The still shorter life of Winthrop Mackworth Praed, on the other hand, was pa.s.sed under sufficiently favourable stars. He was born in 1802, and his father, Serjeant Praed, possessed property, practice at the bar, and official position. Praed was sent to Eton, where he became a pillar of the famous school magazine _The Etonian_, and thence to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he did extremely well, made the acquaintance of Macaulay, and wrote in _Knight"s Quarterly_. After a short interval of tutoring and reading for the bar he entered Parliament in 1830, and remained in it for the rest of his life, which closed on 15th July 1839.
He had latterly been secretary to the Board of Control, and it was thought that, had he lived, he might have made a considerable political reputation both as speaker and administrator.
The almost unchequered sunshine of one of these careers and the little sun and much shadow of the other have left traces--natural though less than might be supposed--of difference between the produce of the two men; but perhaps the difference is less striking than the resemblance.
That Hood--obliged to write for bread, and outliving Praed by something like a decade at the two ends--wrote a great deal more than Praed did is of little consequence, for the more leisurely writer is as unequal as the duty labourer. Hood had the deeper and stronger genius: of this there is no doubt, and the advantage more than made up for Praed"s advantages in scholarship and in social standing and accomplishment. In this serious work of Hood"s--_Lycus the Centaur_, _The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies_, _The Elm Tree_, _The Haunted House_--there is observable--to a degree never surpa.s.sed by any of the poets of this group except Beddoes, and more sustained and human, though less weird and sweet, than his--a strain of the true, the real, the ineffable tone of poetry proper. At this Praed never arrives: there are at most in him touches which may seem to a very charitable judgment to show that in other circ.u.mstances sorrow, pa.s.sion, or the like might have roused him to display the hidden fire. On the other hand, neither Hood"s breeding, nor, I think, his nature, allowed him to display the exquisite airiness, the delicate artificial bloom and perfection, of Praed"s best _vers de societe_--the _Season_, the _Letter of Advice_, and the rest. This last bloom has never been quite equalled--even Prior"s touch is coa.r.s.e to it, even that of the late Mr. Locker is laboured and deliberate. So too as there is nothing in Praed of the popular indignation--generous and fine but a little theatrical--which endears Hood to the general in _The Bridge of Sighs_ and _The Song of the Shirt_, so there is nothing in Hood of the sound political sense, underlying apparent banter, of Praed"s _Speaker Asleep_ and other things.
But where the two poets come together, on a ground which they have almost to themselves, is in a certain kind of humorous poetry ranging from the terrific-grotesque, as in Hood"s _Miss Kilmansegg_ and Praed"s _Red Fisherman_, to the simple, humorously tender study of characters, as in a hundred things of Hood"s and in not a few of Praed"s with _The Vicar_ at their head. The resemblance here is less in special points than in a certain general view of life, conditioned in each case by the poet"s breeding, temperament, and circ.u.mstance, but alike in essence and quality: in a certain variety of the essentially English fashion of taking life with a mixture of jest and earnest, of humour and sentiment.
Hood, partly influenced by the need of caring for the public, partly by his pupilship to Lamb, perhaps went to further extremes both in mere fun and in mere sentiment than Praed did, but the central substance is the same in both.
Yet one gift which Hood has and Praed has not remains to be noticed--the gift of exquisite song writing. Compared with the admired inanities of Barry Cornwall, his praised contemporary, Hood"s "Fair Ines," his "Time of Roses," his exquisite "Last Stanzas," and not a few other things, are as gold to gilt copper. Praed has nothing to show against these; but he, like Hood, was no inconsiderable prose writer, while the latter, thanks to his apprenticeship to the burin, had an extraordinary faculty of ill.u.s.trating his own work with cuts, contrary to all the canons, but inimitably grotesque.
It is probable that even in this long survey of the great poetical production of the first third of this century some gaps may be detected by specialists. But it seemed to me impossible to give more than the barest mention here to the "single speech" accident of Charles Wolfe, the author of the "Burial of Sir John Moore," which everybody knows, and of absolutely nothing else that is worth a single person"s knowing; to the gigantic and impossible labours of Edwin Atherstone; to the industrious translation of Rose and Sotheby; to the decent worth of Caroline Bowles, and the Hood-and-water of Laman Blanchard. And there are others perhaps who cannot be even mentioned; for there must be an end.
FOOTNOTES:
[3] _Lyrical Ballads_, 1798, and with additions 1800; _Poems_, 1807 (in these four volumes even adorers have allowed all his greatest work to be included); _The Excursion_, 1814; _The White Doe of Rylston_, 1815; _Sonnets on the River Duddon_, and others, 1819-20. In 1836 he brought out a collected edition of his poems in six volumes. _The Prelude_ was posthumous.
[4] It must be remembered that Wordsworth was a prose writer of considerable excellence and of no small volume. Many people no doubt were surprised when Dr. Grosart, by collecting his pamphlets, his essays, his notes, and his letters, managed to fill three large octavo volumes. But his poetry so far outweighs his prose (though, like most poets, he could write admirably in his pedestrian style when he chose) that his utterances in "the other harmony" need not be specially considered. The two most considerable examples of this prose are the pamphlet on _The Convention of Cintra_ and the five and twenty years later _Guide to the Lakes_. But minor essays, letters of a more or less formal character, and prefaces and notes to the poems, make up a goodly total; and always display a genius germane to that of the poems.
[5] This word, as well as "Aspheterism," which has had a less general currency, was a characteristic coinage of Coleridge"s to designate a kind of Communism, partly based on the speculations of G.o.dwin, and intended to be carried into practice in America.
[6] Yet this praise can only be a.s.signed to Coleridge with large allowance. He was always unjust to his own _immediate_ predecessors, Johnson, Gibbon, etc.; and he was not too sensible of the real merits of Pope or even of Dryden. In this respect Leigh Hunt, an immeasurably weaker thinker, had a much more catholic taste. And it is not certain that, as a mere prose writer, Coleridge was a very good prose writer.
[7] Curiously enough, there was another and slightly older Samuel Rogers, a clergyman, who published verse in 1782, just before his namesake, and who dealt with Hope--
Hope springs eternal in the _aspiring_ breast.
His verse, of which specimens are given in Southey"s _Modern English Poets_, is purely eighteenth century. He died in 1790.
[8] Henry Headley, who, like Bowles and Landor, was a member of Trinity College, Oxford, and who died young, after publishing a few original poems of no great value, deserves more credit for his _Select Beauties of Ancient English Poetry_, published in two volumes, with an exquisite t.i.tle-page vignette, by Cadell in 1787, than has sometimes been allowed him by the not numerous critics who have noticed him recently, or by those who immediately followed him. His knowledge was soon outgrown, and therefore looked down upon; and his taste was a very little indiscriminate. But it was something to put before an age which was just awakening to the appet.i.te for such things two volumes full of selections from the too little read poets of the seventeenth, with a few of the sixteenth century. Moreover, Headley"s biographical information shows very praiseworthy industry, and his critical remarks a great deal of taste at once nice and fairly catholic. A man who in his day could, while selecting and putting forth Drayton and Carew, Daniel and King, speak enthusiastically of Dryden and even of Goldsmith, must have had the root of the matter in him as few critics have had.
[9] Not to be confounded with _Robert_, or "Satan" Montgomery, his junior by many years, and a much worse poet, the victim of Macaulay"s famous cla.s.sical example of what is called in English "slating," and in French _ereintement_. There is really nothing to be said about this person that Macaulay has not said; though perhaps one or two of the things he has said are a little strained.
[10] Some fifteen years ago, in a little book on Dryden, I called Kirke White a "miserable poetaster," and was rebuked for it by those who perhaps knew Byron"s lines and nothing more. Quite recently Mr. Gosse was rebuked more loudly for a less severe denunciation. I determined that I would read Kirke White again; and the above judgment is the mildest I can possibly p.r.o.nounce after the reading. A good young man with a pathetic career; but a poetaster merely.
CHAPTER III
THE NEW FICTION
Although, as was shown in the first chapter, the amount of novel writing in the last decades of the eighteenth century was very considerable, and the talent displayed by at least some of the pract.i.tioners of the form distinctly great, it can hardly have been possible for any careful observer of it, either during the last ten years of the old age or the first fifteen of the new, to be satisfied with it on the whole, or to think that it had reached a settled or even a promising condition. Miss Burney (now Madame d"Arblay), whose brilliant debut with _Evelina_ was made just before the date at which this book begins, had just after that date produced _Cecilia_, in which partial and contemporary judges professed to see no falling off. But though she was still living and writing,--though she lived and wrote till the present century was nearly half over,--_Camilla_ (1796) was acknowledged as a doubtful success, and _The Wanderer_ (1814) as a disastrous failure; nor after this did she attempt the style again.
The unpopularity of Jacobinism and the growing distaste for the philosophy of the eighteenth century prevented much attempt being made to follow up the half political, half philosophical novel of G.o.dwin, Holcroft, and Bage. No such causes, however, were in operation as concerning the "Tale of Terror," the second founder of which, Monk Lewis, was indeed no inconsiderable figure during the earlier part of the great age of 1810-30, while Charles Robert Maturin improved considerably upon Lewis himself. Maturin was born in Ireland (where he princ.i.p.ally lived) in 1782, and died there in 1824. He took orders, but was too eccentric for success in his profession, and his whole heart was set on literature and the drama. Befriended by Scott and Byron, though very severely criticised by Coleridge, he succeeded in getting his tragedy of _Bertram_ acted at Drury Lane with success; but his later theatrical ventures (_Manuel_, _Fredolpho_) were less fortunate. He also published sermons; but he lives in literature only by his novels, and not very securely by these. He produced three of them--_The Fatal Vengeance: or, The Family of Montorio_, _The Wild Irish Boy_, and the _Milesian Chief_--under a pseudonym before he was thirty; while after the success of _Bertram_ he avowed _Women_ (1818), _Melmoth the Wanderer_ (1820), and _The Albigenses_ (1824), the last in a sort of cross style between his earlier patterns and Scott. But his fame had best be allowed to rest wholly on _Melmoth_, a remarkable book dealing with the supposed selling of a soul to the devil in return for prolonged life; the bargain, however, being terminable if the seller can induce some one else to take it off his hands. Although far too long, marvellously involved with tales within tales, and disfigured in parts by the rant and the gush of its cla.s.s, _Melmoth_ is really a powerful book, which gave something more than a pa.s.sing shudder to its own generation (it specially influenced Balzac), and which has not lost its force even now. But the usual novel of this kind, which was written in vast numbers, was simply beneath contempt.
The exquisite artist who, as mentioned formerly, had taken these tales of terror as part subject of her youthful satire, had begun to write some years before the close of the eighteenth century. But Miss Austen"s books were long withheld from the press, and she was considerably preceded in publication by Maria Edgeworth. These last are the only novels of the first decade of the nineteenth century which have held any ground, though they were but few among the crowds not merely of tales of terror but of fashionable novels, "Minerva Press" inanities, attempts in the b.a.s.t.a.r.d and unsuccessful kind of historical romance which preceded Scott"s, and others. Miss Edgeworth, who was born in 1767, the daughter of an eccentric busybody of good family and property in Ireland, and who lived till 1848, had a great fame in her own day, deserved it, never entirely lost it, and has lately had it revived; while Scott declared (but in such matters Scott was a little apt to let his good-nature and his freedom from personal vanity get the better of strict critical truth) that her Irish novels had supplied the suggestion of his Scotch ones. Her chief works in this kind were _Castle Rackrent_ (1801), a book with little interest of the strictly "novel" kind, but a wonderful picture of the varieties of recklessness and misconduct which in the course of a generation or two ruined or crippled most of the landlords of Ireland; _Belinda_ (1803), her most ambitious and elaborate if not her most successful effort, which includes a very vivid and pregnant sketch of the feminine dissipation of the end of the last century; _Tales of Fashionable Life_, including the admirable _Absentee_; and _Ormond_, the most vivid of her Irish stories next to _Castle Rackrent_. She continued to write novels as late as 1834 (_Helen_), while some very charming letters of hers, though privately printed a good many years ago, were not published till 1894. Miss Edgeworth"s father, Richard, was himself something of a man of letters, and belonged to the cla.s.s of Englishmen who, without imbibing French freethinking, had eagerly embraced the "utility" doctrines, the political economy, and some of the educational and social crazes of the French _philosophes_; and he did his daughter no good by thrusting into her earlier work a strain of his own crotchet and purpose. Indirectly, however, this brought about in _The Parent"s a.s.sistant_, in other books for children, and in the _Moral Tales_, some of her most delightful work. In the novels (which besides these mentioned include _Leonora_, _Harrington_, _Ennui_, and _Patronage_, the longest of all) Miss Edgeworth occupies a kind of middle position between the eighteenth century novelists, of whom Miss Burney is the last, and those of the nineteenth, of whom Miss Austen is the first. This is not merely, though no doubt it is partly, due to the fact that the society which she saw (and she mixed in a great deal, from the highest downwards) was itself in a kind of transition state: it was at least as much owing to a certain want of distinct modernness and distinct universality in her own character, thought, and style. Miss Edgeworth, though possessed of delightful talents falling little short of genius, and of much humour (which last is shown in the charming _Essay on Irish Bulls_, as well as in her novels and her letters), missed, as a rule, the last and greatest touches; and, except some of her Irish characters, who are rather types than individuals, she has not created many live persons, while sometimes she wanders very far from life. Her touch, in short, though extremely pleasant, was rather uncertain. She can tell a story to perfection, but does not often invent it perfectly; and by herself she can hardly be said to have originated anything, though of course, if we could accept the above quoted statement of Scott"s, she indirectly originated a very great deal.
Very different is the position occupied by Jane Austen, who was born at Steventon in Hampshire on 16th December 1775, being the daughter of the rector of that place, lived a quiet life chiefly at various places in her native county, frequented good society in the rank of not the richest country squires, to which her own family belonged, and died at Winchester unmarried on 24th July 1817. Of her six completed novels, _Sense and Sensibility_, _Pride and Prejudice_, _Mansfield Park_, and _Emma_ were published during the last seven years of her life, while _Northanger Abbey_ and _Persuasion_ appeared, for the first time with an author"s name, the year after her death. They had no enormous or sudden popularity, but the best judges, from Scott downwards, at once recognised their extraordinary merit; and it is not too much to say that by the best judges, with rare exceptions, that merit has been acknowledged with ever increasing fulness at once of enthusiasm and discrimination to the present day. With Scott, Miss Austen is the parent of nineteenth century fiction; or, to speak with greater exactness, she is the mother of the nineteenth century novel, just as he is the father of the nineteenth century romance.
One indeed of the most wonderful things about her is her earliness. Even the dates of publication of her first books precede those of any novelist of the same rank and the same modernity; but these dates are misleading. _Northanger Abbey_ was written more than twenty years before it appeared, and the bulk of _Pride and Prejudice_ (which some hold to be the best and most characteristic of all) is known to have been as old at least as _Northanger Abbey_. That is to say, almost at the very time of the appearance of _Camilla_ (to which, by the way, Miss Austen was an original subscriber), a book not strikingly more nineteenth century in tone than the novels of Richardson, though a little more so in manners, a girl even younger than Miss Burney herself had been when she wrote _Evelina_ was drawing other girls, who, putting aside the most trivial details of dress, speech, and so forth, might be living girls to-day.
The charm and the genius of Miss Austen are not universally admitted; the touch of old fashion in external detail apparently discontenting some readers, the delicate and ever-present irony either escaping or being distasteful to others, while the extreme quietness of the action and the entire absence of excitement probably revolt a third cla.s.s. But the decriers do not usually attempt formal criticism. However, they sometimes do, and such an attempt once came under the notice of the present historian. It was urged that to extol Miss Austen"s method is a masculine delusion, that method being nothing but the throwing into literature of the habit of minute and semi-satiric observation natural to womankind. It did not apparently occur to this critic that he (or she) was in the first place paying Miss Austen an extraordinarily high compliment--a compliment almost greater than the most enthusiastic "Janites" have ventured--inasmuch as no higher literary triumph can be even conceived than thus to focus, formulate, and crystallise the special talent and gift of an entire s.e.x into a literary method. Nor did it probably occur to him that he was laying himself open to the damaging, or rather ruinous retort, "Then how is it that, of all the women who have preceded and followed Miss Austen as novelists, no other has displayed this specially and universally feminine gift?"
It is no doubt true that there is something feminine about the method, which, with the addition of a certain _nescio quid_, giving it its modern difference, may be said to combine the peculiarities of Fielding and of Richardson, though it works on a much smaller scale than either.
It has the intense and pervading, though not the exuberant and full-blooded, _livingness_ of Fielding, and it also has something not unlike a feminine counterpart and complement of his pervading irony; while it is not unlike Richardson in building up the characters and the stories partly by an infinity of tiny strokes of detail, often communicated in conversation, partly by the use of an exceedingly nice and delicate a.n.a.lysis of motive and temperament. It is in the former respect that Miss Austen stands apart from most, if not from all, women who have written novels. Irony is by no means a frequent feminine gift; and as women do not often possess it in any great degree, so they do not as a rule enjoy it. Miss Austen is only inferior among English writers to Swift, to Fielding, and to Thackeray--even if it be not improper to use the term inferiority at all for what is after all not much more than difference--in the use of this potent but most double-edged weapon. Her irony indeed is so subtle that it requires a certain dose of subtlety to appreciate it, and it is not uncommon to find those who consider such personages as Mr. Collins in _Pride and Prejudice_ to be merely farcical, instead of, as they are in fact, preachers of the highest and most Shakespearian comedy. But there would be no room here to examine Miss Austen"s perfections in detail; the important thing for the purposes of this history is to observe again that she "set the clock,"
so to speak, of pure novel writing to the time which was to be nineteenth century time to this present hour. She discarded violent and romantic adventure. She did not rely in the very least degree on describing popular or pa.s.sing fashions, amus.e.m.e.nts, politics; but confined herself to the most strictly ordinary life. Yet she managed in some fashion so to extract the characteristics of that life which are perennial and human, that there never can be any doubt to fit readers in any age finding themselves at home with her, just as they find themselves at home with all the greatest writers of bygone ages. And lastly, by some a.n.a.logous process she hit upon a style which, though again true to the ordinary speech of her own day, and therefore now reviled as "stilted" and formal by those who have not the gift of literary detachment, again possesses the universal quality, and, save in the merest externals, is neither ancient nor modern.
For the moment, however, Miss Austen"s example had not so much little influence as none at all. A more powerful and popular force, coming immediately afterwards and coinciding with the bent of general taste, threw for the time the whole current of English novel writing into quite a different channel; and it was not till the first rush of this current had expended itself, after an interval of thirty or forty years, that the novel, as distinguished from the romance and from nondescript styles partaking now of the romance itself, now of something like the eighteenth century story, engaged the popular ear. This new development was the historical novel proper; and the hand that started it at last was that of Scott. At last--for both men and women had been trying to write historical novels for about two thousand years, and for some twenty or thirty the attempts had come tolerably thick and fast. But before Scott no one, ancient or modern, Englishman or foreigner, had really succeeded. In the first place, until the eighteenth century was pretty far advanced, the conception and the knowledge of history as distinguished from the mere writing and reading of chronicles had been in a very rudimentary condition. Exceedingly few historians and no readers of history, as a cla.s.s and as a rule, had practised or acquired the art of looking at bygone ages with any attempt to realise and revive the ideas of those ages themselves, or even, while looking at them with the eyes of the present, to keep in mind that these were quite different eyes from those of contemporaries. In the same way no attempt at getting "local colour," at appropriateness of dialect, and so forth, had been made. These negligences in the hands of genius had been as unimportant as the negligences of genius always are. If Shakespeare"s "G.o.dlike Romans" are not entirely free from anachronism, n.o.body of sense would exchange them for anything else than themselves; and though Dante practically repeated in the _Commedia_ the curious confusion which in less gifted _trouveres_ and romances mixed up Alexander with Charlemagne and blended Greek and Gothic notions in one inextricable tangle, this also was supremely unimportant, if not even in a manner interesting. But when, at the end of the eighteenth century, writers, of secondary powers at best, engaging in a new and unengineered way, endeavoured to write historical novels, they all, from G.o.dwin and Mrs. Radcliffe to Miss Reeves and the Misses Lee, made the merest gallimaufries of inaccurate history, questionable fiction, manners heedlessly jumbled, and above all dialogue dest.i.tute of the slightest semblance of verisimilitude, and drawn chiefly from that of the decadent tragic and comic drama of the time.
It is not possible--it never is in such cases--to give a very exact account of the causes which led Walter Scott, when the public seemed to be a little tiring of the verse-romances which have been discussed in the last chapter, to take to romances in prose. The example of Miss Edgeworth, if a true cause at all, could affect only his selection of Scotch manners to ill.u.s.trate his histories, not his adoption of the historical style itself. But he did adopt it; and, fishing out from an old desk the beginnings of a story which he had left unfinished, or rather had scarce commenced, years earlier, he fashioned it into _Waverley_. This appearing in the year 1814 at a serious crisis in his own affairs, opened at once a new career of fame and fortune to him, and a previously unknown field of exploit and popularity to the English novel.
The extraordinary greatness of Scott--who in everything but pure style, and the expression of the highest raptures of love, thought, and nature, ranks with the greatest writers of the world--is not better indicated by any single fact than by the fact that it is impossible to describe his novels in any simple formula. He practically created the historical novel; and, what is more, he elaborated it to such an extent that no really important additions to his scheme have been made since. But not all his novels are historical. The two which immediately succeeded _Waverley_, and which perhaps the best judges consider his best,--_Guy Mannering_ and _The Antiquary_,--have only the faintest touch of history about them, and might have none at all without affecting their excellence; while one of the most powerful of his later books, _St.
Ronan"s Well_, is almost absolutely virgin of fact. So also, though his incomparable delineation of national manners, speech, and character, of the _cosas de Escocia_ generally, is one of the princ.i.p.al sources of his interest, _Ivanhoe_, which has perhaps been the most popular of all his books, _Kenilworth_, which is not far below it in popularity or in merit, and one or two others, have nothing at all of Scotland in them; and the altogether admirable romance of _Quentin Durward_, one of his four or five masterpieces, so little that what there is plays the smallest part in the success. So yet again, historical novelist as Scott is, and admirably as he has utilised and revivified history, he is by no means an extremely accurate historical scholar, and is wont not merely to play tricks with history to suit his story,--that is probably always allowable,--but to commit anachronisms which are quite unnecessary and even a little teasing.
There is no doubt that the single gift underlying all these and other things--the gift which enabled Scott not merely, as has been said, to create the historical novel, but to give the novel generally an entirely new start and direction, to establish its popularity, to clear its reputation from the smirch of frivolity on the one side and immorality on the other, to put it in the position occupied at other times or in other countries by the drama and the sermon, and to make it a rival of the very newspaper which was being refashioned at the same moment, while providing opportunities for the production of literature proper not inferior to those of any literary kind except poetry--that this was a gift of higher scope, if of vaguer definition, than any of those referred to. It was that gift which no one except Shakespeare has ever possessed in larger measure, though others have possessed it in greater partial intensity and perfection--the gift of communicating life to the persons, the story, the dialogue. To some extent Scott had this treasure in an earthen vessel. He could not, like Thackeray, like Fielding, like Miss Austen even, make everybody that he touched alive: his heroes very generally are examples to the contrary. And as a rule, when he did perform this function of the wizard,--a name given to him by a more than popular appropriateness,--he usually did it, not by the acc.u.mulation of a vast number of small strokes, but by throwing on the canvas, or rather panel, large outlines, free sweeps of line, and breadths of colour, instinct with vivacity and movement. Yet he managed wholly to avoid that fault of some creative imaginations which consists in personifying and individualising their figures by some easily recognisable label of mannerism. Even his most mannered characters, his humourists in the seventeenth century sense, of whom Dugald Dalgetty is the prince and chief--the true commander of the whole _stift_ of this _Dunkelspiel_--stand poles asunder from those inventions of d.i.c.kens and of some others who are ticketed for us by a gesture or a phrase repeated _ad nauseam_. And this gift probably is most closely connected with another: the extraordinary variety of Scott"s scene, character, and--so far as the term is applicable to his very effective but rather loose fashion of story-telling--plot. It is a common and a just complaint of novelists, especially when they are fertile rather than barren, that with them scene, plot, and character all run into a kind of mould, that their stories with a little trouble can be thrown into a sort of common form, that their persons simply "change from the blue bed to the brown,"
and that the blue and brown beds themselves are seen, under their diverse colours, to have a singular and not very welcome uniformity of pattern and furniture. Even Scott does not escape this almost invariable law of the brain-artist: it is one of the sole Shakespearian characteristics that Shakespeare does escape it entirely and altogether.
A certain form of huddled and not altogether probable catastrophe, a knack of introducing in the earlier part of the story, as if big with fate, personages who afterwards play but a subordinate part, and one or two other things, might be urged against Sir Walter. But, on the whole, no artist is less chargeable with stereotype than he. His characters are hardly ever doubles; their relationships (certain general connections excepted, which are practically the scaffolding of the romance in itself) do not repeat themselves; the backgrounds, however much or however little strict local colour they may have, are always sufficiently differentiated. They have the variety, as they have the truth, of nature.
No detailed account can here be attempted of the marvellous rapidity and popularity of the series of novels from the appearance of _Waverley_ till just before the author"s death eighteen years later. The anecdotage of the matter is enormous. The books were from the first anonymous, and for some time the secret of their authorship was carefully and on the whole successfully preserved. Even several years after the beginning, so acute a judge as Hazlitt, though he did not entertain, thought it necessary seriously to discuss, the suggestion that G.o.dwin wrote them,--a suggestion which, absurd as, with our illegitimate advantage of distance and perspective, we see it to be, was less nonsensical than it seems to those who forget that at the date of the appearance of _Waverley_ there was no novelist who could have been selected with more plausibility. After a time this and that were put together, and a critic of the name of Adolphus constructed an argument of much ingenuity and shrewdness to show that the author of _Marmion_ and the _Lady of the Lake_ must be the author of _Waverley_. But the secret was never regularly divulged till Sir Walter"s misfortunes, referred to in the section on his poetry, made further concealment not so much useless as impossible in the first place, and positively detrimental in the second.
The series was dauntlessly continued, despite the drag of the _Napoleon_, the necessity of attempting other work that would bring in money, and above all the strain on the faculties both of imagination and labour which domestic as well as pecuniary misfortunes imposed. Nor did Scott, it may be fearlessly, a.s.serted, though it is not perhaps the general opinion, ever publish any "dotages," with the possible exception of _Castle Dangerous_, which was not only finished but begun when the fatal disease of the brain which killed him had got the upper hand. The introduction to the _Chronicles of the Canongate_, written in 1827, is one of the most exquisite and masterly things that he ever did, though, from its not actually forming part of one of the novels, it is comparatively little known. The _Fair Maid of Perth_, a year later, has been one of the most popular of all abroad, and not the least so at home; and there are critics who rank _Anne of Geierstein_, in 1829, very high indeed. Few defenders are found for _Count Robert of Paris_, which was in fact written in the valley of the shadow; and it may be admitted that in his earlier days Scott would certainly have been able to give it a fuller development and a livelier turn. Yet the opening scene, though a little too long, the escape from the vaults of the Blachernal, and not a few other things, would be recognised as marvellous if they could be put before a competent but unbia.s.sed taste, which knew nothing of Sir Walter"s other work, but was able to compare it not merely with the work of his predecessors but with that of his imitators, numerous and enterprising as they were, at the time that _Count Robert_ appeared.
In such a comparison Scott at his worst excels all others at their best.
It is not merely that in this detail and in that he has the mastery, but that he has succeeded in making novel writing in general turn over a completely new leaf, enter upon a distinctly different compet.i.tion.
With the masterpieces of the eighteenth century novel he does not enter into comparison at all: he is working on a different scene, addressing a different audience, using different tools, colours, methods. Every successful novelist up to his time had, whatever his ostensible "_temp._ of tale," quietly a.s.sumed the thoughts, the speech, the manners, even to a great extent the dress and details of his own day. And in this a.s.sumption all but the greatest had inevitably estranged from them the ears and eyes of days that were not their own, which days, no doubt, were in turn themselves rapidly hastening to change, but never to revert to the original surroundings. Scott had done in prose fiction what the poets and the dramatists had sometimes done, what very rare philosophers had sometimes done likewise. Ostensibly going to the past, and to some extent really borrowing its circ.u.mstances, he had in reality gone straight to man as man; he had varied the particular trapping only to exhibit the universal substance. The Baron of Bradwardine, Dandie Dinmont, Edie Ochiltree, Mause Headrigg, Bailie Jarvie, and the long list of originals down to Oliver Proudfute and even later, their less eccentric companions from Fergus MacIvor to Queen Margaret, may derive part of their appeal from dialect and colouring, from picturesque "business" and properties. But the chief of that appeal lies in the fact that they are all men and women of the world, of life, of time in general; that even when their garments, even when their words are a little out of fashion, there is real flesh and blood beneath the garments, real thought and feeling behind the words. It may be urged by the Devil"s Advocate, and is not wholly susceptible of denial by his opponent, that, after the first four or five books, the enormous gains open to Scott first tempted, and the heroic efforts afterwards demanded of him later compelled, the author to put not quite enough of himself and his knowledge into his work, to "pad" if not exactly to "scamp" a little. Yet it is the fact that some of his very best work was not only very rapidly written, but written under such circ.u.mstances of bodily suffering and mental worry as would have made any work at all impossible to most men. And, on the whole, it is perhaps as idle to speculate whether this work might have been better, as it is ungenerous to grumble that it ought to have been. For after all it is such a body of literature as, for complete liberation from any debts to models, fertility and abundance of invention, n.o.bility of sentiment, variety and keenness of delight, nowhere else exists as the work of a single author in prose.
It was certain that an example so fascinating in itself, and of such extraordinary profit in fame and fortune to the author, would be followed. It was said with sufficient accuracy that Scott"s novels, at the best of his career, brought him in about 15,000 a year, a sum previously undreamt of by authors; while their reputation overshadowed not only all others in England, but all others throughout Europe. And it is rather surprising, and shows how entirely Scott had the priority in this field, that it was not for six or seven years at least that any noteworthy attempts in his manner appeared, while it can scarcely be said that in England anything of very great value was published in it before his death. In the last ten years of his life, however, imitations, chiefly of his historical style, did appear in great numbers; and he has left in his diary an extremely interesting, a very good-natured, but a very shrewd and just criticism upon them in general, and upon two in particular--the _Brambletye House_ of Horace Smith, one of the authors of the delightful parodies called _Rejected Addresses_, and the first book, _Sir John Chiverton_, of an author who was to continue writing for some half century, and at times to attain very great popularity. This was Harrison Ainsworth, and G. P. R. James also began to publish pretty early in the third decade of the century. James"
_Richelieu_, his first work of mark, appeared in 1825, the same year as _Sir John Chiverton_; but he was rather the older man of the two, having been born in 1801, while Ainsworth"s birth year was 1805. The latter, too, long outlived James, who died in 1860, while holding the post of English Consul in Venice, while Ainsworth survived till 1882. Both were exceedingly prolific, James writing history and other work as well as the novels--_Darnley_, _Mary of Burgundy_, _Henry Masterton_, _John Marston Hall_, and dozens of others--which made his fame; while Ainsworth (_Jack Sheppard_, _The Tower of London_, _Crichton_, _Rookwood_, _Old St. Paul"s_, etc.) was a novelist only. Both, especially between 1830 and 1850, achieved considerable popularity with the general public; and they kept it much longer (if indeed they have yet lost it) with schoolboys. But while the attempt of both to imitate Scott was palpable always, the success of neither could be ranked very high by severe criticism. James wrote better than Ainsworth: his historical knowledge was of a much wider and more accurate kind, and he was not unimbued with the spirit of romance. But the sameness of his situations (it became a stock joke to speak of the "two hors.e.m.e.n" who so often appeared in his opening scenes), the exceedingly conventional character of his handling, and the theatrical feebleness of his dialogue, were always reprehended and open to reprehension. Harrison Ainsworth, on the other hand, had a real knack of arresting and keeping the interest of those readers who read for mere excitement: he was decidedly skilful at gleaning from memoirs and other doc.u.ments sc.r.a.ps of decoration suitable for his purpose, he could in his better days string incidents together with a very decided knack, and, till latterly, his books rarely languished. But his writing was very poor in strictly literary merit, his style was at best bustling prose melodrama, and his characters were scarcely ever alive.
The chief follower of Sir Walter Scott in "Scotch" novels--for Miss Ferrier, the Scottish counterpart of Miss Edgeworth and Miss Austen, was, though his friend, hardly his follower, and _Marriage_ was mainly written before _Waverley_--was John Galt, who also has some claim to priority. He was born (2nd May 1779) at Irvine in Ayrshire, the scene of his best work, but pa.s.sed most of his youth at Greenock. His father was a retired West India captain; and Galt"s biographers do not make it very clear whence he obtained the capital for the various travels and enterprises which occupied his not exactly eventful, but busy and varied life. He had entered the Custom-house; but went to London in 1804, and tried literature in many forms, and for the most part with very little success. While travelling in the Levant he met Byron, of whom long afterwards he published a rather absurd life; and after his return home his _Ayrshire Legatees_ found welcome and popularity in _Blackwood_. This was in 1821, and after five years" busy writing Galt went to Canada in charge of a great scheme of colonisation and commerce called the Canada Company. This, after fair prospects, broke down completely. He came back again, wrote hard, and schemed incessantly. But fortune was not kind to him; and he died, in a way a broken man, at Greenock on 11th April 1839.
Galt, though with some of the national characteristics which have not always made Scotchmen popular, appears to have been a person of worth and amiability. He got on well with Byron, a very uncommon thing; and from Carlyle, whom he met when they were both on the staff of _Fraser_, he receives unwontedly amiable notice. His literary production was vast and totally uncritical; his poems, dramas, etc., being admittedly worthless, his miscellaneous writing mostly book-making, while his historical novels are given up by all but devotees. He had, however, a special walk--the delineation of the small humours and ways of his native town and county--in which, if not exactly supreme, he has seldom been equalled. The _Ayrshire Legatees_ is in main scheme a pretty direct and not very brilliant following of _Humphrey Clinker_; but the letters of the worthy family who visit London are read in a home circle which shows Galt"s peculiar talent. It is shown better still in his next published work, _The Annals of the Parish_, which is said to have been written long before, and in the pre-Waverley days to have been rejected by the publishers because "_Scotch_ novels could not pay." It is not exactly a novel, being literally what its t.i.tle holds out--the annals of a Western Parish by its minister, the Rev. Mr. Balwhidder, a Presbyterian Parson Adams of a less robust type, whose description of himself and parishioners is always good, and at times charming. _Sir Andrew Wylie_ (a fantastic book of much good fun and much good feeling), _The Entail_, and _The Provost_ (the last two sometimes ranked next to the _Annals_), followed rapidly, and are all good in a way which has been oddly revived of late years by some of our most popular novelists.
A better writer than Galt, though a less fertile, was Dr. Moir ("Delta"), another _Blackwood_ man, whose chief single performance is _Mansie Wauch_, but who wrote both prose and verse, both tales and essays, with considerable accomplishment of style, and with a very agreeable mixture of serious and comic power.
Meanwhile, the historical novel did not by any means absorb the attention of the crowds of aspirants who hurried to try their fortune in the wake of Scott. Lady Morgan (or rather Miss Sydney Owenson) did, in _The Wild Irish Girl_ (1806) and other things, some "rattling Hibernian stories" quite early; John Banim (1798-1842) coincided with the two Englishmen and exceeded them in _gout du terroir_; and the _Fairy Legends_ (1826) of Crofton Croker (1798-1854) are at their best simply exquisite. But the older styles continued after a fashion, or underwent slight changes, before the novel of purely ordinary life, on a plan midway between Scott and Miss Austen, triumphed in the middle of the century. One of the most popular of novelists in the reigns of George IV. and William IV. was Theodore Hook (1788-1841), a man of respectable connections and excellent education, who, having made himself a favourite with the Regent and many persons of quality as a diner-out and improvisatore, received a valuable appointment at the Mauritius, laid himself open by carelessness to a prosecution for malversation, and, returning to England, never entirely escaped from the effects of this, though he was extremely successful both as a novelist, and as a newspaper writer and editor, in the _John Bull_ chiefly. Some of Hook"s political squibs and light verses still retain attraction; and the tradition of his extraordinary faculties in improvising both words, music, and dramatic arrangement remains. But his novels (_Sayings and Doings_, _Gilbert Gurney_, _Gurney Married_, _Maxwell_, etc.) have become very dead-alive. They have little plot; a sort of rattling adventure in a modernised following of Smollett, which is their chief source of interest; manners true enough to their own day to be out-of-date now, but not handled with sufficient art ever to regain the attraction of revived antiquity; and a very careless and undistinguished style.
The first series of Hook"s _Sayings and Doings_ appeared in 1824, the year before that of the novels of James and Ainsworth above noticed.
Three years later, and five before Scott"s death, appeared _Falkland_, the first (anonymous) novel of a writer far surpa.s.sing any of the hour in talent, and credited by some with positive genius. Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer, afterwards Sir Edward Lytton-Bulwer, and later still Lord Lytton (born in 1800), was the youngest son of General Bulwer of Wood Dalling and Haydon in Norfolk, while he on his mother"s side represented an ancient Hertfordshire family seated at Knebworth. He was a Cambridge man: he obtained the Chancellor"s prize for English verse in 1825, and his first books were in poetical form. He became a Member of Parliament, being returned in the Whig interest for St. Ives before the Reform Bill pa.s.sed, and in the first Reform Parliament for Lincoln, and he held this seat for a decade, receiving his baronetcy in 1835. For another decade he was out of the House of Commons, though he succeeded to the Knebworth estate in 1844. He was returned for Hertfordshire in 1852, and, joining Lord Derby"s reconst.i.tuted party, ranked for the rest of his life as a Conservative of a somewhat Liberal kind. In the second Derby administration he was Colonial Secretary, but took no part in that of 1867, and died just before the return of the Tories to power in 1873.
This sufficiently brilliant political career was complicated by literary production and success in a manner not equalled by any Englishman of his time, and only approached by Macaulay and by Mr. Disraeli. _Falkland_ was succeeded by _Pelham_, which was published with his name, and which was the first, perhaps the most successful, and by far the most brilliant, of the novels in which authors have endeavoured to secure the rank of man of the world even more than that of man of letters, taking the method chiefly of fashionable, and therefore somewhat ephemeral, epigram. Nor did Bulwer (as he was known in the heyday of his popularity) ever cease novel writing for the forty-five years which were left to him, while the styles of his production varied with fashion in a manner impossible to a man of less consummate versatility and talent, though perhaps equally impossible to one of a very decided turn of genius. The fashionable novel, the crime novel, the romance of mystery, the romance of cla.s.sical times, the historical novel, by turns occupied him; and it is more easy to discover faults in _Paul Clifford_, _Eugene Aram_, _The Pilgrims of the Rhine_, _The Last Days of Pompeii_, _Ernest Maltravers_, _Zanoni_, _Rienzi_, _The Last of the Barons_, and _Harold_, than to refuse admiration to their extraordinary qualities. Then their author, recognising the public taste, as he always did, or perhaps exemplifying it with an almost unexampled quickness, turned to the domestic kind, which was at last, more than thirty years after Miss Austen"s death, forcing its way, and wrote _The Caxtons_, _My Novel_, and _What will he do with it?_--books which to some have seemed his greatest triumphs. The veering of that taste back again to tales of terror was acknowledged by _A Strange Story_, which, in 1861, created an excitement rarely, if ever, caused by the work of a man who had been writing for more than a generation; while _The Haunted and the Haunters_, a brief ghost-story contributed to _Blackwood"s Magazine_, has always seemed to the present writer the most perfect thing that he ever did, and one of the most perfect things of its kind ever done. In the very last years of his life, the wonderful _girouette_ of his imagination felt other popular gales, and produced--partly as novels of actual society, partly as Ja.n.u.s-faced satires of what was and what might be--_The Coming Race_, _Kenelm Chillingly_, and the posthumous _Parisians_.
But this list of novels, which does not include by name much more than two-thirds of his actual production, by no means exhausts Lord Lytton"s literary work. For some years, chiefly before he had pa.s.sed middle life, he was an active dramatist, and at least three of his plays--_The Lady of Lyons_, _Richelieu_, and _Money_--had a success (not merely pa.s.sing, and in the first case at least permanent) which few if any other plays of the century have had. He was always returning to verse, though never with real poetical success; the exceptions which may be urged most forcibly being his translations from Schiller, a congenial original. He was at one time editor of the _New Monthly Magazine_. He translated freely, he wrote much criticism,--which is often in isolated pa.s.sages, if not so often in general drift and grasp, extremely good,--and he was a constant essayist in very various kinds. It is probable that if his entire works were ever collected, which is not likely, few, if any, authors of the nineteenth century, though it be one of unbridled writing and printing, could equal him in volume; while it is certain that very few indeed could produce more numerous testimonials of the kind given by the immediate, and not merely immediate, success of separate works.
Yet it has been sometimes complained, sometimes boasted, that "with the critics Bulwer is dead"; and it is not very certain that with the faithful herd of uncritical readers the first Lord Lytton keeps any great place. Even many years ago he had ceased to be, if he ever was, a general favourite with those who specially loved literature; and it is rather doubtful whether he will ever regain even a considerable vogue of esteem. Perhaps this may be unjust, for he certainly possessed ability in bulk, and perhaps here and there in detail, far surpa.s.sing that of all but the very greatest of his contemporaries. Even the things which were most urged against him by contemporary satirists, and which it is to be feared are remembered at second-hand when the first-hand knowledge of his work has declined, need not be fatal. A man may write such things as "There is an eloquence in Memory because it is the nurse of Hope"
without its being necessary to cast up his capital letters against him in perpetuity, or to inquire without ceasing whether eloquence is an inseparable property of nurses. But he had two great faults--want of concentration and want of reality; and the very keenness, the very delicacy of his appreciation of the shiftings of popular taste may seem without unfairness to argue a certain shallowness of individual soil, a literary compost wherein things spring up rapidly because they have no depth of earth, but also because they have no depth of earth, rapidly vanish and wither away. The novel and the magazine have beyond all doubt given us much admirable work which without them we should not have had; they have almost as certainly, and in no case much more certainly than in Bulwer"s, over-forced and over-coaxed into hasty and ephemeral production talents which, with a little more hardening and under less exacting circ.u.mstances, might have become undoubted genius. Sentimental grandiloquence is not by itself fatal: the fashion which tempts to it, which turns on it, may return to it again; and it is never impossible to make allowance for its excesses, especially when, as in the case under discussion, it is accompanied by a rare and true satiric grasp of life.
In these early externals of his, Bulwer was only the most ill.u.s.trious of the innumerable victims of Byron. But his failure to make his figures thoroughly alive is more serious; and this must be put down partly to incapacity to take pains.