° % O0 l BRITISH NOVELISTS AND TKEIE STYLES. BRITISH NOVELISTS AND THEIR STYLES: BEING A CRITICAL SKETCH OF THE HISTORY OF BRITISH PROSE FICTION. BY DAVID MASSON, M.A. PBOFESSOB OF ENGLISH LITEEATTTEE IN TJNIVEKSITY COLLEGE, LONDON; ATJTHOK OF "THE LIFE AND TIMES OF JOHN MILTON," ETC. MACMILLAN AND CO. AND 23, HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN", LONDON. 18-59. [The Right of Translation is Reserved."] ^ ^ R. CLAY ; PRINTER, BREAD STREET HILL. PREFATORY NOTE. The substance of the following pages was de- livered, in the form of Lectures, to the members of the Philosophical Institution of Edinburgh in the months of March and April, 1858. Passages neces- sarily omitted in the delivery are here restored ; a few passages spoken from notes are expanded from recollection ; and there are also some additions, especially towards the end. By these changes the Discourses are made to exceed by much the ordinary limits of Lectures. I have, however, retained the name of ' ' Lectures " by way of title, — partly be- cause nearly all the matter, as it stands, was actually prepared to be spoken ; and partly because the name may serve to account for anything in the manner of treatment or in the style that might not be con- sidered so fitting in other forms of composition. With respect to one of the Lectures — the third — it might even be obliging if the reader were to remem- ber specially that it was prepared for an Edinburgh audience. University College, London, June. 1859. CONTENTS. LECTURE I. On the Novel as a Form of Literature; and on Early British Prose-Fiction. — Page 1. (1.) Nature of the Novel.— The Novel a form of Poetry— Its relation to the Epic — Relative capabilities of Verse and Prose in Fiction— Points for Criticism in a Novel— The Theme or Subject— The Incidents — The Scenery — The Characters — Extra-Poetical Merits. (2.) History of the Novel. — Its late appearance, compared -with other forms of Literature— Classical Romances— Mediaeval Fictions— Early Italian, French, and Spanish Prose Fictions — Early British Romances — The " Mort d' Arthur" — Chap-Book Romances— Early English Translations of Foreign Novels— More's "Utopia," and similar Fictions — Sidney's " Arcadia," and Pastoral Novels— Boyle's "Parthenissa," and Classic- Heroic Novels — Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress — Mrs. Aphra Behn, and Novel- ettes of the Restoration. LECTURE II. British Novelists of the Eighteenth Century.— 79. Swift and Defoe— Intellectual characteristics of the Eighteenth Century — Preponderance of Prose in British Literature during this Century— The Fictions of Swift and Defoe new Prose forms— Swift's characteristics- Defoe's characteristics— Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne : their biographical relations sketched— Richardson's method in his Novels— His iii CONTENTS. Morality — Humour and Humorists — Fielding's Theory of the Novel which he practised— The Comic Novel— Fielding and Smollett compared and con- trasted—British Life a century ago, as represented in their Novels Sterne's peculiarities, moral and literary — Johnson's "Rasselas," Goldsmith's "Vicar of Wakefield," and Walpole's "Castle of Otranto" — Later Novels and Novelists of the Eighteenth Century. LECTURE III. Scott and his Influence. — 155. Edinburgh seventy years ago — Edinburgh since — Its Important Inhabitants in recent times — Scott pre-eminently the "genius loci " — Two most prominent features of Scott's mind — His Love of the Past, or Passion for History— His affection for the past, not for the whole past, but only for the Gothic por- tion of it— Patriotism or Scotticism of Scott — His special affection for Edin- burgh — Time and manner of his determination to the Novel— Review of the progress of British Prose-Fiction in the twenty-five years preceding " Waver- ley," or from 1789 to 1814— Twenty Novelists immediately preceding Scott — Lady-Novelists— Nationality in Novels— Revolutionary Novels : Godwin— The Gothic Romance School: Mrs. Radcliffe — Novel of English Manners: Miss Austen — Relations of Scott to his Predecessors — The Waverley Novels classified Scott the Founder of the Historical Novel — Limits of his histo- rical research — Is his medisevalism sound? — Defect of Scott's genius- Excellence of his Scottish characters — Scotland's obligations to him— Young Edinburgh. LECTURE IV.' British Novelists since Scott. — 208. Enumeration of British Novelists of the last forty-five years— Statistics of Novel-writing during this period— Classification of Recent Novels into thir- teen kinds— Sir Lytton Bulwer's Proposed Classification of Novels, and his own versatility— Fashionable Novelists— Dickens and Thackeray, as repre- sentatives of a new era in the history of the British Novel— The two com- CONTENTS. ix pared as artists — Compared as ethical teachers — Realistic Art and Romantic Art in Novels — Imitations of Dickens and Thackeray — The year 1848 an important year to date from, in literary as well as in political History — Per- severing spirit of Realism in recent Prose-Fictions, and application of this spirit to the representation of facts peculiarly contemporary ; Miss Bronte, if any one, is the true genius loci. It is not without significance that in the very centre of the city there rises that monument to his memory which every eye in Edinburgh is compelled to rest on several times every day, whatever other object it misses. There his white statue sits, as it should, quite in the city's centre ! Edinburgh is the city of Sir Walter Scott. There are, perhaps, those hearing me who remember him as he actually walked in these streets — who have watched his stalwart figure as it limped along on the footway before them, or, meeting him with a friend, have watched his bushy eyebrows and saga- cious countenance, and overheard the burr of his voice. To me this is but a fancy ; but even to me so much is the man identified with the place, that, as I pass the stationary statue, I seem to see the original as he was, and to follow him, and him alone, in the moving crowd on the other side of Princes Street. That was his walk on earth ; and there, be sure, his spirit haunts, save when he revisits Abbotsford ! With Scott's birth in Edinburgh, and with his education and residence here, the fancy will con- M 2 164 SCO TT A ND HIS I NFL UENCE. nect, and perhaps an actual study of the man's life would also in some degree connect, those two qual- ities of his genius to which it owed what was most characteristic in its action on the poetry, the prose fiction, and the general literature of Britain and of Europe — his veneration for the past, and his intense and yet catholic Scotticism. I am not here to ven- ture on so extensive a task as an analysis of Scott's genius all in all, so as to see what he had in common with other men of the same literary order and in what he differed from them ; but I think you will agree that, when I name these two qualities — his passion for the antique and his Scotticism — I name the two qualities which stood out so prominently in his character as to affect all the others and determine them in operation. Veneration for the past, delight in the antique — this is pre-eminently the disposition of the Historian. The faculty of the Philosopher is Reason, the specu- lative faculty, which does not neglect the phenomena of the past, but works also in the present with a view to the future ; the faculty of the Poet is Imagi- nation, which need not expatiate in the past, except when it voluntarily chooses that particular field as footing for its ideal inventions; but the faculty of the Historian is Memory, whose very domain is the HIS LOVE OF THE PAST. 165 past. True, there are historians of different types — some, as Herodotus, in whom the love of the past seems almost pure and motiveless, a kind of ultimate unreasoning feeling, happy in its own exercise ; and others, as Thucydides, in whose narratives of past transactions there is more of the critical, or philoso- phical, or practical, or didactic spirit. True, also, it may be questioned whether — seeing that an exact and complete knowledge of the past, and especially of the distant past, is impossible, and it is always only the past as perceived and shaped by his own spirit, and as represented by his own present mode of thinking, that any historian can give us — that which is valuable and permanent in any history is not more the meaning than the materials ; in other words, either the poetic significance with which the materials are invested by a mind seeing them in that haze which already generalises them for the imagina- tion and blots out the particular, or the philosophic bearing on universal life which the mind can the more easily detect in them for a similar reason. Still, it remains true that the pure love of the past — the habit of incessantly remembering, instead of incessantly imagining or reasoning — is the charac- teristic of the historian as such ; and that the differ- ences among historians arise in part from the varying 166 SCOTT AND HIS INFLUENCE. strength of this characteristic,, whether it is the poetical tendency or the philosophical tendency that goes along with it. In Scott the degree of this characteristic was enormous. He blended the poet with the historian, and the form of most of his works was poetical rather than professedly historical ; but he frequently adopted the historical form, too ; and there is scarcely a fragment of his poetry that has not history for its matter. There were other poets of his age, excelling him, some in one respect and some in another ; but he beat them all in the article of history, and in all that the passion for history, and a head and heart full of history could give to a modern poet. In the sheer delight in the past, and the passion for gathering its reminiscences, he was as inordinately endowed as Herodotus ; in whom, however, there was less of the poet in addition. Herodotus was a man, if we may so say, who walked round half the margin of the ancient Mediterranean, observing its monuments, collecting its legends, and painting its manners, so as to con- dense into one book all the wrecks of tradition and of fact which time had rolled down, in that the then colonised portion of the world, from the begin- ning of things to his own day. Scott was a man who, in virtue of a similar constitutional tendency HIS LOVE OF THE PAST. 167 which he had educated from his boyhood, did the same for a limited portion of time over a limited portion of the much more extensively peopled and much more completely organised world of his day — Gothic Europe, from the tenth century or thereby onwards. This limitation of Scott's love of the antique to a particular region geographically and a particular era chronologically, is worthy of notice. He does not go round and round the world (as who could in that fashion ?) ; his themes are not even oriental, except when Gothic adventure, as in the crusades, takes him to the East. Gothic Europe is his range. Then, again, it is to the centuries that constitute the Gothic era of European history, and, preferably, to the last of these, after the rise of the feudal system out of the earlier mediaeval chaos, that he confines his imaginative wanderings. He does not go back to classical times. It is as if, starting from the full light of his own days, and going back century after century — through the eighteenth to the seventeenth, and thence to the sixteenth, thence to the fifteenth, and so on — he had, in all, a range of about eight centuries through which he roamed, as in his proper domain, more attached to certain portions even of these than to others ; and as if, the moment he had 168 SCOTT AND HIS I NFL UENCE. penetrated far enough back to see the light of the anterior classical ages breaking through the gloom, then invariably he turned his steps, as feeling that, where there was Greek and Roman light, he had no interest in going, and he was at home only in the Gothic forest. With the exception of a back-refer- ence now and then as far as the supposed days of King Arthur and of the British Druids, his oldest express theme, if I remember aright, is the wars of the Moors and the Goths in Spain. Scott's venera- tion for the past, then, was not a veneration for the whole past, but for the Gothic portion of it ; and in this he differed from other men who have possessed in strong degree the same general affection for history. Niebuhr, for example, delighted in the classical past ; there have been others whose tastes led them to Hellenic scenes and subjects rather than to Gothic and modern ; and I do not believe that Scott felt half the enthusiasm for Caesar that Shakespeare dicL Those who have the affection for the past (and most poets have had it more or less) might, indeed, bo subdivided farther, and in a somewhat interesting manner, according to the portion of the past which is observed most strongly to possess their affections* As Scott was preternaturally endowed with the- affection as regards degree, so I believe that the HIS SCOTTICISM. 169 portion of the past on which he fastened was as extensive as so strong an affection could well apply itself to, and also that it was the most important for all modern purposes. Whether he did really under- stand the Gothic ages over which he roamed, whether his representations of feudal and mediaeval facts, beliefs, costumes, and manners were really authentic and accurate, or whether and to what extent they were but fictitious makeshifts, which he partly knew to be such, is a question which may be reserved. But Scott's veneration for the past reached its highest and most shrewd and intelligent form in his Scotticism. It is a coincidence with more than the usual amount of verbal good luck in it that his name should have been Scott — generically and comprehen- sively the Scotchman. In all Scotchmen, indeed, even the most philosophic and most cosmopolitan that the little land has produced, there has been found, it is believed, something of this Scotticism — this loving regard for the " land of brown heath and shaggy wood/'' and knowledge of its traditions, and sympathy, more or less hearty, with its habits, its prejudices, and its humours. Part of every Scotch- man's outfit in life is, or used to be, his Scotticism, however much he might choose to disguise it or make 170 SCOTT AND HIS INFLUENCE. light of it. Nay, not a few of the most eminent literary Scotchmen before Sir Walter, had exhibited their Scotticism openly, ostentatiously, and with almost plaguy loudness, and had proclaimed it, through good report and through bad report, as a conscious element in their genius. So it was, as we have seen, with Smollett; and so, in still larger proportion, it had been with Burns : — " Even then a wish, I mind its power — A wish, that to my latest hour Shall strongly heave my breast — That I, for poor auld Scotland's sake, Some usefu' plan or beuk could make, Or sing a sang at least. The rough bur-thistle, spreading wide Amang the bearded bear, I turned the weeder-clips aside, And spared the symbol dear. No nation, no station My envy e'er could raise ; A Scot still, but blot still, I knew nae higher praise ! " All this feeling Scott, too, had from his child- hood ; and in his earliest readings in his boyhood and youth he had nursed and fostered it — still turning and returning from his miscellaneous readings in the universal literature of European romance and history back with especial fondness to the legends and the history of his native land. Moreover, inasmuch as HIS SCOTTICISM. 171 he was a native of Edinburgh, it might be possible to show that his Scotticism was necessarily of a more central, and, as we may say, more metropolitan kind than the Scotticism of either Smollett or Burns. In his early familiarity with Edinburgh both physi- cally and socially, and in his wanderings about its environs, he had acquired, in wonderfully strong degree, that affection for it, that actual magnetic or nervous connexion with it, which we have already described. Who does not remember the burst in ." Marmion," when Edinburgh is seen from the Braids ? " Still on the spot Lord Marmion stay'd, For fairer scene he ne'er surveyed. When sated with the martial show That peopled all the plain below, The wandering eye could o'er it go, And mark the distant city glow, With gloomy splendour red ; For on the smoke-wreaths, huge and slow, That round the sable turrets flow, The morning beams were shed, And tinged them with a lustre proud, Like that which streaks a thunder-cloud. Such dusky grandeur clothed the height Where the huge castle holds its state, And all the steep slope adown, Whose ridgy back heaves to the sky, Piled deep and massy, close and high, Mine own romantic town." 172 SCOTT AND HIS INFLUENCE. But even in this outburst dedicated to his " own romantic town," his fancy passes instinctively to the whole land of which it is the capital. He makes Marmion and his companions glance beyond the city, far north to the Ochil mountains, to Fife and the Firth, to Preston-Bay and Berwick-Law ; and then, in the next line, this limited scene stands as a repre- sentation of all Scotland : — " Fitz-Eustace' heart felt closely pent ; As if to give his rapture vent, The spur he to his charger lent, , And raised his bridle hand ; And, making demivolte in air, Cried, 'Where's the coward that would not dare To fight for such a land ? ' " As this general regard for all Scotland might be expected more particularly of a metropolitan Scot, so the poet had increased and cultivated it by his more than usual amount of travel and residence in those days in different parts of Scotland. Tweedside and the Border were soon familiar to him and dear to him as the region of his ancestors ; he knew the West ; he had gone far up the east coast, and ulti- mately he got as far as the Orkneys ; and, at a time when the Highlands were much less pervious than they now are to Lowland tourists, he had lived in HIS SCOTTICISM. 173 them for months together, surrounded by tartan and Gaelic, and yet quite at home. It was not only with the scenery of his country that he was acquainted. Being himself one of the shrewdest, most kindly, and most sociable of men, and " having had from his infancy," as he says, "free and unrestrained com- " munication with all ranks of his countrymen, from " the Scottish peer to the Scottish ploughman," he knew their ways, their dialect, their modes of thought, their humours, as intimately as any Scotch- man breathing. His profession as a lawyer, and his official position as a sheriff, added even a technical knowledge of Scottish institutions ; and the age in which he lived was one in which it was possible for a retentive memory, like his, to store up reports and relics at first hand of a wilder state of Scottish society which had passed away — recollections, both Highland and Lowland, reaching back to the Jacobite Rebellions and even farther. All in all, his Scotticism was full, extensive, and thorough. In combination with his love of the past, it took, for the ordinary purposes of public citizenship, the form of Scottish Toryism j but in the larger field of literature its outcome was such as to thrill and please the world. As all know, it was not till Scott's mature life, and 174 SCOTT AND HIS I NFL UENCE. when he had already long been known as one of the first British poets and miscellaneous prose-writers of his time, that he turned into the track of prose fiction. From 1796 to 1805, or from his twenty-sixth to his thirty-fifth year, his literary occupations were in desultory translations from the German, and in collecting and editing Scottish ballads and romances; then, from his thirty-fifth year to his forty- fourth, came the period of his original metrical romances ; and it was not till 1814, when the "Lay of the Last Minstrel " and " Marmion " and the " Lady of the Lake " had gone over the world in thousands, and people were detecting a falling off in the poems by which these had been succeeded, that he resolved to carry his love of the antique and his Scotticism out of that metrical style the power of which was wan- ing, and made his first anonymous venture as a novelist in Waverley. Here, therefore, it is neces- sary that we should take a retrospective view of the course of British novel-writing from the point at which we left it in our last lecture, namely at or about the year 1789, on to this year 1814, when the author of Waverley burst on the novel-reading public like a meteor among the smaller stars. The interval is exactly a quarter of a century. HIS IMMEDIATE PREDECESSORS. 175 After Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, Goldsmith, Walpole, and other writers belonging to the early part of the reign of George III., the respectability of the British novel was kept up, as we saw, though its resources were hardly extended, by such writers as Mackenzie, Miss Eeeve, Miss Burney, Beckford, Cumberland, Robert Bage, and Dr. John Moore. Besides these respectable writers, there were scores of others engaged in producing trashy tales to supply the growing appetite for works of fiction which the older novelists had created. This was the age of the beginning of the so-called " Minerva-Press Novels," which continued to be poured forth in superabundance till Scott took the field. About the year 1789, however, we find, as might be expected, novelists of a better class making their appearance. That year, as all know, is a great epoch in modern European history. It was the year of the French Revolution, when, through blood and war and universal agitation, the various countries of Europe passed out of that system of things which had sub- sisted during the eighteenth century, and entered on a new period of life — the period to which we now belong. For most purposes, the year 1789, and not the year 1800, is to be considered as the proper close 176 SCOTT AND HIS INFLUENCE. of the " Eighteenth Century." This is seen best in the history of literature. Take the history of British Literature for example. It is now an established practice among us to date the commencement of a new era in British literary history — the era in which, we still are — from the year 1789, there or there- abouts. As a new social spirit then comes in — a spirit superseding the old Whiggism and Toryism of the eighteenth century, or, at least, giving a new significance to these terms by reconnecting them with first principles — so there then comes in also a new intellectual spirit. It is seen working in all the forms of our literature. Our philosophy begins to deepen itself, affected partly by the deeper social questions which the French. Revolution had forced on the attention of mankind, partly by the quie.t diffusion among us, through such interpreters as Coleridge, of ideas taken from the rising philosophy of Germany. Our historical literature also takes on a different hue, and begins to be characterised, on the one hand, by more of that spirit of political innovation and aspiration after progress which belonged to the revolutionary epoch, and on the other, by a kind of reactionary regard for that past which the revolution misrepresented and maligned. But, above all, the change was visible in our poetry. IMMEDIATE PREDECESSORS. 177 In all our literary histories you will find the epoch of the French Revolution marked as the epoch of an interesting revival of natural British Poetry, after that interregnum of more artificial Poetry which had begun in Dryden. It is about this time that the simultaneous publications of Burns and Cowper, of Crabbe and Bowles, herald in the change of poetic style and matter which was consummated by Words- worth. An attention rather to the permanent and invariable facts of life than to the changing aspects of human manners, a deeper reverence for nature, and a closer study of all natural appearances, a greater ideality of tone, and yet a return to truth and simplicity of diction — such, variously phrased, were the qualities on which, as Wordsworth alleged, the revival depended. So far as the change was fundamental, it must have affected also our Prose Fiction. To some extent we find that it did so. I can here, however, be but brief in my indications. In the interval between 1789 and 1814 I count twenty novelists of sufficient mark to be remembered individually in the history of British Prose Litera- ture. Two of these are Robert Bage and Dr. John Moore, who had begun their career as novelists prior to 1789 ; the others, named as nearly as pos- N 178 SCOTT AND HIS INFLUENCE. sible in the order of their appearance, are — Thomas Holcroft, Mrs. Charlotte Smith, Sophia and Harriet Lee, Mrs. Inchbald, Mrs. Radcliffe, Matthew Gre- gory Lewis, Mrs. Opie, "William Godwin, Anna Maria Porter and Jane Porter, Miss Edgeworth, Miss Jane Austen, Mrs. Brunton, Mrs. Hamilton, Hannah More, Miss Owenson (afterwards Lady Morgan), and the Rev. Charles Maturin. I must depend very much on your own associations with these names for the impressions you are likely to take, along with me, as to the nature of the change or changes in British novel-writing which they represent as having occurred in the quarter of a century now under notice; but I may call your attention to one or two facts. And, first, it is worth observing that no fewer than fourteen out of the twenty novelists that have been named were women. No fact of this kind is accidental; and an investigation concerning the causes of it might not be without results. Probably reasons for it might be found in the state of British society at that period, as affected by the general con- dition of Europe, and as leading to a somewhat new adjustment of the various kinds of intellectual occu- pation between the sexes — men let us say (and this is statistically the fact) transferring themselves LADY-NO VE LISTS. 179 to other kinds of literature, including metrical Poetry, and retaining the ascendancy there ; while women took possession of the Novel. Be the causes of the fact, however, what they may, the fact itself is interesting. If the Novel or Prose Fiction was the first fortress in the territory of literature which the women seized — nay, if they seized it all the the more easily because the men, being absent else- where, had left it weakly garrisoned — it cannot be denied, at all events, that they manned it well. Not only were the women in the majority, but they also did the duty of the garrison better than the men who had been left in it. With the exception of Godwin, I do not know that any of the male novelists I have mentioned could be put in com- parison, in respect of genuine merit, with such novelists of the other sex as Mrs. Eadcliffe, Miss Edgeworth, and Miss Austen. Out of this fact, taken along with the fact that from that time to this there has been an uninterrupted succession of lady-novelists, and also with the fact that, though the Novel was the first fortress into which the sex were admitted in any number, they have since found their way into other fortresses of the literary domain, not excepting Poetry, nor even History, and have done excellent duty there too — out of these n2 180 SCOTT AND HIS INFLUENCE. facts, I say, may we not derive a prognostication? May there not be still farther room in the realm of intellectual activity for the genius of women ; may they not yet be in all the garrisons ? For my part I know not a more unmanly outcry than that in fashion against "strong-minded women." Either the phrase is an irony which repetition has turned into a serious fallacy, and what is meant is, that the so called "strong-minded women" are not strong- minded, and that analogous specimens of men would be regarded as weak-minded ; or the phrase is cruel and mean. No woman yet but was better, nobler, ay, and essentially more womanly in precise propor- tion as her natural abilities had received all the education of which they were capable! No man really but thinks so and finds it so — at least, no man worth his beard ! As to what may be the inherent difference of intellectual and social function involved in the fact of sex, we need not trouble ourselves so very much. Whatever the difference is, nature will take ample care of it, and it will be all the better pronounced the less its manifestation is impeded. It is obvious that we have already gained much by the representation which women have been able to make of their peculiar dispositions and modes of perception in the portion of the field of litera- NATIONALITY IN NOVELS, 181 ture which they have already occupied. Perhaps there was a special propriety in their selecting the Prose Fiction as the form of literature in which first to express themselves — the capabilities of that form of literature being such that we can conceive women conveying most easily through it those views and perceptions which, by presupposition, they were best qualified to contribute. Another statistical fact connected with the list of novelists which I have given, is that, out of the entire twenty, twelve were of English, six of Irish, and only two of Scottish birth. This proportion suggests, with tolerable accuracy, certain easily-conceived dif- ferences as regards the themes chosen by the no- velists, and their modes of treating them. To some extent, all of them took general British themes, or continental themes, or themes of general poetic in- terest ; but we note also a certain affection in some of them for the representation of peculiarly national manners and circumstances ; and, as might be ex- pected, where this is the case, the affection follows the accident of birth. Thus Mrs. Inchbald, Mrs. Opie, and Miss Austen are novelists of English so- ciety and English manners ; Miss Edgeworth, in not a few of her tales, constitutes herself, of express pur- pose, a painter and critic of Irish manners and Irish 182 SCO TT A ND HIS 1NFL UENCE. society ; and in Moore we have a characteristic dash of Scotticism. So far as there is an exception to what the statistical proportion just stated might suggest, it is in favour of Scotland. One or two of the English and Irish novelists took a fancy for Scottish subjects. The two Miss Porters, though of Irish birth, had resided long in Edinburgh ; and from the younger of them Scottish boys have received that prime favourite of theirs, " The Scottish Chiefs" — a romance in which, as the boysfind out when they grow older, it is not exactly the historical Wallace or the Wallace of Blind Henry that is the hero, but a highly modernized Wallace, tremulous with the most exquisite sentiments, and carrying in his hand, as the saviour of Scotland, alternately a sword and a white cambric handkerchiefA Mrs. Hamilton also, though born in Ireland, was of Scottish extrac- tion, and was educated in Scotland ; and her " Cot- tagers of G-lenburnie w is a genuine Scottish story. And Mrs. Radcliffe's first romance was laid in Scot- tish feudal times. Passing to the novels themselves, can we classify them into kinds ? Can we discern in them any definite tendencies of the British novel-writing of the period different from those which existed before ? As far as my recollected acquaintance with speci- RE VOL UTIONARY NO VELS : GOD WIN. 183 mens of the novels themselves entitles me to judge, I think that we can. The novels of the writers I have named may, I think, be grouped into three classes, each representing a tendency of the British prose-fiction of the period. (1.) Perhaps the most characteristic tendency of British novel-writing, immediately or soon after the year 1789, was to the embodiment in fiction of those social speculations and aspirations which had sprung out of the French Revolution as observed from these islands. I need not tell you how powerfully all thoughtful minds in this country were then stirred by the tremendous events abroad — how, on the one hand, a veteran Burke was struck aghast and all but abjured his Whiggism, because it seemed as if a legion of fiends had come into alliance with it ; and how, on the other, ardent young souls, such as Wordsworth and Coleridge and Southey, leaped with enthusiasm and saw the age of gold. Liberty, equality, fraternity; human progress and perfecti- bility; the iniquity of existing institutions — with these and such notions were many minds filled. They broke out in various forms — in poems and in works of prose-fiction, as well as in pamphlets and doc- trinal treatises. In prose fiction Bage and Holcroft were representatives of the roused democratic spirit ; 184 SCO TT A ND HIS I NFL UENCE. but its greatest representative by far was William Godwin. It was in 1794 that this remarkable man — already well known as a political writer, and destined to a long life of farther literary activity — published his novel entitled Caleb Williams ; or, Things as they are. It was intended to be, as he said in his preface, " a study and delineation of things passing in the moral world," a poetical exposition of the vices and mal- arrangements of existing society, li a general review of the modes of domestic and unrecorded despotism by which man becomes the destroyer of man." Those of you who remember the novel — the tale which it tells of the sufferings of the noble-minded and wealthy Falkland, who lives on with the con- sciousness of having committed a murder for which two innocent men have been hanged, and of the suf- ferings which, in self-preservation, he inflicts on the youth, Caleb Williams, his secretary, who has come into possession of the fatal secret — will judge of the truth of this description. In Godwin's later novels the spirit and purpose are the same, with variations in the circumstance. The action of society upon character, or, as one of his critics says, " Man the enemy of man " — such is his constant text. " Amid the woods the tiger knows his kind; The panther preys not on the panther brood ; Man only is the common foe of man." GOTHIC ROMANCE; MRS. EALCLIFFE. 185 As Godwin's, however, was no vulgar intellect, and as his politics were of an ardent and speculative cast, so, even now, when his novels are read for their purely imaginative interest, they impress powerfully. (2.) As distinct from the kind of novel which Godwin represented, we have, in the list under view, various specimens of what may be called the Gothic romance of the picturesque and the terrible. The beginnings of this kind of novel have been referred to WaJpole, in his Castle of Otranto, and to his imitator, Miss Keeve, in her Old English Baron ; but it attained its full development in the present period, in the fictions of Mrs. Radcliffe, Matthew Gregory Lewis, and, I believe, also in those of Ma- turin, and in some of those of the Miss Porters and of Harriet Lee. In so far as the tendency to this kind of fiction involved a romantic veneration for the past, it may be regarded as a reaction against the revo- lutionary spirit of the time, as embodied in Godwin and others. But it would be too superficial a view of the nature of the tendency to suppose that it ori- ginated merely in any such reaction, conscious or unconscious. Godwin himself goes back, in some of his novels, to feudal times, and is not destitute of power of imagination in old Gothic circumstance. We see, indeed, that the great literary controversy 186 SCOTT AND HIS INFLUENCE. between Classicism and Romanticism was a direct resnlt of the French Revolution. In that crisis the Gothic depths of the western European mind were broken into ; and though, politically, the immediate effect was a disgust of the past and a longing towards the future as the era of human emancipation, yet, intellectually, the effect was a contempt for classic modes of fancy and composition, and a letting loose of the imagination upon Nature in her wildest and grandest recesses, and upon whatever in human his- tory could supply aught in affinity with the furious workings of contemporary passion. The Gothic Romance of the picturesque and the ghastly afforded the necessary conditions. Gloomy Gothic castles in wild valleys, with forests clothing the neighbouring hills ; lawless banditti hovering round ; the moon bowling fearfully through clouds over inland scenes of horror, or illuminating with its full blue light Italian bays and fated spots on their promontories ; monks, tyrannical chieftains, and inquisitors ; shrieks in the night, supernatural noises, the tolling of the bell, the heavy footstep in the corridor ; — " Hark ! it approaches ; save me, save me ; " — at that instant, the flash of lightning through the Gothic window ; the door dashed open ; the unnameable apparition ; the roar of the simultaneous thunder ; " Ye powers NOVEL OF MANNERS: MISS AUSTEN. 187 of Hell ! " — No, Heaven has its messengers too ; the voice cries, "Forbear;" she's saved, she's saved! Of all the practitioners of this style of art, need I say that Mrs. Radcliffe is the chief? She has been called the Salvator Rosa of British prose fiction ; and, in reference to her Sicilian Romance, her Ro- mance of the Forest, her Mysteries of Udolpho, and her Italian, Sir Walter Scott has but done her justice when he says : " Fielding, Richardson, Smollett, and " even Walpole, though writing upon imaginative " subjects, are decidedly prose authors ; but Mrs. " Radcliffe has a title to be considered the first "poetess of romantic fiction — that is, if actual " rhythm shall not be deemed essential to poetry." Mrs. RadclifiVs romances are, indeed, of a wholly fantastic kind of Gothic, with no whit of foundation in actual knowledge of mediaeval history. Her charac- ters are but vague melodramatic phantoms that flit through her descriptions of scenery, and serve as agents for her terrific situations. There is something like treachery also to the true theory of her style in her habit of always solving the mystery at the end by purely natural explanations. Monk Lewis and others of the school were more daring in this respect. (3.) The majority of the novelists of our list, how- J 88 - SCOTT AND EIS INFLUENCE. ever, were, as their predecessors of the eighteenth century had been, mere painters of life and manners, with more or less of humour and more or less of ethical purpose. Moore, the two Miss Lees, Mrs. Inchbald, Mrs. Smith, Mrs. Opie, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs. Brunton, Mrs. Hamilton, Hannah More, Miss Owenson — all of them lady-novelists, except one — continued this style of fiction. The differences in their novels, as compared with previous novels of life and manners, must be considered as arising, in part, from the actual differences of the life and manners that were to be painted, but in part, also, from a dif- ference in the method of description — which last may be resolved into the fact, already noted, that women were now taking their turn as describers, and bringing their peculiar tact of perception, and their peculiar notions of the right and the tasteful, to the task of representing much in society that had been omitted before, and especially the ways of their own sex. Among these lady-novelists, Miss Edge- worth and Miss Austen were, undoubtedly, the first in talent. So far as they remind us of previous novelists of the other sex, it is most, as might be expected, of Richardson ; but, while resembling him in minuteness of observation, in good sense, and in clear moral aim, they present many differences. SCOTT S TENDENCIES. 189 All in all, as far as my information goes, the best judges unanimously prefer Miss Austen to any of ber contemporaries of tbe same order. Tbey reckon ber Sense and Sensibility, her Pride and Prejudice, ber Mansfield Park and ber Emma (which novels were published in her life-time), and also her Northanger Abbey and her Persuasion (which were published posthumously) as not only better than anything else of the kind written in her day, but also among the most perfect and charming fictions in the language. I have known the most hard-headed men in ecstasies with them ; and the only objection I have heard of as brought against them by ladies is, that they reveal too many of their secrets. We return to Scott. In virtue both of his consti- tution and of his education, Scott, if he had betaken himself to prose fiction at first, instead of deferring his exercises in it to his mature age, would have had his connexions, in the main, with the two last-named schools of British novel-writing at the close of the last and the beginning of the present century. He would have stood apart from Godwin and his class of political and speculative novelists, or would have even proclaimed himself their antagonist; and he would have taken rank both among the romance- 190 SCOTT AND HIS INFLUENCE. writers of the Gothic picturesque and among the painters of contemporary life and manners — a chief among both by reason of the general superiority of his genius, and producing among both those peculiar effects which would have resulted from his passion for the real in History, from his extensive antiqua- rian knowledge, and from his Scotticism. We have his own authority for this statement. He tell us that, as early as 1799 or 1800, before he had appeared conspicuously as a poet, he had meditated the com- position of a prose tale of chivalry, after the example of Walpole's " Castle of Otranto," but on a Scottish subject, and with " plenty of Border characters and supernatural incident." He had actually written some pages of such a romance, to be entitled "Thomas the Rhymer/' when circumstances changed his in- tention. He did not, however, abandon the idea of a Scottish prose romance; in 1805 he wrote a por- tion of Waverley / and, though that, too, was thrown aside, the impression made upon him by Miss Edge- worth's Irish tales was such as to convince him that, when he had leisure, he should be able to do something in a similar style, for the representation of Scottish manners. The leisure came in 1814, when Waverley was completed and published. Between that date and his death in 1832 he gave to the world, WA VERLE Y NO VELS CLASSIFIED. 191 besides much else, the rest of the series of the Waverley Novels. If we omit one or two tales now included in the series, but not originally published in it, the Waver- ley Novels are twenty-nine in number. Of these twenty-nine novels, unless I err in my recollection of their contents, 12 belong to the eighteenth century, whether to the earlier or to the later part of it — namely, Waverley, Guy Mannering, The Anti- quary, Rob Roy, The Black Dwarf, The Heart of Mid-Lothian, The Bride of Lammermoor , St. Ronan's Well, Redgauntlet, The Highland Widow, The Two Drovers, and The Surgeon's Daughter; 6 belong to the seventeenth century — namely, Old Mortality, The Legend of Montrose, The Pirate, Woodstock, The Fortunes of Nigel, and Peveril of the Peak; 3 to the sixteenth — namely, The Monastery, The Abbot, and Kenilworth ; 3 to the fifteenth — namely, Quen- tin Durward, The Fair Maid of Perth, and Anne of Geierstein; 1 to the fourteenth — namely, Castle Dangerous ; and the remaining 4 to other centuries as far back as the end of the eleventh — namely, Ivanhoe, The Betrothed, The Talisman, and Count Robert of Paris. Thus it appears that, though Scott did not hesitate to throw an occasional novel pretty far back into feudal and Gothic times, he preferred, 192 SCOTT AND HIS INFLUENCE. on the whole, ground nearer to his own age, where he could blend the interest of romantic adventure with that of homely and humorous representation of manners. Take another numerical classification of the novels on a different principle. Out of the whole twenty-nine, no fewer than 19, as I calculate, have their scenes laid wholly, or in great part, in Scotland, and are almost throughout novels of Scottish circumstance; 5 have their scenes laid in England — one of which, however, The Fortunes of Nigel, has much of Scottish circumstance in it; 2 have their scenes on the Continent — one of which, however, Quentin Durward, has a Scotchman for its hero ; and 3 are Oriental in their ground and refer- ence — of which one also, The Talisman, is dedicated to the adventures of a Scotchman. Thus, as regards place, it appears that Scott kept by preference near home, and that, but for some six or seven novels spared for purely English or for more remote themes, the name of " The Scottish Novels" might be applied with accuracy to the entire series. Combining the two classifications, and taking note of the order in which the novels were published, we can farther see, very distinctly, that Scott began with those which were Scottish in their subjects and lay nearest his own age, and that, only after he had pretty well TEE W AVE RLE Y NOVELS. 193 exhausted that ground and that time, did he work far backwards chronologically and away from Scot- land geographically. Ivanhoe, which was his first novel not Scottish in subject, and also the first thrown farther back in time than the seventeenth century, was the tenth novel of the series in the order of composition. You do not expect me, I am sure, to criticise the Waverley novels. We all know them and we all enjoy them. There has been a deluge of British novels since they were written — many of them most rich and striking, and some of them presenting subtle characteristics which we do not seek in the Waverley novels, and which recommend them in an express manner to recent tastes ; but when we are fatigued after a hard day's work and want a book in the evening, do we not, all of us, find it answer our purpose to fall back on a Waverley novel? At such times do we not run over the series mentally or on the bookshelf to see which of the novels it is that lies farthest off in our recollection ; and, even should that chance to be the poorest of the set, do we not find it, after all, very pleasant reading ? And, in this way, do we not systematically recover one after another of the series, just as it is slipping over the horizon of our memory, and retain all in permanent 194 SCOTT AND HIS INFL UEXCE. possession ? And, when we think how many can use the books in this way — that it is not the rich or the learned only that can thus wile away an hour of fatigue over these volumes, but that to myriads of the poor and laborious wherever our language is spoken, and, through translation, farther still, they serve the same refreshing function, as being so simple in matter and of such general interest, that the un- learned as well as the learned can understand them, and, at the same time, so pure and healthy in the main that no mind can take harm from them — have we not, in this thought, some measure of the gratitude which, if only on the score of innocent amusement, the world owes to Scott? He was a modest, hearty man, with as little of the cant of authorship about him as any author that ever lived ; he even detested that cant, talked as little of books as any man, and was a living rebuke to that miserable pedantry of our book- making days which thinks and acts as if books were the only things of interest in the world, as if the earth were mere standing ground for writers and printers, the sea ink, and the sky parchment ; and hence, when he spoke of his own novels, or of prose fiction in general, it was enough for him to think that the means of innocent amusement were thereby increased, and that men, in the midst of their THE W AVE RLE Y NOVELS. 195 business, might thereby have their minds a little lightened, and their hearts stirred by cheerful fancies. In attaining this, he attained more than he cared to mention as involved in it. It is the part of all poets and creative writers thus to make rich the thought of the world by additions to its stock^of well known fancies ; and when we think of the quantity of Scott's creative writing as well as of its popularity in kind — of the number of romantic stories he gave to the world and the plenitude of vivid incident in each, of the abundance in his novels of picturesque scenes and descriptions of nature, fit for the painter's art and actually employing it, and, above all, of the immense multitude of characters, real and fantastic, heroic and humorous, which his novels have added to that ideal population of beings bequeathed to the world by the poetic genius of the past, and hovering round us and overhead as airy agents and com- panions of existence — he evidently takes his place as, since Shakespeare, the man whose contribution of material to the hereditary British imagination has been the largest and the most various. Strikeout Scott, and all that has been accumulated on him by way of interest on his capital, from the British mind of the last seventy years, and how much poorer we should be ! His influence is more widely diffused 02 1 9 6 SCOTT A ND HIS INFL UENCE. through certain departments of European and Ameri- can literature than that of any individual writer that has recently lived ; and, many generations hence, the tinge of that influence will still be visible. It was no slight thing for the interests of British prose fiction, in relation to other established forms of our literature, that such a man as Scott, already laurelled as a metrical poet, and possessing besides a general reputation in the world of letters, should have devoted the last eighteen years of his life to activity in that particular field. Prose Fiction as- sumed, in consequence, a higher relative dignity ; nay Prose itself could be conscious of having ad- vanced its standard several stages nearer to the very citadel of Poesy. Apart, however, from the extension given by the Waverley novels to the prose form of fiction in the general realm of imaginative writing, we note several other influences which they had on the direction and aims of imaginative writing, whether in prose or in verse. For an exposition of one of these influences — the influence exerted by Scott's peculiar method of viewing and describing natural scenery upon our modern art of landscape, whether in literature or in painting — I may refer you to Mr. Ruskin, to whose observations on such a subject it is not for me to add anything. You will find in the THE HISTORICAL XO VEL. 197 third volume of Mr. Buskin's "Modern Painters" ample illustrations of Scott's fine sense of the pic- turesque in natural scenery, and especially of that by which Mr. Ruskin sets so much store, his fond- ness for colour and sensitiveness to its effects; and you will there also find distinctions acutely ex- pounded between Scott's mode of viewing nature and Wordsworth's mode, and also between Scott's mode and that of Tennyson and other more recent poets. It remains for me, in concluding this lecture, to call your attention again to those two character- istics of Scott which we agreed to consider as the most prominently marked in his genius — his venera- tion for the past, or the tendency of his genius to the historical; and, as a special form of that, his Scotticism. Out of these characteristics, as might be expected, spring two of the most notable influences- which he has exerted on British prose fiction. And, first, by the historical character of his novels, he communicated a historical tendency to our litera- ture of fiction, which has not yet exhausted itself, and which has led to important results not ending in fiction only. Scott is the father of the Modern Historical Novel. There had been attempts at the thing before ; but he first established this form of writing among us. In virtue, however, of his own 198 SC.0 TT A ND HIS I NFL UENCE. affection not so much for the whole of the historical past as for the Gothic portion of that past, from the tenth or eleventh century downwards, — that is for the ages of European chivalry and feudalism, and the times succeeding them, — he established the Historical Novel among us, so far as his own labours went, not in its entire capabilities, but only as applied to the range of the Gothic period, mediseval and modern. Scott is said to be the founder of the Novel of Chi- valry. Such a designation, however, though accurate so far, is not sufficiently extensive. By far the greater number of his novels, as we have seen, are not novels of the age of Chivalry, nor even of that of Feudalism, but refer to times subsequent to the Reformation, and, most of them, to the latter half of the seventeenth or to the eighteenth century. The phrase " Historical Novel " is, therefore, the more suitable; or, to be more precise still, "the Histo- rical Novel of the Gothic period in Europe." Those who have in their minds the proper signification of the words " Gothic period," as meaning the period of the leading activity of the so-called Gothic race in civilization, will understand what is here meant. There is no doubt that Scott did much to rouse an interest in this period of history, to settle our filial affections upon it as that whence we derive imme- SCOTT S MEDIEVALISM. . 199 diately all that is in us and about us ; and also that he did much to interpret it to us, to make its habits, its costumes, its modes of life and action, more con- ceivable and intelligible. Even in such a matter as the revival among us of a taste for Gothic architec- ture and for mediaeval art generally, Scott's influence may be traced. Here, however, comes in a question which was reserved. Was Scott's wholesome influence in the matter of Gothicism and medievalism direct or in- direct ? Did he do the good he has done in this department by his own actual teachings, or only by setting a fashion which has led or may lead to more earnest inquiries and to more accurate teachings? Did Scott really understand the earlier feudal and chivalrous times which he represents in some of his novels ? Were his notions of those times authentic and true, or only fictitious makeshifts? Mr. Ruskin, with all his admiration for Scott, pronounces de- cidedly against him in this question. He says that Scott, though he " had some confused love of Gothic architecture, because it was dark, picturesque, old, and like nature," knew nothing really about it, and was wrong in all he thought he knew. He says further, that Scott's " romance and antiquarianism, his knighthood and monkery," are all false and were 200 SCOTT AND HIS INFLUENCE. known by himself to be false. Baron Bunsen gives a similar opinion ; and, indeed, I know that the opinion is general among men whose judgment in such a matter is entitled to respect. I have heard a very good judge say that the German novel, " Si- donia the Sorcerer," is a deeper and truer delineation of mediaeval life than any of Scott's. For my own part, I cannot quite agree with this depreciation of Scott's medievalism and feudalism, or, at least, with the manner of it. I do not think that it was his antiquarian information that was in fault ; at least, in reading his Ivanhoe, or his Talisman, or his Quen- tin Durward, or his Fair Maid of Perth — in all of which he certainly flashes on the fancy in a manner that historians had not done before, and, with all their carping, have not found out the art of doing yet, a vivid condition of things intended to pass for medievalism and feudalism — I cannot find that our severest men of research have yet furnished us with that irrefragable and self-evidencing scheme or theory of Medievalism and Feudalism, by the test of which what Scott proffers as such is to fall so obviously into rubbish. Men, in hovering over a time, must fancy somewhat about it ; and a very vivid " some- what" will stand till accurate knowledge furnishes the imagination with the substitute. Scott's " some- SCOTT'S DEFECT. 201 what" about Chivalry and Feudalism, besides that it will fade fast enough as we get a better, was not picked up at random, or without an amount of acquaintance with the materials that was in his time rather uncommon. What in Scott's Gothicism and Medievalism, is false arises, I believe, from a certain defect in his genius, which would have produced, and perhaps did produce, corresponding falsity in his imaginations out of the Gothic and mediaeval regions altogether — to wit, his deficiency in the purely speculative faculty. The only Scottish thing that Scott had not in him was Scotch metaphysics. His mind was not of the investigatiug, or philosophic, or speculative type ; he was ; not, in the distinctive sense of the term, a thinker. Craniologists see this defect, they tell us, in the very shape of his head — high above the ears, but not long from back to front. Whether the defect was in his head or in his thumbs, there it was, and it produced its consequences. It is in this most conspicuously that he falls short of Shakespeare. It is owing to this that, in so many of his more stately and ambitious characters — as when he tries to paint a Cromwell or a Raleigh, or a Queen Elizabeth, or a Louis the Eleventh, or an enthusiastic mediaeval monk — it seems as if he could but give a certain exte- 202 SCOTT AND HIS INFLUENCE. rior account of the physiognomy, costume, arid gesture, but had no power to work from the inner mind outwards, so as to make the characters live. He cannot get at the mode of thinking of such personages ; indeed the notion of a u mode of think- ing" as belonging to persons, or to ages, and to be seized in representing them, was not very familiar to him. If he did not reproduce the earnest and powerful thought of the mediaeval period, its real feelings and beliefs, it was because his philosophy of the human mind and of human history was not so deep and subtle as to make feelings, beliefs, and modes of thought, the objects of his anxious imagi- nation. But, if he failed in representing a great and peculiar mind of the historical past, he would equally have failed, and for the same reason, in representing a great and peculiar mind of the historical present. This is a feat, indeed, to which I do not think we can boast that many of our writers of prose fiction have been, at any time, competent. The wonder is that Scott, notwithstanding his defect, succeeded so marvellously where he did suc- ceed. Need I say where that is ? Do we not feel that; in his representations of homely and even of striking; and heroic Scottish characters (with the exception, already implied, and accounted for, of his Presby- HIS SCOTTISH CHARACTERS. 203 terians and Covenanters), in a period of Scottish society near to his own time —in his representations of Scottish life and Scottish humours, nay of Scottish beliefs and modes of thinking in the eighteenth and seventeenth centuries (repeat the exception, at least partially) or even farther back still, where his shrewd observations of present human nature could co-ope- rate with his antiquarian knowledge in filling out a social picture — he was simply "as successful as it was possible to be ? Are not his Davie Gellatlys, his Dandie Dinrnonts, his Counsellor Pleydells, his Old- bucks, his Saunders Mucklebackets, his Edie Ochil- trees, his Cuddie Headriggs, his Xicol James, his Caleb Balderstones, his Dugald Dalgettys, his Meg Doddses, and the like — nay, in a more tragic and elevated order, are not his Meg Merrilieses, his Rob Roys, his Red gauntlets, his Jeannie Deanses — as perfect creations as any in literature? These, and especially the homelier characters, are simply as well done as they could possibly be ; and, in their concep- tion and execution, I do not know that Scott is inferior to Shakespeare. Is it that in such cases his Scottish heart and his poetic instinct, acting on what he saw and knew, whirled him beyond his conscious power of speculation ; or is it that, after all, there was a speculative faculty in Scott which he had not worked ? 204: SCOTT AND HIS INFL UENCE. From the shrewdness and sagacity of some of his critical prefaces to his novels, where he discusses principles of literature without seeming to call them such, I am sometimes tempted to believe the latter. And so, after all, Scott is greatest in his Scotti- cism. It is as a painter of Scottish nature and Scottish life, an interpreter of Scottish beliefs and Scottish feelings, a narrator of Scottish history, that he attains to the height of his genius. He has Scotticized European literature. He has interested the world in the little land. It had been heard of before ; it had given the world some reason to be interested in it before ; with, at no time, more than a million and a half of souls in it, it had spoken and acted with some emphasis in relation to the bigger nations around it. But, since Scott, the Thistle, till then a wayside weed, has had a great promotion in universal botany, and blooms, less prickly than of yore, but the identical Thistle still, in all the gardens of the world. All round the globe the little land is famous; tourists flock to it to admire its scenery, while they shoot its game ; and afar off, when the kilted regiments do British work, and the pibroch shrills them to the work they do, and men, marking what they do, ask whence they come, the answer is "From the land of Scott." SCOTTICISM. 205 " Caledonia, stern and wild, Meet nurse for a poetic child ! " sang Scott long ago. Caledonia nursed him, and he has repaid the nursing. And this man was born amongst you ! This city gave him birth. All Scot- land claims him, but here he had his peculiar home. Nor was he ultimus Scotorum, nor the last of the men of Edinburgh. You have since had among you, born among you or naturalized among you from other parts of Scotland, other specimens of tbe national breed — Jeffrey, Chalmers, Wilson, Miller, Hamilton. Nature abhors duplicates; and though in all of these there was an element of characteristic Scotticism, and this was a source of their strength, all of them were men by themselves, powerful by reason of their independent mould and structure, and not one of them a repetition of Scott. This is as it should be. Scotticism is not one in- variable thing, fixed and intransmutable. It does not consist merely in vaunting and proclaiming itself, in working in Scottish facts, Scottish traditions, Scottish reminiscences — all of which has perhaps been done enough ; it may be driven inwards ; it may exist internally as a mode of thought ; and there may be efficient Scotticism where not one word is said of the Thistle, and where the language 206 SCOTT AND HIS INFLUENCE. and the activity are catholic and cosmopolitan. And, seeing that it is so, need we suppose that we have yet seen the last of the Scotchmen, the last of the men of Edinburgh ? No ! The drain may still be southwards; Scotland now subserves, politically at least, the higher unity of Great Britain, just as that unity in its turn subserves a larger unity still, not so obviously carved out in the body of the sur- rounding world; at the time when Scotland was united to her great neighbour, she was made par- taker of an intellectual accumulation and an inheri- tance of institutions, far richer, measured by the mode of extension, than she had to offer to that neighbour in return; and since that period, while much of the effort of Scotland has been in continua- tion of her own separate development, much has necessarily and justly been ruled by the law of her fortunate partnership. And so for the future, it may be the internal Scotticism, working on British or on still more general objects, and not the Scotti- cism that works only on Scottish objects of thought, that may be in demand in literature as well as in other walks. But while Scotland is true to herself, and while nature in her and her social conditions co-operate to impart to her sons such an education, as heretofore, there needs be no end to her race of YOUNG ED1NBUBGH. 207 characteristic men, nor even to her home-grown and home-supported literature. And, if so of Scotland at large, so relatively of the city that is her centre. While the traditions of Edinburgh are not forgotten, nor her monuments destroyed, nor her beauties eradicated; while the Castle still frowns in the midst, and the Lion of Arthur's Seat still keeps guard, and the wooded Corstorphines lie soft on one side, and the Pentlands loom larger behind, and the same circle of objects surrounds the ravished sight by day, and at night the lamp-lit darkness of the city's own heights and hollows is one glittering pic- turesque, and far off Inchkeith light flashes and disappears, piercing this nocturnal picturesque in- termittingly, as with the gleam of a distant mystery ; so long, if but human will and industry answer as they ought, may this city keep up her intellectual succession. There are great ones gone, and nature abhors duplicates ; but " Other spirits there are, standing apart Upon the forehead of this town to come." 208 LECTURE IV. BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. The British Novelists since Scott are a very nume- rous body. Among them may be reckoned some of those mentioned in my last Lecture as having pre- ceded Scott in the field of Prose Fiction — particularly Mrs. Opie, Godwin, the two Miss Porters, Miss Edgeworth, Lady Morgan, and Mr. Maturin. Though these had all preceded Scott as writers of prose fiction, they continued to write novels after the Author of "Waverley had become the acknowledged, king of that species of literature ; and some of them were not less affected than their juniors by his surpassing influ- ence. Then, in the list of British novelists who made their appearance during the eighteen years in which the Waverley novels were in progress, some very shortly after the series had been begun, and others just as it was closing and Scott was retiring from the scene, I count no fewer than thirty-five names of some past or present note — to wit, in Scotland, or of LIST OF NO VE LISTS. 209 Scottish birth, and under the immediate shadow of the Author of Waverley, John Gait, Mrs. Johnstone, Miss Ferrier, the Ettrick Shepherd, Allan Cunning- ham, Scott's son-in-law Lockhart, Professor Wilson, Sir Thomas Dick Lauder, Andrew Picken, and David M. Moir ; in Ireland, or of Irish birth, Mr. Thomas Colley Grattan, Banim, Crofton Croker, Gerald Griffin, and William Carleton; and in England, and chiefly of English birth, Godwin's daughter Mrs. Shelley, Lady Caroline Lamb, Mr. Peacock, Thomas Hope, Leigh Hunt, Theodore Hook and his brother Dr. James Hook, James Morier, Mr. Lister, Mr. Plumer Ward, Mr. Gleig, Mr. Horace Smith, Miss Mitford, Miss Landon, Mr. Disraeli, Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, Mrs. Gore, Captain Marry at, Mr. James, and Mrs. Trollope. The majority of these, it will be observed, survived Scott ; and not a few of them, though they had taken their places as novel- writers while Scott was alive, attained their full cele- brity in that capacity after Scott was gone. In the group of some ten or twelve active novel writers upon whom the future hopes of the British novel were sup- posed to rest in 1832, the year of Scott's death, were Theodore Hook, Miss Mitford, Mr. Disraeli, Sir Ed- ward Bulwer Lytton, Mrs. Gore, Mr. James, and Mrs. Trollope. Several of these are still with us, and p 210 BRITISH NO VE LISTS SINCE SCO TT. have certainly done more for the novel, in the matter of quantity at least, than could have been expected from them, — Sir Bulwer Lytton having produced in all some five-and-twenty novels ; Mrs. Gore and Mrs. Trollope I know not how many ; Mr. James I know not how many ; and Mr. Disraeli having escaped similar productiveness only by that series of events which diverted his attention to politics, and has made him a British minister. To this group of novelists left in the field at Scott's death there have been added, in the course of the quarter of a century which has elapsed since then, a little legion of new recruits. I will not venture on a complete list of their names ; but when I mention those of Lady Blessington, Miss Martineau, Mrs. S. C. Hall, Mr. Harrison Ainsworth, Mr. Leitch Ritchie, the Howitts, Mr. Folkestone Williams, Charles Dickens, Mr. Lever, Mr. Samuel Warren, Douglas Jerrold, Elliot Warburton, Mr. James Grant, Mrs. Crowe, Miss- Jewsbury, William Makepeace Thackeray, Mr. Lewes, Mr. Shirley Brooks, Mr. Whyte Melville, Mr. Wilkie Collins, the brothers Mayhew, Mr. Charles Heade, Mr. James Hannay, Mr. Whitty, Mr. Anthony Trollope, Mrs. Marsh, Mrs. Oliphant, Miss Kavanagh, Miss Mulock, Miss Sewell, Miss Yonge, Miss Craik, Miss Bronte, Mrs. Gaskell, ■ST A TISTICS OF NO VEL- WRITING. 211 Charles Kingsley, and the author of Tom Brown, they will suffice to suggest the others. All in all, were we to include in the catalogue of (i British No- velists since Scott," all who have written novels with some degree of popular success from the date of the first Waverley Novels to the present time, the cata- logue, I believe, would include over a hundred names. 1 You will understand that I do not suppose included in this catalogue the contemporary American writers of prose fiction. These also have been numerous, and there have been among them, as you know, writers whose works have interested as powerfully on this side of the Atlantic as on the other; but, except by implication, I do not take them into account. If a list of the British novelists since Scott seems formidable, how much more formidable would be the sight of the novels produced by them gathered into one heap ! On this point allow me to present you with some statistics. The British Museum authorities cannot be sure that they receive copies of all the novels published in the British Islands ; but it is 1 The names cited by me are those of the writers with whose works my own acquaintance, direct or indirect, chances to be greatest ; but, in the list prefixed to the second volume of Mr. Jeaffreson's Novels and Novelists (1858), I count thirty- five additional names, and every season is adding fresh oues. p2 BBITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. likely that their collection is more complete, for the period with which we are now concerned, than any other that exists. Now, I have been informed that the number of novels standing on the shelves of the British Museum Library as having been published in Britain in the year 1820 — i. e. when the Waverley Novels were at the height of their popularity — is 26 in all, counting 76 volumes; that, ten years later, or in 1830, when the Waverley series was nearly finished, the yield to the Library in this depart- ment had increased to 101 books, or 205 volumes within the year ; that, twenty years later, or in 1850, the yield was 98 books or 210 volumes ; and that for the year 1856, the yield was 88 books or 201 volumes. Taking these data as approximately accurate, they give us the curious fact that the annual yield of British novels had been quadrupled by the time of Scott's death as compared with what it had been when he was in the middle of his Waverley series — having risen from 26 a-year, or a new novel every fortnight, to about 100 a-year, or nearly two new novels every week ; and, moreover, that this proportion of about 100 new novels every year, or two every week, has continued pretty steady since Scott's death, or, if there has been any change, has fallen off lately rather than increased. Making an average calculation from ST A TIST1CS OF NO VEL- WRITING. 213 these facts, I find that there may have been in all about 3,000 novels, counting about 7,000 separate volumes, produced in these islands since the publi- cation of " Waverley." And this corresponds pretty well with a calculation made on independent grounds. In the London Book Catalogue, giving a classified Index of all books published in Great Britain from the year 1816 to the year 1851 inclusive, the novels or works of prose fiction occupy twenty-two pages, and amount to about 3,300 separate entries. In this list, however, reprints of old novels as well as trans- lations and reprints of imported novels are included. Balancing these against the probable yield of the six years, from 1852 to 1857 inclusive, not embraced in the Catalogue, I believe that my calculation, as just stated, may pass as near the truth. Now, you don't expect me to have read, during my pilgrimage, these 7,000 volumes of British novels. The thing is practicable. It is satisfactory to think that, by sticking to two novels a-week, any one who chooses may, at the present rate, keep up with the velocity of the novel-producing apparatus at work among us, and not have a single novel of deficit when he balances at the year's end. But I have not done it. I have read a good many novels — perhaps specimens, at least, of all our best novelists ; but, in what I have to say, I have no objection that you 214 BRl TIS1I NO VE LISTS SINCE SCO TT. should consider me as one speaking of the composi- tion of the mass, in virtue of having inserted the tasting-scoop into it at a good many points ; and I shall trust a good deal to your own acquaintance with recent novels for the extension and correction, as well as for the corroboration, of my statements. What I propose to do is, first, to classify, in some sort of manner, the British novels that have made their appearance in the interval between Scott and our two great living representatives of a distinct style of prose fiction, Dickens and Thackeray — tracing certain general features in the miscellaneous aggregate, and alluding, as far as my knowledge serves me, to certain works of peculiar mark; then to say something of Dickens and Thackeray especi- ally, and of their effects on Prose Fiction; then, to indicate certain tendencies of British novel-writing discernible, I think, in the works of one or two writers who have come into the field since Dickens and Thackeray were in divided possession of it ; and lastly, in continuation of this, and by way of appro- priate close to these lectures, to indulge in a few speculations as to the possibilities of the British Novel of the future, In a classification of British novels from the date .of Scott's first occupation of the domain of Prose CLA SS1FICA TIOX OF RE CEXT XO VELS. 215 Fiction, it is in accordance with what we might expect that we should find a considerable space occupied by (1) The Novel oe Scottish Liee and Manners, either in direct imitation of Scott, or in continuation and extension of his patriotic illustra- tions. This is, accordingly, what we do find. By far the largest proportion of those whom we have named as Scottish writers of fiction after Scott — Gait, Mrs. Johnstone, Miss Ferrier, Hogg, Allan Cunningham, Lockhart, Wilson, Sir Thomas Dick Lauder, Picken, and Moir — devoted by far the largest proportion of their labour in this walk to the composition of pic- tures and stories of Scottish life. In all of them, so far as they followed this line of fiction, Scott's influence may be traced ; but there are few of them in whom — whether by reason of independent pecu- liarities of their minds, or by reason of their having been natives of other parts of Scotland than that to which Scott belonged, or by reason of their having gone through different courses of Scottish experience from his — a peculiar and original vein of Scotticism is not discernible. Thus, in Hogg we have more of the humble shepherd-life of the Scottish Lowlands ; in Gait and Picken, more of the shrewd West- country Scottish life ; and, I may add, in Hugh Miller's Scenes and Legends of the North of Scotland, 216 BRITISH NO VE LISTS SINCE SCO TT. more of the life and character of that part of Scot- land where the Norse or Scandinavian borders on the Celtic. In one of his novels also, Gait carries his Scotchman across the Atlantic, and so exhibits Scotticism at work amid conditions in which Scott had never placed it. Finally, from Lockhart and Wilson, as men of extra-Scottish scholarship and culture, though they also selected native themes for their fic- tions, and grew up in close relations to Scott, we have illustrations of Scottish life and manners, conceived in a different literary spirit, and presenting different characteristics. In Wilson's Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life, and in his other Scottish stories, we have, unless my impression of them deceives me, a spirit of lyrical pathos, and of poetical Arcadianism, which tinges, without obscuring, the real Scottish colour, and reminds us of the Lake poet and disciple of Wordsworth, as well as of the follower of Scott ; while in his Nodes Amhrosianae, he burst away in a riot of Scotticism on which Scott had never ventured — a Scotticism not only- real and humorous, but daringly imaginative and poetic, to the verge of Lakism and beyond — displaying withal an originality of manner natural to a new cast of genius, and a command of resources in the Scottish idiom and dialect un- fathomed even by Scott. Wilson's "Ettrick Shep- CLASSIF1CA TION OF RECENT NO VELS. 217 herd " is one of the most extraordinary creations of recent prose fiction. But it is not only novelists of Scottish birth that have occupied themselves, since Scott, in delineating Scottish nature and Scottish humours and characters. As Wordsworth purposely made the hero of his " Excursion " a Scottish pedlar, so, from the time of Scott to the present day, not a few English novelists have paid Scotland the com- pliment of treating it as an ideal land of rugged sublimity, both physical and moral, nearer to prim- eval nature, and less civilized and sophisticated than other parts of the British dominions, and have either laid their scenes there, or have fetched thence occasional characters, with all their Doric about them, to demean themselves among the Southerns in a way very different from that of such older literary representatives of the Scot as Mac Sarcasm and MacSycophant. Eor an example I may refer to Mr. Kingsley's Sandy Mackaye in Alton Locke — the cynical old Scotchman who keeps a book-stall in London, beats fallacies out of the young tailor by his talk, and rectifies, to a considerable extent, whatever is wrong in his neighbourhood. Besides the Scottish Novel, however, or the novel with Scottish character and circumstance in it, there has been (2) The Novel of Irish Liee and Man- 218 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. NEiis. This had been initiated, as we have seen, by Miss Edgeworth and practised by Miss Owenson and others before Scott had established the corresponding Scottish Novel; but, as was natural, the example of what Scott had done for the sister-land helped to stimulate new Irish genius in the patriotic direction. Besides some of the later tales of Miss Edgeworth, we have, therefore, as specimens of the Irish Novel since Scott, the fictions of Banim, Crofton Croker, Oriffin, Carleton, and Lover, and some of those of Mr. Lever, and Mrs. S. C. Hall. As regards (3) The Novel oe English Liee and i Manners, it may be said, I think, that, though there have been specimens of it, there has been a deficiency of the variety that would exactly correspond to the Scottish Novels and the Irish Novels, as just described. Seeing that the majority of the British Novelists since Scott have been Englishmen or Englishwomen, they have, of course, laid their scenes in England, and have, in a sense, made the delinea- tion of English life and manners a professed part of their purpose. In this sense, Lady Caroline Lamb, Mr. Peacock, Theodore Hook, Mr. Plumer Ward, Mr. Disraeli, Sir Bulwer Lytton, Mrs. Gore, Mrs. Trollope, and, later still, Lady Blessington, Miss Martineau, Mr. Samuel Warren, Douglas Jerrold, CLA SSIFICA TION OF RECEXT XO VELS. 219 Mrs. Crowe, Miss Jewsbury, Mr. Lewes, Mr. Shirley- Brooks, Mrs. Marsh, Miss Mulock and others have all been novelists of English life — some of them continuing the exquisite style of English domestic fiction which had been begun by Miss Austen, and others introducing original peculiarities into the novel, and extending its range farther over the sur- face and more into the corners of English life. In their hands, however, or in the hands of most of them, the Novel of English life and manners has not had that express nationality of character which is found in the contemporary Scottish and Irish Novels. Whether from the very variety of life and manners over so broad a country as England • — Yorkshire exhibiting one set of characteristics, Devonshire another, Kent and Sussex another, and so on; or whether because what could be done in the way of a novel of national English characteristics had already been done to a sufficient extent by Fielding and others of the eighteenth century, and there remained no such interest for British readers in that English system of life which was becoming the normal and conventional one for all, as in the outstanding bits of still unbooked barbaresque presented by Scotland and Ireland — certain it is that, in most of the novelists I have named, we have 220 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. only a certain sublimation of English life as presented or supposed to be presented in the uppermost layers of society over the country at large, or as concen- trated in London and its suburbs. In the tales of Miss Mitford, and in some of those of Theodore Hook, Mr. Peacock, and perhaps also of Sir Bulwer Lytton and some others, without taking into account Dickens and Thackeray, I believe there are illustra- tions of English nature and life in their non-conven- tional and non-metropolitan varieties; and it is worthy of remark that of late this tendency to the illustration of the outstanding barbaresque and primitive in English society itself has been gaining strength. Miss Bronte made a refreshing innovation in English novel-writing when she drew her cha- racters and scenes and even portions of her dialect from her native Yorkshire ; Mrs. Gaskell has followed with her pictures of artisan life, and her specimens of provincial dialect in Lancashire ; and Mr. Kingsley has broken ground, as an artist, in Devonshire and other counties. There are rich fields of yet unbooked English life both in northern and in southern Eng- land ; and the literary centralization of English life in London has been owing, perhaps, to the centra- lization of the literary craft itself there. Out of this centralization, however, there has CLASSIFICA TION OF RECENT NO VELS. 221 sprung (4) The Fashionable Novel, as it has been called, which aims at describing life as it goes on in the aristocratic portions of London society and in the portions immediately connected with these. Belgravia, Mayfair, and the West End of London generally are the topographical seats of this kind of Novel — saving, of course, that at Christmas, and after the Opera and Parliamentary season, the lords, baronets, ladies, wits, and footmen, who figure in them, are dispersed into the country or even as far as Scotland and the Continent. Representatives of this style of novel, are Lady Caroline Lamb, Theodore Hook again, Mr. Disraeli, Sir Bulwer Lytton again, Mrs. Gore, Mrs. Trollope, Lady Bles- sington, &c. But another kind of Novel, also perhaps the result of the same centralization of literary attention on the metropolis, has been (5) The Illustrious Criminal Novel, of which the most celebrated specimens have been Sir Bulwer Lytton's Paul Clifford and Mr. Ainsworth's Jack Sheppard. I need hardly say that this kind of novel, though dealing with roguery and criminal adventure, is by no means the same as that exemplified by Fielding in his " Jonathan Wild," or as the Spanish picaresque novels, or even as Defoe's illustrations of outlaw life in his da v. 222 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. But Fiction gets tired of having its attention fixed on the Metropolis, just as Novelists get tired of living in it; and hence, by way of variety, we have had what may be called (6) The Traveller's Novel, the nature of which is that we are taken in it beyond the British Islands, usually in the train of " fashion- able" people, and are made to roam over the Continent, or to reside in Paris, or at German spas, or in Florence or other Italian cities. In most of the Fashionable Novels we have something of this ; but several of the novels of Sir Bulwer Lytton, and more still of Mrs. Gore's and Mrs. Trollope's, belong in a special manner to the class now designated. Mr. Thackeray also, after his peculiar fashion, will now and then take us, with the Kickleburys or some other English family, up the Rhine. Varieties of the Traveller's Novel, worthy of being separately classed, are (7 and 8) The Novel oe American Man- ners and Society, of which Mrs. Trollope, Captain Marryat, and, to some extent, also Mr. Dickens and Mr. Thackeray have given us specimens, and The Oriental Novel, or Novel of Eastern Manners and Society, of which we have had specimens in the Persian and Indian novels of Mr. Morier, Mr. Bailie Fraser, and others. These two kinds of Novel, in as far as they lead us, in a right spirit, CLASSIFICA TION OF RECENT NO VELS. 223 over new regions of natural scenery and new social fields, are by no means unimportant. I may name as two additional kinds of Novel, in which the interest also arises in a great degree from imaginary locomotion, (9 and 10) The Military Novel and The Naval Novel — the first represented in such stories of military life and adventure as those of Mr. Gleig, Mr. Maxwell, Mr. Lever, and, more inciden- tally, in parts of Thackeray's fictions ; the second in the sea-stories of Captain Marryat, Captain Chamier, Mr. James Hannay, Mr. Cupples, and others. In some of these naval novels of later times, besides much of the interest to be found in such older sea- novels as those of Smollett, arising from the represen- tation of sailor-characters and the incidents and humours of ship-life, whether as packed up on board ship or as let loose, to the discomfiture of landsmen, in port- towns, there is much of another sort of inte- rest, not found in Smollett's sea-stories, and indeed alien to the literature of that day — the interest arising from the poetry of the sea itself, and from the relations of the hearty fellows, not only to each other in the gun-room and mess-room, but also to the vast element on which they float, and to the clouds that scud and the hurricanes that blow over the wilderness of waters. In this conjunction of two 224: BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. sets of relations — the relations of the men to each other as individuals of the same crew, pursuing their voyage together, and the relations of the crew as a whole to the visible infinity in which they pursue their voyage, through which fly the omens which they mark, and over which hover and shriek the demons which they dread — the sailor's life is typical poeti- cally of human life in the general. Something of this notion has caught some of our later sea- novelists ; and it is not now only the jealousies and the practical jokes of the mess-room that they give us, but the superstitions also of the man at the wheel, or the yarns of the old sailors whiling away the calm of a starry night and exchanging the wild ideas of their marine religion, or the scene when all hands are on deck and the captain's voice is heard amid the storm, or when the ship is cleared for action, and Jack stands, no longer slouching and comical, but calm and magnificent, his breast and arms bare, the cannon levelled, and his match already at the touch- hole. But, while we have had novels of real action and adventure of all kinds, there have not been wanting specimens, at least, of (11) The Novel of Super- natural Phantasy. Mrs. Shelley's Frankenstein, and Bulwer Lytton's Zanoni, are of this class ; and CLASSIFICATION OF RECENT NOVELS. 225 there are one or two of Douglas Jerrold's tales, as well as of Dickens's Christmas Stories, in which there is a poetic use of ghostly agency. Nor have there been wanting specimens of (12) what may be called The Art and Culture Novel, in which the purpose is to exhibit the growth and education of an individual character of the more thoughtful order. By far the greatest example of this species of fiction in modern literature is the "Wilhelm Meister" of Goethe ; and there can be no doubt that that work, since it was translated, has had some influence on the aims of British novel-writing. Indeed, what is best in our fashionable novels seems to have arisen from an occasional desire on the part of those who practise such a style of fiction to make it subserve some such purpose. Some of Bulwer's novels are, perhaps, the nearest approach, in design, to the Art and Culture Novel that have been yet noticed among us; but I do not know that we have yet, or, at all events, that we have had till very recently, any very pure, pecimens of the novel so designated. All this while, as you will already have assured yourselves, we have by no means lost sight of (13), The Historical Novel, to which the genius of Scott gave, while he lived, such vigour and predominance. Since the impulse which Scott gave to the historical Q 226 BRITISH NO VELISTS SIN CE SCOTT. variety of prose fiction we have had historical novels in great, and even increasing, abundance. We have had Scotch historical novels of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries from Gait, and romances of still older periods of Scottish history from Sir Thomas Dick Lauder and others ; we have had Irish his- torical novels from some of the Irish novelists already mentioned; and, in extension of Scott's few, but splendid, inroads upon national English History, we have had English historical novels from Godwin, from Sir Bulwer Lytton (witness his Harold and his Last of the Barons), from Horace Smith, from Mr. Ainsworth, and, above all, from Mr. G. P. R. James. Mr. Kingsley, also, has ventured on this field afresh in his Westward Ho ! ; nay, Mr. Thackeray, too, in his Esmond, and Mr. Dickens in his Barnaby Budge, where he describes the Gordon Riots. In the field of Continental History, broken in upon by Scott in his iC Quentin Durward" and his " Anne of Geierstein," James has had a realm to himself, save for such an occasional intrusion as that of Bulwer Lytton in his Rienzi. It is observable also, that, though Scott's pas- sion for the historical confined itself to the Gothic period of the European past, the taste for the his- torical in fiction or for the fictitious in history which he fostered has, since his time, overflowed the Gothic CLASSIFICA TION OF RECENT NO VELS. 227 area altogether, and extended beyond it both chro- nologically and geographically. Chronologically — for have we not had fictions of Classical History in Lockhart's Valerius, a Roman Story, in Bulwer's Last Days of Pompeii, in Mr. Wilkie Collins' s Antoninus, in Kingsley's Hypatia, and in others still more ancient in their reference ? Geographically — for, besides the novels of oriental society and man- ners already alluded to, have we not novels of orien- tal history ? Of these the most celebrated, I believe, is Hope's Anastasius. or Memoirs of a modern Greek, written at the close of the Eighteenth century. It is sufficient to say of this novel, which is a description of the decrepit society of the Turkish Empire at the time indicated by the title, that some critics, includ- ing Baron Bunsen, praise it as of deeper epical import than any of Scott's. I have thus enumerated, by way of rough and obvious, rather than considered and thorough classi- fication, thirteen distinct varieties of the British novel, as in existence during the quarter of a cen- tury after Scott's influence had begun, and as in existence still. The classification, such as it is, has been made on external grounds, with reference to the different kinds of object-matter handled in the Q2 228 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. novels. Had the classification been according to the different notions or styles of art employed in the treatment of the object-matter, whatever its kind, fewer heads might have sufficed. Thus, Sir Bulwer Lytton classifies all novels into the three kinds of the Familiar, the Picturesque, and the Intellectual — not a very scientific classification, but one which has an obvious meaning. Whichever classification we use — whether the external one, according to the matter, or the internal one, according to the style of treatment — Sir Bulwer Lytton himself may carry off the palm from all his coevals in respect of versatility. Take his own classification, according to styles of treatment, and he has given us Novels Familiar, Novels Picturesque, and Novels Intellectual. Take the other classification, according to the kinds of matter treated, and he has given us novels ranking under at least seven of the thirteen heads enumerated — to wit, the Novel of English Manners, the Fashion- able Novel, the Novel of Illustrious Villainy, the Traveller's Novel, the Novel of Supernatural Phan- tasy, the Art and Culture Novel, and the Historical Novel. I say nothing of any other of Bulwer's merits besides this of his versatility, save that, of all British novelists, he seems to have worked most con- sciously on a theory of the Novel as a form of litera- THE FASHIONABLE NOVEL. 229 ture. This, indeed, may be the very cause of his versatility. Of all the kinds of novel that I have mentioned, perhaps the most characteristic product of the time was, and is, the Fashionable Novel. I think we shall agree that this very popular form of fiction may now very safely be dispensed with — that no harm would attend its total and immediate extinc- tion. Not that the classes of society whose feelings and doings this form of fiction professes to represent are classes whose feelings and doings are unimpor- tant or uninteresting. Far from it. No one can be in any place where the members of these classes are gathered together, without feeling that, behind those faces, fresh or pale, haggard or beautiful, there are brains at work, more active than the average, and that those hearts, male or female, have their pas- sions and their histories. Let whosoever is qualified tell forth the peculiar experience of those classes in any serious form that may be possible ; and let what is ridiculous or despicable among them live under the terror of Michael Angelo Titmarsh. Eut in the Fashionable Novel, commonly so called, there is no sort of information at all. There is no soundness in it. Human life there is all resolved into that one interest, into which, as we are told, things had 230 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. resolved themselves also in the world before the Flood — the interest of marrying and giving in mar- riage. One could almost wish for another Flood, if that would put an end to it. At all events let us throw all the cold water upon it that we ourselves can. For, so far as other interests are bound up, in the Fashionable Novel, with that primary and fundamental one, the effect is but to add to the silliness, to make the frivolity more mischievous. In most Fashionable Novels, for example, there is a dash of politics. The two Houses of Parliament are appendages to that Vanity Fair in which the ladies and gentlemen move ; and, so far as the gen- tlemen have any occupation in addition to flirtation, it is in the function of legislating for their country. The veteran baronet goes to' the Commons after dinner, or retires to his blue-books ; the young hero aspires to the representation of the county and a futurity as a Pitt or a Canning ; changes of ministry and dissolutions are parts of the machinery of the novel ; and always at some point of the story there are the humours of an Election. These things are in our social life, and represented they must be in our fictions, like any other social facts, and in full proportion; but, represented as they are in our Fashionable Novels — why, it is catering for Revolu- THE FASHIONABLE NOVEL. 231 tion ! Parliament an appendage to Vanity Fair ; legislation a relief from flirtation ; those figures of gentlemen and ladies moving about in their charmed circle, and having their destinies, and the chances of their marriages affected by votes, changes of ministry, and dissolutions — why, where on earth, all this time, in the Fashionable Novelist's imagination, is the thing called the Country? Nay, and if there is serious political talk for a page or two, what talk it is ! So and so — such and such a minister — " plays his cards well ! " That is the phrase. Plays his cards well ! Is Government, then, card-playing ? In a sense it may be ; for the suit is diamonds, and spades are the agricultural interest, and hearts too have to be played with, and, if politics is long con- sidered card-playing, it may all end in clubs. One of the best passages in Bleak House is a passage satirizing in real life that mode of talking about politics as an amusement of "fashionable" persons, which has reproduced itself in the Fashion- able Novel. It is an account of the talk that went on at the Dedlock family mansion of Chesney Wold amid the guests there assembled — the chief colloquists being Lord Boodle and Mr. Buffy. " He (Lord Boodle) perceives with astonishment that, sup- posing the present government to be overthrown, the limited 232 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. choice of the Crown in the formation of a new ministry would lie between Lord Goodie and Sir Thomas Doodle — supposing it to be impossible for the Duke of Foodie to act with Goodie; which may be assumed to be the case, in consequence of the breach arising out of that affair with Hoodie. Then, giving the Home Department and the leadership of the House of Commons to Joodle, the Exchequer to Koodle, the Colonies to Loodle, and the Foreign Office to Moodle, what are you to do with Noodle ? You can't offer him the Presidency of the Council ; that is reserved for Poodle ! You can't put him in the Woods and Forests ; that is hardly good enough for Quoodle ! "What follows 1 That the country is ship- wrecked, lost, and gone to pieces, because you can't provide for Noodle ? " On the other hand, the Eight Honorable William Buffy, M.P., contends across the table with some one else, that the shipwreck of the country, — of which there is no doubt ; it is only the manner of it that is in question, — is attributable to Cuffy. If you had done with Cuffy what you ought to have done when he first came into Parliament, and had prevented him from going over to Duffy, you would have got him into alliance with Fuffv ; you would have had with you the weight attaching as a smart debater to Guffy ; you would have brought to bear upon the elections the wealth of Huffy ; you would have got in for three counties Juffy, Kuffy, and Luffy ; and you would have strengthened your administration by the official knowledge and the business-habits of Muffy ! All this instead of being, as you now are, dependent on the mere caprice of Puffy ! " Need I read more? If satire could annihilate nonsense, would not the Boodle and Buffy style of politics — which is very much that of our Fashionable Novels — have been by this time beyond the moon? DICKENS AND THA CKERA Y. 233 Prose Fiction in Britain — nay, in the rest of Europe and in America too — has received a fresh impulse and has taken on a new set of characteristics, since Dickens and Thackeray became, for us, its chief representatives. These two writers belong to the classic roll ; they are now in their living activity, and the buzz of critics is about them ; but a time will come when they shall have their settled places, and, the buzz having transferred itself to others whose turn of penance it will then be, they shall be seen in their full proportions relatively to the Fieldings and Smolletts and Sternes that went before them, and men, noting their differences in comparison with these, may assert also, more boldly than we, what shall seem their superiorities. Dickens, as you are aware, was the first in the field. His Sketches by Boz appeared in 1837 followed, within the next ten years, by his Pickwick, his Nicholas Nickleby, his Oliver Twist (previously published in magazine parts), his Humphrey's Clock (including The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Budge), his Martin Chuzzlewit, and several of his Christmas Stories. It was not till after these ten years of Dickens's established popu- larity, or till about the year 1847, that Mr. Thackeray — whose extraordinary powers had already, however, been long recognized within a limited circle of intel- 234 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. lectual men, in virtue of his numerous scattered publications and papers — stepped forth into equally extensive celebrity. His Vanity Fair was the first efficient proclamation to the public at large of the existence of this signal British talent, increasingly known since by the republication of those Miscel- lanies which had been buried in magazines and other periodicals, and by the successive triumphs of the Snob Papers, Pendennis, Esmond, the Newcomes, and various Christmas Books. Parallel with these had been running later fictions from Mr. Dickens's pen — Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, and Bleak House. Mr. Dickens also had the last word in his Little Dorrit, until the other day, when Mr. Thacke- ray recommenced in his Virginians. For, with the two writers, according to the serial system, it seems to be, whether by arrangement or by necessity, as with Castor and Pollux ; both cannot be above the horizon of the publishing world at once, and, when the one is there, the other takes his turn in Tartarus. But whether simultaneously visible or alternate, the two are now so closely associated in the public mind that whenever the one is mentioned the other is thought of. It is now Dickens and Thackeray, Thackeray and Dickens, all the world over. Nay, not content with associating them, people have got DICKENS AND THACKERAY. 235 into the habit of contrasting them and naming them in opposition to each other. There is a Dickens faction, and there is a Thackeray faction ; and there is no debate more common, wherever literary talk goes on, than the debate as to the respective merits of Dickens and Thackeray. Perhaps there is a certain ungraciousness in our thus always comparing and contrasting the two writers. We ought to be but too glad that we have such a pair of contemporaries, yet living and in their prime, to cheer on against each other. I felt this strongly once when I saw the two men together. The occasion was historic. It was in June, 1857 ; the place was Norwood Cemetery. A multitude had gathered there to bury a man known to both of them, and who had known both of them well — a man whom we have had incidentally to name as holding a place, in some respects peculiar, in the class of writers to which they belong, though his most effective place was in a kindred department of literature ; a man, too, of whom I will say that, let the judgment on his remaining writings be permanently what it may, and let tongues have spoken of him this or that awry, there breathed not, to my knowledge, within the unwholesome bounds of what is specially Lon- don, any one in whose actual person there was more 236 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. of the pith of energy at its tensest, of that which in a given myriad anywhere distinguishes the one. How like a little Nelson he stood, dashing back his hair, and quivering for the verbal combat ! The flash of his wit, in which one quality the island had not his match, was but the manifestation easiest to be observed of a mind compact of sense and informa- tion, and of a soul generous and on fire. And now all that remained of Jerrold was enclosed within the leaden coffin which entered the cemetery gates. As it passed, one saw Dickens among the bearers of the pall, his uncovered head of genius stooped, and the wind blowing his hair. Close behind came Thackeray ; and, as the slow procession wound up the hill to the chapel, the crowd falling into it in twos and threes and increasing its length, his head was to be seen by the later ranks, towering far in the front above all the others, like that of a marching Saul. And so up to the little chapel they moved ; and, after the service for the dead, down again to another slope of the hill, where, by the side of one of the walks, and opposite to the tombstone of Blanchard, Jerrold's grave was open. There the last words were read ; the coffin was lowered ; and the two, among hundreds of others, looked down their farewell. And so, dead at the age of fifty-four, Jerrold was left in . DICKENS AND THACKERAY. 237 his solitary place, where the rains were to fall, and the nights were to roll overhead, and but now and then, on a summer's day, a chance stroller would linger in curiosity ; and back into the roar of London dispersed the funeral crowd. Among those remitted to the living were the two of whom we speak, aged, the one forty-five, the other forty-six. Why not be thankful that the great city had two such men still known to its streets ; why too curiously institute comparisons between them ? . And yet, in instituting such comparisons, the public are guided by a right critical instinct. There can be no doubt that the two writers bring out and throw into relief each other's peculiarities — that they are, in some respects, the opposites of each other ; and that each is most accurately studied when his differences from the other are noted and scrutinized. But, first, as to their general resemblances. Both novelists belong, in the main, though by no means exclusively, to the order of Humorists, or writers of Comic Fiction. Moreover, under this distinction, both stand very much in the same relation to their predecessors in respect of the kind or kinds of fiction, previously in use, to which they have attached them- selves, and in respect of the extension of range which that kind or those kinds of fiction have received at 238 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. their hands. The connexions of both at first were chiefly with that which we have distinguished as the Novel of English Life and Manners ; and both, in working this kind of Novel, have added immensely to its achievements and capabilities in one particular field — that of the Metropolis. The Novels of Dickens and Thackeray are, most of them, novels of London; it is in the multifarious circumstance of London life and its peculiar humours that they move most frequently and have their most characteristic being. A fact not unimportant in the appreciation of both ! As the greatest aggregate of human beings on the face of the earth, as a population of several millions crushed together in one dense mass on a space of a few square miles-— this mass consisting, for the most part, of Englishmen, but containing also as many Scotchmen as there are in Edinburgh, as many Irishmen as there are in Dublin, and a perfect Polyglott of other nations in addition — London is as good an epitome of the world as anywhere exists, presenting all those phenomena of interest, whether serious or humorous, which result from great num- bers, heterogeneousness of composition, and close social packing ; besides which, as the metropolis of the British Empire, it is the centre whither all the sensations of the Empire tend, and whence the DICKENS AND THACKERAY. 239 motive currents issue that thrill to the extremities. If any city could generate and sustain a species of Novel entirely out of its own resources,, it might surely be London; nor would ten thousand novels exhaust it. After all the mining efforts of previous novelists in so rich a field, Dickens and Thackeray have certainly sunk new shafts in it, and have come upon valuable veins not previously disturbed. So much is this the case that, without injustice to Fielding and others, Dickens and Thackeray might well be considered as the founders of a peculiar sub-variety of the Novel of English Life and Manners, to be called " The British Metropolitan Novel." As Lon- doners, however, do not always stay in London, or, vrhile in London, are not always engrossed by what is passing there, so our two novelists both range, and range about e qually, beyond the bounds of the kind of fiction thus designated. They do give us English life and manners out of London; nay, they have both, as we have seen, given us specimens also of their ability in at least two varieties of the Novel distinct from that of English life and manners — the Traveller's Novel, and the Historical Novel. If, in this respect of external range, either has the advantage, it is perhaps Dickens — who, in his Christmas stories, and in stories interspersed 240 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. through his larger fictions, has given us specimens of his skill in a kind of prose phantasy which Thackeray has not attempted. In addition to the difference just indicated, critics have pointed out, or readers have discovered for themselves, not a few other differences between Dickens and Thackeray. In the mere matter of literary style, there is a very obvious difference. Mr. Thackeray, according to the general opinion, is the more terse and idio- matic, and Mr. Dickens the more diffuse and luxuriant writer. There is an Horatian strictness and strength in Thackeray which satisfies the most cultivated taste and wins the respect of the severest critic; but Dickens, if he is the more rapid "and careless on the whole, seems more susceptible to passion, and rises to a keener and wilder song. Referring the difference of style to its origin in difference of intellectual constitution, critics are accustomed to say that Thackeray's is the mind of closer and harder, and Dickens's the mind of looser and richer texture — that the intellect of the one is the more penetrating and reflective, and that of the other the more excursive and intuitive. Passing to the substance of their novels, as com- posed of incident, description, and character, we are DICKENS AND THACKERAY. 241 able to give more definiteness to the popularly felt differences between the two novelists in this respect, by attending to the analogies between novel-writing and the art of painting. In virtue of his descriptions or imaginations of scenery, the Novelist may be con- sidered along with Landscape and Object painters; and, in virtue of his characters and his incidents, along with Figure and Action painters. So, on the whole, we find the means of indicating a novelist's range and peculiarities by having recourse to the kindred craft for names and terms. On this plan we should have to say that, while both our novelists are masterly artists, the art of Dickens is the wider in its range as to object and circumstance. I may here use a sentence or two on this subject which I wrote for another occasion. " Dickens," I then said, " can give you a landscape proper — a piece of the " rural English earth in its summer or in its winter " dress, with a bit of water and a village spire in it ; " he can give you, what painters seldom attempt, " a great patch of flat country by night, with the red " trail of a railway-train traversing the darkness ; " he can succeed in a sea-piece ; he can describe " the crowded quarter of a city, or the main street " of a country town, by night or by day ; he can " paint a garden, sketch the interior of a cathedral, R 242 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. " or photograph the interior of a hut or of a drawing- " room ; he can even be minute in his delineations " of single articles of dress or of furniture. Take u him again in the Figure department. Here he " can be an animal painter, with Landseer, when " he likes, as witness his dogs, ponies, and ravens ; " he can be a historical painter, as witness his " description of the Gordon Riots ; he can be a " caricaturist, like Leech ; he can give you a bit of " village-life with Wilkie ; he can paint a haggard " scene of low city life, so as to remind one of some of " the Dutch artists, or a pleasant family scene, gay or " sentimental, reminding one of Maclise or of Frank (C Stone; he can body forth romantic conceptions " of terror or beauty that have arisen in his imagi- " nation ; he can compose a fantastic fairy piece ; he " can even succeed in a dream or allegory, where the " figures are hardly human. The range of Thackeray, ct on the other hand, is more restricted. In the land- fC scape department, he can give you a quiet little bit " of background, such as a park, a clump of trees, or " the vicinity of a country-house, with a village seen " in the sunset ; a London street also, by night or by " day, is familiar to his eye ; but, on the whole, his li scenes are laid in those more habitual places of " resort where the business or the pleasure of aristo- DICKENS AND THACKERAY. 243 cratic or middle-class society goes on — a pillared clubhouse in Pall Mall, the box or pit of a theatre, a brilliant reception-room in Mayfair, a public dancing-room, a newspaper office, a shop in Pater- noster Row, the interior of a married man's house, or a bachelor's chambers in the Temple. And his choice of subjects from the life corresponds. Men and women as they are, and as they behave daily in the charmed circles of rank, literature, and fashion, are the objects of Mr. Thackeray's pencil; and in his delineations of them, he seems to unite the strong and fierce characteristics of Hogarth, with a touch both of Wilkie and Maclise, and not a little of that regular grace and bloom of colouring which charm us in the groups of Watteau.-" Within his range, the merit of superior care, clear- ness, and finish may be assigned to Thackeray ; but there are passages in Dickens — such as the descrip- tion of the storm on the East Coast in his Copperfield — to which, for visual weirdliness, there is nothing comparable in the pages of his rival. As to the difference of ethical spirit, or of general philosophy, between the two writers, the public have come to a very definite conclusion. Dickens, it is said, is the more genial, kindly, cheerful, and senti- mental ; Thackeray, the more harsh, caustic, cynical, r2 244 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. and satirical writer. And, proceeding on this dis- tinction, the two factions argue, consistently with it, in behalf of their respective favourites — the adherents of Dickens objecting to what they call Thackeray's merciless views of human life, and his perception of the mean at the roots of everything ; and the adherents of Thackeray, on the other hand, main- taining the wholesome effect of his bracing sense in comparison with what they call Dickens's sickly sentimentalism. For us, joining neither of the fac- tions, it is enough to recognise the fact of the difference on which they argue so constantly. The philosophy of Dickens certainly is the professed philosophy of kindliness, of a genial interest in all things great and small, of a light English joyousness, and a sunny universal benevolence ; whereas, though I do not agree with those that represent Thackeray's writings as mainly cynical, but think that, in such characters as his Warrington, he has shown his belief in manly nobleness, and his power of repre- senting it — yet it seems clear that the pervading philosophy of his writings, far more than those of Dickens, is that of a profoundly reasoned pococur- antism, of a sceptical acquiescence in the world as it is ; or, to use his own words in describing the state of mind of his hero Pendennis, u of a belief, qualified DICKENS AND THACKERAY. 2 45 with scorn, in all things extant." The difference is perhaps hest seen, and with most advantage to Thackeray, when it is expressed negatively — that is, with reference not to what the two writers respec- tively inculcate, but to what they respectively attack and oppose. Stated so (but such a method of state- ment, it should be remembered, is not the fairest for all purposes), the philosophy of Dickens may be denned as Anti-Puritanism, whereas that of Thack- eray may be defined as Anti-Snobbism. Whatever practice, institution, or mode of thinking is adverse, in Mr. Dickens's view, to natural enjoyment and festivity, against that he makes war ; whereas that which Mr. Thackeray hunts out and hunts down everywhere is Snobbism. Although, in their positive forms, both philosophies are good, perhaps in their negative applications Mr. Thackeray's is the least liable to exception. Anti-Snobbism, it may indeed be admitted, is not a perfect summary of the whole decalogue; but, in the present day, and especially in and about London, it is that which most nearly passes for such a summary ; and, seeing that there is no question anywhere but that Snobbism is a bad thing, and little difficulty anywhere in knowing what it is, Mr. Thackeray's doctrine is one to which there needs be less hesitation in wishing universal 246 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. good speed than to the corresponding doctrine of his rival—a doctrine which would too hastily extinguish that, about the nature of which, and its proper varie- ties, there may well be much controversy. Farther, it is to Mr. Thackeray's advantage, in the opinion of many, that in his satires in behalf of Anti- Snobbism, or of any other doctrine that he may hold, it is men and their modes of thinking and acting that he attacks, and not social institutions. To do battle with the vanity, the affectation, the insincerity, the Snobbism, that lies under each man's own hat, and actuates each man's own gestures and conduct, is Mr. Thackeray's way ; and rarely or never does he concern himself with social anomalies or abuses. In this respect he is singularly acqui- escent and conservative for a man of such general strength of intellect. Mr. Dickens, on the other hand, is singularly aggressive and opinionative. There is scarcely a social question on which he has not touched ; and there are few of his novels in which he has not blended the functions of a social and political critic with those of the artist, to a degree detrimental, as many think, to his genius in the latter capacity. For Mr. Dickens's wonderful powers of description are no guarantee for the cor- rectness of his critical judgments in those particulars DICKENS AND TEA CKERA Y. , , 247 to which he may apply them. " We may owe one " degree of respect/' I have said, " to Dickens, as " the describer of Squeers and Creakle, and quite " another degree of respect when he tells us how he " would have boys educated. Mr. Spenlow may be u a capital likeness of a Doctors' Commons lawyer ; " and yet this would not be the proper ground for " concluding Mr. Dickens's view of a reform in the " Ecclesiastical Courts to be right. No man has " given more picturesque illustrations of London " criminal life ; yet he might not be equally trust- " worthy in his notions of prison-discipline. His " Dennis, the hangman, is a powerfully conceived " character ; yet this is no reason for accepting his " opinion on capital punishments." And yet how much we owe to Mr. Dickens for this very opinion- ativeness ! With his real shrewdness, his thought- fulness, his courage, what noble hits he has made ! The Administrative Reform Association might have worked for ten years without producing half of the effect which Mr. Dickens has produced in the same direction, by flinging out the phrase, " The Circum- locution Office." He has thrown out a score of such phrases, equally efficacious for social reform ; and it matters little that some of them might turn out on inquiry to be ludicrous exaggerations. 248 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. All these differences, however, between Dickens and Thackeray, and still others that might be pointed out, resolve themselves into the one funda- mental difference, that they are artists of opposite schools. Thackeray is a novelist of what is called the Real school; Dickens is a novelist of the Ideal or Romantic school. (The terms Real and Ideal have been so run upon of late, that their repetition begins to nauseate ; but they must be kept, for all that, till better equivalents are provided.) It is Thackeray's aim to represent life as it is actually and historically — men and women, as they are, in those situations in which they are usually placed, with that mixture of good and evil and of strength and foible which is to be found in their characters, and liable only to those incidents which are of ordinary occurrence. He will have no faultless characters, no demigods — nothing but men and brethren. And from this it results that, when once he has conceived a character, he works downwards and inwards in his treatment of it, making it firm and clear at all points in its relations to hard fact, and cutting down, where necessary, to the very foundations. Dickens, on the other hand, with all his keenness of observation, is more light and poetic in his method. Having once caught a hint from actual fact, he generalizes DICKENS AND THACKERAY. 249 it, runs away with this generalization into a corner, and develops it there into a character to match ; which character he then transports, along with others similarly suggested, into a world of semi- fantastic conditions, where the laws need not be those of ordinary probability. He has characters of ideal perfection and beauty, as well as of ideal ugli- ness and brutality — characters of a human kind verging on the supernatural, as well as characters actually belonging to the supernatural. Even his situations and scenery often lie in a region beyond the margin of everyday life. Now both kinds of art are legitimate; and each writer is to be tried within his own kind by the success he has attained in it. Mr. Thackeray, I believe, is as perfect a master in his kind of art as is to be found in the whole series of British prose writers ; a man in whom strength of understanding, acquired know- ledge of men, subtlety of perception, deep philo- sophic humour, and exquisiteness of literary taste, are combined in a degree and after a manner not seen in any known precedent. But the kinds of art are different ; and I believe some injustice has been done to Mr. Dickens of late, by forgetting this when comparing him with his rival. It is as if we were to insist that all painters should be of the 250 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. school of Hogarth. The Ideal or Romantic artist must be true to nature as well as the Real artist, but he may be true in a different fashion. He may take hints from Nature in her extremest moods, and make these hints the germs of creations fitted for a world projected imaginatively beyond the real one, or inserted into the midst of the real one, and yet ima- ginatively moated round from it. Homer, Shake- speare, and Cervantes, are said to be true to nature ; and yet there is not one of their most pronounced characters exactly such as ever was to be found, or ever will be found in nature — not one of them which is not the result of some suggestion snatched from nature, in one or other of her uttermost moments, and then carried away and developed in the void. The question with the Real artist, with respect to what he conceives, is, " How would this actually be in nature; in what exact setting of surrounding particulars would it appear ? " and, with a view to satisfy himself on this question, he dis- sects, observes, and recollects all that is in historical relation to his conception. The question with the Ideal artist is, " What can be made out of this ; with what human conclusions, ends, and aspirations can it be imaginatively interwoven, so that the whole, though attached to nature by its origin, shall DICKENS AND THACKERAY. 251 transcend or overlie nature on the side of the pos- sibly existent — the might, could, or should be, or the might, could, or should have been ? n All honour to Thackeray and the prose-fiction of social reality; but much honour, too, to Dickens, for maintaining among us, even in the realm of the light and the amusing, some representation in prose of that art of ideal phantasy, the total absence of which in the literature of any age would be a sign nothing short of hideous. The true objection to Dickens is, that his idealism tends too much to extravagance and caricature. It would be possible for an ill-natured critic to go through all his works, and to draw out in one long column a list of their chief characters, annexing in a parallel column the phrases or labels by which these characters are dis- tinguis hed, and of which they are generalizations — the " There's some credit in being jolly here" of Mark Tapley ; the " It isn't of the slightest conse- quence " of Toots ; the " Something will turn up " of Mr. Micawber, &c._, &c. Even this, however, is a mode of art legitimate, I believe, in principle, as it is certainly most effective in fact. There never was a Mr. Micawber in nature, exactly as he appears in the pages of Dickens ; but Micawberism pervades nature through and through ; and to have extracted 252 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT/- . this quality from nature, embodying the full essence of a thousand instances of it in one ideal mon- strosity, is a feat of invention. From the incessant repetition by Mr. Dickens of this inventive process openly and without variation, except in the results, the public have caught what is called his mannerism or trick ; and hence a certain recoil from his later writings among the cultivated and fastidious. But let any one observe our current table-talk or our current literature, and, despite this profession of dissatisfaction, and in the very circles where it most abounds, let him note how gladly Dickens is used, and how frequently his phrases, his fancies, and the names of his characters come in, as illustration, embellishment, proverb, and seasoning. Take any periodical in which there is a severe criticism of Dickens' s last publication ; and, ten to one, in the same periodical, aDd perhaps by the same hand, there will be a leading article, setting out with a quotation from Dickens that flashes on the mind of the reader the thought which the whole article is meant to convey, or containing some allusion to one of Dickens's characters which enriches the text in the middle and floods it an inch round with colour and humour. Mr. Thackeray's writings also yield similar contributions of pithy sayings applicable to NOVEL OF COCKNEY FUN. 253 the occasions of common talk, and of typical char- acters serving the purpose of luminous metonymy — as witness his Becky Sharps, his Fokers, his Captain Costigans, and his Jeameses ; but, in his case, owing to his habit rather of close delineation of the complex and particular as nature presents it, than of rapid fictitious generalization, more of the total effect, whether of admiration or of ethical instruction, takes place in the act of reading him. The imitations, direct and indirect, of Thackeray and Dickens are, I need not say, innumerable. It is owing to their extraordinary popularity that, while all those forms of the novel which I enumerated at the beginning of this discourse, are still in practice amongst us, such a preponderance has within the last few years been attained by what may be called the Metropolitan Comic Fiction, or the Novel of Cockney Fun — a kind of fiction which has degene- rated in some hands into something so frivolous that the sooner it ends the better. Of late years, how- ever, there have been signs among us, I believe, of the rise of a new kind or of new kinds of novel- writing, differing not only from this wretched novel of metropolitan fun, but also from the established styles either of Dickens or of Thackeray. The 254 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. change can hardly be assigned to any particular year; but it may be convenient to date it from the eventful year 1848. If I am not mistaken, the year 1848 will have to be referred back to for several generations to come as an epoch commencing much in European history. It was not only that then a wave of democratic revolution passed over the face of Europe, overthrow- ing thrones and constitutionalizing for a moment absolute governments, and that this movement was followed by a reaction, apparently restoring what had been cast down, but in reality leaving all out of equilibrium, and bequeathing a heritage of wars the duration of which no one can calculate. It was that at this instant of political commotion, and involved in the commotion itself, partly as cause and partly as immediate effect, there was an outburst into the in- tellectual atmosphere of Europe of a whole set of new ideas and speculations previously latent or in course of formation in individual minds, or within the pre- cincts of philosophical schools, but then irrecoverably let loose into the general consciousness, to exist as so much theory, baulked of all present realization, but on that very account elaborating itself more fiercely in meditation and in verbal controversy, and overhanging more visibly the social fabric on whose RECEXT SPECULATIONS. 255 towers and foundations it means to topple down. It was not without significance, for example, that the short-lived French Republic of 1848 called itself La Repiibliqae Democratique et Sociale. By the addition of the second adjective it was meant that the new Revolution proceeded on principles and involved ends which had not existed in the great prior Revolution of 1789, and that, in addition to the ideas of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity which that Revolution had promulgated and formulized, this carried in it a set of ideas, excogitated since, and trenching more deeply upon established human arrangements — the ideas that had been forming themselves in the minds of Saint- Simonians, Fourierists, and other speculative Parisian sects, and that had assumed for their general designation the vague word Socialism. Associated with these novelties of Socialism which were flung into the European atmosphere, chiefly from France, at the date under notice, were others, of different origin geographically — some capable of being comprehended under the same name as tending to radical social changes, others more purely speculative in form, and appertaining to the traditional questions and varia- tions of theology. Altogether there mounted into the intellectual air of Europe in or about the year 1848 an unusual quantity of speculation that, with 256 BRITISH NO VELISTS SINCE SCOTT. respect to the popular or general mind, might be called new ; and it still hangs there like a cloud. At every moment in the world's history existing society has thus had hanging over it a certain accu- mulation of recent theory freighted with changes about to be precipitated ; but it may be questioned whether within human memory there has been a time when the accumulation was so large and various as- at present. Take the Continent, and what do we see there ? As a flooring, still nothing else but the old Papal and Imperial organization which was con- cluded to be condemned long ago; and over this flooring, in full march to and fro, populations who believe neither in Papacy nor in Empire ! Or let us look nearer home ! Was there ever a time when Britain contained within it a greater mass of esoteric opinion at variance with existing profession and practice — when, if the entire population, and espe- cially the leading men in it, were polled on oath as to their beliefs on matters most fundamental, a greater crowd would have to walk to the farther end ? It is not only our " representative institutions " that are at present on trial. Now, as all this has been represented in some degree in our popular literature, so it has been represented, perhaps most distinctly of all, in our REALISM IN RECENT NOVELS. 257 literature of prose fiction. It is in the nature of this species of literature, as I have already said, to take a more powerful hold than Verse can do of those eddies of current fact and opinion, as distinct from the steadier undercourse of things, which, in the language of those who look more to the eddies than to the undercurrent,, constitute a social crisis ; and, if so, then, whether in attending to the eddies, or in trying to dive, with epic Verse, down to the undercurrent, the Novel of the present has and may have plenty of work. My acquaintance with the British novels of the last ten years is not sufficiently detailed, to make me sure that I can indicate all the tendencies of our novel-writing discernible since the time when Dickens and Thackeray were in divided possession of the field, or even that I can cite the instances that would best illustrate the tendencies which I do indicate ; but, with allowance for these defects, the following ob- servations may pass as true : — (] .) In the first place, and generally, I think it is to be perceived that of late- — and this to a great extent from the influence of Mr. Thackeray's ex- ample — there has been a growth among our novel- writers of a wholesome spirit of Realism. To borrow a phrase from a kindred art, a spirit of con- scious Pre-Uaphaelitism has invaded this species of s 258 BRITISH NO VELISTS SINCE SCOTT. literature. Not that here, any more than in our metrical poetry, or in the art of painting itself, the practice of those special merits which are now signalized by the term Pre-Raphaelitism is new. As there were painters who painted truly, minutely, and carefully before Pre-Raphaelitism was heard of ; as Wordsworth long ago preached a revolution in Poetry akin to that which the Pre-Raphaelites have advocated in painting; and as Crabbe practised long ago in his verse a Pre-Raphaelitism of the harder sort — so among our novelists there have never been wanting examples of the most persevering and painstaking accuracy. Richardson, Fielding, and Miss Austen certainly painted from the life. Of late, however, there seems to have been, among our practitioners of the novelist's art, a more general and conscious cultivation of the virtue inculcated in Pre-Raphaelitism — shown, first, in the more resolute and careful attention of novelists to facts and charac- ters lying within the range of their own easy observa- tion ; secondly, in a disposition to go in search of facts and characters lying somewhat beyond that range, as painters carry their easel into unfamiliar localities ; and, thirdly, in a greater indifference to traditional ideas of beauty, and an increased willingness to accept, as worthy of study and representation, facts REALISM IN RECENT NOVELS. 259 and objects accounted common, disagreeable, or even painful. In illustration, I may refer again to the representations of previously unexplored tracts of provincial English scenery and life in the novels of Miss Bronte, Mrs, Gaskell, Miss Mulock and others — to the minute speciality with which in these novels physiognomies and places are described ; the range which they take among the different professions, crafts, and classes of society, as each possessing its peculiar habits and cast of thinking ; and the use in them all, when occasion serves, of the local dialect or of racy provincialisms. It is as if, proceeding on the theory that the British Novel, in its totality, should be a Natural History of British life, indivi- dual novelists were acting farther on the principle of subdivision of labour, and working out separately the natural histories of separate counties and parishes. With Thackeray presiding in the centre, as director of the metropolitan museum, and observer- in-chief of the Middlesex district, though with the liberty of an excursion hither and thither as he chooses, there are scores of others at work gathering facts specially in Berkshire, Yorkshire, Lancashire, &c, some of them with the talent of accomplished masters in the whole field of the science. Sir Bulwer Lytton has not disdained in his more recent novels S2 260 BRITISH NO VE LISTS SINCE SCO TT. to ply the functions of a quiet naturalist; and at this moment readers are hailing the advent of a new artist of the Real school, in the author of Adam Bede. In that kind of Natural History, however, which may thus form the business of the Novel, a larger proportion of the phenomena are phenomena purely of the present than in Natural History proper. The mineralogy, the botany, the zoology of Britain, or of its districts, are tolerably constant from year to year, so that labourers in these departments apply their successive efforts to an accumulation already nearly fixed ; and even in the more varying annual meteorology the variations from year to year are not so great as they seem. In those facts, on the other hand, to which the Novelist with analogous aims has to direct his attention, the rate of vicissitude is rapid. Human nature comes down the same in its essentials ; customs and institutions are also perpe- tuated from generation to generation ; but over this tolerably solid basis there rolls in every generation an assemblage of facts, psychological and political, held for the meantime in vital solution and suspense, as the immediate element in which the generation breathes, though soon also to fall down as sediment, a thin additional layer to the stratification foregone. REALISM IN RECENT NO VELS. 261 Yet, as we are now regarding the Novel, it is precisely to these purely contemporary facts — these " humours" of the present, as Ben Jonson used to call them — that the Novelist is supposed to owe his closest attention. It is the tendency of Realistic art — as commonly denned, at all events — to direct attention very particularly to all such circumstances of con- temporary interest. Hence, to the full extent to which the operation of this kind of Naturalism in art has prevailed in British novel-writing during the last ten years, we observe an influx into British novels of those very sorts of circumstance which the decad itself has so plentifully generated. Not only have the actual movements and occurrences in Europe during these ten years — the Parisian Revo- lution of 1848, the Hungarian and Italian wars, the Crimean war, &c. — served as definite events with which to associate fictitious incidents ; but there has been a determination also to ideal incidents and situations of the order of those historically recent — political conspiracies, club-meetings, strikes in the manufacturing districts, mill-riots, &c. ; while, as additions to the novelist's traditionary stock of ideal characters, we have had the Socialist, the Bed Re- publican, the Foreign Refugee, the Government Spy, the young Chartist Orator, the Emancipated Woman, 262 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. and the like. In especial, within Britain, there has been a determination to make representatives of all classes of clergymen and of all religious creeds sit for their photographs in Novels — the Jesuit priest, the Roman Catholic pervert, the High-Church par- son, the Broad-Church parson, the Low-Church parson, Curates of all the varieties, the Dissenting Preacher, the Methodist, the Unitarian, the Philo- sophical Sceptic, the Spiritualist, the Positivist, and even the Mormonite. In proof of the tendency of the Novel thus to pluck its materials out of the most characteristic and recent facts of the political and speculative imbroglio of the time, it is enough to recollect again the later novels of Thackeray and Sir Bulwer Lytton, or any of Kingsley's, Mrs. GaskelTs, or Miss Bronte's. If the Beal is to be represented in Novels, are not Puseyism, Socialism, Positivism, &c. among the last buddings of the Real ? Deep, indeed, in the present time, might the art of the Realist go, if the Realist had courage to be what he pretends. With all our professions of representing what is exactly as it is, do we not as yet, Novelists and all of us, keep cunningly near the surface ? (2.) It is impossible, however, for the Novelist or for any other artist to limit himself to the mere function of representing what he sees. However dis- NOVELS OF PURPOSE. 263 passionate his mind, however determined he may be to regard the facts aronnd him as so many objects to be observed, studied, represented, and nothing more, there will always be more or less of purpose blended with the representation. All creations of poetic art, nay even all transcripts from nature by the his- torian, inasmuch as they are actuated by some mood or state of mind, have doctrine or purpose worked into them, and may on due analysis be made to yield it. The very choice of such and such facts to be represented, to the exclusion of others, is a manifestation of purpose, of preference, of moral intention. " When we would philosophise, we phi- losophise ; when we refuse to philosophise, then also in that very thing we philosophise ; always and necessarily we do philosophise." There is evidently room, however, for large gradation in this respect, in the interval between those novels and poems which, being constructed as far as may be on the principle of pure representation, have their purpose involved and buried in the fact that they are necessarily allegories of the mind, or of some portion or phase of the mind, that produced them, and those other novels and poems, frequent in every time, which avow a didactic aim. To these last in a more special sense, may be given the name, Novels or Poems of 264 BRITISH NO VELISTS SINCE SCOTT. Purpose. Now, it is in accordance with what has been said concerning the state of Britain and of Europe during the last ten years, that the propor- tion of Novels of such a kind — -Novels made in the service not of " contemporary fun " merely, but also of contemporary earnest — should have been on the increase. Such, at all events, has been the fact ; and so in addition to the increase and extension of a persevering spirit of realism, we have to report, as characteristic of British novel-writing recently and at present, a great development of the Novel of Purpose. Not only, for example, have we had novels repre- senting duly, as interesting phenomena of the time, Chartism, Socialism, &c, in the sphere of secu- lar politics, and Anglo-Catholicism, Evangelicism, Broad Church, &c, in the sphere of ecclesiastical opinion ; we have also had novels in which the doc- trines distinguished by these, or by other names, have been either inculcated, or satirized and repro- bated, separately or jointly — Roman Catholic novels, Anglo-Catholic novels, Evangelical novels, Broad- Church novels, Christian Socialist novels, Tempe- rance novels, Woman's Rights novels, &c. Hardly a question or doctrine of the last ten years can be pointed out that has not had a novel framed in its NO VELS OF P URPOSE. 265 interest, positively or negatively. To a great extent tales and novels now serve the purpose of pam- phlets. There are, of course, all varieties of merit in such novels, according to the nature of the doc- trine propounded, and the depth of humanity and power of imagination allied with the special belief. In some cases, the story is made so mechanically to the order of the dogma, and by a person of such shallow and narrow sympathies, and so destitute both of knowledge and of poetic genius, that the result is but a lifeless sequence of silly incidents, or a fierce polemical tirade. Illustrations of an opposite kind, exhibiting liberality of sentiment and genius naturally poetical powerfully at work under the inspiration of strong speculative convictions of a general order, and even of precise conclusions on current social questions, are to be found, I believe, in novels put forth from very different quarters of the theological and political world, but nowhere so conspicuously as in those of Mr. Kingsley. By far the highest class of recent novels of pur- pose have been some which might be recognised by themselves, as constituting a peculiar group in the variety mentioned, under the name of the Art and Culture Novel, in our classification of British Novel- ists since Scott, and then spoken of as comparatively 266 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. rare among us. The novels I mean are those which, concerning themselves or not, in a dogmatic manner, with the specialities of present political or ecclesiastical controversy, and being usually indeed the productions of minds not disposed to over-esti- mate such specialities, even when they artistically deal with them, address themselves rather to that deeper question of fundamental faith as against fundamental scepticism, which is proclaimed every- where as the one paramount fact of the age — em- bodying certain views on this question in the supposed education of an imaginary hero, or of several imaginary personages together, who pass through various intellectual stages to attain one that is final. In all novels whatsoever, of course, the hero passes through a series of mental stages, the usual goal or consummation being an all- con soling, all- illuminating marriage. Bat in the Art and Culture novel, as I consider it, the design is to represent a mind of the thoughtful order, struggling through doubt and error towards certainty and truth; and the interest arises from the variation given to that one text which the poet has thus typically expressed : " Though now he serves me but perplexedly, Yet will I soon to clearness bring him thorough : Knows well the gardener from the greening tree That flower and fruit will deck the coming morrow." NO VELS OF P URPOSE. 267 But though this text might be prefixed to all the novels of the class now under consideration, the interpretations actually given to it in different novels of the class are as various as the notions entertained by the different writers of novels, as to what consti- tutes remediable " perplexity," and as to what may be the maximum of attainable " clearness." Let me glance at some of the more clearly marked varieties in this respect. There are, first, those whose notions of the morality to be inculcated, of the " clearness " to be attained, are moderate. Their reasoning, if it were to be articulately expressed, might take some such form as this : " Men complain of the doubt and uncertainty " by which their thoughts and actions are perplexed ; " but, after all, are there not many things suf- " ficiently certain, if people would take the " trouble to find them out, and enter them in their " inventory of ascertained truths ? A man's creed " consists and must consist in those things, what- " ever they are, which he has no doubt about ; all " else is not his creed, but only his wish, his fancy, " or an element of alien belief through which he " navigates, more or less honestly, and more or less " conformably, by the rudder of his own. Accept- " ing this definition, and giving no place in one's 268 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. creed, properly so called, to any proposition that could be ranked as dubitable, might not one still compose for one's self a very respectable creed by simply collecting all the known truths, all the clear indubitabilities, within one's reach? One might commence, if need were, with the law of gravitation ; about which, surely, there exists, out of Ireland, no doubt to speak of. On this, as a basis, one might pile, without much effort, a considerable body of other equally certain truths — truths mechanical, truths chemical, truths physiological ; nay, it would surely be hard if one could not top the pyramid with a number of very important truths, rationally or historically ascer- tained, relating to man's social connexions, and his conduct in life — truths economical and pruden- tial, furnished out of individual experience, or out of the repertory of the sciences which refer to industry and its fruits ; truths political of kindred origin ; and such truths ethical as are embodied in the time-honoured maxims, i Honesty is the best policy,' ( Be just and fear not;' together with whatever of more delicate and nicely evolved con- viction might form an appropriate apex. This,, they say, is an age of intellectual anarchy; but • such a complement of ascertained truths is even NO VJSLS OF P URPOSE. 269 " now possible to any man ; and, unless one be all " the more exacting in one's demands, and all the " more difficult to rule, it is possible that, with " such a complement of truths firmly in his posses- " sion, he might go through the world steadily, " honourably, and usefully. But this possession (C is not born with a man ; it has to be acquired. " Man comes into the world regardless and un- " formed ; he has to lay down in his mind gradually, " and one by one, even the fundamental blocks of " his belief, and thereon to build whatever may " come as superstructure. Even the knowledge of " the law of gravitation is not innate in the child, " but has to be acquired by painful efforts, and a " succession of tumbles. And so with truths of the " more complex sciences, and with truths of the " moral and social order, the acquisition of which fe last, and still more their effective incorporation in " the consciousness, so as to become a living and (C active faith, are processes extending, in almost u every instance, far beyond the early period of life. " Now, in so far as the novelist makes it his aim to " exhibit, by fictitious examples, this process of the " formation of character, or of the culture of the " individual by circumstance and by reflection, his c( task will consist in nothing less than this — the 270 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. " conduct of his imaginary hero through his period 11 of ignorance, empty-mindedness, aimless and unre- " gulated impulse, and consequent error, on to that " point, where, by the successive strokes upon him " of the offended natural laws, the fatigue of his " successive buffetings with an element which always " throws him back, and perhaps also the fortuitous " occurrence of some happy juncture which lets in " the light upon him in a sudden gush, and renders " his obedience to law thenceforth easier, he comes " into effective possession of such a complement of " doctrine as, though it may not finish or satisfy " him outright, may fit him for good citizenship, " and serve him passably through the rest of life. " Why this process of imaginary education should " so frequently take the form of a love-story, pro- " tracted and complicated by oppositions of fate, " separations, misunderstandings and even infideli- " ties, but ending in a suitable marriage, is obvious " enough. Not to mention other reasons, a very large " proportion of those peculiar ethical problems the " solution of which is necessary to impart something " like finality to a man's creed and character, and so " to frank him as a full citizen of the body politic, " are problems which are supposed to be best stated " in the history of a passionate and thwarted love, NO VELS OF P URPOSE. 27 1 ' and to receive their solution most naturally at the ' moment and through the agency of marriage. The ' most common forms of f perplexity' are such that { the Novelist is only true to nature when he repre- ' sents the ' perplexity' as vanishing and the ' clear - ' ness' as coming in the arms of Rosa or Emily. ' There the long perturbed youth attains to light and ' calmness ; there he repudiates the doubts and the f moral heresies of his bachelorhood, and wonders c how he could ever have entertained them ; there ' he crowns his faith with the articles yet wanting 1 to it, or conforms to the faith which he finds esta- 1 Wished. As the ancients said of men when they ( died, so it may be said of men when they marry, 1 Abeunt ad plures : f they go over to the majority. ' ' At this point, therefore, the Novelist in ordinary ' does well to take leave of them — not only because ' the interest in them is gone for one half of his 1 readers, but also because he has led them on to ' a natural epoch in their existence. If he chooses, ' however, he may follow them still farther, and 1 exhibit the process of their education as continued ' in their new circumstances, on to a second mar- ' riage or to any other conclusion that he may fix, f including death itself." It is on the principles so explained that most 272 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. specimens we have of the peculiar kind of the Art and Culture Novel now under consideration are consciously or unconsciously constructed. Mr. Thackeray, for example, pilots young Pendennis past the syren Blanche Amory, and leaves him, wiser for his wanderings, in the haven of Laura's love. And so, in others of his novels, in so far as he intends them to be of the class under notice, the scepticism or ignorance or mental perplexity of his hero is represented as terminating, and the better frame of mind is represented as arriving, in the event of marriage — save that (herein redeeming his philo- sophy of character from the charge of facility that might otherwise attach to it) he is in the habit of making the heroes of his former novels reappear in their new capacity as married men in his subsequent ones, and reappear still fallible and with something farther to seek. The scepticism represented as cha- racterizing young Pendennis during his period of education, and until Warrington and Laura have cured him, is, I think, about the extreme, whether as regards kind or as regards extent, that is ever represented in our recent Art and Culture Novels of the more temperate order : — " The truth, friend ! " Arthur said impatiently, " where is the truth 1 Show it me. That is the question between us. REPRESENTA TIONS OF SCEP TIC ISM. 273 I see it on both sides. I see it on the Conservative side of the house, and amongst the Badicals, and even on the Ministe- rial benches. I see it in this man, who worships by Act of Par- liament, and is rewarded with a silk apron and five thousand a-year ; in that man who, driven fatally by the remorseless logic of his creed, gives up everything, friends, fame, dearest ties, closest intimacies, the respect of an army of churchmen, the recognised position of a leader, and passes over, truth-impelled, to the enemy, in whose ranks he is ready to serve henceforth as a nameless private soldier. I see the truth in that man, his brother, whose logic drives him to quite a different con- clusion, and who, after having passed a life in vain endeavours to reconcile an irreconcilable book, flings it at last down in despair, and declares, with tearful eyes and hands up to heaven, his revolt and recantation. If the truth is with all these, why should I take side with any one of them 1 . . Yes ; I am a Sadducee ; I take things as I find them, and the world and the acts of parliament of the world as they are, and as I intend to take a wife, if I find one — not to be madly in love and prostrate at her feet, like a fool — but to be good- natured to her and courteous, expecting good-nature and pleasant society from her in turn. And so, George, if ever you hear of my marrying, depend on it, it won't be a romantic attachment on my side ; and if you hear of any good place under government, I have no particular scruples that I know of which would prevent me from accepting your offer." — " O Pen, you scoundrel, I know what you mean," here Warrington broke out. This, I say, is about the extreme measure and nature of the scepticism that is treated in any of the novels now under consideration; and Mr. Thackeray deserves credit for having so boldly, in a work of fiction, grasped so serious a phenomenon. Few of T 274 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. our recent novelists perhaps have been so explicit. Yet the novel from which the above quotation is made may stand as the type of a class becoming more common. As Mr. Thackeray leads Pendennis out of the condition of mind so represented on to a final condition, in which, though there is no express repu- diation of some parts of the foregoing declaration, yet there is an infusion of more positive tenets and the total spirit is braver and more manly, so, and by an analogous process, do other novelists conduct their heroes on through a period of listlessness and moral aberration to a resting-ground of faith. There are, however, sub-varieties of method and of general aim. I do not know that we have had any novels of this kind written distinctly in the interest of that philosophy which abjures all theology whatever, regards the theological habit in any form as a vice or a weakness, and proclaims it as the highest wisdom " To apprehend no farther than this world, And square one's life according." In actual novels, however, confining themselves as they usually do to the incidents of a secular life, we have, not unfrequently, something tantamount. The " perplexity " they represent is the perplexity of the RELIGION IN NOVELS. 275 ordinary struggle with fortune and the ordinary weakness and impulsiveness of youth ; and the cor- responding " clearness " at the end is the clearness of a settled worldly position and a morality suf- ficiently disciplined to hold and enjoy it. Most frequently, however, there is a certain conventional recognition of the theological element; and, as a portion of the youth's " perplexity " is represented as consisting in his relaxed hold of religious doctrines and his relaxed attention to religious observances, so in the ultimate " clearness " there is usually involved a coming round again at marriage to the forsaken creed and the neglected worship. A pew is taken in the ivy-clad parish church ; and, while the heroine, now the wife, will attend service twice on Sundays, the hero, now the husband, will make it his regular practice to go at least once. Mr. Kingsley and others who might be associated with him have taught this peculiar novel of purpose a bolder flight. Admitting that there is a definite complement of truths relating to human procedure which may be ascertained by reason, experience, and a scientific study of the natural laws, and admitting, moreover, that a man will behave better or worse in this world, according as he has made up this secular kind of creed well or ill for himself, or has inherited t2 276 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. it in perfect or imperfect condition from those who have educated him, they yet maintain the inadequacy of any such conceivable complement of prudential or ethical truths self-evolved for the full satisfaction and regulation of the human being, and the necessity of a deeper faith, a faith metaphysical, in which these very truths must be rooted ere they can function so powerfully as they might, or even retain, strictly speaking, any right to this name of " truths" under which they announce themselves. To under- take the voyage of life with no other outfit than this body of so-called secular doctrine, would be at best, they hold, to sail in a ship well- trimmed in itself and under good sanitary regulation, but with no port in view, no compass, no reference to anything without the ship, not even to the sea in which it floats. Such seamanship as that would be which, professed only an attention to the internal economy of the ship itself, and a neglect of its relations to the very element in which it moved, such, they think, would that doctrine of human life be which professed to apprehend only within the visible bounds of life and to fabricate the final rule out of what might be perceptible there. Life is a voyage; the element is time ; there is a port in the coming eternity. Nor is man left without the necessary knowledge whereby RELIGION IN NO VELS. 277 this voyage is to be governed. Deep in the structure of the human mind itself, when it is duly investi- gated, there are found certain bonds of evident connexion between it and the world of the meta- physical ; certain truths which the mind cannot but think, without ceasing to be and abnegating the possibility of any stroke of truth thereafter ; certain principles the conjunction of which makes it mind and determines the extent and the mode of its grasp ; certain marks, so to speak, of its fracture from the body of the unseen universal. Out of the study of these, they say, arises Natural Religion — that kind of Religion which has always been in the world, and always will be in the world, all contrary philosophy notwithstanding, so long as the world wheels on its axle, bears suffering and sorrow on its bulk, and turns its hemispheres alternately to the vaults of the stars. But this, they say, is not all. It has not been permitted to this world to wheel on in that faint kind of light, scarce better than darkness, which wells forth from the human mind itself, preying eagerly on its own metaphysical roots, and carrying in it some few obscure ideas, some con- fused Platonic recollections, of the infinity whence it feels itself distorn. A Revelation has been given. Once and again from the outer realms of mystery 278 BRITISH NO VE LISTS SINCE SCOTT. a great light has struck our wheeling earth — struck it till its bosses beamed and glittered. Of old it came flutteringly through prophets and scattered men of God; last of all and conclusively it came, it came at Nazareth. " God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by His Son, whom He hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also He made the worlds." Yes, "heir of all things, by whom also He made the worlds!" Backward from that point in the earth's history the light extends, in- volving the very beginnings and the offsets ; and forward from that point it also extends, suffusing itself through all things, and involving the ends and the upshots. Let philosophies form and accumulate themselves, all will end in Christianity ; let there be wars and revolutions, and let states and common- wealths rise and succeed each other, all are but preparations towards that kingdom of Christ wherein all will be included, for all things are His inheritance. And so with individual men now ; be they what they may, all is incomplete within them, they are not fully men, until Christianity has occupied their being. This faith may, indeed, exist where it is not suspected to be, and it may not be, alas ! where it is MR. EINGSLET. 279 least supposed to be absent ; but be it must wherever man is to be essentially man, and life is to be at its highest potency. And so, wherever in literature, whether in history, in poem, or in novel, life is to be represented, and, above all, wherever the scheme is to exhibit the formation of character and the pro- gress of an individual mind through doubt and error to final certainty and truth, this recognition of Christianity as the supreme principle ought to be, with those who adopt the argument, unremittingly and unmistakeably present. A while ago, the introduction of such considera- tions in connexion with such a form of literature as the Novel might have seemed absurdly irrelevant. In connexion with Metrical Poetry they might have seemed, in virtue of many precedents, relevant enough ; but they would have seemed out of rela- tion to all or to almost all known precedents in modern prose fiction. That this is no longer the case is owing to no one more evidently than to Mr. Kingsley. Not in that spirit, common enough among previous novelists of purpose, which simply treated orthodoxy as a part of established social propriety, and therefore attributed it to the hero or brought the hero over to it, as a matter of course, but in a spirit far more resolute and 280 BRITISH NO VE LISTS SINCE SCOTT. thoroughgoing, does he uphold in his novels the necessity of Christian purpose. Whatever objections may be taken to his method, and whatever may be thought of his success, there can be no mistake as to his intention. His very rhetoric is surcharged, to the extent of a vehement mannerism, with the phrases of his Theology ; and there is not one of his novels that has not the power of Christianity for its theme. In his splendid historical novel of Hypatia we have a representation of a mind exercised amid the con- flicts of a world all in chaos, with the Goths breaking through its old Polytheistic fabric and a vague Platonism bidding here and there for the possession of its leading Pagan minds, till at length the sole refuge is found in the conquering faith of the Chris- tians. In his Westward Ho ! the purpose similarly is to show how Christianity, in its form of free Eliza- bethan Protestantism, lived and worked in the manly minds of an age about the manliest that England has seen, and inspired them to actions and enter- prises the noblest in English history. And so, in his tales of present life, he is always fully alive to the struggle between belief and unbelief and between various forms both of the one and of the other, which makes existing society what it is ; and he either asserts positively the sole and supreme efficiency of " TOM BROWN." 281 Christianity for the adequate rule of life in these latter days as in those that have gone before, exhi- biting its applications to what may seem the most peculiar contemporary problems, or he suggests the same conclusion by the fictitious shipwreck of all that cannot, by a due latitude of interpretation, be brought within the Christian definition. What Mr. Kingsley has done in this respect has been done also in a simpler walk of fiction and with reference to a more definite order of interests, by the author of Tom Brown. Here, in the story of the education of an English schoolboy, there is the same argument as in Mr. Kingsley's works for the supreme compe- tency of Christian principle in the formation of character ; and, though the immediate scene is but a public school, and the incidents are those of schoolboy life, yet, by the ultimate reference of all that happens for good in this little world to the influence of Dr. Arnold, not only is the extension of the argument to society at large irresistibly sug- gested, but the argument itself is all the more impressively enforced by being associated with the memory of the man who was so emphatically its representative. Having a basis of historic truth in its relation to such a man, enforcing its lesson with such direct honesty, and charged in every sentence 282 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. with the very spirit of English manliness, little wonder that the book went straight to the popular heart, that its effects on the minds both of boys and of parents were immediate, and that the author was instantly recognized as a man from whom readers, tired of namby-pamby, might expect more books of the right Saxon sort. Compared, however, with Christianity as usually understood among the existing sects, the Christianity whose competency to all modern intellectual wants and to all modern social problems is thus proclaimed by Mr. Kingsley and by others might certainly ap- pear to be Christianity with a difference. The con- comitants, it is satirically suggested — beer, tobacco, the boxing-gloves, athletic exercises in general, and a general readiness at all times to resort to the knock-down method of action and to fight like a genuine John Bull — are not the concomitants recog- nized in the usual definitions of Christianity whether in the Greek or in the Latin Fathers. " More is the pity," reply the teachers who are attacked ; but, not shrinking even from the historical question so proposed, they cite their proofs that the effective Christianity of all times has been of the brave and manly and liberal kind which they seek to inculcate, and they argue that the Christianity which some of MUSCULAR CHRISTIANITY. 283 the sects would substitute for it is but a weak dilu- tion of the authentic creed. The Christianity which such men as Tertullian, St. Augustine, and Luther professed — the Christianity of the days when England was England, and Elizabeth sent her Drakes and Ealeighs to do English work against the Devil and the Spaniard, or Cromwell led his Ironsides to battle for the right — this, they say, and not any attenuated Christianity, whether of dry modern dogmatists or of feeble modern pietists, is the Christianity that will still be found capable of all the work, all the difficulties, of our own present world, from our busy England on through the rest of Europe, and so through Asia, Africa, and America, with Australia to boot. Taking them at their word, but still with an implied jest at the large proportion of the above- mentioned concomitants in their representations of English Christianity as it might be, the critics have goodhumouredly closed the controversy by affixing to the doctrine of Mr. Kingsley and his school a witty nickname. They have called it the doctrine of "a muscular Christianity," and the heroes in whom it is embodied in their novels tf muscular Christians." There is only about as much justice in the nickname as there is in nicknames in general ; but it has become current, and the writers at whom 284 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. it is aimed have too much relish for humour to be anxious to protest against it. Indeed, if they were in want of a reason for letting it circulate, they might find one in an advantage which it might give them by way of retort. In the present day, they might say with some truth, the alternative with not a small number of minds seems to be between this school of theirs of " a muscular Christianity " and a contemporary school of " nervous Paganism." For, side by side with Mr. Kingsley and his school, or rather beyond them, and occupying a bleaker and more extreme standing-ground on the plain of spe- culation, are a body of thinkers — not unrepresented either in our literature of prose fiction — whose characteristic it is that they also are incessantly ruminating the same high problems of the meta- physical, without having the privilege of rest in the same solution. It has long been a subject of remark, and gene- rally of complaint, that so much of our Poetry is of the " subjective " kind — i. e. representative of the passing feelings, phrenzies, doubts, longings and aspirations of the minds who are able so to express themselves, rather than of the vast world of fact, lying fixed, whether in the past or in the present, beyond the troubled bounds of the poet's own con- POEMS ABOUT POETS. 285 sciousness. From the time of Byron and Shelley we have had a succession of poems exhibiting indi- vidual minds of the thoughtful order shattered to their very foundations by passion and scepticism, at war with all the institutions of society, and bellowing to earth and heaven their sense of Nature's cruelty and of their own utter wretchedness. Recently there has been a farther peculiarity in this kind of poetry which has attracted the notice of critics. Poets have begun, as if systematically, to make imaginary Poets their heroes. On opening a recent book of poetry, the chance is that it is a Poet that will be found soliloquizing, conversing with his friend, watching the moonlight with his mistress, or blaspheming his destiny on a bridge at midnight. The opportunity so given for ridicule is obvious. " Why this perpetual writing about poets ? Is there " not the great world of action, from Adam down- " wards, to supply themes ? What percentage of " the human race would all the poets alive amount " to, that the human race is thus called upon so " peremptorily to contemplate them and their " whistlings ? Does a shoemaker make shoes for " himself alone ; or does a painter always paint " himself at his easel ? What was poetry meant to " be but holding the mirror up to nature ? Why 286 BRITISH NO VEL1STS SINCE SCOTT. " this perpetual holding up of the mirror to the " poet's own insignificant physiognomy, with nothing " but its wooden unreflecting back to all the leagues " of contemporary landscape, and to all the tide of " life through six thousand years V Now, though there is much natural temptation to such comments, they are essentially unfair. That phenomenon of intellectual restlessness, which is exhibited over and over again in the poems in question, is a phenomenon of universal time, intermingled with all that is and with all that has been ; and, in exhibiting it, the poet is not neglecting the world of past and present fact, but is only educing from its multifarious circum- stance that which is recurring and fundamental. Moreover, though the phenomenon appertains to all time, it has so gained in visibility in the present age of the world, that it presses more palpably for repre- sentation. Is not speculative anarchy proclaimed everywhere as the fact of all others most character- istic of our time ; and is there not a larger number of minds than ever there was before, revolving over and over again the same abstract problems, and, indeed, debarred by the arrangements of the time from any other habitual occupation? If poets, in the actual sense, are still but a small minority of the body-politic, they are at least on the increase ; and NERVOUS PAGANISM. 287 the class of persons, for whom imaginary poets may- stand as representatives and who will read the ima- ginary histories of such poets with interest, is a class not only widely diffused but also socially authori- tative. In short, if a poet is thrown on a " weak piping time of peace " what is there for him to repre- sent as contemporary save the weakness and the piping? The same reasoning would apply to the very special class of novels which corresponds with the poems in view. Such novels are, indeed, as yet rare — Verse having hitherto reserved mainly for itself themes so high and dangerous. But specimens are not wanting of fictitious representations in prose of mental per- plexity at its uttermost, not ending in Mr. Kingsley's happy solution. Recent works of prose fiction might be named in which, as in recent poems, a poet or some personage of the purely intellectual class is the hero, and the story is that of his progress through the very blackness of darkness, with only natural reason, or the revelation that can come through reason, as his guide. There is the mind preying on its own metaphysical roots ; there is the parting, piece by piece, with the old hereditary faith, and yet all the remaining torture of the ceaseless interroga- tion which that faith satisfied ; there are the pangs of 288 BRITISH NO VELISTS SINCE SCOTT. love despised or disprized ; there is the burden of sin and the alternate sullenness and madness of despair. Sometimes the " clearness" is represented as coming, and then in one or other of a few well-known forms. The happy marriage may be an occasional agency ; but, even where it is admitted, its effect is but aux- iliary. Sometimes the mind under probation is made to ascertain for itself that its perpetual metaphysical self-torture, its perpetual labour on questions which cannot be answered, is a misuse of its faculties, and so to take rest in the philosophic conclusion that " man was not born to solve the problem of the uni- verse, but to find out where the problem begins, and then to restrain himself within the limits of the com- prehensible." When this is the solution adopted, however, the result is represented as by no means the same as in the case previously imagined of a mind that has never exercised itself on the problems of the supernatural at all, but has secured its com- fort from the outset by voting the supernatural to be non-extant, and proceeding to pile up, as one's suf- ficient creed, a few average certainties of the secular. No ; these average certainties are, indeed, more eagerly adopted now because they may have been neglected heretofore, and a satisfaction is found that was not anticipated in science and art and all the NER VO US PA GA N~ISM. 289 multiform use and investigation of the world as it is ; but the mind retains in it a touch of " the de- monic M to witness to its old wanderings ; it works now with a higher and less calculable potency ; through the shell of darkness that enspheres the visible world, there glimmers the gauzy light of a world believed in, though pronounced impenetrable ; as the little island of life is tilled and cultivated, it is at least still known to be an island, and there is still heard in its midmost fields the roar of the sur- rounding sea. Or, again, sometimes there is more than this merely negative conclusion. The mind in its gropings has seized some actual belief, super- natural in its reference, which it will not afterwards let go, and which anchors it howsoever it ranges ; or a dead hand, it may be, seems stretched in one's behalf from the world of spirits; or it is as when Dante walked on earth and there hovered ever before him, interpretative of all around and apocalyptic of all beyond, the vision of his beatified Beatrice. Generally, too, as a part of one or other of these solutions, there is an assertion of the sanative virtue of action, of the power of work to dispel doubt and despair, and to heal a mind fevered by excess of speculation. And so at the close, as in Maud, there is the glimpse of some enterprise into which the u 290 BRITISH NO VE LISTS SINCE SCO TT. mind, recovering its reason, may plunge, and in which, though it is lost to view, the fancy may follow its beneficent activity. " And as months ran on and rumour of battle grew, 1 It is time, it is time, passionate heart,' said I (For I cleaved to a cause that I felt to be pure and true), ' It is time, passionate heart and morbid eye, That old hysterical mock-disease should die.' And I stood on a giant deck, and mix'd my breath With a loyal people shouting a battle cry, Till I saw the dreary phantom arise and fly Far into the North, and battle, and seas of death." Perhaps, however, the most characteristic of the special class of fictions which we have been describing are those in which " clearness " is not represented as coming at all, but which confine themselves merely to a statement of the question. The perpetual knocking at the unopened door — such is their image of human life. This is Nervous Paganism at its uttermost ; and one or two specimens of it in our prose -literature, not actually calling themselves novels, but really such, might be specified, were it not that their authors would feel a reluctance to being named. Muscular Pagans would not mind it. (3.) In addition to the tendency to a wider and more persevering Realism, and also to the marked tendency to more of doctrinal and didactic earnest- HIGHER POETIC PO WER. 291 ness in all directions, there may be reported, respect- ing our recent and contemporary novel-writing, the appearance here and there of more of purely poetic aim, and of a larger power and liberty in the ideal. While, on the one hand, our novelists are striving- after a closer rendering of life as it is throughout all ranks of society and all professions, on the other hand, we find in some novelists, and sometimes where this virtue of Realism exists in high degree, a dispo- sition to vindicate for the novel also that right of ideality which is allowed to metrical Poetry, and so to introduce in their novels incidents, scenes, and characters not belonging to the ordinary world, but holding their tenure from the sway of phantasy. I have already named Mr. Dickens as a novelist in whom the poetic capability is strongly developed. There are portions also of Miss Bronte's novels where the imagination breaks away from social fact and exercises itself in visual and other allegories ; and in Mr. Kingsley's bold descriptions of scenery, his heroic and impassioned conceptions of character, and the romantic sequence of his incidents and situ- ations, there is as marked an inroad as has been made in recent prose fiction into the peculiar domain of the Poet. The mere citation of such instances will suffice to explain what is meant ; and I would u2 292 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. only observe farther that, as in such novelists there is more and more of the higher matter of poetry, so, wherever this is the case, their language too assumes more and more of the poetical and even of the me- trical form. As Mr. Dickens and Mr. Kingsley, for example, may be associated, in virtue of much of the matter of their writings, with such elder prose-poets as Wilson and De Quincey (and these two, it is to be remembered, take rank also among our novelists), so from their writings, too, passages might be ex- tracted which might be read, with scarce an alteration, as good unconscious verse. There are no symptoms yet that the Novel is about to lose its popularity as a form of literature. On the contrary, there is every symptom, that in one shape or another it will continue to be popular for a long time, and that more and more of talent will flow into it. The very remarks which we have been making as to the recent tendencies and charac- teristics of our British novel-writing are proofs to this effect. The Novel, we have found, has been becoming more real and determinate, in so far as it can convey matter of fact, more earnest, in so far as it can be made a vehicle for matter of speculation, and more conscious, at the same time, of its ability in DESIDERATA. 293 all matter of phantasy. What is this but saying that its capabilities have been increasing simultaneously as regards each of the three kinds of intellectual exercise which make up total literature — History, Philosophy, and Poetry ; and what is this again but saying, that in future there may be either a greater disposition among those who naturally distribute themselves according to this threefold classification to employ it for their several purposes, or a greater desire among those who are peculiarly novelists to push its powers in the threefold service ? On such a supposition, we may venture, in conclusion, on three hopes as to the Novel of the future, corre- sponding severally to the three tendencies which have been indicated as most conspicuous in the Novel of the present : — I. In the interest of the Novel considered in its relations to History, or as a form of literature repre- senting the facts of human life, there might be a more general recognition than heretofore, both among Novelists and their readers, of the full theo- retical capabilities of the Novel, as being the prose counterpart of the Epic. In other words, there might be more attention among our novelists of real life to epic breadth of interest. I may illustrate my meaning by a particular 294 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. instance of the defect I have in view. It will not be denied, I think, that, by the conversion of the Novel, in the hands of the majority of modern novelists, and especially of lady-novelists, into a mere love and marriage story, there has been a serious contraction of its capabilities. Of Love, as an influence in human affairs, it is impossible either for History or for Romance to exaggerate the impor- tance. Over every portion of human society, from the beginning of the world till now, over every little hand's- breadth of British or of any other society at this moment, there has waved, there is waving, the white hand of Aphrodite. And what effects of the white hand wherever it waves — what sweet pain, what freaks and mischiefs, what trains of wild and unforeseen events, what derangements and convul- sions, not confined to the spots where they begin, but sending forth circles of tremor, which agitate all interests, and ripple sometimes to the thrones of kings ! Through love, as a portal, man and woman both pass, at one point or another, ere they are free of the corporation of the human race, acquainted with its laws and constitution, and partakers of its privileges. That this feeling then, and all that appertains to it, should receive large recognition in literature, that representations of it should be multi- LOVE AXD MARRIAGE XOVELS. 295 plied, and that histories should be constructed to exhibit it, is right and necessary,; nor can any history or fiction be accounted a complete rendering of all life in which this particular interest is omitted or made insignificant. But there are other human u interests " — if we may use that hacknied word — besides Love and Marriage. There are other deities in the Polytheistic Pantheon besides Aphrodite. There is Apollo, the physician and artist; there is Minerva, the wise and serene ; there is Juno, the sumptuous and queenly; there is the red god, Mars ; not far off sits green-haired Neptune ; all around is Pan, the wood-rover ; and down upon all, the resting bolt in his hand, looks the calm and great-browed Jove. It was the action and inter- action of these deities that, in the Pagan philosophy, produced life — Yenus having only her characteristic part ; and, if for deities we substitute principles, the same is true yet. Exactly, therefore, as, in the Homeric Epic, the whole Pantheon was engaged, and Yenus appears but now and then to wave her hand and have it wounded, so, to constitute a true modern epic, there must be the like subordination, the like variety. And, indeed, in almost all the greater novelists, whether of our own or of other countries— Richardson being one of the exceptions — 206 BRITISH NO VE LISTS SINCE SCOTT. and certainly in all the greatest narrative and dra- matic poets, this breadth of interest, this ranging of the mind over a wide surface of the phenomena of human life, has been a conspicuous characteristic. In Cervantes we have all Spain to range over. In Shakespeare's dramas we have love in abundance, and, at least, some thread or hint of love in each ; but what a play throughout of other interests, and in some how rare the gleam of the white hand amid the spears of warriors and the deliberations of senates ! So in Scott ; and so in almost every other very eminent novelist. That so many of our inferior novels now should be love and marriage novels and nothing more, arises perhaps from the fact, that the novel-reading age in the one sex falls generally between the eighteenth and the twenty-fifth year, and that, with the other sex, in the present state of our social arrangements, the " white hand '.' remains, directly or indirectly, the permanent human interest during the whole of life. II. In the interest of the Novel, considered as a vehicle for doctrine, a very considerable influx into it both of the speculative spirit and of the best results of speculation, is yet to be desired. The question of the proper limits within which a poet or other artist may seek to inculcate doctrine ART AND DOCTRINE. 297 through his works, is one on which something has already been said in connexion with those recent novels which we have named Novels of Purpose. It is, however, a question, the complete discussion of which would involve many farther considerations. On the one hand, the popular distaste for works of art evidently manufactured to the order of some moral or dogma is founded on a right instinct. The art of Shakespeare in his dramas, as it is and always has been more popular than the art of Ben Jonson in his, is also deeper and truer in principle. Moreover, it may be said, there is a certain incom- patibility between the spirit in which an artist proceeds, and the spirit in which a teacher or dog- matist ought to proceed, if he is true to his calling. It is the supposed essence of a work of art that it shall give pleasure ; but perhaps it is the test of efficient doctrine that it shall give pain. The artist may lawfully aspire to be popular ; the teacher who aspires to popularity does so at his peril. It might be a true testimony to the power of an artist that the crowd were crowning him with laurel in the market-place ; but respecting a moralist, or spiritual reformer, a truer testimony might be that they were taking up stones to stone him. Works of art and imagination are such that those who produce them 298 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. may live by their sale, and not necessarily be untrue to their function ; the very worst feature in our modern organization of literature is that so many literary men must live by the sale of doctrine. When doctrine has to be sold to enable its producer to go on producing more, there is a grievous chance that the doctrine last sold, and the farther doctrine in preparation will, more or less consciously, be of a kind to be saleable. True, the labourer even in doctrine is worthy of his hire; but he will labour perhaps better if he is in circumstances not to require any. In the ancient Greek world it was the men who were called Sophists who took fees for their teaching; the philosopher Socrates had his bread otherwise. He earned his bread by sculpture, of the quality of which we do not hear much ; by his philosophy, of the quality of which we can judge for ourselves, all that he got from the public in his life was a cup of hemlock. But, though we thus regard it as the distinction between the true Greek philosophers and the contemporary Sophists that the Sophists taught for hire and the philoso- phers gratuitously, we do not extend the inference to the Greek dramatists. They probably expected to be paid handsomely, as well as to be applauded, for their dramas ; and yet their dramas were such as ART AND DOCTRINE. 299 we see. And so, in the case -of the modern novel, what chance is there for the novelist of attaining his legitimate end as an artist, that of communicating and diffusing pleasure, if he aims also at reforming society by a strenuous inculcation of doctrine, which, in so far as it is good and calculated for the exigency, ought almost necessarily to irritate ? Now, without waiting to detect a certain amount of fallacy which mingles with the general truth of such an argument, it might be enough to fall back on the consideration already adduced — that every artist, poet, or novelist is also a thinker whether he chooses or not. The imagination is not a faculty working apart ; it is the whole mind thrown into the act of imagining ; and the value of any act of imagination, therefore, or of all the acts of imagina- tion of any particular mind, will depend on the total strength and total furnishing of the mind, doctrinal contents and all, that is thrown into this form of exercise. Every artist is a thinker, whether he knows it or not ; and ultimately no artist will be found greater as an artist than he was as a thinker. The novelist chooses a certain portion of life to be imaginatively represented ; well, there is latent doc- trine in the very choice. He is the providence of the mimic world he has framed ; well, he must 300 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. conduct it, consciously or unconsciously, according to some philosophy of life. He makes his characters reason and act in different situations and in modes calling for approbation or reprobation; well, he is, in spite of himself, a good or a bad moral casuist. Now, to the extent to which these obvious facts carry us, is it not to be wished that our novelists brought to their business a fair amount of scientific capital, a fair amount of acquaintance with the best thoughts that may be current on the subjects of greatest interest and importance ? Is the wish un- necessary ? It hardly appears to be so. If there is any kind of literary attempt to which a mind empty of all knowledge is apt nevertheless to think itself quite competent, is it not to writing a novel ? And what havoc, in our actual novels, of the most simple and certain principles ! The very element in which the novelist works is human nature; yet what sort of Psychology have we in the ordinary run of novels ? A Psychology, if the truth must be spoken, such as would not hold good in a world of imaginary cats, not to speak of men — impossible conformations of character; actions determined by motives that never could have determined the like ; sudden conversions brought about by logical means of such astounding simplicity that wonder itself ART AXD DOCTRINE. 301 is paralyzed in contemplating them ; chains of events defying all laws of conceivable causation ! How shaky also the Political Economy and the Social Science of a good many of our novelists — sciences in the matter of which they must work, if not also in that of some of the physical sciences, in fram- ing their fictitious histories ! Before novels or poems can stand the inspection of that higher criticism which every literary work must be able to pass ere it can rank in the first class, their authors must be at least abreast of the best speculation of their time. Not that what we want from novelists and poets is farther matter of speculation. What we want from them is matter of imagination ; but the imagination of a well furnished mind is one thing, and that of a vacuum is another. Respecting some kinds of novels — those included, for example, in the more profound order of what we have called novels of purpose — our demands might be higher. That a writer may be fitted to frame imaginary histories illustrating the deeper problems of human education, and to be a sound casuist in the most difficult ques- tions of human experience, it is necessary that he should bring to his task not only an average acquaintance with the body of good current doctrine, but also an original speculative faculty. In such 302 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. cases, the desirable arrangement might be either that our novelists were philosophers, or that philo- sophers were our novelists. III. In the interest of the Novel, considered as a variety of general Poetry, there might be a more decided assertion of its competency for the higher as well as for the lower exercises of the poetic faculty, of its fitness for representations of the grand, the elemental, the ideal, as well as for representations of the socially minute, varying, and real. In other words, there might, with advantage, be a protest, within certain limits, and especially at present, against the exclusive practice of what is called the novel of social reality. I have so often touched on this topic that it may be well here somewhat to vary my language in returning to it. Several times I have used the word " elemental" as synonymous, or nearly so, with the word "ideal," and as perhaps less objectionable, inasmuch as it avoids the notion of opposition to the " real" which this latter word is apt to suggest, and which is not intended. Let me now, therefore, confine myself to that word, and explain more distinctly what is meant by it. The old doctrine of the Four Elements is now naught in Science; but there is a lingering validity in it, in respect that to the merely intuitive eye the THE "ELEMENTAL." 303 four elements recognised in it still seem to compose the totality of nature, and yet to be distinct among themselves. There is the brown and stable Earth, mineral or organic; round its massive bulk roars and surges the fluid element of Water, here collected in oceans, there distributed in streams ; over Earth and Water alike blows the fickle element of Air, deepening, as the eye ascends, from invisible trans- parency to the still blue of the heavenly dome; and finally, scattered through all, is the fiercer element of Fire, here tonguing over the earth wherever it may be kindled, there flashing through the ether, and, high over all, as natural vision fancies, col- lected permanently into points and orbs. Moreover, this distribution of external nature by the eye sinks inward into the mind, becomes a mode of universal thought, and affects our language respecting mind itself. Some souls, solid and strong, seem to have an affinity with the earth ; some, more fluid, with the water ; some, soft and supersubtle, with the air ; some, hot and terrible, with the fires and the light- nings; while some there are — earthy-fiery, fiery- aerial, and the like — whose affinities must be represented as compound. Nay, more, it will be found that the element to which any mind is referred by those observing its operations, is also generally 304 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. that for the sensible circumstance of which it shows, in its fancies, a marked affection. Shelley might be classed as an aerial spirit with a touch of fainter fire; and the circumstance with which Shelley's poetry abounds is that of Meteorology. So much for the word u elemental" as it might be afforded to us out of the obsolete, but still signi- ficant, doctrine of the Four Elements. But we need not associate the word with any such doctrine. The elemental in nature or in life may be defined as consisting simply of those objects or phenomena in each which are recognised as most large, compre- hensive, primitive, impressive, and enduring. There is an elemental of the physical world, and there is an elemental of the moral world. The elemental in the physical world consists of the more massive and enduring phenomena of that world, of those larger sights and sounds of nature that impressed men primevally, and that continue to impress powerfully now — the wide expanse of earth, barren with moor or waving with corn and forest ; the sea restless to the horizon, and rolling its waves to the beach ; the gusts of the raging tempest; the sun majestic in the heavens, and the nocturnal glory of the stars : the clouds, the rains, the rocks, the vales, the mountains. To these more massive and permanent THE "ELEMENTAL." 305 objects or phenomena of the physical world there correspond objects or phenomena of the moral world, distinguished from the rest as also more massive and enduring. Birth, Life, Death ; Labour, Sorrow, Love, Kevenge ; the thought of the Whence, the thought of the Why, the thought of the Whither — these, in the moral world, are the con- siderations that are elemental. Men of old revolved them ; we revolve them ; those who come after us will revolve them. As in the physical world there are infinite myriads of phenomena, complex and minute, aggregated on the basis of the elemental and into which the elemental may be decomposed, so on these fundamental feelings, facts, and thoughts of the moral world are all the minuter facts of social experience piled, and over these as their basis they roll in varying whirl. These are the generalities ; the rest are the minutiae. Now to the hundred definitions that have been given of genius, let this one more be added — that that soul is a soul of genius which is in affinity with the elemental in nature and in life, and which, by the necessity of its constitution, tends always from the midst of the complex and minute to the simple and the general. I know not where the difference between the purest form of the passion for the elemental on the x 306 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. one hand, and the most prurient form of affection for mean social detail on the other is better repre- sented than in the contrast between the Archangels and Mephistopheles in the Prologue to Goethe's " Faust." The Prologue opens with a hymn of the three Archangels, singing, first severally and then together, before the throne of Deity : — " RAPHAEL. In chorus with each kindred star The Sun sends forth his ancient song, And on his path prescribed from far, In thunder going, rolls along : The Angels gather strength, beholding, Though none their substance fathom may ; The mystic works of Thy upholding Are lordly as on Time's first day. GABRIEL. And swift and swift, all thought outstripping, Wheels round the pomp of Earth in sight, Its daily gleam of Eden dipping In deep and horror-teeming night : The sea, in mighty billows dashing, Up-foams against the rock's deep base ; And rock and sea, together crashing. Whirl ceaseless in the starry race. MICHAEL* And loud storms roar, their warfare waging From sea to land, from land to sea ; And fashion round it, in their raging,, A girdle woven wondrously : THE "ELEMENTAL." 307 There flames the flash of desolation, To clear the coming thunder's way : Yet, Lord, we have in veneration The gentle going of thy day. THE THREE. The Angels gather strength, beholding, Though none Thy substance fathom may ; And all the works of Thy upholding Are lordly as on Time's first day." As the song ends, Mephistopheles comes forward; and mark, in contrast, the tenor of his speech : — " Of suns and worlds deuce one word can / gabble ; I only know how men grow miserable. The little god of earth is still the same old clay, And is as odd this hour as on Creation's day. Better somewhat his situation, Hadst Thou not given him that same light of inspiration : Eeason he calls % and uses 't so that he Grows but more beastly than the very beasts to be. He seems to me, begging your Grace's pardon, Like one of those long-legg'd things in a garden, That fly about, and hop and spring, And in the grass the same old chirrup sing. Would I could say that here the story closes ! But in all sorts of dirt they thrust their noses." These are the two moods. They reproduce them- selves in literature. In all the greater literature of the world, from Homer and the Greek Drama downwards, there is heard the tone of the Elemental song. Nor need it be absent in our Prose Fiction. 308 BRITISH NOVELISTS SINCE SCOTT. No more than our metrical Poetry must this form of literature be permitted to degenerate into a ceaseless variation of the speech of Mephistopheles, that men are as miserable as ever and that the world is all in a mess. It may be that the representation of social reality is, on the whole, the proper business of the Novel; but even in the representation of social reality the spirit may be that of the far- surveying and the sublime. I believe, however, that there may be vindicated for the literature of prose phantasy the liberty of an order of fiction different from the usual Novel of Social Reality, and ap- proaching more to what has always been allowed in metrical poesy, and that, accordingly, those occasional prose fictions are to be welcomed which deal with characters of heroic imaginary mould, and which remove us from cities and the crowded haunts of men. THE END. b>\ K. CLAY, PRINTER, BREAD STREET HILL. % * A 1 B a *£• Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. ' Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide Treatment Date: Jan. 2009 I x o (724) ^ A * ■§ Neutralizing agent: Magnesium oxide Treatment Date: Jan. 2009 PreservationTechnologies A WORLD LEADER IN COLLECTIONS PRESERVATION 111 Thomson Park Drive Cranberry Township, PA 16™** (724)779-2111 -^ •^ %? } «i^ > s \ • *- ^ " -* .^ ^. S' \* ,5 ^ y ^^ ^o 1 <> ' f -K *>.