occurs at irregular intervals—are for once fair samples of their author's genius. "Tommy's dead," the lament of a father over his son, is too long, it has frequent flatnesses, repetitions that do not add to the effect, bits of mere gush, trivialities. The tragic and echoing magnificence of the Ravelston refrain is not quite seconded by the text: both to a certain extent deserve the epithet (which I have repudiated for Beddoes in another place) of "artificial." And yet both have the fragmentary, not to be analysed, almost uncanny charm and grandeur which have been spoken of in that place. Nor do this charm, this grandeur, fail to reappear (always more or less closely accompanied by the faults just mentioned, and also by a kind of flatulent rant which is worse than any of them) both in Dobell's war-songs, which may be said in a way to hand the torch on from Campbell to Mr. Kipling, and in his marvellously unequal blank verse, where the most excellent thought and phrase alternate with sheer balderdash—a pun which (it need hardly be said) was not spared by contemporary critics to the author of Balder.
Alexander Smith never rises to the heights nor strikes the distinct notes of Dobell; but the Life Drama is really on the whole better than either Balder or The Roman, and is full of what may be called, from opposite points of view, happy thoughts and quaint conceits, expressed in a stamp of verse certainly not quite original, but melodious always, and sometimes very striking. He has not yet had his critical resurrection, and perhaps none such will ever exalt him to a very high prominent position. He seems to suffer from the operation of that mysterious but very real law which decrees that undeserved popularity shall be followed by neglect sometimes even more undeserved. But when he does finally find his level, it will not be a very low one.
To the Spasmodics may be appended yet another list of bards who can claim here but the notice of a sentence or a clause, though by no means uninteresting to the student, and often very interesting indeed to the student-lover of poetry:—the two Joneses—Ernest (1819-69), a rather silly victim of Chartism, for which he went to prison, but a generous person and master of a pretty twitter enough; and Ebenezer (1820-60), a London clerk, author of Studies of Sensation and Event, a rather curious link between the Cockney school of the beginning of the century and some minor poets of our own times, but overpraised by his rediscoverers some years ago; W. C. Bennett, a popular song-writer; William Cory ( -1892), earlier and better known as Johnson, an Eton master, a scholar, an admirable writer of prose and in Ionica of verse slightly effeminate but with a note in it not unworthy of one glance of its punning title; W. C. Roscoe (1823-59), grandson of the historian, a minor poet in the best sense of the term; William Allingham (1824-89), sometime editor of Fraser, and a writer of verse from whom at one time something might have been expected; Thomas Woolner, a sculptor of great, and—in My Beautiful Lady, Pygmalion, etc.—a poet of estimable merit, whose first-named volume attracted rather disproportionate praise at its first appearance. As one thinks of the work of these and others—often enjoyable, sometimes admirable, and long ago or later admired and enjoyed—the unceremoniousness of despatching them so slightly brings a twinge of shame. But it is impossible to do justice to their work, or to the lyrics, merry or sensuous, of Mortimer Collins, who was nearly a real poet of vers de société, and had a capital satiric and a winning romantic touch; the stirring ballads of Walter Thornbury (which, however, would hardly have been written but for Macaulay on the one hand and Barham on the other) and the ill-conditioned but clever Radical railing of Robert Brough at "Gentlemen." But if they cannot be discussed, they shall at least be mentioned. On three others, Frederick Locker, Arthur Hugh Clough, and "Owen Meredith" (Lord Lytton), we must dwell longer.
Clough has been called by persons of distinction a "bad poet"; but this was only a joke, and, with all respect to those who made it, a rather bad joke. The author of "Qua Cursum Ventus," of the marvellous picture of the advancing tide in "Say not the struggle," and of not a few other things, was certainly no bad poet, though it would not be uncritical to call him a thin one. He was born at Liverpool on New Year's Day 1819, spent part of his childhood in America, went to Rugby very young and distinguished himself there greatly, though it may be doubted whether the peculiar system which Arnold had just brought into full play was the healthiest for a self-conscious and rather morbid nature like Clough's. From Rugby he went to Balliol, and was entirely upset, not, as is sometimes most unjustly said, by Newman, but by the influence of W. G. Ward, a genial Puck of Theology, who, himself caring for nothing but mathematics, philosophy, and play-acting, disturbed the consciences of others by metaphysical quibbles, and then took refuge in the Church of Rome. Clough, who had been elected to an Oriel fellowship, threw it up in 1848, turned freethinker, and became the head of an educational institution in London called University Hall. He did not hold this very long, receiving a post in the Education Office, which he held in various forms till his death in 1861 at Florence.
It is not necessary to be biassed by Matthew Arnold's musical epicede of "Thyrsis" in order to admit, nor should any bias against his theological views and his rather restless character be sufficient to induce any one to deny, a distinct vein of poetry in Clough. His earliest and most popular considerable work, The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (the title of which was originally rather different,) is written in hexameters which do not, like Kingsley's, escape the curse of that "pestilent heresy"; and the later Amours de Voyage and Dipsychus, though there are fine passages in both, bring him very close to the Spasmodic school, of which in fact he was an unattached and more cultivated member, with fancies directed rather to religiosity than to strict literature. Ambarvalia had preceded the Bothie, and other things followed. On the whole, Clough is one of the most unsatisfactory products of that well-known form of nineteenth century scepticism which has neither the strength to believe nor the courage to disbelieve "and have done with it." He hankers and looks back, his "two souls" are always warring with each other, and though the clash and conflict sometimes bring out fine things (as in the two pieces above cited and the still finer poem at Naples with the refrain "Christ is not risen"), though his "Latest Decalogue" has satirical merit, and some of his country poems, written without undercurrent of thought, are fresh and genial, he is on the whole a failure. But he is a failure of a considerable poet, and some fragments of success chequer him.
Frederick Locker, who on his second marriage took the additional name of Lampson, was born in 1821 of a family long connected with the Navy and with Greenwich Hospital. He himself held for some years a post in the Admiralty; but he was much more addicted to society and to literature than to official work. His first marriage with Lady Charlotte Bruce strengthened his social position, and his second gave him wealth. He published, as early as 1857, a volume of light verse entitled London Lyrics, which, with the work of Prior, Praed, and Mr. Austin Dobson, stands at the head of its kind in English. But—an exceedingly rare thing for amateur as well as for professional writers in our time—he was not tempted either by profit or fame to write copiously. He added during his not short life, which closed in May 1895, a few more poems to London Lyrics. He edited in 1867 an anthology of his own kind of verse called Lyra Elegantiarum, and in 1879 he produced a miscellany of verse and prose, original and selected, called Patchwork, in which some have seen his most accomplished and characteristic production. In form it is something like Southey's Omniana, partly a commonplace book, partly full of original things; but the extracts are so choicely made and the original part is so delightful that it is not quite like any book in the language. If Charles Lamb had been of Mr. Locker's time and circumstances he might have made its fellow. "My Guardian Angel," a short prose anecdote, is, as nearly as the present writer knows, unique. Latterly its author was chiefly known as a man of much hospitality and a collector of choice books. He would not do anything bad, and apparently he did not feel inclined to do anything good. And as this is a century when almost everybody must still be doing, and taking the chance of goodness and badness, such an exception to the rule should meet with honour.
No poet of the period, perhaps none of the century, occupies a position less settled by general criticism, or more difficult to settle, than that of Edward Robert, first Earl of Lytton, for a long time known in poetry as "Owen Meredith." The only son of the novelist, he was born on 8th November 1831, and after going to Harrow, but not to either university, entered the diplomatic service at the age of eighteen. In this he filled a great many different offices at a great many different places for nearly thirty years, till, after succeeding to his father's title, he was made First Minister at Lisbon, and then in 1876 Viceroy of India. This post he gave up in 1880, and after the return of the Tory party to power, was sent in 1887 as Ambassador to Paris, where he was very popular, and where he died in 1892.
Despite the fact that his time, save for the interval of 1880-87, was thus uninterruptedly occupied with business, Lord Lytton was an indefatigable writer of verse; while in The Ring of Amasis he tried the prose romance. His chief poetical books were Clytemnestra (1855); The Wanderer (1859), which contains some charming lyrical work; Lucile (1860), a verse story; Songs of Servia (Serbski Pesme) (1861); Orval, or the Fool of Time and Chronicles and Characters (1869); Fables in Song (1874); Glenaveril, a very long modern epic (1885); and After Paradise, or Legends of Exile (1887). Besides these he collaborated in 1861 with his friend Julian Fane in a poem, Tannhäuser, which, though too much of a Tennysonian echo, has good passages; and after his death two volumes equal if not superior to anything he had done, Marah, a collection of short poems, and King Poppy, a fantastic epic, were published. This extensive and not always easily accessible work is conveniently represented by two volumes of selections, one representing chiefly the earlier and shorter works, edited by Miss Betham-Edwards in 1890, the other drawn mostly from the later and longer, edited by his daughter, Lady Betty Balfour, in 1894. This latter was accompanied by reprints of The Wanderer and Lucile.
The difficulties in criticism above referred to arise, not merely from the voluminousness of this work, nor from the fact that Lord Lytton shares with all the poets of his special generation, except Rossetti, that inability to hit upon a definite and distinct manner of his own which is so frequently and strangely remarkable in what may be called intermediate poetical periods. Indeed in his later years he did strike out something like a very distinct style. But he suffers more than any other poet of anything like his gifts from two faults, one of which is perhaps the fault that hurts a poet most with the vulgar, and the other that which does him most harm with critics. He was so frankly pleased with, and so apt at imitating the work of his great contemporaries, that he would publish things to which fools gave the name of plagiarisms—when they were in fact studies in the manner of Tennyson, Heine, Browning, and others. And in the second place, though he frequently rewrote, it seemed impossible for him to retrench and concentrate. To this may be added his fondness for extremely long narrative poems, the taste for which has certainly gone out, while it may be doubted whether, unless they are pure romances of adventure, they are ever good things.
The consequence of all this, and perhaps of other things less legitimately literary, such as political partnership, has hitherto been that Lord Lytton has been ranked very far indeed below his proper place. For he had two poetical gifts, the higher of them in a high, the lower in an eminent degree. The first was the gift of true lyric, not seldom indeed marred by the lack of polish above noticed, but real, true, and constant, from the "Fata Morgana" and "Buried Heart" of The Wanderer to the "Experientia Docet" and "Selenites" of Marah, more than thirty years later. The other was a much more individual power, and by some might be ranked higher. It is the gift of what can best generally be called ironical narration, using irony in its proper sense of covert suggestive speech. This took various forms, indicated with more or less clearness in the very titles of Chronicles and Characters and Fables in Song,—symbolic-mystical in Legends of Exile (where not only some of the legends but the poems called "Uriel" and "Strangers" are among the best things of the author and highly typical of his later manner), and fantastically romantic, with a strong touch of symbolism, in King Poppy. And when, as happens in most of the pieces mentioned above and many others, the combination welds itself into a kind of passionate allegory, few poets show a better power of transporting the reader in the due poetic manner. There can be no doubt that if Lord Lytton had developed this faculty somewhat earlier (there are traces of it very early), had made its exercises rather more clear and direct, and had subjected their expression to severer thinning and compression, he would have made a great reputation as a poet. As it is, it cannot be denied that he had the positive faculties of poetry in kind and degree only inferior to those possessed by at most four or five of his English contemporaries from Tennyson downwards.
Nor should there perhaps lack mention of Roden Noel and Thomas Ashe, two writers in whom, from their earlier work, it was not unreasonable to expect poets of a distinct kind, and who, though they never improved on this early work, can never be said exactly to have declined from it. The first and elder was a son of the Earl of Gainsborough, was born in 1834, went to Cambridge, travelled a good deal, and at various times, till his death at the age of sixty, published much verse and not a little prose, both showing a distinctly poetical imagination without a sufficient organ of expression. Nor did he ever develop this except in A Little Child's Monument, where the passionate personal agony injures as much as it helps the poetical result. Mr. Ashe, who was born in 1836, and died in 1889, also a Cambridge man, had a much less ambitious and rather less interesting but somewhat better-organised talent for verse, and his Sorrows of Hypsipyle, published in 1866, caused and authorised at the time considerable expectations from him. But his vein was rather the result of classical culture working on a slight original talent than anything better, and he did not rise beyond a pleasant competence in verse which was never that of a poetaster, but hardly ever that of a distinct poet. In which respect he may appear here as the representative of no scanty company dead and living. For even the longest chapter of a book must have an end; and it is impossible to find room in it for the discussion of the question, whether the friends of Oliver Madox Brown, son of the famous Præ-Raphaelite painter, were or were not wrong in seeing extraordinary promise in his boyish work; whether the sonnets of Ernest Lefroy (1855-91) were exercises or works of art. A few more remarks on humorous poets and women-poets must close the record.
In the art of merely or mainly humorous singing two names, those of Edward Lear and Charles Stuart Calverley, entirely dominate the rest among dead writers in the last part of the century. Lear, a good deal the elder man of the two, was born in 1813, was a painter by profession, and was the "E. L." of a well-known poem of Tennyson's. It was not till 1861 that his delightful nonsense-verses, known to his friends in private, were first published, and they received various additions at intervals till his death in 1888. The sheer nonsense-verse—the amphigouri as the French call it—has been tried in various countries and at various times, but never with such success as in England, and it has seldom, if ever, been cultivated in England with such success as by Lear. His happy concoction of fantastic names, the easy slipping flow of his verse, and above all, the irresistible parody of sense and pathos that he contrived to instil into his rigmarole are unapproachable. In a new and not in the least opprobrious sense he was "within the realms of Nonsense absolute."
Calverley attempted less "uttermost isles" of fun. Born in 1831 of an excellent Yorkshire family, he was educated at Harrow, and—a thing as rare in the nineteenth as common in the seventeenth century—at both universities, gaining at both a great reputation for scholarship, eccentricity, and bodily strength. After some time he married and began to work at the Bar; but an accident on the ice in 1867 brought on concussion of the brain, though he lingered in constantly weakening health till 1884. His Verses and Translations twenty-two years earlier had made him the model of all literary undergraduates with a turn for humour; and he was able in spite of his affliction to issue some things later, the chief being Fly Leaves in 1872. Calverley, as has been said, was a scholar, and his versions both from and into the classical languages would of themselves have given him a reputation; but his forte lay partly in the easier vein of parody, wherein few excelled him, partly in the more difficult one of original light verse, wherein he had a turn (as in his famous eulogy on tobacco) quite his own. He has never been equalled in this, or even approached, except by James Kenneth Stephen (1859-92), whose premature death deprived his friends of a most amiable personality, and literature, in all probability, of a considerable ornament. As it was, "J. K. S." left next to nothing but two tiny collections of verse, showing an inspiration midway between Calverley and Praed, but with quite sufficient personal note.
Two other writers of less scholarly style, but belonging to the London Bohemian school of the third quarter of the century, W. J. Prowse, "Nicholas" (1836-70), and H. S. Leigh (1837-83), may be noticed. Prowse, whose career was very short, was the author of the charming lines on "The beautiful City of Prague," which have been attributed to others: while Leigh's Carols of Cockayne (he was also a playwright) vary the note of Hood happily, and now and then with a real originality.
Except Miss Rossetti, no woman during this time approached the poetical excellence of Mrs. Barrett Browning. But the whole period has been unprecedentedly fertile in poetesses, and whereas we had but five or six to mention in the earlier chapter devoted to verse, we have here at least a dozen, though no one who requires very extended notice here. Lady Dufferin (1807-1867), mother of the well-known diplomatist, a member of the Sheridan family, and her sister, and junior by a year, Mrs. Norton (1808-1876), were both writers of facile and elegant verse, with the Irish note of easy melody. The former was the less known to the general reader, though a few of her pieces, such as "The Irish Emigrant" and "Katie's Letter," have always been favourite numbers for recitation. Mrs. Norton at one time enjoyed a considerable reputation as a poetess by contributions to "Annuals" and "Souvenirs," chiefly in the sentimental ballad style which pleased the second quarter of the century. "The Outward Bound," "Bingen on the Rhine," and other things are at least passable, and one of the author's latest and most ambitious poems, The Lady of La Garaye, has a sustained respectability. To a few fanatical admirers the scanty verse of Emily Brontë has seemed worthy of such high praise that only mass of work would appear to be wanting to put her in the first rank of poetesses if not of poets. Part of this, however, it is to be feared, is due to admiration of the supposed freedom of thought in her celebrated "Last Lines," which either in sincerity or bravado pronounce that "vain are the thousand creeds," and declare for a sort of vague Pantheism, immanent at once in self and the world. At thirty, however, a genuine poetess should have produced more than a mere handful of verse, and its best things should be independent of polemical partisanship either for or against orthodoxy. As a matter of fact, her exquisite "Remembrance," and the slightly rhetorical but brave and swinging epigram of "The Old Stoic," give her better claims than the "Last Lines," and with them and a few others place her as a remarkable though not by any means a supreme figure.
The more prudent admirers of Marian Evans (George Eliot), who wrote a good deal of verse, either admit that her verse was not poetry, or hold up a much-quoted passage, "Oh, may I join the choir invisible," which, like the far superior piece just referred to, is only a hymn on the side which generally dispenses with hymns; and not a very good one, though couched in fair Wordsworthian blank verse. They would no doubt indulge in derisive scorn at the idea of the mild muse of Adelaide Anne Procter, daughter of "Barry Cornwall," receiving praise denied to Miss Brontë and Miss Evans; and it must be admitted that Miss Procter never did anything so good as "Remembrance." On the other hand, she was quite free from the "sawdust" and heaviness which mar George Eliot's verse. Her style was akin to that which has been noticed in speaking of Mrs. Norton, though of a somewhat later fashion, and like those of her father, her songs, especially the famous "Message," had the knack of suiting composers. Menella Bute Stedley and Dora Greenwell, a respectable pair, somewhat older than Miss Procter (she was born in 1825 and died in 1864), considerably outlived her, Miss Stedley's life lasting from 1820 to 1877, and Miss Greenwell's from 1821 to 1882. Both were invalids, and soothed their cares with verse, the latter to the better effect, though both in no despicable strain. Augusta Webster (1840-94) and Emily Pfeiffer ( -1890) were later poetesses of the same kind, but lower rank, though both were greatly praised by certain critics. Sarah Williams, a short-lived writer of some sweetness (1841-68), commended herself chiefly to those who enjoy verse religious but "broad"; Constance Naden to those who like pessimist agnosticism; Amy Levy to those who can deplore a sad fate and admire notes few and not soaring, but passionate and genuine.
Certain novelists who were mentioned at the end of chapter iii., though they all lived far into the last half of the century, not only belonged essentially to its first division, but strictly speaking fell out of strict chronological arrangement of any kind, being of the class of more or less eccentric men of genius who may appear at any time and belong to none in particular; and certain others of the earlier time, less eccentric, lived on far towards our own. About 1850 however, a little before or a little after it, there appeared a group of novelists of great talent, and in some cases of genius itself, who were less self-centred, and exemplified to a greater degree the special tendencies of the time. These tendencies were variously connected with the Oxford or Tractarian Movement; the transfer of political power from the upper to the middle classes by the first Reform Bill; the rise of what is for shortness called Science; the greater esteem accorded to and the more general practice of what is, again for shortness, called Art; the extension in a certain sense of education; the re-engagement of England, long severed from continental politics, in those politics by the Crimean war; the enormous development of commerce by the use of steam navigation and of railways; the opening up of Australia and its neighbourhood; the change effected in the East by the removal, gradual for some time, then rapid and complete after the Indian Mutiny, of the power of the East India Company; and the "Liberal" movement generally.
To work and counterwork out the influence of these various causes on separate authors, and the connection of the authors with the causes, would take a volume in itself. But on the scale and within the limits possible here, the names of Charlotte Brontë, Marian Evans (commonly called George Eliot), Charles Kingsley, Anthony Trollope, and Charles Reade will give us such central points as can be most safely utilised. Another, Miss Charlotte Yonge, the chief practitioner of the religious novel, was contemporary with almost the earliest of these, but falls out of this book as still living.
The members of this group were, as happens with a repeated coincidence in literary history too distinct to be altogether neglected, born within a very few years of each other: Reade in 1814, Trollope in 1815, Miss Brontë next year, Kingsley and Miss Evans in 1819; but as generally happens likewise, their appearance as authors, or at least as novelists, did not follow in exact sequel. The first-renowned, the shortest-lived, and though by no means the most brilliant or powerful, in a certain way the freshest and most independent, was Charlotte Brontë, the daughter of a Yorkshire clergyman of eccentric and not altogether amiable character and of Irish blood. She was born on 21st April 1816. The origin of the Brontës or Pruntys has, as well as their family history generally, been discussed with the curiously disproportionate minuteness characteristic of our time; but hardly anything need be said of the results of the investigation, except that they were undoubtedly Irish. Charlotte's mother died soon after the Rev. Patrick Brontë had received the living of Haworth, and Charlotte herself was sent to school at a place called Cowan's Bridge, her experiences at which have in the same way been the subject of endless inquiry into the infinitely little, in connection with the "Lowood" of Jane Eyre. After two of her sisters had died, and she herself had been very ill, she was taken away and educated partly at home, partly elsewhere. Her two surviving sisters, who were her juniors, Emily by two years and Anne by four, were both of more or less literary leanings, and as they were all intended to be governesses, the sole profession for poor gentlewomen in the middle of the century, Emily and Charlotte were sent to Brussels to qualify. In 1846 the three published a joint volume of Poems under the pseudonyms (which kept their initials) of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, and to people over middle age Charlotte Brontë is still perhaps most familiar as Currer Bell. Emily's poems are elsewhere commented upon. The eldest and youngest sister had no poetical vocation, and Anne had not much for prose. But she, like the others, attempted it after the failure of their verse in a triad of novels, The Professor, by Charlotte; Wuthering Heights (very much praised by those who look first for unconventionality and force), by Emily, who followed it with The Tenant of Wildfell Hall; and Agnes Grey, by Anne. But Charlotte could not get The Professor published—indeed it is anything but a good book—and set to work at the famous Jane Eyre, which after being freely refused by publishers, was accepted by Messrs. Smith and Elder and published in 1847, with the result of violent attacks and very considerable popularity. Death the next year and the year after robbed her of both her sisters and of her brother Patrick, a ne'er-do-weel, who, on the strength of his Bohemianism and his sisters, is sometimes supposed to have had genius. Shirley appeared in 1849, and Villette in 1852. In 1854 Charlotte married her father's curate, Mr. Nicholls, but died next year, on 31st March 1855.
Perhaps the most interesting way of looking at Charlotte Brontë, who, as has been said, has been violently attacked, and who has also been extravagantly praised (though not so extravagantly as her sister Emily), is to look at her in the light of a precursor or transition-novelist, representing the time when the followers of Scott had wearied the public with second-rate romances, when Thackeray had not arisen, or had only just arisen, and when the modern domestic novel in its various kinds, from the religious to the problematic, was for the most part in embryo, or in very early stages. This latter novel she in fact anticipated in many of its kinds, and partly to the fact of this anticipation, partly to the vividness which her representation of personal experiences gave to her work, may the popularity which it at first had, and such of it as has survived, be assigned. In this latter point, however, lay danger as well as safety. It seems very improbable that if Charlotte Brontë had lived, and if she had continued to write, her stock of experiences would have sufficed her; and it would not appear that she had much else. She is indeed credited with inventing the "ugly hero" in the Mr. Rochester of Jane Eyre, but in the long-run ugliness palls almost as much as beauty, perhaps sooner. Except in touches probably due to suggestions from Emily, the "weirdness" of the younger sister was not exhibited by the elder. The more melodramatic parts of the book would not have borne repetition, and its main appeal now lies in the Lowood scenes and the character of Jane herself, which are both admittedly autobiographical. So also Shirley is her sister Emily, the curates who pester her appear to have been almost in case to enter libel actions if they thought proper, and Villette is little more than an embroidered version of the Brussels sojourn. How successful an appeal of this kind is, the experience of Byron and many others has shown; how dangerous it is, could not be better shown than by the same experience. It was Charlotte Brontë's good fortune that she died before she had utterly exhausted her vein, though those who fail to regard Paul Emanuel with the affection which he seems to inspire in some, may think that she went perilously near it. But fate was kind to her: some interesting biographies and brilliant essays at different periods have revived and championed her fame: and her books—at least Jane Eyre almost as a whole and parts of the others—will always be simply interesting to the novel-reader, and interesting in a more indirect fashion to the critic. For this last will perceive that, thin and crude as they are, they are original, they belong to their own present and future, not to their past, and that so they hold in the history of literature a greater place than many books of greater accomplishment which are simply worked on already projected and accepted lines. Emily's work, though too small in bulk and too limited in character to be put really high, has this original character in intense equality.
The mantle of Charlotte Brontë fell almost directly from her shoulders on those of another novelist of her sex. The author of Jane Eyre died, as has been said, in the spring of 1855. In the autumn of the next year was written, and in the January issue of Blackwood's Magazine for 1857 appeared, the first of a series of Scenes of Clerical Life. The author, then and for some time afterwards unknown, was Mary Ann or Marian Evans, who took various styles during her life, but wrote habitually under the nom de guerre of "George Eliot." Miss Brontë had not been a very precocious novelist; but Miss Evans did not begin to write novels till she was nearly as old as Miss Brontë was when she died. Her time, however, had been by no means wasted. Born on 22nd November 1819, at Arbury in Warwickshire, where her father was land-steward to Mr. Newdigate, she moved, after twenty years' life in the country or at school, with her father into Coventry, and became acquainted with a set of Unitarians who had practically broken all connection with Christianity. She accepted their opinions with the curious docility and reflexiveness which, strong as was her mind in a way, always distinguished her; and as a sign of profession she undertook the translation of Strauss' Leben Jesu. In 1849 she went abroad, and stayed for some time at Geneva, studying hard, and not returning to England till next year. Then establishing herself in London, she began to write for the Westminster Review, which she helped to edit, and translated Feuerbach's Wesen des Christenthums. It is highly probable that she would never have been known except as an essayist and translator, if she had not formed an irregular union with George Henry Lewes, a very clever and versatile journalist, who was almost a philosopher, almost a man of science, and perhaps quite a man of letters of the less creative kind. Under his influence (he had been a novelist himself, though an unsuccessful one, and was an excellent critic) the docility above remarked on turned itself into the channel of novel-writing, with immediate and amazing success.
Some good judges have thought that Miss Evans never exceeded, in her own special way, the Scenes of Clerical Life. But it was far exceeded in popularity by Adam Bede, which, oddly enough, was claimed by or at least for an impostor after its triumphant appearance in 1858. The position of the author may be said to have been finally established by The Mill on the Floss (1860), though the opening part of Silas Marner (1861) is at least equal if not superior to anything she ever did. Her later works were Romola, a story of the Italian Renaissance (1863); Felix Holt, the Radical (1866); some poems (the Spanish Gypsy, Jubal, etc., 1868-74); Middlemarch (1871); and Daniel Deronda (1876). This last was followed by a volume of essays entitled the Impressions of Theophrastus Such. Mr. Lewes having died in 1878, Miss Evans, in May 1880, married Mr. John Cross, and died herself in December of the same year. Her Life and Letters were subsequently published by her husband, but the letters proved extremely disappointing to her admirers, and the life was not very illuminative, except as to that docility and capacity for taking colour and pressure from surroundings which have been noticed above.
As a poet George Eliot has been noticed elsewhere. She merely put some of the thoughtful commonplaces of her time and school into wooden verse, occasionally grandiose but never grand, and her purple passages have the purple of plush not of velvet. Nor is she very remarkable as an essayist, though some of her early articles have merit, and though Theophrastus Such, appearing at a time when her general hold on the public was loosening, not commending itself in form to her special admirers, and injured in parts by the astonishing pseudo-scientific jargon which she had acquired, was received rather more coldly than it deserved. But as a novelist she is worthy of careful attention. Between 1860 and 1870, a decade in which Thackeray passed away early and during which Dickens did no first-class work, she had some claims to be regarded as the chief English novelist who had given much and from whom more was to be expected; after Dickens' death probably four critics out of five would have given her the place of greatest English novelist without hesitation. Nevertheless, even from the first there were dissidents: while at the time of the issue of Middlemarch her fame was at the very highest, the publication of Daniel Deronda made it fall rapidly; and a considerable reaction (perhaps to be reversed, perhaps not) has set in against her since her death.
The analysis of George Eliot's genius is indeed exceedingly curious. There are in her two currents or characters which are more or less mingled in all her books, but of which the one dominates in those up to and including Silas Marner, while the other is chiefly noticeable in those from Romola onward. The first, the more characteristic and infinitely the more healthy and happy, is a quite extraordinary faculty of humorous observation and presentation of the small facts and oddities of (especially provincial) life. The Scenes of Clerical Life show this strongly, together with a fund of untheatrical pathos which scarcely appears in so genuine a form afterwards. In Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss it combines with a somewhat less successful vein of tragedy to make two admirable, if not faultless, novels; it lends a wonderful charm to the slight and simple study of Silas Marner. But, abundant as it is, it would seem that this is observation, not invention, nor that happiest blending of observation and invention which we find in Shakespeare and Scott. The accumulated experiences of her long and passive youth were now poured out with a fortunate result. But in default of invention, and in presence of the scientific or pseudo-scientific spirit which was partly natural to her and partly imbibed from those who surrounded her, she began, after Silas Marner, to draw always in part and sometimes mainly upon quite different storehouses. It is probable that the selection of the Italian Renaissance subject of Romola was a very disastrous one. She herself said that she "was a young woman when she began the book and an old one when she finished it." It is a very remarkable tour de force, but it is a tour de force executed entirely against the grain. It is not alive: it is a work of erudition not of genius, of painful manufacture not of joyous creation or even observation. And this note of labour deepened and became more obvious even when she returned to modern and English subjects, by reason of the increased "purpose" which marked her later works. It has been noted by all critics of any perception as extremely piquant, though not to careful students of life and letters at all surprising, that George Eliot, whose history was always well known, is in almost every one of her books the advocate of the strictest union of love and marriage—no love without marriage and no marriage without love. But she was not satisfied with defending this thesis, beneficial, comparatively simple, and, in the situations which it suggests, not unfriendly to art. In her last book, Daniel Deronda, she embarked on a scheme, equally hopeless and gratuitous, of endeavouring to enlist the public sympathies in certain visions of neo-Judaism. In all these books indeed, even in Deronda, the old faculty of racy presentation of the humours of life recurred. But it became fainter and less frequent; and it was latterly obscured, as has been hinted, by a most portentous jargon borrowed from the not very admirable lingo of the philosophers and men of science of the last half of the nineteenth century. All these things together made the later books conspicuously, what even the earlier had been to some extent, lifeless structures. They were constructed no doubt with much art and of material not seldom precious, but they were not lively growths, and they were fatally tinged with evanescent "forms in chalk," fancies of the day and hour, not less ephemeral for being grave in subject and seeming, and almost more jejune or even disgusting to posterity on that account.
Almost as much of the time, though curiously different in the aspect of it which he represented, was Charles Kingsley, who was born in the same year as George Eliot, on the 18th of June 1819. A fanciful critic might indulge in a contrast between the sober though not exactly dull scenery of the Midlands which saw her birth, and that of the most beautiful part of Devonshire (Holne, on the south-eastern fringe of Dartmoor) where, at the vicarage which his father held, Kingsley was born. He was educated at King's College, London, and Magdalene College, Cambridge, took a very good degree, and very soon after his appointment to the curacy of Eversley, in Hampshire, became rector thereof in 1844. He held the living for the rest of his life, dying there on the 23rd January 1875. It was not, however, by any means his only preferment. In 1860 he was made Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, not the most fortunate of appointments; for, with a tendency to small slips in fact at least equal to that of his friend and brother-in-law Mr. Froude, Kingsley, though capable of presenting separate aspects and facets of the past admirably, had not the general historic grasp which redeemed Froude. Nine years later he resigned the post and was made a Canon of Chester, while in 1873 this was exchanged for a Canonry at Westminster and a Chaplaincy to the Queen. Otherwise Kingsley's private life was happy and uneventful, its chief incident being a voyage to the West Indies (which, though unvisited, he had long before so brilliantly described) in 1871.
His literary work was very large, much varied, and of an excellence almost more varied than its kinds. He began, of course, with verse, and his Saint's Tragedy (1848), a drama on the story of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, was followed by shorter poems (far too few) at different times, most of them previous to 1858, though the later books contain some charming fragments, and some appeared posthumously. Of all men who have written so little verse during as long a life in our time, Kingsley is probably the best poet. The Saint's Tragedy is a little "viewy" and fluent. But in Andromeda he has written the very best English hexameters ever produced, and perhaps the only ones in which that alien or rebel takes on at least the semblance of a loyal subject to the English tongue. The rise of the breeze after the passage of the Nereids, the expostulation of Andromeda with Perseus, and the approach of the monster, are simply admirable. "The Last Buccaneer" and "The Red King"—call them "Wardour Street," as some critics may—are among the best of their kind; and scores of songs, snatches, etc., from "The Three Fishers" and "The Starlings" of a very early date to the "When all the world is young" ballad of the Water Babies and the posthumous fragment in rhyme of "Lorraine, Lorraine, Lorrèe"—one of the triumphs of that pure poetry which has the minimum of meaning, yet enough—are of extraordinary vigour, freshness, and charm.
But Kingsley was one of those darlings—perhaps the rarest—of the Muses to whom they grant the gift not only of doing a little poetry exquisitely, but the further gift of abstaining from doing anything ill; and he seems to have recognised almost at once that "the other harmony," that of prose, was the one meant for him to do his day's work in. An enthusiast for the people, and an eager disciple of Carlyle, he produced in the fateful year 1849 two novels, Alton Locke and Yeast, a little crude, immature, and violent, but of wonderful power and beauty as literature, and putting current ideas of Chartism, the Tractarian movement, the woes of the working classes, and what not, with that most uncommon touch which takes out of the expression all its ephemerality. He had joined Maurice in the "Christian Socialist" movement, and was a frequent newspaper writer in the same sense as that of his novels; while he soon began to contribute to Fraser's Magazine a series of extremely brilliant essays, since collected in various forms, on literature, scenery, sport (he was an ardent fisherman), and things in general. His next novel, Hypatia, is still shot with Christian Socialism, but is much less crude; and a further sobering down without any loss of force appears in the great Elizabethan novel of Westward Ho! usually, and perhaps rightly, thought his masterpiece (1855). Two Years Ago (1857), the title of which refers to the Crimean War, is much more unequal, and exhibits signs of a certain declension, though to a level still very high. His last novel, Hereward the Wake (1866), was and is very variously judged.
But even the poems, the essays, and the novels, do not by any means fill up the list of the results of Kingsley's activity. He was a constant, and at his best a very good, sermon-writer for publication. He produced in the first flush of the rage for seashore studies (1854) a very pleasant little book called Glaucus; he collected some of his historical lectures in The Roman and the Teuton; and he wrote in 1863 the delightful nondescript of The Water Babies, part story, part satire, part Rabelaisian fatrasie, but almost all charming, and perhaps the latest book in which his powers appear at their very best. These powers, as exhibited in his novels, with a not dissimilar exhibition in little in his essays, are so remarkable that in certain senses Kingsley may, with a little kindness, be put in the very first class of English novelists, and might be put there by the sternest critical impartiality were it not for his concomitant defects. These defects are fairly numerous, and they are unfortunately of a kind not likely to escape attention. He was a rather violent, though a very generous partisan, and was perpetually going out of his way to provoke those on the other side by "flings" of this or that kind. He was extremely fond of arguing, but was a most poor and unhappy logician. One of the best known and most unfortunate episodes of his literary life was the controversy into which he plunged with Newman in 1864. Kingsley had before on various occasions spoken enthusiastically of Newman's genius and character: the reference to the peculiar estimate of truth held by some Roman Catholics, and approved, or supposed to be approved, by Newman, which was the text for the latter's wrath, was anything but offensive, and it afterwards became certain, through the publication of the Apologia, that the future Cardinal, with the inspiration of a born controversialist, had simply made Kingsley the handle for which he had been waiting. A very little dialectical skill would have brought Kingsley out of the contest with honours at least divided; but, as it was, he played like a child into Newman's hands, and not only did much to re-establish that great man in public opinion, but subjected himself at the time, and to some extent since, to an obloquy at least as unjust as that which had rested upon Newman. This maladroitness appears constantly in the novels themselves, and it is accompanied not merely by the most curious and outrageous blunders in fact (such as that which represents Marlowe as dying in the time of James the First, not that of Elizabeth), but by odd lapses of taste in certain points, and in some (chiefly his later) books by a haphazard and inartistic construction.
We must, of course, allow for these things, which are the more annoying in that they are simply a case of those which incuria fudit. But when they are allowed for, there will remain such a gallery of scenes, characters, and incidents, as few English novelists can show. The best passages of Kingsley's description, from Alton Locke to Hereward, are almost unequalled and certainly unsurpassed. The shadows of London low life and of working-class thought in Alton Locke, imitated with increasing energy for half a century, have never been quite reached, and are most brilliantly contrasted with the lighter Cambridge scenes. Yeast, perhaps the least general favourite among his books, and certainly the crudest, has a depth of passion and power, a life, an intensity, the tenth part of which would make the fortune of a novel now; and the variety and brilliancy of Hypatia are equalled by its tragedy. Unequal as Two Years Ago is, and weak in parts, it still has admirable passages; and Hereward to some extent recovers the strange panoramic and phantasmagoric charm of Hypatia. But where Westward Ho! deserves the preference, and where Kingsley vindicates his claim to be the author not merely of good passages but of a good book, is in the sustained passion of patriotism, the heroic height of adventure and chivalry, which pervades it from first to last. Few better historical novels have ever been written; and though, with one exception, that of Salvation Yeo, the author has drawn better characters elsewhere, he has nowhere knitted his incidents into such a consistent whole, or worked characters and scenes together into such a genuine and thorough work of art.
Anthony Trollope, one of the most typical novelists of the century, or at least of the half-century, in England, if not one of the greatest, was a member of a literary family whose other members, of more or less distinction, may for convenience' sake best be mentioned here. Little is recorded of his father, who was, however, a barrister, and a Fellow of New College, Oxford. But Anthony's mother, the "Mrs. Trollope" of two generations ago, who was born a Miss Milton in 1780, was herself very well known in print, especially by her novel of The Widow Barnaby (1839), which had sequels, and by her very severe Domestic Manners of the Americans, which appeared in 1832, after she had qualified herself to write it by a three years' residence in the United States. She wrote a great deal at this period, and survived till 1863; but her work hardly survived as long as she did. It has, however, been said, and not without justice, that much of the more vivid if coarser substance of her younger son's humour is to be traced in it. The elder son, Thomas Adolphus, who was born in 1810, and lived from 1841 for some half-century onwards in Italy, was also a prolific novelist, and wrote much on Italian history; while perhaps his best work was to be found in some short pieces, combining history with a quasi-fictitious interest, which he contributed to the periodicals edited by Dickens.
But neither mother nor elder brother could vie with Anthony, who was born in 1815, was educated at Winchester and Harrow, spent the greater part of his life as an official of the Post Office, and died in December 1882, leaving an enormous number of novels, which at one time were the most popular, or almost the most popular, of their day, and to which rather fastidious judges have found it difficult to refuse all but the highest praise. Almost immediately after Trollope's death appeared an Autobiography in which, with praiseworthy but rather indiscreet frankness, he detailed habits of work of a mechanical kind, the confession of which played into the hands of those who had already begun to depreciate him as a mere book-maker. It is difficult to say how many novels he wrote, persevering as he did in composition up to the very time of his death; and it is certain that the productions of his last decade were, as a rule, very inferior to his best. This best is to be found chiefly, but not entirely, in what is called the "Barsetshire" series, clustering round a county and city which are more or less exactly Hampshire and Winchester, beginning in 1855 with The Warden, a good but rather immature sketch, and continuing through Barchester Towers (perhaps his masterpiece), Doctor Thorne, Framley Parsonage, and The Small House at Allington (the two latter among the early triumphs of the Cornhill Magazine), to The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867), which runs Barchester Towers very hard, if it does not surpass it. Other favourite books of his were The Three Clerks, Orley Farm, Can You Forgive Her, and Phineas Finn—nor does this by any means exhaust the list even of his good books.
It has been said that Trollope is a typical novelist, and the type is of sufficient importance to receive a little attention, even in space so jealously allotted as ours must be. The novel craved by and provided for the public of this second period (it has also been said) was a novel of more or less ordinary life, ranging from the lower middle to the upper class, correctly observed, diversified by sufficient incident not of an extravagant kind, and furnished with description and conversation not too epigrammatic but natural and fairly clever. This norm Trollope hit with surprising justness, and till the demand altered a little or his own hand failed (perhaps there was something of both) he continued to hit it. His interests and experiences were fairly wide; for, besides being active in his Post Office duties at home and abroad, he was an enthusiastic fox-hunter, fairly fond of society and of club-life, ambitious enough at least to try other paths than those of fiction in his Thackeray (a failure), his Cicero (a worse failure), and other things. And everything that he saw he could turn into excellent novel-material. No one has touched him in depicting the humours of a public office, few in drawing those of cathedral cities and the hunting-field. If his stories, as stories, are not of enthralling interest or of very artfully constructed plots, their craftsmanship in this respect leaves very little to complain of. And he can sometimes, as in the Stanhope family of Barchester Towers, in Mrs. Proudie passim, in Madalina Demolines, and in others, draw characters very little removed from those who live with us for ever. It is extremely improbable that there will ever be a much better workman of his own class; and his books are certainly, at their best, far better than all but one or two that appear, not merely in any given year nowadays, but in any given lustrum. Yet the special kind of their excellence, the facts that they reflect their time without transcending it, and that in the way of merely reflective work each time prefers its own workmen and is never likely to find itself short of them, together with the great volume of Trollope's production, are certainly against him; and it is hard even for those who enjoyed him most, and who can still enjoy him, to declare positively that there is enough of the permanent and immortal in him to justify the hope of a resurrection.
In Charles Reade, on the other hand, there is undoubtedly something of this permanent or transcendent element, though less perhaps than some fervent admirers of his have claimed. He was born on June 1814 at Ipsden in Oxfordshire, where his family had been some time seated as squires. He had no public school education, but was elected first to a Demyship and then to a Fellowship at Magdalen College, Oxford. He was called to the Bar in 1842; but his Fellowship made him independent, and he pursued many crazes—he was one of the most eccentric of those English authors who are noticed in this volume—but no profession. He did not even begin to write very early, and when he did it was drama, not prose or fiction. He was not very successful with the stage, though he never quite gave it up. It was about 1852 when he began to write, or at least to publish, novels; and between the Peg Woffington of that year and his death on 1st April 1884 he produced nearly a score, diversifying the publication with law-suits, eccentric newspaper correspondences, and other things. Indeed he has in more than one of his books introduced mental delusions with such startling subtlety and truth, and was so entirely odd in the ordinary relations of life, that some have not hesitated to insinuate a slight want of sanity.
If there was any madness in him, the hackneyed alliance of great wits was certainly not refused. A novelist of violent likes and dislikes himself, he has found violent partisans and scornful pooh-poohers. Among the former there is perhaps hardly one of his chief books—the quaint and brilliant Peg Woffington, the pathetic Christie Johnstone, Hard Cash, Griffith Gaunt, Put Yourself in his Place, A Terrible Temptation, and the rest—which has not special sectaries. But catholic criticism would undoubtedly put It is Never too Late to Mend (1856) and The Cloister and the Hearth (1861) at the head of all. The former is a tale of the moment, based chiefly on some stories which had got abroad of tyranny in gaols, and on the Australian gold fever of a few years earlier. The latter is a pure romance, purporting to tell the adventures of Erasmus' father in the fifteenth century. The contrast of these subjects illustrates admirably a curious combination in Reade's genius which, for the matter of that, might be independently exemplified from either book. On the one side he was one of the earliest and one of the most industrious of those who have been called the "document" or "reporter" novelists—now collecting enormous stores of newspaper cuttings and busying himself with keenest interest in the things of the day; now, as in The Cloister and the Hearth, not disdaining to impart realism and vividness to his pictures by adapting and almost translating whole passages from Erasmus' own Colloquies. On the other, he was a poetic seer and dreamer, of the strongest romantic force, and capable of extraordinary flights of power, passion, and pathos. But there was another thing that he was not, and that was a critic. His taste and judgment were extremely deficient; he had no sense of general proportion in his work; and was quite as likely to be melodramatic as to be tragical, to be coarse as to be strong, to be tedious as to be amusing, to be merely revolting as to purify by pity and terror. Both the books just specially mentioned may be thought too long: it is certain that The Cloister and the Hearth is. That a freshness still evident in Christie Johnstone has been lost in both (having been killed by "the document") is also true. But still, Reade undoubtedly had genius, and to genius most things can without much trouble be forgiven.
The chief novelist of what is rather loosely called the School of Dickens, was Wilkie Collins, son of the painter of that name, who was born in London on 8th January 1824, and died in 1889. His greatest popularity was in the decade between 1857 and 1866, when The Dead Secret, The Woman in White, No Name, and Armadale, especially the second, had an immense vogue. Perhaps The Moonstone, which is later, is also better than any of these. The strictly literary merit of none could be put high, and the method, that of forwarding the result by a complicated intertwist of letters and narratives, though it took the public fancy for a time, was clumsy; while the author followed his master in more than one aberration of taste and sentiment. His brother Charles Collins, who had a much shorter life, had a much more delicate style and fancy; and the Cruise upon Wheels, a record of an actual tour slightly embellished and thrown into fictitious form, is one of the books which have, and are not, unless they drop entirely out of sight, likely to lose, a firm following of friends, few perhaps but faithful. Mortimer Collins, a contemporary, but no relation of these, whose poems have already been mentioned, was born in 1827 and died in 1876, the last twenty years of his life having been occupied by various and voluminous literary work. He was one of the last of the so-called Bohemian school in letters and journalism, something of a scholar, a fertile novelist, and a versatile journalist in most of the kinds which make up modern journalism.
Henry Kingsley, younger brother of Charles, was himself a prolific and vigorous novelist; and though a recent attempt to put him above his brother cannot possibly be allowed by sound criticism, he had perhaps a more various command of fiction, certainly a truer humour, and if a less passionate, perhaps a more thoroughly healthy literary temperament. But his life was not long, and he was unfortunately compelled during most of it to write for a living. Born in 1830, he was educated at King's College, London, and Worcester College, Oxford, on leaving which latter he went to Australia and lived there for five years. Returning in 1859, he wrote the admirable Australian story of Geoffrey Hamlyn, which, with Ravenshoe two years later, contains most of his work that can be called really first rate. He returned to Australia for his subject in The Hillyars and the Burtons, and wrote several other novels before his death in 1876, having been during part of the time a newspaper editor, a newspaper correspondent, and a journalist generally. The absence of composition, which Flaubert deplored in English novels generally, shows at its height in Henry Kingsley, whose Ravenshoe, for instance, has scarcely any plot at all, and certainly owes nothing to what it has; while he was a rapid and careless writer. But he had, in a somewhat less elaborate form, all his brother's talents for description of scene and action, and his characters, if more in the way of ordinary life, are also truer to that life. Also he is particularly to be commended for having, without the slightest strait-lacedness, and indeed with a good deal of positive Bohemianism, exhibited the nineteenth century English notion of what constitutes a gentleman perhaps better than any one else. "There are some things a fellow can't do"—the chance utterance of his not ungenerous scamp Lord Welter—is a memorable sentence, whereon a great sermon might be preached.
A little older than Henry Kingsley (he died in the same year), much more popular for a time, and the exerter of an influence which has not ceased yet, and has been on the whole distinctly undervalued, was George Henry Lawrence, who was educated at Rugby and Balliol, was called to the Bar, but was generally known in his own time as Major Lawrence from a militia commission which he held. He also fought in, or at least was present during, the war of independence of the southern states of America. Lawrence, who was born in 1827, published in his thirtieth year a novel, Guy Livingstone, which was very popular, and much denounced as the Gospel of "muscular blackguardism"—a parody on the phrase "muscular Christianity," which had been applied to and not unwelcomed by Charles Kingsley. The book exhibited a very curious blend of divers of the motives and interests which have been specified as actuating the novel about this time. Lawrence, who was really a scholar, felt to the full the Præ-Raphaelite influence in art, though by no means in religion, and wrote in a style which is a sort of transition between the excessive floridness of the first Lord Lytton and the later Corinthianism of Mr. Symonds. But he retained also from his prototype, and new modelled, the tendency to take "society" and the manners, especially the amatory manners, of society very much as his province. And thus he rather shocked the moralists, not only in Guy Livingstone itself, but in its successors Sword and Gown, Barren Honour, Sans Merci, etc. That Lawrence's total ideal, both in style and sentiment, was artificial, false, and flawed, may be admitted. But he has to a great extent been made to bear the blame of exaggerations of his own scheme by others; and he was really a novelist and a writer of great talent, which somehow came short, but not so very far short, of genius.
Mrs. Gaskell was older than most of those hitherto mentioned in this chapter, having been born in 1810; but she did not begin to write very early. Mary Barton, her first and nearly her best book, appeared in 1848, and its vivid picture of Manchester life, assisted by its great pathos, naturally attracted attention at that particular time. Cranford (1853), in a very different style, something like a blend of Miss Mitford and Miss Austen, has been the most permanently popular of her works. Ruth, of the same year, shocked precisians (which it need not have done), but is of much less literary value than Mary Barton or Cranford. Mrs. Gaskell, who was the biographer of Charlotte Brontë, produced novels regularly till her death in 1865, and never wrote anything bad, though it may be doubted whether anything but Cranford will retain permanent rank.
The year 1857, which saw Guy Livingstone, saw a book as different as possible in ideal, but also one of no common merit, in John Halifax, Gentleman. The author of this was Dinah Maria Mulock, who afterwards became Mrs. Craik. She was born at Stoke-upon-Trent in 1826, and had written for nearly ten years when John Halifax appeared. She died in 1888, having written a very great deal both in prose and verse; the former part including many novels, of which the best perhaps is A Life for a Life. Mrs. Craik was an example of the influence, so often noticed and to be noticed in the latter part of our period, of the great demand for books on writers of any popularity. Her work was never bad; but it was to a very great extent work which was, as the French say, the "small change" for what would probably in other circumstances have been a very much smaller quantity of much better work. How this state of things—which has been brought about on the one hand by the printing press, newspapers, and the spread of education, on the other by the disuse of sinecures, patronage, pensions, and easy living generally—is to be prevented from affecting literature very disastrously is not clear. Its negative or rather privative effect cannot but be bad; if its positive effect is always as good as the works of Mrs. Craik, it will be fortunate.
It is difficult, in a book of this kind, to know how far to attempt the subdivisions of specialist novels which have been common, such as for instance the sporting novel, the practitioners of which have been innumerable. The chief perhaps were Robert Surtees, the author of the facetious series of which "Mr. Jorrocks" is the central and best figure, and Major Whyte-Melville. The former, about the middle of the century, carried out with much knowledge, not inconsiderable wit, and the advantage of admirable illustrations from the pencil of John Leech, something like the original idea of Pickwick as a sporting romance, and there is a strong following of Dickens in him. Major Whyte-Melville, born near St. Andrews in 1821 and heir to property there, was educated at Eton, served for some years in the Guards, and with the Turkish Contingent in the Crimean War, and was killed in the hunting-field in 1878. He touched various styles, chiefly those of Lever and Bulwer, while he had a sort of contact with George Lawrence. He was never happier than in depicting his favourite pastime, which figures in most of his novels and inspired him with some capital verse. But in Holmby House, Sarchedon, the Gladiators, etc., he tried the historical style also.
Nor must the brief life, embittered by physical suffering, but productive of not a little very cheerful work, of Francis Edward Smedley, a relation of the poetess mentioned in the last chapter, be forgotten. He, born in 1818, went to Cambridge, and then became a novelist and journalist, dying in 1864. His best work belongs to exactly the period with which this chapter begins, the early fifties, and had the advantage, like other novels of the time, of illustration by "Phiz." The three chief books are Frank Fairleigh (1850), Lewis Arundel (1852), and Harry Coverdale's Courtship (1854). With a touch of Bulwerian romance, something of the sporting novel, and a good deal of the adventure story, Smedley united plenty of pleasant humour and occasionally not a little real wit.
It will have been observed that more than one of the more distinguished novelists of this time attempted, and that at least one of them achieved, the historical novel; nor was it at all likely that a kind so attractive in itself, illustrated by such remarkable genius, and discovered at last after many centuries of futile endeavour, should immediately or entirely lose its popularity. Yet it is certain that for about a quarter of a century, from 1845 to 1870, not merely the historical novel, but the romance generally, did lose general practice and general attention, while, though about the latter date at least one novel of brilliant quality, Mr. Blackmore's Lorna Doone, vindicated romance, and historical romance, it was still something of an exception. Those who are old enough, and who paid sufficient attention to contemporary criticism, will remember that for many years the advent of a historical novel was greeted in reviews with a note not exactly of contempt, but of the sort of surprise with which men greet something out of the way and old fashioned.
This was the inevitable result of that popularity of the domestic and usual novel which this chapter has hitherto described, and it was as natural and as inevitable that the domestic and usual novel should in its turn undergo the same law. Not that this, again, was summarily, much less finally displaced; on the contrary, the enormous and ever-increasing demand for fiction—which the establishment of public free libraries, and the custom of printing in cheaper form for sale, has encouraged pari passu with the apparent discouragement given to it by the fall of circulating libraries from the absolutely paramount place which they occupied not long ago—maintained the call for this as for other kinds of story. But partly mere love of change, partly the observations of those critics who were not content to follow the fashion merely, and partly also the familiar but inexplicable rise at the same time of divers persons whose talent inclined in a new direction, brought in, about 1880 or later, a demand for romance, for historical romance, and for the short story—three things against which the taste of the circulating-library reader during the generation then expiring had distinctly set itself. The greater part of the results of this change falls out of our subject; but one remarkable name, perhaps the most remarkable of all, is given to us by the Fates.
For one of the pillars of this new building of romance was only too soon removed. Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson (more commonly known to the public by the first two, and to his friends by the second of his Christian names) belonged to the famous family of lighthouse architects who so long carried on the traditions of Smeaton in that department of engineering; and he was to have been an engineer himself. But he was incurably literary; and after school and college at Edinburgh, was called to the Bar, with no more practical results in that profession than in the other. Born on 13th November 1850, he was not extremely precocious in publication; and it was not till nearly the end of the seventies that his essays in the Cornhill Magazine and his stories in a periodical called London, short lived and not widely circulated, but noteworthy in its way, attracted attention. He followed them up with two volumes of somewhat Sternian travel, An Inland Voyage (1878) and Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes (1879); next collecting his Cornhill Essays in two other volumes, Virginibus Puerisque (1881) and Familiar Studies of Men and Books (1882), and his London stories in The New Arabian Nights (1882). But he did not get hold of the public till a year later than the latest of these dates, with his famous Treasure Island, the best boys' story since Marryat, and one of a literary excellence to which Marryat could make no pretensions. The vein of romance which he then struck, and the older and more fanciful one of The New Arabian Nights, were followed up alternately or together in an almost annual succession of books—Prince Otto (1885), The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Kidnapped (1886), The Black Arrow (a wonderfully good, though not very generally popular, York-and-Lancaster story) (1888), The Master of Ballantræ (1889), the exquisite Catriona (1893). It also pleased him to write, in collaboration with others, The Dynamiter, The Wrecker, The Ebb Tide, etc., where the tracing of the several shares is not unamusing. Stevenson also attempted poetry, and his Child's Garden of Verse (1885) has very warm admirers, who are often more doubtful about Underwoods (1887) and Ballads (1891). The list of his work is not exhausted, and one of the latest additions to it was A Footnote to History (1892), containing an account of the intestine troubles of the island of Samoa, where Mr. Stevenson, long a victim to lung disease, latterly fixed his abode, and where he died suddenly in the winter of 1894.
As has been the case with most of the distinguished writers of recent years, Mr. Stevenson has been praised by some of his contemporaries and juniors with an uncritical fervour which has naturally provoked depreciation from others; and the charm of his personality was so great that it is extremely difficult for any one who knew him to hold the scales quite even. As the most brilliant and interesting by far, however, of those English writers whose life was comprised in the last half of the century he absolutely demands critical treatment here, and it so happens that his method and results were extremely typical of the literary movement and character of our time. He has left somewhat minute accounts of his own apprenticeship, but they are almost unnecessary: no critic of the slightest competence could fail to divine the facts. Adopting to the full, and something more than the full, the modern doctrine of the all-importance of art, of manner, of style in literature, Mr. Stevenson early made the most elaborate studies in imitative composition. There is no doubt that he at last succeeded in acquiring a style which was quite his own: but it was complained, and with justice, that even to the last he never attained complete ease in this style; that its mannerism was not only excessive, but bore, as even excessive mannerism by no means always does, the marks of distinct and obvious effort. This was perhaps most noticeable in his essays, which were further marred by the fact that much of them was occupied by criticism, for which, though his taste was original and delicate, Stevenson's knowledge was not quite solid enough, and his range of sympathies a little deficient in width. In his stories, on the other hand, the devil's advocate detected certain weak points, the chief of them being an incapacity to finish, and either a distaste or an incapacity for introducing women. This last charge was finally refuted by Catriona, not merely in the heroine, but in the much more charming and lifelike figure of Barbara Grant; but the other was something of a true bill to the last. It was Stevenson's weakness (as by the way it also was Scott's) to huddle up his stories rather than to wind them off to an orderly conclusion.