen's methods, or her
+results, have appealed to everybody. Madame de Staël thought her
+_vulgaire_--meaning, of course, not exactly our "vulgar" but
+"commonplace"; Charlotte Brontë was not much otherwise minded; her own
+Marianne Dashwood would doubtless have thought the same. Readers without
+some touch of letters may think her style old-fashioned: it has even
+been termed "stilted." Not merely may amateurs of blood and thunder, of
+passion and sensation, think her tame, but the more modern devotees of
+"analysis" may consider her superficial. On the other hand, it is
+notorious that, from her own day to this, she has never wanted
+partisans, often of superlative competence, and of the most strikingly
+different tempers, tastes, and opinions. The extraordinary quietness of
+her art is only matched by its confidence: its subtlety by its strength.
+She did not try many styles; she deliberately and no doubt wisely
+refused to try the other style which was already carrying all before it
+in her own later days. She seems to have confined herself (with what
+seems to some high-flying judges an almost ignoble caution) to the
+strata of society that she knew most thoroughly: and the curious have
+noted that she seldom goes above a baronet, and hardly even descends to
+a butler, in her range of personages who are not mere mutes. It is not
+at all unlikely--in fact it is almost certain--that she might have
+enlarged this range, and that of her incident, with perfect safety and
+to the great profit and delight of her readers. But these actual things
+she knew she could do consummately; and she would not risk the
+production of anything not consummate.
+
+The value of her, artistically, is of course in the perfection of what
+she did; but the value of her historically is in the way in which she
+showed that, given the treatment, any material could be perfected. It
+was in this way, as has been pointed out, that the possibilities of the
+novel were shown to be practically illimitable. Tragedy is not needed:
+and the most ordinary transactions, the most everyday characters,
+develop into an infinite series of comedies with which the novelist can
+amuse himself and his readers. The _ludicrum humani seculi_ on the one
+hand, and the artist's power of extracting and arranging it on the
+other--these two things supply all that is wanted. This Hampshire
+parson's daughter had found the philosopher's stone of the novel: and
+the very pots and pans, the tongs and pokers of the house, could be
+turned into novel-gold by it.
+
+But even gold is not everything: and only a fanatic, and a rather
+foolish fanatic, would say that this style of fiction summed up and
+exhausted all the good that fiction could give and do. Miss Austen's art
+excludes (it has been said) tragedy; it does not let in much pure
+romance; although its variety is in a way infinite, yet it is not
+various in infinite ways, but rather in very finite ones. Everybody who
+denies its excellence is to be blamed: but nobody is to be blamed for
+saying that he should like some other excellences as well. The desire is
+innocent, nay commendable: and it was being satisfied, at practically
+the same time, by the work of Sir Walter Scott in a kind of novel almost
+as new (when we regard it in connection with its earlier examples) as
+Miss Austen's own. This was the Historical novel, which, in a way, not
+only subsumed many though not quite all varieties of Romance, but also
+summoned to its aid not a little--in fact a very great deal--of the
+methods of the pure novel itself.
+
+It is not very long since a critic, probably not very old, sentenced the
+critical opinions of another critic, certainly not very young, to "go
+into the melting pot" because they were in favour of the historical
+novel: and because the historical novel had for some time past done
+great harm (I think the phrase was stronger) to the imaginative
+literature of England. Now there are several things which might be said
+about this judgment--I do not say "in arrest" of it, because it is of
+itself inoperative: as it happens you cannot put critical opinions in
+the melting pot. At least, they won't melt: and they come out again
+like the diabolic rat that Mr. Chips tried to pitch-boil. In the first
+place, there is the question whether the greater part by far of the
+imaginative and other literature of _any_ time does not itself "go into
+the melting pot," and whether it much matters what sends it there. In
+the second, if this seems too cynical, there is the very large and grave
+question whether a still larger proportion of the novel of manners, in
+England, France, and all other countries during the same time, has not
+been as bad as, or worse than, the romantic division, historical or
+other. But the worst faults of the judgment remain. In the first place
+there is the fatal shortness of view. It is with the literature of two
+thousand, not with the literature of twenty, years that the true critic
+has to do: and no kind which--in two thousand, or two hundred, or
+twenty--has produced literature that is good or great can be even
+temporarily put aside because (as every kind of literature without
+exception has been again and again) it is for a time barren or fruitful
+only in weeds. And any one who does not count Scott and Dumas and
+Thackeray among the makers of good literature must really excuse others
+if they simply take no further count of him. The historical novel is a
+good kind, good friends, a marvellous good kind: and it has the
+advantage over the pure novel of manners that it is much less subject to
+obsolescence, if it be really well done; while it can practically annex
+most of the virtues of that novel of manners itself.
+
+This excellent kind, however, had been wandering about in the
+wilderness--had indeed hardly got so far even as that stage, but had
+been a mere "bodiless childful of life in the gloom"--for more than two
+thousand years before _Waverley_. Of its earlier attempts to get into
+full existence we cannot say much here:[18] something on the more
+recent but rather abortive birth-throes has been promised, and is now
+due. It is not improbable that considerable assistance was rendered to
+the kind by the heroic romance of the seventeenth century in prose and
+verse, which often attempted historic, and almost always
+pseudo-historic, guise. As has been seen in regard to such collections
+as Croxall's, historical stories were freely mingled with fictitious:
+and it could not be for nothing that Horace Walpole, the author of the
+_Castle of Otranto_, was a rather ardent and even to some extent
+scholarly student of the romance and the gossip of history. Much
+earlier, Fielding himself, in his salad days, had given something of an
+historic turn to the story of _A Journey from this World to the Next_.
+And when history itself became more common and more readable, it could
+not but be that this inexhaustible source of material for the new kind
+of literature, which was being so eagerly demanded and so busily
+supplied, should suggest itself. Some instances of late eighteenth and
+early nineteenth century experiments have been given and discussed in
+the last chapter: and when Scott (or "the Author of _Waverley_") had
+achieved his astonishing success, some of the writers of these put in
+the usual claim of "That's _my_ thunder." This was done in the case of
+the Lees, it was also done in the case of Jane Porter, the writer of
+the once famous and favourite _Thaddeus of Warsaw_ (1803) and _Scottish
+Chiefs_ (1810): while, as we have seen, there had been historical colour
+enough in Godwin's novels to make suggestion of _his_ "authorship of
+_Waverley_" not absolutely preposterous. Even Mrs. Radcliffe had touched
+the style; and humbler persons like the egregious Henrietta Mosse had
+attempted it in the most serious spirit.
+
+    [18] Those who are curious about the matter will find it
+    treated in a set of Essays by the present writer, which
+    originally appeared in _Macmillan's Magazine_ during the autumn
+    of 1894, and were reprinted among _Essays in English
+    Literature_, Second Series, London, 1895.
+
+But with their varying degrees of talent--with, in one or two cases,
+even a little genius--all these writers had broken themselves upon one
+fatal difficulty--that of anachronism: not in the petty sense of the
+pedant, but in the wide one of the critic. The present writer is not
+prepared, without reading _A Peep at Our Ancestors_ again (which he
+distinctly declines to do), to say that there are, in that remarkable
+performance, any positive errors of historic fact worse than, or as bad,
+as those which pedantry has pointed out in _Ivanhoe_. But whereas you
+may be nearly as well acquainted with the actual history of the time as
+the pedants themselves, and a great deal better acquainted with its
+literature, and yet never be shocked, disgusted, or contemptuously
+amused in _Ivanhoe_ by such things as were quoted from the _Peep_ a few
+pages back--so, to those who know something of "the old Elizabeth way,"
+and even nowadays to those who know very little, and that little at
+second hand, Miss Lee's travesty of it in _The Recess_ is impossible and
+intolerable. When Mrs. Radcliffe, at the date definitely given of 1584,
+talks about "the Parisian opera," represents a French girl of the
+sixteenth century as being "instructed in the English poets," and talks
+about driving in a "landau," the individual blunders are, perhaps, not
+more violent than those of the chronology by which Scott's Ulrica is
+apparently a girl at the time of the Conquest and a woman, not too old
+to be the object of rivalry between Front de Boeuf and his father, not
+long before the reign of Richard I. But this last oversight does not
+affect the credibility of the story, or the homogeneity of the manners,
+in the least. Mrs. Radcliffe jumbles up two (or more than two) utterly
+different states and stages of society, manners, and other things which
+constitute the very atmosphere of the story itself. Perhaps (we have
+very few easy conversations of the period to justify a positive
+statement) a real Bois-Guilbert and still more a real Wamba might not
+have talked exactly like Scott's personages: but there is no insistent
+and disturbing reason why they should not. When we hear an Adelaise of
+the mid-twelfth century asking whether she does not receive her
+education from her mamma, the necessary "suspension of disbelief"
+becomes impossible.
+
+But these now most obvious truths were not obvious at all between 1780
+and 1810: and it is perhaps the greatest evidence of Scott's genius that
+half, but by no means quite, unconsciously he saw them, and that he has
+made everybody see them since. It was undoubtedly fortunate that he
+began novel-writing so late: for earlier even he might have been caught
+in the errors of the time. But when he did begin, he had not only
+reached middle life and matured his considerable original critical
+faculty--criticism and wine are the only things that even the "kind calm
+years" may be absolutely trusted to improve if there is any original
+goodness in them--but he had other advantages. He had read, if not with
+minute accuracy, very widely indeed: and he possessed, as Lord Morley
+has well said, "the genius of history" in a degree which perhaps no
+merely meticulous scholar has ever reached, and which was not exceeded
+in _quality_ even by the greatest historians such as Gibbon. He had an
+almost unmatched combination of common sense with poetic imagination, of
+knowledge of the world with knowledge of letters. He had shown himself
+to be possessed of the secret of semi-historical narrative itself in
+half a dozen remarkable verse romances, and therefore had less to do in
+engineering the prose romance. Last of all, he had seen what to
+avoid--not merely in his editing of Strutt's _Queenhoo Hall_ (a valuable
+property-room for the novel, but nothing of a real novel), but in his
+reading of the failures of his predecessors and contemporaries. The very
+beginning of _Waverley_ itself (which most people skip) is invaluable,
+because it shows us that at the time he wrote it (which, it need hardly
+be said, was a long time before its completion) he had not the knowledge
+or the courage to strike straight out into the stream of action and
+conversation, but troubled himself with accumulating bladders and
+arranging ropes for the possible salvation of his narrative if it got
+into difficulties. Very soon he knew that it would not get into
+difficulties: and away he went.
+
+It ought not to be necessary, but from some symptoms it may be
+desirable, to point out that Scott is very far from being an historical
+novelist only. An acute French critic, well acquainted with both
+literatures, once went so far as to say that there were a good many
+professed "philosophical" novels which did not contain such keen
+psychology as Scott's: and I would undertake to show a good deal of
+cause on this side. But short of it, it is undeniable that he can do
+perfectly well without any historical scaffolding. There is practically
+nothing of it in his second and third novels, _Guy Mannering_ and _The
+Antiquary_, each of which good judges have sometimes ranked as his very
+best: there is as little or less in _St. Ronan's Well_, a very fine
+thing as it is, and one which, but for James Ballantyne's meddling folly
+and prudery, would have been much finer. The incomparable little
+conversation--scenes and character-sketches scattered among the
+Introductions to the novels--especially the history of Crystal
+Croftangry--show that he could perfectly well have dispensed with all
+out-of-the-way incident had he chosen. But, as a rule, he did not so
+choose: and, in the majority of cases, he preferred to take his
+out-of-the-way incident from historical sources. Not here,
+unfortunately, can we allow ourselves even a space proportionate to that
+given above in Miss Austen's case to the criticism of individual novels:
+but luckily there is not much need of this. The brilliant overture of
+_Waverley_ as such, with its entirely novel combination of the
+historical and the "national" elements upon the still more novel
+background of Highland scenery; the equally vivid and vigorous narrative
+and the more interesting personages of _Old Mortality_ and _Rob Roy_;
+the domestic tragedy, with the historical element for little more than a
+framework, of the _Heart of Midlothian_ and the _Bride of Lammermoor_;
+the little masterpiece of _A Legend of Montrose_; the fresh departure,
+with purely English subject, of _Ivanhoe_ and its triumphant sequels in
+_Kenilworth, Quentin Durward_, and others; the striking utilisation of
+literary assistance in the _Fortunes of Nigel_; and the wonderful
+blending of autobiographic, historical, and romantic interest in
+_Redgauntlet_:--one cannot dwell on these and other things. The magic
+continued even in _Woodstock_--written as this was almost between the
+blows of the executioner's crow-bar on the wheel, in the tightening of
+the windlasses at the rack--it is not absent, whatever people may say,
+in _Anne of Geierstein_, nor even quite lacking in the better parts of
+_Count Robert of Paris_. But we must not expatiate on its effects; we
+must only give a little attention to the means by which they are
+achieved.
+
+Another of the common errors about Scott is to represent--perhaps really
+to regard--him as a hit-or-miss and hand-to-mouth _improvisatore_, who
+bundled out his creations anyhow, and did not himself know how he
+created them. The fallacy is worse than a fallacy: for it is down-right
+false witness. We have numerous passages in and out of the novels--the
+chief of them being the remarkable conversation with Captain Clutterbuck
+in the Introduction to the _Fortunes of Nigel_ and the reflections in
+the _Diary_ on _Sir John Chiverton_ and _Brambletye House_--showing that
+Scott knew perfectly well the construction and the stringing of his
+fiddle, as well as the trick of applying his rosin. But if we had not
+these direct testimonies, no one of any critical faculty could mistake
+the presence of consciously perceived principles in the books
+themselves. A man does not suddenly, and by mere blind instinct, avoid
+such a pitfall as that of incongruous speech and manners, which has been
+noticed above. It is not mere happy-go-lucky blundering which makes him
+invariably decline another into which people still fall--the selection
+of historical personages of the first importance, and elaborately known,
+for the _central_ figures of his novels. Not to believe in luck is a
+mark of perhaps greater folly than to over-believe in it: but luck will
+not always keep a man clear of such perils as that unskilful wedging of
+great blocks of mere history into his story, which the lesser historical
+novelists always commit, or that preponderance of mere narrative itself
+as compared with action and conversation from which even Dumas, even
+Thackeray, is not free.
+
+That he knew what he was doing and what he had to do is thus certain;
+that he did it to an astounding extent is still more certain; but it
+would not skill much to deny that he did not always give himself time to
+do it perfectly in every respect, though it is perhaps not mere paradox
+or mere partisanship to suggest that if he had given himself more time,
+he would hardly have done better, and might have done worse. The
+accusation of superficiality has been _already_ glanced at: and it is
+pretty certain that it argues more superficiality, of a much more
+hopeless kind, in those who make it. The accusation of careless and
+slovenly style is not much better: for Scott had, perfectly, the style
+suited to his own work, and you cannot easily have a better style than
+that. But there are two defects in him which were early detected by good
+and friendly judges: and which are in fact natural results of the
+extraordinary force and fertility of his creative power. One--the less
+serious, but certainly to some extent a fault in art and a point in
+which he is distinguished for the worse from Shakespeare--is that he is
+rather given to allow at first, to some of his personages, an
+elaborateness and apparent emphasis of drawing which seems to promise an
+importance for them in the story that they never actually attain. Mike
+Lambourne in _Kenilworth_ is a good example of this: but there are many
+others. The fact evidently was that, in the rush of the artist's plastic
+imagination, other figures rose and overpowered these. It is an excuse:
+but it is hardly a justification. The other and more serious is a
+tendency--which grew on him and may no doubt have been encouraged by the
+astonishing pecuniary rewards of his work--to hurry his conclusions, to
+"huddle up the cards and throw them into the bag," as Lady Louisa Stuart
+told him. There is one of the numerous, but it would seem generic and
+classifiable, forms of unpleasant dream in which the dreamer's watch, to
+his consternation, suddenly begins to send its hands round at double and
+ten-fold speed. Scott is rather apt to do this, towards the close of his
+novels, in his eagerness to begin something else. These defects,
+however, are defects much more from the point of view of abstract
+criticism than from that of the pleasure of the reader: while, even from
+the former, they are outweighed many times by merits. And as regards our
+present method of estimation, they hardly count at all.
+
+For, in that calculus, the important thing is that Scott, like Miss
+Austen, at once opened an immense new field to the novelist, and showed
+how that field was to be cultivated. The complement-contrast of the pair
+can need emphasising only to those on whom no emphasis would be likely
+to impress it: but it may not be quite so evident at once that between
+them they cover almost the entire possible ground of prose fiction. The
+more striking and popular as well as more strictly novel style of Scott
+naturally attracted most attention at first: indeed it can hardly be
+said that, for the next thirty years, much attempt was made to follow in
+Miss Austen's steps, while such attempts as were made were seldom very
+good.[19] But there is no need to hurry Time: and he generally knows
+what he is about. At any rate he had, in and through these two
+provided--for generations, probably for centuries, to come--patterns and
+principles for whoso would to follow in prose fiction.
+
+    [19] Some work of distinction, actually later than hers in date,
+    is older in kind. This is the case not only with the later books
+    of her Irish elder sister. Miss Edgeworth (see last chapter),
+    but with all those of her Scotch younger one, Miss Ferrier, who
+    wrote _Marriage_ just after _Sense and Sensibility_ appeared,
+    but did not publish it (1818) till after Miss Austen's death,
+    following it with _The Inheritance_ (1824) and _Destiny_ (1831).
+    Miss Ferrier, who had a strong though rather hard humour and
+    great faculty of pronounced character-drawing, is better at a
+    series of sketches than at a complete novel--only _The
+    Inheritance_ having much central unity. And there is still
+    eighteenth-century quality rather than nineteenth in her
+    alternations of Smollettian farce-satire and Mackenziefied
+    sentiment. She is very good to read, but stand a little out of
+    the regular historic succession, as well as out of the ordinary
+    novel classes.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+THE SUCCESSORS--TO THACKERAY
+
+
+A person inexperienced in the ways of life and literature might expect
+that such developments as those surveyed and discussed in the last
+chapter must have immediate and unbroken development further. Scott had
+thrown open, and made available, the whole vast range of history for the
+romancer: Miss Austen had shown the infinite possibilities of ordinary
+and present things for the novelist. And such a one might contend that,
+even if the common idea of definite precursorship and teachership be a
+mistake, the more subtle doctrine that such work as Scott's, and as Miss
+Austen's, is really the result of generally working forces, as well as
+of individual genius, would lead to the same conclusion. But the
+expectation would show his inexperience, and his ignorance of the fact
+that Art, unlike Science, declines to be bound by any calculable laws
+whatsoever.
+
+It was indeed impossible that Scott's towering fame should not draw the
+nobler sort, and his immense gains the baser, to follow in his track:
+and they promptly did so. But, as he himself quoted in the remarkable
+comments (above alluded to) on his early imitators in the _Diary_, they
+had "gotten his fiddle, but not his rosin"--an observation the truth of
+which may be shown presently. Miss Austen's immediate influence in the
+other direction was almost _nil_: and this was hardly to be regretted,
+because a tolerably stationary state of manners, language, etc., such
+as her kind of novel requires, had not quite, though it had nearly, been
+reached. At any rate, the kind of ebb or half ebb, which so often,
+though not so certainly, follows flood-tides in literature, came upon
+the novel in the twenties and thirties. Even the striking appearance of
+Dickens and _Pickwick_ in 1837 can hardly be said to have turned it
+distinctly: for the Dickensian novel is a species by itself--neither
+strictly novel nor strictly romance, but, as Polonius might say, a
+picaresque-burlesque-sentimental-farcical-realist-fantastic nondescript.
+Not till _Vanity Fair_ did the novel of pure real life advance its
+standard once more: while the historical novel-romance of a new kind may
+date its revival with--though it should scarcely trace that revival
+to--_Esmond_, or _Westward Ho!_ or both.
+
+Between Scott on the earlier side and Dickens and Thackeray on the
+other, there was an immense production of novels, illustrated by not a
+few names which should rank high in the second class, while some would
+promote more than one of them to the first. The lines of development, as
+well as the chief individual practitioners, may be best indicated by
+short discussions of Hook, Bulwer, Disraeli, Ainsworth, James, Marryat,
+and Peacock.
+
+The most probable demur to this list is likely to be taken at the very
+first name. Theodore Hook has had no return of the immense popularity
+which his _Sayings and Doings_ (1826-1829) obtained for him; nor,
+perhaps, is he ever likely to have any; nor yet, further, save in one
+respect, can he be said to deserve it. Flimsily constructed, hastily
+written, reflecting indeed the ways and speech of the time after a
+fashion, but in a distorted mirror and with a thin and superficial
+representation, nearer to bad drama than to good literature, full of
+horseplay and forced high jinks--his stories have all the inseparable
+faults of improvisation together with those of art that is out of
+fashion and manners-painting (such as it is) of manners that are dead,
+and when alive were those of a not very picturesque, pleasing, or
+respectable transition. Yet, for all this, Hook has a claim on the
+critical historian of literature, and especially of the novel, which has
+been far too little acknowledged. And this claim does not even consist
+in the undoubted fact that his influence both on Dickens and on
+Thackeray was direct and very great. It lies in the larger and more
+important, though connected, fact that, at a given moment, his were the
+hands in which the torch of the novel-procession was deposited. He
+stands to fiction almost exactly as Leigh Hunt stands to the
+miscellaneous essay. He modernised and multiplied its subjects,
+attractions, appeals: he "vulgarised" it in the partly good French
+sense, as well as in the wholly bad English one; he was its journalist
+and _colporteur_. He broke up the somewhat stock-and-type moulds of
+eighteenth-century tale-telling; admitted a plurality, almost an
+infinity, of interest and incident; gave a sort of universal franchise
+to possible subjects of novel; and (perhaps most important of all)
+banished from that novel the tendency to conventional "lingo" which,
+though never so prevalent in it as in eighteenth-century drama, had
+existed. It may seem to some readers that there is an exaggerated and
+paradoxical opposition between this high praise and the severe censure
+pronounced a little above--that both cannot be true. But both are true:
+and it is a really natural and necessary cause and proof at once of
+their truth that Hook never wrote a really good novel, hardly even a
+really good tale ("Gervase Skinner" is probably the best), and yet that
+he deserves the place here given to him.
+
+Ainsworth and James perhaps deserve to be taken next, not so much in
+point of merit as because both, though continuing (especially Ainsworth)
+very late, began pretty early. Indeed, a book in which Ainsworth had a
+hand, though it is said to be not wholly his, _Sir John Chiverton_, was
+with Horace Smith's _Brambletye House_ (1826), the actual subject of
+Scott's criticism above quoted. Both Ainsworth and James are unconcealed
+followers of Scott himself: and they show the dangers to which the
+historical romance is exposed when it gets out of the hands of genius.
+Of the two, James had the greater scholarship, the better command of
+English, and perhaps a nearer approach to command also of character:
+Ainsworth more "fire in his interior," more variety, somewhat more
+humour (though neither was strong in this respect), and a certain not
+useless or despicable faculty of splashy scene-painting and rough but
+not ineffective stage-management. But of Scott's combination of poetry,
+humour, knowledge of life, reading, grasp of character, and command of
+effective dialogue and description, both were utterly destitute: and
+both fell into the mistake (which even Dumas did not wholly avoid) of
+attempting to give the historical effect by thrusting in lardings of
+pure history, by overloading descriptions of dress, etc., and, in short,
+by plastering the historic colour on, instead of suffusing it, as Scott
+had managed to do. Popular as they were, not merely with youthful
+readers, they undoubtedly brought the historical novel into some
+discredit a little before the middle of the century.[20]
+
+    [20] Here and in a good many cases to come it is impossible to
+    particularise criticism. It matters the less that, from
+    Ainsworth's _Rookwood_ (1834) and James' _Richelieu_ (1829)
+    onwards, the work of both was very much _par sibi_ in merit and
+    defect alike.
+
+With Bulwer and Disraeli we get into a different sphere of
+literature--whether into the same in both cases, and whether, if so,
+into one of the highest, are questions on which no general agreement has
+yet been reached--on which, perhaps, no general agreement is even
+possible.
+
+With regard to the second, it must be remembered that to him, whether as
+Mr. Disraeli or as Lord Beaconsfield, novel-writing was always a
+"by-work"--partly a means to his real end of politics, partly a
+relaxation from the work necessary to that end. He called himself a
+"gentleman of the press"--with that mixture of sincerity, purpose, and
+ironical simulation which brought on him, from unintelligent or not very
+honest opponents, and even from others, the charge of affectation, if
+not of hypocrisy. And, undoubtedly, he did a good deal of work for the
+press, and very remarkable work too--almost wholly in the kind of
+novel-writing, from _Vivian Grey_ (1826) to _Endymion_ (1880). Yet it
+may be permitted--in the face of some more than respectable opinion on
+the other side--to doubt whether, except in some curious sports and
+by-products, he ever produced real novel-work of the highest class. In
+the satiric-fantastic tale--in a kind of following of Voltaire--such as
+_Ixion_, he has hardly a superior, unless it be Anthony Hamilton, who is
+the superior of Voltaire himself and the master of everybody. For a pure
+love-novel of a certain kind, _Henrietta Temple_ (1837) is bad to
+beat--and in a curious cross between the historical, biographical, and
+the romantic, _Venetia_ (same year) also stands pretty much alone. But
+all the rest, more or less political, more or less "of society," more or
+less fantastic--_Coningsby_ (1844) as well as _Alroy_ (1833), _Tancred_
+(1847) as well as _Vivian Grey, Sybil_ (1845), as well as _The Young
+Duke_ (1831), "leave to desire" in a strange way. Like the three which
+have been excepted for praise, each is in a manner _sui generis_, while
+the whole group stands, in a manner also, apart from others and by
+itself. There is astonishing cleverness everywhere, in regard to almost
+every point of novel-composition, though with special regard to
+epigrammatic phrase. But the whole is _inorganic_ somehow, and more than
+somehow unreal; without (save in the cases mentioned) attaining that
+obviously unreal but persuasive phantasmagoria which some great writers
+of fiction have managed to put in existence and motion. How far this is
+due to the fact that most of the novels are political is a question
+rather to be hinted than to be discussed. But the present writer has
+never read a political novel, whether on his own side or on others, that
+seemed to him to be wholly satisfactory.
+
+Bulwer--for it is perhaps here not impolite or improper still to call
+the first Lord Lytton by the name under which he wrote for forty years,
+and solidly niched himself in the novel-front of the minster of English
+Literature--had not a few points of resemblance to his rival and future
+chief. But their relations to politics and letters were reversed.
+Disraeli was a born politician who was also a very considerable man of
+letters: Bulwer was a born man of letters who was a by no means
+inconsiderable politician. His literary ability was extraordinarily
+diversified: but, once more, he was (here also) a born novelist, who was
+also a not inconsiderable dramatist; a critic who might not impossibly
+have been great, a miscellanist of ability, and a verse-writer than whom
+many a worse has somehow or other obtained the name of poet. He began
+novel-writing very early (_Falkland_ is of 1827), he continued it all
+his life, and he was the very Proteus-chameleon of the novel in changing
+his styles to suit the tastes of the day. He never exactly copied
+anybody: and in all his various attempts he went extremely near to the
+construction of masterpieces. In the novel of society with _Pelham_
+(1828); the novel of crime with _Eugene Aram_ (1832) and _Zanoni_
+(1842); the novel of passion and a sort of mystery with _Ernest
+Maltravers_ and _Alice_; the historic romance with _The Last Days of
+Pompeii_ (1834), _The Last of the Barons_ (1843), and _Harold_ (1848),
+he made marks deep and early. When the purely domestic kind came in he
+made them, earlier and deeper still, with _The Caxtons_ (1850), _My
+Novel_ (1853), etc. He caught the "sensation" ball at nearly its first
+service with his old "mystery" racket, and played the most brilliant
+game of the whole tournament in _A Strange Story_ (1862). At the last he
+tried later kinds still in books like _The Coming Race_ (1871), _The
+Parisians_ (1873), and _Kenelm Chillingly_. And once, Pallas being kind,
+he did an almost perfect thing (there is not a speck or a flaw in it
+except, perhaps, the mechanical death of the bulldog) and produced one
+of the best examples of one of the best and oldest classes of fiction
+known to the world, in the ghost-story of _The Haunted and the Haunters_
+(1859).
+
+Such a mass, such a length, such a variety of production, with so many
+merits in it, would be difficult to meet elsewhere in our department.
+And yet very few critics of unquestionable competence, if any, have
+accorded the absolute First Class to Lord Lytton as a novelist. That
+this is partly (and rather unjustly) due to the singular and sometimes
+positively ridiculous grandiloquence and to the half-mawkish,
+half-rancid, sentimentality which too often mar his earlier novels is
+probably true. But it is not all the truth: if it were, it would be
+almost sufficient to point out that he outgrew the first of these faults
+completely, the second almost completely; and that from _The Caxtons_
+(1850) onward there is hardly any stain on his literary character in
+any such respect. But other faults--or at least defects--remain. They
+may be almost summed up in the charge of want of _consummateness_.
+Bulwer could be romantic--but his romance had the touch of bad taste and
+insincerity referred to above. He could, as in _The Caxtons_, be fairly
+true to ordinary life--but even then he seemed to feel a necessity of
+setting off and as it were apologising for the simplicity and veracity
+by touches--in fact by _douches_--of Sternian fantastry, and by other
+touches of what was a little later to be called sensationalism. Even his
+handling of the supernatural, which was undoubtedly a strong point of
+his, was not wholly _de ban aloi_. To pronounce him, as was once done by
+an acute and amiable judge, "the _hum_miest of _bugs_" was excessive in
+life, and would be preposterous in literature. But there undoubtedly
+was, with rare exceptions, a suspicion of what is called in slang
+"faking" about his work. The wine is not "neat" but doctored; the
+composition is _pastiche_; a dozen other metaphors--of stucco, veneer,
+glueing-up--suggest themselves. And then there suggests itself, in turn,
+a sort of shame at such imputations on the author of such a mass of
+work, so various, so interesting, so important as accomplishment,
+symptom, and pattern at once. And perhaps one may end by pronouncing
+Bulwer one of the very greatest of English novelists who are not of the
+very greatest.
+
+It is difficult to say whether the usual attitude of criticism to
+Captain Marryat (1792-1848) is more uncritical than ungrateful or more
+ungrateful than uncritical. Because he has amused the boy, it seems to
+be taken for granted that he ought not to amuse the man: because he does
+not write with the artificial and often extremely arbitrary graces of
+the composition books, that he is "not literature." If it be so, why in
+the first case so much the worse for "the man," and in the second so
+much the worse for literature. As a matter of fact, he has many of the
+qualities of the novelist in a high degree: and if he were in the
+fortunate position of an ancient classic, whose best works only survive,
+these qualities could not fail of recognition. Much of his later work
+simply ought not to count; for it was mere hack-labour, rendered, if not
+necessary, very nearly so by the sailor's habit (which Marryat possessed
+in the highest degree) of getting rid of money. Even among this,
+_Masterman Ready_ and _The Children of the New Forest_, "children's
+books," as they may be called, rank very high in their kind. But he
+counts here, of course, for his sea-novels mainly: and in them there are
+several things for us to notice. One is that Marryat had the true
+quality of the craftsman, as distinguished from the amateur or the
+chance-medley man who has a lucky inspiration. If it were the case that
+his books derived their whole attraction from the novelty and (within
+its limits) the variety of their sea-matter, then the first ought to be
+the best, as in nearly all such cases is the fact. But _Frank Mildmay_
+(1829), so far from being the best, is not far from being the worst of
+Marryat's novels. Much--dangerously much--as he put of his own
+experiences in the book, he did not know in the least how to manage
+them. And if Frank is something of a bravo, more of a blackguard, and
+nearly a complete ruffian, it is not merely because there was a good
+deal of brutality in the old navy; not merely because Marryat's own
+standard of chivalry was not quite that of Chaucer's Knight:--but
+partly, also, because he was aiming blunderingly at what he supposed to
+be part of the novelist's business--irregular as well as regular
+gallantry, and highly seasoned adventure. But, like all good artists
+(and like hardly anybody who has not the artistic quality in him), he
+taught himself by his failure, even though he sometimes relapsed. Of
+actual construction he was never a master. _The King's Own_, with its
+overdose of history at the beginning and of melodrama at the end, is an
+example. But his two masterpieces, _Peter Simple_ (1834) and _Mr.
+Midshipman Easy_ (1836), are capital instances of what may be called
+"particularist" fiction--the fiction that derives its special zest from
+the "colours" of some form of life unfamiliar to those who have not
+actually lived it. Even _Peter Simple_ is unduly weighted at the end by
+the machinations of Peter's uncle against him and, at intervals during
+the book, by the proceedings connected therewith. But _Mr. Midshipman
+Easy_ is flawless--except for the amiable but surely excessive
+sentimentalists who are shocked at the way in which Mr. Easy _père_
+quits the greater stage by mounting the lesser. Than this book there is
+not a better novel of special "humour" in literature; as much may be
+said of the greater part of _Peter Simple_, of not a little in _Jacob
+Faithful_ (a great favourite with Thackeray, who always did justice to
+Marryat), and _Japhet in Search of a Father_, and of something in almost
+all. Nor were high jinks and special naval matters by any means
+Marryat's only province. Laymen may agree with experts in thinking the
+clubhauling of the _Diomède_ in _Peter Simple_, and the two great fights
+of the _Aurora_ with the elements and with the Russian frigate in _Mr.
+Midshipman Easy_, to be extraordinarily fine things:--vivid, free from
+extravagance, striking, stirring, clear, as descriptive and narrative
+literature of the kind can be only at its best, and too seldom is at
+all. An almost Defoe-like exactness of detail is one of Marryat's
+methods and merits: while it is very remarkable that he rarely attempts
+to produce the fun, in which Defoe is lacking and he himself so
+fertile, by mere exaggeration or caricature of detail. There are
+exceptions--the Dominie business in _Jacob Faithful_ is one--but they
+are exceptions. Take Hook, his immediate predecessor, and no doubt in a
+way his model, as (it has been said) Hook was to almost everybody at the
+time; take even Dickens, his fellow-pupil with Hook and his own greater
+successor; and you will find that Marryat resorts less than either to
+the humour of simple _charge_ or exaggeration.
+
+The last name on our present list belongs to the class of "eccentric"
+novelists--the adjective being used, not in its transferred and partly
+improper sense so much as in its true one. Peacock never plays the
+Jack-pudding like Sterne: and his shrewd wit never permits him the
+sincere aberrations of Amory. But his work is out of the ordinary
+courses, and does not turn round the ordinary centres of novel writing.
+It belongs to the tradition--if to any tradition at all--of Lucian and
+the Lucianists--especially as that tradition was redirected by Anthony
+Hamilton. It thus comes, in one way, near part of the work of Disraeli;
+though, except in point of satiric temper, its spirit is totally
+different. Peacock was essentially a scholar (though a non-academic one)
+and essentially a humorist. In the progress of his books from _Headlong
+Hall_ (1816) to _Gryll Grange_ (1860)--the last separated from the group
+to which the first belongs by more than twice as many years as were
+covered by that group itself--he mellowed his tone, but altered his
+scheme very little. Except in _Maid Marian_ and _The Misfortunes of
+Elphin_, where the Scott influence is evident, though Peacock was
+himself a rebel to Scott, the plan is always the same. _Headlong Hall_
+and _Nightmare Abbey, Melincourt_ and _Crotchet Castle_ (1831), as well
+as _Gryll Grange_ itself, all have the uniform, though by no means
+monotonous, canvas of a party of guests assembled at a country-house and
+consisting of a number of "originals," with one or more common-sense but
+by no means commonplace characters to serve as contrast. It is in the
+selection and management of these foils that one of Peacock's principal
+distinctions lies. In his earlier books, and in accordance with the
+manners of the time, there is a good deal of "high jinks"--less later.
+In all, there is also a good deal of personal and literary satire, which
+tones and mellows as it proceeds. At first Peacock is extremely unjust
+to the Lake poets--so unjust indeed as to be sometimes hardly
+amusing--to the two universities (of which it so happened that he was
+not a member), to the Tory party generally, to clergymen, to other
+things and persons. In _Crotchet Castle_ the progress of Reform was
+already beginning to produce a beneficent effect of reaction upon him,
+and in _Gryll Grange_, though the manners and cast are surprisingly
+modern, the whole tone is conservative--with a small if not even with a
+large C--for the most prominent and well treated character is a
+Churchman of the best academic Tory type.
+
+It is not, however, in anything yet mentioned that Peacock's charm
+consists, so much as in the intensely literary, but not in the least
+pedantic, tone with which he suffuses his books, the piquant but not in
+the least affected turn of the phrases that meet us throughout, the
+peculiar quality of his irony (most quintessenced in _The Misfortunes of
+Elphin_, which is different in scheme from the rest, but omnipresent),
+and the crisp presentation of individual scene, incident, and character
+of a kind. Story, in the general sense, there is none, or next to
+none--the personages meet, go through a certain number of dinners
+(Peacock is great at eating and drinking), diversions, and
+difficulties, marry to a greater or less extent, but otherwise part. Yet
+such things as the character of Scythrop in _Nightmare Abbey_ (a half
+fantastic, half faithful portrait of Shelley, who was Peacock's intimate
+friend), or of Dr. Folliott (a genial parson) in _Crotchet Castle_--as
+the brilliant picture of the breaking of the dyke in _Elphin_, or the
+comic one of the rotten-borough election in _Melincourt_--are among the
+triumphs of the English novel. And they are present by dozens and
+scores: while (though it is a little out of our way) there is no doubt
+that the attraction of the books is greatly enhanced by the abundance of
+inset verse--sometimes serious, more often light--of which Peacock,
+again in an eccentric fashion, was hardly less a master than he was of
+prose.
+
+Here also it has seemed fit to dwell on a single writer, not perhaps
+generally held to be of the absolutely first class, because these
+"eccentrics" are of very great importance in the history of the English
+novel. The danger of the kind--even more than of other literary
+kinds--lies in the direction of mould and mechanism--of the production,
+by the thousand, of things of no individual quality and character. This
+danger has been and is being amply exemplified. But the Peacocks (would
+the plural were more justified!) save us from it by their own
+unconquerable individuality in the first place and, in the second, by
+the fact that even the best in this kind is "caviare to the general,"
+while anything that is not the best has no attraction either for the
+general or the elect. They are, as it were, the salt of the novel-feast,
+in more senses than one: and it is cause for thankfulness that, in this
+respect as in the physical, England has been well off for salt-pits.
+
+Besides these individual names--which in most literatures would be
+great, and even in English literature are not small--the second quarter
+of the century added to the history of the novel an infinity of others
+who can hardly appear here even on the representative or selective
+system. All the suns of the novel hitherto mentioned had moons and stars
+around them; all the _cadres_ of the various kinds were filled with
+privates and non-commissioned officers to follow the leaders. Gait and
+Moir carried out the "Scotch novel" with something of Scott, but more of
+Smollett (Gait at least certainly, in part of his work, preceded Scott).
+Lady Morgan, who has been mentioned already, Banim, Crofton Croker, and
+others played a similar part to Miss Edgeworth. Glascock, Chamier, and
+Howard were, as it were, lieutenants (the last directly so) to Marryat.
+The didactic side of Miss Edgeworth was taken up by Harriet Martineau.
+Mrs. Shelley's _Frankenstein_ (1818) is among the latest good examples
+of the "Terror" class, to which her husband had contributed two of its
+worst, and two of the feeblest books ever written by a man of the
+greatest genius, in _Zastrozzi_ and _St. Irvyne_, some seven years
+earlier. Many women, not unnaturally, encouraged by the great examples
+of Miss Burney, Miss Edgeworth, Miss Austen, and Miss Ferrier, attempted
+novels of the most various kinds, sometimes almost achieving the purely
+domestic variety, sometimes branching to other sorts. The novels of Mrs.
+Gore, chiefly in the "fashionable" kind, are said to have attained the
+three-score and ten in number; Mrs. Crowe dealt with the supernatural
+outside of her novels if not also in them; the luckless poetess "L.E.L."
+was a novelist in _Ethel Churchill_ (1837) and other books; Mrs.
+Trollope, prolific mother of a more prolific son, showed not a little
+power, if not quite so much taste, in _The Vicar of Wrexhill_ (1837) and
+_The Widow Barnaby_. Single books, like Morier's _Hajji Baba_ (1824),
+Hope's _Anastasius_ (1819), Croly's _Salathiel_ (1829), gained fame
+which they have not quite lost: and the little known Michael Scott
+(1789-1835) left in _Tom Cringle's Log_ and _The Cruise of the Midge_ a
+pair of stories of West Indian scenery and adventure which are nearly
+first rate. In 1839, not long after _Pickwick_, Samuel Warren's _Ten
+Thousand a Year_ blended Bulwer and Dickens in a manner which to this
+day is a puzzle in its near approach to success. Yet he never repeated
+this approach, though he had earlier done striking things in the _Diary
+of a Late Physician_ (1830). But in the latest thirties and early
+forties there arose two writers who were to eclipse every one of their
+contemporaries in this kind.
+
+The remarkable originality and idiosyncrasy of Dickens have perhaps, to
+some extent and from not a few persons, concealed the fact that he was
+not, any more than other people, an earth-born wonder. Scanted of
+education as he was, he has in several places frankly and eagerly
+confessed his early acquaintance with the great older novelists, and his
+special fancy for Smollett--whose influence indeed is traceable on him
+from first to last, and not least in the famous "interiors" of which he
+made far more than his example had done. Even in _Pickwick_ the expert
+will trace suggestions from others. But if the work is read in its
+proper order, and the _Sketches by Boz_ are taken first, nobody who
+knows both Leigh Hunt and Theodore Hook will fail to see that Dickens
+owed a great deal to both. The fact is in no sense discreditable to him:
+on the contrary, it adds, in the estimation of all reasonable and
+critical judges, a very great deal of interest, and takes away none. The
+earth-born prodigy is seldom good for much and never for very much. The
+genius who fastens on the points in preceding literature most congenial
+to him, develops them, builds on them with his own matter and form, and
+turns out something far greater than his originals is the really
+satisfactory person. Had Leigh Hunt lent to Hook his literature, his
+fund of trivial but agreeable observation and illustration, and his
+attractive style; had Hook communicated to Hunt his narrative faculty
+and his fecundity in character and manners:--neither could have written
+_Pickwick_ or even the worst of its successors. Had there been no Hunt
+and no Hook, Dickens would no doubt have managed, in some fashion, to
+"do for himself." But it would have given him more trouble, he would
+have done it more slowly, and he would hardly have earned that generous
+and admirable phrase of his greatest contemporary in fiction which will
+be quoted shortly.
+
+Neither from Smollett, however, nor from Hook, nor from Hunt, nor from
+anybody else did Dickens take what makes him Dickens. His idiosyncrasy,
+already mentioned, is so marked that everybody acknowledges its
+presence: but its exact character and nature are matter not so much of
+debate (though they are that also in the highest degree) as matter of
+more or less _questing_, often of a rather blind-man's-buff kind. There
+is probably no author of whom really critical estimates are so rare. He
+has given so much pleasure to so many people--perhaps there are none to
+whom he has given more pleasure than to some of those who have
+criticised him most closely--that to mention any faults in him is
+upbraided as a sort of personal and detestable ingratitude and
+treachery. If you say that he cannot draw a gentleman, you are told that
+you are a parrot and a snob, who repeats what other snobs have told you;
+that gentlemen are not worth drawing; that he _can_ draw them; and so
+forth. If you suggest that he is fantastic, it is reproachfully asked if
+poetry is not fantastic, and if you do not like poetry? If you intimate
+small affection for Little Nell and Little Paul, you are a brute; if you
+hint that his social crusades were often quite irrational, and sometimes
+at least as mischievous as they were beneficial, you are a parasite of
+aristocracy and a foe of "the people." If you take exception to his
+repetitions, his mannerisms, his tedious catch-processes of various
+kinds, you are a "stop-watch critic" and worthy of all the generous
+wrath of the exemplary and Reverend Mr. Yorick. And yet all these
+assertions, objections, descriptions, are arch-true: and they can be
+made by persons who know Dickens and enjoy Dickens a thousand times
+better--who admire him in a manner a thousand times more really
+complimentary--than the folk who simply cry "Great is Dickens" and will
+listen to nothing but their own sweet voices.
+
+The real, the great, the unique merit of Dickens is that he brought to
+the service of the novel an imagination which, though it was never
+poetic, was plastic in almost the highest degree: and that he
+communicated to the results of it a kind of existence which, though
+distinctly different from that of actual life, has a reality of its own,
+and possesses the distinguishing mark of genius, so that if it does not
+exactly force belief in itself, it forces suspension of disbelief. To
+have done this is not only to have accomplished a wonderful artistic
+triumph, but to confer an immense benefit on the human race. But in
+doing it Dickens exhibits various foibles, prejudices, and disabilities:
+though it is quite open to any one to maintain that these rather
+assisted the flow of his imagination than hindered it. He began very
+young; he had curiously little literature; his knowledge of life,
+extraordinarily alert and acute, was very one-sided, and the organs by
+which he attained it seem absolutely to shut themselves and refuse
+communion with certain orders of society and classes of human creatures.
+The wealth of fantastic imagery which he used to such purpose not
+infrequently stimulated him to a disorderly profusion of grotesque; he
+was congenitally melodramatic; and before very long his habit of
+attributing special catch-words, gestures, and the like to his
+characters, exaggerated, degenerated, and stereotyped itself in a
+fashion which it is difficult to think satisfactory to anybody. He was,
+moreover, a "novelist of purpose" in the highest degree; he had very
+strong, but very crude--not to say absurd--political ideas; and he was
+apt to let the great powers of pathos, of humour, of vivid description,
+which he possessed to "get out of hand" and to land him in the maudlin,
+the extravagant, and the bombastic.
+
+But--to put ourselves in connection with the main thread of our story
+once more--he not only himself provided a great amount of the novel
+pleasure for his readers, but he infused into the novel generally
+something of a new spirit. It has been more than once pointed out that
+there is almost more danger with the novel of "getting into ruts" than
+with any kind of literature. Nobody could charge the Dickens novel with
+doing this, except as regards mannerisms of style, and though it might
+inspire many, it was very unlikely to create a rut for any one else. He
+liked to call himself "the inimitable," and so, in a way, he was.
+Imitations of him were, of course, tried: but they were all bad and
+obvious failures. Against the possible tameness of the domestic novel;
+against the too commonly actual want of actuality of the historic
+romance; he set this new fantastic activity of his, which was at once
+real and unreal, but where the reality had a magical touch of the
+unfamiliar and the very unreality was stimulating. He might have a
+hundred faults--he was in fact never faultless, except in _Pickwick_,
+which is so absolutely unique that there is nothing to compare with it
+and show up faults (if it has any) by the comparison. But you can read
+him again and again with unceasing delight, and with delight of a kind
+given by no other novelist.[21]
+
+    [21] It has not been thought necessary to insert criticism of
+    Dickens's individual novels. They are almost all well known to
+    almost everybody: and special discussion of them would be
+    superfluous, while their general characteristics and positions
+    in novel-history are singularly uniform and can be described
+    together.
+
+The position of Thackeray in the history of the novel is as different
+from that of Dickens as the fortunes of the two were in their own
+progress and development. In fact, though a sort of pseudo-Plutarchian
+parallel between them is nearly as inevitable as it is common, it is a
+parallel almost entirely composed of differences, carried out in matter
+almost incommensurable. In the first place, Dickens, as we have seen,
+and as Thackeray said (with the generous and characteristic addition "at
+the head of the whole tribe"), "came and took his place calmly" and
+practically at once (or with the preliminary only of "Boz") in
+_Pickwick_. Whether he ever went further may at least be questioned. But
+Thackeray did not take his place at once--in fact he conspicuously
+failed to take it for some sixteen years: although he produced, for at
+least the last ten of these, work containing indications of
+extraordinary power, in a variety of directions almost as extraordinary.
+
+To attempt to assign reasons for this comparative failure would be
+idle--the fact is the only reasonable reason. But some phenomena and
+symptoms can be diagnosed. It is at least noteworthy that Thackeray--in
+this approaching Dickens perhaps nearer than in any other point--began
+with extravaganza--to adopt perhaps the most convenient general name
+for a thing which cannot be quite satisfactorily designated by any. In
+both cases the adoption was probably due to the example and popularity
+of Theodore Hook. But it was also due, in a higher and more metaphysical
+sense, to the fact that the romance, which had had so mighty a success
+in Scott's hands, was for the time overblown, and that the domestic
+novel, despite the almost equally wonderful, though much quieter and
+less popular achievement of Miss Austen, was not thoroughly and
+genuinely ready. From extravaganza in a certain sense Dickens, as has
+been said, never really departed: and he achieved most of his best work
+in his own peculiar varieties of it. Thackeray was, if not to leave it
+entirely aside, to use it in his later days merely as an occasional
+variation and seasoning. But at first he could not, apparently, get free
+from it: and he might have seemed unable to dispense with its almost
+mechanical externalities of mis-spelling and the like. It must also be
+remembered that circumstances were at first curiously unfavourable to
+him: and that loss of fortune, domestic affliction, and other things
+almost compelled him to write from hand to mouth--to take whatever
+commission offered itself: whereas the, if not immediate, speedy and
+tremendous success of _Pickwick_ put the booksellers entirely at
+Dickens's feet. Still, a certain vacillation--an uncertainty of design
+not often accompanying genius like his--must be acknowledged in
+Thackeray. For a time he hesitated between pen and pencil, the latter of
+which implements he fortunately never abandoned, though the former was
+his predestined wand. Then he could not, or would not, for years, get
+out of the "miscellaneous" style, or patchwork of styles--reviews, short
+stories, burlesques, what not. His more important attempts seemed to
+have an attendant _guignon_.[22] _Catherine_ (1839-1840), a very powerful
+thing in parts, was ill-planned and could not be popular. _A Shabby
+Genteel Story_ (1841), containing almost the Thackerayan _quiddity_, was
+interrupted partly by his wife's illness, partly, it would seem, by
+editorial disfavour, and moreover still failed to shake off the
+appearance of a want of seriousness. Even _The Great Hoggarty Diamond_
+(1841-1842) was apparently cut short by request, and still lay open to
+an unjust, but not quite inexcusable, question on this same point of
+"seriousness." In all there was, or might seem to be, a queer and to
+some readers an unsatisfactory blend of what they had not learnt to call
+"realism" with what they were quite likely to think fooling. During
+these years Thackeray was emphatically of the class of writers of whom
+people "do not know what to make." And it is a true saying of English
+people--though perhaps not so pre-eminently true of them as some would
+have it--that "not to know what to make" of a thing or a person is
+sufficient reason for them to distrust, dislike, and "wash their hands
+of" it or him.
+
+    [22] For this reason, and for the variety of kind of his later
+    novels a little more individual notice must be given to them
+    than in the case of Dickens, but still only a little, and
+    nothing like detailed criticism.
+
+Some would have it that _Barry Lyndon_ (1843) marks the close of this
+period of indecision and the beginning of that of maturity. The commoner
+and perhaps the juster opinion is that this position belongs to _Vanity
+Fair_ (1846-1848). At any rate, _after_ that book there could be no
+doubt about the fact of the greatness of its writer, though it may be
+doubted whether even now the quality of this greatness is correctly and
+generally recognised. It is this--that at last the novel of real life on
+the great scale has been discovered. Even yet a remnant of shyness hangs
+on the artist. He puts his scene a little though not very far back; he
+borrows a little, though not much, historical and romantic interest in
+the Waterloo part; the catastrophe of the Becky-Steyne business, though
+by no means outside of the probable contents of any day's newspaper, is
+slightly exceptional. But on the whole the problem of "reality, the
+whole reality, and nothing but reality" is faced and grasped and
+solved--with, of course, the addition to the "nothing but" of "except
+art."
+
+He had struck his path and he kept to it: even when, as in _Esmond_
+(1852) and _The Virginians_ (1858-1859) actually, and in _Denis Duval_
+prospectively, he blended the historical with the domestic variety.
+_Pendennis_ (1849-1850) imports nothing out of the most ordinary
+experience; _The Newcomes_ (1854-1855) very little; _Philip_ (1861-1862)
+only its pantomime conclusion; while the two completely historical tales
+are in nothing more remarkable than in the way in which their remoter
+and more unfamiliar main subject, and their occasional excursions from
+everyday life, are subdued to the scheme of the realist novel in the
+best sense of the term--the novel rebuilt and refashioned on the lines
+of Fielding, but with modern manners, relying on variety and life, and
+relying on these only.
+
+There is thus something of similarity (though with attendant
+differences, of the most important kind) between the joint position of
+Dickens and Thackeray towards the world of the novel, and the joint
+position of Scott and Miss Austen. They _overlap_ more than their great
+forerunners of the preceding generation. Both wrote historical novels:
+it is indeed Thackeray's unique distinction that he was equally master
+of the historical novel and of the novel of pure modern society, almost
+uneventful. In parts of some of his later books, especially _Little
+Dorrit_, _Great Expectations_, and _Our Mutual Friend_, Dickens at
+least tried to exchange his picaresque-fantastic cloudland for actual
+ordinary modern life. But on the whole the method of Thackeray was the
+method of the novel, though shot with a strong romantic spirit, and the
+method of Dickens the method of the romance applied, for the most part,
+to material which could hardly be called romantic. Both, therefore, in a
+manner, recalled the forces of fiction from the rather straggling and
+particularist courses which it had been pursuing for the last quarter of
+a century.
+
+In fact, even in the two mighty men of genius whom we have just been
+discussing, there may be seen--at their beginnings at least--something
+of that irresolution, uncertainty, and want of reliance on the powers of
+the novel, it-by-itself-it, which we have noticed before: and which the
+unerring craftsmanship of Scott had already pointed out in the
+"Conversation of the Author of _Waverley_ with Captain Clutterbuck" more
+than once referred to. They want excuses and pretexts, bladders and
+spring-boards. Even Dickens, despite his irrepressible self-reliance,
+burdens himself, at the beginning of _Pickwick_, with the clumsy old
+machinery of a club which he practically drops: and, still later, with
+the still more clumsy framework of "Master Humphrey's Clock" which he
+has not quietly to drop, but openly to strip off and cast away, before
+he has gone very far. Thackeray takes sixteen years of experiment before
+he trusts his genius, boldly and on the great scale, to reveal itself in
+its own way, and in the straight way of the novel.
+
+Yet in this time also a great advance was made, as is shown not only by
+the fact that Dickens and Thackeray themselves became possible, but by
+the various achievements of the principal writers mentioned in this
+chapter, of one or two who might have been, but are perhaps, on the
+whole, best postponed to the next, such as Lever, and of the great army
+of minorities who have been of necessity omitted. In every direction and
+from every point of view novel is _growing_. Although it was abused by
+precisians, the _gran conquesta_ of Scott had forced it into general
+recognition and requisition. Even the still severe discipline of family
+life in the first half of the nineteenth century, instead of excluding
+it altogether, contented itself with prescribing that "novels should not
+be read in the morning." A test which may be thought vulgar by the
+super-fine or the superficial, but a pretty good one, is the altered
+status and position of the writers of novels. In the eighteenth,
+especially the earlier eighteenth, century the novelist had not merely
+been looked down upon _as_ a novelist, but had, as a rule, resorted to
+novel-writing under some stress of circumstance. Even when he was by
+birth a "gentleman of coat armour" as Fielding and Smollett were, he was
+usually a gentleman very much out at elbows: the stories, true or false,
+of _Rasselas_ and Johnson's mother's funeral expenses, of the _Vicar of
+Wakefield_ and Goldsmith's dunning landlady, have something more than
+mere anecdote in them. Mackenzie, though the paternity of his _famille
+déplorable_ of novels was no secret, preserved a strict nominal
+incognito. Women, as having no regular professions and plenty of time at
+their disposal, were allowed more latitude: and this really perhaps had
+something to do with their early prominence in the novel; but it is
+certain that Scott's rigid, and for a long time successful, maintenance
+of the mask was by no means mere prudery, and still less merely prudent
+commercial speculation. Yet he, who altered so much in the novel,
+altered this also. Of the novelists noticed in the early part of this
+chapter, one became Prime Minister of England, another rose to cabinet
+rank, a baronetcy, and a peerage; a third was H.M. consul in important
+posts abroad; a fourth held a great position, if not in the service
+directly of the crown, in what was of hardly less importance, that of
+the East India Company; a fifth was a post-captain in the navy and
+Companion of the Bath.
+
+And all this had been rendered possible partly by the genius of
+novel-writers, partly by the appetite of the novel-reader. This latter
+was to continue unabated: whether the former was to increase, to
+maintain itself, or slacken must be, to some extent of course, matter of
+opinion. But we have still two quarter-centuries to survey, in the first
+of which there may perhaps be some reason for thinking that the novel
+rose to its actual zenith. Nearly all the writers mentioned in this
+chapter continued to write--the greater part, in genius, of Thackeray's
+accomplished work, and the greater part, in bulk, of Dickens's, had
+still to appear. But these elders were reinforced by fresh recruits,
+some of them of a prowess only inferior to the very greatest: and a
+distinct development of the novel itself, in the direction of
+self-reliance and craftsmanlike working on its own lines, was to be
+seen. In particular, the deferred influence of Miss Austen was at last
+to be brought to bear with astonishing results: while, partly owing to
+the example of Thackeray, the historical variety (which had for the most
+part been a pale and rather vulgarised imitation of Scott), was to be
+revived and varied in a manner equally astonishing. More than ever we
+shall have to let styles and kinds "speak by their foremen"--in fact to
+some extent to let them speak for themselves with very little detailed
+notice even of these foremen. But we shall still endeavour to keep the
+general threads in hand and to exhibit their direction, their crossing,
+and their other phenomena, as clearly as possible to the reader. For
+only so can we complete the picture of the course of fiction throughout
+English literature--with the sole exclusion of living writers, whose
+work can never be satisfactorily treated in such a book as this--first,
+because they are living and, secondly, because it is not done.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE MID-VICTORIAN NOVEL
+
+
+At about the very middle of the nineteenth century--say from 1845 to
+1855 in each direction, but almost increasingly towards the actual
+dividing line of 1850--there came upon the English novel a very
+remarkable wind of refreshment and new endeavour. Thackeray and Dickens
+themselves are examples of it, with Lever and others, before this
+dividing line: many others yet come to join them. A list of books
+written out just as they occur to the memory, and without any attempt to
+marshal them in strict chronological order, would show this beyond all
+reasonable possibility of gainsaying. Thackeray's own best accomplished
+work from _Vanity Fair_ (1846) itself through _Pendennis_ (1849) and
+_Esmond_ (1852) to _The Newcomes_ (1854); the brilliant centre of
+Dickens's work in _David Copperfield_ (1850)--stand at the head and have
+been already noticed by anticipation or implication, while Lever had
+almost completed the first division of his work, which began with _Harry
+Lorrequer_ as early as the year of _Pickwick_. But such books as _Yeast_
+(1848), _Westward Ho!_ (1855); as _The Warden_ (1855); as _Jane Eyre_
+(1847) and its too few successors; as _Scenes of Clerical Life_ (1857);
+as _Mary Barton_ (1848) and the novels which followed it, with others
+which it is perhaps almost unfair to leave out even in this allusive
+summary by sample, betokened a stirring of the waters, a rattling among
+the bones, such as is not common in literature. Death removed Thackeray
+early and Dickens somewhat less prematurely, but after a period rather
+barren in direct novel work. The others continued and were constantly
+reinforced: nor was it till well on in the seventies that any distinct
+drop from first- to second-growth quality could be observed in the
+general vintage of English fiction.
+
+One is not quite driven, on this occasion, to the pusillanimous
+explanation that this remarkable variety and number of good novels was
+simply due to the simultaneous existence of an equally remarkable number
+of good novelists. The fact is that, by this time, the great example of
+Scott and Miss Austen--the great wave of progress which exemplified
+itself first and most eminently in these two writers--had had time to
+work upon and permeate another generation of practitioners. The
+novelists who have just been cited were as a rule born in the second
+decade of the century, just before, about, or after the time at which
+Scott and Miss Austen began to publish. They had therefore--as their
+elders, even though they may have had time to read the pair, had
+not--time to assimilate thoroughly and early the results which that pair
+had produced or which they had first expressed. And they had even
+greater advantages than this. They had had time to assimilate, likewise,
+the results of all the rest of that great literary generation of which
+Scott and Miss Austen were themselves but members. They profited by
+thirty years more of constant historical exploration and realising of
+former days. One need not say, for it is question-begging, that they
+also _profited_ by, but they could at least avail themselves of, the
+immense change of manners and society which made 1850 differ more from
+1800 than 1800 had differed, not merely from 1750 but from 1700. They
+had, even though all of them may not have been sufficiently grateful for
+it, the stimulus of that premier position in Europe which the country
+had gained in the Napoleonic wars, and which she had not yet wholly lost
+or even begun to lose. They had wider travel, more extended occupations
+and interests, many other new things to draw upon. And, lastly, they had
+some important special incidents and movements--the new arrangement of
+political parties, the Oxford awakening, and others--to give suggestion
+and impetus to novels of the specialist kind. Nay, they had not only the
+great writers, in other kinds, of the immediate past, but those of the
+present, Carlyle, Tennyson, latterly Ruskin, and others still to
+complete their education and the machinery of its development.
+
+The most remarkable feature of this _renouveau_, as has been both
+directly and indirectly observed before, is the resumption, the immense
+extension, and the extraordinary improvement of the domestic novel. Not
+that this had not been practised during the thirty years since Miss
+Austen's death. But the external advantages just enumerated had failed
+it: and it had enlisted none of the chief talents which were at the
+service of fiction generally. A little more gift and a good deal more
+taste might have enabled Mrs. Trollope to do really great things in it:
+but she left them for her son to accomplish. Attempts and "tries" at it
+had been made constantly, and the goal had been very nearly reached,
+especially, perhaps, in that now much forgotten but remarkable _Emilia
+Wyndham_ (1846) by Anne Caldwell (Mrs. Marsh), which was wickedly
+described by a sister novelist as the "book where the woman breaks her
+desk open with her head," but which has real power and exercised real
+influence for no short time.
+
+This new domestic novel followed Miss Austen in that it did not
+necessarily avail itself of anything but perfectly ordinary life, and
+relied chiefly on artistic presentment--on treatment rather than on
+subject. It departed from her in that it admitted a much wider range and
+variety of subject itself; and by no means excluded the passions and
+emotions which, though she had not been so prudish as to ignore their
+results, she had never chosen to represent in much actual exercise, or
+to make the mainsprings of her books.
+
+The first supreme work of the kind was perhaps in _Vanity Fair_ and
+_Pendennis_, the former admitting exceptional and irregular developments
+as an integral part of its plot and general appeal, the latter doing for
+the most part without them. But _Pendennis_ exhibited in itself, and
+taught to other novelists, if not an absolutely new, a hitherto little
+worked, and clumsily worked, source of novel interest. We have seen how,
+as early as Head or Kirkman, the possibility of making such a source out
+of the ways of special trades, professions, employments, and vocations
+had been partly seen and utilised. Defoe did it more; Smollett more
+still; and since the great war there had been naval and military novels
+in abundance, as well as novels political, clerical, sporting, and what
+not. But these special interests had been as a rule drawn upon too
+onesidedly. The eighteenth century found its mistaken fondness for
+episodes, inset stories, and the like, particularly convenient here: the
+naval, military, sporting, and other novels of the nineteenth were apt
+to rely too exclusively on these differences. Such things as the
+Oxbridge scenes and the journalism scenes of _Pendennis_--both among the
+most effective and popular, perhaps _the_ most effective and popular,
+parts of the book--were almost, if not entirely, new. There had been
+before, and have since been, plenty of university novels, and their
+record has been a record of almost uninterrupted failure; there have
+since, if not before, _Pendennis_ been several "press" novels, and their
+record has certainly not been a record of unbroken success. But the
+employment here, by genius, of such subjects for substantial _parts_ of
+a novel was a success pure and unmixed. So, in the earlier book, the
+same author had shown how the most humdrum incident and the minutest
+painting of ordinary character could be combined with historic tragedy
+like that furnished by Waterloo, with domestic _drame_ of the most
+exciting kind like the discovery of Lord Steyne's relations with Becky,
+or the at least suggested later crime of that ingenious and rather
+hardly treated little person.
+
+Most of the writers mentioned and glanced at above took--not of course
+always, often, or perhaps ever in conscious following of Thackeray, but
+in consequence of the same "skiey influences" which worked on him--to
+this mixed domestic-dramatic line. And what is still more interesting,
+men who had already made their mark for years, in styles quite
+different, turned to it and adopted it. We have seen this of Bulwer, and
+the evidences of the change in him which are given by the "Caxton"
+novels. We have not yet directly dealt with another instance of almost
+as great interest and distinction, Charles Lever, though we have named
+him and glanced at his work.
+
+Lever, who was born as early as 1806, had, it has been said, begun to
+write novels as early as his junior, Dickens, and had at once developed,
+in _Harry Lorrequer_, a pretty distinct style of his own. This style was
+a kind of humour-novel with abundant incident, generally with a somewhat
+"promiscuous" plot and with lively but externally drawn characters--the
+humours being furnished partly by Lever's native country, Ireland, and
+partly by the traditions of the great war of which he had collected a
+store in his capacity of physician to the Embassy at Brussels. He had
+kept up this style, the capital example of which is _Charles O'Malley_
+(1840), with unabated _verve_ and with great popular success for a dozen
+years before 1850. But about that time, or rather earlier, the general
+"suck" of the current towards a different kind (assisted no doubt by the
+feeling that the public might be getting tired of the other style) made
+him change it into studies of a less specialised kind--of foreign
+travel, home life, and the like--sketches which, in his later days
+still, he brought even closer to actuality. It is true that in the long
+run his popularity has depended, and will probably always depend, on the
+early "rollicking" adventure books: not only because of their natural
+appeal, but because there is plenty of the other thing elsewhere, and
+hardly any of this particular thing anywhere. To almost anybody, for
+instance, except a very great milksop or a pedant of construction,
+_Charles O'Malley_ with its love-making and its fighting, its
+horsemanship and its horse-play, its "devilled kidneys"[23] and its
+devil-may-care-ness, is a distinctly delectable composition; and if a
+reasonable interval be allowed between the readings, may be read over
+and over again, at all times of life, with satisfaction. But the fact of
+the author's change remains not the less historically and
+symptomatically important, in connection with the larger change of which
+we are now taking notice, and with the similar phenomena observable in
+the work of Bulwer. At the same time it has been pointed out that the
+following of Miss Austen by no means excluded the following of Scott:
+and that the new development included "crosses" of novel and romance,
+sometimes of the historical kind, sometimes not, which are of the
+highest, or all but the highest, interest. Early and good examples of
+these may be found in the work of the Brontës, Charlotte and Emily (the
+third sister Anne is but a pale reflection of her elders), and of
+Charles Kingsley. Charlotte (b. 1816) and Charles (b. 1819) were
+separated in their birth by but three years, Emily (b. 1818) and
+Kingsley by but one.
+
+    [23] Edgar Poe has a perfectly serious and very characteristic
+    explosion at the prominence of these agreeable viands in the
+    book.
+
+The curious story of the struggles of the Brontë girls to get published
+hardly concerns us, and Emily's work, _Wuthering Heights_,[24] is one of
+those isolated books which, whatever their merit, are rather ornaments
+than essential parts in novel history. But this is not the case with
+_Jane Eyre_ (1847), _Shirley_ (1849), _Villette_ (1852), and _The
+Professor_ (1857) (but written much earlier). These are all examples of
+the determination to base novels on actual life and experience. Few
+novelists have ever kept so close to their own part in these as
+Charlotte Brontë did, though she accompanied, permeated, and to a
+certain extent transformed her autobiography and observation by a
+strong romantic and fantastic imaginative element. Deprive Thackeray and
+Dickens of nearly all their humour and geniality, take a portion only of
+the remaining genius of each in the ratio of about 2 _Th_. to 1 _D_.,
+add a certain dash of the old terror-novel and the German fantastic
+tale, moisten with feminine spirit and water, and mix thoroughly: and
+you have something very like Charlotte Brontë. But it is necessary to
+add further, and it is her great glory, the perfume and atmosphere of
+the Yorkshire moors, which she had in not quite such perfection as her
+sister Emily, but in combination with more general novel-gift. Her
+actual course of writing was short, and it could probably in no case
+have been long; she wanted wider and, perhaps, happier experience, more
+literature, more man-and-woman-of-the-worldliness, perhaps a sweeter and
+more genial temper. But the English novel would have been incomplete
+without her and her sister; they are, as wholes, unlike anybody else,
+and if they are not exactly great they have the quality of greatness.
+Above all, they kept novel and romance together--a deed which is great
+without any qualification or drawback.
+
+    [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 _à 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 Brontë_ 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 _réussite_--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 Ramée). 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 _bête 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 _un_popular 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 _appât_. 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
+Molières, 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 Molières 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 mediæval 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 Brontë 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 mediæval 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 _dénouements_ 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 _débuts_ 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 _à 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 _corvèe_, 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.
+
+Very late in the century the genius of Mr. William Morris turned from
+verse to prose tale-telling in a series of romances which caught the
+fancy neither of the public nor of the critics as a whole, but which
+seem to some whom the gods have made not quite uncritical to be, if
+rightly taken, of much accomplishment, and of almost more promise and
+suggestion. These, seven or eight in number, from _The House of the
+Wulfings_ (1889) to _The Sundering Flood_, published after the author's
+death in 1898, were actual romances--written in a kind of modernised
+fifteenth-century English, and dealing, some with far back incidents of
+the conflict between Romans and "Barbarians," most with the frank
+no-time and no-place of Romance itself. They came at an unfortunate
+moment, when the younger generation of readers were thinking it proper
+to be besotted with crude realism or story-less impressionism, and when
+some at least of those who might have welcomed them earlier had left
+their first faith in poetry or poetic prose. There was, moreover,
+perhaps some genuine dislike, and certainly a good deal of precisian
+condemnation, of the "Wardour Street" dialect. Yet there was no sham in
+them: it was impossible for Mr. Morris to have anything to do with
+shams--even his socialism was not that--and they were in reality a
+revival, however Rip van Winklish it might seem, of the pure old romance
+itself, at the hands of a nineteenth-century sorcerer, who no doubt put
+a little of the nineteenth century into them. The best--probably the
+best of all is _The Well at the World's End_ (1896)--have an
+extraordinary charm for any one who can taste romance: and are by no
+means unlikely to awake the taste for it in generations to come. But for
+the present the thing lay out of the way of its generation, and was not
+comprehended or enjoyed thereby. For it is no doubt nearly as annoying
+to have bread given to you when you want thistles as to have thistles
+given to you when you want bread. But just as the ballad is the
+appointed reviver of poetry, so is romance the appointed reviver of
+prose-fiction: and in one form or another it will surely do its work,
+sooner or later.
+
+Here it may be best to stop the actual current of critical comment on
+individuals. Something has been hinted as to the general present
+condition of the novel, but there is no need to emphasise it or to enter
+into particulars about it: indeed, even if such a proceeding were
+convenient in one way it would be very inconvenient in another. One
+might, for instance, have to consider, rather curiously, a remarkable
+statement recently attributed to a popular novelist that "the general
+standard of excellence in fiction is higher _to-day_ than ever it was
+before." But we can take higher ground. Far be it from me to bow to the
+Baal of "up-to-dateness," for even if I had any such hankering, I think
+I should remember that the surest way of being out-of-date to-morrow is
+the endeavour to be up-to-date to-day. Only by keeping perspective can
+you hope to confirm and steady your view: only by relinquishing the
+impossible attempt to be complete can you achieve a relative
+completeness.
+
+Yet it is well to remember that Lockhart, one of the best critics who
+ever lived (when he let himself be so), a novelist too, and not likely
+to lose an opportunity of magnifying his office if he could, took
+occasion, in noticing the novels of his friend Theodore Hook at poor
+"Mr. Wagg's" death, gravely to deplore the decadence of the novel
+generally: and not much later, in reprinting the article, had the wisdom
+to recognise, and the courage to record, the fact that Thackeray had
+disappointed his prognostications. Literature, it has been said, is the
+incalculable of incalculables: and not only may a new novelist arise
+to-morrow, but some novelist who has been writing for almost any number
+of years may change his style, strike the vein, and begin the
+exploitation of a new gold-field in novel-production.
+
+But this does not affect the retrospect of the past. There we are on
+perfectly firm ground--ground which we have traversed carefully already,
+and which we may survey in surety now.
+
+We have seen, then, that the prose novel--a late growth both in ancient
+and in modern times in all countries--was a specially late and
+slow-yielding one in English. Although Thoms's _Early English Prose
+Romances_ is by no means an exhaustive collection, and for this reason
+was not specially referred to in the first chapter, it is impossible not
+to recognise that its three rather small volumes, of matter for the most
+part exceeding poor and beggarly, contrast in the most pitiful fashion
+with the scores and almost hundreds containing Early English Romances in
+verse. Malory of course brings the prose-scale down very considerably
+from its uncomfortably _meteoric_ position, and some other things help:
+but the total of prose and verse before 1500 can be brought level by no
+possible sleight of weighing. Still, as we have seen, this did not
+matter very much: for the verse got "transprosed" sooner or later, and
+the romances and tales of other countries were greedily admitted _ad
+eundem_ in sixteenth and seventeenth century English.
+
+Yet the novel proper lingered: and, except in the single and eccentric
+masterpiece of Bunyan, the seventeenth century ended without having seen
+one real specimen of prose fiction that was thoroughly satisfactory.
+Nearly half the eighteenth had gone too, with nothing but the less
+isolated but still not perfect performances of Defoe, and the once more
+still eccentric masterpiece of _Gulliver_, before the novel-period
+really opened. It is literally not more than two long lifetimes ago--it
+is quite certain that there are now living hundreds, perhaps thousands,
+of persons born when others were still living who drew their first
+breaths in or before the year when Pamela made her modest, but very
+distinctly self-conscious, curtsey to the world. How soon it grew to a
+popular form of literature, and how steadily that popularity has
+continued and increased, there is not much need to say or to repeat.
+Statistical persons every year give us the hundreds of novels that
+appear from the presses, and the thousands of readers who take them out
+of, or read them in, public libraries. I do not know whether there
+exists anywhere a record of the total number published since 1740, but I
+dare say it does. I should not at all wonder if this total ran into
+scores of thousands: if you were to bring in short stories it would
+certainly do so. People have almost left off shaking their heads over
+the preponderant or exclusive attention to fiction in these public
+libraries themselves: in fact the tendency seems to be rather to make
+out that it is decreasing. It may be so; or it may not. But what remains
+certain is that there is a very large number of educated people to whom
+"reading" simply means reading novels; who never think of taking up a
+book that is not a novel; for whom the novel exhausts even the very
+meaning of the word "literature." We know that the romance was
+originally so called simply because it was the commonest book in
+"Romance" language. We are less unsophisticated now: but there are
+certainly large numbers of His Majesty's subjects by whom a novel on
+this principle ought to be called "an english" though it might have to
+share that appellation with the newspaper.
+
+Yet, as we have seen, for this or that reason, the _average_ novel did
+not come to anything like perfection for a very long time. In a single
+example, or set of examples, it reached something like perfection almost
+at once. Fielding, Scott, Miss Austen, and Thackeray are the Four
+Masters of the whole subject, giving the lady the same degree as the
+others by courtesy of letters. But in the first (as for the matter of
+that in the last) of the four the success was rather a matter of
+individual and inimitable genius than of systematic discovery of method
+practicable by others. Nobody, except Thackeray himself, has ever
+followed Fielding successfully, and that only in parts and touches; as
+Fielding had (unfortunately) no opportunity of following Thackeray, no
+one has ever followed Thackeray satisfactorily at all. Such reasons as
+presented themselves have been given for the fact that nearly half of
+the whole period passed before the two systems--of the pure novel and
+the novel-romance--were discovered: and even then they were not at once
+put to work. But the present writer would be the very first to confess
+that these explanations leave a great deal unexplained.
+
+Yet whatever faults there might be in the supply there could be no doubt
+about the demand when it was once started. It was indeed almost entirely
+independent of the goodness or badness of the average supply itself.
+Allowing for the smaller population and the much smaller proportion of
+that population who were likely to--who indeed could--read, and for the
+inferior means of distribution, it may be doubted whether the largest
+sales of novels recorded in the last half century have surpassed those
+of the most trumpery trash of the "Minerva Press" period--the last
+decade of the eighteenth and the first of the nineteenth century. For
+the main novel-public is quite omnivorous, and almost absolutely
+uncritical of what it devours. The admirable though certainly fortunate
+Scot who "could never remember drinking bad whisky" might be echoed, if
+they had the wit, by not a few persons who never seem to read a bad
+novel, or at least to be aware that they are reading one.
+
+At the same time, the failure of the quest for novel-recipes was
+compensated by an absence of that working of those recipes to death
+which the last century--or the last three-quarters of it--has seen. The
+average work of any one of a dozen nineteenth-century producers of
+novels by the dozen and the score, whom at this place it is not
+necessary to name, is probably on the whole a much better turned out
+thing--one better observing its own purposes, and open to less criticism
+in detail--than even the best of the works of the earlier division
+outside of Fielding. But the eighteenth-century books--faulty, only
+partially satisfying as they may be in comparison, say, with a
+well-succeeded Trollope or one of the better Blackmores--very often have
+a certain idiosyncrasy, a freedom from machine-work, which supplies
+something not altogether unlike the contrast between the furniture of
+the two periods. Stress and dwelling have been purposely given, to some
+minor books of this period, for this very reason.
+
+But at the same time the limitations, outside the greatest, are
+certainly peculiar. It seems wonderful that a man like Cumberland, for
+instance, who had not a little literary talent, should not have been
+able to make _Henry_ into a story of real interest that might hold the
+reader as even second-class Trollope--say a book like _Orley
+Farm_--does. We have ungraciously recognised that some of our lady
+novelists, who wrote by forties and by fifties, did not always sustain
+the interest of their novels. Miss Burney wrote four in all, and could
+hardly keep up the interest of hers right through the second. Above all,
+there is the difficulty of their failure with conversation and, in fact,
+with any diction proper for conversation. If Horace Walpole, a
+contemporary of the eighteenth-century novel from its actual start to
+practically its finish, could give us thousands and all but tens of
+thousands of phrases that want but a little of being novel-conversation
+ready made, why could not the other people make it for their own
+purposes? But we have got no answer to these questions: and probably
+there is none.
+
+The way in which Scott and Miss Austen themselves simultaneously found
+out the secrets of the two kinds of novel is no doubt, as such ways
+always are, in the larger part mysterious: but to a certain extent it
+can be explained and analysed, independently of the direct literary
+genius of each. One of the greatest gifts of Scott--one with which the
+non-historical novelist can dispense as little as his brother the
+historical--was that "genius of history" with which Lord Morley--a
+critic not likely to be misled by sympathy in some respects at any
+rate--has justly credited him. For unless you have this "historic
+sense," as it has been more generally and perhaps better termed (though
+to the intense disgust of some professed historians), it is not only
+impossible for you to delineate scene and character at a distance from
+your time, but you become really disqualified for depicting your own
+time itself. You fail to distinguish the temporary from the permanent;
+you achieve perhaps a fairly faithful copy of actual manners and
+fashions, but you do nothing more, and as the subject dies so does the
+picture. Contrast Hook, say, with Thackeray, and the difference will
+emerge at once.
+
+Secondly, Scott had, besides this historic sense and the relish for
+humanity which must accompany it, a knowledge of literature with which
+he has been too seldom credited to the full. When he published
+_Waverley_ he had been reading all sorts and conditions of books for
+some five-and-thirty years, and assimilating them if, as the pedants
+will have it, with a distressing inaccuracy in particulars, with a
+general and genial fidelity of which the pedants do not even dream and
+could not comprehend, or they would not be pedants. He was thus
+furnished with infinite stores of illustrative matter, never to
+overpower, but always to accompany and season, his knowledge of life. In
+a few instances this felicity of adoption has been recognised, but not a
+tenth part of it has ever been systematically put on record. The more
+widely and the longer a man reads, the more constantly will he find that
+Scott has been before him, and has "lifted" just the touch that he
+wanted at the time and in the place.
+
+But perhaps a greater gift (there were still others which it would be
+long to perscribe--descriptive faculty, humour, pathos, half a dozen
+other things of the highest importance in themselves, but of less
+special application) was that which enabled him to discover and apply
+something like a universal novel _language_. He did this, not as
+Shakespeare did (and as nobody but Shakespeare, except perhaps Dante to
+some extent, ever has done or apparently could do), by making a really
+universal language which fits all times and persons because it is
+universal like its creator's soul. Still less did he do it by adopting
+the method which Spenser did consummately, but which almost everybody
+else has justified Ben Jonson by doing very badly:--that is to say by
+constructing a mosaic of his own. But his own method was nearer to this
+latter. For historical creations (the most important of his
+non-historic, _Guy Mannering_ and the _Antiquary_, were so near his own
+time that he had no difficulty) he threw back with remarkable cunning to
+a period somewhat earlier, and coloured this up to the required tint by
+actual suggestions from contemporary, or nearly contemporary,
+literature, where he could get it. He has done this so consummately that
+perhaps the only novel of his where the language strikes us as
+artificial is the single one in which he actually endeavoured to be
+"up-to-date"--_St. Ronan's Well_.
+
+This question of "Lingo," on the other hand, was Miss Austen's weakest
+point: and we have seen and shall see that it continued to be a weak
+point with others. Some admirers have defended her even here: but proud
+as I am to be an Austen Friar, a knight (or at least squire) of the
+order of St. Jane, I cannot go to this length. She very nearly
+succeeded, and sometimes she did quite: but not always. The easy
+dialogue and phrase that we find as early as Horace Walpole, even as
+Chesterfield and Lady Mary, in letters; which, in her own early days,
+appears in Fanny Burney's diaries but not in the novels, does not seem
+always within Miss Austen's grasp. But her advance in this respect is
+enormous: she is, for instance, far beyond Scott himself in _St. Ronan's
+Well_: and when she is thoroughly interested in a character, and engaged
+in unfolding it and gently satirising it at the same time, she rarely
+goes even a hair's-breadth wrong. In almost every other respect she does
+not go wrong to the extent of the minutest section of a hair. The story
+is the least part with her: but her stories are always miraculously
+_adequate_: neither desultory and pillar-to-post, nor elaborated with
+the minuteness which seems to please some people, but which is quite
+indifferent to the majority, and is certainly a positive nuisance to a
+few who are not quite of negligible judgment. But the reason of this
+adequacy in story contains in itself her greatest triumph. Not being a
+poet, she cannot reach the Shakespearian consummateness of poetic
+phrase: though she sometimes comes not so far short of this in the prose
+variety. But in the other great province of character, though hers is
+but a Rutland to his Yorkshire--or rather to his England or his
+world--she is almost equally supreme. And by her manipulation of it she
+showed, once for all, how the most ordinary set of circumstances, and
+even the most ordinary characters in a certain sense, can be made to
+supply the material of prose fiction to an absolutely illimitable
+extent. Her philosopher's stone (to take up the old parable again) does
+not lose its powers even when all the metal in the house is
+exhausted--if indeed the metal, or anything else, in the House of
+Humanity were exhaustible. The chairs and tables, the beds and the
+basins--everything--can be made into novel-gold: and, when it has been
+made, it remains as useful for future conversion, by the same or any
+other magician of the same class, as ever. One of the most curious
+things about Miss Austen is the entire absence of self-repetition in
+her. Even her young men--certainly not her greatest successes--are by no
+means doubles of each other: and nature herself could not turn out half
+a dozen girls more subtly and yet more sufficiently differentiated than
+Catherine and Elizabeth, Marianne and Fanny, Elinor and Emma, and
+finally the three sisters of _Persuasion_, the other (quite other)
+Elizabeth, Mary, and Anne. The "ruts of the brain" in novelists are a
+by-word. There are none here.
+
+In these two great writers of English novel there is, really for the
+first time, the complementary antithesis after which people have often
+gone (I fear it must be said) wool-gathering elsewhere. The amateurs of
+cosmopolitan literature, I believe, like to find it in Stendhal and
+Michelet. They praise the former for his delicate and pitiless
+psychological analysis. It had been anticipated a dozen years, nay,
+nearly twenty years, before he saw the Beresina: and was being given out
+in print at about the very moment of that uncomfortable experience, and
+before he himself published anything, by a young English lady--a lady if
+ever there was one and English if any person ever was--in a country
+parsonage in Hampshire or in hired houses, quite humdrum and commonplace
+to the commonplace and humdrum imagination, at Bath and Southampton.
+They praise Michelet for his enthusiastic and multiform apprehension of
+the plastic reality of the past, his re-creation of it, his putting of
+it, live and active, before the present. The thing had been done, twenty
+years earlier again, by a Scotch advocate who had deliberately turned
+from poetic form, though he retained poetic imagination, and who did not
+disdain not to make a fool of himself, as Michelet, with all his genius,
+did again and again. Of all the essentials of the two manners of
+fictitious creation--Michelet's was not fictitious, but he almost made
+it so, and Stendhal's was not historical, but he almost made it so
+likewise--Scott and Miss Austen had set the types, given the methods,
+arranged the processes as definitely as Fust, or Coster, or Gutenberg,
+or Fust's friend Mephistopheles--who perhaps, on the whole, has the best
+title to the invention--did in another matter three hundred years
+before.
+
+That Scott's variety should be taken up first, and should for a time
+have the great popularity, the greater number of disciples, the greater
+acceptance as a mode of pleasing--was, as has been pointed out, natural
+enough; it is not a little significant that (to avert our eyes from
+England) the next practitioner of the psychological style in European
+literature, Balzac, went through a long and mostly unsuccessful
+probation in the other kind, and never wholly deserted it, or at least
+always kept looking back to it. But the general shortcomings (as they
+have been admitted to be) in the whole of the second quarter of the
+century (or a little less) with us, were but natural results of the
+inevitable expatiation, unsystematic and irresolute, over the newly
+discovered provinces. And they gave admirable work of various
+kinds--work especially admirable if we remember that there was no
+general literary uprising with us as there was, in France and elsewhere,
+about 1830. If it were in any way possible--similar supposings have been
+admitted in literature very often--it would be extremely interesting to
+take a person _ex hypothesi_ fairly acquainted with the rest of
+literature--English, foreign, European, and classical--but who knew
+nothing and had heard nothing of Bulwer, Disraeli, Peacock, Marryat,
+even Ainsworth and James and others between Scott and the accomplished
+work of Thackeray (Dickens's is, as has been said, mainly a sport of
+genius), and to turn him loose on this work. I do him the justice to
+suppose that he would find not a few faults: I shall also do him the
+justice to think it likely that he (being, as said, _ex hypothesi_
+furnished with the miscellaneous knowledge necessary to enjoy them)
+would enjoy them very keenly and thoroughly. If you added the minorities
+of the time, such as that very clever Miss Robinson (I think her name
+was Emma) who wrote _Whitefriars_ and other historical romances in the
+forties; such as Charles Macfarlane, who died, like Colonel Newcome, a
+poor brother of the Charterhouse after writing capital things like _The
+Dutch in the Medway_ and _The Camp of Refuge_--if, I say, you gave him
+these things and he was a good man, but lazy, like Gray, I think he
+would vote for a continuance of his life of novels and sofas without
+sighing for anything further. But undoubtedly it might be contended that
+something further was needed: and it came. This was verisimilitude--the
+holding of the true mirror to actual society.
+
+This verisimilitude, it should be observed, is not only difficult to
+attain: it seems not to be easy even to recognise. I have seen it said
+that the reason which makes it "hopeless for many people even to try to
+get through _Pickwick_" (their state itself must be "hopeless" enough,
+and it is to be hoped there are not "many" of them) is that it
+"describes states of society unimaginable to many people of to-day."
+Again, these many people must be somewhat unimaginative. But that is not
+the point of the matter. The point is that Dickens depicts no "state of
+society" that ever existed, except in the _Dickensium Sidus_. What he
+gives is full of intensely real touches which help to create its charm.
+But it is difficult to say that there is even a single person in it who
+is real as a whole, in the sense of having possibly existed in this
+world: and the larger whole of the book generally is pure fantasy--as
+much so as one of the author's own favourite goblin-dream stories.
+
+With Thackeray the case is exactly the opposite. It is a testimony no
+doubt to Dickens's real power--though perhaps not to his readers'
+perspicacity--that he made them believe that he intended a "state of
+society" when, whether he intended it or not, he certainly has not given
+it. But Thackeray intended it and gave it. His is a "state of society"
+always--whether in late seventeenth century, early or late eighteenth,
+early or middle nineteenth--which existed or might have existed; his
+persons are persons who lived or might have lived. And it is the
+discovery of this art of creation by him and its parallel diffusion
+among his contemporaries that I am endeavouring to make clear here.
+Fielding, Scott to some extent, Miss Austen had had it. Dickens, till
+_Great Expectations_ at least, never achieved and I believe never
+attempted it. Bulwer, having failed in it for twenty years, struck it at
+last about this time, and so did, even before him, Mrs. Marsh, and
+perhaps others, falteringly and incompletely. But as a general gift--a
+characteristic--it never distinguished novelists till after the middle
+of the century.
+
+It is, I think, impossible to find a better meeting and overlapping
+place of the old and the new novel, than that very remarkable book
+_Emilia Wyndham_, which has been already more than once referred to. It
+was written in 1845 and appeared next year--the year of _Vanity Fair_.
+But the author was twenty years older than Thackeray, though she
+survived him by nearly a dozen; she had not begun early; and she was
+fifty-five when she wrote _Emilia_. The not unnatural consequence is
+that there is a great deal of inconsistency in the general texture of
+the book: and that any clever cub, in the 'prentice stage of reviewing,
+could make columns of fun out of it. The general theme is age-old, being
+not different from the themes of most other novels in that respect. A
+half-idiotic spendthrift (he ends as very nearly an actual idiot) not
+merely wastes his own property but practically embezzles that of his
+wife and daughter; the wife dies and the daughter is left alone with an
+extravagant establishment, a father practically _non compos_, not a
+penny in her pocket after she has paid his doctor, and a selfish
+baronet-uncle who will do less than nothing to help her. She has loved
+half unconsciously, and been half consciously loved by, a soldier cousin
+or quasi-cousin: but he is in the Peninsular War. Absolutely no help
+presents itself but that of a Mr. Danby, a conveyancer, who, in some way
+not very consonant with the usual etiquette of his profession, has been
+mixed up with her father's affairs--a man middle-aged, apparently dry as
+his own parchments, and quite unversed in society. He helps her clumsily
+but lavishly: and her uncle forces her to accept his hand as the only
+means of saving her father from jail first and an asylum afterwards. The
+inevitable disunion, brought about largely by Danby's mother (an awful
+old middle-class harridan), follows; and the desk-and-head incident
+mentioned above is brought about by her seeing the (false) announcement
+of her old lover's death in the paper. But she herself is consistently,
+perhaps excessively, but it is fair to say not ridiculously, angelic;
+Danby is a gentleman and a good fellow at heart; and of course, after
+highly tragical possibilities, these good gifts triumph. The greatest
+danger is threatened, and the actual happy ending brought about, by an
+auxiliary plot, in which the actors are the old lover (two old lovers
+indeed), his wife (a beautiful featherhead, who has been Emilia's
+school-fellow and dearest friend), and a wicked "Duke of C."
+
+Even from this sketch the tolerably expert reader of novels may discover
+where the weak points are likely to lie; he will be a real expert if he
+anticipates the strong ones without knowing the book. As was formerly
+noticed, the dialogue is ill supplied with diction. The date of the
+story is 1809: and the author had for that period a fairly safe pattern
+in Miss Austen: but she does not use it at all, nor does she make the
+lingo frankly that of her own day. There are gross improbabilities--Mr.
+Danby, for instance (who is represented as wrapped up in his business,
+and exclusively occupied with the legal side of money matters and the
+money side of the law), actually discharges, or thinks he is
+discharging, hundreds and thousands of Mr. Wyndham's liabilities by
+handing his own open cheques, not to the creditors, not to any one
+representing them, but to a country attorney who has succeeded him in
+the charge of the debts and affairs, and whom he knows to be a sharp
+practitioner and suspects to be a scoundrel. The inhuman uncle and the
+licentious duke are mere cardboard characters: and the featherheaded
+Lisa talks and behaves like a mixture of the sprightly heroines of
+Richardson (for whom Lady Mary most righteously prescribed a sound
+whipping) and the gushing heroines of Lady Morgan. There is too much
+chaise-and-four and laudanum-bottle; too much moralising; too much of a
+good many other things. And yet, somehow or other, there are also things
+very rarely to be found in any novel--even taking in Bulwer and the
+serious part of Dickens--up to the date. The scene between Danby and his
+mother, in the poky house in Charlotte Street, when she discovers that
+he has been giving a hundred-pound cheque to a young lady is
+impressingly good: it is not absolutely unsuggestive of what Thackeray
+was just doing, and really not far from what Trollope was not for some
+years to do. There are other passages which make one think of George
+Eliot, who indeed might have been writing at the very time; there are
+even faint and faltering suggestions of Ibsenic "duty to ourselves." Mr.
+Danby (the characters regularly call each other "Mr.," "Mrs.," and
+"Miss," even when they are husbands and wives, daughters or nieces, and
+uncles or fathers) is a miss, and not quite a miss, of a very striking,
+original, possible, and even probable character. His mother, with
+something more of the Dickensian type-character, can stand by her
+unpleasant self, and came ten years before "the Campaigner." Susan, her
+pleasanter servant, is equally self-sufficing, and came five years
+before Peggotty, to whom she is not without resemblances.[28]
+
+    [28] Another novel of Mrs. Marsh-Caldwell's, _Norman's Bridge_,
+    has strong suggestions of _John Halifax_, and is ten years
+    older.
+
+But it is not so much the merits on the one hand, or the defects on the
+other, of the book that deserve attention here and justify the place
+given to it: it is the general "chip-the-shell" character. The shell is
+only being chipped: large patches of it still hamper the chicken, which
+is thus a half developed and half disfigured little animal. All sorts of
+didactics, of Byronic-Bulwerish sentiment, of conventionalities of
+various kinds, still hold their place; the language, as we have said, is
+traditional and hardly even that; and the characters are partly drawn
+from Noah's Arks of various dates, partly from the stock company of the
+toy theatre. On the other hand, besides the touches of modernity already
+mentioned, and assisting them, there is a great attention to
+"interiors." The writer has, for her time, a more than promising sense
+of the incongruity between Empire dress and furniture and the style of
+George II.: and the shabbiness or actual squalor of Charlotte Street and
+Chancery Lane show that she had either been a very early and forward
+scholar of Dickens, or had discovered the thing on her own account. Her
+age may excuse some of the weak points, but it makes the presence of the
+strong ones all the more remarkable: and it shows all the more forcibly
+how the general influences which were to produce the great central
+growth of Victorian novel were at work, and at work almost violently, in
+the business of pulling down the old as well as of building up the new.
+
+Of that new novel it is not necessary to say much more. In the last
+fifty or sixty years of the nineteenth century it did, as it seems to
+me, very great things--so great that, putting poetry, which is supreme,
+aside, there is no division of the world's literature within a time at
+all comparable to its own which can much, if at all, excel it. It did
+these great things because partly of the inscrutable laws which
+determined that a certain number of men and women of unusual power
+should exist, and should devote themselves to it, partly of the less
+heroic-sounding fact that the general appetite of other men and
+womenkind could make it worth while for these persons of genius and
+talent not to do something else. But even so, the examination, rightly
+conducted, discovers more than a sufficient dose of nobility. For the
+novel appeal is not, after all, to a mere blind animal thirst for
+something that will pass and kill time, for something that will drug or
+flutter or amuse. Beyond and above these things there is something else.
+The very central cause and essence of it--most definitely and most
+keenly felt by nobler spirits and cultivated intelligences, but also
+dimly and unconsciously animating very ordinary people--is the human
+delight in humanity--the pleasure of seeing the men and women of long
+past ages living, acting, and speaking as they might have done, those of
+the present living, acting, speaking as they do--but in each case with
+the portrayal not as a mere copy of particulars, but influenced with
+that spirit of the universal which is the secret and the charm of art.
+It is because the novels of these years recognised and provided this
+pleasure in a greater degree than those of the former period (except the
+productions of a few masters) that they deserve the higher position
+which has been here assigned them. If the novels of any period, before
+or since or to come, have deserved, may or shall deserve, a lower
+place--it is, and will be, because of their comparative or positive
+neglect of the combination of these conditions. Perhaps it is not easy
+to see what new country there is for the novel to conquer. But, as with
+other kinds of literature, there is practically no limit to its powers
+of working its actual domains. In the finest of its already existing
+examples it hardly yields in accomplishment even to poetry; in that
+great secondary (if secondary) office of all Art--to redress the
+apparent injustice, and console for the apparent unkindness, of
+Nature--to serve as rest and refreshment between those exactions of life
+which, though neither unjust nor unkind, are burdensome, it has no equal
+among all the kinds of Art itself.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+_Adam Bede_
+Adams, W.
+Addison
+_Adeline Mowbray_
+Aelfric
+_Agathos_
+Ainsworth, H.
+_Alton Locke_
+_Amadis_
+_Amelia_
+_Amis and Amillion_
+Amory, Thomas
+_Anabasis, The_
+Anglo-Saxon, Romance in
+_Anna_
+_Anna St. Ives_
+_Apollonius of Tyre_
+Apuleius
+Arblay, Madame d', _see_ Burney, F.
+_Arcadia, The_
+_Aretina_
+_Arthour and Merlin_
+Arthurian Legend, the;
+  its romantic concentration
+_Ask Mamma_
+_Ass, The Golden_
+_Atlantis, The New_
+Austen, Miss
+
+_Badman, Mr_.
+Bage, R.
+Balzac
+Banim
+_Barchester Towers_
+Barrett, E.S.
+_Barry Lyndon_
+"Barsetshire Novels," the
+_Battle of the Books, The_
+Beaconsfield, Lord, _see_ Disraeli, B.
+Beckford
+Behn, Afra
+_Belinda_
+Bennett, Mrs.
+_Bentivolio and Urania_
+_Beowulf_
+Bergerac, C. de
+Berington, S.
+Berkeley
+Berners, Lord
+_Bertrams, The_
+_Beryn, The Tale of_
+Besaut, Sir W.
+_Betsy Thoughtless_
+_Bevis of Hampton_
+Black, W.
+Blackmore, R.D.
+Blair
+Borrow, George
+Boyle, Roger, Lord Broghill and Earl of Orrery
+_Brambletye House_
+Brontë, Charlotte
+  Emily and Anne
+Brooke, H.
+Brunetière, M.
+Brunton, Mrs.
+Bulwer, Sir E.B. Lytton (1st Lord Lytton)
+_Buncle, The life of John_
+Bunyan
+Burney, F.
+Byrne, Mrs.
+Byron
+
+_Caleb Williams_
+_Cambridge Freshman, The_
+_Camilla_
+_Canterbury Tales_ (the Misses Lee's)
+_Can You Forgive Her?_
+_Captain Singleton_
+_Castle of Otranto, The_
+_Catherine_
+_Catriona_
+_Caxtons, The_
+_Cecilia_
+Chamier, Captain
+_Charles O'Malley_
+"Charlotte Elizabeth"
+Chateaubriand, 152
+_Children of the Abbey, The_
+_Chrestien de Troyes_
+_Chronicles of Carlingford, The_
+_Chrysal_
+Circulating libraries, effort of
+_Clarissa_
+Clive, Mrs. A.
+_Cloister and the Hearth, The_
+Coleridge
+Collins, Wilkie
+_Colonel Jack_
+_Complaint of Deor, The_
+Congreve
+_Convent of Grey Penitents, The_
+Coventry, F.
+"Coverley Papers," the
+Craik, Mrs.
+_Cranford_
+_Cripps the Carrier_
+Crisp, "Daddy"
+Croker, Crofton
+Croly
+_Crotchet Castle_
+Crowe, Mrs.
+Crowne, John
+Croxall, Dr.
+Cumberland, R.
+_Cyropædia, The_
+
+Dante
+_David Simple_
+Defoe
+Dickens
+Diderot
+_Discipline_
+Disraeli, B.
+_Divina Commedia, The_
+Dumas
+Dunlop
+
+Edgeworth, Miss
+Ellis, G., _Early English Romances_
+_Emarè_
+_Emilia Wyndham_
+_Emma_
+_English Rogue, The_
+_Esmond_
+_Euphues_
+Eustathius
+Evans, Mary Ann ("George Eliot")
+_Evelina_
+
+_Fair Quaker of Dea
+_Ferdinand Count Fathom_
+Ferrier, Miss
+Fielding, H.
+Fielding, S.
+_Florence of Rome_
+_Florice and Blancheflour_
+_Fool of Quality, The_
+Ford, Emmanuel
+_Fortunes of Nigel, The_
+_Frank_
+_Frank Fairlegh_
+_Frank Mildmay_
+
+Galt
+_Gamekeeper at Home, The_
+Gaskell, Mrs.
+_Gawain and the Green Knight_
+Geoffrey of Monmouth
+"George Eliot," _see_ Evans, M.A.
+Gilpin
+Glascock, Capt.
+Godwin, W.
+Goldsmith
+Gore, Mrs.
+Graves, Rev. R.
+Gray
+_Great Hoggarty Diamond, The_
+Green, Sarah
+Grey, Mr. W.W.
+_Gryll Grange_
+_Guadentio di Lucca_
+_Gulliver's Travels_
+_Guy Livingstone_
+_Guy of Warwick_
+
+Hagiology, its effect on Romance
+Hamilton, Anthony
+Hardy, Mr.
+_Haunted and the Haunters, The_
+_Havelok the Dam_
+Haywood, Eliza
+Hazlitt
+Head, R.
+_Heir of Redclyffe, The_
+_Heliodorus_
+Henley, Mr. W.E.
+_Henrietta Temple_
+_Henry_
+_Hereward the Wake_
+_Hermsprong_
+Herodotus
+_Heroine, The_
+Holcroft, T.
+_Holy War, The_
+Hook, Theodore
+Hope
+_Horn, King_
+_Humphry Clinker_
+Hunt, Leigh
+_Hypatia_
+
+_Idalia_
+_Ida of Athena_
+_Iliad The_
+"Imitation" (the Greek=Fiction)
+Inchbald, Mrs.
+_Incognita_
+Ingelo, N.
+_Ipomydon_
+_Isle of Pines, The_
+_Italian, The_
+_It is Never too Late to Mend_
+_Ixion_
+
+_Jack Wilton_
+_Jacob Faithful_
+James, G.P.R.
+_Jane Eyre_
+Jefferies, R.
+_Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy_
+_John Runcle_
+_John Inglesand_
+Johnson, Dr.
+Johnstone, C.
+_Jonathan Wild_
+"Jorrocks," Mr.
+_Joseph Andrews_
+_Journey from This World to the Next, A_
+
+_Kate Coventry_
+Kingsley, C.
+Kingsley, H.
+_King's Own, The_
+Kirkman, F.
+
+"Lady Mary" (Wortley-Montagu)
+_Lady Susan_
+_Lancelot (of the Laik)_, the Scots
+_Last Chronicle of Barset, The_
+Lawrence, G.A.
+Layamon
+Lee, the Misses
+"L.E.L."
+Lennox, Mrs.
+_Leoline and Sydanis_
+Letter-form in novels
+Lever, C.
+Lewis, M.G.
+_Libertine, The_
+Livy
+Lockhart
+_London_
+Longus
+_Lorna Doone_
+Lucian
+_Lybius Disconus_
+Lydia
+Lyly
+Lytton, _see_ Bulwer
+
+Macaulay
+Macdonald, George
+Macfarlane, C.
+Mackenzie, Henry
+Mackenzie, Sir George
+Malory
+_Man as He Is_
+_Manley, Mrs._
+_Man of Feeling, The_
+_Mansfield Park_
+Map, W.
+_Marianne_ (Marivaux)
+_Marivaux_
+Marryat, Captain
+Marsh, Mrs.
+Martineau, Mrs.
+_Mary Barton_
+Maturin, C.R.
+_Melincourt_
+_Melmoth the Wanderer_
+Melville, Mr. L.
+_Memoirs of a Cavalier_
+Meredith, Mr. George
+_Merlin_
+Michelet
+_Mill on the Floss, The_
+_Misfortunes of Elphin, The_
+_Mr. Midshipman Easy_
+_Mr. Verdant Green_
+_Mrs. Veal_
+_Moll Flanders_
+_Monk, The_
+_Montelion_
+Moore, Dr. John
+Morgan, Lady
+Morier
+Morley of Blackburn, Lord
+Morris, W.
+_Morte d'Arthur_, the alliterative;
+  the metrical;
+  Malory's
+Mosse, Henrietta
+_Mount Henneth_
+_Mysteries of Udolpho, The_
+
+Nash, T.
+_Nature and Art_
+Neville, H.
+_Nightmare Abbey_
+_No Name_
+_North and South_
+_Northanger Abbey_
+_Novelist, The_
+_Novella_, the Italian, influence of
+
+_Oceana_
+_Odyssey, The_
+_Old English Baron, The_
+_Old Manor House, The_
+Oliphant, Mrs.
+Opie, Mrs.
+_Ordeal of Richard Feverel, The_
+_Ormond_
+_Ornatus and Artesia_
+_Oroonoko_
+"Ouida"
+Ovid
+
+Paget, F.
+_Palace of Pleasure_, Painter's
+Paltock, R.
+_Pamela_
+_Pandion and Amphigeneia_
+Paris, M. Gaston
+_Parismus and Parismenus_
+_Parthenissa_
+_Paul Ferroll_
+Peacock, T.L.
+_Peep at Our Ancestors_
+_Pendennis_
+_Peregrine Pickle_
+_Persuasion_
+_Peter Simple_
+_Peter Wilkins_
+Petronius
+_Phantasies_
+_Pharonnida_
+_Pickwick Papers, The_
+_Pilgrim's Progress, The_
+Plato
+Poe, Edgar
+_Polite Conversation_ (Swift's)
+_Pompey the Little_
+Porter, Miss
+_Pride and Prejudice_
+_Proud King, The_
+Publication, system of
+
+_Queenhoo Hall_
+_Quixote, The Female_
+_Quixote, The Spiritual_
+
+Rabelais
+Radcliffe, Mrs.
+Raleigh, Professor Sir Walter
+_Rasselas_
+Reade, C.
+_Recess, The_
+Reeve, Clara
+Rice, James
+_Richard Coeur de Lion_
+Richardson
+Ritson
+_Robinson Crusoe_
+Robinson, Emma (?)
+Roche, R.M.
+_Roderich Random_
+Romance;
+  its connection with the "Saint's Life";
+  not completely separable from novel;
+  heroic
+_Romance Readers and Romance Writers_
+_Romola_
+"Rosa Matilda"
+_Roxana_
+_Ruin, The_
+_Ruth_
+
+_St. Irvyne_
+_St. Leon_
+_St. Ronan's Well_
+_Sayings and Doings_
+"S.G.," _see_ Green, Sarah
+Scott, Michael
+Scott, Sir W.
+_Sense and Sensibility_
+_Sentimental Journey, A_
+_Seven Wise Masters, The_
+Sewell, Miss
+_Shabby Genteel Story, A_
+_Shadow of the Cross, The_
+Shadwell, Charles
+Shebbeare
+Shelley
+Sheridan, Frances
+Sherwood, Mrs.
+_Shirley_
+_Shortest Way with the Dissenters_
+_Simple Story, A_
+_Sir Amadas_
+_Sir Charles Grandison_
+_Sir Eglamour_
+_Sir Eger, Sir Grame, and Sir Graysteel_
+_Sir John Chiverton_
+_Sir Isumhras_
+_Sir Lancelot Greaves_
+_Sir Launfal_
+_Sir Orfeo_
+_Sir Triamond_
+_Sketches by Boz_
+Smart, Capt. H.
+Smedley, Frank
+Smith, Charlotte
+Smith, Horace
+Smollett
+Socrates
+_Spiritual Quixote, The_
+_Squire of Low Degree, The_
+Staël, Mme. de
+Steele
+Stendhal
+Sterne
+Stevenson, R.L.
+_Strange Story, A_
+Stuart, Lady L.
+Surtees, R.
+Swift
+_Sydney Biddulph_
+
+_Tale of a Tub, A_
+_Ten Thousand a Year_
+Tennyson
+Terror-Novel, the
+Thackeray
+_Thaddeus of Warsaw_
+Thorns
+Tolstoi, Count
+_Tom and Jerry_
+_Tom Brown's Schooldays_
+_Tom Cringle's Log_
+_Tom Jones_
+Tourguenief
+"Tractarian" Novel, the
+_Treasure Island_
+_Tristram Shandy_
+Tristram story, the
+Trollope, Anthony
+Trollope, Mrs.
+_Two Years Ago_
+
+_Unfortunate Traveller, The_
+_Urania_
+_Utopia_
+
+_Vanity Fair_
+_Vathek_
+_Venetia_
+_Vicar of Wake field, The_
+Virgil
+_Vision of St. Paul, The_
+_Voyage Round the World_
+
+Wace
+Walpole, H.
+_Wanderer, The_
+_Warden, The_
+Ward's _Catalogue of Romances_
+Warren, S.
+_Water Babies, The_
+_Watsons, The_
+_Waverley_
+Weber
+_Well at the World's End_
+_Westward Ho!_
+Whyte-Melville, G.J.
+_Wild Irish Girl, The_
+Wilkinson, Sarah
+_William of Palerne_
+Wortley-Montagu, Lady M., _see_ "Lady Mary"
+Wroth, Lady Mary
+_Wuthering Heights_
+
+Xenophon
+
+_Yeast_
+Yonge, Miss
+_Ywain and Gawain_
+
+_Zastrozzi_
+Zeluco
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The English Novel, by George Saintsbury
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ENGLISH NOVEL ***
+
+***** This file should be named 14469-8.txt or 14469-8.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        https://www.gutenberg.org/1/4/4/6/14469/
+
+Produced by Jonathan Ingram, Riikka Talonpoika and the PG Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+https://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at https://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+https://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at https://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit https://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including including checks, online payments and credit card
+donations.  To donate, please visit: https://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     https://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
diff --git a/old/14469-8.zip b/old/14469-8.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6181221
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/14469-8.zip
diff --git a/old/14469-h.zip b/old/14469-h.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..4631485
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/14469-h.zip
diff --git a/old/14469-h/14469-h.htm b/old/14469-h/14469-h.htm
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..4547aa8
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/14469-h/14469-h.htm
@@ -0,0 +1,9967 @@
+<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
+<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
+    "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
+  <head>
+    <title>
+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of The English Novel, by George Saintsbury.
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css">
+/*<![CDATA[  XML blockout */
+<!--
+    p {  margin-top: .75em;
+         text-align: justify;
+         margin-bottom: .75em;
+         }
+    .poem span.i1     {display: block; margin-left: 1em;}
+    .poem span.i4     {display: block; margin-left: 4em;}
+    .poem span.i3     {display: block; margin-left: 3em;}
+    .poem span.i6     {display: block; margin-left: 6em;}
+    h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6 {
+         text-align: center; /* all headings centered */
+         clear: both;
+         }
+    hr { width: 33%;
+	 margin-top: 2em;
+	 margin-bottom: 2em;
+         margin-left: auto;
+         margin-right: auto;
+         clear: both;
+       }
+
+    table {margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;}
+
+    body{margin-left: 10%;
+         margin-right: 10%;
+        }
+
+    .linenum  {position: absolute; top: auto; left: 4%;} /* poetry number */
+    .blockquot{margin-left: 5%; margin-right: 10%;}
+    .pagenum  {position: absolute; left: 92%; font-size: smaller; text-align: right;} /* page numbers */
+    .sidenote {width: 20%; padding-bottom: .5em; padding-top: .5em;
+               padding-left: .5em; padding-right: .5em; margin-left: 1em;
+               float: right; clear: right; margin-top: 1em;
+               font-size: smaller; background: #eeeeee; border: dashed 1px;}
+    .note, .footnote
+    {margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-size: 0.9em;}
+
+    .bb       {border-bottom: solid 2px;}
+    .bl       {border-left: solid 2px;}
+    .bt       {border-top: solid 2px;}
+    .br       {border-right: solid 2px;}
+    .bbox     {border: solid 2px;}
+
+    .center   {text-align: center;}
+    .smcap    {font-variant: small-caps;}
+
+    .figcenter   {margin: auto; text-align: center;}
+
+    .figleft     {float: left; clear: left; margin-left: 0; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top:
+                 1em; margin-right: 1em; padding: 0; text-align: center;}
+
+    .figright    {float: right; clear: right; margin-left: 1em; margin-bottom: 1em;
+                 margin-top: 1em; margin-right: 0; padding: 0; text-align: center;}
+
+    .footnotes        {border: dashed 1px;}
+    .footnote         {margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-size: 0.9em;}
+    .footnote .label  {position: absolute; right: 84%; text-align: right;}
+    .fnanchor         {vertical-align: super; font-size: .8em; text-decoration: none;}
+
+    .poem             {margin-left:10%; margin-right:10%; text-align: left;}
+    .poem br          {display: none;}
+    .poem .stanza     {margin: 1em 0em 1em 0em;}
+    .poem span        {display: block; margin: 0; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;}
+    .poem span.i2     {display: block; margin-left: 2em;}
+    .poem span.i4     {display: block; margin-left: 4em;}
+    // -->
+    /* XML end  ]]>*/
+    </style>
+  </head>
+<body>
+
+
+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The English Novel, by George Saintsbury
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The English Novel
+
+Author: George Saintsbury
+
+Release Date: December 26, 2004 [EBook #14469]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ENGLISH NOVEL ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Jonathan Ingram, Riikka Talonpoika and the PG Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+<h1>THE ENGLISH NOVEL</h1>
+<br />
+<h3>BY</h3>
+<br />
+<h2>GEORGE SAINTSBURY</h2>
+<br /><br />
+<h3>PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE</h3>
+<h3>UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH</h3>
+<br />
+<h3>LONDON: J.M. DENT &amp; SONS LTD.</h3>
+<h3>BEDFORD STREET, STRAND  1913</h3>
+<h3>NEW YORK: E.P. BUTTON &amp; CO.</h3>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="PREFACE" id="PREFACE" />PREFACE</h2>
+
+
+<p>It is somewhat curious that there is, so far as I know, no complete
+handling in English of the subject of this volume, popular and important
+though that subject has been. Dunlop's <i>History of Fiction</i>, an
+excellent book, dealt with a much wider matter, and perforce ceased its
+dealing just at the beginning of the most abundant and brilliant
+development of the English division. Sir Walter Raleigh's <i>English
+Novel</i>, a book of the highest value for acute criticism and grace of
+style, stops short at Miss Austen, and only glances, by a sort of
+anticipation, at Scott. The late Mr. Sidney Lanier's <i>English Novel and
+the Principle of its Development</i> is really nothing but a laudatory
+study of &quot;George Eliot,&quot; with glances at other writers, including
+violent denunciations of the great eighteenth-century men. There are
+numerous monographs on parts of the subject: but nothing else that I
+know even attempting the whole. I should, of course, have liked to deal
+with so large a matter in a larger space: but one may and should
+&quot;cultivate the garden&quot; even if it is not a garden of many acres in
+extent. I need only add that I have endeavoured, not so much to give
+&quot;reviews&quot; of individual books and authors, as to indicate what Mr.
+Lanier took for the second part of his title, but did not, I think,
+handle very satisfactorily in his text.</p>
+
+<p>I may perhaps add, without impropriety, that the composition of this
+book has not been hurried, and that I have taken all the pains I could,
+by revision and addition as it proceeded, to make it a complete survey
+of the Novel, as it has come from the hands of all the more important
+novelists, not now alive, up to the end of the nineteenth century.</p>
+
+<p>GEORGE SAINTSBURY.</p>
+
+<p><i>Christmas</i>, 1912.</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+
+<h3>CONTENTS</h3><br />
+
+<!-- Autogenerated TOC. Modify or delete as required. -->
+<p>
+ <a href="#CHAPTER_I"><b>I. THE FOUNDATION IN ROMANCE</b></a><br />
+ <a href="#CHAPTER_II"><b>II. FROM LYLY TO SWIFT</b></a><br />
+ <a href="#CHAPTER_III"><b>III. THE FOUR WHEELS OF THE NOVEL WAIN</b></a><br />
+ <a href="#CHAPTER_IV"><b>IV. THE MINOR AND LATER EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL</b></a><br />
+ <a href="#CHAPTER_V"><b>V. SCOTT AND MISS AUSTEN</b></a><br />
+ <a href="#CHAPTER_VI"><b>VI. THE SUCCESSORS&mdash;TO THACKERAY</b></a><br />
+ <a href="#CHAPTER_VII"><b>VII. THE MID-VICTORIAN NOVEL</b></a><br />
+ <a href="#CHAPTER_VIII"><b>VIII. THE FICTION OF YESTERDAY&mdash;CONCLUSION</b></a><br /><br />
+ <a href="#INDEX"><b>INDEX</b></a><br />
+ </p>
+<!-- End Autogenerated TOC. -->
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="THE_ENGLISH_NOVEL" id="THE_ENGLISH_NOVEL" /><a name="Page_0" id="Page_0" /><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1" />THE ENGLISH NOVEL</h2>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_I" id="CHAPTER_I" />CHAPTER I</h2>
+
+<h2>THE FOUNDATION IN ROMANCE</h2>
+
+
+<p>One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts of
+literary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature at any
+rate, of prose fiction, and the comparative absence, in the two great
+classical languages, of what we call by that name. It might be an
+accident, though a rather improbable one, that we have no Greek prose
+fiction till a time long subsequent to the Christian era, and nothing in
+Latin at all except the fragments of Petronius and the romance of
+Apuleius. But it can be no accident, and it is a very momentous fact,
+that, from the foundation of Greek criticism, &quot;Imitation,&quot; that is to
+say &quot;Fiction&quot; (for it is neither more nor less), was regarded as not
+merely the inseparable but the constituent property of poetry, even
+though those who held this were doubtful whether poetry must necessarily
+be in verse. It is another fact of the greatest importance that the
+ancients who, in other forms than deliberate prose fiction, try to &quot;tell
+a story,&quot; do not seem to know very well how to do it.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>Odyssey</i> is, indeed, one of the greatest of all stories, it is the
+original romance of the West; but the <i>Iliad</i>, though a magnificent
+poem, is not much of a story. Herodotus can tell one, if anybody can,
+and Plato (or<a name="Page_2" id="Page_2" /> Socrates) evidently could have done so if it had lain in
+his way: while the <i>Anabasis</i>, though hardly the <i>Cyrop&aelig;dia</i>, shows
+glimmerings in Xenophon. But otherwise we must come down to Lucian and
+the East before we find the faculty. So, too, in Latin before the two
+late writers named above, Ovid is about the only person who is a real
+story-teller. Virgil makes very little of his <i>story</i> in verse: and it
+is shocking to think how Livy throws away his chances in prose. No:
+putting the Petronian fragments aside, Lucian and Apuleius are the only
+two novelists in the classical languages before about 400 A.D.: and
+putting aside their odd coincidence of subject, it has to be remembered
+that Lucian was a Syrian Greek and Apuleius an African Latin. The
+conquered world was to conquer not only its conqueror, but its
+conqueror's teacher, in this youngest accomplishment of literary art.</p>
+
+<p>It was probably in all cases, if not certainly, mixed blood that
+produced the curious development generally called Greek Romance. It is
+no part of our business to survey, in any detail, the not very numerous
+but distinctly interesting compositions which range in point of
+authorship from Longus and Heliodorus, probably at the meeting of the
+fourth and fifth centuries, to Eustathius in the twelfth. At one time
+indeed, when we may return to them a little, we shall find them
+exercising direct and powerful influence on modern European fiction, and
+so both directly and indirectly on English: but that is a time a good
+way removed from the actual beginning of our journey. Still, <i>Apollonius
+of Tyre</i>, which is probably the oldest piece of English prose fiction
+that we have, is beyond all doubt derived ultimately from a Greek
+original of this very class: and the class itself is an immense advance,
+in the novel direction, upon anything that we have before. It is on <a name="Page_3" id="Page_3" />the
+one hand essentially a &quot;romance of adventure,&quot; and on the other
+essentially a &quot;love-story&quot;&mdash;in senses to which we find little in
+classical literature to correspond in the one case and still less in the
+other. Instead of being, like <i>Lucius</i> and the <i>Golden Ass</i>, a tissue of
+stories essentially unconnected and little more than framed by the main
+tale, it is, though it may have a few episodes, an example of at least
+romantic unity throughout, with definite hero and definite heroine, the
+prominence and importance of the latter being specially noteworthy. It
+is in fact the first division of literature in which the heroine assumes
+the position of a protagonist. If it falls short in character, so do
+even later romances to a great extent: if dialogue is not very
+accomplished, that also was hardly to be thoroughly developed till the
+novel proper came into being. In the other two great divisions, incident
+and description, it is abundantly furnished. And, above all, the two
+great Romantic motives, Adventure and Love, are quite maturely present
+in it.</p>
+
+<p>To pass to the deluge, and beyond it, and to come to close quarters with
+our proper division, the origin of Romance itself is a very debatable
+subject, or rather it is a subject which the wiser mind will hardly care
+to debate much. The opinion of the present writer&mdash;the result, at least,
+of many years' reading and thought&mdash;is that it is a result of the
+marriage of the older East and the newer (non-classical) West through
+the agency of the spread of Christianity and the growth and diffusion of
+the &quot;Saint's Life.&quot; The beginnings of Hagiology itself are very
+uncertain: but what is certain is that they are very early: and that as
+the amalgamation or leavening of the Roman world with barbarian material
+proceeded, the spread of Christianity proceeded likewise. The <i>Vision of
+St. Paul</i>&mdash;one of the <a name="Page_4" id="Page_4" />earliest examples and the starter it would seem,
+if not of the whole class of sacred Romances, at any rate of the large
+subsection devoted to Things after Death&mdash;has been put as early as
+&quot;before 400 A.D.&quot; It would probably be difficult to date such legends as
+those of St. Margaret and St. Catherine <i>too</i> early, having regard to
+their intrinsic indications: and the vast cycle of Our Lady, though
+probably later, must have begun long before the modern languages were
+ready for it, while that of the Cross should be earlier still. And let
+it be remembered that these Saints' Lives, which are still infinitely
+good reading, are not in the least confined to homiletic necessities.
+The jejuneness and woodenness from which the modern religious story too
+often suffers are in no way chargeable upon all, or even many, of them.
+They have the widest range of incident&mdash;natural as well as supernatural:
+their touches of nature are indeed extended far beyond mere incident.
+Purely comic episodes are by no means wanting: and these, like the
+parallel passages in the dramatising of these very legends, were sure to
+lead to isolation of them, and to a secular continuation.</p>
+
+<p>But, once more, we must contract the sweep, and quicken the pace to deal
+not with possible origins, but with actual results&mdash;not with Ancient or
+Transition literature, but with the literature of English in the
+department first of fiction generally and then, with a third and last
+narrowing, to the main subject of English fiction in prose.</p>
+
+<p>The very small surviving amount, and the almost completely second-hand
+character, of Anglo-Saxon literature have combined to frustrate what
+might have been expected from another characteristic of it&mdash;the unusual
+equality of its verse and prose departments. We have only one&mdash;not<a name="Page_5" id="Page_5" />
+quite entire but substantive&mdash;prose tale in Anglo-Saxon, the version of
+the famous story of <i>Apollonius of Tyre</i>, which was to be afterwards
+declined by Chaucer, but attempted by his friend and contemporary Gower,
+and to be enshrined in the most certain of the Shakespearean
+&quot;doubtfuls,&quot; <i>Pericles</i>. It most honestly gives itself out as a
+translation (no doubt from the Latin though there was an early Greek
+original) and it deals briefly with the subject. But as an example of
+narrative style it is very far indeed from being contemptible: and in
+passages such as Apollonius' escape from shipwreck, and his wooing of
+the daughter of Arcestrates, there is something which is different from
+style, and with which style is not always found in company&mdash;that faculty
+of telling a story which has been already referred to. Nor does this
+fail in the narrative portions of the prose Saints' Lives and Homilies,
+especially Aelfric's, which we possess; in fact it is in these last
+distinctly remarkable&mdash;as where Aelfric tells the tale of the monk who
+spied on St. Cuthbert's seaside devotions. The same faculty is
+observable in Latin work, not least in Bede's still more famous telling
+of the Caedmon story, and of the vision of the other world.</p>
+
+<p>But these faculties have better chance of exhibiting themselves in the
+verse division of our Anglo-Saxon wreckage. <i>Beowulf</i> itself consists of
+one first-rate story and one second-rate but not despicable tale,
+hitched together more or less anyhow. The second, with good points, is,
+for us, negligible: the first is a &quot;yarn&quot; of the primest character. One
+may look back to the <i>Odyssey</i> itself without finding anything so good,
+except the adventures of the Golden Ass which had all the story-work of
+two mightiest literatures behind them. As literature on the other hand,
+<i>Beowulf</i> may be overpraised: it has been <a name="Page_6" id="Page_6" />so frequently. But let
+anybody with the slightest faculty of &quot;conveyance&quot; tell the first part
+of the story to a tolerably receptive audience, and he will not doubt
+(unless he is fool enough to set the effect down to his own gifts and
+graces) about its excellence as such. There is character&mdash;not much, but
+enough to make it more than a <i>mere</i> story of adventure&mdash;and adventure
+enough for anything; there is by no means ineffectual speech&mdash;even
+dialogue&mdash;of a kind: and there is some effective and picturesque
+description. The same faculties reappear in such mere fragments as that
+of <i>Waldhere</i> and the &quot;Finnsburgh&quot; fight: but they are shown much more
+fully in the Saints' Lives&mdash;best of all in the <i>Andreas</i>, no doubt, but
+remarkably also (especially considering the slender amount of
+&quot;happenings&quot;) in the <i>Guthlac</i> and the <i>Juliana</i>. In fact the very
+fragments of Anglo-Saxon poetry, by a sort of approximation which they
+show to dramatic narrative and which with a few exceptions is far less
+present in the classics, foretell much more clearly and certainly than
+in the case of some other foretellings which have been detected in them,
+the future achievements of English literature in the department of
+fiction. <i>The Ruin</i> (the finest thing perhaps in all Anglo-Saxon) is a
+sort of background study for something that might have been much better
+than <i>The Last Days of Pompeii</i>: and <i>The Complaint of Deor</i>, in its
+allusion to the adventures of the smith Weland and others, makes one
+sorry that some one more like the historian of a later and decadent
+though agreeable Wayland the Smith, had not told us the tale that is now
+left untold. A crowd of fantastic imaginings or additions, to supply the
+main substance, and a certain common-sense grasp of actual conditions
+and circumstances to set them upon, and contrast them with&mdash;these are
+the great requirements of Fiction in life and <a name="Page_7" id="Page_7" />character. You must mix
+prose and poetry to get a good romance or even novel. The consciences of
+the ancients revolted from this mixture of kinds; but there was no such
+revolt in the earlier moderns, and least of all in our own medi&aelig;val
+forefathers.</p>
+
+<p>So few people are really acquainted with the whole range of Romance
+(even in English), or with any large part of it, that one may without
+undue presumption set down in part, if not in whole, to ignorance, a
+doctrine and position which we must now attack. This is that romance and
+novel are widely separated from each other; and that the historian of
+the novel is really straying out of his ground if he meddles with
+Romance. These are they who would make our proper subject begin with
+Marivaux and Richardson, or at earliest with Madame de La Fayette, who
+exclude Bunyan altogether, and sometimes go so far as to question the
+right of entry to Defoe. But the counter-arguments are numerous: and any
+one of them would almost suffice by itself. In the first place the idea
+of the novel arising so late is unnatural and unhistorical: these
+Melchisedecs without father or mother are not known in literature. In
+the second a pedantic insistence on the exclusive definition of the
+novel involves one practical inconvenience which no one, even among
+those who believe in it, has yet dared to face. You must carry your wall
+of partition along the road as well as across it: and write separate
+histories of Novel and Romance for the last two centuries. The present
+writer can only say that, though he has dared some tough adventures in
+literary history, he would altogether decline this. Without the help of
+the ants that succoured Psyche against Venus that heap would indeed be
+ill to sort.</p>
+
+<p>But there is a third argument, less practical in appearance <a name="Page_8" id="Page_8" />but bolder
+and deeper, which is really decisive of the matter, though few seem to
+have seen it or at least taken it up. The separation of romance and
+novel&mdash;of the story of incident and the story of character and
+motive&mdash;is a mistake logically and psychologically. It is a very old
+mistake, and it has deceived some of the elect: but a mistake it is. It
+made even Dr. Johnson think Fielding shallower than Richardson; and it
+has made people very different from Dr. Johnson think that Count Tolstoi
+is a greater analyst and master of a more developed humanity than
+Fielding. As a matter of fact, when you have excogitated two or more
+human beings out of your own head and have set them to work in the
+narrative (not the dramatic) way, you have made the novel <i>in posse</i>, if
+not <i>in esse</i>, from its apparently simplest development, such as
+<i>Daphnis and Chloe</i>, to its apparently most complex, such as the
+<i>Kreutzer Sonata</i> or the triumphs of Mr. Meredith. You have started the
+&quot;Imitation&quot;&mdash;the &quot;fiction&quot;&mdash;and <i>tout est l&agrave;</i>. The ancients could do
+this in the dramatic way admirably, though on few patterns; in the
+poetical way as admirably, but again not on many. The Middle Ages lost
+the dramatic way almost entirely, but they actually improved the
+poetical on its narrative side, and the result was Romance. In every
+romance there is the germ of a novel and more; there is at least the
+suggestion and possibility of romance in every novel that deserves the
+name. In the Tristram story and the Lancelot cycle there are most of the
+things that the romancer of incident and the novelist of character and
+motive can want or can use, till the end of the world; and Malory (that
+&quot;mere compiler&quot; as some pleasantly call him) has put the possibilities
+of the latter and greater creation so that no one who has eyes can miss
+them. Nor <i>in the beginning</i> does it much <a name="Page_9" id="Page_9" />or at all matter whether the
+vehicle was prose or verse. In fact they mostly wrote in verse because
+prose was not ready.</p>
+
+<p>In the minor romances and tales (taking English versions only) from
+<i>Havelok</i> to <i>Beryn</i> there is a whole universe of situation, scenario,
+opportunity for &quot;business.&quot; That they have the dress and the
+scene-backing of one particular period can matter to no one who has eyes
+for anything beyond dress and scene-backing. And when we are told that
+they are apt to run too much into grooves and families, it is sufficient
+to answer that it really does not lie in the mouth of an age which
+produces grime-novels, problem-novels, and so forth, as if they had been
+struck off on a hectograph, possessing the not very exalted gift of
+varying names and places&mdash;to reproach any other age on this score. But
+we have only limited room here for generalities and still less for
+controversy; let us turn to our proper work and survey the actual
+turn-out in fiction&mdash;mostly as a result of mere fashion, verse, but
+partly prose&mdash;which the Middle Ages has left us as a contribution to
+this department of English literature.</p>
+
+<p>It has been said that few people know the treasures of English romance,
+yet there is little excuse for ignorance of them. It is some century
+since Ellis's extremely amusing, if sometimes rather prosaic, book put
+much of the matter before those who will not read originals; to be
+followed in the same path by Dunlop later, and much later still by the
+invaluable and delightful <i>Catalogue of</i> [British Museum] <i>Romances</i> by
+Mr. Ward. It is nearly as long since the collections of Ritson and
+Weber, soon supplemented by others, and enlarged for the last forty
+years by the publications of the Early English Text Society, put these
+originals themselves within the reach of everybody who is not so <a name="Page_10" id="Page_10" />lazy
+or so timid as to be disgusted or daunted by a very few actually
+obsolete words and a rather large proportion of obsolete spellings,
+which will yield to even the minimum of intelligent attention. Only a
+very small number (not perhaps including a single one of importance)
+remain unprinted, though no doubt a few are out of print or difficult to
+obtain. The quality and variety of the stories told in them are both
+very considerable, even without making allowance for what has been
+called the stock character of medi&aelig;val composition. That almost all are
+directly imitated from the French is probable enough, that most are is
+certain: but this matters, for our purpose, nothing at all. That the
+imitation was not haphazard or indiscriminate is obvious. Thus, though
+we have some, we have not very many representatives of the class which
+was the most numerous of all in France&mdash;the <i>chansons de geste</i> or
+stories of French legendary history, national or family. Except as far
+as the Saracens are concerned, they would naturally have less interest
+for English hearers. The <i>Mati&egrave;re de Rome</i>, again&mdash;the legends of
+antiquity&mdash;though represented, is not very abundant outside of the
+universally popular Tale of Troy; and the almost equally popular
+Alexander legend does not occupy a very large part of them. What is
+perhaps more remarkable is that until Malory exercised his genius upon
+&quot;the French book,&quot; the more poetical parts of the &quot;matter of Britain&quot;
+itself do not seem to have been very much written about in English. The
+preliminary stuff about Merlin and Vortigern exists in several
+handlings; the foreign campaigns of Arthur seem always (perhaps from
+national vanity) to have been popular. The &quot;off&quot;-branches of Tristram
+and Percivale, and not a few of the still more episodic romances of
+adventures concerning Gawain, Iwain, and other knights, receive
+<a name="Page_11" id="Page_11" />attention. The execrable Lonelich or Lovelich, who preceded Malory a
+little, had of course predecessors in handling the other parts of the
+Graal story. But the crown and flower of the whole&mdash;the inspiration
+which connected the Round Table and the Graal and the love of Lancelot
+and Guinevere&mdash;though, so far as the present writer's reading and
+opinion are of any weight, the recent attempts to deprive the
+Englishman, Walter Map, of the honour of conceiving it are of no
+force&mdash;seems to have waited till the fifteenth century&mdash;that is to say
+the last part of three hundred years&mdash;before Englishmen took it up. Most
+popular of all perhaps, on the principle that in novels the flock &quot;likes
+the savour of fresh grass,&quot; seem to have been the pure <i>romans
+d'aventures</i>&mdash;quite unconnected or nearly so with each other or with any
+of the larger cycles. Those adventures of particular heroes have
+sometimes a sort of Arthurian link, but they really have no more to do
+with the main Arthurian story than if Arthur were not.</p>
+
+<p>For the present purpose, however, filiation, origin, and such-like
+things are of much less importance than the actual stories that get
+themselves told to satisfy that demand which in due time is to produce
+the supply of the novel. Of these the two oldest, as regards the actual
+forms in which we have them, are capital examples of the more and less
+original handling of &quot;common-form&quot; stories or motives. They were not
+then, be it remembered, quite such common-form as now&mdash;the rightful heir
+kept out of his rights, the usurper of them, the princess gracious or
+scornful or both by turns, the quest, the adventure, the revolutions and
+discoveries and fights, the wedding bells and the poetical justice on
+the villain. Let it be remembered, too, if anybody is scornful of these
+as <i>vieux jeu</i>, that they have never been really improved upon except by
+the <a name="Page_12" id="Page_12" />very obvious and unoriginal method common in clever-silly days, of
+simply reversing some of them, of &quot;turning platitudes topsy-turvy,&quot; as
+not the least gifted, or most old-fashioned, of novelists, Tourguenief,
+has it. Perhaps the oldest of all, <i>Havelok the Dane</i>&mdash;a story the age
+of which from evidence both internal and external, is so great that
+people have not quite gratuitously imagined a still older Danish or even
+Anglo-Saxon original for the French romance from which our existing one
+is undoubtedly taken&mdash;is one of the most spirited of all. Both hero and
+heroine&mdash;Havelok, who should be King of Denmark and Goldborough, who
+should be Queen of England&mdash;are ousted by their treacherous
+guardian-viceroys as infants; and Havelok is doomed to drowning by his
+tutor, the greater or at least bolder villain of the two. But the
+fisherman Grim, who is chosen as his murderer, discovers that the child
+has, at night, a <i>nimbus</i> of flame round his head; renounces his crime
+and escapes by sea with the child and his own family to Grimsby.
+Havelok, growing up undistinguished from his foster-brethren, takes
+service as a scullion with the English usurper. This usurper is seeking
+how to rid himself of the princess without violence, but in some way
+that will make her succession to the crown impossible, and Havelok
+having shown prowess in sports is selected as the maiden's husband. She,
+too, discovers his royalty at night by the same token; and the pair
+regain their respective inheritances and take vengeance on their
+respective traitors, in a lively and adventurous fashion. There are all
+the elements of a good story in this: and they are by no means wasted or
+spoilt in the actual handling. It is not a mere sequence of incident;
+from the mixture of generosity and canniness in the fisherman who
+ascertains that he is to have traitor's wages before he finally decides
+to rescue<a name="Page_13" id="Page_13" /> Havelok, to the not unnatural repugnance of Goldborough at
+her forced wedding with a scullion, the points where character comes in
+are not neglected, though of course the author does not avail himself of
+them either in Shakespearean or in Richardsonian fashion. They are
+<i>there</i>, ready for development by any person who may take it into his
+head to develop them.</p>
+
+<p>So too is it in the less powerful and rather more cut and dried <i>King
+Horn</i>. Here the opening is not so very different; the hero's father is
+murdered by pirate invaders, and he himself set adrift in a boat. But in
+this the princess (daughter of course of the king who shelters him)
+herself falls in love with Horn, and there is even a scene of
+considerable comic capabilities in which she confides this affection by
+mistake to one of his companions (fortunately a faithful one) instead of
+to himself. But Horn has a faithless friend also; and rivals, and
+adventures, and journeys; and returns just in the nick of time, and
+recognitions by rings, and everything that can properly be desired
+occur. In these&mdash;even more perhaps than in Havelok's more masculine and
+less sentimental fortunes&mdash;there are openings not entirely neglected by
+the romancer (though, as has been said, he does not seem to have been
+one of the strongest of his kind) for digression, expatiation,
+embroidery. Transpose these two stories (as the slow kind years will
+teach novelists inevitably to do) into slightly different keys,
+introduce variations and episodes and <i>codas</i>, and you have the
+possibilities of a whole library of fiction, as big and as varied as any
+that has ever established itself for subscribers, and bigger than any
+that has ever offered itself as one collection to buyers.</p>
+
+<p>The love-stories of these two tales are what it is the fashion&mdash;exceedingly
+complimentary to the age referred <a name="Page_14" id="Page_14" />to if not to the age of the fashion
+itself&mdash;to call &quot;mid-Victorian&quot; in their complete &quot;propriety.&quot;
+Indeed, it is a Puritan lie, though it seems to possess the vivaciousness
+of its class, that the romances are distinguished by &quot;bold bawdry.&quot;
+They are on the contrary rather singularly pure, and contrast, in
+that respect, remarkably with the more popular folk-tale. But fiction,
+no more than drama, could do without the &#7937;&#956;&#945;&#961;&#964;&#7985;&#945;&mdash;the
+human and not unpardonable frailty. This appears in, and complicates,
+the famous story of <i>Tristram</i>, which, though its present English form
+is probably younger than <i>Havelok</i> and <i>Horn</i>, is likely to have existed
+earlier: indeed must have done so if Thomas of Erceldoune wrote on the
+subject. Few can require to be told that beautiful and tragical history
+of &quot;inauspicious stars&quot; which hardly any man, of the many who have
+handled it in prose and verse, has been able to spoil. Our Middle
+English form is not consummate, and is in some places crude in manner
+and in sentiment. But it is notable that the exaggerated and inartistic
+repulsiveness of Mark, resorted to by later writers as a rather
+rudimentary means of exciting compassion for the lovers, is not to be
+found here; in fact, one of the most poetical touches in the piece is
+one of sympathy for the luckless husband, when he sees the face of his
+faithless queen slumbering by her lover's side with the sun on it. &quot;And
+Mark rewed therefore.&quot; The story, especially in its completion with the
+&quot;Iseult of Brittany&quot; part and the death of Tristram, gives scope for
+every possible faculty and craftsmanship of the most analytic as of the
+most picturesque novelist of modern times. There is nothing in the least
+like it in ancient literature; and to get a single writer who would do
+it justice in modern times we should have to take the best notes of
+Charles Kingsley, and Mr. Blackmore, and<a name="Page_15" id="Page_15" /> Mr. Meredith, leaving out all
+their faults, and combine. It is not surprising that, in the very
+infancy of the art, nobody in German or French, any more than in English
+(though the German here is, as it happens, the best), should have done
+it full justice; but it is a wonder that a story of such capacities
+should have been sketched, and even worked out in considerable detail,
+so early.</p>
+
+<p>Of the far greater story of which <i>Tristram</i> is a mere episode and
+hardly even that&mdash;a chantry or out-lying chapel of the great
+cathedral&mdash;the Arthurian Legend, the earlier English versions, or rather
+the earlier versions in English, are, as has been said, not only
+fragmentary but disappointing. There is nothing in the least strange in
+this, even though (as the present writer, who can speak with indifferent
+knowledge, still firmly holds) the conception of the story itself in its
+greatest and unifying stage is probably if not certainly English. The
+original sources of the story of Arthur are no doubt Celtic; they give
+themselves out as being so, and there is absolutely no critical reason
+for disbelieving them. But in these earlier forms&mdash;the authority of the
+most learned Celticists who have any literary gift and any appreciation
+of evidence is decisive on this point&mdash;not only are the most
+characteristic unifying features&mdash;the Graal story and the love of
+Lancelot and Guinevere&mdash;completely wanting, but <i>the</i> great stroke of
+genius&mdash;the connection of these two and the subordination of all minor
+legends as to the dim national hero, Arthur, with those about him&mdash;is
+more conspicuously wanting still. Whether it was the Englishman Walter
+Map, the Norman Robert de Borron, or the Frenchman Chrestien de Troyes,
+to whom this flash of illumination came, has never been proved&mdash;will
+pretty certainly now never be proved. M. Gaston Paris failed to do it;
+and it is exceedingly unlikely <a name="Page_16" id="Page_16" />that, where he failed, any one else will
+succeed, unless the thrice and thirty times sifted libraries of Europe
+yield some quite unexpected windfall. In the works commonly attributed
+to Chrestien, all of which are well known to the present writer, there
+is no sign of his having been able to conceive this, though he is a
+delightful romancer. Robert is a mere shadow; and his attributed works,
+<i>as</i> his works, are shadows too, though they are interesting enough in
+themselves. Walter not only has the greatest amount of traditional
+attribution, but is the undoubted author of <i>De Nugis Curialium</i>. And
+the author of <i>De Nugis Curialium</i>, different as it is from the
+Arthurian story, <i>could</i> have finally divined the latter.</p>
+
+<p>But at the time when he wrote, Englishmen, with the rarest exceptions,
+wrote only in French or Latin; and when they began to write in English,
+a man of genius, to interpret and improve on him, was not found for a
+long time. And the most interesting parts of the Arthurian story are
+rarely handled at all in such early vernacular versions of it as we
+have, whether in verse or prose. Naturally enough, perhaps, it was the
+fabulous historic connection with British history, and the story of the
+great British enchanter Merlin, that attracted most attention. The
+<i>Arthour and Merlin</i> which is in the Auchinleck MS.; the prose <i>Merlin</i>,
+published by the Early English Text Society; the alliterative Thornton
+<i>Morte d'Arthur</i>, and others, are wont to busy themselves about the
+antecedents of the real story&mdash;about the uninteresting wars of the King
+himself with Saxons, and Romans, and giants, and rival kings, rather
+than with the great chivalric triple cord of Round Table, Graal, and
+Guinevere's fault. The pure Graal poems, <i>Joseph of Arimathea</i>, the work
+of the abominable Lonelich or Lovelich, etc., deal mainly with another
+branch of <a name="Page_17" id="Page_17" />previous questions&mdash;things bearable as introductions,
+fillings-up, and so forth, but rather jejune in themselves. The Scots
+<i>Lancelot</i> is later than Malory himself, and of very little interest.
+Layamon's account, the oldest that we have, adds little (though what
+little it does add is not unimportant) to Geoffrey of Monmouth and Wace;
+and tells what it has to tell with nearly as little skill in narrative
+as in poetry. Only the metrical <i>Morte</i>&mdash;from which, it would appear,
+Malory actually transprosed some of his most effective passages in the
+manner in which genius transproses or transverses&mdash;has, for that reason,
+for its dealings with the catastrophe, and for the further opportunity
+of comparison with Tennyson, interest of the higher kind. But before we
+come to Malory himself it is desirable to turn to the branches&mdash;the
+chapels, as we have called them, to the cathedral&mdash;which he also, in
+some cases at least, utilised in the <i>magnum opus</i> of English prose
+romance.</p>
+
+<p>These outliers were rather more fortunate, probably for no more
+recondite reason than that the French originals (from which they were in
+almost every instance certainly taken) were finished in themselves. Of
+the special Gawain cycle or sub-cycle we have two romances in pure
+metrical form, and more than two in alliterative, which are above the
+average in interest. <i>Ywain and Gawain</i>, one of the former, is derived
+directly or indirectly from the <i>Chevalier au Lyon</i> of Chrestien de
+Troyes; and both present some remarkable affinities with the unknown
+original of the &quot;Sir Beaumains&quot; episode of Malory, and, through it, with
+Tennyson's <i>Gareth and Lynette</i>. The other, <i>Lybius Disconus (Le Beau
+D&eacute;connu)</i> is also concerned with that courteous nephew of Arthur who, in
+later versions of the main story, is somewhat sacrificed to Lancelot.
+For a &quot;<i>real</i> romance,&quot; as it calls itself (though it is fair to say
+that in the original the word <a name="Page_18" id="Page_18" />means &quot;royal&quot;), of the simpler kind but
+extremely well told, there are not many better metrical specimens than
+<i>Ywain and Gawain</i>, but it has less character-interest, actual or
+possible, than those which have been commented on. The hero, King
+Urien's son, accepts an adventure in which another knight of the Table,
+Sir Colgrevance, has fared ill, after it has been told in a conversation
+at court which is joined in first by the Queen and afterwards by the
+King. Sir Kay here shows his usual cross-grainedness; and Guinevere
+&quot;with milde mood&quot; requests to know &quot;What the devil is thee within?&quot; The
+adventure is of a class well known in romance. You ride to a certain
+fountain, pour water from it on a stone, and then, after divers marvels,
+have to do battle with a redoubtable knight. Colgrevance has fared
+badly; Kay is as usual quite sure that he would fare better; but Ywain
+actually undertakes the task. He has a tough battle with the knight who
+answers the challenge, but wounds him mortally; and when the knight
+flies to his neighbouring castle, is so hard on his heels that the
+portcullis actually drops on his horse's haunches just behind the
+saddle, and cuts the beast in two. Ywain is thus left between the
+portcullis and the (by this time shut) door&mdash;a position all the more
+awkward that the knight himself expires immediately after he has reached
+shelter. The situation is saved, however, by the guardian damsel of
+romance, Lunet (the Linet or Lynette of the Beaumains-Gareth story), who
+emerges from a postern between gate and portcullis and conveys the
+intruder safe to her own chamber. Here a magic bed makes him invisible:
+though the whole castle, including the very room, is ransacked by the
+dead knight's people and would-be revengers, at the bidding of his
+widow.</p>
+
+<p>This widow, however, is rather an Ephesian matron.<a name="Page_19" id="Page_19" /> The sagacious Lunet,
+whose confidante she is, suggests to her that, unless she enlists some
+doughty knight as her champion, the king will confiscate her fief; and
+that there is no champion like a husband. A very little more finesse
+effects the marriage, even though the lady is made aware of the identity
+of her new lover and her own husband's slayer. (It is of course
+necessary to remember that the death of a combatant in fairly challenged
+and fought single contest was not reckoned as any fault to his
+antagonist.) Ywain actually shows his prowess against the King: and has
+an opportunity of showing Kay once more that it is one thing to blame
+other people for failing, and another to succeed yourself. And after
+this the newly married pair live together happily for a time. But it was
+reckoned a fault in a knight to take too prolonged a honeymoon: and
+Ywain, after what the French call <i>adieux d&eacute;chirants</i>, obtains leave for
+the usual &quot;twelvemonth and a day,&quot; at the expiration of which, on St.
+John's Eve, he is without fail to return, the engagement being sealed by
+the gift from his lady of a special ring. He forgets his promise of
+course: and at the stated time a damsel appears, sternly demands the
+ring, and announces her lady's decision to have nothing further to do
+with him. There is in such cases only one thing for any true knight,
+from Sir Lancelot to Sir Amadis, to do: and that is to go mad, divest
+himself of his garments, and take to the greenwood. This Ywain duly
+does, supporting himself at first on the raw flesh of game which he
+kills with a bow and arrows wrested from a chance-comer; and then on
+less savage but still simple food supplied by a benevolent hermit. As he
+lies asleep under a tree, a lady rides by with attendants, and one of
+these (another of the wise damsels of romance) recognises him as Sir
+Ywain. The lady has at the time sore need of a <a name="Page_20" id="Page_20" />champion against a
+hostile earl, and she also fortunately possesses a box of ointment
+infallible against madness, which Morgane la Faye has given her. With
+this the damsel is sent back to anoint Ywain. He comes to his senses, is
+armed and clothed, undertakes the lady's defence, and discomfits the
+earl: but is as miserable as ever. Resisting the lady's offer of herself
+and all her possessions, he rides off once more &quot;with heavy heart and
+dreary cheer.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Soon he hears a hideous noise and, riding in its direction, finds that a
+dragon has attacked a lion. He succours the holier beast, kills the
+dragon, and though he has unavoidably wounded the lion in the <i>m&ecirc;l&eacute;e</i> is
+thenceforth attended by him not merely as a food-provider, but as the
+doughtiest of squires and comrades in fight. To aggravate his sorrow he
+comes to the fountain and thorn-tree of the original adventure, and
+hears some one complaining in the chapel hard by. They exchange
+questions. &quot;A man,&quot; he said, &quot;some time I was&quot; (which must be one of the
+earliest occurrences in English of a striking phrase), and the prisoner
+turns out to be Lunet. She has been accused of treason by the usual
+steward (it is <i>very</i> hard for a steward of romance to be good) and two
+brothers&mdash;of treason to her lady, and is to be burnt, unless she can
+find a knight who will fight the three. Ywain agrees to defend her: but
+before he can carry out his promise he has, on the same morning, to meet
+a terrible giant who is molesting his hosts at a castle where he is
+guested. Both adventures, however, are achieved on the same day, with
+very notable aid from the lion: and Ywain undertakes a fresh one, being
+recruited by the necessary damsel-messenger, against two half-fiend
+brother knights. They stipulate that the lion is to be forcibly
+prevented from interfering, and he is locked up in <a name="Page_21" id="Page_21" />a room; but, hearing
+the noise of battle, he scratches up the earth under the door, frees
+himself, and once more succours his master at the nick of time. Even
+this does not expiate Ywain's fault: and yet another task falls to
+him&mdash;the championship of the rights of the younger of a pair of sisters,
+the elder of whom has secured no less a representative than Gawain
+himself. The pair, unknowing and unknown, fight all day long before
+Arthur's court with no advantage on either side: and when the light
+fails an interchange of courtesies leads to recognition and the
+settlement of the dispute. Now the tale is nearly full. Ywain rides yet
+again to the magic fountain and performs the rite; there is no one to
+meet him; the castle rocks and the inmates quake. But the crafty Lunet
+persuades her mistress to swear that if the Knight of the Lion, who has
+fallen at variance with his lady, will come to the rescue, she will do
+all she can to reconcile the pair. Which not ill-prepared &quot;curtain&quot; duly
+falls: leaving us comfortably assured that Ywain and his Lady and Lunet
+and the Lion (one wishes that these two could have made a match of it,
+and he must surely have been a bewitched knight) lived happily</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span>&quot;Until that death had driven them down.&quot;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>This, it has been said, is a specimen of the pure romance; with little
+except incident in it, and a touch or two of manners. It does not, as
+the others noticed above do, lend itself much to character-drawing. But
+it is spiritedly told; though rougher, it is much more vigorous than the
+French original; and the mere expletives and stock phrases, which are
+the curse of these romances, do not obtrude themselves too much. In this
+respect, and some others, it is the superior of the one coupled above
+with it, <i>Lybius Disconus</i>, which is closer, except in names, to the
+Beaumains <a name="Page_22" id="Page_22" />story. Still, this also is not a bad specimen of the same
+class. The hero of it is a son, not a brother, of Gawain, comes nameless
+or nicknamed, but as &quot;Beaufils,&quot; not &quot;Beaumains,&quot; to Arthur's court, and
+is knighted at once, not made to go through the &quot;kitchen-knave&quot; stage.
+Accordingly, the damsel Elene (not Lunet), to whom he is assigned as
+champion in the adventure of the Lady of Sinadowne, objects only to his
+novelty of knighthood and is converted by his first victory. The course
+of the adventures is, however, different from that which some people
+know from Malory, and many from Tennyson. One of them is farcical: the
+Fair Unknown rescues a damsel at her utmost need from two giants, a red
+and a black, one of whom is roasting a wild boar and uses the animal as
+a weapon, with the spit in it, for the combat. Moreover, he falls a
+victim to the wiles of a sorceress-chatelaine whom he has also
+succoured: and it is only after the year and day that Elene goads him on
+to his proper quest. But this also is no bad story.</p>
+
+<p>The limits of this volume admit of not much farther &quot;argument&quot; (though
+the writer would very gladly give it) of these minor romances of
+adventure, Arthurian and other. Ellis's easily accessible book supplies
+abstracts of the main Arthurian story before Malory; of the two most
+famous, though by no means best, of all the non-Arthurian romances, <i>Guy
+of Warwick</i> and <i>Bevis of Hampton</i> (the former of which was handled and
+rehandled from age to age, moralised, curtailed, lengthened, and hashed
+up in every form); of the brilliant and vigorous <i>Richard
+Coeur-de-Lion</i>; of the less racy Charlemagne romances in English; of the
+<i>Seven Wise Masters</i>, brought from the East and naturalised all over
+Europe; of the delightful love story of <i>Florice and Blancheflour</i>; of
+that powerful and pathetic <a name="Page_23" id="Page_23" />legend of the <i>Proud King</i> (Robert of
+Sicily), which Longfellow and Mr. William Morris both modernised, each
+in his way; of those other legends, <i>Sir Isumbras</i> and <i>Amis and
+Amillion</i>, which are so beautiful to those who can appreciate the
+medi&aelig;val mind, and to the beauty of which others seem insensible; of
+<i>Sir Triamond</i> and <i>Sir Eglamour</i> (examples of the romance at its
+weakest); of the exceedingly spirited and interesting <i>Ipomydon</i>, and of
+some others, including the best of Scotch romances, <i>Sir Eger, Sir
+Grame, and Sir Graysteel</i>. But Ellis could not know others, and he left
+alone yet others that he might have known&mdash;the exquisite <i>Sir Launfal</i>
+of Thomas Chester at the beginning of the fifteenth century, where an
+unworthy presentment of Guinevere is compensated by the gracious image
+of Launfal's fairy love; the lively adventures of <i>William of Palerne</i>,
+who had a werewolf for his friend and an emperor's daughter for his
+love, eloping with her in white bear-skins, the unusual meat of which
+was being cooked in her father's kitchen; <i>Sir Orfeo</i>&mdash;Orpheus and
+Eurydice, with a happy ending; <i>Emar&egrave;</i>, one of the tales of innocent but
+persecuted heroines of which Chaucer's Constance is the best known;
+<i>Florence of Rome</i>; the rather famous <i>Squire of Low Degree; Sir
+Amadas</i>, not a very good handling of a fine motive, charity to a corpse;
+many others.</p>
+
+<p>Nor does he seem to have known one of the finest of all&mdash;the
+alliterative romance of <i>Gawain and the Green Knight</i> which, since Dr.
+Morris published it some forty years ago for the Early English Text
+Society, has made its way through text-books into more general knowledge
+than most of its fellows enjoy. In this the hero is tempted repeatedly,
+elaborately, and with great knowledge of nature and no small command of
+art on the teller's part, by the wife of his host and destined
+antagonist. He resists in the <a name="Page_24" id="Page_24" />main, but succumbs in the point of
+accepting a magic preservative as a gift: and is discovered and lectured
+accordingly. It is curious that this, which is far above the usual mere
+adventure-story and is novel of a high kind as well as romance, has no
+known French original; and is strongly English in many characteristics
+besides its verse-form.</p>
+
+<p>On the whole, however, one need have no difficulty in admitting that the
+majority of these romances <i>do</i> somewhat content themselves with
+incident, incident only, and incident not merely of a na&iuml;f but of a
+stock kind, for their staple. There are striking situations, even striking
+phrases, here and there; there is plenty of variety in scene, and more than
+is sometimes thought in detail; but the motive-and-character-interest is
+rarely utilised as it might be, and very generally is not even suggested.
+There is seldom any real plot or &quot;fable&quot;&mdash;only a chain of events: and
+though no one but a very dull person will object to the supernatural
+element, or to the exaggerated feats of professedly natural prowess and
+endurance, it cannot be said that on the whole they are artistically
+managed. You feel, not merely that the picture would have been better if
+the painter had taken more pains, but that the reason why he did not
+is that he did not know how.</p>
+
+<p>Sir Thomas Malory, himself most unknown perhaps of all great writers,
+did know how; and a cynical person might echo the <i>I nunc</i> of the Roman
+satirist, and dwell on the futility of doing great things, in reference
+to the fact that it used to be fashionable, and is still not uncommon,
+to call Malory a &quot;mere compiler.&quot; Indeed from the direction which modern
+study so often takes, of putting inquiry into origins above everything,
+and neglecting the consideration of the work as work, this practice is
+not <a name="Page_25" id="Page_25" />likely soon to cease. But no mistake about the mysterious
+Englishman (the place-names with which the designation is connected are
+all pure English) is possible to any one who has read his book, and who
+knows what prose fiction is. <i>The Noble Histories of King Arthur, La
+Morte d'Arthur, The Story of the most Noble and Worthy King Arthur, The
+Most Ancient and Famous History of the Renowned Prince Arthur, The
+Birth, Life, and Acts of King Arthur</i>&mdash;call it by whichever name anybody
+likes of those which various printers and reprinters have given it&mdash;is
+one of the great books of the world. If they can give us any single
+&quot;French book&quot;&mdash;the reference to which is a commonplace of the
+subject&mdash;from which it was taken, let them; they have not yet. If they
+point out (as they can) French and English books from which parts of it
+were taken, similar things may be done with Dante and Chaucer, with
+Shakespeare and Milton, and very probably could have been done with
+Homer. It is what the artist does with his materials, not where he gets
+them, that is the question. And Malory has done, with <i>his</i> materials, a
+very great thing indeed. He is working no doubt to a certain extent
+blindly; working much better than he knows, and sometimes as he would
+not work if he knew better; though whether he would work as well if he
+knew better is quite a different point. Sometimes he may not take the
+best available version of a story; but we must ask ourselves whether he
+knew it. Sometimes he may put in what we do not want: but we must ask
+ourselves whether there was not a reason for doing so, to him if not to
+us. What is certain is that he, and he only in any language, makes of
+this vast assemblage of stories one story, and one book. He does it
+(much more than half unconsciously no doubt) by following the lines of,
+as I suppose, Walter Map, and <a name="Page_26" id="Page_26" />fusing the different motives, holding to
+this method even in parts of the legend with which, so far as one knows,
+Map cannot have meddled. Before him this legend consisted of half a
+dozen great divisions&mdash;a word which may be used of malice prepense.
+These were the story of Merlin, that of Arthur's own origin, and that of
+the previous history of the Graal for introduction; the story of
+Arthur's winning the throne, of the Round Table, and of the marriage
+with Guinevere, also endless branchings of special knights' adventures,
+and of the wars with the Saxons and the Romans, and the episode of the
+False Guinevere&mdash;with whom for a time Arthur lives as with his
+queen&mdash;for middle; and the story of the Graal-quest, the love of
+Lancelot for the Queen, and the rebellion of Mordred with its fatal
+consequences, for close. Exactly how much of this Malory personally had
+before him we cannot of course say: but of any working up of the whole
+that would have spared him trouble, and robbed him of credit, we do not
+know. In fact the favourite term &quot;compiler&quot; gives up the only dangerous
+point. Now in what way did Malory <i>compile</i>? In the way in which the
+ordinary compiler proceeds he most emphatically does not. He cuts down
+the preliminaries mercilessly: but they can be perfectly well spared. He
+misses almost all the wars with the Saxons, which are the most tedious
+parts of the originals. He adopts, most happily, the early, not the
+late, placing of those with the Romans. He drops the false Guinevere
+altogether, which is imperative, that the true one may have no right to
+plead the incident&mdash;though he does not represent Arthur as &quot;blameless.&quot;
+He gives the <i>roman d'aventures</i> side of the Round Table stories, from
+the great Tristram and Palomides romances through the Beaumains episode
+downwards, because they are interesting in themselves and lead <a name="Page_27" id="Page_27" />up to
+the Graal quest. He gives that Quest as plentifully because it leads up
+to the &quot;dolorous death and departing out of this world of them all.&quot; How
+he gives the Lancelot and Guinevere tragedy we shall see presently. And
+the catastrophe of the actual &quot;departing&quot; he gives perfectly; with the
+magnificent final scenes which he has converted, sometimes in almost
+Shakespearean fashion, by the slightest verbal touches from mediocre
+verse to splendid prose. A very remarkable compiler! It is a pity that
+they did not take him and cut him up in little stars for a light to all
+his brethren in compiling thereafter.</p>
+
+<p>For he has what no compiler as such can have&mdash;because the moment he has
+it he ceases to be a compiler, and becomes an artist&mdash;the sense of
+<i>grasp</i>, the power to put his finger, and to keep it, on the central
+pulse and nerve of the story. That he did this deliberately is so
+unlikely as to be practically impossible: that he did it is certain. The
+Arthurian Legend is the greatest of medi&aelig;val creations as a subject&mdash;a
+&quot;fable&quot;&mdash;just as the <i>Divina Commedia</i> is the greatest of medi&aelig;val
+&quot;imitations&quot; and works of art. And as such it is inevitable that it
+should carry with it the sense of the greatest medieval <i>differences</i>,
+Chivalry and Romance. The strong point of these differences is the way
+in which they combine the three great motives, as Dante isolates them,
+of Valour, Love, and Religion. The ancients never realised this
+combination at all; the moderns have merely struggled after it, or
+blasphemed it in fox-and-grapes fashion: the medi&aelig;vals <i>had</i> it&mdash;in
+theory at any rate. The Round Table stories, merely as such, illustrate
+Valour; the Graal stories, Religion; the passion of Lancelot and
+Guinevere with the minor instances, Love. All these have their
+&#7937;&#956;&#945;&#961;&#964;&#7985;&#945;&mdash;their tragic and tragedy-causing fault and flaw. The knight
+wastes his valour in idle bickerings; <a name="Page_28" id="Page_28" />he forgets law in his love; and
+though there is no actual degradation of religion, he fails to live up
+to the ideal that he does not actually forswear. To throw the
+presentation&mdash;the <i>mimesis</i>&mdash;of all this into perfectly worthy form
+would probably have been too much for any single genius of that curious
+time (when genius was so widely spread and so little concentrated)
+except Dante himself, whose hand found other work to do. To colour and
+shape the various fragments of the mosaic was the work of scores. To put
+them together, if not in absolutely perfect yet in more than sufficient
+shape, was, so far as we know, the luck of Malory only: though some one
+(Map or another) had done a mighty day's work long before in creating
+the figure and the adventures of Lancelot and imagining the later quest
+of the Graal with the figure of Galahad&mdash;that &quot;improved Percivale,&quot; as
+the seedsmen say.</p>
+
+<p>But besides this power of shaping (or even of merely combining)
+scattered elements into a story, Malory has another&mdash;<i>the</i> other of the
+first importance to the novelist proper&mdash;in his attraction to character,
+if not exactly in his making up of it. It has been said above that the
+defect of the pure romances&mdash;especially those of continental origin&mdash;is
+the absence of this. What the Greeks called &#948;&#953;&#7937;&#957;&#959;&#953;&#945;&mdash;&quot;sentiment,&quot;
+&quot;thought,&quot; &quot;cast of thought,&quot; as it has been variously rendered&mdash;is even
+more absent from them than plot or character itself: and of its almost
+necessary connection with this latter they often seem to have no idea.
+Very rare is such a touch as that of Sir Amadas being unable at the feast
+to get rid of the memory of the unburied corpse, kept by enemies from the
+kindly earth that would hide it, and the rites that would help it to peace:
+still rarer that in <i>Guy of Warwick</i> when the hero, at the height of
+his fame and in the full enjoyment of his <a name="Page_29" id="Page_29" />desires, looks from the tower and
+is struck by the selfishness and earthliness of his career. The first
+notion is not &quot;improved&quot; in the original at all, and the second very badly;
+but in most of the others such things do not even exist. Now the greater
+Legend is full of situations which encourage such thoughts, and even of
+expressed thoughts that only need craftsmanship to turn them into the
+cornerstones of character-building, and the jewels, five or fifty words
+long, of literature. The fate and metaphysical aid that determine the
+relations of Tristram and Iseult; the unconscious incest of Arthur and
+Margause with its Greek-tragic consequence; the unrewarded fidelity of
+Palomides, and (an early instance of the soon to be triumphant allegory)
+his fruitless chase of the Beast Glatissant; all these are matters in
+point. But of course the main nursery of such things is the
+Lancelot-and-Guinevere story itself. Nobody has yet made Guinevere a
+person&mdash;nobody but Shakespeare could have done so perhaps, though
+Shakespeare's Guinevere would probably have been the greatest woman in
+all art. But Malory has not been the least successful with her: and of
+Lancelot he has made, if only in study, one of the great characters of
+that fictitious world which is so much truer than the real. And let no
+one say that we are reading Tennyson or any one else into Malory. There
+are yet persons, at least at the time this was written not quite
+Methusalahs, who read the <i>Morte d'Arthur</i> before the <i>Idylls</i> appeared
+and who have never allowed even the <i>Idylls</i> to overlay their original
+idea of the most perfect and most gentle of knights.</p>
+
+<p>It is probable indeed that Malory invented little or nothing in the
+various situations, by which the character of Lancelot, and the history
+of his fatal love, are evolved. We know in most cases that this is so.
+It is possible, too, <a name="Page_30" id="Page_30" />that at first (probably because the possibilities
+had not dawned on him, as it has been admitted they never did very
+consciously) he has not made the most of the introduction of lover and
+lady. But when the interest becomes concentrated, as in the various
+passages of Guinevere's wrath with her lover and their consequences, or
+in the final series of catastrophes, he is fully equal to the occasion.
+We <i>know</i>&mdash;this time to his credit&mdash;how he has improved, in the act of
+borrowing them, the earlier verse-pictures of the final parting of the
+lovers, and there are many other episodes and juxtapositions of which as
+much may be said. That except as to Lancelot's remorse (which after all
+is the great point) there is not much actual talk about motive and
+sentiment is nothing; or nothing but the condition of the time. The
+important point is that, as the electricians say, &quot;the house is wired&quot;
+for the actual installation of character-novelling. There is here the
+complete scenario, and a good deal more, for a novel as long as
+<i>Clarissa</i> and much more interesting, capable of being worked out in the
+manner, not merely of Richardson himself, but of Mr. Meredith or Mr.
+Hardy. It <i>is</i> a great romance, if not the greatest of romances: it has
+a great novel, if not the greatest of novels, written in sympathetic ink
+between the lines, and with more than a little of the writing sometimes
+emerging to view.</p>
+
+<p>Little in the restricted space here available can be, though much might
+be in a larger, said about the remaining attempts in English fiction
+before the middle of the sixteenth century. The later romances, down to
+those of Lord Berners, show the character of the older with a certain
+addition of the &quot;conjuror's supernatural&quot; of the <i>Amadis</i> school. But
+the short verse-tales, especially those of the Robin Hood cycle, and
+some of the purely comic kind, <a name="Page_31" id="Page_31" />introduce an important variation of
+interest: and even some of the longer, such as that <i>Tale of Beryn</i>,
+which used to be included in Chaucer's works, vary the chivalrous model
+in a useful way. Still more important is the influence of the short
+<i>prose</i> tale:&mdash;first Latin, as in the <i>Gesta Romanorum</i> (which of course
+had older and positively medi&aelig;val forerunners), then Italian and French.
+The prose saved the writer from verbiage and stock phrase; the shortness
+from the tendency to &quot;watering out&quot; which is the curse of the long verse
+or prose romance. Moreover, to get point and appeal, it was especially
+necessary to <i>throw up</i> the subject&mdash;incident, emotion, or whatever it
+was&mdash;to bring it out; not merely to meander and palaver about it. But
+language and literature were both too much in a state of transition to
+admit of anything capital being done at this time. It was the great good
+fortune of England, corresponding to that experienced with Chaucer in
+poetry three quarters of a century earlier, that Malory came to give the
+sum and substance of what medi&aelig;val fiction could do in prose. For more,
+the times and the men had to come.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_II" id="CHAPTER_II" /><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32" />CHAPTER II</h2>
+
+<h2>FROM LYLY TO SWIFT</h2>
+
+
+<p>During the dying-off of romance proper, or its transference from verse
+to prose in the late fifteenth and earlier sixteenth century, there is
+not very much to note about prose fiction in England. But, as the
+conditions of modern literature fashioned themselves, a very great
+influence in this as in other departments was no doubt exercised with us
+by Italian, as well as some by Spanish in a way which may be postponed
+for a little. The Italian prose tale had begun to exercise that
+influence as early as Chaucer's time: but circumstances and atmosphere
+were as yet unfavourable for its growth. It is a hackneyed truism that
+Italian society was very much more modern than any other in Europe at
+this time&mdash;in fact it would not be a mere paradox to say that it was,
+and continued to be till the later sixteenth, much more modern than it
+has ever been since&mdash;or till very recently. By &quot;modern&quot; is here meant
+the kind of society which is fairly cultivated, fairly comfortable,
+fairly complicated with classes not very sharply separated from each
+other, not dominated by any very high ideals, tolerably corrupt, and
+sufficiently business-like. The Italian <i>novella</i>, of course, admits
+wild passions and extravagant crimes: but the general tone of it is
+<i>bourgeois</i>&mdash;at any rate domestic. With its great number of situations
+and motives, presented in miniature, careful work is necessary to bring
+out the effect: and, above all, there is abundant room for study of
+manners, for proverbial and popular wisdom and witticism, for
+&quot;furniture&quot;&mdash;to use <a name="Page_33" id="Page_33" />that word in a wide sense. Above all, the Italian
+mind, like the Greek, had an ethical twist&mdash;twist in more senses than
+one, some would say, but that does not matter. Manners, morals,
+motives&mdash;these three could not but displace, to some extent, mere
+incident: though there was generally incident of a poignant or piquant
+kind as well. In other words the <i>novella</i> was actually (though still in
+miniature) a novel in nature as well as in name. And these <i>novelle</i>
+became, as is generally known, common in English translations after the
+middle of the sixteenth century. Painter's huge <i>Palace of Pleasure</i>
+(1566) is only the largest and best known of many translations, single
+and collected, of the Italian <i>novellieri</i> and the French tale-tellers,
+contemporary, or of times more or less earlier.</p>
+
+<p>For some time, as almost everybody knows, these collections of
+translated matter served a purpose&mdash;great indeed, but somewhat outside
+their proper department&mdash;by furnishing the Elizabethan dramatists with a
+large part&mdash;perhaps the larger part&mdash;of their subjects. But they very
+soon began to exercise it directly by suggesting the fictitious part of
+the prose pamphlet&mdash;a department which, though infinitely less well
+known than the plays, and still not very easy to know, holds almost the
+second position as representing the popular literature of the
+Elizabethan time. And they also had&mdash;in one case certainly, in the other
+probably&mdash;no little influence upon the two great Elizabethan works which
+in a manner founded the modern novel and the modern romance in
+English&mdash;the <i>Euphues</i> of Lyly and the <i>Arcadia</i> of Sir Philip Sidney.</p>
+
+<p>The pamphlet stories (which are themselves often play-connected, as in
+the case of Lodge's <i>Rosalynde</i> and Greene's <i>Pandosto</i>) do not require
+much notice, with one exception&mdash;Nash's <i>Jack Wilton or the Unfortunate
+Traveller</i>, to which <a name="Page_34" id="Page_34" />some have assigned a position equal, or perhaps
+superior in our particular subject, to that of the <i>Arcadia</i> or that of
+<i>Euphues</i>. This seems to the present writer a mistake: but as to appear
+important is (in a not wholly unreal sense) to be so, the piece shall be
+separately considered. The rest are mostly marred by a superabundance of
+rather rudimentary art, and a very poor allowance of matter. There is
+hardly any character, and except in a few pieces, such as Lodge's
+<i>Margarite of America</i>, there is little attempt to utilise new scenes
+and conditions. But the whole class has special interest for us in one
+peculiarity which makes it perhaps unreadable to any but students, and
+that is its saturation with the Elizabethan conceit and word-play which
+is sometimes called Euphuism. Nor is this wonderful, considering that
+more than one of these &quot;pamphlets&quot; is directly connected with the matter
+and the personages of <i>Euphues</i> itself. To this famous book, therefore,
+we had better turn.</p>
+
+<p>Some people, it is believed, have denied that <i>Euphues</i> is a novel at
+all; and some of these some have been almost indignant at its being
+called one. It is certainly, with <i>Rasselas</i>, the most remarkable
+example, in English, of a novel which is to a great extent deprived of
+the <i>agr&eacute;mens</i> to which we have for some two centuries been accustomed
+in the kind, and, to a still greater, loaded with others which do not
+appeal to us. To put aside altogether its extraordinary and in a way
+epoch-making style, which gives it its main actual place in the history
+of English literature, it is further loaded with didactic digressions
+which, though certain later novelists have been somewhat peccant in the
+kind, have never been quite equalled&mdash;no, not in <i>Rasselas</i> itself or
+the <i>Fool of Quality</i>. But if anybody, who has the necessary knowledge
+to understand, and therefore the <a name="Page_35" id="Page_35" />necessary patience to tolerate, these
+knotty knarry envelopes, insertions, and excrescences, will for the
+moment pay no attention to them, but merely strip them off, he will find
+the carcass of a very tolerable novel left behind. The first plot of
+Philautus&mdash;Euphues&mdash;Lucilla, and the successive jilting of the two
+friends for each other and for Curio, is no mean novel-substance. Not
+Balzac himself, certainly no one of his successors, need disdain it: and
+more than one of them has taken up something like it. The journey from
+Naples to London, and the episode of Fidus and Iffida, could have been
+worked up, in the good old three-volume days, to a most effective second
+volume. And the picture of the court, with the further loves of
+Philautus, Camilla, and the &quot;violet&quot; Frances, would supply a third of
+themselves even if Euphues were left out, though some livelier
+presentation of his character (which Lyly himself was obviously too much
+personally interested to make at all clear) would improve the whole
+immensely. But it was still too early: the thing was not yet to be done.
+Only, I do not know any book in which the possibilities, and even the
+outlines, of this thing were indicated and vaguely sketched earlier in
+any European language, unless it be the <i>Lucretia and Euryalus</i> of &AElig;neas
+Silvius, which is much more confined in its scope.</p>
+
+<p>The fact is that the very confusedness, the many undeveloped sides, of
+<i>Euphues</i>, make it much more of an ancestor of the modern novel than if
+it were more of a piece. The <i>quicquid agunt homines</i> is as much the
+province of the novel as of the satire; and there is more than something
+of this as it affected Elizabethan times in <i>Euphues</i>. Men's interest in
+morals, politics, and education; their development of the modern idea of
+society; their taste for letters; their conceits and fancies&mdash;all these
+appear in it.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36" />The <i>Arcadia</i> stands in a different compartment. <i>Euphues</i> is very much
+<i>sui generis</i>: failure as it may be from some points of view, it
+deserves the highest respect for this, and like most other things <i>sui
+generis</i> it was destined to propagate the genus, if only after many
+days. The <i>Arcadia</i> was in intention certainly, and to great extent in
+actual fact, merely a carrying out of the attempt, common all over
+Europe (as a result of the critical searchings of heart of the
+Italians), to practise a new kind&mdash;the Heroic Romance of the sub-variety
+called pastoral. The &quot;heroic&quot; idea generally was (as ought to be, but
+perhaps is not, well known) to blend, after a fashion, classical and
+romantic characteristics&mdash;to substitute something like the classic unity
+of fable or plot for the mere &quot;meandering&quot; of romantic story, and to pay
+at least as much attention to character as the classics had paid,
+instead of neglecting it altogether, as had recently though not always
+been the case in Romance. But the scheme retained on the other hand the
+variety of incident and appeal of this latter: and especially assigned
+to Love the high place which Romance had given it. As for the
+Pastoral&mdash;that is almost a story to itself, and a story which has been
+only once (by Mr. W.W. Greg) satisfactorily, and then not quite
+completely, told. It is enough to say here, and as affecting our own
+subject, that it supplied a new opportunity of gratifying the passion of
+the Renaissance for imitating antiquity, at the same time permitting to
+no small extent the introduction of things that were really romantic,
+and above all providing a convention. The Heroic romance generally and
+the Pastoral in particular went directly back to the Greek romances of
+Heliodorus and Longus: but they admitted many new and foreign elements.</p>
+
+<p>At the same time, bastard as the heroic romance was, it <a name="Page_37" id="Page_37" />could not but
+exercise an important influence on the future of fiction, inasmuch as it
+combined, or attempted to combine, with classical unity and medi&aelig;val
+variety the more modern interest of manners and (sometimes) personality.
+Sidney's attempt (which, it must be remembered, is not certainly known
+to be wholly his as it stands, and <i>is</i> certainly known not to have been
+revised by him for publication) exercised a very great influence in
+English. For its popularity was enormous, and it doubtless served as
+shoehorn to draw on that of the English translations of French and
+Spanish romance which supplied, during the greater part of the
+seventeenth century, the want of original composition of the kind. The
+unconscionable amount of talk and of writing &quot;about it and about it&quot;
+which <i>Euphues</i> and the minor Euphuist romances display is at least as
+prominent in the <i>Arcadia</i>: and this talk rarely takes a form congenial
+to the modern novel reader's demands. Moreover, though there really is a
+plot, and a sufficient amount of incident, this reader undoubtedly, and
+to no small extent justly, demands that both incident and plot shall be
+more disengaged from their framework&mdash;that they should be brought into
+higher relief, should stand out more than is the case. Yet further, the
+pure character-interest is small&mdash;is almost nonexistent: and the
+rococo-mosaic of manners and sentiment which was to prove the curse of
+the heroic romance generally prevents much interest being felt in that
+direction.<a id="footnotetag1" name="footnotetag1"></a><a href="#footnote1"><sup>1</sup></a> It would also be impossible to devise a style less suited
+to prose narrative, except of a very peculiar kind and on a small scale,
+than that either of <i>Euphues</i> or of the <i>Arcadia</i>, <a name="Page_38" id="Page_38" />which, though an
+uncritical tradition credits it with driving out Lyly's, is practically
+only a whelp of the same litter. Embarrassed, heavy, rhetorical, it has
+its place in the general evolution of English prose, and a proper and
+valuable place too. But it is bad even for pure romance purposes: and
+nearly hopeless for the panoramic and kaleidoscopic variety which should
+characterise the novel. To the actual successors of the <i>Arcadia</i> in
+English we shall come presently.</p>
+
+<p><i>The Unfortunate Traveller</i> is of much less importance than the other
+two. It has obtained such reputation as it possesses, partly because of
+its invention or improvement of the fable of &quot;Surrey and Geraldine&quot;;
+more, and more justly, because it does work up a certain amount of
+historical material&mdash;the wars of Henry VIII. in French Flanders&mdash;into
+something premonitory (with a little kindness on the part of the
+premonished) of the great and long missed historical novel; still more
+for something else. Nash, with his quick wit, seems to have been really
+the first to perceive the capabilities of that foreign travel and
+observation of manners which was becoming common, stripped of the
+special atmosphere of pilgrimage which had formerly enveloped it. Even
+here, he had had the &quot;notion of the notion&quot; supplied to him by Lyly in
+<i>Euphues</i>: and a tolerably skilful advocate would not have so very much
+difficulty in claiming the book as one of the tribe of Euphuist
+pamphlets. But Jack Wilton the &quot;traveller&quot; is a little more of a person
+than the pedagogic Euphues and the shadowy Philautus. At any rate he has
+a very strong anticipation of Defoe, whose &quot;Cavalier&quot; was not improbably
+suggested by him. But Nash has neither the patience of Defoe, nor that
+singular originality, which accompanies in the author of <i>Moll Flanders</i>
+a <a name="Page_39" id="Page_39" />certain inability to make the most of it. <i>The Unfortunate Traveller</i>
+is a sort of compilation or congeries of current <i>fabliaux, novelle</i>,
+and <i>faceti&aelig;</i>, with the introduction of famous actual persons of the
+time, from the crowned heads of the period, through Luther and Aretine
+downwards, to give bait and attraction. Sometimes it reminds one of a
+working up of the <i>Colloquies</i> of Erasmus: three centuries earlier than
+<i>The Cloister and the Hearth</i>, with much less genius than Charles
+Reade's, and still more without his illegitimate advantage of actual
+novels behind him for nearly half the time. But it gives us &quot;disject&aelig;
+membra <i>novell&aelig;</i>&quot; rather than a novel itself: and the oftener one reads
+it the more clear one is that the time for writing novels had not yet
+come. The materials are there; the desire to utilise&mdash;and even a faint
+vague idea of <i>how</i> to utilise&mdash;them is there; but the art is almost
+completely absent. Even regarded as an early attempt in the &quot;picaresque&quot;
+manner, it is abortive and only half organised.</p>
+
+<p>The subject of the English &quot;Heroic&quot; Romance, in the wide sense, is one
+which has been very little dealt with. Dunlop neglected it rather
+surprisingly, and until Professor Raleigh's chapter on the subject there
+was little of a satisfactory kind to be found about it anywhere. It
+must, however, be admitted that the abstainers from it have been to some
+extent justified in their abstention. The subject is a curious one: and
+it has an important place in the history of the Novel, because it shows
+at once how strong was the <i>nisus</i> towards prose fiction and how
+surprisingly difficult writers seem, nevertheless, to have found it to
+hit upon anything really good, much more anything really original in
+kind. For it is hardly too much to say that this century of attempt&mdash;we
+cannot call it a century of invention&mdash;from Ford to Congreve, does not
+<a name="Page_40" id="Page_40" />add a single piece of any considerable merit to the roll of English
+books. As for a masterpiece, there is nothing in respect of which the
+use of such a word would not be purely ridiculous. And yet the attempts
+are interesting to the historian, and should not be uninteresting to the
+historical student of literature. One or two of them have a sort of
+shadowy name and place in literary history already.</p>
+
+<p>In tracing their progress and character, we must allow for two native
+models: and for three foreign sources, one ancient, two modern, of
+influence. <i>The Arcadia</i> and <i>Euphues</i>, the former continuously, the
+latter by revival after an interval, exercised very great effect in the
+first half of the seventeenth century, during at least the earlier part
+of which the vogue of <i>Amadis</i> and its successors, as Englished by
+Anthony Munday and others, likewise continued. The Greek romances also
+had much to do with the matter: for the Elizabethan translators had
+introduced them to the vulgar, and the seventeenth century paid a good
+deal of attention to Greek. Then, when that century itself was on its
+way, the pastoral romance of D'Urf&eacute; first, and the Calpren&egrave;de-Scud&eacute;ry
+productions in the second place, came to give a fresh impulse, and
+something of a new turn. The actual translations of French and Spanish
+romance, shorter and longer, good, bad, and indifferent, are of immense
+bulk and doubtless excited imitation: but we cannot possibly deal with
+them here. A bare list would fill a chapter. But some work of more or
+less (generally less) originality, in at least adaptation, calls for a
+little individual notice: and some general characterisation may be
+added.</p>
+
+<p>It may be desirable to prelude the story by a reminder to the reader
+that the <i>general</i> characteristics of these various sources were
+&quot;harlequin&quot; in their diversity of apparent colour. The <i>Amadis</i> romances
+and, indeed, all the later <a name="Page_41" id="Page_41" />examples of that great kind, such as <i>Arthur
+of Little Britain</i>, which Berners translated, were distinguished on the
+one side by a curious convention of unsmooth running of the course of
+love, on the other sometimes by a much greater licence of morality than
+their predecessors, and always by a prodigality of the &quot;conjuror's
+supernatural&quot;&mdash;witches and giants and magic black and white. The Spanish
+&quot;picaresque&quot; story was pretty real but even less decent: and its French
+imitations (though not usually reaching the licence of the short tale,
+which clung to <i>fabliau</i> ways in this respect) imitated it here also.
+The French heroic romance, on the other hand, observed the most
+scrupulous propriety in language and situation: but aggravated the
+Amadisian troubling of the course of true love, and complicated
+everything, very frequently if not invariably, by an insinuated &quot;key&quot;
+interest of identification of the ancient personages selected as heroes
+and heroines with modern personages of quality and distinction.</p>
+
+<p>Emanuel Ford (whom the British Museum catalogue insists on spelling
+Ford<i>e</i> and of whom very little seems to be known) published <i>Parismus,
+Prince of Bohemia</i>, as early as 1598. In less than a hundred years
+(1696) it had reached its fourteenth edition, and it continued to be
+popular in abridged and chap-booked form<a id="footnotetag2" name="footnotetag2"></a><a href="#footnote2"><sup>2</sup></a> far into the eighteenth
+century. (It is sometimes called <i>Parismus and Parismenus</i>: the second
+part being, as very commonly in romances of the class after the <i>Amadis</i>
+pattern, occupied largely with the adventures of the son of the hero of
+the first.) On the whole, <i>Parismus</i>, though it has few pretensions to
+elegance of style, and though some delicate tastes have been shocked at
+certain licences of incident, descrip<a name="Page_42" id="Page_42" />tion, and phrase in it, is quite
+the best of our bunch in this kind. It is, in general conception, pure
+<i>Amadis</i> of the later and slightly degraded type. Laurana, the heroine
+(of whom a peculiarly hideous portrait adorns the black-letter editions
+side by side with Parismus himself, who is rather a &quot;jolly gentleman&quot;)
+is won with much less difficulty and in much less time than Oriana&mdash;but
+separations and difficulties duly follow in &quot;desolate isles&quot; and the
+like. And though Parismus himself is less of an Amadis than Amadis, the
+&quot;contrast of friends,&quot; founded by that hero and Galaor, is kept up by
+his association with a certain Pollipus&mdash;&quot;a man of his hands&quot; if ever
+there was one, for with them he literally wrings the neck of the
+enchantress Bellona, who has enticed him to embrace her. There is plenty
+of the book, as there always should be in its kind (between 400 and 500
+very closely printed quarto pages), and its bulk is composed of
+proportionately plentiful fighting and love-making and of a very much
+smaller proportion of what schoolboys irreverently call &quot;jaw&quot; than is
+usual in the class. If it were not for the black letter (which is trying
+to the eyes) I should not myself object to have no other reading than
+<i>Parismus</i> for some holiday evenings, or even after pretty tough days of
+literary and professional work. <i>The Famous History of Montelion, the
+Knight of the Oracle</i> (1633?) proclaims its Amadisian type even more
+clearly: but I have only read it in an abridged edition of the close of
+the century. I should imagine that <i>in extenso</i> it was a good deal
+duller than <i>Parismus</i>. And of course the comparative praise which has
+been given to that book must be subject to the reminder that it is what
+it is&mdash;a romance of disorderly and what some people call childish
+adventure, and of the above-ticketed &quot;conjuror's supernatural.&quot; If
+anybody cannot read <i>Amadis</i> itself, he <a name="Page_43" id="Page_43" />certainly will not read
+<i>Parismus</i>: and perhaps not everybody who can manage the original&mdash;perhaps
+not even everybody who can manage <i>Palmerin</i>&mdash;could put up with Ford's
+copy. I can take this Ford as I find him: but I am not sure that I would
+go much lower.</p>
+
+<p><i>Ornatus and Artesia</i> (1607?), on the other hand&mdash;his second or third
+book&mdash;strikes me as owing more to Heliodorus than to Montalvo, or
+Lobeira, or whoever was the author of the great romance of the last
+chivalric type. There are more intricacies in it; the heroine plays a
+rather more important part; there is even something of a nearer approach
+to modern novel-ways in this production, which reappeared at &quot;Grub
+Street near the Upper Pump&quot; in the year 1650. Ornatus sees his mistress
+asleep and in a kind of deshabille, employs a noble go-between, Adellena
+(a queer spelling of &quot;Adelina&quot; which may be intentional), is rejected
+with apparent indignation, of course; writes elaborate letters in vain,
+but overhears Artesia soliloquising confession of her love for him and
+disguises himself as a girl, Silvia. Then the villain of the piece,
+Floretus, to obtain the love of this supposed Silvia, murders a person
+of distinction and plots to poison Artesia herself. Ornatus-Silvia is
+banished: and all sorts of adventures and disguises follow, entirely in
+the Greek style. The book is not very long, extending only to signature
+R in a very small quarto. Except that it is much less lively and
+considerably less &quot;free,&quot; it reminds one rather in type of Kynaston's
+verse <i>Leoline and Sydanis</i>. In fact the verse and prose romances of the
+time are very closely connected: and Chamberlayne's <i>Pharonnida</i>&mdash;far
+the finest production of the English &quot;heroic&quot; school in prose, verse, or
+drama&mdash;was, when the fancy for abridging set in, condensed into a tiny
+prose <i>Eromena</i>. But <i>Ornatus and Artesia</i>, if more <a name="Page_44" id="Page_44" />modern, more
+decent, and less extravagant than <i>Parismus</i>, is nothing like so
+interesting to read. It is indeed quite possible that there is, if not
+in it, in its popularity, a set-back to the <i>Arcadia</i> itself, which had
+been directly followed in Lady Mary Wroth's <i>Urania</i> (1621), and to
+which (by the time of the edition noted) Charles I.'s admiration&mdash;so
+indecently and ignobly referred to by Milton&mdash;had given a fresh
+attraction for all good anti-Puritans. That an anti-Puritan should be a
+romance-lover was almost a necessity.</p>
+
+<p>When the French &quot;heroics&quot; began to appear it was only natural that they
+should be translated, and scarcely less so that they should be imitated
+in England. For they were not far off the <i>Arcadia</i> pattern: and they
+were a distinct and considerable effort to supply the appetite for
+fiction which has been dwelt upon. But except for this, and for
+fashion's sake, they did not contain much that would appeal to an
+English taste: and it is a little significant that one great reader of
+them who is known to us&mdash;Mrs. Pepys&mdash;was a Frenchwoman. Indeed, save for
+the very considerable &quot;pastime&quot; of a kind that they gave to a time, much
+of which required passing, it is difficult to understand their
+attraction for English readers. Their interminable talk never (till
+perhaps very recently) was a thing to suit our nation: and the &quot;key&quot;
+interest strikes us at any rate as of the most languid kind. But they
+<i>were</i> imitated as well as translated: and the three most famous of the
+imitations are the work of men of mark in their different ways. These
+are the <i>Parthenissa</i> (1654) of Roger Boyle, Lord Broghill and Earl of
+Orrery; the <i>Aretina</i> (1661) of Sir George Mackenzie; and the <i>Pandion
+and Amphigeneia</i> (1665) of &quot;starch Johnny&quot; Crowne.</p>
+
+<p>Boyle was a strong Francophile in literature, and his not inconsiderable
+influence on the development of the <a name="Page_45" id="Page_45" />heroic <i>play</i> showed it only less
+decidedly than his imitation of the Scud&eacute;ry romance. I cannot say that I
+have read <i>Parthenissa</i> through: and I can say that I do not intend to
+do so. It is enough to have read Sainte Madeleine of the Ink-Desert
+herself, without reading bad imitations of her. But I have read enough
+to know that <i>Parthenissa</i> would never give me anything like the
+modified satisfaction that is given by <i>Parismus</i>: and after all, if a
+man will not take the trouble to finish writing his book (which Orrery
+never did) why should his readers take the trouble even to finish
+reading what he has written? The scene is Parthia, with alternation to
+Syria, and diversions and episodes elsewhere: and though there is a
+certain amount of fighting, the staple is quite decorous but exceedingly
+dull love-making, conducted partly in the endless dialogue (or rather
+automatic monologue) already referred to, and partly in letters more
+&quot;handsome&quot; even than Mr. Frank Churchill's, and probably a good deal
+more sincere in their conventional way, but pretty certainly less
+amusing. The original attraction indeed of this class of novel
+consisted, and, in so far as it still exists, may be said to consist, in
+noble sentiment, elegantly expressed. It deserved, and in a manner
+deserves, the commendatory part of Aramis's rebuke to Porthos for
+expressing impatience with the compliments between Athos and D'Artagnan
+at their first and hostile rencounter.<a id="footnotetag3" name="footnotetag3"></a><a href="#footnote3"><sup>3</sup></a> Otherwise there is not much to
+be said for it. It does not indeed deserve Johnson's often quoted remark
+as to Richardson (on whom when we come to him we shall have something
+more to say in connection with these heroic romances), if any one were
+to read <i>Parthenissa</i> for the story he would <a name="Page_46" id="Page_46" />not, unless he were a very
+impulsive person, &quot;hang himself.&quot; He would simply, after a number of
+pages varying with the individual, cease to read it.</p>
+
+<p>The work of the great Lord Advocate who was traduced by Covenanting
+malice is in a certain sense more interesting: and that not merely
+because it is much shorter. <i>Aretina</i> or <i>The Serious Romance</i>, opens
+with an &quot;apology for Romances&quot; generally, which goes far to justify
+Dryden's high opinion of Mackenzie as a critic. But it cannot be said to
+be much&mdash;it is a little&mdash;more interesting as a story than <i>Parthenissa</i>,
+and it is written in a most singular lingo&mdash;not displaying the racy
+quaintness of Mackenzie's elder contemporary and fellow-loyalist
+Urquhart, but a sort of Scotified and modernised Euphuism rather
+terrible to peruse. A library is &quot;a bibliotheck richly tapestried with
+books.&quot; Somebody possesses, or is compared to &quot;a cacochymick stomach,
+which transubstantiates the best of meats in its own malignant humour.&quot;
+And when the hero meets a pair of cannibal ruffians he confronts one and
+&quot;pulling out a pistol, sends from its barrel two balls clothed in
+Death's livery, and by them opens a sallyport to his soul to fly out of
+that nasty prison.&quot; A certain zest may be given by these oddities, but
+it hardly lasts out more than 400 pages: and though the lives of Aretina
+and Philaretes are more simply and straightforwardly told than might be
+thought likely&mdash;though there are ingenious disguises of contemporary
+politics, and though Mackenzie was both a wise man and a wit&mdash;it is more
+certain than ever, when we close his book, that this is not the way of
+the world, nor the man to walk in that way.</p>
+
+<p><i>Pandion and Amphigeneia</i> is the inferior in importance of both these
+books. Crowne had perhaps rather more <a name="Page_47" id="Page_47" />talent than it is usual to credit
+him with, but he does not show it here. I think Sir Walter Raleigh is
+quite right in regarding the book as more or less traced over the
+<i>Arcadia</i>: and it may be said to have all the defects of Sidney's
+scheme&mdash;which, it is fair once more to observe, we do not possess in any
+form definitely settled by its author&mdash;with none of the merits of his
+ornament, his execution, and his atmosphere of poetic fancy.</p>
+
+<p>The fact is that this heroic romance was foredoomed to inefficiency. It
+was not a genuine <i>kind</i> at all: but a sort of patchwork of imitations
+of imitations&mdash;a mule which, unlike the natural animal, was itself bred,
+and bred in and in, of mules for generations back. It was true to no
+time, to no country, to no system of manners, life, or thought. Its
+oldest ancestor in one sense, though not in another&mdash;the Greek
+romance&mdash;was itself the growth of the latest and most artificial period
+of the literature to which it belonged. The pure medi&aelig;val romance of
+chivalry was another, but of this it had practically nothing left. The
+<i>Amadis</i> class, the late Renaissance pastorals, the immediately
+preceding or accompanying French romances of the Scud&eacute;ry type, were, in
+increasing degree, hybrid, artificial, and dead-alive. Impotence and
+sterility in every sense could but be its portion. Of the two great
+qualities of the novel&mdash;Variety and Life&mdash;it had never succeeded in
+attaining any considerable share, and it had now the merest show of
+variety and no life at all. There is hardly anything to be said in its
+favour, except that its vogue, as has been observed, testified to the
+craving for prose fiction, and kept at least a simulacrum of that
+fiction before the public. How far there may be any real, though
+metaphysical, connection between the great dramatic output of this
+seventeenth century in England and its small production in <a name="Page_48" id="Page_48" />novel is a
+question not to be discussed here. But undoubtedly the fact of the
+contrast is a &quot;document in the case,&quot; and one of the most important in
+its own direction; completing the testimony of the medi&aelig;val period in
+the other (that as romance dwindled, drama grew) and leading up to that
+of the eighteenth century when drama dwindled and the novel grew. The
+practice of Afra Behn in both, and the fact that Congreve, the greatest
+English dramatist of the close of the century, began with a novel and
+deserted the style for drama, are also interesting, and combine
+themselves very apparently with the considerations just glanced at. But
+Congreve and Afra must be postponed for a moment.</p>
+
+<p>The two last discussed books, with <i>Eromena</i> and some others, are
+posterior to the Restoration in date, but somewhat earlier in type. The
+reign of Charles II., besides the &quot;heroic&quot; romances and Bunyan, and one
+most curious little production to be noticed presently, is properly
+represented in fiction by two writers, to whom, by those who like to
+make discoveries, considerable importance has sometimes been assigned in
+the history of the English Novel. These are Richard Head and Afra Behn,
+otherwise &quot;the divine Astr&aelig;a.&quot; It is, however, something of an injustice
+to class them together: for Afra was a woman of very great ability, with
+a suspicion of genius, while Head was at the very best a bookmaker of
+not quite the lowest order, though pretty near it. Of <i>The English
+Rogue</i> (1665-1680), which earns him his place here, only the first part,
+and a certain section of the fourth, are even attributed to him by
+Francis Kirkman, the Curll of his generation, who published the thing at
+intervals and admittedly wrote parts of it himself. It is quite openly a
+picaresque novel: and imitated not merely from the Spanish originals but
+from Sorel's<a name="Page_49" id="Page_49" /> <i>Francion</i>, which had appeared in France some forty years
+before. Yet, if we compare this latter curious book with Head's we shall
+see how very far behind, even with forty years' advantage in time, was
+the country which, in the next century, was practically to create the
+modern novel. <i>Francion</i> is not a work of genius: and it does not
+pretend to much more than the usual picaresque farrago of adventure,
+unmoral and sometimes rather cruel, but comic of a kind, strung together
+with little art in fable, and less in character. But the author is to
+some extent &quot;cumbered about serving.&quot; He names his characters, tries to
+give them some vague personality, furnishes them with some roughly and
+sketchily painted scenery, and gives us not merely told tales, but
+occasionally something distantly resembling conversation. Head takes no
+trouble of this kind: and Kirkman does not seem to think that any such
+thing is required of him. Very few of the characters of <i>The English
+Rogue</i> have so much as a name to their backs: they are &quot;a prentice,&quot; &quot;a
+master,&quot; &quot;a mistress,&quot; &quot;a servant,&quot; &quot;a daughter,&quot; &quot;a tapster,&quot; etc. They
+are invested with hardly the slightest individuality: the very hero is a
+scoundrel as characterless as he is nameless:<a id="footnotetag4" name="footnotetag4"></a><a href="#footnote4"><sup>4</sup></a> he is the mere thread
+which keeps the beads of the story together after a fashion. These beads
+themselves, moreover, are only the old anecdotes of &quot;coney-catching,&quot;
+over-reaching, and worse, which had separately filled a thousand
+<i>fabliaux, novelle</i>, &quot;jests,&quot; and so forth: and which are now flung
+together in gross, chiefly by the excessively clumsy and unimaginative
+expedient of making the personages tell long strings of them as their
+own experience. When anything more is wanted, accounts of the manners of
+foreign countries, taken from &quot;voyage-<a name="Page_50" id="Page_50" />and-travel&quot; books; of the tricks
+of particular trades (as here of piratical book-selling); of anything
+and everything that the writer's dull fancy can think of, are foisted
+in. The thing is in four volumes, and it seems that a fifth was intended
+as a close: but there is no particular reason why it should not have
+extended to forty or fifty, nay to four or five hundred. It could have
+had no real end, just as it has no real beginning or middle.</p>
+
+<p>One other point deserves notice. The tone of the Spanish and French
+picaresque novel had never been high: but it is curiously degraded in
+this English example. Fureti&egrave;re honestly called his book <i>Roman
+Bourgeois</i>. Head might have called his, if he had written in French,
+<i>Roman Canaille</i>. Not merely the sentiments but the very outward
+trappings and accidents of gentility are banished from the book. Yet we
+do not get any real reality in compensation. Head is no Defoe: he can
+give us the company that Colonel Jack kept in his youth and Moll
+Flanders in her middle age: but he makes not the slightest attempt to
+give us Moll or Jack, or even Moll's or Jack's habit, environment,
+novel-furniture of any kind whatsoever. The receipt to make <i>The English
+Rogue</i> is simply this: &quot;Take from two to three dozen Elizabethan
+pamphlets of different kinds, but principally of the 'coney-catching'
+variety, and string them together by making a batch of shadowy
+personages tell them to each other when they are not acting in them.&quot;
+Except in a dim sort of idea that a novel should have some bulk and
+substance, it is difficult to see any advance whatever in this
+muck-heap&mdash;which the present writer, having had to read it a second time
+for the present purpose, most heartily hopes to be able to leave
+henceforth undisturbed on his shelves.</p>
+
+<p>Not in this fashion must the illustrious Afra be spoken of.<a name="Page_51" id="Page_51" /> It is true
+that&mdash;since it ceased to be the fashion merely to dismiss her with a
+&quot;fie-fie!&quot; which her prose work, at any rate, by no means merits&mdash;there
+has sometimes been a tendency rather to overdo praise of her, not merely
+in reference to her lyrics, some of which can never be praised too
+highly, but in reference to these novels. <i>Oroonoko</i> or <i>The Royal
+Slave</i>, with its celebration of the virtues of a noble negro and his
+love for his Imoinda, and his brutal ill-treatment and death by torture
+at the hands of white murderers, undoubtedly took the fancy of the
+public. But to see at once Rousseau and Byron in it, Chateaubriand and
+Wilberforce and I know not what else, is rather in the &quot;lunatic, lover,
+and poet&quot; order of vision. Even Head and Kirkman, as we have observed,
+had perceived the advantage of foreign scenery and travel to vary their
+matter; Afra had herself been in Guiana; and, as she was of a very
+inflammable disposition, it is quite possible that some Indian Othello
+had caught her fresh imagination. On the other hand, there was the
+heroic romance, with all its sighs and flames, still the rage: and a
+much less nimble intellect than Afra's, with a much less cosmopolitan
+experience, might easily see the use of transposing it into a new key.
+Still, there is no doubt that <i>The Royal Slave</i> and even its companions
+are far above the dull, dirty, and never more than half alive stuff of
+<i>The English Rogue. Oroonoko</i> is a story, not a pamphlet or a mere
+&quot;coney-catching&quot; jest. To say that it wants either contraction or
+expansion; less &quot;talk about it&quot; and more actual conversation; a stronger
+projection of character and other things; is merely to say that it is an
+experiment in the infancy of the novel, not a following out of secrets
+already divulged. It certainly is the first prose story in English which
+can be ranked with things that already existed in <a name="Page_52" id="Page_52" />foreign literatures.
+Nor is it the only one of the batch in which advance is seen. &quot;The King
+of Bantam,&quot; for instance, is the account of an &quot;extravagant,&quot; though not
+quite a fool, who is &quot;coney-catched&quot; in the old manner. But it opens in
+a fashion very different indeed from the old manner. &quot;This money is
+certainly a most devilish thing! I'm sure the want of it had been like
+to ruin my dear Philibella!&quot; and the succeeding adventures are pretty
+freshly told. The trick of headlong overture was a favourite with Afra.
+&quot;The Adventure of the Black Lady&quot; begins, &quot;About the beginning of last
+June, as near as I can remember, Bellamira came to town from Hampshire.&quot;
+It is a trick of course: and here probably borrowed from the French: but
+the line which separates trick from artistic device is an exceedingly
+narrow and winding one. At any rate, this plunging into the middle of
+things wakes up the reader's attention, and does not permit him to doze.
+&quot;The Lucky Mistake,&quot; on the other hand, opens with a little landscape,
+&quot;The river Loire has on its delightful banks, etc.&quot; &quot;The Fair Jilt,&quot; a
+Bandello-like story, begins with an exaltation of Love: and so on. Now
+these things, though they may seem matters of course to the mere modern
+reader, were not matters of course then. Afra very likely imitated; her
+works have never been critically edited; and have not served as field
+for much origin-hunting. But whether she followed others or not, she led
+her own division. All these things and others are signs of an awakened
+conscience&mdash;of a sense of the fact that fiction, to be literature, must
+be something more than the relation of a bare fact, tragic, comic, or
+neutral&mdash;that the novelist is a cook, and must prepare and serve his
+materials with a sauce as much his own as possible, of plot,
+arrangement, character-drawing, scenery, conversation, reflection, and
+<a name="Page_53" id="Page_53" />what not. That conversation itself&mdash;the subtlest instrument of all and
+the most effective for constructing character&mdash;is so little developed,
+can only, I think, be accounted for by supposing Afra and others to be
+under the not unnatural mistake that conversation especially belonged to
+the drama, which was still the most popular form of literature, and in
+which she herself was a copious practitioner. But this mistake was not
+long to prevail: and it had no effect on that great contemporary of hers
+who would, it is to be feared, have used the harshest language
+respecting her, and to whom we now come.</p>
+
+<p>It is impossible to share, and not very easy even to understand, the
+scruples of those who would not admit John Bunyan to a place in the
+hierarchy and the pedigree of the English novel, or would at best grant
+him an outside position in relation to it. Their exquisite reasons, so
+far as one can discern them, appear to be (or to concern) the facts that
+<i>The Pilgrim's Progress</i> and <i>The Holy War</i> are religious, and that they
+are allegories.<a id="footnotetag5" name="footnotetag5"></a><a href="#footnote5"><sup>5</sup></a> It may be humbly suggested that by applying the
+double rule to verse we can exclude <i>Paradise Lost</i> and the <i>Faerie
+Queene</i> from the <a name="Page_54" id="Page_54" />succession of English Poetry, whereby no doubt we
+shall be finely holden in understanding the same: while it is by no
+means certain that, if the exclusion of allegory be pushed home, we must
+not cancel <i>Don Quixote</i> from the list of the world's novels. Even in
+prose, to speak plainly, the hesitation&mdash;unless it comes from the
+foolish dislike to things religious, as such, which has been the bigotry
+of the last generation or two&mdash;comes from the almost equally foolish
+determination to draw up arbitrary laws of literary kind. Discarding
+prejudice and punctilio, every one must surely see that, in diminishing
+measure, even <i>The Holy War</i> is a novel, and that <i>The Pilgrim's
+Progress</i> has every one of the four requisites&mdash;plot, character,
+description, and dialogue&mdash;while one of these requisites&mdash;character with
+its accessory manners&mdash;is further developed in the <i>History of Mr.
+Badman</i> after a fashion for which we shall look vainly in any division
+of European literature (except drama) before it. This latter fact has
+indeed obtained a fair amount of recognition since Mr. Froude drew the
+attention of the general reader to it in his book on Bunyan, in the
+&quot;English Men of Letters&quot; series, five-and-twenty years ago: but it must
+have struck careful readers of the great tinker's minor works long
+before. Indeed there are very good internal reasons for thinking that no
+less a person than Thackeray must have known <i>Mr. Badman</i>. This
+wonderful little sketch, however&mdash;the related history of a man who is an
+utter rascal both in family and commercial relations, but preserves his
+reputation intact and does not even experience any deathbed
+repentance&mdash;is rather an unconscious study for a character in a novel&mdash;a
+sketch of a <i>bourgeois</i> Barnes Newcome&mdash;than anything more. It has the
+old drawback of being narrated, not acted or spoken at first hand: and
+so, though it is in a sense Fielding at nearly <a name="Page_55" id="Page_55" />his best, more than half
+a century before Fielding attempted <i>Joseph Andrews</i>, no more need be
+said of it. So, too, the religious element and the allegory <i>are</i> too
+prominent in <i>The Holy War</i>&mdash;the novelist's desk is made too much of a
+pulpit in large parts of it. Other parts, concerning the inhabitants of
+Mansoul and their private affairs, are domestic novel-writing of nearly
+the pure kind: and if <i>The Pilgrim's Progress</i> did not exist, it would
+be worth while to pick them out and discuss them. But, as it most
+fortunately does exist, this is not needful.</p>
+
+<p>The only fault with the novel-character of the greater book which might
+possibly be found by a critic who did not let the allegory bite him, and
+was not frightened by the religion, is that there is next to no love
+element in it, though there are wedding bells. Mercy is indeed quite
+nice enough for a heroine: but Bunyan might have bestowed her better
+than on a young gentleman so very young that he had not long before made
+himself (no doubt allegorically) ill with unripe and unwholesome fruit.
+But if he had done so, the suspicions of his brethren&mdash;<i>they</i> were acute
+enough as it was not to mistake the character of the book, whatever
+modern critics may do&mdash;would have been even more unallayable. And, as it
+is, the &quot;alluring countenance&quot; does shed not a little grace upon the
+story, or at least upon the Second Part: while the intenser character of
+the First hardly requires this. Any other lack is, to the present
+writer, imperceptible. The romance interest of quest, adventure,
+achievement, is present to the fullest degree: and what is sometimes
+called the pure novel interest of character and conversation is present
+in a degree not lower. It must be accepted as a great blessing, even by
+those who regard Puritanism as an almost unmitigated curse, that its
+principles forbade Bunyan to <a name="Page_56" id="Page_56" />think of choosing the profane and
+abominable stage-play as the form of his creation. We had had our fill
+of good plays, and were beginning to drink of that which was worse:
+while we had no good novels and wanted them. Of course the large amount
+of actual &quot;Tig and Tirry&quot; dialogue (as Dr. Johnson would say) is
+probably one of the things which have made precisians shy of accepting
+the <i>Progress</i> for what it really is. But we must remember that this
+encroachment on the dramatic province was exactly what was wanted to
+remove the reproach of fiction. The inability to put actual conversation
+of a lively kind in the mouths of personages has been indicated as one
+of the great defects of the novel up to this time. Except Cervantes, it
+is difficult to think of any novelist who had shown himself able to
+supply the want. Bunyan can do it as few have done it even since his
+time. The famous dialogue of Christian and By-ends is only the best&mdash;if
+it is the best&mdash;of scores nearly or quite as good. The curious
+intellectual flaccidity of the present day seems to be &quot;put off&quot; by the
+&quot;ticket&quot; names; but no one who has the true literary sense cares for
+these one way or another, or is more disturbed by them than if they were
+Wilkins and Jones. Just as Coleridge observed that to enjoy some kinds
+of poetry you must suspend disbelief, so, with mere literary fashions,
+you must suspend disagreement. We should not call By-ends By-ends now:
+and whether we should do better or worse nobody, as Plato says, knows
+but the Deity. But the best of us would be hard put to it to make
+By-ends reveal his By-endishness more perfectly than he does by his
+conversation, and without any ticket-name at all.</p>
+
+<p>Not less remarkable, and only a little less new, is the vividness and
+sufficiency of the scene painting and setting.<a name="Page_57" id="Page_57" /> It has been said that
+the great novelists not only provide us with a world of friends more
+real and enjoyable than the actual folk we know, but also with a world
+for those friends to live in, more real and far more enjoyable than the
+world in which we ourselves sojourn. And this is well seen of Christian.
+The Slough of Despond and the terrible overhanging hill; the gateway and
+the Interpreter's House and the House Beautiful; the ups and downs of
+the road, and the arbours and the giants' dens: Beulah and the
+Delectable Mountains:&mdash;one knows them as one knows the country that one
+has walked over, and perhaps even better. There is no description for
+description's sake: yet nothing is wanting of the descriptive kind.</p>
+
+<p>Yet all these things are&mdash;as they should be&mdash;only subsidiary to the main
+interest of the Pilgrimage itself. Once more, one may fear that it is no
+good sign of the wits of the age that readers should be unable to
+discard familiarity with the argument of the story. It is the way in
+which that argument is worked out and illustrated that is the thing. I
+have never myself, since I became thoroughly acquainted with Lydgate's
+Englishing of Deguilevile's <i>Pilgrimage of the Soul of Man</i>, had any
+doubt that&mdash;in some way or other, direct or indirect, at tenth or
+twentieth hand perhaps&mdash;Bunyan was acquainted with it: but this is of no
+importance. He might undoubtedly have got all his materials straight out
+of the Bible. But his working of them up is all his own, and is
+wonderful. Here, to begin with, is the marvel not merely of a
+continuation which is not a falling off, but of a repetition of the same
+general scheme with different but closely connected personages, which is
+entirely free from monotony. One is so accustomed to the facts that
+perhaps it hardly strikes one at first how extraordinarily audacious the
+attempt is: nay, <a name="Page_58" id="Page_58" />the very success of it may blind all but critics to
+the difficulty. It is no wonder that people tried further continuations
+and further complications: still less wonder that they utterly failed.
+Probably even Bunyan himself could not have &quot;done it a third time.&quot; But
+he did it these twice with such vividness of figure and action; such
+completeness of fable; such sufficiency of behaviour and of speech as
+have scarcely ever been equalled. As ideal as Spenser, as real as Defoe:
+such is Bunyan. And he shows this realism and this idealism in a prose
+narrative, bringing the thoughts and actions and characters and speech
+of fictitious human beings before his readers&mdash;for their inspection
+perhaps; for their delight certainly. If this is not the being and the
+doing of a novelist this deponent very humbly declareth that he knoweth
+not what the being and the doing of a novelist are.</p>
+
+<p>We must now turn to two small but noteworthy attempts at the kind, which
+have been referred to above.</p>
+
+<p>In 1668 there appeared a very curious little book (entitled at great
+length after the manner of the times, but more shortly called <i>The Isle
+of Pines</i>), which is important in the literary ancestry of Defoe and
+Swift and not unimportant in itself. Its author was Henry Neville, of
+the Nevilles of Billingbeare, son of one Sir Henry and grandson of
+another, the grandfather having been of some mark in diplomacy and
+courtiership in late Elizabethan and early Jacobean times. The grandson
+had had a life of some stir earlier. Born in 1620, and educated at
+Merton and University Colleges, he had left Oxford without a degree, had
+taken the Parliamentary side, but as a rigid Republican and
+anti-Cromwellite; had been a member of the Rota, and after the
+Restoration had been arrested in 1663 for supposed treasonable
+practices, but escaped serious punish<a name="Page_59" id="Page_59" />ment. He lived quietly for more
+than thirty years longer and died in 1694. Besides <i>The Isle of Pines</i>
+he wrote satirical tracts (the <i>Parliament of Ladies</i> being the best
+known), translated Machiavelli, and was evidently a man of parts,
+though, like his friend Harrington, something of a &quot;crank.&quot; He seems
+also to have been, as some others of the extremer Puritans certainly
+were, pretty loose in his construction of moral laws.</p>
+
+<p><i>The Isle</i> is a very short book of thirty-one quarto pages: but there is
+a good deal in it, and it must have been very carefully written. A
+certain Cornelius van Sloetten writes, &quot;supported by letters from
+Amsterdam,&quot; how a Dutch ship, driven far out of reckoning in the
+Southern Ocean, comes to a &quot;fourth island, near Terra Australis
+Incognita,&quot; which is inhabited by white people, speaking English, but
+mostly naked. The headman is a certain William Pine, whose grandfather,
+George, has left a written account of the origin of the community. This
+relates how George was wrecked on the island, the ship perishing &quot;with
+man and mouse,&quot; except himself, his master's daughter, two white
+maidservants, and a negro girl. The island proves pleasant and
+habitable: and George, to prevent unfairness and ill-feeling, unites
+himself to all his female companions, the quintet living in perfect
+harmony. Thirty-seven children result: and these at first necessarily
+intermarry; but after this first generation, a rule is made that
+brothers and sisters may not unite&mdash;the descendants of the four original
+wives forming clans who may marry into the others but not into their
+own. A wider legal code of fair stringency is arranged, with the
+sanction of capital and other punishments: and things go so well that
+the patriarch musters a tribe of 565 persons by the time he is sixty,
+and of 1789 twenty years later, when he departs this life, <a name="Page_60" id="Page_60" />piously
+praying God &quot;to multiply them and send them the true report of the
+gospel.&quot; The multiplication has duly taken place, and there is something
+like a civil war while the Dutch are there; but they interfere with
+fire-arms to restore order, and leave all well. The writer's cunning is
+shown by the fact that he does not stop abruptly: but finishes off with
+some subsequent and quite <i>verisimilar</i> experiences of the Dutch ship.
+The book does not appear to have had a very great popularity in England,
+though it was reprinted and abridged at least once, pretty shortly. But
+it was very popular abroad, was translated into three or four languages,
+and was apparently taken as a genuine account.</p>
+
+<p>Neville's art is in fact not inconsiderable. Earlier voyages and travels
+of course supplied him with his technical and geographical details: and
+the codification of the Isle of Pines suggests the Bacon-Harrington
+tradition. But he has got the vividness and realism which have usually
+been lacking before: and though some of his details are pretty &quot;free&quot; it
+is by no means only through such things that these qualities are
+secured. To Cyrano de Bergerac he bears no likeness at all. In fact,
+though Neville <i>was</i> a satirist, satire does not seem to have been in
+any way his object here. Whatever that object may have been, he has
+certainly struck, by accident or not, on the secret of producing an
+interesting account by ingeniously multiplied and adjusted detail.
+Moreover, as there is no conversation, the book stands&mdash;accidentally
+this time almost without doubt&mdash;at the opposite pole from the
+talk-deluged romances of the Scud&eacute;ry type. Whether Defoe actually knew
+it or not matters exceedingly little: that something of his method, and
+in a manner the subject of his first and most famous novel, are here
+before him, <a name="Page_61" id="Page_61" />seems quite indisputable. Perhaps not the least piquant
+thing to do with <i>The Isle of Pines</i> is to contrast it with <i>Oceana</i>. Of
+course the contrast is unfair: nearly all contrasts are. But there is
+actually, as has been pointed out, a slight contact between the work of
+the two friends: and their complete difference in every other respect
+makes this more curiously apparent. And another odd thing is that
+Neville&mdash;&quot;Rota&quot;-republican as he was&mdash;should have adopted patriarchal
+(one can hardly say <i>legitimate</i>) government here.</p>
+
+<p>Congreve's <i>Incognita</i> (1692), the last seventeenth-century novel that
+requires special notice, belongs much more to the class of Afra's tales
+than to that of the heroic romances. It is a short story of seventy-five
+small pages only and of the Italian-Spanish imbroglio type. The friends
+Aurelian and Hippolito take each other's names for certain purposes, and
+their beloveds, &quot;Incognita,&quot; Juliana and Leonora, are perplexed
+accordingly: while family feuds, letter assignations at a convent where
+the name of the convent unluckily happens to be torn off, and other
+stock ingredients of the kind are freely used. Most writers have either
+said nothing about the book or have given it scanty praise; with the
+exception, Sir Walter Raleigh, I confess that I cannot here agree. Being
+Congreve's it could not be quite without flashes of wit, but they do not
+appear to me to be either very numerous or very brilliant; the plot,
+such as it is, is a plot of drama rather than of fiction; and there is
+no character that I can see. It is in fact only one of a vast multitude
+of similar stories, not merely in the two languages just referred to,
+but in French, which were but to show that the time of the novel was not
+yet come, even when the time of this century was all but over.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62" />It was quite over, and the first two decades of the next were all but
+over too, before the way was, to any important extent, further explored:
+but important assistance in the exploration was given at the beginning
+of the second of these decades. The history of the question of the
+relations of the Addison-Steele periodical, and especially of the
+&quot;Coverley Papers,&quot; to the novel is both instructive and amusing to those
+who have come to appreciate the humours of literary things. It would
+probably have shocked the more orthodox admirers of the <i>Spectator</i>,
+during the eighteenth century, to have any such connection or relation
+so much as hinted. But when people began to consider literature and
+literary history in a better arranged perspective, the fact that there
+<i>is</i> such a connection or relation must have been soon perceived. It has
+become comparatively a commonplace: and now the third stage&mdash;that in
+which people become uneasy and suspicious of the commonplace and obvious
+and try to turn it topsy-turvy&mdash;has begun.</p>
+
+<p>It is of course undeniable that the &quot;Coverley Papers,&quot; as they stand,
+are not a novel, even on the loosest conception and construction of the
+term. There is no plot; some of what should be the most important
+characters are merely heard of, not seen; and the various scenes have no
+sort of connection, except that the same persons figure in them. But
+these undeniable facts do not interfere with two other facts, equally
+undeniable and much more important. The first is that the papers could
+be turned into a novel with hardly any important alteration, and with
+only <i>quantum suff.</i> of addition and completion. &quot;The widow&quot; is there in
+the background ready to be produced and made a heroine; many of the
+incidents are told novel-fashion already, and more could be translated
+into that <a name="Page_63" id="Page_63" />fashion by the veriest tyro at novel writing who has written
+at any time during the last one hundred and fifty years. The personages
+of the club have merely to step down and out; the scenes to be
+connected, amplified, and multiplied; the conversation to undergo the
+same process.</p>
+
+<p>But the second point is of greater importance still. Not only could the
+&quot;Coverley Papers,&quot; be made into a novel without the slightest
+difficulty, and by a process much of which would be simple enlargement
+of material; but they already possess, in a fashion which requires no
+alteration at all, many of the features of the novel, far more
+successfully hit off than had ever been done before in the novel itself.
+This is true of the dialogue to no small extent, and of the description
+even more: but it is truest of all of the characters. Except Bunyan,
+nobody in prose fiction had ever made personages so thoroughly spirited
+as Sir Roger and even the two Wills, Honeycomb and Wimble; while here
+there was &quot;no allaying Thames&quot; in the shape of allegory, little
+moralising and that of a kind quite human, a plentiful setting of
+ordinary and familiar scene, and a more plentiful and exact adjustment
+of ordinary and familiar manners. It is true that Addison, partly owing
+to the undercurrent of his satirical humour (Steele succeeds rather
+better here), has not attained the astonishing verisimilitude of the
+writer to whom we shall come next and last but one in this chapter. His
+characters are perfectly natural, but we know, all the while, that they
+are works of art. But in most of the points just mentioned he has
+exactly the tricks of the novelist's art that Defoe has not. The smaller
+tales in the <i>Tatler</i> and its followers undoubtedly did something to
+remove the reproach from prose fiction, and more to sharpen the appetite
+for it. But they were nothing new: the short tale being of un<a name="Page_64" id="Page_64" />known
+antiquity. The &quot;Coverley Papers&quot; <i>were</i> new and did much more. This new
+kind of treatment may not have suggested beforehand (it is not certain
+that it did not) the extensive novel of character and manners&mdash;the play
+lengthened, bodied more strongly, and turned into narrative form. But
+the process was <i>there</i>; the instances of it were highly reputed and
+widely known. It must in almost any case have gone hard but a further
+step still would be taken. It was actually taken by the person who had
+suggested the periodical essay itself.</p>
+
+<p>Much has been written about Defoe, but, curiously enough, the least part
+of what has been written about him has concerned the very part of him
+that is read&mdash;his novels. Nay, occasional eccentrics, and not only
+these, have shown a sort of disposition to belittle him as a novelist:
+indeed the stock description of Richardson as the Father of the English
+Novel almost pointedly rules Defoe out. Yet further, the most adequate
+and intelligent appreciation of his novel work itself has too often been
+mainly confined to what is no doubt a subject of exceeding interest&mdash;the
+special means by which he secures the attention, and procures the
+delight, of his readers. We shall have to deal with this too. But the
+point to which it is wished to draw special attention now is different,
+and we may reach it best by the ordinary &quot;statement of case.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Almost everybody who knows any literary history, knows that the book by
+which, after thirty or forty years of restless publication in all sorts
+of prose and rhyme, Defoe niched himself immovably in English
+literature, was a new departure by almost an old man. He was all but, if
+not quite, sixty when <i>Robinson Crusoe</i> appeared: and a very few
+following years saw the appearance of his pretty voluminous &quot;minor&quot;
+novels. The subject of the <a name="Page_65" id="Page_65" />first every one knows without limitation: it
+is not so certain, though vigorous efforts have been made to popularise
+the others, that even their subjects are clearly known to many people.
+<i>Captain Singleton</i> (1720), <i>Moll Flanders</i>, and <i>Colonel Jack</i> (both
+1722) are picaresque romances with tolerably sordid heroes and heroines,
+but with the style entirely rejuvenated by Defoe's secret. <i>Roxana</i>
+(1724), a very puzzling book which is perhaps not entirely his writing,
+is of the same general class: the <i>Voyage round the World</i> (1725), the
+least interesting, but not <i>un</i>interesting, is exactly what its title
+imports,&mdash;in other words, the &quot;stuffing&quot; of the <i>Robinson</i> pie without
+the game. The <i>Memoirs of a Cavalier</i> (1720) approach the historical
+novel (or at least the similar &quot;stuffing&quot; of that) and have raised
+curious and probably insoluble questions as to whether they are
+inventions at all&mdash;questions intimately connected with that general one
+referred to above. One or two minor things are sometimes added to the
+list: but they require no special notice. The seven books just mentioned
+are Defoe's contribution to the English novel. Let us consider the
+quality of this contribution first&mdash;and then the means used to attain
+it.</p>
+
+<p>Their novel-quality (which, as has been hinted, has not been claimed so
+loudly or so steadily as it should have been for Defoe) is the quality
+of Story-Interest&mdash;and this, one dares say, he not only infused for the
+first time in full dose, but practically introduced into the English
+novel, putting the best of the old medi&aelig;val romances aside and also
+putting aside <i>The Pilgrim's Progress</i>, which is not likely to have been
+without influence on himself. It may be said, &quot;Oh! but the <i>Amadis</i>
+romances, and the Elizabethan novels, and the 'heroics' must have
+interested or they would not have been read.&quot; This looks plausible, <a name="Page_66" id="Page_66" />but
+is a mistake. Few people who have not studied the history of criticism
+know the respectable reluctance to be <i>pleased</i> with literature which
+distinguished mankind till very recent times; and which in fact kept the
+novel back or was itself maintained by the absence of the novel. In life
+people pleased themselves irregularly enough: in literature they could
+not get out of the idea that they ought to be instructed, that it was
+enough to be instructed, and that it was discreditable to ask for more.
+Even the poet was allowed to delight grudgingly and at his peril; was
+suspected because he did delight, and had to pay a sort of heavy
+licence-duty for it, in the shape of concomitant instruction to others
+and good behaviour in himself. In fact he was a publican who was bound
+to serve stodgy food as well as exhilarating drink.</p>
+
+<p>It is impossible to doubt that people were similarly affected to the
+fiction of the Renaissance and the seventeenth century, at least in its
+longer examples&mdash;for the smaller <i>novelle</i> could amuse in their own way
+sometimes, though they could hardly absorb. It is equally impossible to
+imagine any one being &quot;enthralled&quot; by <i>Euphues</i>. Admiration, of a kind,
+must have been the only passion excited by it. In the <i>Arcadia</i> there is
+a certain charm, but it belongs to the inset verse&mdash;to the almost
+Spenserian <i>visionariness</i> of parts&mdash;to the gracious lulling atmosphere
+of the whole. If it had been published in three volumes, one cannot
+imagine the most enthusiastic novel-reader knocking up a friend late at
+night for volume two or volume three. I have said that I can read
+<i>Parismus</i> for pastime: but the pastime that it provides is certainly
+not over-stimulating, and the mild stimulant becomes unsweetened and
+unlemoned barley-water in books of the <i>Parthenissa</i> class. If with them
+conversing one forgets all <a name="Page_67" id="Page_67" />time, it must be by the influence of the
+kind go-between Sleep. We know, of course, that their contemporaries did
+not go to sleep over them: but it was because they felt that they were
+being done good to&mdash;that they were in the height of polite society&mdash;that
+their manners were being softened and not allowed to be gross. The time,
+in its blunt way, was fond of contrasting the attractions of a mistress
+on one side and &quot;a friend and a bottle&quot; on the other. That a novel could
+enter into competition with either or both, as an interesting and even
+exciting means of passing the time, would have entered very few heads at
+all and have been contemptuously dismissed from most of those that it
+did enter.</p>
+
+<p>Addison and Steele in the &quot;Coverley Papers&quot; had shown the way to
+construct this new spell: Defoe actually constructed it. It may be that
+some may question whether the word &quot;exciting&quot; applies exactly to his
+stories. But this is logomachy: and in fact a well-willing reader <i>can</i>
+get very fairly excited while the Cavalier is escaping after Marston
+Moor; while it is doubtful whether the savages have really come and what
+will be the event; while it is again doubtful whether Moll is caught or
+not; or what has become of those gains of the boy Jack, which can hardly
+be called ill-gotten because there is such a perfect unconsciousness of
+ill on the part of the getter. At any rate, if such a reader cannot feel
+excitement here, he would utterly stagnate in any previous novel.</p>
+
+<p>In presence of this superior&mdash;this emphatically and doubly
+&quot;novel&quot;&mdash;interest, all other things become comparatively unimportant.
+The relations of <i>Robinson Crusoe</i> to Selkirk's experiences and to one
+or two other books (especially the already mentioned <i>Isle of Pines</i>)
+may not unfitly employ the literary historian who chooses to occupy
+<a name="Page_68" id="Page_68" />himself with them. The allegory which Defoe alleges in it, and which
+some biographers have endeavoured to work out, cannot, I suppose, be
+absolutely pooh-poohed, but presents no attractions whatever to the
+present writer. Whether the <i>Cavalier</i> is pure fiction, or partly
+embroidered fact, <i>is</i> a somewhat interesting question, if only because
+it seems to be impossible to find out the answer: and the same may be
+said of the not impossible (indeed almost more than probable) Portuguese
+maps and documents at the back of <i>Captain Singleton</i>. To disembroil the
+chronological muddle of <i>Roxana</i>, and follow out the tangles of the
+hide-and-seek of that most unpleasant &quot;lady of pleasure&quot; and her
+daughter, may suit some. But, apart from all these things, there abides
+the fact that you can <i>read</i> the books&mdash;read them again and again&mdash;enjoy
+them most keenly at first and hardly less keenly afterwards, however
+often you repeat the reading.</p>
+
+<p>As has been partly said, the means by which this effect is achieved, and
+also the means by which it is not, are almost equally remarkable. The
+Four Elements of the novel are sometimes, and not incorrectly, said to
+be Plot, Character, Description, and Dialogue&mdash;Style, which some would
+make a fifth, being rather a characteristic in another order of
+division. It is curious that Defoe is rebellious or evasive under any
+analysis of this kind. His plots are of the &quot;strong&quot; order&mdash;the events
+succeed each other and are fairly connected, but do not compose a
+history so much as a chronicle. In character, despite his intense
+verisimilitude, he is not very individual. Robinson himself, Moll, Jack,
+William the Quaker in <i>Singleton</i>, even Roxana the cold-blooded and
+covetous courtesan, cannot be said not to be real&mdash;they and almost every
+one of the minorities are an immense advance on the colourless and
+<a name="Page_69" id="Page_69" />bloodless ticketed puppets of the Middle Fiction. But they still want
+<i>something</i>&mdash;the snap of the fingers of the artist. Moll is perhaps the
+most real of all of them and yet one has no flash-sights of her
+being&mdash;never sees her standing out against soft blue sky or
+thunder-cloud as one sees the great characters of fiction; never hears
+her steps winding and recognises her gesture as one does theirs.</p>
+
+<p>So again his description is sufficient: and the enumerative
+particularity of it is even great part of the <i>secret de Polichinelle</i>
+to which we are coming. But it is far from elaborate in any other way
+and has hardly the least decoration or poetical quality. Well as we know
+Crusoe's Island the actual scenery of it is not half so much impressed
+as that even, for instance, of Masterman Ready's&mdash;it is either of the
+human figures&mdash;Crusoe's own grotesque bedizenment, the savages, Friday,
+the Spaniards, Will Atkins&mdash;or of the works of man&mdash;the stockade, the
+boat, and the rest&mdash;that we think. A little play is made with Jack's
+glass-house squalor and Roxana's magnificence <i>de mauvais lieu</i>, but not
+much: the gold-dust and deserts of <i>Singleton</i> are a necessary part of
+the &quot;business,&quot; but nothing more. <i>Moll Flanders</i>&mdash;in some respects the
+greatest of all his books&mdash;has the bareness of an Elizabethan stage in
+scenery and properties&mdash;it is much if Greenfield spares us a table or a
+bed to furnish it.</p>
+
+<p>Of Dialogue Defoe is specially fond&mdash;even making his personages
+soliloquise in this after a fashion&mdash;and it plays a very important part
+in &quot;the secret:&quot; yet it can hardly be classed very high <i>as</i> dialogue.
+And this is at least partly due to the strange <i>drab</i> shapelessness of
+his style, which never takes on any brilliant colour, or quaint
+individual form.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70" />Yet it is very questionable whether any other style would have suited
+the method so well, or would even have suited it at all. For this
+method&mdash;to leave off hinting at it and playing round it&mdash;is one of
+almost endless accumulation of individually trivial incident, detail,
+and sometimes observation, the combined effect of which is to produce an
+insensible but undoubting acceptance, on the reader's part, of the facts
+presented to him. The process has been more than once analysed in that
+curious and convenient miniature example of it, the &quot;Mrs. Veal&quot;
+<i>supercherie</i>: but you may open the novels proper almost anywhere and
+discover it in full operation. Like most great processes of art, this is
+an adoption and perfecting of habits usual with the most inartistic
+people&mdash;a turning to good account of the interminably circumstantial
+superfluities of the common gossip and newsmonger. Very often Defoe
+actually does not go beyond this&mdash;just as in <i>The Shortest Way with the
+Dissenters</i> he had simply reproduced the actual thoughts and wishes of
+those who disliked dissent. But sometimes he got the better of this
+also, as in the elaborate building up of Robinson's surroundings and not
+a little in the other books. And there the effect is not only
+verisimilar but wonderful in its verisimilitude. At any rate, in him,
+and for English prose and secular fiction, we have first that mysterious
+charm of the <i>real that is not real</i>&mdash;of the &quot;human creation&quot;&mdash;which
+constitutes the appeal of the novel. In some of the books there is
+hardly any appeal of any other sort. Moll Flanders, though not unkindly,
+and &quot;improper&quot; rather from the force of circumstances than from any
+specially vicious inclination, is certainly not a person for whom one
+has much liking. Colonel Jack, after his youthful experiences in
+pocket-picking, is rather a nonentity, something of a coward, a <a name="Page_71" id="Page_71" />fellow
+of no particular wits, parts, or definite qualities of any kind. Singleton
+is a rascal who &quot;plays Charlemagne,&quot; as the French gambling term has it,
+and endows his repentance with the profits of his sin. As for Roxana there
+are few more repulsive heroines in fiction&mdash;while the Cavalier and the
+chief figure in the <i>Voyage Round the World</i> are simply threads on
+which their respective adventures are strung. Even Robinson himself enlists
+no particular sympathy except of the &quot;put-yourself-in-his-place&quot; kind. Yet
+these sorry or negative personages, of whom, in the actual creation of God,
+we should be content to know nothing except from paragraphs in the
+newspaper (and generally in the police-reports thereof), content us
+perfectly well with their company through hundreds and thousands of
+solid pages, and leave us perfectly ready to enjoy it again after
+a reasonable interval.</p>
+
+<p>This, as has been said, is the mystery of fiction&mdash;a mystery partly set
+a-working in the medi&aelig;val romance, then mostly lost, and now
+recovered&mdash;in his own way and according to his own capacity&mdash;by Defoe.
+It was to escape others for a little longer and then to be yet again
+rediscovered by the great quartette of the mid-eighteenth century&mdash;to
+slip in and out of hands during the later part of that century, and then
+to be all but finally established, in patterns for everlasting
+pursuance, by Miss Austen and by Scott. But Defoe is really (unless we
+put Bunyan before him) the first of the magicians&mdash;not the greatest by
+any means, but great and almost alone in the peculiar talent of making
+uninteresting things interesting&mdash;not by burlesquing them or satirising
+them; not by suffusing or inflaming them with passion; not by giving
+them the amber of style; but by serving them &quot;simple of themselves&quot; as
+though they actually existed.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72" />The position of Defoe in novel history is so great that there is a
+temptation to end this chapter with him. But to do so would cause an
+inconvenience greater than any resulting advantages. For the greatest of
+Defoe's contemporaries in English letters also comes into our division,
+and comes best here. One cannot conveniently rank Swift with the great
+quartette of the next chapter, because he is a novelist &quot;by interim&quot; and
+incompletely: to rank him among the minor and later novelists of the
+eighteenth century would be as to the first part of the classification
+absurd and as to the last false. And he comes, not merely in time,
+pretty close to Defoe, incommensurable as is the genius of the two. It
+has even been thought (plausibly enough, though the matter is of no
+great importance) that the form of <i>Gulliver</i> may have been to some
+extent determined by <i>Robinson Crusoe</i> and Defoe's other novels of
+travel. And there is a subtler reason for taking the pair together and
+both close to Addison and Steele.</p>
+
+<p>Swift had shown the general set towards prose fiction, and his own bent
+in the same direction, long before Defoe's novel-period and as early as
+the <i>Tale of a Tub</i> and the <i>Battle of the Books</i> (<i>published</i> 1704 but
+certainly earlier in part). The easy flow of the narrative, and the
+vivid dialogue of the Spider and the Bee in the latter, rank high among
+those premonitions of novel with which, in this place, we should be
+specially busied. In the former Peter, Martin, and Jack want but a
+little more of the alchemist's furnace to accomplish their projection
+into real characters, and not merely allegorical figure-heads. But, of
+course, in both books, the satiric purpose dominates too much to allow
+them to be really ranked among novels, even if they had taken the
+trouble to clothe themselves with more of the novel-garb.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73" />With <i>Gulliver</i> it is different. It is a commonplace on its subject
+(but like many other commonplaces a thing ill to forget or ignore) that
+natural and unsophisticated children always <i>do</i>, and that almost
+anybody who has a certain power of turning blind eyes when and where he
+chooses <i>can</i>, read it simply as a story of adventure and enjoy it
+hugely. It would be a most preternatural child or a most singularly
+constituted adult who could read <i>Utopia</i> or <i>Oceana</i>, or even Cyrano's
+<i>Voyages</i>, &quot;for the story&quot; and enjoy them hugely. This means that Swift
+had either learnt from Defoe or&mdash;and considering those earlier
+productions of his own much more probably&mdash;had independently developed
+the knack of <i>absorbing</i> the reader&mdash;the knack of telling a story. But
+of course there is in one sense much more, and in another much less,
+than a story in <i>Gulliver</i>: and the finest things in it are independent
+of story, though (and this once more comes in for our present purpose)
+they are quite capable of adaptation to story-purposes, and have been so
+adapted ever since by the greatest masters of the art. These are strokes
+of satire, turns of phrase, little illuminations of character, and
+seasonings of description. But the great point of <i>Gulliver</i> is that,
+like Defoe's work, though in not quite the same way, it is
+<i>interesting</i>&mdash;that it takes hold of its reader and gives him its
+&quot;peculiar pleasure.&quot; When a work of art does this, it is pretty near
+perfection.</p>
+
+<p>There is, however, another book of Swift's which, though perhaps seldom
+mentioned or even thought of in connection with the novel, is of real
+importance in that connection, and comes specially in with our present
+main consideration&mdash;the way in which the several parts of the completed
+novel were being, as it were, separately got ready and set apart for the
+use of the accomplished novelist. This is the very <a name="Page_74" id="Page_74" />curious and
+agreeable piece called <i>Polite Conversation</i> (1738), on which, though it
+was not printed till late in his life and close on <i>Pamela</i> itself,
+there is good reason for thinking that he had been for many years
+engaged. The importance of dialogue in the novel has been often
+mentioned and will scarcely be contested: while frequent occasion has
+been taken to point out that it had hitherto been very ill-achieved.
+Swift's &quot;conversation&quot; though designedly <i>underlined</i>, as it were, to
+show up current follies and extravagances of phrase and of fashion
+generally, is yet pretty certainly in the main the real average
+conversation of the society of his time, which he knew well and
+thoroughly. Further, there is a distinct, though it may be almost
+impalpable, difference between it and the conversation of the stage,
+though it is naturally connected therewith. Non-poetical stage dialogue
+in capable hands is either deliberate talking for display of &quot;wit&quot; like
+that of Congreve, or is conditioned and directed by the necessities of
+action and character. Of course, novel conversation may diverge in the
+first direction, and cannot properly neglect the second altogether. But,
+as there is room for very much more of it, it may and should allow
+itself a considerably wider range and imitate, on proper occasions, the
+desultory gossip and small talk of people who live on the &quot;boards&quot; of a
+room-floor and not of a stage.</p>
+
+<p>This is just what Swift's does, and just what there is very little of in
+Defoe; almost necessarily less in Addison and his group because of their
+essay form; and hardly anything elsewhere and earlier. Just as the
+Coverley Papers could, by one process and no difficult one, have been
+thrown into a novel; so by another, a not much more difficult and a much
+less complicated one, could the <i>Polite Conversation</i> be thrown into
+part of a novel&mdash;while in each case the <a name="Page_75" id="Page_75" />incomplete and unintentional
+draft itself supplies patterns for the complete work in new kind such as
+had never been given before. Indeed the <i>Conversation</i> may almost be
+said to <i>be</i> part of a novel&mdash;and no small part&mdash;as it stands, and of
+such a novel as had never been written before.</p>
+
+<p>But there was something still further all but absolutely necessary to
+the novel, though not necessary to it alone, which Defoe, Addison, and
+Swift, each in his several way, worked mightily to supply: and that was
+a flexible business-like &quot;workaday&quot; prose style. Not merely so long as
+men aimed at the eccentric and contorted styles of <i>Euphues</i> and the
+<i>Arcadia</i>, but so long as the old splendid and gorgeous, but cumbrous
+and complicated pre-Restoration style lasted, romances were possible,
+but novels were not. You might indeed pick out of Shakespeare&mdash;especially
+from such parts as those of Beatrice, Rosalind, and some of the fools&mdash;a
+capital novel-style: but then you can pick almost anything out of
+Shakespeare. Elsewhere the constant presence either of semi-poetic
+phraseology or of some kind of &quot;lingo&quot; was almost fatal. You want what
+Sprat calls a more &quot;natural way of speaking&quot; (though not necessarily a
+&quot;naked&quot; one) for novel purposes&mdash;a certain absence of ceremony and parade
+of phrase: though the presence of slang and some other things, the rebuking
+of which was partly Swift's object in the <i>Conversation</i>, is <i>not</i>
+fatal, and so he, in a manner, blessed and prescribed what he meant to ban.</p>
+
+<p>Thus, by the early years of the reign of George II., or a little later,
+we find, on the one side, an evident, and variously though
+inarticulately proclaimed, desire for novels; on the other, the
+accumulation, in haphazard and desultory way, of almost all the methods,
+the processes, the &quot;plant,&quot; necessary to turn novels out; but hardly
+<a name="Page_76" id="Page_76" />anything except the considered work of Bunyan, Defoe, and Swift which
+really deserves the name of novel. A similar process had been going on
+in France; and, in the different work of Le Sage and Marivaux, had
+actually produced work in the kind more advanced than anything in
+English. But the tables were soon to be turned: and during the rest of
+the century the English Novel was at last to assert itself as a
+distinct, an increasingly popular, and a widely cultivated kind. That
+this was due to the work of the four great novelists who fill its
+central third and will fill our next chapter cannot perhaps be said:
+that their work was the first great desertion of it may be said safely.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_III" id="CHAPTER_III" /><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77" />CHAPTER III</h2>
+
+<h2>THE FOUR WHEELS OF THE NOVEL WAIN</h2>
+
+
+<p>It does not enter into the plan, because it would be entirely
+inconsistent with the scale, of the present book to give details of the
+lives of the novelists, except when they have something special to do
+with the subject, or when (as in the case of a few minorities who happen
+to be of some importance) even well-informed readers are likely to be
+quite ignorant about them. Accounts, in all degrees of scale and
+competence, of the lives of Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne
+abound. It is sufficient&mdash;but in the special circumstances at this point
+perhaps necessary&mdash;here to sum the facts very briefly in so far as they
+bear on the main issue. Richardson (1689-1761), not merely the first to
+write, but the eldest by much more than his priority in writing, was the
+son of a Derbyshire tradesman, was educated for some time at
+Charterhouse, but apprenticed early to a printer&mdash;which trade he pursued
+with diligence and profit for the rest of his life in London and its
+immediate neighbourhood. After his literary success, he gathered round
+him a circle of ladies and gentlemen interested in literature: but he
+never had any first-hand acquaintance with general society of the
+&quot;gentle&quot; kind, much less with that of the upper classes. Fielding
+(1707-1754), on the contrary, was a member (though only as the son of a
+younger son of a younger son) of a family of great antiquity and
+distinction, which held an earldom in England and another in Ireland,
+and was connected as well as <a name="Page_78" id="Page_78" />it was derived, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu,
+for instance, being the novelist's cousin. He was educated at Eton and
+Leyden: but his branch of the family being decidedly impecunious, was
+thrown very much on his own resources. These were mainly drawn from
+literature, first as a playwright then as a novelist, journalism and
+miscellanies coming in. But he was called to the Bar: and though he
+probably did not make much money there, he obtained the poorly paid and
+hard-worked but rather important position of &quot;Bow Street Magistrate,&quot;
+which meant that he was head, directly of the London police such as it
+was, and indirectly of that of the whole kingdom. His temper was in some
+ways as aristocratic as his birth: but though Horace Walpole's accounts
+of his fancy for low company are obviously exaggerated, there is no
+doubt that he was a good deal of what has since been called a
+&quot;Bohemian.&quot; His experience of variety in scene was much wider than
+Richardson's, although after he came home from Leyden (where he went to
+study law) it was chiefly confined to London and the south of England
+(especially Bath, Dorsetshire, where he lived for a time, and the
+Western Circuit), till his last voyage, in hopeless quest of health, to
+Lisbon, where he died. His knowledge of literature, and even what may be
+called his scholarship, were considerable, and did credit to the public
+school education of those days.</p>
+
+<p>Smollett (1721-1771) differed from his two predecessors in being a
+Scotsman: but in family was very much nearer to Fielding than to
+Richardson, being the grandson of a judge who was a Commissioner of the
+Union, and a gentleman of birth and property&mdash;which last would, had he
+lived long enough, have come to Smollett himself. But he suffered in his
+youth from some indistinctly known family jars, was apprenticed to a
+Glasgow surgeon, and <a name="Page_79" id="Page_79" />escaping thence to London with a tragedy in his
+pocket, was in undoubted difficulties till (and after) he obtained the
+post of surgeon's mate on board a man-of-war, and took part in the
+Carthagena expedition. After coming home he made at least some attempts
+to practise: but was once more drawn off to literature, though
+fortunately not to tragedy. For the rest of his life he was a
+hard-worked but by no means ill-paid journalist, novelist, and
+miscellanist, making as much as &pound;2000 by his <i>History of England</i>, not
+ill-written, though now never read. Like Fielding (though, unlike him,
+more than once) he went abroad in search of health and died in the quest
+at Leghorn. Smollett was not ignorant, but he seems to have known modern
+languages better than ancient: though there is doubt about his direct
+share in the translations to which he gave his name. Moreover he had
+some though no great skill in verse.</p>
+
+<p>Lastly Sterne (1713-1768), though hardly, as it is the custom to call
+him, &quot;an Irishman,&quot; yet vindicated the claims of the third constituent
+of the United Kingdom by being born in Ireland, from which country his
+mother came. But the Sternes were pure English, of a gentle family which
+had migrated from East Anglia through Nottingham to Yorkshire, and was
+much connected with Cambridge. Thither Laurence, the novelist, after a
+very roving childhood (his father was a soldier), and a rather irregular
+education, duly went: and, receiving preferment in the Church from his
+Yorkshire relations, lived for more than twenty years in that county
+without a history, till he took the literary world&mdash;hardly by storm, but
+by a sort of fantastic capful of wind&mdash;with <i>Tristram Shandy</i> in 1760.
+Seven or eight years of fame, some profit, not hard work (for his books
+shrink into no great solid bulk), and constant travelling, ended by a
+sudden death at his<a name="Page_80" id="Page_80" /> Bond Street lodgings, after a long course of
+ill-health very carelessly attended to.</p>
+
+<p>One or two more traits are relevant. All the four were married, and
+married pretty early; two of them married twice. Richardson's first wife
+was, in orthodox fashion, his master's daughter: of his second little is
+known. Fielding's first (he had made a vain attempt earlier to abduct an
+heiress who was a relation) was, by universal consent, the model both of
+Sophia and Amelia, almost as charming as either, and as amiable; his
+second was her maid. Of Mrs. Smollett, who was a Miss Lascelles and a
+West Indian heiress in a small way, we know very little&mdash;the habit of
+identifying her with the &quot;Narcissa&quot; of <i>Roderick Random</i> is natural,
+inconclusive, but not ridiculous. Sterne's matrimonial relations are the
+most famous of all: and though posterity has, with its usual charity,
+constructed a legend for the pair which is probably much worse than the
+reality, that reality is more than a little awkward. Mrs. Sterne was a
+Miss Lumley, of a good Yorkshire family, some, though small, fortune,
+and more friends who exerted themselves for her husband. By inexcusable
+levity, ignorance, misjudgment, or heartless cupidity their daughter
+Lydia published, after the death of both, letters some of which contain
+courtship of the most lackadaisical sentimentality and others later
+expressions (which occasionally reach the scandalous) of weariness and
+disgust on Sterne's part. Other evidence of an indisputable character
+shows that he was, at least and best, an extravagant and mawkish
+philanderer with any girl or woman who would join in a flirtation: and
+while there is no evidence against Mrs. Sterne's character in the
+ordinary sense, and hardly any of value against her temper, she seems
+(which is perhaps <a name="Page_81" id="Page_81" />not wonderful) to have latterly preferred to live
+apart from her husband, and to have put him to considerable, if not
+unreasonable, expenses by her fancy for wandering about France with the
+daughter.</p>
+
+<p>Finally, in general character, Richardson seems to have been a
+respectable person of rather feminine temperament and, though
+good-natured to his friends, endowed with a feminine spitefulness.
+Fielding, though by no means answering to the standard of minor and even
+major morals demanded</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">&quot;by the wise ones,<br /></span>
+<span>By the grave and the precise ones.&quot;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>though reckless and disorderly in his ways and habits, appears to have
+been in the main a thorough gentleman, faithful to truth and honour,
+fearless, compassionate, intolerant of meanness and brutality and of
+treachery most of all&mdash;a man of many faults perhaps, but of no really
+bad or disgusting ones. Concerning Smollett's personality we know least
+of all the four. It was certainly disfigured by an almost savage
+pugnacity of temper; by a strange indifference to what ought to be at
+the lowest the conduct of a gentleman, and by a most repulsive
+inclination&mdash;perhaps natural, but developed by training&mdash;to the merely
+foul and nasty. But he seems to have been brave, charitable though not
+in the most gracious way, honest, and on the whole a much better fellow
+than he might generally seem. Sterne is the most difficult of the four
+to characterise fairly, because of the unlucky revelations to which we
+possess no parallel in the case of the other three, and which, if we had
+them, might probably alter our estimates of a good many now well reputed
+people. It is perhaps enough to say that his letters contain many good
+traits as well as some bad ones; that his unlucky <a name="Page_82" id="Page_82" />portrait, with its
+combination of leer and sneer, is probably responsible for much; and
+that the parts which, as we shall see further, he chose to play, of
+extravagant humorist and extravagant sentimentalist, not only almost
+necessitate attitudes which may easily become offensive in the playing,
+but are very likely, in practice, to communicate something apparently
+not natural and unattractive to the player.</p>
+
+<p>But enough of the workers, though not too much in the case of such
+remarkable contemporary exponents of a new kind of Human Comedy: let us
+go to the work.</p>
+
+<p>In the long &quot;History of the Unexpected,&quot; thick-strewn as it is with
+curiosities, there are few things odder than the appearance and the
+sequels of <i>Pamela: or Virtue Rewarded</i>, which, in circumstances to be
+noted presently, is said to have been begun on November 12, 1739, was
+finished (as far as the first part goes) exactly two months later, and
+(there being, in the case of the author's business, no obstacle of the
+kind that has frequently beset the appearance of greater works) was
+published later in the year 1740. That author was over fifty years old:
+though he had had much to do with ushering literature into the world, he
+had never attempted to produce it; he belonged to a class which was apt
+to regard <i>belles lettres</i> with profound suspicion; and his experiences,
+both in literature itself and in life, had been necessarily of the most
+limited kind. But there were certain counterbalancing facts to be taken
+into consideration which, though they can hardly be said to be <i>causes</i>
+of the marvel&mdash;the cause was the Hour, which hit, as it listed, on the
+Man&mdash;were a little more than accidental occasions of it. Richardson, as
+we see from his work, must have been a rather careful student of such
+novels as there were. The name of his first heroine, with the
+essentially English throwing back of the accent added, is the <a name="Page_83" id="Page_83" />same as
+that of one of Sidney's heroines in the <i>Arcadia</i>, which had been not
+long before modernised for eighteenth-century reading by a certain Mrs.
+Stanley. The not very usual form &quot;Laurana,&quot; which is the name of a
+character in his latest novel, is that of the heroine of <i>Parismus</i>.
+Further, he had had curious early experiences (which we know from his
+own meticulous revelations) of writing love-letters, when he was a mere
+boy, for girl-friends of his to adapt in writing to their lovers. &quot;His
+eye,&quot; he says, &quot;had been always on the ladies,&quot; though no doubt always
+also in the most honourable way. And, quite recently, the
+crystallisation had been precipitated by a commission from two of his
+bookseller (i.e. publisher) patrons&mdash;the founder of the House of
+Rivington and the unlucky Osborne who was knocked down by Johnson and
+picked up (not quite as one would wish to be) by Pope. They asked him to
+prepare a series of &quot;Familiar Letters on the useful concerns of common
+life.&quot; Five-and-twenty years before, he had heard in outline something
+like the story of <i>Pamela</i>. In shaping this into letters he thought it
+might be a &quot;new species of writing that might possibly turn young people
+into a course of reading different from the pomp and parade of
+romance-writing, and dismissing the improbable and marvellous with which
+novels generally abound, might tend to promote the cause of religion and
+virtue.&quot; His wife and &quot;a young lady living with them,&quot; to whom he had
+read some of it, used to come into his little closet every night with,
+&quot;Have you any more of <i>Pamela</i>, Mr. R.?&quot; Two other female friends joined
+in the interest and eulogy. He finished it (that is, the first two
+volumes which contain the whole of the original idea) and published it,
+though at first with the business-like precaution of appearing to &quot;edit&quot;
+only, and the more business-like liberty of liberal <a name="Page_84" id="Page_84" />praise of what he
+edited. It became at once popular: and received the often repeated, but
+to the author very annoying, compliment of piratical continuation. So he
+set to work and continued it himself: as usually (though by no means
+invariably) with rather diminished success. On such points as the
+suggestion that he may have owed a debt to Marivaux (in <i>Marianne</i>) and
+others, little need be said here. I have never had much doubt myself
+that the indebtedness existed: though it would be rash, and is
+unnecessary, to attempt to determine to what extent and in what
+particular form.</p>
+
+<p>It is by no means so difficult as it may at first sight appear to put
+oneself very much in the situation of a contemporary reader of <i>Pamela</i>,
+even if one has read it three or four times, provided that a fairly long
+period has elapsed since the last reading, and that the novels of the
+preceding age are fairly&mdash;and freshly&mdash;familiar. The thing has been in
+fact done&mdash;with unexpected but not in the least deliberate or suspicious
+success&mdash;by the present writer, who has read the book after an interval
+of some fifteen years and just after reading (in some cases again, in
+some for the first time) most of the works noticed in the preceding
+chapter. The difference of &quot;the new species of writing&quot; (one is reminded
+of the description of Spenser as &quot;the new poet&quot;) is almost startling:
+and of a kind which Richardson pretty certainly did not fully apprehend
+when he used the phrase. In order to appreciate it, one must not only
+leave out the two last volumes (which, as has been said, the first
+readers had not before them at all, and had better never have had) but
+also the second, or great part of it, which they would only have reached
+after they had been half whetted, half satiated, and wholly bribed, by
+the first. The defects of this later part and indeed of the first itself
+will be duly <a name="Page_85" id="Page_85" />noticed presently. Let it be to us, for the moment, the
+story of Pamela up to and including &quot;Mr. B.'s&quot; repentance and amendment
+of mind: and the &quot;difference&quot; of this story, which fills some hundred
+and twenty or thirty closely printed, double columned, royal octavo
+pages in the &quot;Ballantyne Novels,&quot; is (despite the awkwardness of such a
+form for the enjoyment of a novel) almost astounding.</p>
+
+<p>To begin with, the novel-attractions are presented with a completeness
+which, as has been pointed out in the last chapter, is almost entirely
+lacking before. There is, of course, not very much plot, in the martinet
+sense of that word: there never was in Richardson, despite his immense
+apparatus and elaboration. The story is not knotted and unknotted; the
+wheel does not come full circle on itself; it merely runs along
+pleasantly till it is time for it to stop, and it stops rather abruptly.
+The siege of Pamela's virtue ends merely because the besieger is tired
+of assaults which fail, and of offering dishonourable terms of
+capitulation which are rejected: because he prefers peace and alliance.
+But such as it is, it is told with a spirit which must have been
+surprising enough to its readers, and which makes it, I confess, seem to
+me now much the best <i>story</i> in Richardson. The various alarums and
+excursions of the siege itself go off smartly and briskly: there may be
+more sequence than connection&mdash;there is <i>some</i> connection, as in the
+case of that most unlucky and ill-treated person the Rev. Mr.
+Williams&mdash;but the sequence is rapid and unbroken, and the constituents
+of it as it were jostle each other&mdash;not in any unfavourable sense, but
+in a sort of rapid dance, &quot;cross hands and down the middle,&quot; which is
+inspiriting and contagious. He lost this faculty later: or rather he
+allowed it to be diluted and slackened into the interminable episodes of
+the not dissimilar though worse-starred plot <a name="Page_86" id="Page_86" />against Clarissa, and the
+<i>massacrant</i> trivialities of the Italian part of <i>Grandison</i>. But he had
+it here: and it is not a fair argument to say (as even in these days I
+have known it said) that Pamela's honour is a commodity of too little
+importance to justify such a pother about it.</p>
+
+<p>This may bring us to the characters. They also are not of the absolutely
+first class&mdash;excepting, as to be discussed later, the great attempt of
+Lovelace, Richardson's never are. But they are an immense advance on the
+personages that did duty as persons in preceding novels, even in Defoe.
+&quot;Mr. B.&quot; himself is indeed not very capital. One does not quite see why
+a man who went on as long as he did and used the means which he
+permitted himself to use, did not go on longer or use them more
+thoroughly. But Richardson has at least vindicated his much-praised
+&quot;knowledge of the human heart&quot; by recognising two truths: first, that
+there are many natures (perhaps most) who are constantly tempted to
+&quot;over-bid&quot;&mdash;to give more and more for something that they want and
+cannot get; and, secondly, that there are others (again, perhaps, the
+majority, if not always the same individuals) who, when they are
+peremptorily told <i>not</i> to do a thing, at once determine to do it. It
+was to Lady Davers mainly that Pamela owed her escape from the fate of
+Clarissa, though she would hardly have taken, or had the chance of
+taking, that fate in the same way. As for the minor characters, at least
+the lower examples are more than sufficient: and Mrs. Jewkes wants very
+little of being a masterpiece. But of course Pamela herself is the
+cynosure, such as there is. She has had rather hard measure with critics
+for the last century and a little more. The questions to ask now are,
+&quot;Is she a probable human being?&quot; and then, &quot;Where are we to find a
+probable human being, worked out to the same degree, before?&quot;<a name="Page_87" id="Page_87" /> I say
+unhesitatingly that the answer to the first is &quot;Yes,&quot; and the answer to
+the second &quot;Nowhere.&quot; The last triumph of originality and individuality
+she does not indeed reach. Richardson had, even more than other men of
+his century in England, a strong Gallic touch: and he always tends to
+the type rather than the individual. Beatrix Esmond is a coquette of the
+highest&mdash;almost of the heroic-poetic&mdash;class, but she is first of all
+Beatrix Esmond. Blanche Amory is a middle-class minx, hardly heroic at
+all, but she is first of all Blanche Amory. Becky Sharp is an
+adventuress who would go pretty close to, and perhaps not stop at,
+positive crime, but she is first of all Becky Sharp. Pamela Andrews is
+not first of all&mdash;perhaps she is hardly at all&mdash;Pamela Andrews. There
+might be fifty or five hundred Pamelas, while there could be only one of
+each of the others. She is the pretty, good-natured, well-principled,
+and rather well-educated menial, whose prudence comes to the aid of her
+principles, whose pride does not interfere with either, and who has a
+certain&mdash;it is hardly unfair to call it&mdash;slyness which is of the sex
+rather than of the individual. But, as such, she is quite admirably
+worked out&mdash;a heroine of Racine in more detail and different
+circumstances, a triumph of art, and at the same time with so much
+nature that it is impossible to dismiss her as merely artificial. The
+nearest thing to her in English prose fiction before (Marianne, of
+course, is closer in French) is Moll Flanders: and good as Moll is, she
+is flat and lifeless in comparison with Pamela. You may call &quot;my
+master's&quot; mistress (actually in the honourable sense, but never in the
+dishonourable) again a minx, though a better minx than Blanche, if you
+like. But there is no animal more alive than a minx: and you will
+certainly not find a specimen of the species in any English novel
+before.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88" />As for description and dialogue, there is not very much of the former
+in <i>Pamela</i>, though it might not be unfair to include under the head
+those details, after the manner of Defoe (such as Pamela's list of
+purchases when she thinks she is going home), which supply their own
+measure of verisimilitude to the story. But there are some things of the
+kind which Defoe never would have thought of&mdash;such as the touches of
+the &quot;tufts of grass&quot; and the &quot;pretty sort of wildflower that grows
+yonder near the elm, the fifth from us on the left,&quot; which occur in the
+gipsy scene. The dialogue plays a much more important part: and may be
+brought into parallel with that in the <i>Polite Conversation</i>, referred
+to above and published just before <i>Pamela</i>. It is &quot;reported&quot; of course,
+instead of being directly delivered, in accordance with the
+letter-scheme of which more presently, but that makes very little
+difference; to the first readers it probably made no difference at all.
+Here again that process of &quot;vivification,&quot; which has been so often dwelt
+on, makes an astonishing progress&mdash;the blood and colour of the novel,
+which distinguish it from the more statuesque narrative, are supplied,
+if indirectly yet sufficiently and, in comparison with previous
+examples, amply. Here you get, almost or quite for the first time in the
+English novel, those spurts and sparks of animation which only the
+living voice can supply. Richardson is a humorist but indirectly; yet
+only the greatest humorists have strokes much better than that admirable
+touch in which, when the &quot;reconciliations and forgivenesses of injuries&quot;
+are being arranged, and Mr. B. (quite in the manner of the time)
+suggests marrying Mrs. Jewkes to the treacherous footman John and giving
+them an inn to keep&mdash;Pamela, the mild and semi-angelic but exceedingly
+feminine Pamela, timidly inquires whether, &quot;This would not look <a name="Page_89" id="Page_89" />like
+very heavy punishment to poor John?&quot; She forgives Mrs. Jewkes of course,
+but only &quot;as a Christian&quot;&mdash;as a greater than Richardson put it
+afterwards and commented on it in the mouth of a personage whom
+Richardson could never have drawn, though Fielding most certainly could.</p>
+
+<p>The original admirers of <i>Pamela</i>, then, were certainly justified: and
+even the rather fatuous eulogies which the author prefixed to it from
+his own and (let us hope) other pens (and which probably provoked
+Fielding himself more than even the substance of the piece) could be
+transposed into a reasonable key. But we ought nowadays to consider this
+first complete English novel from a rather higher point of view, and ask
+ourselves, not merely what its comparative merits were in regard to its
+predecessors, and as presented to its first readers, but what its
+positive character is and what, as far as it goes, are the positive
+merits or defects which it shows in its author.</p>
+
+<p>The first thing to strike one in this connection is, almost of course,
+the letter-form. More agreement has been reached about this, perhaps,
+than about some other points in the inquiry. The initial difficulty of
+fiction which does not borrow the glamour of verse or of the stage is
+the question, &quot;What does all this mean?&quot; &quot;What is the authority?&quot; &quot;How
+does the author know it all?&quot; And a hundred critics have pointed out
+that there are practically only three ways of meeting this. The boldest
+and the best by far is to follow the poet and the dramatist themselves;
+to treat it like one of the magic lions of romance, ignore it, and pass
+on, secure of safety, to tell your story &quot;from the blue,&quot; as if it were
+an actual history or revelation, or something passing before the eyes of
+the reader. But at that time few novelists had the courage to do this,
+daunted as they were by the absence of the sword and shield of <a name="Page_90" id="Page_90" />verse,
+of the vantage-room of the stage. Then there is the alternative of
+recounting it by the mouth of one of the actors in, or spectators of,
+the events&mdash;a plan obvious, early, presenting some advantages, still
+very commonly followed, but always full of little traps and pits of
+improbability, and peculiarly trying in respect to the character (if he
+is made to have any) of the narrator himself. Thirdly, there is the
+again easy resource of the &quot;document&quot; in its various forms. Of these,
+letters and diaries possess some prerogative advantages; and were likely
+to suggest themselves very particularly at this time when the actual
+letter and diary (long rather strangely rare in English) had for some
+generations appeared, and were beginning to be common. In the first
+place the information thus obtained looks natural and plausible: and
+there is a subsidiary advantage&mdash;on which Richardson does not draw very
+much in <i>Pamela</i>, but which he employs to the full later&mdash;that by
+varying your correspondents you can get different views of the same
+event, and first-hand manifestations of extremely different characters.</p>
+
+<p>Its disadvantages, on the other hand, are equally obvious: but there are
+two or three of them of especial importance. In the first place, it is
+essentially an artificial rather than an artful plan&mdash;its want of
+verisimilitude, as soon as you begin to think of it, is as great as that
+of either of the others if not greater. In the second, without immense
+pains, it must be &quot;gappy and scrappy,&quot; while the more these pains are
+taken the more artificial it will become. In the third, the book is
+extremely likely, in the taking of these pains and even without them, to
+become intolerably lengthy and verbose. In the first part at least of
+the first part of <i>Pamela</i>, Richardson avoided these dangers fairly if
+not fully; in the second part he succumbed <a name="Page_91" id="Page_91" />to them; in his two later
+novels, though more elaborate and important plots to some extent bore up
+the expansion, he succumbed to them almost more. Pains have been taken
+above to show how the first readers of <i>Pamela</i> might rejoice in it,
+because of its contrast with the character of the seventeenth-century
+novel which was most read&mdash;the Scud&eacute;ry or &quot;heroic&quot; romance. It is not, I
+think, too severe to say that nothing but the parallel with that
+romance, and the tolerance induced by familiarity with it, could make
+any one put up with the second part of <i>Pamela</i> itself, or with the
+inhumanly prolonged divagation of <i>Clarissa</i> and <i>Grandison</i>. Nor, as
+has been hinted, is the solace of the letters&mdash;in the opportunity of
+setting forth different tempers and styles&mdash;here much taken.</p>
+
+<p>There is no doubt that one main attraction of this letter-plan (whether
+consciously experienced or not does not matter) was its ready adaptation
+to Richardson's own special and peculiar gift of minute analysis of
+mood, temper, and motive. The diary avowedly, and the letter in reality,
+even though it may be addressed to somebody else, is a continuous
+soliloquy: and the novelist can use it with a frequency and to a length
+which would be intolerable and impossible on the stage. Now soliloquy is
+the great engine for self&mdash;revelation and analysis. It is of course to a
+great extent in consequence of this analysis that Richardson owes his
+pride of place in the general judgment. It is quite possible to lay too
+much stress on it, as distinguishing the novel from the romance: and the
+present writer is of opinion that too much stress has actually been
+laid. The real difference between romance <i>per se</i> and novel <i>per se</i>
+(so far as they are capable of distinct existence) is that the romance
+depends more on incident and the novel more on character. Now this
+minute <a name="Page_92" id="Page_92" />analysis and exhibition, though it is one way of drawing or
+constructing character, is not the only, nor even a necessary, one. It
+can be done without: but it has impressed the vulgar, and even some who
+are not the vulgar, from Dr. Johnson to persons whom it is unnecessary
+to mention. They cannot believe that there is &quot;no deception&quot;&mdash;that the
+time is correctly told&mdash;unless the works of the watch are bared to them:
+and this Richardson most undoubtedly does. Even in his 'prentice work,
+every flutter of Pamela's little heart is registered, and registered
+probably enough: nor could the registry have been effected, perhaps, in
+any other way that should be in the least probable so well as by the
+letter and journal method. Of course this analysis was not quite new; it
+had existed in a sort of way in the heroic novel: and it had been
+eminently present in the famous <i>Princesse de Cl&egrave;ves</i> of Madame de la
+Fayette as well as in her French successors. But these stories had
+generally been as short as the heroics had been long: and no one had
+risen (or descended) to anything like the minuteness and fullness of
+Richardson. As was before pointed out in regard to the letter-system
+generally, this method of treatment is exposed to special dangers,
+particularly those of verbosity and &quot;overdoing&quot;&mdash;not to mention the
+greater one of missing the mark. Richardson can hardly be charged with
+error, though he may be with excess, in regard to Pamela herself in the
+earlier part of the book&mdash;perhaps even not in regard to Mr. B.'s
+intricacies of courtship, matrimonial compliment, and arbitrary temper
+later. But he certainly succumbs to them in the long and monstrous scene
+in which Lady Davers bullies, storms at, and positively assaults her
+unfortunate sister-in-law before she is forced to allow that she <i>is</i>
+her sister-in-law. Part of course of his error here comes from the
+<a name="Page_93" id="Page_93" />mistake with which Lady Mary afterwards most justly reproached
+him&mdash;that he talked about fine ladies and gentlemen without knowing
+anything about them. It was quite natural for Lady Davers to be
+disgusted, to be incredulous, to be tyrannical, to be in a certain sense
+violent. But it is improbable that she would in any case have spoken and
+behaved like a drunken fishfag quarrelling with another in the street:
+and the extreme prolongation of the scene brings its impropriety more
+forcibly into view. Here, as elsewhere (a point of great importance to
+which I may invite attention), Richardson follows out, with
+extraordinary minuteness and confidence, a wrong course: and his very
+expertness in the process betrays him and brings him to grief. If he had
+run the false scent for a few yards only it would not matter: in a chase
+prolonged to something like &quot;Hartleap Well&quot; extension there is less
+excuse for his not finding it out. Nevertheless it would of course be
+absurd not to rank this &quot;knowledge of the human heart&quot; among the claims
+which not only gave him but have kept his reputation. I do not know that
+he shows it much less in the later part of the first two volumes
+(Pamela's recurrent tortures of jealous curiosity about Sally Godfrey
+are admirable) or even in the dreary sequel. But analysis for analysis'
+sake can have few real, though it may have some pretended, devotees.</p>
+
+<p>The foregoing remarks have been designed, less as a criticism of
+<i>Pamela</i> (which would be unnecessary here), or even of Richardson (which
+would be more in place, but shall be given in brief presently), than as
+an account and justification of the book's position in the real subject
+of this volume&mdash;the History of the English Novel. And this account will
+dispense us from dealing, at corresponding length, with the individually
+more important but histori<a name="Page_94" id="Page_94" />cally subordinate books which followed. Of
+these <i>Clarissa</i>, as few people can be ignorant, is a sort of enlarged,
+diversified, and transposed <i>Pamela</i>, in which the attempts of a
+libertine of more resolution and higher gifts than Mr. B. upon a young
+lady of much more than proportionately higher station and qualities than
+Pamela's, are&mdash;as such success goes&mdash;successful at last: but only to
+result in the death of the victim and the punishment of the criminal.
+The book is far longer than even the extended <i>Pamela</i>; has a much wider
+range; admits of episodes and minor plots, and is altogether much more
+ambitious; but still&mdash;though the part of the seducer Lovelace is much
+more important than that of Mr. B.&mdash;it is chiefly occupied with the
+heroine. In <i>Sir Charles Grandison</i>, on the contrary, though no less
+than three heroines exist after a fashion and are carefully treated, the
+author's principal object is to depict&mdash;in direct contrast to Mr. B. and
+Lovelace&mdash;a &quot;Good Man&quot;&mdash;the actual first title of the book, which he
+wisely altered. This faultless and insufferable monster is frantically
+beloved by, and hesitates long between, two beauties, the Italian
+Clementina della Porretta and the English Harriet Byron. The latter of
+these carries him off (rather because of religious difficulties than of
+any great predilection on his own part) and the piece ends with a
+repetition, extension, and intensification of the bounties showered upon
+Pamela by her husband, and her almost abject gratitude for them. Only of
+course &quot;the good man&quot; could never be guilty of Mr. B.'s meditated
+relapse from the path of rectitude, nor (one may perhaps add) does Miss
+Byron seem to possess the insinuating astuteness by which Pamela once
+more</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span>&quot;Reconciles the new perverted man,&quot;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>to adapt the last line of <i>A Lover's Complaint</i> to the situation.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95" /><i>Grandison</i>, like <i>Clarissa</i>, has a much wider range of personage and
+incident than <i>Pamela</i>, and is again double the length of it. No
+detailed criticism of these enormous books (both of which are conducted
+in the letter-form, though, in the latter case especially, with long
+retrospects and narratives which rather strain the style) is possible
+here. But a few remarks on the characters of Lovelace and Clarissa,
+which have usually been regarded as Richardson's greatest triumphs, may
+fitly precede some on his whole character as a novelist.</p>
+
+<p>Admiration and sympathy, tempered with a few reserves, have been the
+general notes of comment on Clarissa: and&mdash;as she goes through the long
+martyrdom of persecution by her family for not marrying the man she does
+not love; of worse persecution from the man whom she does love, but who
+will not marry her, at least until he has conquered her virtue; and of
+perhaps worst when she feels it her duty to resist his repentant and (as
+such things go) honourable proffers after he has treacherously deprived
+her of technical honour&mdash;compassion at least is impossible to refuse.
+But &quot;compassion,&quot; though it literally translates &quot;sympathy&quot; from Greek
+into Latin, is not its synonym in English. It is a disagreeable thing to
+have to say: but Clarissa's purity strikes one as having at once too
+much questionable prudery in it and too little honest prudence: while
+her later resolution has as much false pride as real principle. Even
+some of her admirers admit a want of straightforwardness in her; she has
+no passion, which rather derogates from the merit of her conduct in any
+case; and though she is abominably ill-treated by almost everybody,
+one's pity for her never comes very near to love.</p>
+
+<p>Towards Lovelace, on the other hand, the orthodox attitude, with even
+greater uniformity, has been shocked, <a name="Page_96" id="Page_96" />or sometimes even unshocked,
+admiration. Hazlitt went into frequently quoted raptures over the
+&quot;regality&quot; of his character: and though to approve of him as a man would
+only be the pretence of a cheap paradoxer, general opinion seems to have
+gone various lengths in the same direction. There have, however, been a
+few dissenters: and I venture to join myself to them in the very
+dissidence of their dissent. Lovelace, it is true, is a most
+astonishingly &quot;succeeded&quot; blend of a snob's fine gentleman and of the
+fine gentleman of a silly and rather unhealthy-minded schoolgirl. He
+is&mdash;it is difficult to resist the temptation of dropping and inserting
+the h's&mdash;handsome, haughty, arbitrary, as well as rich, generous after a
+fashion, well descended, well dressed, well mannered&mdash;except when he is
+insolent. He is also&mdash;which certainly stands to his credit in the bank
+which is not that of the snob or the schoolgirl&mdash;no fool in a general
+way. But he is not in the least a gentleman except in externals: and
+there is nothing really &quot;great&quot; about him at all. Even his scoundrelism
+is mostly, if not wholly, <i>pose</i>&mdash;which abominable thing indeed
+distinguishes him throughout, in every speech and every act, from the
+time when he sighs as he kisses Miss Arabella Harlowe's hand to the time
+when he says, &quot;Let this expiate!&quot; as that hallowed sword of Colonel
+Morden's passes through his rotten heart. Now if Richardson had <i>meant</i>
+this, it might be granted at once that Lovelace is one of the greatest
+characters of fiction: and I do not deny that <i>taken as this</i>, meant or
+not meant, he is great. But Richardson obviously did <i>not</i> mean it; and
+Hazlitt did not mean it; and none of the admirers mean it. <i>They</i> all
+thought and think that Lovelace is something like what Milton's Satan
+was, and what my Lord Byron would have liked to be. This is very unfair
+to the Prince of<a name="Page_97" id="Page_97" /> Darkness: and it is even not quite just to &quot;the noble
+poet.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>At the same time, the acute reader will have noticed, the acknowledgment
+that the fact that Richardson&mdash;even not knowing it and intending to do
+something else&mdash;did hit off perfectly and consummately the ideal of such
+a &quot;prevailing party&quot; (to quote Lord Foppington) as snobs and
+schoolgirls, is a serious and splendid tribute to his merits: as is also
+the fact that his two chief characters are characters still interesting
+and worth arguing about. Those merits, indeed, are absolutely
+incontestable. His immediate and immense popularity, abroad as well as
+at home, would not necessarily prove much, though it must not be
+neglected, and historically, at least, is of the first importance. But
+he does not need it.</p>
+
+<p>For, as should have been sufficiently shown, he did very great
+things&mdash;first by gathering up the scattered means and methods which had
+been half ignorantly hit on by others, and co-ordinating them into the
+production of the finished and complete novel; secondly (though less) by
+that infusion of elaborate &quot;minor psychology&quot; as it may be called, which
+is his great characteristic; and, thirdly, by means of it and of other
+things, in raising the pitch of interest in his readers to an infinitely
+higher degree than had ever been known before. The dithyrambs of Diderot
+are, though not ridiculously, amusingly excessive: but they are only an
+exaggeration of the truth. On the comic side he was weak: and he made a
+most unfortunate mistake by throwing this part of the business on young
+ladies of position and (as he thought) of charm&mdash;Miss Darnford, Miss
+Howe, Charlotte Grandison&mdash;who are by no means particularly comic and
+who are sometimes very particularly vulgar. But of tragedy positive, in
+the <i>bourgeois</i> kind, he <a name="Page_98" id="Page_98" />had no small command, and in the middle
+business&mdash;in affairs neither definitely comic nor definitely tragic&mdash;he
+was wonderfully prolific and facile. His immense and heart-breaking
+lengthiness is not <i>mere</i> verbosity: it comes partly from the artist's
+natural delight in a true and newly found method, partly from a still
+more respectably artistic desire not to do the work negligently. As for
+the unhealthiness of atmosphere which has been generally and not
+unjustly charged upon him, it is, in part, no doubt the result of
+imperfect temperament and breeding: but it is also as closely connected
+with his very method as are the merits thereof. You cannot &quot;consider so
+curiously&quot; without considering too curiously. The drawbacks of his work
+are obvious, and they were likely to be, and were, exaggerated. But they
+might be avoided and the merits kept: nor is it too much to say that the
+triumphs of the English novel in the last century have been not a little
+due to the avoidance of the one and the keeping of the other.</p>
+
+<p>It would be, in the circumstances, peculiarly uncivil and disobliging
+to lay very much stress on the fact that, after all, the greatest
+of Richardson's works is his successor, caricaturist, and
+superior&mdash;Fielding. When the memoirs of Miss Pamela Andrews appeared,
+the future biographer of her doubly supposititious brother was a not
+very young man of thirty-three, who had written a good many not very
+good plays, had contributed to periodicals, and had done a little work
+at the Bar, besides living, at least till his marriage and it may be
+feared later, an exceedingly &quot;rackety&quot; life. It is not improbable,
+though it is not certain, that he had already turned his attention to
+prose fiction of a kind. For, though the <i>Miscellanies</i> which followed
+<i>Joseph Andrews</i> were three years later than<a name="Page_99" id="Page_99" /> <i>Pamela</i> in appearance,
+the <i>Journey from this World to the Next</i> which they contain has the
+immaturity of earliness; and we can hardly conceive it as written after
+the adventures and character of Mr. Abraham Adams. It is unequal, rather
+tedious in parts, and in conception merely a <i>pastiche</i> of Lucian and
+Fontenelle: but it contains some remarkable things in the way of shrewd
+satirical observation of human nature. And the very fact that it is a
+following of something else is interesting, in connection with the
+infinitely more important work that preceded it in publication, <i>The
+Adventures of Joseph Andrews and his Friend Mr. Abraham Adams</i> (1742).</p>
+
+<p>Nobody has ever had much difficulty in accounting for the way in which
+Fielding availed himself of the appearance and popularity of <i>Pamela</i>.
+And though Richardson would have been superhuman instead of very human
+indeed (with an ordinary British middle-class humanity, and an
+extraordinary vein of genius) if he had done otherwise, few have joined
+him in thinking <i>Joseph</i> a &quot;lewd and ungenerous engraftment.&quot; We have
+not ourselves been very severe on the faults of <i>Pamela</i>, the reason of
+lenity being, among other things, that it in a manner produced Fielding,
+and all the fair herd of his successors down to the present day. But
+those faults are glaring: and they were of a kind specially likely to
+attract the notice and the censure of a genial, wholesome, and, above
+all, masculine taste and intellect like Fielding's. Even at that time,
+libertine as it was in some ways, and sentimental as it was in others,
+people had not failed to notice that Pamela's virtue is not quite what
+was then called &quot;neat&quot; wine&mdash;the pure and unadulterated juice of the
+grape. The <i>longueurs</i> and the fiddle-faddle, the shameless and fulsome
+preface-advertisements and the rest lay open enough to <a name="Page_100" id="Page_100" />censure. So
+Fielding saw the handles, and gripped them at once by starting a <i>male</i>
+Pamela&mdash;a situation not only offering &quot;most excellent differences,&quot; but
+in itself possessing, to graceless humanity at all times it may be
+feared, and at that time perhaps specially, something essentially
+ludicrous in minor points. At first he kept the parody very close:
+though the necessary transposition of the parts afforded opportunity
+(amply taken) for display of character and knowledge of nature superior
+to Richardson's own. Later the general opinion is that he, especially
+inspirited by his <i>trouvaille</i> of Adams, almost forgot the parody, and
+only furbished up the <i>Pamela</i>-connection at the end to make a formal
+correspondence with the beginning, and to get a convenient and
+conventional &quot;curtain.&quot; I am not so sure of this. Even Adams is to a
+certain extent suggested by Williams, though they turn out such very
+different persons. Mrs. Slipslop, a character, as Gray saw, not so very
+far inferior to Adams, is not only a parallel to Mrs. Jewkes, but also,
+and much more, a contrast to the respectable Mrs. Jervis and Mrs.
+Warden. All sorts of fantastic and not-fantastic doublets may be traced
+throughout: and I am not certain that Parson Trulliber's majestic
+doctrine that no man, even in his own house, shall drink when he &quot;caaled
+vurst&quot; is not a demoniacally ingenious travesty of Pamela's
+characteristic casuistry, when she says that she will do anything to
+propitiate Lady Davers, but she will not &quot;fill wine&quot; to her in her own
+husband's house.</p>
+
+<p>But this matters little: and we have no room for it. Suffice it as
+agreed and out of controversy that <i>Joseph Andrews</i> started as a parody
+of <i>Pamela</i> and that, whether in addition or in substitution, it turned
+to something very different. It is not quite so uncontroversial, but
+will be <a name="Page_101" id="Page_101" />asserted here as capable of all but demonstration, that the
+&quot;something different&quot; is also something much greater. There is still not
+very much plot&mdash;the parody did not necessitate and indeed rather
+discouraged that, and what there is is arrived at chiefly by the old and
+seldom very satisfactory system of <i>anagnorisis</i>&mdash;the long-lost-child
+business. But, under the three other heads, Joseph distances his sister
+hopelessly and can afford her much more than weight for sex. It has been
+said that there are doubtfully in Richardson anywhere, and certainly not
+in <i>Pamela</i>, those startling creations of personality which are almost
+more real to us than the persons we know in the flesh. It is not that
+Pamela and her meyney are <i>un</i>real; for they are not: but that they are
+not personal. The Reverend Abraham Adams is a good deal more real than
+half the parsons who preached last Sunday, and a good deal more
+personal: and the quality is not confined to him, though he has most of
+it. So, too, with the description. The time was not yet for any minute
+or elaborate picture-setting. But here again also that extra dose of
+life and action&mdash;almost of bustle&mdash;which Fielding knows how to instil is
+present. In <i>Pamela</i> the settings are frequent, but they are &quot;still
+life&quot; and rather shadowy: we do not <i>see</i> the Bedfordshire and
+Lincolnshire mansions, the summer houses where (as she observes with
+demure relish when the danger is over) Mr. B. was &quot;very naughty;&quot; even
+the pond where, if she had been another sort of girl, the <i>drame</i> might
+have become real tragedy. Fielding does not take very much more trouble
+and yet somehow we <i>do</i> see it all, with a little help from our own
+imaginations perhaps, but on his suggestion and start. Especially the
+outdoor life and scenes&mdash;the inn-yards and the high roads and the downs
+by night or day; the pig-sty where poor Adams is <a name="Page_102" id="Page_102" />the victim of live
+pigs and the public-house kitchen where he succumbs to a by-product of
+dead ones&mdash;these are all real for us.</p>
+
+<p>But most of all is the regular progress of vivification visible in the
+dialogue. This, as we have seen, had been the very weakest point of the
+weakness of almost all (we might say of all) English novels up to the
+close of the first quarter of the eighteenth century. Richardson had
+done a great deal for it: but it was impossible that, on his method, it
+should not, for the most part, be languid, or at any rate long-winded.
+Here again Fielding spirits the thing up&mdash;oxygenates and ozonises the
+atmosphere: while, in even fuller measure than his predecessor and
+victim, he recognises the efficacy of dialogue as the revealer of
+character. He has, assisted no doubt by Shakespeare and his own dramatic
+practice, discovered that you do not want volumes of it to do the
+business&mdash;that single moments and single sentences will do that business
+at times, if they are used in the proper way.</p>
+
+<p>In short, Fielding here used his reluctant and indignant forerunner as a
+spring-board, whence to attain heights which that forerunner could never
+have reached: he &quot;stood upon his shoulders&quot; in the most cavalier but
+also the most successful fashion. In the novel as Richardson knew it and
+was thinking of it, when he began <i>Pamela</i>, you were, as a rule, in an
+artificial world altogether&mdash;a world artificial with an artificiality
+only faintly and occasionally touched with any reality at all. In
+<i>Pamela</i> itself there is perhaps nothing, and certainly not much, that
+is <i>wholly</i> unreal: but the reality is treated and rendered in an
+artificial way. In <i>Joseph Andrews</i>, though its professed genesis and
+procedure are artificial too, you break away at once from serious
+artifice. These are all real people who <a name="Page_103" id="Page_103" />do real things in a real way
+now, as they did nearly two hundred years ago: however much dress, and
+speech, and manners may have changed. And we are told of their doings in
+a real way, too. Exactly how the teller knew it we do not know: but we
+do not think of this at all. And on the other hand there is no perpetual
+reminder of art, like the letter-ending and beginning, to disturb or
+alloy the once and gladly accepted &quot;suspension of disbelief.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>A slight digression may not be improper here. Even in their own days,
+when the <i>gros mot</i> was much less shocking than it is now, there was a
+general notion&mdash;which has more or less persisted, in spite of all
+changes of fashion in this respect, and exists even now when licence of
+subject as distinguished from phrase has to a great extent
+returned&mdash;that Fielding is more &quot;coarse,&quot; more &quot;improper,&quot; and so forth
+than Richardson. As a matter of fact, neither admits positively indecent
+language&mdash;that had gone out, except in the outskirts and fringes of
+English literature, generations earlier. But I am much mistaken if there
+are not in Richardson more than a few scenes and situations the
+&quot;impropriety&quot; of which positively exceeds anything in Fielding.
+Naturally one does not give indications: but readers may be pretty
+confident about the fact. The comparative &quot;bloodlessness,&quot; however&mdash;the
+absence of life and colour in the earlier and older writer&mdash;acts as a
+sort of veil to them.</p>
+
+<p>Yet (to return to larger and purer air), however much one may admire
+<i>Joseph Andrews</i>, the kind of <i>parasitic</i> representation which it allows
+itself, and the absence of any attempt to give an original story tells
+against it. And it may, in any case, be regarded as showing that the
+novelist, even yet, was hugging the shore or allowing himself to be
+taken in tow&mdash;that he did not dare to launch out <a name="Page_104" id="Page_104" />into the deep and
+trust to his own sails and the wind of nature to propel him&mdash;to his own
+wits and soul to guide. Even Fielding's next venture&mdash;the wonderful and
+almost unique venture of <i>Jonathan Wild</i>&mdash;leaves some objection of this
+sort possible, though, for myself, I should never dream of admitting it.
+Jonathan was (so much the worse for human nature) a real person: and the
+outlines of his story&mdash;if not the actual details&mdash;are given partly by
+his actual life, partly by Gay's <i>Beggar's Opera</i> and its sequel.
+Moreover, the whole marvellous little book has a purpose&mdash;the purpose of
+satire on false ideas of greatness, historical and political. The
+invention and the art of the writer are not even yet allowed frank and
+free course.</p>
+
+<p>But though criticism will allow this, it will, if it be competent and
+courageous, allow no deduction to be made from the other greatness of
+this little masterpiece. It has never been popular; it is never likely
+to be popular; and one may almost say that it is sincerely to be hoped
+that it never will be popular. For if it were, either all the world
+would be scoundrels, which would be a pity: or all the world would be
+philosophers and persons of taste, in which case it would be impossible,
+as the famous story has it, to &quot;look down on one's fellow-creatures from
+a proper elevation.&quot; It really is a novel and a remarkable one&mdash;superior
+even to <i>Vanity Fair</i>, according to Thackeray's own definition, as a
+delineation of &quot;a set of people living without God in the world.&quot; But it
+is even more (and here its only parallel is <i>A Tale of a Tub</i>, which is
+more desultory and much more of a <i>fatrasie</i> or salmagundy of odds and
+ends) a masterpiece and quintessential example of irony. Irony had come
+in with the plain prose style, without which it is almost impossible:
+and not merely Swift but others had done great things with it. It is,
+however, only <a name="Page_105" id="Page_105" />here that it reaches the quintessence just spoken of with
+a coherent and substantive purpose to serve as vehicle for it. It is
+possibly too strong for most people's taste: and one may admit that, for
+anything like frequent enjoyment, it wants a certain admixture of the
+fantastic in its various senses&mdash;after the method of Voltaire in one
+way, of Beckford in another, of Peacock in a third, of Disraeli in a
+fourth&mdash;to make it acceptable to more than a very few. But it shows,
+even from our present limited point of view, of what immense and exalted
+application the novel-method was capable: and it shows also the
+astonishing powers of its author. &quot;Genial,&quot; in the usual sense, it
+certainly cannot be called; in the proper sense as equalling &quot;what is
+the production of genius&quot; there are few books which deserve the term
+better. But it is an exercise in a by-way of the novel road-system,
+though an early proof of the fact that such by-ways are endlessly open.</p>
+
+<p>But the time was coming, though it did not (and could hardly) come very
+quickly, when Fielding was to discard all kinds of adventitious aids and
+suggestions&mdash;all crutches, spring-boards, go-carts, tugs, patterns,
+tracings&mdash;and go his own way&mdash;and the Way of the Novel&mdash;with no guidance
+but something of the example of Cervantes directly and Shakespeare
+indirectly among the moderns, and of the poetic fiction-writers of old.
+It is perfectly clear that he had thought widely (and perhaps had read
+not a little) on the subject of literary criticism, in a sense not
+common in his day, and that the thinking had led him to a conception of
+the &quot;prose epic&quot; which, though it might have been partly (not wholly by
+any means) pieced out of the Italian and Spanish critics of the late
+sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, had never been worked out as
+a complete theory, much less applied in practice and to <a name="Page_106" id="Page_106" />prose. The
+Prose Epic aims at&mdash;and in Fielding's case has been generally admitted
+to have hit&mdash;something like the classical unity of main action. But it
+borrows from the romance-idea the liberty of a large accretion and
+divagation of minor and accessory plot:&mdash;not the mere &quot;episode&quot; of the
+ancients, but the true minor plot of Shakespeare. It assumes,
+necessarily and once for all, the licence of tragi-comedy, in that sense
+of the term in which <i>Much Ado About Nothing</i> and <i>A Winter's Tale</i> are
+tragi-comedies, and in which <i>Othello</i> itself might have been made one.
+And it follows further in the wake of the Shakespearean drama by
+insisting far more largely than ancient literature of any kind, and far
+more than any modern up to its date except drama had done, on the
+importance of Character. Description and dialogue are rather subordinate
+to these things than on a level with them&mdash;but they are still further
+worked out than before. And there is a new element&mdash;perhaps suggested by
+the <i>parabasis</i> of ancient comedy, but, it may be, more directly by the
+peculiar method of Swift in <i>A Tale of a Tub</i>. At various places in his
+narrative, but especially at the beginnings of books and chapters,
+Fielding as it were &quot;calls a halt&quot; and addresses his readers on matters
+more or less relevant to the story, but rather in the manner of a
+commentator and scholiast upon it than as actual parts of it. Of this
+more later: for the immediate purpose is to survey and not to criticise.</p>
+
+<p>The result of all this was <i>Tom Jones</i>&mdash;by practically universal consent
+one of the capital books of English literature. It is unnecessary to
+recapitulate the famous praises of Gibbon, of Coleridge, of Byron, and
+of others: and it is only necessary to deal briefly with the complaints
+which, if they have never found such monumental expres<a name="Page_107" id="Page_107" />sion as the
+praises, have been sometimes widely entertained. These objections&mdash;as
+regards interest&mdash;fasten partly on the address-digressions, partly on
+the great inset-episode of &quot;The Man of the Hill:&quot; as regards morality on
+a certain alleged looseness of principle in that respect throughout, and
+especially on the licence of conduct accorded to the hero himself and
+the almost entire absence of punishment for it. As for the first, &quot;The
+Man of the Hill&quot; was partly a concession to the fancy of the time for
+such things, partly a following of such actual examples as Fielding
+admitted&mdash;for it need hardly be said that the inset-episode, of no or
+very slight connection with the story, is common both in the ancients
+and in Cervantes, while it is to be found as long after Fielding as in
+the early novel-work of Dickens. The digression-openings are at least as
+satisfactory to some as they are unsatisfactory to others; it is even
+doubtful whether they annoy anybody half so much as they have delighted
+some excellent judges. The other point is well worn: but the wearing has
+not taken off its awkwardness and unsavouriness. Difference of habit and
+manners at the time will account for much: but the wiser apologists will
+simply say that Fielding's attitude to certain deviations from the
+strict moral law was undoubtedly very indulgent, provided that such
+deviations were unaccompanied by the graver and more detestable vices of
+cruelty, treachery, and fraud&mdash;that to vice which was accompanied by
+these blacker crimes he was utterly merciless; and that if he is thus
+rather exposed to the charge of &quot;compounding by damning&quot;&mdash;in the famous
+phrase&mdash;the things that he damned admit of no excuse and those that he
+compounded for have been leniently dealt with by all but the sternest
+moralists.</p>
+
+<p>Such things are, however (in the admirable French sense),<a name="Page_108" id="Page_108" />
+<i>mis&egrave;res</i>&mdash;wretched petty cavils and shallows of criticism. The only
+sensible thing to do is to launch out with Fielding into that deep and
+open sea of human character and fate which he dared so gloriously.
+During the curious phase of literary opinion which the last twenty years
+or so have seen, it has apparently been discovered by some people that
+his scheme of human thought and feeling is too simple&mdash;&quot;toylike&quot; I think
+they call it&mdash;in comparison with that, say, of Count Tolstoi or of Mr.
+Meredith, that modern practice has reached a finer technique than his or
+even than that of his greatest follower, Thackeray. Far be it from the
+present writer to say, or to insinuate, anything disrespectful of the
+great moderns who have lately left us. Yet it may be said without the
+slightest disrespect to them that the unfavourable comparison is mainly
+a revival of Johnson's mistake as to Fielding and Richardson. It is,
+however, something more&mdash;for it comes also from a failure to estimate
+aright the <i>parabasis</i>-openings which have been more than once referred
+to. These passages do not perhaps exhibit the by-work and the process in
+the conspicuous skeleton-clock fashion which their critics admire and
+desire, but they contain an amount of acute and profound exploration of
+human nature which it would be difficult to match and impossible to
+surpass elsewhere: while the results of Fielding's working, of his
+&quot;toylike&quot; scheme, are remarkable toys indeed&mdash;toys which, if we regard
+them as such, must surely strike us as rather uncanny. One is sometimes
+constrained to think that it is perhaps not much more difficult to make
+than to recognise a thoroughly live character. It certainly must be very
+difficult to do the latter if there is any considerable number of
+persons who are unable to do it in the case of almost every one of the
+personages of <i>Tom Jones</i>. With <a name="Page_109" id="Page_109" />one possible exception they are all
+alive&mdash;even more so than those of <i>Joseph Andrews</i> and with a less
+peculiar and limited liveliness than those of <i>Jonathan Wild</i>. But it
+certainly is curious that as the one good man of <i>Jonathan</i>, Heartfree,
+is the least alive of its personages, so the one bad man of <i>Tom</i>,
+Blifil, occupies the same position.</p>
+
+<p>The result of this variety and abundance of life is an even more than
+corresponding opportunity for enjoyment. This enjoyment may arise in
+different persons from different sources. The much praised and seldom
+cavilled at unity and completeness of the story may appeal to some.
+There are others who are inclined towards elaborate plots as Sam Weller
+was to the &quot;'rig'nal&quot; of his subpoena. It was a &quot;gratifyin' sort o'
+thing, and eased his mind&quot; to be aware of its existence, and that was
+all. These latter find <i>their</i> sources of enjoyment elsewhere, but
+everywhere else. The abundance and the vividness of character-presentation;
+the liveliness and the abundance of the staging of that character; the
+variety of scene and incident&mdash;all most properly connected with the plot,
+but capable of existing and of being felt without it; the human dialogue;
+the admirable phrase in that dialogue and out of it, in the digressions, in
+the narrative, above, and through, and about, and below it all&mdash;these
+things and others (for it is practically impossible to exhaust the
+catalogue) fill up the cup to the brim, and keep it full, for the
+born lover of the special novel-pleasure.</p>
+
+<p>In one point only was Fielding a little unfortunate perhaps: and even
+here the &quot;perhaps&quot; has to be underlined. He came just before the end of
+a series of almost imperceptible changes in ordinary English speech
+which brought about something like a stationary state. His maligner and
+only slightly younger contemporary, Horace Walpole, <a name="Page_110" id="Page_110" />in some of his
+letters, writes in a fashion which, putting mere slang aside, has hardly
+any difference from that of to-day. Fielding still uses &quot;hath&quot; for &quot;has&quot;
+and a few other things which seem archaic, not to students of literature
+but to the general. In the same way dress, manners, etc., though much
+more picturesque, were by that fact distinguished from those of almost
+the whole nineteenth century and the twentieth as far as it has gone:
+while incidents were, even in ordinary life, still usual which have long
+ceased to be so. In this way the immense advance&mdash;greater than was made
+by any one else till Miss Austen&mdash;that he made in the pure novel of this
+ordinary life may be missed. But the intrinsic magnificence, interest,
+nature, abundance of <i>Tom Jones</i> can only be missed by those who were
+predestined to miss them. It is tempting&mdash;but the temptation must be
+resisted&mdash;to enliven these pages with an abstract of its astonishing
+&quot;biograph-panorama.&quot; But nothing save itself can do it justice. &quot;Take
+and read&quot; is the only wise advice.</p>
+
+<p>No such general agreement has been reached in respect of Fielding's last
+novel, <i>Amelia</i>. The author's great adversary, Johnson&mdash;an adversary
+whose hostility was due partly to generous and grateful personal
+relations with Richardson, partly to political disagreement (for
+Fielding was certainly &quot;a vile Whig&quot;), but most of all perhaps to a sort
+of horrified recoil from the novelist's easy handling of temptations
+which were no easy matter to his critic&mdash;was nearly if not quite
+propitiated by it: and the enthusiasm for it of such a &quot;cynic&quot; as
+Thackeray is well known. Of the very few persons whom it would not be
+ridiculous to name with these, Scott&mdash;whose competence in criticising
+his own art is one of the most wonderful though the least generally
+recognised things about him&mdash;inclines, in the <a name="Page_111" id="Page_111" />interesting
+Introduction-Dialogue to <i>The Fortunes of Nigel</i>, to put it on a level
+with <i>Tom Jones</i> itself as a perfectly constructed novel. But modern
+criticism has, rightly or wrongly, been more dubious. Amelia is almost
+too perfect: her very forgiveness (it has been suggested) would be more
+interesting if she had not almost completely shut her eyes to there
+being anything to forgive. Her husband seems to us to prolong the
+irresponsibility of youth, which was pardonable in Tom, to a period of
+life and to circumstances of enforced responsibility which make us
+rather decline to honour the drafts he draws; and he is also a little
+bit of a fool, which Tom, to do him justice, is not, though he is
+something of a scatterbrain. Dr. Harrison, whose alternate wrath and
+reconciliation supply the most important springs of the plot, is, though
+a natural, a rather unreasonable person. The &quot;total impression&quot; has even
+been pronounced by some people to be a little dull. What there is of
+truth in these criticisms and others (which it would be long even to
+summarise) may perhaps be put briefly under two heads. It is never so
+easy to arouse interest in virtue as it is in vice: or in weak and
+watered vice as in vice rectified (or <i>un</i>rectified) to full strength.
+And the old requirement of &quot;the quest&quot; is one which will hardly be
+dispensed with. Here (for we know perfectly well that Amelia's virtue is
+in no danger) there is no quest, except that of the fortune which ought
+to be hers, which at last comes to her husband, and which we are told
+(and hope rather doubtfully) that husband had at last been taught&mdash;by
+the Fool's Tutor, Experience&mdash;not utterly to throw away. But this
+fortune drops in half casually at the last by a series of stage
+accidents, not ill-machined by any means, but not very particularly
+interesting.</p>
+
+<p>Such, however, are the criticisms which Fielding himself <a name="Page_112" id="Page_112" />has taught
+people to make, by the very excellence of his success in the earlier
+novels: and there is a certain comparative and relative validity in
+them. But consider <i>Amelia</i> in itself, and they begin to look, if not
+positively unfounded, rather unimportant. Once more, the astonishing
+truth and variety of scene and character make themselves felt&mdash;even more
+felt&mdash;even felt in new directions. The opening prison scenes exceed
+anything earlier even in Fielding himself, much more in any one else, as
+examples of the presentation of the unfamiliar. Miss Matthews&mdash;whom
+Fielding has probably abstained from working out as much as he might
+lest she should, from the literary point of view, obscure Amelia&mdash;is a
+marvellous outline; Colonels James and Bath are perfectly finished
+studies of ordinary and extraordinary &quot;character&quot; in the stage sense. No
+novel even of the author's is fuller of <i>vignettes</i>&mdash;little pictures of
+action and behaviour, of manners and society, which are not in the least
+irrelevant to the general story, but on the contrary extra-illustrate
+and carry it out.</p>
+
+<p>While, therefore, we must in no way recede from the position above
+adopted in regard to Richardson, we may quite consistently accord an
+even higher place to Fielding. He relieved the novel of the tyranny and
+constraint of the Letter; he took it out of the rut of confinement to a
+single or a very limited class of subjects&mdash;for the themes of <i>Pamela</i>
+and <i>Clarissa</i> to a very large extent, of <i>Pamela</i> and <i>Grandison</i> to a
+considerable one, and of all three to an extent not small, are
+practically the same. He gave it altogether a larger, wider, higher,
+deeper range. He infused in it (or restored to it) the refreshing and
+preserving element of humour. He peopled it with a great crowd of lively
+and interesting characters&mdash;endowed, almost without <a name="Page_113" id="Page_113" />regard to their
+technical &quot;position <i>in</i> life,&quot; with unlimited possession <i>of</i> life. He
+shook up its pillows, and bustled its business arrangements. He first
+gave it&mdash;for in matter of prose style Richardson has few resources, and
+those rather respectable than transporting, and decidedly
+monotonous&mdash;the attractions of pure literature in form, and in pretty
+various form. He also gave it the attraction of pure comedy, only
+legitimately salted with farce, in such personages as Adams and
+Partridge; of lower and more farcical, but still admirable comedy in
+Slipslop and Trulliber and Squire Western; of comedy almost romantic and
+certainly charming in Sophia; of domestic drama in Amelia; of satiric
+portraiture in a hundred figures from the cousins (respectable and
+disreputable), Miss Western and Lady Bellaston, downwards. He stocked it
+with infinite miscellanies of personage, and scene, and picture, and
+phrase. As has happened in one or two other cases, he carried, at least
+in the opinion of the present writer, the particular art as far as it
+will go. He did not indeed leave nothing for his successors to do&mdash;on
+the contrary he left them in a sense everything&mdash;for he showed how
+everything could be done. But if he has sometimes been equalled, he has
+never been surpassed: and it is not easy to see even how he can be
+surpassed. For as his greatest follower has it somewhere, though not of
+him, &quot;You cannot beat the best, you know.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>One point only remains, the handling of which may complete a treatment
+which is designedly kept down in detail. It has been hinted at already,
+perhaps more than once, but has not been brought out. This is the
+enormous range of suggestion in Fielding&mdash;the innumerable doors which
+stand open in his ample room, and lead from it to other chambers and
+corridors of the endless palace of<a name="Page_114" id="Page_114" /> Novel-Romance. This had most
+emphatically not been the case with his predecessor: for Richardson,
+except in point of mere length, showed little power of expatiation, kept
+himself very much to the same ground and round, and was not likely to
+teach anybody else to make excursions. Indeed Fielding's breaking away
+in <i>Joseph Andrews</i> is an allegory in itself. But, at least with pupils
+and followers of any wits, there was not even any need of such breaking
+away from himself, though no doubt there are in existence many dull and
+slavish attempts to follow his work, especially <i>Tom Jones</i>. &quot;Find it
+out for yourself&quot;&mdash;the great English motto which in the day of England's
+glory was the motto of her men of learning as well as of her men of
+business, of her artists as well as of her craftsmen&mdash;might have been
+Fielding's: but he supplemented it with infinite finger-pointings
+towards the various things that might be found out. Almost every kind of
+novel exists&mdash;potentially&mdash;in his Four (the custom of leaving out
+<i>Jonathan Wild</i> should be wholly abrogated), though of course they do
+not themselves illustrate or carry out at length many of the kinds that
+they thus suggest.</p>
+
+<p>And in fact it could not be otherwise: because, as has been pointed out,
+while Fielding had no inconsiderable command of the Book of Literature,
+he turned over by day and night the larger, the more difficult, but
+still the greater Book of Life. Not merely <i>quicquid agunt homines</i>, but
+<i>quicquid sentiunt, quicquid cogitant</i>, whatever they love and hate,
+whatever they desire or decline&mdash;all these things are the subjects of
+his own books: and the range of subject which they suggest to others is
+thus of necessity inexhaustible.</p>
+
+<p>If there have been some who denied or failed to recognise his greatness,
+it must be because he has played on these <a name="Page_115" id="Page_115" />unwary ones the same trick
+that Garrick, in an immortal scene, played on his own Partridge. There
+is so little parade about Fielding (for even the opening addresses are
+not parade to these good people: they may disconcert or even disgust,
+but they do not dazzle them), that his characters and his scenes look
+commonplace. They feel sure that &quot;if they had seen a ghost they would
+have looked in the very same manner and done just as he does.&quot; They are
+sure that, in the scene with Gertrude, &quot;Lord, help them! any man&mdash;that
+is any good man&mdash;that had such a mother would have done exactly the
+same.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Well! in a way no doubt they are right; and one may imitate the wisdom
+of Mr. Jones on the original occasion in not saying much more to them.
+To others, of course, this is the very miracle of art&mdash;a miracle, as far
+as the art of prose fiction is concerned, achieved in its fullness for
+practically the first time. This is the true <i>mimesis</i>&mdash;the re-creation
+or fresh creation of fictitious reality. There were in Fielding's time,
+and probably ever since have been, those who thought him &quot;low;&quot; there
+were, even in his own time, and have been in varying, but on the whole
+rather increased, degree since, those who thought him immoral: there
+appear to be some who think (or would like it to be thought that they
+think) him commonplace and obvious. Now, as it happens, all these
+charges have been brought against Nature too. To embellish, and correct,
+and heighten, and extra-decorate her was not Fielding's way: but to
+follow, and to interpret, and to take up her own processes with results
+uncommonly like her own. That is his immense glory to all those who can
+realise and understand it: and as for the others we must let them alone,
+joined to their own idols.</p>
+
+<p>In passing to the third of this great quartette, we make <a name="Page_116" id="Page_116" />a little
+descent, but not much of one, while the new peak to which we come is
+well defined and separated, with characters and outlines all its own. It
+may be doubted whether any competent critic not, like Scott, bribed by
+compatriotism, ever put Smollett above Fielding, or even on a level with
+him. Thackeray, in one of the most inspired moments of his rather
+irregularly-inspired criticism, remarks, &quot;I fancy he did not invent
+much,&quot; and this of itself would refer him to a lower class. The writer
+of fiction is not to refuse suggestion from his experience; on the
+contrary, he will do so at his peril, and will hardly by any possibility
+escape shipwreck unless his line is the purely fantastic. But if he
+relies solely, or too much, on such experience, though he may be quite
+successful, his success will be subject to discount, bound to pay
+royalty to experience itself. It is pretty certain that most of
+Smollett's most successful things, from <i>Roderick Random</i> to <i>Humphry
+Clinker</i>, and in those two capital books, perhaps, most of all, kept
+very close to actual experience, and sometimes merely reported it.</p>
+
+<p>This, however, is only a comparative drawback; it is in a sense a
+positive merit; and it is connected, in a very intimate way, with the
+general character of Smollett's novel-method. This is, to a great
+extent, a reaction or relapse towards the picaresque style. Smollett may
+have translated both Cervantes and Le Sage; he certainly translated the
+latter: and it was Le Sage who in any case had the greatest influence
+over him. Now the picaresque method is not exactly untrue to ordinary
+life: on the contrary, as we have seen, it was a powerful schoolmaster
+to bring the novel thereto. But it subjects the scenes of ordinary life
+to a peculiar process of sifting: and when it has got what it wants, it
+proceeds to heighten them and<a name="Page_117" id="Page_117" /> &quot;touch them up&quot; in its own peculiar
+manner of decoration. This is Smollett's method throughout, even in that
+singular <i>pastiche</i> of <i>Don Quixote</i> itself, <i>Sir Launcelot Greaves</i>,
+which certainly was not his happiest conception, but which has had
+rather hard measure.</p>
+
+<p>As used by him it has singular merits, and communicates to at least
+three of his five books (<i>The Adventures of an Atom</i> is deliberately
+excluded as not really a novel at all) a certain &quot;liveliness&quot; which,
+though it is not the life<i>like</i>ness of Fielding, is a great attraction.
+He showed it first in <i>Roderick Random</i> (1748), which appeared a little
+before <i>Tom Jones</i>, and was actually taken by some as the work of the
+same author. It would be not much more just to take Roderick as
+Smollett's deliberate presentment of himself than to apply the same
+construction to Marryat's not very dissimilar, but more unlucky, <i>coup
+d'essai</i> of <i>Frank Mildmay</i>. But it is certain that there was something,
+though exactly how much has never been determined, of the author's
+family history in the earliest part, a great deal of his experiences on
+board ship in the middle, and probably not a little, though less, of his
+fortunes in Bath and London towards the end. As a single source of
+interest and popularity, no doubt, the principal place must be given to
+the naval part of the book. Important as the English navy had been, for
+nearly two centuries if not for much longer, it had never played any
+great part in literature, though it had furnished some caricatured and
+rather conventional sketches. There is something more in a play, <i>The
+Fair Quaker of Deal</i>, by Charles Shadwell, nephew or son of Dryden's
+victim, but this was only of third or fourth rate literary value, and an
+isolated example to boot. The causes of the neglect have been set forth
+by many writers from Macaulay downwards, and need not be discussed here;
+<a name="Page_118" id="Page_118" />the fact is certain. Smollett's employment of &quot;the service&quot; as a
+subject may have been, consciously and intentionally, only one of those
+utilisings of personal experience of which we have spoken. But really it
+was an instance of the great fact that the novelist, on the instigation
+mainly of Fielding himself, was beginning to take all actual life to be
+his province.</p>
+
+<p>Smollett brought to his work peculiar powers, the chief of which was a
+very remarkable one, and almost as much &quot;improved on&quot; Fielding as
+Fielding's exercise of it was improved on Richardson&mdash;that of providing
+his characters and scenes with accessories. Roderick is not only a much
+more disagreeable person than Tom, but he is much <i>less</i> of a person:
+and Strap, though (<i>vice vers&acirc;</i>) rather a better fellow than Partridge,
+is a much fainter and more washed-out character. But in mere interest of
+story and accessories the journey of Roderick and Strap to London is
+quite the equal, and perhaps the superior, of that of Tom and his
+hanger-on after we once leave Upton, where the interest is of a kind
+that Smollett could not reach. It is probable that Fielding might, if he
+had chosen, have made the prison in <i>Amelia</i> as horribly and
+disgustingly realistic (to use a horrible and disgusting word) as the
+ship in <i>Roderick</i>, but he at any rate did not choose. Moreover
+Smollett, himself a member of one of the less predominant partners of
+the British and Irish partnership, perhaps for that reason hit on
+utilising the difference of these partners (after a fashion which had
+never been seen since Shakespeare) in the Welshman Morgan. As far as
+mere plot goes, he enters into no competition whatever with either
+Fielding or Richardson: the picaresque model did not require that he
+should. When Roderick has made use of his friends, knocked down his
+enemies, and generally elbowed and <a name="Page_119" id="Page_119" />shoved his way through the crowd of
+adventures long enough, Narcissa and her fortune are not so much the
+reward of his exertions as a stock and convenient method of putting an
+end to the account of them. The customer has been served with a
+sufficient amount of the commodity he demands: and the scissors are
+applied, the canister shut up, the tap turned off. It almost results&mdash;it
+certainly coincides&mdash;that some of the minor characters, and some of the
+minor scenes, are much more vivid than the hero (the heroine is almost
+an absolute nonentity) and the whole story. The curate and the exciseman
+in the ninth chapter are, by common consent, among Smollett's greatest
+triumphs; but the curate might be excommunicated and the exciseman
+excised without anybody who read the book perceiving the slightest gap
+or missing link, as far as the story is concerned.</p>
+
+<p>Smollett's second venture, <i>Peregrine Pickle</i> (1751), was more
+ambitious, perhaps rose higher in parts, but undoubtedly contained even
+more doubtful and inferior matter. No one can justly blame him, though
+any one may most justly refrain from praising, from the general point of
+view, as regards the &quot;insets&quot; of Miss Williams's story in <i>Roderick</i> and
+of that of Lady Vane here. From that point of view they range with the
+&quot;Man of the Hill&quot; in <i>Tom Jones</i>, and in the first case at least, though
+most certainly not in the second, have more justification of connection
+with the central story. He may so far underlie the charge of error of
+judgment, but nothing worse. Unluckily the &quot;Lady Vane&quot; insertion was, to
+a practical certainty, a commercial not an artistic transaction: and
+both here and elsewhere Smollett carried his already large licence to
+the extent of something like positive pornography. He is in fact one of
+the few writers of real eminence who have <a name="Page_120" id="Page_120" />been forced to Bowdlerise
+themselves. Further, there would be more excuse for the most offensive
+part of <i>Peregrine</i> if it were not half plagiarism of the main
+situations of <i>Pamela</i> and <i>Clarissa</i>: if Smollett had not deprived his
+hero of all the excuses which, even in the view of some of the most
+respectable characters of <i>Pamela</i>, attached to the conduct of Mr. B.;
+and if he had not vulgarised Lovelace out of any possible attribution of
+&quot;regality,&quot; except of being what the time would have called King of the
+Black Guard. As for Tom Jones, he does not come into comparison with
+&quot;Perry&quot; at all, and he would doubtless have been most willing and
+able&mdash;competent physically as well as morally&mdash;to administer the proper
+punishment to that young ruffian by drubbing him within an inch of his
+life.</p>
+
+<p>These, no doubt, are grave drawbacks: but the racy fun of the book
+almost atones for them: and the exaltation of the naval element of
+<i>Roderick</i> which one finds here in Trunnion and Hatchway and Pipes
+carries the balance quite to the other side. This is the case even
+without, but much more with, the taking into account of Smollett's usual
+irregular and almost irrelevant <i>bonuses</i>, such as the dinner after the
+fashion of the ancients and the rest. No: <i>Peregrine Pickle</i> can never
+be thrown to the wolves, even to the most respectable and moral of these
+animals in the most imposing as well as ravening of attitudes. English
+Literature cannot do without it.</p>
+
+<p>Without <i>Ferdinand Count Fathom</i> (1753) many people have thought that
+English Literature could do perfectly well: and without going quite so
+far, one may acknowledge that perhaps a shift could be made. The idea of
+re-transferring the method (in the first place at any rate) to foreign
+parts was not a bad one, and it may be observed that by <a name="Page_121" id="Page_121" />far the best
+portion of <i>Fathom</i> is thus occupied. Not a few of these opening
+passages are excellent: and Fathom's mother, if not a person, is an
+excellent type: it is probable that the writer knew the kind well. But
+his unhappy tendency to enter for the same stakes as his great
+forerunners makes it almost impossible not to compare <i>Ferdinand Fathom</i>
+with <i>Jonathan Wild</i>: and the effect is very damaging to the Count. Much
+of the book is dull: and Fathom's conversation is (to adopt a cant word)
+extremely unconvincing. The fact seems to be that Smollett had run his
+picaresque vein dry, as far as it connected itself with mere rascality
+of various kinds, and he did well to close it. He had published three
+novels in five years: he waited seven before his next, and then eleven
+more before his last.</p>
+
+<p>A qualified apology has been hinted above for <i>Sir Launcelot Greaves</i>.
+It is undoubtedly evidence of the greatness of <i>Don Quixote</i> that there
+should have been so many direct imitations of it by persons of genius
+and talent: but this particular instance is unfortunate to the verge of
+the preposterous, if not over it. The eighteenth century was indeed
+almost the capital time of English eccentricity: and it was also a time
+of licence which sometimes looked very like lawlessness. But its
+eccentricities were not at this special period romantic: and its
+lawlessness was rather abuse of law than wholesale neglect of it. A
+rascally attorney or a stony-hearted creditor might inflict great
+hardship under the laws affecting money: and a brutal or tyrannical
+squire might do the same under those affecting the tenure or the
+enjoyment of house or land. &quot;Persons of quality&quot; might go very far. But
+even a person of quality, if he took to riding about the country in
+complete steel, assaulting the lieges, and setting up a sort of
+cadi-<a name="Page_122" id="Page_122" />justice of his own in opposition to the king's, would probably
+have been brought pretty rapidly, if not to the recovery of his senses,
+to the loss of his liberty. Nor, with rare exceptions, are the
+subordinate or incidental humours of the first class. But I have always
+thought that the opening passage more than entitles the book to an
+honourable place in the history of English fiction. I do not know where
+to look, before it, for such an &quot;interior&quot;&mdash;such a complete Dutch
+picture of room and furniture and accessories generally. Even so learned
+a critic as the late M. Bruneti&egrave;re thought that things of the kind were
+not older than Balzac. I have known English readers, not ignorant, who
+thought they were scarcely older than Dickens. Dickens, however,
+undoubtedly took them from Smollett, of whom we know that he was an
+early and enthusiastic admirer: and Scott, who has them much earlier
+than Dickens, not improbably was in some degree indebted for them to his
+countryman. At any rate in that countryman they are: and you will not
+find a much better example of them anywhere than this of the
+inn-kitchen. But apart from it, and from a few other things of the same
+or similar kinds, there is little to be said for the book. The divine
+Aurelia especially is almost more shadowy than the divine Narcissa and
+the divine Emilia: and can claim no sort of sistership in personality
+with Amelia or Sophia, even with Clarissa or Pamela. In fact, up to this
+time Smollett's women&mdash;save in the case of Fathom's hell-cat of a
+mother, and one or two more who are &quot;minors&quot;&mdash;have done absolutely
+nothing for his books. It was to be quite otherwise in the last and
+best, though even here the heroine <i>en titre</i> is hardly, even though we
+have her own letters to body her out, more substantial than her elder
+sisters. But Lydia, though the <i>ing&eacute;nue</i>, is <a name="Page_123" id="Page_123" />not the real heroine of
+this book: her aunt and her aunt's maid divide that position between
+them.</p>
+
+<p>A sufficiently ungracious critic may, if he chooses, see in Smollett's
+falling back on the letter-plan for <i>Humphry Clinker</i> (1771) an
+additional proof of that deficiency in strictly inventive faculty which
+has been noticed. The more generous &quot;judge by results&quot; will hardly care
+to consider so curiously in the case of such a masterpiece. For a
+masterpiece it really is. The comparative absence of &quot;character&quot; in the
+higher and literary sense as contrasted with &quot;character-<i>parts</i>&quot; in the
+technical meaning of the theatre has been admitted in the other books.
+Here, with the aid of the letters, it is amply supplied, or perhaps (to
+speak with extreme critical closeness) the character-parts are turned
+into characters by this means. There is no stint, because of the
+provision of this higher interest, of the miscellaneous fun and
+&quot;business&quot; which Smollett had always supplied so lavishly out of his
+experience, his observation, and, if not his invention, his combining
+faculty. And there is the setting of interior and exterior &quot;furniture&quot;
+which has been also referred to. Abundant as is the information which
+the eighteenth century has given us as to its justly beloved place of
+pilgrimage, Bath, there is nothing livelier than the Bath scenes here,
+from Chesterfield to Miss Austen, and few things, if any, so vivid and
+detailed. So it is with Clifton earlier, with London later, with
+Scotland last of all, and with the journeys connecting them. Yet these
+things are mere <i>hors d'oeuvre</i>, pickles, sauces, condiments, beside the
+solid character-food of the Brambles and Melfords, of Winifred Jenkins
+and of the redoubtable Lismahago. That there is no exaggeration or
+caricature cannot, of course, be said. It was not Smollett's notion of
+art to present the <a name="Page_124" id="Page_124" />elaborate academies of Richardson, or the almost
+uncanny duplications of Nature which Fielding could achieve. He must
+embolden, in fact grotesque, the line; heighten, in fact splash and
+plaster, the colour. But he has not left Nature behind here: he has only
+put her in a higher light.</p>
+
+<p>One means of doing so has been condemned in him, as in others, as in its
+great earlier master, Swift, and its greatest later one, Thackeray, by
+some purists. They call it cheap and inartistic: but this is mere
+pedantry and prudery. Mis-spelling is not a thing to be employed every
+day or for every purpose: if you do that, you get into the ineffably
+dreary monotony which distinguishes the common comic journalist. But
+thrown in occasionally, and in the proper place, it gives an excellent
+zest: and it has seldom been employed&mdash;never, except in the two
+instances quoted&mdash;better than in the cases of Tabitha Bramble and her
+maid. For it is employed in the only legitimate way, that of zest, not
+substance. Tabitha and Winifred would still be triumphs of
+characterisation of a certain kind if they wrote as correctly as Uncle
+Matthew or Nephew Jery. Further, Lismahago is a bolder and a much less
+caricatured utilising of the &quot;national&quot; resource than Morgan. If
+Smollett had not been a perfectly undaunted, as well as a not very
+amiable, person he would hardly have dared to &quot;<i>lacess</i> the thistle&quot; in
+this fashion. But there are few sensible Scotsmen nowadays who would not
+agree with that most sensible, as well as greatest, of their
+compatriots, Sir Walter Scott, in acknowledging the justice (comic
+emphasis granted) of the twitch, and the truth of the grip, at that
+formidable plant. The way in which Smollett mixes up actual living
+persons, by their own names, with his fictitious characters may strike
+us as odd: but there is, for the most part, nothing offensive in it,
+<a name="Page_125" id="Page_125" />and in fact, except a little of his apparently inevitable indulgence in
+nasty detail, there is nothing at all offensive in the book. The
+contrast of its general tone with that especially of his first two; the
+softening and mellowing of the general presentation&mdash;is very remarkable
+in a man of undoubtedly not very gentle disposition who had long
+suffered from extremely bad health, and whose chief original works
+recently&mdash;the <i>Journey</i> and the <i>Adventures</i>&mdash;had been, the first a
+tissue of grumbles, the second an outburst of savagery. But though the
+grumbles recur in Matthew Bramble's mouth, they become merely humorous
+there: and there is practically no savagery at all. Leghorn, it has been
+observed more than once, was in a fashion a Land of Beulah: a &quot;season of
+calm weather&quot; had set in for a rather stormy life just before the end.</p>
+
+<p>Whatever may be his defects (and from the mere point of view of Momus
+probably a larger number may be found in him than either in Richardson
+or in Fielding), Smollett well deserves an almost equal place with them
+in the history of the novel. Richardson, though he had found the
+universal as far as certain aspects of it in humanity are concerned, had
+confined it within a very narrow space, or particular envelope, in tone
+and temper: the fact that he has been called &quot;stifling,&quot; though the
+epithet may not be entirely just, is almost sufficient evidence of this.
+Fielding had taken the novel into a far larger air and, as has been said
+already, there was hardly anything to which his method might not lead,
+and in which it would not be effective. But he had been exclusively
+English in externals: and the result is that, to this day, he has had
+less influence abroad than perhaps any English writer of equal genius
+and than some of far less.<a id="footnotetag6" name="footnotetag6"></a><a href="#footnote6"><sup>6</sup></a> Smollett, by his remark<a name="Page_126" id="Page_126" />able utilisation
+of the characteristics of the other members of Magna-Britannia; by his
+excursions into foreign European and even transatlantic scenery, had
+widened the external if not the internal prospect; and had done perhaps
+even more by that chance-medley, as it perhaps was, of attention to the
+still more internal detail which was to be of such importance in the
+novel to come. Taking the three together (not without due allowance for
+the contemporary, if mainly imitative, developments which will be
+described in the next chapter), they had put prose fiction in a position
+which it had not attained, even in Spain earlier, even in France at more
+or less the same time: and had entirely antiquated, on the one hand, the
+mere <i>fabliau</i> or <i>novella</i>&mdash;the story of a single limited situation&mdash;on
+the other, the discursive romance with little plot and next to no
+character. One great further development, impossible at this time, of
+the larger novel, the historical, waited for Scott: but even this was
+soon, though very awkwardly, tried. It could not yet be born because the
+historic sense which was its necessary begetter hardly existed, and
+because the provision of historic matter for this sense to work on was
+rather scanty. But it is scarcely extravagant to say that it is more
+difficult to conceive even Scott doing what he did without Richardson,
+Fielding, and Smollett before him, than it is to believe that, with
+these predecessors, somebody like Scott was bound to come.</p>
+
+<p>Great, however, as the three are, there is no need of any &quot;injustice to
+Ireland&quot;&mdash;little as Ireland really has to claim in Sterne's merit or
+demerit. He is not a fifth wheel to the coach by any means: he is the
+fourth and almost the necessary one. In Richardson, Fielding, and
+Smollett the general character and possibilities of the novel had been
+shown, with the exception just noted: and indeed hardly <a name="Page_127" id="Page_127" />with that
+exception, because they showed the way clearly to it. But its almost
+illimitable particular capabilities remained unshown, or shown only in
+Fielding's half extraneous divagations, and in earlier things like the
+work of Swift. Sterne took it up in the spirit of one who wished to
+exhibit these capabilities; and did exhibit them signally in more than
+one or two ways. He showed how the novel could present, in refreshed
+form, the <i>fatrasie</i>, the pillar-to-post miscellany, of which Rabelais
+had perhaps given the greatest example possible, but of which there were
+numerous minor examples in French. He showed how it could be made, not
+merely to present humorous situations, but to exhibit a special kind of
+humour itself&mdash;to make the writer as it were the hero without his ever
+appearing as character in <i>Tristram</i>, or to humorise autobiography as in
+the <i>Sentimental Journey</i>. And last of all (whether it was his greatest
+achievement or not is matter of opinion), he showed the novel of purpose
+in a form specially appealing to his contemporaries&mdash;the purpose being
+to exhibit, glorify, luxuriate in the exhibition of, sentiment or
+&quot;sensibility.&quot; In none of these things was he wholly original; though
+the perpetual upbraiding of &quot;plagiarism&quot; is a little unintelligent.
+Rabelais, not to mention others, had preceded him, and far excelled him,
+in the <i>fatrasie</i>; Swift in the humour-novel; two generations of
+Frenchmen and Frenchwomen in the &quot;sensibility&quot; kind. But he brought all
+together and adjusted the English novel, actually to them, potentially
+to much else.</p>
+
+<p>To find fault with his two famous books is almost contemptibly easy. The
+plagiarism which, if not found out at once, was found out very soon, is
+the least of these: in fact hardly a fault at all. The indecency, which
+<i>was</i> found out at once, and which drew a creditable and not in the
+<a name="Page_128" id="Page_128" />least Tartuffian protest from Warburton, is a far more serious
+matter&mdash;not so much because of the licence in subject as because of the
+unwholesome and sniggering tone. The sentimentality is very often simply
+maudlin, almost always tiresome <i>to us</i>, and in very, very few
+cases justified by brilliant success even in its own very doubtful
+kind. Most questionable of all, perhaps, is the merely mechanical
+mountebankery&mdash;the blanks, and the dashes, and the rows of stops, the
+black pages and the marbled pages which he employs to force a guffaw
+from his readers. The abstinence from any central story in <i>Tristram</i> is
+one of those dubious pieces of artifice which may possibly show the
+artist's independence of the usual attractions of story-telling, but may
+also suggest to the churlish the question whether his invention would
+have supplied him with any story to tell; and the continual asides and
+halts and parenthetic divagations in the <i>Journey</i> are not quite free
+from the same suggestion. In fact if you &quot;can see a church by daylight&quot;
+you certainly want no piercing vision, and no artificial assistance of
+light or lens, to discover the faults of this very unedifying churchman.</p>
+
+<p>But he remains, for all that, a genius; and one of the great figures in
+our history. There is to his credit in general, as has been already
+pointed out, the great asset of having indicated, and in two notable
+instances patterned, the out-of-the-way novel&mdash;the novel eccentric,
+particular, individual. There is to that credit still more the
+brilliancy of the two specimens themselves in spite of their faults;
+their effectiveness in the literature of delight; the great powers of a
+kind more or less peculiar to the artist which they show, and the power,
+perhaps still greater, which they display in the actually general and
+ordinary lines of the novel, though adapted to this extraordinary use.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129" />For though it pleased Sterne to anticipate the knife-grinder's innocent
+confession, &quot;Story? God bless you! I have none to tell, sir!&quot; in a
+sardonic paraphrase of half a score of volumes, he actually possessed
+the narrative faculty in an extraordinary degree. He does not merely
+show this in his famous inset short stories, accomplished as these are:
+he achieves a much greater marvel in the way in which he makes his
+<i>fatrasies</i> as it were novels. After one or two, brief but certainly not
+tedious, volumes of the <i>Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy</i>, you know
+that you are being cheated, and are going to be: at the end you know
+still more certainly that you have been. You have had nothing of the
+&quot;Life&quot; but a great deal round rather than about the birth, and a few
+equivocal, merely glanced at, and utterly unco-ordinated incidents
+later. If you have had any &quot;opinions&quot; they have been chiefly those of
+Mr. Tristram Shandy's father and other members of his family, or those
+of its friends and circle, or of those shadowy personages outside the
+pretended story, such as Eugenius and Yorick, besides a few discourses
+which drop the slightest pretension of being Shandean or Tristramic and
+are plainly and simply the author's. In the <i>Journey</i> there is more
+unity; but it is, quite frankly, the unity of the temperament of that
+author himself. The incidents&mdash;sentimental, whimsical, fie-fie&mdash;have no
+other connection or tendency than the fact that they occur to the
+&quot;gentleman in the black silk smalls&quot; and furnish him with figures as it
+were for his performance. Yet you are <i>held</i> in a way in which nothing
+but the romance or the novel ever does hold you. The thing is a
+&#956;&#965;&#952;&#959;&#987; &#7940;&#956;&#965;&#952;&#959;&#987;&mdash;story without story-end, without story-beginning,
+without story-connection or middle: but a story for all that. A
+dangerous precedent, perhaps; but a great accomplish<a name="Page_130" id="Page_130" />ment: and, even as
+a precedent, the leader of a very remarkable company. In not a few
+noteworthy later books&mdash;in a very much greater number of parts of later
+books&mdash;as we take our hats off to the success we are saluting not a new
+but an old friend, and that friend Sterne.</p>
+
+<p>On the second great count&mdash;character&mdash;Sterne's record is still more
+distinguished: and here there is no legerdemain about the matter. There
+is a consensus of all sound opinion to the effect that my Uncle Toby is
+an absolute triumph&mdash;even among those who think that, as in the case of
+Colonel Newcome later, it would have been possible to achieve that
+triumph without letting his simplicity run so near to something less
+attractive. It is not the sentiment that is here to blame, because
+Sterne has luckily not forgotten (as he has in the case of his dead
+donkeys and his live Marias) that humour is the only thing that will
+keep such sentiment from turning mawkish, if not even rancid; and that
+the antiseptic effect will not be achieved by keeping your humour and
+your sentiment in separate boxes. Trim is even better: he is indeed next
+to Sancho&mdash;and perhaps Sam Weller&mdash;the greatest of all &quot;followers&quot; in
+the novel: he supplies the only class-figure in which Sterne perhaps
+beats Fielding himself. About Walter Shandy there is more room for
+difference: and it is possible to contend that, great as he is, he is
+not complete&mdash;that he is something of a &quot;humour&quot; in the old one-sided
+and over-emphasised Jonsonian sense. Nothing that he does or says
+misbecomes him: but a good deal that he does not do and say might be
+added with advantage, in order to give us the portrait of a whole as
+well as a live man. As for the other male characters, Sterne's plan
+excused him&mdash;as it did not quite in Mr. Shandy's case&mdash;from making them
+<a name="Page_131" id="Page_131" />more than sketches and shadows. But what uncommonly lively sketches and
+shadows they are!</p>
+
+<p>Sterne's unlucky failing prevented him in most cases from touching the
+women off with a clean brush: but the quality of <i>liveness</i> pertains to
+them in almost a higher measure: and perhaps testifies even more
+strongly to his almost uncanny faculty of communicating it by touches
+which are not always unclean and are sometimes slight to an astonishing
+degree. Even that shadow of a shade &quot;My dear, dear Jenny&quot; has a
+suggestion of verity about her which has shocked and fluttered some: the
+maids of the Shandean household, the grisettes and peasant girls and
+ladies of the <i>Journey</i>, have flesh which is not made of paper, and
+blood that is certainly not ink. And the peculiarity extends to his two
+chief named heroines, Mrs. Shandy and the Widow. Never were any two
+female personages more unceremoniously treated in the way of scanty and
+incidental appearance. Never were any personages of scanty and
+incidental appearance made more alive and more female.</p>
+
+<p>His details and accessories of all kinds, descriptive, literary, and
+other, would give subject for a separate chapter; but we must turn (for
+this chapter is already too long) to his phrase&mdash;in dialogue, narrative,
+whatever you please to call it. For the fact is that these two things,
+and all others in which phrase and expression can be used, melt into
+each other with Sterne in a manner as &quot;flibberti-gibbety&quot; as most other
+things about him. This phrase or expression is of course artificial to
+the highest degree: and it is to it that the reproach of depending on
+mechanical aids chiefly applies. And yet laboriously figured, tricked,
+machined as it is&mdash;easy as once more it may be to prove that it is
+artifice and not art&mdash;the fact remains that, not <a name="Page_132" id="Page_132" />merely (perhaps not by
+any means chiefly) in the stock extract-pieces which everybody knows,
+but almost everywhere, it is triumphant: and that English literature
+would be seriously impoverished without it. Certainly never was there a
+style which more fully justified the definition given by Buffon, in
+Sterne's own time, of style as &quot;the <i>very</i> man.&quot; Falsetto, &quot;faking,&quot;
+vamping, shoddy&mdash;all manner of evil terms may be heaped upon it without
+the possibility of completely clearing it from them. To some eyes it
+underlies them most when it is most ambitious, as in the Le Fevre story
+and the diatribe against critics. It leaves the court with all manner of
+stains on its character. Only, once more, if it did not exist we should
+be ignorant of more than one of the most remarkable possibilities of the
+English language.</p>
+
+<p>Thus, in almost exactly the course of a technical generation&mdash;from the
+appearance of <i>Pamela</i> in 1740 to that of <i>Humphry Clinker</i> in 1771&mdash;the
+wain of the novel was solidly built, furnished with four main wheels to
+move it, and set a-going to travel through the centuries. In a sense,
+inasmuch as <i>Humphry Clinker</i> itself, though Smollett's best work, can
+hardly be said to show any absolutely new faculties, character, or
+method, the process was even accomplished in two-thirds of the time,
+between <i>Pamela</i> and <i>Tristram Shandy</i>. We shall see in the next chapter
+how eagerly the examples were taken up: and how, long before Smollett
+died, the novel of this and that kind had become one of the most
+prolific branches of literature. But, for the moment, the important
+thing is to repeat that it had been thoroughly and finally started on
+its high road, in general by Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett; in
+particular and wayward but promising side-paths by Sterne.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IV" id="CHAPTER_IV" /><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133" />CHAPTER IV</h2>
+
+<h2>THE MINOR AND LATER EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL<a id="footnotetag7" name="footnotetag7"></a><a href="#footnote7"><sup>7</sup></a></h2>
+
+<p>It is at last beginning to be recognised in principle, though it is
+still much too often forgotten in practice, that the minor work of a
+time is at least as important as the major in determining general
+literary characteristics and tendencies. Nor is this anywhere much more
+noticeable than in regard to the present period of our present subject.
+The direct influence of Richardson and Fielding was no doubt very great:
+but the development of the novel during the middle and later century was
+too large and too various to be all mere imitation. As a result,
+however, of their influence, there certainly came over the whole kind a
+very remarkable change. Even before them the <i>nisus</i> towards it, which
+has been noticed in the chapter before the last, is observable enough.
+Mrs. Manley's rather famous <i>New Atlantis</i> (1709) has at least the form
+of a key-novel of the political sort: but the whole interest is in the
+key and not in the novel, though the choice of the form is something.
+And the second, third, and fourth decades of the century saw other work
+testifying to the vague and almost unconscious hankering after prose
+fiction which was becoming endemic. A couple of examples of this may be
+treated, in <a name="Page_134" id="Page_134" />passing, before we come to the work&mdash;not exactly of the
+first class in itself&mdash;of a writer who shows both the pre-Richardsonian
+and the post-Richardsonian phases of it most interestingly, and after a
+fashion to which there are few exact parallels.</p>
+
+<p>A book, which counts here from the time of its appearance, and from a
+certain oddity and air of &quot;key&quot; about it, rather than from much merit as
+literature, or any as a story, is the <i>Adventures of Gaudentio di Lucca</i>
+by Simon Berington.<a id="footnotetag8" name="footnotetag8"></a><a href="#footnote8"><sup>8</sup></a> It appeared in 1737, between Defoe and Swift on
+the earlier, and Richardson on the later side, while the English world
+was to the novel as an infant crying for the light&mdash;and the bottle&mdash;at
+once. It begins and ends with adventures and discoveries of an ordinary
+romantic type. But the body consists of a revelation to certain Italian
+Inquisitors (who are not at all of the lurid type familiar to the
+Protestant imagination, but most equitable and well-disposed as well as
+potent, grave, and reverend signers) of an unknown country of &quot;the Grand
+Pophar&quot; in the centre of Africa. This country is civilised, but not yet
+Christianised: and the description of it of course gives room for the
+exercise of the familiar game of contrast&mdash;in this case not so much
+satiric as didactic&mdash;with countries nearer home which are at least
+supposed to be both civilised and Christian. It is a &quot;respectable&quot; book
+both in the French and the English sense: but it is certainly not very
+amusing, and cannot even be called very interesting in any way, save
+historically.</p>
+
+<p>The other example which we shall take is of even less intrinsic
+attraction: in fact it is a very poor thing. There are, however, more
+ways than one in which<a name="Page_135" id="Page_135" /> <i>corpora vilia</i> are good for experiment and
+evidence: and we may find useful indications in the mere bookmaking of
+the time. Lowndes, the fortunate publisher of <i>Evelina</i>, some dozen
+years before that windfall came, had issued, or reissued, a collection
+called <i>The Novelist</i> and professedly containing <i>The select novels of
+Dr. Croxall</i> [the ingenious author of <i>The Fair Circassian</i> and the part
+destroyer of Hereford Cathedral] <i>and other Polite Tales</i>. The book is
+an unblushing if not an actually piratical compilation; sweeping
+together, with translations and adaptations published by Croxall himself
+at various times in the second quarter of the century and probably
+earlier, most of the short stories from the <i>Spectator</i> class of
+periodical which had appeared during the past two-thirds of a century.
+Most of the rest are obvious (and very badly done) translations from the
+French and even from Cervantes' <i>Exemplary Novels</i>; seasoned with
+personal and other anecdotes, so that the whole number of separate
+articles may exceed four-score. Of these a few are interesting attempts
+at the historical novel or novelette&mdash;short sketches of Mary Queen of
+Scots (very sympathetic and evidently French in origin from the phrase
+&quot;a <i>temple</i> which was formerly a church&quot;), Jane Shore (an exquisitely
+absurd piece of eighteenth-century middle-class modernising and
+moralising), Essex, Buckingham, and other likely figures. There are cuts
+by the &quot;Van-somethings and Back-somethings&quot; of the time: and the whole,
+though not worthy of anything better than the &quot;fourpenny box,&quot; is an
+evident symptom of popular taste. The sweetmeats or <i>hors d'oeuvre</i> of
+the older caterings for that taste are here collected together to form a
+<i>pi&egrave;ce de r&eacute;sistance</i>. It is true that <i>The Novelist</i> is only a true
+title in the older sense&mdash;that the pieces are <i>novelle</i> not &quot;novels&quot;
+proper. But they are fiction, or <a name="Page_136" id="Page_136" />fact treated like fiction: and though
+the popular taste itself was evidently ceasing to be satisfied with
+these morsels and demanding a substantial joint, yet the substance was,
+after all, the same.</p>
+
+<p>We rise higher, if not very high, with the novels of Mrs. Eliza Haywood
+(1693-1756), one of the damned of the <i>Dunciad</i>, but, like some of her
+fellows in that <i>Inferno</i>, by no means deserving hopeless reprobation.
+Every one who has devoted any attention to the history of the novel, as
+well as some who have merely considered it as a part of that of English
+literature generally, has noticed the curious contrast between the
+earlier and the later novels of this writer. <i>Betsy Thoughtless</i> (1751)
+and <i>Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy</i> (1753) could, without much difficulty, be
+transposed into novels of to-day. <i>Idalia</i> (1723) is of an entirely
+different mood and scheme. It is a pure Behnesque <i>nouvelle</i>, merely
+describing the plots and outrage which ruin the heroine (<i>The
+Unfortunate Mistress</i> is the second title), but attempting no
+character-drawing (the only hint at such a thing is that Idalia, instead
+of being a meek and suffering victim, is said to have a violent temper),
+and making not the slightest effort even to complete what story there
+is. For the thing breaks off with a sort of &quot;<i>perhaps</i> to be concluded
+in <i>some</i> next,&quot; about which we have not made up our minds. Very rarely
+do we find such a curious combination or succession of styles so early:
+but the novel, for pretty obvious reasons, seems to offer temptations to
+it and facilities for it.</p>
+
+<p>For <i>Idalia's</i> above-named juniors, while not bad books to read for mere
+amusement, have a very particular interest for the student of the
+history of the novel. Taken in connection with their author's earlier
+work, they illustrate, for the first time, a curious phenomenon which
+has repeated itself often, notably in the case of Bulwer, and of <a name="Page_137" id="Page_137" />a
+living novelist who need not be named. This is that the novel, more
+almost than any other kind of literature, seems to lend itself to what
+may be called the <i>timeserving</i> or &quot;opportunism&quot; of craftsmanship&mdash;to
+call out the adaptiveness and versatility of the artist. <i>Betsy</i> and
+<i>Jenny</i> are so different from <i>Idalia</i> and her group that a critic of
+the idle Separatist persuasion would, were it not for troublesome
+certainties of fact, have no difficulty whatever in proving that they
+must be by different authors. We know that they were <i>not</i>: and we know
+also the reason of their dissimilarity&mdash;the fact that <i>Pamela</i> and her
+brother and their groups <i>ont pass&eacute; par l&agrave;</i>.<a id="footnotetag9" name="footnotetag9"></a><a href="#footnote9"><sup>9</sup></a> This fact is most
+interesting: and it shows, among other things, that Mrs. Eliza Haywood
+was a decidedly clever woman.</p>
+
+<p>At the same time the two books also show that she was not quite clever
+enough: and that she had not realised, as in fact hardly one of the
+minor novelists of this time did realise, the necessity of
+individualising character. Betsy is both a nice and a good
+girl&mdash;&quot;thoughtless&quot; up to specification, but no fool, perfectly
+&quot;straight&quot; though the reverse of prudish, generous, merry, lovable. But
+with all these good qualities she is not quite a person. Jenny is, I
+think, a little more of one, but still not quite&mdash;while the men and the
+other women are still less. Nor had Eliza mastered that practised knack
+of &quot;manners-painting&quot; which was to stand Fanny Burney, and many another
+after her, in the stead of actual character-creation. Her situations are
+often very lively, if not exactly decorous; and they sometimes have a
+real dramatic verisimilitude, for instance, the quarrel and
+reconciliation of the Lord and the Lady in <i>Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy</i>;
+but the higher <a name="Page_138" id="Page_138" />verisimilitude of prose fiction they lack. Neither again
+(though Smollett had given her a lead here) had she attained that power
+of setting and furnishing a scene which is so powerful a weapon in the
+novelist's armoury. Yet she had learnt much: and her later work would
+have been almost a wonder in her own earlier time.</p>
+
+<p>She had even been preceded in the new line by one, and closely followed
+by another writer of her own sex, both of unblemished reputation, and
+perhaps her superiors in intellectual quality and accomplishment, though
+they had less distinct novel-faculty. Sarah Fielding, the great
+novelist's sister, but herself one of Richardson's literary seraglio,
+had a good deal of her brother's humour, but very little of his
+constructive grasp of life. <i>David Simple</i> (1744), her best known work,
+the <i>Familiar Letters</i> connected with it (to which Henry contributed),
+and <i>The Governess</i> display both the merit and the defect&mdash;but the
+defect is more fatal to a novel than the merit is advantageous. Once
+more&mdash;if the criticism has been repeated <i>ad nauseam</i> the occasions of
+it may be warranted to be much more nauseous in themselves&mdash;one looks up
+for interest, and is not fed. &quot;The Adventures&quot; of David&mdash;whose progeny
+must have been rapidly enriched and ennobled if Peter Simple was his
+descendant&mdash;were &quot;in search of a Friend,&quot; and he came upon nobody in the
+least like O'Brien. It was, in fact, too early or too late for a <i>lady</i>
+to write a thoroughly good novel. It had been possible in the days of
+Madeleine de Scud&egrave;ry, and it became possible in the days of Frances
+Burney: but for some time before, in the days of Sarah Fielding, it was
+only possible in the ways of Afra and of Mrs. Haywood, who, without any
+unjust stigma on them, can hardly be said to fulfil the idea of
+ladyhood, as no doubt Miss Fielding did.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139" />There is an amusing and (in its context) just passage of Thackeray's,
+in which he calls Charlotte Lennox, author of <i>The Female Quixote</i>
+(1752), a &quot;figment.&quot; But it would be unlucky if any one were thereby
+prevented from reading this work of the lady whom Johnson admired, and
+for whom he made an all-night orgie of apple-pie and bay-leaves. Her
+book, which from its heroine is also called <i>Arabella</i>, is clever and
+not unamusing, though it errs (in accordance with the moral-critical
+principles of the time) by not merely satirising the &quot;heroic&quot; romances
+of the Gomberville-La Calpren&egrave;de-Scud&egrave;ry type, but solemnly discussing
+them. Arabella, the romance-bitten daughter of a marquis, is, for all
+her delusion, or because of it, rather a charming creature. Her lover
+Glanville, his Richardsonian sister, and the inevitable bad Baronet (he
+can hardly be called wicked, especially for a Baronet) are more
+commonplace: and the thing would have been better as a rather long
+<i>nouvelle</i> than as a far from short novel. It alternately comes quite
+close to its original (as in the intended burning of Arabella's books)
+and goes entirely away from it, and neither as an imitation nor
+independently is it as good as Graves's <i>Spiritual Quixote</i>: but it is
+very far from contemptible.</p>
+
+<p>Yet though the aptitude of women for novel-writing was thus early
+exemplified, it is not to be supposed that the majority of persons who
+felt the new influences were of that sex. By far the larger number of
+those who crowded to follow the Four were, like them, men.</p>
+
+<p>That not exactly credit to the Tory party, Dr. John Shebbeare, has had
+his demerits in other ways excused to some extent on the score of
+<i>Lydia</i>&mdash;whose surname, by the way, was &quot;Fairchild,&quot; not unknown in
+later days of fiction. Even one who, if critical conscience would in
+<a name="Page_140" id="Page_140" />any way permit it, would fain let the Tory dogs have a little the best
+of it, must, I fear, pronounce <i>Lydia</i> a very poor thing. Shebbeare, who
+was a journalist, had the journalist faculty of &quot;letting everything go
+in&quot;&mdash;of taking as much as he could from Richardson, Fielding, Smollett,
+etc., up to date (1755); and of throwing back to Afra for an interesting
+Indian, Canassatego. The book (like not a few other eighteenth-century
+novels) has very elaborate chapter headings and very short chapters, so
+that an immoral person can get up its matter pretty easily. A virtuous
+one who reads it through will have to look to his virtue for reward. The
+irony is factitious and forced; the sentiment unappealing; the
+coarseness quite destitute of Rabelaisian geniality; and the
+nomenclature may be sampled from &quot;the Countess of Liberal&quot; and &quot;Lord
+Beef.&quot; I believe Shebbeare was once pilloried for his politics. If it
+had been for <i>Lydia</i>, I should not have protested.</p>
+
+<p>The next book to be mentioned is an agreeable change. Why Hazlitt
+compared <i>The Life of John Buncle</i> (1756-1766) to Rabelais is a somewhat
+idle though perhaps not quite unanswerable question; the importance of
+the book itself in the history of the English novel, which has sometimes
+been doubted or passed over, is by no means small. Its author, Thomas
+Amory (1691?-1788), was growing old when he wrote it and even when he
+prefaced it with a kind of Introduction, the <i>Memoirs of several Ladies</i>
+(1755). It is a sort of dream-exaggeration of an autobiography; at first
+sight, and not at first sight only, the wildest of farragos. The author
+represents himself as a disinherited son who is devoted, with equal
+enthusiasm, to matrimony, eating and drinking as much as he can of the
+best things he can find, discussion of theological problems in a
+&quot;Christian-deist&quot;<a name="Page_141" id="Page_141" /> or Unitarian sense, &quot;natural philosophy&quot; in the vague
+eighteenth-century meaning, and rambling&mdash;chiefly in the fell district
+which includes the borders of Lancashire, Yorkshire, Westmoreland,
+&quot;Bishopric&quot; (Durham), and Cumberland. With this district&mdash;which even
+now, though seamed with roads and railways, does actually contain some
+of the wildest scenery of the island; which only forty years ago was
+much wilder; and which in Amory's time was a howling wilderness in
+parts&mdash;he deals in the characteristic spirit of exaggeration which
+perhaps, as much as anything else, suggested Rabelais to Hazlitt. From
+Malham Cove and Hardraw Scar, through the Wild Boar Fell district to the
+head of Teesdale, you can find at this moment rough and rugged scenery
+enough, some of which is actually recognisable when &quot;reduced&quot; from
+Amory's extravagance. But that extravagance extends the distances from
+furlongs to leagues; deepens the caverns from yards to furlongs; and
+exalts fell and scar into Alps and Andes. In the same way he has to
+marry eight wives (not seven as has been usually, and even by the
+present writer, said), who are distractingly beautiful and wonderfully
+wise, but who seldom live more than two years: and has a large number of
+children about whom he says nothing, &quot;because he has not observed in
+them anything worth speaking about.&quot; The courtships are varied between
+abrupt embraces soon after introduction, and discussions on Hebrew,
+Babel, &quot;Christian-deism,&quot; and the binomial theorem. In the most
+inhospitable deserts, his man or boy<a id="footnotetag10" name="footnotetag10"></a><a href="#footnote10"><sup>10</sup></a> is invariably able to produce
+from his wallet &quot;ham, tongue, potted blackcock, and a pint of cyder,&quot;
+while in more favourable <a name="Page_142" id="Page_142" />circumstances Buncle takes his ease in his inn
+by consuming &quot;a pound of steak, a quart of green peas, two fine cuts of
+bread, a tankard of strong ale, and a pint of port&quot; and singing cheerful
+love-ditties a few days after the death of an adored wife. He comes down
+the side of precipices by a mysterious kind of pole-jumping&mdash;half a
+dozen fathoms at a drop with landing-places a yard wide&mdash;like a chamois
+or a rollicking Rocky Mountain ram. Every now and then he finds a
+skeleton, with a legend of instructive tenor, in a hermitage which he
+annexes: and almost infallibly, at the worst point of the wilderness,
+there is an elegant country seat with an obliging old father and a
+lively heiress ready to take the place of the last removed charmer.</p>
+
+<p>Mad, however, as this sketch may sound, and certainly not quite sane as
+Amory may have been, there is a very great deal of method in his, and
+some in its, madness. The flashes of shrewdness and the blocks of pretty
+solid learning (Rabelaisian again) do not perhaps so much concern us:
+but the book, ultra-eccentric as it is, does count for something in the
+history of the English novel. Its descriptions, rendered through a
+magnifying glass as they are, have considerable power; and are quite
+unlike anything in prose fiction, and most things in prose literature,
+before it. In Buncle himself there is a sort of extra-natural,
+&quot;four-dimension&quot; nature and proportion which assert the novelist's power
+memorably:&mdash;if a John Buncle could exist, he would very probably be like
+Amory's John Buncle. Above all, the book (let it be remembered that it
+came before <i>Tristram Shandy</i>) is almost the beginning of the Eccentric
+Novel&mdash;not of the satiric-marvellous type which Cyrano and Swift had
+revived from Lucian, but of a new, a modern, and a very English variety.
+Buncle is sometimes extraordinarily like Borrow (on whom he prob<a name="Page_143" id="Page_143" />ably
+had influence), and it would not be hard to arrange a very considerable
+spiritual succession for him, by no means deserving the uncomplimentary
+terms in which he dismisses his progeny in the flesh.</p>
+
+<p>If there is an almost preposterous cheerfulness about <i>Buncle</i>, the
+necessary alternative can be amply supplied by the next book to which we
+come. The curious way in which Johnson almost invariably managed to hit
+the critical nail on the head is well illustrated by his remark to
+Frances Sheridan, author of the <i>Memoirs of Miss Sydney Bid[d]ulph</i>
+(1761), that he &quot;did not know whether she had a right, on moral
+principles, to make her readers suffer so much.&quot; Substitute &quot;&aelig;sthetic&quot;
+for &quot;moral&quot; and &quot;heroine&quot; for &quot;readers,&quot; and the remark retains its
+truth on another scheme of criticism, which Johnson was not ostensibly
+employing, and which he might have violently denounced. The book, though
+with its subsequent prolongation too long, is a powerful one: and though
+actually dedicated to Richardson and no doubt consciously owing much to
+his influence, practically clears off the debt by its own earnings. But
+Miss Bidulph (she started with only one <i>d</i>, but acquired another),
+whose journal to her beloved Cecilia supplies the matter and method of
+the novel, is too persistently unlucky and ill-treated, without the
+smallest fault of her own, for anything but really, not fictitiously,
+real life. Her misfortunes spring from obeying her mother (but there was
+neither moral nor satire in this then), and husbands, lovers, rivals,
+relations, connections&mdash;everybody&mdash;conspire to afflict her. Poetical
+justice has been much abused in both senses of that verb: <i>Sydney
+Biddulph</i> shows cause for it in the very act of neglect.</p>
+
+<p>But the eighteenth century, on the whole, loathed melancholy. The
+<i>Spiritual Quixote</i> (1772) of the Reverend<a name="Page_144" id="Page_144" /> Richard Graves (1715-1804)
+has probably been a little injured by the ingenuous proclamation of
+indebtedness in the title. It is, however, an extremely clever and
+amusing book: and one of the best of the many imitations of its
+original, which, indeed, it follows only on broad and practically
+independent lines. During his long life (for more than half a century of
+which he was rector of Claverton near Bath) Graves knew many interesting
+persons, from Shenstone and Whitefield (with both of whom he was at
+Pembroke College, Oxford, though he afterwards became a fellow of All
+Souls) to Malthus, who was a pupil of his; and he had some interesting
+private experiences. He wove a good deal that was personal into his
+novel, which, as may easily be guessed, is a satire upon Methodism, and
+in which Whitefield is personally and not altogether favourably
+introduced. But even on him Graves is by no means savage: while his
+treatment of his hero, Geoffrey Wildgoose, a young Oxford man who,
+living in retirement with his mother in the country, becomes an
+evangelist, very mainly from want of some more interesting occupation,
+is altogether good-humoured. Wildgoose promptly falls in love with a
+fascinating damsel-errant, Julia Townsend; and the various adventures,
+religious, picaresque, and amatory, are embroiled and disembroiled with
+very fair skill in character and fairer still in narrative. Nor is the
+Sancho-Partridge of the piece, Jerry Tugwell, a cobbler (who thinks,
+though he is very fond of his somewhat masterful wife, that a little
+absence from her would not be unrefreshing), by any means a failure.
+Both Scott and Dickens evidently knew Graves well,<a id="footnotetag11" name="footnotetag11"></a><a href="#footnote11"><sup>11</sup></a> and knowledge of
+him might with advantage be more general.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145" />The novels that have been noticed since those contrasted ones of Mrs.
+Haywood's, which occupy a position by themselves, all possess a sort of
+traditional fame; and cover (with the proper time allowed for the start
+given by Richardson and Fielding) nearly the same period of thirty
+years&mdash;in this case 1744 (<i>David Simple</i>) to 1772 (<i>The Spiritual
+Quixote</i>)&mdash;which is covered by the novels of the great quartette
+themselves. It would be possible to add a great many, and easy and not
+disagreeable to the writer to dwell on a few. Of these few some are
+perhaps necessary. Frank Coventry's <i>Pompey the Little</i>&mdash;an amusing
+satirical novel with a pet dog for the title-giver and with the
+promising (but as a rule ill-handled) subject of university life treated
+early&mdash;appeared in 1751&mdash;the same year which saw the much higher flight
+(the pun is in sense not words) of <i>Peter Wilkins</i>, by Robert Paltock of
+Clement's Inn, a person of whom practically nothing else is known. It
+would be lucky for many people if they were thus singly yoked to
+history. It was once fashionable to dismiss <i>Peter</i> as a boy's book,
+because it discovers a world of flying men and women, modelled partly on
+Defoe, partly on Swift; it has more recently been fashionable to hint a
+sneer at it as &quot;sentimental&quot; because of its presentment of a sort of
+fantastic and unconventional Amelia (who, it may be remembered, made her
+appearance in the same year) in the heroine Youwarkee. Persons who do
+not care for fashion will perhaps sometimes agree that, though not
+exactly a masterpiece, it is rather a charming book. If anybody is
+sickened by its charm he may restore himself by a still better known
+story which no one can accuse of <a name="Page_146" id="Page_146" />charm or sentiment, though it is
+clever enough&mdash;Charles Johnstone's <i>Chrysal</i> or <i>The Adventures of a
+Guinea</i> (1760). This, which is strongly Smollettian in more ways than
+one, derives its chief notoriety from the way in which the scandalous
+(and perhaps partly fabulous) orgies of Medmenham Abbey are, like other
+scandalous and partly fabulous gossip of the time, brought in. But it
+<i>is</i> clever; though emphatically one of the books which &quot;leave a bad
+taste in the mouth.&quot; Indeed about this time the novel, which even in
+clean hands allowed itself not a little freedom, took, in others,
+excursions in the direction of the province of &quot;prohibited literature,&quot;
+and sometimes passed the border.</p>
+
+<p>One rather celebrated book, however, has not yet been mentioned: and it
+will serve very well, with two others greater in every way, as usher to
+a few general remarks on the weakness of this generation of minor
+novelists. Between 1766 and 1770 Henry Brooke, an Irishman of position,
+fortune, and literary distinction in other ways, who was at the time of
+more than middle age, published <i>The Fool of Quality</i> or <i>The Adventures
+of Henry Earl of Morland</i>. The hero is a sort of Grandison-Buncle, as
+proper though scarcely as priggish as the one, and as eccentric and
+discursive as the other; the story is chaos: the book is stuffed with
+disquisitions on all sorts of moral, social, and political problems. It
+is excellently written; it is clear from it that Brooke (who was for a
+time actually mad) did not belie the connection of great wits with
+madness. But it is, perhaps, most valuable as an evidence of the
+unconquerable set of the time towards novel.</p>
+
+<p>Of this, however, as of some other points, we have greater evidence
+still in the shape of two books, each of them, as nothing else yet
+mentioned in this chapter can claim <a name="Page_147" id="Page_147" />to be, a permanent and capital
+contribution to English literature&mdash;Johnson's <i>Rasselas</i> (1759) and
+Goldsmith's <i>Vicar of Wakefield</i> (1766).</p>
+
+<p>It is not from the present writer that any one need look for an attempt
+to belittle Johnson: and there is no doubt (for the <i>Lives of the Poets</i>
+is but a bundle of essays) that <i>Rasselas</i> is Johnson's greatest <i>book</i>.
+But there may be, in some minds, as little doubt that attempts to defend
+it from the charge of not being a novel are only instances of that not
+wholly unamiable frenzy of eagerness to &quot;say <i>not</i> ditto to Mr. Burke&quot;
+which is characteristic of clever undergraduates, and of periods which
+are not quite of the greatest in literature. <i>Rasselas</i> is simply an
+extended and glorified moral apologue&mdash;an enlarged &quot;Vision of Mirza.&quot; It
+has no real story; it has no real characters; its dialogue is &quot;talking
+book;&quot; it indulges in some but not much description. It is in fact a
+prose <i>Vanity of Human Wishes</i>, admirably if somewhat stiffly arranged
+in form, and as true to life as life itself. You will have difficulty in
+finding a wiser book anywhere; but although it is quite true that a
+novel need not be foolish, wisdom is certainly not its determining
+<i>differentia</i>. Yet for our purposes <i>Rasselas</i> is almost as valuable as
+<i>Tom Jones</i> itself: because it shows how imperative and wide-ranging was
+the struggle towards production of this kind in prose. The book is
+really&mdash;to adapt the quaint title of one of the preceding
+century&mdash;<i>Johnson al Mondo</i>: and at this time, when Johnson wanted to
+communicate his thoughts to the world in a popular form, we see that he
+chose the novel.</p>
+
+<p>The lesson is not so glaringly obvious in the <i>Vicar of Wakefield</i>,
+because this <i>is</i> a novel, and a very delightful one. The only point
+of direct contact with <i>Rasselas</i> is the knowledge of human
+nature, though in the one book this <a name="Page_148" id="Page_148" />takes the form of melancholy
+aphorism and apophthegm, in the other that of felicitous trait and
+dialogue-utterance. There is plenty of story, though this has not been
+arranged so as to hit the taste of the martinet in &quot;fable;&quot; the book has
+endless character; the descriptions are Hogarth with less of <i>peuple</i>
+about them; the dialogue is unsurpassable. Yet Goldsmith, untiring hack
+of genius as he was, wrote no other novel; evidently felt no particular
+call or predilection for the style; would have been dramatist, poet,
+essayist with greater satisfaction to himself, though scarcely
+(satisfactory as he is in all these respects) to us. That he tried it at
+all can hardly be set down to anything else than the fact that the style
+was popular: and his choice is one of the highest possible testimonies
+to the popularity of the style. Incidentally, of course, the <i>Vicar</i> has
+more for us than this, because it indicates, as vividly as any of the
+work of the great Four themselves, how high and various the capacities
+of the novel are&mdash;how in fact it can almost completely compete with and,
+for a time, vanquish the drama on its own ground. Much of it, of
+course&mdash;the &quot;Fudge!&quot; scene between Mr. Burchell and the town ladies may
+be taken as the first example that occurs&mdash;<i>is</i> drama, with all the
+cumbrous accessories of stage and scene and circumstance spared. One may
+almost see that &quot;notice to quit,&quot; which (some will have it) has been,
+after nearly a century and a half, served back again on the novel,
+served by the <i>Vicar of Wakefield</i> on the drama.</p>
+
+<p>At the same time even the <i>Vicar</i>, though perhaps less than any other
+book yet noticed in this chapter, illustrates the proposition to which
+we have been leading up&mdash;that, outside the great quartette, and even to
+a certain extent inside of it, the novel had not yet fully found its
+proper path&mdash;had still less made up its mind to walk freely and <a name="Page_149" id="Page_149" />firmly
+therein. Either it has some <i>arri&egrave;re pens&eacute;e</i>, some second purpose,
+besides the simple attempt to interest and absorb by the artistic
+re-creation of real and ordinary life: or, without exactly doing this,
+it shows signs of mistrust and misgiving as to the sufficiency of such
+an appeal, and supplements it by the old tricks of the drama in
+&quot;revolution and discovery;&quot; by incident more or less out of the ordinary
+course; by satire, political, social, or personal; by philosophical
+disquisition; by fantastic imagination&mdash;by this, that, and the other of
+the fatal auxiliaries who always undo their unwise employers. Men want
+to write novels; and the public wants them to write novels; and supply
+does not fail desire and demand. There is a well-known <i>locus classicus</i>
+from which we know that, not long after the century had passed its
+middle, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in Italy regularly received boxes of
+novels from her daughter in England, and read them, eagerly though by no
+means uncritically, as became Fielding's cousin and her ladyship's self.
+But while the kind had not conquered, and for a long time did not
+conquer, any high place in literature from the point of view of serious
+criticism&mdash;while, now and long afterwards, novel-writing was the
+Cinderella of the literary family, and novel-reading the inexhaustible
+text for sermons on wasted, nay positively ill-spent, time&mdash;the
+novelists themselves half justified their critics by frequent
+extravagance; by more frequent unreality; by undue licence pretty often;
+by digression and divagation still oftener. Except Fielding, hardly any
+one had dared boldly to hold up the mirror to nature, and be content
+with giving the reflection, in his own way, but with respect for it. For
+even Goldsmith, with infinite touches of nature, had not given quite a
+natural whole, and even Johnson, though absolutely true, <a name="Page_150" id="Page_150" />had failed to
+accommodate his truth to the requirements of the novel.</p>
+
+<p>The turning point in this direction of the kind was to be made by a
+person far inferior in ability to any one of the great quartette, and in
+a book which, <i>as</i> a book, cannot pretend to an equality with the worst
+of theirs&mdash;by a person indeed of less intellectual power, and in a book
+of less literary merit, than not a few of the persons and books just
+noticed. There is something, no doubt, paradoxical in this: and the
+paradox is connected, both with a real quality of the subject and with a
+surprising diversity of opinions about it. Frances Burney and her
+<i>Evelina</i> (1778), not to mention her subsequent works and her delightful
+<i>Diary</i>, have been the subject of a great deal of writing: but though
+more than a hundred years&mdash;more indeed than a century and a
+quarter&mdash;have passed since the book insidiously took London by gradual
+storm, it may, without too much presumption, be questioned whether
+either book or author has yet been finally or satisfactorily &quot;placed.&quot;
+The immense advantage of not having a history, positively illustrated
+once for all in Shakespeare, could hardly be negatively illustrated
+better than in Madame d'Arblay. She had the curious, and actually very
+unpleasant, experience of being selected for a position at court on the
+strength of her literary achievements, of finding it intolerable, of
+breaking down, and of never doing any really good work after her
+release, through much more than half of her long life. On this fact
+critical biography has fastened almost exclusively. Macaulay, in one of
+his most brilliant and best known essays, represents the world as having
+been deprived of unknown quantities of admirable work by the misplaced
+kindness, and the positive unkindness, of Queen Charlotte. Some have
+agreed with him, some have differed <a name="Page_151" id="Page_151" />with him. Some, in one of the
+natural if uncritical revulsions, have questioned whether even <i>Evelina</i>
+is a very remarkable book. Some, with human respect for the great names
+of its early admirers, have passed it over gingerly&mdash;not exactly as
+willing to wound, but as quite afraid or reluctant to strike. Nay,
+actual critical evaluations of the novel-values of Miss Burney's four
+attempts in novel-writing are very rare. I dare say there are other
+people who have read <i>The Wanderer</i> through: but I never met any one who
+had done so except (to quote Rossetti) myself: and I could not bring
+myself, even on this occasion, to read it again. I doubt whether very
+many now living have read <i>Camilla</i>. Even <i>Cecilia</i> requires an effort,
+and does not repay that effort very well. Only <i>Evelina</i> itself is
+legible and relegible&mdash;for reasons which will be given presently. Yet
+<i>Cecilia</i> was written shortly after <i>Evelina</i>, under the same stimulus
+of abundant and genial society, with no pressure except that of friendly
+encouragement and perhaps assistance, and long before the supposed
+blight of royal favour and royal exigences came upon its author. When
+<i>Camilla</i> was published she had been relieved from these exigences,
+though not from that favour, for five years: and was a thoroughly happy
+woman, rejoicing in husband and child. Even when the impossible
+<i>Wanderer</i> was concocted, she had had ample leisure, had as yet incurred
+none of her later domestic sorrows, and was assured of lavish recompense
+for her (it must be said) absolutely worthless labours. Why this steady
+declension, with which, considering the character of <i>Cecilia</i>, the
+court sojourn can have had nothing to do? And admitting it, why still
+uphold, as the present writer does uphold, <i>Evelina</i> as one of the
+<i>points de rep&egrave;re</i> of the English novel? Both questions shall be
+answered in their order.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152" />Frances Burney must have been, as we see not merely from external
+testimony, but from the infallible witness of her own diary, a most
+engaging person to any one who could get over her shyness and her
+prudery:<a id="footnotetag12" name="footnotetag12"></a><a href="#footnote12"><sup>12</sup></a> but she was only in a very limited sense a gifted one.
+Macaulay grants her a &quot;fine understanding;&quot; but even his own article
+contradicts the statement, which is merely one of his exaggerations for
+the sake of point. She had <i>not</i> a fine understanding: though she was
+neither silly nor stupid, her sense was altogether inferior to her
+sensibility. Although living in a most bookish circle she was, as
+Macaulay himself admits, almost illiterate: and (which he does not say)
+her comparative critical estimates of books, when she does give them,
+are merely contemptible. This harsh statement could be freely
+substantiated: but it is enough to say that, when a girl, she preferred
+some forgotten rubbish called <i>Henry and Frances</i> to the <i>Vicar of
+Wakefield</i>: and that, when a woman, she deliberately offended
+Chateaubriand by praising the <i>Itin&eacute;raire</i> rather than the <i>G&eacute;nie du
+Christianisme</i>, or <i>Atala</i>, or <i>Ren&eacute;</i>, or <i>Les Martyrs</i>. She had very
+little inventive power; her best novel, <i>Evelina</i>, has no plot worth
+speaking of. She never wrote really well. Even the <i>Diary</i> derives its
+whole charm from the matter and the <i>reportage. Evelina</i> is tolerable
+style of the kind that has no style; <i>Cecilia</i> is pompous and
+Johnsonian; <i>Camilla</i> was stigmatised by the competent and affectionate
+judgment of Mrs. Delany as &quot;Gallicised;&quot; and <i>The Wanderer</i> is in a
+lingo which suggests the translation of an ill-written French original
+by a person who does not know English.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153" />What then was it in <i>Evelina</i>, and in part in <i>Cecilia</i> (with a faint
+survival even into <i>Camilla</i>), which turned the heads of such a &quot;town&quot;
+as Johnson and Burke, Walpole and Windham, and many others&mdash;which, to
+persons who can see it, makes the books attractive to-day, and which
+should always give their author a secure and distinguished place in the
+great torch-race of English fiction-writers? It is this&mdash;that Miss
+Burney had a quite marvellous faculty of taking impressions of actual
+speech, manners, and to a certain extent character: that she had, at any
+rate for a time, a corresponding faculty of expressing, or at least
+reporting, her impressions. Next (and perhaps most of all) that she had
+the luck to come at a moment when speech and manners were turning to the
+modern; and lastly, that she was content, in parts of her work at any
+rate, to let her faculty of expression work, automatically and
+uninterfered with, on the impressions: and thereby give us record of
+them for all time. Her acute critic &quot;Daddy&quot; Crisp lamented that we had
+not had a series of recorders of successive <i>tons</i> [fashions] like
+Fanny. But she was much more than a mere fashion-monger: and what has
+lasted best in her was not mere fashion. She could see and record life
+and nature: and she did so. Still, fashion had a good deal to do with
+it: and when her access to fashion and society ceased, the goodness of
+her work ceased likewise.</p>
+
+<p>Even this gift, and this even in <i>Evelina</i> and the better parts of
+<i>Cecilia</i>, she had not always with her. The sentimental parts of
+<i>Evelina</i>&mdash;the correspondence with Mr. Villars, the courtship with Lord
+Orville, and others&mdash;are very weak: and it cannot be said that Evelina
+herself, though she is a pleasant girl enough, gives the lie to Mr.
+Pope's libel about women. Cecilia has a little more individuality. But
+the great strength of the former book <a name="Page_154" id="Page_154" />lies in the admirable lower
+middle-class pictures of the Branghtons and Mr. Smith, whom Fanny had
+evidently studied from the life in the queer neighbourhood of Poland
+Street: as also in the justness and verisimilitude of the picture of the
+situation, which in different ways both books present&mdash;that of the
+introduction of a young girl to the world.<a id="footnotetag13" name="footnotetag13"></a><a href="#footnote13"><sup>13</sup></a> In these points, as in
+others which there is neither space nor need to particularise, Miss
+Burney showed that she had hit upon&mdash;stumbled upon one may almost
+say&mdash;the real principle and essence of the novel as distinguished from
+the romance&mdash;its connection with actual ordinary life&mdash;life studied
+freshly and directly &quot;<i>from</i> the life,&quot; and disguised and adulterated as
+little as possible by exceptional interests and incidents. It is
+scarcely too much to say that one great reason why the novel was so long
+coming into existence was precisely this&mdash;that life and society so long
+remained subject to these exceptional interests and incidents. It is
+only within the last century or so that the &quot;life of 'mergency&quot; (to
+adapt Mr. Chucks slightly) ceased to be the ordinary life. Addison's
+&quot;Dissenter's Diary&quot; with its record of nothing but constitutionals and
+marrow-bones, and Mr. Nisby's opinions, has simply amused half a dozen
+generations. Yet, in a sense, it has nearly as much to do with the
+advent of the novel as Sir Roger de Coverley himself. For these things
+are, not merely in an allegory, the subjects of the novel. Not so very
+much earlier Mr. Nisby would have had a chance of delivering his
+opinions on the scaffold: and his disciple would have had prison bread
+and water for marrow-bones and &quot;Brooks and Hellier.&quot; These would have
+been subjects for romance: the others were subjects for novel.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155" />All glory, therefore, be to Frances Burney; both that which her
+generous successor and superior gives her in <i>Northanger Abbey</i>, and
+more also&mdash;for Miss Austen, naturally enough, was not taking the
+view-point of literary history. But it has been said that Fanny herself
+possessed her gift in two senses uncertainly&mdash;first, in that she did not
+very clearly perceive what it was, and, secondly, in that she soon lost
+grip of it. It is, therefore, not wonderful that few others caught the
+trick from her for a long time&mdash;for indeed fully twenty years, till Miss
+Edgeworth made her appearance. But these twenty years were years of
+extreme fertility in novels of different sorts, while&mdash;a phenomenon that
+occurs not seldom&mdash;the older kind of fiction made a kind of rally at the
+very time that the newer was at last solidly establishing itself. There
+was, indeed, ample room for both. You cannot kill Romance: it would be a
+profound misfortune, perhaps the profoundest that could befall the human
+race, if you could. But the new romance was of rather a bastard kind,
+and it showed more of the bad blood than of the good till, by a curious
+coincidence, Scott once more found the true strain, just about the same
+time as that at which Miss Austen was making known the true strain of
+the novel proper.</p>
+
+<p>This hybrid new romance had been stumbled upon more than a decade before
+Fanny Burney in her turn stumbled upon the pure novel: and most people
+know in what and by whom. To this day it is by no means easy to be
+certain what Horace Walpole really meant to write, or thought he was
+writing, in <i>The Castle of Otranto</i> (1764). His own references to his
+own writings are too much saturated with affectation and pose to make it
+safe to draw any conclusions from them; there is little or no external
+evidence; and the book itself is rather a puzzle.<a name="Page_156" id="Page_156" /> Taking the Preface to
+the second edition with a very large allowance of salt&mdash;the success of
+the first <i>before</i> this preface makes double salting advisable&mdash;and
+accommodating it to the actual facts, one finds it hardly necessary to
+go beyond the obvious and almost commonplace solution that <i>The Castle
+of Otranto</i> was simply the castle of Strawberry Hill itself with paper
+for lath and ink for plaster&mdash;in other words, an effort to imitate
+something which the imitator more than half misunderstood. Of medi&aelig;val
+literature proper, apart from chronicles and genealogies, Walpole knew
+nothing: and for its more precious features he had the dislike which
+sometimes accompanies ignorance. But he undoubtedly had positive
+literary genius&mdash;flawed, alloyed, incomplete, uncritical of itself, but
+existing: and this genius showed itself here. His paper-and-ink
+&quot;Strawberry&quot; is quite another guess structure from his lath-and-plaster
+one. For itself in itself&mdash;for what it <i>is</i>&mdash;the present writer, though
+he has striven earnestly and often for the sake of the great things that
+it <i>did</i>, has never been able to get up any affection or admiration. It
+is preposterous, desultory, tedious, clumsy, dull. But it made people
+(we know it on such excellent authority as Gray's) shudder: and the
+shudder was exactly what they wanted&mdash;in every sense of the verb &quot;to
+want.&quot; Moreover, quite independently of this shudder, it pointed the way
+to a wide, fertile, and delightful province of historical, social,
+literary, and other matter which had long been neglected, and which
+people had been assured was not worth exploring. Blair was just using,
+or about to use, &quot;any romance of chivalry&quot; as a hyperbolical
+exemplification of the contemptible in literature. Hume had been arguing
+against, and Voltaire was still sneering at, all sorts of superstition
+and supernaturalism. The common cant <a name="Page_157" id="Page_157" />of criticism for generations had
+been that &quot;sense&quot; and &quot;reason&quot; were to be the only criteria. Walpole's
+egregious helmet dropped from no one knew (or knows) where on all these
+Philistinisms: and squelched them. How it did this, why it did it, and
+so forth, one knows not much more than one knows why and how all the
+things happened in the novel itself. <i>Apr&egrave;s coup</i>, the author talked
+about &quot;Shakespeare&quot; (of whom, by the way, he was anything but a fervent
+or thorough admirer) and the like. Shakespeare had, as Sir Walter
+Raleigh has well pointed out, uncommonly little to do with it. But
+Shakespeare at least supplies us with an appropriate phrase for the
+occasion. <i>The Castle of Otranto</i> &quot;lay in&quot; Horace's &quot;way, and he found
+it.&quot; And with it, though hardly in it, he found the New Romance.</p>
+
+<p>In Horace's case also, as in that of Frances, though the success was
+even more momentous, the successors were slow and doubtful, though not
+quite so slow. In some dozen years Walpole read Miss Clara Reeve's <i>Old
+English Baron</i> (1777), and as in another celebrated case &quot;thought it a
+bore.&quot; It <i>is</i> rather a bore. It has more consecutiveness than
+<i>Otranto</i>, and escapes the absurdities of the copiously but clumsily
+used supernatural by administering it in a very minute dose. But there
+is not a spark of genius in it, whereas that spark, though sometimes
+curiously wrapped up in ashes, was always present (Heaven knows where he
+got it!) in Sir Robert's youngest son. And the contagion spread. For
+general and epidemic purposes it had to wait till the Germans had
+carried it over the North Sea and sent it back again. For particular
+ones, it found a new development in one of the most remarkable of all
+novels, twenty years younger than <i>Otranto</i>, and a few years older than
+the new outburst of the &quot;Gothic&quot;<a name="Page_158" id="Page_158" /> supernatural in the works of Anne
+Radcliffe and Mat Lewis.</p>
+
+<p><i>Vathek</i> (1786) stands alone&mdash;almost independent even of its
+sponsors&mdash;it would be awkward to say godfathers&mdash;Hamilton and Voltaire;
+apart likewise from such work as it, no doubt, in turn partly suggested
+to Peacock and to Disraeli. There is, perhaps, no one towards whom it is
+so tempting to play the idle game of retrospective Providence as towards
+the describer of Batalha and Alcoba&ccedil;a, the creator of Nouronnihar and
+the Hall of Eblis. Fonthill has had too many vicissitudes since
+Beckford, and Cintra is a far cry; but though his associations with Bath
+are later, it is still possible, in that oddly enchanted city, to get
+something of the mixed atmosphere&mdash;eighteenth century, nineteenth, and
+of centuries older and younger than either&mdash;which, <i>tamis&eacute;e</i> in a
+mysterious fashion, surrounds this extraordinary little masterpiece.
+Take Beckford's millions away; make him coin his wits to supply the want
+of them; and what would have been the result? Perhaps more <i>Vatheks</i>;
+perhaps things even better than <i>Vathek</i>;<a id="footnotetag14" name="footnotetag14"></a><a href="#footnote14"><sup>14</sup></a> perhaps nothing at all. On
+the whole, it is always wiser not to play Providence, in fact or fancy.
+All that need be said is that Anthony Hamilton and Voltaire are
+certainly not by themselves&mdash;good as they are, and admirable as the
+first is&mdash;enough to account for <i>Vathek</i>. Romance has passed there as
+well as persiflage and something like <i>co&iuml;onnerie</i>; it is Romance that
+has given us the baleful beauty of that Queen of Evil, Nouronnihar, and
+the vision of the burning hearts that make their own wandering but
+eternal Hell. The tendency of the novel had been on the <a name="Page_159" id="Page_159" />whole, even in
+its best examples, to prose in feeling as well as in form. It was
+Beckford who availed himself of the poetry which is almost inseparable
+from Romance. But it was Horace Walpole who had opened the door to
+Romance herself.</p>
+
+<p>Still, <i>Vatheks</i> are not to be had to order: and as Romance was wanted,
+to order and in bulk, during the late years of the eighteenth century,
+some other kind had to be supplied. The chief accredited purveyors of it
+have been already named and must now be dealt with, to be followed by
+the list of secondary, never quite accomplished, exponents now of novel,
+now of romance, now of the two mixed, who filled the closing years of
+the eighteenth century.</p>
+
+<p>It is, however, unjust to put the author of <i>The Mysteries of Udolpho</i>
+and the author of <i>The Monk</i> on the same level. Mat Lewis was a clever
+boy with a lively fancy, a knack of catching and even of anticipating
+popular tendencies in literature, a rather vulgar taste by nature, and
+no faculty of self-criticism to correct it. The famous <i>Monk</i> (1795),
+which he published when he was twenty, is as preposterous as <i>Otranto</i>
+and adds to its preposterousness a <i>haut go&ucirc;t</i> of atrocity and indecency
+which Walpole was far too much of a gentleman, and even of a true man of
+letters, to attempt or to tolerate. Lewis's other work in various forms
+is less offensive: but&mdash;except in respect of verse-rhythm which does not
+here concern us&mdash;hardly any of it is literature. What does concern us is
+that the time took it for literature, because it adopted the
+terror-style in fiction.</p>
+
+<p>Anne Ward (she married a barrister named Radcliffe, of whom we do not
+hear much except that his engagements in journalism threw time on his
+wife's hands for writing) appears to have started on her career of
+terror-novelist, in which she preceded Lewis, with two fixed resolves of
+<a name="Page_160" id="Page_160" />principle very contrary to his practice. The first was to observe
+strict &quot;propriety&quot; in her books&mdash;a point in which the novel had always
+been a little peccant. The second and more questionable, but also more
+original, was a curious determination to lavish the appearance of the
+supernatural, in accordance with the Walpolian tradition and the German
+adoption of it, but never to allow anything <i>really</i> supernatural in
+ultimate explanation or want of explanation. She applied these two
+principles to the working out, over and over again, of practically the
+same story&mdash;the persecutions of a beautiful and virtuous heroine, and
+her final deliverance from them. Her first attempt, <i>The Castles of
+Athlin and Dunbayne</i>, appeared as early as 1789: and she left a
+posthumous romance, <i>Gaston de Blondeville</i>, which did not come out till
+1826, four years after her death. She also wrote some poems and a volume
+of <i>Travels</i> (1794) which is important for a reason to be noticed
+presently. But her fame rests upon four books, which she published in
+seven years, between her own twenty-sixth and thirty-third, <i>A Sicilian
+Romance</i> (1790), <i>The Romance of the Forest</i> (1791), the world-renowned
+<i>Mysteries of Udolpho</i> in 1794-1795, and <i>The Italian</i> two years later.</p>
+
+<p>These stories owed their original attraction to the skill with which, by
+the use of a Defoe-like minuteness of detail, added to a pictorial
+faculty which Defoe had not, an atmosphere of terror is constantly
+diffused and kept up. Very little that is terrible actually happens: but
+the artist succeeds (so long as the trick has not become too familiar)
+in persuading you that something very terrible is <i>going</i> to happen, or
+has just happened. And so the delight of something &quot;horrid,&quot; as the
+Catherines and Isabellas of the day put it, is given much more
+plentifully, and even <a name="Page_161" id="Page_161" />much more excitingly, than it could be by a real
+horror now and then, with intervals of miscellaneous business. In one
+sense, indeed, the process will not stand even the slightest critical
+examination: for it is soon seen to consist of a succession of serious
+mystifications and non-comic much-ados-about-nothing. But these &quot;ados&quot;
+are most cunningly made (her last book, <i>The Italian</i>, is, perhaps, the
+best place to look for them, if the reader is not taking up the whole
+subject with a virtuous thoroughness), and Mrs. Radcliffe's great praise
+is that she induced her original readers to suspend their critical
+faculties sufficiently to enable them to take it all seriously. Scott,
+who undoubtedly owed her something, assigned her positive genius: and
+modern critics, while, perhaps, seldom experiencing much real
+delectation from her work, have discovered in it not a few positive and
+many more indirect and comparative merits. The influence on Scott is not
+the least of these: but there is even a more unquestionable asset of the
+same kind in the fact that the Byronic villain-hero, if not Byron
+himself, is Mrs. Radcliffe's work. Schedoni did much more than beget or
+pattern Lara: he <i>is</i> Lara, to all intents and purposes, in &quot;first
+state&quot; and before the final touch has been put by the greater master who
+took the plate in hand.</p>
+
+<p>But there is more to be said for Mrs. Radcliffe than this. Her
+&quot;explained supernatural,&quot; tiresome as it may be to some of us nowadays,
+is really a marvel of patience and ingenuity: and this same quality
+extends to her plots generally. The historical side of her novels (which
+she does to some extent attempt) is a failure, as everything of the kind
+was before Scott: that we may leave till we come to Scott himself. But
+one important engine of the novelist she set to work in a fashion which
+had never been <a name="Page_162" id="Page_162" />managed before, and that is elaborate description. She
+shows an early adaptation of that &quot;picturesque,&quot; of which we see the
+beginnings in Gray, when she was in the nursery, which was being
+directly developed by Gilpin, but which, as we may see from her
+<i>Travels</i>, she had got not merely from books, but from her own
+observation. She applies it both within and without: at one moment
+giving pages on the scenery of the Apennines, at another paragraphs on
+the furniture of her abbeys and castles. The pine forests and the
+cataracts; the skyline of Udolpho bathed in sunset glow, while a
+&quot;melancholy purple tint&quot; steals up the slopes to its foundations&mdash;are
+all in the day's work now; but they were not so then, and it is fair to
+say that Mrs. Radcliffe does them well. The &quot;high canopied tester of
+dark green damask&quot; and the &quot;counterpane of black velvet&quot; which
+illustrate the introduction of the famous chapter of the Black Pall in
+Chateau le Blanc may be mere inventory goods now: but, once more, they
+were not so then. And this faculty of description (which, as noted
+above, could hardly have been, and pretty certainly was not, got from
+books, though it may have been, to some extent and quite legitimately,
+got from pictures) was applied in many minor ways&mdash;touches of really or
+supposedly horrible objects in the dark, faint suggestions of sound, or
+of appeals to the other senses&mdash;hints of all sorts, which were to become
+common tricks of the trade, but were then quite new.</p>
+
+<p>At any rate, by these and other means she attained that great result of
+the novel which has been noted in Defoe, in Richardson, and in
+others&mdash;the result of what the French vividly call <i>enfisting</i> the
+reader&mdash;getting hold of his attention, absorbing him in a pleasant
+fashion. The mechanism was often too mechanical: taken with the
+<a name="Page_163" id="Page_163" />author's steady and honest, but somewhat inartistic determination to
+explain everything it sometimes produces effects positively ridiculous
+to us. With the proviso of <i>valeat quantum</i>, it is not quite unfair to
+dwell, as has often been dwelt, on the fact that the grand triumph of
+Mrs. Radcliffe's terrormongering&mdash;the famous incident of the Black
+Veil&mdash;is produced by a piece of wax-work. But the result resulted&mdash;the
+effect <i>was</i> produced: and it was left to those who were clever enough
+to improve upon the means. For the time these means were &quot;improved upon&quot;
+in another sense; we shall glance at some of the caricatures, intended
+and unintended, later. For the present we may turn to other varieties of
+the curiously swarming novel-production of these two last decades of the
+century, and especially of the very last.</p>
+
+<p>If Scott had not established Richard Cumberland's <i>Henry</i> (1795) in the
+fortress of the Ballantyne Novels, it would hardly be necessary to
+notice &quot;Sir Fretful Plagiary's&quot; contributions to the subject of our
+history. He preluded it with another, <i>Arundel</i> (1789), and followed it
+much later with a third, <i>John de Lancaster</i>: but there is no need to
+say anything of these. <i>Henry</i> displays the odd hit-<i>and</i>-miss quality
+which seems to have attached itself to Cumberland everywhere, whether as
+novelist, dramatist, essayist, diplomatist, poet, or anything else. It
+is, though by no means a mere &quot;plagiarism,&quot; an obvious and avowed
+imitation of Fielding, and the writer is so intent on his <i>pastiche</i>
+that he seems quite oblivious himself, and appears to expect equal
+oblivion on the part of his readers, of the fact that nearly two
+generations had passed. Henry is Joseph; Susan May is a much more
+elaborate and attractive Betty; the doctor's wife a vulgarised and
+repulsive Lady Booby; Ezekiel Daw, whom Scott admired, a<a name="Page_164" id="Page_164" /> <i>dissenting</i>
+Adams&mdash;the full force of the outrage of which variation Sir Walter
+perhaps did not feel. There are some good things in the story, but, as a
+whole, it is chiefly valuable as an early example of that great danger
+of modern literature&mdash;the influence of the &quot;printed book&quot; itself: and in
+a less degree of that forging ahead of the novel generally in public
+favour which we are chronicling. If the kind had not been popular, and
+if Fielding had not been its great prophet, one may be pretty sure that
+<i>Henry</i> would never have existed. The causes are important: the effect
+not quite so.</p>
+
+<p>There was, however, at this time a novel-school, and not such a very
+small one, which had more legitimate reasons for existence, inasmuch as
+it really served as mouthpiece to the thoughts and opinions of the time,
+whether these thoughts and opinions were good or bad. This may be called
+the &quot;revolutionary school,&quot; and its three most distinguished scholars
+were Bage, Holcroft, and Godwin, with Mrs. Inchbald perhaps to be added.
+The first began considerably before the outbreak of the actual French
+Revolution and shows the influence of its causes: the others were
+directly influenced by itself.</p>
+
+<p>One of the most remarkable of English novel-writers who are not absolute
+successes, and one who, though less completely obscured by Fortune than
+some, has never had quite his due, is Robert Bage. It was unfortunate
+for him that he fell in with the crude generation contemporary in their
+manhood with the French Revolution, and so manifested the crudity in
+full. Bage, in fact, except for a certain strength of humour, is almost
+more French than English. He has been put in the school of Richardson,
+but it is certain that Richardson would have been shocked at the
+supposed scholar: and it is not certain that Bage <a name="Page_165" id="Page_165" />would or need have
+felt complimented by the assignment of the master. He has the special
+laxity of the time in point of &quot;morality,&quot; or at least of decency; its
+affectations of rather childish perfectibilism and anti-theism; and the
+tendency of at least a part of it to an odd Calibanic jesting. Bage is
+good-tempered enough as it is: but he rather suggests possible
+Carrier-and-Fouch&eacute; developments in a favourable and fostering
+atmosphere. One does not quite know why Scott, who included in the
+Ballantyne Novels three of Bage's, <i>Mount Henneth</i> (1781), <i>Barham
+Downs</i> (1784), and <i>James Wallace</i> (1788), did not also include, if not
+<i>The Fair Syrian</i> (1787), two others, <i>Man as He is</i> (1792) and the
+still later <i>Hermsprong</i>, or <i>Man as He is Not</i> (1796). This last has
+sometimes been regarded as Bage's masterpiece: but it does not seem so
+to the present writer. It begins by the sketch of an illegitimate child,
+written in Bage's worst vein of hard rasping irony, entirely devoid of
+the delicate spring and &quot;give&quot; which irony requires, and which
+constitutes the triumph even of such things as <i>A Tale of a Tub</i> and
+<i>Jonathan Wild</i>. The rather impossibly named Hermsprong himself is not
+really so named at all, but is related (and in fact head-of-the-house)
+to the wicked or at least not good lord of the story. He is of the kind
+of Sir Charles Grandison, Rights-of-Mannified, which infests all these
+novels and is a great bore&mdash;as, indeed, to me is the whole book. The
+earlier <i>Man as He is</i> is far better. The hero, Sir George Paradyne,
+though of the same general class, is very much more tolerable and (being
+sometimes naughty) preferable to Grandison himself: while the heroine&mdash;a
+certain Miss Colerain, who is a merchant's daughter under a double cloud
+of her father's misfortune and of calumny as regards herself&mdash;though not
+an absolute success, is worth a dozen Harriets, <a name="Page_166" id="Page_166" />with thirteen
+Charlottes thrown in to make &quot;25 as 24&quot; in bookseller's phrase. Bage's
+extravagant or perhaps only too literal manners-painting (for it was an
+odd time) appears not infrequently, as in the anecdote of a justly
+enraged, though as a matter of fact mistaken, husband, who finds a young
+gentleman sitting on his wife's lap, with her arms round him, while he
+is literally and <i>en tout bien tout honneur</i> painting her face&mdash;being a
+great artist in that way. <i>Mount Henneth</i> is perhaps the liveliest of
+all: though its liveliness is partly achieved by less merely extravagant
+unconventionalities than this. But as a matter of fact Bage never
+entirely &quot;comes off&quot;: though there is cleverness enough in him to have
+made a dozen popular and deservedly popular novelists at a better time
+for the novel. For he was essentially a novelist of manners and
+character at a transition time, when manners and character had come out
+of one stage and had not settled into another. Even Miss Edgeworth in
+<i>Belinda</i> shows the disadvantage of this: and she was a lady of genius,
+while Bage had only talent and was not quite a gentleman.</p>
+
+<p>Thomas Holcroft was not a gentleman at all, never pretended to the
+title, and would probably have been rather affronted if any one had
+applied it to him: for he was a violent Atheist and Jacobin, glorying in
+his extraction from a shoemaker and an oysterseller, and in his
+education as a stable boy. He was, however, a man of considerable
+intellectual power and of some literary gift, which chiefly showed
+itself in his dramas (the best known, <i>The Road to Ruin</i>), but is not
+quite absent from his novels <i>Alwyn</i> (1780), <i>Anna St. Ives</i> (1792), and
+<i>Hugh Trevor</i> (1794-1797). The series runs in curious parallel to that
+of Bage's work: for <i>Alwyn</i>, the liveliest and the earliest by far of
+the three, is little more than a study partly after<a name="Page_167" id="Page_167" /> Fielding, but more
+after Smollett, with his own experiences brought in. The other two are
+purpose-novels of anarchist perfectibilism, and Holcroft enjoys the
+traditional credit of having directly inspired Godwin. Godwin himself
+acknowledged the obligation; indeed it is well known that&mdash;in pecuniary
+matters more particularly&mdash;Godwin had no hesitation either in incurring
+or in acknowledging obligations, always provided that he was not
+expected to discharge them. It is possible that Holcroft's rough and
+ready acceptance and exaggeration of the doctrines which Rousseau had
+(as seems most probable) developed from a paradox of Diderot's, gave an
+impetus to the rather sluggish but more systematic mind of Godwin. But
+it is certain that <i>Political Justice</i>, though it is not a novel at all,
+is a much more amusing book than <i>Anna St. Ives</i>, which is one. And
+though Holcroft (especially if the presence of this quality in his
+<i>Autobiography</i> is not wholly due to Hazlitt&mdash;there is some chance that
+it is) possessed a liveliness in narrative to which Godwin could never
+attain, there is no doubt that this enigmatical and many-sided spunger,
+philanderer, and corruptor of youth had a much higher general
+qualification for novel-writing than any one mentioned hitherto in this
+chapter, or perhaps than any to be mentioned, except the curiously
+contrasted pair, of Irish birth, who are to come last in it.</p>
+
+<p>I have sometimes thought that the greatest testimony to Godwin's power
+in this respect is the idea (which even Hazlitt, though he did not share
+it, does not seem to have thought preposterous, and which seems to have
+been held by others who were not fools) that Godwin might be the author
+of <i>Waverley</i>. To us, looking back, the notion seems as absurd as that
+Bacon could be the author of Shakespeare or Steele of the <i>Tale of a
+Tub</i>: but if, instead <a name="Page_168" id="Page_168" />of looking back, we throw ourselves back, the
+absurdity does not quite persist as it does in the other two instances.
+There are some who, of course, would say, &quot;Why take this fanciful test
+of Godwin's ability when you have a real one in <i>Caleb Williams</i>?&quot; The
+reasons are double: for, historically, such an estimate by
+contemporaries is of the very first value, and to the present writer
+<i>Caleb Williams</i> (1794) has never seemed a very interesting book. It is
+impossible to sympathise with a hero who is actuated by the very lowest
+of human motives, sheer inquisitiveness: and <i>my</i> sense of natural
+justice (which is different from Godwin's) demands not that he shall
+escape, but that he shall be broken on the wheel, or burnt at a slow
+fire, or made to read <i>Political Justice</i> after the novelty of its
+colossal want of humour has palled on him. One could sympathise with
+Falkland, but is not allowed to do so: because he is not human, except
+in his crime. But, as has been said, to those whose sporting interests
+are excited by the pleasures and hazards of the chase, these things no
+doubt do not occur. After all <i>Caleb</i> is, in a sense, the first
+&quot;detective novel&quot;: and detective novels have always been popular, though
+they bore some people to extinction. Far, however, be it from me to deny
+that this popularity, especially when, as in the present case, it has
+been continued for four whole generations, is a real and a very
+considerable asset. Even if it were now to cease, it is actually funded
+and vested to Godwin's credit in the <i>grand livre</i> of literary history:
+and it can never be written off. Perhaps <i>Caleb</i> is the one book of the
+later English eighteenth century in novel for which there must always be
+a public as soon as it is presented to that public. And when this is
+said and endorsed by those who do not personally much care for the book,
+it is at once a sufficient <a name="Page_169" id="Page_169" />testimony to the position of the author, and
+a vindication of the not absolutely imbecile position of those who
+thought that he might have written <i>Waverley</i> and its successors. The
+way in which Godwin in his later novels came down from the mountain-tops
+of theory and paradox just as he came down from those of <i>Political
+Justice</i> itself is interesting and amusing, but not for us. As novels
+they are certainly inferior. The best parts of <i>St. Leon</i> (1799) and
+<i>Fleetwood</i> (1805) are perhaps better than anything in <i>Caleb:
+Mandeville</i> (1817) and <i>Deloraine</i> (1833) are <i>senilia</i>.<a id="footnotetag15" name="footnotetag15"></a><a href="#footnote15"><sup>15</sup></a> The
+graceful figure of the heroine Marguerite in <i>St. Leon</i> is said to be
+modelled on Mary Wollstonecraft, and there are some fresh pictures of
+youth and childhood in <i>Fleetwood</i>. But <i>St. Leon</i>, besides its
+historical shortcomings (which, once more, we may postpone), is full of
+faults, from the badly managed supernatural to an only too natural
+dullness and languor of general story: nor has <i>Fleetwood</i> anything like
+the absorbing power which <i>Caleb Williams</i> exercises, in its own way and
+on its own people. Yet again we may perhaps say that the chief interest
+of Godwin, from our point of view, is his repeated and further weighted
+testimony to the importance of the novel as an appeal to public
+attention. In this respect it was in fact displacing, not only the drama
+on one side, but the sermon on the other. Not so very long before these
+two had almost engrossed the domain of <i>popular</i> literature, the graver
+and more precise folk habitually reading sermons as well as hearing
+them, and the looser and lighter folk reading drama much oftener than
+(in then-existing circumstances) they had the opportunity of seeing it.
+With the novel the &quot;address to the reader&quot; became direct and stood by
+itself. The novelist could emulate Burke with his right <a name="Page_170" id="Page_170" />barrel and
+Lydia Languish with his left. He certainly did not always endeavour to
+profit as well as to delight: but the double power was, from this time
+forward, shared by him with his brother in the higher and older
+<i>Dichtung</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Next to Godwin may be placed a lady who was much adored by that curious
+professor of philandering, political <i>in</i>justice, psychology, and the
+use of the spunge, but who wisely put him off. Mrs. Inchbald's
+(1753-1821) command of a certain kind of dramatic or at least theatrical
+situation, and her propensity to Richardsonian &quot;human-heart&quot;-mongering,
+have from time to time secured a certain number of admirers for <i>A
+Simple Story</i> (1791) and <i>Nature and Art</i> (1796). Some, availing
+themselves of the confusion between &quot;style&quot; and &quot;handling&quot; which has
+recently become fashionable, have even credited her with style itself.
+Of this she has nothing&mdash;unless the most conventional of
+eighteenth-century phraseology, dashed with a kind of <i>marivaudage</i>
+which may perhaps seem original to those who do not know Marivaux's
+French followers, shall deserve the name. She is indeed very much of an
+English Madame Riccoboni. But her situations&mdash;such as the meeting in <i>A
+Simple Story</i> of a father with the daughter whom, though not exactly
+casting her off, he has persistently refused to see, in revenge for her
+mother's unfaithfulness, and the still more famous scene in <i>Nature and
+Art</i> where a judge passes the death-sentence on a woman whom he has
+betrayed&mdash;have, as has been allowed, the dramatic or melodramatic
+quality which attracts people in &quot;decadent&quot; periods. There seems,
+indeed, to have been a certain decadent charm about Mrs. Inchbald
+herself&mdash;with her beauty, her stage skill, her strict virtue combined
+with any amount of &quot;sensibility,&quot; her affectation of nature, and her
+benevolence not in the <a name="Page_171" id="Page_171" />least sham but distinctly posing. And something
+of this rococo relish may no doubt, with a little good will and
+sympathy, be detected in her books. But of the genuine life and the
+natural language which occasionally inspirit the much more unequal and
+more generally commonplace work of Miss Burney, she has practically
+nothing. And she thus falls out of the main line of development, merely
+exemplifying the revolutionary and sentimental episode.</p>
+
+<p>We must now, for some pages, illustrate the course of the novel by minor
+examples: and we may begin with a brief notice of two writers, one of
+whom might have been taken before Miss Burney and the other just after
+her chronologically: but who, in the order of thought and method, will
+come better here. Both were natives of Scotland and both illustrate
+different ways of the novel. Henry Mackenzie, an Edinburgh advocate, in
+three books&mdash;the names of which at least are famous, while his friend
+Sir Walter has preserved the books themselves in the collection so often
+mentioned&mdash;produced, in his own youth and in rapid succession, <i>The Man
+of Feeling</i> (1771), <i>The Man of the World</i> (1773), and <i>Julia de
+Roubign&eacute;</i> (1777). John Moore, a Glasgow physician, wrote, when he was
+nearly sixty, the novel of <i>Zeluco</i> (1786) and followed it up with
+<i>Edward</i> ten years afterwards and <i>Mordaunt</i> (1800). Mackenzie did good
+work later in the periodical essay: but his fiction is chiefly the
+&quot;sensibility&quot;-novel of the French and of Sterne, reduced to the
+absolutely absurd. From his essay-work, and from Scott's and other
+accounts of him, he must have possessed humour of a kind: but the
+extremely limited character of its nature and operation may be
+exemplified by his representation of a whole press-gang as bursting into
+tears at the pathetic action and words of an old man who offers himself
+as substitute for his son.<a name="Page_172" id="Page_172" /> This is one of the not rare, but certainly
+one of the most consummate, instances of fashion caricaturing itself in
+total unconsciousness. But it <i>was</i> the fashion: and Mackenzie, though
+perhaps he helped to bring it to an end, no doubt caused the shedding,
+by &quot;the fair&quot; of the time, of an ocean of tears as great as the ocean of
+port wine which was contemporaneously absorbed by &quot;the brave.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Moore saw a good deal of continental society&mdash;he is indeed one of the
+first-hand witnesses for the events of the French Revolution&mdash;and he had
+a more considerable influence on the novel than has always been allowed
+him. <i>Zeluco</i> chiefly survives because of the exquisitely ludicrous and
+human trait of the English sailor who, discussing the French army,
+pronounces white uniforms &quot;absurd&quot; and blue &quot;only fit for the artillery
+and the blue horse.&quot; But it is not quite certain that its villain-hero
+had not something, and perhaps a good deal, to do with those of Mrs.
+Radcliffe who were soon to follow, and, through these, with Byron who
+was not to be very long after. The later books are of much less
+importance, if only because they follow the outburst of fiction which
+the French Revolution itself ushered. But Moore, who was intimately
+connected with Smollett, carried on the practice of making national or
+sub-national characteristics important elements of novel interest: and
+is thus noteworthy in more ways than one.</p>
+
+<p>He is a late instance&mdash;he was born in 1729 and so was only a few years
+younger than Smollett himself&mdash;of the writers who had, for all but half
+a century after Richardson's appearance, accumulated patterns and
+examples of the novel in all sorts of forms, hardly one of which lacked
+numerous and almost innumerable imitators and followers. By these later
+years of the century the famous &quot;Minerva Press&quot; and many others issued
+deluges of novel-work <a name="Page_173" id="Page_173" />which were eagerly absorbed by readers.
+&quot;Absorbed&quot; in more senses than one: for the institution of circulating
+libraries, while it facilitated reading, naturally tended towards the
+destruction of the actual volumes read. Novels were rarely produced in a
+very careful or sumptuous fashion, and good copies of those that were in
+any way popular are now rather hard to obtain: while even in the British
+Museum it will frequently be found that only the later editions are
+represented. We shall finish this chapter with some instances, taken not
+quite at random, of the work of the last decades of the eighteenth and
+the beginning of the nineteenth century, winding up with more general
+notice of two remarkable writers who represent&mdash;though at least one of
+them lived far later&mdash;the period before Scott, and who also, as it
+happens, represent the contrast of novel and romance in a fashion
+unusually striking. The description, as some readers will have
+anticipated, refers to Miss Edgeworth and to Maturin. But the smaller
+fry must be taken first.</p>
+
+<p>It is not uninteresting to compare two such books as Mrs. Bennett's
+<i>Anna</i> and Mrs. Opie's <i>Adeline Mowbray</i>. Published at twenty years'
+distance (1785 and 1804) they show the rapid growth of the novel, even
+during a time when nothing of the first class appeared. <i>Anna, or the
+Memoirs of a Welsh Heiress, interspersed with Anecdotes of a Nabob</i>, is
+a kind of bad imitation of Miss Burney, with a catchpenny
+&quot;interspersion&quot; to suit the day. <i>Adeline Mowbray</i>, written with more
+talent, chimes in by infusing one of the tones of <i>its</i> day&mdash;Godwinian
+theories of life. The space between was the palmy time of that now
+almost legendary &quot;Minerva Press&quot; which, as has been said, flooded the
+ever-absorbent market with stuff of which <i>The Libertine</i>, masterpiece
+of Mrs. Byrne, <i>alias</i> Charlotte Dacre,<a name="Page_174" id="Page_174" /> <i>alias</i> &quot;Rosa Matilda,&quot; is
+perhaps best worth singling out from its companions, <i>Hours of Solitude,
+The Nun of St. Omers, Zofloya</i>, etc., because it specially shocked the
+censor of the style who will be mentioned presently. It is pure (or
+not-pure) rubbish. Angelo (the libertine) seduces the angelic Gabrielle
+de Montmorency, who follows him to Italy in male attire, saves him from
+the wicked courtesan Oriana and her bravo Fiorenz<i>a</i> (<i>sic</i>), is married
+by him, but made miserable, and dies. He continues his misbehaviour to
+their children, and finally blows his brains out. &quot;Bah! it is bosh!&quot; as
+the Master observes of something else.</p>
+
+<p>It may seem iniquitous to say that some tolerably good novel-writers
+must be more summarily treated than some bad ones here: but there is
+reason for it. Such, for instance, as Charlotte Smith and the Miss Lees
+are miles above such others as the just-mentioned polyonymous &quot;Rosa,&quot; as
+Sarah Wilkinson, or as Henrietta Mosse-Rouvi&egrave;re. The first three would
+make a very good group for a twenty-page causerie. Charlotte Smith, who
+was tolerably expert in verse as well as prose; who anticipated, and
+perhaps taught, Scott in the double use of the name &quot;Waverley&quot;; and
+whose <i>Old Manor House</i> (1793) is a solid but not heavy work of its
+kind&mdash;is something of a person in herself, but less of a figure in
+history, because she neither innovates nor does old things consummately.
+Harriet and Sophia Lee claimed innovation for the latter's <i>Recess</i>
+(1783-1786), as Miss Porter did for <i>Thaddeus of Warsaw</i>, but the claim
+can be even less allowed. There is nothing of real historical spirit,
+and very little goodness of any kind, in <i>The Recess. The Canterbury
+Tales</i> (1797-1805) (so named merely because they are supposed to be told
+by different persons) were praised by Byron, as he praised the<a name="Page_175" id="Page_175" /> <i>Percy
+Anecdotes</i> and other things&mdash;either irresponsibly or impishly. They are
+not exactly bad: but also as far as possible from consummateness.</p>
+
+<p>On the other hand, <i>The Convent of Grey Penitents</i>, one of the crops
+which rewarded Miss Wilkinson for tilling the lands of her imagination
+with the spade of her style, <i>is</i> very nearly consummate&mdash;in badness. It
+is a fair example of the worst imitations of Mrs. Radcliffe and Mat
+Lewis conjointly, though without the latter's looseness. The Marquis di
+Zoretti was an Italian nobleman&mdash;&quot;one of those characters in whose bosom
+resides an unquenchable thirst of avarice&quot; [&quot;<i>thirst</i> of <i>avarice</i>&quot; is
+good!], etc. He marries, however, a lovely signora of the odd name of
+Rosalthe, without a fortune, &quot;which circumstance was overlooked by his
+lordship&quot; for a very short time only. He plots to be free of her: she
+goes to England and dies there to the genteelest of slow music. Their
+son Horatio falls in love with a certain Julietta, who is immured by
+wicked arts in the &quot;Convent of Grey Penitents,&quot; tormented by the head,
+Gradisca, but rescued, and so forth. The book, if harmless, is about as
+worthless as a book can be: but it represents, very fairly, the ruck, if
+not indeed even the main body, of the enormous horde of romances which
+issued from the press towards the end of the eighteenth century and the
+beginning of the nineteenth, and which, in their different action on
+persons of genius, gave us <i>Zastrozzi</i> on the one side and <i>Northanger
+Abbey</i> on the other.</p>
+
+<p>As for Miss Henrietta Mosse, otherwise Rouvi&egrave;re, she represents the
+other school of abortive historical novel. <i>A Peep at Our Ancestors</i>
+(1807) is fairly worthy of its ridiculous name. It is preceded by
+expressions of thanks to the authorities of &quot;the British Museum and the
+Heralds'<a name="Page_176" id="Page_176" /> Office&quot; for the &quot;access to records&quot; vouchsafed to its author.
+As the date of the story is 1146 (it was long before Mr. Freeman wrote)
+access to records would certainly not have been superfluous. The actual
+results of it are blocks of spiritless and commonplace historic
+narrative&mdash;it is nearly all narrative, not action&mdash;diversified by
+utterances like this of Malcolm III. of Scotland, &quot;O my Edward! the deed
+which struck my son's life has centred [<i>sic</i>] thy noble youthful bosom
+also,&quot; or this of the heroine (such as there is), &quot;the gentle <i>elegant</i>
+Adelaise,&quot; &quot;And do I not already receive my education of thee, mamma?&quot;
+It is really a pity that the creator of this remarkable peep-show did
+not give references to her &quot;records,&quot; so that one might look up this
+&quot;elegant&quot; young creature of the twelfth century who talked about
+&quot;education&quot; and said &quot;mamma!&quot; But this absolute failure in
+verisimilitude is practically universal before Scott.</p>
+
+<p>The works of the very beautifully named Regina Maria Roche should
+probably be read, as they were for generations, in late childhood or
+early youth. Even then an intelligent boy or girl would perceive some of
+the absurdity, but might catch a charm that escapes the less receptive
+oldster. They were, beyond all question, immensely popular, and
+continued to be so for a long time: in fact it is almost sufficient
+evidence that there is, if I mistake not, in the British Museum no
+edition earlier than the tenth of the most famous of them, <i>The Children
+of the Abbey</i> (1798). This far-renowned work opens with the exclamation
+of the heroine Amanda, &quot;Hail, sweet sojourn of my infancy!&quot; and we are
+shortly afterwards informed that in the garden &quot;the part appropriated to
+vegetables was divided from the part sacred to Flora.&quot; Otherwise, the
+substance of the thing is a curious sort of watered-down<a name="Page_177" id="Page_177" /> Richardson,
+passed through successive filtering beds of Mackenzie, and even of Mrs.
+Radcliffe. It is difficult for even the most critical taste to find much
+savour or stimulus in the resulting liquid. But, like almost everybody
+mentioned here, Regina is a document of the demands of readers and the
+faculty of writers: and so she &quot;standeth,&quot; if not exactly &quot;crowned,&quot; yet
+ticketed.</p>
+
+<p>Work&mdash;somewhat later&mdash;of some interest, but not of first-class quality,
+is to be found in the <i>Discipline</i> (1811) and <i>Self-Control</i> (1814) of
+Mary Brunton. A Balfour of Orkney on the father's side and a Ligonier on
+the mother's, the authoress had access to the best English as well as
+Scottish society, and seems to have had more than a chance of taking a
+place in the former: but preferred to marry a minister-professor and
+settled down to country manse life. She died in middle age and her
+husband wrote a memoir of her. <i>Discipline</i> seems to represent a sort of
+fancy combination of the life she might have led and the life she did
+lead. Ellen Percy, the heroine, starts in the highest circles; forgets
+herself so far as to &quot;waltz<i>e</i>&quot; with a noble ne'er-do-weel, thereby
+earning the &quot;stern disapprobation&quot; of a respectable lover; comes down in
+the world; has Highland experiences which, at the book's early date, are
+noteworthy; marries (like her creatress) a minister; but &quot;retains a
+little of her coquettish sauciness.&quot; &quot;Bless her, poor little dear!&quot; one
+can imagine Thackeray exclaiming in his later and mellowed days. Mrs.
+Brunton's letters breathe a lady-like and not unamiable propriety, and
+she is altogether a sort of milder, though actually earlier, Miss
+Ferrier.</p>
+
+<p>Ireland vindicated its claim to comparative liveliness in the work of a
+better known contemporary and survivor. Lady Morgan's (Miss Sydney
+Owenson's) <i>Wild Irish Girl</i><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178" /> (1806) is one of the books whose titles
+have prolonged for them a kind of shadowy existence. It is written in
+letters: and the most interesting thing about it for some readers now is
+that the heroine supplied Thackeray with the name Glorvina, which, it
+seems, means in Irish &quot;sweet voice,&quot; if Lady Morgan is to be trusted <i>in
+rebus Celticis</i>. It is to be hoped she is: for the novel is a sort of
+<i>mac&eacute;doine</i> of Irish history, folk-lore, scenery, and what not, done up
+in a syrup of love-making <i>quant. suff.</i> Its author wrote many more
+novels and became a butt for both good- and ill-natured satire with the
+comic writers of the twenties, thirties, and forties. The title was
+actually borrowed by Maturin in <i>The Wild Irish</i> &quot;Boy,&quot; and it is fair
+to say that the book preceded Scott's, though not Miss Edgeworth's,
+experiments in the line of the &quot;national&quot; novel. The earlier Reviewers
+were discreditably savage on women-writers, and Lady Morgan had her
+share of their truculence. She did not wholly deserve it: but it must be
+said that nothing she wrote can really be ranked as literature, save on
+the most indiscriminate and uncritical estimate. It is, however,
+difficult to see much harm in her.</p>
+
+<p><i>Ida of Athens</i>, for instance, which shocked contemporaries, and which,
+by the way, has the very large first title of <i>Woman</i>, could only bring
+a blush to cheeks very tickle of that sere: a yawn might come much more
+easily. The most shocking thing that the heroine, who is &quot;an attempt to
+delineate woman in her natural state,&quot; does (and that not of malice) is
+to receive her lover in a natural bathroom. But her adventures are told
+in a style which is the oddest compound of Romantesque and Johnsonese.
+(&quot;The hour was ardent. The bath was cool. <i>He calculated upon the
+probable necessity of its enjoyment</i>.&quot;) The spirit is the silliest and
+most ignorant Philhellenism&mdash;all the beauty, <a name="Page_179" id="Page_179" />virtue, wisdom, of the
+ancient Greeks being supposed to be inherited by their mongrel
+successors of the early nineteenth century. An English and a Turkish
+lover dispute Ida's affection or possession. There are the elaborate
+pseudo-erudite notes which one has learnt to associate chiefly with
+Moore. The authoress boasts in her preface that she &quot;has already written
+almost as many volumes as she has years,&quot; and that she has hardly ever
+corrected her proofs. Perhaps this silliness will make some think her
+not more an example of the savagery of contemporary criticism than a
+justification thereof.</p>
+
+<p>It was in fact not only brutal man who objected to the preposterous
+excesses of pseudo-romance: and serious or jocular parables were taken
+up against it, if not before <i>Northanger Abbey</i> was written, long before
+it was published. In 1810 a certain &quot;G.&quot; or &quot;S.G.,&quot; whose full name was
+Sarah Green, wrote, besides some actual history and an attempt at the
+historical novel, a very curious and rather hybrid book entitled
+<i>Romance Readers and Romance Writers</i>. Its preface is an instance of
+&quot;Women, beware Women,&quot; for though it stigmatises male creatures, such as
+a certain Curteis and a certain Pickersgill, it treats Lady Morgan (then
+only Sydney Owenson) and &quot;Rosa Matilda&quot; even more roughly and asks (as
+has been asked about a hundred years later and was asked about a hundred
+years before), &quot;Is it not amazing that the [two] most licentious writers
+of romance are women?&quot; And it starts with a burlesque account of a
+certain Margaret Marsham who exclaims, &quot;What then? to add to my earthly
+miseries am I to be called Peggy? My name is Margari<i>tt</i>a!&quot; &quot;I am sure
+that if I am called Peggy again I shall go into a fit.&quot; But this promise
+of something to complete the trio with <i>Northanger Abbey</i> and <i>The
+Heroine</i> (to be presently mentioned)<a name="Page_180" id="Page_180" /> is not maintained. Not only does
+the writer force the note of parody too much by making &quot;Margaritta&quot; say
+to herself, &quot;Poor persecuted <i>dove</i> that I am,&quot; and adore a labourer's
+shirt on a hedge, but she commits the far more fatal fault of exchanging
+her jest for earnest. Margaritta&mdash;following her romance-models&mdash;falls a
+victim to an unprincipled great lady and the usual wicked baronet&mdash;at
+whose head, one is bound to say, she flings herself with such violence
+as no baronet could possibly resist. Her sister Mary, innocent of
+romance-reading and all other faults, is, though not as guilty, as
+unlucky almost as Margaret: and by far the greater part of the book is
+an unreal presentment, in nearly the worst manner of the eighteenth
+century itself, of virtuous curates, <i>un</i>virtuous &quot;tonish&quot; rectors, who
+calmly propose to seduce their curates' daughters (an offence which, for
+obvious reasons, must, in the worst times, have been unusual), libertine
+ladies, and reckless &quot;fashionables&quot; of all kinds. The preface and the
+opening create expectations, not merely of amusement but of power, which
+are by no means fulfilled. It is &quot;S.G.&quot; who asserts that <i>Ida of Athens</i>
+&quot;has brought a blush to the cheek of many,&quot; and one can only repeat the
+suggested substitution.</p>
+
+<p>The only faults that can be found with <i>The Heroine</i> or <i>The Adventures
+of Cherubina</i>, by Eaton Stannard Barrett, which appeared in the same
+year, with no very different object and subject, though written in
+lighter vein, are one that it could not help and another that it could.
+Unjustly, but unavoidably, the first is the worst. That it is a
+burlesque rather overdone&mdash;a burlesque <i>burlesqu&eacute;</i>&mdash;not in the manner of
+Thackeray, but in that of some older and some more recent writers&mdash;is
+unfortunate, but not fatal. One can forgive&mdash;one can even enjoy&mdash;the
+ghost who not <a name="Page_181" id="Page_181" />only sneezes but says, &quot;D&mdash;n, all is blown!&quot; When the
+heroine is actually locked up with a man in a chest one is more
+doubtful: recovering when the Marquis de Furioso, &quot;bowing gracefully to
+the bride,&quot; stabs himself to the heart, which is almost &quot;the real
+Mackay&quot; as they say in the North. The slight awkwardness of snow falling
+the day after the characters have been eating strawberries does not
+amuse <i>us</i> much, because this is a comparatively ordinary event of the
+early twentieth century, whatever it might be of the early nineteenth.
+But what is fatal, though the author could not help it, is that the
+infinitely lighter, more artistic, and more lethal dart of <i>Northanger
+Abbey</i> had been launched by the pen, if not the press, more than a dozen
+years before.</p>
+
+<p>There are few more curious and interesting personages in the history of
+the English Novel than Maria Edgeworth. The variety of her
+accomplishment in the kind was extraordinary: and in more than one of
+its species she went very near perfection. One is never quite certain
+whether the perpetual meddling of her rather celebrated father
+Richard&mdash;one of the capital examples of the unpractical pragmatists and
+clever-silly crotcheteers who produced and were produced by the
+Revolutionary period&mdash;did her more harm than good. It certainly loaded
+her work with superfluous and (to us) disgusting didacticism: but it
+might be contended that, without its stimulus, she would have done much
+less, perhaps nothing. As it was, she lived for more than eighty years
+(till all but the middle of the nineteenth century) and wrote for more
+than sixty. Her work is thus very bulky: but it may be considered, for
+our present purpose, in three groups&mdash;her short stories written mainly
+but not wholly for children; her regular novels; and her Irish studies.
+Of these the middle division <a name="Page_182" id="Page_182" />has been, and no doubt has deserved to be,
+the least popular: but its principal example, <i>Belinda</i> (1801)
+(<i>Patronage</i>, a longer and later book, and others are inferior), is
+considerably better than is usually admitted and, by its early date,
+deserves special notice here. It preceded Miss Austen's work in
+publication, and is specially cited by her as a capital example of novel
+in connection with the work of Miss Burney: and it is evidently founded
+on study of the latter, of which, indeed, it is the first really worthy
+continuation. Maria has nothing so good as Fanny's Smiths and
+Branghtons: but the whole book is far superior to <i>Evelina</i>. The
+extravagance of the <i>fin-de-si&egrave;cle</i> society which it represents has
+probably disguised from not a few readers who do not know the facts, the
+other fact that it is a real attempt at realist observation of manners:
+and it has the narrative merit which was Miss Edgeworth's gift of
+nature. But the hero is patchy and improbable: the heroine, a good and
+quite possible girl, is not sufficiently &quot;reliefed out&quot;; and the most
+important figures of the book, Lord and Lady Delacour, almost great
+successes, are not helped by the peculiar academic-didactic moralising
+which she had caught from Marmontel.</p>
+
+<p>The following of that ingenious and now too much under-valued writer
+stood her in better stead in the <i>Moral Tales</i> (1801) (which she
+deliberately called after his<a id="footnotetag16" name="footnotetag16"></a><a href="#footnote16"><sup>16</sup></a>), the<a name="Page_183" id="Page_183" /> <i>Popular Tales</i> of the same
+kind, and (though Marmontel did not intentionally write for children)
+the delightful <i>Parent's Assistant</i> (1801) and <i>Frank</i>. In the two
+first-named divisions, the narrative faculty just mentioned appears
+admirably, together with another and still greater gift, that of
+character-painting, and even a grasp of literary and social satire,
+which might not be anticipated from some of her other books. The French
+governess (<i>Mlle. Panache</i>) and the satire on romantic young-ladyism
+(<i>Angelina</i>) are excellent examples of this. As for the pure child's
+stories, generation after generation of competent criticism, childish
+and adult, has voted them by acclamation into almost the highest place
+possible: and the gain-sayers have for the most part been idle
+paradoxers, ill-conditioned snarlers at things clean and sweet, or fools
+pure and simple.</p>
+
+<p>The &quot;Irish brigade&quot; of the work&mdash;<i>Castle Rackrent</i> (1800), <i>Ormond</i>, and
+<i>The Absentee</i>, with the non-narrative but closely-connected <i>Essay on
+Irish Bulls</i>&mdash;have perhaps commanded the most unchequered applause. They
+are not quite free from the sentimentality and the didacticism which
+were both rampant in the novel of Miss Edgeworth's earlier time: but
+these are atoned for by a quite new use of the &quot;national&quot; element. Even
+Smollett and, following Smollett, Moore had chiefly availed themselves
+of this for its farcical or semi-farcical opportunities. Miss Edgeworth
+did not neglect these, but she did not confine herself to them: and such
+characters as Corny the &quot;King of the Black Isles&quot; in <i>Ormond</i> actually
+add a new province and a new pleasure to fiction.</p>
+
+<p>Her importance is thus very great: and it only wanted the proverbial or
+anecdotic &quot;That!&quot; to make it much greater. &quot;That!&quot; as it generally is,
+was in her case the <a name="Page_184" id="Page_184" />last fusing touch of genius to accomplish the
+<i>grand oeuvre</i>&mdash;the perfect projection. She had humour, pathos,
+knowledge of the world, power of drawing it, acquaintance with
+literature, shrewd common sense, an excellent style when she was allowed
+to write in her own way, the feelings of a lady who was also a good
+woman. King Charles is made to say in <i>Woodstock</i> that &quot;half the things
+in the world remind him of the Tales of Mother Goose.&quot; It is
+astonishing, in the real complimentary sense, how many things remind one
+of situations, passages, phrases, in Miss Edgeworth's works of all the
+kinds from <i>Castle Rackrent</i> to <i>Frank</i>. She also had a great and an
+acknowledged influence on Scott, a considerable and a certainly not
+disavowed influence on Miss Austen. She is good reading always, however
+much we may sometimes pish and pshaw at the untimely poppings-in of the
+platitudes and crotchets (for he was that most abominable of things, a
+platitudinous crotcheteer) of Richard her father. She was a girl of
+fourteen when the beginnings of the domestic novel were laid in
+<i>Evelina</i>, and she lived to see it triumph in <i>Vanity Fair</i>. But her own
+work, save in some of her short stories, which are pretty perfect,
+represents the imperfect stage of the development&mdash;the stage when the
+novel is trying for the right methods and struggling to get into the
+right ways, but has not wholly mastered the one or reached the others.</p>
+
+<p>There are those who would assign what they might call &quot;higher genius,&quot;
+or &quot;rarer gift,&quot; or something similar, to her countryman Charles Robert
+Maturin. The present writer is not very fond of these measurings
+together of things incommensurable&mdash;these attempts to rank the &quot;light
+white sea-mew&quot; as superior or inferior to the &quot;sleek black pantheress.&quot;
+It is enough to say that while<a name="Page_185" id="Page_185" /> Miss Edgeworth very deliberately adopted
+the novel, and even, as we have seen, slightly satirised at least
+pseudo-romance, Maturin was romantic or nothing. His life was hardly
+half hers in length, and his temperament appears to have been as
+discontented as hers was sunny: but he had his successes in drama as
+well as in novel, and one of his attempts in the latter kind had a
+wide-ranging influence abroad as well as at home, has been recently
+printed both in whole and in part, and undoubtedly ranks among the
+novels which any tolerably well instructed person would enumerate if he
+were asked to give a pretty full list of celebrated (and deservedly
+celebrated) books of the kind in English. The others fall quite out of
+comparison. <i>The Fatal Revenge</i> or the <i>Family of Montorio</i> (1807) is a
+try for the &quot;furthest&quot; in the Radcliffe-Lewis direction, discarding
+indeed the crudity of <i>The Monk</i>, but altogether neglecting the
+restraint of <i>Udolpho</i> and its companions in the use of the
+supernatural. <i>The Wild Irish Boy</i> (1808), <i>The Milesian Chief</i> (1812),
+<i>Women</i> (1818), and <i>The Albigenses</i> (1824) are negligible, the last,
+perhaps, rather less so than the others. But <i>Melmoth the Wanderer</i>
+(1820) is in quite a different case. It has faults in plenty&mdash;especially
+a narrative method of such involution that, as it has been said, &quot;a
+considerable part of the book consists of a story told to a certain
+person, who is a character in a longer story, found in a manuscript
+which is delivered to a third person, who narrates the greater part of
+the novel to a fourth person, who is the namesake and descendant of the
+title-hero.&quot; Stripped of these tiresome lendings (which, as has been
+frequently pointed out, were a mania with the eighteenth century and
+naturally grew to such intricacy as this), the central story, though not
+exactly new, is impressive: and it is told and worked out in manner more
+<a name="Page_186" id="Page_186" />impressive, because practically novel, save for, perhaps, a little
+suggestion from <i>Vathek</i>. Melmoth has bartered his soul with the devil
+for something like immortality and other privileges, including the
+unusual one of escaping doom if he can get some one to take the bargain
+off his hands. This leads up to numerous episodes or chapters in which
+Melmoth endeavours to obtain substitutes: and in one of these the love
+interest of the book&mdash;the, of course, fatal love of Melmoth himself for
+a Spanish-Indian girl Immalee or Isidora&mdash;is related with some real
+pathos and passion, though with a good deal of mere sentiment and
+twaddle. Maturin is stronger in his terror-scenes, and affected his own
+generation very powerfully: his influence being so great in France that
+Balzac attempted a variation and continuation, and that there are
+constant references to the book in the early French Romantics. In fact
+for this kind of &quot;sensation&quot; Maturin is, putting <i>Vathek</i> aside, quite
+the chief of the whole school. But it is doubtful whether he had many
+other gifts as a novelist, and this particular one is one that cannot be
+exercised very frequently, and is very difficult to exercise at all
+without errors and extravagances.</p>
+
+<p>The child-literature of this school and period was very large, and, had
+we space, would be worth dealing with at length&mdash;as in the instances of
+the famous <i>Sandford and Merton</i> (1783-1789) by Thomas Day, Richard
+Edgeworth's friend, of Mrs. Trimmer's <i>Story of the Robins</i>, and others.
+It led up to the definitely religious school of children's books, first
+evangelical, then tractarian, with which we shall deal later: but was
+itself as a rule utilitarian&mdash;or sentimental&mdash;moral rather than directly
+religious. It is, however, like other things&mdash;indeed almost all
+things&mdash;in this chapter&mdash;a document of the fashion in which the novel
+was &quot;filling <a name="Page_187" id="Page_187" />all numbers&quot; and being used for all purposes. It was, of
+course, in this case, nearest to the world-old &quot;fable&quot;&mdash;especially to
+the moral apologues of which the medi&aelig;val sermon-writers and others had
+been so fond. But its popularity, especially when taken in connection
+with the still surviving distrust of fiction, is valuable. It involves
+not merely the principle that &quot;the devil shall not have all the best
+tunes,&quot; but the admission that this tune is good.</p>
+
+<p>This point, and that other also frequently mentioned and closely
+connected with it, that the novel at this time overflows into almost
+every conceivable department of subject and object, are the main facts
+of a general historical kind, which should be in the reader's mind as
+the upshot of this chapter. But there is a third, almost as important as
+either, and that is the almost universal coming short of complete
+success&mdash;the lack of consummateness, the sense that if the Novel Israel
+is not exactly still in the wilderness, it has not yet crossed the
+Jordan. Even if we take in the last chapter, and its comparative giants,
+with the present and its heroes, ordinary folk, and pygmies, we shall
+scarcely find more than one great master, Fielding, and one little
+masterpiece, <i>Vathek</i>, deserving the adjective &quot;consummate.&quot; No doubt
+the obvious explanation&mdash;that the hour was not because the man had not
+come except in this single case&mdash;is a good one: but it need not be left
+in the bare isolation of its fatalism. There are at least several
+subsidiary considerations which it is well to advance. The transition
+state of manners and language cannot be too often insisted upon: for
+this affected the process at both ends, giving the artist in fictitious
+life an uncertain model to copy and unstable materials to work in. The
+deficiency of classical patterns&mdash;at a time which still firmly believed,
+for the most part, that all good work in literature had been <a name="Page_188" id="Page_188" />so done by
+the ancients that it could at best be emulated&mdash;should count for
+something: the scanty respect in which the kind was held for something
+more. As to one of the most important species, frequent allusions have
+been made, and in the next chapter full treatment will be given, to the
+causes which made the <i>historical</i> novel impossible until very late in
+the century, and decidedly unlikely to be good even then. Perhaps,
+without attempting further detail, we may conclude by saying that the
+productions of this time present, and present inevitably, the nonage and
+novitiate of a branch of art which hardly possessed any genuine
+representatives when the century was born and which numbered them, bad
+and good, by thousands and almost tens of thousands at its death. In the
+interval there had been continuous and progressive exercise; there had
+been some great triumphs; there had been not a little good and pleasant
+work; and of even the work that was less good and less pleasant one may
+say that it at least represented experiment, and might save others from
+failure.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_V" id="CHAPTER_V" /><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189" />CHAPTER V</h2>
+
+<h2>SCOTT AND MISS AUSTEN</h2>
+
+
+<p>In 1816 Sir Thomas Bernard, baronet, barrister, and philanthropist,
+published, having it is said written it three years previously, an
+agreeable dialogue on <i>Old Age</i>, which was very popular, and reached its
+fifth edition in 1820. The interlocutors are Bishops Hough and Gibson
+and Mr. Lyttleton, the supposed time 1740&mdash;the year, by accident or
+design, of <i>Pamela</i>. In this the aged and revered &quot;martyr of Magdalen&quot;
+is mildly reproached by his brother prelate for liking novels. Hough
+puts off the reproach as mildly, and in a most academic manner, by
+saying that he only admits them <i>speciali grati&acirc;</i>. This was in fact the
+general attitude to the whole kind, not merely in 1740, but after all
+the work of nearly another life-time as long as Hough's&mdash;almost in 1816
+itself. Yet when Sir Thomas published his little book, notice to quit,
+of a double kind, had been served on this fallacy. Miss Austen's life
+was nearly done, and some of her best work had not been published: but
+the greater part had. Scott was in his actual hey-day. Between them,
+they had dealt and were dealing&mdash;from curiously different sides and in
+as curiously different manners&mdash;the death-blow to the notion that the
+novel was an inferior if not actually discreditable kind, suitable for
+weak intellects only, and likely to weaken strong ones, frivolous when
+not positively immoral, giving a distaste for serious reading, implying
+in the writer an <a name="Page_190" id="Page_190" />inability to do anything more serious, and generally
+presenting a glaring contrast to real &quot;literature.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Interesting as each of these two great novelists is individually, the
+interest of the pair, from our present historical point of view, is
+almost greater; and the way in which they complete each other is hardly
+short of uncanny. Before their time, despite the great examples of prose
+fiction produced by Bunyan, Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and
+Sterne, and the remarkable determination towards the life of ordinary
+society given, or instanced, by Miss Burney; despite the immense
+novel-production of the last half of the eighteenth century and the
+first decade of the nineteenth&mdash;it is hardly too much to say that &quot;the
+novel,&quot; as such, had not found its proper way or ways at all. Bunyan's
+was an example of genius in a peculiar kind of the novel: as, in a very
+different one, was Sterne's. Defoe, possessing some of the rarest gifts
+of the novelist, was quite lacking in others. Richardson was not only
+<i>exemplar vitiis imitabile</i> and <i>imitatum</i>, but it might be doubted
+whether, even when not faulty, he was not more admirable than
+delightful. Smollett, like Defoe, was not much more than part of a
+novelist: and Miss Burney lacked strength, equality, and range. There
+remained Fielding: and it certainly is not here that any restrictions or
+allowances will be insinuated as to Fielding's praise. But Fielding's
+novels are a circle in which no one else save Thackeray has ever been
+able to walk. And what we are looking for now is something rather
+different from this&mdash;a masterpiece, or masterpieces, which may not only
+yield delight and excite admiration in itself or themselves, but may
+bring forth fruit in others&mdash;fruit less masterly perhaps, but of the
+same or a similar kind. In other words, nobody's work yet&mdash;save in the
+special kinds&mdash;had <a name="Page_191" id="Page_191" />been capable of yielding a novel-<i>formula</i>: nobody
+had hit upon the most capital and fruitful novel-ideas. And nearly
+everybody had, in the kind, done work curiously and almost
+incomprehensibly faulty. Of these faults, the worst, perhaps, were
+classable under the general head of inverisimilitude. Want of truth to
+nature in character and dialogue, extravagant and clumsy plotting,
+neglect of (indeed entire blindness to) historic colour, unreal and
+unobserved description&mdash;all these things might be raised to a height or
+sunk to a bathos in the work of the Minerva Press&mdash;but there was far too
+much of them in <i>all</i> the novel work of these sixty or seventy years.</p>
+
+<p>Although the facts and dates are well enough known, it is perhaps not
+always remembered that Miss Austen, while representing what may, using a
+rather objectionable and ambiguous word, be called a more &quot;modern&quot; style
+of novel than Scott's, began long before him and had almost finished her
+work before his really began. If that wonderful Bath bookseller had not
+kept <i>Northanger Abbey</i> in a drawer, instead of publishing it, it would
+have had nearly twenty years start of <i>Waverley</i>. And it must be
+remembered that <i>Northanger Abbey</i>, though it is, perhaps, chiefly
+thought of as a parody-satire on the school of Mrs. Radcliffe, is, as
+these parody-satires have a habit of being, a great deal more. If
+Catherine had not made a fool of herself about the <i>Orphan of the Black
+Forest</i> and <i>Horrid Mysteries</i> (or rather if everything relating to this
+were &quot;blacked out&quot; as by a Russian censor) there would still remain the
+admirable framework of her presentation at Bath and her intercourse with
+the Tilneys; the more admirable character-sketches of herself&mdash;the
+triumph of the ordinary made not ordinary&mdash;and the Thorpes; the most
+admirable flashes of satire and knowledge of human <a name="Page_192" id="Page_192" />nature, not
+&quot;promiscuous&quot; or thrown out <i>apropos</i> of things in general, but acting
+as assistants and invigorators to the story.</p>
+
+<p>In the few words just used lies, as far as it can be comprehended in any
+few words, the secret both of Miss Austen and of Scott. It has been
+said&mdash;more than once or twice, I fear&mdash;that hardly until Bunyan and
+Defoe do we get an interesting story&mdash;something that grasps us and
+carries us away with it&mdash;at all. Except in the great eighteenth-century
+Four the experience is not repeated, save in parts of Miss Burney and
+Miss Edgeworth later&mdash;it is simulated rather than actually brought about
+by the Terror-novel&mdash;except in the eternal exception of <i>Vathek</i>&mdash;for
+Maturin did not do his best work till much later. The absence of it is
+mainly due to a concatenation of inabilities on the part of the writers.
+They don't know what they ought to do: and in a certain sense it may
+even be said that they don't know what they are doing. In the worst
+examples surveyed in the last chapter, such as <i>A Peep at Our
+Ancestors</i>, this ignorance plumbs the abyss&mdash;blocks of dull serious
+narrative, almost or quite without action, and occasional insertions of
+flat, insipid, and (to any one with a little knowledge) impossible
+conversation, forming their staple. Of the better class of books, from
+the <i>Female Quixote</i> to <i>Discipline</i>, this cannot fairly be said: but
+there is always something wanting. Frequently, as in both the books just
+mentioned, the writer is too serious and too desirous to instruct.
+Hardly ever is there a real <i>projection</i> of character, in the round and
+living&mdash;only pale, sketchy &quot;academies&quot; that neither live, nor move, nor
+have any but a fitful and partial being. The conversation is, perhaps,
+the worst feature of all&mdash;for it follows the contemporary stage in
+adopting a conventional lingo which, as we know <a name="Page_193" id="Page_193" />from private letters as
+early as Gray's and Walpole's, if not even as Chesterfield's and those
+of men and women older still, was <i>not</i> the language of well-bred,
+well-educated, and intelligent persons at any time during the century.
+As for the Fourth Estate of the novel&mdash;description&mdash;it had rarely been
+attempted even by the great masters. In fact it has been pointed out as
+perhaps the one unquestionable merit of Mrs. Radcliffe that&mdash;following
+the taste for the picturesque which, starting from Gray and popularised
+by Gilpin, was spreading over the country&mdash;she did attempt to introduce
+this important feature, and did partly, in a rococo way, succeed in
+introducing it. As for plot, that has never been our strong point&mdash;we
+seem to have been contented with <i>Tom Jones</i> as payment in full of that
+demand.<a id="footnotetag17" name="footnotetag17"></a><a href="#footnote17"><sup>17</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>Now, this was all changed. It is doubtful whether if <i>Northanger Abbey</i>
+had actually appeared in 1796 it would have been appreciated&mdash;Miss
+Austen, like other writers of genius, had, not exactly as the common but
+incorrect phrase goes, to create the taste for her own work, but to
+arouse the long dormant appetite which she was born to satisfy. Yet,
+looking back a hundred years, it seems impossible that anybody of wits
+should have failed at once to discover the range, the perfection, and
+the variety of the new gift, or set of gifts. Here all the elements come
+in: and something with them that enlivens and intensifies them all. The
+plot is not intricate, but there is a plot&mdash;good deal more, perhaps,
+than is generally noticed, and more than Miss Austen herself sometimes
+gave, as, for instance, in <i>Mansfield Park</i>. It is even rather artfully
+<a name="Page_194" id="Page_194" />worked out&mdash;the selfish gabble of John Thorpe, who may look to
+superficial observers like a mere outsider, playing an important part
+<i>twice</i> in the evolution. There is not lavish but amply sufficient
+description and scenery&mdash;the Bath vignettes, especially the Beechencliff
+prospect; the sketch of the Abbey itself and of Henry's parsonage, etc.
+But it is in the other two constituents that the blowing of the new wind
+of the spirit is most perceptible. The character-drawing is simply
+wonderful, especially in the women&mdash;though the men lack nothing. John
+Thorpe has been glanced at&mdash;there had been nothing like him before, save
+in Fielding and in the very best of the essayists and dramatists.
+General Tilney has been found fault with as unnatural and excessive: but
+only by people who do not know what &quot;harbitrary gents&quot; fathers of
+families, who were not only squires and members of parliament, but
+military men, could be in the eighteenth century&mdash;and perhaps a little
+later. His son Henry, in common with most of his author's <i>jeunes
+premiers</i>, has been similarly objected to as colourless. He really has a
+great deal of subdued individuality, and it <i>had</i> to be subdued, because
+it would not have done to let him be too superior to Catherine. James
+Morland and Frederick Tilney are not to be counted as more than &quot;walking
+gentlemen,&quot; Mr. Allen only as a little more: and they fulfil their law.
+But Isabella Thorpe is almost better than her brother, as being nearer
+to pure comedy and further from farce; Eleanor Tilney is adequate; and
+Mrs. Allen is sublime on her scale. A novelist who, at the end of the
+eighteenth century, could do Mrs. Allen, could do anything that she
+chose to do; and might be trusted never to attempt anything that she
+could not achieve. And yet the heroine is perhaps&mdash;as she ought to
+be&mdash;the greatest triumph of the whole, and the most indicative of <a name="Page_195" id="Page_195" />the
+new method. The older heroines had generally tried to be extraordinary:
+and had failed. Catherine tries to be ordinary: and is an extraordinary
+success. She is pretty, but not beautiful: sensible and well-natured,
+but capable, like most of us, of making a complete fool of herself and
+of doing complete injustice to other people; fairly well educated, but
+not in the least learned or accomplished. In real life she would be
+simply a unit in the thousands of quite nice but ordinary girls whom
+Providence providentially provides in order that mankind shall not be
+alone. In literature she is more precious than rubies&mdash;exactly because
+art has so masterfully followed and duplicated nature.</p>
+
+<p>Precisely to what extent the attractive quality of this art is enhanced
+by the pervading irony of the treatment would be a very difficult
+problem to work out. It is scarcely hazardous to say that irony is the
+very salt of the novel: and that just as you put salt even in a cake, so
+it is not wise to neglect it wholly even in a romance. Life itself, as
+soon as it gets beyond mere vegetation, is notoriously full of irony:
+and no imitation of it which dispenses with the seasoning can be worth
+much. That Miss Austen's irony is consummate can hardly be said to be
+matter of serious contest.</p>
+
+<p>It has sometimes been thought&mdash;perhaps mistakenly&mdash;that the exhibition
+of it in <i>Northanger Abbey</i> is, though a very creditable essay, <i>not</i>
+consummate. But <i>Pride and Prejudice</i> is known to be, in part, little if
+at all later than <i>Northanger Abbey</i>: and there can again be very little
+dispute among judges in any way competent as to the quality of the irony
+there. Nor does it much matter what part of this wonderful book was
+written later and what earlier: for its ironical character is
+all-pervading, <a name="Page_196" id="Page_196" />in almost every character, except Jane and her lover who
+are mere foils to Elizabeth and Darcy, and even in these to some extent;
+and in the whole story, even in the at least permitted suggestion that
+the sight of Pemberley, and Darcy's altered demeanour, had something to
+do with Elizabeth's resignation of the old romantic part of <i>Belle dame
+sans merci</i>. It may further be admitted, even by those who protest
+against the undervaluation of <i>Northanger Abbey</i>, that <i>Pride and
+Prejudice</i> flies higher, and maintains its flight triumphantly. It is
+not only longer; it is not only quite independent of parody or contrast
+with something previous; but it is far more intricate and elaborate as
+well as more original. Elizabeth herself is not merely an ordinary girl:
+and the putting forward of her, as an extraordinary yet in no single
+point unnatural one, is victoriously carried out. Her father, in spite
+of (nay, perhaps, including) his comparative collapse when he is called
+upon, not as before to talk but to act, in the business of Lydia's
+flight, is a masterpiece. Mr. Collins is, once more by common consent of
+the competent, unsurpassed, if not peerless: those who think him
+unnatural simply do not know nature. Shakespeare and Fielding were the
+only predecessors who could properly serve as sponsors to &quot;this young
+lady&quot; (as Scott delightfully calls her) on her introduction among the
+immortals on the strength of this character alone. Lady Catherine is not
+much the inferior (it would have been pleasing to tell her so) of her
+<i>prot&eacute;g&eacute;</i> and chaplain. Of almost all the characters, and of quite the
+whole book, it is scarcely extravagant to say that it could not have
+been better on its own scale and scheme&mdash;that it is difficult to
+conceive any scheme and scale on which it could have been better. And,
+yet once more, there is nothing out of the way in it&mdash;the only thing not
+of <a name="Page_197" id="Page_197" />absolutely everyday occurrence, the elopement of Lydia, happens on
+so many days still, with slight variations, that it can hardly be called
+a licence.</p>
+
+<p>The same qualities appear throughout the other books, whether in more or
+less quintessence and with less or more alloy is a question rather of
+individual taste than for general or final critical decision. <i>Sense and
+Sensibility</i>, the first actually to appear (1811), is believed to have
+been written about the same time as <i>Pride and Prejudice</i>, which
+appeared two years later, and <i>Northanger Abbey</i>, which did not see the
+light till its author was dead. It is the weakest of the three&mdash;perhaps
+it is the weakest of all: but the weakness is due rather to an error of
+judgment than to a lack of power. Like <i>Northanger Abbey</i> it has a
+certain dependence on something else: the extravagances of Marianne
+satirise the Sensibility-novel just as those of Catherine do the
+Terror-story of the immediate past. But it is on a much larger scale:
+and things of the kind are better in miniature. Moreover, the author's
+sense of creative faculty made her try to throw up and contrast her
+heroine with other characters, in a way which she had not attempted in
+<i>Northanger Abbey</i>: and good as these are in themselves, they make a
+less perfect whole. Indeed, in the order of thought, <i>Sense and
+Sensibility</i> is the &quot;youngest&quot; of the novels&mdash;the least self-criticised.
+Nothing in it shows lack of power (John Dashwood and his wife are of the
+first order); a good deal in it shows lack of knowledge exactly how to
+direct that power.</p>
+
+<p><i>Mansfield Park</i> (1814), though hardly as brilliant as <i>Pride and
+Prejudice</i>, shows much more maturity than <i>Sense and Sensibility</i>. Much
+of it is quite consummate, the character of Mrs. Norris especially: and
+for subtly <a name="Page_198" id="Page_198" />interwoven phrase without emphasis, conveying knowledge and
+criticism of life, it has few equals. But it has an elopement. <i>Emma</i>,
+which has perhaps on the whole been the most general favourite, may
+challenge that position on one ground beyond all question, though
+possibly not on all. It is the absolute triumph of that reliance on the
+strictly ordinary which has been indicated as Miss Austen's title to
+pre-eminence in the history of the novel. Not an event, not a
+circumstance, not a detail, is carried out of &quot;the daily round, the
+common task&quot; of average English middle-class humanity, upper and lower.
+Yet every event, every circumstance, every detail, is put <i>sub specie
+eternitatis</i> by the sorcery of art. Few things could be more
+terrible&mdash;nothing more tiresome&mdash;than to hear the garrulous Miss Bates
+talk in actual life; few things are more delightful than to read her
+speeches as they occur here. An aspiring soul might feel disposed to
+&quot;take and drown itself in a pail&quot; (as one of Dickens's characters says)
+if it had to live the life which the inhabitants of Highbury are
+represented as living; to read about that life&mdash;to read about it over
+and over again&mdash;has been and is always likely to be one of the chosen
+delights of some of the best wits of our race. This is one of the
+paradoxes of art: and perhaps it is the most wonderful of them,
+exceeding even the old &quot;pity and terror&quot; problem. And the discovery of
+it, as a possible source of artistic success, is one of the greatest
+triumphs and one of the most inexhaustible discoveries of that art
+itself. For by another paradox&mdash;this time not of art but of nature&mdash;the
+extraordinary is exhaustible and the ordinary is not. Tragedy and the
+more &quot;incidented&quot; comedy, it is well known, run into types and reproduce
+situations almost inevitably. &quot;All the stories are told.&quot; But the story
+of the life of Highbury never can be told, <a name="Page_199" id="Page_199" />because there is really
+nothing in it but the telling: and here the blessed infinity of Art
+comes in again.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Austen's last book, like her first, was published posthumously and
+she left nothing else but a couple of fragments. One of these, <i>Lady
+Susan</i>, does not, so far as it extends, promise much, though it is such
+a fragment and such an evident first draft even of this, that judgment
+of it is equally unfair and futile. The other, <i>The Watsons</i>, has some
+very striking touches, but is also a mere beginning. <i>Persuasion</i>&mdash;which
+appeared with <i>Northanger Abbey</i> and which, curiously enough, has, like
+its nearly twenty years elder sister, Bath for its principal scene&mdash;has
+also some pretensions to primacy among the books, and is universally
+admitted to be of its author's most delicate, most finished, and most
+sustained work. And this, like <i>Emma</i>, resolutely abstains from even the
+slightest infusion of startling or unusual incident, of &quot;exciting&quot;
+story, of glaring colour of any kind: relying only on congruity of
+speech, sufficient if subdued description, and above all a profusion of
+the most delicately, but the most vividly drawn character, made to
+unfold a plot which has interest, if no excitement, and seasoned
+throughout with the unfailing condiment&mdash;the author's &quot;own sauce&quot;&mdash;of
+gentle but piquant irony and satire.</p>
+
+<p>It is not to be supposed or inferred that Miss Austen's methods, or her
+results, have appealed to everybody. Madame de Sta&euml;l thought her
+<i>vulgaire</i>&mdash;meaning, of course, not exactly our &quot;vulgar&quot; but
+&quot;commonplace&quot;; Charlotte Bront&euml; was not much otherwise minded; her own
+Marianne Dashwood would doubtless have thought the same. Readers without
+some touch of letters may think her style old-fashioned: it has even
+been termed &quot;stilted.&quot; Not merely may amateurs of blood and thunder, of
+passion <a name="Page_200" id="Page_200" />and sensation, think her tame, but the more modern devotees of
+&quot;analysis&quot; may consider her superficial. On the other hand, it is
+notorious that, from her own day to this, she has never wanted
+partisans, often of superlative competence, and of the most strikingly
+different tempers, tastes, and opinions. The extraordinary quietness of
+her art is only matched by its confidence: its subtlety by its strength.
+She did not try many styles; she deliberately and no doubt wisely
+refused to try the other style which was already carrying all before it
+in her own later days. She seems to have confined herself (with what
+seems to some high-flying judges an almost ignoble caution) to the
+strata of society that she knew most thoroughly: and the curious have
+noted that she seldom goes above a baronet, and hardly even descends to
+a butler, in her range of personages who are not mere mutes. It is not
+at all unlikely&mdash;in fact it is almost certain&mdash;that she might have
+enlarged this range, and that of her incident, with perfect safety and
+to the great profit and delight of her readers. But these actual things
+she knew she could do consummately; and she would not risk the
+production of anything not consummate.</p>
+
+<p>The value of her, artistically, is of course in the perfection of what
+she did; but the value of her historically is in the way in which she
+showed that, given the treatment, any material could be perfected. It
+was in this way, as has been pointed out, that the possibilities of the
+novel were shown to be practically illimitable. Tragedy is not needed:
+and the most ordinary transactions, the most everyday characters,
+develop into an infinite series of comedies with which the novelist can
+amuse himself and his readers. The <i>ludicrum humani seculi</i> on the one
+hand, and the artist's power of extracting and arranging it on <a name="Page_201" id="Page_201" />the
+other&mdash;these two things supply all that is wanted. This Hampshire
+parson's daughter had found the philosopher's stone of the novel: and
+the very pots and pans, the tongs and pokers of the house, could be
+turned into novel-gold by it.</p>
+
+<p>But even gold is not everything: and only a fanatic, and a rather
+foolish fanatic, would say that this style of fiction summed up and
+exhausted all the good that fiction could give and do. Miss Austen's art
+excludes (it has been said) tragedy; it does not let in much pure
+romance; although its variety is in a way infinite, yet it is not
+various in infinite ways, but rather in very finite ones. Everybody who
+denies its excellence is to be blamed: but nobody is to be blamed for
+saying that he should like some other excellences as well. The desire is
+innocent, nay commendable: and it was being satisfied, at practically
+the same time, by the work of Sir Walter Scott in a kind of novel almost
+as new (when we regard it in connection with its earlier examples) as
+Miss Austen's own. This was the Historical novel, which, in a way, not
+only subsumed many though not quite all varieties of Romance, but also
+summoned to its aid not a little&mdash;in fact a very great deal&mdash;of the
+methods of the pure novel itself.</p>
+
+<p>It is not very long since a critic, probably not very old, sentenced the
+critical opinions of another critic, certainly not very young, to &quot;go
+into the melting pot&quot; because they were in favour of the historical
+novel: and because the historical novel had for some time past done
+great harm (I think the phrase was stronger) to the imaginative
+literature of England. Now there are several things which might be said
+about this judgment&mdash;I do not say &quot;in arrest&quot; of it, because it is of
+itself inoperative: as it happens you cannot put critical opinions in
+the melting <a name="Page_202" id="Page_202" />pot. At least, they won't melt: and they come out again
+like the diabolic rat that Mr. Chips tried to pitch-boil. In the first
+place, there is the question whether the greater part by far of the
+imaginative and other literature of <i>any</i> time does not itself &quot;go into
+the melting pot,&quot; and whether it much matters what sends it there. In
+the second, if this seems too cynical, there is the very large and grave
+question whether a still larger proportion of the novel of manners, in
+England, France, and all other countries during the same time, has not
+been as bad as, or worse than, the romantic division, historical or
+other. But the worst faults of the judgment remain. In the first place
+there is the fatal shortness of view. It is with the literature of two
+thousand, not with the literature of twenty, years that the true critic
+has to do: and no kind which&mdash;in two thousand, or two hundred, or
+twenty&mdash;has produced literature that is good or great can be even
+temporarily put aside because (as every kind of literature without
+exception has been again and again) it is for a time barren or fruitful
+only in weeds. And any one who does not count Scott and Dumas and
+Thackeray among the makers of good literature must really excuse others
+if they simply take no further count of him. The historical novel is a
+good kind, good friends, a marvellous good kind: and it has the
+advantage over the pure novel of manners that it is much less subject to
+obsolescence, if it be really well done; while it can practically annex
+most of the virtues of that novel of manners itself.</p>
+
+<p>This excellent kind, however, had been wandering about in the
+wilderness&mdash;had indeed hardly got so far even as that stage, but had
+been a mere &quot;bodiless childful of life in the gloom&quot;&mdash;for more than two
+thousand years before <i>Waverley</i>. Of its earlier attempts to get into
+full existence <a name="Page_203" id="Page_203" />we cannot say much here:<a id="footnotetag18" name="footnotetag18"></a><a href="#footnote18"><sup>18</sup></a> something on the more
+recent but rather abortive birth-throes has been promised, and is now
+due. It is not improbable that considerable assistance was rendered to
+the kind by the heroic romance of the seventeenth century in prose and
+verse, which often attempted historic, and almost always
+pseudo-historic, guise. As has been seen in regard to such collections
+as Croxall's, historical stories were freely mingled with fictitious:
+and it could not be for nothing that Horace Walpole, the author of the
+<i>Castle of Otranto</i>, was a rather ardent and even to some extent
+scholarly student of the romance and the gossip of history. Much
+earlier, Fielding himself, in his salad days, had given something of an
+historic turn to the story of <i>A Journey from this World to the Next</i>.
+And when history itself became more common and more readable, it could
+not but be that this inexhaustible source of material for the new kind
+of literature, which was being so eagerly demanded and so busily
+supplied, should suggest itself. Some instances of late eighteenth and
+early nineteenth century experiments have been given and discussed in
+the last chapter: and when Scott (or &quot;the Author of <i>Waverley</i>&quot;) had
+achieved his astonishing success, some of the writers of these put in
+the usual claim of &quot;That's <i>my</i> thunder.&quot; This was done in the case of
+the Lees, it was also done in the case of Jane Porter, the writer of
+the once famous and favourite <i>Thaddeus of Warsaw</i> (1803) and <i>Scottish
+Chiefs</i> (1810): while, as we have seen, there had been historical colour
+enough in Godwin's novels to <a name="Page_204" id="Page_204" />make suggestion of <i>his</i> &quot;authorship of
+<i>Waverley</i>&quot; not absolutely preposterous. Even Mrs. Radcliffe had touched
+the style; and humbler persons like the egregious Henrietta Mosse had
+attempted it in the most serious spirit.</p>
+
+<p>But with their varying degrees of talent&mdash;with, in one or two cases,
+even a little genius&mdash;all these writers had broken themselves upon one
+fatal difficulty&mdash;that of anachronism: not in the petty sense of the
+pedant, but in the wide one of the critic. The present writer is not
+prepared, without reading <i>A Peep at Our Ancestors</i> again (which he
+distinctly declines to do), to say that there are, in that remarkable
+performance, any positive errors of historic fact worse than, or as bad,
+as those which pedantry has pointed out in <i>Ivanhoe</i>. But whereas you
+may be nearly as well acquainted with the actual history of the time as
+the pedants themselves, and a great deal better acquainted with its
+literature, and yet never be shocked, disgusted, or contemptuously
+amused in <i>Ivanhoe</i> by such things as were quoted from the <i>Peep</i> a few
+pages back&mdash;so, to those who know something of &quot;the old Elizabeth way,&quot;
+and even nowadays to those who know very little, and that little at
+second hand, Miss Lee's travesty of it in <i>The Recess</i> is impossible and
+intolerable. When Mrs. Radcliffe, at the date definitely given of 1584,
+talks about &quot;the Parisian opera,&quot; represents a French girl of the
+sixteenth century as being &quot;instructed in the English poets,&quot; and talks
+about driving in a &quot;landau,&quot; the individual blunders are, perhaps, not
+more violent than those of the chronology by which Scott's Ulrica is
+apparently a girl at the time of the Conquest and a woman, not too old
+to be the object of rivalry between Front de Boeuf and his father, not
+long before the reign of Richard I. But this last oversight does not
+affect the credibility of the story, or the <a name="Page_205" id="Page_205" />homogeneity of the manners,
+in the least. Mrs. Radcliffe jumbles up two (or more than two) utterly
+different states and stages of society, manners, and other things which
+constitute the very atmosphere of the story itself. Perhaps (we have
+very few easy conversations of the period to justify a positive
+statement) a real Bois-Guilbert and still more a real Wamba might not
+have talked exactly like Scott's personages: but there is no insistent
+and disturbing reason why they should not. When we hear an Adelaise of
+the mid-twelfth century asking whether she does not receive her
+education from her mamma, the necessary &quot;suspension of disbelief&quot;
+becomes impossible.</p>
+
+<p>But these now most obvious truths were not obvious at all between 1780
+and 1810: and it is perhaps the greatest evidence of Scott's genius that
+half, but by no means quite, unconsciously he saw them, and that he has
+made everybody see them since. It was undoubtedly fortunate that he
+began novel-writing so late: for earlier even he might have been caught
+in the errors of the time. But when he did begin, he had not only
+reached middle life and matured his considerable original critical
+faculty&mdash;criticism and wine are the only things that even the &quot;kind calm
+years&quot; may be absolutely trusted to improve if there is any original
+goodness in them&mdash;but he had other advantages. He had read, if not with
+minute accuracy, very widely indeed: and he possessed, as Lord Morley
+has well said, &quot;the genius of history&quot; in a degree which perhaps no
+merely meticulous scholar has ever reached, and which was not exceeded
+in <i>quality</i> even by the greatest historians such as Gibbon. He had an
+almost unmatched combination of common sense with poetic imagination, of
+knowledge of the world with knowledge of letters. He had shown himself
+to be possessed of the secret of semi-historical <a name="Page_206" id="Page_206" />narrative itself in
+half a dozen remarkable verse romances, and therefore had less to do in
+engineering the prose romance. Last of all, he had seen what to
+avoid&mdash;not merely in his editing of Strutt's <i>Queenhoo Hall</i> (a valuable
+property-room for the novel, but nothing of a real novel), but in his
+reading of the failures of his predecessors and contemporaries. The very
+beginning of <i>Waverley</i> itself (which most people skip) is invaluable,
+because it shows us that at the time he wrote it (which, it need hardly
+be said, was a long time before its completion) he had not the knowledge
+or the courage to strike straight out into the stream of action and
+conversation, but troubled himself with accumulating bladders and
+arranging ropes for the possible salvation of his narrative if it got
+into difficulties. Very soon he knew that it would not get into
+difficulties: and away he went.</p>
+
+<p>It ought not to be necessary, but from some symptoms it may be
+desirable, to point out that Scott is very far from being an historical
+novelist only. An acute French critic, well acquainted with both
+literatures, once went so far as to say that there were a good many
+professed &quot;philosophical&quot; novels which did not contain such keen
+psychology as Scott's: and I would undertake to show a good deal of
+cause on this side. But short of it, it is undeniable that he can do
+perfectly well without any historical scaffolding. There is practically
+nothing of it in his second and third novels, <i>Guy Mannering</i> and <i>The
+Antiquary</i>, each of which good judges have sometimes ranked as his very
+best: there is as little or less in <i>St. Ronan's Well</i>, a very fine
+thing as it is, and one which, but for James Ballantyne's meddling folly
+and prudery, would have been much finer. The incomparable little
+conversation&mdash;scenes and character-sketches scattered among the
+Introductions to the novels&mdash;especially <a name="Page_207" id="Page_207" />the history of Crystal
+Croftangry&mdash;show that he could perfectly well have dispensed with all
+out-of-the-way incident had he chosen. But, as a rule, he did not so
+choose: and, in the majority of cases, he preferred to take his
+out-of-the-way incident from historical sources. Not here,
+unfortunately, can we allow ourselves even a space proportionate to that
+given above in Miss Austen's case to the criticism of individual novels:
+but luckily there is not much need of this. The brilliant overture of
+<i>Waverley</i> as such, with its entirely novel combination of the
+historical and the &quot;national&quot; elements upon the still more novel
+background of Highland scenery; the equally vivid and vigorous narrative
+and the more interesting personages of <i>Old Mortality</i> and <i>Rob Roy</i>;
+the domestic tragedy, with the historical element for little more than a
+framework, of the <i>Heart of Midlothian</i> and the <i>Bride of Lammermoor</i>;
+the little masterpiece of <i>A Legend of Montrose</i>; the fresh departure,
+with purely English subject, of <i>Ivanhoe</i> and its triumphant sequels in
+<i>Kenilworth, Quentin Durward</i>, and others; the striking utilisation of
+literary assistance in the <i>Fortunes of Nigel</i>; and the wonderful
+blending of autobiographic, historical, and romantic interest in
+<i>Redgauntlet</i>:&mdash;one cannot dwell on these and other things. The magic
+continued even in <i>Woodstock</i>&mdash;written as this was almost between the
+blows of the executioner's crow-bar on the wheel, in the tightening of
+the windlasses at the rack&mdash;it is not absent, whatever people may say,
+in <i>Anne of Geierstein</i>, nor even quite lacking in the better parts of
+<i>Count Robert of Paris</i>. But we must not expatiate on its effects; we
+must only give a little attention to the means by which they are
+achieved.</p>
+
+<p>Another of the common errors about Scott is to represent&mdash;perhaps really
+to regard&mdash;him as a hit-or-miss and <a name="Page_208" id="Page_208" />hand-to-mouth <i>improvisatore</i>, who
+bundled out his creations anyhow, and did not himself know how he
+created them. The fallacy is worse than a fallacy: for it is down-right
+false witness. We have numerous passages in and out of the novels&mdash;the
+chief of them being the remarkable conversation with Captain Clutterbuck
+in the Introduction to the <i>Fortunes of Nigel</i> and the reflections in
+the <i>Diary</i> on <i>Sir John Chiverton</i> and <i>Brambletye House</i>&mdash;showing that
+Scott knew perfectly well the construction and the stringing of his
+fiddle, as well as the trick of applying his rosin. But if we had not
+these direct testimonies, no one of any critical faculty could mistake
+the presence of consciously perceived principles in the books
+themselves. A man does not suddenly, and by mere blind instinct, avoid
+such a pitfall as that of incongruous speech and manners, which has been
+noticed above. It is not mere happy-go-lucky blundering which makes him
+invariably decline another into which people still fall&mdash;the selection
+of historical personages of the first importance, and elaborately known,
+for the <i>central</i> figures of his novels. Not to believe in luck is a
+mark of perhaps greater folly than to over-believe in it: but luck will
+not always keep a man clear of such perils as that unskilful wedging of
+great blocks of mere history into his story, which the lesser historical
+novelists always commit, or that preponderance of mere narrative itself
+as compared with action and conversation from which even Dumas, even
+Thackeray, is not free.</p>
+
+<p>That he knew what he was doing and what he had to do is thus certain;
+that he did it to an astounding extent is still more certain; but it
+would not skill much to deny that he did not always give himself time to
+do it perfectly in every respect, though it is perhaps not mere paradox
+or mere partisanship to suggest that if he had given him<a name="Page_209" id="Page_209" />self more time,
+he would hardly have done better, and might have done worse. The
+accusation of superficiality has been <i>already</i> glanced at: and it is
+pretty certain that it argues more superficiality, of a much more
+hopeless kind, in those who make it. The accusation of careless and
+slovenly style is not much better: for Scott had, perfectly, the style
+suited to his own work, and you cannot easily have a better style than
+that. But there are two defects in him which were early detected by good
+and friendly judges: and which are in fact natural results of the
+extraordinary force and fertility of his creative power. One&mdash;the less
+serious, but certainly to some extent a fault in art and a point in
+which he is distinguished for the worse from Shakespeare&mdash;is that he is
+rather given to allow at first, to some of his personages, an
+elaborateness and apparent emphasis of drawing which seems to promise an
+importance for them in the story that they never actually attain. Mike
+Lambourne in <i>Kenilworth</i> is a good example of this: but there are many
+others. The fact evidently was that, in the rush of the artist's plastic
+imagination, other figures rose and overpowered these. It is an excuse:
+but it is hardly a justification. The other and more serious is a
+tendency&mdash;which grew on him and may no doubt have been encouraged by the
+astonishing pecuniary rewards of his work&mdash;to hurry his conclusions, to
+&quot;huddle up the cards and throw them into the bag,&quot; as Lady Louisa Stuart
+told him. There is one of the numerous, but it would seem generic and
+classifiable, forms of unpleasant dream in which the dreamer's watch, to
+his consternation, suddenly begins to send its hands round at double and
+ten-fold speed. Scott is rather apt to do this, towards the close of his
+novels, in his eagerness to begin something else. These defects,
+however, are defects much more from <a name="Page_210" id="Page_210" />the point of view of abstract
+criticism than from that of the pleasure of the reader: while, even from
+the former, they are outweighed many times by merits. And as regards our
+present method of estimation, they hardly count at all.</p>
+
+<p>For, in that calculus, the important thing is that Scott, like Miss
+Austen, at once opened an immense new field to the novelist, and showed
+how that field was to be cultivated. The complement-contrast of the pair
+can need emphasising only to those on whom no emphasis would be likely
+to impress it: but it may not be quite so evident at once that between
+them they cover almost the entire possible ground of prose fiction. The
+more striking and popular as well as more strictly novel style of Scott
+naturally attracted most attention at first: indeed it can hardly be
+said that, for the next thirty years, much attempt was made to follow in
+Miss Austen's steps, while such attempts as were made were seldom very
+good.<a id="footnotetag19" name="footnotetag19"></a><a href="#footnote19"><sup>19</sup></a> But there is no need to hurry Time: and he generally knows
+what he is about. At any rate he had, in and through these two
+provided&mdash;for generations, probably for centuries, to come&mdash;patterns and
+principles for whoso would to follow in prose fiction.</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VI" id="CHAPTER_VI" /><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211" />CHAPTER VI</h2>
+
+<h2>THE SUCCESSORS&mdash;TO THACKERAY</h2>
+
+
+<p>A person inexperienced in the ways of life and literature might expect
+that such developments as those surveyed and discussed in the last
+chapter must have immediate and unbroken development further. Scott had
+thrown open, and made available, the whole vast range of history for the
+romancer: Miss Austen had shown the infinite possibilities of ordinary
+and present things for the novelist. And such a one might contend that,
+even if the common idea of definite precursorship and teachership be a
+mistake, the more subtle doctrine that such work as Scott's, and as Miss
+Austen's, is really the result of generally working forces, as well as
+of individual genius, would lead to the same conclusion. But the
+expectation would show his inexperience, and his ignorance of the fact
+that Art, unlike Science, declines to be bound by any calculable laws
+whatsoever.</p>
+
+<p>It was indeed impossible that Scott's towering fame should not draw the
+nobler sort, and his immense gains the baser, to follow in his track:
+and they promptly did so. But, as he himself quoted in the remarkable
+comments (above alluded to) on his early imitators in the <i>Diary</i>, they
+had &quot;gotten his fiddle, but not his rosin&quot;&mdash;an observation the truth of
+which may be shown presently. Miss Austen's immediate influence in the
+other direction was almost <i>nil</i>: and this was hardly to be regretted,
+because a tolerably stationary state of manners, language, <a name="Page_212" id="Page_212" />etc., such
+as her kind of novel requires, had not quite, though it had nearly, been
+reached. At any rate, the kind of ebb or half ebb, which so often,
+though not so certainly, follows flood-tides in literature, came upon
+the novel in the twenties and thirties. Even the striking appearance of
+Dickens and <i>Pickwick</i> in 1837 can hardly be said to have turned it
+distinctly: for the Dickensian novel is a species by itself&mdash;neither
+strictly novel nor strictly romance, but, as Polonius might say, a
+picaresque-burlesque-sentimental-farcical-realist-fantastic nondescript.
+Not till <i>Vanity Fair</i> did the novel of pure real life advance its
+standard once more: while the historical novel-romance of a new kind may
+date its revival with&mdash;though it should scarcely trace that revival
+to&mdash;<i>Esmond</i>, or <i>Westward Ho!</i> or both.</p>
+
+<p>Between Scott on the earlier side and Dickens and Thackeray on the
+other, there was an immense production of novels, illustrated by not a
+few names which should rank high in the second class, while some would
+promote more than one of them to the first. The lines of development, as
+well as the chief individual practitioners, may be best indicated by
+short discussions of Hook, Bulwer, Disraeli, Ainsworth, James, Marryat,
+and Peacock.</p>
+
+<p>The most probable demur to this list is likely to be taken at the very
+first name. Theodore Hook has had no return of the immense popularity
+which his <i>Sayings and Doings</i> (1826-1829) obtained for him; nor,
+perhaps, is he ever likely to have any; nor yet, further, save in one
+respect, can he be said to deserve it. Flimsily constructed, hastily
+written, reflecting indeed the ways and speech of the time after a
+fashion, but in a distorted mirror and with a thin and superficial
+representation, nearer to bad drama than to good literature, full of
+horseplay and forced high jinks&mdash;his <a name="Page_213" id="Page_213" />stories have all the inseparable
+faults of improvisation together with those of art that is out of
+fashion and manners-painting (such as it is) of manners that are dead,
+and when alive were those of a not very picturesque, pleasing, or
+respectable transition. Yet, for all this, Hook has a claim on the
+critical historian of literature, and especially of the novel, which has
+been far too little acknowledged. And this claim does not even consist
+in the undoubted fact that his influence both on Dickens and on
+Thackeray was direct and very great. It lies in the larger and more
+important, though connected, fact that, at a given moment, his were the
+hands in which the torch of the novel-procession was deposited. He
+stands to fiction almost exactly as Leigh Hunt stands to the
+miscellaneous essay. He modernised and multiplied its subjects,
+attractions, appeals: he &quot;vulgarised&quot; it in the partly good French
+sense, as well as in the wholly bad English one; he was its journalist
+and <i>colporteur</i>. He broke up the somewhat stock-and-type moulds of
+eighteenth-century tale-telling; admitted a plurality, almost an
+infinity, of interest and incident; gave a sort of universal franchise
+to possible subjects of novel; and (perhaps most important of all)
+banished from that novel the tendency to conventional &quot;lingo&quot; which,
+though never so prevalent in it as in eighteenth-century drama, had
+existed. It may seem to some readers that there is an exaggerated and
+paradoxical opposition between this high praise and the severe censure
+pronounced a little above&mdash;that both cannot be true. But both are true:
+and it is a really natural and necessary cause and proof at once of
+their truth that Hook never wrote a really good novel, hardly even a
+really good tale (&quot;Gervase Skinner&quot; is probably the best), and yet that
+he deserves the place here given to him.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214" />Ainsworth and James perhaps deserve to be taken next, not so much in
+point of merit as because both, though continuing (especially Ainsworth)
+very late, began pretty early. Indeed, a book in which Ainsworth had a
+hand, though it is said to be not wholly his, <i>Sir John Chiverton</i>, was
+with Horace Smith's <i>Brambletye House</i> (1826), the actual subject of
+Scott's criticism above quoted. Both Ainsworth and James are unconcealed
+followers of Scott himself: and they show the dangers to which the
+historical romance is exposed when it gets out of the hands of genius.
+Of the two, James had the greater scholarship, the better command of
+English, and perhaps a nearer approach to command also of character:
+Ainsworth more &quot;fire in his interior,&quot; more variety, somewhat more
+humour (though neither was strong in this respect), and a certain not
+useless or despicable faculty of splashy scene-painting and rough but
+not ineffective stage-management. But of Scott's combination of poetry,
+humour, knowledge of life, reading, grasp of character, and command of
+effective dialogue and description, both were utterly destitute: and
+both fell into the mistake (which even Dumas did not wholly avoid) of
+attempting to give the historical effect by thrusting in lardings of
+pure history, by overloading descriptions of dress, etc., and, in short,
+by plastering the historic colour on, instead of suffusing it, as Scott
+had managed to do. Popular as they were, not merely with youthful
+readers, they undoubtedly brought the historical novel into some
+discredit a little before the middle of the century.<a id="footnotetag20" name="footnotetag20"></a><a href="#footnote20"><sup>20</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>With Bulwer and Disraeli we get into a different sphere <a name="Page_215" id="Page_215" />of
+literature&mdash;whether into the same in both cases, and whether, if so,
+into one of the highest, are questions on which no general agreement has
+yet been reached&mdash;on which, perhaps, no general agreement is even
+possible.</p>
+
+<p>With regard to the second, it must be remembered that to him, whether as
+Mr. Disraeli or as Lord Beaconsfield, novel-writing was always a
+&quot;by-work&quot;&mdash;partly a means to his real end of politics, partly a
+relaxation from the work necessary to that end. He called himself a
+&quot;gentleman of the press&quot;&mdash;with that mixture of sincerity, purpose, and
+ironical simulation which brought on him, from unintelligent or not very
+honest opponents, and even from others, the charge of affectation, if
+not of hypocrisy. And, undoubtedly, he did a good deal of work for the
+press, and very remarkable work too&mdash;almost wholly in the kind of
+novel-writing, from <i>Vivian Grey</i> (1826) to <i>Endymion</i> (1880). Yet it
+may be permitted&mdash;in the face of some more than respectable opinion on
+the other side&mdash;to doubt whether, except in some curious sports and
+by-products, he ever produced real novel-work of the highest class. In
+the satiric-fantastic tale&mdash;in a kind of following of Voltaire&mdash;such as
+<i>Ixion</i>, he has hardly a superior, unless it be Anthony Hamilton, who is
+the superior of Voltaire himself and the master of everybody. For a pure
+love-novel of a certain kind, <i>Henrietta Temple</i> (1837) is bad to
+beat&mdash;and in a curious cross between the historical, biographical, and
+the romantic, <i>Venetia</i> (same year) also stands pretty much alone. But
+all the rest, more or less political, more or less &quot;of society,&quot; more or
+less fantastic&mdash;<i>Coningsby</i> (1844) as well as <i>Alroy</i> (1833), <i>Tancred</i>
+(1847) as well as <i>Vivian Grey, Sybil</i> (1845), as well as <i>The Young
+Duke</i> (1831), &quot;leave to desire&quot; in a strange way. Like the three which
+have been excepted for praise, each is in a manner <i>sui <a name="Page_216" id="Page_216" />generis</i>, while
+the whole group stands, in a manner also, apart from others and by
+itself. There is astonishing cleverness everywhere, in regard to almost
+every point of novel-composition, though with special regard to
+epigrammatic phrase. But the whole is <i>inorganic</i> somehow, and more than
+somehow unreal; without (save in the cases mentioned) attaining that
+obviously unreal but persuasive phantasmagoria which some great writers
+of fiction have managed to put in existence and motion. How far this is
+due to the fact that most of the novels are political is a question
+rather to be hinted than to be discussed. But the present writer has
+never read a political novel, whether on his own side or on others, that
+seemed to him to be wholly satisfactory.</p>
+
+<p>Bulwer&mdash;for it is perhaps here not impolite or improper still to call
+the first Lord Lytton by the name under which he wrote for forty years,
+and solidly niched himself in the novel-front of the minster of English
+Literature&mdash;had not a few points of resemblance to his rival and future
+chief. But their relations to politics and letters were reversed.
+Disraeli was a born politician who was also a very considerable man of
+letters: Bulwer was a born man of letters who was a by no means
+inconsiderable politician. His literary ability was extraordinarily
+diversified: but, once more, he was (here also) a born novelist, who was
+also a not inconsiderable dramatist; a critic who might not impossibly
+have been great, a miscellanist of ability, and a verse-writer than whom
+many a worse has somehow or other obtained the name of poet. He began
+novel-writing very early (<i>Falkland</i> is of 1827), he continued it all
+his life, and he was the very Proteus-chameleon of the novel in changing
+his styles to suit the tastes of the day. He never exactly copied
+anybody: and in all his various attempts <a name="Page_217" id="Page_217" />he went extremely near to the
+construction of masterpieces. In the novel of society with <i>Pelham</i>
+(1828); the novel of crime with <i>Eugene Aram</i> (1832) and <i>Zanoni</i>
+(1842); the novel of passion and a sort of mystery with <i>Ernest
+Maltravers</i> and <i>Alice</i>; the historic romance with <i>The Last Days of
+Pompeii</i> (1834), <i>The Last of the Barons</i> (1843), and <i>Harold</i> (1848),
+he made marks deep and early. When the purely domestic kind came in he
+made them, earlier and deeper still, with <i>The Caxtons</i> (1850), <i>My
+Novel</i> (1853), etc. He caught the &quot;sensation&quot; ball at nearly its first
+service with his old &quot;mystery&quot; racket, and played the most brilliant
+game of the whole tournament in <i>A Strange Story</i> (1862). At the last he
+tried later kinds still in books like <i>The Coming Race</i> (1871), <i>The
+Parisians</i> (1873), and <i>Kenelm Chillingly</i>. And once, Pallas being kind,
+he did an almost perfect thing (there is not a speck or a flaw in it
+except, perhaps, the mechanical death of the bulldog) and produced one
+of the best examples of one of the best and oldest classes of fiction
+known to the world, in the ghost-story of <i>The Haunted and the Haunters</i>
+(1859).</p>
+
+<p>Such a mass, such a length, such a variety of production, with so many
+merits in it, would be difficult to meet elsewhere in our department.
+And yet very few critics of unquestionable competence, if any, have
+accorded the absolute First Class to Lord Lytton as a novelist. That
+this is partly (and rather unjustly) due to the singular and sometimes
+positively ridiculous grandiloquence and to the half-mawkish,
+half-rancid, sentimentality which too often mar his earlier novels is
+probably true. But it is not all the truth: if it were, it would be
+almost sufficient to point out that he outgrew the first of these faults
+completely, the second almost completely; and that from <i>The Caxtons</i>
+(1850) onward there is hardly any stain on his literary <a name="Page_218" id="Page_218" />character in
+any such respect. But other faults&mdash;or at least defects&mdash;remain. They
+may be almost summed up in the charge of want of <i>consummateness</i>.
+Bulwer could be romantic&mdash;but his romance had the touch of bad taste and
+insincerity referred to above. He could, as in <i>The Caxtons</i>, be fairly
+true to ordinary life&mdash;but even then he seemed to feel a necessity of
+setting off and as it were apologising for the simplicity and veracity
+by touches&mdash;in fact by <i>douches</i>&mdash;of Sternian fantastry, and by other
+touches of what was a little later to be called sensationalism. Even his
+handling of the supernatural, which was undoubtedly a strong point of
+his, was not wholly <i>de ban aloi</i>. To pronounce him, as was once done by
+an acute and amiable judge, &quot;the <i>hum</i>miest of <i>bugs</i>&quot; was excessive in
+life, and would be preposterous in literature. But there undoubtedly
+was, with rare exceptions, a suspicion of what is called in slang
+&quot;faking&quot; about his work. The wine is not &quot;neat&quot; but doctored; the
+composition is <i>pastiche</i>; a dozen other metaphors&mdash;of stucco, veneer,
+glueing-up&mdash;suggest themselves. And then there suggests itself, in turn,
+a sort of shame at such imputations on the author of such a mass of
+work, so various, so interesting, so important as accomplishment,
+symptom, and pattern at once. And perhaps one may end by pronouncing
+Bulwer one of the very greatest of English novelists who are not of the
+very greatest.</p>
+
+<p>It is difficult to say whether the usual attitude of criticism to
+Captain Marryat (1792-1848) is more uncritical than ungrateful or more
+ungrateful than uncritical. Because he has amused the boy, it seems to
+be taken for granted that he ought not to amuse the man: because he does
+not write with the artificial and often extremely arbitrary graces of
+the composition books, that he is &quot;not literature.&quot;<a name="Page_219" id="Page_219" /> If it be so, why in
+the first case so much the worse for &quot;the man,&quot; and in the second so
+much the worse for literature. As a matter of fact, he has many of the
+qualities of the novelist in a high degree: and if he were in the
+fortunate position of an ancient classic, whose best works only survive,
+these qualities could not fail of recognition. Much of his later work
+simply ought not to count; for it was mere hack-labour, rendered, if not
+necessary, very nearly so by the sailor's habit (which Marryat possessed
+in the highest degree) of getting rid of money. Even among this,
+<i>Masterman Ready</i> and <i>The Children of the New Forest</i>, &quot;children's
+books,&quot; as they may be called, rank very high in their kind. But he
+counts here, of course, for his sea-novels mainly: and in them there are
+several things for us to notice. One is that Marryat had the true
+quality of the craftsman, as distinguished from the amateur or the
+chance-medley man who has a lucky inspiration. If it were the case that
+his books derived their whole attraction from the novelty and (within
+its limits) the variety of their sea-matter, then the first ought to be
+the best, as in nearly all such cases is the fact. But <i>Frank Mildmay</i>
+(1829), so far from being the best, is not far from being the worst of
+Marryat's novels. Much&mdash;dangerously much&mdash;as he put of his own
+experiences in the book, he did not know in the least how to manage
+them. And if Frank is something of a bravo, more of a blackguard, and
+nearly a complete ruffian, it is not merely because there was a good
+deal of brutality in the old navy; not merely because Marryat's own
+standard of chivalry was not quite that of Chaucer's Knight:&mdash;but
+partly, also, because he was aiming blunderingly at what he supposed to
+be part of the novelist's business&mdash;irregular as well as regular
+gallantry, and highly seasoned adventure. But, like all good artists
+(and like hardly anybody who <a name="Page_220" id="Page_220" />has not the artistic quality in him), he
+taught himself by his failure, even though he sometimes relapsed. Of
+actual construction he was never a master. <i>The King's Own</i>, with its
+overdose of history at the beginning and of melodrama at the end, is an
+example. But his two masterpieces, <i>Peter Simple</i> (1834) and <i>Mr.
+Midshipman Easy</i> (1836), are capital instances of what may be called
+&quot;particularist&quot; fiction&mdash;the fiction that derives its special zest from
+the &quot;colours&quot; of some form of life unfamiliar to those who have not
+actually lived it. Even <i>Peter Simple</i> is unduly weighted at the end by
+the machinations of Peter's uncle against him and, at intervals during
+the book, by the proceedings connected therewith. But <i>Mr. Midshipman
+Easy</i> is flawless&mdash;except for the amiable but surely excessive
+sentimentalists who are shocked at the way in which Mr. Easy <i>p&egrave;re</i>
+quits the greater stage by mounting the lesser. Than this book there is
+not a better novel of special &quot;humour&quot; in literature; as much may be
+said of the greater part of <i>Peter Simple</i>, of not a little in <i>Jacob
+Faithful</i> (a great favourite with Thackeray, who always did justice to
+Marryat), and <i>Japhet in Search of a Father</i>, and of something in almost
+all. Nor were high jinks and special naval matters by any means
+Marryat's only province. Laymen may agree with experts in thinking the
+clubhauling of the <i>Diom&egrave;de</i> in <i>Peter Simple</i>, and the two great fights
+of the <i>Aurora</i> with the elements and with the Russian frigate in <i>Mr.
+Midshipman Easy</i>, to be extraordinarily fine things:&mdash;vivid, free from
+extravagance, striking, stirring, clear, as descriptive and narrative
+literature of the kind can be only at its best, and too seldom is at
+all. An almost Defoe-like exactness of detail is one of Marryat's
+methods and merits: while it is very remarkable that he rarely attempts
+to produce the fun, in which Defoe <a name="Page_221" id="Page_221" />is lacking and he himself so
+fertile, by mere exaggeration or caricature of detail. There are
+exceptions&mdash;the Dominie business in <i>Jacob Faithful</i> is one&mdash;but they
+are exceptions. Take Hook, his immediate predecessor, and no doubt in a
+way his model, as (it has been said) Hook was to almost everybody at the
+time; take even Dickens, his fellow-pupil with Hook and his own greater
+successor; and you will find that Marryat resorts less than either to
+the humour of simple <i>charge</i> or exaggeration.</p>
+
+<p>The last name on our present list belongs to the class of &quot;eccentric&quot;
+novelists&mdash;the adjective being used, not in its transferred and partly
+improper sense so much as in its true one. Peacock never plays the
+Jack-pudding like Sterne: and his shrewd wit never permits him the
+sincere aberrations of Amory. But his work is out of the ordinary
+courses, and does not turn round the ordinary centres of novel writing.
+It belongs to the tradition&mdash;if to any tradition at all&mdash;of Lucian and
+the Lucianists&mdash;especially as that tradition was redirected by Anthony
+Hamilton. It thus comes, in one way, near part of the work of Disraeli;
+though, except in point of satiric temper, its spirit is totally
+different. Peacock was essentially a scholar (though a non-academic one)
+and essentially a humorist. In the progress of his books from <i>Headlong
+Hall</i> (1816) to <i>Gryll Grange</i> (1860)&mdash;the last separated from the group
+to which the first belongs by more than twice as many years as were
+covered by that group itself&mdash;he mellowed his tone, but altered his
+scheme very little. Except in <i>Maid Marian</i> and <i>The Misfortunes of
+Elphin</i>, where the Scott influence is evident, though Peacock was
+himself a rebel to Scott, the plan is always the same. <i>Headlong Hall</i>
+and <i>Nightmare Abbey, Melincourt</i> and <i>Crotchet Castle</i> (1831), as well
+as <i>Gryll Grange</i> itself, all have <a name="Page_222" id="Page_222" />the uniform, though by no means
+monotonous, canvas of a party of guests assembled at a country-house and
+consisting of a number of &quot;originals,&quot; with one or more common-sense but
+by no means commonplace characters to serve as contrast. It is in the
+selection and management of these foils that one of Peacock's principal
+distinctions lies. In his earlier books, and in accordance with the
+manners of the time, there is a good deal of &quot;high jinks&quot;&mdash;less later.
+In all, there is also a good deal of personal and literary satire, which
+tones and mellows as it proceeds. At first Peacock is extremely unjust
+to the Lake poets&mdash;so unjust indeed as to be sometimes hardly
+amusing&mdash;to the two universities (of which it so happened that he was
+not a member), to the Tory party generally, to clergymen, to other
+things and persons. In <i>Crotchet Castle</i> the progress of Reform was
+already beginning to produce a beneficent effect of reaction upon him,
+and in <i>Gryll Grange</i>, though the manners and cast are surprisingly
+modern, the whole tone is conservative&mdash;with a small if not even with a
+large C&mdash;for the most prominent and well treated character is a
+Churchman of the best academic Tory type.</p>
+
+<p>It is not, however, in anything yet mentioned that Peacock's charm
+consists, so much as in the intensely literary, but not in the least
+pedantic, tone with which he suffuses his books, the piquant but not in
+the least affected turn of the phrases that meet us throughout, the
+peculiar quality of his irony (most quintessenced in <i>The Misfortunes of
+Elphin</i>, which is different in scheme from the rest, but omnipresent),
+and the crisp presentation of individual scene, incident, and character
+of a kind. Story, in the general sense, there is none, or next to
+none&mdash;the personages meet, go through a certain number of dinners
+(Peacock is <a name="Page_223" id="Page_223" />great at eating and drinking), diversions, and
+difficulties, marry to a greater or less extent, but otherwise part. Yet
+such things as the character of Scythrop in <i>Nightmare Abbey</i> (a half
+fantastic, half faithful portrait of Shelley, who was Peacock's intimate
+friend), or of Dr. Folliott (a genial parson) in <i>Crotchet Castle</i>&mdash;as
+the brilliant picture of the breaking of the dyke in <i>Elphin</i>, or the
+comic one of the rotten-borough election in <i>Melincourt</i>&mdash;are among the
+triumphs of the English novel. And they are present by dozens and
+scores: while (though it is a little out of our way) there is no doubt
+that the attraction of the books is greatly enhanced by the abundance of
+inset verse&mdash;sometimes serious, more often light&mdash;of which Peacock,
+again in an eccentric fashion, was hardly less a master than he was of
+prose.</p>
+
+<p>Here also it has seemed fit to dwell on a single writer, not perhaps
+generally held to be of the absolutely first class, because these
+&quot;eccentrics&quot; are of very great importance in the history of the English
+novel. The danger of the kind&mdash;even more than of other literary
+kinds&mdash;lies in the direction of mould and mechanism&mdash;of the production,
+by the thousand, of things of no individual quality and character. This
+danger has been and is being amply exemplified. But the Peacocks (would
+the plural were more justified!) save us from it by their own
+unconquerable individuality in the first place and, in the second, by
+the fact that even the best in this kind is &quot;caviare to the general,&quot;
+while anything that is not the best has no attraction either for the
+general or the elect. They are, as it were, the salt of the novel-feast,
+in more senses than one: and it is cause for thankfulness that, in this
+respect as in the physical, England has been well off for salt-pits.</p>
+
+<p>Besides these individual names&mdash;which in most litera<a name="Page_224" id="Page_224" />tures would be
+great, and even in English literature are not small&mdash;the second quarter
+of the century added to the history of the novel an infinity of others
+who can hardly appear here even on the representative or selective
+system. All the suns of the novel hitherto mentioned had moons and stars
+around them; all the <i>cadres</i> of the various kinds were filled with
+privates and non-commissioned officers to follow the leaders. Gait and
+Moir carried out the &quot;Scotch novel&quot; with something of Scott, but more of
+Smollett (Gait at least certainly, in part of his work, preceded Scott).
+Lady Morgan, who has been mentioned already, Banim, Crofton Croker, and
+others played a similar part to Miss Edgeworth. Glascock, Chamier, and
+Howard were, as it were, lieutenants (the last directly so) to Marryat.
+The didactic side of Miss Edgeworth was taken up by Harriet Martineau.
+Mrs. Shelley's <i>Frankenstein</i> (1818) is among the latest good examples
+of the &quot;Terror&quot; class, to which her husband had contributed two of its
+worst, and two of the feeblest books ever written by a man of the
+greatest genius, in <i>Zastrozzi</i> and <i>St. Irvyne</i>, some seven years
+earlier. Many women, not unnaturally, encouraged by the great examples
+of Miss Burney, Miss Edgeworth, Miss Austen, and Miss Ferrier, attempted
+novels of the most various kinds, sometimes almost achieving the purely
+domestic variety, sometimes branching to other sorts. The novels of Mrs.
+Gore, chiefly in the &quot;fashionable&quot; kind, are said to have attained the
+three-score and ten in number; Mrs. Crowe dealt with the supernatural
+outside of her novels if not also in them; the luckless poetess &quot;L.E.L.&quot;
+was a novelist in <i>Ethel Churchill</i> (1837) and other books; Mrs.
+Trollope, prolific mother of a more prolific son, showed not a little
+power, if not quite so much taste, in <i>The Vicar of Wrexhill</i> (1837) and
+<i>The Widow Barnaby</i>. Single books, <a name="Page_225" id="Page_225" />like Morier's <i>Hajji Baba</i> (1824),
+Hope's <i>Anastasius</i> (1819), Croly's <i>Salathiel</i> (1829), gained fame
+which they have not quite lost: and the little known Michael Scott
+(1789-1835) left in <i>Tom Cringle's Log</i> and <i>The Cruise of the Midge</i> a
+pair of stories of West Indian scenery and adventure which are nearly
+first rate. In 1839, not long after <i>Pickwick</i>, Samuel Warren's <i>Ten
+Thousand a Year</i> blended Bulwer and Dickens in a manner which to this
+day is a puzzle in its near approach to success. Yet he never repeated
+this approach, though he had earlier done striking things in the <i>Diary
+of a Late Physician</i> (1830). But in the latest thirties and early
+forties there arose two writers who were to eclipse every one of their
+contemporaries in this kind.</p>
+
+<p>The remarkable originality and idiosyncrasy of Dickens have perhaps, to
+some extent and from not a few persons, concealed the fact that he was
+not, any more than other people, an earth-born wonder. Scanted of
+education as he was, he has in several places frankly and eagerly
+confessed his early acquaintance with the great older novelists, and his
+special fancy for Smollett&mdash;whose influence indeed is traceable on him
+from first to last, and not least in the famous &quot;interiors&quot; of which he
+made far more than his example had done. Even in <i>Pickwick</i> the expert
+will trace suggestions from others. But if the work is read in its
+proper order, and the <i>Sketches by Boz</i> are taken first, nobody who
+knows both Leigh Hunt and Theodore Hook will fail to see that Dickens
+owed a great deal to both. The fact is in no sense discreditable to him:
+on the contrary, it adds, in the estimation of all reasonable and
+critical judges, a very great deal of interest, and takes away none. The
+earth-born prodigy is seldom good for much and never for very much. The
+genius who fastens on the points in preceding literature most congenial
+to him, develops them, <a name="Page_226" id="Page_226" />builds on them with his own matter and form, and
+turns out something far greater than his originals is the really
+satisfactory person. Had Leigh Hunt lent to Hook his literature, his
+fund of trivial but agreeable observation and illustration, and his
+attractive style; had Hook communicated to Hunt his narrative faculty
+and his fecundity in character and manners:&mdash;neither could have written
+<i>Pickwick</i> or even the worst of its successors. Had there been no Hunt
+and no Hook, Dickens would no doubt have managed, in some fashion, to
+&quot;do for himself.&quot; But it would have given him more trouble, he would
+have done it more slowly, and he would hardly have earned that generous
+and admirable phrase of his greatest contemporary in fiction which will
+be quoted shortly.</p>
+
+<p>Neither from Smollett, however, nor from Hook, nor from Hunt, nor from
+anybody else did Dickens take what makes him Dickens. His idiosyncrasy,
+already mentioned, is so marked that everybody acknowledges its
+presence: but its exact character and nature are matter not so much of
+debate (though they are that also in the highest degree) as matter of
+more or less <i>questing</i>, often of a rather blind-man's-buff kind. There
+is probably no author of whom really critical estimates are so rare. He
+has given so much pleasure to so many people&mdash;perhaps there are none to
+whom he has given more pleasure than to some of those who have
+criticised him most closely&mdash;that to mention any faults in him is
+upbraided as a sort of personal and detestable ingratitude and
+treachery. If you say that he cannot draw a gentleman, you are told that
+you are a parrot and a snob, who repeats what other snobs have told you;
+that gentlemen are not worth drawing; that he <i>can</i> draw them; and so
+forth. If you suggest that he is fantastic, it is reproachfully asked if
+poetry is not fantastic, <a name="Page_227" id="Page_227" />and if you do not like poetry? If you intimate
+small affection for Little Nell and Little Paul, you are a brute; if you
+hint that his social crusades were often quite irrational, and sometimes
+at least as mischievous as they were beneficial, you are a parasite of
+aristocracy and a foe of &quot;the people.&quot; If you take exception to his
+repetitions, his mannerisms, his tedious catch-processes of various
+kinds, you are a &quot;stop-watch critic&quot; and worthy of all the generous
+wrath of the exemplary and Reverend Mr. Yorick. And yet all these
+assertions, objections, descriptions, are arch-true: and they can be
+made by persons who know Dickens and enjoy Dickens a thousand times
+better&mdash;who admire him in a manner a thousand times more really
+complimentary&mdash;than the folk who simply cry &quot;Great is Dickens&quot; and will
+listen to nothing but their own sweet voices.</p>
+
+<p>The real, the great, the unique merit of Dickens is that he brought to
+the service of the novel an imagination which, though it was never
+poetic, was plastic in almost the highest degree: and that he
+communicated to the results of it a kind of existence which, though
+distinctly different from that of actual life, has a reality of its own,
+and possesses the distinguishing mark of genius, so that if it does not
+exactly force belief in itself, it forces suspension of disbelief. To
+have done this is not only to have accomplished a wonderful artistic
+triumph, but to confer an immense benefit on the human race. But in
+doing it Dickens exhibits various foibles, prejudices, and disabilities:
+though it is quite open to any one to maintain that these rather
+assisted the flow of his imagination than hindered it. He began very
+young; he had curiously little literature; his knowledge of life,
+extraordinarily alert and acute, was very one-sided, and the organs by
+which he <a name="Page_228" id="Page_228" />attained it seem absolutely to shut themselves and refuse
+communion with certain orders of society and classes of human creatures.
+The wealth of fantastic imagery which he used to such purpose not
+infrequently stimulated him to a disorderly profusion of grotesque; he
+was congenitally melodramatic; and before very long his habit of
+attributing special catch-words, gestures, and the like to his
+characters, exaggerated, degenerated, and stereotyped itself in a
+fashion which it is difficult to think satisfactory to anybody. He was,
+moreover, a &quot;novelist of purpose&quot; in the highest degree; he had very
+strong, but very crude&mdash;not to say absurd&mdash;political ideas; and he was
+apt to let the great powers of pathos, of humour, of vivid description,
+which he possessed to &quot;get out of hand&quot; and to land him in the maudlin,
+the extravagant, and the bombastic.</p>
+
+<p>But&mdash;to put ourselves in connection with the main thread of our story
+once more&mdash;he not only himself provided a great amount of the novel
+pleasure for his readers, but he infused into the novel generally
+something of a new spirit. It has been more than once pointed out that
+there is almost more danger with the novel of &quot;getting into ruts&quot; than
+with any kind of literature. Nobody could charge the Dickens novel with
+doing this, except as regards mannerisms of style, and though it might
+inspire many, it was very unlikely to create a rut for any one else. He
+liked to call himself &quot;the inimitable,&quot; and so, in a way, he was.
+Imitations of him were, of course, tried: but they were all bad and
+obvious failures. Against the possible tameness of the domestic novel;
+against the too commonly actual want of actuality of the historic
+romance; he set this new fantastic activity of his, which was at once
+real and unreal, but where the reality had a magical touch of the
+unfamiliar and the very unreality was stimulating. He <a name="Page_229" id="Page_229" />might have a
+hundred faults&mdash;he was in fact never faultless, except in <i>Pickwick</i>,
+which is so absolutely unique that there is nothing to compare with it
+and show up faults (if it has any) by the comparison. But you can read
+him again and again with unceasing delight, and with delight of a kind
+given by no other novelist.<a id="footnotetag21" name="footnotetag21"></a><a href="#footnote21"><sup>21</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>The position of Thackeray in the history of the novel is as different
+from that of Dickens as the fortunes of the two were in their own
+progress and development. In fact, though a sort of pseudo-Plutarchian
+parallel between them is nearly as inevitable as it is common, it is a
+parallel almost entirely composed of differences, carried out in matter
+almost incommensurable. In the first place, Dickens, as we have seen,
+and as Thackeray said (with the generous and characteristic addition &quot;at
+the head of the whole tribe&quot;), &quot;came and took his place calmly&quot; and
+practically at once (or with the preliminary only of &quot;Boz&quot;) in
+<i>Pickwick</i>. Whether he ever went further may at least be questioned. But
+Thackeray did not take his place at once&mdash;in fact he conspicuously
+failed to take it for some sixteen years: although he produced, for at
+least the last ten of these, work containing indications of
+extraordinary power, in a variety of directions almost as extraordinary.</p>
+
+<p>To attempt to assign reasons for this comparative failure would be
+idle&mdash;the fact is the only reasonable reason. But some phenomena and
+symptoms can be diagnosed. It is at least noteworthy that Thackeray&mdash;in
+this approaching Dickens perhaps nearer than in any other point&mdash;began
+with extravaganza&mdash;to adopt perhaps the most con<a name="Page_230" id="Page_230" />venient general name
+for a thing which cannot be quite satisfactorily designated by any. In
+both cases the adoption was probably due to the example and popularity
+of Theodore Hook. But it was also due, in a higher and more metaphysical
+sense, to the fact that the romance, which had had so mighty a success
+in Scott's hands, was for the time overblown, and that the domestic
+novel, despite the almost equally wonderful, though much quieter and
+less popular achievement of Miss Austen, was not thoroughly and
+genuinely ready. From extravaganza in a certain sense Dickens, as has
+been said, never really departed: and he achieved most of his best work
+in his own peculiar varieties of it. Thackeray was, if not to leave it
+entirely aside, to use it in his later days merely as an occasional
+variation and seasoning. But at first he could not, apparently, get free
+from it: and he might have seemed unable to dispense with its almost
+mechanical externalities of mis-spelling and the like. It must also be
+remembered that circumstances were at first curiously unfavourable to
+him: and that loss of fortune, domestic affliction, and other things
+almost compelled him to write from hand to mouth&mdash;to take whatever
+commission offered itself: whereas the, if not immediate, speedy and
+tremendous success of <i>Pickwick</i> put the booksellers entirely at
+Dickens's feet. Still, a certain vacillation&mdash;an uncertainty of design
+not often accompanying genius like his&mdash;must be acknowledged in
+Thackeray. For a time he hesitated between pen and pencil, the latter of
+which implements he fortunately never abandoned, though the former was
+his predestined wand. Then he could not, or would not, for years, get
+out of the &quot;miscellaneous&quot; style, or patchwork of styles&mdash;reviews, short
+stories, burlesques, what not. His more important attempts seemed to
+have an attendant<a name="Page_231" id="Page_231" /> <i>guignon</i>.<a id="footnotetag22" name="footnotetag22"></a><a href="#footnote22"><sup>22</sup></a> <i>Catherine</i> (1839-1840), a very powerful
+thing in parts, was ill-planned and could not be popular. <i>A Shabby
+Genteel Story</i> (1841), containing almost the Thackerayan <i>quiddity</i>, was
+interrupted partly by his wife's illness, partly, it would seem, by
+editorial disfavour, and moreover still failed to shake off the
+appearance of a want of seriousness. Even <i>The Great Hoggarty Diamond</i>
+(1841-1842) was apparently cut short by request, and still lay open to
+an unjust, but not quite inexcusable, question on this same point of
+&quot;seriousness.&quot; In all there was, or might seem to be, a queer and to
+some readers an unsatisfactory blend of what they had not learnt to call
+&quot;realism&quot; with what they were quite likely to think fooling. During
+these years Thackeray was emphatically of the class of writers of whom
+people &quot;do not know what to make.&quot; And it is a true saying of English
+people&mdash;though perhaps not so pre-eminently true of them as some would
+have it&mdash;that &quot;not to know what to make&quot; of a thing or a person is
+sufficient reason for them to distrust, dislike, and &quot;wash their hands
+of&quot; it or him.</p>
+
+<p>Some would have it that <i>Barry Lyndon</i> (1843) marks the close of this
+period of indecision and the beginning of that of maturity. The commoner
+and perhaps the juster opinion is that this position belongs to <i>Vanity
+Fair</i> (1846-1848). At any rate, <i>after</i> that book there could be no
+doubt about the fact of the greatness of its writer, though it may be
+doubted whether even now the quality of this greatness is correctly and
+generally recognised. It is this&mdash;that at last the novel of real life on
+the great scale has been discovered. Even yet a remnant of shyness hangs
+<a name="Page_232" id="Page_232" />on the artist. He puts his scene a little though not very far back; he
+borrows a little, though not much, historical and romantic interest in
+the Waterloo part; the catastrophe of the Becky-Steyne business, though
+by no means outside of the probable contents of any day's newspaper, is
+slightly exceptional. But on the whole the problem of &quot;reality, the
+whole reality, and nothing but reality&quot; is faced and grasped and
+solved&mdash;with, of course, the addition to the &quot;nothing but&quot; of &quot;except
+art.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>He had struck his path and he kept to it: even when, as in <i>Esmond</i>
+(1852) and <i>The Virginians</i> (1858-1859) actually, and in <i>Denis Duval</i>
+prospectively, he blended the historical with the domestic variety.
+<i>Pendennis</i> (1849-1850) imports nothing out of the most ordinary
+experience; <i>The Newcomes</i> (1854-1855) very little; <i>Philip</i> (1861-1862)
+only its pantomime conclusion; while the two completely historical tales
+are in nothing more remarkable than in the way in which their remoter
+and more unfamiliar main subject, and their occasional excursions from
+everyday life, are subdued to the scheme of the realist novel in the
+best sense of the term&mdash;the novel rebuilt and refashioned on the lines
+of Fielding, but with modern manners, relying on variety and life, and
+relying on these only.</p>
+
+<p>There is thus something of similarity (though with attendant
+differences, of the most important kind) between the joint position of
+Dickens and Thackeray towards the world of the novel, and the joint
+position of Scott and Miss Austen. They <i>overlap</i> more than their great
+forerunners of the preceding generation. Both wrote historical novels:
+it is indeed Thackeray's unique distinction that he was equally master
+of the historical novel and of the novel of pure modern society, almost
+uneventful. In parts of some of his later books, especially <i>Little
+Dorrit</i>,<a name="Page_233" id="Page_233" /> <i>Great Expectations</i>, and <i>Our Mutual Friend</i>, Dickens at
+least tried to exchange his picaresque-fantastic cloudland for actual
+ordinary modern life. But on the whole the method of Thackeray was the
+method of the novel, though shot with a strong romantic spirit, and the
+method of Dickens the method of the romance applied, for the most part,
+to material which could hardly be called romantic. Both, therefore, in a
+manner, recalled the forces of fiction from the rather straggling and
+particularist courses which it had been pursuing for the last quarter of
+a century.</p>
+
+<p>In fact, even in the two mighty men of genius whom we have just been
+discussing, there may be seen&mdash;at their beginnings at least&mdash;something
+of that irresolution, uncertainty, and want of reliance on the powers of
+the novel, it-by-itself-it, which we have noticed before: and which the
+unerring craftsmanship of Scott had already pointed out in the
+&quot;Conversation of the Author of <i>Waverley</i> with Captain Clutterbuck&quot; more
+than once referred to. They want excuses and pretexts, bladders and
+spring-boards. Even Dickens, despite his irrepressible self-reliance,
+burdens himself, at the beginning of <i>Pickwick</i>, with the clumsy old
+machinery of a club which he practically drops: and, still later, with
+the still more clumsy framework of &quot;Master Humphrey's Clock&quot; which he
+has not quietly to drop, but openly to strip off and cast away, before
+he has gone very far. Thackeray takes sixteen years of experiment before
+he trusts his genius, boldly and on the great scale, to reveal itself in
+its own way, and in the straight way of the novel.</p>
+
+<p>Yet in this time also a great advance was made, as is shown not only by
+the fact that Dickens and Thackeray themselves became possible, but by
+the various achievements of the principal writers mentioned in this
+chapter, <a name="Page_234" id="Page_234" />of one or two who might have been, but are perhaps, on the
+whole, best postponed to the next, such as Lever, and of the great army
+of minorities who have been of necessity omitted. In every direction and
+from every point of view novel is <i>growing</i>. Although it was abused by
+precisians, the <i>gran conquesta</i> of Scott had forced it into general
+recognition and requisition. Even the still severe discipline of family
+life in the first half of the nineteenth century, instead of excluding
+it altogether, contented itself with prescribing that &quot;novels should not
+be read in the morning.&quot; A test which may be thought vulgar by the
+super-fine or the superficial, but a pretty good one, is the altered
+status and position of the writers of novels. In the eighteenth,
+especially the earlier eighteenth, century the novelist had not merely
+been looked down upon <i>as</i> a novelist, but had, as a rule, resorted to
+novel-writing under some stress of circumstance. Even when he was by
+birth a &quot;gentleman of coat armour&quot; as Fielding and Smollett were, he was
+usually a gentleman very much out at elbows: the stories, true or false,
+of <i>Rasselas</i> and Johnson's mother's funeral expenses, of the <i>Vicar of
+Wakefield</i> and Goldsmith's dunning landlady, have something more than
+mere anecdote in them. Mackenzie, though the paternity of his <i>famille
+d&eacute;plorable</i> of novels was no secret, preserved a strict nominal
+incognito. Women, as having no regular professions and plenty of time at
+their disposal, were allowed more latitude: and this really perhaps had
+something to do with their early prominence in the novel; but it is
+certain that Scott's rigid, and for a long time successful, maintenance
+of the mask was by no means mere prudery, and still less merely prudent
+commercial speculation. Yet he, who altered so much in the novel,
+altered this also. Of the novelists noticed in the early part <a name="Page_235" id="Page_235" />of this
+chapter, one became Prime Minister of England, another rose to cabinet
+rank, a baronetcy, and a peerage; a third was H.M. consul in important
+posts abroad; a fourth held a great position, if not in the service
+directly of the crown, in what was of hardly less importance, that of
+the East India Company; a fifth was a post-captain in the navy and
+Companion of the Bath.</p>
+
+<p>And all this had been rendered possible partly by the genius of
+novel-writers, partly by the appetite of the novel-reader. This latter
+was to continue unabated: whether the former was to increase, to
+maintain itself, or slacken must be, to some extent of course, matter of
+opinion. But we have still two quarter-centuries to survey, in the first
+of which there may perhaps be some reason for thinking that the novel
+rose to its actual zenith. Nearly all the writers mentioned in this
+chapter continued to write&mdash;the greater part, in genius, of Thackeray's
+accomplished work, and the greater part, in bulk, of Dickens's, had
+still to appear. But these elders were reinforced by fresh recruits,
+some of them of a prowess only inferior to the very greatest: and a
+distinct development of the novel itself, in the direction of
+self-reliance and craftsmanlike working on its own lines, was to be
+seen. In particular, the deferred influence of Miss Austen was at last
+to be brought to bear with astonishing results: while, partly owing to
+the example of Thackeray, the historical variety (which had for the most
+part been a pale and rather vulgarised imitation of Scott), was to be
+revived and varied in a manner equally astonishing. More than ever we
+shall have to let styles and kinds &quot;speak by their foremen&quot;&mdash;in fact to
+some extent to let them speak for themselves with very little detailed
+notice even of these foremen. But we shall still endeavour to keep the
+general threads <a name="Page_236" id="Page_236" />in hand and to exhibit their direction, their crossing,
+and their other phenomena, as clearly as possible to the reader. For
+only so can we complete the picture of the course of fiction throughout
+English literature&mdash;with the sole exclusion of living writers, whose
+work can never be satisfactorily treated in such a book as this&mdash;first,
+because they are living and, secondly, because it is not done.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VII" id="CHAPTER_VII" /><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237" />CHAPTER VII</h2>
+
+<h2>THE MID-VICTORIAN NOVEL</h2>
+
+
+<p>At about the very middle of the nineteenth century&mdash;say from 1845 to
+1855 in each direction, but almost increasingly towards the actual
+dividing line of 1850&mdash;there came upon the English novel a very
+remarkable wind of refreshment and new endeavour. Thackeray and Dickens
+themselves are examples of it, with Lever and others, before this
+dividing line: many others yet come to join them. A list of books
+written out just as they occur to the memory, and without any attempt to
+marshal them in strict chronological order, would show this beyond all
+reasonable possibility of gainsaying. Thackeray's own best accomplished
+work from <i>Vanity Fair</i> (1846) itself through <i>Pendennis</i> (1849) and
+<i>Esmond</i> (1852) to <i>The Newcomes</i> (1854); the brilliant centre of
+Dickens's work in <i>David Copperfield</i> (1850)&mdash;stand at the head and have
+been already noticed by anticipation or implication, while Lever had
+almost completed the first division of his work, which began with <i>Harry
+Lorrequer</i> as early as the year of <i>Pickwick</i>. But such books as <i>Yeast</i>
+(1848), <i>Westward Ho!</i> (1855); as <i>The Warden</i> (1855); as <i>Jane Eyre</i>
+(1847) and its too few successors; as <i>Scenes of Clerical Life</i> (1857);
+as <i>Mary Barton</i> (1848) and the novels which followed it, with others
+which it is perhaps almost unfair to leave out even in this allusive
+summary by sample, betokened a stirring of the waters, a rattling among
+the bones, such as is not common in literature. Death removed Thackeray
+early and Dickens somewhat less prematurely, <a name="Page_238" id="Page_238" />but after a period rather
+barren in direct novel work. The others continued and were constantly
+reinforced: nor was it till well on in the seventies that any distinct
+drop from first- to second-growth quality could be observed in the
+general vintage of English fiction.</p>
+
+<p>One is not quite driven, on this occasion, to the pusillanimous
+explanation that this remarkable variety and number of good novels was
+simply due to the simultaneous existence of an equally remarkable number
+of good novelists. The fact is that, by this time, the great example of
+Scott and Miss Austen&mdash;the great wave of progress which exemplified
+itself first and most eminently in these two writers&mdash;had had time to
+work upon and permeate another generation of practitioners. The
+novelists who have just been cited were as a rule born in the second
+decade of the century, just before, about, or after the time at which
+Scott and Miss Austen began to publish. They had therefore&mdash;as their
+elders, even though they may have had time to read the pair, had
+not&mdash;time to assimilate thoroughly and early the results which that pair
+had produced or which they had first expressed. And they had even
+greater advantages than this. They had had time to assimilate, likewise,
+the results of all the rest of that great literary generation of which
+Scott and Miss Austen were themselves but members. They profited by
+thirty years more of constant historical exploration and realising of
+former days. One need not say, for it is question-begging, that they
+also <i>profited</i> by, but they could at least avail themselves of, the
+immense change of manners and society which made 1850 differ more from
+1800 than 1800 had differed, not merely from 1750 but from 1700. They
+had, even though all of them may not have been sufficiently grateful for
+it, the stimulus of that premier position in Europe <a name="Page_239" id="Page_239" />which the country
+had gained in the Napoleonic wars, and which she had not yet wholly lost
+or even begun to lose. They had wider travel, more extended occupations
+and interests, many other new things to draw upon. And, lastly, they had
+some important special incidents and movements&mdash;the new arrangement of
+political parties, the Oxford awakening, and others&mdash;to give suggestion
+and impetus to novels of the specialist kind. Nay, they had not only the
+great writers, in other kinds, of the immediate past, but those of the
+present, Carlyle, Tennyson, latterly Ruskin, and others still to
+complete their education and the machinery of its development.</p>
+
+<p>The most remarkable feature of this <i>renouveau</i>, as has been both
+directly and indirectly observed before, is the resumption, the immense
+extension, and the extraordinary improvement of the domestic novel. Not
+that this had not been practised during the thirty years since Miss
+Austen's death. But the external advantages just enumerated had failed
+it: and it had enlisted none of the chief talents which were at the
+service of fiction generally. A little more gift and a good deal more
+taste might have enabled Mrs. Trollope to do really great things in it:
+but she left them for her son to accomplish. Attempts and &quot;tries&quot; at it
+had been made constantly, and the goal had been very nearly reached,
+especially, perhaps, in that now much forgotten but remarkable <i>Emilia
+Wyndham</i> (1846) by Anne Caldwell (Mrs. Marsh), which was wickedly
+described by a sister novelist as the &quot;book where the woman breaks her
+desk open with her head,&quot; but which has real power and exercised real
+influence for no short time.</p>
+
+<p>This new domestic novel followed Miss Austen in that it did not
+necessarily avail itself of anything but perfectly <a name="Page_240" id="Page_240" />ordinary life, and
+relied chiefly on artistic presentment&mdash;on treatment rather than on
+subject. It departed from her in that it admitted a much wider range and
+variety of subject itself; and by no means excluded the passions and
+emotions which, though she had not been so prudish as to ignore their
+results, she had never chosen to represent in much actual exercise, or
+to make the mainsprings of her books.</p>
+
+<p>The first supreme work of the kind was perhaps in <i>Vanity Fair</i> and
+<i>Pendennis</i>, the former admitting exceptional and irregular developments
+as an integral part of its plot and general appeal, the latter doing for
+the most part without them. But <i>Pendennis</i> exhibited in itself, and
+taught to other novelists, if not an absolutely new, a hitherto little
+worked, and clumsily worked, source of novel interest. We have seen how,
+as early as Head or Kirkman, the possibility of making such a source out
+of the ways of special trades, professions, employments, and vocations
+had been partly seen and utilised. Defoe did it more; Smollett more
+still; and since the great war there had been naval and military novels
+in abundance, as well as novels political, clerical, sporting, and what
+not. But these special interests had been as a rule drawn upon too
+onesidedly. The eighteenth century found its mistaken fondness for
+episodes, inset stories, and the like, particularly convenient here: the
+naval, military, sporting, and other novels of the nineteenth were apt
+to rely too exclusively on these differences. Such things as the
+Oxbridge scenes and the journalism scenes of <i>Pendennis</i>&mdash;both among the
+most effective and popular, perhaps <i>the</i> most effective and popular,
+parts of the book&mdash;were almost, if not entirely, new. There had been
+before, and have since been, plenty of university novels, and their
+record has been a record of <a name="Page_241" id="Page_241" />almost uninterrupted failure; there have
+since, if not before, <i>Pendennis</i> been several &quot;press&quot; novels, and their
+record has certainly not been a record of unbroken success. But the
+employment here, by genius, of such subjects for substantial <i>parts</i> of
+a novel was a success pure and unmixed. So, in the earlier book, the
+same author had shown how the most humdrum incident and the minutest
+painting of ordinary character could be combined with historic tragedy
+like that furnished by Waterloo, with domestic <i>drame</i> of the most
+exciting kind like the discovery of Lord Steyne's relations with Becky,
+or the at least suggested later crime of that ingenious and rather
+hardly treated little person.</p>
+
+<p>Most of the writers mentioned and glanced at above took&mdash;not of course
+always, often, or perhaps ever in conscious following of Thackeray, but
+in consequence of the same &quot;skiey influences&quot; which worked on him&mdash;to
+this mixed domestic-dramatic line. And what is still more interesting,
+men who had already made their mark for years, in styles quite
+different, turned to it and adopted it. We have seen this of Bulwer, and
+the evidences of the change in him which are given by the &quot;Caxton&quot;
+novels. We have not yet directly dealt with another instance of almost
+as great interest and distinction, Charles Lever, though we have named
+him and glanced at his work.</p>
+
+<p>Lever, who was born as early as 1806, had, it has been said, begun to
+write novels as early as his junior, Dickens, and had at once developed,
+in <i>Harry Lorrequer</i>, a pretty distinct style of his own. This style was
+a kind of humour-novel with abundant incident, generally with a somewhat
+&quot;promiscuous&quot; plot and with lively but externally drawn characters&mdash;the
+humours being furnished partly <a name="Page_242" id="Page_242" />by Lever's native country, Ireland, and
+partly by the traditions of the great war of which he had collected a
+store in his capacity of physician to the Embassy at Brussels. He had
+kept up this style, the capital example of which is <i>Charles O'Malley</i>
+(1840), with unabated <i>verve</i> and with great popular success for a dozen
+years before 1850. But about that time, or rather earlier, the general
+&quot;suck&quot; of the current towards a different kind (assisted no doubt by the
+feeling that the public might be getting tired of the other style) made
+him change it into studies of a less specialised kind&mdash;of foreign
+travel, home life, and the like&mdash;sketches which, in his later days
+still, he brought even closer to actuality. It is true that in the long
+run his popularity has depended, and will probably always depend, on the
+early &quot;rollicking&quot; adventure books: not only because of their natural
+appeal, but because there is plenty of the other thing elsewhere, and
+hardly any of this particular thing anywhere. To almost anybody, for
+instance, except a very great milksop or a pedant of construction,
+<i>Charles O'Malley</i> with its love-making and its fighting, its
+horsemanship and its horse-play, its &quot;devilled kidneys&quot;<a id="footnotetag23" name="footnotetag23"></a><a href="#footnote23"><sup>23</sup></a> and its
+devil-may-care-ness, is a distinctly delectable composition; and if a
+reasonable interval be allowed between the readings, may be read over
+and over again, at all times of life, with satisfaction. But the fact of
+the author's change remains not the less historically and
+symptomatically important, in connection with the larger change of which
+we are now taking notice, and with the similar phenomena observable in
+the work of Bulwer. At the same time it has been pointed out that the
+following of Miss Austen by no means excluded the follow<a name="Page_243" id="Page_243" />ing of Scott:
+and that the new development included &quot;crosses&quot; of novel and romance,
+sometimes of the historical kind, sometimes not, which are of the
+highest, or all but the highest, interest. Early and good examples of
+these may be found in the work of the Bront&euml;s, Charlotte and Emily (the
+third sister Anne is but a pale reflection of her elders), and of
+Charles Kingsley. Charlotte (b. 1816) and Charles (b. 1819) were
+separated in their birth by but three years, Emily (b. 1818) and
+Kingsley by but one.</p>
+
+<p>The curious story of the struggles of the Bront&euml; girls to get published
+hardly concerns us, and Emily's work, <i>Wuthering Heights</i>,<a id="footnotetag24" name="footnotetag24"></a><a href="#footnote24"><sup>24</sup></a> is one of
+those isolated books which, whatever their merit, are rather ornaments
+than essential parts in novel history. But this is not the case with
+<i>Jane Eyre</i> (1847), <i>Shirley</i> (1849), <i>Villette</i> (1852), and <i>The
+Professor</i> (1857) (but written much earlier). These are all examples of
+the determination to base novels on actual life and experience. Few
+novelists have ever kept so close to their own part in these as
+Charlotte Bront&euml; did, though she accompanied, permeated, and to a
+certain extent transformed her autobiography and observation by a
+strong romantic and fantastic imaginative element. Deprive Thackeray and
+Dickens of nearly all their humour and geniality, take a portion only of
+the remaining genius of each in the ratio of about 2 <i>Th</i>. to 1 <i>D</i>.,
+add a certain dash of the old terror-novel and the German fantastic
+tale, moisten with feminine spirit and water, and mix thoroughly: and
+you have something very like Charlotte Bront&euml;. But it is necessary to
+add further, and it is her great glory, the perfume and atmosphere of
+the Yorkshire moors, which she had in not quite such perfection as her
+sister Emily, <a name="Page_244" id="Page_244" />but in combination with more general novel-gift. Her
+actual course of writing was short, and it could probably in no case
+have been long; she wanted wider and, perhaps, happier experience, more
+literature, more man-and-woman-of-the-worldliness, perhaps a sweeter and
+more genial temper. But the English novel would have been incomplete
+without her and her sister; they are, as wholes, unlike anybody else,
+and if they are not exactly great they have the quality of greatness.
+Above all, they kept novel and romance together&mdash;a deed which is great
+without any qualification or drawback.</p>
+
+<p>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 &quot;dead set&quot; 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 &quot;trail coats&quot; 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 <a name="Page_245" id="Page_245" />are meticulous about literary and
+historical accuracy&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>Yet <i>almost</i> 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, &quot;This is Bosh,&quot; is prepared also to exalt him miles
+above writers whose margins he would be quite content to leave without a
+single annotation of this&mdash;or any other&mdash;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 <i>replicas</i> among them is one
+of their extraordinary features. <i>Yeast</i>, the first (1848), and <i>Alton
+Locke</i>, 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:<a id="footnotetag25" name="footnotetag25"></a><a href="#footnote25"><sup>25</sup></a> 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; <a name="Page_246" id="Page_246" />both, intentionally beyond
+all doubt, are fantastic and extravagant; but both are full of genius.
+Argemone Lavington, the heroine of <i>Yeast</i>, 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
+&quot;character-parts.&quot; Both, but especially <i>Yeast</i>, are full of admirable
+descriptive writing, not entirely without indebtedness to Mr. Ruskin,
+but very often independently carried out, and always worthy of a &quot;place
+on the line&quot; in any gallery. There is much accurate and real dialogue,
+not a little firm character-drawing. Above all, both are full of
+blood&mdash;of things lived and seen, not vamped up from reading or
+day-dreaming&mdash;and yet full of dreams, day and other, and full of
+literature. Perhaps &quot;the malt was a little above the meal,&quot; the yeast
+present in more abundant quality than the substances for fermentation,
+but there was no lack even of these.</p>
+
+<p><i>Hypatia</i>&mdash;which succeeded after some interval (1853) and when the
+writer's Christian Socialist, Churchman-Chartist excitement had somewhat
+clarified itself&mdash;is a more substantial, a more ambitious, but certainly
+also an even more successful book. It has something of&mdash;and perhaps,
+though in far transposed matter, owes something to&mdash;<i>Esmond</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>But it was in the next year, 1854, that Kingsley's work reached its
+greatest perfection in the brilliant historical novel of <i>Westward Ho!</i>
+where the glories of Elizabethan adventure and patriotism were treated
+with a wonderful kindred enthusiasm, with admirable narrative faculty,
+<a name="Page_247" id="Page_247" />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&mdash;and Kingsley availed himself of the
+opportunity in a far more than sufficient degree&mdash;that &quot;coat-trailing&quot;
+which, as has been said, inevitably in its turn provokes &quot;coat-treading&quot;:
+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 &quot;eccentric&quot; variety: the others,
+though full of good things, were perhaps on the whole failures. The
+first referred to (the second in order of appearance), <i>The Water
+Babies</i> (1863), is a half Rabelaisian though perfectly inoffensive
+<i>fatrasie</i> of all sorts of things, exceedingly delightful to fit tastes.
+But <i>Two Tears Ago</i> (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 <i>Hypatia</i> and <i>Westward Ho!</i> by central and
+active interests of story and character. &quot;Spasmodic&quot; 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 &quot;rectified.&quot; While in the much later <i>Hereward the Wake</i>
+(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 <i>Two Tears Ago</i>, or perhaps a greater one in degree, to concoct
+the story (which is little more than a chronicle) together with a
+certain neglect <a name="Page_248" id="Page_248" />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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;it also must, one fears, be called an abuse&mdash;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&mdash;he had
+perhaps the most, in a curious rather incalculable fashion, of the whole
+group&mdash;that he very nearly succeeded in digesting these &quot;marine stores&quot;
+of detail and document into real books. But he did not <a name="Page_249" id="Page_249" />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 <i>It is Never too Late to Mend</i>
+(1856) and <i>The Cloister and the Hearth</i> (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.</p>
+
+<p>There is not so much object here in discussing the much discussed
+question of the merits and defects of &quot;George Eliot&quot; (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 &quot;reduced&quot;
+judgments, her best work&mdash;<i>Scenes of Clerical Life</i> (1857-1858), <i>Adam
+Bede</i> (1859), <i>The Mill on the Floss</i> (1860), <i>Silas Marner</i>
+(1861)&mdash;consists of very carefully observed and skilfully rendered
+studies of country life and character, tinged, especially in <i>Adam Bede</i>
+and <i>The Mill on the Floss</i>, 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, <i>Romola</i> (1865), was an enormous <i>tour de force</i> 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. <i>Felix Holt the Radical</i> (1866), <i>Middle
+March</i> (1872), and <i>Daniel Deronda</i> (1876) were equally elaborate
+sketches <a name="Page_250" id="Page_250" />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 <i>over</i>-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&mdash;once a light and almost
+frivolous thing&mdash;had come to be taken with the utmost seriousness&mdash;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 <i>pari passu</i> 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!</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>orageuse</i>, but apparently
+characterised by the rather squalid yet mild dissipation which he has
+described in <i>The Three Clerks</i> (1858) and <i>The Small House at
+Allington</i> (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<a name="Page_251" id="Page_251" /> <i>The Warden</i> (1855),
+and then, much more directly and triumphantly, with its sequel
+<i>Barchester Towers</i> (1857). When the first of these was published
+Dickens had been a successful novelist for nearly twenty years and
+Thackeray had &quot;come to his own&quot; for nearly ten. <i>The Warden</i> 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 &quot;abuse&quot;&mdash;the distribution in supposed unjust proportion of the funds
+of an endowed hospital for aged men&mdash;is its main avowed subject. But
+Trollope indulged in no tirades and no fantastic-grotesque
+caricature&mdash;in fact he actually drew a humorous sketch of a novel <i>&agrave; la
+Dickens</i> on the matter. His real object was evidently to sketch
+faithfully, but again not without humour, the cathedral society of
+&quot;Barchester&quot; 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. <i>Barchester
+Towers</i> 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 <a name="Page_252" id="Page_252" />of his (one again, perhaps,
+suggested by Thackeray) to run his books into series or cycles&mdash;the
+chief being that actually opened as above, and continuing through others
+to the brilliant <i>Last Chronicle of Barset</i> (1867), which in some
+respect surpasses <i>Barchester Towers</i> 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 <i>lustrum</i> and a little more (say
+1877-1882), though never exactly bad or painful to read, was obvious
+hack-work. But between <i>The Warden</i> and <i>The American Senator</i>,
+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.<a id="footnotetag26" name="footnotetag26"></a><a href="#footnote26"><sup>26</sup></a> 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&mdash;like the manner, speech, etc., of novels such as those of Hook
+and Surtees&mdash;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
+<i>average</i> novel of the third quarter of the century&mdash;in a more than
+average but not of an extraordinary, transcendental, or quintessential
+condition&mdash;Anthony Trollope is about as good a representative as can be
+found. His talent is individual enough, <a name="Page_253" id="Page_253" />but not too individual: system
+and writer may each have the credit due to them allotted without
+difficulty.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Cranford</i> at Knutsford in Cheshire: but did not
+publish this till after Dickens had, in 1850, established <i>Household
+Words</i>, where it appeared in instalments. She had a little earlier, in
+1848, published her first novel, <i>Mary Barton</i>&mdash;a vivid but distinctly
+one-sided picture of factory life in Lancashire. In the same year with
+the collected <i>Cranford</i> (1853) appeared <i>Ruth</i>, also a &quot;strife-novel&quot;
+(as the Germans would say) though in a different way: and two years
+later what is perhaps her most elaborate effort, <i>North and South</i>. A
+year or two before her death in 1865 <i>Sylvia's Lovers</i> was warmly
+welcomed by some: and the unfinished <i>Wives and Daughters</i>, which was
+actually interrupted by that death, has been considered her maturest
+work. Her famous and much controverted <i>Life of Charlotte Bront&euml;</i> does
+not belong to us, except in so far as it knits the two novelists
+together.</p>
+
+<p>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 &quot;an effect of power and a cause of
+pleasure&quot;: but there appears to some to be in her a pervading want of
+actual success&mdash;of <i>r&eacute;ussite</i>&mdash;absolute and unquestionable. The sketches
+of <i>Cranford</i> 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
+<i>Cranford</i> is not) by Miss Austen. But the mere mention of the last
+<a name="Page_254" id="Page_254" />name kills them. The author of <i>Emma</i> 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 <i>Mary Barton</i> and <i>Ruth</i>, but here the &quot;problem&quot;&mdash;the
+&quot;purpose&quot;&mdash;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. <i>North and South</i> is perhaps on the whole the best
+place in which to study Mrs. Gaskell's art: for <i>Wives and Daughters</i> 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&mdash;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&mdash;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 (<i>not</i> apparently with
+Christianity as such or with Anglicanism as such), and who dies
+&quot;promiscuously,&quot; to be followed, in equally promiscuous fashion, by a
+friend who leaves his daughter Margaret a fortune&mdash;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 <a name="Page_255" id="Page_255" />folly and
+of hopeless disease. The lover (who is to a great extent a replica of
+the masterful mill-owner in <i>Shirley</i>) 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&mdash;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
+&quot;means&quot; well in Herbert's sense of the word: but what is meant is not
+quite done.</p>
+
+<p>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, <i>The
+Ordeal of Richard Feverel</i> (1859), first of a brilliant series that was
+to illustrate the whole remaining years of the century; and the isolated
+masterpiece of <i>Phantastes</i>, 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, <i>Lavengro</i> and <i>The
+Romany Rye</i>, in which George Borrow, if he did not exactly create,
+brought to perfec<a name="Page_256" id="Page_256" />tion from some points of view what may be called the
+autobiographic novel.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Paul Ferroll</i>
+(1855) of Mrs. Archer Clive, a well-restrained crime-novel, the story of
+which is indicated in the title of its sequel, <i>Why Paul Ferroll killed
+his Wife</i>. Henry Kingsley, George Alfred Lawrence, Wilkie Collins, and
+others began their careers at this time. The best book ever written
+about school, <i>Tom Brown's School Days</i> (1857), and the best book in
+lighter vein ever written about Oxford, <i>Mr. Verdant Green</i> (1853-1856),
+both appeared in the fifties.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;the &quot;sporting&quot; novel&mdash;developed itself largely and in some cases
+went beyond mere sport. Such early books as Egan's <i>Tom and Jerry</i>
+(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 <i>Pickwick</i> (<i>not</i> that which Dickens
+substituted), excogitated (between 1831 <a name="Page_257" id="Page_257" />and 1838) the remarkable
+fictitious personage of &quot;Mr. Jorrocks,&quot; 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&mdash;and sometimes very
+amusing&mdash;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, <i>Frank Fairlegh</i>
+(1850), <i>Lewis Arundel</i> (1852), and <i>Harry Coverdale's Courtship</i>
+(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
+<i>Market Harborough</i> (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 <i>Kate Coventry</i> (1856), a very lively and
+agreeable book, mix sport with general character and manners-painting.
+Others, such as <i>Holmby House</i> (1860), <i>The Queen's Maries</i> (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 <i>Guy Livingstone</i> (1857) onwards&mdash;a series almost typical, which
+was developed further, with touches of original but <a name="Page_258" id="Page_258" />uncritical talent,
+which often dropped into unintentional caricature, by the late &quot;Ouida&quot;
+(Louise de La Ram&eacute;e). All the three last writers mentioned, however,
+especially the last two, made sport only an ingredient in their novel
+composition (&quot;Ouida,&quot; 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&mdash;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 <i>Field</i>, 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&mdash;its tendency to &quot;accaparate&quot;
+and utilise all the forms of life, all the occupations and amusements of
+mankind&mdash;shows itself notably enough.</p>
+
+<p>So, too, one notable book has, here even more than elsewhere, often set
+going hosts of imitations. <i>Tom Brown's School Days</i>, 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
+<a name="Page_259" id="Page_259" />religious novel, though, here as elsewhere, the better examples did not
+merely harp on one string.</p>
+
+<p>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 &quot;Tractarian&quot; 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 <i>Little Henry and his
+Bearer</i> and <i>The Fairchild Family</i> (1818) and &quot;Charlotte Elizabeth&quot;
+(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&mdash;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&mdash;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 <i>Agathos</i> (before 1840) is a very spirited and
+well-written adaptation of the &quot;whole armour of God&quot; theme so often
+re-allegorised: and Adams's <i>Shadow of the Cross</i> is only the best of
+several good stories&mdash;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 <a name="Page_260" id="Page_260" />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
+<i>Owlet of Owlstone Edge</i> and <i>The Curate of Cumberworth and the Vicar of
+Roost</i> of Francis Paget, attacking, the slovenly neglect and supineness
+which, quite as much as unsound doctrine, was the <i>b&ecirc;te noire</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+(<i>Gertrude, Katharine Ashton</i>, 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&mdash;that the characters, though actually <a name="Page_261" id="Page_261" />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 <i>mimesis</i>&mdash;of creation
+of fictitious fact and person. But this is not common: and the epithet
+&quot;dull,&quot; which too commonly only stigmatises the person using it, may
+really suggest itself not seldom in reference to Miss Sewell. A &quot;success
+of esteem&quot; is about the utmost that can be accorded her.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;the famous <i>Heir of Redclyffe</i>
+(1853), which captivated William Morris and his friends at Oxford, and
+which, with a little unnecessary sentimentality and a little
+&quot;unco-guidness,&quot; is full of cleverness, nature, good sense, good taste,
+and good form; <i>Heartsease</i> (1854), perhaps the best of all; <i>Dynevor
+Terrace</i> (1857), less of a general favourite but full of good things;
+and the especially popular <i>Daisy Chain</i> (1856), with not a <a name="Page_262" id="Page_262" />few
+others&mdash;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 &quot;raw&quot;:
+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&mdash;if not of the supreme artist, of the real craftsman&mdash;which
+prevents a thing from being a failure. What is meant is done: though
+perhaps it might have been meant higher.</p>
+
+<p>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, <i>Emilia Wyndbam, Pendennis</i>, and <i>Yeast</i>, 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&mdash;the difference
+between the first and the other two in <i>style</i> or (as that word is
+almost hopelessly ambiguous) let us perhaps say <i>diction</i>. 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 &quot;stilted&quot; forms and phrases of fifty or
+almost a hundred years earlier clung to her still. The resulting lingo
+is far <a name="Page_263" id="Page_263" />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 <i>ease</i>. There are endless flourishes and
+periphrases&mdash;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 &quot;won't&quot; but always &quot;will not,&quot; whereas the ability to use the two
+forms adds infinite propriety as well as variety to the dialogue. You
+say, &quot;At length a most unfortunate accident aggravated (if aggravation
+were possible) the unfortunate circumstances of the situation.&quot; You
+address your own characters in the oratorical manner of Mr. Burke and
+other great men, &quot;Ah, Mr. Danby! if instead, etc.&quot; 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 &quot;three-decker&quot; 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 &quot;Minerva Press&quot;
+and its contemporaries and successors at the end of the eighteenth and
+beginning of the nineteenth century, <i>four</i> was a very favourite if not
+the most usual number. But these <a name="Page_264" id="Page_264" />volumes were usually small&mdash;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 &quot;beginning, middle, and end,&quot; though
+there is a corresponding disadvantage which soon developed itself&mdash;and
+in fact, finally, I have no doubt helped to ruin the form&mdash;the
+temptation to make the <i>second</i> volume a place of mere padding. But the
+actual popularity of &quot;the old three-decker&quot; 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 &quot;smashing&quot; 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&mdash;alleging, what no doubt was true, that the
+libraries had a lower tariff for them. Further, the short story, now so
+popular, was very <i>un</i>popular 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.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265" />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 &quot;public&quot; or &quot;free&quot; libraries, books in general
+and novels in particular had been very largely diffused by clubs,
+&quot;institutions,&quot; 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 &quot;Russell Institution in Great Coram Street,&quot; which a great
+author, who was its neighbour, once took for an example of desolation;
+or the still existing and flourishing &quot;Philosophical&quot; 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&mdash;&quot;Mudie's&quot; 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&mdash;and almost the whole
+<i>sustaining</i> cause&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266" />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 &quot;parts.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;the small
+individual bulk of which necessitated division of whatsoever was not
+itself on a very small scale. If you run down the &quot;Contents&quot; of the
+<i>British Essayists</i> you will constantly find &quot;Continuation of the story
+of Alonso and Imoinda&quot; 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. <i>Blackwood</i> and the <i>London</i>, the first
+fruits of the new kind, did not at once take to the novel by
+instalments: and the <i>London</i> had no time to do so. But <i>Blackwood</i>
+soon became celebrated&mdash;a reputation which it has never lost&mdash;for the
+excellence of its short stories, and by degrees took to long ones; while
+its followers&mdash;<i>Fraser, Bentley's Miscellany, The Dublin University
+Magazine</i>, the <i>New Monthly</i>, and others&mdash;almost from the first bated
+their hooks with this new <i>app&acirc;t</i>. 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. <i>Fraser</i> in particular was
+Thackeray's chief refuge in the Days of Ignorance of <a name="Page_267" id="Page_267" />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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<i>Tristram Shandy</i>, 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&mdash;in combination with his own very distinct
+predilection for keeping the ring himself and being his own editor&mdash;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 <i>Macmillan's</i> and
+the <i>Cornhill</i>, cut the ground from under its feet. The last remarkable
+novel that I remember seeing in the form was <i>The Last Chronicle of
+Barset. Middlemarch</i> and <i>Daniel Deronda</i><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268" /> came out in parts which were
+rather volumes than parts.</p>
+
+<p>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 &quot;go
+to seed&quot; in the middle&mdash;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&mdash;if possible&mdash;indeed to
+leave each off at an interesting point. But this itself rather tended to
+a jumpy and ill-composed whole&mdash;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&mdash;common enough in every
+class&mdash;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-<a name="Page_269" id="Page_269" />that-is-no-plot of such a book as <i>Little Dorrit</i>&mdash;the plot which
+marks time with elaborate gesticulation and really does not advance at
+all&mdash;were not largely due to the system.</p>
+
+<p>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 &quot;popular libraries,&quot; yellow-backed railway issues, and the like, as
+soon as possible.</p>
+
+<p>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 <a name="Page_270" id="Page_270" />and bettered
+Moli&egrave;res, week by week or day by day, count their years between these
+limits. <i>Beati illi</i> from some points of view, but from others, if they
+go on longer, Heaven help them indeed!</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The comparison, both in the longer and shorter time, to the great summer
+of the drama may be too complimentary&mdash;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&mdash;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 Moli&egrave;res 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 <a name="Page_271" id="Page_271" />incalculableness. But
+he might admit&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;not too well regulated; stirred at once by
+the sinking force of the medi&aelig;val 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&mdash;was favourable to the rise and flourishing of this
+disorderly abundance of dramatic creation&mdash;tragic, comic, and in all the
+varieties that <i>Hamlet</i> 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 &quot;good form.&quot;
+Scholarship and knowledge of literature had not yet been exchanged for
+&quot;education&quot; 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 <a name="Page_272" id="Page_272" />the kinds of literature&mdash;poetry&mdash;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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VIII" id="CHAPTER_VIII" /><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273" />CHAPTER VIII</h2>
+
+<h2>THE FICTION OF YESTERDAY&mdash;CONCLUSION</h2>
+
+
+<p>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 &quot;downward movement,&quot; like such movements generally in
+literature, is only so to be characterised with considerable provisos
+and allowances. Literary &quot;down-grades&quot; 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 <i>average</i>
+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 Bront&euml; and Mrs. Gaskell were indeed dead, and if
+Kingsley had not wholly ceased writing novels, he had, before ceasing,
+given signs that he had <a name="Page_274" id="Page_274" />better do so. Yet, at least to the admirers of
+&quot;George Eliot,&quot; 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Lorna Doone</i> (1869). Mr. Hardy was on the eve of
+catching it with the new and powerful attractions of <i>Under the
+Greenwood Tree</i> (1872). In the heart of the sixties (1863-4-6), the
+<i>Chronicles of Carlingford</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>In the cases of Mr. Meredith and of Mr. Hardy&mdash;not to speak of others on
+whom the bar still luckily rests&mdash;the &quot;great ox&quot; was, until the original
+composition of this book was actually finished, &quot;on the tongue&quot; of any
+one who does not disregard the good old literary brocard &quot;<i>de</i> vivis
+<i>nil nisi</i> necessarium.&quot; 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&mdash;till the <i>ne varietur</i> and <i>ne plus ultra</i> of
+death have been set on it&mdash;you shall abstain from a more general
+judgment, which can <a name="Page_275" id="Page_275" />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&mdash;the note of
+a certain <i>perversity</i>&mdash;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&mdash;not in their cases with
+any important or really damaging effect, though undoubtedly so in regard
+to some of their followers&mdash;a suggestion that this &quot;perversity&quot; is the
+note of a waning period&mdash;that just as the excessive desire to be <i>like</i>
+all the best models is the note of Classical decadence, so the excessive
+desire to be <i>unlike</i> everything else is the note of Romantic
+degeneration.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>The Ordeal
+of Richard Feverel</i>; the freshness and charm of the earlier, the
+strenuous workmanship and original handling of the later, novels of the
+author of <i>Far from the Madding Crowd</i> and of <i>Tess of the
+D'Urbervilles</i>, simply disable off-hand the judgment of the critic&mdash;and
+in fact annul his jurisdiction&mdash;if he fails to admire <a name="Page_276" id="Page_276" />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&mdash;in Mr. Meredith's case more specially and for a
+longer preliminary period, but virtually in both&mdash;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&mdash;the two chief worldly occupations and ends
+of the mind of man&mdash;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&mdash;which is
+exactly what is <i>not</i> possible&mdash;then the period 1870-1908 might, as far
+as novel-writing is concerned, point to these two names and say, &quot;These
+are mine; what does it matter what you choose to say against me?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Richard Feverel</i> 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 <a name="Page_277" id="Page_277" />followed <i>The Ordeal</i> itself&mdash;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&mdash;unhastingly but unrestingly with others. <i>Evan Harrington</i> (1861)
+is generally lighter in tone; and should be taken in connection with the
+ten years later <i>Harry Richmond</i> as an example of what may be called a
+sort of new picaresque novel&mdash;the subjects being exalted from the
+gutter&mdash;at least the street gutter&mdash;to higher stories of the novel
+house. <i>Emilia in England</i> (1864), later called <i>Sandra Belloni</i>, and
+its sequel <i>Vittoria</i> (1866), embody, especially the latter, the
+Italomania of the mid-century. Between them <i>Rhoda Fleming</i> (1865),
+returning to English country life, showed, with the old characteristics
+of expression, tragic power superior perhaps to that of the end of
+<i>Feverel</i>. In fact some have been inclined to put <i>Rhoda</i> at the head.
+In 1875 <i>Beauchamp's Career</i> showed the novelist's curious fancy for
+studying off actual contemporaries; for it is now perfectly well known
+who &quot;Beauchamp&quot; was: and four years later came what the true Meredithian
+regards as the masterpiece, <i>The Egoist</i>. Two other books followed, to
+some extent in the track of <i>Beauchamp's Career, Diana of the Crossways</i>
+(1886), utilising the legend of Mrs. Norton's betrayal of secrets, and
+<i>The Tragic Comedians</i> (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, <i>One of Our
+Conquerors</i> (1891), <i>Lord Ormont and his Aminta</i> (1894), and <i>The
+Amazing Marriage</i> (1895).</p>
+
+<p>No bibliography of Mr. Meredith being here necessary <a name="Page_278" id="Page_278" />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 &quot;total-effect&quot; 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.</p>
+
+<p>By invoking (practically at the outset of his work) &quot;the Comic Spirit&quot;
+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&mdash;not altogether to his
+advantage&mdash;altogether by himself in his class of artistic creation. All
+the six from Thackeray to Shakespeare&mdash;one might even go farther back
+and, taking a more paradoxical example, add Rabelais&mdash;are, even in
+extravaganza, in parody, <a name="Page_279" id="Page_279" />in what you please, at once pre-eminently and
+<i>prima facie</i> 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 <i>first</i>. 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:&mdash;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&mdash;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 &quot;to be
+different,&quot; 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 <i>The
+Ordeal of Richard Feverel</i> actually worked.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Extra- not anti-&quot; that is the key. The worlds of<a name="Page_280" id="Page_280" /> 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 &quot;four dimensions&quot; 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&mdash;some
+would say the fifth, sixth, and almost tenth dimensions&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;what, in
+short, is intended by the French word <i>faire</i>. 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 &quot;The
+Promise in Disturbance.&quot; 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 <i>The Egoist</i> 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 &quot;style&quot; goes, the
+peculiarity, whether they admit it to be a fault or not, is practically
+admitted as a fact by all <a name="Page_281" id="Page_281" />but Meredith-monomaniacs. Here is a <i>sors
+Meredithiana</i>, taken from <i>Rhoda Fleming</i>, one of the simplest of the
+books:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;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.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>To match that&mdash;it would be exceedingly easy to match and beat it out of
+the author himself&mdash;you must go to the maddest of the seventeenth-century
+metaphysicals&mdash;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 <i>Diana of the Crossways</i>:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;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&mdash;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.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Here undoubtedly there is something more than a simile, an image, or a
+<i>pointe</i>; there is a thought, and the author's <a name="Page_282" id="Page_282" />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?</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Feverel</i>; 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 <i>The Egoist</i>. 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&mdash;but why begin a list which would never end?&mdash;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 <a name="Page_283" id="Page_283" />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 &quot;those who
+lack the intelligence and sensibility that can alone admit them to the
+charmed circle of appreciative readers&quot; and who &quot;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.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Now &quot;Fudge!&quot; is a rude word: but I fear we must borrow it from
+Goldsmith's hero, and apply it here. As for &quot;charmed circles&quot; there is
+uncommonly good company outside them, where, as Beatrice says, we may
+&quot;be as merry as the day is long,&quot; so that the Comic Spirit cannot
+entirely disdain us. And as for art&mdash;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&mdash;at first hand or very shortly&mdash;he &quot;enfists,&quot;
+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 &quot;let himself be
+read&quot;&mdash;anything else that he gives you is a <i>bonus</i>, a trimming, a
+dessert.</p>
+
+<p>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 <a name="Page_284" id="Page_284" />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 <i>engouement</i>, 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 &quot;like the security.&quot; 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 <i>tapage</i>, and by a too painful and elaborate endeavour to
+be unlike other people.</p>
+
+<p>A very interesting subject for examination from the present point of
+view is Mr. Blackmore, because, on the one hand there is complete
+<i>parrhesia</i>, 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 &quot;good form&quot; 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 &quot;out of his own head.&quot; 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 <i>Arabian Nights</i> valley, with
+the figures and action of a medi&aelig;val romance <a name="Page_285" id="Page_285" />and the human interest of
+a modern novel, is really wonderful. And there is hardly a book of his
+last thirty years' production, from <i>Clara Vaughan</i> to <i>Perlycross</i>,
+which has not vigour, variety, character, &quot;race&quot; enough for half a
+dozen. In such books, for example, as <i>The Maid of Sker</i> and <i>Cripps the
+Carrier</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+&quot;inevitableness&quot; which sometimes amounts to improbability, as in the
+case particularly of that most vivid and racy of books, <i>Cripps the
+Carrier</i>, 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 &quot;possible-improbable&quot; which contrasts so fatally
+with the &quot;probable-impossible.&quot; In not a few cases, too, there is that
+reproduction of similar <i>d&eacute;nouements</i> 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&mdash;no one of which is absolutely fatal&mdash;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 <i>not</i> written on any
+account; but one feels that they were written <a name="Page_286" id="Page_286" />rather because the author
+chose to do so than because he could not help it. Now it is possible to
+exaggerate the necessity of &quot;mission&quot; and the like: but, after all, <i>Ich
+kann nicht anders</i> must be to some extent the mood of mind of the man
+who is committing a masterpiece.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Richard Feverel</i> and very little later than the time of
+<i>Vanity Fair</i>. They produced, the one in <i>Salem Chapel</i> (1863), a book
+which contemporaries might be excused for thinking likely to herald a
+new George Eliot at least; the other, in <i>John Halifax, Gentleman</i>
+(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&mdash;the supernatural stories of her last stages are only
+inferior to the <i>Chronicles of Carlingford</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>Three remarkable novelists of the other sex may be mentioned, in the
+same way, together. They were all <a name="Page_287" id="Page_287" />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&mdash;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 <i>blague</i>. 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&mdash;that of
+<i>pastime</i>&mdash;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 <i>Poems</i>, and some other suggestive books, I am inclined
+to think that perhaps he did <i>not</i> always regard literature as a thing
+of the kind of a superior railway sandwich.</p>
+
+<p>It is quite certain that, in his beginning, Mr. William Black
+entertained no such idea; for his actual <i>d&eacute;buts</i> were something like
+what long afterwards were called problem-novels, and <i>In Silk Attire</i>
+(1869), <i>Kilmeny</i> (1870), and the charming <i>Daughter of Heth</i> (1871)
+attempted a great deal besides mere amusement. It is true that no one of
+them&mdash;not <a name="Page_288" id="Page_288" />even the last&mdash;could be called an entire success: a &quot;little
+more powder&quot; 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 <i>The
+Strange Adventures of a Phaeton</i> (1872) and <i>A Princess of Thule</i>
+(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 <i>Macleod of Dare</i>
+(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.</p>
+
+<p>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 attri<a name="Page_289" id="Page_289" />buted, except an
+incredibly feeble adaptation of <i>Mr. Verdant Green</i>, entitled <i>The
+Cambridge Freshman</i> and signed &quot;Martin Legrand.&quot; During the seventies,
+and for a year or two later, till Rice's death in 1882, the pair
+provided along series of novels from <i>Ready-Money Mortiboy</i> (1871) to
+<i>The Chaplain of the Fleet</i> (1881), the most popular book between being,
+perhaps, <i>The Golden Butterfly</i> (1876). These belonged, loosely, to the
+school of Dickens, as that school had been carried on by Wilkie Collins
+(<i>v. inf.</i>), but with less grotesque than the original master, and less
+&quot;sensation&quot; 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.</p>
+
+<p>It was certain that people would affect to discover a &quot;falling off&quot; 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
+<i>Revolt of Man</i> (which certainly owed nothing to collaboration), as <i>All
+Sorts and Conditions of Men</i> (1882), the first of the kind apparently
+that Besant wrote alone, as <i>Dorothy Forster</i> (1884), and as the
+powerful if not exactly delightful <i>Children of Gibeon</i> (1886) were
+perhaps more vigorous than anything earlier, and certainly not less
+original. But the curse of the &quot;machine-made&quot; 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 &quot;London&quot; 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.<a name="Page_290" id="Page_290" /> The first class of
+work, however (which actually resulted in a &quot;People's Palace&quot; 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 &quot;down&quot;
+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 <i>&agrave; la
+douzaine</i>. 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 &quot;grist for the
+mill&quot;; 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 <i>corv&egrave;e</i>, 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
+&quot;star-y-pointing pyramid&quot; that shall defy the operations of time.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;the dividing year&mdash;with <i>Antonina</i>: but his three great triumphs
+in the &quot;sensation&quot; novel (as it was rather stupidly called)<a name="Page_291" id="Page_291" /> were <i>The
+Dead Secret</i> (1857), <i>The Woman in White</i> (1860), and <i>No Name</i> (1862).
+Throughout the sixties and a little later, in <i>Armadale</i> (1866), <i>The
+Moonstone</i> (1870), perhaps <i>The New Magdalen</i> (1873), and even as late
+as 1875 in <i>The Law and the Lady</i>, 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 &quot;revolution&quot; (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 &quot;No Name&quot; 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.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292" />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&mdash;men, however, of very
+different tastes and abilities&mdash;were Richard Jefferies and Joseph Henry
+Shorthouse. The latter, after attracting very wide attraction by a
+remarkable book&mdash;almost a kind to itself&mdash;<i>John Inglesant</i> (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 <i>Pall Mall Gazette</i> with a series of studies of
+country life, <i>The Gatekeeper at Home</i> (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 &quot;important&quot; than
+the few pictures, as of a Meissonier-<i>paysagiste</i>, 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 <a name="Page_293" id="Page_293" />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.</p>
+
+<p>The principal development of mid-nineteenth-century fiction had been, as
+we have seen, in the direction of the novel <i>proper</i>&mdash;the
+character-study of modern ordinary life. But, even as early as <i>Esmond</i>
+and <i>Hypatia</i>, 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<a id="footnotetag27" name="footnotetag27"></a><a href="#footnote27"><sup>27</sup></a> as its rival till,
+towards the end of the latter decade, Mr. Blackmore's <i>Lorna Doone</i> 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&mdash;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 &quot;sedulously aping&quot;
+others. It may be<a name="Page_294" id="Page_294" /> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 &quot;slovenliness&quot; 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
+<i>London</i>, which came to be edited by his friend the late Mr. Henley and
+had a very small staff, he issued certain <i>New Arabian Nights</i> 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, &quot;boy's
+book&quot;-writing, and the like. In fact <i>Treasure Island</i> (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&mdash;the style and narrative and the delineation
+of the chief character, the engaging villain John Silver&mdash;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 pre<a name="Page_295" id="Page_295" />vented 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, <i>Catriona</i>
+(1893), seemed to some judges of at least considerable experience the
+best thing he had yet done, especially in one all-important
+respect&mdash;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 <i>Weir of Hermiston</i> (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.</p>
+
+<p>Very late in the century the genius of Mr. William Morris turned from
+verse to prose tale-telling in a series of romances which caught the
+fancy neither of the public nor of the critics as a whole, but which
+seem to some whom the gods have made not quite uncritical to be, if
+rightly taken, of much accomplishment, and of almost more promise and
+suggestion. These, seven or eight in number, from <i>The House of the
+Wulfings</i> (1889) to <i>The Sundering Flood</i>, published after the author's
+death in 1898, were actual romances&mdash;written in a kind of modernised
+<a name="Page_296" id="Page_296" />fifteenth-century English, and dealing, some with far back incidents of
+the conflict between Romans and &quot;Barbarians,&quot; most with the frank
+no-time and no-place of Romance itself. They came at an unfortunate
+moment, when the younger generation of readers were thinking it proper
+to be besotted with crude realism or story-less impressionism, and when
+some at least of those who might have welcomed them earlier had left
+their first faith in poetry or poetic prose. There was, moreover,
+perhaps some genuine dislike, and certainly a good deal of precisian
+condemnation, of the &quot;Wardour Street&quot; dialect. Yet there was no sham in
+them: it was impossible for Mr. Morris to have anything to do with
+shams&mdash;even his socialism was not that&mdash;and they were in reality a
+revival, however Rip van Winklish it might seem, of the pure old romance
+itself, at the hands of a nineteenth-century sorcerer, who no doubt put
+a little of the nineteenth century into them. The best&mdash;probably the
+best of all is <i>The Well at the World's End</i> (1896)&mdash;have an
+extraordinary charm for any one who can taste romance: and are by no
+means unlikely to awake the taste for it in generations to come. But for
+the present the thing lay out of the way of its generation, and was not
+comprehended or enjoyed thereby. For it is no doubt nearly as annoying
+to have bread given to you when you want thistles as to have thistles
+given to you when you want bread. But just as the ballad is the
+appointed reviver of poetry, so is romance the appointed reviver of
+prose-fiction: and in one form or another it will surely do its work,
+sooner or later.</p>
+
+<p>Here it may be best to stop the actual current of critical comment on
+individuals. Something has been hinted as to the general present
+condition of the novel, but there is no need to emphasise it or to enter
+into particulars about it:<a name="Page_297" id="Page_297" /> indeed, even if such a proceeding were
+convenient in one way it would be very inconvenient in another. One
+might, for instance, have to consider, rather curiously, a remarkable
+statement recently attributed to a popular novelist that &quot;the general
+standard of excellence in fiction is higher <i>to-day</i> than ever it was
+before.&quot; But we can take higher ground. Far be it from me to bow to the
+Baal of &quot;up-to-dateness,&quot; for even if I had any such hankering, I think
+I should remember that the surest way of being out-of-date to-morrow is
+the endeavour to be up-to-date to-day. Only by keeping perspective can
+you hope to confirm and steady your view: only by relinquishing the
+impossible attempt to be complete can you achieve a relative
+completeness.</p>
+
+<p>Yet it is well to remember that Lockhart, one of the best critics who
+ever lived (when he let himself be so), a novelist too, and not likely
+to lose an opportunity of magnifying his office if he could, took
+occasion, in noticing the novels of his friend Theodore Hook at poor
+&quot;Mr. Wagg's&quot; death, gravely to deplore the decadence of the novel
+generally: and not much later, in reprinting the article, had the wisdom
+to recognise, and the courage to record, the fact that Thackeray had
+disappointed his prognostications. Literature, it has been said, is the
+incalculable of incalculables: and not only may a new novelist arise
+to-morrow, but some novelist who has been writing for almost any number
+of years may change his style, strike the vein, and begin the
+exploitation of a new gold-field in novel-production.</p>
+
+<p>But this does not affect the retrospect of the past. There we are on
+perfectly firm ground&mdash;ground which we have traversed carefully already,
+and which we may survey in surety now.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298" />We have seen, then, that the prose novel&mdash;a late growth both in ancient
+and in modern times in all countries&mdash;was a specially late and
+slow-yielding one in English. Although Thoms's <i>Early English Prose
+Romances</i> is by no means an exhaustive collection, and for this reason
+was not specially referred to in the first chapter, it is impossible not
+to recognise that its three rather small volumes, of matter for the most
+part exceeding poor and beggarly, contrast in the most pitiful fashion
+with the scores and almost hundreds containing Early English Romances in
+verse. Malory of course brings the prose-scale down very considerably
+from its uncomfortably <i>meteoric</i> position, and some other things help:
+but the total of prose and verse before 1500 can be brought level by no
+possible sleight of weighing. Still, as we have seen, this did not
+matter very much: for the verse got &quot;transprosed&quot; sooner or later, and
+the romances and tales of other countries were greedily admitted <i>ad
+eundem</i> in sixteenth and seventeenth century English.</p>
+
+<p>Yet the novel proper lingered: and, except in the single and eccentric
+masterpiece of Bunyan, the seventeenth century ended without having seen
+one real specimen of prose fiction that was thoroughly satisfactory.
+Nearly half the eighteenth had gone too, with nothing but the less
+isolated but still not perfect performances of Defoe, and the once more
+still eccentric masterpiece of <i>Gulliver</i>, before the novel-period
+really opened. It is literally not more than two long lifetimes ago&mdash;it
+is quite certain that there are now living hundreds, perhaps thousands,
+of persons born when others were still living who drew their first
+breaths in or before the year when Pamela made her modest, but very
+distinctly self-conscious, curtsey to the world. How soon it grew to a
+popular form of literature, <a name="Page_299" id="Page_299" />and how steadily that popularity has
+continued and increased, there is not much need to say or to repeat.
+Statistical persons every year give us the hundreds of novels that
+appear from the presses, and the thousands of readers who take them out
+of, or read them in, public libraries. I do not know whether there
+exists anywhere a record of the total number published since 1740, but I
+dare say it does. I should not at all wonder if this total ran into
+scores of thousands: if you were to bring in short stories it would
+certainly do so. People have almost left off shaking their heads over
+the preponderant or exclusive attention to fiction in these public
+libraries themselves: in fact the tendency seems to be rather to make
+out that it is decreasing. It may be so; or it may not. But what remains
+certain is that there is a very large number of educated people to whom
+&quot;reading&quot; simply means reading novels; who never think of taking up a
+book that is not a novel; for whom the novel exhausts even the very
+meaning of the word &quot;literature.&quot; We know that the romance was
+originally so called simply because it was the commonest book in
+&quot;Romance&quot; language. We are less unsophisticated now: but there are
+certainly large numbers of His Majesty's subjects by whom a novel on
+this principle ought to be called &quot;an english&quot; though it might have to
+share that appellation with the newspaper.</p>
+
+<p>Yet, as we have seen, for this or that reason, the <i>average</i> novel did
+not come to anything like perfection for a very long time. In a single
+example, or set of examples, it reached something like perfection almost
+at once. Fielding, Scott, Miss Austen, and Thackeray are the Four
+Masters of the whole subject, giving the lady the same degree as the
+others by courtesy of letters. But in the first (as for the matter of
+that in the last) of the four the success was <a name="Page_300" id="Page_300" />rather a matter of
+individual and inimitable genius than of systematic discovery of method
+practicable by others. Nobody, except Thackeray himself, has ever
+followed Fielding successfully, and that only in parts and touches; as
+Fielding had (unfortunately) no opportunity of following Thackeray, no
+one has ever followed Thackeray satisfactorily at all. Such reasons as
+presented themselves have been given for the fact that nearly half of
+the whole period passed before the two systems&mdash;of the pure novel and
+the novel-romance&mdash;were discovered: and even then they were not at once
+put to work. But the present writer would be the very first to confess
+that these explanations leave a great deal unexplained.</p>
+
+<p>Yet whatever faults there might be in the supply there could be no doubt
+about the demand when it was once started. It was indeed almost entirely
+independent of the goodness or badness of the average supply itself.
+Allowing for the smaller population and the much smaller proportion of
+that population who were likely to&mdash;who indeed could&mdash;read, and for the
+inferior means of distribution, it may be doubted whether the largest
+sales of novels recorded in the last half century have surpassed those
+of the most trumpery trash of the &quot;Minerva Press&quot; period&mdash;the last
+decade of the eighteenth and the first of the nineteenth century. For
+the main novel-public is quite omnivorous, and almost absolutely
+uncritical of what it devours. The admirable though certainly fortunate
+Scot who &quot;could never remember drinking bad whisky&quot; might be echoed, if
+they had the wit, by not a few persons who never seem to read a bad
+novel, or at least to be aware that they are reading one.</p>
+
+<p>At the same time, the failure of the quest for novel-recipes was
+compensated by an absence of that working of those <a name="Page_301" id="Page_301" />recipes to death
+which the last century&mdash;or the last three-quarters of it&mdash;has seen. The
+average work of any one of a dozen nineteenth-century producers of
+novels by the dozen and the score, whom at this place it is not
+necessary to name, is probably on the whole a much better turned out
+thing&mdash;one better observing its own purposes, and open to less criticism
+in detail&mdash;than even the best of the works of the earlier division
+outside of Fielding. But the eighteenth-century books&mdash;faulty, only
+partially satisfying as they may be in comparison, say, with a
+well-succeeded Trollope or one of the better Blackmores&mdash;very often have
+a certain idiosyncrasy, a freedom from machine-work, which supplies
+something not altogether unlike the contrast between the furniture of
+the two periods. Stress and dwelling have been purposely given, to some
+minor books of this period, for this very reason.</p>
+
+<p>But at the same time the limitations, outside the greatest, are
+certainly peculiar. It seems wonderful that a man like Cumberland, for
+instance, who had not a little literary talent, should not have been
+able to make <i>Henry</i> into a story of real interest that might hold the
+reader as even second-class Trollope&mdash;say a book like <i>Orley
+Farm</i>&mdash;does. We have ungraciously recognised that some of our lady
+novelists, who wrote by forties and by fifties, did not always sustain
+the interest of their novels. Miss Burney wrote four in all, and could
+hardly keep up the interest of hers right through the second. Above all,
+there is the difficulty of their failure with conversation and, in fact,
+with any diction proper for conversation. If Horace Walpole, a
+contemporary of the eighteenth-century novel from its actual start to
+practically its finish, could give us thousands and all but tens of
+thousands of phrases that want but a little of being novel-conversation
+ready made, <a name="Page_302" id="Page_302" />why could not the other people make it for their own
+purposes? But we have got no answer to these questions: and probably
+there is none.</p>
+
+<p>The way in which Scott and Miss Austen themselves simultaneously found
+out the secrets of the two kinds of novel is no doubt, as such ways
+always are, in the larger part mysterious: but to a certain extent it
+can be explained and analysed, independently of the direct literary
+genius of each. One of the greatest gifts of Scott&mdash;one with which the
+non-historical novelist can dispense as little as his brother the
+historical&mdash;was that &quot;genius of history&quot; with which Lord Morley&mdash;a
+critic not likely to be misled by sympathy in some respects at any
+rate&mdash;has justly credited him. For unless you have this &quot;historic
+sense,&quot; as it has been more generally and perhaps better termed (though
+to the intense disgust of some professed historians), it is not only
+impossible for you to delineate scene and character at a distance from
+your time, but you become really disqualified for depicting your own
+time itself. You fail to distinguish the temporary from the permanent;
+you achieve perhaps a fairly faithful copy of actual manners and
+fashions, but you do nothing more, and as the subject dies so does the
+picture. Contrast Hook, say, with Thackeray, and the difference will
+emerge at once.</p>
+
+<p>Secondly, Scott had, besides this historic sense and the relish for
+humanity which must accompany it, a knowledge of literature with which
+he has been too seldom credited to the full. When he published
+<i>Waverley</i> he had been reading all sorts and conditions of books for
+some five-and-thirty years, and assimilating them if, as the pedants
+will have it, with a distressing inaccuracy in particulars, with a
+general and genial fidelity of which the pedants do not even dream and
+could not comprehend, or they would <a name="Page_303" id="Page_303" />not be pedants. He was thus
+furnished with infinite stores of illustrative matter, never to
+overpower, but always to accompany and season, his knowledge of life. In
+a few instances this felicity of adoption has been recognised, but not a
+tenth part of it has ever been systematically put on record. The more
+widely and the longer a man reads, the more constantly will he find that
+Scott has been before him, and has &quot;lifted&quot; just the touch that he
+wanted at the time and in the place.</p>
+
+<p>But perhaps a greater gift (there were still others which it would be
+long to perscribe&mdash;descriptive faculty, humour, pathos, half a dozen
+other things of the highest importance in themselves, but of less
+special application) was that which enabled him to discover and apply
+something like a universal novel <i>language</i>. He did this, not as
+Shakespeare did (and as nobody but Shakespeare, except perhaps Dante to
+some extent, ever has done or apparently could do), by making a really
+universal language which fits all times and persons because it is
+universal like its creator's soul. Still less did he do it by adopting
+the method which Spenser did consummately, but which almost everybody
+else has justified Ben Jonson by doing very badly:&mdash;that is to say by
+constructing a mosaic of his own. But his own method was nearer to this
+latter. For historical creations (the most important of his
+non-historic, <i>Guy Mannering</i> and the <i>Antiquary</i>, were so near his own
+time that he had no difficulty) he threw back with remarkable cunning to
+a period somewhat earlier, and coloured this up to the required tint by
+actual suggestions from contemporary, or nearly contemporary,
+literature, where he could get it. He has done this so consummately that
+perhaps the only novel of his where the language strikes us as
+artificial is <a name="Page_304" id="Page_304" />the single one in which he actually endeavoured to be
+&quot;up-to-date&quot;&mdash;<i>St. Ronan's Well</i>.</p>
+
+<p>This question of &quot;Lingo,&quot; on the other hand, was Miss Austen's weakest
+point: and we have seen and shall see that it continued to be a weak
+point with others. Some admirers have defended her even here: but proud
+as I am to be an Austen Friar, a knight (or at least squire) of the
+order of St. Jane, I cannot go to this length. She very nearly
+succeeded, and sometimes she did quite: but not always. The easy
+dialogue and phrase that we find as early as Horace Walpole, even as
+Chesterfield and Lady Mary, in letters; which, in her own early days,
+appears in Fanny Burney's diaries but not in the novels, does not seem
+always within Miss Austen's grasp. But her advance in this respect is
+enormous: she is, for instance, far beyond Scott himself in <i>St. Ronan's
+Well</i>: and when she is thoroughly interested in a character, and engaged
+in unfolding it and gently satirising it at the same time, she rarely
+goes even a hair's-breadth wrong. In almost every other respect she does
+not go wrong to the extent of the minutest section of a hair. The story
+is the least part with her: but her stories are always miraculously
+<i>adequate</i>: neither desultory and pillar-to-post, nor elaborated with
+the minuteness which seems to please some people, but which is quite
+indifferent to the majority, and is certainly a positive nuisance to a
+few who are not quite of negligible judgment. But the reason of this
+adequacy in story contains in itself her greatest triumph. Not being a
+poet, she cannot reach the Shakespearian consummateness of poetic
+phrase: though she sometimes comes not so far short of this in the prose
+variety. But in the other great province of character, though hers is
+but a Rutland to his Yorkshire&mdash;or rather to his England or his
+world&mdash;she is almost equally supreme. And by her manipu<a name="Page_305" id="Page_305" />lation of it she
+showed, once for all, how the most ordinary set of circumstances, and
+even the most ordinary characters in a certain sense, can be made to
+supply the material of prose fiction to an absolutely illimitable
+extent. Her philosopher's stone (to take up the old parable again) does
+not lose its powers even when all the metal in the house is
+exhausted&mdash;if indeed the metal, or anything else, in the House of
+Humanity were exhaustible. The chairs and tables, the beds and the
+basins&mdash;everything&mdash;can be made into novel-gold: and, when it has been
+made, it remains as useful for future conversion, by the same or any
+other magician of the same class, as ever. One of the most curious
+things about Miss Austen is the entire absence of self-repetition in
+her. Even her young men&mdash;certainly not her greatest successes&mdash;are by no
+means doubles of each other: and nature herself could not turn out half
+a dozen girls more subtly and yet more sufficiently differentiated than
+Catherine and Elizabeth, Marianne and Fanny, Elinor and Emma, and
+finally the three sisters of <i>Persuasion</i>, the other (quite other)
+Elizabeth, Mary, and Anne. The &quot;ruts of the brain&quot; in novelists are a
+by-word. There are none here.</p>
+
+<p>In these two great writers of English novel there is, really for the
+first time, the complementary antithesis after which people have often
+gone (I fear it must be said) wool-gathering elsewhere. The amateurs of
+cosmopolitan literature, I believe, like to find it in Stendhal and
+Michelet. They praise the former for his delicate and pitiless
+psychological analysis. It had been anticipated a dozen years, nay,
+nearly twenty years, before he saw the Beresina: and was being given out
+in print at about the very moment of that uncomfortable experience, and
+before he himself published anything, by a young English lady&mdash;a lady if
+<a name="Page_306" id="Page_306" />ever there was one and English if any person ever was&mdash;in a country
+parsonage in Hampshire or in hired houses, quite humdrum and commonplace
+to the commonplace and humdrum imagination, at Bath and Southampton.
+They praise Michelet for his enthusiastic and multiform apprehension of
+the plastic reality of the past, his re-creation of it, his putting of
+it, live and active, before the present. The thing had been done, twenty
+years earlier again, by a Scotch advocate who had deliberately turned
+from poetic form, though he retained poetic imagination, and who did not
+disdain not to make a fool of himself, as Michelet, with all his genius,
+did again and again. Of all the essentials of the two manners of
+fictitious creation&mdash;Michelet's was not fictitious, but he almost made
+it so, and Stendhal's was not historical, but he almost made it so
+likewise&mdash;Scott and Miss Austen had set the types, given the methods,
+arranged the processes as definitely as Fust, or Coster, or Gutenberg,
+or Fust's friend Mephistopheles&mdash;who perhaps, on the whole, has the best
+title to the invention&mdash;did in another matter three hundred years
+before.</p>
+
+<p>That Scott's variety should be taken up first, and should for a time
+have the great popularity, the greater number of disciples, the greater
+acceptance as a mode of pleasing&mdash;was, as has been pointed out, natural
+enough; it is not a little significant that (to avert our eyes from
+England) the next practitioner of the psychological style in European
+literature, Balzac, went through a long and mostly unsuccessful
+probation in the other kind, and never wholly deserted it, or at least
+always kept looking back to it. But the general shortcomings (as they
+have been admitted to be) in the whole of the second quarter of the
+century (or a little less) with us, were but natural results of the
+inevitable <a name="Page_307" id="Page_307" />expatiation, unsystematic and irresolute, over the newly
+discovered provinces. And they gave admirable work of various
+kinds&mdash;work especially admirable if we remember that there was no
+general literary uprising with us as there was, in France and elsewhere,
+about 1830. If it were in any way possible&mdash;similar supposings have been
+admitted in literature very often&mdash;it would be extremely interesting to
+take a person <i>ex hypothesi</i> fairly acquainted with the rest of
+literature&mdash;English, foreign, European, and classical&mdash;but who knew
+nothing and had heard nothing of Bulwer, Disraeli, Peacock, Marryat,
+even Ainsworth and James and others between Scott and the accomplished
+work of Thackeray (Dickens's is, as has been said, mainly a sport of
+genius), and to turn him loose on this work. I do him the justice to
+suppose that he would find not a few faults: I shall also do him the
+justice to think it likely that he (being, as said, <i>ex hypothesi</i>
+furnished with the miscellaneous knowledge necessary to enjoy them)
+would enjoy them very keenly and thoroughly. If you added the minorities
+of the time, such as that very clever Miss Robinson (I think her name
+was Emma) who wrote <i>Whitefriars</i> and other historical romances in the
+forties; such as Charles Macfarlane, who died, like Colonel Newcome, a
+poor brother of the Charterhouse after writing capital things like <i>The
+Dutch in the Medway</i> and <i>The Camp of Refuge</i>&mdash;if, I say, you gave him
+these things and he was a good man, but lazy, like Gray, I think he
+would vote for a continuance of his life of novels and sofas without
+sighing for anything further. But undoubtedly it might be contended that
+something further was needed: and it came. This was verisimilitude&mdash;the
+holding of the true mirror to actual society.</p>
+
+<p>This verisimilitude, it should be observed, is not only <a name="Page_308" id="Page_308" />difficult to
+attain: it seems not to be easy even to recognise. I have seen it said
+that the reason which makes it &quot;hopeless for many people even to try to
+get through <i>Pickwick</i>&quot; (their state itself must be &quot;hopeless&quot; enough,
+and it is to be hoped there are not &quot;many&quot; of them) is that it
+&quot;describes states of society unimaginable to many people of to-day.&quot;
+Again, these many people must be somewhat unimaginative. But that is not
+the point of the matter. The point is that Dickens depicts no &quot;state of
+society&quot; that ever existed, except in the <i>Dickensium Sidus</i>. What he
+gives is full of intensely real touches which help to create its charm.
+But it is difficult to say that there is even a single person in it who
+is real as a whole, in the sense of having possibly existed in this
+world: and the larger whole of the book generally is pure fantasy&mdash;as
+much so as one of the author's own favourite goblin-dream stories.</p>
+
+<p>With Thackeray the case is exactly the opposite. It is a testimony no
+doubt to Dickens's real power&mdash;though perhaps not to his readers'
+perspicacity&mdash;that he made them believe that he intended a &quot;state of
+society&quot; when, whether he intended it or not, he certainly has not given
+it. But Thackeray intended it and gave it. His is a &quot;state of society&quot;
+always&mdash;whether in late seventeenth century, early or late eighteenth,
+early or middle nineteenth&mdash;which existed or might have existed; his
+persons are persons who lived or might have lived. And it is the
+discovery of this art of creation by him and its parallel diffusion
+among his contemporaries that I am endeavouring to make clear here.
+Fielding, Scott to some extent, Miss Austen had had it. Dickens, till
+<i>Great Expectations</i> at least, never achieved and I believe never
+attempted it. Bulwer, having failed in it for twenty years, struck it at
+last about this <a name="Page_309" id="Page_309" />time, and so did, even before him, Mrs. Marsh, and
+perhaps others, falteringly and incompletely. But as a general gift&mdash;a
+characteristic&mdash;it never distinguished novelists till after the middle
+of the century.</p>
+
+<p>It is, I think, impossible to find a better meeting and overlapping
+place of the old and the new novel, than that very remarkable book
+<i>Emilia Wyndham</i>, which has been already more than once referred to. It
+was written in 1845 and appeared next year&mdash;the year of <i>Vanity Fair</i>.
+But the author was twenty years older than Thackeray, though she
+survived him by nearly a dozen; she had not begun early; and she was
+fifty-five when she wrote <i>Emilia</i>. The not unnatural consequence is
+that there is a great deal of inconsistency in the general texture of
+the book: and that any clever cub, in the 'prentice stage of reviewing,
+could make columns of fun out of it. The general theme is age-old, being
+not different from the themes of most other novels in that respect. A
+half-idiotic spendthrift (he ends as very nearly an actual idiot) not
+merely wastes his own property but practically embezzles that of his
+wife and daughter; the wife dies and the daughter is left alone with an
+extravagant establishment, a father practically <i>non compos</i>, not a
+penny in her pocket after she has paid his doctor, and a selfish
+baronet-uncle who will do less than nothing to help her. She has loved
+half unconsciously, and been half consciously loved by, a soldier cousin
+or quasi-cousin: but he is in the Peninsular War. Absolutely no help
+presents itself but that of a Mr. Danby, a conveyancer, who, in some way
+not very consonant with the usual etiquette of his profession, has been
+mixed up with her father's affairs&mdash;a man middle-aged, apparently dry as
+his own parchments, and quite unversed in society. He helps her clumsily
+but lavishly: and her uncle forces her <a name="Page_310" id="Page_310" />to accept his hand as the only
+means of saving her father from jail first and an asylum afterwards. The
+inevitable disunion, brought about largely by Danby's mother (an awful
+old middle-class harridan), follows; and the desk-and-head incident
+mentioned above is brought about by her seeing the (false) announcement
+of her old lover's death in the paper. But she herself is consistently,
+perhaps excessively, but it is fair to say not ridiculously, angelic;
+Danby is a gentleman and a good fellow at heart; and of course, after
+highly tragical possibilities, these good gifts triumph. The greatest
+danger is threatened, and the actual happy ending brought about, by an
+auxiliary plot, in which the actors are the old lover (two old lovers
+indeed), his wife (a beautiful featherhead, who has been Emilia's
+school-fellow and dearest friend), and a wicked &quot;Duke of C.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Even from this sketch the tolerably expert reader of novels may discover
+where the weak points are likely to lie; he will be a real expert if he
+anticipates the strong ones without knowing the book. As was formerly
+noticed, the dialogue is ill supplied with diction. The date of the
+story is 1809: and the author had for that period a fairly safe pattern
+in Miss Austen: but she does not use it at all, nor does she make the
+lingo frankly that of her own day. There are gross improbabilities&mdash;Mr.
+Danby, for instance (who is represented as wrapped up in his business,
+and exclusively occupied with the legal side of money matters and the
+money side of the law), actually discharges, or thinks he is
+discharging, hundreds and thousands of Mr. Wyndham's liabilities by
+handing his own open cheques, not to the creditors, not to any one
+representing them, but to a country attorney who has succeeded him in
+the charge of the debts and affairs, and whom he knows to be a sharp
+practitioner and suspects to be a scoundrel. The inhuman <a name="Page_311" id="Page_311" />uncle and the
+licentious duke are mere cardboard characters: and the featherheaded
+Lisa talks and behaves like a mixture of the sprightly heroines of
+Richardson (for whom Lady Mary most righteously prescribed a sound
+whipping) and the gushing heroines of Lady Morgan. There is too much
+chaise-and-four and laudanum-bottle; too much moralising; too much of a
+good many other things. And yet, somehow or other, there are also things
+very rarely to be found in any novel&mdash;even taking in Bulwer and the
+serious part of Dickens&mdash;up to the date. The scene between Danby and his
+mother, in the poky house in Charlotte Street, when she discovers that
+he has been giving a hundred-pound cheque to a young lady is
+impressingly good: it is not absolutely unsuggestive of what Thackeray
+was just doing, and really not far from what Trollope was not for some
+years to do. There are other passages which make one think of George
+Eliot, who indeed might have been writing at the very time; there are
+even faint and faltering suggestions of Ibsenic &quot;duty to ourselves.&quot; Mr.
+Danby (the characters regularly call each other &quot;Mr.,&quot; &quot;Mrs.,&quot; and
+&quot;Miss,&quot; even when they are husbands and wives, daughters or nieces, and
+uncles or fathers) is a miss, and not quite a miss, of a very striking,
+original, possible, and even probable character. His mother, with
+something more of the Dickensian type-character, can stand by her
+unpleasant self, and came ten years before &quot;the Campaigner.&quot; Susan, her
+pleasanter servant, is equally self-sufficing, and came five years
+before Peggotty, to whom she is not without resemblances.<a id="footnotetag28" name="footnotetag28"></a><a href="#footnote28"><sup>28</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>But it is not so much the merits on the one hand, or the defects on the
+other, of the book that deserve attention <a name="Page_312" id="Page_312" />here and justify the place
+given to it: it is the general &quot;chip-the-shell&quot; character. The shell is
+only being chipped: large patches of it still hamper the chicken, which
+is thus a half developed and half disfigured little animal. All sorts of
+didactics, of Byronic-Bulwerish sentiment, of conventionalities of
+various kinds, still hold their place; the language, as we have said, is
+traditional and hardly even that; and the characters are partly drawn
+from Noah's Arks of various dates, partly from the stock company of the
+toy theatre. On the other hand, besides the touches of modernity already
+mentioned, and assisting them, there is a great attention to
+&quot;interiors.&quot; The writer has, for her time, a more than promising sense
+of the incongruity between Empire dress and furniture and the style of
+George II.: and the shabbiness or actual squalor of Charlotte Street and
+Chancery Lane show that she had either been a very early and forward
+scholar of Dickens, or had discovered the thing on her own account. Her
+age may excuse some of the weak points, but it makes the presence of the
+strong ones all the more remarkable: and it shows all the more forcibly
+how the general influences which were to produce the great central
+growth of Victorian novel were at work, and at work almost violently, in
+the business of pulling down the old as well as of building up the new.</p>
+
+<p>Of that new novel it is not necessary to say much more. In the last
+fifty or sixty years of the nineteenth century it did, as it seems to
+me, very great things&mdash;so great that, putting poetry, which is supreme,
+aside, there is no division of the world's literature within a time at
+all comparable to its own which can much, if at all, excel it. It did
+these great things because partly of the inscrutable laws which
+determined that a certain number of men and women of <a name="Page_313" id="Page_313" />unusual power
+should exist, and should devote themselves to it, partly of the less
+heroic-sounding fact that the general appetite of other men and
+womenkind could make it worth while for these persons of genius and
+talent not to do something else. But even so, the examination, rightly
+conducted, discovers more than a sufficient dose of nobility. For the
+novel appeal is not, after all, to a mere blind animal thirst for
+something that will pass and kill time, for something that will drug or
+flutter or amuse. Beyond and above these things there is something else.
+The very central cause and essence of it&mdash;most definitely and most
+keenly felt by nobler spirits and cultivated intelligences, but also
+dimly and unconsciously animating very ordinary people&mdash;is the human
+delight in humanity&mdash;the pleasure of seeing the men and women of long
+past ages living, acting, and speaking as they might have done, those of
+the present living, acting, speaking as they do&mdash;but in each case with
+the portrayal not as a mere copy of particulars, but influenced with
+that spirit of the universal which is the secret and the charm of art.
+It is because the novels of these years recognised and provided this
+pleasure in a greater degree than those of the former period (except the
+productions of a few masters) that they deserve the higher position
+which has been here assigned them. If the novels of any period, before
+or since or to come, have deserved, may or shall deserve, a lower
+place&mdash;it is, and will be, because of their comparative or positive
+neglect of the combination of these conditions. Perhaps it is not easy
+to see what new country there is for the novel to conquer. But, as with
+other kinds of literature, there is practically no limit to its powers
+of working its actual domains. In the finest of its already existing
+examples it hardly yields in accomplishment even to poetry; in that
+great <a name="Page_314" id="Page_314" />secondary (if secondary) office of all Art&mdash;to redress the
+apparent injustice, and console for the apparent unkindness, of
+Nature&mdash;to serve as rest and refreshment between those exactions of life
+which, though neither unjust nor unkind, are burdensome, it has no equal
+among all the kinds of Art itself.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="INDEX" id="INDEX" /><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315" />INDEX</h2>
+
+
+<p>
+<i>Adam Bede</i>,  <a href='#Page_249'>249</a> <br />
+Adams, W.,  <a href='#Page_259'>259</a> <br />
+Addison,  <a href='#Page_62'>62</a>,  <a href='#Page_63'>63</a>,  <a href='#Page_154'>154</a>,  <a href='#Page_253'>253</a> <br />
+<i>Adeline Mowbray</i>,  <a href='#Page_173'>173</a> <br />
+Aelfric,  <a href='#Page_5'>5</a> <br />
+<i>Agathos</i>,  <a href='#Page_259'>259</a> <br />
+Ainsworth, H.,  <a href='#Page_214'>214</a> <br />
+<i>Alton Locke</i>,  <a href='#Page_245'>245</a>,  <a href='#Page_246'>246</a> <br />
+<i>Amadis</i>,  <a href='#Page_30'>30</a>,  <a href='#Page_40'>40</a>,  <a href='#Page_41'>41</a>,  <a href='#Page_65'>65</a> <br />
+<i>Amelia</i>,  <a href='#Page_110'>110</a>-<a href='#Page_112'>112</a>,  <a href='#Page_118'>118</a>,  <a href='#Page_137'>137</a>  <i>n.</i><br />
+<i>Amis and Amillion</i>,  <a href='#Page_23'>23</a> <br />
+Amory, Thomas,  <a href='#Page_140'>140</a>-<a href='#Page_143'>143</a> <br />
+<i>Anabasis, The</i>,  <a href='#Page_2'>2</a> <br />
+Anglo-Saxon, Romance in,  <a href='#Page_4'>4</a>-<a href='#Page_7'>7</a> <br />
+<i>Anna</i>,  <a href='#Page_173'>173</a> <br />
+<i>Anna St. Ives</i>,  <a href='#Page_167'>167</a> <br />
+<i>Apollonius of Tyre</i>,  <a href='#Page_2'>2</a>,  <a href='#Page_5'>5</a> <br />
+Apuleius,  <a href='#Page_1'>1</a>-<a href='#Page_3'>3</a>,  <a href='#Page_5'>5</a> <br />
+Arblay, Madame d', <i>see</i> Burney, F.<br />
+<i>Arcadia, The</i>,  <a href='#Page_33'>33</a>,  <a href='#Page_36'>36</a>-<a href='#Page_38'>38</a>,  <a href='#Page_66'>66</a> <br />
+<i>Aretina</i>,  <a href='#Page_46'>46</a> <br />
+<i>Arthour and Merlin</i>,  <a href='#Page_16'>16</a> <br />
+Arthurian Legend, the, <a href="#CHAPTER_I">chap. i.</a> <i>passim</i>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">its romantic concentration,  <a href='#Page_15'>15</a>-<a href='#Page_17'>17</a>,  <a href='#Page_24'>24</a>-<a href='#Page_31'>31</a> </span><br />
+<i>Ask Mamma</i>,  <a href='#Page_193'>193</a>  <i>n.</i><br />
+<i>Ass, The Golden</i>,  <a href='#Page_3'>3</a>,  <a href='#Page_5'>5</a> <br />
+<i>Atlantis, The New</i>,  <a href='#Page_133'>133</a> <br />
+Austen, Miss,  <a href='#Page_71'>71</a>,  <a href='#Page_110'>110</a>,  <a href='#Page_155'>155</a>, <a href="#CHAPTER_V">chap. v.</a> <i>passim</i>,  <a href='#Page_230'>230</a>,  <a href='#Page_238'>238</a>,  <a href='#Page_253'>253</a>, <a href='#Page_298'>298</a>  <i>sq.</i><br />
+<br />
+<i>Badman, Mr</i>.,  <a href='#Page_54'>54</a> <br />
+Bage, R.,  <a href='#Page_164'>164</a>-<a href='#Page_166'>166</a> <br />
+Balzac,  <a href='#Page_35'>35</a>,  <a href='#Page_122'>122</a>,  <a href='#Page_186'>186</a>,  <a href='#Page_278'>278</a>-<a href='#Page_280'>280</a> <br />
+Banim,  <a href='#Page_224'>224</a> <br />
+<i>Barchester Towers</i>,  <a href='#Page_251'>251</a> <br />
+Barrett, E.S.,  <a href='#Page_180'>180</a>,  <a href='#Page_181'>181</a> <br />
+<i>Barry Lyndon</i>,  <a href='#Page_231'>231</a> <br />
+&quot;Barsetshire Novels,&quot; the,  <a href='#Page_250'>250</a>-<a href='#Page_253'>253</a> <br />
+<i>Battle of the Books, The</i>,  <a href='#Page_72'>72</a> <br />
+Beaconsfield, Lord, <i>see</i> Disraeli, B.<br />
+Beckford,  <a href='#Page_158'>158</a>,  <a href='#Page_159'>159</a> <br />
+Behn, Afra,  <a href='#Page_48'>48</a>,  <a href='#Page_50'>50</a>-<a href='#Page_53'>53</a> <br />
+<i>Belinda</i>,  <a href='#Page_182'>182</a> <br />
+Bennett, Mrs.,  <a href='#Page_173'>173</a> <br />
+<i>Bentivolio and Urania</i>,  <a href='#Page_53'>53</a>  <i>n.</i><br />
+<i>Beowulf</i>,  <a href='#Page_5'>5</a>,  <a href='#Page_6'>6</a> <br />
+Bergerac, C. de,  <a href='#Page_73'>73</a> <br />
+Berington, S.,  <a href='#Page_134'>134</a> <br />
+Berkeley,  <a href='#Page_134'>134</a>  <i>n.</i><br />
+Berners, Lord,  <a href='#Page_30'>30</a> <br />
+<i>Bertrams, The</i>,  <a href='#Page_252'>252</a>  <i>n.</i><br />
+<i>Beryn, The Tale of</i>,  <a href='#Page_31'>31</a> <br />
+Besaut, Sir W.,  <a href='#Page_288'>288</a>-<a href='#Page_290'>290</a> <br />
+<i>Betsy Thoughtless</i>,  <a href='#Page_136'>136</a>-<a href='#Page_138'>138</a> <br />
+<i>Bevis of Hampton</i>,  <a href='#Page_22'>22</a> <br />
+Black, W.,  <a href='#Page_287'>287</a>-<a href='#Page_288'>288</a> <br />
+Blackmore, R.D.,  <a href='#Page_274'>274</a>,  <a href='#Page_284'>284</a>-<a href='#Page_286'>286</a> <br />
+Blair,  <a href='#Page_156'>156</a> <br />
+Borrow, George,  <a href='#Page_142'>142</a>,  <a href='#Page_255'>255</a> <br />
+Boyle, Roger, Lord Broghill and Earl of Orrery,  <a href='#Page_44'>44</a>-<a href='#Page_46'>46</a> <br />
+<i>Brambletye House</i>,  <a href='#Page_208'>208</a>,  <a href='#Page_214'>214</a> <br />
+Bront&euml;, Charlotte,  <a href='#Page_199'>199</a>,  <a href='#Page_243'>243</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Emily and Anne,  <a href='#Page_243'>243</a> </span><br />
+Brooke, H.,  <a href='#Page_146'>146</a> <br />
+Bruneti&egrave;re, M.,  <a href='#Page_122'>122</a> <br />
+Brunton, Mrs.,  <a href='#Page_177'>177</a> <br />
+Bulwer, Sir E.B. Lytton (1st Lord Lytton),  <a href='#Page_216'>216</a>-<a href='#Page_218'>218</a>,  <a href='#Page_241'>241</a> <br />
+<i>Buncle, The life of John</i>,  <a href='#Page_140'>140</a>-<a href='#Page_143'>143</a> <br />
+Bunyan,  <a href='#Page_53'>53</a>-<a href='#Page_58'>58</a>,  <a href='#Page_190'>190</a> <br />
+Burney, F.,  <a href='#Page_150'>150</a>-<a href='#Page_155'>155</a>,  <a href='#Page_190'>190</a>,  <a href='#Page_263'>263</a> <br />
+Byrne, Mrs.,  <a href='#Page_173'>173</a>,  <a href='#Page_174'>174</a> <br />
+Byron,  <a href='#Page_96'>96</a>,  <a href='#Page_161'>161</a>,  <a href='#Page_172'>172</a> <br />
+<br />
+<i>Caleb Williams</i>,  <a href='#Page_168'>168</a> <br />
+<i>Cambridge Freshman, The</i>,  <a href='#Page_289'>289</a> <br />
+<i>Camilla</i>,  <a href='#Page_151'>151</a> <br />
+<i>Canterbury Tales</i> (the Misses Lee's),  <a href='#Page_174'>174</a> <br />
+<i>Can You Forgive Her?</i>  <a href='#Page_252'>252</a>  <i>n.</i><br />
+<i>Captain Singleton</i>,  <a href='#Page_65'>65</a>-<a href='#Page_71'>71</a> <br />
+<i>Castle of Otranto, The</i>,  <a href='#Page_155'>155</a>-<a href='#Page_157'>157</a> <br />
+<i>Catherine</i>,  <a href='#Page_231'>231</a> <br />
+<i>Catriona</i>,  <a href='#Page_295'>295</a> <br />
+<i>Caxtons, The</i>,  <a href='#Page_218'>218</a> <br />
+<i>Cecilia</i>,  <a href='#Page_151'>151</a> <br />
+Chamier, Captain,  <a href='#Page_224'>224</a> <br />
+<i>Charles O'Malley</i>,  <a href='#Page_242'>242</a> <br />
+&quot;Charlotte Elizabeth,&quot;  <a href='#Page_259'>259</a> <br />
+Chateaubriand,  <a href='#Page_152'>152</a> <br />
+<i>Children of the Abbey, The</i>,  <a href='#Page_176'>176</a> <br />
+<i>Chrestien de Troyes</i>,  <a href='#Page_15'>15</a> <br />
+<i>Chronicles of Carlingford, The</i>,  <a href='#Page_286'>286</a> <br />
+<i>Chrysal</i>,  <a href='#Page_146'>146</a> <br />
+Circulating libraries, effort of,  <a href='#Page_263'>263</a>-<a href='#Page_265'>265</a> <br />
+<i>Clarissa</i>,  <a href='#Page_94'>94</a>-<a href='#Page_97'>97</a> <br />
+Clive, Mrs. A.,  <a href='#Page_256'>256</a> <br />
+<i>Cloister and the Hearth, The</i>,  <a href='#Page_39'>39</a>,  <a href='#Page_249'>249</a> <br />
+Coleridge,  <a href='#Page_56'>56</a> <br />
+Collins, Wilkie,  <a href='#Page_290'>290</a>-<a href='#Page_291'>291</a> <br />
+<i>Colonel Jack</i>,  <a href='#Page_65'>65</a>-<a href='#Page_71'>71</a> <br />
+<i>Complaint of Deor, The</i>,  <a href='#Page_6'>6</a> <br />
+Congreve,  <a href='#Page_61'>61</a> <br />
+<i>Convent of Grey Penitents, The</i>,  <a href='#Page_175'>175</a> <br />
+Coventry, F.,  <a href='#Page_145'>145</a> <br />
+&quot;Coverley Papers,&quot; the,  <a href='#Page_62'>62</a>,  <a href='#Page_63'>63</a>,  <a href='#Page_154'>154</a> <br />
+Craik, Mrs.,  <a href='#Page_255'>255</a>,  <a href='#Page_286'>286</a> <br />
+<i>Cranford</i>,  <a href='#Page_253'>253</a> <br />
+<i>Cripps the Carrier</i>,  <a href='#Page_285'>285</a> <br />
+Crisp, &quot;Daddy,&quot;  <a href='#Page_153'>153</a> <br />
+Croker, Crofton,  <a href='#Page_224'>224</a> <br />
+Croly,  <a href='#Page_225'>225</a> <br />
+<i>Crotchet Castle</i>,  <a href='#Page_222'>222</a> <br />
+Crowe, Mrs.,  <a href='#Page_224'>224</a> <br />
+Crowne, John,  <a href='#Page_46'>46</a>,  <a href='#Page_47'>47</a> <br />
+Croxall, Dr.,  <a href='#Page_135'>135</a> <br />
+Cumberland, R.,  <a href='#Page_163'>163</a> <br />
+<i>Cyrop&aelig;dia, The</i>,  <a href='#Page_2'>2</a> <br />
+<br />
+Dante,  <a href='#Page_27'>27</a> <br />
+<i>David Simple</i>,  <a href='#Page_138'>138</a> <br />
+Defoe,  <a href='#Page_57'>57</a>,  <a href='#Page_60'>60</a>,  <a href='#Page_64'>64</a>-<a href='#Page_72'>72</a>,  <a href='#Page_88'>88</a>,  <a href='#Page_190'>190</a> <br />
+Dickens,  <a href='#Page_122'>122</a>,  <a href='#Page_144'>144</a>,  <a href='#Page_212'>212</a>,  <a href='#Page_225'>225</a>-<a href='#Page_229'>229</a>,  <a href='#Page_243'>243</a>,  <a href='#Page_267'>267</a>,  <a href='#Page_268'>268</a>,  <a href='#Page_278'>278</a>-<a href='#Page_280'>280</a>,  <a href='#Page_308'>308</a> <br />
+Diderot,  <a href='#Page_97'>97</a> <br />
+<i>Discipline</i>,  <a href='#Page_177'>177</a> <br />
+Disraeli, B.,  <a href='#Page_215'>215</a>,  <a href='#Page_216'>216</a> <br />
+<i>Divina Commedia, The</i>,  <a href='#Page_27'>27</a>,  <a href='#Page_28'>28</a> <br />
+Dumas,  <a href='#Page_202'>202</a>,  <a href='#Page_208'>208</a> <br />
+Dunlop,  <a href='#Page_9'>9</a>,  <a href='#Page_39'>39</a> <br />
+<br />
+Edgeworth, Miss,  <a href='#Page_155'>155</a>,  <a href='#Page_178'>178</a>,  <a href='#Page_181'>181</a>-<a href='#Page_184'>184</a>,  <a href='#Page_210'>210</a>  <i>n.</i><br />
+Ellis, G., <i>Early English Romances</i>,  <a href='#Page_9'>9</a>,  <a href='#Page_22'>22</a>,  <a href='#Page_23'>23</a> <br />
+<i>Emar&egrave;</i>,  <a href='#Page_23'>23</a> <br />
+<i>Emilia Wyndham</i>,  <a href='#Page_29'>29</a>,  <a href='#Page_262'>262</a>,  <a href='#Page_263'>263</a>,  <a href='#Page_309'>309</a>-<a href='#Page_312'>312</a> <br />
+<i>Emma</i>,  <a href='#Page_198'>198</a> <br />
+<i>English Rogue, The</i>,  <a href='#Page_48'>48</a>-<a href='#Page_50'>50</a> <br />
+<i>Esmond</i>,  <a href='#Page_232'>232</a>,  <a href='#Page_246'>246</a>,  <a href='#Page_293'>293</a> <br />
+<i>Euphues</i>,  <a href='#Page_33'>33</a>-<a href='#Page_35'>35</a>,  <a href='#Page_66'>66</a> <br />
+Eustathius,  <a href='#Page_2'>2</a> <br />
+Evans, Mary Ann (&quot;George Eliot&quot;),  <a href='#Page_249'>249</a>-<a href='#Page_250'>250</a>,  <a href='#Page_274'>274</a> <br />
+<i>Evelina</i>,  <a href='#Page_135'>135</a>,  <a href='#Page_150'>150</a>  <i>sq.</i><br />
+<br />
+<i>Fair Quaker of Deal, The</i>,  <a href='#Page_117'>117</a> <br />
+<i>Ferdinand Count Fathom</i>,  <a href='#Page_120'>120</a>,  <a href='#Page_121'>121</a> <br />
+Ferrier, Miss,  <a href='#Page_177'>177</a>,  <a href='#Page_210'>210</a>  <i>n.</i><br />
+Fielding, H.,  <a href='#Page_8'>8</a>,  <a href='#Page_55'>55</a>,  <a href='#Page_77'>77</a>,  <a href='#Page_78'>78</a>,  <a href='#Page_80'>80</a>,  <a href='#Page_98'>98</a>-<a href='#Page_115'>115</a>,  <a href='#Page_118'>118</a>,  <a href='#Page_125'>125</a>,  <a href='#Page_149'>149</a>,  <a href='#Page_163'>163</a>,  <a href='#Page_190'>190</a>,  <a href='#Page_203'>203</a>, <a href='#Page_234'>234</a>, <a href='#Page_298'>298</a> <i>sq.</i><br />
+Fielding, S.,  <a href='#Page_138'>138</a> <br />
+<i>Florence of Rome</i>,  <a href='#Page_23'>23</a> <br />
+<i>Florice and Blancheflour</i>,  <a href='#Page_22'>22</a> <br />
+<i>Fool of Quality, The</i>,  <a href='#Page_34'>34</a>,  <a href='#Page_146'>146</a> <br />
+Ford, Emmanuel,  <a href='#Page_41'>41</a>-<a href='#Page_44'>44</a> <br />
+<i>Fortunes of Nigel, The</i>,  <a href='#Page_208'>208</a> <br />
+<i>Frank</i>,  <a href='#Page_183'>183</a> <br />
+<i>Frank Fairlegh</i>,  <a href='#Page_257'>257</a> <br />
+<i>Frank Mildmay</i>,  <a href='#Page_117'>117</a>,  <a href='#Page_219'>219</a> <br />
+<br />
+Galt,  <a href='#Page_224'>224</a> <br />
+<i>Gamekeeper at Home, The</i>,  <a href='#Page_292'>292</a> <br />
+Gaskell, Mrs.,  <a href='#Page_253'>253</a>,  <a href='#Page_254'>254</a> <br />
+<i>Gawain and the Green Knight</i>,  <a href='#Page_23'>23</a>,  <a href='#Page_24'>24</a> <br />
+Geoffrey of Monmouth,  <a href='#Page_17'>17</a> <br />
+&quot;George Eliot,&quot; <i>see</i> Evans, M.A.<br />
+Gilpin,  <a href='#Page_162'>162</a> <br />
+Glascock, Capt.,  <a href='#Page_224'>224</a> <br />
+Godwin, W.,  <a href='#Page_167'>167</a>-<a href='#Page_170'>170</a>,  <a href='#Page_203'>203</a> <br />
+Goldsmith,  <a href='#Page_147'>147</a>-<a href='#Page_149'>149</a>,  <a href='#Page_234'>234</a> <br />
+Gore, Mrs.,  <a href='#Page_224'>224</a> <br />
+Graves, Rev. R.,  <a href='#Page_139'>139</a>,  <a href='#Page_143'>143</a>,  <a href='#Page_144'>144</a> <br />
+Gray,  <a href='#Page_162'>162</a> <br />
+<i>Great Hoggarty Diamond, The</i>,  <a href='#Page_231'>231</a> <br />
+Green, Sarah,  <a href='#Page_179'>179</a> <br />
+Grey, Mr. W.W.,  <a href='#Page_36'>36</a> <br />
+<i>Gryll Grange</i>,  <a href='#Page_222'>222</a> <br />
+<i>Guadentio di Lucca</i>,  <a href='#Page_134'>134</a> <br />
+<i>Gulliver's Travels</i>,  <a href='#Page_72'>72</a>-<a href='#Page_75'>75</a> <br />
+<i>Guy Livingstone</i>,  <a href='#Page_257'>257</a> <br />
+<i>Guy of Warwick</i>,  <a href='#Page_22'>22</a> <br />
+<br />
+Hagiology, its effect on Romance,  <a href='#Page_3'>3</a>, <a href='#Page_4'>4</a> <br />
+Hamilton, Anthony,  <a href='#Page_215'>215</a> <br />
+Hardy, Mr.,  <a href='#Page_274'>274</a>  <i>sq.</i><br />
+<i>Haunted and the Haunters, The</i>,  <a href='#Page_217'>217</a> <br />
+<i>Havelok the Dam</i>,  <a href='#Page_12'>12</a>,  <a href='#Page_13'>13</a>,  <a href='#Page_14'>14</a> <br />
+Haywood, Eliza,  <a href='#Page_136'>136</a>-<a href='#Page_138'>138</a> <br />
+Hazlitt,  <a href='#Page_140'>140</a> <br />
+Head, R.,  <a href='#Page_48'>48</a>-<a href='#Page_50'>50</a> .<br />
+<i>Heir of Redclyffe, The</i>,  <a href='#Page_261'>261</a> <br />
+<i>Heliodorus</i>,  <a href='#Page_2'>2</a> <br />
+Henley, Mr. W.E.,  <a href='#Page_284'>284</a>,  <a href='#Page_294'>294</a> <br />
+<i>Henrietta Temple</i>,  <a href='#Page_215'>215</a> <br />
+<i>Henry</i>,  <a href='#Page_163'>163</a> <br />
+<i>Hereward the Wake</i>,  <a href='#Page_247'>247</a> <br />
+<i>Hermsprong</i>,  <a href='#Page_165'>165</a> <br />
+Herodotus,  <a href='#Page_1'>1</a> <br />
+<i>Heroine, The</i>,  <a href='#Page_180'>180</a>,  <a href='#Page_181'>181</a> <br />
+Holcroft, T.,  <a href='#Page_166'>166</a>,  <a href='#Page_167'>167</a> <br />
+<i>Holy War, The</i>,  <a href='#Page_55'>55</a> <br />
+Hook, Theodore,  <a href='#Page_212'>212</a>,  <a href='#Page_213'>213</a>,  <a href='#Page_226'>226</a>,  <a href='#Page_230'>230</a>,  <a href='#Page_252'>252</a>,  <a href='#Page_297'>297</a>,  <a href='#Page_302'>302</a> <br />
+Hope,  <a href='#Page_225'>225</a> <br />
+<i>Horn, King</i>,  <a href='#Page_13'>13</a> <br />
+<i>Humphry Clinker</i>,  <a href='#Page_123'>123</a>-<a href='#Page_125'>125</a> <br />
+Hunt, Leigh,  <a href='#Page_212'>212</a>,  <a href='#Page_226'>226</a> <br />
+<i>Hypatia</i>,  <a href='#Page_246'>246</a>,  <a href='#Page_293'>293</a> <br />
+<br />
+<i>Idalia</i>,  <a href='#Page_136'>136</a> <br />
+<i>Ida of Athena</i>,  <a href='#Page_178'>178</a>-<a href='#Page_180'>180</a> <br />
+<i>Iliad The</i>,  <a href='#Page_1'>1</a> <br />
+&quot;Imitation&quot; (the Greek=Fiction),  <a href='#Page_1'>1</a> <br />
+Inchbald, Mrs.,  <a href='#Page_170'>170</a>,  <a href='#Page_171'>171</a> <br />
+<i>Incognita</i>,  <a href='#Page_61'>61</a> <br />
+Ingelo, N.,  <a href='#Page_53'>53</a>  <i>n.</i><br />
+<i>Ipomydon</i>,  <a href='#Page_23'>23</a> <br />
+<i>Isle of Pines, The</i>,  <a href='#Page_58'>58</a>-<a href='#Page_61'>61</a>,  <a href='#Page_67'>67</a> <br />
+<i>Italian, The</i>,  <a href='#Page_161'>161</a> <br />
+<i>It is Never too Late to Mend</i>,  <a href='#Page_249'>249</a> <br />
+<i>Ixion</i>,  <a href='#Page_215'>215</a> <br />
+<br />
+<i>Jack Wilton</i>,  <a href='#Page_38'>38</a>,  <a href='#Page_39'>39</a> <br />
+<i>Jacob Faithful</i>,  <a href='#Page_220'>220</a> <br />
+James, G.P.R.,  <a href='#Page_214'>214</a> <br />
+<i>Jane Eyre</i>,  <a href='#Page_243'>243</a> <br />
+Jefferies, R.,  <a href='#Page_292'>292</a>,  <a href='#Page_293'>293</a> <br />
+<i>Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy</i>,  <a href='#Page_136'>136</a>-<a href='#Page_138'>138</a> <br />
+<i>John Runcle</i>,  <a href='#Page_140'>140</a>-<a href='#Page_143'>143</a> <br />
+<i>John Inglesand</i>,  <a href='#Page_292'>292</a> <br />
+Johnson, Dr.,  <a href='#Page_8'>8</a>,  <a href='#Page_56'>56</a>,  <a href='#Page_92'>92</a>,  <a href='#Page_110'>110</a>,  <a href='#Page_139'>139</a>,  <a href='#Page_147'>147</a>,  <a href='#Page_234'>234</a> <br />
+Johnstone, C.,  <a href='#Page_146'>146</a> <br />
+<i>Jonathan Wild</i>,  <a href='#Page_104'>104</a>,  <a href='#Page_105'>105</a> <br />
+&quot;Jorrocks,&quot; Mr.,  <a href='#Page_193'>193</a>  <i>n.</i>,  <a href='#Page_245'>245</a>  <i>n.</i>,  <a href='#Page_257'>257</a> <br />
+<i>Joseph Andrews</i>,  <a href='#Page_98'>98</a>-<a href='#Page_104'>104</a> <br />
+<i>Journey from This World to the Next, A</i>,  <a href='#Page_99'>99</a> <br />
+<br />
+<i>Kate Coventry</i>,  <a href='#Page_257'>257</a> <br />
+Kingsley, C.,  <a href='#Page_244'>244</a>-<a href='#Page_248'>248</a>,  <a href='#Page_257'>257</a>,  <a href='#Page_262'>262</a>,  <a href='#Page_263'>263</a> <br />
+Kingsley, H.,  <a href='#Page_256'>256</a> <br />
+<i>King's Own, The</i>,  <a href='#Page_220'>220</a> <br />
+Kirkman, F.,  <a href='#Page_48'>48</a>-<a href='#Page_50'>50</a> <br />
+<br />
+&quot;Lady Mary&quot; (Wortley-Montagu),  <a href='#Page_93'>93</a>,  <a href='#Page_149'>149</a> <br />
+<i>Lady Susan</i>,  <a href='#Page_199'>199</a> <br />
+<i>Lancelot (of the Laik)</i>, the Scots,  <a href='#Page_17'>17</a> <br />
+<i>Last Chronicle of Barset, The</i>,  <a href='#Page_252'>252</a> <br />
+Lawrence, G.A.,  <a href='#Page_257'>257</a> <br />
+Layamon,  <a href='#Page_17'>17</a> <br />
+Lee, the Misses,  <a href='#Page_174'>174</a>,  <a href='#Page_203'>203</a> <br />
+&quot;L.E.L.,&quot;  <a href='#Page_224'>224</a> <br />
+Lennox, Mrs.,  <a href='#Page_139'>139</a> <br />
+<i>Leoline and Sydanis</i>,  <a href='#Page_43'>43</a> <br />
+Letter-form in novels,  <a href='#Page_89'>89</a>-<a href='#Page_91'>91</a> <br />
+Lever, C.,  <a href='#Page_234'>234</a>,  <a href='#Page_241'>241</a>,  <a href='#Page_242'>242</a>,  <a href='#Page_268'>268</a> <br />
+Lewis, M.G.,  <a href='#Page_159'>159</a> <br />
+<i>Libertine, The</i>,  <a href='#Page_173'>173</a> <br />
+Livy,  <a href='#Page_2'>2</a> <br />
+Lockhart,  <a href='#Page_297'>297</a> <br />
+<i>London</i>,  <a href='#Page_294'>294</a> <br />
+Longus,  <a href='#Page_2'>2</a> <br />
+<i>Lorna Doone</i>,  <a href='#Page_284'>284</a>,  <a href='#Page_293'>293</a> <br />
+Lucian,  <a href='#Page_2'>2</a>,  <a href='#Page_3'>3</a> <br />
+<i>Lybius Disconus</i>,  <a href='#Page_17'>17</a>,  <a href='#Page_21'>21</a>,  <a href='#Page_22'>22</a> <br />
+Lydia,  <a href='#Page_139'>139</a>-<a href='#Page_140'>140</a> <br />
+Lyly,  <a href='#Page_33'>33</a>-<a href='#Page_35'>35</a> <br />
+Lytton, <i>see</i> Bulwer<br />
+<br />
+Macaulay,  <a href='#Page_152'>152</a> <br />
+Macdonald, George,  <a href='#Page_255'>255</a> <br />
+Macfarlane, C.,  <a href='#Page_307'>307</a> <br />
+Mackenzie, Henry,  <a href='#Page_171'>171</a>,  <a href='#Page_172'>172</a>,  <a href='#Page_234'>234</a>  <i>sq.</i><br />
+Mackenzie, Sir George,  <a href='#Page_46'>46</a> <br />
+Malory,  <a href='#Page_8'>8</a>,  <a href='#Page_14'>14</a>-<a href='#Page_17'>17</a>,  <a href='#Page_24'>24</a>-<a href='#Page_31'>31</a> <br />
+<i>Man as He Is</i>,  <a href='#Page_165'>165</a> <br />
+<i>Manley, Mrs.</i>,  <a href='#Page_133'>133</a> <br />
+<i>Man of Feeling, The</i>,  <a href='#Page_171'>171</a> <br />
+<i>Mansfield Park</i>,  <a href='#Page_197'>197</a> <br />
+Map, W.,  <a href='#Page_11'>11</a> <br />
+<i>Marianne</i> (Marivaux),  <a href='#Page_84'>84</a>,  <a href='#Page_87'>87</a> <br />
+<i>Marivaux</i>,  <a href='#Page_84'>84</a>,  <a href='#Page_87'>87</a>,  <a href='#Page_170'>170</a> <br />
+Marryat, Captain,  <a href='#Page_218'>218</a>-<a href='#Page_221'>221</a> <br />
+Marsh, Mrs.,  <a href='#Page_239'>239</a>,  <a href='#Page_262'>262</a>,  <a href='#Page_263'>263</a>,  <a href='#Page_305'>305</a> <br />
+Martineau, Mrs.,  <a href='#Page_224'>224</a> <br />
+<i>Mary Barton</i>,  <a href='#Page_253'>253</a>,  <a href='#Page_254'>254</a> <br />
+Maturin, C.R.,  <a href='#Page_178'>178</a>,  <a href='#Page_184'>184</a>-<a href='#Page_186'>186</a> <br />
+<i>Melincourt</i>,  <a href='#Page_223'>223</a> <br />
+<i>Melmoth the Wanderer</i>,  <a href='#Page_185'>185</a>,  <a href='#Page_186'>186</a> <br />
+Melville, Mr. L.,  <a href='#Page_158'>158</a>  <i>n.</i><br />
+<i>Memoirs of a Cavalier</i>,  <a href='#Page_65'>65</a>-<a href='#Page_71'>71</a> <br />
+Meredith, Mr. George,  <a href='#Page_8'>8</a>,  <a href='#Page_108'>108</a>,  <a href='#Page_255'>255</a>,  <a href='#Page_274'>274</a>-<a href='#Page_284'>284</a> <br />
+<i>Merlin</i>,  <a href='#Page_16'>16</a> <br />
+Michelet,  <a href='#Page_305'>305</a>,  <a href='#Page_306'>306</a> <br />
+<i>Mill on the Floss, The</i>,  <a href='#Page_249'>249</a> <br />
+<i>Misfortunes of Elphin, The</i>,  <a href='#Page_222'>222</a> <br />
+<i>Mr. Midshipman Easy</i>,  <a href='#Page_220'>220</a> <br />
+<i>Mr. Verdant Green</i>,  <a href='#Page_256'>256</a>,  <a href='#Page_289'>289</a> <br />
+<i>Mrs. Veal</i>,  <a href='#Page_70'>70</a> <br />
+<i>Moll Flanders</i>,  <a href='#Page_65'>65</a>-<a href='#Page_71'>71</a>,  <a href='#Page_87'>87</a> <br />
+<i>Monk, The</i>,  <a href='#Page_159'>159</a> <br />
+<i>Montelion</i>,  <a href='#Page_42'>42</a>,  <a href='#Page_43'>43</a> <br />
+Moore, Dr. John,  <a href='#Page_171'>171</a>,  <a href='#Page_172'>172</a> <br />
+Morgan, Lady,  <a href='#Page_177'>177</a>-<a href='#Page_179'>179</a> <br />
+Morier,  <a href='#Page_225'>225</a> <br />
+Morley of Blackburn, Lord,  <a href='#Page_205'>205</a>,  <a href='#Page_301'>301</a> <br />
+Morris, W.,  <a href='#Page_295'>295</a>,  <a href='#Page_296'>296</a> <br />
+<i>Morte d'Arthur</i>, the alliterative,  <a href='#Page_16'>16</a> <br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">the metrical,  <a href='#Page_17'>17</a> </span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Malory's,  <a href='#Page_14'>14</a>-<a href='#Page_17'>17</a>,  <a href='#Page_24'>24</a>-<a href='#Page_31'>31</a> </span><br />
+Mosse, Henrietta,  <a href='#Page_175'>175</a>,  <a href='#Page_176'>176</a> <br />
+<i>Mount Henneth</i>,  <a href='#Page_166'>166</a> <br />
+<i>Mysteries of Udolpho, The</i>,  <a href='#Page_159'>159</a>  <i>sq.</i><br />
+<br />
+Nash, T.,  <a href='#Page_38'>38</a>,  <a href='#Page_39'>39</a> <br />
+<i>Nature and Art</i>,  <a href='#Page_170'>170</a> <br />
+Neville, H.,  <a href='#Page_58'>58</a>-<a href='#Page_61'>61</a> <br />
+<i>Nightmare Abbey</i>,  <a href='#Page_223'>223</a> <br />
+<i>No Name</i>,  <a href='#Page_291'>291</a> <br />
+<i>North and South</i>,  <a href='#Page_254'>254</a>,  <a href='#Page_255'>255</a> <br />
+<i>Northanger Abbey</i>,  <a href='#Page_155'>155</a>  , <a href='#Page_179'>179</a>,  <a href='#Page_191'>191</a>,  <a href='#Page_193'>193</a>-<a href='#Page_195'>195</a> <br />
+<i>Novelist, The</i>,  <a href='#Page_135'>135</a> <br />
+<i>Novella</i>, the Italian, influence of,  <a href='#Page_31'>31</a>  <i>sq.</i><br />
+<br />
+<i>Oceana</i>,  <a href='#Page_73'>73</a> <br />
+<i>Odyssey, The</i>,  <a href='#Page_1'>1</a> <br />
+<i>Old English Baron, The</i>,  <a href='#Page_157'>157</a> <br />
+<i>Old Manor House, The</i>,  <a href='#Page_174'>174</a> <br />
+Oliphant, Mrs.,  <a href='#Page_255'>255</a>,  <a href='#Page_274'>274</a>,  <a href='#Page_286'>286</a> <br />
+Opie, Mrs.,  <a href='#Page_173'>173</a> <br />
+<i>Ordeal of Richard Feverel, The</i>,  <a href='#Page_255'>255</a> <br />
+<i>Ormond</i>,  <a href='#Page_183'>183</a> <br />
+<i>Ornatus and Artesia</i>,  <a href='#Page_43'>43</a>,  <a href='#Page_44'>44</a> <br />
+<i>Oroonoko</i>,  <a href='#Page_51'>51</a> <br />
+&quot;Ouida,&quot;  <a href='#Page_258'>258</a> <br />
+Ovid,  <a href='#Page_2'>2</a> <br />
+<br />
+Paget, F.,  <a href='#Page_260'>260</a> <br />
+<i>Palace of Pleasure</i>, Painter's,  <a href='#Page_33'>33</a> <br />
+Paltock, R.,  <a href='#Page_145'>145</a> <br />
+<i>Pamela</i>,  <a href='#Page_82'>82</a>-<a href='#Page_93'>93</a>,  <a href='#Page_99'>99</a>-<a href='#Page_101'>101</a> <br />
+<i>Pandion and Amphigeneia</i>,  <a href='#Page_44'>44</a>,  <a href='#Page_46'>46</a> <br />
+Paris, M. Gaston,  <a href='#Page_15'>15</a> <br />
+<i>Parismus and Parismenus</i>,  <a href='#Page_41'>41</a>,  <a href='#Page_42'>42</a>,  <a href='#Page_66'>66</a> <br />
+<i>Parthenissa</i>,  <a href='#Page_44'>44</a>,  <a href='#Page_45'>45</a> <br />
+<i>Paul Ferroll</i>,  <a href='#Page_256'>256</a> <br />
+Peacock, T.L.,  <a href='#Page_221'>221</a>-<a href='#Page_223'>223</a> <br />
+<i>Peep at Our Ancestors</i>,  <a href='#Page_175'>175</a>,  <a href='#Page_176'>176</a>,  <a href='#Page_204'>204</a>,  <a href='#Page_205'>205</a> <br />
+<i>Pendennis</i>,  <a href='#Page_240'>240</a> <br />
+<i>Peregrine Pickle</i>,  <a href='#Page_119'>119</a>,  <a href='#Page_120'>120</a> <br />
+<i>Persuasion</i>,  <a href='#Page_199'>199</a> <br />
+<i>Peter Simple</i>,  <a href='#Page_220'>220</a> <br />
+<i>Peter Wilkins</i>,  <a href='#Page_145'>145</a> <br />
+Petronius,  <a href='#Page_1'>1</a>,  <a href='#Page_2'>2</a> <br />
+<i>Phantasies</i>,  <a href='#Page_255'>255</a> <br />
+<i>Pharonnida</i>,  <a href='#Page_43'>43</a> <br />
+<i>Pickwick Papers, The</i>,  <a href='#Page_225'>225</a>  <i>sq.</i>,  <a href='#Page_308'>308</a> <br />
+<i>Pilgrim's Progress, The</i>,  <a href='#Page_53'>53</a>-<a href='#Page_58'>58</a>,  <a href='#Page_65'>65</a> <br />
+Plato,  <a href='#Page_1'>1</a>,  <a href='#Page_56'>56</a> <br />
+Poe, Edgar,  <a href='#Page_242'>242</a>  <i>n.</i><br />
+<i>Polite Conversation</i> (Swift's),  <a href='#Page_73'>73</a>-<a href='#Page_75'>75</a> <br />
+<i>Pompey the Little</i>,  <a href='#Page_145'>145</a> <br />
+Porter, Miss,  <a href='#Page_174'>174</a>,  <a href='#Page_203'>203</a> <br />
+<i>Pride and Prejudice</i>,  <a href='#Page_195'>195</a>-<a href='#Page_197'>197</a> <br />
+<i>Proud King, The</i>,  <a href='#Page_23'>23</a> <br />
+Publication, system of,  <a href='#Page_266'>266</a>-<a href='#Page_269'>269</a> <br />
+<br />
+<i>Queenhoo Hall</i>,  <a href='#Page_206'>206</a> <br />
+<i>Quixote, The Female</i>,  <a href='#Page_139'>139</a> <br />
+<i>Quixote, The Spiritual</i>,  <a href='#Page_139'>139</a> <br />
+<br />
+Rabelais,  <a href='#Page_127'>127</a>,  <a href='#Page_140'>140</a> <br />
+Radcliffe, Mrs.  <a href='#Page_159'>159</a>-<a href='#Page_163'>163</a>,  <a href='#Page_204'>204</a>,  <a href='#Page_205'>205</a> <br />
+Raleigh, Professor Sir Walter,  <a href='#Page_39'>39</a>,  <a href='#Page_47'>47</a>,  <a href='#Page_53'>53</a>  <i>n.</i>,  <a href='#Page_61'>61</a>,  <a href='#Page_157'>157</a> <br />
+<i>Rasselas</i>,  <a href='#Page_34'>34</a>,  <a href='#Page_147'>147</a> <br />
+Reade, C.,  <a href='#Page_248'>248</a>,  <a href='#Page_249'>249</a>,  <a href='#Page_274'>274</a> <br />
+<i>Recess, The</i>,  <a href='#Page_174'>174</a> <br />
+Reeve, Clara,  <a href='#Page_157'>157</a> <br />
+Rice, James,  <a href='#Page_288'>288</a>,  <a href='#Page_289'>289</a> <br />
+<i>Richard Coeur de Lion</i>,  <a href='#Page_22'>22</a> <br />
+Richardson,  <a href='#Page_8'>8</a>,  <a href='#Page_77'>77</a>,  <a href='#Page_82'>82</a>-<a href='#Page_97'>97</a>,  <a href='#Page_99'>99</a>-<a href='#Page_103'>103</a>,  <a href='#Page_125'>125</a>,  <a href='#Page_137'>137</a>  <i>n.</i>,  <a href='#Page_190'>190</a>,  <a href='#Page_263'>263</a> <br />
+Ritson,  <a href='#Page_9'>9</a> <br />
+<i>Robinson Crusoe</i>,  <a href='#Page_64'>64</a>-<a href='#Page_72'>72</a> <br />
+Robinson, Emma (?),  <a href='#Page_307'>307</a> <br />
+Roche, R.M.,  <a href='#Page_176'>176</a> <br />
+<i>Roderich Random</i>,  <a href='#Page_117'>117</a>-<a href='#Page_119'>119</a> <br />
+Romance, <a href="#CHAPTER_I">ch. i.</a> <i>passim</i>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">its connection with the &quot;Saint's Life,&quot;  <a href='#Page_3'>3</a> </span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">not completely separable from novel,  <a href='#Page_8'>8</a> </span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">heroic,  <a href='#Page_39'>39</a>-<a href='#Page_48'>48</a> </span><br />
+<i>Romance Readers and Romance Writers</i>,  <a href='#Page_179'>179</a> <br />
+<i>Romola</i>,  <a href='#Page_249'>249</a> <br />
+&quot;Rosa Matilda,&quot;  <a href='#Page_174'>174</a> <br />
+<i>Roxana</i>,  <a href='#Page_65'>65</a>-<a href='#Page_71'>71</a> <br />
+<i>Ruin, The</i>,  <a href='#Page_6'>6</a> <br />
+<i>Ruth</i>,  <a href='#Page_253'>253</a>,  <a href='#Page_254'>254</a> <br />
+<br />
+<i>St. Irvyne</i>,  <a href='#Page_224'>224</a> <br />
+<i>St. Leon</i>,  <a href='#Page_169'>169</a> <br />
+<i>St. Ronan's Well</i>,  <a href='#Page_206'>206</a> <br />
+<i>Sayings and Doings</i>,  <a href='#Page_212'>212</a>,  <a href='#Page_213'>213</a> <br />
+&quot;S.G.,&quot; <i>see</i> Green, Sarah<br />
+Scott, Michael,  <a href='#Page_225'>225</a> <br />
+Scott, Sir W.,  <a href='#Page_71'>71</a>,  <a href='#Page_110'>110</a>,  <a href='#Page_116'>116</a>,  <a href='#Page_122'>122</a>,  <a href='#Page_124'>124</a>,  <a href='#Page_144'>144</a>,  <a href='#Page_161'>161</a>,  <a href='#Page_174'>174</a>,  <a href='#Page_178'>178</a>,
+<a href="#CHAPTER_V">ch. v.</a> <i>passim</i>,  <a href='#Page_214'>214</a>,  <a href='#Page_230'>230</a>,  <a href='#Page_233'>233</a>,  <a href='#Page_234'>234</a>,  <a href='#Page_238'>238</a>,  <a href='#Page_298'>298</a>  <i>sq.</i><br />
+<i>Sense and Sensibility</i>,  <a href='#Page_197'>197</a> <br />
+<i>Sentimental Journey, A</i>,  <a href='#Page_127'>127</a>-<a href='#Page_132'>132</a> <br />
+<i>Seven Wise Masters, The</i>,  <a href='#Page_22'>22</a> <br />
+Sewell, Miss,  <a href='#Page_260'>260</a>,  <a href='#Page_261'>261</a> <br />
+<i>Shabby Genteel Story, A</i>,  <a href='#Page_231'>231</a> <br />
+<i>Shadow of the Cross, The</i>,  <a href='#Page_259'>259</a> <br />
+Shadwell, Charles,  <a href='#Page_117'>117</a> <br />
+Shebbeare,  <a href='#Page_139'>139</a>,  <a href='#Page_140'>140</a> <br />
+Shelley,  <a href='#Page_227'>227</a>,  <a href='#Page_224'>224</a> <br />
+Sheridan, Frances,  <a href='#Page_143'>143</a> <br />
+Sherwood, Mrs.,  <a href='#Page_259'>259</a> <br />
+<i>Shirley</i>,  <a href='#Page_255'>255</a> <br />
+<i>Shortest Way with the Dissenters</i>,  <a href='#Page_70'>70</a> <br />
+<i>Simple Story, A</i>,  <a href='#Page_170'>170</a> <br />
+<i>Sir Amadas</i>,  <a href='#Page_23'>23</a> <br />
+<i>Sir Charles Grandison</i>,  <a href='#Page_94'>94</a>-<a href='#Page_95'>95</a> <br />
+<i>Sir Eglamour</i>,  <a href='#Page_23'>23</a> <br />
+<i>Sir Eger, Sir Grame, and Sir Graysteel</i>,  <a href='#Page_23'>23</a> <br />
+<i>Sir John Chiverton</i>,  <a href='#Page_208'>208</a> <br />
+<i>Sir Isumhras</i>,  <a href='#Page_23'>23</a> <br />
+<i>Sir Lancelot Greaves</i>,  <a href='#Page_117'>117</a>,  <a href='#Page_121'>121</a>,  <a href='#Page_122'>122</a> <br />
+<i>Sir Launfal</i>,  <a href='#Page_23'>23</a> <br />
+<i>Sir Orfeo</i>,  <a href='#Page_23'>23</a> <br />
+<i>Sir Triamond</i>,  <a href='#Page_23'>23</a> <br />
+<i>Sketches by Boz</i>,  <a href='#Page_225'>225</a> <br />
+Smart, Capt. H.,  <a href='#Page_258'>258</a> <br />
+Smedley, Frank,  <a href='#Page_257'>257</a> <br />
+Smith, Charlotte,  <a href='#Page_174'>174</a> <br />
+Smith, Horace,  <a href='#Page_214'>214</a> <br />
+Smollett,  <a href='#Page_78'>78</a>,  <a href='#Page_79'>79</a>,  <a href='#Page_81'>81</a>,  <a href='#Page_115'>115</a>-<a href='#Page_126'>126</a>,  <a href='#Page_190'>190</a>,  <a href='#Page_225'>225</a>,  <a href='#Page_226'>226</a>,  <a href='#Page_234'>234</a> <br />
+Socrates,  <a href='#Page_2'>2</a> <br />
+<i>Spiritual Quixote, The</i>,  <a href='#Page_139'>139</a>,  <a href='#Page_143'>143</a>,  <a href='#Page_144'>144</a> <br />
+<i>Squire of Low Degree, The</i>,  <a href='#Page_23'>23</a> <br />
+Sta&euml;l, Mme. de,  <a href='#Page_199'>199</a> <br />
+Steele,  <a href='#Page_62'>62</a>,  <a href='#Page_63'>63</a> <br />
+Stendhal,  <a href='#Page_305'>305</a>,  <a href='#Page_306'>306</a> <br />
+Sterne,  <a href='#Page_79'>79</a>-<a href='#Page_81'>81</a>,  <a href='#Page_126'>126</a>-<a href='#Page_132'>132</a>,  <a href='#Page_190'>190</a> <br />
+Stevenson, R.L.,  <a href='#Page_284'>284</a>,  <a href='#Page_293'>293</a>-<a href='#Page_295'>295</a> <br />
+<i>Strange Story, A</i>,  <a href='#Page_217'>217</a> <br />
+Stuart, Lady L.,  <a href='#Page_209'>209</a> <br />
+Surtees, R.,  <a href='#Page_245'>245</a>  <i>n.</i>,  <a href='#Page_252'>252</a>,  <a href='#Page_256'>256</a> <br />
+Swift,  <a href='#Page_72'>72</a>-<a href='#Page_75'>75</a> <br />
+<i>Sydney Biddulph</i>,  <a href='#Page_143'>143</a> <br />
+<br />
+<i>Tale of a Tub, A</i>,  <a href='#Page_72'>72</a>,  <a href='#Page_104'>104</a> <br />
+<i>Ten Thousand a Year</i>,  <a href='#Page_225'>225</a> <br />
+Tennyson,  <a href='#Page_17'>17</a>,  <a href='#Page_29'>29</a> <br />
+Terror-Novel, the,  <a href='#Page_159'>159</a>  <i>sq.</i><br />
+Thackeray,  <a href='#Page_54'>54</a>,  <a href='#Page_104'>104</a>,  <a href='#Page_110'>110</a>,  <a href='#Page_116'>116</a>,  <a href='#Page_139'>139</a>,  <a href='#Page_190'>190</a>,  <a href='#Page_202'>202</a>,  <a href='#Page_208'>208</a>,  <a href='#Page_212'>212</a>,  <a href='#Page_229'>229</a>-<a href='#Page_235'>235</a>,
+<a href='#Page_240'>240</a>,  <a href='#Page_241'>241</a>,  <a href='#Page_243'>243</a>,  <a href='#Page_262'>262</a>,  <a href='#Page_267'>267</a>,  <a href='#Page_268'>268</a>,  <a href='#Page_278'>278</a>,  <a href='#Page_297'>297</a>  <i>sq.</i>,  <a href='#Page_308'>308</a><br />
+<i>Thaddeus of Warsaw</i>,  <a href='#Page_174'>174</a>,  <a href='#Page_203'>203</a> <br />
+Thorns,  <a href='#Page_298'>298</a> <br />
+Tolstoi, Count,  <a href='#Page_8'>8</a>,  <a href='#Page_108'>108</a> <br />
+<i>Tom and Jerry</i>,  <a href='#Page_256'>256</a> <br />
+<i>Tom Brown's Schooldays</i>,  <a href='#Page_256'>256</a>,  <a href='#Page_258'>258</a> <br />
+<i>Tom Cringle's Log</i>,  <a href='#Page_225'>225</a> <br />
+<i>Tom Jones</i>,  <a href='#Page_105'>105</a>-<a href='#Page_111'>111</a>,  <a href='#Page_193'>193</a> <br />
+Tourguenief,  <a href='#Page_12'>12</a> <br />
+&quot;Tractarian&quot; Novel, the,  <a href='#Page_259'>259</a> <br />
+<i>Treasure Island</i>,  <a href='#Page_294'>294</a> <br />
+<i>Tristram Shandy</i>,  <a href='#Page_127'>127</a>-<a href='#Page_132'>132</a> <br />
+Tristram story, the,  <a href='#Page_14'>14</a> <br />
+Trollope, Anthony,  <a href='#Page_250'>250</a>-<a href='#Page_253'>253</a>,  <a href='#Page_257'>257</a>,  <a href='#Page_274'>274</a>,  <a href='#Page_293'>293</a>  <i>n.</i><br />
+Trollope, Mrs.,  <a href='#Page_224'>224</a>,  <a href='#Page_239'>239</a> <br />
+<i>Two Years Ago</i>,  <a href='#Page_247'>247</a> <br />
+<br />
+<i>Unfortunate Traveller, The</i>,  <a href='#Page_38'>38</a>,  <a href='#Page_39'>39</a> <br />
+<i>Urania</i>,  <a href='#Page_44'>44</a> <br />
+<i>Utopia</i>,  <a href='#Page_75'>75</a> <br />
+<br />
+<i>Vanity Fair</i>,  <a href='#Page_231'>231</a>  <i>sq.</i>,  <a href='#Page_240'>240</a> <br />
+<i>Vathek</i>,  <a href='#Page_158'>158</a>,  <a href='#Page_159'>159</a>,  <a href='#Page_186'>186</a> <br />
+<i>Venetia</i>,  <a href='#Page_215'>215</a> <br />
+<i>Vicar of Wake field, The</i>,  <a href='#Page_147'>147</a>,  <a href='#Page_148'>148</a> <br />
+Virgil,  <a href='#Page_2'>2</a> <br />
+<i>Vision of St. Paul, The</i>,  <a href='#Page_3'>3</a>,  <a href='#Page_4'>4</a> <br />
+<i>Voyage Round the World</i>,  <a href='#Page_65'>65</a> <br />
+<br />
+Wace,  <a href='#Page_17'>17</a> <br />
+Walpole, H.,  <a href='#Page_109'>109</a>,  <a href='#Page_155'>155</a>-<a href='#Page_157'>157</a>,  <a href='#Page_159'>159</a>,  <a href='#Page_203'>203</a>,  <a href='#Page_301'>301</a>,  <a href='#Page_304'>304</a> <br />
+<i>Wanderer, The</i>,  <a href='#Page_151'>151</a> <br />
+<i>Warden, The</i>,  <a href='#Page_251'>251</a> <br />
+Ward's <i>Catalogue of Romances</i>,  <a href='#Page_9'>9</a> <br />
+Warren, S.,  <a href='#Page_225'>225</a> <br />
+<i>Water Babies, The</i>,  <a href='#Page_247'>247</a> <br />
+<i>Watsons, The</i>,  <a href='#Page_199'>199</a> <br />
+<i>Waverley</i>,  <a href='#Page_202'>202</a>  <i>sq.</i><br />
+Weber,  <a href='#Page_9'>9</a> <br />
+<i>Well at the World's End</i>,  <a href='#Page_296'>296</a> <br />
+<i>Westward Ho!</i>  <a href='#Page_246'>246</a>,  <a href='#Page_247'>247</a> <br />
+Whyte-Melville, G.J.,  <a href='#Page_257'>257</a> <br />
+<i>Wild Irish Girl, The</i>,  <a href='#Page_178'>178</a> <br />
+Wilkinson, Sarah,  <a href='#Page_175'>175</a> <br />
+<i>William of Palerne</i>,  <a href='#Page_23'>23</a> <br />
+Wortley-Montagu, Lady M., <i>see</i> &quot;Lady Mary&quot;<br />
+Wroth, Lady Mary,  <a href='#Page_44'>44</a> <br />
+<i>Wuthering Heights</i>,  <a href='#Page_243'>243</a> <br />
+<br />
+Xenophon,  <a href='#Page_2'>2</a> <br />
+<br />
+<i>Yeast</i>,  <a href='#Page_245'>245</a>,  <a href='#Page_246'>246</a> <br />
+Yonge, Miss,  <a href='#Page_260'>260</a>-<a href='#Page_262'>262</a> <br />
+<i>Ywain and Gawain</i>,  <a href='#Page_17'>17</a>-<a href='#Page_21'>21</a> <br />
+<br />
+<i>Zastrozzi</i>,  <a href='#Page_224'>224</a> <br />
+Zeluco,  <a href='#Page_172'>172</a> <br />
+</p>
+<hr style="width: 95%;" />
+<h3>FOOTNOTES</h3>
+
+<blockquote class="footnote">
+
+<a id="footnote1" name="footnote1"></a> <b>Footnote 1</b>: <a href="#footnotetag1">(return)</a>
+<p>As a work of general literature, the attraction of the
+    <i>Arcadia</i> is of course much enhanced by, if it does not chiefly
+    depend upon, its abundant, varied, and sometimes charming
+    verse-insets. But, as a novel, it cannot count these.</p>
+
+<a id="footnote2" name="footnote2"></a> <b>Footnote 2</b>: <a href="#footnotetag2">(return)</a>
+<p>It is pleasant to remember that one of the chief publishers
+    of these things in the late seventeenth century was <i>W.
+    Thackeray</i>. </p>
+
+<a id="footnote3" name="footnote3"></a> <b>Footnote 3</b>: <a href="#footnotetag3">(return)</a>
+<p>&quot;Quant &agrave; moi, je trouve les choses que ces messieurs se
+    disent fort bien dites et tout &agrave; fait dignes de deux
+    gentilhommes.&quot;</p>
+
+<a id="footnote4" name="footnote4"></a> <b>Footnote 4</b>: <a href="#footnotetag4">(return)</a>
+<p>He <i>has</i> a name, Meriton Latroon, but it is practically
+    never used in the actual story.</p>
+
+<a id="footnote5" name="footnote5"></a> <b>Footnote 5</b>: <a href="#footnotetag5">(return)</a>
+<p>The heroic kind had lent itself very easily and obviously to
+    allegory. Not very long before Bunyan English literature had
+    been enriched with a specimen of this double variety which for
+    Sir W. Raleigh &quot;marks the lowest depth to which English romance
+    writing sank.&quot; I do not know that I could go quite so far as
+    this in regard to the book&mdash;<i>Bentivolio and Urania</i> by Nathaniel
+    Ingelo. The first edition of this appeared in 1660: the second
+    (there seem to have been at least four) lies before me at this
+    moment dated 1669, or nine years before the <i>Progress</i> itself.
+    You require a deep-sea-lead of uncommonly cunning construction
+    to sound, register, and compare the profundities of the bathos
+    in novels. The book has about 400 folio pages very closely
+    packed with type, besides an alphabetical index full of Hebrew
+    and Greek derivations of its names&mdash;&quot;Gnothisauton,&quot; &quot;Achamoth,&quot;
+    &quot;Ametameletus,&quot; &quot;Dogmapernes,&quot; and so forth. Its principles are
+    inexorably virtuous; there is occasional action interspersed
+    among its innumerable discourses, and I think it not improbable
+    that if it were only possible to read it, it might do one some
+    good. But it would not be the good of the novel.</p>
+
+<a id="footnote6" name="footnote6"></a> <b>Footnote 6</b>: <a href="#footnotetag6">(return)</a>
+<p>This is said not to have been quite the case at the <i>very</i>
+    first: but it has been so since.</p>
+
+<a id="footnote7" name="footnote7"></a> <b>Footnote 7</b>: <a href="#footnotetag7">(return)</a>
+<p>A little of the work to be noticed in this chapter is not
+    strictly eighteenth century, but belongs to the first decade or
+    so of the nineteenth. But the majority of the contents actually
+    conform to the title, and there is hardly any more convenient or
+    generally applicable heading for the novel before Miss Austen
+    and Scott, excluding the great names dealt with in the last
+    chapter.</p>
+
+<a id="footnote8" name="footnote8"></a> <b>Footnote 8</b>: <a href="#footnotetag8">(return)</a>
+<p>The not infrequent attribution of this book to Berkeley is a
+    good instance of the general inability to discriminate <i>style</i>.</p>
+
+<a id="footnote9" name="footnote9"></a> <b>Footnote 9</b>: <a href="#footnotetag9">(return)</a>
+<p>The elect ladies about Richardson joined <i>Betsy</i> with
+    <i>Amelia</i>, and sneered at both.</p>
+
+<a id="footnote10" name="footnote10"></a> <b>Footnote 10</b>: <a href="#footnotetag10">(return)</a>
+<p>It has been observed, and is worth observing, that the
+    eighteenth-century hero, even in his worst circumstances, can
+    seldom exist without a &quot;follower.&quot;</p>
+
+<a id="footnote11" name="footnote11"></a> <b>Footnote 11</b>: <a href="#footnotetag11">(return)</a>
+<p>Julia Mannering reminds me a little of Julia Townsend: and
+    if this be doubtful, the connection of Jerry's &quot;Old madam gave
+    me some higry-pigry&quot; and Cuddie's &quot;the leddy cured me with some
+    hickery-pickery&quot; is not. While, for Dickens, compare the way in
+    which Sam Weller's landlord in the Fleet got into trouble with
+    the Tinker's Tale in <i>Spiritual Quixote</i>, bk. iv. chap. ii.</p>
+
+<a id="footnote12" name="footnote12"></a> <b>Footnote 12</b>: <a href="#footnotetag12">(return)</a>
+<p>Also, perhaps, to one who had not yet discovered that
+    intense concentration on herself and her family with which,
+    after their quarrel, Mrs. Thrale, not quite an impartial judge,
+    but a very shrewd one, charged her, and which does appear in the
+    <i>Diary</i>.</p>
+
+<a id="footnote13" name="footnote13"></a> <b>Footnote 13</b>: <a href="#footnotetag13">(return)</a>
+<p>Dunlop and others have directly or indirectly suggested a
+    good deal of plagiarism in <i>Evelina</i> from <i>Miss Betsy
+    Thoughtless</i>: but it is exactly in this <i>life</i>-quality that the
+    earlier novelist fails.</p>
+
+<a id="footnote14" name="footnote14"></a> <b>Footnote 14</b>: <a href="#footnotetag14">(return)</a>
+<p>Since the text was written&mdash;indeed very recently&mdash;the
+    long-missing &quot;Episodes&quot; of <i>Vathek</i> itself have been at length
+    supplied by the welcome diligence of Mr. Lewis Melville. They
+    are not &quot;better than Vathek,&quot; but they are good.</p>
+
+<a id="footnote15" name="footnote15"></a> <b>Footnote 15</b>: <a href="#footnotetag15">(return)</a>
+<p>Godwin had written novel-<i>juvenilia</i> of which few say
+    anything.</p>
+
+<a id="footnote16" name="footnote16"></a> <b>Footnote 16</b>: <a href="#footnotetag16">(return)</a>
+<p>The peculiar pedantic ignorance which critics sometimes
+    show has objected to this rendering of Marmontel's <i>Contes
+    Moraux</i>, urging that it should read &quot;tales <i>of manners</i>.&quot; It
+    might be enough to remark that the Edgeworths, father and
+    daughter, were probably a good deal better acquainted both with
+    French and English than these cavillers. But there is a
+    rebutting argument which is less <i>ad hominem</i>. &quot;Tales of
+    Manners&quot; leaves out at least as much on one side as &quot;Moral
+    Tales&quot; does on the other: and the actual meaning is quite clear
+    to those who know that of the Latin <i>mores</i> and the French
+    <i>moeurs</i>. It is scarcely worth while to attempt to help those
+    who do not know by means of paraphrases.</p>
+
+<a id="footnote17" name="footnote17"></a> <b>Footnote 17</b>: <a href="#footnotetag17">(return)</a>
+<p>The frankness of the ingenious creator of Mr. Jorrocks
+    should be imitated by 99 per cent. of English novelists. &quot;The
+    following story,&quot; says he of <i>Ask Mamma</i>, &quot;does not involve the
+    complication of a plot. It is a mere continuous narrative.&quot;</p>
+
+<a id="footnote18" name="footnote18"></a> <b>Footnote 18</b>: <a href="#footnotetag18">(return)</a>
+<p>Those who are curious about the matter will find it
+    treated in a set of Essays by the present writer, which
+    originally appeared in <i>Macmillan's Magazine</i> during the autumn
+    of 1894, and were reprinted among <i>Essays in English
+    Literature</i>, Second Series, London, 1895.</p>
+
+<a id="footnote19" name="footnote19"></a> <b>Footnote 19</b>: <a href="#footnotetag19">(return)</a>
+<p>Some work of distinction, actually later than hers in date,
+    is older in kind. This is the case not only with the later books
+    of her Irish elder sister. Miss Edgeworth (see last chapter),
+    but with all those of her Scotch younger one, Miss Ferrier, who
+    wrote <i>Marriage</i> just after <i>Sense and Sensibility</i> appeared,
+    but did not publish it (1818) till after Miss Austen's death,
+    following it with <i>The Inheritance</i> (1824) and <i>Destiny</i> (1831).
+    Miss Ferrier, who had a strong though rather hard humour and
+    great faculty of pronounced character-drawing, is better at a
+    series of sketches than at a complete novel&mdash;only <i>The
+    Inheritance</i> having much central unity. And there is still
+    eighteenth-century quality rather than nineteenth in her
+    alternations of Smollettian farce-satire and Mackenziefied
+    sentiment. She is very good to read, but stand a little out of
+    the regular historic succession, as well as out of the ordinary
+    novel classes.</p>
+
+<a id="footnote20" name="footnote20"></a> <b>Footnote 20</b>: <a href="#footnotetag20">(return)</a>
+<p>Here and in a good many cases to come it is impossible to
+    particularise criticism. It matters the less that, from
+    Ainsworth's <i>Rookwood</i> (1834) and James' <i>Richelieu</i> (1829)
+    onwards, the work of both was very much <i>par sibi</i> in merit and
+    defect alike.</p>
+
+<a id="footnote21" name="footnote21"></a> <b>Footnote 21</b>: <a href="#footnotetag21">(return)</a>
+<p>It has not been thought necessary to insert criticism of
+    Dickens's individual novels. They are almost all well known to
+    almost everybody: and special discussion of them would be
+    superfluous, while their general characteristics and positions
+    in novel-history are singularly uniform and can be described
+    together.</p>
+
+<a id="footnote22" name="footnote22"></a> <b>Footnote 22</b>: <a href="#footnotetag22">(return)</a>
+<p>For this reason, and for the variety of kind of his later
+    novels a little more individual notice must be given to them
+    than in the case of Dickens, but still only a little, and
+    nothing like detailed criticism.</p>
+
+<a id="footnote23" name="footnote23"></a> <b>Footnote 23</b>: <a href="#footnotetag23">(return)</a>
+<p>Edgar Poe has a perfectly serious and very characteristic
+    explosion at the prominence of these agreeable viands in the
+    book.</p>
+
+<a id="footnote24" name="footnote24"></a> <b>Footnote 24</b>: <a href="#footnotetag24">(return)</a>
+<p>Some will have it that this was really Charlotte's: but not
+    with much probability.</p>
+
+<a id="footnote25" name="footnote25"></a> <b>Footnote 25</b>: <a href="#footnotetag25">(return)</a>
+<p>It is curious to compare this (dealing as it does largely
+    with sport) and the &quot;Jorrocks&quot; 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.</p>
+
+<a id="footnote26" name="footnote26"></a> <b>Footnote 26</b>: <a href="#footnotetag26">(return)</a>
+<p>His most ambitious studies in strict <i>character</i> are the
+    closely connected heroines of <i>The Bertrams</i> (1859) and <i>Can you
+    Forgive Her?</i> (1864-1865). But the first-named book has never
+    been popular; and the other hardly owes its popularity to the
+    heroine.</p>
+
+<a id="footnote27" name="footnote27"></a> <b>Footnote 27</b>: <a href="#footnotetag27">(return)</a>
+<p>Anthony Trollope, in one of the discursive passages in his
+    early books, has left positive testimony to the distaste with
+    which publishers regarded it.</p>
+
+<a id="footnote28" name="footnote28"></a> <b>Footnote 28</b>: <a href="#footnotetag28">(return)</a>
+<p>Another novel of Mrs. Marsh-Caldwell's, <i>Norman's Bridge</i>,
+    has strong suggestions of <i>John Halifax</i>, and is ten years
+    older.</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The English Novel, by George Saintsbury
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ENGLISH NOVEL ***
+
+***** This file should be named 14469-h.htm or 14469-h.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        https://www.gutenberg.org/1/4/4/6/14469/
+
+Produced by Jonathan Ingram, Riikka Talonpoika and the PG Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+https://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at https://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+https://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at https://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit https://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including including checks, online payments and credit card
+donations.  To donate, please visit: https://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     https://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
+
+
+</pre>
+
+</body>
+</html>
diff --git a/old/14469.txt b/old/14469.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0e6fa60
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/14469.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,9821 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The English Novel, by George Saintsbury
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The English Novel
+
+Author: George Saintsbury
+
+Release Date: December 26, 2004 [EBook #14469]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ENGLISH NOVEL ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Jonathan Ingram, Riikka Talonpoika and the PG Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE ENGLISH NOVEL
+
+BY
+
+GEORGE SAINTSBURY
+
+PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE
+UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH
+
+LONDON: J.M. DENT & SONS LTD.
+BEDFORD STREET, STRAND  1913
+NEW YORK: E.P. BUTTON & CO.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+It is somewhat curious that there is, so far as I know, no complete
+handling in English of the subject of this volume, popular and important
+though that subject has been. Dunlop's _History of Fiction_, an
+excellent book, dealt with a much wider matter, and perforce ceased its
+dealing just at the beginning of the most abundant and brilliant
+development of the English division. Sir Walter Raleigh's _English
+Novel_, a book of the highest value for acute criticism and grace of
+style, stops short at Miss Austen, and only glances, by a sort of
+anticipation, at Scott. The late Mr. Sidney Lanier's _English Novel and
+the Principle of its Development_ is really nothing but a laudatory
+study of "George Eliot," with glances at other writers, including
+violent denunciations of the great eighteenth-century men. There are
+numerous monographs on parts of the subject: but nothing else that I
+know even attempting the whole. I should, of course, have liked to deal
+with so large a matter in a larger space: but one may and should
+"cultivate the garden" even if it is not a garden of many acres in
+extent. I need only add that I have endeavoured, not so much to give
+"reviews" of individual books and authors, as to indicate what Mr.
+Lanier took for the second part of his title, but did not, I think,
+handle very satisfactorily in his text.
+
+I may perhaps add, without impropriety, that the composition of this
+book has not been hurried, and that I have taken all the pains I could,
+by revision and addition as it proceeded, to make it a complete survey
+of the Novel, as it has come from the hands of all the more important
+novelists, not now alive, up to the end of the nineteenth century.
+
+GEORGE SAINTSBURY.
+
+_Christmas_, 1912.
+
+
+
+
+    CONTENTS
+
+    CHAP.
+
+       I. THE FOUNDATION IN ROMANCE
+      II. FROM LYLY TO SWIFT
+     III. THE FOUR WHEELS OF THE NOVEL WAIN
+      IV. THE MINOR AND LATER EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL
+       V. SCOTT AND MISS AUSTEN
+      VI. THE SUCCESSORS--TO THACKERAY
+     VII. THE MID-VICTORIAN NOVEL
+    VIII. THE FICTION OF YESTERDAY--CONCLUSION
+
+          INDEX
+
+
+
+
+THE ENGLISH NOVEL
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+THE FOUNDATION IN ROMANCE
+
+
+One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts of
+literary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature at any
+rate, of prose fiction, and the comparative absence, in the two great
+classical languages, of what we call by that name. It might be an
+accident, though a rather improbable one, that we have no Greek prose
+fiction till a time long subsequent to the Christian era, and nothing in
+Latin at all except the fragments of Petronius and the romance of
+Apuleius. But it can be no accident, and it is a very momentous fact,
+that, from the foundation of Greek criticism, "Imitation," that is to
+say "Fiction" (for it is neither more nor less), was regarded as not
+merely the inseparable but the constituent property of poetry, even
+though those who held this were doubtful whether poetry must necessarily
+be in verse. It is another fact of the greatest importance that the
+ancients who, in other forms than deliberate prose fiction, try to "tell
+a story," do not seem to know very well how to do it.
+
+The _Odyssey_ is, indeed, one of the greatest of all stories, it is the
+original romance of the West; but the _Iliad_, though a magnificent
+poem, is not much of a story. Herodotus can tell one, if anybody can,
+and Plato (or Socrates) evidently could have done so if it had lain in
+his way: while the _Anabasis_, though hardly the _Cyropaedia_, shows
+glimmerings in Xenophon. But otherwise we must come down to Lucian and
+the East before we find the faculty. So, too, in Latin before the two
+late writers named above, Ovid is about the only person who is a real
+story-teller. Virgil makes very little of his _story_ in verse: and it
+is shocking to think how Livy throws away his chances in prose. No:
+putting the Petronian fragments aside, Lucian and Apuleius are the only
+two novelists in the classical languages before about 400 A.D.: and
+putting aside their odd coincidence of subject, it has to be remembered
+that Lucian was a Syrian Greek and Apuleius an African Latin. The
+conquered world was to conquer not only its conqueror, but its
+conqueror's teacher, in this youngest accomplishment of literary art.
+
+It was probably in all cases, if not certainly, mixed blood that
+produced the curious development generally called Greek Romance. It is
+no part of our business to survey, in any detail, the not very numerous
+but distinctly interesting compositions which range in point of
+authorship from Longus and Heliodorus, probably at the meeting of the
+fourth and fifth centuries, to Eustathius in the twelfth. At one time
+indeed, when we may return to them a little, we shall find them
+exercising direct and powerful influence on modern European fiction, and
+so both directly and indirectly on English: but that is a time a good
+way removed from the actual beginning of our journey. Still, _Apollonius
+of Tyre_, which is probably the oldest piece of English prose fiction
+that we have, is beyond all doubt derived ultimately from a Greek
+original of this very class: and the class itself is an immense advance,
+in the novel direction, upon anything that we have before. It is on the
+one hand essentially a "romance of adventure," and on the other
+essentially a "love-story"--in senses to which we find little in
+classical literature to correspond in the one case and still less in the
+other. Instead of being, like _Lucius_ and the _Golden Ass_, a tissue of
+stories essentially unconnected and little more than framed by the main
+tale, it is, though it may have a few episodes, an example of at least
+romantic unity throughout, with definite hero and definite heroine, the
+prominence and importance of the latter being specially noteworthy. It
+is in fact the first division of literature in which the heroine assumes
+the position of a protagonist. If it falls short in character, so do
+even later romances to a great extent: if dialogue is not very
+accomplished, that also was hardly to be thoroughly developed till the
+novel proper came into being. In the other two great divisions, incident
+and description, it is abundantly furnished. And, above all, the two
+great Romantic motives, Adventure and Love, are quite maturely present
+in it.
+
+To pass to the deluge, and beyond it, and to come to close quarters with
+our proper division, the origin of Romance itself is a very debatable
+subject, or rather it is a subject which the wiser mind will hardly care
+to debate much. The opinion of the present writer--the result, at least,
+of many years' reading and thought--is that it is a result of the
+marriage of the older East and the newer (non-classical) West through
+the agency of the spread of Christianity and the growth and diffusion of
+the "Saint's Life." The beginnings of Hagiology itself are very
+uncertain: but what is certain is that they are very early: and that as
+the amalgamation or leavening of the Roman world with barbarian material
+proceeded, the spread of Christianity proceeded likewise. The _Vision of
+St. Paul_--one of the earliest examples and the starter it would seem,
+if not of the whole class of sacred Romances, at any rate of the large
+subsection devoted to Things after Death--has been put as early as
+"before 400 A.D." It would probably be difficult to date such legends as
+those of St. Margaret and St. Catherine _too_ early, having regard to
+their intrinsic indications: and the vast cycle of Our Lady, though
+probably later, must have begun long before the modern languages were
+ready for it, while that of the Cross should be earlier still. And let
+it be remembered that these Saints' Lives, which are still infinitely
+good reading, are not in the least confined to homiletic necessities.
+The jejuneness and woodenness from which the modern religious story too
+often suffers are in no way chargeable upon all, or even many, of them.
+They have the widest range of incident--natural as well as supernatural:
+their touches of nature are indeed extended far beyond mere incident.
+Purely comic episodes are by no means wanting: and these, like the
+parallel passages in the dramatising of these very legends, were sure to
+lead to isolation of them, and to a secular continuation.
+
+But, once more, we must contract the sweep, and quicken the pace to deal
+not with possible origins, but with actual results--not with Ancient or
+Transition literature, but with the literature of English in the
+department first of fiction generally and then, with a third and last
+narrowing, to the main subject of English fiction in prose.
+
+The very small surviving amount, and the almost completely second-hand
+character, of Anglo-Saxon literature have combined to frustrate what
+might have been expected from another characteristic of it--the unusual
+equality of its verse and prose departments. We have only one--not
+quite entire but substantive--prose tale in Anglo-Saxon, the version of
+the famous story of _Apollonius of Tyre_, which was to be afterwards
+declined by Chaucer, but attempted by his friend and contemporary Gower,
+and to be enshrined in the most certain of the Shakespearean
+"doubtfuls," _Pericles_. It most honestly gives itself out as a
+translation (no doubt from the Latin though there was an early Greek
+original) and it deals briefly with the subject. But as an example of
+narrative style it is very far indeed from being contemptible: and in
+passages such as Apollonius' escape from shipwreck, and his wooing of
+the daughter of Arcestrates, there is something which is different from
+style, and with which style is not always found in company--that faculty
+of telling a story which has been already referred to. Nor does this
+fail in the narrative portions of the prose Saints' Lives and Homilies,
+especially Aelfric's, which we possess; in fact it is in these last
+distinctly remarkable--as where Aelfric tells the tale of the monk who
+spied on St. Cuthbert's seaside devotions. The same faculty is
+observable in Latin work, not least in Bede's still more famous telling
+of the Caedmon story, and of the vision of the other world.
+
+But these faculties have better chance of exhibiting themselves in the
+verse division of our Anglo-Saxon wreckage. _Beowulf_ itself consists of
+one first-rate story and one second-rate but not despicable tale,
+hitched together more or less anyhow. The second, with good points, is,
+for us, negligible: the first is a "yarn" of the primest character. One
+may look back to the _Odyssey_ itself without finding anything so good,
+except the adventures of the Golden Ass which had all the story-work of
+two mightiest literatures behind them. As literature on the other hand,
+_Beowulf_ may be overpraised: it has been so frequently. But let
+anybody with the slightest faculty of "conveyance" tell the first part
+of the story to a tolerably receptive audience, and he will not doubt
+(unless he is fool enough to set the effect down to his own gifts and
+graces) about its excellence as such. There is character--not much, but
+enough to make it more than a _mere_ story of adventure--and adventure
+enough for anything; there is by no means ineffectual speech--even
+dialogue--of a kind: and there is some effective and picturesque
+description. The same faculties reappear in such mere fragments as that
+of _Waldhere_ and the "Finnsburgh" fight: but they are shown much more
+fully in the Saints' Lives--best of all in the _Andreas_, no doubt, but
+remarkably also (especially considering the slender amount of
+"happenings") in the _Guthlac_ and the _Juliana_. In fact the very
+fragments of Anglo-Saxon poetry, by a sort of approximation which they
+show to dramatic narrative and which with a few exceptions is far less
+present in the classics, foretell much more clearly and certainly than
+in the case of some other foretellings which have been detected in them,
+the future achievements of English literature in the department of
+fiction. _The Ruin_ (the finest thing perhaps in all Anglo-Saxon) is a
+sort of background study for something that might have been much better
+than _The Last Days of Pompeii_: and _The Complaint of Deor_, in its
+allusion to the adventures of the smith Weland and others, makes one
+sorry that some one more like the historian of a later and decadent
+though agreeable Wayland the Smith, had not told us the tale that is now
+left untold. A crowd of fantastic imaginings or additions, to supply the
+main substance, and a certain common-sense grasp of actual conditions
+and circumstances to set them upon, and contrast them with--these are
+the great requirements of Fiction in life and character. You must mix
+prose and poetry to get a good romance or even novel. The consciences of
+the ancients revolted from this mixture of kinds; but there was no such
+revolt in the earlier moderns, and least of all in our own mediaeval
+forefathers.
+
+So few people are really acquainted with the whole range of Romance
+(even in English), or with any large part of it, that one may without
+undue presumption set down in part, if not in whole, to ignorance, a
+doctrine and position which we must now attack. This is that romance and
+novel are widely separated from each other; and that the historian of
+the novel is really straying out of his ground if he meddles with
+Romance. These are they who would make our proper subject begin with
+Marivaux and Richardson, or at earliest with Madame de La Fayette, who
+exclude Bunyan altogether, and sometimes go so far as to question the
+right of entry to Defoe. But the counter-arguments are numerous: and any
+one of them would almost suffice by itself. In the first place the idea
+of the novel arising so late is unnatural and unhistorical: these
+Melchisedecs without father or mother are not known in literature. In
+the second a pedantic insistence on the exclusive definition of the
+novel involves one practical inconvenience which no one, even among
+those who believe in it, has yet dared to face. You must carry your wall
+of partition along the road as well as across it: and write separate
+histories of Novel and Romance for the last two centuries. The present
+writer can only say that, though he has dared some tough adventures in
+literary history, he would altogether decline this. Without the help of
+the ants that succoured Psyche against Venus that heap would indeed be
+ill to sort.
+
+But there is a third argument, less practical in appearance but bolder
+and deeper, which is really decisive of the matter, though few seem to
+have seen it or at least taken it up. The separation of romance and
+novel--of the story of incident and the story of character and
+motive--is a mistake logically and psychologically. It is a very old
+mistake, and it has deceived some of the elect: but a mistake it is. It
+made even Dr. Johnson think Fielding shallower than Richardson; and it
+has made people very different from Dr. Johnson think that Count Tolstoi
+is a greater analyst and master of a more developed humanity than
+Fielding. As a matter of fact, when you have excogitated two or more
+human beings out of your own head and have set them to work in the
+narrative (not the dramatic) way, you have made the novel _in posse_, if
+not _in esse_, from its apparently simplest development, such as
+_Daphnis and Chloe_, to its apparently most complex, such as the
+_Kreutzer Sonata_ or the triumphs of Mr. Meredith. You have started the
+"Imitation"--the "fiction"--and _tout est la_. The ancients could do
+this in the dramatic way admirably, though on few patterns; in the
+poetical way as admirably, but again not on many. The Middle Ages lost
+the dramatic way almost entirely, but they actually improved the
+poetical on its narrative side, and the result was Romance. In every
+romance there is the germ of a novel and more; there is at least the
+suggestion and possibility of romance in every novel that deserves the
+name. In the Tristram story and the Lancelot cycle there are most of the
+things that the romancer of incident and the novelist of character and
+motive can want or can use, till the end of the world; and Malory (that
+"mere compiler" as some pleasantly call him) has put the possibilities
+of the latter and greater creation so that no one who has eyes can miss
+them. Nor _in the beginning_ does it much or at all matter whether the
+vehicle was prose or verse. In fact they mostly wrote in verse because
+prose was not ready.
+
+In the minor romances and tales (taking English versions only) from
+_Havelok_ to _Beryn_ there is a whole universe of situation, scenario,
+opportunity for "business." That they have the dress and the
+scene-backing of one particular period can matter to no one who has eyes
+for anything beyond dress and scene-backing. And when we are told that
+they are apt to run too much into grooves and families, it is sufficient
+to answer that it really does not lie in the mouth of an age which
+produces grime-novels, problem-novels, and so forth, as if they had been
+struck off on a hectograph, possessing the not very exalted gift of
+varying names and places--to reproach any other age on this score. But
+we have only limited room here for generalities and still less for
+controversy; let us turn to our proper work and survey the actual
+turn-out in fiction--mostly as a result of mere fashion, verse, but
+partly prose--which the Middle Ages has left us as a contribution to
+this department of English literature.
+
+It has been said that few people know the treasures of English romance,
+yet there is little excuse for ignorance of them. It is some century
+since Ellis's extremely amusing, if sometimes rather prosaic, book put
+much of the matter before those who will not read originals; to be
+followed in the same path by Dunlop later, and much later still by the
+invaluable and delightful _Catalogue of_ [British Museum] _Romances_ by
+Mr. Ward. It is nearly as long since the collections of Ritson and
+Weber, soon supplemented by others, and enlarged for the last forty
+years by the publications of the Early English Text Society, put these
+originals themselves within the reach of everybody who is not so lazy
+or so timid as to be disgusted or daunted by a very few actually
+obsolete words and a rather large proportion of obsolete spellings,
+which will yield to even the minimum of intelligent attention. Only a
+very small number (not perhaps including a single one of importance)
+remain unprinted, though no doubt a few are out of print or difficult to
+obtain. The quality and variety of the stories told in them are both
+very considerable, even without making allowance for what has been
+called the stock character of mediaeval composition. That almost all are
+directly imitated from the French is probable enough, that most are is
+certain: but this matters, for our purpose, nothing at all. That the
+imitation was not haphazard or indiscriminate is obvious. Thus, though
+we have some, we have not very many representatives of the class which
+was the most numerous of all in France--the _chansons de geste_ or
+stories of French legendary history, national or family. Except as far
+as the Saracens are concerned, they would naturally have less interest
+for English hearers. The _Matiere de Rome_, again--the legends of
+antiquity--though represented, is not very abundant outside of the
+universally popular Tale of Troy; and the almost equally popular
+Alexander legend does not occupy a very large part of them. What is
+perhaps more remarkable is that until Malory exercised his genius upon
+"the French book," the more poetical parts of the "matter of Britain"
+itself do not seem to have been very much written about in English. The
+preliminary stuff about Merlin and Vortigern exists in several
+handlings; the foreign campaigns of Arthur seem always (perhaps from
+national vanity) to have been popular. The "off"-branches of Tristram
+and Percivale, and not a few of the still more episodic romances of
+adventures concerning Gawain, Iwain, and other knights, receive
+attention. The execrable Lonelich or Lovelich, who preceded Malory a
+little, had of course predecessors in handling the other parts of the
+Graal story. But the crown and flower of the whole--the inspiration
+which connected the Round Table and the Graal and the love of Lancelot
+and Guinevere--though, so far as the present writer's reading and
+opinion are of any weight, the recent attempts to deprive the
+Englishman, Walter Map, of the honour of conceiving it are of no
+force--seems to have waited till the fifteenth century--that is to say
+the last part of three hundred years--before Englishmen took it up. Most
+popular of all perhaps, on the principle that in novels the flock "likes
+the savour of fresh grass," seem to have been the pure _romans
+d'aventures_--quite unconnected or nearly so with each other or with any
+of the larger cycles. Those adventures of particular heroes have
+sometimes a sort of Arthurian link, but they really have no more to do
+with the main Arthurian story than if Arthur were not.
+
+For the present purpose, however, filiation, origin, and such-like
+things are of much less importance than the actual stories that get
+themselves told to satisfy that demand which in due time is to produce
+the supply of the novel. Of these the two oldest, as regards the actual
+forms in which we have them, are capital examples of the more and less
+original handling of "common-form" stories or motives. They were not
+then, be it remembered, quite such common-form as now--the rightful heir
+kept out of his rights, the usurper of them, the princess gracious or
+scornful or both by turns, the quest, the adventure, the revolutions and
+discoveries and fights, the wedding bells and the poetical justice on
+the villain. Let it be remembered, too, if anybody is scornful of these
+as _vieux jeu_, that they have never been really improved upon except by
+the very obvious and unoriginal method common in clever-silly days, of
+simply reversing some of them, of "turning platitudes topsy-turvy," as
+not the least gifted, or most old-fashioned, of novelists, Tourguenief,
+has it. Perhaps the oldest of all, _Havelok the Dane_--a story the age
+of which from evidence both internal and external, is so great that
+people have not quite gratuitously imagined a still older Danish or even
+Anglo-Saxon original for the French romance from which our existing one
+is undoubtedly taken--is one of the most spirited of all. Both hero and
+heroine--Havelok, who should be King of Denmark and Goldborough, who
+should be Queen of England--are ousted by their treacherous
+guardian-viceroys as infants; and Havelok is doomed to drowning by his
+tutor, the greater or at least bolder villain of the two. But the
+fisherman Grim, who is chosen as his murderer, discovers that the child
+has, at night, a _nimbus_ of flame round his head; renounces his crime
+and escapes by sea with the child and his own family to Grimsby.
+Havelok, growing up undistinguished from his foster-brethren, takes
+service as a scullion with the English usurper. This usurper is seeking
+how to rid himself of the princess without violence, but in some way
+that will make her succession to the crown impossible, and Havelok
+having shown prowess in sports is selected as the maiden's husband. She,
+too, discovers his royalty at night by the same token; and the pair
+regain their respective inheritances and take vengeance on their
+respective traitors, in a lively and adventurous fashion. There are all
+the elements of a good story in this: and they are by no means wasted or
+spoilt in the actual handling. It is not a mere sequence of incident;
+from the mixture of generosity and canniness in the fisherman who
+ascertains that he is to have traitor's wages before he finally decides
+to rescue Havelok, to the not unnatural repugnance of Goldborough at
+her forced wedding with a scullion, the points where character comes in
+are not neglected, though of course the author does not avail himself of
+them either in Shakespearean or in Richardsonian fashion. They are
+_there_, ready for development by any person who may take it into his
+head to develop them.
+
+So too is it in the less powerful and rather more cut and dried _King
+Horn_. Here the opening is not so very different; the hero's father is
+murdered by pirate invaders, and he himself set adrift in a boat. But in
+this the princess (daughter of course of the king who shelters him)
+herself falls in love with Horn, and there is even a scene of
+considerable comic capabilities in which she confides this affection by
+mistake to one of his companions (fortunately a faithful one) instead of
+to himself. But Horn has a faithless friend also; and rivals, and
+adventures, and journeys; and returns just in the nick of time, and
+recognitions by rings, and everything that can properly be desired
+occur. In these--even more perhaps than in Havelok's more masculine and
+less sentimental fortunes--there are openings not entirely neglected by
+the romancer (though, as has been said, he does not seem to have been
+one of the strongest of his kind) for digression, expatiation,
+embroidery. Transpose these two stories (as the slow kind years will
+teach novelists inevitably to do) into slightly different keys,
+introduce variations and episodes and _codas_, and you have the
+possibilities of a whole library of fiction, as big and as varied as any
+that has ever established itself for subscribers, and bigger than any
+that has ever offered itself as one collection to buyers.
+
+The love-stories of these two tales are what it is the fashion--exceedingly
+complimentary to the age referred to if not to the age of the fashion
+itself--to call "mid-Victorian" in their complete "propriety."
+Indeed, it is a Puritan lie, though it seems to possess the vivaciousness
+of its class, that the romances are distinguished by "bold bawdry."
+They are on the contrary rather singularly pure, and contrast, in
+that respect, remarkably with the more popular folk-tale. But fiction,
+no more than drama, could do without the [Greek: amarthia]--the
+human and not unpardonable frailty. This appears in, and complicates,
+the famous story of _Tristram_, which, though its present English form
+is probably younger than _Havelok_ and _Horn_, is likely to have existed
+earlier: indeed must have done so if Thomas of Erceldoune wrote on the
+subject. Few can require to be told that beautiful and tragical history
+of "inauspicious stars" which hardly any man, of the many who have
+handled it in prose and verse, has been able to spoil. Our Middle
+English form is not consummate, and is in some places crude in manner
+and in sentiment. But it is notable that the exaggerated and inartistic
+repulsiveness of Mark, resorted to by later writers as a rather
+rudimentary means of exciting compassion for the lovers, is not to be
+found here; in fact, one of the most poetical touches in the piece is
+one of sympathy for the luckless husband, when he sees the face of his
+faithless queen slumbering by her lover's side with the sun on it. "And
+Mark rewed therefore." The story, especially in its completion with the
+"Iseult of Brittany" part and the death of Tristram, gives scope for
+every possible faculty and craftsmanship of the most analytic as of the
+most picturesque novelist of modern times. There is nothing in the least
+like it in ancient literature; and to get a single writer who would do
+it justice in modern times we should have to take the best notes of
+Charles Kingsley, and Mr. Blackmore, and Mr. Meredith, leaving out all
+their faults, and combine. It is not surprising that, in the very
+infancy of the art, nobody in German or French, any more than in English
+(though the German here is, as it happens, the best), should have done
+it full justice; but it is a wonder that a story of such capacities
+should have been sketched, and even worked out in considerable detail,
+so early.
+
+Of the far greater story of which _Tristram_ is a mere episode and
+hardly even that--a chantry or out-lying chapel of the great
+cathedral--the Arthurian Legend, the earlier English versions, or rather
+the earlier versions in English, are, as has been said, not only
+fragmentary but disappointing. There is nothing in the least strange in
+this, even though (as the present writer, who can speak with indifferent
+knowledge, still firmly holds) the conception of the story itself in its
+greatest and unifying stage is probably if not certainly English. The
+original sources of the story of Arthur are no doubt Celtic; they give
+themselves out as being so, and there is absolutely no critical reason
+for disbelieving them. But in these earlier forms--the authority of the
+most learned Celticists who have any literary gift and any appreciation
+of evidence is decisive on this point--not only are the most
+characteristic unifying features--the Graal story and the love of
+Lancelot and Guinevere--completely wanting, but _the_ great stroke of
+genius--the connection of these two and the subordination of all minor
+legends as to the dim national hero, Arthur, with those about him--is
+more conspicuously wanting still. Whether it was the Englishman Walter
+Map, the Norman Robert de Borron, or the Frenchman Chrestien de Troyes,
+to whom this flash of illumination came, has never been proved--will
+pretty certainly now never be proved. M. Gaston Paris failed to do it;
+and it is exceedingly unlikely that, where he failed, any one else will
+succeed, unless the thrice and thirty times sifted libraries of Europe
+yield some quite unexpected windfall. In the works commonly attributed
+to Chrestien, all of which are well known to the present writer, there
+is no sign of his having been able to conceive this, though he is a
+delightful romancer. Robert is a mere shadow; and his attributed works,
+_as_ his works, are shadows too, though they are interesting enough in
+themselves. Walter not only has the greatest amount of traditional
+attribution, but is the undoubted author of _De Nugis Curialium_. And
+the author of _De Nugis Curialium_, different as it is from the
+Arthurian story, _could_ have finally divined the latter.
+
+But at the time when he wrote, Englishmen, with the rarest exceptions,
+wrote only in French or Latin; and when they began to write in English,
+a man of genius, to interpret and improve on him, was not found for a
+long time. And the most interesting parts of the Arthurian story are
+rarely handled at all in such early vernacular versions of it as we
+have, whether in verse or prose. Naturally enough, perhaps, it was the
+fabulous historic connection with British history, and the story of the
+great British enchanter Merlin, that attracted most attention. The
+_Arthour and Merlin_ which is in the Auchinleck MS.; the prose _Merlin_,
+published by the Early English Text Society; the alliterative Thornton
+_Morte d'Arthur_, and others, are wont to busy themselves about the
+antecedents of the real story--about the uninteresting wars of the King
+himself with Saxons, and Romans, and giants, and rival kings, rather
+than with the great chivalric triple cord of Round Table, Graal, and
+Guinevere's fault. The pure Graal poems, _Joseph of Arimathea_, the work
+of the abominable Lonelich or Lovelich, etc., deal mainly with another
+branch of previous questions--things bearable as introductions,
+fillings-up, and so forth, but rather jejune in themselves. The Scots
+_Lancelot_ is later than Malory himself, and of very little interest.
+Layamon's account, the oldest that we have, adds little (though what
+little it does add is not unimportant) to Geoffrey of Monmouth and Wace;
+and tells what it has to tell with nearly as little skill in narrative
+as in poetry. Only the metrical _Morte_--from which, it would appear,
+Malory actually transprosed some of his most effective passages in the
+manner in which genius transproses or transverses--has, for that reason,
+for its dealings with the catastrophe, and for the further opportunity
+of comparison with Tennyson, interest of the higher kind. But before we
+come to Malory himself it is desirable to turn to the branches--the
+chapels, as we have called them, to the cathedral--which he also, in
+some cases at least, utilised in the _magnum opus_ of English prose
+romance.
+
+These outliers were rather more fortunate, probably for no more
+recondite reason than that the French originals (from which they were in
+almost every instance certainly taken) were finished in themselves. Of
+the special Gawain cycle or sub-cycle we have two romances in pure
+metrical form, and more than two in alliterative, which are above the
+average in interest. _Ywain and Gawain_, one of the former, is derived
+directly or indirectly from the _Chevalier au Lyon_ of Chrestien de
+Troyes; and both present some remarkable affinities with the unknown
+original of the "Sir Beaumains" episode of Malory, and, through it, with
+Tennyson's _Gareth and Lynette_. The other, _Lybius Disconus (Le Beau
+Deconnu)_ is also concerned with that courteous nephew of Arthur who, in
+later versions of the main story, is somewhat sacrificed to Lancelot.
+For a "_real_ romance," as it calls itself (though it is fair to say
+that in the original the word means "royal"), of the simpler kind but
+extremely well told, there are not many better metrical specimens than
+_Ywain and Gawain_, but it has less character-interest, actual or
+possible, than those which have been commented on. The hero, King
+Urien's son, accepts an adventure in which another knight of the Table,
+Sir Colgrevance, has fared ill, after it has been told in a conversation
+at court which is joined in first by the Queen and afterwards by the
+King. Sir Kay here shows his usual cross-grainedness; and Guinevere
+"with milde mood" requests to know "What the devil is thee within?" The
+adventure is of a class well known in romance. You ride to a certain
+fountain, pour water from it on a stone, and then, after divers marvels,
+have to do battle with a redoubtable knight. Colgrevance has fared
+badly; Kay is as usual quite sure that he would fare better; but Ywain
+actually undertakes the task. He has a tough battle with the knight who
+answers the challenge, but wounds him mortally; and when the knight
+flies to his neighbouring castle, is so hard on his heels that the
+portcullis actually drops on his horse's haunches just behind the
+saddle, and cuts the beast in two. Ywain is thus left between the
+portcullis and the (by this time shut) door--a position all the more
+awkward that the knight himself expires immediately after he has reached
+shelter. The situation is saved, however, by the guardian damsel of
+romance, Lunet (the Linet or Lynette of the Beaumains-Gareth story), who
+emerges from a postern between gate and portcullis and conveys the
+intruder safe to her own chamber. Here a magic bed makes him invisible:
+though the whole castle, including the very room, is ransacked by the
+dead knight's people and would-be revengers, at the bidding of his
+widow.
+
+This widow, however, is rather an Ephesian matron. The sagacious Lunet,
+whose confidante she is, suggests to her that, unless she enlists some
+doughty knight as her champion, the king will confiscate her fief; and
+that there is no champion like a husband. A very little more finesse
+effects the marriage, even though the lady is made aware of the identity
+of her new lover and her own husband's slayer. (It is of course
+necessary to remember that the death of a combatant in fairly challenged
+and fought single contest was not reckoned as any fault to his
+antagonist.) Ywain actually shows his prowess against the King: and has
+an opportunity of showing Kay once more that it is one thing to blame
+other people for failing, and another to succeed yourself. And after
+this the newly married pair live together happily for a time. But it was
+reckoned a fault in a knight to take too prolonged a honeymoon: and
+Ywain, after what the French call _adieux dechirants_, obtains leave for
+the usual "twelvemonth and a day," at the expiration of which, on St.
+John's Eve, he is without fail to return, the engagement being sealed by
+the gift from his lady of a special ring. He forgets his promise of
+course: and at the stated time a damsel appears, sternly demands the
+ring, and announces her lady's decision to have nothing further to do
+with him. There is in such cases only one thing for any true knight,
+from Sir Lancelot to Sir Amadis, to do: and that is to go mad, divest
+himself of his garments, and take to the greenwood. This Ywain duly
+does, supporting himself at first on the raw flesh of game which he
+kills with a bow and arrows wrested from a chance-comer; and then on
+less savage but still simple food supplied by a benevolent hermit. As he
+lies asleep under a tree, a lady rides by with attendants, and one of
+these (another of the wise damsels of romance) recognises him as Sir
+Ywain. The lady has at the time sore need of a champion against a
+hostile earl, and she also fortunately possesses a box of ointment
+infallible against madness, which Morgane la Faye has given her. With
+this the damsel is sent back to anoint Ywain. He comes to his senses, is
+armed and clothed, undertakes the lady's defence, and discomfits the
+earl: but is as miserable as ever. Resisting the lady's offer of herself
+and all her possessions, he rides off once more "with heavy heart and
+dreary cheer."
+
+Soon he hears a hideous noise and, riding in its direction, finds that a
+dragon has attacked a lion. He succours the holier beast, kills the
+dragon, and though he has unavoidably wounded the lion in the _melee_ is
+thenceforth attended by him not merely as a food-provider, but as the
+doughtiest of squires and comrades in fight. To aggravate his sorrow he
+comes to the fountain and thorn-tree of the original adventure, and
+hears some one complaining in the chapel hard by. They exchange
+questions. "A man," he said, "some time I was" (which must be one of the
+earliest occurrences in English of a striking phrase), and the prisoner
+turns out to be Lunet. She has been accused of treason by the usual
+steward (it is _very_ hard for a steward of romance to be good) and two
+brothers--of treason to her lady, and is to be burnt, unless she can
+find a knight who will fight the three. Ywain agrees to defend her: but
+before he can carry out his promise he has, on the same morning, to meet
+a terrible giant who is molesting his hosts at a castle where he is
+guested. Both adventures, however, are achieved on the same day, with
+very notable aid from the lion: and Ywain undertakes a fresh one, being
+recruited by the necessary damsel-messenger, against two half-fiend
+brother knights. They stipulate that the lion is to be forcibly
+prevented from interfering, and he is locked up in a room; but, hearing
+the noise of battle, he scratches up the earth under the door, frees
+himself, and once more succours his master at the nick of time. Even
+this does not expiate Ywain's fault: and yet another task falls to
+him--the championship of the rights of the younger of a pair of sisters,
+the elder of whom has secured no less a representative than Gawain
+himself. The pair, unknowing and unknown, fight all day long before
+Arthur's court with no advantage on either side: and when the light
+fails an interchange of courtesies leads to recognition and the
+settlement of the dispute. Now the tale is nearly full. Ywain rides yet
+again to the magic fountain and performs the rite; there is no one to
+meet him; the castle rocks and the inmates quake. But the crafty Lunet
+persuades her mistress to swear that if the Knight of the Lion, who has
+fallen at variance with his lady, will come to the rescue, she will do
+all she can to reconcile the pair. Which not ill-prepared "curtain" duly
+falls: leaving us comfortably assured that Ywain and his Lady and Lunet
+and the Lion (one wishes that these two could have made a match of it,
+and he must surely have been a bewitched knight) lived happily
+
+    "Until that death had driven them down."
+
+This, it has been said, is a specimen of the pure romance; with little
+except incident in it, and a touch or two of manners. It does not, as
+the others noticed above do, lend itself much to character-drawing. But
+it is spiritedly told; though rougher, it is much more vigorous than the
+French original; and the mere expletives and stock phrases, which are
+the curse of these romances, do not obtrude themselves too much. In this
+respect, and some others, it is the superior of the one coupled above
+with it, _Lybius Disconus_, which is closer, except in names, to the
+Beaumains story. Still, this also is not a bad specimen of the same
+class. The hero of it is a son, not a brother, of Gawain, comes nameless
+or nicknamed, but as "Beaufils," not "Beaumains," to Arthur's court, and
+is knighted at once, not made to go through the "kitchen-knave" stage.
+Accordingly, the damsel Elene (not Lunet), to whom he is assigned as
+champion in the adventure of the Lady of Sinadowne, objects only to his
+novelty of knighthood and is converted by his first victory. The course
+of the adventures is, however, different from that which some people
+know from Malory, and many from Tennyson. One of them is farcical: the
+Fair Unknown rescues a damsel at her utmost need from two giants, a red
+and a black, one of whom is roasting a wild boar and uses the animal as
+a weapon, with the spit in it, for the combat. Moreover, he falls a
+victim to the wiles of a sorceress-chatelaine whom he has also
+succoured: and it is only after the year and day that Elene goads him on
+to his proper quest. But this also is no bad story.
+
+The limits of this volume admit of not much farther "argument" (though
+the writer would very gladly give it) of these minor romances of
+adventure, Arthurian and other. Ellis's easily accessible book supplies
+abstracts of the main Arthurian story before Malory; of the two most
+famous, though by no means best, of all the non-Arthurian romances, _Guy
+of Warwick_ and _Bevis of Hampton_ (the former of which was handled and
+rehandled from age to age, moralised, curtailed, lengthened, and hashed
+up in every form); of the brilliant and vigorous _Richard
+Coeur-de-Lion_; of the less racy Charlemagne romances in English; of the
+_Seven Wise Masters_, brought from the East and naturalised all over
+Europe; of the delightful love story of _Florice and Blancheflour_; of
+that powerful and pathetic legend of the _Proud King_ (Robert of
+Sicily), which Longfellow and Mr. William Morris both modernised, each
+in his way; of those other legends, _Sir Isumbras_ and _Amis and
+Amillion_, which are so beautiful to those who can appreciate the
+mediaeval mind, and to the beauty of which others seem insensible; of
+_Sir Triamond_ and _Sir Eglamour_ (examples of the romance at its
+weakest); of the exceedingly spirited and interesting _Ipomydon_, and of
+some others, including the best of Scotch romances, _Sir Eger, Sir
+Grame, and Sir Graysteel_. But Ellis could not know others, and he left
+alone yet others that he might have known--the exquisite _Sir Launfal_
+of Thomas Chester at the beginning of the fifteenth century, where an
+unworthy presentment of Guinevere is compensated by the gracious image
+of Launfal's fairy love; the lively adventures of _William of Palerne_,
+who had a werewolf for his friend and an emperor's daughter for his
+love, eloping with her in white bear-skins, the unusual meat of which
+was being cooked in her father's kitchen; _Sir Orfeo_--Orpheus and
+Eurydice, with a happy ending; _Emare_, one of the tales of innocent but
+persecuted heroines of which Chaucer's Constance is the best known;
+_Florence of Rome_; the rather famous _Squire of Low Degree; Sir
+Amadas_, not a very good handling of a fine motive, charity to a corpse;
+many others.
+
+Nor does he seem to have known one of the finest of all--the
+alliterative romance of _Gawain and the Green Knight_ which, since Dr.
+Morris published it some forty years ago for the Early English Text
+Society, has made its way through text-books into more general knowledge
+than most of its fellows enjoy. In this the hero is tempted repeatedly,
+elaborately, and with great knowledge of nature and no small command of
+art on the teller's part, by the wife of his host and destined
+antagonist. He resists in the main, but succumbs in the point of
+accepting a magic preservative as a gift: and is discovered and lectured
+accordingly. It is curious that this, which is far above the usual mere
+adventure-story and is novel of a high kind as well as romance, has no
+known French original; and is strongly English in many characteristics
+besides its verse-form.
+
+On the whole, however, one need have no difficulty in admitting that the
+majority of these romances _do_ somewhat content themselves with
+incident, incident only, and incident not merely of a naif but of a
+stock kind, for their staple. There are striking situations, even striking
+phrases, here and there; there is plenty of variety in scene, and more than
+is sometimes thought in detail; but the motive-and-character-interest is
+rarely utilised as it might be, and very generally is not even suggested.
+There is seldom any real plot or "fable"--only a chain of events: and
+though no one but a very dull person will object to the supernatural
+element, or to the exaggerated feats of professedly natural prowess and
+endurance, it cannot be said that on the whole they are artistically
+managed. You feel, not merely that the picture would have been better if
+the painter had taken more pains, but that the reason why he did not
+is that he did not know how.
+
+Sir Thomas Malory, himself most unknown perhaps of all great writers,
+did know how; and a cynical person might echo the _I nunc_ of the Roman
+satirist, and dwell on the futility of doing great things, in reference
+to the fact that it used to be fashionable, and is still not uncommon,
+to call Malory a "mere compiler." Indeed from the direction which modern
+study so often takes, of putting inquiry into origins above everything,
+and neglecting the consideration of the work as work, this practice is
+not likely soon to cease. But no mistake about the mysterious
+Englishman (the place-names with which the designation is connected are
+all pure English) is possible to any one who has read his book, and who
+knows what prose fiction is. _The Noble Histories of King Arthur, La
+Morte d'Arthur, The Story of the most Noble and Worthy King Arthur, The
+Most Ancient and Famous History of the Renowned Prince Arthur, The
+Birth, Life, and Acts of King Arthur_--call it by whichever name anybody
+likes of those which various printers and reprinters have given it--is
+one of the great books of the world. If they can give us any single
+"French book"--the reference to which is a commonplace of the
+subject--from which it was taken, let them; they have not yet. If they
+point out (as they can) French and English books from which parts of it
+were taken, similar things may be done with Dante and Chaucer, with
+Shakespeare and Milton, and very probably could have been done with
+Homer. It is what the artist does with his materials, not where he gets
+them, that is the question. And Malory has done, with _his_ materials, a
+very great thing indeed. He is working no doubt to a certain extent
+blindly; working much better than he knows, and sometimes as he would
+not work if he knew better; though whether he would work as well if he
+knew better is quite a different point. Sometimes he may not take the
+best available version of a story; but we must ask ourselves whether he
+knew it. Sometimes he may put in what we do not want: but we must ask
+ourselves whether there was not a reason for doing so, to him if not to
+us. What is certain is that he, and he only in any language, makes of
+this vast assemblage of stories one story, and one book. He does it
+(much more than half unconsciously no doubt) by following the lines of,
+as I suppose, Walter Map, and fusing the different motives, holding to
+this method even in parts of the legend with which, so far as one knows,
+Map cannot have meddled. Before him this legend consisted of half a
+dozen great divisions--a word which may be used of malice prepense.
+These were the story of Merlin, that of Arthur's own origin, and that of
+the previous history of the Graal for introduction; the story of
+Arthur's winning the throne, of the Round Table, and of the marriage
+with Guinevere, also endless branchings of special knights' adventures,
+and of the wars with the Saxons and the Romans, and the episode of the
+False Guinevere--with whom for a time Arthur lives as with his
+queen--for middle; and the story of the Graal-quest, the love of
+Lancelot for the Queen, and the rebellion of Mordred with its fatal
+consequences, for close. Exactly how much of this Malory personally had
+before him we cannot of course say: but of any working up of the whole
+that would have spared him trouble, and robbed him of credit, we do not
+know. In fact the favourite term "compiler" gives up the only dangerous
+point. Now in what way did Malory _compile_? In the way in which the
+ordinary compiler proceeds he most emphatically does not. He cuts down
+the preliminaries mercilessly: but they can be perfectly well spared. He
+misses almost all the wars with the Saxons, which are the most tedious
+parts of the originals. He adopts, most happily, the early, not the
+late, placing of those with the Romans. He drops the false Guinevere
+altogether, which is imperative, that the true one may have no right to
+plead the incident--though he does not represent Arthur as "blameless."
+He gives the _roman d'aventures_ side of the Round Table stories, from
+the great Tristram and Palomides romances through the Beaumains episode
+downwards, because they are interesting in themselves and lead up to
+the Graal quest. He gives that Quest as plentifully because it leads up
+to the "dolorous death and departing out of this world of them all." How
+he gives the Lancelot and Guinevere tragedy we shall see presently. And
+the catastrophe of the actual "departing" he gives perfectly; with the
+magnificent final scenes which he has converted, sometimes in almost
+Shakespearean fashion, by the slightest verbal touches from mediocre
+verse to splendid prose. A very remarkable compiler! It is a pity that
+they did not take him and cut him up in little stars for a light to all
+his brethren in compiling thereafter.
+
+For he has what no compiler as such can have--because the moment he has
+it he ceases to be a compiler, and becomes an artist--the sense of
+_grasp_, the power to put his finger, and to keep it, on the central
+pulse and nerve of the story. That he did this deliberately is so
+unlikely as to be practically impossible: that he did it is certain. The
+Arthurian Legend is the greatest of mediaeval creations as a subject--a
+"fable"--just as the _Divina Commedia_ is the greatest of mediaeval
+"imitations" and works of art. And as such it is inevitable that it
+should carry with it the sense of the greatest medieval _differences_,
+Chivalry and Romance. The strong point of these differences is the way
+in which they combine the three great motives, as Dante isolates them,
+of Valour, Love, and Religion. The ancients never realised this
+combination at all; the moderns have merely struggled after it, or
+blasphemed it in fox-and-grapes fashion: the mediaevals _had_ it--in
+theory at any rate. The Round Table stories, merely as such, illustrate
+Valour; the Graal stories, Religion; the passion of Lancelot and
+Guinevere with the minor instances, Love. All these have their [Greek:
+amarthia]--their tragic and tragedy-causing fault and flaw. The knight
+wastes his valour in idle bickerings; he forgets law in his love; and
+though there is no actual degradation of religion, he fails to live up
+to the ideal that he does not actually forswear. To throw the
+presentation--the _mimesis_--of all this into perfectly worthy form
+would probably have been too much for any single genius of that curious
+time (when genius was so widely spread and so little concentrated)
+except Dante himself, whose hand found other work to do. To colour and
+shape the various fragments of the mosaic was the work of scores. To put
+them together, if not in absolutely perfect yet in more than sufficient
+shape, was, so far as we know, the luck of Malory only: though some one
+(Map or another) had done a mighty day's work long before in creating
+the figure and the adventures of Lancelot and imagining the later quest
+of the Graal with the figure of Galahad--that "improved Percivale," as
+the seedsmen say.
+
+But besides this power of shaping (or even of merely combining)
+scattered elements into a story, Malory has another--_the_ other of the
+first importance to the novelist proper--in his attraction to character,
+if not exactly in his making up of it. It has been said above that the
+defect of the pure romances--especially those of continental origin--is
+the absence of this. What the Greeks called [Greek: dihanoia]--"sentiment,"
+"thought," "cast of thought," as it has been variously rendered--is even
+more absent from them than plot or character itself: and of its almost
+necessary connection with this latter they often seem to have no idea.
+Very rare is such a touch as that of Sir Amadas being unable at the feast
+to get rid of the memory of the unburied corpse, kept by enemies from the
+kindly earth that would hide it, and the rites that would help it to peace:
+still rarer that in _Guy of Warwick_ when the hero, at the height of
+his fame and in the full enjoyment of his desires, looks from the tower and
+is struck by the selfishness and earthliness of his career. The first
+notion is not "improved" in the original at all, and the second very badly;
+but in most of the others such things do not even exist. Now the greater
+Legend is full of situations which encourage such thoughts, and even of
+expressed thoughts that only need craftsmanship to turn them into the
+cornerstones of character-building, and the jewels, five or fifty words
+long, of literature. The fate and metaphysical aid that determine the
+relations of Tristram and Iseult; the unconscious incest of Arthur and
+Margause with its Greek-tragic consequence; the unrewarded fidelity of
+Palomides, and (an early instance of the soon to be triumphant allegory)
+his fruitless chase of the Beast Glatissant; all these are matters in
+point. But of course the main nursery of such things is the
+Lancelot-and-Guinevere story itself. Nobody has yet made Guinevere a
+person--nobody but Shakespeare could have done so perhaps, though
+Shakespeare's Guinevere would probably have been the greatest woman in
+all art. But Malory has not been the least successful with her: and of
+Lancelot he has made, if only in study, one of the great characters of
+that fictitious world which is so much truer than the real. And let no
+one say that we are reading Tennyson or any one else into Malory. There
+are yet persons, at least at the time this was written not quite
+Methusalahs, who read the _Morte d'Arthur_ before the _Idylls_ appeared
+and who have never allowed even the _Idylls_ to overlay their original
+idea of the most perfect and most gentle of knights.
+
+It is probable indeed that Malory invented little or nothing in the
+various situations, by which the character of Lancelot, and the history
+of his fatal love, are evolved. We know in most cases that this is so.
+It is possible, too, that at first (probably because the possibilities
+had not dawned on him, as it has been admitted they never did very
+consciously) he has not made the most of the introduction of lover and
+lady. But when the interest becomes concentrated, as in the various
+passages of Guinevere's wrath with her lover and their consequences, or
+in the final series of catastrophes, he is fully equal to the occasion.
+We _know_--this time to his credit--how he has improved, in the act of
+borrowing them, the earlier verse-pictures of the final parting of the
+lovers, and there are many other episodes and juxtapositions of which as
+much may be said. That except as to Lancelot's remorse (which after all
+is the great point) there is not much actual talk about motive and
+sentiment is nothing; or nothing but the condition of the time. The
+important point is that, as the electricians say, "the house is wired"
+for the actual installation of character-novelling. There is here the
+complete scenario, and a good deal more, for a novel as long as
+_Clarissa_ and much more interesting, capable of being worked out in the
+manner, not merely of Richardson himself, but of Mr. Meredith or Mr.
+Hardy. It _is_ a great romance, if not the greatest of romances: it has
+a great novel, if not the greatest of novels, written in sympathetic ink
+between the lines, and with more than a little of the writing sometimes
+emerging to view.
+
+Little in the restricted space here available can be, though much might
+be in a larger, said about the remaining attempts in English fiction
+before the middle of the sixteenth century. The later romances, down to
+those of Lord Berners, show the character of the older with a certain
+addition of the "conjuror's supernatural" of the _Amadis_ school. But
+the short verse-tales, especially those of the Robin Hood cycle, and
+some of the purely comic kind, introduce an important variation of
+interest: and even some of the longer, such as that _Tale of Beryn_,
+which used to be included in Chaucer's works, vary the chivalrous model
+in a useful way. Still more important is the influence of the short
+_prose_ tale:--first Latin, as in the _Gesta Romanorum_ (which of course
+had older and positively mediaeval forerunners), then Italian and French.
+The prose saved the writer from verbiage and stock phrase; the shortness
+from the tendency to "watering out" which is the curse of the long verse
+or prose romance. Moreover, to get point and appeal, it was especially
+necessary to _throw up_ the subject--incident, emotion, or whatever it
+was--to bring it out; not merely to meander and palaver about it. But
+language and literature were both too much in a state of transition to
+admit of anything capital being done at this time. It was the great good
+fortune of England, corresponding to that experienced with Chaucer in
+poetry three quarters of a century earlier, that Malory came to give the
+sum and substance of what mediaeval fiction could do in prose. For more,
+the times and the men had to come.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+FROM LYLY TO SWIFT
+
+
+During the dying-off of romance proper, or its transference from verse
+to prose in the late fifteenth and earlier sixteenth century, there is
+not very much to note about prose fiction in England. But, as the
+conditions of modern literature fashioned themselves, a very great
+influence in this as in other departments was no doubt exercised with us
+by Italian, as well as some by Spanish in a way which may be postponed
+for a little. The Italian prose tale had begun to exercise that
+influence as early as Chaucer's time: but circumstances and atmosphere
+were as yet unfavourable for its growth. It is a hackneyed truism that
+Italian society was very much more modern than any other in Europe at
+this time--in fact it would not be a mere paradox to say that it was,
+and continued to be till the later sixteenth, much more modern than it
+has ever been since--or till very recently. By "modern" is here meant
+the kind of society which is fairly cultivated, fairly comfortable,
+fairly complicated with classes not very sharply separated from each
+other, not dominated by any very high ideals, tolerably corrupt, and
+sufficiently business-like. The Italian _novella_, of course, admits
+wild passions and extravagant crimes: but the general tone of it is
+_bourgeois_--at any rate domestic. With its great number of situations
+and motives, presented in miniature, careful work is necessary to bring
+out the effect: and, above all, there is abundant room for study of
+manners, for proverbial and popular wisdom and witticism, for
+"furniture"--to use that word in a wide sense. Above all, the Italian
+mind, like the Greek, had an ethical twist--twist in more senses than
+one, some would say, but that does not matter. Manners, morals,
+motives--these three could not but displace, to some extent, mere
+incident: though there was generally incident of a poignant or piquant
+kind as well. In other words the _novella_ was actually (though still in
+miniature) a novel in nature as well as in name. And these _novelle_
+became, as is generally known, common in English translations after the
+middle of the sixteenth century. Painter's huge _Palace of Pleasure_
+(1566) is only the largest and best known of many translations, single
+and collected, of the Italian _novellieri_ and the French tale-tellers,
+contemporary, or of times more or less earlier.
+
+For some time, as almost everybody knows, these collections of
+translated matter served a purpose--great indeed, but somewhat outside
+their proper department--by furnishing the Elizabethan dramatists with a
+large part--perhaps the larger part--of their subjects. But they very
+soon began to exercise it directly by suggesting the fictitious part of
+the prose pamphlet--a department which, though infinitely less well
+known than the plays, and still not very easy to know, holds almost the
+second position as representing the popular literature of the
+Elizabethan time. And they also had--in one case certainly, in the other
+probably--no little influence upon the two great Elizabethan works which
+in a manner founded the modern novel and the modern romance in
+English--the _Euphues_ of Lyly and the _Arcadia_ of Sir Philip Sidney.
+
+The pamphlet stories (which are themselves often play-connected, as in
+the case of Lodge's _Rosalynde_ and Greene's _Pandosto_) do not require
+much notice, with one exception--Nash's _Jack Wilton or the Unfortunate
+Traveller_, to which some have assigned a position equal, or perhaps
+superior in our particular subject, to that of the _Arcadia_ or that of
+_Euphues_. This seems to the present writer a mistake: but as to appear
+important is (in a not wholly unreal sense) to be so, the piece shall be
+separately considered. The rest are mostly marred by a superabundance of
+rather rudimentary art, and a very poor allowance of matter. There is
+hardly any character, and except in a few pieces, such as Lodge's
+_Margarite of America_, there is little attempt to utilise new scenes
+and conditions. But the whole class has special interest for us in one
+peculiarity which makes it perhaps unreadable to any but students, and
+that is its saturation with the Elizabethan conceit and word-play which
+is sometimes called Euphuism. Nor is this wonderful, considering that
+more than one of these "pamphlets" is directly connected with the matter
+and the personages of _Euphues_ itself. To this famous book, therefore,
+we had better turn.
+
+Some people, it is believed, have denied that _Euphues_ is a novel at
+all; and some of these some have been almost indignant at its being
+called one. It is certainly, with _Rasselas_, the most remarkable
+example, in English, of a novel which is to a great extent deprived of
+the _agremens_ to which we have for some two centuries been accustomed
+in the kind, and, to a still greater, loaded with others which do not
+appeal to us. To put aside altogether its extraordinary and in a way
+epoch-making style, which gives it its main actual place in the history
+of English literature, it is further loaded with didactic digressions
+which, though certain later novelists have been somewhat peccant in the
+kind, have never been quite equalled--no, not in _Rasselas_ itself or
+the _Fool of Quality_. But if anybody, who has the necessary knowledge
+to understand, and therefore the necessary patience to tolerate, these
+knotty knarry envelopes, insertions, and excrescences, will for the
+moment pay no attention to them, but merely strip them off, he will find
+the carcass of a very tolerable novel left behind. The first plot of
+Philautus--Euphues--Lucilla, and the successive jilting of the two
+friends for each other and for Curio, is no mean novel-substance. Not
+Balzac himself, certainly no one of his successors, need disdain it: and
+more than one of them has taken up something like it. The journey from
+Naples to London, and the episode of Fidus and Iffida, could have been
+worked up, in the good old three-volume days, to a most effective second
+volume. And the picture of the court, with the further loves of
+Philautus, Camilla, and the "violet" Frances, would supply a third of
+themselves even if Euphues were left out, though some livelier
+presentation of his character (which Lyly himself was obviously too much
+personally interested to make at all clear) would improve the whole
+immensely. But it was still too early: the thing was not yet to be done.
+Only, I do not know any book in which the possibilities, and even the
+outlines, of this thing were indicated and vaguely sketched earlier in
+any European language, unless it be the _Lucretia and Euryalus_ of AEneas
+Silvius, which is much more confined in its scope.
+
+The fact is that the very confusedness, the many undeveloped sides, of
+_Euphues_, make it much more of an ancestor of the modern novel than if
+it were more of a piece. The _quicquid agunt homines_ is as much the
+province of the novel as of the satire; and there is more than something
+of this as it affected Elizabethan times in _Euphues_. Men's interest in
+morals, politics, and education; their development of the modern idea of
+society; their taste for letters; their conceits and fancies--all these
+appear in it.
+
+The _Arcadia_ stands in a different compartment. _Euphues_ is very much
+_sui generis_: failure as it may be from some points of view, it
+deserves the highest respect for this, and like most other things _sui
+generis_ it was destined to propagate the genus, if only after many
+days. The _Arcadia_ was in intention certainly, and to great extent in
+actual fact, merely a carrying out of the attempt, common all over
+Europe (as a result of the critical searchings of heart of the
+Italians), to practise a new kind--the Heroic Romance of the sub-variety
+called pastoral. The "heroic" idea generally was (as ought to be, but
+perhaps is not, well known) to blend, after a fashion, classical and
+romantic characteristics--to substitute something like the classic unity
+of fable or plot for the mere "meandering" of romantic story, and to pay
+at least as much attention to character as the classics had paid,
+instead of neglecting it altogether, as had recently though not always
+been the case in Romance. But the scheme retained on the other hand the
+variety of incident and appeal of this latter: and especially assigned
+to Love the high place which Romance had given it. As for the
+Pastoral--that is almost a story to itself, and a story which has been
+only once (by Mr. W.W. Greg) satisfactorily, and then not quite
+completely, told. It is enough to say here, and as affecting our own
+subject, that it supplied a new opportunity of gratifying the passion of
+the Renaissance for imitating antiquity, at the same time permitting to
+no small extent the introduction of things that were really romantic,
+and above all providing a convention. The Heroic romance generally and
+the Pastoral in particular went directly back to the Greek romances of
+Heliodorus and Longus: but they admitted many new and foreign elements.
+
+At the same time, bastard as the heroic romance was, it could not but
+exercise an important influence on the future of fiction, inasmuch as it
+combined, or attempted to combine, with classical unity and mediaeval
+variety the more modern interest of manners and (sometimes) personality.
+Sidney's attempt (which, it must be remembered, is not certainly known
+to be wholly his as it stands, and _is_ certainly known not to have been
+revised by him for publication) exercised a very great influence in
+English. For its popularity was enormous, and it doubtless served as
+shoehorn to draw on that of the English translations of French and
+Spanish romance which supplied, during the greater part of the
+seventeenth century, the want of original composition of the kind. The
+unconscionable amount of talk and of writing "about it and about it"
+which _Euphues_ and the minor Euphuist romances display is at least as
+prominent in the _Arcadia_: and this talk rarely takes a form congenial
+to the modern novel reader's demands. Moreover, though there really is a
+plot, and a sufficient amount of incident, this reader undoubtedly, and
+to no small extent justly, demands that both incident and plot shall be
+more disengaged from their framework--that they should be brought into
+higher relief, should stand out more than is the case. Yet further, the
+pure character-interest is small--is almost nonexistent: and the
+rococo-mosaic of manners and sentiment which was to prove the curse of
+the heroic romance generally prevents much interest being felt in that
+direction.[1] It would also be impossible to devise a style less suited
+to prose narrative, except of a very peculiar kind and on a small scale,
+than that either of _Euphues_ or of the _Arcadia_, which, though an
+uncritical tradition credits it with driving out Lyly's, is practically
+only a whelp of the same litter. Embarrassed, heavy, rhetorical, it has
+its place in the general evolution of English prose, and a proper and
+valuable place too. But it is bad even for pure romance purposes: and
+nearly hopeless for the panoramic and kaleidoscopic variety which should
+characterise the novel. To the actual successors of the _Arcadia_ in
+English we shall come presently.
+
+    [1] As a work of general literature, the attraction of the
+    _Arcadia_ is of course much enhanced by, if it does not chiefly
+    depend upon, its abundant, varied, and sometimes charming
+    verse-insets. But, as a novel, it cannot count these.
+
+_The Unfortunate Traveller_ is of much less importance than the other
+two. It has obtained such reputation as it possesses, partly because of
+its invention or improvement of the fable of "Surrey and Geraldine";
+more, and more justly, because it does work up a certain amount of
+historical material--the wars of Henry VIII. in French Flanders--into
+something premonitory (with a little kindness on the part of the
+premonished) of the great and long missed historical novel; still more
+for something else. Nash, with his quick wit, seems to have been really
+the first to perceive the capabilities of that foreign travel and
+observation of manners which was becoming common, stripped of the
+special atmosphere of pilgrimage which had formerly enveloped it. Even
+here, he had had the "notion of the notion" supplied to him by Lyly in
+_Euphues_: and a tolerably skilful advocate would not have so very much
+difficulty in claiming the book as one of the tribe of Euphuist
+pamphlets. But Jack Wilton the "traveller" is a little more of a person
+than the pedagogic Euphues and the shadowy Philautus. At any rate he has
+a very strong anticipation of Defoe, whose "Cavalier" was not improbably
+suggested by him. But Nash has neither the patience of Defoe, nor that
+singular originality, which accompanies in the author of _Moll Flanders_
+a certain inability to make the most of it. _The Unfortunate Traveller_
+is a sort of compilation or congeries of current _fabliaux, novelle_,
+and _facetiae_, with the introduction of famous actual persons of the
+time, from the crowned heads of the period, through Luther and Aretine
+downwards, to give bait and attraction. Sometimes it reminds one of a
+working up of the _Colloquies_ of Erasmus: three centuries earlier than
+_The Cloister and the Hearth_, with much less genius than Charles
+Reade's, and still more without his illegitimate advantage of actual
+novels behind him for nearly half the time. But it gives us "disjectae
+membra _novellae_" rather than a novel itself: and the oftener one reads
+it the more clear one is that the time for writing novels had not yet
+come. The materials are there; the desire to utilise--and even a faint
+vague idea of _how_ to utilise--them is there; but the art is almost
+completely absent. Even regarded as an early attempt in the "picaresque"
+manner, it is abortive and only half organised.
+
+The subject of the English "Heroic" Romance, in the wide sense, is one
+which has been very little dealt with. Dunlop neglected it rather
+surprisingly, and until Professor Raleigh's chapter on the subject there
+was little of a satisfactory kind to be found about it anywhere. It
+must, however, be admitted that the abstainers from it have been to some
+extent justified in their abstention. The subject is a curious one: and
+it has an important place in the history of the Novel, because it shows
+at once how strong was the _nisus_ towards prose fiction and how
+surprisingly difficult writers seem, nevertheless, to have found it to
+hit upon anything really good, much more anything really original in
+kind. For it is hardly too much to say that this century of attempt--we
+cannot call it a century of invention--from Ford to Congreve, does not
+add a single piece of any considerable merit to the roll of English
+books. As for a masterpiece, there is nothing in respect of which the
+use of such a word would not be purely ridiculous. And yet the attempts
+are interesting to the historian, and should not be uninteresting to the
+historical student of literature. One or two of them have a sort of
+shadowy name and place in literary history already.
+
+In tracing their progress and character, we must allow for two native
+models: and for three foreign sources, one ancient, two modern, of
+influence. _The Arcadia_ and _Euphues_, the former continuously, the
+latter by revival after an interval, exercised very great effect in the
+first half of the seventeenth century, during at least the earlier part
+of which the vogue of _Amadis_ and its successors, as Englished by
+Anthony Munday and others, likewise continued. The Greek romances also
+had much to do with the matter: for the Elizabethan translators had
+introduced them to the vulgar, and the seventeenth century paid a good
+deal of attention to Greek. Then, when that century itself was on its
+way, the pastoral romance of D'Urfe first, and the Calprenede-Scudery
+productions in the second place, came to give a fresh impulse, and
+something of a new turn. The actual translations of French and Spanish
+romance, shorter and longer, good, bad, and indifferent, are of immense
+bulk and doubtless excited imitation: but we cannot possibly deal with
+them here. A bare list would fill a chapter. But some work of more or
+less (generally less) originality, in at least adaptation, calls for a
+little individual notice: and some general characterisation may be
+added.
+
+It may be desirable to prelude the story by a reminder to the reader
+that the _general_ characteristics of these various sources were
+"harlequin" in their diversity of apparent colour. The _Amadis_ romances
+and, indeed, all the later examples of that great kind, such as _Arthur
+of Little Britain_, which Berners translated, were distinguished on the
+one side by a curious convention of unsmooth running of the course of
+love, on the other sometimes by a much greater licence of morality than
+their predecessors, and always by a prodigality of the "conjuror's
+supernatural"--witches and giants and magic black and white. The Spanish
+"picaresque" story was pretty real but even less decent: and its French
+imitations (though not usually reaching the licence of the short tale,
+which clung to _fabliau_ ways in this respect) imitated it here also.
+The French heroic romance, on the other hand, observed the most
+scrupulous propriety in language and situation: but aggravated the
+Amadisian troubling of the course of true love, and complicated
+everything, very frequently if not invariably, by an insinuated "key"
+interest of identification of the ancient personages selected as heroes
+and heroines with modern personages of quality and distinction.
+
+Emanuel Ford (whom the British Museum catalogue insists on spelling
+Ford_e_ and of whom very little seems to be known) published _Parismus,
+Prince of Bohemia_, as early as 1598. In less than a hundred years
+(1696) it had reached its fourteenth edition, and it continued to be
+popular in abridged and chap-booked form[2] far into the eighteenth
+century. (It is sometimes called _Parismus and Parismenus_: the second
+part being, as very commonly in romances of the class after the _Amadis_
+pattern, occupied largely with the adventures of the son of the hero of
+the first.) On the whole, _Parismus_, though it has few pretensions to
+elegance of style, and though some delicate tastes have been shocked at
+certain licences of incident, description, and phrase in it, is quite
+the best of our bunch in this kind. It is, in general conception, pure
+_Amadis_ of the later and slightly degraded type. Laurana, the heroine
+(of whom a peculiarly hideous portrait adorns the black-letter editions
+side by side with Parismus himself, who is rather a "jolly gentleman")
+is won with much less difficulty and in much less time than Oriana--but
+separations and difficulties duly follow in "desolate isles" and the
+like. And though Parismus himself is less of an Amadis than Amadis, the
+"contrast of friends," founded by that hero and Galaor, is kept up by
+his association with a certain Pollipus--"a man of his hands" if ever
+there was one, for with them he literally wrings the neck of the
+enchantress Bellona, who has enticed him to embrace her. There is plenty
+of the book, as there always should be in its kind (between 400 and 500
+very closely printed quarto pages), and its bulk is composed of
+proportionately plentiful fighting and love-making and of a very much
+smaller proportion of what schoolboys irreverently call "jaw" than is
+usual in the class. If it were not for the black letter (which is trying
+to the eyes) I should not myself object to have no other reading than
+_Parismus_ for some holiday evenings, or even after pretty tough days of
+literary and professional work. _The Famous History of Montelion, the
+Knight of the Oracle_ (1633?) proclaims its Amadisian type even more
+clearly: but I have only read it in an abridged edition of the close of
+the century. I should imagine that _in extenso_ it was a good deal
+duller than _Parismus_. And of course the comparative praise which has
+been given to that book must be subject to the reminder that it is what
+it is--a romance of disorderly and what some people call childish
+adventure, and of the above-ticketed "conjuror's supernatural." If
+anybody cannot read _Amadis_ itself, he certainly will not read
+_Parismus_: and perhaps not everybody who can manage the original--perhaps
+not even everybody who can manage _Palmerin_--could put up with Ford's
+copy. I can take this Ford as I find him: but I am not sure that I would
+go much lower.
+
+    [2] It is pleasant to remember that one of the chief publishers
+    of these things in the late seventeenth century was _W.
+    Thackeray_.
+
+_Ornatus and Artesia_ (1607?), on the other hand--his second or third
+book--strikes me as owing more to Heliodorus than to Montalvo, or
+Lobeira, or whoever was the author of the great romance of the last
+chivalric type. There are more intricacies in it; the heroine plays a
+rather more important part; there is even something of a nearer approach
+to modern novel-ways in this production, which reappeared at "Grub
+Street near the Upper Pump" in the year 1650. Ornatus sees his mistress
+asleep and in a kind of deshabille, employs a noble go-between, Adellena
+(a queer spelling of "Adelina" which may be intentional), is rejected
+with apparent indignation, of course; writes elaborate letters in vain,
+but overhears Artesia soliloquising confession of her love for him and
+disguises himself as a girl, Silvia. Then the villain of the piece,
+Floretus, to obtain the love of this supposed Silvia, murders a person
+of distinction and plots to poison Artesia herself. Ornatus-Silvia is
+banished: and all sorts of adventures and disguises follow, entirely in
+the Greek style. The book is not very long, extending only to signature
+R in a very small quarto. Except that it is much less lively and
+considerably less "free," it reminds one rather in type of Kynaston's
+verse _Leoline and Sydanis_. In fact the verse and prose romances of the
+time are very closely connected: and Chamberlayne's _Pharonnida_--far
+the finest production of the English "heroic" school in prose, verse, or
+drama--was, when the fancy for abridging set in, condensed into a tiny
+prose _Eromena_. But _Ornatus and Artesia_, if more modern, more
+decent, and less extravagant than _Parismus_, is nothing like so
+interesting to read. It is indeed quite possible that there is, if not
+in it, in its popularity, a set-back to the _Arcadia_ itself, which had
+been directly followed in Lady Mary Wroth's _Urania_ (1621), and to
+which (by the time of the edition noted) Charles I.'s admiration--so
+indecently and ignobly referred to by Milton--had given a fresh
+attraction for all good anti-Puritans. That an anti-Puritan should be a
+romance-lover was almost a necessity.
+
+When the French "heroics" began to appear it was only natural that they
+should be translated, and scarcely less so that they should be imitated
+in England. For they were not far off the _Arcadia_ pattern: and they
+were a distinct and considerable effort to supply the appetite for
+fiction which has been dwelt upon. But except for this, and for
+fashion's sake, they did not contain much that would appeal to an
+English taste: and it is a little significant that one great reader of
+them who is known to us--Mrs. Pepys--was a Frenchwoman. Indeed, save for
+the very considerable "pastime" of a kind that they gave to a time, much
+of which required passing, it is difficult to understand their
+attraction for English readers. Their interminable talk never (till
+perhaps very recently) was a thing to suit our nation: and the "key"
+interest strikes us at any rate as of the most languid kind. But they
+_were_ imitated as well as translated: and the three most famous of the
+imitations are the work of men of mark in their different ways. These
+are the _Parthenissa_ (1654) of Roger Boyle, Lord Broghill and Earl of
+Orrery; the _Aretina_ (1661) of Sir George Mackenzie; and the _Pandion
+and Amphigeneia_ (1665) of "starch Johnny" Crowne.
+
+Boyle was a strong Francophile in literature, and his not inconsiderable
+influence on the development of the heroic _play_ showed it only less
+decidedly than his imitation of the Scudery romance. I cannot say that I
+have read _Parthenissa_ through: and I can say that I do not intend to
+do so. It is enough to have read Sainte Madeleine of the Ink-Desert
+herself, without reading bad imitations of her. But I have read enough
+to know that _Parthenissa_ would never give me anything like the
+modified satisfaction that is given by _Parismus_: and after all, if a
+man will not take the trouble to finish writing his book (which Orrery
+never did) why should his readers take the trouble even to finish
+reading what he has written? The scene is Parthia, with alternation to
+Syria, and diversions and episodes elsewhere: and though there is a
+certain amount of fighting, the staple is quite decorous but exceedingly
+dull love-making, conducted partly in the endless dialogue (or rather
+automatic monologue) already referred to, and partly in letters more
+"handsome" even than Mr. Frank Churchill's, and probably a good deal
+more sincere in their conventional way, but pretty certainly less
+amusing. The original attraction indeed of this class of novel
+consisted, and, in so far as it still exists, may be said to consist, in
+noble sentiment, elegantly expressed. It deserved, and in a manner
+deserves, the commendatory part of Aramis's rebuke to Porthos for
+expressing impatience with the compliments between Athos and D'Artagnan
+at their first and hostile rencounter.[3] Otherwise there is not much to
+be said for it. It does not indeed deserve Johnson's often quoted remark
+as to Richardson (on whom when we come to him we shall have something
+more to say in connection with these heroic romances), if any one were
+to read _Parthenissa_ for the story he would not, unless he were a very
+impulsive person, "hang himself." He would simply, after a number of
+pages varying with the individual, cease to read it.
+
+    [3] "Quant a moi, je trouve les choses que ces messieurs se
+    disent fort bien dites et tout a fait dignes de deux
+    gentilhommes."
+
+The work of the great Lord Advocate who was traduced by Covenanting
+malice is in a certain sense more interesting: and that not merely
+because it is much shorter. _Aretina_ or _The Serious Romance_, opens
+with an "apology for Romances" generally, which goes far to justify
+Dryden's high opinion of Mackenzie as a critic. But it cannot be said to
+be much--it is a little--more interesting as a story than _Parthenissa_,
+and it is written in a most singular lingo--not displaying the racy
+quaintness of Mackenzie's elder contemporary and fellow-loyalist
+Urquhart, but a sort of Scotified and modernised Euphuism rather
+terrible to peruse. A library is "a bibliotheck richly tapestried with
+books." Somebody possesses, or is compared to "a cacochymick stomach,
+which transubstantiates the best of meats in its own malignant humour."
+And when the hero meets a pair of cannibal ruffians he confronts one and
+"pulling out a pistol, sends from its barrel two balls clothed in
+Death's livery, and by them opens a sallyport to his soul to fly out of
+that nasty prison." A certain zest may be given by these oddities, but
+it hardly lasts out more than 400 pages: and though the lives of Aretina
+and Philaretes are more simply and straightforwardly told than might be
+thought likely--though there are ingenious disguises of contemporary
+politics, and though Mackenzie was both a wise man and a wit--it is more
+certain than ever, when we close his book, that this is not the way of
+the world, nor the man to walk in that way.
+
+_Pandion and Amphigeneia_ is the inferior in importance of both these
+books. Crowne had perhaps rather more talent than it is usual to credit
+him with, but he does not show it here. I think Sir Walter Raleigh is
+quite right in regarding the book as more or less traced over the
+_Arcadia_: and it may be said to have all the defects of Sidney's
+scheme--which, it is fair once more to observe, we do not possess in any
+form definitely settled by its author--with none of the merits of his
+ornament, his execution, and his atmosphere of poetic fancy.
+
+The fact is that this heroic romance was foredoomed to inefficiency. It
+was not a genuine _kind_ at all: but a sort of patchwork of imitations
+of imitations--a mule which, unlike the natural animal, was itself bred,
+and bred in and in, of mules for generations back. It was true to no
+time, to no country, to no system of manners, life, or thought. Its
+oldest ancestor in one sense, though not in another--the Greek
+romance--was itself the growth of the latest and most artificial period
+of the literature to which it belonged. The pure mediaeval romance of
+chivalry was another, but of this it had practically nothing left. The
+_Amadis_ class, the late Renaissance pastorals, the immediately
+preceding or accompanying French romances of the Scudery type, were, in
+increasing degree, hybrid, artificial, and dead-alive. Impotence and
+sterility in every sense could but be its portion. Of the two great
+qualities of the novel--Variety and Life--it had never succeeded in
+attaining any considerable share, and it had now the merest show of
+variety and no life at all. There is hardly anything to be said in its
+favour, except that its vogue, as has been observed, testified to the
+craving for prose fiction, and kept at least a simulacrum of that
+fiction before the public. How far there may be any real, though
+metaphysical, connection between the great dramatic output of this
+seventeenth century in England and its small production in novel is a
+question not to be discussed here. But undoubtedly the fact of the
+contrast is a "document in the case," and one of the most important in
+its own direction; completing the testimony of the mediaeval period in
+the other (that as romance dwindled, drama grew) and leading up to that
+of the eighteenth century when drama dwindled and the novel grew. The
+practice of Afra Behn in both, and the fact that Congreve, the greatest
+English dramatist of the close of the century, began with a novel and
+deserted the style for drama, are also interesting, and combine
+themselves very apparently with the considerations just glanced at. But
+Congreve and Afra must be postponed for a moment.
+
+The two last discussed books, with _Eromena_ and some others, are
+posterior to the Restoration in date, but somewhat earlier in type. The
+reign of Charles II., besides the "heroic" romances and Bunyan, and one
+most curious little production to be noticed presently, is properly
+represented in fiction by two writers, to whom, by those who like to
+make discoveries, considerable importance has sometimes been assigned in
+the history of the English Novel. These are Richard Head and Afra Behn,
+otherwise "the divine Astraea." It is, however, something of an injustice
+to class them together: for Afra was a woman of very great ability, with
+a suspicion of genius, while Head was at the very best a bookmaker of
+not quite the lowest order, though pretty near it. Of _The English
+Rogue_ (1665-1680), which earns him his place here, only the first part,
+and a certain section of the fourth, are even attributed to him by
+Francis Kirkman, the Curll of his generation, who published the thing at
+intervals and admittedly wrote parts of it himself. It is quite openly a
+picaresque novel: and imitated not merely from the Spanish originals but
+from Sorel's _Francion_, which had appeared in France some forty years
+before. Yet, if we compare this latter curious book with Head's we shall
+see how very far behind, even with forty years' advantage in time, was
+the country which, in the next century, was practically to create the
+modern novel. _Francion_ is not a work of genius: and it does not
+pretend to much more than the usual picaresque farrago of adventure,
+unmoral and sometimes rather cruel, but comic of a kind, strung together
+with little art in fable, and less in character. But the author is to
+some extent "cumbered about serving." He names his characters, tries to
+give them some vague personality, furnishes them with some roughly and
+sketchily painted scenery, and gives us not merely told tales, but
+occasionally something distantly resembling conversation. Head takes no
+trouble of this kind: and Kirkman does not seem to think that any such
+thing is required of him. Very few of the characters of _The English
+Rogue_ have so much as a name to their backs: they are "a prentice," "a
+master," "a mistress," "a servant," "a daughter," "a tapster," etc. They
+are invested with hardly the slightest individuality: the very hero is a
+scoundrel as characterless as he is nameless:[4] he is the mere thread
+which keeps the beads of the story together after a fashion. These beads
+themselves, moreover, are only the old anecdotes of "coney-catching,"
+over-reaching, and worse, which had separately filled a thousand
+_fabliaux, novelle_, "jests," and so forth: and which are now flung
+together in gross, chiefly by the excessively clumsy and unimaginative
+expedient of making the personages tell long strings of them as their
+own experience. When anything more is wanted, accounts of the manners of
+foreign countries, taken from "voyage-and-travel" books; of the tricks
+of particular trades (as here of piratical book-selling); of anything
+and everything that the writer's dull fancy can think of, are foisted
+in. The thing is in four volumes, and it seems that a fifth was intended
+as a close: but there is no particular reason why it should not have
+extended to forty or fifty, nay to four or five hundred. It could have
+had no real end, just as it has no real beginning or middle.
+
+    [4] He _has_ a name, Meriton Latroon, but it is practically
+    never used in the actual story.
+
+One other point deserves notice. The tone of the Spanish and French
+picaresque novel had never been high: but it is curiously degraded in
+this English example. Furetiere honestly called his book _Roman
+Bourgeois_. Head might have called his, if he had written in French,
+_Roman Canaille_. Not merely the sentiments but the very outward
+trappings and accidents of gentility are banished from the book. Yet we
+do not get any real reality in compensation. Head is no Defoe: he can
+give us the company that Colonel Jack kept in his youth and Moll
+Flanders in her middle age: but he makes not the slightest attempt to
+give us Moll or Jack, or even Moll's or Jack's habit, environment,
+novel-furniture of any kind whatsoever. The receipt to make _The English
+Rogue_ is simply this: "Take from two to three dozen Elizabethan
+pamphlets of different kinds, but principally of the 'coney-catching'
+variety, and string them together by making a batch of shadowy
+personages tell them to each other when they are not acting in them."
+Except in a dim sort of idea that a novel should have some bulk and
+substance, it is difficult to see any advance whatever in this
+muck-heap--which the present writer, having had to read it a second time
+for the present purpose, most heartily hopes to be able to leave
+henceforth undisturbed on his shelves.
+
+Not in this fashion must the illustrious Afra be spoken of. It is true
+that--since it ceased to be the fashion merely to dismiss her with a
+"fie-fie!" which her prose work, at any rate, by no means merits--there
+has sometimes been a tendency rather to overdo praise of her, not merely
+in reference to her lyrics, some of which can never be praised too
+highly, but in reference to these novels. _Oroonoko_ or _The Royal
+Slave_, with its celebration of the virtues of a noble negro and his
+love for his Imoinda, and his brutal ill-treatment and death by torture
+at the hands of white murderers, undoubtedly took the fancy of the
+public. But to see at once Rousseau and Byron in it, Chateaubriand and
+Wilberforce and I know not what else, is rather in the "lunatic, lover,
+and poet" order of vision. Even Head and Kirkman, as we have observed,
+had perceived the advantage of foreign scenery and travel to vary their
+matter; Afra had herself been in Guiana; and, as she was of a very
+inflammable disposition, it is quite possible that some Indian Othello
+had caught her fresh imagination. On the other hand, there was the
+heroic romance, with all its sighs and flames, still the rage: and a
+much less nimble intellect than Afra's, with a much less cosmopolitan
+experience, might easily see the use of transposing it into a new key.
+Still, there is no doubt that _The Royal Slave_ and even its companions
+are far above the dull, dirty, and never more than half alive stuff of
+_The English Rogue. Oroonoko_ is a story, not a pamphlet or a mere
+"coney-catching" jest. To say that it wants either contraction or
+expansion; less "talk about it" and more actual conversation; a stronger
+projection of character and other things; is merely to say that it is an
+experiment in the infancy of the novel, not a following out of secrets
+already divulged. It certainly is the first prose story in English which
+can be ranked with things that already existed in foreign literatures.
+Nor is it the only one of the batch in which advance is seen. "The King
+of Bantam," for instance, is the account of an "extravagant," though not
+quite a fool, who is "coney-catched" in the old manner. But it opens in
+a fashion very different indeed from the old manner. "This money is
+certainly a most devilish thing! I'm sure the want of it had been like
+to ruin my dear Philibella!" and the succeeding adventures are pretty
+freshly told. The trick of headlong overture was a favourite with Afra.
+"The Adventure of the Black Lady" begins, "About the beginning of last
+June, as near as I can remember, Bellamira came to town from Hampshire."
+It is a trick of course: and here probably borrowed from the French: but
+the line which separates trick from artistic device is an exceedingly
+narrow and winding one. At any rate, this plunging into the middle of
+things wakes up the reader's attention, and does not permit him to doze.
+"The Lucky Mistake," on the other hand, opens with a little landscape,
+"The river Loire has on its delightful banks, etc." "The Fair Jilt," a
+Bandello-like story, begins with an exaltation of Love: and so on. Now
+these things, though they may seem matters of course to the mere modern
+reader, were not matters of course then. Afra very likely imitated; her
+works have never been critically edited; and have not served as field
+for much origin-hunting. But whether she followed others or not, she led
+her own division. All these things and others are signs of an awakened
+conscience--of a sense of the fact that fiction, to be literature, must
+be something more than the relation of a bare fact, tragic, comic, or
+neutral--that the novelist is a cook, and must prepare and serve his
+materials with a sauce as much his own as possible, of plot,
+arrangement, character-drawing, scenery, conversation, reflection, and
+what not. That conversation itself--the subtlest instrument of all and
+the most effective for constructing character--is so little developed,
+can only, I think, be accounted for by supposing Afra and others to be
+under the not unnatural mistake that conversation especially belonged to
+the drama, which was still the most popular form of literature, and in
+which she herself was a copious practitioner. But this mistake was not
+long to prevail: and it had no effect on that great contemporary of hers
+who would, it is to be feared, have used the harshest language
+respecting her, and to whom we now come.
+
+It is impossible to share, and not very easy even to understand, the
+scruples of those who would not admit John Bunyan to a place in the
+hierarchy and the pedigree of the English novel, or would at best grant
+him an outside position in relation to it. Their exquisite reasons, so
+far as one can discern them, appear to be (or to concern) the facts that
+_The Pilgrim's Progress_ and _The Holy War_ are religious, and that they
+are allegories.[5] It may be humbly suggested that by applying the
+double rule to verse we can exclude _Paradise Lost_ and the _Faerie
+Queene_ from the succession of English Poetry, whereby no doubt we
+shall be finely holden in understanding the same: while it is by no
+means certain that, if the exclusion of allegory be pushed home, we must
+not cancel _Don Quixote_ from the list of the world's novels. Even in
+prose, to speak plainly, the hesitation--unless it comes from the
+foolish dislike to things religious, as such, which has been the bigotry
+of the last generation or two--comes from the almost equally foolish
+determination to draw up arbitrary laws of literary kind. Discarding
+prejudice and punctilio, every one must surely see that, in diminishing
+measure, even _The Holy War_ is a novel, and that _The Pilgrim's
+Progress_ has every one of the four requisites--plot, character,
+description, and dialogue--while one of these requisites--character with
+its accessory manners--is further developed in the _History of Mr.
+Badman_ after a fashion for which we shall look vainly in any division
+of European literature (except drama) before it. This latter fact has
+indeed obtained a fair amount of recognition since Mr. Froude drew the
+attention of the general reader to it in his book on Bunyan, in the
+"English Men of Letters" series, five-and-twenty years ago: but it must
+have struck careful readers of the great tinker's minor works long
+before. Indeed there are very good internal reasons for thinking that no
+less a person than Thackeray must have known _Mr. Badman_. This
+wonderful little sketch, however--the related history of a man who is an
+utter rascal both in family and commercial relations, but preserves his
+reputation intact and does not even experience any deathbed
+repentance--is rather an unconscious study for a character in a novel--a
+sketch of a _bourgeois_ Barnes Newcome--than anything more. It has the
+old drawback of being narrated, not acted or spoken at first hand: and
+so, though it is in a sense Fielding at nearly his best, more than half
+a century before Fielding attempted _Joseph Andrews_, no more need be
+said of it. So, too, the religious element and the allegory _are_ too
+prominent in _The Holy War_--the novelist's desk is made too much of a
+pulpit in large parts of it. Other parts, concerning the inhabitants of
+Mansoul and their private affairs, are domestic novel-writing of nearly
+the pure kind: and if _The Pilgrim's Progress_ did not exist, it would
+be worth while to pick them out and discuss them. But, as it most
+fortunately does exist, this is not needful.
+
+    [5] The heroic kind had lent itself very easily and obviously to
+    allegory. Not very long before Bunyan English literature had
+    been enriched with a specimen of this double variety which for
+    Sir W. Raleigh "marks the lowest depth to which English romance
+    writing sank." I do not know that I could go quite so far as
+    this in regard to the book--_Bentivolio and Urania_ by Nathaniel
+    Ingelo. The first edition of this appeared in 1660: the second
+    (there seem to have been at least four) lies before me at this
+    moment dated 1669, or nine years before the _Progress_ itself.
+    You require a deep-sea-lead of uncommonly cunning construction
+    to sound, register, and compare the profundities of the bathos
+    in novels. The book has about 400 folio pages very closely
+    packed with type, besides an alphabetical index full of Hebrew
+    and Greek derivations of its names--"Gnothisauton," "Achamoth,"
+    "Ametameletus," "Dogmapernes," and so forth. Its principles are
+    inexorably virtuous; there is occasional action interspersed
+    among its innumerable discourses, and I think it not improbable
+    that if it were only possible to read it, it might do one some
+    good. But it would not be the good of the novel.
+
+The only fault with the novel-character of the greater book which might
+possibly be found by a critic who did not let the allegory bite him, and
+was not frightened by the religion, is that there is next to no love
+element in it, though there are wedding bells. Mercy is indeed quite
+nice enough for a heroine: but Bunyan might have bestowed her better
+than on a young gentleman so very young that he had not long before made
+himself (no doubt allegorically) ill with unripe and unwholesome fruit.
+But if he had done so, the suspicions of his brethren--_they_ were acute
+enough as it was not to mistake the character of the book, whatever
+modern critics may do--would have been even more unallayable. And, as it
+is, the "alluring countenance" does shed not a little grace upon the
+story, or at least upon the Second Part: while the intenser character of
+the First hardly requires this. Any other lack is, to the present
+writer, imperceptible. The romance interest of quest, adventure,
+achievement, is present to the fullest degree: and what is sometimes
+called the pure novel interest of character and conversation is present
+in a degree not lower. It must be accepted as a great blessing, even by
+those who regard Puritanism as an almost unmitigated curse, that its
+principles forbade Bunyan to think of choosing the profane and
+abominable stage-play as the form of his creation. We had had our fill
+of good plays, and were beginning to drink of that which was worse:
+while we had no good novels and wanted them. Of course the large amount
+of actual "Tig and Tirry" dialogue (as Dr. Johnson would say) is
+probably one of the things which have made precisians shy of accepting
+the _Progress_ for what it really is. But we must remember that this
+encroachment on the dramatic province was exactly what was wanted to
+remove the reproach of fiction. The inability to put actual conversation
+of a lively kind in the mouths of personages has been indicated as one
+of the great defects of the novel up to this time. Except Cervantes, it
+is difficult to think of any novelist who had shown himself able to
+supply the want. Bunyan can do it as few have done it even since his
+time. The famous dialogue of Christian and By-ends is only the best--if
+it is the best--of scores nearly or quite as good. The curious
+intellectual flaccidity of the present day seems to be "put off" by the
+"ticket" names; but no one who has the true literary sense cares for
+these one way or another, or is more disturbed by them than if they were
+Wilkins and Jones. Just as Coleridge observed that to enjoy some kinds
+of poetry you must suspend disbelief, so, with mere literary fashions,
+you must suspend disagreement. We should not call By-ends By-ends now:
+and whether we should do better or worse nobody, as Plato says, knows
+but the Deity. But the best of us would be hard put to it to make
+By-ends reveal his By-endishness more perfectly than he does by his
+conversation, and without any ticket-name at all.
+
+Not less remarkable, and only a little less new, is the vividness and
+sufficiency of the scene painting and setting. It has been said that
+the great novelists not only provide us with a world of friends more
+real and enjoyable than the actual folk we know, but also with a world
+for those friends to live in, more real and far more enjoyable than the
+world in which we ourselves sojourn. And this is well seen of Christian.
+The Slough of Despond and the terrible overhanging hill; the gateway and
+the Interpreter's House and the House Beautiful; the ups and downs of
+the road, and the arbours and the giants' dens: Beulah and the
+Delectable Mountains:--one knows them as one knows the country that one
+has walked over, and perhaps even better. There is no description for
+description's sake: yet nothing is wanting of the descriptive kind.
+
+Yet all these things are--as they should be--only subsidiary to the main
+interest of the Pilgrimage itself. Once more, one may fear that it is no
+good sign of the wits of the age that readers should be unable to
+discard familiarity with the argument of the story. It is the way in
+which that argument is worked out and illustrated that is the thing. I
+have never myself, since I became thoroughly acquainted with Lydgate's
+Englishing of Deguilevile's _Pilgrimage of the Soul of Man_, had any
+doubt that--in some way or other, direct or indirect, at tenth or
+twentieth hand perhaps--Bunyan was acquainted with it: but this is of no
+importance. He might undoubtedly have got all his materials straight out
+of the Bible. But his working of them up is all his own, and is
+wonderful. Here, to begin with, is the marvel not merely of a
+continuation which is not a falling off, but of a repetition of the same
+general scheme with different but closely connected personages, which is
+entirely free from monotony. One is so accustomed to the facts that
+perhaps it hardly strikes one at first how extraordinarily audacious the
+attempt is: nay, the very success of it may blind all but critics to
+the difficulty. It is no wonder that people tried further continuations
+and further complications: still less wonder that they utterly failed.
+Probably even Bunyan himself could not have "done it a third time." But
+he did it these twice with such vividness of figure and action; such
+completeness of fable; such sufficiency of behaviour and of speech as
+have scarcely ever been equalled. As ideal as Spenser, as real as Defoe:
+such is Bunyan. And he shows this realism and this idealism in a prose
+narrative, bringing the thoughts and actions and characters and speech
+of fictitious human beings before his readers--for their inspection
+perhaps; for their delight certainly. If this is not the being and the
+doing of a novelist this deponent very humbly declareth that he knoweth
+not what the being and the doing of a novelist are.
+
+We must now turn to two small but noteworthy attempts at the kind, which
+have been referred to above.
+
+In 1668 there appeared a very curious little book (entitled at great
+length after the manner of the times, but more shortly called _The Isle
+of Pines_), which is important in the literary ancestry of Defoe and
+Swift and not unimportant in itself. Its author was Henry Neville, of
+the Nevilles of Billingbeare, son of one Sir Henry and grandson of
+another, the grandfather having been of some mark in diplomacy and
+courtiership in late Elizabethan and early Jacobean times. The grandson
+had had a life of some stir earlier. Born in 1620, and educated at
+Merton and University Colleges, he had left Oxford without a degree, had
+taken the Parliamentary side, but as a rigid Republican and
+anti-Cromwellite; had been a member of the Rota, and after the
+Restoration had been arrested in 1663 for supposed treasonable
+practices, but escaped serious punishment. He lived quietly for more
+than thirty years longer and died in 1694. Besides _The Isle of Pines_
+he wrote satirical tracts (the _Parliament of Ladies_ being the best
+known), translated Machiavelli, and was evidently a man of parts,
+though, like his friend Harrington, something of a "crank." He seems
+also to have been, as some others of the extremer Puritans certainly
+were, pretty loose in his construction of moral laws.
+
+_The Isle_ is a very short book of thirty-one quarto pages: but there is
+a good deal in it, and it must have been very carefully written. A
+certain Cornelius van Sloetten writes, "supported by letters from
+Amsterdam," how a Dutch ship, driven far out of reckoning in the
+Southern Ocean, comes to a "fourth island, near Terra Australis
+Incognita," which is inhabited by white people, speaking English, but
+mostly naked. The headman is a certain William Pine, whose grandfather,
+George, has left a written account of the origin of the community. This
+relates how George was wrecked on the island, the ship perishing "with
+man and mouse," except himself, his master's daughter, two white
+maidservants, and a negro girl. The island proves pleasant and
+habitable: and George, to prevent unfairness and ill-feeling, unites
+himself to all his female companions, the quintet living in perfect
+harmony. Thirty-seven children result: and these at first necessarily
+intermarry; but after this first generation, a rule is made that
+brothers and sisters may not unite--the descendants of the four original
+wives forming clans who may marry into the others but not into their
+own. A wider legal code of fair stringency is arranged, with the
+sanction of capital and other punishments: and things go so well that
+the patriarch musters a tribe of 565 persons by the time he is sixty,
+and of 1789 twenty years later, when he departs this life, piously
+praying God "to multiply them and send them the true report of the
+gospel." The multiplication has duly taken place, and there is something
+like a civil war while the Dutch are there; but they interfere with
+fire-arms to restore order, and leave all well. The writer's cunning is
+shown by the fact that he does not stop abruptly: but finishes off with
+some subsequent and quite _verisimilar_ experiences of the Dutch ship.
+The book does not appear to have had a very great popularity in England,
+though it was reprinted and abridged at least once, pretty shortly. But
+it was very popular abroad, was translated into three or four languages,
+and was apparently taken as a genuine account.
+
+Neville's art is in fact not inconsiderable. Earlier voyages and travels
+of course supplied him with his technical and geographical details: and
+the codification of the Isle of Pines suggests the Bacon-Harrington
+tradition. But he has got the vividness and realism which have usually
+been lacking before: and though some of his details are pretty "free" it
+is by no means only through such things that these qualities are
+secured. To Cyrano de Bergerac he bears no likeness at all. In fact,
+though Neville _was_ a satirist, satire does not seem to have been in
+any way his object here. Whatever that object may have been, he has
+certainly struck, by accident or not, on the secret of producing an
+interesting account by ingeniously multiplied and adjusted detail.
+Moreover, as there is no conversation, the book stands--accidentally
+this time almost without doubt--at the opposite pole from the
+talk-deluged romances of the Scudery type. Whether Defoe actually knew
+it or not matters exceedingly little: that something of his method, and
+in a manner the subject of his first and most famous novel, are here
+before him, seems quite indisputable. Perhaps not the least piquant
+thing to do with _The Isle of Pines_ is to contrast it with _Oceana_. Of
+course the contrast is unfair: nearly all contrasts are. But there is
+actually, as has been pointed out, a slight contact between the work of
+the two friends: and their complete difference in every other respect
+makes this more curiously apparent. And another odd thing is that
+Neville--"Rota"-republican as he was--should have adopted patriarchal
+(one can hardly say _legitimate_) government here.
+
+Congreve's _Incognita_ (1692), the last seventeenth-century novel that
+requires special notice, belongs much more to the class of Afra's tales
+than to that of the heroic romances. It is a short story of seventy-five
+small pages only and of the Italian-Spanish imbroglio type. The friends
+Aurelian and Hippolito take each other's names for certain purposes, and
+their beloveds, "Incognita," Juliana and Leonora, are perplexed
+accordingly: while family feuds, letter assignations at a convent where
+the name of the convent unluckily happens to be torn off, and other
+stock ingredients of the kind are freely used. Most writers have either
+said nothing about the book or have given it scanty praise; with the
+exception, Sir Walter Raleigh, I confess that I cannot here agree. Being
+Congreve's it could not be quite without flashes of wit, but they do not
+appear to me to be either very numerous or very brilliant; the plot,
+such as it is, is a plot of drama rather than of fiction; and there is
+no character that I can see. It is in fact only one of a vast multitude
+of similar stories, not merely in the two languages just referred to,
+but in French, which were but to show that the time of the novel was not
+yet come, even when the time of this century was all but over.
+
+It was quite over, and the first two decades of the next were all but
+over too, before the way was, to any important extent, further explored:
+but important assistance in the exploration was given at the beginning
+of the second of these decades. The history of the question of the
+relations of the Addison-Steele periodical, and especially of the
+"Coverley Papers," to the novel is both instructive and amusing to those
+who have come to appreciate the humours of literary things. It would
+probably have shocked the more orthodox admirers of the _Spectator_,
+during the eighteenth century, to have any such connection or relation
+so much as hinted. But when people began to consider literature and
+literary history in a better arranged perspective, the fact that there
+_is_ such a connection or relation must have been soon perceived. It has
+become comparatively a commonplace: and now the third stage--that in
+which people become uneasy and suspicious of the commonplace and obvious
+and try to turn it topsy-turvy--has begun.
+
+It is of course undeniable that the "Coverley Papers," as they stand,
+are not a novel, even on the loosest conception and construction of the
+term. There is no plot; some of what should be the most important
+characters are merely heard of, not seen; and the various scenes have no
+sort of connection, except that the same persons figure in them. But
+these undeniable facts do not interfere with two other facts, equally
+undeniable and much more important. The first is that the papers could
+be turned into a novel with hardly any important alteration, and with
+only _quantum suff._ of addition and completion. "The widow" is there in
+the background ready to be produced and made a heroine; many of the
+incidents are told novel-fashion already, and more could be translated
+into that fashion by the veriest tyro at novel writing who has written
+at any time during the last one hundred and fifty years. The personages
+of the club have merely to step down and out; the scenes to be
+connected, amplified, and multiplied; the conversation to undergo the
+same process.
+
+But the second point is of greater importance still. Not only could the
+"Coverley Papers," be made into a novel without the slightest
+difficulty, and by a process much of which would be simple enlargement
+of material; but they already possess, in a fashion which requires no
+alteration at all, many of the features of the novel, far more
+successfully hit off than had ever been done before in the novel itself.
+This is true of the dialogue to no small extent, and of the description
+even more: but it is truest of all of the characters. Except Bunyan,
+nobody in prose fiction had ever made personages so thoroughly spirited
+as Sir Roger and even the two Wills, Honeycomb and Wimble; while here
+there was "no allaying Thames" in the shape of allegory, little
+moralising and that of a kind quite human, a plentiful setting of
+ordinary and familiar scene, and a more plentiful and exact adjustment
+of ordinary and familiar manners. It is true that Addison, partly owing
+to the undercurrent of his satirical humour (Steele succeeds rather
+better here), has not attained the astonishing verisimilitude of the
+writer to whom we shall come next and last but one in this chapter. His
+characters are perfectly natural, but we know, all the while, that they
+are works of art. But in most of the points just mentioned he has
+exactly the tricks of the novelist's art that Defoe has not. The smaller
+tales in the _Tatler_ and its followers undoubtedly did something to
+remove the reproach from prose fiction, and more to sharpen the appetite
+for it. But they were nothing new: the short tale being of unknown
+antiquity. The "Coverley Papers" _were_ new and did much more. This new
+kind of treatment may not have suggested beforehand (it is not certain
+that it did not) the extensive novel of character and manners--the play
+lengthened, bodied more strongly, and turned into narrative form. But
+the process was _there_; the instances of it were highly reputed and
+widely known. It must in almost any case have gone hard but a further
+step still would be taken. It was actually taken by the person who had
+suggested the periodical essay itself.
+
+Much has been written about Defoe, but, curiously enough, the least part
+of what has been written about him has concerned the very part of him
+that is read--his novels. Nay, occasional eccentrics, and not only
+these, have shown a sort of disposition to belittle him as a novelist:
+indeed the stock description of Richardson as the Father of the English
+Novel almost pointedly rules Defoe out. Yet further, the most adequate
+and intelligent appreciation of his novel work itself has too often been
+mainly confined to what is no doubt a subject of exceeding interest--the
+special means by which he secures the attention, and procures the
+delight, of his readers. We shall have to deal with this too. But the
+point to which it is wished to draw special attention now is different,
+and we may reach it best by the ordinary "statement of case."
+
+Almost everybody who knows any literary history, knows that the book by
+which, after thirty or forty years of restless publication in all sorts
+of prose and rhyme, Defoe niched himself immovably in English
+literature, was a new departure by almost an old man. He was all but, if
+not quite, sixty when _Robinson Crusoe_ appeared: and a very few
+following years saw the appearance of his pretty voluminous "minor"
+novels. The subject of the first every one knows without limitation: it
+is not so certain, though vigorous efforts have been made to popularise
+the others, that even their subjects are clearly known to many people.
+_Captain Singleton_ (1720), _Moll Flanders_, and _Colonel Jack_ (both
+1722) are picaresque romances with tolerably sordid heroes and heroines,
+but with the style entirely rejuvenated by Defoe's secret. _Roxana_
+(1724), a very puzzling book which is perhaps not entirely his writing,
+is of the same general class: the _Voyage round the World_ (1725), the
+least interesting, but not _un_interesting, is exactly what its title
+imports,--in other words, the "stuffing" of the _Robinson_ pie without
+the game. The _Memoirs of a Cavalier_ (1720) approach the historical
+novel (or at least the similar "stuffing" of that) and have raised
+curious and probably insoluble questions as to whether they are
+inventions at all--questions intimately connected with that general one
+referred to above. One or two minor things are sometimes added to the
+list: but they require no special notice. The seven books just mentioned
+are Defoe's contribution to the English novel. Let us consider the
+quality of this contribution first--and then the means used to attain
+it.
+
+Their novel-quality (which, as has been hinted, has not been claimed so
+loudly or so steadily as it should have been for Defoe) is the quality
+of Story-Interest--and this, one dares say, he not only infused for the
+first time in full dose, but practically introduced into the English
+novel, putting the best of the old mediaeval romances aside and also
+putting aside _The Pilgrim's Progress_, which is not likely to have been
+without influence on himself. It may be said, "Oh! but the _Amadis_
+romances, and the Elizabethan novels, and the 'heroics' must have
+interested or they would not have been read." This looks plausible, but
+is a mistake. Few people who have not studied the history of criticism
+know the respectable reluctance to be _pleased_ with literature which
+distinguished mankind till very recent times; and which in fact kept the
+novel back or was itself maintained by the absence of the novel. In life
+people pleased themselves irregularly enough: in literature they could
+not get out of the idea that they ought to be instructed, that it was
+enough to be instructed, and that it was discreditable to ask for more.
+Even the poet was allowed to delight grudgingly and at his peril; was
+suspected because he did delight, and had to pay a sort of heavy
+licence-duty for it, in the shape of concomitant instruction to others
+and good behaviour in himself. In fact he was a publican who was bound
+to serve stodgy food as well as exhilarating drink.
+
+It is impossible to doubt that people were similarly affected to the
+fiction of the Renaissance and the seventeenth century, at least in its
+longer examples--for the smaller _novelle_ could amuse in their own way
+sometimes, though they could hardly absorb. It is equally impossible to
+imagine any one being "enthralled" by _Euphues_. Admiration, of a kind,
+must have been the only passion excited by it. In the _Arcadia_ there is
+a certain charm, but it belongs to the inset verse--to the almost
+Spenserian _visionariness_ of parts--to the gracious lulling atmosphere
+of the whole. If it had been published in three volumes, one cannot
+imagine the most enthusiastic novel-reader knocking up a friend late at
+night for volume two or volume three. I have said that I can read
+_Parismus_ for pastime: but the pastime that it provides is certainly
+not over-stimulating, and the mild stimulant becomes unsweetened and
+unlemoned barley-water in books of the _Parthenissa_ class. If with them
+conversing one forgets all time, it must be by the influence of the
+kind go-between Sleep. We know, of course, that their contemporaries did
+not go to sleep over them: but it was because they felt that they were
+being done good to--that they were in the height of polite society--that
+their manners were being softened and not allowed to be gross. The time,
+in its blunt way, was fond of contrasting the attractions of a mistress
+on one side and "a friend and a bottle" on the other. That a novel could
+enter into competition with either or both, as an interesting and even
+exciting means of passing the time, would have entered very few heads at
+all and have been contemptuously dismissed from most of those that it
+did enter.
+
+Addison and Steele in the "Coverley Papers" had shown the way to
+construct this new spell: Defoe actually constructed it. It may be that
+some may question whether the word "exciting" applies exactly to his
+stories. But this is logomachy: and in fact a well-willing reader _can_
+get very fairly excited while the Cavalier is escaping after Marston
+Moor; while it is doubtful whether the savages have really come and what
+will be the event; while it is again doubtful whether Moll is caught or
+not; or what has become of those gains of the boy Jack, which can hardly
+be called ill-gotten because there is such a perfect unconsciousness of
+ill on the part of the getter. At any rate, if such a reader cannot feel
+excitement here, he would utterly stagnate in any previous novel.
+
+In presence of this superior--this emphatically and doubly
+"novel"--interest, all other things become comparatively unimportant.
+The relations of _Robinson Crusoe_ to Selkirk's experiences and to one
+or two other books (especially the already mentioned _Isle of Pines_)
+may not unfitly employ the literary historian who chooses to occupy
+himself with them. The allegory which Defoe alleges in it, and which
+some biographers have endeavoured to work out, cannot, I suppose, be
+absolutely pooh-poohed, but presents no attractions whatever to the
+present writer. Whether the _Cavalier_ is pure fiction, or partly
+embroidered fact, _is_ a somewhat interesting question, if only because
+it seems to be impossible to find out the answer: and the same may be
+said of the not impossible (indeed almost more than probable) Portuguese
+maps and documents at the back of _Captain Singleton_. To disembroil the
+chronological muddle of _Roxana_, and follow out the tangles of the
+hide-and-seek of that most unpleasant "lady of pleasure" and her
+daughter, may suit some. But, apart from all these things, there abides
+the fact that you can _read_ the books--read them again and again--enjoy
+them most keenly at first and hardly less keenly afterwards, however
+often you repeat the reading.
+
+As has been partly said, the means by which this effect is achieved, and
+also the means by which it is not, are almost equally remarkable. The
+Four Elements of the novel are sometimes, and not incorrectly, said to
+be Plot, Character, Description, and Dialogue--Style, which some would
+make a fifth, being rather a characteristic in another order of
+division. It is curious that Defoe is rebellious or evasive under any
+analysis of this kind. His plots are of the "strong" order--the events
+succeed each other and are fairly connected, but do not compose a
+history so much as a chronicle. In character, despite his intense
+verisimilitude, he is not very individual. Robinson himself, Moll, Jack,
+William the Quaker in _Singleton_, even Roxana the cold-blooded and
+covetous courtesan, cannot be said not to be real--they and almost every
+one of the minorities are an immense advance on the colourless and
+bloodless ticketed puppets of the Middle Fiction. But they still want
+_something_--the snap of the fingers of the artist. Moll is perhaps the
+most real of all of them and yet one has no flash-sights of her
+being--never sees her standing out against soft blue sky or
+thunder-cloud as one sees the great characters of fiction; never hears
+her steps winding and recognises her gesture as one does theirs.
+
+So again his description is sufficient: and the enumerative
+particularity of it is even great part of the _secret de Polichinelle_
+to which we are coming. But it is far from elaborate in any other way
+and has hardly the least decoration or poetical quality. Well as we know
+Crusoe's Island the actual scenery of it is not half so much impressed
+as that even, for instance, of Masterman Ready's--it is either of the
+human figures--Crusoe's own grotesque bedizenment, the savages, Friday,
+the Spaniards, Will Atkins--or of the works of man--the stockade, the
+boat, and the rest--that we think. A little play is made with Jack's
+glass-house squalor and Roxana's magnificence _de mauvais lieu_, but not
+much: the gold-dust and deserts of _Singleton_ are a necessary part of
+the "business," but nothing more. _Moll Flanders_--in some respects the
+greatest of all his books--has the bareness of an Elizabethan stage in
+scenery and properties--it is much if Greenfield spares us a table or a
+bed to furnish it.
+
+Of Dialogue Defoe is specially fond--even making his personages
+soliloquise in this after a fashion--and it plays a very important part
+in "the secret:" yet it can hardly be classed very high _as_ dialogue.
+And this is at least partly due to the strange _drab_ shapelessness of
+his style, which never takes on any brilliant colour, or quaint
+individual form.
+
+Yet it is very questionable whether any other style would have suited
+the method so well, or would even have suited it at all. For this
+method--to leave off hinting at it and playing round it--is one of
+almost endless accumulation of individually trivial incident, detail,
+and sometimes observation, the combined effect of which is to produce an
+insensible but undoubting acceptance, on the reader's part, of the facts
+presented to him. The process has been more than once analysed in that
+curious and convenient miniature example of it, the "Mrs. Veal"
+_supercherie_: but you may open the novels proper almost anywhere and
+discover it in full operation. Like most great processes of art, this is
+an adoption and perfecting of habits usual with the most inartistic
+people--a turning to good account of the interminably circumstantial
+superfluities of the common gossip and newsmonger. Very often Defoe
+actually does not go beyond this--just as in _The Shortest Way with the
+Dissenters_ he had simply reproduced the actual thoughts and wishes of
+those who disliked dissent. But sometimes he got the better of this
+also, as in the elaborate building up of Robinson's surroundings and not
+a little in the other books. And there the effect is not only
+verisimilar but wonderful in its verisimilitude. At any rate, in him,
+and for English prose and secular fiction, we have first that mysterious
+charm of the _real that is not real_--of the "human creation"--which
+constitutes the appeal of the novel. In some of the books there is
+hardly any appeal of any other sort. Moll Flanders, though not unkindly,
+and "improper" rather from the force of circumstances than from any
+specially vicious inclination, is certainly not a person for whom one
+has much liking. Colonel Jack, after his youthful experiences in
+pocket-picking, is rather a nonentity, something of a coward, a fellow
+of no particular wits, parts, or definite qualities of any kind. Singleton
+is a rascal who "plays Charlemagne," as the French gambling term has it,
+and endows his repentance with the profits of his sin. As for Roxana there
+are few more repulsive heroines in fiction--while the Cavalier and the
+chief figure in the _Voyage Round the World_ are simply threads on
+which their respective adventures are strung. Even Robinson himself enlists
+no particular sympathy except of the "put-yourself-in-his-place" kind. Yet
+these sorry or negative personages, of whom, in the actual creation of God,
+we should be content to know nothing except from paragraphs in the
+newspaper (and generally in the police-reports thereof), content us
+perfectly well with their company through hundreds and thousands of
+solid pages, and leave us perfectly ready to enjoy it again after
+a reasonable interval.
+
+This, as has been said, is the mystery of fiction--a mystery partly set
+a-working in the mediaeval romance, then mostly lost, and now
+recovered--in his own way and according to his own capacity--by Defoe.
+It was to escape others for a little longer and then to be yet again
+rediscovered by the great quartette of the mid-eighteenth century--to
+slip in and out of hands during the later part of that century, and then
+to be all but finally established, in patterns for everlasting
+pursuance, by Miss Austen and by Scott. But Defoe is really (unless we
+put Bunyan before him) the first of the magicians--not the greatest by
+any means, but great and almost alone in the peculiar talent of making
+uninteresting things interesting--not by burlesquing them or satirising
+them; not by suffusing or inflaming them with passion; not by giving
+them the amber of style; but by serving them "simple of themselves" as
+though they actually existed.
+
+The position of Defoe in novel history is so great that there is a
+temptation to end this chapter with him. But to do so would cause an
+inconvenience greater than any resulting advantages. For the greatest of
+Defoe's contemporaries in English letters also comes into our division,
+and comes best here. One cannot conveniently rank Swift with the great
+quartette of the next chapter, because he is a novelist "by interim" and
+incompletely: to rank him among the minor and later novelists of the
+eighteenth century would be as to the first part of the classification
+absurd and as to the last false. And he comes, not merely in time,
+pretty close to Defoe, incommensurable as is the genius of the two. It
+has even been thought (plausibly enough, though the matter is of no
+great importance) that the form of _Gulliver_ may have been to some
+extent determined by _Robinson Crusoe_ and Defoe's other novels of
+travel. And there is a subtler reason for taking the pair together and
+both close to Addison and Steele.
+
+Swift had shown the general set towards prose fiction, and his own bent
+in the same direction, long before Defoe's novel-period and as early as
+the _Tale of a Tub_ and the _Battle of the Books_ (_published_ 1704 but
+certainly earlier in part). The easy flow of the narrative, and the
+vivid dialogue of the Spider and the Bee in the latter, rank high among
+those premonitions of novel with which, in this place, we should be
+specially busied. In the former Peter, Martin, and Jack want but a
+little more of the alchemist's furnace to accomplish their projection
+into real characters, and not merely allegorical figure-heads. But, of
+course, in both books, the satiric purpose dominates too much to allow
+them to be really ranked among novels, even if they had taken the
+trouble to clothe themselves with more of the novel-garb.
+
+With _Gulliver_ it is different. It is a commonplace on its subject
+(but like many other commonplaces a thing ill to forget or ignore) that
+natural and unsophisticated children always _do_, and that almost
+anybody who has a certain power of turning blind eyes when and where he
+chooses _can_, read it simply as a story of adventure and enjoy it
+hugely. It would be a most preternatural child or a most singularly
+constituted adult who could read _Utopia_ or _Oceana_, or even Cyrano's
+_Voyages_, "for the story" and enjoy them hugely. This means that Swift
+had either learnt from Defoe or--and considering those earlier
+productions of his own much more probably--had independently developed
+the knack of _absorbing_ the reader--the knack of telling a story. But
+of course there is in one sense much more, and in another much less,
+than a story in _Gulliver_: and the finest things in it are independent
+of story, though (and this once more comes in for our present purpose)
+they are quite capable of adaptation to story-purposes, and have been so
+adapted ever since by the greatest masters of the art. These are strokes
+of satire, turns of phrase, little illuminations of character, and
+seasonings of description. But the great point of _Gulliver_ is that,
+like Defoe's work, though in not quite the same way, it is
+_interesting_--that it takes hold of its reader and gives him its
+"peculiar pleasure." When a work of art does this, it is pretty near
+perfection.
+
+There is, however, another book of Swift's which, though perhaps seldom
+mentioned or even thought of in connection with the novel, is of real
+importance in that connection, and comes specially in with our present
+main consideration--the way in which the several parts of the completed
+novel were being, as it were, separately got ready and set apart for the
+use of the accomplished novelist. This is the very curious and
+agreeable piece called _Polite Conversation_ (1738), on which, though it
+was not printed till late in his life and close on _Pamela_ itself,
+there is good reason for thinking that he had been for many years
+engaged. The importance of dialogue in the novel has been often
+mentioned and will scarcely be contested: while frequent occasion has
+been taken to point out that it had hitherto been very ill-achieved.
+Swift's "conversation" though designedly _underlined_, as it were, to
+show up current follies and extravagances of phrase and of fashion
+generally, is yet pretty certainly in the main the real average
+conversation of the society of his time, which he knew well and
+thoroughly. Further, there is a distinct, though it may be almost
+impalpable, difference between it and the conversation of the stage,
+though it is naturally connected therewith. Non-poetical stage dialogue
+in capable hands is either deliberate talking for display of "wit" like
+that of Congreve, or is conditioned and directed by the necessities of
+action and character. Of course, novel conversation may diverge in the
+first direction, and cannot properly neglect the second altogether. But,
+as there is room for very much more of it, it may and should allow
+itself a considerably wider range and imitate, on proper occasions, the
+desultory gossip and small talk of people who live on the "boards" of a
+room-floor and not of a stage.
+
+This is just what Swift's does, and just what there is very little of in
+Defoe; almost necessarily less in Addison and his group because of their
+essay form; and hardly anything elsewhere and earlier. Just as the
+Coverley Papers could, by one process and no difficult one, have been
+thrown into a novel; so by another, a not much more difficult and a much
+less complicated one, could the _Polite Conversation_ be thrown into
+part of a novel--while in each case the incomplete and unintentional
+draft itself supplies patterns for the complete work in new kind such as
+had never been given before. Indeed the _Conversation_ may almost be
+said to _be_ part of a novel--and no small part--as it stands, and of
+such a novel as had never been written before.
+
+But there was something still further all but absolutely necessary to
+the novel, though not necessary to it alone, which Defoe, Addison, and
+Swift, each in his several way, worked mightily to supply: and that was
+a flexible business-like "workaday" prose style. Not merely so long as
+men aimed at the eccentric and contorted styles of _Euphues_ and the
+_Arcadia_, but so long as the old splendid and gorgeous, but cumbrous
+and complicated pre-Restoration style lasted, romances were possible,
+but novels were not. You might indeed pick out of Shakespeare--especially
+from such parts as those of Beatrice, Rosalind, and some of the fools--a
+capital novel-style: but then you can pick almost anything out of
+Shakespeare. Elsewhere the constant presence either of semi-poetic
+phraseology or of some kind of "lingo" was almost fatal. You want what
+Sprat calls a more "natural way of speaking" (though not necessarily a
+"naked" one) for novel purposes--a certain absence of ceremony and parade
+of phrase: though the presence of slang and some other things, the rebuking
+of which was partly Swift's object in the _Conversation_, is _not_
+fatal, and so he, in a manner, blessed and prescribed what he meant to ban.
+
+Thus, by the early years of the reign of George II., or a little later,
+we find, on the one side, an evident, and variously though
+inarticulately proclaimed, desire for novels; on the other, the
+accumulation, in haphazard and desultory way, of almost all the methods,
+the processes, the "plant," necessary to turn novels out; but hardly
+anything except the considered work of Bunyan, Defoe, and Swift which
+really deserves the name of novel. A similar process had been going on
+in France; and, in the different work of Le Sage and Marivaux, had
+actually produced work in the kind more advanced than anything in
+English. But the tables were soon to be turned: and during the rest of
+the century the English Novel was at last to assert itself as a
+distinct, an increasingly popular, and a widely cultivated kind. That
+this was due to the work of the four great novelists who fill its
+central third and will fill our next chapter cannot perhaps be said:
+that their work was the first great desertion of it may be said safely.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE FOUR WHEELS OF THE NOVEL WAIN
+
+
+It does not enter into the plan, because it would be entirely
+inconsistent with the scale, of the present book to give details of the
+lives of the novelists, except when they have something special to do
+with the subject, or when (as in the case of a few minorities who happen
+to be of some importance) even well-informed readers are likely to be
+quite ignorant about them. Accounts, in all degrees of scale and
+competence, of the lives of Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne
+abound. It is sufficient--but in the special circumstances at this point
+perhaps necessary--here to sum the facts very briefly in so far as they
+bear on the main issue. Richardson (1689-1761), not merely the first to
+write, but the eldest by much more than his priority in writing, was the
+son of a Derbyshire tradesman, was educated for some time at
+Charterhouse, but apprenticed early to a printer--which trade he pursued
+with diligence and profit for the rest of his life in London and its
+immediate neighbourhood. After his literary success, he gathered round
+him a circle of ladies and gentlemen interested in literature: but he
+never had any first-hand acquaintance with general society of the
+"gentle" kind, much less with that of the upper classes. Fielding
+(1707-1754), on the contrary, was a member (though only as the son of a
+younger son of a younger son) of a family of great antiquity and
+distinction, which held an earldom in England and another in Ireland,
+and was connected as well as it was derived, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu,
+for instance, being the novelist's cousin. He was educated at Eton and
+Leyden: but his branch of the family being decidedly impecunious, was
+thrown very much on his own resources. These were mainly drawn from
+literature, first as a playwright then as a novelist, journalism and
+miscellanies coming in. But he was called to the Bar: and though he
+probably did not make much money there, he obtained the poorly paid and
+hard-worked but rather important position of "Bow Street Magistrate,"
+which meant that he was head, directly of the London police such as it
+was, and indirectly of that of the whole kingdom. His temper was in some
+ways as aristocratic as his birth: but though Horace Walpole's accounts
+of his fancy for low company are obviously exaggerated, there is no
+doubt that he was a good deal of what has since been called a
+"Bohemian." His experience of variety in scene was much wider than
+Richardson's, although after he came home from Leyden (where he went to
+study law) it was chiefly confined to London and the south of England
+(especially Bath, Dorsetshire, where he lived for a time, and the
+Western Circuit), till his last voyage, in hopeless quest of health, to
+Lisbon, where he died. His knowledge of literature, and even what may be
+called his scholarship, were considerable, and did credit to the public
+school education of those days.
+
+Smollett (1721-1771) differed from his two predecessors in being a
+Scotsman: but in family was very much nearer to Fielding than to
+Richardson, being the grandson of a judge who was a Commissioner of the
+Union, and a gentleman of birth and property--which last would, had he
+lived long enough, have come to Smollett himself. But he suffered in his
+youth from some indistinctly known family jars, was apprenticed to a
+Glasgow surgeon, and escaping thence to London with a tragedy in his
+pocket, was in undoubted difficulties till (and after) he obtained the
+post of surgeon's mate on board a man-of-war, and took part in the
+Carthagena expedition. After coming home he made at least some attempts
+to practise: but was once more drawn off to literature, though
+fortunately not to tragedy. For the rest of his life he was a
+hard-worked but by no means ill-paid journalist, novelist, and
+miscellanist, making as much as L2000 by his _History of England_, not
+ill-written, though now never read. Like Fielding (though, unlike him,
+more than once) he went abroad in search of health and died in the quest
+at Leghorn. Smollett was not ignorant, but he seems to have known modern
+languages better than ancient: though there is doubt about his direct
+share in the translations to which he gave his name. Moreover he had
+some though no great skill in verse.
+
+Lastly Sterne (1713-1768), though hardly, as it is the custom to call
+him, "an Irishman," yet vindicated the claims of the third constituent
+of the United Kingdom by being born in Ireland, from which country his
+mother came. But the Sternes were pure English, of a gentle family which
+had migrated from East Anglia through Nottingham to Yorkshire, and was
+much connected with Cambridge. Thither Laurence, the novelist, after a
+very roving childhood (his father was a soldier), and a rather irregular
+education, duly went: and, receiving preferment in the Church from his
+Yorkshire relations, lived for more than twenty years in that county
+without a history, till he took the literary world--hardly by storm, but
+by a sort of fantastic capful of wind--with _Tristram Shandy_ in 1760.
+Seven or eight years of fame, some profit, not hard work (for his books
+shrink into no great solid bulk), and constant travelling, ended by a
+sudden death at his Bond Street lodgings, after a long course of
+ill-health very carelessly attended to.
+
+One or two more traits are relevant. All the four were married, and
+married pretty early; two of them married twice. Richardson's first wife
+was, in orthodox fashion, his master's daughter: of his second little is
+known. Fielding's first (he had made a vain attempt earlier to abduct an
+heiress who was a relation) was, by universal consent, the model both of
+Sophia and Amelia, almost as charming as either, and as amiable; his
+second was her maid. Of Mrs. Smollett, who was a Miss Lascelles and a
+West Indian heiress in a small way, we know very little--the habit of
+identifying her with the "Narcissa" of _Roderick Random_ is natural,
+inconclusive, but not ridiculous. Sterne's matrimonial relations are the
+most famous of all: and though posterity has, with its usual charity,
+constructed a legend for the pair which is probably much worse than the
+reality, that reality is more than a little awkward. Mrs. Sterne was a
+Miss Lumley, of a good Yorkshire family, some, though small, fortune,
+and more friends who exerted themselves for her husband. By inexcusable
+levity, ignorance, misjudgment, or heartless cupidity their daughter
+Lydia published, after the death of both, letters some of which contain
+courtship of the most lackadaisical sentimentality and others later
+expressions (which occasionally reach the scandalous) of weariness and
+disgust on Sterne's part. Other evidence of an indisputable character
+shows that he was, at least and best, an extravagant and mawkish
+philanderer with any girl or woman who would join in a flirtation: and
+while there is no evidence against Mrs. Sterne's character in the
+ordinary sense, and hardly any of value against her temper, she seems
+(which is perhaps not wonderful) to have latterly preferred to live
+apart from her husband, and to have put him to considerable, if not
+unreasonable, expenses by her fancy for wandering about France with the
+daughter.
+
+Finally, in general character, Richardson seems to have been a
+respectable person of rather feminine temperament and, though
+good-natured to his friends, endowed with a feminine spitefulness.
+Fielding, though by no means answering to the standard of minor and even
+major morals demanded
+
+              "by the wise ones,
+    By the grave and the precise ones."
+
+though reckless and disorderly in his ways and habits, appears to have
+been in the main a thorough gentleman, faithful to truth and honour,
+fearless, compassionate, intolerant of meanness and brutality and of
+treachery most of all--a man of many faults perhaps, but of no really
+bad or disgusting ones. Concerning Smollett's personality we know least
+of all the four. It was certainly disfigured by an almost savage
+pugnacity of temper; by a strange indifference to what ought to be at
+the lowest the conduct of a gentleman, and by a most repulsive
+inclination--perhaps natural, but developed by training--to the merely
+foul and nasty. But he seems to have been brave, charitable though not
+in the most gracious way, honest, and on the whole a much better fellow
+than he might generally seem. Sterne is the most difficult of the four
+to characterise fairly, because of the unlucky revelations to which we
+possess no parallel in the case of the other three, and which, if we had
+them, might probably alter our estimates of a good many now well reputed
+people. It is perhaps enough to say that his letters contain many good
+traits as well as some bad ones; that his unlucky portrait, with its
+combination of leer and sneer, is probably responsible for much; and
+that the parts which, as we shall see further, he chose to play, of
+extravagant humorist and extravagant sentimentalist, not only almost
+necessitate attitudes which may easily become offensive in the playing,
+but are very likely, in practice, to communicate something apparently
+not natural and unattractive to the player.
+
+But enough of the workers, though not too much in the case of such
+remarkable contemporary exponents of a new kind of Human Comedy: let us
+go to the work.
+
+In the long "History of the Unexpected," thick-strewn as it is with
+curiosities, there are few things odder than the appearance and the
+sequels of _Pamela: or Virtue Rewarded_, which, in circumstances to be
+noted presently, is said to have been begun on November 12, 1739, was
+finished (as far as the first part goes) exactly two months later, and
+(there being, in the case of the author's business, no obstacle of the
+kind that has frequently beset the appearance of greater works) was
+published later in the year 1740. That author was over fifty years old:
+though he had had much to do with ushering literature into the world, he
+had never attempted to produce it; he belonged to a class which was apt
+to regard _belles lettres_ with profound suspicion; and his experiences,
+both in literature itself and in life, had been necessarily of the most
+limited kind. But there were certain counterbalancing facts to be taken
+into consideration which, though they can hardly be said to be _causes_
+of the marvel--the cause was the Hour, which hit, as it listed, on the
+Man--were a little more than accidental occasions of it. Richardson, as
+we see from his work, must have been a rather careful student of such
+novels as there were. The name of his first heroine, with the
+essentially English throwing back of the accent added, is the same as
+that of one of Sidney's heroines in the _Arcadia_, which had been not
+long before modernised for eighteenth-century reading by a certain Mrs.
+Stanley. The not very usual form "Laurana," which is the name of a
+character in his latest novel, is that of the heroine of _Parismus_.
+Further, he had had curious early experiences (which we know from his
+own meticulous revelations) of writing love-letters, when he was a mere
+boy, for girl-friends of his to adapt in writing to their lovers. "His
+eye," he says, "had been always on the ladies," though no doubt always
+also in the most honourable way. And, quite recently, the
+crystallisation had been precipitated by a commission from two of his
+bookseller (i.e. publisher) patrons--the founder of the House of
+Rivington and the unlucky Osborne who was knocked down by Johnson and
+picked up (not quite as one would wish to be) by Pope. They asked him to
+prepare a series of "Familiar Letters on the useful concerns of common
+life." Five-and-twenty years before, he had heard in outline something
+like the story of _Pamela_. In shaping this into letters he thought it
+might be a "new species of writing that might possibly turn young people
+into a course of reading different from the pomp and parade of
+romance-writing, and dismissing the improbable and marvellous with which
+novels generally abound, might tend to promote the cause of religion and
+virtue." His wife and "a young lady living with them," to whom he had
+read some of it, used to come into his little closet every night with,
+"Have you any more of _Pamela_, Mr. R.?" Two other female friends joined
+in the interest and eulogy. He finished it (that is, the first two
+volumes which contain the whole of the original idea) and published it,
+though at first with the business-like precaution of appearing to "edit"
+only, and the more business-like liberty of liberal praise of what he
+edited. It became at once popular: and received the often repeated, but
+to the author very annoying, compliment of piratical continuation. So he
+set to work and continued it himself: as usually (though by no means
+invariably) with rather diminished success. On such points as the
+suggestion that he may have owed a debt to Marivaux (in _Marianne_) and
+others, little need be said here. I have never had much doubt myself
+that the indebtedness existed: though it would be rash, and is
+unnecessary, to attempt to determine to what extent and in what
+particular form.
+
+It is by no means so difficult as it may at first sight appear to put
+oneself very much in the situation of a contemporary reader of _Pamela_,
+even if one has read it three or four times, provided that a fairly long
+period has elapsed since the last reading, and that the novels of the
+preceding age are fairly--and freshly--familiar. The thing has been in
+fact done--with unexpected but not in the least deliberate or suspicious
+success--by the present writer, who has read the book after an interval
+of some fifteen years and just after reading (in some cases again, in
+some for the first time) most of the works noticed in the preceding
+chapter. The difference of "the new species of writing" (one is reminded
+of the description of Spenser as "the new poet") is almost startling:
+and of a kind which Richardson pretty certainly did not fully apprehend
+when he used the phrase. In order to appreciate it, one must not only
+leave out the two last volumes (which, as has been said, the first
+readers had not before them at all, and had better never have had) but
+also the second, or great part of it, which they would only have reached
+after they had been half whetted, half satiated, and wholly bribed, by
+the first. The defects of this later part and indeed of the first itself
+will be duly noticed presently. Let it be to us, for the moment, the
+story of Pamela up to and including "Mr. B.'s" repentance and amendment
+of mind: and the "difference" of this story, which fills some hundred
+and twenty or thirty closely printed, double columned, royal octavo
+pages in the "Ballantyne Novels," is (despite the awkwardness of such a
+form for the enjoyment of a novel) almost astounding.
+
+To begin with, the novel-attractions are presented with a completeness
+which, as has been pointed out in the last chapter, is almost entirely
+lacking before. There is, of course, not very much plot, in the martinet
+sense of that word: there never was in Richardson, despite his immense
+apparatus and elaboration. The story is not knotted and unknotted; the
+wheel does not come full circle on itself; it merely runs along
+pleasantly till it is time for it to stop, and it stops rather abruptly.
+The siege of Pamela's virtue ends merely because the besieger is tired
+of assaults which fail, and of offering dishonourable terms of
+capitulation which are rejected: because he prefers peace and alliance.
+But such as it is, it is told with a spirit which must have been
+surprising enough to its readers, and which makes it, I confess, seem to
+me now much the best _story_ in Richardson. The various alarums and
+excursions of the siege itself go off smartly and briskly: there may be
+more sequence than connection--there is _some_ connection, as in the
+case of that most unlucky and ill-treated person the Rev. Mr.
+Williams--but the sequence is rapid and unbroken, and the constituents
+of it as it were jostle each other--not in any unfavourable sense, but
+in a sort of rapid dance, "cross hands and down the middle," which is
+inspiriting and contagious. He lost this faculty later: or rather he
+allowed it to be diluted and slackened into the interminable episodes of
+the not dissimilar though worse-starred plot against Clarissa, and the
+_massacrant_ trivialities of the Italian part of _Grandison_. But he had
+it here: and it is not a fair argument to say (as even in these days I
+have known it said) that Pamela's honour is a commodity of too little
+importance to justify such a pother about it.
+
+This may bring us to the characters. They also are not of the absolutely
+first class--excepting, as to be discussed later, the great attempt of
+Lovelace, Richardson's never are. But they are an immense advance on the
+personages that did duty as persons in preceding novels, even in Defoe.
+"Mr. B." himself is indeed not very capital. One does not quite see why
+a man who went on as long as he did and used the means which he
+permitted himself to use, did not go on longer or use them more
+thoroughly. But Richardson has at least vindicated his much-praised
+"knowledge of the human heart" by recognising two truths: first, that
+there are many natures (perhaps most) who are constantly tempted to
+"over-bid"--to give more and more for something that they want and
+cannot get; and, secondly, that there are others (again, perhaps, the
+majority, if not always the same individuals) who, when they are
+peremptorily told _not_ to do a thing, at once determine to do it. It
+was to Lady Davers mainly that Pamela owed her escape from the fate of
+Clarissa, though she would hardly have taken, or had the chance of
+taking, that fate in the same way. As for the minor characters, at least
+the lower examples are more than sufficient: and Mrs. Jewkes wants very
+little of being a masterpiece. But of course Pamela herself is the
+cynosure, such as there is. She has had rather hard measure with critics
+for the last century and a little more. The questions to ask now are,
+"Is she a probable human being?" and then, "Where are we to find a
+probable human being, worked out to the same degree, before?" I say
+unhesitatingly that the answer to the first is "Yes," and the answer to
+the second "Nowhere." The last triumph of originality and individuality
+she does not indeed reach. Richardson had, even more than other men of
+his century in England, a strong Gallic touch: and he always tends to
+the type rather than the individual. Beatrix Esmond is a coquette of the
+highest--almost of the heroic-poetic--class, but she is first of all
+Beatrix Esmond. Blanche Amory is a middle-class minx, hardly heroic at
+all, but she is first of all Blanche Amory. Becky Sharp is an
+adventuress who would go pretty close to, and perhaps not stop at,
+positive crime, but she is first of all Becky Sharp. Pamela Andrews is
+not first of all--perhaps she is hardly at all--Pamela Andrews. There
+might be fifty or five hundred Pamelas, while there could be only one of
+each of the others. She is the pretty, good-natured, well-principled,
+and rather well-educated menial, whose prudence comes to the aid of her
+principles, whose pride does not interfere with either, and who has a
+certain--it is hardly unfair to call it--slyness which is of the sex
+rather than of the individual. But, as such, she is quite admirably
+worked out--a heroine of Racine in more detail and different
+circumstances, a triumph of art, and at the same time with so much
+nature that it is impossible to dismiss her as merely artificial. The
+nearest thing to her in English prose fiction before (Marianne, of
+course, is closer in French) is Moll Flanders: and good as Moll is, she
+is flat and lifeless in comparison with Pamela. You may call "my
+master's" mistress (actually in the honourable sense, but never in the
+dishonourable) again a minx, though a better minx than Blanche, if you
+like. But there is no animal more alive than a minx: and you will
+certainly not find a specimen of the species in any English novel
+before.
+
+As for description and dialogue, there is not very much of the former
+in _Pamela_, though it might not be unfair to include under the head
+those details, after the manner of Defoe (such as Pamela's list of
+purchases when she thinks she is going home), which supply their own
+measure of verisimilitude to the story. But there are some things of the
+kind which Defoe never would have thought of--such as the touches of
+the "tufts of grass" and the "pretty sort of wildflower that grows
+yonder near the elm, the fifth from us on the left," which occur in the
+gipsy scene. The dialogue plays a much more important part: and may be
+brought into parallel with that in the _Polite Conversation_, referred
+to above and published just before _Pamela_. It is "reported" of course,
+instead of being directly delivered, in accordance with the
+letter-scheme of which more presently, but that makes very little
+difference; to the first readers it probably made no difference at all.
+Here again that process of "vivification," which has been so often dwelt
+on, makes an astonishing progress--the blood and colour of the novel,
+which distinguish it from the more statuesque narrative, are supplied,
+if indirectly yet sufficiently and, in comparison with previous
+examples, amply. Here you get, almost or quite for the first time in the
+English novel, those spurts and sparks of animation which only the
+living voice can supply. Richardson is a humorist but indirectly; yet
+only the greatest humorists have strokes much better than that admirable
+touch in which, when the "reconciliations and forgivenesses of injuries"
+are being arranged, and Mr. B. (quite in the manner of the time)
+suggests marrying Mrs. Jewkes to the treacherous footman John and giving
+them an inn to keep--Pamela, the mild and semi-angelic but exceedingly
+feminine Pamela, timidly inquires whether, "This would not look like
+very heavy punishment to poor John?" She forgives Mrs. Jewkes of course,
+but only "as a Christian"--as a greater than Richardson put it
+afterwards and commented on it in the mouth of a personage whom
+Richardson could never have drawn, though Fielding most certainly could.
+
+The original admirers of _Pamela_, then, were certainly justified: and
+even the rather fatuous eulogies which the author prefixed to it from
+his own and (let us hope) other pens (and which probably provoked
+Fielding himself more than even the substance of the piece) could be
+transposed into a reasonable key. But we ought nowadays to consider this
+first complete English novel from a rather higher point of view, and ask
+ourselves, not merely what its comparative merits were in regard to its
+predecessors, and as presented to its first readers, but what its
+positive character is and what, as far as it goes, are the positive
+merits or defects which it shows in its author.
+
+The first thing to strike one in this connection is, almost of course,
+the letter-form. More agreement has been reached about this, perhaps,
+than about some other points in the inquiry. The initial difficulty of
+fiction which does not borrow the glamour of verse or of the stage is
+the question, "What does all this mean?" "What is the authority?" "How
+does the author know it all?" And a hundred critics have pointed out
+that there are practically only three ways of meeting this. The boldest
+and the best by far is to follow the poet and the dramatist themselves;
+to treat it like one of the magic lions of romance, ignore it, and pass
+on, secure of safety, to tell your story "from the blue," as if it were
+an actual history or revelation, or something passing before the eyes of
+the reader. But at that time few novelists had the courage to do this,
+daunted as they were by the absence of the sword and shield of verse,
+of the vantage-room of the stage. Then there is the alternative of
+recounting it by the mouth of one of the actors in, or spectators of,
+the events--a plan obvious, early, presenting some advantages, still
+very commonly followed, but always full of little traps and pits of
+improbability, and peculiarly trying in respect to the character (if he
+is made to have any) of the narrator himself. Thirdly, there is the
+again easy resource of the "document" in its various forms. Of these,
+letters and diaries possess some prerogative advantages; and were likely
+to suggest themselves very particularly at this time when the actual
+letter and diary (long rather strangely rare in English) had for some
+generations appeared, and were beginning to be common. In the first
+place the information thus obtained looks natural and plausible: and
+there is a subsidiary advantage--on which Richardson does not draw very
+much in _Pamela_, but which he employs to the full later--that by
+varying your correspondents you can get different views of the same
+event, and first-hand manifestations of extremely different characters.
+
+Its disadvantages, on the other hand, are equally obvious: but there are
+two or three of them of especial importance. In the first place, it is
+essentially an artificial rather than an artful plan--its want of
+verisimilitude, as soon as you begin to think of it, is as great as that
+of either of the others if not greater. In the second, without immense
+pains, it must be "gappy and scrappy," while the more these pains are
+taken the more artificial it will become. In the third, the book is
+extremely likely, in the taking of these pains and even without them, to
+become intolerably lengthy and verbose. In the first part at least of
+the first part of _Pamela_, Richardson avoided these dangers fairly if
+not fully; in the second part he succumbed to them; in his two later
+novels, though more elaborate and important plots to some extent bore up
+the expansion, he succumbed to them almost more. Pains have been taken
+above to show how the first readers of _Pamela_ might rejoice in it,
+because of its contrast with the character of the seventeenth-century
+novel which was most read--the Scudery or "heroic" romance. It is not, I
+think, too severe to say that nothing but the parallel with that
+romance, and the tolerance induced by familiarity with it, could make
+any one put up with the second part of _Pamela_ itself, or with the
+inhumanly prolonged divagation of _Clarissa_ and _Grandison_. Nor, as
+has been hinted, is the solace of the letters--in the opportunity of
+setting forth different tempers and styles--here much taken.
+
+There is no doubt that one main attraction of this letter-plan (whether
+consciously experienced or not does not matter) was its ready adaptation
+to Richardson's own special and peculiar gift of minute analysis of
+mood, temper, and motive. The diary avowedly, and the letter in reality,
+even though it may be addressed to somebody else, is a continuous
+soliloquy: and the novelist can use it with a frequency and to a length
+which would be intolerable and impossible on the stage. Now soliloquy is
+the great engine for self--revelation and analysis. It is of course to a
+great extent in consequence of this analysis that Richardson owes his
+pride of place in the general judgment. It is quite possible to lay too
+much stress on it, as distinguishing the novel from the romance: and the
+present writer is of opinion that too much stress has actually been
+laid. The real difference between romance _per se_ and novel _per se_
+(so far as they are capable of distinct existence) is that the romance
+depends more on incident and the novel more on character. Now this
+minute analysis and exhibition, though it is one way of drawing or
+constructing character, is not the only, nor even a necessary, one. It
+can be done without: but it has impressed the vulgar, and even some who
+are not the vulgar, from Dr. Johnson to persons whom it is unnecessary
+to mention. They cannot believe that there is "no deception"--that the
+time is correctly told--unless the works of the watch are bared to them:
+and this Richardson most undoubtedly does. Even in his 'prentice work,
+every flutter of Pamela's little heart is registered, and registered
+probably enough: nor could the registry have been effected, perhaps, in
+any other way that should be in the least probable so well as by the
+letter and journal method. Of course this analysis was not quite new; it
+had existed in a sort of way in the heroic novel: and it had been
+eminently present in the famous _Princesse de Cleves_ of Madame de la
+Fayette as well as in her French successors. But these stories had
+generally been as short as the heroics had been long: and no one had
+risen (or descended) to anything like the minuteness and fullness of
+Richardson. As was before pointed out in regard to the letter-system
+generally, this method of treatment is exposed to special dangers,
+particularly those of verbosity and "overdoing"--not to mention the
+greater one of missing the mark. Richardson can hardly be charged with
+error, though he may be with excess, in regard to Pamela herself in the
+earlier part of the book--perhaps even not in regard to Mr. B.'s
+intricacies of courtship, matrimonial compliment, and arbitrary temper
+later. But he certainly succumbs to them in the long and monstrous scene
+in which Lady Davers bullies, storms at, and positively assaults her
+unfortunate sister-in-law before she is forced to allow that she _is_
+her sister-in-law. Part of course of his error here comes from the
+mistake with which Lady Mary afterwards most justly reproached
+him--that he talked about fine ladies and gentlemen without knowing
+anything about them. It was quite natural for Lady Davers to be
+disgusted, to be incredulous, to be tyrannical, to be in a certain sense
+violent. But it is improbable that she would in any case have spoken and
+behaved like a drunken fishfag quarrelling with another in the street:
+and the extreme prolongation of the scene brings its impropriety more
+forcibly into view. Here, as elsewhere (a point of great importance to
+which I may invite attention), Richardson follows out, with
+extraordinary minuteness and confidence, a wrong course: and his very
+expertness in the process betrays him and brings him to grief. If he had
+run the false scent for a few yards only it would not matter: in a chase
+prolonged to something like "Hartleap Well" extension there is less
+excuse for his not finding it out. Nevertheless it would of course be
+absurd not to rank this "knowledge of the human heart" among the claims
+which not only gave him but have kept his reputation. I do not know that
+he shows it much less in the later part of the first two volumes
+(Pamela's recurrent tortures of jealous curiosity about Sally Godfrey
+are admirable) or even in the dreary sequel. But analysis for analysis'
+sake can have few real, though it may have some pretended, devotees.
+
+The foregoing remarks have been designed, less as a criticism of
+_Pamela_ (which would be unnecessary here), or even of Richardson (which
+would be more in place, but shall be given in brief presently), than as
+an account and justification of the book's position in the real subject
+of this volume--the History of the English Novel. And this account will
+dispense us from dealing, at corresponding length, with the individually
+more important but historically subordinate books which followed. Of
+these _Clarissa_, as few people can be ignorant, is a sort of enlarged,
+diversified, and transposed _Pamela_, in which the attempts of a
+libertine of more resolution and higher gifts than Mr. B. upon a young
+lady of much more than proportionately higher station and qualities than
+Pamela's, are--as such success goes--successful at last: but only to
+result in the death of the victim and the punishment of the criminal.
+The book is far longer than even the extended _Pamela_; has a much wider
+range; admits of episodes and minor plots, and is altogether much more
+ambitious; but still--though the part of the seducer Lovelace is much
+more important than that of Mr. B.--it is chiefly occupied with the
+heroine. In _Sir Charles Grandison_, on the contrary, though no less
+than three heroines exist after a fashion and are carefully treated, the
+author's principal object is to depict--in direct contrast to Mr. B. and
+Lovelace--a "Good Man"--the actual first title of the book, which he
+wisely altered. This faultless and insufferable monster is frantically
+beloved by, and hesitates long between, two beauties, the Italian
+Clementina della Porretta and the English Harriet Byron. The latter of
+these carries him off (rather because of religious difficulties than of
+any great predilection on his own part) and the piece ends with a
+repetition, extension, and intensification of the bounties showered upon
+Pamela by her husband, and her almost abject gratitude for them. Only of
+course "the good man" could never be guilty of Mr. B.'s meditated
+relapse from the path of rectitude, nor (one may perhaps add) does Miss
+Byron seem to possess the insinuating astuteness by which Pamela once
+more
+
+    "Reconciles the new perverted man,"
+
+to adapt the last line of _A Lover's Complaint_ to the situation.
+
+_Grandison_, like _Clarissa_, has a much wider range of personage and
+incident than _Pamela_, and is again double the length of it. No
+detailed criticism of these enormous books (both of which are conducted
+in the letter-form, though, in the latter case especially, with long
+retrospects and narratives which rather strain the style) is possible
+here. But a few remarks on the characters of Lovelace and Clarissa,
+which have usually been regarded as Richardson's greatest triumphs, may
+fitly precede some on his whole character as a novelist.
+
+Admiration and sympathy, tempered with a few reserves, have been the
+general notes of comment on Clarissa: and--as she goes through the long
+martyrdom of persecution by her family for not marrying the man she does
+not love; of worse persecution from the man whom she does love, but who
+will not marry her, at least until he has conquered her virtue; and of
+perhaps worst when she feels it her duty to resist his repentant and (as
+such things go) honourable proffers after he has treacherously deprived
+her of technical honour--compassion at least is impossible to refuse.
+But "compassion," though it literally translates "sympathy" from Greek
+into Latin, is not its synonym in English. It is a disagreeable thing to
+have to say: but Clarissa's purity strikes one as having at once too
+much questionable prudery in it and too little honest prudence: while
+her later resolution has as much false pride as real principle. Even
+some of her admirers admit a want of straightforwardness in her; she has
+no passion, which rather derogates from the merit of her conduct in any
+case; and though she is abominably ill-treated by almost everybody,
+one's pity for her never comes very near to love.
+
+Towards Lovelace, on the other hand, the orthodox attitude, with even
+greater uniformity, has been shocked, or sometimes even unshocked,
+admiration. Hazlitt went into frequently quoted raptures over the
+"regality" of his character: and though to approve of him as a man would
+only be the pretence of a cheap paradoxer, general opinion seems to have
+gone various lengths in the same direction. There have, however, been a
+few dissenters: and I venture to join myself to them in the very
+dissidence of their dissent. Lovelace, it is true, is a most
+astonishingly "succeeded" blend of a snob's fine gentleman and of the
+fine gentleman of a silly and rather unhealthy-minded schoolgirl. He
+is--it is difficult to resist the temptation of dropping and inserting
+the h's--handsome, haughty, arbitrary, as well as rich, generous after a
+fashion, well descended, well dressed, well mannered--except when he is
+insolent. He is also--which certainly stands to his credit in the bank
+which is not that of the snob or the schoolgirl--no fool in a general
+way. But he is not in the least a gentleman except in externals: and
+there is nothing really "great" about him at all. Even his scoundrelism
+is mostly, if not wholly, _pose_--which abominable thing indeed
+distinguishes him throughout, in every speech and every act, from the
+time when he sighs as he kisses Miss Arabella Harlowe's hand to the time
+when he says, "Let this expiate!" as that hallowed sword of Colonel
+Morden's passes through his rotten heart. Now if Richardson had _meant_
+this, it might be granted at once that Lovelace is one of the greatest
+characters of fiction: and I do not deny that _taken as this_, meant or
+not meant, he is great. But Richardson obviously did _not_ mean it; and
+Hazlitt did not mean it; and none of the admirers mean it. _They_ all
+thought and think that Lovelace is something like what Milton's Satan
+was, and what my Lord Byron would have liked to be. This is very unfair
+to the Prince of Darkness: and it is even not quite just to "the noble
+poet."
+
+At the same time, the acute reader will have noticed, the acknowledgment
+that the fact that Richardson--even not knowing it and intending to do
+something else--did hit off perfectly and consummately the ideal of such
+a "prevailing party" (to quote Lord Foppington) as snobs and
+schoolgirls, is a serious and splendid tribute to his merits: as is also
+the fact that his two chief characters are characters still interesting
+and worth arguing about. Those merits, indeed, are absolutely
+incontestable. His immediate and immense popularity, abroad as well as
+at home, would not necessarily prove much, though it must not be
+neglected, and historically, at least, is of the first importance. But
+he does not need it.
+
+For, as should have been sufficiently shown, he did very great
+things--first by gathering up the scattered means and methods which had
+been half ignorantly hit on by others, and co-ordinating them into the
+production of the finished and complete novel; secondly (though less) by
+that infusion of elaborate "minor psychology" as it may be called, which
+is his great characteristic; and, thirdly, by means of it and of other
+things, in raising the pitch of interest in his readers to an infinitely
+higher degree than had ever been known before. The dithyrambs of Diderot
+are, though not ridiculously, amusingly excessive: but they are only an
+exaggeration of the truth. On the comic side he was weak: and he made a
+most unfortunate mistake by throwing this part of the business on young
+ladies of position and (as he thought) of charm--Miss Darnford, Miss
+Howe, Charlotte Grandison--who are by no means particularly comic and
+who are sometimes very particularly vulgar. But of tragedy positive, in
+the _bourgeois_ kind, he had no small command, and in the middle
+business--in affairs neither definitely comic nor definitely tragic--he
+was wonderfully prolific and facile. His immense and heart-breaking
+lengthiness is not _mere_ verbosity: it comes partly from the artist's
+natural delight in a true and newly found method, partly from a still
+more respectably artistic desire not to do the work negligently. As for
+the unhealthiness of atmosphere which has been generally and not
+unjustly charged upon him, it is, in part, no doubt the result of
+imperfect temperament and breeding: but it is also as closely connected
+with his very method as are the merits thereof. You cannot "consider so
+curiously" without considering too curiously. The drawbacks of his work
+are obvious, and they were likely to be, and were, exaggerated. But they
+might be avoided and the merits kept: nor is it too much to say that the
+triumphs of the English novel in the last century have been not a little
+due to the avoidance of the one and the keeping of the other.
+
+It would be, in the circumstances, peculiarly uncivil and disobliging
+to lay very much stress on the fact that, after all, the greatest
+of Richardson's works is his successor, caricaturist, and
+superior--Fielding. When the memoirs of Miss Pamela Andrews appeared,
+the future biographer of her doubly supposititious brother was a not
+very young man of thirty-three, who had written a good many not very
+good plays, had contributed to periodicals, and had done a little work
+at the Bar, besides living, at least till his marriage and it may be
+feared later, an exceedingly "rackety" life. It is not improbable,
+though it is not certain, that he had already turned his attention to
+prose fiction of a kind. For, though the _Miscellanies_ which followed
+_Joseph Andrews_ were three years later than _Pamela_ in appearance,
+the _Journey from this World to the Next_ which they contain has the
+immaturity of earliness; and we can hardly conceive it as written after
+the adventures and character of Mr. Abraham Adams. It is unequal, rather
+tedious in parts, and in conception merely a _pastiche_ of Lucian and
+Fontenelle: but it contains some remarkable things in the way of shrewd
+satirical observation of human nature. And the very fact that it is a
+following of something else is interesting, in connection with the
+infinitely more important work that preceded it in publication, _The
+Adventures of Joseph Andrews and his Friend Mr. Abraham Adams_ (1742).
+
+Nobody has ever had much difficulty in accounting for the way in which
+Fielding availed himself of the appearance and popularity of _Pamela_.
+And though Richardson would have been superhuman instead of very human
+indeed (with an ordinary British middle-class humanity, and an
+extraordinary vein of genius) if he had done otherwise, few have joined
+him in thinking _Joseph_ a "lewd and ungenerous engraftment." We have
+not ourselves been very severe on the faults of _Pamela_, the reason of
+lenity being, among other things, that it in a manner produced Fielding,
+and all the fair herd of his successors down to the present day. But
+those faults are glaring: and they were of a kind specially likely to
+attract the notice and the censure of a genial, wholesome, and, above
+all, masculine taste and intellect like Fielding's. Even at that time,
+libertine as it was in some ways, and sentimental as it was in others,
+people had not failed to notice that Pamela's virtue is not quite what
+was then called "neat" wine--the pure and unadulterated juice of the
+grape. The _longueurs_ and the fiddle-faddle, the shameless and fulsome
+preface-advertisements and the rest lay open enough to censure. So
+Fielding saw the handles, and gripped them at once by starting a _male_
+Pamela--a situation not only offering "most excellent differences," but
+in itself possessing, to graceless humanity at all times it may be
+feared, and at that time perhaps specially, something essentially
+ludicrous in minor points. At first he kept the parody very close:
+though the necessary transposition of the parts afforded opportunity
+(amply taken) for display of character and knowledge of nature superior
+to Richardson's own. Later the general opinion is that he, especially
+inspirited by his _trouvaille_ of Adams, almost forgot the parody, and
+only furbished up the _Pamela_-connection at the end to make a formal
+correspondence with the beginning, and to get a convenient and
+conventional "curtain." I am not so sure of this. Even Adams is to a
+certain extent suggested by Williams, though they turn out such very
+different persons. Mrs. Slipslop, a character, as Gray saw, not so very
+far inferior to Adams, is not only a parallel to Mrs. Jewkes, but also,
+and much more, a contrast to the respectable Mrs. Jervis and Mrs.
+Warden. All sorts of fantastic and not-fantastic doublets may be traced
+throughout: and I am not certain that Parson Trulliber's majestic
+doctrine that no man, even in his own house, shall drink when he "caaled
+vurst" is not a demoniacally ingenious travesty of Pamela's
+characteristic casuistry, when she says that she will do anything to
+propitiate Lady Davers, but she will not "fill wine" to her in her own
+husband's house.
+
+But this matters little: and we have no room for it. Suffice it as
+agreed and out of controversy that _Joseph Andrews_ started as a parody
+of _Pamela_ and that, whether in addition or in substitution, it turned
+to something very different. It is not quite so uncontroversial, but
+will be asserted here as capable of all but demonstration, that the
+"something different" is also something much greater. There is still not
+very much plot--the parody did not necessitate and indeed rather
+discouraged that, and what there is is arrived at chiefly by the old and
+seldom very satisfactory system of _anagnorisis_--the long-lost-child
+business. But, under the three other heads, Joseph distances his sister
+hopelessly and can afford her much more than weight for sex. It has been
+said that there are doubtfully in Richardson anywhere, and certainly not
+in _Pamela_, those startling creations of personality which are almost
+more real to us than the persons we know in the flesh. It is not that
+Pamela and her meyney are _un_real; for they are not: but that they are
+not personal. The Reverend Abraham Adams is a good deal more real than
+half the parsons who preached last Sunday, and a good deal more
+personal: and the quality is not confined to him, though he has most of
+it. So, too, with the description. The time was not yet for any minute
+or elaborate picture-setting. But here again also that extra dose of
+life and action--almost of bustle--which Fielding knows how to instil is
+present. In _Pamela_ the settings are frequent, but they are "still
+life" and rather shadowy: we do not _see_ the Bedfordshire and
+Lincolnshire mansions, the summer houses where (as she observes with
+demure relish when the danger is over) Mr. B. was "very naughty;" even
+the pond where, if she had been another sort of girl, the _drame_ might
+have become real tragedy. Fielding does not take very much more trouble
+and yet somehow we _do_ see it all, with a little help from our own
+imaginations perhaps, but on his suggestion and start. Especially the
+outdoor life and scenes--the inn-yards and the high roads and the downs
+by night or day; the pig-sty where poor Adams is the victim of live
+pigs and the public-house kitchen where he succumbs to a by-product of
+dead ones--these are all real for us.
+
+But most of all is the regular progress of vivification visible in the
+dialogue. This, as we have seen, had been the very weakest point of the
+weakness of almost all (we might say of all) English novels up to the
+close of the first quarter of the eighteenth century. Richardson had
+done a great deal for it: but it was impossible that, on his method, it
+should not, for the most part, be languid, or at any rate long-winded.
+Here again Fielding spirits the thing up--oxygenates and ozonises the
+atmosphere: while, in even fuller measure than his predecessor and
+victim, he recognises the efficacy of dialogue as the revealer of
+character. He has, assisted no doubt by Shakespeare and his own dramatic
+practice, discovered that you do not want volumes of it to do the
+business--that single moments and single sentences will do that business
+at times, if they are used in the proper way.
+
+In short, Fielding here used his reluctant and indignant forerunner as a
+spring-board, whence to attain heights which that forerunner could never
+have reached: he "stood upon his shoulders" in the most cavalier but
+also the most successful fashion. In the novel as Richardson knew it and
+was thinking of it, when he began _Pamela_, you were, as a rule, in an
+artificial world altogether--a world artificial with an artificiality
+only faintly and occasionally touched with any reality at all. In
+_Pamela_ itself there is perhaps nothing, and certainly not much, that
+is _wholly_ unreal: but the reality is treated and rendered in an
+artificial way. In _Joseph Andrews_, though its professed genesis and
+procedure are artificial too, you break away at once from serious
+artifice. These are all real people who do real things in a real way
+now, as they did nearly two hundred years ago: however much dress, and
+speech, and manners may have changed. And we are told of their doings in
+a real way, too. Exactly how the teller knew it we do not know: but we
+do not think of this at all. And on the other hand there is no perpetual
+reminder of art, like the letter-ending and beginning, to disturb or
+alloy the once and gladly accepted "suspension of disbelief."
+
+A slight digression may not be improper here. Even in their own days,
+when the _gros mot_ was much less shocking than it is now, there was a
+general notion--which has more or less persisted, in spite of all
+changes of fashion in this respect, and exists even now when licence of
+subject as distinguished from phrase has to a great extent
+returned--that Fielding is more "coarse," more "improper," and so forth
+than Richardson. As a matter of fact, neither admits positively indecent
+language--that had gone out, except in the outskirts and fringes of
+English literature, generations earlier. But I am much mistaken if there
+are not in Richardson more than a few scenes and situations the
+"impropriety" of which positively exceeds anything in Fielding.
+Naturally one does not give indications: but readers may be pretty
+confident about the fact. The comparative "bloodlessness," however--the
+absence of life and colour in the earlier and older writer--acts as a
+sort of veil to them.
+
+Yet (to return to larger and purer air), however much one may admire
+_Joseph Andrews_, the kind of _parasitic_ representation which it allows
+itself, and the absence of any attempt to give an original story tells
+against it. And it may, in any case, be regarded as showing that the
+novelist, even yet, was hugging the shore or allowing himself to be
+taken in tow--that he did not dare to launch out into the deep and
+trust to his own sails and the wind of nature to propel him--to his own
+wits and soul to guide. Even Fielding's next venture--the wonderful and
+almost unique venture of _Jonathan Wild_--leaves some objection of this
+sort possible, though, for myself, I should never dream of admitting it.
+Jonathan was (so much the worse for human nature) a real person: and the
+outlines of his story--if not the actual details--are given partly by
+his actual life, partly by Gay's _Beggar's Opera_ and its sequel.
+Moreover, the whole marvellous little book has a purpose--the purpose of
+satire on false ideas of greatness, historical and political. The
+invention and the art of the writer are not even yet allowed frank and
+free course.
+
+But though criticism will allow this, it will, if it be competent and
+courageous, allow no deduction to be made from the other greatness of
+this little masterpiece. It has never been popular; it is never likely
+to be popular; and one may almost say that it is sincerely to be hoped
+that it never will be popular. For if it were, either all the world
+would be scoundrels, which would be a pity: or all the world would be
+philosophers and persons of taste, in which case it would be impossible,
+as the famous story has it, to "look down on one's fellow-creatures from
+a proper elevation." It really is a novel and a remarkable one--superior
+even to _Vanity Fair_, according to Thackeray's own definition, as a
+delineation of "a set of people living without God in the world." But it
+is even more (and here its only parallel is _A Tale of a Tub_, which is
+more desultory and much more of a _fatrasie_ or salmagundy of odds and
+ends) a masterpiece and quintessential example of irony. Irony had come
+in with the plain prose style, without which it is almost impossible:
+and not merely Swift but others had done great things with it. It is,
+however, only here that it reaches the quintessence just spoken of with
+a coherent and substantive purpose to serve as vehicle for it. It is
+possibly too strong for most people's taste: and one may admit that, for
+anything like frequent enjoyment, it wants a certain admixture of the
+fantastic in its various senses--after the method of Voltaire in one
+way, of Beckford in another, of Peacock in a third, of Disraeli in a
+fourth--to make it acceptable to more than a very few. But it shows,
+even from our present limited point of view, of what immense and exalted
+application the novel-method was capable: and it shows also the
+astonishing powers of its author. "Genial," in the usual sense, it
+certainly cannot be called; in the proper sense as equalling "what is
+the production of genius" there are few books which deserve the term
+better. But it is an exercise in a by-way of the novel road-system,
+though an early proof of the fact that such by-ways are endlessly open.
+
+But the time was coming, though it did not (and could hardly) come very
+quickly, when Fielding was to discard all kinds of adventitious aids and
+suggestions--all crutches, spring-boards, go-carts, tugs, patterns,
+tracings--and go his own way--and the Way of the Novel--with no guidance
+but something of the example of Cervantes directly and Shakespeare
+indirectly among the moderns, and of the poetic fiction-writers of old.
+It is perfectly clear that he had thought widely (and perhaps had read
+not a little) on the subject of literary criticism, in a sense not
+common in his day, and that the thinking had led him to a conception of
+the "prose epic" which, though it might have been partly (not wholly by
+any means) pieced out of the Italian and Spanish critics of the late
+sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, had never been worked out as
+a complete theory, much less applied in practice and to prose. The
+Prose Epic aims at--and in Fielding's case has been generally admitted
+to have hit--something like the classical unity of main action. But it
+borrows from the romance-idea the liberty of a large accretion and
+divagation of minor and accessory plot:--not the mere "episode" of the
+ancients, but the true minor plot of Shakespeare. It assumes,
+necessarily and once for all, the licence of tragi-comedy, in that sense
+of the term in which _Much Ado About Nothing_ and _A Winter's Tale_ are
+tragi-comedies, and in which _Othello_ itself might have been made one.
+And it follows further in the wake of the Shakespearean drama by
+insisting far more largely than ancient literature of any kind, and far
+more than any modern up to its date except drama had done, on the
+importance of Character. Description and dialogue are rather subordinate
+to these things than on a level with them--but they are still further
+worked out than before. And there is a new element--perhaps suggested by
+the _parabasis_ of ancient comedy, but, it may be, more directly by the
+peculiar method of Swift in _A Tale of a Tub_. At various places in his
+narrative, but especially at the beginnings of books and chapters,
+Fielding as it were "calls a halt" and addresses his readers on matters
+more or less relevant to the story, but rather in the manner of a
+commentator and scholiast upon it than as actual parts of it. Of this
+more later: for the immediate purpose is to survey and not to criticise.
+
+The result of all this was _Tom Jones_--by practically universal consent
+one of the capital books of English literature. It is unnecessary to
+recapitulate the famous praises of Gibbon, of Coleridge, of Byron, and
+of others: and it is only necessary to deal briefly with the complaints
+which, if they have never found such monumental expression as the
+praises, have been sometimes widely entertained. These objections--as
+regards interest--fasten partly on the address-digressions, partly on
+the great inset-episode of "The Man of the Hill:" as regards morality on
+a certain alleged looseness of principle in that respect throughout, and
+especially on the licence of conduct accorded to the hero himself and
+the almost entire absence of punishment for it. As for the first, "The
+Man of the Hill" was partly a concession to the fancy of the time for
+such things, partly a following of such actual examples as Fielding
+admitted--for it need hardly be said that the inset-episode, of no or
+very slight connection with the story, is common both in the ancients
+and in Cervantes, while it is to be found as long after Fielding as in
+the early novel-work of Dickens. The digression-openings are at least as
+satisfactory to some as they are unsatisfactory to others; it is even
+doubtful whether they annoy anybody half so much as they have delighted
+some excellent judges. The other point is well worn: but the wearing has
+not taken off its awkwardness and unsavouriness. Difference of habit and
+manners at the time will account for much: but the wiser apologists will
+simply say that Fielding's attitude to certain deviations from the
+strict moral law was undoubtedly very indulgent, provided that such
+deviations were unaccompanied by the graver and more detestable vices of
+cruelty, treachery, and fraud--that to vice which was accompanied by
+these blacker crimes he was utterly merciless; and that if he is thus
+rather exposed to the charge of "compounding by damning"--in the famous
+phrase--the things that he damned admit of no excuse and those that he
+compounded for have been leniently dealt with by all but the sternest
+moralists.
+
+Such things are, however (in the admirable French sense),
+_miseres_--wretched petty cavils and shallows of criticism. The only
+sensible thing to do is to launch out with Fielding into that deep and
+open sea of human character and fate which he dared so gloriously.
+During the curious phase of literary opinion which the last twenty years
+or so have seen, it has apparently been discovered by some people that
+his scheme of human thought and feeling is too simple--"toylike" I think
+they call it--in comparison with that, say, of Count Tolstoi or of Mr.
+Meredith, that modern practice has reached a finer technique than his or
+even than that of his greatest follower, Thackeray. Far be it from the
+present writer to say, or to insinuate, anything disrespectful of the
+great moderns who have lately left us. Yet it may be said without the
+slightest disrespect to them that the unfavourable comparison is mainly
+a revival of Johnson's mistake as to Fielding and Richardson. It is,
+however, something more--for it comes also from a failure to estimate
+aright the _parabasis_-openings which have been more than once referred
+to. These passages do not perhaps exhibit the by-work and the process in
+the conspicuous skeleton-clock fashion which their critics admire and
+desire, but they contain an amount of acute and profound exploration of
+human nature which it would be difficult to match and impossible to
+surpass elsewhere: while the results of Fielding's working, of his
+"toylike" scheme, are remarkable toys indeed--toys which, if we regard
+them as such, must surely strike us as rather uncanny. One is sometimes
+constrained to think that it is perhaps not much more difficult to make
+than to recognise a thoroughly live character. It certainly must be very
+difficult to do the latter if there is any considerable number of
+persons who are unable to do it in the case of almost every one of the
+personages of _Tom Jones_. With one possible exception they are all
+alive--even more so than those of _Joseph Andrews_ and with a less
+peculiar and limited liveliness than those of _Jonathan Wild_. But it
+certainly is curious that as the one good man of _Jonathan_, Heartfree,
+is the least alive of its personages, so the one bad man of _Tom_,
+Blifil, occupies the same position.
+
+The result of this variety and abundance of life is an even more than
+corresponding opportunity for enjoyment. This enjoyment may arise in
+different persons from different sources. The much praised and seldom
+cavilled at unity and completeness of the story may appeal to some.
+There are others who are inclined towards elaborate plots as Sam Weller
+was to the "'rig'nal" of his subpoena. It was a "gratifyin' sort o'
+thing, and eased his mind" to be aware of its existence, and that was
+all. These latter find _their_ sources of enjoyment elsewhere, but
+everywhere else. The abundance and the vividness of character-presentation;
+the liveliness and the abundance of the staging of that character; the
+variety of scene and incident--all most properly connected with the plot,
+but capable of existing and of being felt without it; the human dialogue;
+the admirable phrase in that dialogue and out of it, in the digressions, in
+the narrative, above, and through, and about, and below it all--these
+things and others (for it is practically impossible to exhaust the
+catalogue) fill up the cup to the brim, and keep it full, for the
+born lover of the special novel-pleasure.
+
+In one point only was Fielding a little unfortunate perhaps: and even
+here the "perhaps" has to be underlined. He came just before the end of
+a series of almost imperceptible changes in ordinary English speech
+which brought about something like a stationary state. His maligner and
+only slightly younger contemporary, Horace Walpole, in some of his
+letters, writes in a fashion which, putting mere slang aside, has hardly
+any difference from that of to-day. Fielding still uses "hath" for "has"
+and a few other things which seem archaic, not to students of literature
+but to the general. In the same way dress, manners, etc., though much
+more picturesque, were by that fact distinguished from those of almost
+the whole nineteenth century and the twentieth as far as it has gone:
+while incidents were, even in ordinary life, still usual which have long
+ceased to be so. In this way the immense advance--greater than was made
+by any one else till Miss Austen--that he made in the pure novel of this
+ordinary life may be missed. But the intrinsic magnificence, interest,
+nature, abundance of _Tom Jones_ can only be missed by those who were
+predestined to miss them. It is tempting--but the temptation must be
+resisted--to enliven these pages with an abstract of its astonishing
+"biograph-panorama." But nothing save itself can do it justice. "Take
+and read" is the only wise advice.
+
+No such general agreement has been reached in respect of Fielding's last
+novel, _Amelia_. The author's great adversary, Johnson--an adversary
+whose hostility was due partly to generous and grateful personal
+relations with Richardson, partly to political disagreement (for
+Fielding was certainly "a vile Whig"), but most of all perhaps to a sort
+of horrified recoil from the novelist's easy handling of temptations
+which were no easy matter to his critic--was nearly if not quite
+propitiated by it: and the enthusiasm for it of such a "cynic" as
+Thackeray is well known. Of the very few persons whom it would not be
+ridiculous to name with these, Scott--whose competence in criticising
+his own art is one of the most wonderful though the least generally
+recognised things about him--inclines, in the interesting
+Introduction-Dialogue to _The Fortunes of Nigel_, to put it on a level
+with _Tom Jones_ itself as a perfectly constructed novel. But modern
+criticism has, rightly or wrongly, been more dubious. Amelia is almost
+too perfect: her very forgiveness (it has been suggested) would be more
+interesting if she had not almost completely shut her eyes to there
+being anything to forgive. Her husband seems to us to prolong the
+irresponsibility of youth, which was pardonable in Tom, to a period of
+life and to circumstances of enforced responsibility which make us
+rather decline to honour the drafts he draws; and he is also a little
+bit of a fool, which Tom, to do him justice, is not, though he is
+something of a scatterbrain. Dr. Harrison, whose alternate wrath and
+reconciliation supply the most important springs of the plot, is, though
+a natural, a rather unreasonable person. The "total impression" has even
+been pronounced by some people to be a little dull. What there is of
+truth in these criticisms and others (which it would be long even to
+summarise) may perhaps be put briefly under two heads. It is never so
+easy to arouse interest in virtue as it is in vice: or in weak and
+watered vice as in vice rectified (or _un_rectified) to full strength.
+And the old requirement of "the quest" is one which will hardly be
+dispensed with. Here (for we know perfectly well that Amelia's virtue is
+in no danger) there is no quest, except that of the fortune which ought
+to be hers, which at last comes to her husband, and which we are told
+(and hope rather doubtfully) that husband had at last been taught--by
+the Fool's Tutor, Experience--not utterly to throw away. But this
+fortune drops in half casually at the last by a series of stage
+accidents, not ill-machined by any means, but not very particularly
+interesting.
+
+Such, however, are the criticisms which Fielding himself has taught
+people to make, by the very excellence of his success in the earlier
+novels: and there is a certain comparative and relative validity in
+them. But consider _Amelia_ in itself, and they begin to look, if not
+positively unfounded, rather unimportant. Once more, the astonishing
+truth and variety of scene and character make themselves felt--even more
+felt--even felt in new directions. The opening prison scenes exceed
+anything earlier even in Fielding himself, much more in any one else, as
+examples of the presentation of the unfamiliar. Miss Matthews--whom
+Fielding has probably abstained from working out as much as he might
+lest she should, from the literary point of view, obscure Amelia--is a
+marvellous outline; Colonels James and Bath are perfectly finished
+studies of ordinary and extraordinary "character" in the stage sense. No
+novel even of the author's is fuller of _vignettes_--little pictures of
+action and behaviour, of manners and society, which are not in the least
+irrelevant to the general story, but on the contrary extra-illustrate
+and carry it out.
+
+While, therefore, we must in no way recede from the position above
+adopted in regard to Richardson, we may quite consistently accord an
+even higher place to Fielding. He relieved the novel of the tyranny and
+constraint of the Letter; he took it out of the rut of confinement to a
+single or a very limited class of subjects--for the themes of _Pamela_
+and _Clarissa_ to a very large extent, of _Pamela_ and _Grandison_ to a
+considerable one, and of all three to an extent not small, are
+practically the same. He gave it altogether a larger, wider, higher,
+deeper range. He infused in it (or restored to it) the refreshing and
+preserving element of humour. He peopled it with a great crowd of lively
+and interesting characters--endowed, almost without regard to their
+technical "position _in_ life," with unlimited possession _of_ life. He
+shook up its pillows, and bustled its business arrangements. He first
+gave it--for in matter of prose style Richardson has few resources, and
+those rather respectable than transporting, and decidedly
+monotonous--the attractions of pure literature in form, and in pretty
+various form. He also gave it the attraction of pure comedy, only
+legitimately salted with farce, in such personages as Adams and
+Partridge; of lower and more farcical, but still admirable comedy in
+Slipslop and Trulliber and Squire Western; of comedy almost romantic and
+certainly charming in Sophia; of domestic drama in Amelia; of satiric
+portraiture in a hundred figures from the cousins (respectable and
+disreputable), Miss Western and Lady Bellaston, downwards. He stocked it
+with infinite miscellanies of personage, and scene, and picture, and
+phrase. As has happened in one or two other cases, he carried, at least
+in the opinion of the present writer, the particular art as far as it
+will go. He did not indeed leave nothing for his successors to do--on
+the contrary he left them in a sense everything--for he showed how
+everything could be done. But if he has sometimes been equalled, he has
+never been surpassed: and it is not easy to see even how he can be
+surpassed. For as his greatest follower has it somewhere, though not of
+him, "You cannot beat the best, you know."
+
+One point only remains, the handling of which may complete a treatment
+which is designedly kept down in detail. It has been hinted at already,
+perhaps more than once, but has not been brought out. This is the
+enormous range of suggestion in Fielding--the innumerable doors which
+stand open in his ample room, and lead from it to other chambers and
+corridors of the endless palace of Novel-Romance. This had most
+emphatically not been the case with his predecessor: for Richardson,
+except in point of mere length, showed little power of expatiation, kept
+himself very much to the same ground and round, and was not likely to
+teach anybody else to make excursions. Indeed Fielding's breaking away
+in _Joseph Andrews_ is an allegory in itself. But, at least with pupils
+and followers of any wits, there was not even any need of such breaking
+away from himself, though no doubt there are in existence many dull and
+slavish attempts to follow his work, especially _Tom Jones_. "Find it
+out for yourself"--the great English motto which in the day of England's
+glory was the motto of her men of learning as well as of her men of
+business, of her artists as well as of her craftsmen--might have been
+Fielding's: but he supplemented it with infinite finger-pointings
+towards the various things that might be found out. Almost every kind of
+novel exists--potentially--in his Four (the custom of leaving out
+_Jonathan Wild_ should be wholly abrogated), though of course they do
+not themselves illustrate or carry out at length many of the kinds that
+they thus suggest.
+
+And in fact it could not be otherwise: because, as has been pointed out,
+while Fielding had no inconsiderable command of the Book of Literature,
+he turned over by day and night the larger, the more difficult, but
+still the greater Book of Life. Not merely _quicquid agunt homines_, but
+_quicquid sentiunt, quicquid cogitant_, whatever they love and hate,
+whatever they desire or decline--all these things are the subjects of
+his own books: and the range of subject which they suggest to others is
+thus of necessity inexhaustible.
+
+If there have been some who denied or failed to recognise his greatness,
+it must be because he has played on these unwary ones the same trick
+that Garrick, in an immortal scene, played on his own Partridge. There
+is so little parade about Fielding (for even the opening addresses are
+not parade to these good people: they may disconcert or even disgust,
+but they do not dazzle them), that his characters and his scenes look
+commonplace. They feel sure that "if they had seen a ghost they would
+have looked in the very same manner and done just as he does." They are
+sure that, in the scene with Gertrude, "Lord, help them! any man--that
+is any good man--that had such a mother would have done exactly the
+same."
+
+Well! in a way no doubt they are right; and one may imitate the wisdom
+of Mr. Jones on the original occasion in not saying much more to them.
+To others, of course, this is the very miracle of art--a miracle, as far
+as the art of prose fiction is concerned, achieved in its fullness for
+practically the first time. This is the true _mimesis_--the re-creation
+or fresh creation of fictitious reality. There were in Fielding's time,
+and probably ever since have been, those who thought him "low;" there
+were, even in his own time, and have been in varying, but on the whole
+rather increased, degree since, those who thought him immoral: there
+appear to be some who think (or would like it to be thought that they
+think) him commonplace and obvious. Now, as it happens, all these
+charges have been brought against Nature too. To embellish, and correct,
+and heighten, and extra-decorate her was not Fielding's way: but to
+follow, and to interpret, and to take up her own processes with results
+uncommonly like her own. That is his immense glory to all those who can
+realise and understand it: and as for the others we must let them alone,
+joined to their own idols.
+
+In passing to the third of this great quartette, we make a little
+descent, but not much of one, while the new peak to which we come is
+well defined and separated, with characters and outlines all its own. It
+may be doubted whether any competent critic not, like Scott, bribed by
+compatriotism, ever put Smollett above Fielding, or even on a level with
+him. Thackeray, in one of the most inspired moments of his rather
+irregularly-inspired criticism, remarks, "I fancy he did not invent
+much," and this of itself would refer him to a lower class. The writer
+of fiction is not to refuse suggestion from his experience; on the
+contrary, he will do so at his peril, and will hardly by any possibility
+escape shipwreck unless his line is the purely fantastic. But if he
+relies solely, or too much, on such experience, though he may be quite
+successful, his success will be subject to discount, bound to pay
+royalty to experience itself. It is pretty certain that most of
+Smollett's most successful things, from _Roderick Random_ to _Humphry
+Clinker_, and in those two capital books, perhaps, most of all, kept
+very close to actual experience, and sometimes merely reported it.
+
+This, however, is only a comparative drawback; it is in a sense a
+positive merit; and it is connected, in a very intimate way, with the
+general character of Smollett's novel-method. This is, to a great
+extent, a reaction or relapse towards the picaresque style. Smollett may
+have translated both Cervantes and Le Sage; he certainly translated the
+latter: and it was Le Sage who in any case had the greatest influence
+over him. Now the picaresque method is not exactly untrue to ordinary
+life: on the contrary, as we have seen, it was a powerful schoolmaster
+to bring the novel thereto. But it subjects the scenes of ordinary life
+to a peculiar process of sifting: and when it has got what it wants, it
+proceeds to heighten them and "touch them up" in its own peculiar
+manner of decoration. This is Smollett's method throughout, even in that
+singular _pastiche_ of _Don Quixote_ itself, _Sir Launcelot Greaves_,
+which certainly was not his happiest conception, but which has had
+rather hard measure.
+
+As used by him it has singular merits, and communicates to at least
+three of his five books (_The Adventures of an Atom_ is deliberately
+excluded as not really a novel at all) a certain "liveliness" which,
+though it is not the life_like_ness of Fielding, is a great attraction.
+He showed it first in _Roderick Random_ (1748), which appeared a little
+before _Tom Jones_, and was actually taken by some as the work of the
+same author. It would be not much more just to take Roderick as
+Smollett's deliberate presentment of himself than to apply the same
+construction to Marryat's not very dissimilar, but more unlucky, _coup
+d'essai_ of _Frank Mildmay_. But it is certain that there was something,
+though exactly how much has never been determined, of the author's
+family history in the earliest part, a great deal of his experiences on
+board ship in the middle, and probably not a little, though less, of his
+fortunes in Bath and London towards the end. As a single source of
+interest and popularity, no doubt, the principal place must be given to
+the naval part of the book. Important as the English navy had been, for
+nearly two centuries if not for much longer, it had never played any
+great part in literature, though it had furnished some caricatured and
+rather conventional sketches. There is something more in a play, _The
+Fair Quaker of Deal_, by Charles Shadwell, nephew or son of Dryden's
+victim, but this was only of third or fourth rate literary value, and an
+isolated example to boot. The causes of the neglect have been set forth
+by many writers from Macaulay downwards, and need not be discussed here;
+the fact is certain. Smollett's employment of "the service" as a
+subject may have been, consciously and intentionally, only one of those
+utilisings of personal experience of which we have spoken. But really it
+was an instance of the great fact that the novelist, on the instigation
+mainly of Fielding himself, was beginning to take all actual life to be
+his province.
+
+Smollett brought to his work peculiar powers, the chief of which was a
+very remarkable one, and almost as much "improved on" Fielding as
+Fielding's exercise of it was improved on Richardson--that of providing
+his characters and scenes with accessories. Roderick is not only a much
+more disagreeable person than Tom, but he is much _less_ of a person:
+and Strap, though (_vice versa_) rather a better fellow than Partridge,
+is a much fainter and more washed-out character. But in mere interest of
+story and accessories the journey of Roderick and Strap to London is
+quite the equal, and perhaps the superior, of that of Tom and his
+hanger-on after we once leave Upton, where the interest is of a kind
+that Smollett could not reach. It is probable that Fielding might, if he
+had chosen, have made the prison in _Amelia_ as horribly and
+disgustingly realistic (to use a horrible and disgusting word) as the
+ship in _Roderick_, but he at any rate did not choose. Moreover
+Smollett, himself a member of one of the less predominant partners of
+the British and Irish partnership, perhaps for that reason hit on
+utilising the difference of these partners (after a fashion which had
+never been seen since Shakespeare) in the Welshman Morgan. As far as
+mere plot goes, he enters into no competition whatever with either
+Fielding or Richardson: the picaresque model did not require that he
+should. When Roderick has made use of his friends, knocked down his
+enemies, and generally elbowed and shoved his way through the crowd of
+adventures long enough, Narcissa and her fortune are not so much the
+reward of his exertions as a stock and convenient method of putting an
+end to the account of them. The customer has been served with a
+sufficient amount of the commodity he demands: and the scissors are
+applied, the canister shut up, the tap turned off. It almost results--it
+certainly coincides--that some of the minor characters, and some of the
+minor scenes, are much more vivid than the hero (the heroine is almost
+an absolute nonentity) and the whole story. The curate and the exciseman
+in the ninth chapter are, by common consent, among Smollett's greatest
+triumphs; but the curate might be excommunicated and the exciseman
+excised without anybody who read the book perceiving the slightest gap
+or missing link, as far as the story is concerned.
+
+Smollett's second venture, _Peregrine Pickle_ (1751), was more
+ambitious, perhaps rose higher in parts, but undoubtedly contained even
+more doubtful and inferior matter. No one can justly blame him, though
+any one may most justly refrain from praising, from the general point of
+view, as regards the "insets" of Miss Williams's story in _Roderick_ and
+of that of Lady Vane here. From that point of view they range with the
+"Man of the Hill" in _Tom Jones_, and in the first case at least, though
+most certainly not in the second, have more justification of connection
+with the central story. He may so far underlie the charge of error of
+judgment, but nothing worse. Unluckily the "Lady Vane" insertion was, to
+a practical certainty, a commercial not an artistic transaction: and
+both here and elsewhere Smollett carried his already large licence to
+the extent of something like positive pornography. He is in fact one of
+the few writers of real eminence who have been forced to Bowdlerise
+themselves. Further, there would be more excuse for the most offensive
+part of _Peregrine_ if it were not half plagiarism of the main
+situations of _Pamela_ and _Clarissa_: if Smollett had not deprived his
+hero of all the excuses which, even in the view of some of the most
+respectable characters of _Pamela_, attached to the conduct of Mr. B.;
+and if he had not vulgarised Lovelace out of any possible attribution of
+"regality," except of being what the time would have called King of the
+Black Guard. As for Tom Jones, he does not come into comparison with
+"Perry" at all, and he would doubtless have been most willing and
+able--competent physically as well as morally--to administer the proper
+punishment to that young ruffian by drubbing him within an inch of his
+life.
+
+These, no doubt, are grave drawbacks: but the racy fun of the book
+almost atones for them: and the exaltation of the naval element of
+_Roderick_ which one finds here in Trunnion and Hatchway and Pipes
+carries the balance quite to the other side. This is the case even
+without, but much more with, the taking into account of Smollett's usual
+irregular and almost irrelevant _bonuses_, such as the dinner after the
+fashion of the ancients and the rest. No: _Peregrine Pickle_ can never
+be thrown to the wolves, even to the most respectable and moral of these
+animals in the most imposing as well as ravening of attitudes. English
+Literature cannot do without it.
+
+Without _Ferdinand Count Fathom_ (1753) many people have thought that
+English Literature could do perfectly well: and without going quite so
+far, one may acknowledge that perhaps a shift could be made. The idea of
+re-transferring the method (in the first place at any rate) to foreign
+parts was not a bad one, and it may be observed that by far the best
+portion of _Fathom_ is thus occupied. Not a few of these opening
+passages are excellent: and Fathom's mother, if not a person, is an
+excellent type: it is probable that the writer knew the kind well. But
+his unhappy tendency to enter for the same stakes as his great
+forerunners makes it almost impossible not to compare _Ferdinand Fathom_
+with _Jonathan Wild_: and the effect is very damaging to the Count. Much
+of the book is dull: and Fathom's conversation is (to adopt a cant word)
+extremely unconvincing. The fact seems to be that Smollett had run his
+picaresque vein dry, as far as it connected itself with mere rascality
+of various kinds, and he did well to close it. He had published three
+novels in five years: he waited seven before his next, and then eleven
+more before his last.
+
+A qualified apology has been hinted above for _Sir Launcelot Greaves_.
+It is undoubtedly evidence of the greatness of _Don Quixote_ that there
+should have been so many direct imitations of it by persons of genius
+and talent: but this particular instance is unfortunate to the verge of
+the preposterous, if not over it. The eighteenth century was indeed
+almost the capital time of English eccentricity: and it was also a time
+of licence which sometimes looked very like lawlessness. But its
+eccentricities were not at this special period romantic: and its
+lawlessness was rather abuse of law than wholesale neglect of it. A
+rascally attorney or a stony-hearted creditor might inflict great
+hardship under the laws affecting money: and a brutal or tyrannical
+squire might do the same under those affecting the tenure or the
+enjoyment of house or land. "Persons of quality" might go very far. But
+even a person of quality, if he took to riding about the country in
+complete steel, assaulting the lieges, and setting up a sort of
+cadi-justice of his own in opposition to the king's, would probably
+have been brought pretty rapidly, if not to the recovery of his senses,
+to the loss of his liberty. Nor, with rare exceptions, are the
+subordinate or incidental humours of the first class. But I have always
+thought that the opening passage more than entitles the book to an
+honourable place in the history of English fiction. I do not know where
+to look, before it, for such an "interior"--such a complete Dutch
+picture of room and furniture and accessories generally. Even so learned
+a critic as the late M. Brunetiere thought that things of the kind were
+not older than Balzac. I have known English readers, not ignorant, who
+thought they were scarcely older than Dickens. Dickens, however,
+undoubtedly took them from Smollett, of whom we know that he was an
+early and enthusiastic admirer: and Scott, who has them much earlier
+than Dickens, not improbably was in some degree indebted for them to his
+countryman. At any rate in that countryman they are: and you will not
+find a much better example of them anywhere than this of the
+inn-kitchen. But apart from it, and from a few other things of the same
+or similar kinds, there is little to be said for the book. The divine
+Aurelia especially is almost more shadowy than the divine Narcissa and
+the divine Emilia: and can claim no sort of sistership in personality
+with Amelia or Sophia, even with Clarissa or Pamela. In fact, up to this
+time Smollett's women--save in the case of Fathom's hell-cat of a
+mother, and one or two more who are "minors"--have done absolutely
+nothing for his books. It was to be quite otherwise in the last and
+best, though even here the heroine _en titre_ is hardly, even though we
+have her own letters to body her out, more substantial than her elder
+sisters. But Lydia, though the _ingenue_, is not the real heroine of
+this book: her aunt and her aunt's maid divide that position between
+them.
+
+A sufficiently ungracious critic may, if he chooses, see in Smollett's
+falling back on the letter-plan for _Humphry Clinker_ (1771) an
+additional proof of that deficiency in strictly inventive faculty which
+has been noticed. The more generous "judge by results" will hardly care
+to consider so curiously in the case of such a masterpiece. For a
+masterpiece it really is. The comparative absence of "character" in the
+higher and literary sense as contrasted with "character-_parts_" in the
+technical meaning of the theatre has been admitted in the other books.
+Here, with the aid of the letters, it is amply supplied, or perhaps (to
+speak with extreme critical closeness) the character-parts are turned
+into characters by this means. There is no stint, because of the
+provision of this higher interest, of the miscellaneous fun and
+"business" which Smollett had always supplied so lavishly out of his
+experience, his observation, and, if not his invention, his combining
+faculty. And there is the setting of interior and exterior "furniture"
+which has been also referred to. Abundant as is the information which
+the eighteenth century has given us as to its justly beloved place of
+pilgrimage, Bath, there is nothing livelier than the Bath scenes here,
+from Chesterfield to Miss Austen, and few things, if any, so vivid and
+detailed. So it is with Clifton earlier, with London later, with
+Scotland last of all, and with the journeys connecting them. Yet these
+things are mere _hors d'oeuvre_, pickles, sauces, condiments, beside the
+solid character-food of the Brambles and Melfords, of Winifred Jenkins
+and of the redoubtable Lismahago. That there is no exaggeration or
+caricature cannot, of course, be said. It was not Smollett's notion of
+art to present the elaborate academies of Richardson, or the almost
+uncanny duplications of Nature which Fielding could achieve. He must
+embolden, in fact grotesque, the line; heighten, in fact splash and
+plaster, the colour. But he has not left Nature behind here: he has only
+put her in a higher light.
+
+One means of doing so has been condemned in him, as in others, as in its
+great earlier master, Swift, and its greatest later one, Thackeray, by
+some purists. They call it cheap and inartistic: but this is mere
+pedantry and prudery. Mis-spelling is not a thing to be employed every
+day or for every purpose: if you do that, you get into the ineffably
+dreary monotony which distinguishes the common comic journalist. But
+thrown in occasionally, and in the proper place, it gives an excellent
+zest: and it has seldom been employed--never, except in the two
+instances quoted--better than in the cases of Tabitha Bramble and her
+maid. For it is employed in the only legitimate way, that of zest, not
+substance. Tabitha and Winifred would still be triumphs of
+characterisation of a certain kind if they wrote as correctly as Uncle
+Matthew or Nephew Jery. Further, Lismahago is a bolder and a much less
+caricatured utilising of the "national" resource than Morgan. If
+Smollett had not been a perfectly undaunted, as well as a not very
+amiable, person he would hardly have dared to "_lacess_ the thistle" in
+this fashion. But there are few sensible Scotsmen nowadays who would not
+agree with that most sensible, as well as greatest, of their
+compatriots, Sir Walter Scott, in acknowledging the justice (comic
+emphasis granted) of the twitch, and the truth of the grip, at that
+formidable plant. The way in which Smollett mixes up actual living
+persons, by their own names, with his fictitious characters may strike
+us as odd: but there is, for the most part, nothing offensive in it,
+and in fact, except a little of his apparently inevitable indulgence in
+nasty detail, there is nothing at all offensive in the book. The
+contrast of its general tone with that especially of his first two; the
+softening and mellowing of the general presentation--is very remarkable
+in a man of undoubtedly not very gentle disposition who had long
+suffered from extremely bad health, and whose chief original works
+recently--the _Journey_ and the _Adventures_--had been, the first a
+tissue of grumbles, the second an outburst of savagery. But though the
+grumbles recur in Matthew Bramble's mouth, they become merely humorous
+there: and there is practically no savagery at all. Leghorn, it has been
+observed more than once, was in a fashion a Land of Beulah: a "season of
+calm weather" had set in for a rather stormy life just before the end.
+
+Whatever may be his defects (and from the mere point of view of Momus
+probably a larger number may be found in him than either in Richardson
+or in Fielding), Smollett well deserves an almost equal place with them
+in the history of the novel. Richardson, though he had found the
+universal as far as certain aspects of it in humanity are concerned, had
+confined it within a very narrow space, or particular envelope, in tone
+and temper: the fact that he has been called "stifling," though the
+epithet may not be entirely just, is almost sufficient evidence of this.
+Fielding had taken the novel into a far larger air and, as has been said
+already, there was hardly anything to which his method might not lead,
+and in which it would not be effective. But he had been exclusively
+English in externals: and the result is that, to this day, he has had
+less influence abroad than perhaps any English writer of equal genius
+and than some of far less.[6] Smollett, by his remarkable utilisation
+of the characteristics of the other members of Magna-Britannia; by his
+excursions into foreign European and even transatlantic scenery, had
+widened the external if not the internal prospect; and had done perhaps
+even more by that chance-medley, as it perhaps was, of attention to the
+still more internal detail which was to be of such importance in the
+novel to come. Taking the three together (not without due allowance for
+the contemporary, if mainly imitative, developments which will be
+described in the next chapter), they had put prose fiction in a position
+which it had not attained, even in Spain earlier, even in France at more
+or less the same time: and had entirely antiquated, on the one hand, the
+mere _fabliau_ or _novella_--the story of a single limited situation--on
+the other, the discursive romance with little plot and next to no
+character. One great further development, impossible at this time, of
+the larger novel, the historical, waited for Scott: but even this was
+soon, though very awkwardly, tried. It could not yet be born because the
+historic sense which was its necessary begetter hardly existed, and
+because the provision of historic matter for this sense to work on was
+rather scanty. But it is scarcely extravagant to say that it is more
+difficult to conceive even Scott doing what he did without Richardson,
+Fielding, and Smollett before him, than it is to believe that, with
+these predecessors, somebody like Scott was bound to come.
+
+    [6] This is said not to have been quite the case at the _very_
+    first: but it has been so since.
+
+Great, however, as the three are, there is no need of any "injustice to
+Ireland"--little as Ireland really has to claim in Sterne's merit or
+demerit. He is not a fifth wheel to the coach by any means: he is the
+fourth and almost the necessary one. In Richardson, Fielding, and
+Smollett the general character and possibilities of the novel had been
+shown, with the exception just noted: and indeed hardly with that
+exception, because they showed the way clearly to it. But its almost
+illimitable particular capabilities remained unshown, or shown only in
+Fielding's half extraneous divagations, and in earlier things like the
+work of Swift. Sterne took it up in the spirit of one who wished to
+exhibit these capabilities; and did exhibit them signally in more than
+one or two ways. He showed how the novel could present, in refreshed
+form, the _fatrasie_, the pillar-to-post miscellany, of which Rabelais
+had perhaps given the greatest example possible, but of which there were
+numerous minor examples in French. He showed how it could be made, not
+merely to present humorous situations, but to exhibit a special kind of
+humour itself--to make the writer as it were the hero without his ever
+appearing as character in _Tristram_, or to humorise autobiography as in
+the _Sentimental Journey_. And last of all (whether it was his greatest
+achievement or not is matter of opinion), he showed the novel of purpose
+in a form specially appealing to his contemporaries--the purpose being
+to exhibit, glorify, luxuriate in the exhibition of, sentiment or
+"sensibility." In none of these things was he wholly original; though
+the perpetual upbraiding of "plagiarism" is a little unintelligent.
+Rabelais, not to mention others, had preceded him, and far excelled him,
+in the _fatrasie_; Swift in the humour-novel; two generations of
+Frenchmen and Frenchwomen in the "sensibility" kind. But he brought all
+together and adjusted the English novel, actually to them, potentially
+to much else.
+
+To find fault with his two famous books is almost contemptibly easy. The
+plagiarism which, if not found out at once, was found out very soon, is
+the least of these: in fact hardly a fault at all. The indecency, which
+_was_ found out at once, and which drew a creditable and not in the
+least Tartuffian protest from Warburton, is a far more serious
+matter--not so much because of the licence in subject as because of the
+unwholesome and sniggering tone. The sentimentality is very often simply
+maudlin, almost always tiresome _to us_, and in very, very few
+cases justified by brilliant success even in its own very doubtful
+kind. Most questionable of all, perhaps, is the merely mechanical
+mountebankery--the blanks, and the dashes, and the rows of stops, the
+black pages and the marbled pages which he employs to force a guffaw
+from his readers. The abstinence from any central story in _Tristram_ is
+one of those dubious pieces of artifice which may possibly show the
+artist's independence of the usual attractions of story-telling, but may
+also suggest to the churlish the question whether his invention would
+have supplied him with any story to tell; and the continual asides and
+halts and parenthetic divagations in the _Journey_ are not quite free
+from the same suggestion. In fact if you "can see a church by daylight"
+you certainly want no piercing vision, and no artificial assistance of
+light or lens, to discover the faults of this very unedifying churchman.
+
+But he remains, for all that, a genius; and one of the great figures in
+our history. There is to his credit in general, as has been already
+pointed out, the great asset of having indicated, and in two notable
+instances patterned, the out-of-the-way novel--the novel eccentric,
+particular, individual. There is to that credit still more the
+brilliancy of the two specimens themselves in spite of their faults;
+their effectiveness in the literature of delight; the great powers of a
+kind more or less peculiar to the artist which they show, and the power,
+perhaps still greater, which they display in the actually general and
+ordinary lines of the novel, though adapted to this extraordinary use.
+
+For though it pleased Sterne to anticipate the knife-grinder's innocent
+confession, "Story? God bless you! I have none to tell, sir!" in a
+sardonic paraphrase of half a score of volumes, he actually possessed
+the narrative faculty in an extraordinary degree. He does not merely
+show this in his famous inset short stories, accomplished as these are:
+he achieves a much greater marvel in the way in which he makes his
+_fatrasies_ as it were novels. After one or two, brief but certainly not
+tedious, volumes of the _Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy_, you know
+that you are being cheated, and are going to be: at the end you know
+still more certainly that you have been. You have had nothing of the
+"Life" but a great deal round rather than about the birth, and a few
+equivocal, merely glanced at, and utterly unco-ordinated incidents
+later. If you have had any "opinions" they have been chiefly those of
+Mr. Tristram Shandy's father and other members of his family, or those
+of its friends and circle, or of those shadowy personages outside the
+pretended story, such as Eugenius and Yorick, besides a few discourses
+which drop the slightest pretension of being Shandean or Tristramic and
+are plainly and simply the author's. In the _Journey_ there is more
+unity; but it is, quite frankly, the unity of the temperament of that
+author himself. The incidents--sentimental, whimsical, fie-fie--have no
+other connection or tendency than the fact that they occur to the
+"gentleman in the black silk smalls" and furnish him with figures as it
+were for his performance. Yet you are _held_ in a way in which nothing
+but the romance or the novel ever does hold you. The thing is a [Greek:
+mythos hamythos]--story without story-end, without story-beginning,
+without story-connection or middle: but a story for all that. A
+dangerous precedent, perhaps; but a great accomplishment: and, even as
+a precedent, the leader of a very remarkable company. In not a few
+noteworthy later books--in a very much greater number of parts of later
+books--as we take our hats off to the success we are saluting not a new
+but an old friend, and that friend Sterne.
+
+On the second great count--character--Sterne's record is still more
+distinguished: and here there is no legerdemain about the matter. There
+is a consensus of all sound opinion to the effect that my Uncle Toby is
+an absolute triumph--even among those who think that, as in the case of
+Colonel Newcome later, it would have been possible to achieve that
+triumph without letting his simplicity run so near to something less
+attractive. It is not the sentiment that is here to blame, because
+Sterne has luckily not forgotten (as he has in the case of his dead
+donkeys and his live Marias) that humour is the only thing that will
+keep such sentiment from turning mawkish, if not even rancid; and that
+the antiseptic effect will not be achieved by keeping your humour and
+your sentiment in separate boxes. Trim is even better: he is indeed next
+to Sancho--and perhaps Sam Weller--the greatest of all "followers" in
+the novel: he supplies the only class-figure in which Sterne perhaps
+beats Fielding himself. About Walter Shandy there is more room for
+difference: and it is possible to contend that, great as he is, he is
+not complete--that he is something of a "humour" in the old one-sided
+and over-emphasised Jonsonian sense. Nothing that he does or says
+misbecomes him: but a good deal that he does not do and say might be
+added with advantage, in order to give us the portrait of a whole as
+well as a live man. As for the other male characters, Sterne's plan
+excused him--as it did not quite in Mr. Shandy's case--from making them
+more than sketches and shadows. But what uncommonly lively sketches and
+shadows they are!
+
+Sterne's unlucky failing prevented him in most cases from touching the
+women off with a clean brush: but the quality of _liveness_ pertains to
+them in almost a higher measure: and perhaps testifies even more
+strongly to his almost uncanny faculty of communicating it by touches
+which are not always unclean and are sometimes slight to an astonishing
+degree. Even that shadow of a shade "My dear, dear Jenny" has a
+suggestion of verity about her which has shocked and fluttered some: the
+maids of the Shandean household, the grisettes and peasant girls and
+ladies of the _Journey_, have flesh which is not made of paper, and
+blood that is certainly not ink. And the peculiarity extends to his two
+chief named heroines, Mrs. Shandy and the Widow. Never were any two
+female personages more unceremoniously treated in the way of scanty and
+incidental appearance. Never were any personages of scanty and
+incidental appearance made more alive and more female.
+
+His details and accessories of all kinds, descriptive, literary, and
+other, would give subject for a separate chapter; but we must turn (for
+this chapter is already too long) to his phrase--in dialogue, narrative,
+whatever you please to call it. For the fact is that these two things,
+and all others in which phrase and expression can be used, melt into
+each other with Sterne in a manner as "flibberti-gibbety" as most other
+things about him. This phrase or expression is of course artificial to
+the highest degree: and it is to it that the reproach of depending on
+mechanical aids chiefly applies. And yet laboriously figured, tricked,
+machined as it is--easy as once more it may be to prove that it is
+artifice and not art--the fact remains that, not merely (perhaps not by
+any means chiefly) in the stock extract-pieces which everybody knows,
+but almost everywhere, it is triumphant: and that English literature
+would be seriously impoverished without it. Certainly never was there a
+style which more fully justified the definition given by Buffon, in
+Sterne's own time, of style as "the _very_ man." Falsetto, "faking,"
+vamping, shoddy--all manner of evil terms may be heaped upon it without
+the possibility of completely clearing it from them. To some eyes it
+underlies them most when it is most ambitious, as in the Le Fevre story
+and the diatribe against critics. It leaves the court with all manner of
+stains on its character. Only, once more, if it did not exist we should
+be ignorant of more than one of the most remarkable possibilities of the
+English language.
+
+Thus, in almost exactly the course of a technical generation--from the
+appearance of _Pamela_ in 1740 to that of _Humphry Clinker_ in 1771--the
+wain of the novel was solidly built, furnished with four main wheels to
+move it, and set a-going to travel through the centuries. In a sense,
+inasmuch as _Humphry Clinker_ itself, though Smollett's best work, can
+hardly be said to show any absolutely new faculties, character, or
+method, the process was even accomplished in two-thirds of the time,
+between _Pamela_ and _Tristram Shandy_. We shall see in the next chapter
+how eagerly the examples were taken up: and how, long before Smollett
+died, the novel of this and that kind had become one of the most
+prolific branches of literature. But, for the moment, the important
+thing is to repeat that it had been thoroughly and finally started on
+its high road, in general by Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett; in
+particular and wayward but promising side-paths by Sterne.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE MINOR AND LATER EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL[7]
+
+    [7] A little of the work to be noticed in this chapter is not
+    strictly eighteenth century, but belongs to the first decade or
+    so of the nineteenth. But the majority of the contents actually
+    conform to the title, and there is hardly any more convenient or
+    generally applicable heading for the novel before Miss Austen
+    and Scott, excluding the great names dealt with in the last
+    chapter.
+
+
+It is at last beginning to be recognised in principle, though it is
+still much too often forgotten in practice, that the minor work of a
+time is at least as important as the major in determining general
+literary characteristics and tendencies. Nor is this anywhere much more
+noticeable than in regard to the present period of our present subject.
+The direct influence of Richardson and Fielding was no doubt very great:
+but the development of the novel during the middle and later century was
+too large and too various to be all mere imitation. As a result,
+however, of their influence, there certainly came over the whole kind a
+very remarkable change. Even before them the _nisus_ towards it, which
+has been noticed in the chapter before the last, is observable enough.
+Mrs. Manley's rather famous _New Atlantis_ (1709) has at least the form
+of a key-novel of the political sort: but the whole interest is in the
+key and not in the novel, though the choice of the form is something.
+And the second, third, and fourth decades of the century saw other work
+testifying to the vague and almost unconscious hankering after prose
+fiction which was becoming endemic. A couple of examples of this may be
+treated, in passing, before we come to the work--not exactly of the
+first class in itself--of a writer who shows both the pre-Richardsonian
+and the post-Richardsonian phases of it most interestingly, and after a
+fashion to which there are few exact parallels.
+
+A book, which counts here from the time of its appearance, and from a
+certain oddity and air of "key" about it, rather than from much merit as
+literature, or any as a story, is the _Adventures of Gaudentio di Lucca_
+by Simon Berington.[8] It appeared in 1737, between Defoe and Swift on
+the earlier, and Richardson on the later side, while the English world
+was to the novel as an infant crying for the light--and the bottle--at
+once. It begins and ends with adventures and discoveries of an ordinary
+romantic type. But the body consists of a revelation to certain Italian
+Inquisitors (who are not at all of the lurid type familiar to the
+Protestant imagination, but most equitable and well-disposed as well as
+potent, grave, and reverend signers) of an unknown country of "the Grand
+Pophar" in the centre of Africa. This country is civilised, but not yet
+Christianised: and the description of it of course gives room for the
+exercise of the familiar game of contrast--in this case not so much
+satiric as didactic--with countries nearer home which are at least
+supposed to be both civilised and Christian. It is a "respectable" book
+both in the French and the English sense: but it is certainly not very
+amusing, and cannot even be called very interesting in any way, save
+historically.
+
+    [8] The not infrequent attribution of this book to Berkeley is a
+    good instance of the general inability to discriminate _style_.
+
+The other example which we shall take is of even less intrinsic
+attraction: in fact it is a very poor thing. There are, however, more
+ways than one in which _corpora vilia_ are good for experiment and
+evidence: and we may find useful indications in the mere bookmaking of
+the time. Lowndes, the fortunate publisher of _Evelina_, some dozen
+years before that windfall came, had issued, or reissued, a collection
+called _The Novelist_ and professedly containing _The select novels of
+Dr. Croxall_ [the ingenious author of _The Fair Circassian_ and the part
+destroyer of Hereford Cathedral] _and other Polite Tales_. The book is
+an unblushing if not an actually piratical compilation; sweeping
+together, with translations and adaptations published by Croxall himself
+at various times in the second quarter of the century and probably
+earlier, most of the short stories from the _Spectator_ class of
+periodical which had appeared during the past two-thirds of a century.
+Most of the rest are obvious (and very badly done) translations from the
+French and even from Cervantes' _Exemplary Novels_; seasoned with
+personal and other anecdotes, so that the whole number of separate
+articles may exceed four-score. Of these a few are interesting attempts
+at the historical novel or novelette--short sketches of Mary Queen of
+Scots (very sympathetic and evidently French in origin from the phrase
+"a _temple_ which was formerly a church"), Jane Shore (an exquisitely
+absurd piece of eighteenth-century middle-class modernising and
+moralising), Essex, Buckingham, and other likely figures. There are cuts
+by the "Van-somethings and Back-somethings" of the time: and the whole,
+though not worthy of anything better than the "fourpenny box," is an
+evident symptom of popular taste. The sweetmeats or _hors d'oeuvre_ of
+the older caterings for that taste are here collected together to form a
+_piece de resistance_. It is true that _The Novelist_ is only a true
+title in the older sense--that the pieces are _novelle_ not "novels"
+proper. But they are fiction, or fact treated like fiction: and though
+the popular taste itself was evidently ceasing to be satisfied with
+these morsels and demanding a substantial joint, yet the substance was,
+after all, the same.
+
+We rise higher, if not very high, with the novels of Mrs. Eliza Haywood
+(1693-1756), one of the damned of the _Dunciad_, but, like some of her
+fellows in that _Inferno_, by no means deserving hopeless reprobation.
+Every one who has devoted any attention to the history of the novel, as
+well as some who have merely considered it as a part of that of English
+literature generally, has noticed the curious contrast between the
+earlier and the later novels of this writer. _Betsy Thoughtless_ (1751)
+and _Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy_ (1753) could, without much difficulty, be
+transposed into novels of to-day. _Idalia_ (1723) is of an entirely
+different mood and scheme. It is a pure Behnesque _nouvelle_, merely
+describing the plots and outrage which ruin the heroine (_The
+Unfortunate Mistress_ is the second title), but attempting no
+character-drawing (the only hint at such a thing is that Idalia, instead
+of being a meek and suffering victim, is said to have a violent temper),
+and making not the slightest effort even to complete what story there
+is. For the thing breaks off with a sort of "_perhaps_ to be concluded
+in _some_ next," about which we have not made up our minds. Very rarely
+do we find such a curious combination or succession of styles so early:
+but the novel, for pretty obvious reasons, seems to offer temptations to
+it and facilities for it.
+
+For _Idalia's_ above-named juniors, while not bad books to read for mere
+amusement, have a very particular interest for the student of the
+history of the novel. Taken in connection with their author's earlier
+work, they illustrate, for the first time, a curious phenomenon which
+has repeated itself often, notably in the case of Bulwer, and of a
+living novelist who need not be named. This is that the novel, more
+almost than any other kind of literature, seems to lend itself to what
+may be called the _timeserving_ or "opportunism" of craftsmanship--to
+call out the adaptiveness and versatility of the artist. _Betsy_ and
+_Jenny_ are so different from _Idalia_ and her group that a critic of
+the idle Separatist persuasion would, were it not for troublesome
+certainties of fact, have no difficulty whatever in proving that they
+must be by different authors. We know that they were _not_: and we know
+also the reason of their dissimilarity--the fact that _Pamela_ and her
+brother and their groups _ont passe par la_.[9] This fact is most
+interesting: and it shows, among other things, that Mrs. Eliza Haywood
+was a decidedly clever woman.
+
+    [9] The elect ladies about Richardson joined _Betsy_ with
+    _Amelia_, and sneered at both.
+
+At the same time the two books also show that she was not quite clever
+enough: and that she had not realised, as in fact hardly one of the
+minor novelists of this time did realise, the necessity of
+individualising character. Betsy is both a nice and a good
+girl--"thoughtless" up to specification, but no fool, perfectly
+"straight" though the reverse of prudish, generous, merry, lovable. But
+with all these good qualities she is not quite a person. Jenny is, I
+think, a little more of one, but still not quite--while the men and the
+other women are still less. Nor had Eliza mastered that practised knack
+of "manners-painting" which was to stand Fanny Burney, and many another
+after her, in the stead of actual character-creation. Her situations are
+often very lively, if not exactly decorous; and they sometimes have a
+real dramatic verisimilitude, for instance, the quarrel and
+reconciliation of the Lord and the Lady in _Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy_;
+but the higher verisimilitude of prose fiction they lack. Neither again
+(though Smollett had given her a lead here) had she attained that power
+of setting and furnishing a scene which is so powerful a weapon in the
+novelist's armoury. Yet she had learnt much: and her later work would
+have been almost a wonder in her own earlier time.
+
+She had even been preceded in the new line by one, and closely followed
+by another writer of her own sex, both of unblemished reputation, and
+perhaps her superiors in intellectual quality and accomplishment, though
+they had less distinct novel-faculty. Sarah Fielding, the great
+novelist's sister, but herself one of Richardson's literary seraglio,
+had a good deal of her brother's humour, but very little of his
+constructive grasp of life. _David Simple_ (1744), her best known work,
+the _Familiar Letters_ connected with it (to which Henry contributed),
+and _The Governess_ display both the merit and the defect--but the
+defect is more fatal to a novel than the merit is advantageous. Once
+more--if the criticism has been repeated _ad nauseam_ the occasions of
+it may be warranted to be much more nauseous in themselves--one looks up
+for interest, and is not fed. "The Adventures" of David--whose progeny
+must have been rapidly enriched and ennobled if Peter Simple was his
+descendant--were "in search of a Friend," and he came upon nobody in the
+least like O'Brien. It was, in fact, too early or too late for a _lady_
+to write a thoroughly good novel. It had been possible in the days of
+Madeleine de Scudery, and it became possible in the days of Frances
+Burney: but for some time before, in the days of Sarah Fielding, it was
+only possible in the ways of Afra and of Mrs. Haywood, who, without any
+unjust stigma on them, can hardly be said to fulfil the idea of
+ladyhood, as no doubt Miss Fielding did.
+
+There is an amusing and (in its context) just passage of Thackeray's,
+in which he calls Charlotte Lennox, author of _The Female Quixote_
+(1752), a "figment." But it would be unlucky if any one were thereby
+prevented from reading this work of the lady whom Johnson admired, and
+for whom he made an all-night orgie of apple-pie and bay-leaves. Her
+book, which from its heroine is also called _Arabella_, is clever and
+not unamusing, though it errs (in accordance with the moral-critical
+principles of the time) by not merely satirising the "heroic" romances
+of the Gomberville-La Calprenede-Scudery type, but solemnly discussing
+them. Arabella, the romance-bitten daughter of a marquis, is, for all
+her delusion, or because of it, rather a charming creature. Her lover
+Glanville, his Richardsonian sister, and the inevitable bad Baronet (he
+can hardly be called wicked, especially for a Baronet) are more
+commonplace: and the thing would have been better as a rather long
+_nouvelle_ than as a far from short novel. It alternately comes quite
+close to its original (as in the intended burning of Arabella's books)
+and goes entirely away from it, and neither as an imitation nor
+independently is it as good as Graves's _Spiritual Quixote_: but it is
+very far from contemptible.
+
+Yet though the aptitude of women for novel-writing was thus early
+exemplified, it is not to be supposed that the majority of persons who
+felt the new influences were of that sex. By far the larger number of
+those who crowded to follow the Four were, like them, men.
+
+That not exactly credit to the Tory party, Dr. John Shebbeare, has had
+his demerits in other ways excused to some extent on the score of
+_Lydia_--whose surname, by the way, was "Fairchild," not unknown in
+later days of fiction. Even one who, if critical conscience would in
+any way permit it, would fain let the Tory dogs have a little the best
+of it, must, I fear, pronounce _Lydia_ a very poor thing. Shebbeare, who
+was a journalist, had the journalist faculty of "letting everything go
+in"--of taking as much as he could from Richardson, Fielding, Smollett,
+etc., up to date (1755); and of throwing back to Afra for an interesting
+Indian, Canassatego. The book (like not a few other eighteenth-century
+novels) has very elaborate chapter headings and very short chapters, so
+that an immoral person can get up its matter pretty easily. A virtuous
+one who reads it through will have to look to his virtue for reward. The
+irony is factitious and forced; the sentiment unappealing; the
+coarseness quite destitute of Rabelaisian geniality; and the
+nomenclature may be sampled from "the Countess of Liberal" and "Lord
+Beef." I believe Shebbeare was once pilloried for his politics. If it
+had been for _Lydia_, I should not have protested.
+
+The next book to be mentioned is an agreeable change. Why Hazlitt
+compared _The Life of John Buncle_ (1756-1766) to Rabelais is a somewhat
+idle though perhaps not quite unanswerable question; the importance of
+the book itself in the history of the English novel, which has sometimes
+been doubted or passed over, is by no means small. Its author, Thomas
+Amory (1691?-1788), was growing old when he wrote it and even when he
+prefaced it with a kind of Introduction, the _Memoirs of several Ladies_
+(1755). It is a sort of dream-exaggeration of an autobiography; at first
+sight, and not at first sight only, the wildest of farragos. The author
+represents himself as a disinherited son who is devoted, with equal
+enthusiasm, to matrimony, eating and drinking as much as he can of the
+best things he can find, discussion of theological problems in a
+"Christian-deist" or Unitarian sense, "natural philosophy" in the vague
+eighteenth-century meaning, and rambling--chiefly in the fell district
+which includes the borders of Lancashire, Yorkshire, Westmoreland,
+"Bishopric" (Durham), and Cumberland. With this district--which even
+now, though seamed with roads and railways, does actually contain some
+of the wildest scenery of the island; which only forty years ago was
+much wilder; and which in Amory's time was a howling wilderness in
+parts--he deals in the characteristic spirit of exaggeration which
+perhaps, as much as anything else, suggested Rabelais to Hazlitt. From
+Malham Cove and Hardraw Scar, through the Wild Boar Fell district to the
+head of Teesdale, you can find at this moment rough and rugged scenery
+enough, some of which is actually recognisable when "reduced" from
+Amory's extravagance. But that extravagance extends the distances from
+furlongs to leagues; deepens the caverns from yards to furlongs; and
+exalts fell and scar into Alps and Andes. In the same way he has to
+marry eight wives (not seven as has been usually, and even by the
+present writer, said), who are distractingly beautiful and wonderfully
+wise, but who seldom live more than two years: and has a large number of
+children about whom he says nothing, "because he has not observed in
+them anything worth speaking about." The courtships are varied between
+abrupt embraces soon after introduction, and discussions on Hebrew,
+Babel, "Christian-deism," and the binomial theorem. In the most
+inhospitable deserts, his man or boy[10] is invariably able to produce
+from his wallet "ham, tongue, potted blackcock, and a pint of cyder,"
+while in more favourable circumstances Buncle takes his ease in his inn
+by consuming "a pound of steak, a quart of green peas, two fine cuts of
+bread, a tankard of strong ale, and a pint of port" and singing cheerful
+love-ditties a few days after the death of an adored wife. He comes down
+the side of precipices by a mysterious kind of pole-jumping--half a
+dozen fathoms at a drop with landing-places a yard wide--like a chamois
+or a rollicking Rocky Mountain ram. Every now and then he finds a
+skeleton, with a legend of instructive tenor, in a hermitage which he
+annexes: and almost infallibly, at the worst point of the wilderness,
+there is an elegant country seat with an obliging old father and a
+lively heiress ready to take the place of the last removed charmer.
+
+    [10] It has been observed, and is worth observing, that the
+    eighteenth-century hero, even in his worst circumstances, can
+    seldom exist without a "follower."
+
+Mad, however, as this sketch may sound, and certainly not quite sane as
+Amory may have been, there is a very great deal of method in his, and
+some in its, madness. The flashes of shrewdness and the blocks of pretty
+solid learning (Rabelaisian again) do not perhaps so much concern us:
+but the book, ultra-eccentric as it is, does count for something in the
+history of the English novel. Its descriptions, rendered through a
+magnifying glass as they are, have considerable power; and are quite
+unlike anything in prose fiction, and most things in prose literature,
+before it. In Buncle himself there is a sort of extra-natural,
+"four-dimension" nature and proportion which assert the novelist's power
+memorably:--if a John Buncle could exist, he would very probably be like
+Amory's John Buncle. Above all, the book (let it be remembered that it
+came before _Tristram Shandy_) is almost the beginning of the Eccentric
+Novel--not of the satiric-marvellous type which Cyrano and Swift had
+revived from Lucian, but of a new, a modern, and a very English variety.
+Buncle is sometimes extraordinarily like Borrow (on whom he probably
+had influence), and it would not be hard to arrange a very considerable
+spiritual succession for him, by no means deserving the uncomplimentary
+terms in which he dismisses his progeny in the flesh.
+
+If there is an almost preposterous cheerfulness about _Buncle_, the
+necessary alternative can be amply supplied by the next book to which we
+come. The curious way in which Johnson almost invariably managed to hit
+the critical nail on the head is well illustrated by his remark to
+Frances Sheridan, author of the _Memoirs of Miss Sydney Bid[d]ulph_
+(1761), that he "did not know whether she had a right, on moral
+principles, to make her readers suffer so much." Substitute "aesthetic"
+for "moral" and "heroine" for "readers," and the remark retains its
+truth on another scheme of criticism, which Johnson was not ostensibly
+employing, and which he might have violently denounced. The book, though
+with its subsequent prolongation too long, is a powerful one: and though
+actually dedicated to Richardson and no doubt consciously owing much to
+his influence, practically clears off the debt by its own earnings. But
+Miss Bidulph (she started with only one _d_, but acquired another),
+whose journal to her beloved Cecilia supplies the matter and method of
+the novel, is too persistently unlucky and ill-treated, without the
+smallest fault of her own, for anything but really, not fictitiously,
+real life. Her misfortunes spring from obeying her mother (but there was
+neither moral nor satire in this then), and husbands, lovers, rivals,
+relations, connections--everybody--conspire to afflict her. Poetical
+justice has been much abused in both senses of that verb: _Sydney
+Biddulph_ shows cause for it in the very act of neglect.
+
+But the eighteenth century, on the whole, loathed melancholy. The
+_Spiritual Quixote_ (1772) of the Reverend Richard Graves (1715-1804)
+has probably been a little injured by the ingenuous proclamation of
+indebtedness in the title. It is, however, an extremely clever and
+amusing book: and one of the best of the many imitations of its
+original, which, indeed, it follows only on broad and practically
+independent lines. During his long life (for more than half a century of
+which he was rector of Claverton near Bath) Graves knew many interesting
+persons, from Shenstone and Whitefield (with both of whom he was at
+Pembroke College, Oxford, though he afterwards became a fellow of All
+Souls) to Malthus, who was a pupil of his; and he had some interesting
+private experiences. He wove a good deal that was personal into his
+novel, which, as may easily be guessed, is a satire upon Methodism, and
+in which Whitefield is personally and not altogether favourably
+introduced. But even on him Graves is by no means savage: while his
+treatment of his hero, Geoffrey Wildgoose, a young Oxford man who,
+living in retirement with his mother in the country, becomes an
+evangelist, very mainly from want of some more interesting occupation,
+is altogether good-humoured. Wildgoose promptly falls in love with a
+fascinating damsel-errant, Julia Townsend; and the various adventures,
+religious, picaresque, and amatory, are embroiled and disembroiled with
+very fair skill in character and fairer still in narrative. Nor is the
+Sancho-Partridge of the piece, Jerry Tugwell, a cobbler (who thinks,
+though he is very fond of his somewhat masterful wife, that a little
+absence from her would not be unrefreshing), by any means a failure.
+Both Scott and Dickens evidently knew Graves well,[11] and knowledge of
+him might with advantage be more general.
+
+    [11] Julia Mannering reminds me a little of Julia Townsend: and
+    if this be doubtful, the connection of Jerry's "Old madam gave
+    me some higry-pigry" and Cuddie's "the leddy cured me with some
+    hickery-pickery" is not. While, for Dickens, compare the way in
+    which Sam Weller's landlord in the Fleet got into trouble with
+    the Tinker's Tale in _Spiritual Quixote_, bk. iv. chap. ii.
+
+The novels that have been noticed since those contrasted ones of Mrs.
+Haywood's, which occupy a position by themselves, all possess a sort of
+traditional fame; and cover (with the proper time allowed for the start
+given by Richardson and Fielding) nearly the same period of thirty
+years--in this case 1744 (_David Simple_) to 1772 (_The Spiritual
+Quixote_)--which is covered by the novels of the great quartette
+themselves. It would be possible to add a great many, and easy and not
+disagreeable to the writer to dwell on a few. Of these few some are
+perhaps necessary. Frank Coventry's _Pompey the Little_--an amusing
+satirical novel with a pet dog for the title-giver and with the
+promising (but as a rule ill-handled) subject of university life treated
+early--appeared in 1751--the same year which saw the much higher flight
+(the pun is in sense not words) of _Peter Wilkins_, by Robert Paltock of
+Clement's Inn, a person of whom practically nothing else is known. It
+would be lucky for many people if they were thus singly yoked to
+history. It was once fashionable to dismiss _Peter_ as a boy's book,
+because it discovers a world of flying men and women, modelled partly on
+Defoe, partly on Swift; it has more recently been fashionable to hint a
+sneer at it as "sentimental" because of its presentment of a sort of
+fantastic and unconventional Amelia (who, it may be remembered, made her
+appearance in the same year) in the heroine Youwarkee. Persons who do
+not care for fashion will perhaps sometimes agree that, though not
+exactly a masterpiece, it is rather a charming book. If anybody is
+sickened by its charm he may restore himself by a still better known
+story which no one can accuse of charm or sentiment, though it is
+clever enough--Charles Johnstone's _Chrysal_ or _The Adventures of a
+Guinea_ (1760). This, which is strongly Smollettian in more ways than
+one, derives its chief notoriety from the way in which the scandalous
+(and perhaps partly fabulous) orgies of Medmenham Abbey are, like other
+scandalous and partly fabulous gossip of the time, brought in. But it
+_is_ clever; though emphatically one of the books which "leave a bad
+taste in the mouth." Indeed about this time the novel, which even in
+clean hands allowed itself not a little freedom, took, in others,
+excursions in the direction of the province of "prohibited literature,"
+and sometimes passed the border.
+
+One rather celebrated book, however, has not yet been mentioned: and it
+will serve very well, with two others greater in every way, as usher to
+a few general remarks on the weakness of this generation of minor
+novelists. Between 1766 and 1770 Henry Brooke, an Irishman of position,
+fortune, and literary distinction in other ways, who was at the time of
+more than middle age, published _The Fool of Quality_ or _The Adventures
+of Henry Earl of Morland_. The hero is a sort of Grandison-Buncle, as
+proper though scarcely as priggish as the one, and as eccentric and
+discursive as the other; the story is chaos: the book is stuffed with
+disquisitions on all sorts of moral, social, and political problems. It
+is excellently written; it is clear from it that Brooke (who was for a
+time actually mad) did not belie the connection of great wits with
+madness. But it is, perhaps, most valuable as an evidence of the
+unconquerable set of the time towards novel.
+
+Of this, however, as of some other points, we have greater evidence
+still in the shape of two books, each of them, as nothing else yet
+mentioned in this chapter can claim to be, a permanent and capital
+contribution to English literature--Johnson's _Rasselas_ (1759) and
+Goldsmith's _Vicar of Wakefield_ (1766).
+
+It is not from the present writer that any one need look for an attempt
+to belittle Johnson: and there is no doubt (for the _Lives of the Poets_
+is but a bundle of essays) that _Rasselas_ is Johnson's greatest _book_.
+But there may be, in some minds, as little doubt that attempts to defend
+it from the charge of not being a novel are only instances of that not
+wholly unamiable frenzy of eagerness to "say _not_ ditto to Mr. Burke"
+which is characteristic of clever undergraduates, and of periods which
+are not quite of the greatest in literature. _Rasselas_ is simply an
+extended and glorified moral apologue--an enlarged "Vision of Mirza." It
+has no real story; it has no real characters; its dialogue is "talking
+book;" it indulges in some but not much description. It is in fact a
+prose _Vanity of Human Wishes_, admirably if somewhat stiffly arranged
+in form, and as true to life as life itself. You will have difficulty in
+finding a wiser book anywhere; but although it is quite true that a
+novel need not be foolish, wisdom is certainly not its determining
+_differentia_. Yet for our purposes _Rasselas_ is almost as valuable as
+_Tom Jones_ itself: because it shows how imperative and wide-ranging was
+the struggle towards production of this kind in prose. The book is
+really--to adapt the quaint title of one of the preceding
+century--_Johnson al Mondo_: and at this time, when Johnson wanted to
+communicate his thoughts to the world in a popular form, we see that he
+chose the novel.
+
+The lesson is not so glaringly obvious in the _Vicar of Wakefield_,
+because this _is_ a novel, and a very delightful one. The only point
+of direct contact with _Rasselas_ is the knowledge of human
+nature, though in the one book this takes the form of melancholy
+aphorism and apophthegm, in the other that of felicitous trait and
+dialogue-utterance. There is plenty of story, though this has not been
+arranged so as to hit the taste of the martinet in "fable;" the book has
+endless character; the descriptions are Hogarth with less of _peuple_
+about them; the dialogue is unsurpassable. Yet Goldsmith, untiring hack
+of genius as he was, wrote no other novel; evidently felt no particular
+call or predilection for the style; would have been dramatist, poet,
+essayist with greater satisfaction to himself, though scarcely
+(satisfactory as he is in all these respects) to us. That he tried it at
+all can hardly be set down to anything else than the fact that the style
+was popular: and his choice is one of the highest possible testimonies
+to the popularity of the style. Incidentally, of course, the _Vicar_ has
+more for us than this, because it indicates, as vividly as any of the
+work of the great Four themselves, how high and various the capacities
+of the novel are--how in fact it can almost completely compete with and,
+for a time, vanquish the drama on its own ground. Much of it, of
+course--the "Fudge!" scene between Mr. Burchell and the town ladies may
+be taken as the first example that occurs--_is_ drama, with all the
+cumbrous accessories of stage and scene and circumstance spared. One may
+almost see that "notice to quit," which (some will have it) has been,
+after nearly a century and a half, served back again on the novel,
+served by the _Vicar of Wakefield_ on the drama.
+
+At the same time even the _Vicar_, though perhaps less than any other
+book yet noticed in this chapter, illustrates the proposition to which
+we have been leading up--that, outside the great quartette, and even to
+a certain extent inside of it, the novel had not yet fully found its
+proper path--had still less made up its mind to walk freely and firmly
+therein. Either it has some _arriere pensee_, some second purpose,
+besides the simple attempt to interest and absorb by the artistic
+re-creation of real and ordinary life: or, without exactly doing this,
+it shows signs of mistrust and misgiving as to the sufficiency of such
+an appeal, and supplements it by the old tricks of the drama in
+"revolution and discovery;" by incident more or less out of the ordinary
+course; by satire, political, social, or personal; by philosophical
+disquisition; by fantastic imagination--by this, that, and the other of
+the fatal auxiliaries who always undo their unwise employers. Men want
+to write novels; and the public wants them to write novels; and supply
+does not fail desire and demand. There is a well-known _locus classicus_
+from which we know that, not long after the century had passed its
+middle, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in Italy regularly received boxes of
+novels from her daughter in England, and read them, eagerly though by no
+means uncritically, as became Fielding's cousin and her ladyship's self.
+But while the kind had not conquered, and for a long time did not
+conquer, any high place in literature from the point of view of serious
+criticism--while, now and long afterwards, novel-writing was the
+Cinderella of the literary family, and novel-reading the inexhaustible
+text for sermons on wasted, nay positively ill-spent, time--the
+novelists themselves half justified their critics by frequent
+extravagance; by more frequent unreality; by undue licence pretty often;
+by digression and divagation still oftener. Except Fielding, hardly any
+one had dared boldly to hold up the mirror to nature, and be content
+with giving the reflection, in his own way, but with respect for it. For
+even Goldsmith, with infinite touches of nature, had not given quite a
+natural whole, and even Johnson, though absolutely true, had failed to
+accommodate his truth to the requirements of the novel.
+
+The turning point in this direction of the kind was to be made by a
+person far inferior in ability to any one of the great quartette, and in
+a book which, _as_ a book, cannot pretend to an equality with the worst
+of theirs--by a person indeed of less intellectual power, and in a book
+of less literary merit, than not a few of the persons and books just
+noticed. There is something, no doubt, paradoxical in this: and the
+paradox is connected, both with a real quality of the subject and with a
+surprising diversity of opinions about it. Frances Burney and her
+_Evelina_ (1778), not to mention her subsequent works and her delightful
+_Diary_, have been the subject of a great deal of writing: but though
+more than a hundred years--more indeed than a century and a
+quarter--have passed since the book insidiously took London by gradual
+storm, it may, without too much presumption, be questioned whether
+either book or author has yet been finally or satisfactorily "placed."
+The immense advantage of not having a history, positively illustrated
+once for all in Shakespeare, could hardly be negatively illustrated
+better than in Madame d'Arblay. She had the curious, and actually very
+unpleasant, experience of being selected for a position at court on the
+strength of her literary achievements, of finding it intolerable, of
+breaking down, and of never doing any really good work after her
+release, through much more than half of her long life. On this fact
+critical biography has fastened almost exclusively. Macaulay, in one of
+his most brilliant and best known essays, represents the world as having
+been deprived of unknown quantities of admirable work by the misplaced
+kindness, and the positive unkindness, of Queen Charlotte. Some have
+agreed with him, some have differed with him. Some, in one of the
+natural if uncritical revulsions, have questioned whether even _Evelina_
+is a very remarkable book. Some, with human respect for the great names
+of its early admirers, have passed it over gingerly--not exactly as
+willing to wound, but as quite afraid or reluctant to strike. Nay,
+actual critical evaluations of the novel-values of Miss Burney's four
+attempts in novel-writing are very rare. I dare say there are other
+people who have read _The Wanderer_ through: but I never met any one who
+had done so except (to quote Rossetti) myself: and I could not bring
+myself, even on this occasion, to read it again. I doubt whether very
+many now living have read _Camilla_. Even _Cecilia_ requires an effort,
+and does not repay that effort very well. Only _Evelina_ itself is
+legible and relegible--for reasons which will be given presently. Yet
+_Cecilia_ was written shortly after _Evelina_, under the same stimulus
+of abundant and genial society, with no pressure except that of friendly
+encouragement and perhaps assistance, and long before the supposed
+blight of royal favour and royal exigences came upon its author. When
+_Camilla_ was published she had been relieved from these exigences,
+though not from that favour, for five years: and was a thoroughly happy
+woman, rejoicing in husband and child. Even when the impossible
+_Wanderer_ was concocted, she had had ample leisure, had as yet incurred
+none of her later domestic sorrows, and was assured of lavish recompense
+for her (it must be said) absolutely worthless labours. Why this steady
+declension, with which, considering the character of _Cecilia_, the
+court sojourn can have had nothing to do? And admitting it, why still
+uphold, as the present writer does uphold, _Evelina_ as one of the
+_points de repere_ of the English novel? Both questions shall be
+answered in their order.
+
+Frances Burney must have been, as we see not merely from external
+testimony, but from the infallible witness of her own diary, a most
+engaging person to any one who could get over her shyness and her
+prudery:[12] but she was only in a very limited sense a gifted one.
+Macaulay grants her a "fine understanding;" but even his own article
+contradicts the statement, which is merely one of his exaggerations for
+the sake of point. She had _not_ a fine understanding: though she was
+neither silly nor stupid, her sense was altogether inferior to her
+sensibility. Although living in a most bookish circle she was, as
+Macaulay himself admits, almost illiterate: and (which he does not say)
+her comparative critical estimates of books, when she does give them,
+are merely contemptible. This harsh statement could be freely
+substantiated: but it is enough to say that, when a girl, she preferred
+some forgotten rubbish called _Henry and Frances_ to the _Vicar of
+Wakefield_: and that, when a woman, she deliberately offended
+Chateaubriand by praising the _Itineraire_ rather than the _Genie du
+Christianisme_, or _Atala_, or _Rene_, or _Les Martyrs_. She had very
+little inventive power; her best novel, _Evelina_, has no plot worth
+speaking of. She never wrote really well. Even the _Diary_ derives its
+whole charm from the matter and the _reportage. Evelina_ is tolerable
+style of the kind that has no style; _Cecilia_ is pompous and
+Johnsonian; _Camilla_ was stigmatised by the competent and affectionate
+judgment of Mrs. Delany as "Gallicised;" and _The Wanderer_ is in a
+lingo which suggests the translation of an ill-written French original
+by a person who does not know English.
+
+    [12] Also, perhaps, to one who had not yet discovered that
+    intense concentration on herself and her family with which,
+    after their quarrel, Mrs. Thrale, not quite an impartial judge,
+    but a very shrewd one, charged her, and which does appear in the
+    _Diary_.
+
+What then was it in _Evelina_, and in part in _Cecilia_ (with a faint
+survival even into _Camilla_), which turned the heads of such a "town"
+as Johnson and Burke, Walpole and Windham, and many others--which, to
+persons who can see it, makes the books attractive to-day, and which
+should always give their author a secure and distinguished place in the
+great torch-race of English fiction-writers? It is this--that Miss
+Burney had a quite marvellous faculty of taking impressions of actual
+speech, manners, and to a certain extent character: that she had, at any
+rate for a time, a corresponding faculty of expressing, or at least
+reporting, her impressions. Next (and perhaps most of all) that she had
+the luck to come at a moment when speech and manners were turning to the
+modern; and lastly, that she was content, in parts of her work at any
+rate, to let her faculty of expression work, automatically and
+uninterfered with, on the impressions: and thereby give us record of
+them for all time. Her acute critic "Daddy" Crisp lamented that we had
+not had a series of recorders of successive _tons_ [fashions] like
+Fanny. But she was much more than a mere fashion-monger: and what has
+lasted best in her was not mere fashion. She could see and record life
+and nature: and she did so. Still, fashion had a good deal to do with
+it: and when her access to fashion and society ceased, the goodness of
+her work ceased likewise.
+
+Even this gift, and this even in _Evelina_ and the better parts of
+_Cecilia_, she had not always with her. The sentimental parts of
+_Evelina_--the correspondence with Mr. Villars, the courtship with Lord
+Orville, and others--are very weak: and it cannot be said that Evelina
+herself, though she is a pleasant girl enough, gives the lie to Mr.
+Pope's libel about women. Cecilia has a little more individuality. But
+the great strength of the former book lies in the admirable lower
+middle-class pictures of the Branghtons and Mr. Smith, whom Fanny had
+evidently studied from the life in the queer neighbourhood of Poland
+Street: as also in the justness and verisimilitude of the picture of the
+situation, which in different ways both books present--that of the
+introduction of a young girl to the world.[13] In these points, as in
+others which there is neither space nor need to particularise, Miss
+Burney showed that she had hit upon--stumbled upon one may almost
+say--the real principle and essence of the novel as distinguished from
+the romance--its connection with actual ordinary life--life studied
+freshly and directly "_from_ the life," and disguised and adulterated as
+little as possible by exceptional interests and incidents. It is
+scarcely too much to say that one great reason why the novel was so long
+coming into existence was precisely this--that life and society so long
+remained subject to these exceptional interests and incidents. It is
+only within the last century or so that the "life of 'mergency" (to
+adapt Mr. Chucks slightly) ceased to be the ordinary life. Addison's
+"Dissenter's Diary" with its record of nothing but constitutionals and
+marrow-bones, and Mr. Nisby's opinions, has simply amused half a dozen
+generations. Yet, in a sense, it has nearly as much to do with the
+advent of the novel as Sir Roger de Coverley himself. For these things
+are, not merely in an allegory, the subjects of the novel. Not so very
+much earlier Mr. Nisby would have had a chance of delivering his
+opinions on the scaffold: and his disciple would have had prison bread
+and water for marrow-bones and "Brooks and Hellier." These would have
+been subjects for romance: the others were subjects for novel.
+
+    [13] Dunlop and others have directly or indirectly suggested a
+    good deal of plagiarism in _Evelina_ from _Miss Betsy
+    Thoughtless_: but it is exactly in this _life_-quality that the
+    earlier novelist fails.
+
+All glory, therefore, be to Frances Burney; both that which her
+generous successor and superior gives her in _Northanger Abbey_, and
+more also--for Miss Austen, naturally enough, was not taking the
+view-point of literary history. But it has been said that Fanny herself
+possessed her gift in two senses uncertainly--first, in that she did not
+very clearly perceive what it was, and, secondly, in that she soon lost
+grip of it. It is, therefore, not wonderful that few others caught the
+trick from her for a long time--for indeed fully twenty years, till Miss
+Edgeworth made her appearance. But these twenty years were years of
+extreme fertility in novels of different sorts, while--a phenomenon that
+occurs not seldom--the older kind of fiction made a kind of rally at the
+very time that the newer was at last solidly establishing itself. There
+was, indeed, ample room for both. You cannot kill Romance: it would be a
+profound misfortune, perhaps the profoundest that could befall the human
+race, if you could. But the new romance was of rather a bastard kind,
+and it showed more of the bad blood than of the good till, by a curious
+coincidence, Scott once more found the true strain, just about the same
+time as that at which Miss Austen was making known the true strain of
+the novel proper.
+
+This hybrid new romance had been stumbled upon more than a decade before
+Fanny Burney in her turn stumbled upon the pure novel: and most people
+know in what and by whom. To this day it is by no means easy to be
+certain what Horace Walpole really meant to write, or thought he was
+writing, in _The Castle of Otranto_ (1764). His own references to his
+own writings are too much saturated with affectation and pose to make it
+safe to draw any conclusions from them; there is little or no external
+evidence; and the book itself is rather a puzzle. Taking the Preface to
+the second edition with a very large allowance of salt--the success of
+the first _before_ this preface makes double salting advisable--and
+accommodating it to the actual facts, one finds it hardly necessary to
+go beyond the obvious and almost commonplace solution that _The Castle
+of Otranto_ was simply the castle of Strawberry Hill itself with paper
+for lath and ink for plaster--in other words, an effort to imitate
+something which the imitator more than half misunderstood. Of mediaeval
+literature proper, apart from chronicles and genealogies, Walpole knew
+nothing: and for its more precious features he had the dislike which
+sometimes accompanies ignorance. But he undoubtedly had positive
+literary genius--flawed, alloyed, incomplete, uncritical of itself, but
+existing: and this genius showed itself here. His paper-and-ink
+"Strawberry" is quite another guess structure from his lath-and-plaster
+one. For itself in itself--for what it _is_--the present writer, though
+he has striven earnestly and often for the sake of the great things that
+it _did_, has never been able to get up any affection or admiration. It
+is preposterous, desultory, tedious, clumsy, dull. But it made people
+(we know it on such excellent authority as Gray's) shudder: and the
+shudder was exactly what they wanted--in every sense of the verb "to
+want." Moreover, quite independently of this shudder, it pointed the way
+to a wide, fertile, and delightful province of historical, social,
+literary, and other matter which had long been neglected, and which
+people had been assured was not worth exploring. Blair was just using,
+or about to use, "any romance of chivalry" as a hyperbolical
+exemplification of the contemptible in literature. Hume had been arguing
+against, and Voltaire was still sneering at, all sorts of superstition
+and supernaturalism. The common cant of criticism for generations had
+been that "sense" and "reason" were to be the only criteria. Walpole's
+egregious helmet dropped from no one knew (or knows) where on all these
+Philistinisms: and squelched them. How it did this, why it did it, and
+so forth, one knows not much more than one knows why and how all the
+things happened in the novel itself. _Apres coup_, the author talked
+about "Shakespeare" (of whom, by the way, he was anything but a fervent
+or thorough admirer) and the like. Shakespeare had, as Sir Walter
+Raleigh has well pointed out, uncommonly little to do with it. But
+Shakespeare at least supplies us with an appropriate phrase for the
+occasion. _The Castle of Otranto_ "lay in" Horace's "way, and he found
+it." And with it, though hardly in it, he found the New Romance.
+
+In Horace's case also, as in that of Frances, though the success was
+even more momentous, the successors were slow and doubtful, though not
+quite so slow. In some dozen years Walpole read Miss Clara Reeve's _Old
+English Baron_ (1777), and as in another celebrated case "thought it a
+bore." It _is_ rather a bore. It has more consecutiveness than
+_Otranto_, and escapes the absurdities of the copiously but clumsily
+used supernatural by administering it in a very minute dose. But there
+is not a spark of genius in it, whereas that spark, though sometimes
+curiously wrapped up in ashes, was always present (Heaven knows where he
+got it!) in Sir Robert's youngest son. And the contagion spread. For
+general and epidemic purposes it had to wait till the Germans had
+carried it over the North Sea and sent it back again. For particular
+ones, it found a new development in one of the most remarkable of all
+novels, twenty years younger than _Otranto_, and a few years older than
+the new outburst of the "Gothic" supernatural in the works of Anne
+Radcliffe and Mat Lewis.
+
+_Vathek_ (1786) stands alone--almost independent even of its
+sponsors--it would be awkward to say godfathers--Hamilton and Voltaire;
+apart likewise from such work as it, no doubt, in turn partly suggested
+to Peacock and to Disraeli. There is, perhaps, no one towards whom it is
+so tempting to play the idle game of retrospective Providence as towards
+the describer of Batalha and Alcobaca, the creator of Nouronnihar and
+the Hall of Eblis. Fonthill has had too many vicissitudes since
+Beckford, and Cintra is a far cry; but though his associations with Bath
+are later, it is still possible, in that oddly enchanted city, to get
+something of the mixed atmosphere--eighteenth century, nineteenth, and
+of centuries older and younger than either--which, _tamisee_ in a
+mysterious fashion, surrounds this extraordinary little masterpiece.
+Take Beckford's millions away; make him coin his wits to supply the want
+of them; and what would have been the result? Perhaps more _Vatheks_;
+perhaps things even better than _Vathek_;[14] perhaps nothing at all. On
+the whole, it is always wiser not to play Providence, in fact or fancy.
+All that need be said is that Anthony Hamilton and Voltaire are
+certainly not by themselves--good as they are, and admirable as the
+first is--enough to account for _Vathek_. Romance has passed there as
+well as persiflage and something like _coionnerie_; it is Romance that
+has given us the baleful beauty of that Queen of Evil, Nouronnihar, and
+the vision of the burning hearts that make their own wandering but
+eternal Hell. The tendency of the novel had been on the whole, even in
+its best examples, to prose in feeling as well as in form. It was
+Beckford who availed himself of the poetry which is almost inseparable
+from Romance. But it was Horace Walpole who had opened the door to
+Romance herself.
+
+    [14] Since the text was written--indeed very recently--the
+    long-missing "Episodes" of _Vathek_ itself have been at length
+    supplied by the welcome diligence of Mr. Lewis Melville. They
+    are not "better than Vathek," but they are good.
+
+Still, _Vatheks_ are not to be had to order: and as Romance was wanted,
+to order and in bulk, during the late years of the eighteenth century,
+some other kind had to be supplied. The chief accredited purveyors of it
+have been already named and must now be dealt with, to be followed by
+the list of secondary, never quite accomplished, exponents now of novel,
+now of romance, now of the two mixed, who filled the closing years of
+the eighteenth century.
+
+It is, however, unjust to put the author of _The Mysteries of Udolpho_
+and the author of _The Monk_ on the same level. Mat Lewis was a clever
+boy with a lively fancy, a knack of catching and even of anticipating
+popular tendencies in literature, a rather vulgar taste by nature, and
+no faculty of self-criticism to correct it. The famous _Monk_ (1795),
+which he published when he was twenty, is as preposterous as _Otranto_
+and adds to its preposterousness a _haut gout_ of atrocity and indecency
+which Walpole was far too much of a gentleman, and even of a true man of
+letters, to attempt or to tolerate. Lewis's other work in various forms
+is less offensive: but--except in respect of verse-rhythm which does not
+here concern us--hardly any of it is literature. What does concern us is
+that the time took it for literature, because it adopted the
+terror-style in fiction.
+
+Anne Ward (she married a barrister named Radcliffe, of whom we do not
+hear much except that his engagements in journalism threw time on his
+wife's hands for writing) appears to have started on her career of
+terror-novelist, in which she preceded Lewis, with two fixed resolves of
+principle very contrary to his practice. The first was to observe
+strict "propriety" in her books--a point in which the novel had always
+been a little peccant. The second and more questionable, but also more
+original, was a curious determination to lavish the appearance of the
+supernatural, in accordance with the Walpolian tradition and the German
+adoption of it, but never to allow anything _really_ supernatural in
+ultimate explanation or want of explanation. She applied these two
+principles to the working out, over and over again, of practically the
+same story--the persecutions of a beautiful and virtuous heroine, and
+her final deliverance from them. Her first attempt, _The Castles of
+Athlin and Dunbayne_, appeared as early as 1789: and she left a
+posthumous romance, _Gaston de Blondeville_, which did not come out till
+1826, four years after her death. She also wrote some poems and a volume
+of _Travels_ (1794) which is important for a reason to be noticed
+presently. But her fame rests upon four books, which she published in
+seven years, between her own twenty-sixth and thirty-third, _A Sicilian
+Romance_ (1790), _The Romance of the Forest_ (1791), the world-renowned
+_Mysteries of Udolpho_ in 1794-1795, and _The Italian_ two years later.
+
+These stories owed their original attraction to the skill with which, by
+the use of a Defoe-like minuteness of detail, added to a pictorial
+faculty which Defoe had not, an atmosphere of terror is constantly
+diffused and kept up. Very little that is terrible actually happens: but
+the artist succeeds (so long as the trick has not become too familiar)
+in persuading you that something very terrible is _going_ to happen, or
+has just happened. And so the delight of something "horrid," as the
+Catherines and Isabellas of the day put it, is given much more
+plentifully, and even much more excitingly, than it could be by a real
+horror now and then, with intervals of miscellaneous business. In one
+sense, indeed, the process will not stand even the slightest critical
+examination: for it is soon seen to consist of a succession of serious
+mystifications and non-comic much-ados-about-nothing. But these "ados"
+are most cunningly made (her last book, _The Italian_, is, perhaps, the
+best place to look for them, if the reader is not taking up the whole
+subject with a virtuous thoroughness), and Mrs. Radcliffe's great praise
+is that she induced her original readers to suspend their critical
+faculties sufficiently to enable them to take it all seriously. Scott,
+who undoubtedly owed her something, assigned her positive genius: and
+modern critics, while, perhaps, seldom experiencing much real
+delectation from her work, have discovered in it not a few positive and
+many more indirect and comparative merits. The influence on Scott is not
+the least of these: but there is even a more unquestionable asset of the
+same kind in the fact that the Byronic villain-hero, if not Byron
+himself, is Mrs. Radcliffe's work. Schedoni did much more than beget or
+pattern Lara: he _is_ Lara, to all intents and purposes, in "first
+state" and before the final touch has been put by the greater master who
+took the plate in hand.
+
+But there is more to be said for Mrs. Radcliffe than this. Her
+"explained supernatural," tiresome as it may be to some of us nowadays,
+is really a marvel of patience and ingenuity: and this same quality
+extends to her plots generally. The historical side of her novels (which
+she does to some extent attempt) is a failure, as everything of the kind
+was before Scott: that we may leave till we come to Scott himself. But
+one important engine of the novelist she set to work in a fashion which
+had never been managed before, and that is elaborate description. She
+shows an early adaptation of that "picturesque," of which we see the
+beginnings in Gray, when she was in the nursery, which was being
+directly developed by Gilpin, but which, as we may see from her
+_Travels_, she had got not merely from books, but from her own
+observation. She applies it both within and without: at one moment
+giving pages on the scenery of the Apennines, at another paragraphs on
+the furniture of her abbeys and castles. The pine forests and the
+cataracts; the skyline of Udolpho bathed in sunset glow, while a
+"melancholy purple tint" steals up the slopes to its foundations--are
+all in the day's work now; but they were not so then, and it is fair to
+say that Mrs. Radcliffe does them well. The "high canopied tester of
+dark green damask" and the "counterpane of black velvet" which
+illustrate the introduction of the famous chapter of the Black Pall in
+Chateau le Blanc may be mere inventory goods now: but, once more, they
+were not so then. And this faculty of description (which, as noted
+above, could hardly have been, and pretty certainly was not, got from
+books, though it may have been, to some extent and quite legitimately,
+got from pictures) was applied in many minor ways--touches of really or
+supposedly horrible objects in the dark, faint suggestions of sound, or
+of appeals to the other senses--hints of all sorts, which were to become
+common tricks of the trade, but were then quite new.
+
+At any rate, by these and other means she attained that great result of
+the novel which has been noted in Defoe, in Richardson, and in
+others--the result of what the French vividly call _enfisting_ the
+reader--getting hold of his attention, absorbing him in a pleasant
+fashion. The mechanism was often too mechanical: taken with the
+author's steady and honest, but somewhat inartistic determination to
+explain everything it sometimes produces effects positively ridiculous
+to us. With the proviso of _valeat quantum_, it is not quite unfair to
+dwell, as has often been dwelt, on the fact that the grand triumph of
+Mrs. Radcliffe's terrormongering--the famous incident of the Black
+Veil--is produced by a piece of wax-work. But the result resulted--the
+effect _was_ produced: and it was left to those who were clever enough
+to improve upon the means. For the time these means were "improved upon"
+in another sense; we shall glance at some of the caricatures, intended
+and unintended, later. For the present we may turn to other varieties of
+the curiously swarming novel-production of these two last decades of the
+century, and especially of the very last.
+
+If Scott had not established Richard Cumberland's _Henry_ (1795) in the
+fortress of the Ballantyne Novels, it would hardly be necessary to
+notice "Sir Fretful Plagiary's" contributions to the subject of our
+history. He preluded it with another, _Arundel_ (1789), and followed it
+much later with a third, _John de Lancaster_: but there is no need to
+say anything of these. _Henry_ displays the odd hit-_and_-miss quality
+which seems to have attached itself to Cumberland everywhere, whether as
+novelist, dramatist, essayist, diplomatist, poet, or anything else. It
+is, though by no means a mere "plagiarism," an obvious and avowed
+imitation of Fielding, and the writer is so intent on his _pastiche_
+that he seems quite oblivious himself, and appears to expect equal
+oblivion on the part of his readers, of the fact that nearly two
+generations had passed. Henry is Joseph; Susan May is a much more
+elaborate and attractive Betty; the doctor's wife a vulgarised and
+repulsive Lady Booby; Ezekiel Daw, whom Scott admired, a _dissenting_
+Adams--the full force of the outrage of which variation Sir Walter
+perhaps did not feel. There are some good things in the story, but, as a
+whole, it is chiefly valuable as an early example of that great danger
+of modern literature--the influence of the "printed book" itself: and in
+a less degree of that forging ahead of the novel generally in public
+favour which we are chronicling. If the kind had not been popular, and
+if Fielding had not been its great prophet, one may be pretty sure that
+_Henry_ would never have existed. The causes are important: the effect
+not quite so.
+
+There was, however, at this time a novel-school, and not such a very
+small one, which had more legitimate reasons for existence, inasmuch as
+it really served as mouthpiece to the thoughts and opinions of the time,
+whether these thoughts and opinions were good or bad. This may be called
+the "revolutionary school," and its three most distinguished scholars
+were Bage, Holcroft, and Godwin, with Mrs. Inchbald perhaps to be added.
+The first began considerably before the outbreak of the actual French
+Revolution and shows the influence of its causes: the others were
+directly influenced by itself.
+
+One of the most remarkable of English novel-writers who are not absolute
+successes, and one who, though less completely obscured by Fortune than
+some, has never had quite his due, is Robert Bage. It was unfortunate
+for him that he fell in with the crude generation contemporary in their
+manhood with the French Revolution, and so manifested the crudity in
+full. Bage, in fact, except for a certain strength of humour, is almost
+more French than English. He has been put in the school of Richardson,
+but it is certain that Richardson would have been shocked at the
+supposed scholar: and it is not certain that Bage would or need have
+felt complimented by the assignment of the master. He has the special
+laxity of the time in point of "morality," or at least of decency; its
+affectations of rather childish perfectibilism and anti-theism; and the
+tendency of at least a part of it to an odd Calibanic jesting. Bage is
+good-tempered enough as it is: but he rather suggests possible
+Carrier-and-Fouche developments in a favourable and fostering
+atmosphere. One does not quite know why Scott, who included in the
+Ballantyne Novels three of Bage's, _Mount Henneth_ (1781), _Barham
+Downs_ (1784), and _James Wallace_ (1788), did not also include, if not
+_The Fair Syrian_ (1787), two others, _Man as He is_ (1792) and the
+still later _Hermsprong_, or _Man as He is Not_ (1796). This last has
+sometimes been regarded as Bage's masterpiece: but it does not seem so
+to the present writer. It begins by the sketch of an illegitimate child,
+written in Bage's worst vein of hard rasping irony, entirely devoid of
+the delicate spring and "give" which irony requires, and which
+constitutes the triumph even of such things as _A Tale of a Tub_ and
+_Jonathan Wild_. The rather impossibly named Hermsprong himself is not
+really so named at all, but is related (and in fact head-of-the-house)
+to the wicked or at least not good lord of the story. He is of the kind
+of Sir Charles Grandison, Rights-of-Mannified, which infests all these
+novels and is a great bore--as, indeed, to me is the whole book. The
+earlier _Man as He is_ is far better. The hero, Sir George Paradyne,
+though of the same general class, is very much more tolerable and (being
+sometimes naughty) preferable to Grandison himself: while the heroine--a
+certain Miss Colerain, who is a merchant's daughter under a double cloud
+of her father's misfortune and of calumny as regards herself--though not
+an absolute success, is worth a dozen Harriets, with thirteen
+Charlottes thrown in to make "25 as 24" in bookseller's phrase. Bage's
+extravagant or perhaps only too literal manners-painting (for it was an
+odd time) appears not infrequently, as in the anecdote of a justly
+enraged, though as a matter of fact mistaken, husband, who finds a young
+gentleman sitting on his wife's lap, with her arms round him, while he
+is literally and _en tout bien tout honneur_ painting her face--being a
+great artist in that way. _Mount Henneth_ is perhaps the liveliest of
+all: though its liveliness is partly achieved by less merely extravagant
+unconventionalities than this. But as a matter of fact Bage never
+entirely "comes off": though there is cleverness enough in him to have
+made a dozen popular and deservedly popular novelists at a better time
+for the novel. For he was essentially a novelist of manners and
+character at a transition time, when manners and character had come out
+of one stage and had not settled into another. Even Miss Edgeworth in
+_Belinda_ shows the disadvantage of this: and she was a lady of genius,
+while Bage had only talent and was not quite a gentleman.
+
+Thomas Holcroft was not a gentleman at all, never pretended to the
+title, and would probably have been rather affronted if any one had
+applied it to him: for he was a violent Atheist and Jacobin, glorying in
+his extraction from a shoemaker and an oysterseller, and in his
+education as a stable boy. He was, however, a man of considerable
+intellectual power and of some literary gift, which chiefly showed
+itself in his dramas (the best known, _The Road to Ruin_), but is not
+quite absent from his novels _Alwyn_ (1780), _Anna St. Ives_ (1792), and
+_Hugh Trevor_ (1794-1797). The series runs in curious parallel to that
+of Bage's work: for _Alwyn_, the liveliest and the earliest by far of
+the three, is little more than a study partly after Fielding, but more
+after Smollett, with his own experiences brought in. The other two are
+purpose-novels of anarchist perfectibilism, and Holcroft enjoys the
+traditional credit of having directly inspired Godwin. Godwin himself
+acknowledged the obligation; indeed it is well known that--in pecuniary
+matters more particularly--Godwin had no hesitation either in incurring
+or in acknowledging obligations, always provided that he was not
+expected to discharge them. It is possible that Holcroft's rough and
+ready acceptance and exaggeration of the doctrines which Rousseau had
+(as seems most probable) developed from a paradox of Diderot's, gave an
+impetus to the rather sluggish but more systematic mind of Godwin. But
+it is certain that _Political Justice_, though it is not a novel at all,
+is a much more amusing book than _Anna St. Ives_, which is one. And
+though Holcroft (especially if the presence of this quality in his
+_Autobiography_ is not wholly due to Hazlitt--there is some chance that
+it is) possessed a liveliness in narrative to which Godwin could never
+attain, there is no doubt that this enigmatical and many-sided spunger,
+philanderer, and corruptor of youth had a much higher general
+qualification for novel-writing than any one mentioned hitherto in this
+chapter, or perhaps than any to be mentioned, except the curiously
+contrasted pair, of Irish birth, who are to come last in it.
+
+I have sometimes thought that the greatest testimony to Godwin's power
+in this respect is the idea (which even Hazlitt, though he did not share
+it, does not seem to have thought preposterous, and which seems to have
+been held by others who were not fools) that Godwin might be the author
+of _Waverley_. To us, looking back, the notion seems as absurd as that
+Bacon could be the author of Shakespeare or Steele of the _Tale of a
+Tub_: but if, instead of looking back, we throw ourselves back, the
+absurdity does not quite persist as it does in the other two instances.
+There are some who, of course, would say, "Why take this fanciful test
+of Godwin's ability when you have a real one in _Caleb Williams_?" The
+reasons are double: for, historically, such an estimate by
+contemporaries is of the very first value, and to the present writer
+_Caleb Williams_ (1794) has never seemed a very interesting book. It is
+impossible to sympathise with a hero who is actuated by the very lowest
+of human motives, sheer inquisitiveness: and _my_ sense of natural
+justice (which is different from Godwin's) demands not that he shall
+escape, but that he shall be broken on the wheel, or burnt at a slow
+fire, or made to read _Political Justice_ after the novelty of its
+colossal want of humour has palled on him. One could sympathise with
+Falkland, but is not allowed to do so: because he is not human, except
+in his crime. But, as has been said, to those whose sporting interests
+are excited by the pleasures and hazards of the chase, these things no
+doubt do not occur. After all _Caleb_ is, in a sense, the first
+"detective novel": and detective novels have always been popular, though
+they bore some people to extinction. Far, however, be it from me to deny
+that this popularity, especially when, as in the present case, it has
+been continued for four whole generations, is a real and a very
+considerable asset. Even if it were now to cease, it is actually funded
+and vested to Godwin's credit in the _grand livre_ of literary history:
+and it can never be written off. Perhaps _Caleb_ is the one book of the
+later English eighteenth century in novel for which there must always be
+a public as soon as it is presented to that public. And when this is
+said and endorsed by those who do not personally much care for the book,
+it is at once a sufficient testimony to the position of the author, and
+a vindication of the not absolutely imbecile position of those who
+thought that he might have written _Waverley_ and its successors. The
+way in which Godwin in his later novels came down from the mountain-tops
+of theory and paradox just as he came down from those of _Political
+Justice_ itself is interesting and amusing, but not for us. As novels
+they are certainly inferior. The best parts of _St. Leon_ (1799) and
+_Fleetwood_ (1805) are perhaps better than anything in _Caleb:
+Mandeville_ (1817) and _Deloraine_ (1833) are _senilia_.[15] The
+graceful figure of the heroine Marguerite in _St. Leon_ is said to be
+modelled on Mary Wollstonecraft, and there are some fresh pictures of
+youth and childhood in _Fleetwood_. But _St. Leon_, besides its
+historical shortcomings (which, once more, we may postpone), is full of
+faults, from the badly managed supernatural to an only too natural
+dullness and languor of general story: nor has _Fleetwood_ anything like
+the absorbing power which _Caleb Williams_ exercises, in its own way and
+on its own people. Yet again we may perhaps say that the chief interest
+of Godwin, from our point of view, is his repeated and further weighted
+testimony to the importance of the novel as an appeal to public
+attention. In this respect it was in fact displacing, not only the drama
+on one side, but the sermon on the other. Not so very long before these
+two had almost engrossed the domain of _popular_ literature, the graver
+and more precise folk habitually reading sermons as well as hearing
+them, and the looser and lighter folk reading drama much oftener than
+(in then-existing circumstances) they had the opportunity of seeing it.
+With the novel the "address to the reader" became direct and stood by
+itself. The novelist could emulate Burke with his right barrel and
+Lydia Languish with his left. He certainly did not always endeavour to
+profit as well as to delight: but the double power was, from this time
+forward, shared by him with his brother in the higher and older
+_Dichtung_.
+
+    [15] Godwin had written novel-_juvenilia_ of which few say
+    anything.
+
+Next to Godwin may be placed a lady who was much adored by that curious
+professor of philandering, political _in_justice, psychology, and the
+use of the spunge, but who wisely put him off. Mrs. Inchbald's
+(1753-1821) command of a certain kind of dramatic or at least theatrical
+situation, and her propensity to Richardsonian "human-heart"-mongering,
+have from time to time secured a certain number of admirers for _A
+Simple Story_ (1791) and _Nature and Art_ (1796). Some, availing
+themselves of the confusion between "style" and "handling" which has
+recently become fashionable, have even credited her with style itself.
+Of this she has nothing--unless the most conventional of
+eighteenth-century phraseology, dashed with a kind of _marivaudage_
+which may perhaps seem original to those who do not know Marivaux's
+French followers, shall deserve the name. She is indeed very much of an
+English Madame Riccoboni. But her situations--such as the meeting in _A
+Simple Story_ of a father with the daughter whom, though not exactly
+casting her off, he has persistently refused to see, in revenge for her
+mother's unfaithfulness, and the still more famous scene in _Nature and
+Art_ where a judge passes the death-sentence on a woman whom he has
+betrayed--have, as has been allowed, the dramatic or melodramatic
+quality which attracts people in "decadent" periods. There seems,
+indeed, to have been a certain decadent charm about Mrs. Inchbald
+herself--with her beauty, her stage skill, her strict virtue combined
+with any amount of "sensibility," her affectation of nature, and her
+benevolence not in the least sham but distinctly posing. And something
+of this rococo relish may no doubt, with a little good will and
+sympathy, be detected in her books. But of the genuine life and the
+natural language which occasionally inspirit the much more unequal and
+more generally commonplace work of Miss Burney, she has practically
+nothing. And she thus falls out of the main line of development, merely
+exemplifying the revolutionary and sentimental episode.
+
+We must now, for some pages, illustrate the course of the novel by minor
+examples: and we may begin with a brief notice of two writers, one of
+whom might have been taken before Miss Burney and the other just after
+her chronologically: but who, in the order of thought and method, will
+come better here. Both were natives of Scotland and both illustrate
+different ways of the novel. Henry Mackenzie, an Edinburgh advocate, in
+three books--the names of which at least are famous, while his friend
+Sir Walter has preserved the books themselves in the collection so often
+mentioned--produced, in his own youth and in rapid succession, _The Man
+of Feeling_ (1771), _The Man of the World_ (1773), and _Julia de
+Roubigne_ (1777). John Moore, a Glasgow physician, wrote, when he was
+nearly sixty, the novel of _Zeluco_ (1786) and followed it up with
+_Edward_ ten years afterwards and _Mordaunt_ (1800). Mackenzie did good
+work later in the periodical essay: but his fiction is chiefly the
+"sensibility"-novel of the French and of Sterne, reduced to the
+absolutely absurd. From his essay-work, and from Scott's and other
+accounts of him, he must have possessed humour of a kind: but the
+extremely limited character of its nature and operation may be
+exemplified by his representation of a whole press-gang as bursting into
+tears at the pathetic action and words of an old man who offers himself
+as substitute for his son. This is one of the not rare, but certainly
+one of the most consummate, instances of fashion caricaturing itself in
+total unconsciousness. But it _was_ the fashion: and Mackenzie, though
+perhaps he helped to bring it to an end, no doubt caused the shedding,
+by "the fair" of the time, of an ocean of tears as great as the ocean of
+port wine which was contemporaneously absorbed by "the brave."
+
+Moore saw a good deal of continental society--he is indeed one of the
+first-hand witnesses for the events of the French Revolution--and he had
+a more considerable influence on the novel than has always been allowed
+him. _Zeluco_ chiefly survives because of the exquisitely ludicrous and
+human trait of the English sailor who, discussing the French army,
+pronounces white uniforms "absurd" and blue "only fit for the artillery
+and the blue horse." But it is not quite certain that its villain-hero
+had not something, and perhaps a good deal, to do with those of Mrs.
+Radcliffe who were soon to follow, and, through these, with Byron who
+was not to be very long after. The later books are of much less
+importance, if only because they follow the outburst of fiction which
+the French Revolution itself ushered. But Moore, who was intimately
+connected with Smollett, carried on the practice of making national or
+sub-national characteristics important elements of novel interest: and
+is thus noteworthy in more ways than one.
+
+He is a late instance--he was born in 1729 and so was only a few years
+younger than Smollett himself--of the writers who had, for all but half
+a century after Richardson's appearance, accumulated patterns and
+examples of the novel in all sorts of forms, hardly one of which lacked
+numerous and almost innumerable imitators and followers. By these later
+years of the century the famous "Minerva Press" and many others issued
+deluges of novel-work which were eagerly absorbed by readers.
+"Absorbed" in more senses than one: for the institution of circulating
+libraries, while it facilitated reading, naturally tended towards the
+destruction of the actual volumes read. Novels were rarely produced in a
+very careful or sumptuous fashion, and good copies of those that were in
+any way popular are now rather hard to obtain: while even in the British
+Museum it will frequently be found that only the later editions are
+represented. We shall finish this chapter with some instances, taken not
+quite at random, of the work of the last decades of the eighteenth and
+the beginning of the nineteenth century, winding up with more general
+notice of two remarkable writers who represent--though at least one of
+them lived far later--the period before Scott, and who also, as it
+happens, represent the contrast of novel and romance in a fashion
+unusually striking. The description, as some readers will have
+anticipated, refers to Miss Edgeworth and to Maturin. But the smaller
+fry must be taken first.
+
+It is not uninteresting to compare two such books as Mrs. Bennett's
+_Anna_ and Mrs. Opie's _Adeline Mowbray_. Published at twenty years'
+distance (1785 and 1804) they show the rapid growth of the novel, even
+during a time when nothing of the first class appeared. _Anna, or the
+Memoirs of a Welsh Heiress, interspersed with Anecdotes of a Nabob_, is
+a kind of bad imitation of Miss Burney, with a catchpenny
+"interspersion" to suit the day. _Adeline Mowbray_, written with more
+talent, chimes in by infusing one of the tones of _its_ day--Godwinian
+theories of life. The space between was the palmy time of that now
+almost legendary "Minerva Press" which, as has been said, flooded the
+ever-absorbent market with stuff of which _The Libertine_, masterpiece
+of Mrs. Byrne, _alias_ Charlotte Dacre, _alias_ "Rosa Matilda," is
+perhaps best worth singling out from its companions, _Hours of Solitude,
+The Nun of St. Omers, Zofloya_, etc., because it specially shocked the
+censor of the style who will be mentioned presently. It is pure (or
+not-pure) rubbish. Angelo (the libertine) seduces the angelic Gabrielle
+de Montmorency, who follows him to Italy in male attire, saves him from
+the wicked courtesan Oriana and her bravo Fiorenz_a_ (_sic_), is married
+by him, but made miserable, and dies. He continues his misbehaviour to
+their children, and finally blows his brains out. "Bah! it is bosh!" as
+the Master observes of something else.
+
+It may seem iniquitous to say that some tolerably good novel-writers
+must be more summarily treated than some bad ones here: but there is
+reason for it. Such, for instance, as Charlotte Smith and the Miss Lees
+are miles above such others as the just-mentioned polyonymous "Rosa," as
+Sarah Wilkinson, or as Henrietta Mosse-Rouviere. The first three would
+make a very good group for a twenty-page causerie. Charlotte Smith, who
+was tolerably expert in verse as well as prose; who anticipated, and
+perhaps taught, Scott in the double use of the name "Waverley"; and
+whose _Old Manor House_ (1793) is a solid but not heavy work of its
+kind--is something of a person in herself, but less of a figure in
+history, because she neither innovates nor does old things consummately.
+Harriet and Sophia Lee claimed innovation for the latter's _Recess_
+(1783-1786), as Miss Porter did for _Thaddeus of Warsaw_, but the claim
+can be even less allowed. There is nothing of real historical spirit,
+and very little goodness of any kind, in _The Recess. The Canterbury
+Tales_ (1797-1805) (so named merely because they are supposed to be told
+by different persons) were praised by Byron, as he praised the _Percy
+Anecdotes_ and other things--either irresponsibly or impishly. They are
+not exactly bad: but also as far as possible from consummateness.
+
+On the other hand, _The Convent of Grey Penitents_, one of the crops
+which rewarded Miss Wilkinson for tilling the lands of her imagination
+with the spade of her style, _is_ very nearly consummate--in badness. It
+is a fair example of the worst imitations of Mrs. Radcliffe and Mat
+Lewis conjointly, though without the latter's looseness. The Marquis di
+Zoretti was an Italian nobleman--"one of those characters in whose bosom
+resides an unquenchable thirst of avarice" ["_thirst_ of _avarice_" is
+good!], etc. He marries, however, a lovely signora of the odd name of
+Rosalthe, without a fortune, "which circumstance was overlooked by his
+lordship" for a very short time only. He plots to be free of her: she
+goes to England and dies there to the genteelest of slow music. Their
+son Horatio falls in love with a certain Julietta, who is immured by
+wicked arts in the "Convent of Grey Penitents," tormented by the head,
+Gradisca, but rescued, and so forth. The book, if harmless, is about as
+worthless as a book can be: but it represents, very fairly, the ruck, if
+not indeed even the main body, of the enormous horde of romances which
+issued from the press towards the end of the eighteenth century and the
+beginning of the nineteenth, and which, in their different action on
+persons of genius, gave us _Zastrozzi_ on the one side and _Northanger
+Abbey_ on the other.
+
+As for Miss Henrietta Mosse, otherwise Rouviere, she represents the
+other school of abortive historical novel. _A Peep at Our Ancestors_
+(1807) is fairly worthy of its ridiculous name. It is preceded by
+expressions of thanks to the authorities of "the British Museum and the
+Heralds' Office" for the "access to records" vouchsafed to its author.
+As the date of the story is 1146 (it was long before Mr. Freeman wrote)
+access to records would certainly not have been superfluous. The actual
+results of it are blocks of spiritless and commonplace historic
+narrative--it is nearly all narrative, not action--diversified by
+utterances like this of Malcolm III. of Scotland, "O my Edward! the deed
+which struck my son's life has centred [_sic_] thy noble youthful bosom
+also," or this of the heroine (such as there is), "the gentle _elegant_
+Adelaise," "And do I not already receive my education of thee, mamma?"
+It is really a pity that the creator of this remarkable peep-show did
+not give references to her "records," so that one might look up this
+"elegant" young creature of the twelfth century who talked about
+"education" and said "mamma!" But this absolute failure in
+verisimilitude is practically universal before Scott.
+
+The works of the very beautifully named Regina Maria Roche should
+probably be read, as they were for generations, in late childhood or
+early youth. Even then an intelligent boy or girl would perceive some of
+the absurdity, but might catch a charm that escapes the less receptive
+oldster. They were, beyond all question, immensely popular, and
+continued to be so for a long time: in fact it is almost sufficient
+evidence that there is, if I mistake not, in the British Museum no
+edition earlier than the tenth of the most famous of them, _The Children
+of the Abbey_ (1798). This far-renowned work opens with the exclamation
+of the heroine Amanda, "Hail, sweet sojourn of my infancy!" and we are
+shortly afterwards informed that in the garden "the part appropriated to
+vegetables was divided from the part sacred to Flora." Otherwise, the
+substance of the thing is a curious sort of watered-down Richardson,
+passed through successive filtering beds of Mackenzie, and even of Mrs.
+Radcliffe. It is difficult for even the most critical taste to find much
+savour or stimulus in the resulting liquid. But, like almost everybody
+mentioned here, Regina is a document of the demands of readers and the
+faculty of writers: and so she "standeth," if not exactly "crowned," yet
+ticketed.
+
+Work--somewhat later--of some interest, but not of first-class quality,
+is to be found in the _Discipline_ (1811) and _Self-Control_ (1814) of
+Mary Brunton. A Balfour of Orkney on the father's side and a Ligonier on
+the mother's, the authoress had access to the best English as well as
+Scottish society, and seems to have had more than a chance of taking a
+place in the former: but preferred to marry a minister-professor and
+settled down to country manse life. She died in middle age and her
+husband wrote a memoir of her. _Discipline_ seems to represent a sort of
+fancy combination of the life she might have led and the life she did
+lead. Ellen Percy, the heroine, starts in the highest circles; forgets
+herself so far as to "waltz_e_" with a noble ne'er-do-weel, thereby
+earning the "stern disapprobation" of a respectable lover; comes down in
+the world; has Highland experiences which, at the book's early date, are
+noteworthy; marries (like her creatress) a minister; but "retains a
+little of her coquettish sauciness." "Bless her, poor little dear!" one
+can imagine Thackeray exclaiming in his later and mellowed days. Mrs.
+Brunton's letters breathe a lady-like and not unamiable propriety, and
+she is altogether a sort of milder, though actually earlier, Miss
+Ferrier.
+
+Ireland vindicated its claim to comparative liveliness in the work of a
+better known contemporary and survivor. Lady Morgan's (Miss Sydney
+Owenson's) _Wild Irish Girl_ (1806) is one of the books whose titles
+have prolonged for them a kind of shadowy existence. It is written in
+letters: and the most interesting thing about it for some readers now is
+that the heroine supplied Thackeray with the name Glorvina, which, it
+seems, means in Irish "sweet voice," if Lady Morgan is to be trusted _in
+rebus Celticis_. It is to be hoped she is: for the novel is a sort of
+_macedoine_ of Irish history, folk-lore, scenery, and what not, done up
+in a syrup of love-making _quant. suff._ Its author wrote many more
+novels and became a butt for both good- and ill-natured satire with the
+comic writers of the twenties, thirties, and forties. The title was
+actually borrowed by Maturin in _The Wild Irish_ "Boy," and it is fair
+to say that the book preceded Scott's, though not Miss Edgeworth's,
+experiments in the line of the "national" novel. The earlier Reviewers
+were discreditably savage on women-writers, and Lady Morgan had her
+share of their truculence. She did not wholly deserve it: but it must be
+said that nothing she wrote can really be ranked as literature, save on
+the most indiscriminate and uncritical estimate. It is, however,
+difficult to see much harm in her.
+
+_Ida of Athens_, for instance, which shocked contemporaries, and which,
+by the way, has the very large first title of _Woman_, could only bring
+a blush to cheeks very tickle of that sere: a yawn might come much more
+easily. The most shocking thing that the heroine, who is "an attempt to
+delineate woman in her natural state," does (and that not of malice) is
+to receive her lover in a natural bathroom. But her adventures are told
+in a style which is the oddest compound of Romantesque and Johnsonese.
+("The hour was ardent. The bath was cool. _He calculated upon the
+probable necessity of its enjoyment_.") The spirit is the silliest and
+most ignorant Philhellenism--all the beauty, virtue, wisdom, of the
+ancient Greeks being supposed to be inherited by their mongrel
+successors of the early nineteenth century. An English and a Turkish
+lover dispute Ida's affection or possession. There are the elaborate
+pseudo-erudite notes which one has learnt to associate chiefly with
+Moore. The authoress boasts in her preface that she "has already written
+almost as many volumes as she has years," and that she has hardly ever
+corrected her proofs. Perhaps this silliness will make some think her
+not more an example of the savagery of contemporary criticism than a
+justification thereof.
+
+It was in fact not only brutal man who objected to the preposterous
+excesses of pseudo-romance: and serious or jocular parables were taken
+up against it, if not before _Northanger Abbey_ was written, long before
+it was published. In 1810 a certain "G." or "S.G.," whose full name was
+Sarah Green, wrote, besides some actual history and an attempt at the
+historical novel, a very curious and rather hybrid book entitled
+_Romance Readers and Romance Writers_. Its preface is an instance of
+"Women, beware Women," for though it stigmatises male creatures, such as
+a certain Curteis and a certain Pickersgill, it treats Lady Morgan (then
+only Sydney Owenson) and "Rosa Matilda" even more roughly and asks (as
+has been asked about a hundred years later and was asked about a hundred
+years before), "Is it not amazing that the [two] most licentious writers
+of romance are women?" And it starts with a burlesque account of a
+certain Margaret Marsham who exclaims, "What then? to add to my earthly
+miseries am I to be called Peggy? My name is Margari_tt_a!" "I am sure
+that if I am called Peggy again I shall go into a fit." But this promise
+of something to complete the trio with _Northanger Abbey_ and _The
+Heroine_ (to be presently mentioned) is not maintained. Not only does
+the writer force the note of parody too much by making "Margaritta" say
+to herself, "Poor persecuted _dove_ that I am," and adore a labourer's
+shirt on a hedge, but she commits the far more fatal fault of exchanging
+her jest for earnest. Margaritta--following her romance-models--falls a
+victim to an unprincipled great lady and the usual wicked baronet--at
+whose head, one is bound to say, she flings herself with such violence
+as no baronet could possibly resist. Her sister Mary, innocent of
+romance-reading and all other faults, is, though not as guilty, as
+unlucky almost as Margaret: and by far the greater part of the book is
+an unreal presentment, in nearly the worst manner of the eighteenth
+century itself, of virtuous curates, _un_virtuous "tonish" rectors, who
+calmly propose to seduce their curates' daughters (an offence which, for
+obvious reasons, must, in the worst times, have been unusual), libertine
+ladies, and reckless "fashionables" of all kinds. The preface and the
+opening create expectations, not merely of amusement but of power, which
+are by no means fulfilled. It is "S.G." who asserts that _Ida of Athens_
+"has brought a blush to the cheek of many," and one can only repeat the
+suggested substitution.
+
+The only faults that can be found with _The Heroine_ or _The Adventures
+of Cherubina_, by Eaton Stannard Barrett, which appeared in the same
+year, with no very different object and subject, though written in
+lighter vein, are one that it could not help and another that it could.
+Unjustly, but unavoidably, the first is the worst. That it is a
+burlesque rather overdone--a burlesque _burlesque_--not in the manner of
+Thackeray, but in that of some older and some more recent writers--is
+unfortunate, but not fatal. One can forgive--one can even enjoy--the
+ghost who not only sneezes but says, "D--n, all is blown!" When the
+heroine is actually locked up with a man in a chest one is more
+doubtful: recovering when the Marquis de Furioso, "bowing gracefully to
+the bride," stabs himself to the heart, which is almost "the real
+Mackay" as they say in the North. The slight awkwardness of snow falling
+the day after the characters have been eating strawberries does not
+amuse _us_ much, because this is a comparatively ordinary event of the
+early twentieth century, whatever it might be of the early nineteenth.
+But what is fatal, though the author could not help it, is that the
+infinitely lighter, more artistic, and more lethal dart of _Northanger
+Abbey_ had been launched by the pen, if not the press, more than a dozen
+years before.
+
+There are few more curious and interesting personages in the history of
+the English Novel than Maria Edgeworth. The variety of her
+accomplishment in the kind was extraordinary: and in more than one of
+its species she went very near perfection. One is never quite certain
+whether the perpetual meddling of her rather celebrated father
+Richard--one of the capital examples of the unpractical pragmatists and
+clever-silly crotcheteers who produced and were produced by the
+Revolutionary period--did her more harm than good. It certainly loaded
+her work with superfluous and (to us) disgusting didacticism: but it
+might be contended that, without its stimulus, she would have done much
+less, perhaps nothing. As it was, she lived for more than eighty years
+(till all but the middle of the nineteenth century) and wrote for more
+than sixty. Her work is thus very bulky: but it may be considered, for
+our present purpose, in three groups--her short stories written mainly
+but not wholly for children; her regular novels; and her Irish studies.
+Of these the middle division has been, and no doubt has deserved to be,
+the least popular: but its principal example, _Belinda_ (1801)
+(_Patronage_, a longer and later book, and others are inferior), is
+considerably better than is usually admitted and, by its early date,
+deserves special notice here. It preceded Miss Austen's work in
+publication, and is specially cited by her as a capital example of novel
+in connection with the work of Miss Burney: and it is evidently founded
+on study of the latter, of which, indeed, it is the first really worthy
+continuation. Maria has nothing so good as Fanny's Smiths and
+Branghtons: but the whole book is far superior to _Evelina_. The
+extravagance of the _fin-de-siecle_ society which it represents has
+probably disguised from not a few readers who do not know the facts, the
+other fact that it is a real attempt at realist observation of manners:
+and it has the narrative merit which was Miss Edgeworth's gift of
+nature. But the hero is patchy and improbable: the heroine, a good and
+quite possible girl, is not sufficiently "reliefed out"; and the most
+important figures of the book, Lord and Lady Delacour, almost great
+successes, are not helped by the peculiar academic-didactic moralising
+which she had caught from Marmontel.
+
+The following of that ingenious and now too much under-valued writer
+stood her in better stead in the _Moral Tales_ (1801) (which she
+deliberately called after his[16]), the _Popular Tales_ of the same
+kind, and (though Marmontel did not intentionally write for children)
+the delightful _Parent's Assistant_ (1801) and _Frank_. In the two
+first-named divisions, the narrative faculty just mentioned appears
+admirably, together with another and still greater gift, that of
+character-painting, and even a grasp of literary and social satire,
+which might not be anticipated from some of her other books. The French
+governess (_Mlle. Panache_) and the satire on romantic young-ladyism
+(_Angelina_) are excellent examples of this. As for the pure child's
+stories, generation after generation of competent criticism, childish
+and adult, has voted them by acclamation into almost the highest place
+possible: and the gain-sayers have for the most part been idle
+paradoxers, ill-conditioned snarlers at things clean and sweet, or fools
+pure and simple.
+
+    [16] The peculiar pedantic ignorance which critics sometimes
+    show has objected to this rendering of Marmontel's _Contes
+    Moraux_, urging that it should read "tales _of manners_." It
+    might be enough to remark that the Edgeworths, father and
+    daughter, were probably a good deal better acquainted both with
+    French and English than these cavillers. But there is a
+    rebutting argument which is less _ad hominem_. "Tales of
+    Manners" leaves out at least as much on one side as "Moral
+    Tales" does on the other: and the actual meaning is quite clear
+    to those who know that of the Latin _mores_ and the French
+    _moeurs_. It is scarcely worth while to attempt to help those
+    who do not know by means of paraphrases.
+
+The "Irish brigade" of the work--_Castle Rackrent_ (1800), _Ormond_, and
+_The Absentee_, with the non-narrative but closely-connected _Essay on
+Irish Bulls_--have perhaps commanded the most unchequered applause. They
+are not quite free from the sentimentality and the didacticism which
+were both rampant in the novel of Miss Edgeworth's earlier time: but
+these are atoned for by a quite new use of the "national" element. Even
+Smollett and, following Smollett, Moore had chiefly availed themselves
+of this for its farcical or semi-farcical opportunities. Miss Edgeworth
+did not neglect these, but she did not confine herself to them: and such
+characters as Corny the "King of the Black Isles" in _Ormond_ actually
+add a new province and a new pleasure to fiction.
+
+Her importance is thus very great: and it only wanted the proverbial or
+anecdotic "That!" to make it much greater. "That!" as it generally is,
+was in her case the last fusing touch of genius to accomplish the
+_grand oeuvre_--the perfect projection. She had humour, pathos,
+knowledge of the world, power of drawing it, acquaintance with
+literature, shrewd common sense, an excellent style when she was allowed
+to write in her own way, the feelings of a lady who was also a good
+woman. King Charles is made to say in _Woodstock_ that "half the things
+in the world remind him of the Tales of Mother Goose." It is
+astonishing, in the real complimentary sense, how many things remind one
+of situations, passages, phrases, in Miss Edgeworth's works of all the
+kinds from _Castle Rackrent_ to _Frank_. She also had a great and an
+acknowledged influence on Scott, a considerable and a certainly not
+disavowed influence on Miss Austen. She is good reading always, however
+much we may sometimes pish and pshaw at the untimely poppings-in of the
+platitudes and crotchets (for he was that most abominable of things, a
+platitudinous crotcheteer) of Richard her father. She was a girl of
+fourteen when the beginnings of the domestic novel were laid in
+_Evelina_, and she lived to see it triumph in _Vanity Fair_. But her own
+work, save in some of her short stories, which are pretty perfect,
+represents the imperfect stage of the development--the stage when the
+novel is trying for the right methods and struggling to get into the
+right ways, but has not wholly mastered the one or reached the others.
+
+There are those who would assign what they might call "higher genius,"
+or "rarer gift," or something similar, to her countryman Charles Robert
+Maturin. The present writer is not very fond of these measurings
+together of things incommensurable--these attempts to rank the "light
+white sea-mew" as superior or inferior to the "sleek black pantheress."
+It is enough to say that while Miss Edgeworth very deliberately adopted
+the novel, and even, as we have seen, slightly satirised at least
+pseudo-romance, Maturin was romantic or nothing. His life was hardly
+half hers in length, and his temperament appears to have been as
+discontented as hers was sunny: but he had his successes in drama as
+well as in novel, and one of his attempts in the latter kind had a
+wide-ranging influence abroad as well as at home, has been recently
+printed both in whole and in part, and undoubtedly ranks among the
+novels which any tolerably well instructed person would enumerate if he
+were asked to give a pretty full list of celebrated (and deservedly
+celebrated) books of the kind in English. The others fall quite out of
+comparison. _The Fatal Revenge_ or the _Family of Montorio_ (1807) is a
+try for the "furthest" in the Radcliffe-Lewis direction, discarding
+indeed the crudity of _The Monk_, but altogether neglecting the
+restraint of _Udolpho_ and its companions in the use of the
+supernatural. _The Wild Irish Boy_ (1808), _The Milesian Chief_ (1812),
+_Women_ (1818), and _The Albigenses_ (1824) are negligible, the last,
+perhaps, rather less so than the others. But _Melmoth the Wanderer_
+(1820) is in quite a different case. It has faults in plenty--especially
+a narrative method of such involution that, as it has been said, "a
+considerable part of the book consists of a story told to a certain
+person, who is a character in a longer story, found in a manuscript
+which is delivered to a third person, who narrates the greater part of
+the novel to a fourth person, who is the namesake and descendant of the
+title-hero." Stripped of these tiresome lendings (which, as has been
+frequently pointed out, were a mania with the eighteenth century and
+naturally grew to such intricacy as this), the central story, though not
+exactly new, is impressive: and it is told and worked out in manner more
+impressive, because practically novel, save for, perhaps, a little
+suggestion from _Vathek_. Melmoth has bartered his soul with the devil
+for something like immortality and other privileges, including the
+unusual one of escaping doom if he can get some one to take the bargain
+off his hands. This leads up to numerous episodes or chapters in which
+Melmoth endeavours to obtain substitutes: and in one of these the love
+interest of the book--the, of course, fatal love of Melmoth himself for
+a Spanish-Indian girl Immalee or Isidora--is related with some real
+pathos and passion, though with a good deal of mere sentiment and
+twaddle. Maturin is stronger in his terror-scenes, and affected his own
+generation very powerfully: his influence being so great in France that
+Balzac attempted a variation and continuation, and that there are
+constant references to the book in the early French Romantics. In fact
+for this kind of "sensation" Maturin is, putting _Vathek_ aside, quite
+the chief of the whole school. But it is doubtful whether he had many
+other gifts as a novelist, and this particular one is one that cannot be
+exercised very frequently, and is very difficult to exercise at all
+without errors and extravagances.
+
+The child-literature of this school and period was very large, and, had
+we space, would be worth dealing with at length--as in the instances of
+the famous _Sandford and Merton_ (1783-1789) by Thomas Day, Richard
+Edgeworth's friend, of Mrs. Trimmer's _Story of the Robins_, and others.
+It led up to the definitely religious school of children's books, first
+evangelical, then tractarian, with which we shall deal later: but was
+itself as a rule utilitarian--or sentimental--moral rather than directly
+religious. It is, however, like other things--indeed almost all
+things--in this chapter--a document of the fashion in which the novel
+was "filling all numbers" and being used for all purposes. It was, of
+course, in this case, nearest to the world-old "fable"--especially to
+the moral apologues of which the mediaeval sermon-writers and others had
+been so fond. But its popularity, especially when taken in connection
+with the still surviving distrust of fiction, is valuable. It involves
+not merely the principle that "the devil shall not have all the best
+tunes," but the admission that this tune is good.
+
+This point, and that other also frequently mentioned and closely
+connected with it, that the novel at this time overflows into almost
+every conceivable department of subject and object, are the main facts
+of a general historical kind, which should be in the reader's mind as
+the upshot of this chapter. But there is a third, almost as important as
+either, and that is the almost universal coming short of complete
+success--the lack of consummateness, the sense that if the Novel Israel
+is not exactly still in the wilderness, it has not yet crossed the
+Jordan. Even if we take in the last chapter, and its comparative giants,
+with the present and its heroes, ordinary folk, and pygmies, we shall
+scarcely find more than one great master, Fielding, and one little
+masterpiece, _Vathek_, deserving the adjective "consummate." No doubt
+the obvious explanation--that the hour was not because the man had not
+come except in this single case--is a good one: but it need not be left
+in the bare isolation of its fatalism. There are at least several
+subsidiary considerations which it is well to advance. The transition
+state of manners and language cannot be too often insisted upon: for
+this affected the process at both ends, giving the artist in fictitious
+life an uncertain model to copy and unstable materials to work in. The
+deficiency of classical patterns--at a time which still firmly believed,
+for the most part, that all good work in literature had been so done by
+the ancients that it could at best be emulated--should count for
+something: the scanty respect in which the kind was held for something
+more. As to one of the most important species, frequent allusions have
+been made, and in the next chapter full treatment will be given, to the
+causes which made the _historical_ novel impossible until very late in
+the century, and decidedly unlikely to be good even then. Perhaps,
+without attempting further detail, we may conclude by saying that the
+productions of this time present, and present inevitably, the nonage and
+novitiate of a branch of art which hardly possessed any genuine
+representatives when the century was born and which numbered them, bad
+and good, by thousands and almost tens of thousands at its death. In the
+interval there had been continuous and progressive exercise; there had
+been some great triumphs; there had been not a little good and pleasant
+work; and of even the work that was less good and less pleasant one may
+say that it at least represented experiment, and might save others from
+failure.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+SCOTT AND MISS AUSTEN
+
+
+In 1816 Sir Thomas Bernard, baronet, barrister, and philanthropist,
+published, having it is said written it three years previously, an
+agreeable dialogue on _Old Age_, which was very popular, and reached its
+fifth edition in 1820. The interlocutors are Bishops Hough and Gibson
+and Mr. Lyttleton, the supposed time 1740--the year, by accident or
+design, of _Pamela_. In this the aged and revered "martyr of Magdalen"
+is mildly reproached by his brother prelate for liking novels. Hough
+puts off the reproach as mildly, and in a most academic manner, by
+saying that he only admits them _speciali gratia_. This was in fact the
+general attitude to the whole kind, not merely in 1740, but after all
+the work of nearly another life-time as long as Hough's--almost in 1816
+itself. Yet when Sir Thomas published his little book, notice to quit,
+of a double kind, had been served on this fallacy. Miss Austen's life
+was nearly done, and some of her best work had not been published: but
+the greater part had. Scott was in his actual hey-day. Between them,
+they had dealt and were dealing--from curiously different sides and in
+as curiously different manners--the death-blow to the notion that the
+novel was an inferior if not actually discreditable kind, suitable for
+weak intellects only, and likely to weaken strong ones, frivolous when
+not positively immoral, giving a distaste for serious reading, implying
+in the writer an inability to do anything more serious, and generally
+presenting a glaring contrast to real "literature."
+
+Interesting as each of these two great novelists is individually, the
+interest of the pair, from our present historical point of view, is
+almost greater; and the way in which they complete each other is hardly
+short of uncanny. Before their time, despite the great examples of prose
+fiction produced by Bunyan, Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and
+Sterne, and the remarkable determination towards the life of ordinary
+society given, or instanced, by Miss Burney; despite the immense
+novel-production of the last half of the eighteenth century and the
+first decade of the nineteenth--it is hardly too much to say that "the
+novel," as such, had not found its proper way or ways at all. Bunyan's
+was an example of genius in a peculiar kind of the novel: as, in a very
+different one, was Sterne's. Defoe, possessing some of the rarest gifts
+of the novelist, was quite lacking in others. Richardson was not only
+_exemplar vitiis imitabile_ and _imitatum_, but it might be doubted
+whether, even when not faulty, he was not more admirable than
+delightful. Smollett, like Defoe, was not much more than part of a
+novelist: and Miss Burney lacked strength, equality, and range. There
+remained Fielding: and it certainly is not here that any restrictions or
+allowances will be insinuated as to Fielding's praise. But Fielding's
+novels are a circle in which no one else save Thackeray has ever been
+able to walk. And what we are looking for now is something rather
+different from this--a masterpiece, or masterpieces, which may not only
+yield delight and excite admiration in itself or themselves, but may
+bring forth fruit in others--fruit less masterly perhaps, but of the
+same or a similar kind. In other words, nobody's work yet--save in the
+special kinds--had been capable of yielding a novel-_formula_: nobody
+had hit upon the most capital and fruitful novel-ideas. And nearly
+everybody had, in the kind, done work curiously and almost
+incomprehensibly faulty. Of these faults, the worst, perhaps, were
+classable under the general head of inverisimilitude. Want of truth to
+nature in character and dialogue, extravagant and clumsy plotting,
+neglect of (indeed entire blindness to) historic colour, unreal and
+unobserved description--all these things might be raised to a height or
+sunk to a bathos in the work of the Minerva Press--but there was far too
+much of them in _all_ the novel work of these sixty or seventy years.
+
+Although the facts and dates are well enough known, it is perhaps not
+always remembered that Miss Austen, while representing what may, using a
+rather objectionable and ambiguous word, be called a more "modern" style
+of novel than Scott's, began long before him and had almost finished her
+work before his really began. If that wonderful Bath bookseller had not
+kept _Northanger Abbey_ in a drawer, instead of publishing it, it would
+have had nearly twenty years start of _Waverley_. And it must be
+remembered that _Northanger Abbey_, though it is, perhaps, chiefly
+thought of as a parody-satire on the school of Mrs. Radcliffe, is, as
+these parody-satires have a habit of being, a great deal more. If
+Catherine had not made a fool of herself about the _Orphan of the Black
+Forest_ and _Horrid Mysteries_ (or rather if everything relating to this
+were "blacked out" as by a Russian censor) there would still remain the
+admirable framework of her presentation at Bath and her intercourse with
+the Tilneys; the more admirable character-sketches of herself--the
+triumph of the ordinary made not ordinary--and the Thorpes; the most
+admirable flashes of satire and knowledge of human nature, not
+"promiscuous" or thrown out _apropos_ of things in general, but acting
+as assistants and invigorators to the story.
+
+In the few words just used lies, as far as it can be comprehended in any
+few words, the secret both of Miss Austen and of Scott. It has been
+said--more than once or twice, I fear--that hardly until Bunyan and
+Defoe do we get an interesting story--something that grasps us and
+carries us away with it--at all. Except in the great eighteenth-century
+Four the experience is not repeated, save in parts of Miss Burney and
+Miss Edgeworth later--it is simulated rather than actually brought about
+by the Terror-novel--except in the eternal exception of _Vathek_--for
+Maturin did not do his best work till much later. The absence of it is
+mainly due to a concatenation of inabilities on the part of the writers.
+They don't know what they ought to do: and in a certain sense it may
+even be said that they don't know what they are doing. In the worst
+examples surveyed in the last chapter, such as _A Peep at Our
+Ancestors_, this ignorance plumbs the abyss--blocks of dull serious
+narrative, almost or quite without action, and occasional insertions of
+flat, insipid, and (to any one with a little knowledge) impossible
+conversation, forming their staple. Of the better class of books, from
+the _Female Quixote_ to _Discipline_, this cannot fairly be said: but
+there is always something wanting. Frequently, as in both the books just
+mentioned, the writer is too serious and too desirous to instruct.
+Hardly ever is there a real _projection_ of character, in the round and
+living--only pale, sketchy "academies" that neither live, nor move, nor
+have any but a fitful and partial being. The conversation is, perhaps,
+the worst feature of all--for it follows the contemporary stage in
+adopting a conventional lingo which, as we know from private letters as
+early as Gray's and Walpole's, if not even as Chesterfield's and those
+of men and women older still, was _not_ the language of well-bred,
+well-educated, and intelligent persons at any time during the century.
+As for the Fourth Estate of the novel--description--it had rarely been
+attempted even by the great masters. In fact it has been pointed out as
+perhaps the one unquestionable merit of Mrs. Radcliffe that--following
+the taste for the picturesque which, starting from Gray and popularised
+by Gilpin, was spreading over the country--she did attempt to introduce
+this important feature, and did partly, in a rococo way, succeed in
+introducing it. As for plot, that has never been our strong point--we
+seem to have been contented with _Tom Jones_ as payment in full of that
+demand.[17]
+
+    [17] The frankness of the ingenious creator of Mr. Jorrocks
+    should be imitated by 99 per cent. of English novelists. "The
+    following story," says he of _Ask Mamma_, "does not involve the
+    complication of a plot. It is a mere continuous narrative."
+
+Now, this was all changed. It is doubtful whether if _Northanger Abbey_
+had actually appeared in 1796 it would have been appreciated--Miss
+Austen, like other writers of genius, had, not exactly as the common but
+incorrect phrase goes, to create the taste for her own work, but to
+arouse the long dormant appetite which she was born to satisfy. Yet,
+looking back a hundred years, it seems impossible that anybody of wits
+should have failed at once to discover the range, the perfection, and
+the variety of the new gift, or set of gifts. Here all the elements come
+in: and something with them that enlivens and intensifies them all. The
+plot is not intricate, but there is a plot--good deal more, perhaps,
+than is generally noticed, and more than Miss Austen herself sometimes
+gave, as, for instance, in _Mansfield Park_. It is even rather artfully
+worked out--the selfish gabble of John Thorpe, who may look to
+superficial observers like a mere outsider, playing an important part
+_twice_ in the evolution. There is not lavish but amply sufficient
+description and scenery--the Bath vignettes, especially the Beechencliff
+prospect; the sketch of the Abbey itself and of Henry's parsonage, etc.
+But it is in the other two constituents that the blowing of the new wind
+of the spirit is most perceptible. The character-drawing is simply
+wonderful, especially in the women--though the men lack nothing. John
+Thorpe has been glanced at--there had been nothing like him before, save
+in Fielding and in the very best of the essayists and dramatists.
+General Tilney has been found fault with as unnatural and excessive: but
+only by people who do not know what "harbitrary gents" fathers of
+families, who were not only squires and members of parliament, but
+military men, could be in the eighteenth century--and perhaps a little
+later. His son Henry, in common with most of his author's _jeunes
+premiers_, has been similarly objected to as colourless. He really has a
+great deal of subdued individuality, and it _had_ to be subdued, because
+it would not have done to let him be too superior to Catherine. James
+Morland and Frederick Tilney are not to be counted as more than "walking
+gentlemen," Mr. Allen only as a little more: and they fulfil their law.
+But Isabella Thorpe is almost better than her brother, as being nearer
+to pure comedy and further from farce; Eleanor Tilney is adequate; and
+Mrs. Allen is sublime on her scale. A novelist who, at the end of the
+eighteenth century, could do Mrs. Allen, could do anything that she
+chose to do; and might be trusted never to attempt anything that she
+could not achieve. And yet the heroine is perhaps--as she ought to
+be--the greatest triumph of the whole, and the most indicative of the
+new method. The older heroines had generally tried to be extraordinary:
+and had failed. Catherine tries to be ordinary: and is an extraordinary
+success. She is pretty, but not beautiful: sensible and well-natured,
+but capable, like most of us, of making a complete fool of herself and
+of doing complete injustice to other people; fairly well educated, but
+not in the least learned or accomplished. In real life she would be
+simply a unit in the thousands of quite nice but ordinary girls whom
+Providence providentially provides in order that mankind shall not be
+alone. In literature she is more precious than rubies--exactly because
+art has so masterfully followed and duplicated nature.
+
+Precisely to what extent the attractive quality of this art is enhanced
+by the pervading irony of the treatment would be a very difficult
+problem to work out. It is scarcely hazardous to say that irony is the
+very salt of the novel: and that just as you put salt even in a cake, so
+it is not wise to neglect it wholly even in a romance. Life itself, as
+soon as it gets beyond mere vegetation, is notoriously full of irony:
+and no imitation of it which dispenses with the seasoning can be worth
+much. That Miss Austen's irony is consummate can hardly be said to be
+matter of serious contest.
+
+It has sometimes been thought--perhaps mistakenly--that the exhibition
+of it in _Northanger Abbey_ is, though a very creditable essay, _not_
+consummate. But _Pride and Prejudice_ is known to be, in part, little if
+at all later than _Northanger Abbey_: and there can again be very little
+dispute among judges in any way competent as to the quality of the irony
+there. Nor does it much matter what part of this wonderful book was
+written later and what earlier: for its ironical character is
+all-pervading, in almost every character, except Jane and her lover who
+are mere foils to Elizabeth and Darcy, and even in these to some extent;
+and in the whole story, even in the at least permitted suggestion that
+the sight of Pemberley, and Darcy's altered demeanour, had something to
+do with Elizabeth's resignation of the old romantic part of _Belle dame
+sans merci_. It may further be admitted, even by those who protest
+against the undervaluation of _Northanger Abbey_, that _Pride and
+Prejudice_ flies higher, and maintains its flight triumphantly. It is
+not only longer; it is not only quite independent of parody or contrast
+with something previous; but it is far more intricate and elaborate as
+well as more original. Elizabeth herself is not merely an ordinary girl:
+and the putting forward of her, as an extraordinary yet in no single
+point unnatural one, is victoriously carried out. Her father, in spite
+of (nay, perhaps, including) his comparative collapse when he is called
+upon, not as before to talk but to act, in the business of Lydia's
+flight, is a masterpiece. Mr. Collins is, once more by common consent of
+the competent, unsurpassed, if not peerless: those who think him
+unnatural simply do not know nature. Shakespeare and Fielding were the
+only predecessors who could properly serve as sponsors to "this young
+lady" (as Scott delightfully calls her) on her introduction among the
+immortals on the strength of this character alone. Lady Catherine is not
+much the inferior (it would have been pleasing to tell her so) of her
+_protege_ and chaplain. Of almost all the characters, and of quite the
+whole book, it is scarcely extravagant to say that it could not have
+been better on its own scale and scheme--that it is difficult to
+conceive any scheme and scale on which it could have been better. And,
+yet once more, there is nothing out of the way in it--the only thing not
+of absolutely everyday occurrence, the elopement of Lydia, happens on
+so many days still, with slight variations, that it can hardly be called
+a licence.
+
+The same qualities appear throughout the other books, whether in more or
+less quintessence and with less or more alloy is a question rather of
+individual taste than for general or final critical decision. _Sense and
+Sensibility_, the first actually to appear (1811), is believed to have
+been written about the same time as _Pride and Prejudice_, which
+appeared two years later, and _Northanger Abbey_, which did not see the
+light till its author was dead. It is the weakest of the three--perhaps
+it is the weakest of all: but the weakness is due rather to an error of
+judgment than to a lack of power. Like _Northanger Abbey_ it has a
+certain dependence on something else: the extravagances of Marianne
+satirise the Sensibility-novel just as those of Catherine do the
+Terror-story of the immediate past. But it is on a much larger scale:
+and things of the kind are better in miniature. Moreover, the author's
+sense of creative faculty made her try to throw up and contrast her
+heroine with other characters, in a way which she had not attempted in
+_Northanger Abbey_: and good as these are in themselves, they make a
+less perfect whole. Indeed, in the order of thought, _Sense and
+Sensibility_ is the "youngest" of the novels--the least self-criticised.
+Nothing in it shows lack of power (John Dashwood and his wife are of the
+first order); a good deal in it shows lack of knowledge exactly how to
+direct that power.
+
+_Mansfield Park_ (1814), though hardly as brilliant as _Pride and
+Prejudice_, shows much more maturity than _Sense and Sensibility_. Much
+of it is quite consummate, the character of Mrs. Norris especially: and
+for subtly interwoven phrase without emphasis, conveying knowledge and
+criticism of life, it has few equals. But it has an elopement. _Emma_,
+which has perhaps on the whole been the most general favourite, may
+challenge that position on one ground beyond all question, though
+possibly not on all. It is the absolute triumph of that reliance on the
+strictly ordinary which has been indicated as Miss Austen's title to
+pre-eminence in the history of the novel. Not an event, not a
+circumstance, not a detail, is carried out of "the daily round, the
+common task" of average English middle-class humanity, upper and lower.
+Yet every event, every circumstance, every detail, is put _sub specie
+eternitatis_ by the sorcery of art. Few things could be more
+terrible--nothing more tiresome--than to hear the garrulous Miss Bates
+talk in actual life; few things are more delightful than to read her
+speeches as they occur here. An aspiring soul might feel disposed to
+"take and drown itself in a pail" (as one of Dickens's characters says)
+if it had to live the life which the inhabitants of Highbury are
+represented as living; to read about that life--to read about it over
+and over again--has been and is always likely to be one of the chosen
+delights of some of the best wits of our race. This is one of the
+paradoxes of art: and perhaps it is the most wonderful of them,
+exceeding even the old "pity and terror" problem. And the discovery of
+it, as a possible source of artistic success, is one of the greatest
+triumphs and one of the most inexhaustible discoveries of that art
+itself. For by another paradox--this time not of art but of nature--the
+extraordinary is exhaustible and the ordinary is not. Tragedy and the
+more "incidented" comedy, it is well known, run into types and reproduce
+situations almost inevitably. "All the stories are told." But the story
+of the life of Highbury never can be told, because there is really
+nothing in it but the telling: and here the blessed infinity of Art
+comes in again.
+
+Miss Austen's last book, like her first, was published posthumously and
+she left nothing else but a couple of fragments. One of these, _Lady
+Susan_, does not, so far as it extends, promise much, though it is such
+a fragment and such an evident first draft even of this, that judgment
+of it is equally unfair and futile. The other, _The Watsons_, has some
+very striking touches, but is also a mere beginning. _Persuasion_--which
+appeared with _Northanger Abbey_ and which, curiously enough, has, like
+its nearly twenty years elder sister, Bath for its principal scene--has
+also some pretensions to primacy among the books, and is universally
+admitted to be of its author's most delicate, most finished, and most
+sustained work. And this, like _Emma_, resolutely abstains from even the
+slightest infusion of startling or unusual incident, of "exciting"
+story, of glaring colour of any kind: relying only on congruity of
+speech, sufficient if subdued description, and above all a profusion of
+the most delicately, but the most vividly drawn character, made to
+unfold a plot which has interest, if no excitement, and seasoned
+throughout with the unfailing condiment--the author's "own sauce"--of
+gentle but piquant irony and satire.
+
+It is not to be supposed or inferred that Miss Austen's methods, or her
+results, have appealed to everybody. Madame de Stael thought her
+_vulgaire_--meaning, of course, not exactly our "vulgar" but
+"commonplace"; Charlotte Bronte was not much otherwise minded; her own
+Marianne Dashwood would doubtless have thought the same. Readers without
+some touch of letters may think her style old-fashioned: it has even
+been termed "stilted." Not merely may amateurs of blood and thunder, of
+passion and sensation, think her tame, but the more modern devotees of
+"analysis" may consider her superficial. On the other hand, it is
+notorious that, from her own day to this, she has never wanted
+partisans, often of superlative competence, and of the most strikingly
+different tempers, tastes, and opinions. The extraordinary quietness of
+her art is only matched by its confidence: its subtlety by its strength.
+She did not try many styles; she deliberately and no doubt wisely
+refused to try the other style which was already carrying all before it
+in her own later days. She seems to have confined herself (with what
+seems to some high-flying judges an almost ignoble caution) to the
+strata of society that she knew most thoroughly: and the curious have
+noted that she seldom goes above a baronet, and hardly even descends to
+a butler, in her range of personages who are not mere mutes. It is not
+at all unlikely--in fact it is almost certain--that she might have
+enlarged this range, and that of her incident, with perfect safety and
+to the great profit and delight of her readers. But these actual things
+she knew she could do consummately; and she would not risk the
+production of anything not consummate.
+
+The value of her, artistically, is of course in the perfection of what
+she did; but the value of her historically is in the way in which she
+showed that, given the treatment, any material could be perfected. It
+was in this way, as has been pointed out, that the possibilities of the
+novel were shown to be practically illimitable. Tragedy is not needed:
+and the most ordinary transactions, the most everyday characters,
+develop into an infinite series of comedies with which the novelist can
+amuse himself and his readers. The _ludicrum humani seculi_ on the one
+hand, and the artist's power of extracting and arranging it on the
+other--these two things supply all that is wanted. This Hampshire
+parson's daughter had found the philosopher's stone of the novel: and
+the very pots and pans, the tongs and pokers of the house, could be
+turned into novel-gold by it.
+
+But even gold is not everything: and only a fanatic, and a rather
+foolish fanatic, would say that this style of fiction summed up and
+exhausted all the good that fiction could give and do. Miss Austen's art
+excludes (it has been said) tragedy; it does not let in much pure
+romance; although its variety is in a way infinite, yet it is not
+various in infinite ways, but rather in very finite ones. Everybody who
+denies its excellence is to be blamed: but nobody is to be blamed for
+saying that he should like some other excellences as well. The desire is
+innocent, nay commendable: and it was being satisfied, at practically
+the same time, by the work of Sir Walter Scott in a kind of novel almost
+as new (when we regard it in connection with its earlier examples) as
+Miss Austen's own. This was the Historical novel, which, in a way, not
+only subsumed many though not quite all varieties of Romance, but also
+summoned to its aid not a little--in fact a very great deal--of the
+methods of the pure novel itself.
+
+It is not very long since a critic, probably not very old, sentenced the
+critical opinions of another critic, certainly not very young, to "go
+into the melting pot" because they were in favour of the historical
+novel: and because the historical novel had for some time past done
+great harm (I think the phrase was stronger) to the imaginative
+literature of England. Now there are several things which might be said
+about this judgment--I do not say "in arrest" of it, because it is of
+itself inoperative: as it happens you cannot put critical opinions in
+the melting pot. At least, they won't melt: and they come out again
+like the diabolic rat that Mr. Chips tried to pitch-boil. In the first
+place, there is the question whether the greater part by far of the
+imaginative and other literature of _any_ time does not itself "go into
+the melting pot," and whether it much matters what sends it there. In
+the second, if this seems too cynical, there is the very large and grave
+question whether a still larger proportion of the novel of manners, in
+England, France, and all other countries during the same time, has not
+been as bad as, or worse than, the romantic division, historical or
+other. But the worst faults of the judgment remain. In the first place
+there is the fatal shortness of view. It is with the literature of two
+thousand, not with the literature of twenty, years that the true critic
+has to do: and no kind which--in two thousand, or two hundred, or
+twenty--has produced literature that is good or great can be even
+temporarily put aside because (as every kind of literature without
+exception has been again and again) it is for a time barren or fruitful
+only in weeds. And any one who does not count Scott and Dumas and
+Thackeray among the makers of good literature must really excuse others
+if they simply take no further count of him. The historical novel is a
+good kind, good friends, a marvellous good kind: and it has the
+advantage over the pure novel of manners that it is much less subject to
+obsolescence, if it be really well done; while it can practically annex
+most of the virtues of that novel of manners itself.
+
+This excellent kind, however, had been wandering about in the
+wilderness--had indeed hardly got so far even as that stage, but had
+been a mere "bodiless childful of life in the gloom"--for more than two
+thousand years before _Waverley_. Of its earlier attempts to get into
+full existence we cannot say much here:[18] something on the more
+recent but rather abortive birth-throes has been promised, and is now
+due. It is not improbable that considerable assistance was rendered to
+the kind by the heroic romance of the seventeenth century in prose and
+verse, which often attempted historic, and almost always
+pseudo-historic, guise. As has been seen in regard to such collections
+as Croxall's, historical stories were freely mingled with fictitious:
+and it could not be for nothing that Horace Walpole, the author of the
+_Castle of Otranto_, was a rather ardent and even to some extent
+scholarly student of the romance and the gossip of history. Much
+earlier, Fielding himself, in his salad days, had given something of an
+historic turn to the story of _A Journey from this World to the Next_.
+And when history itself became more common and more readable, it could
+not but be that this inexhaustible source of material for the new kind
+of literature, which was being so eagerly demanded and so busily
+supplied, should suggest itself. Some instances of late eighteenth and
+early nineteenth century experiments have been given and discussed in
+the last chapter: and when Scott (or "the Author of _Waverley_") had
+achieved his astonishing success, some of the writers of these put in
+the usual claim of "That's _my_ thunder." This was done in the case of
+the Lees, it was also done in the case of Jane Porter, the writer of
+the once famous and favourite _Thaddeus of Warsaw_ (1803) and _Scottish
+Chiefs_ (1810): while, as we have seen, there had been historical colour
+enough in Godwin's novels to make suggestion of _his_ "authorship of
+_Waverley_" not absolutely preposterous. Even Mrs. Radcliffe had touched
+the style; and humbler persons like the egregious Henrietta Mosse had
+attempted it in the most serious spirit.
+
+    [18] Those who are curious about the matter will find it
+    treated in a set of Essays by the present writer, which
+    originally appeared in _Macmillan's Magazine_ during the autumn
+    of 1894, and were reprinted among _Essays in English
+    Literature_, Second Series, London, 1895.
+
+But with their varying degrees of talent--with, in one or two cases,
+even a little genius--all these writers had broken themselves upon one
+fatal difficulty--that of anachronism: not in the petty sense of the
+pedant, but in the wide one of the critic. The present writer is not
+prepared, without reading _A Peep at Our Ancestors_ again (which he
+distinctly declines to do), to say that there are, in that remarkable
+performance, any positive errors of historic fact worse than, or as bad,
+as those which pedantry has pointed out in _Ivanhoe_. But whereas you
+may be nearly as well acquainted with the actual history of the time as
+the pedants themselves, and a great deal better acquainted with its
+literature, and yet never be shocked, disgusted, or contemptuously
+amused in _Ivanhoe_ by such things as were quoted from the _Peep_ a few
+pages back--so, to those who know something of "the old Elizabeth way,"
+and even nowadays to those who know very little, and that little at
+second hand, Miss Lee's travesty of it in _The Recess_ is impossible and
+intolerable. When Mrs. Radcliffe, at the date definitely given of 1584,
+talks about "the Parisian opera," represents a French girl of the
+sixteenth century as being "instructed in the English poets," and talks
+about driving in a "landau," the individual blunders are, perhaps, not
+more violent than those of the chronology by which Scott's Ulrica is
+apparently a girl at the time of the Conquest and a woman, not too old
+to be the object of rivalry between Front de Boeuf and his father, not
+long before the reign of Richard I. But this last oversight does not
+affect the credibility of the story, or the homogeneity of the manners,
+in the least. Mrs. Radcliffe jumbles up two (or more than two) utterly
+different states and stages of society, manners, and other things which
+constitute the very atmosphere of the story itself. Perhaps (we have
+very few easy conversations of the period to justify a positive
+statement) a real Bois-Guilbert and still more a real Wamba might not
+have talked exactly like Scott's personages: but there is no insistent
+and disturbing reason why they should not. When we hear an Adelaise of
+the mid-twelfth century asking whether she does not receive her
+education from her mamma, the necessary "suspension of disbelief"
+becomes impossible.
+
+But these now most obvious truths were not obvious at all between 1780
+and 1810: and it is perhaps the greatest evidence of Scott's genius that
+half, but by no means quite, unconsciously he saw them, and that he has
+made everybody see them since. It was undoubtedly fortunate that he
+began novel-writing so late: for earlier even he might have been caught
+in the errors of the time. But when he did begin, he had not only
+reached middle life and matured his considerable original critical
+faculty--criticism and wine are the only things that even the "kind calm
+years" may be absolutely trusted to improve if there is any original
+goodness in them--but he had other advantages. He had read, if not with
+minute accuracy, very widely indeed: and he possessed, as Lord Morley
+has well said, "the genius of history" in a degree which perhaps no
+merely meticulous scholar has ever reached, and which was not exceeded
+in _quality_ even by the greatest historians such as Gibbon. He had an
+almost unmatched combination of common sense with poetic imagination, of
+knowledge of the world with knowledge of letters. He had shown himself
+to be possessed of the secret of semi-historical narrative itself in
+half a dozen remarkable verse romances, and therefore had less to do in
+engineering the prose romance. Last of all, he had seen what to
+avoid--not merely in his editing of Strutt's _Queenhoo Hall_ (a valuable
+property-room for the novel, but nothing of a real novel), but in his
+reading of the failures of his predecessors and contemporaries. The very
+beginning of _Waverley_ itself (which most people skip) is invaluable,
+because it shows us that at the time he wrote it (which, it need hardly
+be said, was a long time before its completion) he had not the knowledge
+or the courage to strike straight out into the stream of action and
+conversation, but troubled himself with accumulating bladders and
+arranging ropes for the possible salvation of his narrative if it got
+into difficulties. Very soon he knew that it would not get into
+difficulties: and away he went.
+
+It ought not to be necessary, but from some symptoms it may be
+desirable, to point out that Scott is very far from being an historical
+novelist only. An acute French critic, well acquainted with both
+literatures, once went so far as to say that there were a good many
+professed "philosophical" novels which did not contain such keen
+psychology as Scott's: and I would undertake to show a good deal of
+cause on this side. But short of it, it is undeniable that he can do
+perfectly well without any historical scaffolding. There is practically
+nothing of it in his second and third novels, _Guy Mannering_ and _The
+Antiquary_, each of which good judges have sometimes ranked as his very
+best: there is as little or less in _St. Ronan's Well_, a very fine
+thing as it is, and one which, but for James Ballantyne's meddling folly
+and prudery, would have been much finer. The incomparable little
+conversation--scenes and character-sketches scattered among the
+Introductions to the novels--especially the history of Crystal
+Croftangry--show that he could perfectly well have dispensed with all
+out-of-the-way incident had he chosen. But, as a rule, he did not so
+choose: and, in the majority of cases, he preferred to take his
+out-of-the-way incident from historical sources. Not here,
+unfortunately, can we allow ourselves even a space proportionate to that
+given above in Miss Austen's case to the criticism of individual novels:
+but luckily there is not much need of this. The brilliant overture of
+_Waverley_ as such, with its entirely novel combination of the
+historical and the "national" elements upon the still more novel
+background of Highland scenery; the equally vivid and vigorous narrative
+and the more interesting personages of _Old Mortality_ and _Rob Roy_;
+the domestic tragedy, with the historical element for little more than a
+framework, of the _Heart of Midlothian_ and the _Bride of Lammermoor_;
+the little masterpiece of _A Legend of Montrose_; the fresh departure,
+with purely English subject, of _Ivanhoe_ and its triumphant sequels in
+_Kenilworth, Quentin Durward_, and others; the striking utilisation of
+literary assistance in the _Fortunes of Nigel_; and the wonderful
+blending of autobiographic, historical, and romantic interest in
+_Redgauntlet_:--one cannot dwell on these and other things. The magic
+continued even in _Woodstock_--written as this was almost between the
+blows of the executioner's crow-bar on the wheel, in the tightening of
+the windlasses at the rack--it is not absent, whatever people may say,
+in _Anne of Geierstein_, nor even quite lacking in the better parts of
+_Count Robert of Paris_. But we must not expatiate on its effects; we
+must only give a little attention to the means by which they are
+achieved.
+
+Another of the common errors about Scott is to represent--perhaps really
+to regard--him as a hit-or-miss and hand-to-mouth _improvisatore_, who
+bundled out his creations anyhow, and did not himself know how he
+created them. The fallacy is worse than a fallacy: for it is down-right
+false witness. We have numerous passages in and out of the novels--the
+chief of them being the remarkable conversation with Captain Clutterbuck
+in the Introduction to the _Fortunes of Nigel_ and the reflections in
+the _Diary_ on _Sir John Chiverton_ and _Brambletye House_--showing that
+Scott knew perfectly well the construction and the stringing of his
+fiddle, as well as the trick of applying his rosin. But if we had not
+these direct testimonies, no one of any critical faculty could mistake
+the presence of consciously perceived principles in the books
+themselves. A man does not suddenly, and by mere blind instinct, avoid
+such a pitfall as that of incongruous speech and manners, which has been
+noticed above. It is not mere happy-go-lucky blundering which makes him
+invariably decline another into which people still fall--the selection
+of historical personages of the first importance, and elaborately known,
+for the _central_ figures of his novels. Not to believe in luck is a
+mark of perhaps greater folly than to over-believe in it: but luck will
+not always keep a man clear of such perils as that unskilful wedging of
+great blocks of mere history into his story, which the lesser historical
+novelists always commit, or that preponderance of mere narrative itself
+as compared with action and conversation from which even Dumas, even
+Thackeray, is not free.
+
+That he knew what he was doing and what he had to do is thus certain;
+that he did it to an astounding extent is still more certain; but it
+would not skill much to deny that he did not always give himself time to
+do it perfectly in every respect, though it is perhaps not mere paradox
+or mere partisanship to suggest that if he had given himself more time,
+he would hardly have done better, and might have done worse. The
+accusation of superficiality has been _already_ glanced at: and it is
+pretty certain that it argues more superficiality, of a much more
+hopeless kind, in those who make it. The accusation of careless and
+slovenly style is not much better: for Scott had, perfectly, the style
+suited to his own work, and you cannot easily have a better style than
+that. But there are two defects in him which were early detected by good
+and friendly judges: and which are in fact natural results of the
+extraordinary force and fertility of his creative power. One--the less
+serious, but certainly to some extent a fault in art and a point in
+which he is distinguished for the worse from Shakespeare--is that he is
+rather given to allow at first, to some of his personages, an
+elaborateness and apparent emphasis of drawing which seems to promise an
+importance for them in the story that they never actually attain. Mike
+Lambourne in _Kenilworth_ is a good example of this: but there are many
+others. The fact evidently was that, in the rush of the artist's plastic
+imagination, other figures rose and overpowered these. It is an excuse:
+but it is hardly a justification. The other and more serious is a
+tendency--which grew on him and may no doubt have been encouraged by the
+astonishing pecuniary rewards of his work--to hurry his conclusions, to
+"huddle up the cards and throw them into the bag," as Lady Louisa Stuart
+told him. There is one of the numerous, but it would seem generic and
+classifiable, forms of unpleasant dream in which the dreamer's watch, to
+his consternation, suddenly begins to send its hands round at double and
+ten-fold speed. Scott is rather apt to do this, towards the close of his
+novels, in his eagerness to begin something else. These defects,
+however, are defects much more from the point of view of abstract
+criticism than from that of the pleasure of the reader: while, even from
+the former, they are outweighed many times by merits. And as regards our
+present method of estimation, they hardly count at all.
+
+For, in that calculus, the important thing is that Scott, like Miss
+Austen, at once opened an immense new field to the novelist, and showed
+how that field was to be cultivated. The complement-contrast of the pair
+can need emphasising only to those on whom no emphasis would be likely
+to impress it: but it may not be quite so evident at once that between
+them they cover almost the entire possible ground of prose fiction. The
+more striking and popular as well as more strictly novel style of Scott
+naturally attracted most attention at first: indeed it can hardly be
+said that, for the next thirty years, much attempt was made to follow in
+Miss Austen's steps, while such attempts as were made were seldom very
+good.[19] But there is no need to hurry Time: and he generally knows
+what he is about. At any rate he had, in and through these two
+provided--for generations, probably for centuries, to come--patterns and
+principles for whoso would to follow in prose fiction.
+
+    [19] Some work of distinction, actually later than hers in date,
+    is older in kind. This is the case not only with the later books
+    of her Irish elder sister. Miss Edgeworth (see last chapter),
+    but with all those of her Scotch younger one, Miss Ferrier, who
+    wrote _Marriage_ just after _Sense and Sensibility_ appeared,
+    but did not publish it (1818) till after Miss Austen's death,
+    following it with _The Inheritance_ (1824) and _Destiny_ (1831).
+    Miss Ferrier, who had a strong though rather hard humour and
+    great faculty of pronounced character-drawing, is better at a
+    series of sketches than at a complete novel--only _The
+    Inheritance_ having much central unity. And there is still
+    eighteenth-century quality rather than nineteenth in her
+    alternations of Smollettian farce-satire and Mackenziefied
+    sentiment. She is very good to read, but stand a little out of
+    the regular historic succession, as well as out of the ordinary
+    novel classes.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+THE SUCCESSORS--TO THACKERAY
+
+
+A person inexperienced in the ways of life and literature might expect
+that such developments as those surveyed and discussed in the last
+chapter must have immediate and unbroken development further. Scott had
+thrown open, and made available, the whole vast range of history for the
+romancer: Miss Austen had shown the infinite possibilities of ordinary
+and present things for the novelist. And such a one might contend that,
+even if the common idea of definite precursorship and teachership be a
+mistake, the more subtle doctrine that such work as Scott's, and as Miss
+Austen's, is really the result of generally working forces, as well as
+of individual genius, would lead to the same conclusion. But the
+expectation would show his inexperience, and his ignorance of the fact
+that Art, unlike Science, declines to be bound by any calculable laws
+whatsoever.
+
+It was indeed impossible that Scott's towering fame should not draw the
+nobler sort, and his immense gains the baser, to follow in his track:
+and they promptly did so. But, as he himself quoted in the remarkable
+comments (above alluded to) on his early imitators in the _Diary_, they
+had "gotten his fiddle, but not his rosin"--an observation the truth of
+which may be shown presently. Miss Austen's immediate influence in the
+other direction was almost _nil_: and this was hardly to be regretted,
+because a tolerably stationary state of manners, language, etc., such
+as her kind of novel requires, had not quite, though it had nearly, been
+reached. At any rate, the kind of ebb or half ebb, which so often,
+though not so certainly, follows flood-tides in literature, came upon
+the novel in the twenties and thirties. Even the striking appearance of
+Dickens and _Pickwick_ in 1837 can hardly be said to have turned it
+distinctly: for the Dickensian novel is a species by itself--neither
+strictly novel nor strictly romance, but, as Polonius might say, a
+picaresque-burlesque-sentimental-farcical-realist-fantastic nondescript.
+Not till _Vanity Fair_ did the novel of pure real life advance its
+standard once more: while the historical novel-romance of a new kind may
+date its revival with--though it should scarcely trace that revival
+to--_Esmond_, or _Westward Ho!_ or both.
+
+Between Scott on the earlier side and Dickens and Thackeray on the
+other, there was an immense production of novels, illustrated by not a
+few names which should rank high in the second class, while some would
+promote more than one of them to the first. The lines of development, as
+well as the chief individual practitioners, may be best indicated by
+short discussions of Hook, Bulwer, Disraeli, Ainsworth, James, Marryat,
+and Peacock.
+
+The most probable demur to this list is likely to be taken at the very
+first name. Theodore Hook has had no return of the immense popularity
+which his _Sayings and Doings_ (1826-1829) obtained for him; nor,
+perhaps, is he ever likely to have any; nor yet, further, save in one
+respect, can he be said to deserve it. Flimsily constructed, hastily
+written, reflecting indeed the ways and speech of the time after a
+fashion, but in a distorted mirror and with a thin and superficial
+representation, nearer to bad drama than to good literature, full of
+horseplay and forced high jinks--his stories have all the inseparable
+faults of improvisation together with those of art that is out of
+fashion and manners-painting (such as it is) of manners that are dead,
+and when alive were those of a not very picturesque, pleasing, or
+respectable transition. Yet, for all this, Hook has a claim on the
+critical historian of literature, and especially of the novel, which has
+been far too little acknowledged. And this claim does not even consist
+in the undoubted fact that his influence both on Dickens and on
+Thackeray was direct and very great. It lies in the larger and more
+important, though connected, fact that, at a given moment, his were the
+hands in which the torch of the novel-procession was deposited. He
+stands to fiction almost exactly as Leigh Hunt stands to the
+miscellaneous essay. He modernised and multiplied its subjects,
+attractions, appeals: he "vulgarised" it in the partly good French
+sense, as well as in the wholly bad English one; he was its journalist
+and _colporteur_. He broke up the somewhat stock-and-type moulds of
+eighteenth-century tale-telling; admitted a plurality, almost an
+infinity, of interest and incident; gave a sort of universal franchise
+to possible subjects of novel; and (perhaps most important of all)
+banished from that novel the tendency to conventional "lingo" which,
+though never so prevalent in it as in eighteenth-century drama, had
+existed. It may seem to some readers that there is an exaggerated and
+paradoxical opposition between this high praise and the severe censure
+pronounced a little above--that both cannot be true. But both are true:
+and it is a really natural and necessary cause and proof at once of
+their truth that Hook never wrote a really good novel, hardly even a
+really good tale ("Gervase Skinner" is probably the best), and yet that
+he deserves the place here given to him.
+
+Ainsworth and James perhaps deserve to be taken next, not so much in
+point of merit as because both, though continuing (especially Ainsworth)
+very late, began pretty early. Indeed, a book in which Ainsworth had a
+hand, though it is said to be not wholly his, _Sir John Chiverton_, was
+with Horace Smith's _Brambletye House_ (1826), the actual subject of
+Scott's criticism above quoted. Both Ainsworth and James are unconcealed
+followers of Scott himself: and they show the dangers to which the
+historical romance is exposed when it gets out of the hands of genius.
+Of the two, James had the greater scholarship, the better command of
+English, and perhaps a nearer approach to command also of character:
+Ainsworth more "fire in his interior," more variety, somewhat more
+humour (though neither was strong in this respect), and a certain not
+useless or despicable faculty of splashy scene-painting and rough but
+not ineffective stage-management. But of Scott's combination of poetry,
+humour, knowledge of life, reading, grasp of character, and command of
+effective dialogue and description, both were utterly destitute: and
+both fell into the mistake (which even Dumas did not wholly avoid) of
+attempting to give the historical effect by thrusting in lardings of
+pure history, by overloading descriptions of dress, etc., and, in short,
+by plastering the historic colour on, instead of suffusing it, as Scott
+had managed to do. Popular as they were, not merely with youthful
+readers, they undoubtedly brought the historical novel into some
+discredit a little before the middle of the century.[20]
+
+    [20] Here and in a good many cases to come it is impossible to
+    particularise criticism. It matters the less that, from
+    Ainsworth's _Rookwood_ (1834) and James' _Richelieu_ (1829)
+    onwards, the work of both was very much _par sibi_ in merit and
+    defect alike.
+
+With Bulwer and Disraeli we get into a different sphere of
+literature--whether into the same in both cases, and whether, if so,
+into one of the highest, are questions on which no general agreement has
+yet been reached--on which, perhaps, no general agreement is even
+possible.
+
+With regard to the second, it must be remembered that to him, whether as
+Mr. Disraeli or as Lord Beaconsfield, novel-writing was always a
+"by-work"--partly a means to his real end of politics, partly a
+relaxation from the work necessary to that end. He called himself a
+"gentleman of the press"--with that mixture of sincerity, purpose, and
+ironical simulation which brought on him, from unintelligent or not very
+honest opponents, and even from others, the charge of affectation, if
+not of hypocrisy. And, undoubtedly, he did a good deal of work for the
+press, and very remarkable work too--almost wholly in the kind of
+novel-writing, from _Vivian Grey_ (1826) to _Endymion_ (1880). Yet it
+may be permitted--in the face of some more than respectable opinion on
+the other side--to doubt whether, except in some curious sports and
+by-products, he ever produced real novel-work of the highest class. In
+the satiric-fantastic tale--in a kind of following of Voltaire--such as
+_Ixion_, he has hardly a superior, unless it be Anthony Hamilton, who is
+the superior of Voltaire himself and the master of everybody. For a pure
+love-novel of a certain kind, _Henrietta Temple_ (1837) is bad to
+beat--and in a curious cross between the historical, biographical, and
+the romantic, _Venetia_ (same year) also stands pretty much alone. But
+all the rest, more or less political, more or less "of society," more or
+less fantastic--_Coningsby_ (1844) as well as _Alroy_ (1833), _Tancred_
+(1847) as well as _Vivian Grey, Sybil_ (1845), as well as _The Young
+Duke_ (1831), "leave to desire" in a strange way. Like the three which
+have been excepted for praise, each is in a manner _sui generis_, while
+the whole group stands, in a manner also, apart from others and by
+itself. There is astonishing cleverness everywhere, in regard to almost
+every point of novel-composition, though with special regard to
+epigrammatic phrase. But the whole is _inorganic_ somehow, and more than
+somehow unreal; without (save in the cases mentioned) attaining that
+obviously unreal but persuasive phantasmagoria which some great writers
+of fiction have managed to put in existence and motion. How far this is
+due to the fact that most of the novels are political is a question
+rather to be hinted than to be discussed. But the present writer has
+never read a political novel, whether on his own side or on others, that
+seemed to him to be wholly satisfactory.
+
+Bulwer--for it is perhaps here not impolite or improper still to call
+the first Lord Lytton by the name under which he wrote for forty years,
+and solidly niched himself in the novel-front of the minster of English
+Literature--had not a few points of resemblance to his rival and future
+chief. But their relations to politics and letters were reversed.
+Disraeli was a born politician who was also a very considerable man of
+letters: Bulwer was a born man of letters who was a by no means
+inconsiderable politician. His literary ability was extraordinarily
+diversified: but, once more, he was (here also) a born novelist, who was
+also a not inconsiderable dramatist; a critic who might not impossibly
+have been great, a miscellanist of ability, and a verse-writer than whom
+many a worse has somehow or other obtained the name of poet. He began
+novel-writing very early (_Falkland_ is of 1827), he continued it all
+his life, and he was the very Proteus-chameleon of the novel in changing
+his styles to suit the tastes of the day. He never exactly copied
+anybody: and in all his various attempts he went extremely near to the
+construction of masterpieces. In the novel of society with _Pelham_
+(1828); the novel of crime with _Eugene Aram_ (1832) and _Zanoni_
+(1842); the novel of passion and a sort of mystery with _Ernest
+Maltravers_ and _Alice_; the historic romance with _The Last Days of
+Pompeii_ (1834), _The Last of the Barons_ (1843), and _Harold_ (1848),
+he made marks deep and early. When the purely domestic kind came in he
+made them, earlier and deeper still, with _The Caxtons_ (1850), _My
+Novel_ (1853), etc. He caught the "sensation" ball at nearly its first
+service with his old "mystery" racket, and played the most brilliant
+game of the whole tournament in _A Strange Story_ (1862). At the last he
+tried later kinds still in books like _The Coming Race_ (1871), _The
+Parisians_ (1873), and _Kenelm Chillingly_. And once, Pallas being kind,
+he did an almost perfect thing (there is not a speck or a flaw in it
+except, perhaps, the mechanical death of the bulldog) and produced one
+of the best examples of one of the best and oldest classes of fiction
+known to the world, in the ghost-story of _The Haunted and the Haunters_
+(1859).
+
+Such a mass, such a length, such a variety of production, with so many
+merits in it, would be difficult to meet elsewhere in our department.
+And yet very few critics of unquestionable competence, if any, have
+accorded the absolute First Class to Lord Lytton as a novelist. That
+this is partly (and rather unjustly) due to the singular and sometimes
+positively ridiculous grandiloquence and to the half-mawkish,
+half-rancid, sentimentality which too often mar his earlier novels is
+probably true. But it is not all the truth: if it were, it would be
+almost sufficient to point out that he outgrew the first of these faults
+completely, the second almost completely; and that from _The Caxtons_
+(1850) onward there is hardly any stain on his literary character in
+any such respect. But other faults--or at least defects--remain. They
+may be almost summed up in the charge of want of _consummateness_.
+Bulwer could be romantic--but his romance had the touch of bad taste and
+insincerity referred to above. He could, as in _The Caxtons_, be fairly
+true to ordinary life--but even then he seemed to feel a necessity of
+setting off and as it were apologising for the simplicity and veracity
+by touches--in fact by _douches_--of Sternian fantastry, and by other
+touches of what was a little later to be called sensationalism. Even his
+handling of the supernatural, which was undoubtedly a strong point of
+his, was not wholly _de ban aloi_. To pronounce him, as was once done by
+an acute and amiable judge, "the _hum_miest of _bugs_" was excessive in
+life, and would be preposterous in literature. But there undoubtedly
+was, with rare exceptions, a suspicion of what is called in slang
+"faking" about his work. The wine is not "neat" but doctored; the
+composition is _pastiche_; a dozen other metaphors--of stucco, veneer,
+glueing-up--suggest themselves. And then there suggests itself, in turn,
+a sort of shame at such imputations on the author of such a mass of
+work, so various, so interesting, so important as accomplishment,
+symptom, and pattern at once. And perhaps one may end by pronouncing
+Bulwer one of the very greatest of English novelists who are not of the
+very greatest.
+
+It is difficult to say whether the usual attitude of criticism to
+Captain Marryat (1792-1848) is more uncritical than ungrateful or more
+ungrateful than uncritical. Because he has amused the boy, it seems to
+be taken for granted that he ought not to amuse the man: because he does
+not write with the artificial and often extremely arbitrary graces of
+the composition books, that he is "not literature." If it be so, why in
+the first case so much the worse for "the man," and in the second so
+much the worse for literature. As a matter of fact, he has many of the
+qualities of the novelist in a high degree: and if he were in the
+fortunate position of an ancient classic, whose best works only survive,
+these qualities could not fail of recognition. Much of his later work
+simply ought not to count; for it was mere hack-labour, rendered, if not
+necessary, very nearly so by the sailor's habit (which Marryat possessed
+in the highest degree) of getting rid of money. Even among this,
+_Masterman Ready_ and _The Children of the New Forest_, "children's
+books," as they may be called, rank very high in their kind. But he
+counts here, of course, for his sea-novels mainly: and in them there are
+several things for us to notice. One is that Marryat had the true
+quality of the craftsman, as distinguished from the amateur or the
+chance-medley man who has a lucky inspiration. If it were the case that
+his books derived their whole attraction from the novelty and (within
+its limits) the variety of their sea-matter, then the first ought to be
+the best, as in nearly all such cases is the fact. But _Frank Mildmay_
+(1829), so far from being the best, is not far from being the worst of
+Marryat's novels. Much--dangerously much--as he put of his own
+experiences in the book, he did not know in the least how to manage
+them. And if Frank is something of a bravo, more of a blackguard, and
+nearly a complete ruffian, it is not merely because there was a good
+deal of brutality in the old navy; not merely because Marryat's own
+standard of chivalry was not quite that of Chaucer's Knight:--but
+partly, also, because he was aiming blunderingly at what he supposed to
+be part of the novelist's business--irregular as well as regular
+gallantry, and highly seasoned adventure. But, like all good artists
+(and like hardly anybody who has not the artistic quality in him), he
+taught himself by his failure, even though he sometimes relapsed. Of
+actual construction he was never a master. _The King's Own_, with its
+overdose of history at the beginning and of melodrama at the end, is an
+example. But his two masterpieces, _Peter Simple_ (1834) and _Mr.
+Midshipman Easy_ (1836), are capital instances of what may be called
+"particularist" fiction--the fiction that derives its special zest from
+the "colours" of some form of life unfamiliar to those who have not
+actually lived it. Even _Peter Simple_ is unduly weighted at the end by
+the machinations of Peter's uncle against him and, at intervals during
+the book, by the proceedings connected therewith. But _Mr. Midshipman
+Easy_ is flawless--except for the amiable but surely excessive
+sentimentalists who are shocked at the way in which Mr. Easy _pere_
+quits the greater stage by mounting the lesser. Than this book there is
+not a better novel of special "humour" in literature; as much may be
+said of the greater part of _Peter Simple_, of not a little in _Jacob
+Faithful_ (a great favourite with Thackeray, who always did justice to
+Marryat), and _Japhet in Search of a Father_, and of something in almost
+all. Nor were high jinks and special naval matters by any means
+Marryat's only province. Laymen may agree with experts in thinking the
+clubhauling of the _Diomede_ in _Peter Simple_, and the two great fights
+of the _Aurora_ with the elements and with the Russian frigate in _Mr.
+Midshipman Easy_, to be extraordinarily fine things:--vivid, free from
+extravagance, striking, stirring, clear, as descriptive and narrative
+literature of the kind can be only at its best, and too seldom is at
+all. An almost Defoe-like exactness of detail is one of Marryat's
+methods and merits: while it is very remarkable that he rarely attempts
+to produce the fun, in which Defoe is lacking and he himself so
+fertile, by mere exaggeration or caricature of detail. There are
+exceptions--the Dominie business in _Jacob Faithful_ is one--but they
+are exceptions. Take Hook, his immediate predecessor, and no doubt in a
+way his model, as (it has been said) Hook was to almost everybody at the
+time; take even Dickens, his fellow-pupil with Hook and his own greater
+successor; and you will find that Marryat resorts less than either to
+the humour of simple _charge_ or exaggeration.
+
+The last name on our present list belongs to the class of "eccentric"
+novelists--the adjective being used, not in its transferred and partly
+improper sense so much as in its true one. Peacock never plays the
+Jack-pudding like Sterne: and his shrewd wit never permits him the
+sincere aberrations of Amory. But his work is out of the ordinary
+courses, and does not turn round the ordinary centres of novel writing.
+It belongs to the tradition--if to any tradition at all--of Lucian and
+the Lucianists--especially as that tradition was redirected by Anthony
+Hamilton. It thus comes, in one way, near part of the work of Disraeli;
+though, except in point of satiric temper, its spirit is totally
+different. Peacock was essentially a scholar (though a non-academic one)
+and essentially a humorist. In the progress of his books from _Headlong
+Hall_ (1816) to _Gryll Grange_ (1860)--the last separated from the group
+to which the first belongs by more than twice as many years as were
+covered by that group itself--he mellowed his tone, but altered his
+scheme very little. Except in _Maid Marian_ and _The Misfortunes of
+Elphin_, where the Scott influence is evident, though Peacock was
+himself a rebel to Scott, the plan is always the same. _Headlong Hall_
+and _Nightmare Abbey, Melincourt_ and _Crotchet Castle_ (1831), as well
+as _Gryll Grange_ itself, all have the uniform, though by no means
+monotonous, canvas of a party of guests assembled at a country-house and
+consisting of a number of "originals," with one or more common-sense but
+by no means commonplace characters to serve as contrast. It is in the
+selection and management of these foils that one of Peacock's principal
+distinctions lies. In his earlier books, and in accordance with the
+manners of the time, there is a good deal of "high jinks"--less later.
+In all, there is also a good deal of personal and literary satire, which
+tones and mellows as it proceeds. At first Peacock is extremely unjust
+to the Lake poets--so unjust indeed as to be sometimes hardly
+amusing--to the two universities (of which it so happened that he was
+not a member), to the Tory party generally, to clergymen, to other
+things and persons. In _Crotchet Castle_ the progress of Reform was
+already beginning to produce a beneficent effect of reaction upon him,
+and in _Gryll Grange_, though the manners and cast are surprisingly
+modern, the whole tone is conservative--with a small if not even with a
+large C--for the most prominent and well treated character is a
+Churchman of the best academic Tory type.
+
+It is not, however, in anything yet mentioned that Peacock's charm
+consists, so much as in the intensely literary, but not in the least
+pedantic, tone with which he suffuses his books, the piquant but not in
+the least affected turn of the phrases that meet us throughout, the
+peculiar quality of his irony (most quintessenced in _The Misfortunes of
+Elphin_, which is different in scheme from the rest, but omnipresent),
+and the crisp presentation of individual scene, incident, and character
+of a kind. Story, in the general sense, there is none, or next to
+none--the personages meet, go through a certain number of dinners
+(Peacock is great at eating and drinking), diversions, and
+difficulties, marry to a greater or less extent, but otherwise part. Yet
+such things as the character of Scythrop in _Nightmare Abbey_ (a half
+fantastic, half faithful portrait of Shelley, who was Peacock's intimate
+friend), or of Dr. Folliott (a genial parson) in _Crotchet Castle_--as
+the brilliant picture of the breaking of the dyke in _Elphin_, or the
+comic one of the rotten-borough election in _Melincourt_--are among the
+triumphs of the English novel. And they are present by dozens and
+scores: while (though it is a little out of our way) there is no doubt
+that the attraction of the books is greatly enhanced by the abundance of
+inset verse--sometimes serious, more often light--of which Peacock,
+again in an eccentric fashion, was hardly less a master than he was of
+prose.
+
+Here also it has seemed fit to dwell on a single writer, not perhaps
+generally held to be of the absolutely first class, because these
+"eccentrics" are of very great importance in the history of the English
+novel. The danger of the kind--even more than of other literary
+kinds--lies in the direction of mould and mechanism--of the production,
+by the thousand, of things of no individual quality and character. This
+danger has been and is being amply exemplified. But the Peacocks (would
+the plural were more justified!) save us from it by their own
+unconquerable individuality in the first place and, in the second, by
+the fact that even the best in this kind is "caviare to the general,"
+while anything that is not the best has no attraction either for the
+general or the elect. They are, as it were, the salt of the novel-feast,
+in more senses than one: and it is cause for thankfulness that, in this
+respect as in the physical, England has been well off for salt-pits.
+
+Besides these individual names--which in most literatures would be
+great, and even in English literature are not small--the second quarter
+of the century added to the history of the novel an infinity of others
+who can hardly appear here even on the representative or selective
+system. All the suns of the novel hitherto mentioned had moons and stars
+around them; all the _cadres_ of the various kinds were filled with
+privates and non-commissioned officers to follow the leaders. Gait and
+Moir carried out the "Scotch novel" with something of Scott, but more of
+Smollett (Gait at least certainly, in part of his work, preceded Scott).
+Lady Morgan, who has been mentioned already, Banim, Crofton Croker, and
+others played a similar part to Miss Edgeworth. Glascock, Chamier, and
+Howard were, as it were, lieutenants (the last directly so) to Marryat.
+The didactic side of Miss Edgeworth was taken up by Harriet Martineau.
+Mrs. Shelley's _Frankenstein_ (1818) is among the latest good examples
+of the "Terror" class, to which her husband had contributed two of its
+worst, and two of the feeblest books ever written by a man of the
+greatest genius, in _Zastrozzi_ and _St. Irvyne_, some seven years
+earlier. Many women, not unnaturally, encouraged by the great examples
+of Miss Burney, Miss Edgeworth, Miss Austen, and Miss Ferrier, attempted
+novels of the most various kinds, sometimes almost achieving the purely
+domestic variety, sometimes branching to other sorts. The novels of Mrs.
+Gore, chiefly in the "fashionable" kind, are said to have attained the
+three-score and ten in number; Mrs. Crowe dealt with the supernatural
+outside of her novels if not also in them; the luckless poetess "L.E.L."
+was a novelist in _Ethel Churchill_ (1837) and other books; Mrs.
+Trollope, prolific mother of a more prolific son, showed not a little
+power, if not quite so much taste, in _The Vicar of Wrexhill_ (1837) and
+_The Widow Barnaby_. Single books, like Morier's _Hajji Baba_ (1824),
+Hope's _Anastasius_ (1819), Croly's _Salathiel_ (1829), gained fame
+which they have not quite lost: and the little known Michael Scott
+(1789-1835) left in _Tom Cringle's Log_ and _The Cruise of the Midge_ a
+pair of stories of West Indian scenery and adventure which are nearly
+first rate. In 1839, not long after _Pickwick_, Samuel Warren's _Ten
+Thousand a Year_ blended Bulwer and Dickens in a manner which to this
+day is a puzzle in its near approach to success. Yet he never repeated
+this approach, though he had earlier done striking things in the _Diary
+of a Late Physician_ (1830). But in the latest thirties and early
+forties there arose two writers who were to eclipse every one of their
+contemporaries in this kind.
+
+The remarkable originality and idiosyncrasy of Dickens have perhaps, to
+some extent and from not a few persons, concealed the fact that he was
+not, any more than other people, an earth-born wonder. Scanted of
+education as he was, he has in several places frankly and eagerly
+confessed his early acquaintance with the great older novelists, and his
+special fancy for Smollett--whose influence indeed is traceable on him
+from first to last, and not least in the famous "interiors" of which he
+made far more than his example had done. Even in _Pickwick_ the expert
+will trace suggestions from others. But if the work is read in its
+proper order, and the _Sketches by Boz_ are taken first, nobody who
+knows both Leigh Hunt and Theodore Hook will fail to see that Dickens
+owed a great deal to both. The fact is in no sense discreditable to him:
+on the contrary, it adds, in the estimation of all reasonable and
+critical judges, a very great deal of interest, and takes away none. The
+earth-born prodigy is seldom good for much and never for very much. The
+genius who fastens on the points in preceding literature most congenial
+to him, develops them, builds on them with his own matter and form, and
+turns out something far greater than his originals is the really
+satisfactory person. Had Leigh Hunt lent to Hook his literature, his
+fund of trivial but agreeable observation and illustration, and his
+attractive style; had Hook communicated to Hunt his narrative faculty
+and his fecundity in character and manners:--neither could have written
+_Pickwick_ or even the worst of its successors. Had there been no Hunt
+and no Hook, Dickens would no doubt have managed, in some fashion, to
+"do for himself." But it would have given him more trouble, he would
+have done it more slowly, and he would hardly have earned that generous
+and admirable phrase of his greatest contemporary in fiction which will
+be quoted shortly.
+
+Neither from Smollett, however, nor from Hook, nor from Hunt, nor from
+anybody else did Dickens take what makes him Dickens. His idiosyncrasy,
+already mentioned, is so marked that everybody acknowledges its
+presence: but its exact character and nature are matter not so much of
+debate (though they are that also in the highest degree) as matter of
+more or less _questing_, often of a rather blind-man's-buff kind. There
+is probably no author of whom really critical estimates are so rare. He
+has given so much pleasure to so many people--perhaps there are none to
+whom he has given more pleasure than to some of those who have
+criticised him most closely--that to mention any faults in him is
+upbraided as a sort of personal and detestable ingratitude and
+treachery. If you say that he cannot draw a gentleman, you are told that
+you are a parrot and a snob, who repeats what other snobs have told you;
+that gentlemen are not worth drawing; that he _can_ draw them; and so
+forth. If you suggest that he is fantastic, it is reproachfully asked if
+poetry is not fantastic, and if you do not like poetry? If you intimate
+small affection for Little Nell and Little Paul, you are a brute; if you
+hint that his social crusades were often quite irrational, and sometimes
+at least as mischievous as they were beneficial, you are a parasite of
+aristocracy and a foe of "the people." If you take exception to his
+repetitions, his mannerisms, his tedious catch-processes of various
+kinds, you are a "stop-watch critic" and worthy of all the generous
+wrath of the exemplary and Reverend Mr. Yorick. And yet all these
+assertions, objections, descriptions, are arch-true: and they can be
+made by persons who know Dickens and enjoy Dickens a thousand times
+better--who admire him in a manner a thousand times more really
+complimentary--than the folk who simply cry "Great is Dickens" and will
+listen to nothing but their own sweet voices.
+
+The real, the great, the unique merit of Dickens is that he brought to
+the service of the novel an imagination which, though it was never
+poetic, was plastic in almost the highest degree: and that he
+communicated to the results of it a kind of existence which, though
+distinctly different from that of actual life, has a reality of its own,
+and possesses the distinguishing mark of genius, so that if it does not
+exactly force belief in itself, it forces suspension of disbelief. To
+have done this is not only to have accomplished a wonderful artistic
+triumph, but to confer an immense benefit on the human race. But in
+doing it Dickens exhibits various foibles, prejudices, and disabilities:
+though it is quite open to any one to maintain that these rather
+assisted the flow of his imagination than hindered it. He began very
+young; he had curiously little literature; his knowledge of life,
+extraordinarily alert and acute, was very one-sided, and the organs by
+which he attained it seem absolutely to shut themselves and refuse
+communion with certain orders of society and classes of human creatures.
+The wealth of fantastic imagery which he used to such purpose not
+infrequently stimulated him to a disorderly profusion of grotesque; he
+was congenitally melodramatic; and before very long his habit of
+attributing special catch-words, gestures, and the like to his
+characters, exaggerated, degenerated, and stereotyped itself in a
+fashion which it is difficult to think satisfactory to anybody. He was,
+moreover, a "novelist of purpose" in the highest degree; he had very
+strong, but very crude--not to say absurd--political ideas; and he was
+apt to let the great powers of pathos, of humour, of vivid description,
+which he possessed to "get out of hand" and to land him in the maudlin,
+the extravagant, and the bombastic.
+
+But--to put ourselves in connection with the main thread of our story
+once more--he not only himself provided a great amount of the novel
+pleasure for his readers, but he infused into the novel generally
+something of a new spirit. It has been more than once pointed out that
+there is almost more danger with the novel of "getting into ruts" than
+with any kind of literature. Nobody could charge the Dickens novel with
+doing this, except as regards mannerisms of style, and though it might
+inspire many, it was very unlikely to create a rut for any one else. He
+liked to call himself "the inimitable," and so, in a way, he was.
+Imitations of him were, of course, tried: but they were all bad and
+obvious failures. Against the possible tameness of the domestic novel;
+against the too commonly actual want of actuality of the historic
+romance; he set this new fantastic activity of his, which was at once
+real and unreal, but where the reality had a magical touch of the
+unfamiliar and the very unreality was stimulating. He might have a
+hundred faults--he was in fact never faultless, except in _Pickwick_,
+which is so absolutely unique that there is nothing to compare with it
+and show up faults (if it has any) by the comparison. But you can read
+him again and again with unceasing delight, and with delight of a kind
+given by no other novelist.[21]
+
+    [21] It has not been thought necessary to insert criticism of
+    Dickens's individual novels. They are almost all well known to
+    almost everybody: and special discussion of them would be
+    superfluous, while their general characteristics and positions
+    in novel-history are singularly uniform and can be described
+    together.
+
+The position of Thackeray in the history of the novel is as different
+from that of Dickens as the fortunes of the two were in their own
+progress and development. In fact, though a sort of pseudo-Plutarchian
+parallel between them is nearly as inevitable as it is common, it is a
+parallel almost entirely composed of differences, carried out in matter
+almost incommensurable. In the first place, Dickens, as we have seen,
+and as Thackeray said (with the generous and characteristic addition "at
+the head of the whole tribe"), "came and took his place calmly" and
+practically at once (or with the preliminary only of "Boz") in
+_Pickwick_. Whether he ever went further may at least be questioned. But
+Thackeray did not take his place at once--in fact he conspicuously
+failed to take it for some sixteen years: although he produced, for at
+least the last ten of these, work containing indications of
+extraordinary power, in a variety of directions almost as extraordinary.
+
+To attempt to assign reasons for this comparative failure would be
+idle--the fact is the only reasonable reason. But some phenomena and
+symptoms can be diagnosed. It is at least noteworthy that Thackeray--in
+this approaching Dickens perhaps nearer than in any other point--began
+with extravaganza--to adopt perhaps the most convenient general name
+for a thing which cannot be quite satisfactorily designated by any. In
+both cases the adoption was probably due to the example and popularity
+of Theodore Hook. But it was also due, in a higher and more metaphysical
+sense, to the fact that the romance, which had had so mighty a success
+in Scott's hands, was for the time overblown, and that the domestic
+novel, despite the almost equally wonderful, though much quieter and
+less popular achievement of Miss Austen, was not thoroughly and
+genuinely ready. From extravaganza in a certain sense Dickens, as has
+been said, never really departed: and he achieved most of his best work
+in his own peculiar varieties of it. Thackeray was, if not to leave it
+entirely aside, to use it in his later days merely as an occasional
+variation and seasoning. But at first he could not, apparently, get free
+from it: and he might have seemed unable to dispense with its almost
+mechanical externalities of mis-spelling and the like. It must also be
+remembered that circumstances were at first curiously unfavourable to
+him: and that loss of fortune, domestic affliction, and other things
+almost compelled him to write from hand to mouth--to take whatever
+commission offered itself: whereas the, if not immediate, speedy and
+tremendous success of _Pickwick_ put the booksellers entirely at
+Dickens's feet. Still, a certain vacillation--an uncertainty of design
+not often accompanying genius like his--must be acknowledged in
+Thackeray. For a time he hesitated between pen and pencil, the latter of
+which implements he fortunately never abandoned, though the former was
+his predestined wand. Then he could not, or would not, for years, get
+out of the "miscellaneous" style, or patchwork of styles--reviews, short
+stories, burlesques, what not. His more important attempts seemed to
+have an attendant _guignon_.[22] _Catherine_ (1839-1840), a very powerful
+thing in parts, was ill-planned and could not be popular. _A Shabby
+Genteel Story_ (1841), containing almost the Thackerayan _quiddity_, was
+interrupted partly by his wife's illness, partly, it would seem, by
+editorial disfavour, and moreover still failed to shake off the
+appearance of a want of seriousness. Even _The Great Hoggarty Diamond_
+(1841-1842) was apparently cut short by request, and still lay open to
+an unjust, but not quite inexcusable, question on this same point of
+"seriousness." In all there was, or might seem to be, a queer and to
+some readers an unsatisfactory blend of what they had not learnt to call
+"realism" with what they were quite likely to think fooling. During
+these years Thackeray was emphatically of the class of writers of whom
+people "do not know what to make." And it is a true saying of English
+people--though perhaps not so pre-eminently true of them as some would
+have it--that "not to know what to make" of a thing or a person is
+sufficient reason for them to distrust, dislike, and "wash their hands
+of" it or him.
+
+    [22] For this reason, and for the variety of kind of his later
+    novels a little more individual notice must be given to them
+    than in the case of Dickens, but still only a little, and
+    nothing like detailed criticism.
+
+Some would have it that _Barry Lyndon_ (1843) marks the close of this
+period of indecision and the beginning of that of maturity. The commoner
+and perhaps the juster opinion is that this position belongs to _Vanity
+Fair_ (1846-1848). At any rate, _after_ that book there could be no
+doubt about the fact of the greatness of its writer, though it may be
+doubted whether even now the quality of this greatness is correctly and
+generally recognised. It is this--that at last the novel of real life on
+the great scale has been discovered. Even yet a remnant of shyness hangs
+on the artist. He puts his scene a little though not very far back; he
+borrows a little, though not much, historical and romantic interest in
+the Waterloo part; the catastrophe of the Becky-Steyne business, though
+by no means outside of the probable contents of any day's newspaper, is
+slightly exceptional. But on the whole the problem of "reality, the
+whole reality, and nothing but reality" is faced and grasped and
+solved--with, of course, the addition to the "nothing but" of "except
+art."
+
+He had struck his path and he kept to it: even when, as in _Esmond_
+(1852) and _The Virginians_ (1858-1859) actually, and in _Denis Duval_
+prospectively, he blended the historical with the domestic variety.
+_Pendennis_ (1849-1850) imports nothing out of the most ordinary
+experience; _The Newcomes_ (1854-1855) very little; _Philip_ (1861-1862)
+only its pantomime conclusion; while the two completely historical tales
+are in nothing more remarkable than in the way in which their remoter
+and more unfamiliar main subject, and their occasional excursions from
+everyday life, are subdued to the scheme of the realist novel in the
+best sense of the term--the novel rebuilt and refashioned on the lines
+of Fielding, but with modern manners, relying on variety and life, and
+relying on these only.
+
+There is thus something of similarity (though with attendant
+differences, of the most important kind) between the joint position of
+Dickens and Thackeray towards the world of the novel, and the joint
+position of Scott and Miss Austen. They _overlap_ more than their great
+forerunners of the preceding generation. Both wrote historical novels:
+it is indeed Thackeray's unique distinction that he was equally master
+of the historical novel and of the novel of pure modern society, almost
+uneventful. In parts of some of his later books, especially _Little
+Dorrit_, _Great Expectations_, and _Our Mutual Friend_, Dickens at
+least tried to exchange his picaresque-fantastic cloudland for actual
+ordinary modern life. But on the whole the method of Thackeray was the
+method of the novel, though shot with a strong romantic spirit, and the
+method of Dickens the method of the romance applied, for the most part,
+to material which could hardly be called romantic. Both, therefore, in a
+manner, recalled the forces of fiction from the rather straggling and
+particularist courses which it had been pursuing for the last quarter of
+a century.
+
+In fact, even in the two mighty men of genius whom we have just been
+discussing, there may be seen--at their beginnings at least--something
+of that irresolution, uncertainty, and want of reliance on the powers of
+the novel, it-by-itself-it, which we have noticed before: and which the
+unerring craftsmanship of Scott had already pointed out in the
+"Conversation of the Author of _Waverley_ with Captain Clutterbuck" more
+than once referred to. They want excuses and pretexts, bladders and
+spring-boards. Even Dickens, despite his irrepressible self-reliance,
+burdens himself, at the beginning of _Pickwick_, with the clumsy old
+machinery of a club which he practically drops: and, still later, with
+the still more clumsy framework of "Master Humphrey's Clock" which he
+has not quietly to drop, but openly to strip off and cast away, before
+he has gone very far. Thackeray takes sixteen years of experiment before
+he trusts his genius, boldly and on the great scale, to reveal itself in
+its own way, and in the straight way of the novel.
+
+Yet in this time also a great advance was made, as is shown not only by
+the fact that Dickens and Thackeray themselves became possible, but by
+the various achievements of the principal writers mentioned in this
+chapter, of one or two who might have been, but are perhaps, on the
+whole, best postponed to the next, such as Lever, and of the great army
+of minorities who have been of necessity omitted. In every direction and
+from every point of view novel is _growing_. Although it was abused by
+precisians, the _gran conquesta_ of Scott had forced it into general
+recognition and requisition. Even the still severe discipline of family
+life in the first half of the nineteenth century, instead of excluding
+it altogether, contented itself with prescribing that "novels should not
+be read in the morning." A test which may be thought vulgar by the
+super-fine or the superficial, but a pretty good one, is the altered
+status and position of the writers of novels. In the eighteenth,
+especially the earlier eighteenth, century the novelist had not merely
+been looked down upon _as_ a novelist, but had, as a rule, resorted to
+novel-writing under some stress of circumstance. Even when he was by
+birth a "gentleman of coat armour" as Fielding and Smollett were, he was
+usually a gentleman very much out at elbows: the stories, true or false,
+of _Rasselas_ and Johnson's mother's funeral expenses, of the _Vicar of
+Wakefield_ and Goldsmith's dunning landlady, have something more than
+mere anecdote in them. Mackenzie, though the paternity of his _famille
+deplorable_ of novels was no secret, preserved a strict nominal
+incognito. Women, as having no regular professions and plenty of time at
+their disposal, were allowed more latitude: and this really perhaps had
+something to do with their early prominence in the novel; but it is
+certain that Scott's rigid, and for a long time successful, maintenance
+of the mask was by no means mere prudery, and still less merely prudent
+commercial speculation. Yet he, who altered so much in the novel,
+altered this also. Of the novelists noticed in the early part of this
+chapter, one became Prime Minister of England, another rose to cabinet
+rank, a baronetcy, and a peerage; a third was H.M. consul in important
+posts abroad; a fourth held a great position, if not in the service
+directly of the crown, in what was of hardly less importance, that of
+the East India Company; a fifth was a post-captain in the navy and
+Companion of the Bath.
+
+And all this had been rendered possible partly by the genius of
+novel-writers, partly by the appetite of the novel-reader. This latter
+was to continue unabated: whether the former was to increase, to
+maintain itself, or slacken must be, to some extent of course, matter of
+opinion. But we have still two quarter-centuries to survey, in the first
+of which there may perhaps be some reason for thinking that the novel
+rose to its actual zenith. Nearly all the writers mentioned in this
+chapter continued to write--the greater part, in genius, of Thackeray's
+accomplished work, and the greater part, in bulk, of Dickens's, had
+still to appear. But these elders were reinforced by fresh recruits,
+some of them of a prowess only inferior to the very greatest: and a
+distinct development of the novel itself, in the direction of
+self-reliance and craftsmanlike working on its own lines, was to be
+seen. In particular, the deferred influence of Miss Austen was at last
+to be brought to bear with astonishing results: while, partly owing to
+the example of Thackeray, the historical variety (which had for the most
+part been a pale and rather vulgarised imitation of Scott), was to be
+revived and varied in a manner equally astonishing. More than ever we
+shall have to let styles and kinds "speak by their foremen"--in fact to
+some extent to let them speak for themselves with very little detailed
+notice even of these foremen. But we shall still endeavour to keep the
+general threads in hand and to exhibit their direction, their crossing,
+and their other phenomena, as clearly as possible to the reader. For
+only so can we complete the picture of the course of fiction throughout
+English literature--with the sole exclusion of living writers, whose
+work can never be satisfactorily treated in such a book as this--first,
+because they are living and, secondly, because it is not done.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE MID-VICTORIAN NOVEL
+
+
+At about the very middle of the nineteenth century--say from 1845 to
+1855 in each direction, but almost increasingly towards the actual
+dividing line of 1850--there came upon the English novel a very
+remarkable wind of refreshment and new endeavour. Thackeray and Dickens
+themselves are examples of it, with Lever and others, before this
+dividing line: many others yet come to join them. A list of books
+written out just as they occur to the memory, and without any attempt to
+marshal them in strict chronological order, would show this beyond all
+reasonable possibility of gainsaying. Thackeray's own best accomplished
+work from _Vanity Fair_ (1846) itself through _Pendennis_ (1849) and
+_Esmond_ (1852) to _The Newcomes_ (1854); the brilliant centre of
+Dickens's work in _David Copperfield_ (1850)--stand at the head and have
+been already noticed by anticipation or implication, while Lever had
+almost completed the first division of his work, which began with _Harry
+Lorrequer_ as early as the year of _Pickwick_. But such books as _Yeast_
+(1848), _Westward Ho!_ (1855); as _The Warden_ (1855); as _Jane Eyre_
+(1847) and its too few successors; as _Scenes of Clerical Life_ (1857);
+as _Mary Barton_ (1848) and the novels which followed it, with others
+which it is perhaps almost unfair to leave out even in this allusive
+summary by sample, betokened a stirring of the waters, a rattling among
+the bones, such as is not common in literature. Death removed Thackeray
+early and Dickens somewhat less prematurely, but after a period rather
+barren in direct novel work. The others continued and were constantly
+reinforced: nor was it till well on in the seventies that any distinct
+drop from first- to second-growth quality could be observed in the
+general vintage of English fiction.
+
+One is not quite driven, on this occasion, to the pusillanimous
+explanation that this remarkable variety and number of good novels was
+simply due to the simultaneous existence of an equally remarkable number
+of good novelists. The fact is that, by this time, the great example of
+Scott and Miss Austen--the great wave of progress which exemplified
+itself first and most eminently in these two writers--had had time to
+work upon and permeate another generation of practitioners. The
+novelists who have just been cited were as a rule born in the second
+decade of the century, just before, about, or after the time at which
+Scott and Miss Austen began to publish. They had therefore--as their
+elders, even though they may have had time to read the pair, had
+not--time to assimilate thoroughly and early the results which that pair
+had produced or which they had first expressed. And they had even
+greater advantages than this. They had had time to assimilate, likewise,
+the results of all the rest of that great literary generation of which
+Scott and Miss Austen were themselves but members. They profited by
+thirty years more of constant historical exploration and realising of
+former days. One need not say, for it is question-begging, that they
+also _profited_ by, but they could at least avail themselves of, the
+immense change of manners and society which made 1850 differ more from
+1800 than 1800 had differed, not merely from 1750 but from 1700. They
+had, even though all of them may not have been sufficiently grateful for
+it, the stimulus of that premier position in Europe which the country
+had gained in the Napoleonic wars, and which she had not yet wholly lost
+or even begun to lose. They had wider travel, more extended occupations
+and interests, many other new things to draw upon. And, lastly, they had
+some important special incidents and movements--the new arrangement of
+political parties, the Oxford awakening, and others--to give suggestion
+and impetus to novels of the specialist kind. Nay, they had not only the
+great writers, in other kinds, of the immediate past, but those of the
+present, Carlyle, Tennyson, latterly Ruskin, and others still to
+complete their education and the machinery of its development.
+
+The most remarkable feature of this _renouveau_, as has been both
+directly and indirectly observed before, is the resumption, the immense
+extension, and the extraordinary improvement of the domestic novel. Not
+that this had not been practised during the thirty years since Miss
+Austen's death. But the external advantages just enumerated had failed
+it: and it had enlisted none of the chief talents which were at the
+service of fiction generally. A little more gift and a good deal more
+taste might have enabled Mrs. Trollope to do really great things in it:
+but she left them for her son to accomplish. Attempts and "tries" at it
+had been made constantly, and the goal had been very nearly reached,
+especially, perhaps, in that now much forgotten but remarkable _Emilia
+Wyndham_ (1846) by Anne Caldwell (Mrs. Marsh), which was wickedly
+described by a sister novelist as the "book where the woman breaks her
+desk open with her head," but which has real power and exercised real
+influence for no short time.
+
+This new domestic novel followed Miss Austen in that it did not
+necessarily avail itself of anything but perfectly ordinary life, and
+relied chiefly on artistic presentment--on treatment rather than on
+subject. It departed from her in that it admitted a much wider range and
+variety of subject itself; and by no means excluded the passions and
+emotions which, though she had not been so prudish as to ignore their
+results, she had never chosen to represent in much actual exercise, or
+to make the mainsprings of her books.
+
+The first supreme work of the kind was perhaps in _Vanity Fair_ and
+_Pendennis_, the former admitting exceptional and irregular developments
+as an integral part of its plot and general appeal, the latter doing for
+the most part without them. But _Pendennis_ exhibited in itself, and
+taught to other novelists, if not an absolutely new, a hitherto little
+worked, and clumsily worked, source of novel interest. We have seen how,
+as early as Head or Kirkman, the possibility of making such a source out
+of the ways of special trades, professions, employments, and vocations
+had been partly seen and utilised. Defoe did it more; Smollett more
+still; and since the great war there had been naval and military novels
+in abundance, as well as novels political, clerical, sporting, and what
+not. But these special interests had been as a rule drawn upon too
+onesidedly. The eighteenth century found its mistaken fondness for
+episodes, inset stories, and the like, particularly convenient here: the
+naval, military, sporting, and other novels of the nineteenth were apt
+to rely too exclusively on these differences. Such things as the
+Oxbridge scenes and the journalism scenes of _Pendennis_--both among the
+most effective and popular, perhaps _the_ most effective and popular,
+parts of the book--were almost, if not entirely, new. There had been
+before, and have since been, plenty of university novels, and their
+record has been a record of almost uninterrupted failure; there have
+since, if not before, _Pendennis_ been several "press" novels, and their
+record has certainly not been a record of unbroken success. But the
+employment here, by genius, of such subjects for substantial _parts_ of
+a novel was a success pure and unmixed. So, in the earlier book, the
+same author had shown how the most humdrum incident and the minutest
+painting of ordinary character could be combined with historic tragedy
+like that furnished by Waterloo, with domestic _drame_ of the most
+exciting kind like the discovery of Lord Steyne's relations with Becky,
+or the at least suggested later crime of that ingenious and rather
+hardly treated little person.
+
+Most of the writers mentioned and glanced at above took--not of course
+always, often, or perhaps ever in conscious following of Thackeray, but
+in consequence of the same "skiey influences" which worked on him--to
+this mixed domestic-dramatic line. And what is still more interesting,
+men who had already made their mark for years, in styles quite
+different, turned to it and adopted it. We have seen this of Bulwer, and
+the evidences of the change in him which are given by the "Caxton"
+novels. We have not yet directly dealt with another instance of almost
+as great interest and distinction, Charles Lever, though we have named
+him and glanced at his work.
+
+Lever, who was born as early as 1806, had, it has been said, begun to
+write novels as early as his junior, Dickens, and had at once developed,
+in _Harry Lorrequer_, a pretty distinct style of his own. This style was
+a kind of humour-novel with abundant incident, generally with a somewhat
+"promiscuous" plot and with lively but externally drawn characters--the
+humours being furnished partly by Lever's native country, Ireland, and
+partly by the traditions of the great war of which he had collected a
+store in his capacity of physician to the Embassy at Brussels. He had
+kept up this style, the capital example of which is _Charles O'Malley_
+(1840), with unabated _verve_ and with great popular success for a dozen
+years before 1850. But about that time, or rather earlier, the general
+"suck" of the current towards a different kind (assisted no doubt by the
+feeling that the public might be getting tired of the other style) made
+him change it into studies of a less specialised kind--of foreign
+travel, home life, and the like--sketches which, in his later days
+still, he brought even closer to actuality. It is true that in the long
+run his popularity has depended, and will probably always depend, on the
+early "rollicking" adventure books: not only because of their natural
+appeal, but because there is plenty of the other thing elsewhere, and
+hardly any of this particular thing anywhere. To almost anybody, for
+instance, except a very great milksop or a pedant of construction,
+_Charles O'Malley_ with its love-making and its fighting, its
+horsemanship and its horse-play, its "devilled kidneys"[23] and its
+devil-may-care-ness, is a distinctly delectable composition; and if a
+reasonable interval be allowed between the readings, may be read over
+and over again, at all times of life, with satisfaction. But the fact of
+the author's change remains not the less historically and
+symptomatically important, in connection with the larger change of which
+we are now taking notice, and with the similar phenomena observable in
+the work of Bulwer. At the same time it has been pointed out that the
+following of Miss Austen by no means excluded the following of Scott:
+and that the new development included "crosses" of novel and romance,
+sometimes of the historical kind, sometimes not, which are of the
+highest, or all but the highest, interest. Early and good examples of
+these may be found in the work of the Brontes, Charlotte and Emily (the
+third sister Anne is but a pale reflection of her elders), and of
+Charles Kingsley. Charlotte (b. 1816) and Charles (b. 1819) were
+separated in their birth by but three years, Emily (b. 1818) and
+Kingsley by but one.
+
+    [23] Edgar Poe has a perfectly serious and very characteristic
+    explosion at the prominence of these agreeable viands in the
+    book.
+
+The curious story of the struggles of the Bronte girls to get published
+hardly concerns us, and Emily's work, _Wuthering Heights_,[24] is one of
+those isolated books which, whatever their merit, are rather ornaments
+than essential parts in novel history. But this is not the case with
+_Jane Eyre_ (1847), _Shirley_ (1849), _Villette_ (1852), and _The
+Professor_ (1857) (but written much earlier). These are all examples of
+the determination to base novels on actual life and experience. Few
+novelists have ever kept so close to their own part in these as
+Charlotte Bronte did, though she accompanied, permeated, and to a
+certain extent transformed her autobiography and observation by a
+strong romantic and fantastic imaginative element. Deprive Thackeray and
+Dickens of nearly all their humour and geniality, take a portion only of
+the remaining genius of each in the ratio of about 2 _Th_. to 1 _D_.,
+add a certain dash of the old terror-novel and the German fantastic
+tale, moisten with feminine spirit and water, and mix thoroughly: and
+you have something very like Charlotte Bronte. But it is necessary to
+add further, and it is her great glory, the perfume and atmosphere of
+the Yorkshire moors, which she had in not quite such perfection as her
+sister Emily, but in combination with more general novel-gift. Her
+actual course of writing was short, and it could probably in no case
+have been long; she wanted wider and, perhaps, happier experience, more
+literature, more man-and-woman-of-the-worldliness, perhaps a sweeter and
+more genial temper. But the English novel would have been incomplete
+without her and her sister; they are, as wholes, unlike anybody else,
+and if they are not exactly great they have the quality of greatness.
+Above all, they kept novel and romance together--a deed which is great
+without any qualification or drawback.
+
+    [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 _un_popular 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.
+
+Very late in the century the genius of Mr. William Morris turned from
+verse to prose tale-telling in a series of romances which caught the
+fancy neither of the public nor of the critics as a whole, but which
+seem to some whom the gods have made not quite uncritical to be, if
+rightly taken, of much accomplishment, and of almost more promise and
+suggestion. These, seven or eight in number, from _The House of the
+Wulfings_ (1889) to _The Sundering Flood_, published after the author's
+death in 1898, were actual romances--written in a kind of modernised
+fifteenth-century English, and dealing, some with far back incidents of
+the conflict between Romans and "Barbarians," most with the frank
+no-time and no-place of Romance itself. They came at an unfortunate
+moment, when the younger generation of readers were thinking it proper
+to be besotted with crude realism or story-less impressionism, and when
+some at least of those who might have welcomed them earlier had left
+their first faith in poetry or poetic prose. There was, moreover,
+perhaps some genuine dislike, and certainly a good deal of precisian
+condemnation, of the "Wardour Street" dialect. Yet there was no sham in
+them: it was impossible for Mr. Morris to have anything to do with
+shams--even his socialism was not that--and they were in reality a
+revival, however Rip van Winklish it might seem, of the pure old romance
+itself, at the hands of a nineteenth-century sorcerer, who no doubt put
+a little of the nineteenth century into them. The best--probably the
+best of all is _The Well at the World's End_ (1896)--have an
+extraordinary charm for any one who can taste romance: and are by no
+means unlikely to awake the taste for it in generations to come. But for
+the present the thing lay out of the way of its generation, and was not
+comprehended or enjoyed thereby. For it is no doubt nearly as annoying
+to have bread given to you when you want thistles as to have thistles
+given to you when you want bread. But just as the ballad is the
+appointed reviver of poetry, so is romance the appointed reviver of
+prose-fiction: and in one form or another it will surely do its work,
+sooner or later.
+
+Here it may be best to stop the actual current of critical comment on
+individuals. Something has been hinted as to the general present
+condition of the novel, but there is no need to emphasise it or to enter
+into particulars about it: indeed, even if such a proceeding were
+convenient in one way it would be very inconvenient in another. One
+might, for instance, have to consider, rather curiously, a remarkable
+statement recently attributed to a popular novelist that "the general
+standard of excellence in fiction is higher _to-day_ than ever it was
+before." But we can take higher ground. Far be it from me to bow to the
+Baal of "up-to-dateness," for even if I had any such hankering, I think
+I should remember that the surest way of being out-of-date to-morrow is
+the endeavour to be up-to-date to-day. Only by keeping perspective can
+you hope to confirm and steady your view: only by relinquishing the
+impossible attempt to be complete can you achieve a relative
+completeness.
+
+Yet it is well to remember that Lockhart, one of the best critics who
+ever lived (when he let himself be so), a novelist too, and not likely
+to lose an opportunity of magnifying his office if he could, took
+occasion, in noticing the novels of his friend Theodore Hook at poor
+"Mr. Wagg's" death, gravely to deplore the decadence of the novel
+generally: and not much later, in reprinting the article, had the wisdom
+to recognise, and the courage to record, the fact that Thackeray had
+disappointed his prognostications. Literature, it has been said, is the
+incalculable of incalculables: and not only may a new novelist arise
+to-morrow, but some novelist who has been writing for almost any number
+of years may change his style, strike the vein, and begin the
+exploitation of a new gold-field in novel-production.
+
+But this does not affect the retrospect of the past. There we are on
+perfectly firm ground--ground which we have traversed carefully already,
+and which we may survey in surety now.
+
+We have seen, then, that the prose novel--a late growth both in ancient
+and in modern times in all countries--was a specially late and
+slow-yielding one in English. Although Thoms's _Early English Prose
+Romances_ is by no means an exhaustive collection, and for this reason
+was not specially referred to in the first chapter, it is impossible not
+to recognise that its three rather small volumes, of matter for the most
+part exceeding poor and beggarly, contrast in the most pitiful fashion
+with the scores and almost hundreds containing Early English Romances in
+verse. Malory of course brings the prose-scale down very considerably
+from its uncomfortably _meteoric_ position, and some other things help:
+but the total of prose and verse before 1500 can be brought level by no
+possible sleight of weighing. Still, as we have seen, this did not
+matter very much: for the verse got "transprosed" sooner or later, and
+the romances and tales of other countries were greedily admitted _ad
+eundem_ in sixteenth and seventeenth century English.
+
+Yet the novel proper lingered: and, except in the single and eccentric
+masterpiece of Bunyan, the seventeenth century ended without having seen
+one real specimen of prose fiction that was thoroughly satisfactory.
+Nearly half the eighteenth had gone too, with nothing but the less
+isolated but still not perfect performances of Defoe, and the once more
+still eccentric masterpiece of _Gulliver_, before the novel-period
+really opened. It is literally not more than two long lifetimes ago--it
+is quite certain that there are now living hundreds, perhaps thousands,
+of persons born when others were still living who drew their first
+breaths in or before the year when Pamela made her modest, but very
+distinctly self-conscious, curtsey to the world. How soon it grew to a
+popular form of literature, and how steadily that popularity has
+continued and increased, there is not much need to say or to repeat.
+Statistical persons every year give us the hundreds of novels that
+appear from the presses, and the thousands of readers who take them out
+of, or read them in, public libraries. I do not know whether there
+exists anywhere a record of the total number published since 1740, but I
+dare say it does. I should not at all wonder if this total ran into
+scores of thousands: if you were to bring in short stories it would
+certainly do so. People have almost left off shaking their heads over
+the preponderant or exclusive attention to fiction in these public
+libraries themselves: in fact the tendency seems to be rather to make
+out that it is decreasing. It may be so; or it may not. But what remains
+certain is that there is a very large number of educated people to whom
+"reading" simply means reading novels; who never think of taking up a
+book that is not a novel; for whom the novel exhausts even the very
+meaning of the word "literature." We know that the romance was
+originally so called simply because it was the commonest book in
+"Romance" language. We are less unsophisticated now: but there are
+certainly large numbers of His Majesty's subjects by whom a novel on
+this principle ought to be called "an english" though it might have to
+share that appellation with the newspaper.
+
+Yet, as we have seen, for this or that reason, the _average_ novel did
+not come to anything like perfection for a very long time. In a single
+example, or set of examples, it reached something like perfection almost
+at once. Fielding, Scott, Miss Austen, and Thackeray are the Four
+Masters of the whole subject, giving the lady the same degree as the
+others by courtesy of letters. But in the first (as for the matter of
+that in the last) of the four the success was rather a matter of
+individual and inimitable genius than of systematic discovery of method
+practicable by others. Nobody, except Thackeray himself, has ever
+followed Fielding successfully, and that only in parts and touches; as
+Fielding had (unfortunately) no opportunity of following Thackeray, no
+one has ever followed Thackeray satisfactorily at all. Such reasons as
+presented themselves have been given for the fact that nearly half of
+the whole period passed before the two systems--of the pure novel and
+the novel-romance--were discovered: and even then they were not at once
+put to work. But the present writer would be the very first to confess
+that these explanations leave a great deal unexplained.
+
+Yet whatever faults there might be in the supply there could be no doubt
+about the demand when it was once started. It was indeed almost entirely
+independent of the goodness or badness of the average supply itself.
+Allowing for the smaller population and the much smaller proportion of
+that population who were likely to--who indeed could--read, and for the
+inferior means of distribution, it may be doubted whether the largest
+sales of novels recorded in the last half century have surpassed those
+of the most trumpery trash of the "Minerva Press" period--the last
+decade of the eighteenth and the first of the nineteenth century. For
+the main novel-public is quite omnivorous, and almost absolutely
+uncritical of what it devours. The admirable though certainly fortunate
+Scot who "could never remember drinking bad whisky" might be echoed, if
+they had the wit, by not a few persons who never seem to read a bad
+novel, or at least to be aware that they are reading one.
+
+At the same time, the failure of the quest for novel-recipes was
+compensated by an absence of that working of those recipes to death
+which the last century--or the last three-quarters of it--has seen. The
+average work of any one of a dozen nineteenth-century producers of
+novels by the dozen and the score, whom at this place it is not
+necessary to name, is probably on the whole a much better turned out
+thing--one better observing its own purposes, and open to less criticism
+in detail--than even the best of the works of the earlier division
+outside of Fielding. But the eighteenth-century books--faulty, only
+partially satisfying as they may be in comparison, say, with a
+well-succeeded Trollope or one of the better Blackmores--very often have
+a certain idiosyncrasy, a freedom from machine-work, which supplies
+something not altogether unlike the contrast between the furniture of
+the two periods. Stress and dwelling have been purposely given, to some
+minor books of this period, for this very reason.
+
+But at the same time the limitations, outside the greatest, are
+certainly peculiar. It seems wonderful that a man like Cumberland, for
+instance, who had not a little literary talent, should not have been
+able to make _Henry_ into a story of real interest that might hold the
+reader as even second-class Trollope--say a book like _Orley
+Farm_--does. We have ungraciously recognised that some of our lady
+novelists, who wrote by forties and by fifties, did not always sustain
+the interest of their novels. Miss Burney wrote four in all, and could
+hardly keep up the interest of hers right through the second. Above all,
+there is the difficulty of their failure with conversation and, in fact,
+with any diction proper for conversation. If Horace Walpole, a
+contemporary of the eighteenth-century novel from its actual start to
+practically its finish, could give us thousands and all but tens of
+thousands of phrases that want but a little of being novel-conversation
+ready made, why could not the other people make it for their own
+purposes? But we have got no answer to these questions: and probably
+there is none.
+
+The way in which Scott and Miss Austen themselves simultaneously found
+out the secrets of the two kinds of novel is no doubt, as such ways
+always are, in the larger part mysterious: but to a certain extent it
+can be explained and analysed, independently of the direct literary
+genius of each. One of the greatest gifts of Scott--one with which the
+non-historical novelist can dispense as little as his brother the
+historical--was that "genius of history" with which Lord Morley--a
+critic not likely to be misled by sympathy in some respects at any
+rate--has justly credited him. For unless you have this "historic
+sense," as it has been more generally and perhaps better termed (though
+to the intense disgust of some professed historians), it is not only
+impossible for you to delineate scene and character at a distance from
+your time, but you become really disqualified for depicting your own
+time itself. You fail to distinguish the temporary from the permanent;
+you achieve perhaps a fairly faithful copy of actual manners and
+fashions, but you do nothing more, and as the subject dies so does the
+picture. Contrast Hook, say, with Thackeray, and the difference will
+emerge at once.
+
+Secondly, Scott had, besides this historic sense and the relish for
+humanity which must accompany it, a knowledge of literature with which
+he has been too seldom credited to the full. When he published
+_Waverley_ he had been reading all sorts and conditions of books for
+some five-and-thirty years, and assimilating them if, as the pedants
+will have it, with a distressing inaccuracy in particulars, with a
+general and genial fidelity of which the pedants do not even dream and
+could not comprehend, or they would not be pedants. He was thus
+furnished with infinite stores of illustrative matter, never to
+overpower, but always to accompany and season, his knowledge of life. In
+a few instances this felicity of adoption has been recognised, but not a
+tenth part of it has ever been systematically put on record. The more
+widely and the longer a man reads, the more constantly will he find that
+Scott has been before him, and has "lifted" just the touch that he
+wanted at the time and in the place.
+
+But perhaps a greater gift (there were still others which it would be
+long to perscribe--descriptive faculty, humour, pathos, half a dozen
+other things of the highest importance in themselves, but of less
+special application) was that which enabled him to discover and apply
+something like a universal novel _language_. He did this, not as
+Shakespeare did (and as nobody but Shakespeare, except perhaps Dante to
+some extent, ever has done or apparently could do), by making a really
+universal language which fits all times and persons because it is
+universal like its creator's soul. Still less did he do it by adopting
+the method which Spenser did consummately, but which almost everybody
+else has justified Ben Jonson by doing very badly:--that is to say by
+constructing a mosaic of his own. But his own method was nearer to this
+latter. For historical creations (the most important of his
+non-historic, _Guy Mannering_ and the _Antiquary_, were so near his own
+time that he had no difficulty) he threw back with remarkable cunning to
+a period somewhat earlier, and coloured this up to the required tint by
+actual suggestions from contemporary, or nearly contemporary,
+literature, where he could get it. He has done this so consummately that
+perhaps the only novel of his where the language strikes us as
+artificial is the single one in which he actually endeavoured to be
+"up-to-date"--_St. Ronan's Well_.
+
+This question of "Lingo," on the other hand, was Miss Austen's weakest
+point: and we have seen and shall see that it continued to be a weak
+point with others. Some admirers have defended her even here: but proud
+as I am to be an Austen Friar, a knight (or at least squire) of the
+order of St. Jane, I cannot go to this length. She very nearly
+succeeded, and sometimes she did quite: but not always. The easy
+dialogue and phrase that we find as early as Horace Walpole, even as
+Chesterfield and Lady Mary, in letters; which, in her own early days,
+appears in Fanny Burney's diaries but not in the novels, does not seem
+always within Miss Austen's grasp. But her advance in this respect is
+enormous: she is, for instance, far beyond Scott himself in _St. Ronan's
+Well_: and when she is thoroughly interested in a character, and engaged
+in unfolding it and gently satirising it at the same time, she rarely
+goes even a hair's-breadth wrong. In almost every other respect she does
+not go wrong to the extent of the minutest section of a hair. The story
+is the least part with her: but her stories are always miraculously
+_adequate_: neither desultory and pillar-to-post, nor elaborated with
+the minuteness which seems to please some people, but which is quite
+indifferent to the majority, and is certainly a positive nuisance to a
+few who are not quite of negligible judgment. But the reason of this
+adequacy in story contains in itself her greatest triumph. Not being a
+poet, she cannot reach the Shakespearian consummateness of poetic
+phrase: though she sometimes comes not so far short of this in the prose
+variety. But in the other great province of character, though hers is
+but a Rutland to his Yorkshire--or rather to his England or his
+world--she is almost equally supreme. And by her manipulation of it she
+showed, once for all, how the most ordinary set of circumstances, and
+even the most ordinary characters in a certain sense, can be made to
+supply the material of prose fiction to an absolutely illimitable
+extent. Her philosopher's stone (to take up the old parable again) does
+not lose its powers even when all the metal in the house is
+exhausted--if indeed the metal, or anything else, in the House of
+Humanity were exhaustible. The chairs and tables, the beds and the
+basins--everything--can be made into novel-gold: and, when it has been
+made, it remains as useful for future conversion, by the same or any
+other magician of the same class, as ever. One of the most curious
+things about Miss Austen is the entire absence of self-repetition in
+her. Even her young men--certainly not her greatest successes--are by no
+means doubles of each other: and nature herself could not turn out half
+a dozen girls more subtly and yet more sufficiently differentiated than
+Catherine and Elizabeth, Marianne and Fanny, Elinor and Emma, and
+finally the three sisters of _Persuasion_, the other (quite other)
+Elizabeth, Mary, and Anne. The "ruts of the brain" in novelists are a
+by-word. There are none here.
+
+In these two great writers of English novel there is, really for the
+first time, the complementary antithesis after which people have often
+gone (I fear it must be said) wool-gathering elsewhere. The amateurs of
+cosmopolitan literature, I believe, like to find it in Stendhal and
+Michelet. They praise the former for his delicate and pitiless
+psychological analysis. It had been anticipated a dozen years, nay,
+nearly twenty years, before he saw the Beresina: and was being given out
+in print at about the very moment of that uncomfortable experience, and
+before he himself published anything, by a young English lady--a lady if
+ever there was one and English if any person ever was--in a country
+parsonage in Hampshire or in hired houses, quite humdrum and commonplace
+to the commonplace and humdrum imagination, at Bath and Southampton.
+They praise Michelet for his enthusiastic and multiform apprehension of
+the plastic reality of the past, his re-creation of it, his putting of
+it, live and active, before the present. The thing had been done, twenty
+years earlier again, by a Scotch advocate who had deliberately turned
+from poetic form, though he retained poetic imagination, and who did not
+disdain not to make a fool of himself, as Michelet, with all his genius,
+did again and again. Of all the essentials of the two manners of
+fictitious creation--Michelet's was not fictitious, but he almost made
+it so, and Stendhal's was not historical, but he almost made it so
+likewise--Scott and Miss Austen had set the types, given the methods,
+arranged the processes as definitely as Fust, or Coster, or Gutenberg,
+or Fust's friend Mephistopheles--who perhaps, on the whole, has the best
+title to the invention--did in another matter three hundred years
+before.
+
+That Scott's variety should be taken up first, and should for a time
+have the great popularity, the greater number of disciples, the greater
+acceptance as a mode of pleasing--was, as has been pointed out, natural
+enough; it is not a little significant that (to avert our eyes from
+England) the next practitioner of the psychological style in European
+literature, Balzac, went through a long and mostly unsuccessful
+probation in the other kind, and never wholly deserted it, or at least
+always kept looking back to it. But the general shortcomings (as they
+have been admitted to be) in the whole of the second quarter of the
+century (or a little less) with us, were but natural results of the
+inevitable expatiation, unsystematic and irresolute, over the newly
+discovered provinces. And they gave admirable work of various
+kinds--work especially admirable if we remember that there was no
+general literary uprising with us as there was, in France and elsewhere,
+about 1830. If it were in any way possible--similar supposings have been
+admitted in literature very often--it would be extremely interesting to
+take a person _ex hypothesi_ fairly acquainted with the rest of
+literature--English, foreign, European, and classical--but who knew
+nothing and had heard nothing of Bulwer, Disraeli, Peacock, Marryat,
+even Ainsworth and James and others between Scott and the accomplished
+work of Thackeray (Dickens's is, as has been said, mainly a sport of
+genius), and to turn him loose on this work. I do him the justice to
+suppose that he would find not a few faults: I shall also do him the
+justice to think it likely that he (being, as said, _ex hypothesi_
+furnished with the miscellaneous knowledge necessary to enjoy them)
+would enjoy them very keenly and thoroughly. If you added the minorities
+of the time, such as that very clever Miss Robinson (I think her name
+was Emma) who wrote _Whitefriars_ and other historical romances in the
+forties; such as Charles Macfarlane, who died, like Colonel Newcome, a
+poor brother of the Charterhouse after writing capital things like _The
+Dutch in the Medway_ and _The Camp of Refuge_--if, I say, you gave him
+these things and he was a good man, but lazy, like Gray, I think he
+would vote for a continuance of his life of novels and sofas without
+sighing for anything further. But undoubtedly it might be contended that
+something further was needed: and it came. This was verisimilitude--the
+holding of the true mirror to actual society.
+
+This verisimilitude, it should be observed, is not only difficult to
+attain: it seems not to be easy even to recognise. I have seen it said
+that the reason which makes it "hopeless for many people even to try to
+get through _Pickwick_" (their state itself must be "hopeless" enough,
+and it is to be hoped there are not "many" of them) is that it
+"describes states of society unimaginable to many people of to-day."
+Again, these many people must be somewhat unimaginative. But that is not
+the point of the matter. The point is that Dickens depicts no "state of
+society" that ever existed, except in the _Dickensium Sidus_. What he
+gives is full of intensely real touches which help to create its charm.
+But it is difficult to say that there is even a single person in it who
+is real as a whole, in the sense of having possibly existed in this
+world: and the larger whole of the book generally is pure fantasy--as
+much so as one of the author's own favourite goblin-dream stories.
+
+With Thackeray the case is exactly the opposite. It is a testimony no
+doubt to Dickens's real power--though perhaps not to his readers'
+perspicacity--that he made them believe that he intended a "state of
+society" when, whether he intended it or not, he certainly has not given
+it. But Thackeray intended it and gave it. His is a "state of society"
+always--whether in late seventeenth century, early or late eighteenth,
+early or middle nineteenth--which existed or might have existed; his
+persons are persons who lived or might have lived. And it is the
+discovery of this art of creation by him and its parallel diffusion
+among his contemporaries that I am endeavouring to make clear here.
+Fielding, Scott to some extent, Miss Austen had had it. Dickens, till
+_Great Expectations_ at least, never achieved and I believe never
+attempted it. Bulwer, having failed in it for twenty years, struck it at
+last about this time, and so did, even before him, Mrs. Marsh, and
+perhaps others, falteringly and incompletely. But as a general gift--a
+characteristic--it never distinguished novelists till after the middle
+of the century.
+
+It is, I think, impossible to find a better meeting and overlapping
+place of the old and the new novel, than that very remarkable book
+_Emilia Wyndham_, which has been already more than once referred to. It
+was written in 1845 and appeared next year--the year of _Vanity Fair_.
+But the author was twenty years older than Thackeray, though she
+survived him by nearly a dozen; she had not begun early; and she was
+fifty-five when she wrote _Emilia_. The not unnatural consequence is
+that there is a great deal of inconsistency in the general texture of
+the book: and that any clever cub, in the 'prentice stage of reviewing,
+could make columns of fun out of it. The general theme is age-old, being
+not different from the themes of most other novels in that respect. A
+half-idiotic spendthrift (he ends as very nearly an actual idiot) not
+merely wastes his own property but practically embezzles that of his
+wife and daughter; the wife dies and the daughter is left alone with an
+extravagant establishment, a father practically _non compos_, not a
+penny in her pocket after she has paid his doctor, and a selfish
+baronet-uncle who will do less than nothing to help her. She has loved
+half unconsciously, and been half consciously loved by, a soldier cousin
+or quasi-cousin: but he is in the Peninsular War. Absolutely no help
+presents itself but that of a Mr. Danby, a conveyancer, who, in some way
+not very consonant with the usual etiquette of his profession, has been
+mixed up with her father's affairs--a man middle-aged, apparently dry as
+his own parchments, and quite unversed in society. He helps her clumsily
+but lavishly: and her uncle forces her to accept his hand as the only
+means of saving her father from jail first and an asylum afterwards. The
+inevitable disunion, brought about largely by Danby's mother (an awful
+old middle-class harridan), follows; and the desk-and-head incident
+mentioned above is brought about by her seeing the (false) announcement
+of her old lover's death in the paper. But she herself is consistently,
+perhaps excessively, but it is fair to say not ridiculously, angelic;
+Danby is a gentleman and a good fellow at heart; and of course, after
+highly tragical possibilities, these good gifts triumph. The greatest
+danger is threatened, and the actual happy ending brought about, by an
+auxiliary plot, in which the actors are the old lover (two old lovers
+indeed), his wife (a beautiful featherhead, who has been Emilia's
+school-fellow and dearest friend), and a wicked "Duke of C."
+
+Even from this sketch the tolerably expert reader of novels may discover
+where the weak points are likely to lie; he will be a real expert if he
+anticipates the strong ones without knowing the book. As was formerly
+noticed, the dialogue is ill supplied with diction. The date of the
+story is 1809: and the author had for that period a fairly safe pattern
+in Miss Austen: but she does not use it at all, nor does she make the
+lingo frankly that of her own day. There are gross improbabilities--Mr.
+Danby, for instance (who is represented as wrapped up in his business,
+and exclusively occupied with the legal side of money matters and the
+money side of the law), actually discharges, or thinks he is
+discharging, hundreds and thousands of Mr. Wyndham's liabilities by
+handing his own open cheques, not to the creditors, not to any one
+representing them, but to a country attorney who has succeeded him in
+the charge of the debts and affairs, and whom he knows to be a sharp
+practitioner and suspects to be a scoundrel. The inhuman uncle and the
+licentious duke are mere cardboard characters: and the featherheaded
+Lisa talks and behaves like a mixture of the sprightly heroines of
+Richardson (for whom Lady Mary most righteously prescribed a sound
+whipping) and the gushing heroines of Lady Morgan. There is too much
+chaise-and-four and laudanum-bottle; too much moralising; too much of a
+good many other things. And yet, somehow or other, there are also things
+very rarely to be found in any novel--even taking in Bulwer and the
+serious part of Dickens--up to the date. The scene between Danby and his
+mother, in the poky house in Charlotte Street, when she discovers that
+he has been giving a hundred-pound cheque to a young lady is
+impressingly good: it is not absolutely unsuggestive of what Thackeray
+was just doing, and really not far from what Trollope was not for some
+years to do. There are other passages which make one think of George
+Eliot, who indeed might have been writing at the very time; there are
+even faint and faltering suggestions of Ibsenic "duty to ourselves." Mr.
+Danby (the characters regularly call each other "Mr.," "Mrs.," and
+"Miss," even when they are husbands and wives, daughters or nieces, and
+uncles or fathers) is a miss, and not quite a miss, of a very striking,
+original, possible, and even probable character. His mother, with
+something more of the Dickensian type-character, can stand by her
+unpleasant self, and came ten years before "the Campaigner." Susan, her
+pleasanter servant, is equally self-sufficing, and came five years
+before Peggotty, to whom she is not without resemblances.[28]
+
+    [28] Another novel of Mrs. Marsh-Caldwell's, _Norman's Bridge_,
+    has strong suggestions of _John Halifax_, and is ten years
+    older.
+
+But it is not so much the merits on the one hand, or the defects on the
+other, of the book that deserve attention here and justify the place
+given to it: it is the general "chip-the-shell" character. The shell is
+only being chipped: large patches of it still hamper the chicken, which
+is thus a half developed and half disfigured little animal. All sorts of
+didactics, of Byronic-Bulwerish sentiment, of conventionalities of
+various kinds, still hold their place; the language, as we have said, is
+traditional and hardly even that; and the characters are partly drawn
+from Noah's Arks of various dates, partly from the stock company of the
+toy theatre. On the other hand, besides the touches of modernity already
+mentioned, and assisting them, there is a great attention to
+"interiors." The writer has, for her time, a more than promising sense
+of the incongruity between Empire dress and furniture and the style of
+George II.: and the shabbiness or actual squalor of Charlotte Street and
+Chancery Lane show that she had either been a very early and forward
+scholar of Dickens, or had discovered the thing on her own account. Her
+age may excuse some of the weak points, but it makes the presence of the
+strong ones all the more remarkable: and it shows all the more forcibly
+how the general influences which were to produce the great central
+growth of Victorian novel were at work, and at work almost violently, in
+the business of pulling down the old as well as of building up the new.
+
+Of that new novel it is not necessary to say much more. In the last
+fifty or sixty years of the nineteenth century it did, as it seems to
+me, very great things--so great that, putting poetry, which is supreme,
+aside, there is no division of the world's literature within a time at
+all comparable to its own which can much, if at all, excel it. It did
+these great things because partly of the inscrutable laws which
+determined that a certain number of men and women of unusual power
+should exist, and should devote themselves to it, partly of the less
+heroic-sounding fact that the general appetite of other men and
+womenkind could make it worth while for these persons of genius and
+talent not to do something else. But even so, the examination, rightly
+conducted, discovers more than a sufficient dose of nobility. For the
+novel appeal is not, after all, to a mere blind animal thirst for
+something that will pass and kill time, for something that will drug or
+flutter or amuse. Beyond and above these things there is something else.
+The very central cause and essence of it--most definitely and most
+keenly felt by nobler spirits and cultivated intelligences, but also
+dimly and unconsciously animating very ordinary people--is the human
+delight in humanity--the pleasure of seeing the men and women of long
+past ages living, acting, and speaking as they might have done, those of
+the present living, acting, speaking as they do--but in each case with
+the portrayal not as a mere copy of particulars, but influenced with
+that spirit of the universal which is the secret and the charm of art.
+It is because the novels of these years recognised and provided this
+pleasure in a greater degree than those of the former period (except the
+productions of a few masters) that they deserve the higher position
+which has been here assigned them. If the novels of any period, before
+or since or to come, have deserved, may or shall deserve, a lower
+place--it is, and will be, because of their comparative or positive
+neglect of the combination of these conditions. Perhaps it is not easy
+to see what new country there is for the novel to conquer. But, as with
+other kinds of literature, there is practically no limit to its powers
+of working its actual domains. In the finest of its already existing
+examples it hardly yields in accomplishment even to poetry; in that
+great secondary (if secondary) office of all Art--to redress the
+apparent injustice, and console for the apparent unkindness, of
+Nature--to serve as rest and refreshment between those exactions of life
+which, though neither unjust nor unkind, are burdensome, it has no equal
+among all the kinds of Art itself.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+_Adam Bede_
+Adams, W.
+Addison
+_Adeline Mowbray_
+Aelfric
+_Agathos_
+Ainsworth, H.
+_Alton Locke_
+_Amadis_
+_Amelia_
+_Amis and Amillion_
+Amory, Thomas
+_Anabasis, The_
+Anglo-Saxon, Romance in
+_Anna_
+_Anna St. Ives_
+_Apollonius of Tyre_
+Apuleius
+Arblay, Madame d', _see_ Burney, F.
+_Arcadia, The_
+_Aretina_
+_Arthour and Merlin_
+Arthurian Legend, the;
+  its romantic concentration
+_Ask Mamma_
+_Ass, The Golden_
+_Atlantis, The New_
+Austen, Miss
+
+_Badman, Mr_.
+Bage, R.
+Balzac
+Banim
+_Barchester Towers_
+Barrett, E.S.
+_Barry Lyndon_
+"Barsetshire Novels," the
+_Battle of the Books, The_
+Beaconsfield, Lord, _see_ Disraeli, B.
+Beckford
+Behn, Afra
+_Belinda_
+Bennett, Mrs.
+_Bentivolio and Urania_
+_Beowulf_
+Bergerac, C. de
+Berington, S.
+Berkeley
+Berners, Lord
+_Bertrams, The_
+_Beryn, The Tale of_
+Besaut, Sir W.
+_Betsy Thoughtless_
+_Bevis of Hampton_
+Black, W.
+Blackmore, R.D.
+Blair
+Borrow, George
+Boyle, Roger, Lord Broghill and Earl of Orrery
+_Brambletye House_
+Bronte, Charlotte
+  Emily and Anne
+Brooke, H.
+Brunetiere, M.
+Brunton, Mrs.
+Bulwer, Sir E.B. Lytton (1st Lord Lytton)
+_Buncle, The life of John_
+Bunyan
+Burney, F.
+Byrne, Mrs.
+Byron
+
+_Caleb Williams_
+_Cambridge Freshman, The_
+_Camilla_
+_Canterbury Tales_ (the Misses Lee's)
+_Can You Forgive Her?_
+_Captain Singleton_
+_Castle of Otranto, The_
+_Catherine_
+_Catriona_
+_Caxtons, The_
+_Cecilia_
+Chamier, Captain
+_Charles O'Malley_
+"Charlotte Elizabeth"
+Chateaubriand, 152
+_Children of the Abbey, The_
+_Chrestien de Troyes_
+_Chronicles of Carlingford, The_
+_Chrysal_
+Circulating libraries, effort of
+_Clarissa_
+Clive, Mrs. A.
+_Cloister and the Hearth, The_
+Coleridge
+Collins, Wilkie
+_Colonel Jack_
+_Complaint of Deor, The_
+Congreve
+_Convent of Grey Penitents, The_
+Coventry, F.
+"Coverley Papers," the
+Craik, Mrs.
+_Cranford_
+_Cripps the Carrier_
+Crisp, "Daddy"
+Croker, Crofton
+Croly
+_Crotchet Castle_
+Crowe, Mrs.
+Crowne, John
+Croxall, Dr.
+Cumberland, R.
+_Cyropaedia, The_
+
+Dante
+_David Simple_
+Defoe
+Dickens
+Diderot
+_Discipline_
+Disraeli, B.
+_Divina Commedia, The_
+Dumas
+Dunlop
+
+Edgeworth, Miss
+Ellis, G., _Early English Romances_
+_Emare_
+_Emilia Wyndham_
+_Emma_
+_English Rogue, The_
+_Esmond_
+_Euphues_
+Eustathius
+Evans, Mary Ann ("George Eliot")
+_Evelina_
+
+_Fair Quaker of Dea
+_Ferdinand Count Fathom_
+Ferrier, Miss
+Fielding, H.
+Fielding, S.
+_Florence of Rome_
+_Florice and Blancheflour_
+_Fool of Quality, The_
+Ford, Emmanuel
+_Fortunes of Nigel, The_
+_Frank_
+_Frank Fairlegh_
+_Frank Mildmay_
+
+Galt
+_Gamekeeper at Home, The_
+Gaskell, Mrs.
+_Gawain and the Green Knight_
+Geoffrey of Monmouth
+"George Eliot," _see_ Evans, M.A.
+Gilpin
+Glascock, Capt.
+Godwin, W.
+Goldsmith
+Gore, Mrs.
+Graves, Rev. R.
+Gray
+_Great Hoggarty Diamond, The_
+Green, Sarah
+Grey, Mr. W.W.
+_Gryll Grange_
+_Guadentio di Lucca_
+_Gulliver's Travels_
+_Guy Livingstone_
+_Guy of Warwick_
+
+Hagiology, its effect on Romance
+Hamilton, Anthony
+Hardy, Mr.
+_Haunted and the Haunters, The_
+_Havelok the Dam_
+Haywood, Eliza
+Hazlitt
+Head, R.
+_Heir of Redclyffe, The_
+_Heliodorus_
+Henley, Mr. W.E.
+_Henrietta Temple_
+_Henry_
+_Hereward the Wake_
+_Hermsprong_
+Herodotus
+_Heroine, The_
+Holcroft, T.
+_Holy War, The_
+Hook, Theodore
+Hope
+_Horn, King_
+_Humphry Clinker_
+Hunt, Leigh
+_Hypatia_
+
+_Idalia_
+_Ida of Athena_
+_Iliad The_
+"Imitation" (the Greek=Fiction)
+Inchbald, Mrs.
+_Incognita_
+Ingelo, N.
+_Ipomydon_
+_Isle of Pines, The_
+_Italian, The_
+_It is Never too Late to Mend_
+_Ixion_
+
+_Jack Wilton_
+_Jacob Faithful_
+James, G.P.R.
+_Jane Eyre_
+Jefferies, R.
+_Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy_
+_John Runcle_
+_John Inglesand_
+Johnson, Dr.
+Johnstone, C.
+_Jonathan Wild_
+"Jorrocks," Mr.
+_Joseph Andrews_
+_Journey from This World to the Next, A_
+
+_Kate Coventry_
+Kingsley, C.
+Kingsley, H.
+_King's Own, The_
+Kirkman, F.
+
+"Lady Mary" (Wortley-Montagu)
+_Lady Susan_
+_Lancelot (of the Laik)_, the Scots
+_Last Chronicle of Barset, The_
+Lawrence, G.A.
+Layamon
+Lee, the Misses
+"L.E.L."
+Lennox, Mrs.
+_Leoline and Sydanis_
+Letter-form in novels
+Lever, C.
+Lewis, M.G.
+_Libertine, The_
+Livy
+Lockhart
+_London_
+Longus
+_Lorna Doone_
+Lucian
+_Lybius Disconus_
+Lydia
+Lyly
+Lytton, _see_ Bulwer
+
+Macaulay
+Macdonald, George
+Macfarlane, C.
+Mackenzie, Henry
+Mackenzie, Sir George
+Malory
+_Man as He Is_
+_Manley, Mrs._
+_Man of Feeling, The_
+_Mansfield Park_
+Map, W.
+_Marianne_ (Marivaux)
+_Marivaux_
+Marryat, Captain
+Marsh, Mrs.
+Martineau, Mrs.
+_Mary Barton_
+Maturin, C.R.
+_Melincourt_
+_Melmoth the Wanderer_
+Melville, Mr. L.
+_Memoirs of a Cavalier_
+Meredith, Mr. George
+_Merlin_
+Michelet
+_Mill on the Floss, The_
+_Misfortunes of Elphin, The_
+_Mr. Midshipman Easy_
+_Mr. Verdant Green_
+_Mrs. Veal_
+_Moll Flanders_
+_Monk, The_
+_Montelion_
+Moore, Dr. John
+Morgan, Lady
+Morier
+Morley of Blackburn, Lord
+Morris, W.
+_Morte d'Arthur_, the alliterative;
+  the metrical;
+  Malory's
+Mosse, Henrietta
+_Mount Henneth_
+_Mysteries of Udolpho, The_
+
+Nash, T.
+_Nature and Art_
+Neville, H.
+_Nightmare Abbey_
+_No Name_
+_North and South_
+_Northanger Abbey_
+_Novelist, The_
+_Novella_, the Italian, influence of
+
+_Oceana_
+_Odyssey, The_
+_Old English Baron, The_
+_Old Manor House, The_
+Oliphant, Mrs.
+Opie, Mrs.
+_Ordeal of Richard Feverel, The_
+_Ormond_
+_Ornatus and Artesia_
+_Oroonoko_
+"Ouida"
+Ovid
+
+Paget, F.
+_Palace of Pleasure_, Painter's
+Paltock, R.
+_Pamela_
+_Pandion and Amphigeneia_
+Paris, M. Gaston
+_Parismus and Parismenus_
+_Parthenissa_
+_Paul Ferroll_
+Peacock, T.L.
+_Peep at Our Ancestors_
+_Pendennis_
+_Peregrine Pickle_
+_Persuasion_
+_Peter Simple_
+_Peter Wilkins_
+Petronius
+_Phantasies_
+_Pharonnida_
+_Pickwick Papers, The_
+_Pilgrim's Progress, The_
+Plato
+Poe, Edgar
+_Polite Conversation_ (Swift's)
+_Pompey the Little_
+Porter, Miss
+_Pride and Prejudice_
+_Proud King, The_
+Publication, system of
+
+_Queenhoo Hall_
+_Quixote, The Female_
+_Quixote, The Spiritual_
+
+Rabelais
+Radcliffe, Mrs.
+Raleigh, Professor Sir Walter
+_Rasselas_
+Reade, C.
+_Recess, The_
+Reeve, Clara
+Rice, James
+_Richard Coeur de Lion_
+Richardson
+Ritson
+_Robinson Crusoe_
+Robinson, Emma (?)
+Roche, R.M.
+_Roderich Random_
+Romance;
+  its connection with the "Saint's Life";
+  not completely separable from novel;
+  heroic
+_Romance Readers and Romance Writers_
+_Romola_
+"Rosa Matilda"
+_Roxana_
+_Ruin, The_
+_Ruth_
+
+_St. Irvyne_
+_St. Leon_
+_St. Ronan's Well_
+_Sayings and Doings_
+"S.G.," _see_ Green, Sarah
+Scott, Michael
+Scott, Sir W.
+_Sense and Sensibility_
+_Sentimental Journey, A_
+_Seven Wise Masters, The_
+Sewell, Miss
+_Shabby Genteel Story, A_
+_Shadow of the Cross, The_
+Shadwell, Charles
+Shebbeare
+Shelley
+Sheridan, Frances
+Sherwood, Mrs.
+_Shirley_
+_Shortest Way with the Dissenters_
+_Simple Story, A_
+_Sir Amadas_
+_Sir Charles Grandison_
+_Sir Eglamour_
+_Sir Eger, Sir Grame, and Sir Graysteel_
+_Sir John Chiverton_
+_Sir Isumhras_
+_Sir Lancelot Greaves_
+_Sir Launfal_
+_Sir Orfeo_
+_Sir Triamond_
+_Sketches by Boz_
+Smart, Capt. H.
+Smedley, Frank
+Smith, Charlotte
+Smith, Horace
+Smollett
+Socrates
+_Spiritual Quixote, The_
+_Squire of Low Degree, The_
+Stael, Mme. de
+Steele
+Stendhal
+Sterne
+Stevenson, R.L.
+_Strange Story, A_
+Stuart, Lady L.
+Surtees, R.
+Swift
+_Sydney Biddulph_
+
+_Tale of a Tub, A_
+_Ten Thousand a Year_
+Tennyson
+Terror-Novel, the
+Thackeray
+_Thaddeus of Warsaw_
+Thorns
+Tolstoi, Count
+_Tom and Jerry_
+_Tom Brown's Schooldays_
+_Tom Cringle's Log_
+_Tom Jones_
+Tourguenief
+"Tractarian" Novel, the
+_Treasure Island_
+_Tristram Shandy_
+Tristram story, the
+Trollope, Anthony
+Trollope, Mrs.
+_Two Years Ago_
+
+_Unfortunate Traveller, The_
+_Urania_
+_Utopia_
+
+_Vanity Fair_
+_Vathek_
+_Venetia_
+_Vicar of Wake field, The_
+Virgil
+_Vision of St. Paul, The_
+_Voyage Round the World_
+
+Wace
+Walpole, H.
+_Wanderer, The_
+_Warden, The_
+Ward's _Catalogue of Romances_
+Warren, S.
+_Water Babies, The_
+_Watsons, The_
+_Waverley_
+Weber
+_Well at the World's End_
+_Westward Ho!_
+Whyte-Melville, G.J.
+_Wild Irish Girl, The_
+Wilkinson, Sarah
+_William of Palerne_
+Wortley-Montagu, Lady M., _see_ "Lady Mary"
+Wroth, Lady Mary
+_Wuthering Heights_
+
+Xenophon
+
+_Yeast_
+Yonge, Miss
+_Ywain and Gawain_
+
+_Zastrozzi_
+Zeluco
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The English Novel, by George Saintsbury
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ENGLISH NOVEL ***
+
+***** This file should be named 14469.txt or 14469.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        https://www.gutenberg.org/1/4/4/6/14469/
+
+Produced by Jonathan Ingram, Riikka Talonpoika and the PG Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+https://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at https://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+https://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at https://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit https://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including including checks, online payments and credit card
+donations.  To donate, please visit: https://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     https://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
diff --git a/old/14469.zip b/old/14469.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..3b255f8
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/14469.zip