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 The Channels of English Literature 
 
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 'The Channels of English Literature 
 
 Edited by Oliphant Smeaton, M.A. 
 
 ENGLISH EPIC AND HEROIC POETRY. 
 By Professor W. Macneile Dixon, M.A., 
 University of Glasgow. 
 
 ENGLISH LYRIC POETRY. 
 By Ernest Rhys. 
 
 ENGLISH ELEGIAC, DIDACTIC, AND 
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 By the Very Rev. H. C. Beeching, D.D., 
 D.Litt., Dean of Norwich, and the Rev. 
 Ronald Bayne, M.A. 
 
 ENGLISH DRAMATIC POETRY. 
 
 By Professor F. E. Schelling, Litt.D., 
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 ENGLISH SATIRIC AND HUMOROUS 
 LITERATURE. 
 
 By Oliphant Smeaton, M.A., F.S.A. 
 
 ENGLISH PHILOSOPHERS and SCHOOLS 
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 By PYofessor George Saintsbury, D.Litt., 
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 ENGLISH HISTORIANS AND SCHOOLS 
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 ENGLISH CRITICISM. 
 
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 THE 
 
 ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 BY , 
 
 GEORGE'^ SAINTSBURY 
 
 PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE 
 UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH 
 
 LONDON : J. M. DENT & SONS LTD. 
 BEDFORD STREET, STRAND 1913 
 
 NEW YORK: E. P. BUTTON & CO.
 
 'Vi'i SZ) 
 
 All rights reserved
 
 PREFACE 
 
 It is somewhat curious that there is, so far as I know, 
 no complete handhng in English of the subject of this 
 volume, popular and important though that subject has 
 been. Dunlop's History of Fiction, an excellent book, 
 dealt with a much wider matter, and perforce ceased its 
 dealing just at the beginning of the most abundant and 
 brilliant development of the English division. Sir Walter 
 Raleigh's English Novel, a book of the highest value for 
 acute criticism and grace of style, stops short at Miss 
 Austen, and only glances, by a sort of anticipation, at 
 Scott. The late Mr. Sidney Lanier's English Novel and the 
 Princi-ple of its Development is really nothing but a lauda- 
 tory study of " George Eliot," with glances at other writers, 
 including violent denunciations of the great eighteenth- 
 century men. There are numerous monographs on parts 
 of the subject: but nothing else that I know even attempt- 
 ing the whole. I should, of course, have liked to deal with 
 so large a matter in a larger space: but one may and should 
 " cultivate the garden " even if it is not a garden of many 
 acres in extent. I need only add that I have endeavoured, 
 not so much to give " reviews " of individual books and 
 authors, as to indicate what Mr. Lanier took for the
 
 vi THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 second part of his title, but did not, I think, handle very 
 satisfactorily in his text. 
 
 I may perhaps add, without impropriety, that the 
 composition of this book has not been hurried, and that I 
 have taken all the pains I could, by revision and addition 
 as it proceeded, to make it a complete survey of the 
 Novel, as it has come from the hands of all the more 
 important novelists, not now alive, up to the end of the 
 nineteenth century. 
 
 GEORGE SAINTSBURY. 
 
 Christmas. 1912.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAP. 
 
 I. The Foundation in Romance 
 II. From Lyly to Swift .... 
 
 III. The Four Wheels of the Novel Wain 
 
 IV. The Minor and Later Eighteenth-Century 
 V. Scott and Miss Austen .... 
 
 VI. The Successors — to Thackeray 
 VII. The Mid-Victorian Novel 
 VIII. The Fiction of Yesterday — Conclusion 
 
 Index ....... 
 
 Novel 
 
 page 
 
 I 
 
 32 
 
 •n 
 133 
 189 
 211 
 237 
 273 
 
 315 
 
 vu
 
 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE FOUNDATION IN ROMANCE 
 
 One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, 
 facts of literary history is the lateness, in Western European 
 Literature at any rate, of prose fiction, and the comparative 
 absence, in the two great classical languages, of what 
 we call by that name. It might be an accident, though 
 a rather improbable one, that we have no Greek prose 
 fiction tiU a time long subsequent to the Christian era, and 
 nothing in Latin at all except the fragments of Petronius 
 and the romance of Apuleius. But it can be no accident, 
 and it is a very momentous fact, that, from the foundation 
 of Greek criticism, " Imitation," that is to say " Fiction " 
 (for it is neither more nor less), was regarded as not merely 
 the inseparable but the constituent property of poetry, 
 even though those who held this were doubtful whether 
 poetry must necessarily be in verse. It is another fact 
 of the greatest importance that the ancients who, in other 
 forms than deliberate prose fiction, try to " teU a story," 
 do not seem to know very well how to do it. 
 
 The Odyssey is, indeed, one of the greatest of all stories, 
 it is the original romance of the West; but the Iliad, 
 though a magnificent poem, is not much of a story. 
 Herodotus can tell one, if anybody can, and Plato (or 
 
 A
 
 2 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 Socrates) evidently could have done so if it had lain in his 
 way: while the Anabasis, though hardly the Cyropadia, 
 shows glimmerings in Xenophon. But otherwise we must 
 come down to Lucian and the East before we find the 
 faculty. So, too, in Latin before the two late writers 
 named above, Ovid is about the only person who is a real 
 story-teller. Virgil makes very little of his story in verse : 
 and it is shocking to think how Livy throws away his 
 chances in prose. No: putting the Petronian fragments 
 aside, Lucian and Apuleius are the only two novelists in 
 the classical languages before about 400 a.d. : and putting 
 aside their odd coincidence of subject, it has to be remem- 
 bered that Lucian was a Syrian Greek and Apuleius an 
 African Latin. The conquered world was to conquer not 
 only its conqueror, but its conqueror's teacher, in this 
 youngest accomplishment of Hterary art. 
 
 It was probably in all cases, if not certainly, mixed 
 blood that produced the curious development generally 
 called Greek Romance. It is no part of our business to 
 survey, in any detail, the not very numerous but distinctly 
 interesting compositions which range in point of author- 
 ship from Longus and Heliodorus, probably at the meeting 
 of the fourth and fifth centuries, to Eustathius in the 
 twelfth. At one time indeed, when we may return to them 
 a little, we shall find them exercising direct and powerful 
 influence on modern European fiction, and so both directly 
 and indirectly on Enghsh: but that is a time a good way 
 removed from the actual beginning of our journey. Still, 
 Apollonius of Tyre, which is probably the oldest piece of 
 Enghsh prose fiction that we have, is beyond all doubt 
 derived ultimately from a Greek original of this very class: 
 and the class itself is an immense advance, in the novel' 
 direction, upon anything that we have before. It is on
 
 THE FOUNDATION IN ROMANCE 3 
 
 the one hand essentially a " romance of adventure," and 
 on the other essentially a " love-story " — in senses to which 
 we find little in classical literature to correspond in the 
 one case and still less in the other. Instead of being, like 
 Lucius and the Golden Ass, a tissue of stories essentially 
 unconnected and little more than framed by the main tale, 
 it is, though it may have a few episodes, an example of at 
 least romantic unity throughout, with definite hero and 
 definite heroine, the prominence and importance of the 
 latter being specially noteworthy. It is in fact the first 
 division of literature in which the heroine assumes the 
 position of a protagonist. If it falls short in character, 
 so do even later romances to a great extent: if dialogue 
 is not very accomplished, that also was hardly to be 
 thoroughly developed till the novel proper came into 
 being. In the other two great divisions, incident and 
 description, it is abundantly furnished. And, above all, 
 the two great Romantic motives, Adventure and Love, 
 are quite maturely present in it. 
 
 To pass to the deluge, and beyond it, and to come to 
 close quarters with our proper division, the origin of 
 Romance itself is a very debatable subject, or rather it is 
 a subject which the wiser mind will hardly care to debate 
 much. The opinion of the present writer — the result, at 
 least, of many years' reading and thought — is that it is a 
 result of the marriage of the older East and the newer (non- 
 classical) West through the agency of the spread of Chris- 
 tianity and the growth and diffusion of the " Saint's Life." 
 The beginnings of Hagiology itself are very uncertain: but 
 what is certain is that they are very early: and that as the 
 amalgamation or leavening of the Roman world with 
 barbarian material proceeded, the spread of Christianity 
 proceeded likewise. The Vision of St. Paul — one of the
 
 4 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 earliest examples and the starter it would seem, it not of 
 the whole class of sacred Romances, at any rate of the 
 large subsection devoted to Things after Death — has been 
 put as early as " before 400 a.d." It would probably be 
 difficult to date such legends as those of St. Margaret and 
 St. Catherine too early, having regard to their intrinsic 
 indications: and the vast cycle of Our Lady, though 
 probably later, must have begun long before the modern 
 languages were ready for it, while that of the Cross should 
 be earlier still. And let it be remembered that these 
 Saints' Lives, which are still infinitely good reading, are 
 not in the least confined to homiletic necessities. The 
 jejuneness and woodenness from which the modern reli- 
 gious story too often suffers are in no way chargeable 
 upon all, or even many, of them. They have the widest 
 range of incident — natural as well as supernatural: their 
 touches of nature are indeed extended far beyond mere 
 incident. Purely comic episodes are by no means wanting: 
 and these, like the parallel passages in the dramatising of 
 these very legends, were sure to lead to isolation of them, 
 and to a secular continuation. 
 
 But, once more, we must contract the sweep, and 
 quicken the pace to deal not with possible origins, but 
 with actual results — not with Ancient or Transition 
 literature, but with the literature of English in the depart- 
 ment first of fiction generally and then, with a third and 
 last narrowing, to the main subject of English fiction in 
 prose. 
 
 The very small surviving amount, and the almost com- 
 pletely second-hand character, of Anglo-Saxon literature 
 have combined to frustrate what might have been expected 
 from another characteristic of it — the unusual equahty 
 of its verse and prose departments. We have only one —
 
 THE FOUNDATION IN ROMANCE 5 
 
 not quite entire but substantive — prose tale in Anglo- 
 Saxon, the version of the famous story of Apollo7iius of 
 Tyre, which was to be afterwards declined by Chaucer, 
 but attempted by his friend and contemporary Gower, 
 and to be enshrined in the most certain of the Shake- 
 spearean " doubtfuls," Pericles. It most honestly gives 
 itself out as a translation (no doubt from the Latin though 
 there was an early Greek original) and it deals briefly with 
 the subject. But as an example of narrative style it is 
 very far indeed from being contemptible: and in passages 
 such as ApoUonius' escape from shipwreck, and his wooing 
 of the daughter of Arcestrates, there is something which 
 is diflFerent from style, and with which style is not always 
 found in company — that faculty of teUing a story which 
 has been already referred to. Nor does this fail in the 
 narrative portions of the prose Saints' Lives and Homilies, 
 especially Aelfric's, which we possess; in fact it is in these 
 last distinctly remarkable — as where Aelfric tells the tale 
 of the monk who spied on St. Cuthbert's seaside devotions. 
 The same faculty is observable in Latin work, not least 
 in Bede's still more famous telling of the Caedmon story, 
 and of the vision of the other world. 
 
 But these faculties have better chance of exliibiting 
 themselves in the verse division of our Anglo-Saxon 
 wreckage. Beowulf itself consists of one first-rate story 
 and one second-rate but not despicable tale, hitched 
 together more or less anyhow. The second, with good 
 points, is, for us, negligible: the first is a " yarn " of the 
 primest character. One may look back to the Odyssey 
 itself without finding anything so good, except the adven- 
 tures of the Golden Ass which had all the story-work of 
 two mightiest literatures behind them. As literature on 
 the other hand, Beowulf may be overpraised : itlias been
 
 6 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 so frequently. But let anybody with the slightest faculty 
 of " conveyance " tell the first part of the story to a 
 tolerably receptive audience, and he will not doubt (unless 
 he is fool enough to set the effect down to his own gifts 
 and graces) about its excellence as such. There is character 
 — not much, but enough to make it more than a mere story 
 of adventure — and adventure enough for anything; there 
 is by no means ineffectual speech — even dialogue — of a 
 kind: and there is some effective and picturesque descrip- 
 tion. The same faculties reappear in such mere fragments 
 as that of Waldhere and the " Finnsburgh " fight: but 
 they are shown much more fully in the Saints' Lives — 
 best of all in the Andreas^ no doubt, but remarkably also 
 (especially considering the slender amount of " happen- 
 ings ") in the Guthlac and the Juliana. In fact the very 
 fragments of Anglo-Saxon poetry, by a sort of approxima- 
 tion which they show to dramatic narrative and which with 
 a few exceptions is far less present in the classics, foretell 
 much more clearly and certainly than in the case of some 
 other foretellings which have been detected in them, the 
 future achievements of EngHsh literature in the depart- 
 ment of fiction. The Ruin (the finest thing perhaps in all 
 Anglo-Saxon) is a sort of background study for something 
 that might have been much better than The Last Days of 
 Pompeii: and The Complaint of Deor, in its allusion to 
 the adventures of the smith Weland and others, makes one 
 sorry that some one more like the historian of a later and 
 decadent though agreeable Wayland the Smith, had not told 
 us the tale that is now left untold. A crowd of fantastic 
 imaginings or additions, to supply the main substance, and 
 a certain common-sense grasp of actual conditions and 
 circumstances to set them upon, and contrast them with — 
 these are the great requirements of Fiction in life and
 
 THE FOUNDATION IN ROMANCE 7 
 
 character. You must mix prose and poetry to get a good 
 romance or even novel. The consciences of the ancients 
 revolted from this mixture of kinds ; but there was no such 
 revolt in the earlier moderns, and least of all in our own 
 mediaeval forefathers. 
 
 So few people are really acquainted with the whole 
 range of Romance (even in English), or with any large part 
 of it, that one may without undue presumption set down 
 in part, if not in whole, to ignorance, a doctrine and 
 position which we must now attack. This is that romance 
 and novel are widely separated from each other; and that 
 the historian of the novel is really straying out of his 
 ground if he meddles with Romance. These are they 
 who would make our proper subject begin with Marivaux 
 and Richardson, or at earliest ^\^th Madame de La Fayette, 
 who exclude Bunyan altogether, and sometimes go so far 
 as to question the right of entry to Defoe. But the counter- 
 arguments are numerous: and any one of them would 
 almost suffice by itself. In the first place the idea of the 
 novel arising so late is unnatural and unhistorical : these 
 Melchisedecs without father or mother are not known in 
 literature. In the second a pedantic insistence on the 
 exclusive definition of the novel involves one practical 
 inconvenience which no one, even among those who believe 
 in it, has yet dared to face. You must carry your wall of 
 partition along the road as well as across it: and write 
 separate histories of Novel and Romance for the last two 
 centuries. The present writer can only say that, though 
 he has dared some tough adventures in literary history, 
 he would altogether decline this. Without the help of 
 the ants that succoured Psyche against Venus that heap 
 would indeed be ill to sort. 
 
 But there is a third argument, less practical in appearance
 
 8 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 but bolder and deeper, which is really decisive of the 
 matter, though few seem to have seen it or at least taken 
 it up. The separation of romance and novel — of the story 
 of incident and the story of character and motive — is a 
 mistake logically and psychologically. It is a very old 
 mistake, and it has deceived some of the elect: but a 
 mistake it is. It made even Dr. Johnson think Fielding 
 shallower than Richardson; and it has made people very 
 different from Dr. Johnson think that Count Tolstoi is a 
 greater analyst and master of a more developed humanity 
 than Fielding, As a matter of fact, when you have ex- 
 cogitated two or more human beings out of your own head 
 and have set them to work in the narrative (not the 
 dramatic) way, you have made the novel in -posse^ if not 
 in esse, from its apparently simplest development, such as 
 Daphnis and, Chloe, to its apparently most complex, such as 
 the Kreutzer Sonata or the triumphs of Mr. Meredith. You 
 have started the " Imitation " — the " fiction " — and tout est 
 la. The ancients could do this in the dramatic way 
 admirably, though on few patterns; in the poetical way as 
 admirably, but again not on many. The Middle Ages lost 
 the dramatic way almost entirely, but they actually im- 
 proved the poetical on its narrative side, and the result 
 was Romance. In every romance there is the germ of a 
 novel and more; there is at least the suggestion and pos- 
 sibihty of romance in every novel that deserves the name. 
 In the Tristram story and the Lancelot cycle there are 
 most of the things that the romancer of incident and the 
 novelist of character and motive can want or can use, till 
 the end of the world; and Malory (that " mere compiler " 
 as some pleasantly call him) has put the possibilities of 
 the latter and greater creation so that no one who has 
 eyes can miss them. Nor in the begijining does it much
 
 THE FOUNDATION IN ROMANCE 9 
 
 or at all matter whether the vehicle was prose or verse. In 
 fact they mostly wrote in verse because prose was not 
 ready. 
 
 In the minor romances and tales (taking English versions 
 only) from Havelok to Beryn there is a whole universe of 
 situation, scenario, opportunity for " business." That 
 they have the dress and the scene-backing of one particular 
 period can matter to no one who has eyes for anything 
 beyond dress and scene-backing. And when we are told 
 that they are apt to run too much into grooves and families, 
 it is sufficient to answer that it really does not he in the 
 mouth of an age which produces grime-novels, problem- 
 novels, and so forth,- as if they had been struck oflF on a 
 hectograph, possessing the not very exalted gift of varying 
 names and places — to reproach any other age on this score. 
 But we have only limited room here for generahties and 
 still less for controversy; let us turn to our proper work 
 and survey the actual turn-out in fiction — mostly as a 
 result of mere fashion, verse, but partly prose — which the 
 Middle Ages has left us as a contribution to this department 
 of English literature. 
 
 It has been said that few people know the treasures of 
 Enghsh romance, yet there is little excuse for ignorance of 
 them. It is some century since Ellis's extremely amusing, 
 if sometimes rather prosaic, book put much of the matter 
 before those who will not read originals; to be followed in 
 the same path by Dunlop later, and much later still by the 
 invaluable and dehghtful Catalogue of [British Museum] 
 Romances by Mr, Ward. It is nearly as long since the 
 collections of Ritson and Weber, soon supplemented by 
 others, and enlarged for the last forty years by the pubhca- 
 tions of the Early English Text Society, put these originals 
 themselves wdthin the reach of everybody who is not so
 
 10 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 lazy or so timid as to be disgusted or daunted by a very 
 few actually obsolete words and a rather large proportion 
 of obsolete spellings, which will yield to even the minimum 
 of intelligent attention. Only a very small number (not 
 perhaps including a single one of importance) remain 
 unprinted, though no doubt a few are out of print or 
 difficult to obtain. The quality and variety of the stories 
 told in them are both very considerable, even without 
 making allowance for what has been called the stock 
 character of medieval composition. That almost aU are 
 directly imitated from the French is probable enough, that 
 most are is certain: but this matters, for our purpose, 
 nothing at all. That the imitation was not haphazard or 
 indiscriminate is obvious. Thus, though we have some, 
 we have not very many representatives of the class which 
 was the most numerous of all in France — the chansons de 
 geste or stories of French legendary history, national or 
 family. Except as far as the Saracens are concerned, they 
 would naturally have less interest for English hearers. 
 The Matiire de Rome, again — the legends of antiquity — 
 though represented, is not very abundant outside of the 
 universally popular Tale of Troy; and the almost equally 
 popular Alexander legend does not occupy a very large 
 part of them. What is perhaps more remarkable is that 
 until Malory exercised his genius upon " the French book," 
 the more poetical parts of the " matter of Britain " itself 
 do not seem to have been very much written about in 
 English. The preliminary stuff about Merlin and Vortigern 
 exists in several handlings; the foreign campaigns of Arthur 
 seem always (perhaps from national vanity) to have been 
 popular. The " off "-branches of Tristram and Percivale^ 
 and not a few of the still more episodic romances of adven- 
 tures concerning Gawain, Iwain, and other knights, receive
 
 THE FOUNDATION IN ROMANCE ii 
 
 attention. The execrable Lonelich or Lovelich, who pre- 
 ceded Malory a little, had of course predecessors in 
 handhng the other parts of the Graal story. But the 
 crown and flower of the whole — the inspiration which con- 
 nected the Round Table and the Graal and the love of 
 Lancelot and Guinevere — though, so far as the present 
 writer's reading and opinion are of any weight, the recent 
 attempts to deprive the Englishman, Walter Map, of the 
 honour of conceiving it are of no force — seems to have 
 waited till the fifteenth century — that is to say the last part 
 of three hundred years — before EngHshmen took it up. 
 Most popular of all perhaps, on the principle that in novels 
 the flock " Hkes the savour of fresh grass," seem to have 
 been the pure romans d'' aventures — quite unconnected or 
 nearly so with each other or with any of the larger cycles. 
 Those adventures of particular heroes have sometimes a 
 sort of Arthurian link, but they really have no more to do 
 with the main Arthurian story than if Arthur were not. 
 
 For the present purpose, however, filiation, origin, and 
 such-like things are of much less importance than the 
 actual stories that get themselves told to satisfy that 
 demand which in due time is to produce the supply of the 
 novel. Of these the two oldest, as regards the actual forms 
 in which we have them, are capital examples of the more 
 and less original handhng of " common-form " stories or 
 motives. They were not then, be it remembered, quite 
 such common-form as now — the rightful heir kept out of 
 his rights, the usurper of them, the princess gracious or 
 scornful or both by turns, the quest, the adventure, the 
 revolutions and discoveries and fights, the wedding bells 
 and the poetical justice on the villain. Let it be remem- 
 bered, too, if anybody is scornful of these as vieuxjeu, that 
 they have never been really improved upon except by the
 
 12 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 very obvious and unoriginal method common in clever- 
 silly days, of simply reversing some of them, of " turning 
 platitudes topsy-turvy," as not the least gifted, or most 
 old-fashioned, of novelists, Tourguenief, has it. Perhaps 
 the oldest of all, Havelok the Dane — a story the age of which, 
 from evidence both internal and external, is so great that 
 people have not quite gratuitously imagined a still older 
 Danish or even Anglo-Saxon original for the French 
 romance from which our existing one is undoubtedly 
 taken — is one of the most spirited of all. Both hero and 
 heroine — Havelok, who should be King of Denmark, and 
 Goldborough, who should be Queen of England — are ousted 
 by their treacherous guardian-viceroys as infants; and 
 Havelok is doomed to drowning by his tutor, the greater or 
 at least bolder villain of the two. But the fisherman Grim, 
 who is chosen as his murderer, discovers that the child has, 
 at night, a nimbus of flame round his head; renounces his 
 crime and escapes by sea with the child and his own family 
 to Grimsby. Havelok, growing up undistinguished from 
 his foster-brethren, takes service as scullion with the 
 English usurper. This usurper is seeking how to rid himself 
 of the princess without violence, but in some way that 
 will make her succession to the crown impossible, and 
 Havelok, having shown prowess in sports, is selected as 
 the maiden's husband. She, too, discovers his royalty at 
 night by the same token; and the pair regain their respec- 
 tive inheritances, and take vengeance on their respective 
 traitors, in a lively and adventurous fashion. There are aU 
 the elements of a good story in this: and they are by no 
 means wasted or spoilt in the actual handling. It is not a 
 mere sequence of incident; from the mixture of generosity 
 and canniness in the fisherman who ascertains that he is 
 to have traitor's wages before he finally decides to rescue
 
 THE FOUNDATION IN ROMANCE 13 
 
 Havelok, to the not unnatural repugnance of Goldborough 
 at her forced wedding with a scullion, the points where 
 character comes in are not neglected, though of course the 
 author does not avail himself of them either in Shakespearean 
 or in Richardsonian fashion. They are there^ ready for 
 development by any person who may take it into his head 
 to develop them. 
 
 So too is it in the less powerful and rather more cut and 
 dried King Horn. Here the opening is not so very different ; 
 the hero's father is murdered by pirate invaders, and he 
 himself set adrift in a boat. But in this the princess 
 (daughter of course of the king who shelters him) herself 
 falls in love with Horn, and there is even a scene of 
 considerable comic capabilities in which she confides this 
 affection by mistake to one of his companions (fortunately 
 a faithful one) instead of to himself. But Horn has a 
 faithless friend also; and rivals, and adventures, and 
 journeys; and returns just in the nick of time, and recog- 
 nitions by rings, and everything that can properly be 
 desired occur. In these — even more perhaps than in 
 Havelok's more masculine and less sentimental fortunes — 
 there are openings not entirely neglected by the romancer 
 (though, as has been said, he does not seem to have been 
 one of the strongest of his kind) for digression, expatiation, 
 embroidery. Transpose these two stories (as the slow kind 
 years will teach novelists inevitably to do) into slightly 
 different keys, introduce variations and episodes and codas, 
 and you have the possibilities of a whole library of fiction, 
 as big and as varied as any that has ever established itself 
 for subscribers, and bigger than any that has ever offered 
 itself as one collection to buyers. 
 
 The love-stories of these two tales are what it is the 
 fashion — exceedingly complimentary to the age referred
 
 14 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 to if not to the age of the fashion itself — to call " mid- 
 Victorian " in their complete " propriety." Indeed, it is 
 a Puritan lie, though it seems to possess the vivaciousness 
 of its class, that the romances are distinguished by " bold 
 bawdry." They are on the contrary rather singularly pure, 
 and contrast, in that respect, remarkably with the more 
 popular folk-tale. But fiction, no more than drama, could 
 do without the ajj^aprla — the human and not unpardonable 
 frailty. This appears in, and complicates, the famous story 
 of Tristram, which, though its present English form is 
 probably younger than Havelok and Horn, is likely to have 
 existed earlier: indeed must have done so if Thomas of 
 Erceldoune wrote on the subject. Few can require to be 
 told that beautiful and tragical history of " inauspicious 
 stars " which hardly any man, of the many who have 
 handled it in prose and verse, has been able to spoil. Our 
 Middle English form is not consummate, and is in some 
 places crude in manner and in sentiment. But it is 
 notable that the exaggerated and inartistic repulsiveness 
 of Mark, resorted to by later writers as a rather rudimentary 
 means of exciting compassion for the lovers, is not to be 
 found here; in fact, one of the most poetical touches in 
 the piece is one of sympathy for the luckless husband, 
 when he sees the face of his faithless queen slumbering by 
 her lover's side with the sun on it. " And Mark rewed 
 therefore." The story, especially in its completion with 
 the " Iseult of Brittany " part and the death of Tristram, 
 gives scope for every possible faculty and craftsmanship 
 of the most analytic as of the most picturesque novelist 
 of modern times. There is nothing in the least like it in 
 ancient literature; and to get a single writer who would 
 do it justice in modern times we should have to take the 
 best notes of Charles Kingsley, and Mr. Blackmore, and
 
 THE FOUNDATION IN ROMANCE 15 
 
 Mr. Meredith, leaving out all their faults, and combine. 
 It is not surprising that, in the very infancy of the art, 
 nobody in German or French, any more than in English 
 (though the German here is, as it happens, the best), should 
 have done it full justice; but it is a wonder that a story of 
 such capacities should have been sketched, and even 
 worked out in considerable detail, so early. 
 
 Of the far greater story of which Tristram is a mere 
 episode and hardly even that — a chantry or out-lying 
 chapel of the great cathedral — the Arthurian Legend, the 
 earlier English versions, or rather the earlier versions in 
 English, are, as has been said, not only fragmentary but 
 disappointing. There is nothing in the least strange in 
 this, even though (as the present writer, who can speak 
 with indifferent knowledge, still firmly holds) the concep- 
 tion of the story itself in its greatest and unifying stage is 
 probably if not certainly English. The original sources of 
 the story of Arthur are no doubt Celtic; they give them- 
 selves out as being so, and there is absolutely no critical 
 reason for disbelieving them. But in these earlier forms — 
 the authority of the most learned Celticists who have any 
 literary gift and any appreciation of evidence is decisive on 
 this point — not only are the most characteristic unifying 
 features — the Graal story and the love of Lancelot and 
 Guinevere — completely wanting, but the great stroke of 
 genius — the connection of these two and the subordination 
 of aU minor legends as to the dim national hero, Arthur, 
 with those about him — is more conspicuously wanting still. 
 Whether it was the Englishman Walter Map, the Norman 
 Robert de Borron, or the Frenchman Chrestien de Troyes, 
 to whom this flash of illumination came, has never been 
 proved — will pretty certainly now never be proved. M. 
 Gaston Paris failed to do it; and it is exceedingly unlikely
 
 i6 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 that, where he failed, any one else will succeed, unless the 
 thrice and thirty times sifted libraries of Europe yield some 
 quite unexpected windfall. In the works commonly attri- 
 buted to Chrestien, all of which are well known to the present 
 writer, there is no sign of his having been able to conceive 
 this, though he is a delightful romancer. Robert is a mere 
 shadow; and his attributed works, as his works, are 
 shadows too, though they are interesting enough in them- 
 selves. Walter not only has the greatest amount of 
 traditional attribution, but is the undoubted author of De 
 Nugis Curialium. And the author of De Nugis Curialium, 
 different as it is from the Arthurian story, could have finally 
 divined the latter. 
 
 But at the time when he wrote, Englishmen, with the 
 rarest exceptions, wrote only in French or Latin; and when 
 they began to write in English, a man of genius, to interpret 
 and improve on him, was not found for a long time. And 
 the most interesting parts of the Arthurian story are rarely 
 handled at all in such early vernacular versions of it as 
 we have, whether in verse or prose. Naturally enough, 
 perhaps, it was the fabulous historic connection with 
 British history, and the story of the great British enchanter 
 Merlin, that attracted most attention. The Arthour and 
 Merlin which is in the Auchinleck MS.; the prose Merlin, 
 published by the Early English Text Society; the allitera- 
 tive Thornton Morte d'' Arthur, and others, are wont to 
 busy themselves about the antecedents of the real story — 
 about the uninteresting wars of the King himself with 
 Saxons, and Romans, and giants, and rival kings, rather 
 than with the great chivalric triple cord of Round Table, 
 Graal, and Guinevere's fault. The pure Graal poems, 
 Joseph of Arimathea, the work of the abominable Lonelich 
 or Lovelich, etc., deal mainly with another branch of
 
 THE FOUNDATION IN ROMANCE 17 
 
 previous questions — things bearable as introductions, fill- 
 ings-up, and so forth, but rather jejune in themselves. 
 The Scots Lancelot is later than Malory himself, and of very 
 little interest. Layamon's account, the oldest that we 
 have, adds little (though what little it does add is not 
 unimportant) to Geoffrey of Monmouth and Wace; and 
 tells what it has to tell with nearly as little skill in narrative 
 as in poetry. Only the metrical Morte — from which, it 
 would appear, Malory actually transprosed some of his 
 most effective passages in the manner in which genius 
 transproses or transverses — has, for that reason, for its 
 dealings with the catastrophe, and for the further oppor- 
 tunity of comparison with Tennyson, interest of the higher 
 kind. But before we come to Malory himself it is desirable 
 to turn to the branches — the chapels, as we have called 
 them, to the cathedral — which he also, in some cases at 
 least, utilised in the magnum opus of English prose romance. 
 These outliers were rather more fortunate, probably for 
 no more recondite reason than that the French originals 
 (from which they were in almost every instance certainly 
 taken) were finished in themselves. Of the special Gawain 
 cycle or sub-cycle we have two romances in pure metrical 
 form, and more than two in alliterative, which are above the 
 average in interest. Twain and Gawain, one of the former, 
 is derived directly or indirectly from the Chevalier au Lyon 
 of Chrestien de Troyes; and both present some remarkable 
 affinities with the unknown original of the "Sir Beaumains" 
 episode of Malory, and, through it, with Tennyson's Gareth 
 and Lynette. The other, Lybius Disconus {Le Beau Deconnu) 
 is also concerned with that courteous nephew of Arthur 
 who, in later versions of the main story, is somewhat 
 sacrificed to Lancelot. For a " real romance," as it calls 
 itself (though it is fair to say that in the original the word 
 
 B
 
 i8 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 means " royal "), of the simpler kind but extremely well 
 told, there are not many better metrical specimens than 
 Twain and Gawain, but it has less character-interest, 
 actual or possible, than those which have been commented 
 on. The hero, King Urien's son, accepts an adventure in 
 which another knight of the Table, Sir Colgrevance, has 
 fared ill, after it has been told in a conversation at court 
 which is joined in first by the Queen and afterwards by the 
 King. Sir Kay here shows his usual cross-grainedness; 
 and Guinevere " with milde mood " requests to know 
 " What the devil is thee within ? " The adventure is of a 
 class well known in romance. You ride to a certain 
 fountain, pour water from it on a stone, and then, after 
 divers marvels, have to do battle with a redoubtable 
 knight. Colgrevance has fared badly; Kay is as usual 
 quite sure that he would fare better; but Ywain actually 
 undertakes the task. He has a tough battle with the 
 knight who answers the challenge, but wounds him mor- 
 tally; and when the knight flies to his neighbouring castle, 
 is so hard on his heels that the portcullis actually drops 
 on his horse's haunches just behind the saddle, and cuts the 
 beast in two. Ywain is thus left between the portcullis 
 and the (by this time shut) door — a position all the more 
 awkward that the knight himself expires immediately after 
 he has reached shelter. The situation is saved, however, 
 by the guardian damsel of romance, Lunet (the Linet or 
 Lynette of the Beaumains-Gareth story), who emerges 
 from a postern between gate and portcullis and conveys the 
 intruder safe to her own chamber. Here a magic bed 
 makes him invisible: though the whole castle, including 
 the very room, is ransacked by the dead knight's people 
 and would-be revengers, at the bidding of his widow. 
 This widow, however, is rather an Ephesian matron.
 
 THE FOUNDATION IN ROMANCE 19 
 
 The sagacious Lunet, whose confidante she is, suggests to 
 her that, unless she enhsts some doughty knight as her 
 champion, the king will confiscate her fief; and that there 
 is no champion like a husband. A very little more finesse 
 effects the marriage, even though the lady is made aware 
 of the identity of her new lover and her own husband's 
 slayer. (It is of course necessary to remember that the 
 death of a combatant in fairly challenged and fought single 
 contest was not reckoned as any fault to his antagonist.) 
 Ywain actually shows his prowess against the King: and 
 has an opportunity of showing Kay once more that it is 
 one thing to blame other people for failing, and another to 
 succeed yourself. And after this the newly married pair 
 live together happily for a time. But it was reckoned a 
 fault in a knight to take too prolonged a honeymoon: and 
 Ywain, after what the French call adieux dichirants, obtains 
 leave for the usual " twelvemonth and a day," at the 
 expiration of which, on St. John's Eve, he is without fail 
 to return, the engagement being sealed by the gift from his 
 lady of a special ring. He forgets his promise of course: 
 and at the stated time a damsel appears, sternly demands 
 the ring, and announces her lady's decision to have nothing 
 further to do with him. There is in such cases only one 
 thing for any true knight, from Sir Lancelot to Sir Amadis, 
 to do : and that is to go mad, divest himself of his garments, 
 and take to the greenwood. This Ywain duly does, sup- 
 porting himself at first on the raw flesh of game which 
 he kills with a bow and arrows wrested from a chance- 
 comer; and then on less savage but still simple food 
 supplied by a benevolent hermit. As he lies asleep under 
 a tree, a lady rides by with attendants, and one of these 
 (another of the wise damsels of romance) recognises him as 
 Sir Ywain. The lady has at the time sore need of a
 
 20 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 champion against a hostile earl, and she also fortunately 
 possesses a box of ointment infallible against madness, 
 which Morgane la Faye has given her. With this the 
 damsel is sent back to anoint Ywain. He comes to his 
 senses, is armed and clothed, undertakes the lady's defence, 
 and discomfits the earl: but is as miserable as ever. 
 Resisting the lady's offer of herself and all her posses- 
 sions, he rides off once more " with heavy heart and 
 dreary cheer." 
 
 Soon he hears a hideous noise and, riding in its direction, 
 finds that a dragon has attacked a lion. He succours 
 the holier beast, kills the dragon, and though he has 
 unavoidably wounded the lion in the meUe is thenceforth 
 attended by him not merely as a food-provider, but as the 
 doughtiest of squires and comrades in fight. To aggravate 
 his sorrow he comes to the fountain and thorn-tree of the 
 original adventure, and hears some one complaining in the 
 chapel hard by. They exchange questions. " A man," 
 he said, " some time I was " (which must be one of the 
 earliest occurrences in English of a striking phrase), and 
 the prisoner turns out to be Lunet. She has been accused 
 of treason by the usual steward (it is very hard for a steward 
 of romance to be good) and two brothers — of treason to 
 her lady, and is to be burnt, unless she can find a knight 
 who will fight the three. Ywain agrees to defend her: 
 but before he can carry out his promise he has, on the same 
 morning, to meet a terrible giant who is molesting his hosts 
 at a castle where he is guested. Both adventures, however, 
 are achieved on the same day, with very notable aid from 
 the lion: and Ywain undertakes a fresh one, being recruited 
 by the necessary damsel-messenger, against two half-fiend 
 brother knights. They stipulate that the lion is to be 
 forcibly prevented from interfering, and he is locked up in
 
 THE FOUNDATION IN RO]MANCE 21 
 
 a room; but, hearing the noise of battle, he scratches up 
 the earth under the door, frees himself, and once more 
 succours his master at the nick of time. Even this does 
 not expiate Ywain's fault: and yet another task falls to 
 him — the championship of the rights of the younger of a 
 pair of sisters, the elder of whom has secured no less a 
 representative than Gawain himself. The pair, unknowing- 
 and unknown, fight all day long before Arthur's court with 
 no advantage on either side: and when the light fails an 
 interchange of courtesies leads to recognition and the 
 settlement of the dispute. Now the tale is nearly full. 
 Ywain rides yet again to the magic fountain and performs 
 the rite; there is no one to meet him; the castle rocks 
 and the inmates quake. But the crafty Lunet persuades 
 her mistress to swear that if the Knight of the Lion, who 
 has fallen at variance with his lady, will come to the rescue, 
 she will do all she can to reconcile the pair. Which not 
 ill-prepared " curtain " duly falls : leaving us comfortably 
 assured that Ywain and his Lady and Lunet and the Lion 
 (one wishes that these two could have made a match of it, 
 and he must surely have been a bewitched knight) lived 
 happily 
 
 " Until that death had driven them down." 
 
 This, it has been said, is a specimen of the pure romance; 
 with little except incident in it, and a touch or two of 
 manners. It does not, as the others noticed above do, 
 lend itself much to character-drawing. But it is spiritedly 
 told; though rougher, it is much more vigorous than the 
 French original; and the mere expletives and stock phrases, 
 which are the curse of these romances, do not obtrude 
 themselves too much. In this respect, and some others, it 
 is the superior of the one coupled above with it, Lybius 
 Disconus, which is closer, except in names, to the Beaumains
 
 22 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 story. Still, this also is not a bad specimen of the same 
 class. The hero of it is a son, not a brother, of Gawain, 
 comes nameless or nicknamed, but as " Beaufils," not 
 *' Beaumains," to Arthur's court, and is knighted at once, 
 not made to go through the " kitchen-knave " stage. 
 Accordingly, the damsel Elene (not Lunet), to whom he is 
 assigned as champion in the adventure of the Lady of 
 Sinadowne, objects only to his novelty of knighthood and 
 is converted by his first victory. The course of the adven- 
 tures is, however, different from that which some people 
 know from Malory, and many from Tennyson. One of 
 them is farcical: the Fair Unknown rescues a damsel at 
 her utmost need from two giants, a red and a black, one of 
 whom is roasting a wild boar and uses the animal as a 
 weapon, with the spit in it, for the combat. Moreover, he 
 falls a victim to the wiles of a sorceress-chatelaine whom 
 he has also succoured: and it is only after the year and 
 day that Elene goads him on to his proper quest. But 
 this also is no bad story. 
 
 The limits of this volume admit of not much farther 
 *' argument " (though the writer would very gladly give 
 it) of these minor romances of adventure, Arthurian and 
 other. Ellis's easily accessible book supplies abstracts of 
 the main Arthurian story before Malory; of the two most 
 famous, though by no means best, of all the non-Arthurian 
 . romances, Guy of Warwick and Bevis of Hampton (the 
 former of which was handled and rehandled from age to 
 age, moralised, curtailed, lengthened, and hashed up in 
 every form) ; of the brilliant and vigorous Richard Cceur-de- 
 Lion ; of the less racy Charlemagne romances in English; 
 of the Seven Wise Masters^ brought from the East and 
 naturalised all over Europe; of the delightful love story 
 of Florice and Blanchefiour ; of that powerful and pathetic
 
 THE FOUNDATION IN ROMANCE 23 
 
 legend of the Proud King (Robert of Sicily), which Long- 
 fellow and Mr. William Morris both modernised, each in 
 his way; of those other legends, Sir Isumbras and Amis and 
 Amillion, which are so beautiful to those who can appreciate 
 the mediaeval mind, and to the beauty of which others 
 seem insensible; of Sir Triamond and Sir E glamour 
 (examples of the romance at its weakest); of the exceed- 
 ingly spirited and interesting Ipomydon, and of some others, 
 including the best of Scotch romances, Sir Eger, Sir Grame, 
 and Sir Graysteel. But Ellis could not know others, and 
 he left alone yet others that he might have known — the 
 exquisite Sir Launfal of Thomas Chester at the beginning 
 of the fifteenth century, where an unworthy presentment 
 of Guinevere is compensated by the gracious image of 
 Launfal's fairy love; the lively adventures of William 
 of Palerne, who had a werewolf for his friend and an em- 
 peror's daughter for his love, eloping with her in white 
 bear-skins, the unusual meat of which was being cooked 
 in her father's kitchen; Sir Orjeo — Orpheus and Eurydice, 
 with a happy ending; Emar^, one of the tales of innocent 
 but persecuted heroines of which Chaucer's Constance is 
 the best known; Florence of Rome ; the rather famous 
 Squire of Low Degree ; Sir Amadas, not a very good 
 handling of a fine motive, charity to a corpse; many others. 
 Nor does he seem to have known one of the finest of all 
 — the alliterative romance of Gazvain and the Green Knight 
 which, since Dr. Morris published it some forty years ago 
 for the Early English Text Society, has made its way 
 through text -books into more general knowledge than 
 most of its fellows enjoy. In this the hero is tempted 
 repeatedly, elaborately, and with great knowledge of nature 
 and no small command of art on the teller's part, by the 
 wife of his host and destined antagonist. He resists in the
 
 24 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 main, but succumbs in the point of accepting a magic 
 preservative as a gift: and is discovered and lectured 
 accordingly. It is curious that this, which is far above the 
 usual mere adventure-story and is novel of a high kind 
 as well as romance, has no known French original; and is 
 strongly English in many characteristics besides its verse- 
 form. 
 
 On the whole, however, one need have no difficulty in 
 admitting that the majority of these romances do somewhat 
 content themselves with incident, incident only, and 
 incident not merely of a naif but of a stock kind, for their 
 staple. There are striking situations, even striking phrases, 
 here and there; there is plenty of variety in scene, and 
 more than is sometimes thought in detail; but the motive- 
 and-character-interest is rarely utilised as it might be, and 
 very generally is not even suggested. There is seldom any 
 real plot or " fable " — only a chain of events: and though. 
 no one but a very dull person will object to the supernatural 
 element, or to the exaggerated feats of professedly natural 
 prowess and endurance, it cannot be said that on the whole 
 they are artistically managed. You feel, not merely that 
 the picture would have been better if the painter had taken 
 more pains, but that the reason why he did not is that he 
 did not know how. 
 
 Sir Thomas Malory, himself most unknown perhaps of 
 aU great writers, did know how; and a cynical person 
 might echo the / nunc of the Roman satirist, and dwell on 
 the futility of doing great things, in reference to the fact 
 that it used to be fashionable, and is still not uncommon, 
 to call Malory a " mere compiler." Indeed from the 
 direction which modern study so often takes, of putting 
 inquiry into origins above everything, and neglecting the 
 consideration of the work as work, this practice is not
 
 THE FOUNDATION IN ROMANCE 25 
 
 likely soon to cease. But no mistake about the mysterious 
 Englishman (the place-names with which the designation 
 is connected are all pure English) is possible to any one 
 who has read his book, and who knows what prose fiction 
 is. The Noble Histories of King Arthur^ La Morte (T Arthur^ 
 7 he Story of the most Noble and Worthy King Arthur, The^ 
 Most Ancient and Famous History of the Renowned Prince 
 Arthur, The Birth, Life, and Acts of King Arthur — call it 
 by whichever name anybody likes of those wliich various 
 printers and reprinters have given it — is one of the great 
 books of the world. If they can give us any single 
 " French book " — the reference to which is a commonplace 
 of the subject — from which it was taken, let them; they 
 have not yet. If they point out (as they can) French 
 and English books from which parts of it were taken, 
 similar things may be done with Dante and Chaucer, with 
 Shakespeare and Milton, and very probably could have 
 been done with Homer. It is what the artist does with 
 his materials, not where he gets them, that is the question. 
 And Malory has done, with his materials, a very great 
 thing indeed. He is working no doubt to a certain extent 
 blindly; working much better than he knows, and some- 
 times as he would not work if he knew better; though 
 whether he would work as weU if he knew better is quite 
 a different point. Sometimes he may not take the best 
 available version of a story; but we must ask ourselves 
 whether he knew it. Sometimes he may put in what we 
 do not want: but we must ask ourselves whether there 
 was not a reason for doing so, to him if not to us. What 
 is certain is that he, and he only in any language, makes 
 of this vast assemblage of stories one story, and one book. 
 He does it (much more than half unconsciously no doubt) 
 by following the lines of, as I suppose, Walter Map, and
 
 i6 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 fusing the different motives, holding to this method even 
 in parts of the legend with which, so far as one knows, Map 
 cannot have meddled. Before him this legend consisted 
 of half a dozen great divisions — a word which may be used 
 of malice prepense. These were the story of Merlin, that 
 of Arthur's own origin, and that of the previous history of 
 the Graal for introduction; the story of Arthur's winning 
 the throne, of the Round Table, and of the marriage with 
 Guinevere, also endless branchings of special knights' 
 adventures, and of the wars with the Saxons and the 
 Romans, and the episode of the False Guinevere — with 
 -whom for a time Arthur lives as with his queen — for middle; 
 and the story of the Graal-quest, the love of Lancelot for the 
 Queen, and the rebellion of Mordred with its fatal conse- 
 quences, for close. Exactly how much of this Malory 
 personally had before him we cannot of course say: but of 
 any working up of the whole that would have spared him 
 trouble, and robbed him of credit, we do not know. In 
 fact the favourite term " compiler " gives up the only 
 dangerous point. Now in what way did Malory compile ? 
 In the way in which the ordinary compiler proceeds he 
 most emphatically does not. He cuts down thepreliminaries 
 mercilessly: but they can be perfectly well spared. He 
 misses almost all the wars with the Saxons, which are 
 the most tedious parts of the originals. He adopts, most 
 happily, the early, not the late, placing of those with the 
 Romans. He drops the false Guinevere altogether, which 
 is imperative, that the true one may have no right to plead 
 the incident — though he does not represent Arthur as 
 " blameless." He gives the roman d^aventures side of the 
 Round Table stories, from the great Tristram and Palo- 
 mides romances through the Beaumains episode down- 
 awards, because they are interesting in themselves and lead
 
 THE FOUNDATION IN ROMANCE 27 
 
 up to the Graal quest. He gives that Quest as plentifully 
 because it leads up to the " dolorous death and departing 
 out of this world of them all." How he gives the Lancelot 
 and Guinevere tragedy we shall see presently. And the 
 catastrophe of the actual " departing " he gives perfectly; 
 with the magnificent final scenes which he has converted, 
 sometimes in almost Shakespearean fashion, by the slightest 
 verbal touches from mediocre verse to splendid prose. A 
 very remarkable compiler! It is a pity that they did not 
 take him and cut him up in little stars for a light to all 
 his brethren in compiling thereafter. 
 
 For he has what no compiler as such can have — because 
 the moment he has it he ceases to be a compiler, and 
 becomes an artist — the sense of grasp, the power to put his 
 finger, and to keep it, on the central pulse and nerve of the 
 story. That he did this deliberately is so unlikely as to 
 be practically impossible: that he did it is certain. The 
 Arthurian Legend is the greatest of mediaeval creations as 
 a subject — a " fable " — just as the Divina Commedia is 
 the greatest of mediaeval " imitations " and works of art. 
 And as such it is inevitable that it should carry with it 
 the sense of the greatest mediaeval differences. Chivalry 
 and Romance. The strong point of these differences is the 
 way in which they combine the three great motives, as 
 Dante isolates them, of Valour, Love, and Religion. The 
 ancients never realised this combination at all; the moderns 
 have merely struggled after it, or blasphemed it in fox-and- 
 grapes fashion: the mediaevals had it — in theory at any 
 rate. The Round Table stories, merely as such, illustrate 
 Valour; the Graal stories, Religion; the passion of Lancelot 
 and Guinevere with the minor instances. Love. All these 
 have their afxapria — their tragic and tragedy-causing fault 
 and flaw. The knight wastes his valour in idle bickerings;
 
 28 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 he forgets law in his love; and though there is no actual 
 degradation of religion, he fails to live up to the ideal that 
 he does not actually forswear. To throw the presentation 
 — the mimesis — of all this into perfectly worthy form would 
 probably have been too much for any single genius of that 
 curious time (when genius was so widely spread and so 
 little concentrated) except Dante himself, whose hand 
 found other work to do. To colour and shape the various 
 fragments of the mosaic was the work of scores. To put 
 them together, if not in absolutely perfect yet in more than 
 sufficient shape, was, so far as we know, the luck of Malory 
 only: though some one (Map or another) had done a 
 mighty day's work long before in creating the figure and 
 the adventures of Lancelot and imagining the later quest 
 of the Graal with the figure of Galahad — that " improved 
 Percivale," as the seedsmen say. 
 
 But besides this power of shaping (or even of merely 
 combining) scattered elements into a story, Malory has 
 another — the other of the first importance to the novelist 
 proper — in his attraction to character, if not exactly in 
 his making up of it. It has been said above that the defect 
 of the pure romances — especially those of continental 
 origin — is the absence of this. What the Greeks called 
 Stdvoia — " sentiment," " thought," " cast of thought," as 
 it has been variously rendered — is even more absent from 
 them than plot or character itself: and of its almost 
 necessary connection with this latter they often seem to 
 have no idea. Very rare is such a touch as that of Sir 
 Amadas being unable at the feast to get rid of the memory 
 of the unburied corse, kept by enemies from the kindly 
 earth that would hide it, and the rites that would help it to 
 peace: still rarer that in Guy of Warmck when the hero, at 
 the height of his fame and in the full enjoyment of his
 
 THE FOUNDATION IN ROMANCE 29 
 
 desires, looks from the tower and is struck by the selfishness 
 and earthliness of his career. The first notion is not 
 " improved " in the original at all, and the second very 
 badly; but in most of the others such things do not even 
 exist. Now the greater Legend is full of situations which 
 encourage such thoughts, and even of expressed thoughts 
 that only need craftsmanship to turn them into the corner- 
 stones of character-building, and the jewels, five or fifty 
 words long, of literature. The fate and metaphysical aid 
 that determine the relations of Tristram and Iseult; the 
 unconscious incest of Arthur and Margause with its Greek- 
 tragic consequence; the unrewarded fidelity of Palomides, 
 and (an early instance of the soon to be triumphant 
 allegory) his fruitless chase of the Beast Glatissant; all 
 these are matters in point. But of course the main nursery 
 of such things is the Lancelot-and-Guinevere story itself. 
 Nobody has yet made Guinevere a person — nobody but 
 Shakespeare could have done so perhaps, though Shake- 
 speare's Guinevere would probably have been the greatest 
 woman in all art. But Malory has not been the least 
 successful with her: and of Lancelot he has made, if only in 
 study, one of the great characters of that fictitious world 
 which is so much truer than the real. And let no one say 
 that we are reading Tennyson or any one else into Malory. 
 There are yet persons, at least at the time this was written 
 not quite Methusalahs, who read the Morte d' Arthur before 
 the Idylls appeared and who have never allowed even the 
 Idylls to overlay their original idea of the most perfect and 
 most gentle of knights. 
 
 It is probable indeed that Malory invented little or 
 nothing in the various situations, by which the character of 
 Lancelot, and the history of his fatal love, are evolved. We 
 know in most cases that this is so. It is possible, too,
 
 30 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 that at first (probably because the possibilities had not 
 dawned on him, as it has been admitted they never did 
 very consciously) he has not made the most of the intro- 
 duction of lover and lady. But when the interest becomes 
 concentrated, as in the various passages of Guinevere's 
 wrath with her lover and their consequences, or in the 
 final series of catastrophes, he is fully equal to the occasion. 
 We know — this time to his credit — how he has improved, 
 in the act of borrowing them, the earlier verse-pictures of 
 the final parting of the lovers, and there are many other 
 episodes and juxtapositions of which as much may be said. 
 That except as to Lancelot's remorse (which after all is the 
 great point) there is not much actual talk about motive 
 and sentiment is nothing; or nothing but the condition 
 of the time. The important point is that, as the electricians 
 say, " the house is wired " for the actual installation of 
 character-novelling. There is here the complete scenario, 
 and a good deal more, for a novel as long as Clarissa and 
 much more interesting, capable of being worked out in the 
 manner, not merely of Richardson himself, but of Mr. 
 Meredith or Mr. Hardy. It is a great romance, if not the 
 greatest of romances: it has a great novel, if not the 
 greatest of novels, written in sympathetic ink between the 
 lines, and with more than a little of the writing sometimes 
 emerging to view. 
 
 Little in the restricted space here available can be, 
 though much might be in a larger, said about the remaining 
 attempts in English fiction before the middle of the six- 
 teenth century. The later romances, down to those of 
 Lord Berners, show the character of the older with a certain 
 addition of the " conjuror's supernatural " of the Amadis 
 school. But the short verse-tales, especially those of the 
 Robin Hood cycle, and some of the purely comic kind.
 
 THE FOUNDATION IN ROMANCE 31 
 
 introduce an important variation of interest: and even 
 some of the longer, such as that Tale ofBeryn, which used to 
 be included in Chaucer's works, vary the chivalrous model 
 in a useful way. Still more important is the influence of 
 the short prose tale : — first Latin, as in the Gesta Romanorum 
 (which of course had older and positively mediaeval fore- 
 runners), then Italian and French. The prose saved the 
 writer from verbiage and stock phrase; the shortness from 
 the tendency to " watering out " which is the curse of the 
 long verse or prose romance. Moreover, to get point and 
 appeal, it was especially necessary to throw up the subject — 
 incident, emotion, or whatever it was — to bring it out; not 
 merely to meander and palaver about it. But language 
 and Uterature were both too much in a state of transition 
 to admit of anything capital being done at this time. It 
 was the great good fortune of England, corresponding to 
 that experienced with Chaucer in poetry three quarters of 
 a century earlier, that Malory came to give the sum and 
 substance of what mediaeval fiction could do in prose. For 
 more, the times and the men had to come.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 FROM LYLY TO SWIFT 
 
 During the dying-off of romance proper, or its transference 
 from verse to prose in the late fifteenth and earlier six- 
 teenth century, there is not very much to note about 
 prose fiction in England. But, as the conditions of modern 
 literature fashioned themselves, a very great influence in 
 this as in other departments was no doubt exercised with 
 us by Italian, as well as some by Spanish in a way which 
 may be postponed for a little. The ItaHan prose tale had 
 begun to exercise that influence as early as Chaucer's time: 
 but circumstances and atmosphere were as yet unfavour- 
 able for its growth. It is a hackneyed truism that Italian 
 society was very much more modern than any other in 
 Europe at this time — in fact it would not be a mere 
 paradox to say that it was, and continued to be till the 
 later sixteenth, much more modern than it has ever been 
 since — or till very recently. By " modern " is here meant 
 the kind of society which is fairly cultivated, fairly com- 
 fortable, fairly complicated with classes not very sharply 
 separated from each other, not dominated by any very 
 high ideals, tolerably corrupt, and sufficiently business-like. 
 The Italian novella, of course, admits wild passions and 
 extravagant crimes: but the general tone of it is bourgeois 
 — at any rate domestic. With its great number of situa- 
 tions and motives, presented in miniature, careful work is 
 necessary to bring out the effect: and, above all, there is 
 abundant room for study of manners, for proverbial and 
 popular wisdom and witticism, for " furniture " — to use 
 
 32
 
 FROM LYLY TO SWIFT 33 
 
 that word in a wide sense. Above all, the Italian mind, 
 like the Greek, had an ethical twist — twist in more senses 
 than one, some would say, but that does not matter. 
 Manners, morals, motives — these three could not but dis- 
 place, to some extent, mere incident: though there was 
 generally incident of a poignant or piquant kind as well. 
 In other words the novella was actually (though still in 
 miniature) a novel in nature as weU as in name. And 
 these novelle became, as is generally known, common in 
 English translations after the middle of the sixteenth 
 •century. Painter's huge Palace oj Pleasure (1566) is only 
 the largest and best known of many translations, single 
 and collected, of the Italian novellieri and the French 
 tale-tellers, contemporary, or of times more or less earlier. 
 
 For some time, as almost everybody knows, these collec- 
 tions of translated matter served a purpose — great indeed, 
 but somewhat outside their proper department — by fur- 
 nishing the Ehzabethan dramatists with a large part — 
 perhaps the larger part — of their subjects. But they very 
 soon began to exercise it directly by suggesting the fictitious 
 part of the prose pamphlet — a department which, though 
 infinitely less well known than the plays, and still not very 
 easy to know, holds almost the second position as repre- 
 senting the popular literature of the Elizabethan time. 
 And they also had — in one case certainly, in the other 
 probably — no little influence upon the two great Eliza- 
 bethan works which in a manner founded the modern 
 novel and the modern romance in English — the Euphues of 
 Lyly and the Arcadia of Sir Philip Sidney. 
 
 The pamphlet stories (which are themselves often play- 
 "Connected, as in the case of Lodge's Rosalynde and Greene's 
 Pandosto) do not require much notice, with one exception — 
 Nash's Jack Wilton or the Unfortunate Traveller, to which 
 
 c
 
 34 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 some have assigned a position equal, or perhaps superior 
 in our particular subject, to that of the Arcadia or that of 
 Euphues. This seems to the present writer a mistake: 
 but as to appear important is (in a not wholly unreal 
 sense) to be so, the piece shall be separately considered. 
 The rest are mostly marred by a superabundance of rather 
 rudimentary art, and a very poor allowance of matter. 
 There is hardly any character, and except in a few pieces,, 
 such as Lodge's Margarite of America, there is little attempt 
 to utilise new scenes and conditions. But the whole class 
 has special interest for us in one peculiarity which makes 
 it perhaps unreadable to any but students, and that is its 
 saturation with the Elizabethan conceit and word-play 
 which is sometimes called Euphuism. Nor is this wonder- 
 ful, considering that more than one of these " pamphlets " 
 is directly connected with the matter and the personages 
 of Euphues itself. To this famous book, therefore, we had 
 better turn. 
 
 Some people, it is believed, have denied that Euphues- 
 is a novel at all; and some of these some have been almost 
 indignant at its being called one. It is certainly, with 
 Rasselas, the most remarkable example, in Enghsh, of a 
 novel which is to a great extent deprived of the agremens 
 to which we have for some two centuries been accustomed 
 in the kind, and, to a still greater, loaded with others which 
 do not appeal to us. To put aside altogether its extraor- 
 dinary and in a way epoch-making style, which gives it its 
 main actual place in the history of English literature, it is 
 further loaded with didactic digressions which, though 
 certain later novelists have been somewhat peccant in the 
 kind, have never been quite equalled — no, not in Rasselas 
 itself or the Fool oj Quality. But if anybody, who has the 
 necessary knowledge to understand, and therefore the
 
 FROM LYLY TO SWIFT 35 
 
 necessary patience to tolerate, these knotty knarry enve- 
 lopes, insertions, and excrescences, will for the moment 
 pay no attention to them, but merely strip them off, he 
 wiU find the carcass of a very tolerable novel left behind. 
 The first plot of Philautus - Euphues - Lucilla, and the 
 successive jilting of the two friends for each other and for 
 Curio, is no mean novel-substance. Not Balzac himself, 
 certainly no one of his successors, need disdain it: and 
 more than one of them has taken up something like it. 
 Tbe journey from Naples to London, and the episode of 
 Fidus and Iffida, could have been worked up, in the good 
 old three-volume days, to a most effective second volume. 
 And the picture of the court, with the further loves of 
 Philautus, Camilla, and the " violet " Frances, would supply 
 a third of themselves even if Euphues were left out, though 
 some livelier presentation of his character (which Lyly 
 himself was obviously too much personally interested to 
 make at all clear) would improve the whole immensely. 
 But it was still too early: the thing was not yet to be 
 done. Only, I do not know any book in which the possi- 
 bilities, and even the outlines, of this thing were indicated 
 and vaguely sketched earlier in any European language, 
 unless it be the Lucretia and Euryalus of ^Eneas Silvius, 
 which is much more confined in its scope. 
 
 The fact is that the very confusedness, the many un- 
 developed sides, of Euphues, make it much more of an 
 ancestor of the modern novel than if it were more of a 
 piece. The quicquid agunt homines is as much the province 
 of the novel as of the satire; and there is more than some- 
 thing of this as it affected Elizabethan times in Euphues. 
 Men's interest in morals, politics, and education; their 
 development of the modern idea of society; their taste for 
 letters; their conceits and fancies — all these appear in it.
 
 36 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 The Arcadia stands in a different compartment. Euphues 
 is very much siii generis : failure as it may be from some 
 points of view, it deserves the highest respect for this, and 
 like most other things sui generis it was destined to propa- 
 gate the genus, if only after many days. The Arcadia was 
 in intention certainly, and to great extent in actual fact, 
 merely a carrying out of the attempt, common all over 
 Europe (as a result of the critical searchings of heart of the 
 Italians), to practise a new kind — the Heroic Romance of 
 the sub-variety called pastoral. The " heroic " idea gener- 
 ally was (as ought to be, but perhaps is not, weU known) 
 to blend, after a fashion, classical and romantic charac- 
 teristics — to substitute something like the classic unity of 
 fable or plot for the mere " meandering " of romantic 
 story, and to pay at least as much attention to character 
 as the classics had paid, instead of neglecting it altogether, 
 as had recently though not always been the case in 
 Romance. But the scheme retained on the other hand the 
 variety of incident and appeal of this latter: and especially 
 assigned to Love the high place which Romance had 
 given it. As for the Pastoral — that is almost a story to 
 itself, and a story which has been only once (by Mr. W. W. 
 Greg) satisfactorily, and then not quite completely, told. 
 It is enough to say here, and as affecting our own subject, 
 that it supplied a new opportunity of gratifying the 
 passion of the Renaissance for imitating antiquity, at the 
 same time permitting to no small extent the introduction 
 of things that were really romantic, and above all providing 
 a convention. The Heroic romance generally and the 
 Pastoral in particular went directly back to the Greek 
 romances of Heliodorus and Longus: but they admitted 
 many new and foreign elements. 
 
 At the same time, bastard as the heroic romance was, it
 
 FROM LYLY TO SWIFT 37 
 
 could not but exercise an important influence on the 
 future of fiction, inasmuch as it combined, or attempted 
 to combine, with classical unity and medieval variety 
 the more modern interest of manners and (sometimes) 
 personality. Sidney's attempt (which, it must be re- 
 membered, is not certainly known to be wholly his as it 
 stands, and is certainly known not to have been revised 
 by him for publication) exercised a very great influence in 
 English. For its popularity was enormous, and it doubtless 
 served as shoehorn to draw on that of the English transla- 
 tions of French and Spanish romance which supplied, 
 during the greater part of the seventeenth century, the 
 want of original composition of the kind. The uncon- 
 scionable amount of talk and of writing " about it and 
 about it " which Euphues and the minor Euphuist romances 
 display is at least as prominent in the Arcadia: and this 
 talk rarely takes a form congenial to the modern novel- 
 reader's demands. Moreover, though there really is a 
 plot, and a sufficient amount of incident, this reader un- 
 doubtedly, and to no small extent justly, demands that 
 both incident and plot shall be more disengaged from their 
 framework — that they should be brought into higher 
 relief, should stand out more than is the case. Yet further, 
 the pure character - interest is small — is almost non- 
 existent: and the rococo-mosaic of manners and senti- 
 ment which was to prove the curse of the heroic romance 
 generally prevents much interest being felt in that direction.^ 
 It would also be impossible to devise a style less suited to 
 prose narrative, except of a very peculiar kind and on a 
 small scale, than that either of Euphues or of the ArcadiUy 
 
 * As a work of general literature, the attractionof the ^rca^^ja is of course 
 much enhanced by, if it does not chiefly depend upon, its abundant, 
 varied, and sometimes charming verse-insets. But, as a novel, it cannot 
 count these.
 
 38 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 which, though an uncritical tradition credits it with driving 
 out Lyly's, is practically only a whelp of the same litter. 
 Embarrassed, heavy, rhetorical, it has its place in the 
 general evolution of English prose, and a proper and 
 valuable place too. But it is bad even for pure romance 
 purposes: and nearly hopeless for the panoramic and 
 kaleidoscopic variety which should characterise the novel. 
 To the actual successors of the Arcadia in English we shall 
 come presently. 
 
 The Unfortunate Traveller is of much less importance than 
 the other two. It has obtained such reputation as it 
 possesses, partly because of its invention or improve- 
 ment of the fable of " Surrey and Geraldine "; more, and 
 more justly, because it does work up a certain amount of 
 historical material — the wars of Henry VIII. in French 
 Flanders — into something premonitory (with a little kind- 
 ness on the part of the premonished) of the great and 
 long missed historical novel; stiU more for something 
 else. Nash, with his quick wit, seems to have been really 
 the first to perceive the capabilities of that foreign travel 
 and observation of manners which was becoming common, 
 stripped of the special atmosphere of pilgrimage which 
 had formerly enveloped it. Even here, he had had the 
 " notion of the notion " supplied to him by Lyly in 
 Euphues : and a tolerably skilful advocate would not 
 have so very much difficulty in claiming the book as one 
 of the tribe of Euphuist pamphlets. But Jack Wilton the 
 " traveller " is a little more of a person than the pedagogic 
 Euphues and the shadowy Philautus. At any rate he has 
 a very strong anticipation of Defoe, whose " Cavalier " 
 was not improbably suggested by him. But Nash has 
 neither the patience of Defoe, nor that singular originality, 
 which accompanies in the author of Moll Flanders a
 
 FROM LYLY TO SWIFT 39 
 
 certain inability to make the most of it. 7he Unfortunate 
 Traveller is a sort of compilation or congeries of current 
 fabliaux, novelle, and facetice, with the introduction of 
 famous actual persons of the time, from the crowned heads 
 of the period, through Luther and Aretine downwards, to 
 give bait and attraction. Sometimes it reminds one of 
 a working up of the Colloquies of Erasmus: three centuries 
 earher than The Cloister and the Hearth, with much less 
 genius than Charles Reade's, and still more without his 
 illegitimate advantage of actual novels behind him for 
 nearly half the time. But it gives us " disjectse membra 
 novella'' rather than a novel itself: and the oftener one 
 reads it the more clear one is that the time for writing novels 
 had not yet come. The materials are there; the desire 
 to utilise — and even a faint vague idea of hozv to utilise — 
 them is there; but the art is almost completely absent. 
 Even regarded as an early attempt in the " picaresque " 
 manner, it is abortive and only half organised. 
 
 The subject of the English " Heroic " Romance, in the 
 wide sense, is one which has been very little dealt with. 
 Dunlop neglected it rather surprisingly, and until Pro- 
 fessor Raleigh's chapter on the subject there was Httle of 
 a satisfactory kind to be found about it anywhere. It 
 must, however, be admitted that the abstainers from it 
 have been to some extent justified in their abstention. 
 The subject is a curious one: and it has an important place 
 in the history of the Novel, because it shows at once how 
 strong was the nisus towards prose fiction and how sur- 
 prisingly difficult writers seem, nevertheless, to have 
 found it to hit upon anything really good, much more any- 
 thing really original in kind. For it is hardly too much 
 to say that this century of attempt — we cannot call it a 
 century of invention — from Ford to Congreve, does not
 
 40 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 add a single piece of any considerable merit to the roll of 
 English books. As for a masterpiece, there is nothing in 
 respect of which the use of such a word would not be 
 purely ridiculous. And yet the attempts are interesting 
 to the historian, and should not be uninteresting to the 
 historical student of literature. One or two of them have 
 a sort of shadowy name and place in Uterary history already. 
 
 In tracing their progress and character, we must allow for 
 two native models: and for three foreign sources, one 
 ancient, two modern, of influence. The Arcadia and 
 Euphues, the former continuously, the latter by revival after 
 an interval, exercised very great effect in the first half of 
 the seventeenth century, during at least the earlier part of 
 which the vogue of Amadis and its successors, as Englished 
 by Anthony Munday and others, likewise continued. The 
 Greek romances also had much to do with the matter: for the 
 Elizabethan translators had introduced them to the vulgar, 
 and the seventeenth century paid a good deal of attention 
 to Greek. Then, when that century itself was on its way, 
 the pastoral romance of D'Urf6 first, and the Calprendde- 
 Scud^ry productions in the second place, came to give a 
 fresh impulse, and something of a new turn. The actual 
 translations of French and Spanish romance, shorter and 
 longer, good, bad, and indifferent, are of immense bulk 
 and doubtless excited imitation: but we cannot possibly 
 deal with them here. A bare list would fill a chapter. 
 But some work of more or less (generally less) originaUty, 
 in at least adaptation, calls for a little individual notice: 
 and some general characterisation may be added. 
 
 It may be desirable to prelude the story by a reminder 
 to the reader that the general characteristics of these various 
 sources were " harlequin " in their diversity of apparent 
 colour. The Amadis romances and, indeed, aU the later
 
 FROM LYLY TO SWIFT 41 
 
 examples of that great kind, such as Arthur of Little Britain^ 
 which Berners translated, were distinguished on the one 
 side by a curious convention of unsmooth running of 
 the course of love, on the other sometimes by a much 
 greater licence of morality than their predecessors, and 
 always by a prodigality of the " conjuror's supernatural " — • 
 witches and giants and magic black and white. The 
 Spanish " picaresque " story was pretty real but even 
 less decent: and its French imitations (though not usually 
 reaching the licence of the short tale, which clung to 
 fabliau ways in this respect) imitated it here also. The 
 French heroic romance, on the other hand, observed the 
 most scrupulous propriety in language and situation: but 
 aggravated the Amadisian troubling of the course of true 
 love, and complicated everything, very frequently if not 
 invariably, by an insinuated " key " interest of identifica- 
 tion of the ancient personages selected as heroes and 
 heroines with modern personages of quality and distinction. 
 Emanuel Ford (whom the British Museum catalogue 
 insists on spelling Ford^ and of whom very little seems to 
 be known) published Parismus, Prince of Bohemia^ as early 
 as 1598. In less than a hundred years (1696) it had 
 reached its fourteenth edition, and it continued to be 
 popular in abridged and chap-booked form ^ far into the 
 eighteenth century. (It is sometimes called Parismus and, 
 Parismenus : the second part being, as very commonly in 
 romances of the class after the Amadis pattern, occupied 
 largely with the adventures of the son of the hero of the 
 first.) On the whole, Parismus^ though it has few preten- 
 sions to elegance of style, and though some delicate tastes 
 have been shocked at certain licences of incident, descrip- 
 
 ^ It is pleasant to remember that one of the chief publishers of these 
 things in the late seventeenth century was W. Thackeray.
 
 42 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 tion, and phrase in it, is quite the best of our bunch in this 
 kind. It is, in general conception, pure Amadis of the 
 later and shghtly degraded type. Laurana, the heroine 
 (of whom a peculiarly hideous portrait adorns the black- 
 letter editions side by side with Parismus himself, who is 
 rather a " jolly gentleman ") is won with much less difhculty 
 and in much less time than Oriana — but separations and 
 difficulties duly follow in " desolate isles " and the like. 
 And though Parismus himself is less of an Amadis than 
 Amadis, the " contrast of friends," founded by that hero 
 and Galaor, is kept up by his association with a certain 
 Pollipus — " a man of his hands " if ever there was one, for 
 with them he literally wrings the neck of the enchantress 
 Bellona, who has enticed him to embrace her. There is 
 plenty of the book, as there always should be in its kind 
 (between 400 and 500 very closely printed quarto pages), 
 and its bulk is composed of proportionately plentiful 
 fighting and love-making and of a very much smaller pro- 
 portion of what schoolboys irreverently caU " jaw " than 
 is usual in the class. If it were not for the black letter 
 (which is trying to the eyes) I should not myself object to 
 have no other reading than Parismus for some holiday 
 evenings, or even after pretty tough days of literary and 
 professional work. The Famous History of Montelion, the 
 Knight of the Oracle (1633 ?) proclaims its Amadisian type 
 even more clearly: but I have only read it in an abridged 
 edition of the close of the century. I should imagine that 
 in extenso it was a good deal duller than Parismus. And 
 of course the comparative praise which has been given to 
 that book must be subject to the reminder that it is what 
 it is — a romance of disorderly and what some people call 
 childish adventure, and of the above-ticketed " conjuror's 
 supernatural." If anybody cannot read Amadis itself, he
 
 FROM LYLY TO SWIFT 43 
 
 certainly will not read Parismus : and perhaps not every- 
 body who can manage the original — perhaps not even 
 everybody who can manage Palmerin — could put up with 
 Ford's copy. I can take this Ford as I find him: but I 
 am not sure that I would go much lower. 
 
 Ornatus and Artesia (1607?), on the other hand — his 
 second or third book — strikes me as owing more to Helio- 
 dorus than to Montalvo, or Lobeira, or whoever was the 
 author of the great romance of the last chivalric type. 
 There are more intricacies in it; the heroine plays a rather 
 more important part; there is even something of a nearer 
 approach to modern novel-ways in this production, which 
 reappeared at " Grub Street near the Upper Pump " in 
 the year 1650. Ornatus sees his mistress asleep and in a 
 kind of deshabille, employs a noble go-between, Adellena 
 (a queer spelling of " Adelina " which may be intentional), 
 is rejected with apparent indignation, of course; writes 
 elaborate letters in vain, but overhears Artesia soliloquising 
 confession of her love for him and disguises himself as a 
 girl, Silvia. Then the villain of the piece, Floretus, to 
 obtain the love of this supposed Silvia, murders a person 
 of distinction and plots to poison Artesia herself. Ornatus- 
 Silvia is banished: and all sorts of adventures and dis- 
 guises follow, entirely in the Greek style. The book is not 
 very long, extending only to signature R in a very small 
 quarto. Except that it is much less lively and con- 
 siderably less " free," it reminds one rather in type of 
 Kynaston's verse Leoline and Sydanis. In fact the verse 
 and prose romances of the time are very closely connected: 
 and Chamberlayne's Pharonnida — far the finest production 
 of the English " heroic " school in prose, verse, or drama — 
 was, when the fancy for abridging set in, condensed into a 
 tiny prose Eromena. But Ornatus and Artesia, if more
 
 44 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 modern, more decent, and less extravagant than ParismuSy 
 is nothing like so interesting to read. It is indeed quite 
 possible that there is, if not in it, in its popularity, a set- 
 back to the Arcadia itself, which had been directly followed 
 in Lady Mary Wroth's Urania (1621), and to which (by 
 the time of the edition noted) Charles I.'s admiration — so 
 indecently and ignobly referred to by Milton — had given 
 a fresh attraction for all good anti-Puritans. That an anti- 
 Puritan should be a romance-lover was almost a necessity. 
 
 When the French " heroics " began to appear it was 
 only natural that they should be translated, and scarcely less 
 so that they should be imitated in England. For they 
 were not far off the Arcadia pattern: and they were a 
 distinct and considerable effort to supply the appetite for 
 fiction which has been dwelt upon. But except for this, 
 and for fashion's sake, they did not contain much that 
 would appeal to an English taste: and it is a little sig- 
 nificant that one great reader of them who is known to us 
 — Mrs. Pepys — was a Frenchwoman. Indeed, save for 
 the very considerable " pastime " of a kind that they gave 
 to a time, much of which required passing, it is difficult to 
 understand their attraction for Enghsh readers. Their 
 interminable talk never (till perhaps very recently) was a 
 thing to suit our nation: and the " key" interest strikes 
 us at any rate as of the most languid kind. But they were 
 imitated as well as translated: and the three most famous 
 of the imitations are the work of men of mark in their 
 different ways. These are the Parthenissa (1654) of Roger 
 Boyle, Lord Broghill and Earl of Orrery; the Aretina 
 (1661) of Sir George Mackenzie; and the Pandion and 
 Amphigeneia (1665) of " starch Johnny " Crowne. 
 
 Boyle was a strong Francophile in literature, and his 
 not inconsiderable influence on the development of the
 
 FROM LYLY TO SWIFT 45 
 
 heroic flay showed it only less decidedly than his imita- 
 tion of the Scud^ry romance. I cannot say that I have 
 read Parthenissa through: and I can say that I do not 
 intend to do so. It is enough to have read Sainte 
 Madeleine of the Ink-Desert herself, without reading bad 
 imitations of her. But I have read enough to know that 
 Parthenissa would never give me anything like the modified 
 satisfaction that is given by Parismus : and after all, if 
 a man will not take the trouble to finish writing his book 
 (which Orrery never did) why should his readers take 
 the trouble even to finish reading what he has written? 
 The scene is Parthia, with alternation to Syria, and 
 diversions and episodes elsewhere: and though there is 
 a certain amount of fighting, the staple is quite decorous 
 but exceedingly dull love-making, conducted partly in the 
 endless dialogue (or rather automatic monologue) already 
 referred to, and partly in letters more " handsome " even 
 than Mr. Frank Churchill's, and probably a good deal more 
 sincere in their conventional way, but pretty certainly 
 less amusing. The original attraction indeed of this class 
 of novel consisted, and, in so far as it still exists, may be 
 said to consist, in noble sentiment, elegantly expressed. It 
 deserved, and in a manner deserves, the commendatory 
 part of Aramis's rebuke to Porthos for expressing im- 
 patience with the compliments between Athos and 
 D'Artagnan at their first and hostile rencounter.^ Other- 
 wise there is not much to be said for it. It does not indeed 
 deserve Johnson's often quoted remark as to Richardson 
 (on whom when we come to him we shall have something 
 more to say in connection with these heroic romances). 
 If any one were to read Parthenissa for the story he would 
 
 ^ " Quant k moi, je trouve les choses que ces messieurs se disent fort bien 
 dites et tout k fait dignes de deux gentilhommes."
 
 46 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 not, unless he were a very impulsive person, "hang himself." 
 He would simply, after a number of pages varying with the 
 individual, cease to read it. 
 
 The work of the great Lord Advocate who was traduced 
 by Covenanting malice is in a certain sense more interest- 
 ing: and that not merely because it is much shorter. 
 Aretina or The Serious Romance, opens with an 
 " apology for Romances " generally, which goes far to 
 justify Dryden's high opinion of Mackenzie as a critic. 
 But it cannot be said to be much — it is a little — more 
 interesting as a story than Parthenissa, and it is written in 
 a most singular lingo — not displaying the racy quaintness 
 of Mackenzie's elder contemporary and fellow-loyalist 
 Urquhart, but a sort of Scotified and modernised 
 Euphuism rather terrible to peruse. A hbrary is " a 
 bibliotheck richly tapestried with books." Somebody 
 possesses, or is compared to " a cacochymick stomach, 
 which transubstantiates the best of meats in its own 
 malignant humour." And when the hero meets a pair of 
 cannibal rufhans he confronts one and " pulling out a pistol, 
 sends from its barrel two balls clothed in Death's hvery, 
 and by them opens a sallyport to his soul to fly out of that 
 nasty prison." A certain zest may be given by these 
 oddities, but it hardly lasts out more than 400 pages : and 
 though the lives of Aretina and Philaretes are more simply 
 and straightforwardly told than might be thought hkely — 
 though there are ingenious disguises of contemporary 
 politics, and though Mackenzie was both a wise man and 
 a wit — it is more certain than ever, when we close his book, 
 that this is not the way of the world, nor the man to walk 
 in that way. 
 
 Pandion and Amphigeneia is the inferior in importance 
 of both these books. Crowne had perhaps rather more
 
 FROM LYLY TO SWIFT 47 
 
 talent than it is usual to credit him with, but he does not 
 show it here. I think Sir Walter Raleigh is quite right in 
 regarding the book as more or less traced over the 
 Arcadia : and it may be said to have all the defects of 
 Sidney's scheme — which, it is fair once more to observe, 
 we do not possess in any form definitely settled by its 
 author — with none of the merits of his ornament, his 
 execution, and his atmosphere of poetic fancy. 
 
 The fact is that this heroic romance was foredoomed to 
 inefficiency. It was not a genuine kind at all: but a sort 
 of patchwork of imitations of imitations — a mule which, 
 unlike the natural animal, was itself bred, and bred in 
 and in, of mules for generations back. It was true to no 
 time, to no country, to no system of manners,life, or thought. 
 Its oldest ancestor in one sense, though not in another — 
 the Greek romance — was itself the growth of the latest and 
 most artificial period of the literature to which it belonged. 
 The pure mediaeval romance of chivalry was another, but 
 of this it had practically nothing left. The Amadis class, 
 the late Renaissance pastorals, the immediately preceding 
 or accompanying French romances of the Scud^ry type, 
 were, in increasing degree, hybrid, artificial, and dead- 
 ahve. Impotence and sterihty in every sense could but 
 be its portion. Of the two great qualities of the novel — 
 Variety and Life — it had never succeeded in attaining 
 any considerable share, and it had now the merest show 
 of variety and no life at all. There is hardly anything 
 to be said in its favour, except that its vogue, as has been 
 observed, testified to the craving for prose fiction, and 
 kept at least a simulacrum of that fiction before the pubhc. 
 How far there may be any real, though metaphysical, 
 connection between the great dramatic output of this 
 seventeenth century in England and its small production in
 
 48 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 novel is a question not to be discussed here. But un- 
 doubtedly the fact of the contrast is a " document in the 
 case," and one of the most important in its own direction; 
 completing the testimony of the mediaeval period in the 
 other (that as romance dwindled, drama grew) and lead- 
 ing up to that of the eighteenth century when drama 
 dwindled and the novel grew. The practice of Afra Behn 
 in both, and the fact that Congreve, the greatest EngHsh 
 dramatist of the close of the century, began with a novel 
 and deserted the style for drama, are also interesting, and 
 combine themselves very apparently with the considera- 
 tions just glanced at. But Congreve and Afra must be 
 postponed for a moment. 
 
 The two last discussed books, with Eromena and some 
 others, are posterior to the Restoration in date, but some- 
 what earlier in type. The reign of Charles H., besides the 
 " heroic " romances and Bunyan, and one most curious 
 little production to be noticed presently, is properly repre- 
 sented in fiction by two writers, to whom, by those who 
 like to make discoveries, considerable importance has some- 
 times been assigned in the history of the English Novel. 
 These are Richard Head and Afra Behn, otherwise " the 
 divine Astraea." It is, however, something of an injustice 
 to class them together: for Afra was a woman of very 
 great ability, with a suspicion of genius, while Head was 
 at the very best a bookmaker of not quite the lowest order, 
 though pretty near it. Of The English Rogue (1665-1680), 
 which earns him his place here, only the first part, and a 
 certain section of the fourth, are even attributed to him by 
 Francis Kirkman, the Curll of his generation, who published 
 the thing at intervals and admittedly wrote parts of it 
 himself. It is quite openly a picaresque novel: and imi- 
 tated not merely from the Spanish originals but from Sorel's
 
 FROM LYLY TO SWIFT 49 
 
 Francion, which had appeared in France some forty years 
 before. Yet, if we compare this latter curious book with 
 Head's we shall see how very far behind, even with forty 
 years' advantage in time, was the country which, in the next 
 century, waspractically to create the modern novel. Francion 
 is not a work of genius: and it does not pretend to much 
 more than the usual picaresque farrago of adventure, unmoral 
 and sometimes rather cruel, but comic of a kind, strung 
 together with little art in fable, and less in character. But 
 the author is to some extent " cumbered about serving." 
 He names his characters, tries to give them some vague 
 personality, furnishes them with some roughly and sketchily 
 painted scenery, and gives us not merely told tales, but 
 occasionally something distantly resembhng conversation. 
 Head takes no trouble of this kind: and Kirkman does not 
 seem to think that any such thing is required of him. Very 
 few of the characters of The English Rogue have so much as 
 a name to their backs: they are " a prentice," " a master," 
 " a mistress," " a servant," " a daughter," " a tapster," 
 etc. They are invested with hardly the slightest in- 
 dividuality: the very hero is a scoundrel as characterless 
 as he is nameless : ^ he is the mere thread which keeps the 
 beads of the story together after a fashion. These beads 
 themselves, moreover, are only the old anecdotes of 
 " coney-catching," over-reaching, and worse, which had 
 separately filled a t\iOu?,9indi fabliaux, novelle, "jests," and 
 so forth : and which are now flung together in gross, chiefly 
 by the excessively clumsy and unimaginative expedient of 
 making the personages tell long strings of them as their 
 own experience. When anything more is wanted, accounts 
 of the manners of foreign countries, taken from " voyage- 
 
 * He has a name, Meriton Latroon, but it is practically never used in 
 the actual story. 
 
 D
 
 50 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 and-travel " books; of the tricks of particular trades (as 
 here of piratical book-selling) ; of anything and everything 
 that the writer's dull fancy can think of, are foisted in. 
 The thing is in four volumes, and it seems that a fifth was 
 intended as a close: but there is no particular reason why 
 it should not have extended to forty or fifty, nay to four or 
 five hundred. It could have had no real end, just as it 
 has no real beginning or middle. 
 
 One other point deserves notice. The tone of the Spanish 
 and French picaresque novel had never been high: but it 
 is curiously degraded in this English example. Fureti^re 
 honestly called his book Roman Bourgeois. Head might 
 have called his, if he had written in French, Roman Canaille. 
 Not merely the sentiments but the very outward trappings 
 and accidents of gentility are banished from the book. 
 Yet we do not get any real reality in compensation. Head 
 is no Defoe: he can give us the company that Colonel Jack 
 kept in his youth and Moll Flanders in her middle age: 
 but he makes not the slightest attempt to give us Moll or 
 Jack, or even Moll's or Jack's habit, environment, novel- 
 furniture of any kind whatsoever. The receipt to make 
 The English Rogue is simply this : " Take from two to three 
 dozen Elizabethan pamphlets of different kinds, but 
 principally of the ' coney-catching ' variety, and string 
 them together by making a batch of shadowy personages 
 tell them to each other when they are not acting in them." 
 Except in a dim sort of idea that a novel should have some 
 bulk and substance, it is difficult to see any advance what- 
 ever in this muck-heap — which the present writer, having 
 had to read it a second time for the present purpose, most 
 heartily hopes to be able to leave henceforth undisturbed 
 on his shelves. 
 
 Not in this fashion must the illustrious Afra be spoken of.
 
 FROM LYLY TO SWIFT 51 
 
 It is true that — since it ceased to be the fashion merely to 
 dismiss her with a " fie-fie! " which her prose work, at any 
 rate, by no means merits — there has sometimes been a 
 tendency rather to overdo praise of her, not merely in 
 reference to her lyrics, some of which can never be praised 
 too highly, but in reference to these novels. Oroonoko or 
 The Royal Slave, with its celebration of the virtues of a 
 noble negro and his love for his Imoinda, and his brutal 
 ill-treatment and death by torture at the hands of white 
 murderers, undoubtedly took the fancy of the public. But 
 to see at once Rousseau and Byron in it, Chateaubriand 
 and Wilberforce and I know not what else, is rather in 
 the " lunatic, lover, and poet " order of vision. Even 
 Head and Kirkman, as we have observed, had perceived the 
 advantage of foreign scenery and travel to vary their 
 matter; Afra had herself been in Guiana; and, as she 
 was of a very inflammable disposition, it is quite possible 
 that some Indian Othello had caught her fresh imagination. 
 On the other hand, there was the heroic romance, with all 
 its sighs and flames, still the rage: and a much less nimble 
 intellect than Afra's, with a much less cosmopolitan ex- 
 perience, might easily see the use of transposing it into a 
 new key. Still, there is no doubt that The Royal Slave 
 and even its companions are far above the dull, dirty, and 
 never more than half aHve stuff of The English Rogue. 
 Oroonoko is a story, not a pamphlet or a mere " coney- 
 catching " jest. To say that it wants either contraction 
 or expansion; less " talk about it " and more actual con- 
 versation; a stronger projection of character and other 
 things; is merely to say that it is an experiment in the 
 infancy of the novel, not a following out of secrets already 
 divulged. It certainly is the first prose story in EngHsh 
 which can be ranked with things that already existed in
 
 52 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 foreign literatures. Nor is it the only one of the batch in 
 which advance is seen. " The King of Bantam," for 
 instance, is the account of an " extravagant," though not 
 quite a fool, who is " coney-catched " in the old manner. 
 But it opens in a fashion very different indeed from the 
 old manner. " This money is certainly a most devilish 
 thing! I'm sure the want of it had been like to ruin my 
 dear PhilibeUa! " and the succeeding adventures are pretty 
 freshly told. The trick of headlong overture was a 
 favourite with Afra. " The Adventure of the Black Lady " 
 begins, " About the beginning of last June, as near as I 
 can remember, Bellamira came to town from Hampshire." 
 It is a trick of course: and here probably borrowed from 
 the French: but the line which separates trick from 
 artistic device is an exceedingly narrow and winding one. 
 At any rate, this plunging into the middle of things wakes 
 up the reader's attention, and does not permit him to 
 doze. " The Lucky Mistake," on the other hand, opens 
 with a little landscape, " The river Loire has on its delight- 
 ful banks, etc." " The Fair Jilt," a BandeUo-like story, 
 begins with an exaltation of Love: and so on. Now these 
 things, though they may seem matters of course to the 
 mere modern reader, were not matters of course then. 
 Afra very likely imitated; her works have never been 
 critically edited; and havenotserved asfield formuch origin- 
 hunting. But whether she followed others or not, she led 
 her own division. All these things and others are signs of 
 an awakened conscience — of a sense of the fact that fiction, 
 to be literature, must be something more than the relation 
 of a bare fact, tragic, comic, or neutral — that the novelist 
 is a cook, and must prepare and serve his materials with a 
 sauce as much his own as possible, of plot, arrangement, 
 character-drawing, scenery, conversation, reflection, and
 
 FROM LYLY TO SWIFT 53 
 
 what not. That conversation Itself — ^the subtlest instru- 
 ment of all and the most effective for constructing character 
 — is so little developed, can only, I think, be accounted for 
 by supposing Afra and others to be under the not unnatural 
 mistake that conversation especially belonged to the 
 drama, which was still the most popular form of literature, 
 and in which she herself was a copious practitioner. But 
 this mistake was not long to prevail: and it had no effect 
 on that great contemporary of hers who would, it is to be 
 feared, have used the harshest language respecting her, 
 and to whom we now come. 
 
 It is impossible to share, and not very easy even to 
 understand, the scruples of those who would not admit 
 John Bunyan to a place in the hierarchy and the pedigree 
 of the English novel, or would at best grant him an outside 
 position in relation to it. Their exquisite reasons, so far 
 as one can discern them, appear to be (or to concern) the 
 facts that The Pilgrint's Progress and The Holy War are 
 religious, and that they are allegories.^ It may be humbly 
 suggested that by applying the double rule to verse we 
 can exclude Paradise Lost and the Faerie Queene from the 
 
 1 The heroic kind had lent itself very easily and obviously to allegory. 
 Not very long before Bunyan English literature had been enriched with a 
 specimen of this double variety which for Sir W. Raleigh " marks the lowest 
 depth to which English romance writing sank." I do not know that I could 
 go quite so far as this in regard to the book — BentivoUo and Urania by 
 Nathaniel Ingelo. The first edition of this appeared in 1660: the second 
 (there seem to have been at least four) lies before me at this moment dated 
 1669, or nine years before the Progress itself. You require a deep-sea-lead 
 of uncommonly cunning construction to sound, register, and compare the 
 profundities of the bathos in novels. The book has about 400 folio pages 
 very closely packed with tj-pe, besides an alphabetical index full of Hebrew 
 and Greek derivations of its names — " Gnothisauton," " Achamoth," 
 " Ametameletus," " Dogmapernes," and so forth. Its principles are 
 inexorably virtuous; there is occasional action interspersed among its 
 innumerable discourses, and I think it not improbable that if it were only 
 possible to read it, it might do one some good. But it would not be the 
 good of the novel.
 
 54 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 succession of English Poetry, whereby no doubt we shall be 
 finely holpen in understanding the same: while it is by no 
 means certain that, if the exclusion of allegory be pushed 
 home, we must not cancel Don Quixote from the list of the 
 world's novels. Even in prose, to speak plainly, the 
 hesitation — unless it comes from the foolish dislike to 
 things religious, as such, which has been the bigotry of the 
 last generation or two — comes from the almost equally 
 foolish determination to draw up arbitrary laws of literary 
 kind. Discarding prejudice and punctilio, every one must 
 surely see that, in diminishing measure, even The Holy 
 War is a novel, and that The Pilgrim's Progress has every 
 one of the four requisites — plot, character, description, and 
 dialogue — while one of these requisites — character with its 
 accessory manners — is further developed in the History of 
 Mr. Badman after a fashion for which we shall look vainly 
 in any division of European literature (except drama) 
 before it. This latter fact has indeed obtained a fair 
 amount of recognition since Mr. Froude drew the attention 
 of the general reader to it in his book on Bunyan, in the 
 " English Men of Letters " series, five-and-twenty years 
 ago: but it must have struck careful readers of the great 
 tinker's minor works long before. Indeed there are very 
 good internal reasons for thinking that no less a person 
 than Thackeray must have known Mr. Badman. This 
 wonderful little sketch, however — the related history of a 
 man who is an utter rascal both in famUy and commercial 
 relations, but preserves his reputation intact and does not 
 even experience any deathbed repentance — is rather an 
 unconscious study for a character in a novel — a sketch of a 
 bourgeois Barnes Newcome — than anything more. It has 
 the old drawback of being narrated, not acted or spoken at 
 first hand: and so, though it is in a sense Fielding at nearly
 
 FROM LYLY TO SWIFT 55 
 
 his best, more than half a century before Fielding attempted 
 Joseph Andrews, no more need be said of it. So, too, the 
 religious element and the allegory are too prominent in 
 The Holy War — the novelist's desk is made too much of a 
 pulpit in large parts of it. Other parts, concerning the 
 inhabitants of Mansoul and their private affairs, are 
 ■domestic novel-writing of nearly the pure kind: and if 
 The PilgrMs Progress did not exist, it would be worth 
 while to pick them out and discuss them. But, as it most 
 fortunately does exist, this is not needful. 
 
 The only fault with the novel-character of the greater 
 book which might possibly be found by a critic who did 
 not let the allegory bite him, and was not frightened by 
 the religion, is that there is next to no love element in it, 
 though there are wedding bells. Mercy is indeed quite 
 nice enough for a heroine: but Bunyan might have 
 bestowed her better than on a young gentleman so very 
 young that he had not long before made himself (no doubt 
 allegorically) ill with unripe and unwholesome fruit. But 
 if he had done so, the suspicions of his brethren — they were 
 acute enough as it was not to mistake the character of the 
 book, whatever modern critics may do — would have been 
 «ven more unallayable. And, as it is, the " alluring coun- 
 tenance " does shed not a little grace upon the story, or at 
 least upon the Second Part : while the intenser character of 
 the First hardly requires this. Any other lack is, to the 
 present writer, imperceptible. The romance interest of 
 •quest, adventure, achievement, is present to the fullest 
 degree: and what is sometimes called the pure novel 
 interest of character and conversation is present in a 
 degree not lower. It must be accepted as a great blessing, 
 •even by those who regard Puritanism as an almost un- 
 mitigated curse, that its principles forbade Bunyan to
 
 56 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 think of choosing the profane and abominable stage-play 
 as the form of his creation. We had had our fill of good plays, 
 and were beginning to drink of that which was worse: 
 while we had no good novels and wanted them. Of course 
 the large amount of actual " Tig and Tirry " dialogue (as 
 Dr. Johnson would say) is probably one of the things which 
 have made precisians shy of accepting the Progress for 
 what it really is. But we must remember that this en- 
 croachment on the dramatic province was exactly what 
 was wanted to remove the reproach of fiction. The 
 inability to put actual conversation of a lively kind in the 
 mouths of personages has been indicated as one of the 
 great defects of the novel up to this time. Except Cer- 
 vantes, it is difficult to think of any novelist who had 
 shown himself able to supply the want. Bunyan can do it 
 as few have done it even since his time. The famous 
 dialogue of Christian and By-ends is only the best — if it is 
 the best — of scores nearly or quite as good. The curious 
 intellectual flaccidity of the present day seems to be " put 
 off" by the "ticket" names; but no one who has the 
 true literary sense cares for these one way or another, or 
 is more disturbed by them than if they were Wilkins and 
 Jones. Just as Coleridge observed that to enjoy some 
 kinds of poetry you must suspend disbelief, so, with mere 
 literary fashions, you must suspend disagreement. We 
 should not call By-ends By-ends now: and whether we 
 should do better or worse nobody, as Plato says, knows 
 but the Deity. But the best of us would be hard put to it 
 to make By-ends reveal his By-endishness more perfectly 
 than he does by his conversation, and without any ticket- 
 name at all. 
 
 Not less remarkable, and only a little less new, is the 
 vividness and sufficiency of the scene painting and setting.
 
 FROM LYLY TO SWIFT 57 
 
 It has been said that the great novelists not only provide 
 us with a world of friends more real and enjoyable than 
 the actual folk we know, but also with a world for those 
 friends to live in, more real and far more enjoyable than 
 the world in which we ourselves sojourn. And this is well 
 seen of Christian. The Slough of Despond and the terrible 
 overhanging hill; the gateway and the Interpreter's House 
 and the House Beautiful; the ups and downs of the road, 
 and the arbours and the giants' dens: Beulah and the 
 Delectable Mountains : — one knows them as one knows the 
 country that one has walked over, and perhaps even 
 better. There is no description for description's sake: yet 
 nothing is wanting of the descriptive kind. 
 
 Yet all these things are — as they should be — only sub- 
 sidiary to the main interest of the Pilgrimage itself. Once 
 more, one may fear that it is no good sign of the wits of 
 the age that readers should be unable to discard familiarity 
 with the argument of the story. It is the way in which 
 that argument is worked out and illustrated that is the 
 thing. I have never myself, since I became thoroughly 
 acquainted with Lydgate's Enghshing of Deguilevile's 
 Pilgrimage of the Soul of Man, had any doubt that — in some 
 way or other, direct or indirect, at tenth or twentieth 
 hand perhaps — Bunyan was acquainted with it: but this 
 is of no importance. He might undoubtedly have got all 
 his materials straight out of the Bible. But his working 
 of them up is all his own, and is wonderful. Here, to begin 
 with, is the marvel not merely of a continuation which is 
 not a falling off, but of a repetition of the same general 
 scheme with different but closely connected personages, 
 which is entirely free from monotony. One is so accus- 
 tomed to the facts that perhaps it hardly strikes one at 
 first how extraordinarily audacious the attempt is: nay,
 
 58 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 the very success of it may blind all but critics to the diffi- 
 culty. It is no wonder that people tried further continua- 
 tions and further complications: still less wonder that they 
 utterly failed. Probably even Bunyan himself could not 
 have " done it a third time." But he did it these twice 
 with such vividness of figure and action; such complete- 
 ness of fable; such sufficiency of behaviour and of speech 
 as have scarcely ever been equalled. As ideal as Spenser, 
 as real as Defoe: such is Bunyan. And he shows this 
 realism and this idealism in a prose narrative, bringing the 
 thoughts and actions and characters and speech of fictitious 
 human beings before his readers — for their inspection 
 perhaps; for their delight certainly. If this is not the 
 being and the doing of a novelist this deponent very 
 humbly declareth that he knoweth not what the being and 
 the doing of a novelist are. 
 
 We must now turn to two small but noteworthy attempts 
 at the kind, which have been referred to above. 
 
 In 1668 there appeared a very curious little book 
 (entitled at great length after the manner of the times, but 
 more shortly called The Isle of Pines), which is important 
 in the literary ancestry of Defoe and Swift and not unim- 
 portant in itself. Its author was Henry Neville, of the 
 Nevilles of Billingbeare, son of one Sir Henry and grandson 
 of another, the grandfather having been of some mark in 
 diplomacy and courtiership in late Elizabethan and early 
 Jacobean times. The grandson had had a life of some 
 stir earlier. Born in 1620, and educated at Merton and 
 University Colleges, he had left Oxford without a degree, 
 had taken the Parliamentary side, but as a rigid Republican 
 and anti-Cromwellite; had been a member of the Rota, 
 and after the Restoration had been arrested in 1 663 for 
 supposed treasonable practices, but escaped serious punish-
 
 FROM LYLY TO SWIFT 59 
 
 ment. He lived quietly for more than thirty years longer 
 and died in 1694. Besides The Isle of Pines he wrote 
 satirical tracts (the Parliament of Ladies being the best 
 known), translated Machiavelli, and was evidently a man 
 of parts, though, like his friend Harrington, something of a 
 " crank." He seems also to have been, as some others of 
 the extremer Puritans certainly were, pretty loose in his 
 construction of moral laws. 
 
 The Isle is a very short book of thirty-one quarto pages : 
 but there is a good deal in it, and it must have been very 
 carefully written. A certain Cornelius van Sloetten writes, 
 " supported by letters from Amsterdam," how a Dutch 
 ship, driven far out of reckoning in the Southern Ocean, 
 comes to a " fourth island, near Terra Australis Incognita," 
 which is inhabited by white people, speaking English, but 
 mostly naked. The headman is a certain William Pine, 
 whose grandfather, George, has left a written account of 
 the origin of the community. This relates how George 
 was wrecked on the island, the ship perishing " with man 
 and mouse," except himself, his master's daughter, two 
 white maidservants, and a negro girl. The island proves 
 pleasant and habitable: and George, to prevent unfairness 
 and ill-feeling, unites himself to all his female companions, 
 the quintet living in perfect harmony. Thirty-seven 
 children result: and these at first necessarily intermarry; 
 but after this first generation, a rule is made that brothers 
 and sisters may not unite — the descendants of the four 
 original wives forming clans who may marry into the 
 others but not into their own. A wider legal code of fair 
 stringency is arranged, with the sanction of capital and 
 other punishments : and things go so well that the patriarch 
 musters a tribe of 565 persons by the time he is sixty, and 
 of 1789 twenty years later, when he departs this life.
 
 6o THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 piously praying God " to multiply them and send them 
 the true report of the gospel." The multiplication has 
 duly taken place, and there is something like a civil war 
 while the Dutch are there; but they interfere with fire- 
 arms to restore order, and leave all well. The writer's 
 cunning is shown by the fact that he does not stop abruptly: 
 but finishes off with some subsequent and quite verisimilar 
 experiences of the Dutch ship. The book does not appear 
 to have had a very great popularity in England, though it 
 was reprinted and abridged at least once, pretty shortly. 
 But it was very popular abroad, was translated into three 
 or four languages, and was apparently taken as a genuine 
 account. 
 
 Neville's art is in fact not inconsiderable. Earlier 
 voyages and travels of course supplied him with his 
 technical and geographical details: and the codification of 
 the Isle of Pines suggests the Bacon-Harrington tradition. 
 But he has got the vividness and realism which have 
 usually been lacking before: and though some of his 
 details are pretty " free " it is by no means only through 
 such things that these qualities are secured. To Cyrano 
 de Bergerac he bears no likeness at all. In fact, though 
 Neville was a satirist, satire does not seem to have been 
 in any way his object here. Whatever that object may 
 have been, he has certainly struck, by accident or not, on 
 the secret of producing an interesting account by in- 
 geniously multiplied and adjusted detail. Moreover, as 
 there is no conversation, the book stands — accidentally this 
 time almost without doubt — at the opposite pole from the 
 talk-deluged romances of the Scud^ry type. Whether 
 Defoe actually knew it or not matters exceedingly little: 
 that something of his method, and in a manner the subject 
 of his first and most famous novel, are here before him.
 
 FROM LYLY TO SWIFT 6i 
 
 seems quite indisputable. Perhaps not the least piquant 
 thing to do with The Isle of Pines is to contrast it with 
 Oceana. Of course the contrast is unfair: nearly all 
 contrasts are. But there is actually, as has been pointed 
 out, a slight contact between the work of the two friends: 
 and their complete difference in every other respect makes 
 this more curiously apparent. And another odd thing is 
 that Neville — " Rota "-republican as he was — should have 
 adopted patriarchal (one can hardly say legitimate) govern- 
 ment here. 
 
 Congreve's Incognita (1692), the last seventeenth-century 
 novel that requires special notice, belongs much more 
 to the class of Afra's tales than to that of the heroic 
 romances. Itis ashortstory of seventy-five small pages only 
 and of the Italian-Spanish imbroglio type. The friends 
 Aurelian and Hippolito take each other's names for certain 
 purposes, and their beloveds, " Incognita," Juliana and 
 Leonora, are perplexed accordingly: while family feuds, 
 letter assignations at a convent where the name of 
 the convent unluckily happens to be torn off, and other 
 stock ingredients of the kind are freely used. Most 
 writers have either said nothing about the book or have 
 given it scanty praise; with the exception. Sir Walter 
 Raleigh, I confess that I cannot here agree. Being 
 Congreve's it could not be quite without flashes of wit, 
 but they do not appear to me to be either very numerous 
 or very brilliant; the plot, such as it is, is a plot of drama 
 rather than of fiction; and there is no character that I can 
 see. It is in fact only one of a vast multitude of 
 similar stories, not merely in the two languages just referred 
 to, but in French, which were but to show that the time 
 of the novel was not yet come, even when the time of this 
 century was all but over.
 
 62 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 It was quite over, and the first two decades of the next 
 were all but over too, before the way was, to any important 
 extent, further explored: but important assistance in the 
 exploration was given at the beginning of the second of 
 these decades. The history of the question of the re- 
 lations of the Addison-Steele periodical, and especially of 
 the " Coverley Papers," to the novel is both instructive 
 and amusing to those who have come to appreciate the 
 humours of literary things. It would probably have 
 shocked the more orthodox admirers of the Spectator, 
 during the eighteenth century, to have any such connection 
 or relation so much as hinted. But when people began 
 to consider literature and literary history in a better 
 arranged perspective, the fact that there is such a con- 
 nection or relation must have been soon perceived. It has 
 become comparatively a commonplace: and now the 
 third stage — that in which people become uneasy and 
 suspicious of the commonplace and obvious and try to 
 turn it topsy-turvy — has begun. 
 
 It is of course undeniable that the " Coverley Papers," 
 as they stand, are not a novel, even on the loosest con- 
 ception and construction of the term. There is no plot; 
 some of what should be the most important characters are 
 merely heard of, not seen; and the various scenes have 
 no sort of connection, except that the same persons figure 
 in them. But these undeniable facts do not interfere 
 with two other facts, equally undeniable and much more 
 important. The first is that the papers could be turned 
 into a novel with hardly any important alteration, and with 
 only quantum suff. of addition and completion. " The 
 widow " is there in the background ready to be produced 
 and made a heroine; many of the incidents are told novel- 
 fashion already, and more could be translated into that
 
 FROM LYLY TO SWIFT 63 
 
 fashion by the veriest tyro at novel writing who has 
 written at any time during the last one hundred and fifty 
 years. The personages of the club have merely to step 
 down and out; the scenes to be connected, amplified, and 
 multiphed; the conversation to undergo the same process. 
 But the second point is of greater importance still. 
 Not only could the "Coverley Papers," be made into a novel 
 without the slightest difficulty, and by a process much of 
 which would be simple enlargement of material; but they 
 already possess, in a fashion which requires no alteration 
 at all, many of the features of the novel, far more success- 
 fully hit oif than had ever been done before in the novel 
 itself. This is true of the dialogue to no small extent, and 
 of the description even more: but it is truest of all of the 
 characters. Except Bunyan, nobody in prose fiction had 
 ever made personages so thoroughly spirited as Sir Roger 
 and even the two Wills, Honeycomb and Wimble; while 
 here there was " no allaying Thames " in the shape of 
 allegory, little moralising and that of a kind quite human, 
 a plentiful setting of ordinary and familiar scene, and a 
 more plentiful and exact adjustment of ordinary and 
 familiar manners. It is true that Addison, partly owing 
 to the undercurrent of his satirical humour (Steele succeeds 
 rather better here), has not attained the astonishing 
 verisimilitude of the writer to whom we shall come next 
 and last but one in this chapter. His characters are 
 perfectly natural, but we know, all the while, that they are 
 works of art. But in most of the points just mentioned 
 he has exactly the tricks of the novelist's art that Defoe 
 has not. The smaller tales in the latter and its followers 
 undoubtedly did something to remove the reproach from 
 prose fiction, and more to sharpen the appetite for it. 
 But they were nothing new: the short tale being of un-
 
 64 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 known antiquity. The " Coverley Papers " were new and 
 did much more. This new kind of treatment may not 
 have suggested beforehand (it is not certain that it did 
 not) the extensive novel of character and manners — the 
 play lengthened, bodied more strongly, and turned into 
 narrative form. But the process was there ; the instances 
 of it were highly reputed and widely known. It must in 
 almost any case have gone hard but a further step still 
 would be taken. It was actually taken by the person who 
 had suggested the periodical essay itself. 
 
 Much has been written about Defoe, but, curiously 
 enough, the least part of what has been written about him 
 has concerned the very part of him that is read — his novels. 
 Nay, occasional eccentrics, and not only these, have 
 shown a sort of disposition to belittle him as a novelist: 
 indeed the stock description of Richardson as the Father 
 of the English Novel almost pointedly rules Defoe out. 
 Yet further, the most adequate and intelligent apprecia- 
 tion of his novel work itself has too often been mainly 
 confined to what is no doubt a subject of exceeding interest 
 • — the special means by which he secures the attention, 
 and procures the delight, of his readers. We shall have 
 to deal with this too. But the point to which it is wished 
 to draw special attention now is different, and we may 
 reach it best by the ordinary " statement of case." 
 
 Almost everybody who knows any literary history, 
 knows that the book by which, after thirty or forty years 
 of restless publication in all sorts of prose and rhyme, 
 Defoe niched himself immovably in English literature, 
 was a new departure by almost an old man. He was all 
 but, if not quite, sixty when Robinson Crusoe appeared: 
 and a very few following years saw the appearance of his 
 pretty voluminous " minor " novels. The subject of the
 
 FROM LYLY TO SWIFT 65 
 
 first every one knows without limitation: it is not so 
 certain, though vigorous efforts have been made to 
 popularise the others, that even their subjects are clearly- 
 known to many people. Captain Singleton (1720), Moll 
 Flanders, and Colonel Jack (both 1722) are picaresque 
 romances with tolerably sordid heroes and heroines, 
 but with the style entirely rejuvenated by Defoe's secret. 
 Roxana (1724), a very puzzling book which is perhaps not 
 entirely his writing, is of the same general class: the 
 Voyage round, the World (1725), the least interesting, but 
 not Mwinteresting, is exactly what its title imports, — in other 
 words, the " stuffing " of the Robinson pie without the 
 game. The Memoirs of a Cavalier (1720) approach the 
 historical novel (or at least the similar " stuffing " of that) 
 and have raised curious and probably insoluble questions as 
 to whether they are inventions at all — questions intimately 
 connected with that general one referred to above. One 
 or two minor things are sometimes added to the hst: but 
 they require no special notice. The seven books just 
 mentioned are Defoe's contribution to the Enghsh novel. 
 Let us consider the quality of this contribution first — and 
 then the means used to attain it. 
 
 Their novel-quality (which, as has been hinted, has not 
 been claimed so loudly or so steadily as it should have been 
 for Defoe) is the quahty of Story-Interest — and this, one 
 dares say, he not only infused for the first time in fuU 
 dose, but practically introduced into the Enghsh novel, 
 putting the best of the old medieval romances aside and 
 also putting aside The Pilgriin's Progress, which is not 
 likely to have been without influence on himself. It may 
 be said, " Oh ! but the Amadis romances, and the Eliza- 
 bethan novels, and the ' heroics ' must have interested 
 or they would not have been read." This looks plausible, 
 
 £
 
 66 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 but is a mistake. Few people who have not studied the 
 history of criticism know the respectable reluctance to be 
 pleased with literature which distinguished mankind till 
 very recent times; and which in fact kept the novel back 
 or was itself maintained by the absence of the novel. In 
 life people pleased themselves irregularly enough: in litera- 
 ture they could not get out of the idea that they ought to 
 be instructed, that it was enough to be instructed, and that 
 it was discreditable to ask for more. Even the poet was 
 allowed to delight grudgingly and at his peril; was sus- 
 pected because he did delight, and had to pay a sort of 
 heavy hcence-duty for it, in the shape of concomitant 
 instruction to others and good behaviour in himself. In 
 fact he was a publican who was bound to serve stodgy 
 food as well as exhilarating drink. 
 
 It is impossible to doubt that people were similarly 
 affected to the fiction of the Renaissance and the seven- 
 teenth century, at least in its longer examples — for the 
 smaller novelle could amuse in their own way sometimes, 
 though they could hardly absorb. It is equally impossible 
 to imagine any one being " enthralled " by Euphues, 
 Admiration, of a kind, must have been the only passion 
 excited by it. In the Arcadia there is a certain charm, 
 but it belongs to the inset verse — to the almost Spenserian 
 visionariness of parts — to the gracious lulling atmosphere 
 of the whole. If it had been pubHshed in three volumes, 
 one cannot imagine the most enthusiastic novel-reader 
 knocking up a friend late at night for volume two or 
 volume three. I have said that I can read Parismus iox 
 pastime: but the pastime that it provides is certainly not 
 over-stimulating, and the mild stimulant becomes un- 
 sweetened and unlemoned barley-water in books of the 
 Parthenissa class. If with them conversing one forgets all
 
 FROM LYLY TO SWIFT 67 
 
 time, it must be by the influence of the kind go-between 
 Sleep. We know, of course, that their contemporaries 
 did not go to sleep over them : but it was because they felt 
 that they were being done good to — that they were in the 
 height of polite society — that their manners were being 
 softened and not allowed to be gross. The time, in its 
 blunt way, was fond of contrasting the attractions of a 
 mistress on one side and " a friend and a bottle " on the 
 other. That a novel could enter into competition with 
 either or both, as an interesting and even exciting means of 
 passing the time, would have entered very few heads at 
 all and have been contemptuously dismissed from most 
 of those that it did enter. 
 
 Addison and Steele in the " Coverley Papers " had shown 
 the way to construct this new spell: Defoe actually con- 
 structed it. It may be that some may question whether 
 the word " exciting " applies exactly to his stories. But 
 this is logomachy: and in fact a well-willing reader can 
 get very fairly excited while the Cavalier is escaping after 
 Marston Moor; while it is doubtful whether the savages 
 have reaUy come and what will be the event; while it is 
 again doubtful whether Moll is caught or not; or what 
 has become of those gains of the boy Jack, which can 
 hardly be called ill-gotten because there is such a perfect 
 unconsciousness of ill on the part of the getter. At any 
 rate, if such a reader cannot feel excitement here, he would 
 utterly stagnate in any previous novel. 
 
 In presence of this superior — this emphatically and 
 doubly " novel " — interest, all other things become com- 
 paratively unimportant. The relations of Robinson Crusoe 
 to Selkirk's experiences and to one or two other books 
 (especially the already mentioned Isle of Pines) may not 
 unfitly employ the literary historian who chooses to occupy
 
 68 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 himself with them. The allegory which Defoe alleges 
 in it, and which some biographers have endeavoured to 
 work out, cannot, I suppose, be absolutely pooh-poohed, 
 but presents no attractions whatever to the present writer. 
 Whether the Cavalier is pure fiction, or partly embroidered 
 fact, is a somewhat interesting question, if only because 
 it seems to be impossible to find out the answer: and the 
 same may be said of the not impossible (indeed almost 
 more than probable) Portuguese maps and documents at 
 the back of Captain Singleton. To disembroil the chrono- 
 logical muddle of Roxana, and follow out the tangles of the 
 hide-and-seek of that most unpleasant " lady of pleasure " 
 and her daughter, may suit some. But, apart from all 
 these things, there abides the fact that you can read the 
 books — read them again and again — enjoy them most 
 keenly at first and hardly less keenly afterwards, however 
 often you repeat the reading. 
 
 As has been partly said, the means by which this effect 
 is achieved, and also the means by which it is not, are 
 almost equally remarkable. The Four Elements of the 
 novel are sometimes, and not incorrectly, said to be Plot, 
 Character, Description, and Dialogue — Style, which some 
 would make a fifth, being rather a characteristic in another 
 order of division. It is curious that Defoe is rebellious 
 or evasive under any analysis of this kind. His plots are 
 of the " strong " order — the events succeed each other 
 and are fairly connected, but do not compose a history 
 so much as a chronicle. In character, despite his intense 
 verisimilitude, he is not very individual. Robinson him- 
 self, Moll, Jack, William the Quaker in Singleton, even 
 Roxana the cold-blooded and covetous courtesan, cannot 
 be said not to be real — they and almost every one of the 
 minorities are an immense advance on the colourless and
 
 FROM LYLY TO SWIFT 69 
 
 bloodless ticketed puppets of the Middle Fiction. But 
 they still want something — the snap of the fingers of the 
 artist. Moll is perhaps the most real of all of them and 
 yet one has no flash-sights of her being — never sees her 
 standing out against soft blue sky or thunder-cloud as 
 one sees the great characters of fiction; never hears 
 her steps winding and recognises her gesture as one does 
 theirs. 
 
 So again his description is sufficient: and the enumerative 
 particularity of it is even great part of the secret de 
 Polichinelle to which we are coming. But it is far from 
 elaborate in any other way and has hardly the least decora- 
 tion or poetical quality. Well as we know Crusoe's 
 Island the actual scenery of it is not half so much im- 
 pressed as that even, for instance, of Masterman Ready's — 
 it is either of the human figures — Crusoe's own grotesque 
 bedizenment, the savages, Friday, the Spaniards, Will 
 Atkins — or of the works of man — the stockade, the boat, 
 and the rest — that we think. A little play is made with 
 Jack's glass-house squalor and Roxana's magnificence 
 de mauvais lieu, but not much: the gold-dust and deserts 
 of Singleton are a necessary part of the " business," but 
 nothing more. Moll Flanders — in some respects the 
 greatest of all his books — has the bareness of an Elizabethan 
 stage in scenery and properties — it is much if Greenfield 
 spares us a table or a bed to furnish it. 
 
 Of Dialogue Defoe is specially fond — even making his 
 personages soliloquise in this after a fashion — and it plays 
 a very important part in " the secret: " yet it can hardly be 
 classed very high as dialogue. And this is at least partly 
 due to the strange drab shapelessness of his style, which 
 never takes on any brilliant colour, or quaint individual 
 form.
 
 70 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 Yet it is very questionable whether any other style 
 would have suited the method so well, or would even have 
 suited it at all. For this method — to leave off hinting at it 
 and playing round it — is one of almost endless accumulation 
 of individually trivial incident, detail, and sometimes 
 observation, the combined effect of which is to produce 
 an insensible but undoubting acceptance, on the reader's 
 part, of the facts presented to him. The process has been 
 more than once analysed in that curious and convenient 
 miniature example of it, the " Mrs. Veal " supercherie : but 
 you may open the novels proper almost anywhere and 
 discover it in full operation. Like most great processes of 
 art, this is an adoption and perfecting of habits usual 
 with the most inartistic people — a turning to good account 
 of the interminably circumstantial superfluities of the 
 common gossip and newsmonger. Very often Defoe 
 actually does not go beyond this — just as in The Shortest 
 Way with the Dissenters he had simply reproduced the 
 actual thoughts and wishes of those who disliked dissent. 
 But sometimes he got the better of this also, as in the 
 elaborate building up of Robinson's surroundings and not 
 a little in the other books. And there the effect is not only 
 verisimilar but wonderful in its verisimilitude. At any 
 rate, in him, and for English prose and secular fiction, we 
 have first that mysterious charm of the real that is not real 
 — of the " human creation " — which constitutes the appeal 
 of the novel. In some of the books there is hardly any 
 appeal of any other sort. Moll Flanders, though not 
 unkindly, and " improper " rather from the force of cir- 
 cumstances than from any specially vicious inclination, 
 is certainly not a person for whom one has much liking. 
 Colonel Jack, after his youthful experiences in pocket- 
 picking, is rather a nonentity, something of a coward, a
 
 FROM LYLY TO SWIFT 71 
 
 fellow of no particular wits, parts, or definite qualities of 
 any kind. Singleton is a rascal who " plays Charlemagne," 
 as the French gambling term has it, and endows his 
 repentance with the profits of his sin. As for Roxana 
 there are few more repulsive heroines in fiction — while 
 the Cavalier and the chief figure in the Voyage Round the 
 World are simply threads on which their respective adven- 
 tures are strung. Even Robinson himself enlists no par- 
 ticular sympathy except of the " put-yourself-in-his-place " 
 kind. Yet these sorry or negative personages, of whom, 
 in the actual creation of God, we should be content to know 
 nothing except from paragraphs in the newspaper (and 
 generally in the police-reports thereof), content us perfectly 
 well with their company through hundreds and thousands 
 of solid pages, and leave us perfectly ready to enjoy it 
 again after a reasonable interval. 
 
 This, as has been said, is the mystery of fiction — a 
 mystery partly set a-working in the mediasval romance, 
 then mostly lost, and now recovered — in his own way and 
 according to his own capacity — by Defoe. It was to 
 escape others for a little longer and then to be yet again 
 rediscovered by the great quartette of the mid-eighteenth 
 century — to slip in and out of hands during the later part 
 of that century, and then to be all but finally established, 
 in patterns for everlasting pursuance, by Miss Austen and 
 by Scott. But Defoe is really (unless we put Bunyan 
 before him) the first of the magicians — not the greatest 
 by any means, but great and almost alone in the peculiar 
 talent of making uninteresting things interesting — not by 
 burlesquing them or satirising them; not by suffusing or 
 inflaming them with passion; not by giving them the 
 amber of style; but by serving them " simple of them- 
 selves " as though they actually existed.
 
 72 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 The position of Defoe in novel history is so great that there 
 is a temptation to end this chapter with him. But to do 
 so would cause an inconvenience greater than any resulting 
 advantages. For the greatest of Defoe's contemporaries 
 in English letters also comes into our division, and comes 
 best here. One cannot conveniently rank Swift with the 
 great quartette of the next chapter, because he is a novelist 
 " by interim " and incompletely: to rank him among the 
 minor and later novelists of the eighteenth century would 
 be as to the first part of the classification absurd and as to 
 the last false. And he comes, not merely in time, pretty 
 close to Defoe, incommensurable as is the genius of the 
 two. It has even been thought (plausibly enough, though 
 the matter is of no great importance) that the form of 
 Gulliver may have been to some extent determined by 
 Robinson Crusoe and Defoe's other novels of travel. And 
 there is a subtler reason for taking the pair together and 
 both close to Addison and Steele. 
 
 Swift had shown the general set towards prose fiction, 
 and his own bent in the same direction, long before Defoe's 
 novel-period and as early as the Tale of a Tub and the 
 Battle of the Books {published 1704 but certainly earlier 
 in part). The easy flow of the narrative, and the vivid 
 dialogue of the Spider and the Bee in the latter, rank high 
 among those premonitions of novel with which, in this 
 place, we should be specially busied. In the former Peter, 
 Martin, and Jack want but a little more of the alchemist's 
 furnace to accomplish their projection into real characters, 
 and not merely allegorical figure-heads. But, of course, 
 in both books, the satiric purpose dominates too much to 
 allow them to be really ranked among novels, even if they 
 had taken the trouble to clothe themselves with more of 
 the novel-garb.
 
 FROM LYLY TO SWIFT 73 
 
 With Gulliver it is different. It is a commonplace on 
 its subject (but like many other commonplaces a thing ill 
 to forget or ignore) that natural and unsophisticated 
 children always do, and that almost anybody who has a 
 certain power of turning blind eyes when and where he 
 chooses can, read it simply as a story of adventure and 
 enjoy it hugely. It would be a most preternatural child 
 or a most singularly constituted adult who could read 
 Utopia or Oceana, or even Cyrano's Voyages, " for the 
 story " and enjoy them hugely. This means that Swift 
 had either learnt from Defoe or — and considering those 
 earlier productions of his own much more probably — had 
 independently developed the knack of absorbing the reader — 
 the knack of telling a story. But of course there is in one 
 sense much more, and in another much less, than a story 
 in Gulliver : and the finest things in it are independent of 
 story, though (and this once more comes in for our present 
 purpose) they are quite capable of adaptation to story- 
 purposes, and have been so adapted ever since by the 
 greatest masters of the art. These are strokes of satire, 
 turns of phrase, little illuminations of character, and 
 seasonings of description. But the great point of Gulliver 
 is that, like Defoe's work, though in not quite the same 
 way, it is interesting — that it takes hold of its reader and 
 gives him its " pecuhar pleasure." When a work of art 
 does this, it is pretty near perfection. 
 
 There is, however, another book of Swift's which, though 
 perhaps seldom mentioned or even thought of in connection 
 with the novel, is of real importance in that connection, 
 and comes specially in with our present main consideration 
 — the way in which the several parts of the completed novel 
 were being, as it were, separately got ready and set apart 
 for the use of the accompUshed novelist. This is the very
 
 74 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 curious and agreeable piece called Polite Conversation 
 (1738), on which, though it was not printed till late in 
 his life and close on Pamela itself, there is good reason for 
 thinking that he had been for many years engaged. The 
 importance of dialogue in the novel has been often men- 
 tioned and will scarcely be contested: while frequent 
 occasion has been taken to point out that it had hitherto 
 been very ill-achieved. Swift's " conversation " though 
 designedly underlined, as it were, to show up current 
 follies and extravagances of phrase and of fashion gener- 
 ally, is yet pretty certainly in the main the real average 
 conversation of the society of his time, which he knew well 
 and thoroughly. Further, there is a distinct, though it 
 may be almost impalpable, difference between it and the 
 conversation of the stage, though it is naturally connected 
 therewith. Non-poetical stage dialogue in capable hands 
 is either deliberate talking for display of " wit," like that 
 of Congreve, or is conditioned and directed by the necessi- 
 ties of action and character. Of course, novel conversation 
 may diverge in the first direction, and cannot properly 
 neglect the second altogether. But, as there is room for 
 very much more of it, it may and should allow itself a 
 considerably wider range and imitate, on proper occasions, 
 the desultory gossip and small talk of people who live on 
 the " boards " of a room-floor and not of a stage. 
 
 This is just what Swift's does, and just what there is 
 very little of in Defoe; almost necessarily less in Addison 
 and his group because of their essay form; and hardly 
 anything elsewhere and earlier. Just as the Coverley Papers 
 could, by one process and no difficult one, have been thrown 
 into a novel; so by another, a not much more difficult and 
 a much less complicated one, could the Polite Conversation 
 be thrown into part of a novel — while in each case the
 
 FROM LYLY TO SWIFT 75 
 
 incomplete and unintentional draft itself supplies patterns 
 for the complete work in new kind such as had never been 
 given before. Indeed the Conversation may almost be 
 said to be part of a novel — and no small part — as it stands, 
 and of such a novel as had never been written before. 
 
 But there was something still further all but absolutely 
 necessary to the novel, though not necessary to it alone, 
 which Defoe, Addison, and Swift, each in his several way, 
 worked mightily to supply: and that was a flexible busi- 
 ncss-like " workaday " prose style. Not merely so long 
 as men aimed at the eccentric and contorted styles of 
 Euphues and the Arcadia, but so long as the old splendid 
 and gorgeous, but cumbrous and complicated pre-Restora- 
 tion style lasted, romances were possible, but novels were 
 not. You might indeed pick out of Shakespeare — especially 
 from such parts as those of Beatrice, Rosalind, and some 
 of the fools — a capital novel-style: but then you can pick 
 almost anything out of Shakespeare. Elsewhere the 
 constant presence either of semi-poetic phraseology or of 
 some kind of " lingo " was almost fatal. You want what 
 Sprat calls a more " natural way of speaking " (though 
 not necessarily a " naked " one) for novel purposes — 
 a certain absence of ceremony and parade of phrase: 
 though the presence of slang and some other things, the 
 rebuking of which was partly Swift's object in the Con- 
 versation, is not fatal, and so he, in a manner, blessed and 
 prescribed what he meant to ban. 
 
 Thus, by the early years of the reign of George II., or 
 a little later, we find, on the one side, an evident, and 
 variously though inarticulately proclaimed, desire for 
 novels; on the other, the accumulation, in haphazard and 
 desultory way, of almost all the methods, the processes, 
 the " plant," necessary to turn novels out; but hardly
 
 76 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 anything except the considered work of Bunyan, Defoe, 
 and Swift which really deserves the name of novel. A 
 similar process had been going on in France; and, in the 
 different work of Le Sage and Marivaux, had actually 
 produced work in the kind more advanced than anything 
 in English. But the tables were soon to be turned: and 
 during the rest of the century the English Novel was at 
 last to assert itself as a distinct, an increasingly popular, 
 and a widely cultivated kind. That this was due to the 
 work of the four great novelists who fiU its central third 
 and will fill our next chapter cannot perhaps be said: 
 that their work was the first great desertion of it may be 
 said safely.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 THE FOUR WHEELS OF THE NOVEL WAIN 
 
 It does not enter into the plan, because it would be entirely 
 inconsistent with the scale, of the present book to give 
 details of the lives of the novelists, except when they have 
 something special to do with the subject, or when (as in 
 the case of a few minorities who happen to be of some 
 importance) even well-informed readers are likely to be 
 quite ignorant about them. Accounts, in all degrees of 
 scale and competence, of the lives of Richardson, Fielding, 
 Smollett, and Sterne abound. It is sufficient — but in the 
 special circumstances at this point perhaps necessary — 
 here to sum the facts very briefly in so far as they bear 
 on the main issue. Richardson (1689-1761), not merely 
 the first to write, but the eldest by much more than his 
 priority in writing, was the son of a Derbyshire tradesman, 
 was educated for some time at Charterhouse, but appren- 
 ticed early to a printer — which trade he pursued with 
 dihgence and profit for the rest of his life in London and 
 its immediate neighbourhood. After his literary success, 
 he gathered round him a circle of ladies and gentlemen 
 interested in literature: but he never had any first-hand 
 acquaintance with general society of the " gentle " kind, 
 much less with that of the upper classes. Fielding (1707- 
 1754), °^ ^^^ contrary, was a member (though only as the 
 son of a younger son of a younger son) of a family of great 
 antiquity and distinction, which held an earldom in Eng- 
 land and another in Ireland, and was connected as well as 
 
 77
 
 78 THE ENGLISH NOVEL • 
 
 it was derived, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, for instance, 
 being the novelist's cousin. He was educated at Eton and 
 Leyden: but his branch of the family being decidedly 
 impecunious, was thrown very much on his own resources. 
 These were mainly drawn from literature, first as a play- 
 wright then as a novelist, journalism and miscellanies 
 coming in. But he was called to the Bar: and though he 
 probably did not make much money there, he obtained 
 the poorly paid and hard-worked but rather important 
 position of " Bow Street Magistrate," which meant that 
 he was head, directly of the London police such as it was, 
 and indirectly of that of the whole kingdom. His temper 
 was in some ways as aristocratic as his birth: but though 
 Horace Walpole's accounts of his fancy for low company 
 are obviously exaggerated, there is no doubt that he was 
 a good deal of what has since been called a " Bohemian." 
 His experience of variety in scene was much wider than 
 Richardson's, although after he came home from Leyden 
 (where he went to study law) it was chiefly confined to 
 London and the south of England (especially Bath, Dorset- 
 shire, where he lived for a time, and the Western Circuit), 
 till his last voyage, in hopeless quest of health, to Lisbon, 
 where he died. His knowledge of literature, and even 
 what may be called his scholarship, were considerable, and 
 did credit to the public school education of those days. 
 
 Smollett (1721-1771) differed from his two predecessors 
 in being a Scotsman: but in family was very much nearer 
 to Fielding than to Richardson, being the grandson of a 
 judge who was a Commissioner of the Union, and a gentle- 
 man of birth and property — which last would, had he 
 lived long enough, have come to Smollett himself. But 
 he suffered in his youth from some indistinctly known 
 family jars, was apprenticed to a Glasgow surgeon, and
 
 THE FOUR WHEELS 79 
 
 escaping thence to London with a tragedy in his pocket, 
 was in undoubted difficulties till (and after) he obtained 
 the post of surgeon's mate on board a man-of-war, and 
 took part in the Carthagena expedition. After coming 
 home he made at least some attempts to practise: but was 
 once more drawn off to literature, though fortunately not 
 to tragedy. For the rest of his life he was a hard-worked 
 but by no means ill-paid journalist, novelist, and mis- 
 cellanist, making as much as ^^2000 by his History of Eng- 
 land, not ill-written, though now never read. Like Fielding 
 (though, unlike him, more than once) he went abroad in 
 search of health and died in the quest at Leghorn, Smollett 
 was not ignorant, but he seems to have known modern 
 languages better than ancient : though there is doubt about 
 his direct share in the translations to which he gavehis name. 
 Moreover he had some though no great skill in verse. 
 
 Lastly Sterne (17 13-1768), though hardly, as it is the 
 custom to call him, " an Irishman," yet vindicated the 
 claims of the third constituent of the United Kingdom by 
 being born in Ireland, from which country his mother 
 came. But the Sternes were pure English, of a gentle 
 family which had migrated from East Anglia through 
 Nottingham to Yorkshire, and was much connected with 
 Cambridge. Thither Laurence, the novelist, after a very 
 roving childhood (his father was a soldier), and a rather 
 irregular education, duly went: and, receiving preferment 
 in the Church from his Yorkshire relations, lived for more 
 than twenty years in that county without a history, till 
 he took the literary world — hardly by storm, but by a 
 sort of fantastic capful of wind — with Tristram Shandy 
 in 1760. Seven or eight years of fame, some profit, not 
 hard work (for his books shrink into no great solid bulk), 
 and constant travelling, ended by a sudden death at his
 
 8o THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 Bond Street lodgings, after a long course of ill-h.ealth very 
 carelessly attended to. 
 
 One or two more traits are relevant. All the four 
 were married, and married pretty early; two of them 
 married twice. Richardson's first wife was, in orthodox 
 fashion, his master's daughter: of his second little is 
 known. Fielding's first (he had made a vain attempt 
 earlier to abduct an heiress who was a relation) was, by 
 universal consent, the model both of Sophia and Amelia, 
 almost as charming as either, and as amiable; his second 
 was her maid. Of Mrs. Smollett, who was a Miss Lascelles 
 and a West Indian heiress in a small way, we know very 
 little — the habit of identifying her with the " Narcissa " 
 of Roderick Random is natural, inconclusive, but not 
 ridiculous. Sterne's matrimonial relations are the most 
 famous of all: and though posterity has, with its usual 
 charity, constructed a legend for the pair which is probably 
 much worse than the reality, that reality is more than 
 a little awkward. Mrs. Sterne was a Miss Lumley, 
 of a good Yorkshire family, some, though small, 
 fortune, and more friends who exerted themselves for her 
 husband. By inexcusable levity, ignorance, misjudgment, 
 or heartless cupidity their daughter Lydia published, 
 after the death of both, letters some of which contain 
 courtship of the most lackadaisical sentimentality and 
 others later expressions (which occasionally reach the 
 scandalous) of weariness and disgust on Sterne's part. 
 Other evidence of an indisputable character shows that 
 he was, at least and best, an extravagant and mawkish 
 philanderer with any girl or woman who would join in a 
 flirtation: and while there is no evidence against Mrs. 
 Sterne's character in the ordinary sense, and hardly any 
 of value against her temper, she seems (which is perhaps
 
 THE FOUR WHEELS 8i 
 
 not wonderful) to have latterly preferred to live apart 
 
 from her husband, and to have put him to considerable, if 
 
 not unreasonable, expenses by her fancy for wandering 
 
 about France with the daughter. 
 
 Finally, in general character, Richardson seems to have 
 
 been a respectable person of rather feminine temperament 
 
 and, though good-natured to his friends, endowed with 
 
 a feminine spitefulness. Fielding, though by no means 
 
 answering to the standard of minor and even major morals 
 
 demanded 
 
 " by the wise ones, 
 By the grave and the precise ones." 
 
 though reckless and disorderly in his ways and habits, 
 appears to have been in the main a thorough gentleman, 
 faithful to truth and honour, fearless, compassionate, 
 intolerant of meanness and brutality and of treachery most 
 of all — a man of many faults perhaps, but of no really 
 bad or disgusting ones. Concerning Smollett's person- 
 ality we know least of all the four. It was certainly dis- 
 figured by an almost savage pugnacity of temper; by a 
 strange indifference to what ought to be at the lowest the 
 conduct of a gentleman, and by a most repulsive inclination 
 — perhaps natural, but developed by training — to the 
 merely foul and nasty. But he seems to have been brave, 
 charitable though not in the most gracious way, honest, 
 and on the whole a much better fellow than he might 
 generally seem. Sterne is the most difficult of the four 
 to characterise fairly, because of the unlucky revelations 
 to which we possess no parallel in the case of the other 
 three, and which, if we had them, might probably alter 
 our estimates of a good many now well reputed people. 
 It is perhaps enough to say that his letters contain many 
 good traits as well as some bad ones; that his unlucky 
 
 F
 
 82 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 portrait, with its combination of leer and sneer, is probably 
 responsible for much; and that the parts which, as we 
 shall see further, he chose to play, of extravagant humorist 
 and extravagant sentimentalist, not only almost necessitate 
 attitudes which may easily become offensive in the playing, 
 but are very hkely, in practice, to communicate something 
 apparently not natural and unattractive to the player. 
 
 But enough of the workers, though not too much in the 
 case of such remarkable contemporary exponents of a new 
 kind of Human Comedy: let us go to the work. 
 
 In the long " History of the Unexpected," thick-strewn 
 as it is with curiosities, there are few things odder than the 
 appearance and the sequels of Pamela : or Virtue Rewarded, 
 which, in circumstances to be noted presently, is said to 
 have been begun on November 12, 1739, was finished (as 
 far as the first part goes) exactly two months later, and 
 (there being, in the case of the author's business, no obstacle 
 of the kind that has frequently beset the appearance of 
 greater works) was published later in the year 1740. That 
 author was over fifty years old: though he had had much 
 to do with ushering hterature into the world, he had never 
 attempted to produce it; he belonged to a class which was 
 apt to regard belles lettres with profound suspicion; and 
 his experiences, both in Hterature itself and in life, had 
 been necessarily of the most limited kind. But there were 
 certain counterbalancing facts to be taken into considera- 
 tion which, though they can hardly be said to be causes 
 of the marvel — the cause was the Hour, which hit, as it 
 listed, on the Man — were a little more than accidental 
 occasions of it. Richardson, as we see from his work, 
 must have been a rather careful student of such novels as 
 there were. The name of his first heroine, with the essen- 
 tially English throwing back of the accent added, is the
 
 THE FOUR WHEELS 83 
 
 same as that of one of Sidney's heroines in the Arcadia, 
 which had been not long before modernised for eighteenth- 
 century reading by a certain Mrs. Stanley. The not very 
 usual form " Laurana," which is the name of a character 
 in his latest novel, is that of the heroine of Parismus. 
 Further, he had had curious early experiences (which we 
 know from his own meticulous revelations) of writing 
 love-letters, when he was a mere boy, for girl-friends of his 
 to adapt in writing to their lovers. " His eye," he says, 
 " had been always on the ladies," though no doubt always 
 also in the most honourable way. And, quite recently, 
 the crystallisation had been precipitated by a commission 
 from two of his bookseller {i.e. publisher) patrons — the 
 founder of the House of Rivington and the unlucky Osborne 
 who was knocked down by Johnson and picked up (not 
 quite as one would wish to be) by Pope. They asked him 
 to prepare a series of " Familiar Letters on the useful con- 
 cerns of common life." Five-and-twenty years before, he 
 had heard in outline something like the story of Pamela. 
 In shaping this into letters he thought it might be a " new 
 species of writing that might possibly turn young people 
 into a course of reading different from the pomp and 
 parade of romance-writing, and dismissing the improbable 
 and marvellous with which novels generally abound, 
 might tend to promote the cause of religion and virtue." 
 His wife and " a young lady living with them," to whom 
 he had read some of it, used to come into his little closet 
 every night with, " Have you any more of Pamela, Mr. R. ? " 
 Two other female friends joined in the interest and eulogy. 
 He finished it (that is, the first two volumes which contain 
 the whole of the original idea) and published it, though at 
 first with the business-like precaution of appearing to 
 " edit " only, and the more business-like liberty of liberal
 
 84 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 praise of what he edited. It became at once popular: and 
 received the often repeated, but to the author very annoy- 
 ing, compHment of piratical continuation. So he set to 
 work and continued it himself: as usually (though by no 
 means invariably) with rather diminished success. On such 
 points as the suggestion that he may have owed a debt to 
 Marivaux (in Marianne) and others, little need be said here. 
 I have never had much doubt myself that the indebtedness 
 existed: though it would be rash, and is unnecessary, to 
 attempt to determine to what extent and in what particular 
 form. 
 
 It is by no means so difficult as it may at first sight appear 
 to put oneself very much in the situation of a contemporary 
 reader of Pamela, even if one has read it three or four times, 
 provided that a fairly long period has elapsed since the 
 last reading, and that the novels of the preceding age are 
 fairly — and freshly — familiar. The thing has been in fact 
 done — with unexpected but not in the least deliberate or 
 suspicious success — by the present writer, who has read 
 the book after an interval of some fifteen years and just 
 after reading (in some cases again, in some for the first 
 time) most of the works noticed in the preceding chapter. 
 The difference of " the new species of writing " (one is 
 reminded of the description of Spenser as " the new poet ") 
 is almost startling: and of a kind which Richardson pretty 
 certainly did not fully apprehend when he used the phrase. 
 In order to appreciate it, one must not only leave out the 
 two last volumes (which, as has been said, the first readers 
 had not before them at all, and had better never have had) 
 but also the second, or great part of it, which they would 
 only have reached after they had been half whetted, half 
 satiated, and wholly bribed, by the first. The defects of 
 this later part and indeed of the first itself will be duly
 
 THE FOUR WHEELS 85 
 
 noticed presently. Let it be to us, for the moment, the 
 story of Pamela up to and including " Mr. B.'s " repent- 
 ance and amendment of mind: and the "difference" of 
 this story, which fills some hundred and twenty or thirty 
 closely printed, double columned, royal octavo pages in 
 the " Ballantyne Novels," is (despite the awkwardness of 
 such a form for the enjoyment of a novel) almost astounding. 
 To begin with, the novel-attractions are presented with 
 a completeness which, as has been pointed out in the last 
 chapter, is almost entirely lacking before. There is, of 
 course, not very much plot, in the martinet sense of that 
 word: there never was in Richardson, despite his immense 
 apparatus and elaboration. The story is not knotted and 
 unknotted; the wheel does not come full circle on itself; 
 it merely runs along pleasantly till it is time for it to stop, 
 and it stops rather abruptly. The siege of Pamela's virtue 
 ends merely because the besieger is tired of assaults which 
 fail, and of offering dishonourable terms of capitulation 
 which are rejected: because he prefers peace and alliance. 
 But such as it is, it is told with a spirit which must have 
 been surprising enough to its readers, and which makes it,- 
 I confess, seem to me now much the best story in Richard- 
 son. The various alarums and excursions of the siege 
 itself go off smartly and briskly: there may be more 
 sequence than connection — there is some connection, as in 
 the case of that most unlucky and ill-treated person the 
 Rev. Mr. Williams — but the sequence is rapid and unbroken, 
 and the constituents of it as it were jostle each other — not 
 in any unfavourable sense, but in a sort of rapid dance, 
 " cross hands and down the middle," which is inspiriting and 
 contagious. He lost this faculty later: or rather he 
 allowed it to be diluted and slackened into the interminable 
 episodes of the not dissimilar though worse-starred plot
 
 86 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 against Clarissa, and the massacrant trivialities of the 
 Italian part of Grandison. But he had it here: and it is 
 not a fair argument to say (as even in these days I have 
 known it said) that Pamela's honour is a commodity of 
 too little importance to justify such a pother about it. 
 
 This may bring us to the characters. They also are not 
 of the absolutely first class — excepting, as to be discussed 
 later, the great attempt of Lovelace, Richardson's never 
 are. But they are an immense advance on the personages 
 that did duty as persons in preceding novels, even in Defoe. 
 " Mr. B. " himself is indeed not very capital. One does 
 not quite see why a man who went on as long as he did and 
 used the means which he permitted himself to use, did not 
 go on longer or use them more thoroughly. But Richard- 
 son has at least vindicated his much-praised " knowledge 
 of the human heart " by recognising two truths: first, that 
 there are many natures (perhaps most) who are constantly 
 tempted to " over-bid " — to give more and more for some- 
 thing that they want and cannot get; and, secondly, that 
 there are others (again, perhaps, the majority, if not always 
 the same individuals) who, when they are peremptorily 
 told not to do a thing, at once determine to do it. It was 
 to Lady Davers mainly that Pamela owed her escape from 
 the fate of Clarissa, though she would hardly have taken, 
 or had the chance of taking, that fate in the same way. 
 As for the minor characters, at least the lower examples are 
 more than sufficient: and Mrs. Jewkes wants very little of 
 being a masterpiece. But of course Pamela herself is the 
 cynosure, such as there is. She has had rather hard 
 measure with critics for the last century and a little more. 
 The questions to ask now are, " Is she a probable human 
 being ? " and then, " Where are we to find a probable 
 human being, worked out to the same degree, before ? "
 
 THE FOUR WHEELS 87 
 
 I say unhesitatingly that the answer to the first is " Yes," 
 and the answer to the second " Nowhere." The last 
 triumph of originality and individuality she does not 
 indeed reach. Richardson had, even more than other 
 men of his century in England, a strong Gallic touch: and 
 he always tends to the type rather than the individual. 
 Beatrix Esmond is a coquette of the highest — almost of the 
 heroic-poetic — class, but she is first of all Beatrix Esmond. 
 Blanche Amory is a middle-class minx, hardly heroic at all, 
 but she is first of all Blanche Amory. Becky Sharp is an 
 adventuress who would go pretty close to, and perhaps not 
 stop at, positive crime, but she is first of all Becky Sharp. 
 Pamela Andrews is not first of all — perhaps she is hardly 
 at all — Pamela Andrews. There might be fifty or five 
 hundred Pamelas, while there could be only one of each 
 of the others. She is the pretty, good-natured, well- 
 principled, and rather well-educated menial, whose prudence 
 comes to the aid of her principles, whose pride does not 
 interfere with either, and who has a certain — it is hardly 
 unfair to call it — slyness which is of the sex rather than 
 of the individual. But, as such, she is quite admirably 
 worked out — a heroine of Racine in more detail and 
 different circumstances, a triumph of art, and at the same 
 time with so much nature that it is impossible to dismiss 
 her as merely artificial. The nearest thing to her in English 
 prose fiction before (Marianne, of course, is closer in French) 
 is Moll Flanders : and good as Moll is, she is flat and lifeless 
 in comparison with Pamela. You may call " my master's " 
 mistress (actually in the honourable sense, but never in the 
 dishonourable) again a minx, though a better minx than 
 Blanche, if you like. But there is no animal more alive 
 than a minx: and you will certainly not find a specimen of 
 the species in any English novel before.
 
 88 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 As for description and dialogue, there is not very much 
 of the former in Pamela, though it might not be unfair to 
 include under the head those details, after the manner of 
 Defoe (such as Pamela's list of purchases when she thinks 
 she is going home), which supply their own measure of 
 verisimilitude to the story. But there are some things 
 of the kind which Defoe never would have thought of — such 
 as the touches of the " tufts of grass " and the " pretty 
 sort of wildflower that grows yonder near the elm, the fifth 
 from us on the left," which occur in the gipsy scene. The 
 dialogue plays a much more important part: and may be 
 brought into parallel with that in the Polite Conversation, 
 referred to above and published just before Pamela. It is 
 " reported " of course, instead of being directly delivered, 
 in accordance with the letter-scheme of which more 
 presently, but that makes very little difference; to the first 
 readers it probably made no difference at all. Here again 
 that process of " vivification," which has been so often 
 dwelt on, makes an astonishing progress — the blood and 
 colour of the novel, which distinguish it from the more 
 statuesque narrative, are supplied, if indirectly yet suffi- 
 ciently and, in comparison with previous examples, amply. 
 Here you get, almost or quite for the first time in the 
 English novel, those spurts and sparks of animation which 
 only the living voice can supply. Richardson is a humorist 
 but indirectly; yet only the greatest humorists have 
 strokes much better than that admirable touch in which, 
 when the " reconciliations and forgivenesses of injuries " 
 are being arranged, and Mr. B. (quite in the manner of the 
 time) suggests marrying Mrs. Jewkes to the treacherous 
 footman John and giving them an inn to keep — Pamela, 
 the mild and semi-angelic but exceedingly feminine 
 Pamela, timidly inquires whether, " This would not look
 
 THE FOUR WHEELS 89 
 
 like very heavy punishment to poor John ? " She forgives 
 Mrs. Jewkes of course, but only " as a Christian " — as a 
 greater than Richardson put it afterwards and commented* 
 on it in the mouth of a personage whom Richardson could 
 never have drawn, though Fielding most certainly could. 
 
 The original admirers of Pamela, then, were certainly 
 justified: and even the rather fatuous eulogies waich the 
 author prefixed to it from his own and (let us hop^) other 
 pens (and which probably provoked Fielding himself more 
 than even the substance of the piece) could be transposed 
 into a reasonable key. But we ought nowadays to con- 
 sider this first complete English novel from a rather higher 
 point of view, and ask ourselves, not merely what its 
 comparative merits were in regard to its predecessors, and 
 as presented to its first readers, but what its positive 
 character is and what, as far as it goes, are the positive 
 merits or defects which it shows in its author. 
 
 The first thing to strike one in this connection is, almost 
 of course, the letter-form. More agreement has been 
 reached about this, perhaps, than about some other points 
 in the inquiry. The initial difficulty of fiction which does 
 not borrow the glamour of verse or of the stage is the 
 question, " What does all this mean ? " " What is the 
 authority ? " " How does the author know it all ? " And 
 a hundred critics have pointed out that there are practically 
 only three ways of meeting this. The boldest and the 
 best by far is to follow the poet and the dramatist them- 
 selves; to treat it like one of the magic lions of romance, 
 ignore it, and pass on, secure of safety, to tell your story 
 " from the blue," as if it were an actual history or revelation, 
 or something passing before the eyes of the reader. But at 
 that time few novelists had the courage to do this, daunted 
 as they were by the absence of the sword and shield of
 
 go THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 verse, of the vantage-room of the stage. Then there is 
 the alternative of recounting it by the mouth of one of the 
 actors in, or spectators of, the events — a plan obvious, 
 early, presenting some advantages, still very commonly 
 followed, but always full of little traps and pits of im- 
 probability, and peculiarly trying in respect to the char- 
 acter (if he is made to have any) of the narrator himself. 
 Thirdly, there is the again easy resource of the " document " 
 in its various forms. Of these, letters and diaries possess 
 some prerogative advantages; and were likely to suggest 
 themselves very particularly at this time when the actual 
 letter and diary (long rather strangely rare in English) 
 had for some generations appeared, and were beginning 
 to be common. In the first place the information thus 
 obtained looks natural and plausible: and there is a subj 
 sidiary advantage — on which Richardson does not draw 
 very much in Pamela, but which he employs to the full 
 later — that by varying your correspondents you can get 
 different views of the same event, and first-hand mani- 
 festations of extremely different characters. 
 
 Its disadvantages, on the other hand, are equally 
 obvious: but there are two or three of them of especial 
 importance. In the first place, it is essentially an artificial 
 rather than an artful plan — its want of verisimilitude, as 
 soon as you begin to think of it, is as great as that of either 
 of the others if not greater. In the second, without 
 immense pains, it must be " gappy and scrappy," while 
 the more these pains are taken the more artificial it will 
 become. In the third, the book is extremely likely, in the 
 taking of these pains and even without them, to become 
 intolerably lengthy and verbose. In the first part at 
 least of the first part of Pamela, Richardson avoided these 
 dangers fairly if not fully; in the second part he succumbed
 
 THE FOUR WHEELS 91 
 
 to them; in his two later novels, though more elaborate 
 and important plots to some extent bore up the expansion, 
 he succumbed to them almost more. Pains have been 
 taken above to show how the first readers of Pamela might 
 rejoice in it, because of its contrast with the character of 
 the seventeenth-century novel which was most read — the 
 Scudery or " heroic " romance. It is not, I think, too 
 severe to say that nothing but the parallel with that 
 romance, and the tolerance induced by familiarity with it, 
 could make any one put up with the second part of Pamela 
 itself, or with the inhumanly prolonged divagation of 
 Clarissa and Grandison. Nor, as has been hinted, is the 
 solace of the letters — in the opportunity of setting forth 
 different tempers and styles — here much taken. 
 
 There is no doubt that one main attraction of this 
 letter-plan (whether consciously experienced or not does 
 not matter) was its ready adaptation to Richardson's own 
 special and peculiar gift of minute analysis of mood, 
 temper, and motive. The diary avowedly, and the letter 
 in reality, even though it may be addressed to somebody 
 else, is a continuous soliloquy: and the novelist can use 
 it with a frequency and to a length which would be intoler- 
 able and impossible on the stage. Now soliloquy is the 
 great engine for self - revelation and analysis. It is of 
 course to a great extent in consequence of this analysis 
 that Richardson owes his pride of place in the general 
 judgment. It is quite possible to lay too much stress on 
 it, as distinguishing the novel from the romance: and the 
 present writer is of opinion that too much stress has 
 actually been laid. The real difference between romance 
 per se and novel per se (so far as they are capable of distinct 
 existence) is that the romance depends more on incident 
 and the novel more on character. Now this minute
 
 92 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 analysis and exhibition, though it is one way of drawing 
 or constructing character, is not the only, nor even a 
 necessary, one. It can be done without: but it has im- 
 pressed the vulgar, and even some who are not the vulgar, 
 from Dr. Johnson to persons whom it is unnecessary to 
 mention. They cannot beHeve that there is " no decep- 
 tion " — that the time is correctly told — unless the works 
 of the watch are bared to them: and this Richardson most 
 undoubtedly does. Even in his 'prentice work, every 
 flutter of Pamela's^ little heart is registered, and registered 
 probably enough: nor could the registry have been effected, 
 perhaps, in any other way that should be in the -least 
 probable so well as by the letter and journal method. Of 
 course this analysis was not quite new; it had existed in 
 a sort of way in the heroic novel: and it had been eminently 
 present in the famous Princesse de Clhes of Madame de la 
 Fayette as well as in her French successors. But these 
 stories had generally been as short as the heroics had been 
 long: and no one had risen (or descended) to anything 
 like the minuteness and fullness of Richardson. As was 
 before pointed out in regard to the letter-system generally, 
 this method of treatment is exposed to special dangers, 
 particularly those of verbosity and " overdoing " — not to 
 mention the greater one of missing the mark. Richardson 
 can hardly be charged with error, though he may be with 
 excess, in regard to Pamela herself in the earlier part of the 
 book — perhaps even not in regard to Mr. B.'s intricacies 
 of courtship, matrimonial compliment, and arbitrary 
 temper later. But he certainly succumbs to them in the 
 long and monstrous scene in which Lady Davers bullies, 
 storms at, and positively assaults her unfortunate sister-in- 
 law before she is forced to aDow that she is her sister-in- 
 law. Part of course of his error here comes from the
 
 THE FOUR WHEELS 93 
 
 mistake with which Lady Mary afterwards most justly 
 reproached him — that he talked about fine ladies and 
 gentlemen without knowing anything about them. It 
 was quite natural for Lady Davers to be disgusted, to be 
 incredulous, to be tyrannical, to be in a certain sense violent. 
 But it is improbable that she would in any case have 
 spoken and behaved like a drunken fishfag quarrelling 
 with another in the street: and the extreme prolongation 
 of the scene brings its impropriety more forcibly into view. 
 Here, as elsewhere (a point of great importance to which I 
 may invite attention), Richardson follows out, with extra- 
 ordinary minuteness and confidence, a wrong course: and 
 his very expertness in the process betrays him and brings 
 him to grief. If he had run the false scent for a few yards 
 only it would not matter: in a chase prolonged to some- 
 thing like " Hartleap Well " extension there is less excuse 
 for his not finding it out. Nevertheless it would of course 
 be absurd not to rank this " knowledge of the human 
 heart " among the claims which not only gave him but 
 have kept his reputation. I do not know that he shows 
 it much less in the later part of the first two volumes 
 (Pamela's recurrent tortures of jealous curiosity about 
 Sally Godfrey are admirable) or even in the dreary sequel. 
 But analysis for analysis' sake can have few real, though 
 it may have some pretended, devotees. 
 
 The foregoing remarks have been designed, less as a 
 criticism of Pamela (which would be unnecessary here), or 
 even of Richardson (which would be more in place, but 
 shall be given in brief presently), than as an account and 
 justification of the book's position in the real subject of 
 this volume — the History of the English Novel. And this 
 account will dispense us from dealing, at corresponding 
 length, with the individually more important but histori-
 
 94 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 cally subordinate books which followed. Of these Clarissa, 
 as few people can be ignorant, is a sort of enlarged, diversi- 
 fied, and transposed Pamela, in which the attempts of a 
 libertine of more resolution and higher gifts than Mr. B. 
 upon a young lady of much more than proportionately 
 higher station and qualities than Pamela's, are — as such 
 success goes — successful at last: but only to result in the 
 death of the victim and the punishment of the criminal. 
 The book is far longer than even the extended Pamela ; has 
 a much wider range; admits of episodes and minor plots, 
 and is altogether much more ambitious; but still — though 
 the part of the seducer Lovelace is much more important 
 than that of Mr. B. — it is chiefly occupied with the heroine. 
 In Sir Charles Grandison, on the contrary, though no less 
 than three heroines exist after a fashion and are carefuUy 
 treated, the author's principal object is to depict — in direct 
 contrast to Mr. B. and Lovelace — a " Good Man " — the 
 actual first title of the book, which he wisely altered. This 
 faultless and insufferable monster is frantically beloved by, 
 and hesitates long between, two beauties, the Italian 
 Clementina della Porretta and the English Harriet Byron. 
 The latter of these carries him off (rather because of 
 religious difficulties than of any great predilection on his 
 own part) and the piece ends with a repetition, extension, 
 and intensification of the bounties showered upon Pamela 
 by her husband, and her almost abject gratitude for them. 
 Only of course " the good man " could never be guilty of 
 Mr. B.'s meditated relapse from the path of rectitude, nor 
 (one may perhaps add) does Miss Byron seem to possess the 
 insinuating astuteness by which Pamela once more 
 
 " Reconciles the new perverted man," 
 to adapt the last line of J Lover'' s Complaint to the situation.
 
 THE FOUR WHEELS 95 
 
 Grandison, like Clarissa, has a much wider range of 
 personage and incident than Pamela, and is again double 
 the length of it. No detailed criticism of these enormous 
 books (both of which are conducted in the letter-form, 
 though, in the latter case especially, with long retrospects 
 and narratives which rather strain the style) is possible 
 here. But a few remarks on the characters of Lovelace 
 and Clarissa, which have usually been regarded as Richard- 
 son's greatest triumphs, may fitly precede some on his 
 whole character as a novelist. 
 
 Admiration and sympathy, tempered with a few reserves, 
 have been the general notes of comment on Clarissa: and 
 — as she goes through the long martyrdom of persecution 
 by her family for not marrying the man she does not love; 
 of worse persecution from the man whom she does love, 
 but who will not marry her, at least until he has conquered 
 her virtue; and of perhaps worst when she feels it her duty 
 to resist his repentant and (as such things go) honourable 
 proffers after he has treacherously deprived her of technical 
 honour — compassion at least is impossible to refuse. But 
 " compassion," though it literally translates " sympathy " 
 from Greek into Latin, is not its synonym in English. It 
 is a disagreeable thing to have to say: but Clarissa's purity 
 strikes one as having at once too much questionable 
 prudery in it and too little honest prudence: while her 
 later resolution has as much false pride as real principle. 
 Even some of her admirers admit a want of straightfor- 
 wardness in her; she has no passion, which rather derogates 
 from the merit of her conduct in any case; and though she 
 is abominably ill-treated by almost everybody, one's pity 
 for her never comes very near to love. 
 
 Towards Lovelace, on the other hand, the orthodox 
 attitude, with even greater uniformity, has been shocked.
 
 96 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 or sometimes even unshocked, admiration. Hazlitt went 
 into frequently quoted raptures over the " regality " of his 
 character: and though to approve of him as a man would 
 only be the pretence of a cheap paradoxer, general opinion 
 seems to have gone various lengths in the same direction. 
 There have, however, been a few dissenters : and I venture 
 to join myself to them in the very dissidence of their 
 dissent. Lovelace, it is true, is a most astonishingly 
 " succeeded " blend of a snob's fine gentleman and of the 
 fine gentleman of a silly and rather unhealthy-minded 
 schoolgirl. He is — it is difficult to resist the temptation 
 of dropping and inserting the h's — handsome, haughty, 
 arbitrary, as well as rich, generous after a fashion, well 
 descended, well dressed, well mannered — except when he 
 is insolent. He is also — which certainly stands to his 
 credit in the bank which is not that of the snob or the 
 schoolgirl — no fool in a general way. But he is not in the 
 least a gentleman except in externals: and there is nothing 
 really " great " about him at all. Even his scoundrelism 
 is mostly, if not wholly, fose — which abominable thing 
 indeed distinguishes him throughout, in every speech and 
 every act, from the time when he sighs as he kisses Miss 
 Arabella Harlowe's hand to the time when he says, " Let 
 this expiate! " as that hallowed sword of Colonel Morden's 
 passes through his rotten heart. Now if Richardson had 
 meant this, it might be granted at once that Lovelace is 
 one of the greatest characters of fiction: and I do not deny 
 that taken as this, meant or not meant, he is great. But 
 Richardson obviously did not mean it; and Hazlitt did 
 not mean it; and none of the admirers mean it. They all 
 thought and think that Lovelace is something like what 
 Milton's Satan was, and what my Lord Byron would 
 have liked to be. This is very unfair to the Prince of
 
 THE FOUR WHEELS 97 
 
 Darkness: and it is even not quite just to "the noble 
 poet." 
 
 At the same time, the acute reader will have noticed, 
 the acknowledgment that the fact that Richardson — even 
 not knowing it and intending to do something else — did hit 
 off perfectly and consummately the ideal of such a " pre- 
 vaihng party " (to quote Lord Foppington) as snobs and 
 schoolgirls, is a serious and splendid tribute to his merits : 
 as is also the fact that his two chief characters are characters 
 still interesting and worth arguing about. Those merits, 
 indeed, are absolutely incontestable. His immediate and 
 immense popularity, abroad as well as at home, would not 
 necessarily prove much, though it must not be neglected, 
 and historically, at least, is of the first importance. But 
 he does not need it. 
 
 For, as should have been sufficiently shown, he did very 
 great things — first by gathering up the scattered means 
 and methods which had been half ignorantly hit on by 
 others, and co-ordinating them into the production of the 
 finished and complete novel; secondly (though less) by 
 that infusion of elaborate " minor psychology " as it may 
 be called, which is his great characteristic; and, thirdly, 
 by means of it and of other things, in raising the pitch of 
 interest in his readers to an infinitely higher degree than 
 had ever been known before. The dithyrambs of Diderot 
 are, though not ridiculously, amusingly excessive: but 
 they are only an exaggeration of the truth. On the comic 
 side he was weak : and he made a most unfortunate mistake 
 by throwing this part of the business on young ladies of 
 position and (as he thought) of charm — Miss Darnford, 
 Miss Howe, Charlotte Grandison — who are by no means 
 particularly comic and who are sometimes very particularly 
 vulgar. But of tragedy positive, in the bourgeois kind, he
 
 98 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 had no small command, and in the middle business — in 
 affairs neither definitely comic nor definitely tragic — he 
 was wonderfully prolific and facile. His immense and 
 heart-breaking lengthiness is not mere verbosity: it comes 
 partly from the artist's natural delight in a true and newly 
 found method, partly from a still more respectably artistic 
 desire not to do the work negligently. As for the un- 
 healthiness of atmosphere which has been generally and 
 not unjustly charged upon him, it is, in part, no doubt the 
 result of imperfect temperament and breeding: but it is 
 also as closely connected with his very method as are 
 the merits thereof. You cannot " consider so curiously " 
 without considering too curiously. The drawbacks of his 
 work are obvious, and they were hkely to be, and were, 
 exaggerated. But they might be avoided and the merits 
 kept: nor is it too much to say that the triumphs of the 
 English novel in the last century have been not a httle 
 due to the avoidance of the one and the keeping of the 
 other. 
 
 It would be, in the circumstances, peculiarly uncivil and 
 disobliging to lay very much stress on the fact that, after 
 all, the greatest of Richardson's works is his successor, 
 caricaturist, and superior — Fielding. When the memoirs 
 of Miss Pamela Andrews appeared, the future biographer 
 of her doubly supposititious brother was a not very young 
 man of thirty-three, who had written a good many not 
 very good plays, had contributed to periodicals, and had 
 done a little work at the Bar, besides living, at least till his 
 marriage and it may be feared later, an exceedingly 
 " rackety " life. It is not improbable, though it is not 
 certain, that he had already turned his attention to prose 
 fiction of a kind. For, though the Miscellanies which 
 followed "Joseph Andrews were three years later than
 
 THE FOUR WHEELS 99 
 
 Pamela in appearance, the Journey from this World to the 
 Next which they contain has the immaturity of earliness; 
 and we can hardly conceive it as written after the adven- 
 tures and character of Mr. Abraham Adams. It is unequal, 
 rather tedious in parts, and in conception merely a fastiche 
 of Lucian and Fontenelle: but it contains some remarkable 
 things in the way of shrewd satirical observation of human 
 nature. And the very fact that it is a following of some- 
 thing else is interesting, in connection with the infinitely 
 more important work that preceded it in publication, 
 The Adventures of Joseph Andrews and his Friend Mr. 
 Abraham Adams (1742). 
 
 Nobody has ever had much difficulty in accounting for 
 the way in which Fielding availed himself of the appear- 
 ance and popularity of Pamela. And though Richardson 
 would have been superhuman instead of very human 
 indeed (with an ordinary British middle-class humanity, 
 and an extraordinary vein of genius) if he had done other- 
 wise, few have joined him in thinking Joseph a " lewd and 
 ungenerous engraftment." We have not ourselves been 
 very severe on the faults of Pamela, the reason of lenity 
 being, among other things, that it in a manner produced 
 Fielding, and all the fair herd of his successors down to the 
 present day. But those faults are glaring: and they were 
 of a kind specially likely to attract the notice and the 
 censure of a genial, wholesome, and, above all, masculine 
 taste and intellect like Fielding's. Even at that time, 
 libertine as it was in some ways, and sentimental as it was 
 in others, people had not failed to notice that Pamela's 
 virtue is not quite what was then called " neat " wine — 
 the pure and unadulterated juice of the grape. The 
 longueurs and the fiddle-faddle, the shameless and fulsome 
 preface-advertisements and the rest lay open enough to
 
 100 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 censure. So Fielding saw the handles, and gripped them 
 at once by starting a male Pamela — a situation not only- 
 offering " most excellent differences," but in itself possess- 
 ing, to graceless humanity at all times it may be feared, 
 and at that time perhaps specially, something essentially 
 ludicrous in minor points. At first he kept the parody 
 very close: though the necessary transposition of the 
 parts afforded opportunity (amply taken) for display of 
 character and knowledge of nature superior to Richard- 
 son's own. Later the general opinion is that he, especially 
 inspirited by his trouvaille of Adams, almost forgot the 
 parody, and only furbished up the P^m^/^-connection at 
 the end to make a formal correspondence with the begin- 
 ning, and to get a convenient and conventional " curtain." 
 I am not so sure of this. Even Adams is to a certain 
 extent suggested by Williams, though they turn out such 
 very different persons, Mrs. SHpslop, a character, as Gray 
 saw, not so very far inferior to Adams, is not only a parallel 
 to Mrs. Jewkes, but also, and much more, a contrast to 
 the respectable Mrs. Jervis and Mrs. Warden. All sorts 
 of fantastic and not-fantastic doublets may be traced 
 throughout: and I am not certain that Parson Trulliber's 
 majestic doctrine that no man, even in his own house, shall 
 drink when he " caaled vurst " is not a demoniacally 
 ingenious travesty of Pamela's characteristic casuistry, 
 when she says that she will do anything to propitiate Lady 
 Davers, but she will not " fill wine " to her in her own 
 husband's house. 
 
 But this matters little: and we have no room for it. 
 Suffice it as agreed and out of controversy that Joseph 
 Andrews started as a parody of Pamela and that, whether 
 in addition or in substitution, it turned to something very 
 different. It is not quite so uncontroversial, but wiU be
 
 THE FOUR WHEELS loi 
 
 asserted here as capable of all but demonstration, that the 
 " something different " is also something much greater. 
 There is still not very much plot — the parody did not 
 necessitate and indeed rather discouraged that, and what 
 there is is arrived at chiefly by the old and seldom very 
 satisfactory system of anagnorisis — the long-lost-child 
 business. But, under the three other heads, Joseph 
 distances his sister hopelessly and can afford her much 
 more than weight for sex. It has been said that there are 
 doubtfully in Richardson anywhere, and certainly not in 
 Pamela, those startling creations of personality which are 
 almost more real to us than the persons we know in the 
 flesh. It is not that Pamela and her meyney are wwreal; 
 for they are not: but that they are not personal. The 
 Reverend Abraham Adams is a good deal more real than 
 half the parsons who preached last Sunday, and a good 
 deal more personal: and the quality is not confined to him, 
 though he has most of it. So, too, with the description. 
 The time was not yet for any minute or elaborate picture- 
 setting. But here again also that extra dose of life and 
 action — almost of bustle — which Fielding knows how to 
 instil is present. In Pamela the settings are frequent, but 
 they are " still life " and rather shadowy: we do not see 
 the Bedfordshire and Lincolnshire mansions, the summer 
 houses where (as she observes with demure relish when the 
 danger is over) Mr. B. was " very naughty; " even the 
 pond where, if she had been another sort of girl, the drame 
 might have become real tragedy. Fielding does not take 
 very much more trouble and yet somehow we do see it all, 
 with a little help from our own imaginations perhaps, but 
 on his suggestion and start. Especially the outdoor life 
 and scenes — the inn-yards and the high roads and the 
 downs by night or day; the pig-sty where poor Adams is 
 
 .1 li-Hi,. J : h
 
 102 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 the victim of live pigs and the pubhc-house kitchen where 
 he succumbs to a by-product of dead ones — these are all 
 real for us. 
 
 But most of all is the regular progress of vivification 
 visible in the dialogue. This, as we have seen, had been 
 the very weakest point of the weakness of almost all 
 (we might say of all) English novels up to the close of the 
 first quarter of the eighteenth century. Richardson had 
 done a great deal for it: but it was impossible that, on his 
 method, it should not, for the most part, be languid, or at 
 any rate long-wnded. Here again Fielding spirits the 
 thing up — oxygenates and ozonises the atmosphere: while, 
 in even fuller measure than his predecessor and victim, he 
 recognises the efficacy of dialogue as the revealer of char- 
 acter. He has, assisted no doubt by Shakespeare and his 
 own dramatic practice, discovered that you do not want 
 volumes of it to do the business — that single moments and 
 single sentences will do that business at times, if they are 
 used in the proper way. 
 
 In short. Fielding here used his reluctant and indignant 
 forerunner as a spring-board, whence to attain heights 
 which that forerunner could never have reached: he 
 " stood upon his shoulders " in the most cavalier but also 
 the most successful fashion. In the novel as Richardson 
 knew it and was thinking of it, when he began Pamela, you 
 were, as a rule, in an artificial world altogether — a world 
 artificial with an artificiality only faintly and occasionally 
 touched with any reality at all. In Pamela itself there is 
 perhaps nothing, and certainly not much, that is wholly 
 unreal: but the reality is treated and rendered in an 
 artificial way. In Joseph Andrews, though its professed 
 genesis and procedure are artificial too, you break away at 
 once from serious artifice. These are all real people who
 
 THE FOUR WHEELS 103 
 
 do real things in a real way now, as they did nearly two 
 hundred years ago: however much dress, and speech, and 
 manners may have changed. And we are told of their 
 doings in a real way, too. Exactly how the teller knew it 
 we do not know: but we do not think of this at all. And 
 on the other hand there is no perpetual reminder of art, like 
 the letter-ending and beginning, to disturb or alloy the 
 once and gladly accepted " suspension of disbelief." 
 
 A slight digression may not be improper here. Even 
 in their own days, when the gros mot was much less shocking 
 than it is now, there was a general notion — which has more 
 or less persisted, in spite of all changes of fashion in this 
 respect, and exists even now when licence of subject as 
 distinguished from phrase has to a great extent returned — 
 that Fielding is more " coarse," more " improper," and so 
 forth than Richardson. As a matter of fact, neither 
 admits positively indecent language — that had gone out, 
 except in the outskirts and fringes of English literature, 
 generations earlier. But I am much mistaken if there are 
 not in Richardson more than a few scenes and situations 
 the " impropriety " of which positively exceeds anything 
 in Fielding. Naturally one does not give indications: 
 but readers may be pretty confident about the fact. The 
 comparative " bloodlessness," however — the absence of 
 life and colour in the earlier and older writer — acts as a 
 sort of veil to them. 
 
 Yet (to return to larger and purer air), however much 
 one may admire Joseph Andrews, the kind of parasitic 
 representation which it allows itself, and the absence of 
 any attempt to give an original story tells against it. And 
 it may, in any case, be regarded as showing that the 
 novelist, even yet, was hugging the shore or allowing him- 
 self to be taken in tow — that he did not dare to launch out
 
 104 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 into the deep and trust to his own sails and the wind of 
 nature to propel him — to his own wits and soul to guide. 
 Even Fielding's next venture — the wonderful and almost 
 unique venture of Jonathan Wild — leaves some objection 
 of this sort possible, though, for myself, I should never 
 dream of admitting it. Jonathan was (so much the worse 
 for human nature) a real person: and the outlines of his 
 story — if not the actual details — are given partly by his 
 actual life, partly by Gay's Beggar's Opera and its sequel. 
 Moreover, the whole marvellous little book has a purpose — 
 the purpose of satire on false ideas of greatness, historical 
 and political. The invention and the art of the writer are 
 not even yet allowed frank and free course. 
 
 But though criticism will allow this, it will, if it be com- 
 petent and courageous, allow no deduction to be made from 
 the other greatness of this little masterpiece. It has never 
 been popular; it is never likely to be popular; and one 
 may almost say that it is sincerely to be hoped that it 
 never wiU be popular. For if it were, either all the world 
 would be scoundrels, which would be a pity: or all the 
 world would be philosophers and persons of taste, in which 
 case it would be impossible, as the famous story has it, to 
 " look down on one's fellow-creatures from a proper 
 elevation." It really is a novel and a remarkable one — 
 superior even to Vanity Fair^ according to Thackeray's 
 own definition, as a delineation of " a set of people living 
 without God in the world." But it is even more (and here 
 its only parallel is A Tale of a Tub, which is more desultory 
 and much more of a fairasie or salmagundy of odds and 
 ends) a masterpiece and quintessential example of irony. 
 Irony had come in with the plain prose style, without 
 which it is almost impossible: and not merely Swift but 
 others had done great things with it. It is, however, only
 
 THE FOUR WHEELS 105 
 
 here that it reaches the quintessence just spoken of with 
 a coherent and substantive purpose to serve as vehicle 
 for it. It is possibly too strong for most people's taste: 
 and one may admit that, for anything like frequent enjoy- 
 ment, it wants a certain admixture of the fantastic in its 
 various senses — after the method of Voltaire in one way, 
 of Beckford in another, of Peacock in a third, of Disraeli 
 in a fourth — to make it acceptable to more than a very 
 few. But it shows, even from our present limited point 
 of view, of what immense and exalted application the 
 novel-method was capable: and it shows also the astonish- 
 ing powers of its author. " Genial," in the usual sense, it 
 certainly cannot be called; in the proper sense as equalling 
 " what is the production of genius " there are few books 
 which deserve the term better. But it is an exercise in 
 a by-way of the novel road-system, though an early proof 
 of the fact that such by-ways are endlessly open. 
 
 But the time was coming, though it did not (and could 
 hardly) come very quickly, when Fielding was to discard 
 all kinds of adventitious aids and suggestions — all crutches, 
 spring-boards, go-carts, tugs, patterns, tracings — and go 
 his own way — and the Way of the Novel — with no guidance 
 but something of the example of Cervantes directly and 
 Shakespeare indirectly among the moderns, and of the 
 poetic fiction-writers of old. It is perfectly clear that he 
 had thought widely (and perhaps had read not a little) 
 on the subject of literary criticism, in a sense not common 
 in his day, and that the thinking had led him to a con- 
 ception of the " prose epic " which, though it might have 
 been partly (not wholly by any means) pieced out of the 
 Italian and Spanish critics of the late sixteenth and early 
 seventeenth centuries, had never been worked out as a 
 complete theory, much less applied in practice and to
 
 io6 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 prose. The Prose Epic aims at — and in Fielding's case 
 has been generally admitted to have hit — something like 
 the classical unity of main action. But it borrows from 
 the romance -idea the liberty of a large accretion and 
 divagation of minor and accessory plot: — not the mere 
 " episode " of the ancients, but the true minor plot of 
 Shakespeare. It assumes, necessarily and once for aU, 
 the licence of tragi-comedy, in that sense of the term in 
 which Much Ado About Nothing and A Winter's Tale are 
 tragi-comedies, and in which Othello itself might have been 
 made one. And it foUows further in the wake of the 
 Shakespearean drama by insisting far more largely than 
 ancient literature of any kind, and far more than any 
 modern up to its date except drama had done, on the 
 importance of Character. Description and dialogue are 
 rather subordinate to these things than on a level with them 
 — but they are still further worked out than before. And 
 there is a new element — perhaps suggested by the parabasis 
 of ancient comedy, but, it may be, more directly by the 
 peculiar method of Swift in A Tale of a Tub. At various 
 places in his narrative, but especially at the beginnings of 
 books and chapters. Fielding as it were " calls a halt " and 
 addresses his readers on matters more or less relevant to 
 the story, but rather in the manner of a commentator and 
 scholiast upon it than as actual parts of it. Of this more 
 later : for the immediate purpose is to survey and not to 
 criticise. 
 
 The result of all this was Tom Jones — by practically 
 universal consent one of the capital books of English 
 literature. It is unnecessary to recapitulate the famous 
 praises of Gibbon, of Coleridge, of Byron, and of others : and 
 it is only necessary to deal briefly with the complaints 
 which, if they have never found such monumental expres-
 
 THE FOUR WHEELS 107 
 
 sion as the praises, have been sometimes widely entertained. 
 These objections — as regards interest — fasten partly on 
 the address-digressions, partly on the great inset-episode 
 of " The Man of the Hill: " as regards morality on a certain 
 alleged looseness of principle in that respect throughout, 
 and especially on the licence of conduct accorded to the 
 hero himself and the almost entire absence of punishment 
 for it. As for the first, " The Man of the Hill " was partly 
 a concession to the fancy of the time for such things, partly 
 a following of such actual examples as Fielding admitted — 
 for it need hardly be said that the inset-episode, of no or 
 very slight connection with the story, is common both in 
 the ancients and in Cervantes, while it is to be found as 
 long after Fielding as in the early novel-work of Dickens. 
 The digression-openings are at least as satisfactory to 
 some as they are unsatisfactory to others; it is even 
 doubtful whether they annoy anybody half so much as 
 they have delighted some excellent judges. The other 
 point is well worn: but the wearing has not taken off its 
 awkwardness and unsavouriness. Difference of habit and 
 manners at the time will account for much: but the wiser 
 apologists will simply say that Fielding's attitude to certain 
 deviations from the strict moral law was undoubtedly very 
 indulgent, provided that such deviations were unaccom- 
 panied by the graver and more detestable vices of cruelty, 
 treachery, and fraud — that to vice which was accompanied 
 by these blacker crimes he was utterly merciless; and 
 that if he is thus rather exposed to the charge of " com- 
 pounding by damning " — in the famous phrase — the things 
 that he damned admit of no excuse and those that he 
 compounded for have been leniently dealt with by all 
 but the sternest moralists. 
 
 Such things are, however (in the admirable French sense),
 
 io8 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 mis^res — wretched petty cavils and shallows of criticism. 
 The only sensible thing to do is to launch out with Fielding 
 into that deep and open sea of human character and fate 
 which he dared so gloriously. During the curious phase 
 of literary opinion which the last twenty years or so have 
 seen, it has apparently been discovered by some people 
 that his scheme of human thought and feeling is too simple 
 — " toylike " I think they call it — in comparison with that, 
 say, of Count Tolstoi or of Mr. Meredith, that modern 
 practice has reached a finer technique than his or even 
 than that of his greatest follower, Thackeray. Far be it 
 from the present writer to say, or to insinuate, anything 
 disrespectful of the great moderns who have lately left us. 
 Yet it may be said Avithout the slightest disrespect to 
 them that the unfavourable comparison is mainly a revival 
 of Johnson's mistake as to Fielding and Richardson. It 
 is, however, something more — for it comes also from a 
 failure to estimate aright the parabasis-o^Qmngs which 
 have been more than once referred to. These passages 
 do not perhaps exhibit the by-work and the process in 
 the conspicuous skeleton-clock fashion which their critics 
 admire and desire, but they contain an amount of acute 
 and profound exploration of human nature which it would 
 be difficult to match and impossible to surpass elsewhere: 
 while the results of Fielding's working, of his " toylike " 
 scheme, are remarkable toys indeed — toys which, if we 
 regard them as such, must surely strike us as rather 
 uncanny. One is sometimes constrained to think that it 
 is perhaps not much more difficult to make than to recog- 
 nise a thoroughly live character. It certainly must be 
 very difficult to do the latter if there is any considerable 
 number of persons who are unable to do it in the case of 
 almost every one of the personages of Tom Jones. With
 
 THE FOUR WHEELS 109 
 
 one possible exception they are all alive — even more so 
 than those of Joseph Andrews and with a less peculiar and 
 limited liveliness than those of Jonathan Wild. But it 
 certainly is curious that as the one good man of Jonathan, 
 Heartfree, is the least alive of its personages, so the one 
 bad man of Tom, Blifil, occupies the same position. 
 
 The result of this variety and abundance of life is an 
 even more than corresponding opportunity for enjoyment. 
 This enjoyment may arise in different persons from different 
 sources. The much praised and seldom cavilled at unity 
 and completeness of the story may appeal to some. There 
 are others who are inclined towards elaborate plots as 
 Sam Weller was to the " 'rig'nal " of his subpoena. It 
 was a " gratifyin' sort o' thing, and eased his mind " to be 
 aware of its existence, and that was all. These latter find 
 their sources of enjoyment elsewhere, but everywhere else. 
 The abundance and the vividness of character-presentation; 
 the liveliness and the abundance of the staging of that 
 character; the variety of scene and incident — all most 
 properly connected with the plot, but capable of existing 
 and of being felt without it; the human dialogue; the 
 admirable phrase in that dialogue and out of it, in the 
 digressions, in the narrative, above, and through, and about, 
 and below it all — these things and others (for it is practi- 
 cally impossible to exhaust the catalogue) fill up the cup 
 to the brim, and keep it full, for the born lover of the 
 special novel-pleasure. 
 
 In one point only was Fielding a little unfortunate per- 
 haps: and even here the " perhaps " has to be underlined. 
 He came just before the end of a series of almost imper- 
 ceptible changes in ordinary English speech which brought 
 about something like a stationary state. His maligner 
 and only slightly younger contemporary, Horace Walpole,
 
 no THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 in some of his letters, writes in a fashion which, putting 
 mere slang aside, has hardly any difference from that of 
 to-day. Fielding still uses " hath " for " has " and a few 
 other things which seem archaic, not to students of litera- 
 ture but to the general. In the same way dress, manners, 
 etc., though much more picturesque, were by that fact 
 distinguished from those of almost the whole nineteenth 
 century and the twentieth as far as it has gone: while 
 incidents were, even in ordinary life, still usual which have 
 long ceased to be so. In this way the immense advance — 
 greater than was made by any one else till Miss Austen — 
 that he made in the pure novel of this ordinary life may be 
 missed. But the intrinsic magnificence, interest, nature, 
 abundance of Tom Jones can only be missed by those who 
 were predestined to miss them. It is tempting — but the 
 temptation must be resisted — to enliven these pages with 
 an abstract of its astonishing " biograph-panorama." But 
 nothing save itself can do it justice. " Take and read " 
 is the only wise advice. 
 
 No such general agreement has been reached in respect 
 of Fielding's last novel, Amelia. The author's great 
 adversary, Johnson — an adversary whose hostility was due 
 partly to generous and grateful personal relations with 
 Richardson, partly to political disagreement (for Fielding 
 was certainly " a vile Whig "), but most of all perhaps to 
 a sort of horrified recoil from the novelist's easy handling 
 of temptations which were no easy matter to his critic — 
 was nearly if not quite propitiated by it: and the enthu- 
 siasm for it of such a " cynic " as Thackeray is well known. 
 Of the very few persons whom it would not be ridiculous to 
 name with these, Scott — whose competence in criticising 
 his own art is one of the most wonderful though the least 
 generally recognised things about him — inclines, in the
 
 THE FOUR WHEELS iii 
 
 interesting Introduction-Dialogue to The Fortunes of Nigel, 
 to put it on a level with Tom Jones itself as a perfectly 
 constructed novel. But modern criticism has, rightly or 
 wrongly, been more dubious. AmeHa is almost too perfect: 
 her very forgiveness (it has been suggested) would be more 
 interesting if she had not almost completely shut her eyes 
 to there being anything to forgive. Her husband seems 
 to us to prolong the irresponsibihty of youth, which was 
 pardonable in Tom, to a period of life and to circumstances 
 of enforced responsibility which make us rather decline to 
 honour the drafts he draws; and he is also a little bit of a 
 fool, which Tom, to do him justice, is not, though he is 
 something of a scatterbrain. Dr. Harrison, whose alternate 
 wrath and reconciliation supply the most important springs 
 of the plot, is, though a natural, a rather unreasonable 
 person. The " total impression " has even been pronounced 
 by some people to be a Httle dull. What there is of truth 
 in these criticisms and others (which it would be long even 
 to summarise) may perhaps be put briefly under two 
 heads. It is never so easy to arouse interest in virtue as 
 it is in vice: or in weak and watered vice as in vice rectified 
 (or Mwrectified) to full strength. And the old requirement 
 of " the quest " is one which will hardly be dispensed with. 
 Here (for we know perfectly well that AmeUa's virtue is in 
 no danger) there is no quest, except that of the fortune 
 which ought to be hers, which at last comes to her husband, 
 and which we are told (and hope rather doubtfully) that 
 husband had at last been taught — by the Fool's Tutor, 
 Experience — not utterly to throw away. But this fortune 
 drops in half casually at the last by a series of stage 
 accidents, not ill-machined by any means, but not very 
 particularly interesting. 
 
 Such, however, are the criticisms which Fielding himself
 
 112 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 has taught people to make, by the very excellence of his 
 success in the earher novels: and there is a certain com- 
 parative and relative vaHdity in them. But consider 
 Amelia in itself, and they begin to look, if not positively 
 unfounded, rather unimportant. Once more, the astonish- 
 ino- truth and variety of scene and character make them- 
 selves felt — even more felt — even felt in new directions. 
 The opening prison scenes exceed anything earher even in 
 Fielding himself, much more in any one else, as examples 
 of the presentation of the unfamiliar. Miss Matthews — 
 whom Fielding has probably abstained from working out 
 as much as he might lest she should, from the hterary 
 point of view, obscure Ameha — is a marvellous outhne; 
 Colonels James and Bath are perfectly finished studies of 
 ordinary and extraordinary " character " in the stage 
 sense. No novel even of the author's is fuller of vignettes 
 — little pictures of action and behaviour, of manners and 
 society, which are not in the least irrelevant to the general 
 story, but on the contrary extra - illustrate and carry 
 it out. 
 
 While, therefore, we must in no way recede from the 
 position above adopted in regard to Richardson, we may 
 quite consistently accord an even higher place to Fielding. 
 He reheved the novel of the tyranny and constraint of the 
 Letter; he took it out of the rut of confinement to a single 
 or a very limited class of subjects — for the themes of 
 Pamela and Clarissa to a very large extent, of Pamela and 
 Grandison to a considerable one, and of all three to an 
 extent not small, are practically the same. He gave it 
 altogether a larger, wider, higher, deeper range. He 
 infused in it (or restored to it) the refreshing and preserving 
 element of humour. He peopled it with a great crowd of 
 lively and interesting characters — endowed, almost without
 
 THE FOUR WHEELS 113 
 
 regard to their technical " position hi life," with unlimited 
 possession of life. He shook up its pillows, and bustled 
 its business arrangements. He first gave it — for in matter 
 of prose style Richardson has few resources, and those 
 rather respectable than transporting, and decidedly 
 monotonous — the attractions of pure literature in form, 
 and in pretty various form. He also gave it the attraction 
 of pure comedy, only legitimately salted with farce, in 
 such personages as Adams and Partridge; of lower and 
 more farcical, but still admirable comedy in Slipslop and 
 Trulliber and Squire Western; of comedy almost romantic 
 and certainly charming in Sophia; of domestic drama in 
 Amelia; of satiric portraiture in a hundred figures from 
 the cousins (respectable and disreputable). Miss Western and 
 Lady Bellaston, downwards. He stocked it with infinite 
 miscellanies of personage, and scene, and picture, and 
 phrase. As has happened in one or two other cases, he 
 carried, at least in the opinion of the present writer, the 
 particular art as far as it will go. He did not indeed leave 
 nothing for his successors to do — on the contrary he left 
 them in a sense everything — for he showed how everything 
 could be done. But if he has sometimes been equalled, 
 he has never been surpassed: and it is not easy to see even 
 how he can be surpassed. For as his greatest follower 
 has it somewhere, though not of him, " You cannot beat 
 the best, you know." 
 
 One point only remains, the handling of which may 
 complete a treatment which is designedly kept down in 
 detail. It has been hinted at already, perhaps more than 
 once, but has not been brought out. This is the enormous 
 range of suggestion in Fielding — the innumerable doors 
 which stand open in his ample room, and lead from it to 
 other chambers and corridors of the endless palace of 
 
 H
 
 114 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 Novel-Romance. This had most emphatically not been 
 the case with his predecessor: for Richardson, except in 
 point of mere length, showed little power of expatiation, 
 kept himself very much to the same ground and round, 
 and was not likely to teach anybody else to make excur- 
 sions. Indeed Fielding's breaking away in Joseph Andrews 
 is an allegory in itself. But, at least with pupils and 
 followers of any wits, there was not even any need of such 
 breaking away from himself, though no doubt there are 
 in existence many dull and slavish attempts to follow his 
 work, especially Tom Jones. " Find it out for yourself " 
 — the great English motto which in the day of England's 
 glory was the motto of her men of learning as well as of 
 her men of business, of her artists as well as of her crafts- 
 men — might have been Fielding's: but he supplemented 
 it with infinite finger-pointings towards the various things 
 that might be found out. Almost every kind of novel 
 exists — potentially — in his Four (the custom of leaving out 
 Jonathan Wild should be wholly abrogated), though of 
 course they do not themselves illustrate or carry out at 
 length many of the kinds that they thus suggest. 
 
 And in fact it could not be otherwise: because, as has 
 been pointed out, while Fielding had no inconsiderable 
 command of the Book of Literature, he turned over by day 
 and night the larger, the more difficult, but still the greater 
 Book of Life. Not merely quicquid agunt homines, but 
 quicquid sentiunt, quicquid cogitant, whatever they love 
 and hate, whatever they desire or decline — all these things 
 are the subjects of his own books: and the range of sub- 
 ject which they suggest to others is thus of necessity 
 inexhaustible. 
 
 If there have been some who denied or failed to recognise 
 his greatness, it must be because he has played on these
 
 THE FOUR WHEELS 115 
 
 unwary ones the same trick that Garrick, in an immortal 
 scene, played on his own Partridge. There is so little 
 parade about Fielding (for even the opening addresses are 
 not parade to these good people: they may disconcert or 
 even disgust, but they do not dazzle them), that his char- 
 acters and his scenes look commonplace. They feel sure 
 that " if they had seen a ghost they would have looked 
 in the very same manner and done just as he does." They 
 are sure that, in the scene with Gertrude, " Lord, help 
 them! any man — that is any good man — that had such 
 a mother would have done exactly the same." 
 
 Well! in a way no doubt they are right; and one may 
 imitate the wisdom of Mr. Jones on the original occasion 
 in not saying much more to them. To others, of course, 
 this is the very miracle of art — a miracle, as far as the art 
 of prose fiction is concerned, achieved in its fuUness for 
 practically the first time. This is the true mimesis — the 
 re-creation or fresh creation of fictitious reality. There 
 were in Fielding's time, and probably ever since have been, 
 those who thought him " low; " there were, even in his 
 own time, and have been in varying, but on the whole 
 rather increased, degree since, those who thought him 
 immoral: there appear to be some who think (or would 
 like it to be thought that they think) him commonplace 
 and obvious. Now, as it happens, all these charges have 
 been brought against Nature too. To embellish, and 
 correct, and heighten, and extra-decorate her was not 
 Fielding's way: but to foUow, and to interpret, and to take 
 up her own processes with results uncommonly like her 
 own. That is his immense glory to all those who can 
 realise and understand it: and as for the others we must 
 let them alone, joined to their own idols. 
 
 In passing to the third of this great quartette, we make
 
 ii6 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 a little descent, but not much of one, while the new peak 
 to which we come is well defined and separated, with 
 characters and outlines all its own. It may be doubted 
 whether any competent critic not, like Scott, bribed by 
 compatriotism, ever put Smollett above Fielding, or even on 
 a level with him. Thackeray, in one of the most inspired 
 moments of his rather irregularly - inspired criticism, 
 remarks, " I fancy he did not invent much," and this of 
 itself would refer him to a lower class. The writer of 
 fiction is not to refuse suggestion from his experience; on 
 the contrary, he will do so at his peril, and will hardly by 
 any possibility escape shipwreck unless his line is the 
 purely fantastic. But if he relies solely, or too much, on 
 such experience, though he may be quite successful, his 
 success will be subject to discount, bound to pay royalty 
 to experience itself. It is pretty certain that most of 
 Smollett's most successful things, from Roderick Random 
 to Humphry Clinker, and in those two capital books, 
 perhaps, most of all, kept very close to actual experience, 
 and sometimes merely reported it. 
 
 This, however, is only a comparative drawback; it is in 
 a sense a positive merit; and it is connected, in a very 
 intimate way, with the general character of Smollett's 
 novel-method. This is, to a great extent, a reaction or 
 relapse towards the picaresque style. Smollett may 
 have translated both Cervantes and Le Sage; he certainly 
 translated the latter: and it was Le Sage who in any case 
 had the greatest influence over him. Now the picaresque 
 method is not exactly untrue to ordinary life: on the 
 contrary, as we have seen, it was a powerful schoolmaster 
 to bring the novel thereto. But it subjects the scenes of 
 ordinary life to a peculiar process of sifting: and when it 
 has got what it wants, it proceeds to heighten them and
 
 THE FOUR WHEELS 117 
 
 " touch them up " in its own peculiar manner of decoration. 
 This is Smollett's method throughout, even in that singular 
 -pastiche of Don Quixote itself, Sir Launcelot Greaves, which 
 certainly was not his happiest conception, but which has 
 had rather hard measure. 
 
 As used by him it has singular merits, and communicates 
 to at least three of his five books {TIhe Adventures of an 
 Atom is deliberately excluded as not really a novel at all) 
 a certain " HveHness " which, though it is not the Yiidike- 
 ness of Fielding, is a great attraction. He showed it first 
 in Roderick Random (1748), which appeared a little before 
 ^om Jones, and was actually taken by some as the work 
 of the same author. It would be not much more just to 
 take Roderick as Smollett's dehberate presentment of 
 himself than to apply the same construction to Marryat's 
 not very dissimilar, but more unlucky, coup d'essai of 
 Frank Mildmay. But it is certain that there was some- 
 thing, though exactly how much has never been determined, 
 of the author's family history in the earliest part, a great 
 deal of his experiences on board ship in the middle, and 
 probably not a httle, though less, of his fortunes in Bath 
 and London towards the end. As a single source of interest 
 and popularity, no doubt, the principal place must be 
 given to the naval part of the book. Important as the 
 English navy had been, for nearly two centuries if not for 
 much longer, it had never played any great part in litera- 
 ture, though it had furnished some caricatured and rather 
 conventional sketches. There is something more in a play, 
 The Fair Quaker of Deal, by Charles Shadwell, nephew or 
 son of Dryden's victim, but this was only of third or fourth 
 rate literary value, and an isolated example to boot. The 
 causes of the neglect have been set forth by many writers 
 from Macaulay downwards, and need not be discussed herej
 
 ii8 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 the fact is certain. Smollett's employment of " the service " 
 as a subject may have been, consciously and intentionally, 
 only one of those utilisings of personal experience of which 
 we have spoken. But really it was an instance of the great 
 fact that the novelist, on the instigation mainly of Fielding 
 himself, was beginning to take all actual life to be his 
 province. 
 
 Smollett brought to his work peculiar powers, the chief 
 of which was a very remarkable one, and almost as much 
 " improved on " Fielding as Fielding's exercise of it was 
 improved on Richardson — that of providing his characters 
 and scenes with accessories. Roderick is not only a much 
 more disagreeable person than Tom, but he is much less of 
 a person: and Strap, though (vice versa) rather a better 
 fellow than Partridge, is a much fainter and more washed- 
 out character. But in mere interest of story and acces- 
 sories the journey of Roderick and Strap to London is 
 quite the equal, and perhaps the superior, of that of Tom 
 and his hanger-on after we once leave Upton, where the 
 interest is of a kind that Smollett could not reach. It is 
 probable that Fielding might, if he had chosen, have made 
 the prison in Amelia as horribly and disgustingly realistic 
 (to use a horrible and disgusting word) as the ship in 
 Roderick, but he at any rate did not choose. Moreover 
 Smollett, himself a member of one of the less predominant 
 partners of the British and Irish partnership, perhaps for 
 that reason hit on utilising the difference of these partners 
 (after a fashion which had never been seen since Shake- 
 speare) in the Welshman Morgan. As far as mere plot goes, 
 he enters into no competition whatever with either Fielding 
 or Richardson: the picaresque model did not require that 
 he should. When Roderick has made use of his friends, 
 knocked down his enemies, and generally elbowed and
 
 THE FOUR WHEELS 119 
 
 shoved his way through the crowd of adventures long 
 enough, Narcissa and her fortune are not so much the 
 reward of his exertions as a stock and convenient method 
 of putting an end to the account of them. The customer 
 has been served with a sufficient amount of the commodity- 
 he demands: and the scissors are apphed, the canister 
 shut up, the tap turned off. It almost results — it certainly 
 coincides— that some of the minor characters, and some 
 of the minor scenes, are much more vivid than the hero 
 (the heroine is almost an absolute nonentity) and the 
 whole story. The curate and the exciseman in the ninth 
 chapter are, by common consent, among Smollett's greatest 
 triumphs; but the curate might be excommunicated and 
 the exciseman excised without anybody who read the book 
 perceiving the slightest gap or missing link, as far as the 
 story is concerned. 
 
 Smollett's second venture. Peregrine Pickle (175 1), was 
 more ambitious, perhaps rose higher in parts, but un- 
 doubtedly contained even more doubtful and inferior 
 matter. No one can justly blame him, though any one 
 may most justly refrain from praising, from the general 
 point of view, as regards the " insets " of Miss Williams's 
 story in Roderick and of that of Lady Vane here. From that 
 point of view they range with the " Man of the Hill " in 
 Tom Jones, and in the first case at least, though most cer- 
 tainly not in the second, have more justification of connec- 
 tion with the central story. He may so far underlie the 
 charge of error of judgment, but nothing worse. Unluckily 
 the " Lady Vane " insertion was, to a practical certainty, 
 a commercial not an artistic transaction: and both here 
 and elsewhere Smollett carried his already large licence to 
 the extent of something like positive pornography. He 
 is in fact one of the few writers of real eminence who have
 
 120 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 been forced to Bowdlerise themselves. Further, there 
 would be more excuse for the most offensive part of Pere- 
 grine if it were not half plagiarism of the main situations 
 of Pamela and Clarissa: if Smollett had not deprived 
 his hero of all the excuses which, even in the view of some 
 of the most respectable characters of Pamela^ attached to 
 the conduct of Mr. B.; and if he had not vulgarised Love- 
 lace out of any possible attribution of " regality," except 
 of being what the time would have called King of the 
 Black Guard. As for Tom Jones, he does not come into 
 comparison with " Perry " at all, and he would doubtless 
 have been most willing and able — competent physically as 
 well as morally — to administer the proper punishment to 
 that young ruffian by drubbing him within an inch of 
 his life. 
 
 These, no doubt, are grave drawbacks: but the racy fun 
 of the book almost atones for them: and the exaltation of 
 the naval element of Roderick which one finds here in 
 Trunnion and Hatchway and Pipes carries the balance 
 quite to the other side. This is the case even without, but 
 much more with, the taking into account of Smollett's 
 usual irregular and almost irrelevant bonuses^ such as the 
 dinner after the fashion of the ancients and the rest. No: 
 Peregrine Pickle can never be thrown to the wolves, even 
 to the most respectable and moral of these animals in the 
 most imposing as well as ravening of attitudes. English 
 Literature cannot do without it. 
 
 Without Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753) many people 
 have thought that English Literature could do perfectly 
 well: and without going quite so far, one may acknowledge 
 that perhaps a shift could be made. The idea of re-trans- 
 ferring the method (in the first place at any rate) to foreign 
 parts was not a bad one, and it may be observed that by
 
 THE FOUR WHEELS 121 
 
 far the best portion of Fathom is thus occupied. Not a 
 few of these opening passages are excellent: and Fathom's 
 mother, if not a person, is an excellent type: it is probable 
 that the writer knew the kind well. But his unhappy 
 tendency to enter for the same stakes as his great fore- 
 runners makes it almost impossible not to compare 
 Ferdinand Fathom with Jonathan Wild : and the effect is 
 very damaging to the Count. Much of the book is dull: 
 and Fathom's conversation is (to adopt a cant word) 
 extremely unconvincing. The fact seems to be that 
 Smollett had run his picaresque vein dry, as far as it con- 
 nected itself with mere rascality of various kinds, and he 
 did well to close it. He had published three novels in five 
 years: he waited seven before his next, and then eleven 
 more before his last. 
 
 A qualified apology has been hinted above for Sir 
 Launcelot Greaves. It is undoubtedly evidence of the 
 greatness of Don Quixote that there should have been so 
 many direct imitations of it by persons of genius and talent: 
 but this particular instance is unfortunate to the verge 
 of the preposterous, if not over it. The eighteenth century 
 was indeed almost the capital time of English eccentricity: 
 and it was also a time of licence which sometimes looked 
 very like lawlessness. But its eccentricities were not at 
 this special period romantic: and its lawlessness was 
 rather abuse of law than wholesale neglect of it. A rascally 
 attorney or a stony-hearted creditor might inflict great 
 hardship under the laws affecting money: and a brutal 
 or tyrannical squire might do the same under those affecting 
 the tenure or the enjoyment of house or land. " Persons 
 of quality " might go very far. But even a person of 
 quahty, if he took to riding about the country in complete 
 steel, assaulting the lieges, and setting up a sort of cadi-
 
 122 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 justice of his own in opposition to the king's, would prob- 
 ably have been brought pretty rapidly, if not to the 
 recovery of his senses, to the loss of his liberty. Nor, 
 with rare exceptions, are the subordinate or incidental 
 humours of the first class. But I have always thought 
 that the opening passage more than entitles the book to 
 an honourable place in the history of English fiction. I 
 do not know where to look, before it, for such an " interior " 
 — such a complete Dutch picture of room and furniture 
 and accessories generally. Even so learned a critic as the 
 late M. Brunetiere thought that things of the kind were 
 not older than Balzac. I have known English readers, 
 not ignorant, who thought they were scarcely older than 
 Dickens. Dickens, however, undoubtedly took them 
 from Smollett, of whom we know that he was an early and 
 enthusiastic admirer: and Scott, who has them much 
 earlier than Dickens, not improbably was in some degree 
 indebted for them to his countryman. At any rate in 
 that countryman they are: and you will not find a much 
 better example of them anywhere than this of the inn- 
 kitchen. But apart from it, and from a few other things 
 of the same or similar kinds, there is little to be said for 
 the book. The divine Aurelia especially is almost more 
 shadowy than the divine Narcissa and the divine Emilia: 
 and can claim no sort of sistership in personality with 
 Amelia or Sophia, even with Clarissa or Pamela. In fact, 
 up to this time Smollett's women — save in the case of 
 Fathom's hell-cat of a mother, and one or two more who 
 are " minors " — have done absolutely nothing for his 
 books. It was to be quite otherwise in the last and best, 
 though even here the heroine en litre is hardly, even though 
 we have her own letters to body her out, more substantial 
 than her elder sisters. But Lydia, though the ingenue, is
 
 THE FOUR WHEELS 123 
 
 not the real heroine of this book: her aunt and her aunt's 
 maid divide that position between them. 
 
 A sufficiently ungracious critic may, if he chooses, see 
 in Smollett's falling back on the letter-plan for Humphry 
 Clinker {ijji) an additional proof of that deficiency in 
 strictly inventive faculty which has been noticed. The 
 more generous " judge by results " will hardly care to 
 consider so curiously in the case of such a masterpiece. 
 For a masterpiece it really is. The comparative absence 
 of " character " in the higher and literary sense as con- 
 trasted with " character-^^r/j- " in the technical meaning 
 of the theatre has been admitted in the other books. 
 Here, with the aid of the letters, it is amply supplied, or 
 perhaps (to speak with extreme critical closeness) the 
 character-parts are turned into characters by this means. 
 There is no stint, because of the provision of this higher 
 interest, of the miscellaneous fun and " business " which 
 Smollett had always supplied so lavishly out of his ex- 
 perience, his observation, and, if not his invention, his 
 combining faculty. And there is the setting of interior 
 and exterior " furniture " which has been also referred to. 
 Abundant as is the information which the eighteenth 
 century has given us as to its justly beloved place of 
 pilgrimage, Bath, there is nothing livelier than the Bath 
 scenes here, from Chesterfield to Miss Austen, and few 
 things, if any, so vivid and detailed. So it is with Clifton 
 earlier, with London later, with Scotland last of all, and 
 with the journeys connecting them. Yet these things are 
 mere hors cTceuvre, pickles, sauces, condiments, beside the 
 solid character-food of the Brambles and Melfords, of 
 Winifred Jenkins and of the redoubtable Lismahago. That 
 there is no exaggeration or caricature cannot, of course, be 
 said. It was not Smollett's notion of art to present the
 
 124 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 elaborate academies of Richardson, or the almost uncanny 
 duplications of Nature which Fielding could achieve. He 
 must embolden, in fact grotesque, the hne; heighten, in 
 fact splash and plaster, the colour. But he has not left 
 Nature behind here: he has only put her in a higher light. 
 
 One means of doing so has been condemned in him, as 
 in others, as in its great earlier master, Swift, and its 
 greatest later one, Thackeray, by some purists. They 
 call it cheap and inartistic: but this is mere pedantry and 
 prudery. Mis-spelling is not a thing to be employed every 
 day or for every purpose: if you do that, you get into 
 the ineffably dreary monotony which distinguishes the 
 common comic journalist. But thrown in occasionally, 
 and in the proper place, it gives an excellent zest: and it 
 has seldom been employed — never, except in the two 
 instances quoted — better than in the cases of Tabitha 
 Bramble and her maid. For it is employed in the only 
 legitimate way, that of zest, not substance. Tabitha and 
 Winifred would still be triumphs of characterisation of a 
 certain kind if they wrote as correctly as Uncle Matthew 
 or Nephew Jery. Further, Lismahago is a bolder and a 
 much less caricatured utilising of the " national " resource 
 than Morgan. If Smollett had not been a perfectly 
 undaunted, as well as a not very amiable, person he would 
 hardly have dared to " lacess the thistle " in this fashion. 
 But there are few sensible Scotsmen nowadays who would 
 not agree with that most sensible, as well as greatest, of 
 their compatriots. Sir Walter Scott, in acknowledging the 
 justice (comic emphasis granted) of the twitch, and the 
 truth of the grip, at that formidable plant. The way in 
 which Smollett mixes up actual living persons, by their 
 own names, with his fictitious characters may strike us as 
 odd: but there is, for the most part, nothing offensive in it,
 
 THE FOUR WHEELS 125 
 
 and in fact, except a little of his apparently inevitable 
 indulgence in nasty detail, there is nothing at all offensive 
 in the book. The contrast of its general tone with that 
 especially of his first two; the softening and mellowing of 
 the general presentation — is very remarkable in a man of 
 undoubtedly not very gentle disposition who had long 
 suffered from extremely bad health, and whose chief 
 original works recently — the Journey and the Adventures — 
 had been, the first a tissue of grumbles, the second an 
 outburst of savagery. But though the grumbles recur in 
 Matthew Bramble's mouth, they become merely humorous 
 there: and there is practically no savagery at all. Leghorn, 
 it has been observed more than once, was in a fashion a 
 Land of Beulah: a " season of calm weather " had set in 
 for a rather stormy life just before the end. 
 
 Whatever may be his defects (and from the mere point 
 of view of Momus probably a larger number may be found 
 in him than either in Richardson or in Fielding), Smollett 
 well deserves an almost equal place with them in the 
 history of the novel. Richardson, though he had found 
 the universal as far as certain aspects of it in humanity are 
 concerned, had confined it within a very narrow space, or 
 particular envelope, in tone and temper: the fact that he 
 has been called " stifling," though the epithet may not be 
 entirely just, is almost sufficient evidence of this. Fielding 
 had taken the novel into a far larger air and, as has been 
 said already, there was hardly anything to which his 
 method might not lead, and in which it would not be 
 effective. But he had been exclusively English in exter- 
 nals: and the result is that, to this day, he has had less 
 influence abroad than perhaps any English writer of equal 
 genius and than some of far less.^ Smollett, by his remark- 
 
 ^ This is said not to have been quite the case at the very first: but it has 
 been so since.
 
 126 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 able utilisation of the characteristics of the other members 
 of Magna-Britannia; by his excursions into foreign Euro- 
 pean and even transatlantic scenery, had widened the 
 external if not the internal prospect; and had done 
 perhaps even more by that chance-medley, as it perhaps 
 was, of attention to the still more internal detail which was 
 to be of such importance in the novel to come. Taking 
 the three together (not without due allowance for the 
 contemporary, if mainly imitative, developments which 
 wiU be described in the next chapter), they had put prose 
 fiction in a position which it had not attained, even in 
 Spain earlier, even in France at more or less the same 
 time: and had entirely antiquated, on the one hand, the 
 mere fabliau or novella — the story of a single limited 
 situation — on the other, the discursive romance with little 
 plot and next to no character. One great further develop- 
 ment, impossible at this time, of the larger novel, the 
 historical, waited for Scott: but even this was soon, though 
 very awkwardly, tried. It could not yet be born because 
 the historic sense which was its necessary begetter hardly 
 existed, and because the provision of historic matter for 
 this sense to work on was rather scanty. But it is scarcely 
 extravagant to say that it is more difficult to conceive even 
 Scott doing what he did without Richardson, Fielding, and 
 Smollett before him, than it is to believe that, with these 
 predecessors, somebody like Scott was bound to come. 
 
 Great, however, as the three are, there is no need of any 
 " injustice to Ireland " — little as Ireland really has to 
 claim in Sterne's merit or demerit. He is not a fifth wheel 
 to the coach by any means: he is the fourth and almost 
 the necessary one. In Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett 
 the general character and possibilities of the novel had been 
 shown, with the exception just noted: and indeed hardly
 
 THE FOUR WHEELS 127 
 
 with that exception, because they showed the way clearly 
 to it. But its almost iUimitable particular capabihties 
 remained unshown, or shown only in Fielding's half 
 extraneous divagations, and in earlier things like the work 
 of Swift. Sterne took it up in the spirit of one who wished 
 to exhibit these capabilities; and did exhibit them signally 
 in more than one or two ways. He showed how the novel 
 could present, in refreshed form, the fatrasie, the pillar-to- 
 post miscellany, of which Rabelais had perhaps given the 
 greatest example possible, but of which there were numerous 
 minor examples in French. He showed how it could be 
 made, not merely to present humorous situations, but to 
 exhibit a special kind of humour itself — to make the writer 
 as it were the hero without his ever appearing as character 
 in Tristram, or to humorise autobiography as in the 
 Sentimental Journey. And last of all (whether it was his 
 greatest achievement or not is matter of opinion), he 
 showed the novel of purpose in a form specially appealing 
 to his contemporaries — the purpose being to exhibit, 
 glorify, luxuriate in the exhibition of, sentiment or " sensi- 
 bility." In none of these things was he wholly original; 
 though the perpetual upbraiding of " plagiarism " is a 
 little unintelligent. Rabelais, not to mention others, had 
 preceded him, and far excelled him, in the fair asie ; Swift 
 in the humour-novel; two generations of Frenchmen and 
 Frenchwomen in the " sensibility " kind. But he brought 
 all together and adjusted the English novel, actually to 
 them, potentially to much else. 
 
 To find fault with his two famous books is almost con- 
 temptibly easy. The plagiarism which, if not found out 
 at once, was found out very soon, is the least of these: in 
 fact hardly a fault at all. The indecency, which zvas found 
 out at once, and which drew a creditable and not in the
 
 128 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 least Tartuffian protest from Warburton, is a far more 
 serious matter — not so much because of the licence in 
 subject as because of the unwholesome and sniggering tone. 
 The sentimentality is very often simply maudlin, almost 
 always tiresome to us, and in very, very few cases justified 
 by brilliant success even in its own very doubtful kind. 
 Most questionable of all, perhaps, is the merely mechanical 
 mountebankery — the blanks, and the dashes, and the 
 rows of stops, the black pages and the marbled pages 
 which he employs to force a guffaw from his readers. The 
 abstinence from any central story in Tristram is one of 
 those dubious pieces of artifice which may possibly show 
 the artist's independence of the usual attractions of story- 
 telling, but may also suggest to the churlish the question 
 whether his invention would have supplied him with any 
 story to tell; and the continual asides and halts and 
 parenthetic divagations in the Journey are not quite free 
 from the same suggestion. In fact if you " can see a church 
 by daylight " you certainly want no piercing vision, and no 
 artificial assistance of light or lens, to discover the faults 
 of this very unedifying churchman. 
 
 But he remains, for all that, a genius; and one of the 
 great figures in our history. There is to his credit in 
 general, as has been already pointed out, the great asset 
 of having indicated, and in two notable instances patterned, 
 the out-of-the-way novel — the novel eccentric, particular, 
 individual. There is to that credit still more the brilliancy 
 of the two specimens themselves in spite of their faults; 
 their effectiveness in the literature of delight; the great 
 powers of a kind more or less peculiar to the artist which 
 they show, and the power, perhaps still greater, which they 
 display in the actually general and ordinary lines of the 
 novel, though adapted to this extraordinary use.
 
 THE FOUR WHEELS 129 
 
 For though it pleased Sterne to anticipate the knife- 
 grinder's innocent confession, " Story ? God bless you ! 
 I have none to tell, sir! " in a sardonic paraphrase of half 
 a score of volumes, he actually possessed the narrative 
 faculty in an extraordinary degree. He does not merely 
 show this in his famous inset short stories, accomplished 
 as these are: he achieves a much greater marvel in the 
 way in which he makes his fatrasies as it were novels. 
 After one or two, brief but certainly not tedious, volumes 
 of the Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, you know 
 that you are being cheated, and are going to be: at the 
 end you know still more certainly that you have been. 
 You have had nothing of the " Life " but a great deal 
 round rather than about the birth, and a few equivocal, 
 merely glanced at, and utterly unco-ordinated incidents 
 later. If you have had any " opinions " they have been 
 chiefly those of Mr. Tristram Shandy's father and other 
 members of his family, or those of its friends and circle, or 
 of those shadowy personages outside the pretended story, 
 such as Eugenius and Yorick, besides a few discourses 
 which drop the slightest pretension of being Shandean or 
 Tristramic and are plainly and simply the author's. In 
 the Journey there is more unity; but it is, quite frankly, the 
 unity of the temperament of that author himself. The 
 incidents — sentimental, whimsical, fie-fie — have no other 
 connection or tendency than the fact that they occur to 
 the " gentleman in the black silk smalls " and furnish him 
 with figures as it were for his performance. Yet you are 
 held in a way in which nothing but the romance or the 
 novel ever does hold you. The thing is a fxvOo'i afxvOo? — 
 a story without story-end, without story-beginning, without 
 story-connection or middle: but a story for all that. A 
 dangerous precedent, perhaps; but a great accomplish-
 
 130 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 ment: and, even as a precedent, the leader of a very 
 remarkable company. In not a few noteworthy later 
 books — in a very much greater number of parts of later 
 books — as we take our hats off to the success we are 
 saluting not a new but an old friend, and that friend 
 Sterne. 
 
 On the second great count — character — Sterne's record 
 is still more distinguished: and here there is no legerdemain 
 about the matter. There is a consensus of all sound 
 opinion to the effect that my Uncle Toby is an absolute 
 triumph — even among those who think that, as in the case 
 of Colonel Newcome later, it would have been possible to 
 achieve that triumph without letting his simplicity run 
 so near to something less attractive. It is not the senti- 
 ment that is here to blame, because Sterne has luckily not 
 forgotten (as he has in the case of his dead donkeys and his 
 live Marias) that humour is the only thing that will keep 
 such sentiment from turning mawkish, if not even rancid; 
 and that the antiseptic effect wiU not be achieved by 
 keeping your humour and your sentiment in separate 
 boxes. Trim is even better: he is indeed next to Sancho — 
 and perhaps Sam Weller — the greatest of all " followers " 
 in the novel: he supplies the only class-figure in which 
 Sterne perhaps beats Fielding himself. About Walter 
 Shandy there is more room for difference: and it is possible 
 to contend that, great as he is, he is not complete — that 
 he is something of a " humour " in the old one-sided and 
 over-emphasised Jonsonian sense. Nothing that he does 
 or says misbecomes him: but a good deal that he does not 
 do and say might be added with advantage, in order to 
 give us the portrait of a whole as well as a live man. As 
 for the other male characters, Sterne's plan excused him — 
 as it did not quite in Mr. Shandy's case — from making them
 
 THE FOUR WHEELS 131 
 
 more than sketches and shadows. But what uncommonly 
 lively sketches and shadows they are! 
 
 Sterne's unlucky failing prevented him in most cases 
 from touching the women off with a clean brush: .but the 
 quality of liveness pertains to them in almost a higher 
 measure: and perhaps testifies even more strongly to his 
 almost uncanny faculty of communicating it by touches 
 which are not always unclean and are sometimes slight to 
 an astonishing degree. Even that shadow of a shade " My 
 dear, dear Jenny " has a suggestion of verity about her 
 which has shocked and fluttered some: the maids of the 
 Shandean household, the grisettes and peasant girls and 
 ladies of the 'Journey, have flesh which is not made of paper, 
 and blood that is certainly not ink. And the peculiarity 
 extends to his two chief named heroines, Mrs. Shandy and 
 the Widow. Never were any two female personages more 
 unceremoniously treated in the way of scanty and inci- 
 dental appearance. Never were any personages of scanty 
 and incidental appearance made more alive and more 
 female. 
 
 His details and accessories of all kinds, descriptive, 
 literary, and other, would give subject for a separate 
 chapter; but we must turn (for this chapter is already 
 too long) to his phrase — in dialogue, narrative, whatever 
 you please to call it. For the fact is that these two things, 
 and all others in which phrase and expression can be used, 
 melt into each other with Sterne in a manner as " flibberti- 
 gibbety " as most other things about him. This phrase or 
 expression is of course artificial to the highest degree: and 
 it is to it that the reproach of depending on mechanical 
 aids chiefly applies. And yet laboriously figured, tricked, 
 machined as it is — easy as once more it may be to prove 
 that it is artifice and not art — the fact remains that, not
 
 132 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 merely (perhaps not by any means chiefly) in the stock 
 extract-pieces which everybody knows, but almost every- 
 where, it is triumphant : and that English literature would 
 be seriously impoverished without it. Certainly never 
 was there a style which more fully justified the definition 
 given by BufFon, in Sterne's own time, of style as " the very 
 man." Falsetto, " faking," vamping, shoddy — all manner 
 of evil terms may be heaped upon it without the possibility 
 of completely clearing it from them. To some eyes it 
 underlies them most when it is most ambitious, as in the 
 Le Fevre story and the diatribe against critics. It leaves 
 the court with all manner of stains on its character. Only, 
 once more, if it did not exist we should be ignorant of more 
 than one of the most remarkable possibilities of the English 
 language. 
 
 Thus, in almost exactly the course of a technical genera- 
 tion — from the appearance of Pamela in 1740 to that of 
 Humphry Clinker in 1771 — the wain of the novel was 
 sohdly built, furnished with four main wheels to move it, 
 and set a-going to travel through the centuries. In a sense, 
 inasmuch as Humphry Clinker itself, though Smollett's 
 best work, can hardly be said to show any absolutely new 
 faculties, character, or method, the process was even 
 accomplished in two-thirds of the time, between Pamela and 
 Tristram Shandy. We shall see in the next chapter how 
 eagerly the examples were taken up : and how, long before 
 Smollett died, the novel of this and that kind had become 
 one of the most prolific branches of literature. But, for 
 the moment, the important thing is to repeat that it had 
 been thoroughly and finally started on its high road, 
 in general by Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett; in 
 particular and wayward but promising side-paths by 
 Sterne.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE MINOR AND LATER EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY 
 
 NOVEL ^ 
 
 It is at last beginning to be recognised in principle, though 
 it is still much too often forgotten in practice, that the 
 minor work of a time is at least as important as the major 
 in determining general literary characteristics and ten- 
 dencies. Nor is this anywhere much more noticeable than 
 in regard to the present period of our present subject. 
 The direct influence of Richardson and Fielding was no 
 doubt very great: but the development of the novel during 
 the middle and later century was too large and too various 
 to be all mere imitation. As a result, however, of their 
 influence, there certainly came over the whole kind a very 
 remarkable change. Even before them the nisus towards 
 it, which has been noticed in the chapter before the last, 
 is observable enough. Mrs. Manley's rather famous Nezv 
 Atlantis (1709) has at least the form of a key-novel of the 
 political sort: but the whole interest is in the key and not 
 in the novel, though the choice of the form is something. 
 And the second, third, and fourth decades of the century 
 saw other work testifying to the vague and almost un- 
 conscious hankering after prose fiction which was becoming 
 endemic. A couple of examples of this may be treated, in 
 
 1 A little of the work to be noticed in this chapter is not strictly 
 eighteenth century, but belongs to the first decade or so of the nineteenth. 
 But the majority of the contents actually conform to the title, and there 
 is hardly any more convenient or generally applicable heading for the 
 novel before Miss Austen and Scott, excluding the great names dealt with 
 in the last chapter.
 
 134 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 passing, before we come to the work — not exactly of the 
 first class in itself — of a writer who shows both the pre- 
 Richardsonian and the post-Richardsonian phases of it 
 most interestingly, and after a fashion to which there are 
 few exact parallels. 
 
 A book, which counts here from the time of its appear- 
 ance, and from a certain oddity and air of " key " about it, 
 rather than from much merit as literature, or any as a 
 story, is the Adventures of Gaudentio di Lucca by Simon 
 Berington.^ It appeared in 1737, between Defoe and 
 Swift on the earlier, and Richardson on the later side, 
 while the English world was to the novel as an infant 
 crying for the light — and the bottle — at once. It begins 
 and ends with adventures and discoveries of an ordinary 
 romantic type. But the body consists of a revelation to 
 certain Italian Inquisitors (who are not at all of the lurid 
 type familiar to the Protestant imagination, but most 
 equitable and well-disposed as well as potent, grave, and 
 reverend signors) of an unknown country of " the Grand 
 Pophar " in the centre of Africa. This country is civilised, 
 but not yet Christianised: and the description of it of 
 course gives room for the exercise of the familiar game of 
 contrast — in this case not so much satiric as didactic — 
 with countries nearer home which are at least supposed to 
 be both civilised and Christian. It is a " respectable " 
 book both in the French and the English sense: but it is 
 certainly not very amusing, and cannot even be called very 
 interesting in any way, save historically. 
 
 The other example which we shall take is of even less 
 intrinsic attraction: in fact it is a very poor thing. 
 There are, however, more ways than one in which 
 
 ' The not infrequent attribution of th's book to Berkeley is a good 
 instance of the general inability to discriminate style.
 
 LATER EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL 135 
 
 corpora vilia are good for experiment and evidence: and 
 we may find useful indications in the mere bookmaking of 
 the time. Lowndes, the fortunate publisher of Evelina, 
 some dozen years before that windfall came, had issued, 
 or reissued, a collection called The Novelist and pro- 
 fessedly containing The select novels of Dr. Croxall [the in- 
 genious author of The Fair Circassian and the part destroyer 
 of Hereford Cathedral] and other Polite Tales. The book 
 is an unblushing if not an actually piratical compilation; 
 sweeping together, with translations and adaptations pub- 
 lished by Croxall himself at various times in the second 
 quarter of the century and probably earlier, most of the 
 short stories from the Spectator class of periodical which 
 had appeared during the past two-thirds of a century. 
 Most of the rest are obvious (and very badly done) trans- 
 lations from the French and even from Cervantes' Exem- 
 plary Novels ; seasoned with personal and other anecdotes, 
 so that the whole number of separate articles may exceed 
 four-score. Of these a few are interesting attempts at 
 the historical novel or novelette — short sketches of Mary 
 Queen of Scots (very sympathetic and evidently French 
 in origin from the phrase " a temple which was formerly a 
 church "), Jane Shore (an exquisitely absurd piece of 
 eighteenth-century middle-class modernising and moralis- 
 ing), Essex, Buckingham, and other likely figures. There 
 are cuts by the " Van-somethings and Back-somethings " 
 of the time: and the whole, though not worthy of anything 
 better than the " fourpenny box," is an evident symptom 
 of popular taste. The sweetmeats or hors d^ceuvre of the 
 older caterings for that taste are here collected together 
 to form a piece de resistance. It is true that The Novelist 
 is only a true title in the older sense — that the pieces are 
 novelle not " novels " proper. But they are fiction, or
 
 136 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 fact treated like fiction: and though the popular taste 
 itself was evidently ceasing to be satisfied with these 
 morsels and demanding a substantial joint, yet the 
 substance was, after aU, the same. 
 
 We rise higher, if not very high, with the novels of 
 Mrs. Eliza Haywood (i 693-1 756), one of the damned of 
 the Dunciad, but, like some of her fellows in that Inferno, 
 by no means deserving hopeless reprobation. Every one 
 who has devoted any attention to the history of the novel, as 
 well as some who have merely considered it as a part of that 
 of English literature generally, has noticed the curious con- 
 trast between the earlier and the later novels of this writer. 
 Betsy Thoughtless (175 1) and Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy 
 (1753) could, without much difficulty, be transposed into 
 novels of to-day. Idalia (1723) is of an entirely different 
 mood and scheme. It is a pure Behnesque nouvelle, merely 
 describing the plots and outrage which ruin the heroine 
 {The Unfortunate Mistress is the second title), but attempt- 
 ing no character-drawdng (the only hint at such a thing is 
 that Idalia, instead of being a meek and suffering victim, 
 is said to have a violent temper), and making not the 
 slightest effort even to complete what story there is. For 
 the thing breaks off with a sort of " perhaps to be concluded 
 in some next," about which we have not made up our minds. 
 Very rarely do we find such a curious combination or suc- 
 cession of styles so early: but the novel, for pretty obvious 
 reasons, seems to offer temptations to it and facilities for it. 
 
 For Idalia^s above-named juniors, while not bad books 
 to read for mere amusement, have a very particular 
 interest for the student of the history of the novel. Taken 
 in connection with their author's earlier work, they illus- 
 trate, for the first time, a curious phenomenon which has 
 repeated itself often, notably in the case of Bulwer, and of
 
 LATER EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL 137 
 
 a living novelist who need not be named. This is that the 
 novel, more almost than any other kind of literature, seems 
 to lend itself to what may be called the timeserving or 
 " opportunism " of craftsmanship — to call out the adap- 
 tiveness and versatility of the artist. Betsy and Jenny 
 are so diiferent from Idalia and her group that a critic of 
 the idle Separatist persuasion would, were it not for 
 troublesome certainties of fact, have no difficulty whatever 
 in proving that they must be by different authors. We 
 know that they were not : and we know also the reason of 
 their dissimilarity — the fact that Pamela and her brother 
 and their groups ont passe par Id?- This fact is most inter- 
 esting: and it shows, among other things, that Mrs. Eliza 
 Haywood was a decidedly clever woman. 
 
 At the same time the two books also show that she was 
 not quite clever enough: and that she had not realised, 
 as in fact hardly one of the minor novelists of this time 
 did realise, the necessity of individualising character. 
 Betsy is both a nice and a good girl — " thoughtless " up 
 to specification, but no fool, perfectly " straight " though 
 the reverse of prudish, generous, merry, lovable. But 
 with all these good qualities she is not quite a person. 
 Jenny is, I think, a little more of one, but still not quite — 
 while the men and the other women are still less. Nor 
 had Eliza mastered that practised knack of " manners- 
 painting " which was to stand Fanny Buriiey, and many 
 another after her, in the stead of actual character-creation. 
 Her situations are often very lively, if not exactly decorous; 
 and they sometimes have a real dramatic verisimilitude, 
 for instance, the quarrel and reconciliation of the Lord and 
 the Lady in Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy ; but the higher 
 
 ^ The elect ladies about Richardson joined Betsy ■9i\i\i Amelia, and 
 sneered at both.
 
 138 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 verisimilitude of prose fiction they lack. Neither again 
 (though Smollett had given her a lead here) had she 
 attained that power of setting and furnishing a scene which 
 is so powerful a weapon in the novelist's armoury. Yet 
 she had learnt much: and her later work would have been 
 almost a wonder in her own earlier time. 
 
 She had even been preceded in the new line by one, and 
 closely followed by another writer of her own sex, both 
 of unblemished reputation, and perhaps her superiors in 
 intellectual quality and accomplishment, though they had 
 less distinct novel - faculty, Sarah Fielding, the great 
 novelist's sister, but herself one of Richardson's literary 
 seraglio, had a good deal of her brother's humour, but very 
 little of his constructive grasp of life. David Simple (1744), 
 her best known work, the Familiar Letters connected with 
 it (to which Henry contributed), and The Governess display 
 both the merit and the defect — but the defect is more 
 fatal to a novel than the merit is advantageous. Once 
 more — if the criticism has been repeated ad nauseam the 
 occasions of it may be warranted to be much more nauseous 
 in themselves — one looks up for interest, and is not fed, 
 " The Adventures " of David — whose progeny must have 
 been rapidly enriched and ennobled if Peter Simple was his 
 descendant — were "in search of a Friend," and he came upon 
 nobody in the least hke O'Brien. It was, in fact, too early 
 or too late for a lady to write a thoroughly good novel. It 
 had been possible in the days of Madeleine de Scudery, and 
 it became possible in the days of Frances Burney: but for 
 some time before, in the days of Sarah Fielding, it was 
 only possible in the ways of Afra and of Mrs, Haywood, 
 who, without any unjust stigma on them, can hardly be 
 said to fulfil the idea of ladyhood, as no doubt INIiss 
 Fielding did.
 
 LATER EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL 139 
 
 There is an amusing and (in its context) just passage 
 of Thackeray's, in which he calls Charlotte Lennox, author 
 of The Female Quixote (1752), a " figment." But it would 
 be unlucky if any one were thereby prevented from reading 
 this work of the lady whom Johnson admired, and for 
 whom he made an all-night orgie of apple-pie and bay- 
 leaves. Her book, which from its heroine is also called 
 Arabella, is clever and not unamusing, though it errs (in 
 accordance with the moral-critical principles of the time) 
 by not merely satirising the " heroic " romances of the 
 Gomberville - La Calprenede- Scudery type, but solemnly 
 discussing them. Arabella, the romance-bitten daughter 
 of a marquis, is, for all her delusion, or because of it, 
 rather a charming creature. Her lover Glanville, his 
 Richardsonian sister, and the inevitable bad Baronet (he 
 can hardly be called wicked, especially for a Baronet) are 
 more commonplace: and the thing would have been better 
 as a rather long nouvelle than as a far from short novel. It 
 alternately comes quite close to its original (as in the 
 intended burning of Arabella's books) and goes entirely 
 away from it, and neither as an imitation nor independently 
 is it as good as Graves's Spiritual Quixote : but it is very 
 far from contemptible. 
 
 Yet though the aptitude of women for novel-writing was 
 thus early exemplified, it is not to be supposed that the 
 majority of persons who felt the new influences were of 
 that sex. By far the larger number of those who crowded 
 to follow the Four were, like them, men. 
 
 That not exactly credit to the Tory party. Dr. John 
 Shebbeare, has had his demerits in other ways excused to 
 some extent on the score of Lydia — whose surname, by 
 the way, was " Fairchild," not unknown in later days of 
 fiction. Even one who, if critical conscience would in
 
 140 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 any way permit it, would fain let the Tory dogs have a 
 little the best of it, must, I fear, pronounce Lydia a very 
 poor thing. Shebbeare, who was a journalist, had the 
 journalist faculty of " letting everything go in " — of taking 
 as much as he could from Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, 
 etc., up to date (1755), and of throwing back to Afra for 
 an interesting Indian, Canassatego. The book (like not a 
 few other eighteenth-century novels) has very elaborate 
 chapter headings and very short chapters, so that an 
 immoral person can get up its matter pretty easily. A 
 virtuous one who reads it through will have to look to his 
 virtue for reward. The irony is factitious and forced; the 
 sentiment unappealing; the coarseness quite destitute of 
 Rabelaisian geniality; and the nomenclature may be 
 sampled from " the Countess of Liberal " and " Lord 
 Beef." I believe Shebbeare was once pilloried for his 
 politics. If it had been for Lydia^ I should not have 
 protested. 
 
 The next book to be mentioned is an agreeable change. 
 Why Hazlitt compared The Life of John Buncle (i'j^6-i'/66) 
 to Rabelais is a somewhat idle though perhaps not quite 
 unanswerable question; the importance of the book itself 
 in the history of the English novel, which has sometimes 
 been doubted or passed over, is by no means small. Its 
 author, Thomas Amory (1691 l-iySS), was growing old when 
 he wrote it and even when he prefaced it with a kind of 
 Introduction, the Memoirs of several Ladies (1755). It is 
 a sort of dream-exaggeration of an autobiography; at first 
 sight, and not at first sight only, the wildest of farragos. 
 The author represents himself as a disinherited son who is 
 devoted, with equal enthusiasm, to matrimony, eating and 
 drinking as much as he can of the best things he can find, 
 discussion of theological problems in a " Christian-deist "
 
 LATER EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL 141 
 
 or Unitarian sense, " natural philosophy " in the vague 
 eighteenth-century meaning, and rambling — chiefly in the 
 fell district which includes the borders of Lancashire, York- 
 shire, Westmoreland, " Bishopric " (Durham), and Cumber- 
 land. With this district — which even now, though seamed 
 with roads and railways, does actually contain some of the 
 wildest scenery of the island; which only forty years ago 
 was much wilder; and which in Amory's time was a howling 
 wilderness in parts — he deals in the characteristic spirit of 
 exaggeration which perhaps, as much as anything else, 
 suggested Rabelais to Hazlitt. From Malham Cove and 
 Hardraw Scar, through the Wild Boar Fell district to the 
 head of Teesdale, you can find at this moment rough and 
 rugged scenery enough, some of which is actually recog- 
 nisable when " reduced " from Amory's extravagance. 
 But that extravagance extends the distances from furlongs 
 to leagues; deepens the caverns from yards to furlongs; 
 and exalts fell and scar into Alps and Andes. In the same 
 way he has to marry eight wives (not seven as has been 
 usually, and even by the present writer, said), who are 
 distractingly beautiful and wonderfully wise, but who 
 seldom live more than two years: and has a large number 
 of children about whom he says nothing, " because he has 
 not observed in them anything worth speaking about." 
 The courtships are varied between abrupt embraces soon 
 after introduction, and discussions on Hebrew, Babel, 
 " Christian-deism," and the binomial theorem. In the 
 most inhospitable deserts, his man or boy ^ is invariably 
 able to produce from his wallet " ham, tongue, potted 
 blackcock, and a pint of cyder," while in more favourable 
 
 ^ It has been observed, and is worth observing, that the eighteenth- 
 century hero, even in his worst circumstances, can seldom exist without a 
 " follower."
 
 142 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 circumstances Buncle takes his ease in his inn by consuming 
 " a pound of steak, a quart of green peas, two fine cuts of 
 bread, a tankard of strong ale, and a pint of port " and 
 singing cheerful love-ditties a few days after the death of 
 an adored wife. He comes down the side of precipices by 
 a mysterious kind of pole-jumping — half a dozen fathoms 
 at a drop with landing-places a yard wide — like a chamois 
 or a rollicking Rocky Mountain ram. Every now and then 
 he finds a skeleton, with a legend of instructive tenor, in a 
 hermitage which he annexes: and almost infallibly, at the 
 worst point of the wilderness, there is an elegant country 
 seat with an obliging old father and a hvely heiress ready 
 to take the place of the last removed charmer. 
 
 Mad, however, as this sketch may sound, and certainly 
 not quite sane as Amory may have been, there is a very 
 great deal of method in his, and some in its, madness. 
 The flashes of shrewdness and the blocks of pretty sohd 
 learning (Rabelaisian again) do not perhaps so much con- 
 cern us: but the book, ultra-eccentric as it is, does count 
 for something in the history of the English novel. Its 
 descriptions, rendered through a magnifying glass as they 
 are, have considerable power; and are quite unlike any- 
 thing in prose fiction, and most things in prose literature, 
 before it. In Buncle himself there is a sort of extra- 
 natural, " four-dimension " nature and proportion which 
 assert the novelist's power memorably: — if a John Buncle 
 could exist, he would very probably be like Amory's John 
 Buncle. Above all, the book (let it be remembered that 
 it came before Tristram Shandy) is almost the beginning of 
 the Eccentric Novel — not of the satiric-marvellous type 
 which Cyrano and Swift had revived from Lucian, but of 
 a new, a modern, and a very English variety. Buncle is 
 sometimes extraordinarily like Borrow (on whom he prob-
 
 LATER EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL 143 
 
 ably had influence), and it would not be hard to arrange 
 a very considerable spiritual succession for him, by no 
 means deserving the uncomplimentary terms in which he 
 dismisses his progeny in the flesh. 
 
 If there is an almost preposterous cheerfulness about 
 Buncle, the necessary alterative can be amply supplied by 
 the next book to which we come. The curious way in 
 which Johnson almost invariably managed to hit the 
 critical nail on the head is well illustrated by his remark 
 to Frances Sheridan, author of the Memoirs of Miss Sydney 
 Bid[d\ulph (1761), that he " did not know whether she had 
 a right, on moral principles, to make her readers suffer 
 so much." Substitute " aesthetic " for " moral " and 
 " heroine " for " readers," and the remark retains its 
 truth on another scheme of criticism, which Johnson was 
 not ostensibly employing, and which he might have 
 violently denounced. The book, though with its subse- 
 quent prolongation too long, is a powerful one: and though 
 actually dedicated to Richardson and no doubt consciously 
 owing much to his influence, practically clears off the debt 
 by its own earnings. But Miss Bidulph (she started with 
 only one d, but acquired another), whose journal to her 
 beloved Ceciha supphes the matter and method of the 
 novel, is too persistently unlucky and illtreated, without 
 the smallest fault of her own, for anything but really, not 
 fictitiously, real life. Her misfortunes spring from obeying 
 her mother (but there was neither moral nor satire in this 
 then), and husbands, lovers, rivals, relations, connections — 
 everybody — conspire to afflict her. Poetical justice has 
 been much abused in both senses of that verb: Sydney 
 Biddulph shows cause for it in the very act of neglect. 
 
 But the eighteenth century, on the whole, loathed melan- 
 choly. The Spiritual Quixote (1772) of the Reverend
 
 144 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 Richard Graves (17 15-1804) has probably been a little 
 injured by the ingenuous proclamation of indebtedness in 
 the title. It is, however, an extremely clever and amusing 
 book: and one of the best of the many imitations of its 
 original, which, indeed, it follows only on broad and practi- 
 cally independent lines. During his long life (for more 
 than half a century of which he was rector of Claverton 
 near Bath) Graves knew many interesting persons, from 
 Shenstone and Whitefield (with both of whom he was at 
 Pembroke College, Oxford, though he afterwards became 
 a fellow of All Souls) to Malthus, who was a pupil of his; 
 and he had some interesting private experiences. He 
 wove a good deal that was personal into his novel, which, 
 as may easily be guessed, is a satire upon Methodism, and 
 in which Whitefield is personally and not altogether favour- 
 ably introduced. But even on him Graves is by no means 
 savage: while his treatment of his hero, Geoffrey Wild- 
 goose, a young Oxford man who, living in retirement with 
 his mother in the country, becomes an evangelist, very 
 mainly from want of some more interesting occupation, is 
 altogether good-humoured. Wildgoose promptly falls in 
 love with a fascinating damsel-errant, Julia Townsend; 
 and the various adventures, religious, picaresque, and 
 amatory, are embroiled and disembroiled with very fair 
 skill in character and fairer still in narrative. Nor is the 
 Sancho-Partridge of the piece, Jerry Tugwell, a cobbler 
 (who thinks, though he is very fond of his somewhat 
 masterful wife, that a little absence from her would not 
 be unrefreshing), by any means a failure. Both Scott and 
 Dickens evidently knew Graves well,^ and knowledge of 
 him might with advantage be more general. 
 
 * Julia Mannering reminds me a little of Julia Townsend: and if this 
 be doubtful, the connection of Jerry's " Old madam gave me some higry-
 
 LATER EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL 145 
 
 The novels that have been noticed since those contrasted 
 ones of Mrs. Haywood's, which occupy a position by them- 
 selves, all possess a sort of traditional fame; and cover 
 (with the proper time allowed for the start given by 
 Richardson and Fielding) nearly the same period of thirty 
 years — in this case 1744 {David Simple) to 1772 (The 
 Spiritual Quixote) — which is covered by the novels of the 
 great quartette themselves. It would be possible to add 
 a great many, and easy and not disagreeable to the writer 
 to dwell on a few. Of these few some are perhaps necessary. 
 Frank Coventry's Pompey the Little — an amusing satirical 
 novel with a pet dog for the title-giver and with the promis- 
 ing (but as a rule ill-handled) subject of university life 
 treated early — appeared in 175 1 — the same year which 
 saw the much higher flight (the pun is in sense not words) 
 of Peter Wilkins, by Robert Paltock of Clement's Inn, 
 a person of whom practically nothing else is known. It 
 would be lucky for many people if they were thus singly 
 yoked to history. It was once fashionable to dismiss 
 Peter as a boy's book, because it discovers a world of 
 flying men and women, modelled partly on Defoe, partly 
 on Swift; it has more recently been fashionable to hint 
 a sneer at it as " sentimental " because of its presentment 
 of a sort of fantastic and unconventional Amelia (who, it 
 may be remembered, made her appearance in the same 
 year) in the heroine Youwarkee. Persons who do not care 
 for fashion will perhaps sometimes agree that, though not 
 exactly a masterpiece, it is rather a charming book. If 
 anybody is sickened by its charm he may restore himself 
 by a still better known story which no one can accuse of 
 
 pigry " and Cuddle's " the leddy cured me with some hickery-pickery " 
 is not. While, for Dickens, compare the way in which Sam VVeller's land- 
 lord in the Fleet got into trouble with the Tinker's Tale in Spiritual 
 Quixote, bk. iv. chap. ii. 
 
 K
 
 146 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 charm or sentiment, though it is clever enough — Charles 
 Johnstone's Chrysal or The Adventures of a Guinea (1760). 
 This, which is strongly SmoUettian in more ways than one, 
 derives its chief notoriety from the way in which the 
 scandalous (and perhaps partly fabulous) orgies of Medmen- 
 ham Abbey are, like other scandalous and partly fabulous 
 gossip of the time, brought in. But it is clever; though 
 emphatically one of the books which " leave a bad taste 
 in the mouth." Indeed about this time the novel, which 
 even in clean hands allowed itself not a httle freedom, 
 took, in others, excursions in the direction of the province 
 of " prohibited literature," and sometimes passed the 
 border. 
 
 One rather celebrated book, however, has not yet been 
 mentioned: and it will serve very weU, with two others 
 greater in every way, as usher to a few general remarks on 
 the weakness of this generation of minor noveHsts. Be- 
 tween 1766 and 1770 Henry Brooke, an Irishman of position, 
 fortune, and hterary distinction in other ways, who was 
 at the time of more than middle age, pubHshed The Fool 
 of Quality or The Adventures of Henry Earl of Morland. 
 The h^ro is a sort of Grandison-Buncle, as proper though 
 scarcely as priggish as the one, and as eccentric and dis- 
 cursive as the other; the story is chaos: the book is stuffed 
 with disquisitions on all sorts of moral, social, and pohtical 
 problems. It is excellently written; it is clear from it 
 that Brooke (who was for a time actually mad) did not 
 belie the connection of great wits with madness. But it 
 is, perhaps, most valuable as an evidence of the unconquer- 
 able set of the time towards novel. 
 
 Of this, however, as of some other points, we have 
 greater evidence still in the shape of two books, each of 
 them, as nothing else yet mentioned in this chapter can claim
 
 LATER EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL 147 
 
 to be, a permanent and capital contribution to English 
 literature — Johnson's Rasselas (1759) and Goldsmith's Vicar 
 of Wakefield {ij66). 
 
 It is not from the present writer that any one need look 
 for an attempt to belittle Johnson: and there is no doubt 
 (for the Lives of the Poets is but a bundle of essays) that 
 Rasselas is Johnson's greatest book. But there may be, 
 in some minds, as little doubt that attempts to defend it 
 from the charge of not being a novel are only instances of 
 that not whoUy unamiable frenzy of eagerness to " say not 
 ditto to Mr. Burke " which is characteristic of clever 
 undergraduates, and of periods which are not quite of the 
 greatest in literature. Rasselas is simply an extended and 
 glorified moral apologue — an enlarged " Vision of Mirza." 
 It has no real story; it has no real characters; its dialogue 
 is "talking book;" it indulges in some but not much 
 description. It is in fact a prose Vanity of Human Wishes, 
 admirably if somewhat stiffly arranged in form, and as 
 true to life as life itself. You will have difficulty in finding 
 a wiser book anywhere; but although it is quite true that 
 a novel need not be foolish, wisdom is certainlv not its 
 determining differentia. Yet for our purposes Rasselas is 
 almost as valuable as Tom Jones itself: because it shows 
 how imperative and wide-ranging was the struggle towards 
 production of this kind in prose. The book is really — 
 to adapt the quaint title of one of the preceding century — 
 Johnson al Mondo: and at this time, when Johnson wanted 
 to communicate his thoughts to the world in a popular 
 form, we see that he chose the novel. 
 
 The lesson is not so glaringly obvious in the Vicar of 
 Wakefield, because this is a novel, and a very delightful 
 one. The only point of direct contact with Rasselas is the 
 knowledge of human nature, though in the one book this
 
 148 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 takes the form of melancholy aphorism and apophthegm, 
 in the other that of felicitous trait and dialogue-utterance. 
 There is plenty of story, though this has not been arranged 
 so as to hit the taste of the martinet in " fable; " the book 
 has endless character; the descriptions are Hogarth with 
 less of peuple about them; the dialogue is unsurpassable. 
 Yet Goldsmith, untiring hack of genius as he was, wrote 
 no other novel; evidently felt no particular call or pre- 
 dilection for the style; would have been dramatist, poet, 
 essayist with greater satisfaction to himself, though scarcely 
 (satisfactory as he is in all these respects) to us. That he 
 tried it at all can hardly be set down to anything else than 
 the fact that the style was popular: and his choice is one 
 of the highest possible testimonies to the popularity of 
 the style. Incidentally, of course, the Vicar has more 
 for us than this, because it indicates, as vividly as any of 
 the work of the great Four themselves, how high and 
 various the capacities of the novel are — how in fact it can 
 almost completely compete with and, for a time, vanquish 
 the drama on its own ground. Much of it, of course — the 
 " Fudge! " scene between Mr. Burchell and the town ladies 
 may be taken as the first example that occurs — is drama, 
 with all the cumbrous accessories of stage and scene and 
 circumstance spared. One may almost see that " notice 
 to quit," which (some will have it) has been, after nearly 
 a century and a half, served back again on the novel, served 
 by the Vicar of Wakefield on the drama. 
 
 At the same time even the Vicar, though perhaps less 
 than any other book yet noticed in this chapter, illustrates 
 the proposition to which we have been leading up — that, 
 outside the great quartette, and even to a certain extent 
 inside of it, the novel had not yet fully found its proper 
 path — had still less made up its mind to walk freely and
 
 LATER EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL 149 
 
 firmly therein. Either it has some arriere pensee^ some 
 second purpose, besides the sim.ple attempt to interest 
 and absorb by the artistic re-creation of real and ordinary 
 life: or, without exactly doing this, it shows signs of mis- 
 trust and misgiving as to the sufficiency of such an appeal, 
 and supplements it by the old tricks of the drama in 
 " revolution and discovery; " by incident more or less out 
 of the ordinary course; by satire, political, social, or 
 personal; by philosophical disquisition; by fantastic 
 imagination — by this, that, and the other of the fatal 
 auxiliaries who always undo their unwise employers. 
 Men want to write novels; and the public wants them to 
 write novels; and supply does not fail desire and demand. 
 There is a well-known locus classicus from which we know 
 that, not long after the century had passed its middle, 
 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in Italy regularly received 
 boxes of novels from her daughter in England, and read 
 them, eagerly though by no means uncritically, as became 
 Fielding's cousin and her ladyship's self. But while the 
 kind had not conquered, and for a long time did not 
 conquer, any high place in literature from the point of 
 view of serious criticism — while, now and long afterwards, 
 novel-writing was the Cinderella of the literary family, and 
 novel-reading the inexhaustible text for sermons on wasted, 
 nay positively ill -spent, time — the novelists themselves 
 half justified their critics by frequent extravagance; by 
 more frequent unreality; by undue licence pretty often; 
 by digression and divagation still oftener. Except Field- 
 ing, hardly any one had dared boldly to hold up the mirror 
 to nature, and be content with giving the reflection, in 
 his own way, but with respect for it. For even Goldsmith, 
 with infinite touches of nature, had not given quite a 
 natural whole, and even Johnson, though absolutely true,
 
 150 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 had failed to accommodate his truth to the requirements 
 of the novel. 
 
 The turning point in this direction of the kind was to 
 be made by a person far inferior in ability to any one of 
 the great quartette, and in a book which, as a book, cannot 
 pretend to an equality with the worst of theirs — by a 
 person indeed of less intellectual power, and in a book of 
 less literary merit, than not a few of the persons and books 
 just noticed. There is something, no doubt, paradoxical 
 in this: and the paradox is connected, both with a real 
 quality of the subject and with a surprising diversity of 
 opinions about it. Frances Burney and her Evelina (lyjS), 
 not to mention her subsequent works and her delightful 
 Diary, have been the subject of a great deal of writing: but 
 though more than a hundred years — more indeed than a 
 century and a quarter — have passed since the book in- 
 sidiously took London by gradual storm, it may, without 
 too much presumption, be questioned whether either book 
 or author has yet been finally or satisfactorily " placed." 
 The immense advantage of not having a history, positively 
 illustrated once for all in Shakespeare, could hardly be 
 negatively illustrated better than in Madame d'Arblay. 
 She had the curious, and actually very unpleasant, ex- 
 perience of being selected for a position at court on the 
 strength of her literary achievements, of finding it intoler- 
 able, of breaking down, and of never doing any really good 
 work after her release, through much more than half of her 
 long life. On this fact critical biography has fastened almost 
 exclusively. Macaulay, in one of his most brilliant and 
 best known essays, represents the world as having been 
 deprived of unknown quantities of admirable work by the 
 misplaced kindness, and the positive unkindness, of Queen 
 Charlotte. Some have agreed with him, some have differed
 
 LATER EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL 151 
 
 with him. Some, in one of the natural if uncritical revul- 
 sions, have questioned whether even Evelina is a very re- 
 markable book. Some, with human respect for the great 
 names of its early admirers, have passed it over gingerly 
 — not exactly as willing to wound, but as quite afraid or re- 
 luctant to strike. Nay, actual critical evaluations of the 
 novel-values of Miss Burney's four attempts in novel-writing 
 are very rare. I dare say there are other people who have 
 read The Wanderer through: but I never met any one who 
 had done so except (to quote Rossetti) myself: and I could 
 not bring myself, even on this occasion, to read it again. 
 I doubt whether very many now living have read Camilla. 
 Even Cecilia requires an effort, and does not repay that 
 effort very well. Only Evelina itself is legible and re- 
 legible — for reasons which will be given presently. Yet 
 Cecilia was written shortly after Evelina, under the same 
 stimulus of abundant and genial society, with no pressure 
 except that of friendly encouragement and perhaps assis- 
 tance, and long before the supposed blight of royal favour 
 and royal exigences came upon its author. When Camilla 
 was published she had been relieved from these exigences, 
 though not from that favour, for five years: and was a 
 thoroughly happy woman, rejoicing in husband and child. 
 Even when the impossible Wanderer was concocted, she 
 had had ample leisure, had as yet incurred none of her 
 later domestic sorrows, and was assured of lavish recom- 
 pense for her (it must be said) absolutely worthless labours. 
 Why this steady declension, with which, considering the 
 character of Cecilia, the court sojourn can have had 
 nothing to do ? And admitting it, why still uphold, as the 
 present writer does uphold, Evelina as one of the points de 
 repere of the English novel ? Both questions shall be 
 answered in their order.
 
 152 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 Frances Burney must have been, as we see not merely 
 from external testimony, but from the infallible witness 
 of her own diary, a most engaging person to any one who 
 could get over her shyness and her prudery:^ but she was 
 only in a very limited sense a gifted one. Macaulay grants 
 her a " fine understanding; " but even his own article 
 contradicts the statement, which is merely one of his 
 exaggerations for the sake of point. She had not a fine 
 understanding: though she was neither silly nor stupid, 
 her sensewas altogether inferior to her sensibility. Although 
 living in a most bookish circle she was, as Macaulay himself 
 admits, almost illiterate: and (which he does not say) her 
 comparative critical estimates of books, when she does 
 give them, are merely contemptible. This harsh statement 
 could be freely substantiated: but it is enough to say that, 
 when a girl, she preferred some forgotten rubbish called 
 Henry and Frances to the Vicar of Wakefield : and that, 
 when a woman, she deliberately offended Chateaubriand 
 by praising the Itineraire rather than the Genie du Chris- 
 tianisme, or Atala, or Rene, or Les Martyrs. She had very 
 little inventive power; her best novel, Evelina, has no 
 plot worth speaking of. She never wrote really well. 
 Even the Diary derives its whole charm from the matter 
 and the reportage. Evelina is tolerable style of the kind 
 that has no style; Cecilia is pompous and Johnsonian; 
 Camilla was stigmatised by the competent and affectionate 
 judgment of Mrs. Delany as " Gallicised; " and The Wan- 
 derer is in a lingo which suggests the translation of an 
 ill-written French original by a person who does not know 
 English. 
 
 ' Also, perhaps, to one who had not yet discovered that intense concen- 
 tration on herself and her family with which, after their quarrel, Mrs. 
 Thrale, not quite an impartial judge, but a very shrewd one, charged her, 
 and which does appear in the Diary.
 
 LATER EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL 153 
 
 What then was it in Evelina, and in part in Cecilia (with 
 a faint survival even into Camilla), which turned the heads 
 of such a " town " as Johnson and Burke, Walpole and 
 Windham, and many others — which, to persons who can see 
 it, makes the books attractive to-day, and which should 
 always give their author a secure and distinguished place 
 in the great torch-race of English fiction-writers ? It is 
 this — that Miss Burney had a quite marvellous faculty of 
 taking impressions of actual speech, manners, and to a 
 certain extent character: that she had, at any rate for a 
 time, a corresponding faculty of expressing, or at least 
 reporting, her impressions. Next (and perhaps most of all) 
 that she had the luck to come at a moment when speech and 
 manners were turning to the modern; and lastly, that she 
 was content, in parts of her work at any rate, to let her 
 faculty of expression work, automatically and uninterfered 
 with, on the impressions: and thereby give us record of 
 them for all time. Her acute critic " Daddy " Crisp 
 lamented that we had not had a series of recorders of 
 successive tons [fashions] like Fanny. But she was much 
 more than a mere fashion-monger: and what has lasted 
 best in her was not mere fashion. She could see and record 
 life and nature : and she did so. Still, fashion had a good 
 deal to do with it: and when her access to fashion and 
 society ceased, the goodness of her work ceased likewise. 
 
 Even this gift, and this even in Evelina and the better 
 parts of Cecilia, she had not always with her. The senti- 
 mental parts of Evelina — the correspondence with Mr. 
 ViUars, the courtship with Lord Orville, and others — are 
 very weak: and it cannot be said that Evelina herself, 
 though she is a pleasant girl enough, gives the lie to Mr. 
 Pope's libel about women. Cecilia has a little more in- 
 dividuality. But the great strength of the former book
 
 154 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 lies in the admirable lower middle-class pictures of the 
 Branghtons and Mr. Smith, whom Fanny had evidently 
 studied from the life in the queer neighbourhood of Poland 
 Street: as also in the justness and verisimilitude of the 
 picture of the situation, which in different ways both 
 books present — that of the introduction of a young girl 
 to the world.^ In these points, as in others which there is 
 neither space nor need to particularise. Miss Burney showed 
 that she had hit upon — stumbled upon one may almost 
 say — the real principle and essence of the novel as dis- 
 tinguished from the romance — its connection with actual 
 ordinary life — hfe studied freshly and directly ^^ from the 
 life," and disguised and adulterated as little as possible 
 by exceptional interests and incidents. It is scarcely too 
 much to say that one great reason why the novel was so 
 long coming into existence was precisely this — that life 
 and society so long remained subject to these exceptional 
 interests and incidents. It is only within the last century 
 or so that the " hfe of 'mergency " (to adapt Mr, Chucks 
 shghtly) ceased to be the ordinary Hfe. Addison's " Dis- 
 senter's Diary " with its record of nothing but constitutionals 
 and marrow-bones, and Mr, Nisby's opinions, has simply 
 amused half a dozen generations. Yet, in a sense, it has 
 nearly as much to do with the advent of the novel as Sir 
 Roger de Coverley himself. For these things are, not 
 merely in an allegory, the subjects of the novel. Not so very 
 much earlier Mr, Nisby would have had a chance of deliver- 
 ing his opinions on the scaffold: and his disciple would 
 have had prison bread and water for marrow-bones and 
 " Brooks and Hellier." These would have been subjects 
 for romance: the others were subjects for novel. 
 
 > Dunlop and others have directly or indirectly suggested a good deal of 
 plagiarism in Evelina from Miss Betsy Thoughtless : but it is exactly in 
 this life-quality that the earlier novelist fails.
 
 LATER EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL 155 
 
 All glory, therefore, be to Frances Burney; both that 
 which her generous successor and superior gives her in 
 Northanger Abbey, and more also — for Miss Austen, natur- 
 ally enough, was not taking the view-point of literary 
 history. But it has been said that Fanny herself possessed 
 her gift in two senses uncertainly — first, in that she did 
 not very clearly perceive what it was, and, secondly, in 
 that she soon lost grip of it. It is, therefore, not wonderful 
 that few others caught the trick from her for a long time — 
 for indeed fully twenty years, till Miss Edgeworth made her 
 appearance. But these twenty years were years of extreme 
 fertility in novels of different sorts, while — a phenomenon 
 that occurs not seldom — the older kind of fiction made 
 a kind of rally at the very time that the newer was at 
 last solidly establishing itself. There was, indeed, ample 
 room for both. You cannot kill Romance: it would be 
 a profound misfortune, perhaps the profoundest that 
 could befall the human race, if you could. But the new 
 romance was of rather a bastard kind, and it showed more 
 of the bad blood than of the good till, by a curious coinci- 
 dence, Scott once more found the true strain, just about 
 the same time as that at which Miss Austen was making 
 known the true strain of the novel proper. 
 
 This hybrid new romance had been stumbled upon more 
 than a decade before Fanny Burney in her turn stumbled 
 upon the pure novel: and most people know in what and 
 by whom. To this day it is by no means easy to be 
 certain what Horace Walpole really meant to write, or 
 thought he was writing, in The Castle of Otranto (1764). 
 His own references to his own writings are too much 
 saturated with affectation and pose to make it safe to 
 draw any conclusions from them; there is little or no 
 external evidence; and the book itself is rather a puzzle.
 
 156 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 Taking the Preface to the second edition with a very large 
 allowance of salt — the success of the first before this preface 
 makes double salting advisable — and accommodating it 
 to the actual facts, one finds it hardly necessary to go 
 beyond the obvious and almost commonplace solution 
 that 7he Castle of Otranto was simply the castle of Straw- 
 berry Hill itself with paper for lath and ink for plaster — 
 in other words, an effort to imitate something which the 
 imitator more than half misunderstood. Of medieval 
 literature proper, apart from chronicles and genealogies, 
 Walpole knew nothing: and for its more precious features 
 he had the dislike which sometimes accompanies ignorance. 
 But he undoubtedly had positive literary genius — flawed, 
 alloyed, incomplete, uncritical of itself, but existing: 
 and this genius showed itself here. His paper-and-ink 
 " Strawberry " is quite another guess structure from his 
 lath-and-plaster one. For itself in itself — for what it is — 
 the present writer, though he has striven earnestly and 
 often for the sake of the great things that it did, has never 
 been able to get up any affection or admiration. It is 
 preposterous, desultory, tedious, clumsy, dull. But it 
 made people (we know it on such excellent authority as 
 Gray's) shudder: and the shudder was exactly what they 
 wanted — in every sense of the verb " to want." Moreover, 
 quite independently of this shudder, it pointed the way 
 to a wide, fertile, and delightful province of historical, 
 social, literary, and other matter which had long been 
 neglected, and which people had been assured was not 
 worth exploring. Blair was just using, or about to use, 
 " any romance of chivalry " as a hyperbolical exemplifica- 
 tion of the contemptible in literature. Hume had been 
 arguing against, and Voltaire was still sneering at, all sorts 
 of superstition and supernaturalism. The common cant
 
 LATER EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL 157 
 
 of criticism for generations had been that " sense " and 
 " reason " were to be the only criteria. Walpole's egre- 
 gious helmet dropped from no one knew (or knows) where 
 on all these Philistinisms: and squelched them. How it 
 did this, why it did it, and so forth, one knows not much 
 more than one knows why and how all the things happened 
 in the novel itself. Apres coup, the author talked about 
 " Shakespeare " (of whom, by the way, he was anything 
 but a fervent or thorough admirer) and the like. Shake- 
 speare had, as Sir Walter Raleigh has well pointed out, 
 uncommonly little to do with it. But Shakespeare at 
 least supplies us with an appropriate phrase for the occa- 
 sion. The Castle of Otranto " lay in " Horace's " way, and 
 he found it." And with it, though hardly in it, he found 
 the New Romance. 
 
 In Horace's case also, as in that of Frances, though the 
 success was even more momentous, the successors were 
 slow and doubtful, though not quite so slow. In some 
 dozen years Walpole read Miss Clara Reeve's Old English 
 Baron {lyj"]), and as in another celebrated case " thought 
 it a bore." It is rather a bore. It has more consecutive- 
 ness than Otranto, and escapes the absurdities of the 
 copiously but clumsily used supernatural by administering 
 it in a very minute dose. But there is not a spark of genius 
 in it, whereas that spark, though sometimes curiously 
 wrapped up in ashes, was always present (Heaven knows 
 where he got it!) in Sir Robert's youngest son. And the 
 contagion spread. For general and epidemic purposes it 
 had to wait till the Germans had carried it over the North 
 Sea and sent it back again. For particular ones, it found 
 a new development in one of the most remarkable of all 
 novels, twenty years younger than Otranto, and a few 
 years older than the new outburst of the " Gothic "
 
 158 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 supernatural in the works of Anne Radcliffe and Mat 
 Lewis. 
 
 Vathek (1786) stands alone— almost independent even 
 of its sponsors — it would be awkward to say godfathers — 
 Hamilton and Voltaire; apart likewise from such work as 
 it, no doubt, in turn partly suggested to Peacock and to 
 Disraeli. There is, perhaps, no one towards whom it is 
 so tempting to play the idle game of retrospective Provi- 
 dence as towards the describer of Batalha and Alcobaga, 
 the creator of Nouronnihar and the Hall of Eblis. Fonthill 
 has had too many vicissitudes since Beckford, and Cintra 
 is a far cry; but though his associations with Bath are 
 later, it is still possible, in that oddly enchanted city, to get 
 something of the mixed atmosphere — eighteenth century, 
 nineteenth, and of centuries older and younger than either 
 — which, tamisee in a mysterious fashion, surrounds this 
 extraordinary little masterpiece. Take Beckford's millions 
 away; make him coin his wits to supply the want of them; 
 and what would have been the result? Perhaps more 
 Vatheks ; perhaps things even better than Vathek ; ^ per- 
 haps nothing at all. On the whole, it is always wiser not 
 to play Providence, in fact or fancy. All that need be said 
 is that Anthony Hamilton and Voltaire are certainly not 
 by themselves — good as they are, and admirable as the 
 first is — enough to account for Vathek. Romance has 
 passed there as well as persiflage and something like 
 co'ionnerie ; it is Romance that has given us the baleful 
 beauty of that Queen of Evil, Nouronnihar, and the vision 
 of the burning hearts that make their own wandering but 
 eternal Hell. The tendency of the novel had been on the 
 
 1 Since the text was written — indeed very recently — the long-missing 
 " Episodes " of Vathek itself have been at length supplied by the welcome 
 diligence of Mr. Lewis Melville. They are not " better than Vathek," 
 but they are good.
 
 LATER EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL 159 
 
 whole, even in its best examples, to prose in feeling as well 
 as in form. It was Beckford who availed himself of the 
 poetry which is almost inseparable from Romance. But 
 it was Horace Walpole who had opened the door to 
 Romance herself. 
 
 Still, Vatheks are not to be had to order: and as Romance 
 was wanted, to order and in bulk, during the late years of 
 the eighteenth century, some other kind had to be supplied. 
 The chief accredited purveyors of it have been already 
 named and must now be dealt with, to be followed by the 
 list of secondary, never quite accomplished, exponents now 
 of novel, now of romance, now of the two mixed, who 
 filled the closing years of the eighteenth century. 
 
 It is, however, unjust to put the author of The Mysteries 
 of Udolpho and the author of The Monk on the same level. 
 Mat Lewis was a clever boy with a lively fancy, a knack 
 of catching and even of anticipating popular tendencies in 
 literature, a rather vulgar taste by nature, and no faculty 
 of self-criticism to correct it. The famous Monk (1795), 
 which he published when he was twenty, is as preposterous 
 as Otranto and adds to its preposterousness a haut gout of 
 atrocity and indecency which Walpole was far too much 
 of a gentleman, and even of a true man of letters, to 
 attempt or to tolerate. Lewis's other work in various forms 
 is less offensive: but — except in respect of verse-rhythm 
 which does not here concern us — hardly any of it is litera- 
 ture. What does concern us is that the time took it for 
 literature, because it adopted the terror-style in fiction. 
 
 Anne Ward (she married a barrister named Radcliffe, of 
 whom we do not hear much except that his engagements 
 in journalism threw time on his wife's hands for writing) 
 appears to have started on her career of terror-novelist, 
 in which she preceded Lewis, with two fixed resolves of
 
 i6o THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 principle very contrary to his practice. The first was to 
 observe strict " propriety " in her books — a point in which 
 the novel had always been a little peccant. The second 
 and more questionable, but also more original, was a 
 curious determination to lavish the appearance of the 
 supernatural, in accordance with the Walpolian tradition 
 and the German adoption of it, but never to allow any- 
 thing really supernatural in ultimate explanation or want 
 of explanation. She applied these two principles to the 
 working out, over and over again, of practically the same 
 story — the persecutions of a beautiful and virtuous heroine, 
 and her final deliverance from them. Her first attempt, 
 7he Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne, appeared as early as 
 1789: and she left a posthumous romance, Gaston de 
 Blondeville, which did not come out till 1 826, four years 
 after her death. She also wrote some poems and a volume 
 of Travels (1794) which is important for a reason to be 
 noticed presently. But her fame rests upon four books, 
 which she published in seven years, between her own 
 twenty-sixth and thirty-third, A Sicilian Romance (1790), 
 7 he Romance of the Forest (1791), the world-renowned 
 Mysteries of Udolpho in 1 794-1 795, and The Italian two 
 years later. 
 
 These stories owed their original attraction to the skill 
 with which, by the use of a Defoe-like minuteness of detail, 
 added to a pictorial faculty which Defoe had not, an 
 atmosphere of terror is constantly diffused and kept up. 
 Very little that is terrible actually happens: but the artist 
 succeeds (so long as the trick has not become too familiar) 
 in persuading you that something very terrible is going to 
 happen, or has just happened. And so the delight of 
 something " horrid," as the Catherines and Isabellas of 
 the day put it, is given much more plentifully, and even
 
 LATER EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL i6i 
 
 much more excitingly, than it could be by a real horror 
 now and then, with intervals of miscellaneous business. 
 In one sense, indeed, the process will not stand even the 
 slightest critical examination: for it is soon seen to consist 
 of a succession of serious mystifications and non-comic 
 much-ados-about-nothing. But these " ados " are most 
 cunningly made (her last book. The Italian, is, perhaps, the 
 best place to look for them, if the reader is not taking up 
 the whole subject with a virtuous thoroughness), and 
 Mrs. Radcliffe's great praise is that she induced her original 
 readers to suspend their critical faculties sufficiently to 
 enable them to take it all seriously. Scott, who un- 
 doubtedly owed her something, assigned her positive genius : 
 and modern critics, while, perhaps, seldom experiencing 
 much real delectation from her work, have discovered in 
 it not a few positive and many more indirect and com- 
 parative merits. The influence on Scott is not the least 
 of these: but there is even a more unquestionable asset 
 of the same kind in the fact that the Byronic villain-hero, 
 if not Byron himself, is Mrs, Radcliffe's work. Schedoni 
 did much more than beget or pattern Lara: he is Lara, 
 to all intents and purposes, in " first state " and before the 
 final touch has been put by the greater master who took 
 the plate in hand. 
 
 But there is more to be said for Mrs. Radcliffe than this. 
 Her " explained supernatural," tiresome as it may be to 
 some of us nowadays, is really a marvel of patience and 
 ingenuity: and this same quality extends to her plots 
 generally. The historical side of her novels (which she 
 does to some extent attempt) is a failure, as everything 
 of the kind was before Scott: that we may leave till we 
 come to Scott himself. But one important engine of the 
 novelist she set to work in a fashion which had never been 
 
 L
 
 i62 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 managed before, and that is elaborate description. She 
 shows an eariy adaptation of that " picturesque," of which 
 we see the beginnings in Gray, when she was in the nursery, 
 which was being directly developed by Gilpin, but which, 
 as we may see from her Travels, she had got not merely 
 from books, but from her own observation. She applies 
 it both within and without: at one moment giving pages 
 on the scenery of the Apennines, at another paragraphs on 
 the furniture of her abbeys and castles. The pine forests 
 and the cataracts; the skyline of Udolpho bathed in sun- 
 set glow, while a " melancholy purple tint " steals up the 
 slopes to its foundations — are all in the day's work now; 
 but they were not so then, and it is fair to say that Mrs. 
 Radcliffe does them well. The " high canopied tester of 
 dark green damask " and the " counterpane of black 
 velvet " which illustrate the introduction of the famous 
 chapter of the Black Pall in Chateau le Blanc may be mere 
 inventory goods now: but, once more, they were not so 
 then. And this faculty of description (which, as noted 
 above, could hardly have been, and pretty certainly was 
 not, got from books, though it may have been, to some 
 extent and quite legitimately, got from pictures) was ap- 
 plied in many minor ways — touches of really or supposedly 
 horrible objects in the dark, faint suggestions of sound, 
 or of appeals to the other senses — hints of all sorts, which 
 were to become common tricks of the trade, but were then 
 quite new. 
 
 At any rate, by these and other means she attained 
 that great result of the novel which has been noted in Defoe, 
 in Richardson, and in others — the result of what the 
 French vividly call enfisting the reader — getting hold of his 
 attention, absorbing him in a pleasant fashion. The 
 mechanism was often too mechanical: taken with the
 
 LATER EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL 163 
 
 author's steady and honest, but somewhat inartistic 
 determination to explain everything it sometimes produces 
 effects positively ridiculous to us. With the proviso of 
 valeat quantum, it is not quite unfair to dwell, as has 
 often been dwelt, on the fact that the grand triumph of 
 Mrs. Radcliffe's terrormongering — the famous incident 
 of the Black Veil — is produced by a piece of wax-work. 
 But the result resulted — the effect was produced: and it 
 was left to those who were clever enough to improve upon 
 the means. For the time these means were " improved 
 upon " in another sense; we shall glance at some of the 
 caricatures, intended and unintended, later. For the 
 present we may turn to other varieties of the curiously 
 swarming novel-production of these two last decades of 
 the century, and especially of the very last. 
 
 If Scott had not established Richard Cumberland's 
 Henry (1795) in the fortress of the Ballantyne Novels, it 
 would hardly be necessary to notice " Sir Fretful Plagiary's" 
 contributions to the subject of our history. He preluded 
 it with another, Arundel {ij^()), and followed it much later 
 with a third, "John de Lancaster : but there is no need to 
 say anything of these. Henry displays the odd hit-and- 
 miss quality which seems to have attached itself to Cumber- 
 land everywhere, whether as novelist, dramatist, essayist, 
 diplomatist, poet, or anything else. It is, though by no 
 means a mere " plagiarism," an obvious and avowed 
 imitation of Fielding, and the writer is so intent on his 
 pastiche that he seems quite oblivious himself, and appears 
 to expect equal oblivion on the part of his readers, of the 
 fact that nearly two generations had passed. Henry is 
 Joseph; Susan May is a much more elaborate and attrac- 
 tive Betty; the doctor's wife a vulgarised and repulsive 
 Lady Booby ; Ezekiel Daw, whom Scott admired, a
 
 i64 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 dissenting Adams — the full force of the outrage of which 
 variation Sir Walter perhaps did not feel. There are some 
 good things in the story, but, as a whole, it is chiefly valu- 
 able as an early example of that great danger of modern 
 literature — the influence of the " printed book " itself: 
 and in a less degree of that forging ahead of the novel 
 generally in public favour which we are chronicling. If 
 the kind had not been popular, and if Fielding had not 
 been its great prophet, one may be pretty sure that Henry 
 would never have existed. The causes are important : the 
 effect not quite so. 
 
 There was, however, at this time a novel-school, and not 
 such a very small one, which had more legitimate reasons 
 for existence, inasmuch as it really served as mouthpiece 
 to the thoughts and opinions of the time, whether these 
 thoughts and opinions were good or bad. This may be 
 called the " revolutionary school," and its three most 
 distinguished scholars were Bage, Holcroft, and Godwin, 
 with Mrs. Inchbald perhaps to be added. The first began 
 considerably before the outbreak of the actual French 
 Revolution and shows the influence of its causes: the 
 others were directly influenced by itself. 
 
 One of the most remarkable of English novel-writers 
 who are not absolute successes, and one who, though less 
 completely obscured by Fortune than some, has never had 
 quite his due, is Robert Bage. It was unfortunate for him 
 that he fell in with the crude generation contemporary in 
 their manhood with the French Revolution, and so mani- 
 fested the crudity in full. Bage, in fact, except for a 
 certain strength of humour, is almost more French than 
 English. He has been put in the school of Richardson, 
 but it is certain that Richardson would have been shocked 
 at the supposed scholar: and it is not certain that Bage
 
 LATER EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL 165 
 
 would or need have felt complimented by the assignment 
 of the master. He has the special laxity of the time in 
 point of " morality," or at least of decency; its affecta- 
 tions of rather childish perfectibilism and anti-theism; and 
 the tendency of at least a part of it to an odd Calibanic 
 jesting. Bage is good-tempered enough as it is: but he 
 rather suggests possible Carrier-and-Fouche developments 
 in a favourable and fostering atmosphere. One does not 
 quite know why Scott, who included in the Ballantyne 
 Novels three of Bage's, Mount Kenneth (1781), Barham 
 Downs (1784), and 'James Wallace (1788), did not also 
 include, if not The Fair Syrian (1787), two others, Man as 
 He is (1792) and the still later Hermsprong, or Man 
 as He is Not (1796). This last has sometimes been regarded 
 as Bage's masterpiece: but it does not seem so to the 
 present writer. It begins by the sketch of an illegitimate 
 child, written in Bage's worst vein of hard rasping irony, 
 entirely devoid of the delicate spring and " give " which 
 irony requires, and which constitutes the triumph even 
 of such things as A Tale of a Tub and Jonathan Wild,. 
 The rather impossibly named Hermsprong himself is not 
 really so named at aU, but is related (and in fact head-of- 
 the-house) to the wicked or at least not good lord of the 
 story. He is of the kind of Sir Charles Grandison, Rights- 
 of-Mannified, which infests all these novels and is a great 
 bore — as, indeed, to me is the whole book. The earlier 
 Man as He is is far better. The hero. Sir George Paradyne, 
 though of the same general class, is very much more toler- 
 able and (being sometimes naughty) preferable to Grandison 
 himself: while the heroine — a certain Miss Colerain, who 
 is a merchant's daughter under a double cloud of her 
 father's misfortune and of calumny as regards herself — 
 though not an absolute success, is worth a dozen Harriets,
 
 i66 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 with thirteen Charlottes thrown in to make " 25 as 24 " 
 in bookseller's phrase. Bage's extravagant or perhaps 
 only too literal manners-painting (for it was an odd time) 
 appears not infrequently, as in the anecdote of a justly 
 enraged, though as a matter of fact mistaken, husband, 
 who finds a young gentleman sitting on his wife's lap, with 
 her arms round him, while he is literally and en tout hien 
 tout honneur painting her face — being a great artist in 
 that way. Mount Henneth is perhaps the liveliest of all: 
 though its liveliness is partly achieved by less merely 
 extravagant unconventionalities than this. But as a 
 matter of fact Bage never entirely " comes off " : though 
 there is cleverness enough in him to have made a dozen 
 popular and deservedly popular novelists at a better time 
 for the novel. For he was essentially a novelist of manners 
 and character at a transition time, when manners and 
 character had come out of one stage and had not settled 
 into another. Even Miss Edgeworth in Belinda shows 
 the disadvantage of this: and she was a lady of genius, 
 while Bage had only talent and was not quite a gentleman. 
 Thomas Holcroft was not a gentleman at all, never 
 pretended to the title, and would probably have been 
 rather affronted if any one had applied it to him: for he 
 was a violent Atheist and Jacobin, glorying in his extrac- 
 tion from a shoemaker and an oysterseller, and in his 
 education as a stable boy. He was, however, a man of 
 considerable intellectual power and of some literary gift, 
 which chiefly showed itself in his dramas (the best known, 
 The Road to Ruin), but is not quite absent from his novels 
 Alzuyn (1780), Anna St. Ives (1792), and Hugh Trevor 
 (lyc^^-iygj). The series runs in curious parallel to that 
 of Bage's work: for Alzuyn, the liveliest and the earliest 
 by far of the three, is little more than a study partly after
 
 LATER EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL 167 
 
 Fielding, but more after Smollett, with his own experiences 
 brought in. The other two are purpose-novels of anar- 
 chist perfectibihsm, and Holcrcft enjoys the traditional 
 credit of having directly inspired Godwin. Godwin him- 
 self acknowledged the obligation; indeed it is well known 
 that — in pecuniary matters more particularly — Godwin 
 had no hesitation either in incurring or in acknowledging 
 obligations, always provided that he was not expected to 
 discharge them. It is possible that Holcroft's rough and 
 ready acceptance and exaggeration of the doctrines which 
 Rousseau had (as seems most probable) developed from 
 a paradox of Diderot's, gave an impetus to the rather 
 sluggish but more systematic mind of Godwin. But it is 
 certain that Political Justice, though it is not a novel at 
 all, is a much more amusing book than Anna St. Ives, 
 which is one. And though Holcroft (especially if the 
 presence of this quality in his Autobiography is not wholly 
 due to Hazlitt — there is some chance that it is) possessed 
 a liveliness in narrative to which Godwin could never 
 attain, there is no doubt that this enigmatical and many- 
 sided spunger, philanderer, and corruptor of youth had 
 a much higher general quahfication for novel-writing than 
 any one mentioned hitherto in this chapter, or perhaps 
 than any to be mentioned, except the curiously contrasted 
 pair, of Irish birth, who are to come last in it. 
 
 I have sometimes thought that the greatest testimony 
 to Godwin's power in this respect is the idea (which even 
 Hazlitt, though he did not share it, does not seem to have 
 thought preposterous, and which seems to have been held 
 by others who were not fools) that Godwin might be the 
 author of Waverley. To us, looking back, the notion 
 seems as absurd as that Bacon could be the author of 
 Shakespeare or Steele of the ^ale of a Tub : but if, instead
 
 i68 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 of looking back, we throw ourselves back, the absurdity 
 does not quite persist as it does in the other two instances. 
 There are some who, of course, would say, " Why take this 
 fanciful test of Godwin's ability when you have a real 
 one in Caleb Williams ?'^ The reasons are double: for, 
 historically, such an estimate by contemporaries is of the 
 very first value, and to the present writer Caleb Williams 
 (1794) has never seemed a very interesting book. It is 
 impossible to sympathise with a hero who is actuated by 
 the very lowest of human motives, sheer inquisitiveness: 
 and my sense of natural justice (which is different from 
 Godwin's) demands not that he shall escape, but that he 
 shall be broken on the wheel, or burnt at a slow fire, or 
 made to read Political Justice after the novelty of its 
 colossal want of humour has palled on him. One could 
 sympathise with Falkland, but is not allowed to do so: 
 because he is not human, except in his crime. But, as has 
 been said, to those whose sporting interests are excited by 
 the pleasures and hazards of the chase, these things no 
 doubt do not occur. After all Caleb is, in a sense, the first 
 " detective novel " : and detective novels have always 
 been popular, though they bore some people to extinction. 
 Far, however, be it from me to deny that this popularity, 
 especially when, as in the present case, it has been con- 
 tinued for four whole generations, is a real and a very 
 considerable asset. Even if it were now to cease, it is 
 actually funded and vested to Godwin's credit in the 
 grand livre of literary history: and it can never be written 
 off. Perhaps Caleb is the one book of the later English 
 eighteenth century in novel for which there must always 
 be a public as soon as it is presented to that public. And 
 when this is said and endorsed by those who do not per- 
 sonally much care for the book, it is at once a sufficient
 
 LATER EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NO^^EL 169 
 
 testimony to the position of the author, and a vindication 
 of the not absolutely imbecile position of those who thought 
 that he might have written Waverley and its successors. 
 The way in which Godwin in his later novels came down 
 from the mountain-tops of theory and paradox just as he 
 came down from those of Political 'Justice itself is interest- 
 ing and amusing, but not for us. As novels they are 
 certainly inferior. The best parts of St. Leon (1799) and 
 Fleetwood, (1805) are perhaps better than anything in 
 Caleb : Mandeville (1817) and Deloraine (1833) are senilia} 
 The graceful figure of the heroine Marguerite in St. Leon 
 is said to be modelled on Mary Wollstonecraft, and there 
 are some fresh pictures of youth and childhood in Fleet- 
 wood. But St. Leon., besides its historical shortcomings 
 (which, once more, we may postpone), is full of faults, from 
 the badly managed supernatural to an only too natural 
 dullness and languor of general story: nor has Fleetwood 
 anything like the absorbing power which Caleb Williams 
 exercises, in its own way and on its own people. Yet 
 again we may perhaps say that the chief interest of Godwin, 
 from our point of view, is his repeated and further weighted 
 testimony to the importance of the novel as an appeal to 
 pubHc attention. In this respect it was in fact displacing, 
 not only the drama on one side, but the sermon on the 
 other. Not so very long before these two had almost 
 engrossed the domain of popular literature, the graver and 
 more precise folk habitually reading sermons as well as 
 hearing them, and the looser and lighter folk reading 
 drama much oftener than (in then-existing circumstances) 
 they had the opportunity of seeing it. With the novel 
 the " address to the reader " became direct and stood by 
 itself. The novelist could emulate Burke with his right 
 1 Godwin had written novel-juvenilia of which few say anything.
 
 170 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 barrel and Lydia Languish with his left. He certainly 
 did not always endeavour to profit as well as to delight: 
 but the double power was, from this time forward, shared 
 by him with his brother in the higher and older Dichtung. 
 Next to Godwin may be placed a lady who was much 
 adored by that curious professor of philandering, pohtical 
 mjustice, psychology, and the use of the spunge, but who 
 wisely put him off. Mrs. Inchbald's (175 3-1 821) command 
 of a certain kind of dramatic or at least theatrical situation, 
 and her propensity to Richardsonian " human-heart "- 
 mongering, have from time to time secured a certain 
 number of admirers for A Simple Story (1791) and Nature 
 and Art (1796). Some, availing themselves of the con- 
 fusion between " style " and " handling " which has 
 recently become fashionable, have even credited her with 
 style itself. Of this she has nothing — unless the most 
 conventional of eighteenth - century phraseology, dashed 
 with a kind of marivaudage which may perhaps seem 
 original to those who do not know Marivaux's French 
 followers, shall deserve the name. She is indeed very 
 much of an English Madame Riccoboni. But her situa- 
 tions—such as the meeting in A Simple Story of a father 
 with the daughter whom, though not exactly casting her 
 off, he has persistently refused to see, in revenge for her 
 mother's unfaithfulness, and the still more famous scene 
 in Nature and Art where a judge passes the death-sentence 
 on a woman whom he has betrayed — have, as has been 
 allowed, the dramatic or melodramatic quality which 
 attracts people in " decadent " periods. There seems, 
 indeed, to have been a certain decadent charm about Mrs. 
 Inchbald herself — with her beauty, her stage skill, her 
 strict virtue combined with any amount of " sensibility," 
 her affectation of nature, and her benevolence not in the
 
 LATER EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL 171 
 
 least sham but distinctly posing. And something of this 
 rococo relish may no doubt, with a little good will and 
 sympathy, be detected in her books. But of the genuine 
 life and the natural language which occasionally inspirit 
 the much more unequal and more generally commonplace 
 work of Miss Burney, she has practically nothing. And 
 she thus falls out of the main Hne of development, merely 
 exemplifying the revolutionary and sentimental episode. 
 
 We must now, for some pages, illustrate the course of the 
 novel by minor examples: and we may begin with a brief 
 notice of two writers, one of whom might have been taken 
 before Miss Burney and the other just after her chrono- 
 logically: but who, in the order of thought and method, 
 will come better here. Both were natives of Scotland and 
 both illustrate different w^ays of the novel. Henry Mac- 
 kenzie, an Edinburgh advocate, in three books — the names 
 of which at least are famous, while his friend Sir. Walter 
 has preserved the books themselves in the collection so 
 often mentioned — produced, in his own youth and in 
 rapid succession, The Man of Feeling (jy/i), The Man of 
 the World (lyjs), and Julia de Roubigne {ijjj). John 
 Moore, a Glasgow physician, wrote, when he was nearly 
 sixty, the novel of Zeluco {ly^iG) and followed it up with 
 Edward ten years afterwards and Mor daunt (1800). Mac- 
 kenzie did good work later in the periodical essay: but 
 his fiction is chiefly the " sensibility "-novel of the French 
 and of Sterne, reduced to the absolutely absurd. From 
 his essay-work, and from Scott's and other accounts of 
 him, he must have possessed humour of a kind: but the 
 extremely limited character of its nature and operation 
 may be exemplified by his representation of a whole press- 
 gang as bursting into tears at the pathetic action and words 
 of an old man who offers himself as substitute for his son.
 
 172 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 This is one of the not rare, but certainly one of the most 
 consummate, instances of fashion caricaturing itself in total 
 unconsciousness. But it was the fashion: and Mackenzie, 
 though perhaps he helped to bring it to an end, no doubt 
 caused the shedding, by " the fair " of the time, of an 
 ocean of tears as great as the ocean of port wine which 
 was contemporaneously absorbed by " the brave." 
 
 Moore saw a good deal of continental society — he is 
 indeed one of the first-hand witnesses for the events of 
 the French Revolution — and he had a more considerable 
 influence on the novel than has always been allowed him. 
 Zeluco chiefly survives because of the exquisitely ludicrous 
 and human trait of the English sailor who, discussing the 
 French army, pronounces white uniforms " absurd " and 
 blue " only fit for the artillery and the blue horse." But 
 it is not quite certain that its villain-hero had not something, 
 and perhaps a good deal, to do with those of Mrs, Radcliffe 
 who were soon to follow, and, through these, with Byron 
 who was not to be very long after. The later books are 
 of much less importance, if only because they follow the 
 outburst of fiction which the French Revolution itself 
 ushered. But Moore, who was intimately connected with 
 Smollett, carried on the practice of making national or 
 sub-national characteristics important elements of novel 
 interest: and is thus noteworthy in more ways than one. 
 
 He is a late instance — he was born in 1729 and so was 
 only a few years younger than Smollett himself — of the 
 writers who had, for all but half a century after Richard- 
 son's appearance, accumulated patterns and examples of 
 the novel in aU sorts of forms, hardly one of which lacked 
 numerous and almost innumerable imitators and followers. 
 By these later years of the century the famous " Minerva 
 Press " and many others issued deluges of novel-work
 
 LATER EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL 173 
 
 which were eagerly absorbed by readers. " Absorbed " 
 in more senses than one: for the institution of circulating 
 libraries, while it facilitated reading, naturally tended 
 towards the destruction of the actual volumes read. Novels 
 were rarely produced in a very careful or sumptuous fashion, 
 and good copies of those that were in any way popular are 
 now rather hard to obtain: while even in the British 
 Museum it will frequently be found that only the later 
 editions are represented. We shall finish this chapter 
 with some instances, taken not quite at random, of the 
 work of the last decades of the eighteenth and the beginning 
 of the nineteenth century, winding up with more general 
 notice of two remarkable writers who represent — though 
 at least one of them lived far later — the period before 
 Scott, and who also, as it happens, represent the contrast 
 of novel and romance in a fashion unusually striking. 
 The description, as some readers will have anticipated, 
 refers to Miss Edgeworth and to Maturin. But the smaller 
 fry must be taken first. 
 
 It is not uninteresting to compare two such books as 
 Mrs. Bennett's Anna and Mrs. Opie's Adeline Mowbray. 
 Published at twenty years' distance (1785 and 1804) they 
 show the rapid growth of the novel, even during a time 
 when nothing of the first class appeared. Anna, or the 
 Memoirs of a Welsh Heiress, interspersed with Anecdotes of 
 a Nabob, is a kind of bad imitation of Miss Burney, with 
 a catchpenny " interspersion " to suit the day. Adeline 
 Mowbray, written with more talent, chimes in by infusing 
 one of the tones of its day — Godwinian theories of life. 
 The space between was the palmy time of that now almost 
 legendary " Minerva Press " which, as has been said, 
 flooded the ever-absorbent market with stuff of which The 
 Libertine, masterpiece of Mrs. Byrne, alias Charlotte Dacre,
 
 174 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 alias " Rosa Matilda," is perhaps best worth singling out 
 from its companions, Hours of Solitude, The Nun of St. 
 Omers, Zofoya, etc., because it specially shocked the 
 censor of the style who will be mentioned presently. It 
 is pure (or not-pure) rubbish. Angelo (the libertine) 
 seduces the angelic Gabrielle de Montmorency, who follows 
 him to Italy in male attire, saves him from the wicked 
 courtesan Oriana and her bravo Fiorenz^ (i"zV), is married 
 by him, but made miserable, and dies. He continues his 
 misbehaviour to their children, and finally blows his 
 brains out. " Bah! it is bosh! " as the Master observes 
 of something else. 
 
 It may seem iniquitous to say that some tolerably good 
 novel-writers must be more summarily treated than some 
 bad ones here: but there is reason for it. Such, for 
 instance, as Charlotte Smith and the Miss Lees are miles 
 above such others as the just-mentioned polyonymous 
 " Rosa," as Sarah Wilkinson, or as Henrietta Mosse- 
 Rouviere. The first three would make a very good group 
 for a twenty-page causerie. Charlotte Smith, who was 
 tolerably expert in verse as well as prose; who antici- 
 pated, and perhaps taught, Scott in the double use of the 
 name " Waverley "; and whose Old Manor House (1793) 
 is a solid but not heavy work of its kind — is something of 
 a person in herself, but less of a figure in history, because 
 she neither innovates nor does old things consummately. 
 Harriet and Sophia Lee claimed innovation for the latter's 
 Recess (i 783-1 786), as Miss Porter did for Thaddeus of 
 Warsaw, but the claim can be even less allowed. There is 
 nothing of real historical spirit, and very little goodness of 
 any kind, in The Recess. The Canterbury Tales (i 797-1 805) 
 (so named merely because they are supposed to be told by 
 different persons) were praised by Byron, as he praised the
 
 LATER EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL 175 
 
 Percy Anecdotes and other things — either irresponsibly or 
 impishly. They are not exactly bad: but also as far as 
 possible from consummateness. 
 
 On the other hand, The Convent of Grey Penitents, one of 
 the crops which rewarded Miss Wilkinson for tilling the 
 lands of her imagination with the spade of her style, is 
 very nearly consummate — in badness. It is a fair example 
 of the worst imitations of Mrs. Radcliffe and Mat Lewis 
 conjointly, though without the latter's looseness. The 
 Marquis di Zoretti was an Italian nobleman — " one of 
 those characters in whose bosom resides an unquenchable 
 thirst of avarice " [" thirst of avarice " is good !], etc. He 
 marries, however, a lovely signora of the odd name of 
 Rosalthe, without a fortune, " which circumstance was over- 
 looked by his lordship " for a very short time only. He 
 plots to be free of her: she goes to England and dies there 
 to the genteelest of slow music. Their son Horatio falls 
 in love with a certain Julietta, who is immured by wicked 
 arts in the " Convent of Grey Penitents," tormented by 
 the head, Gradisca, but rescued, and so forth. The book, 
 if harmless, is about as worthless as a book can be: but it 
 represents, very fairly, the ruck, if not indeed even the 
 main body, of the enormous horde of romances which 
 issued from the press towards the end of the eighteenth 
 century and the beginning of the nineteenth, and which, 
 in their different action on persons of genius, gave us 
 Zastrozzi on the one side and North anger Abbey on the 
 other. 
 
 As for Miss Henrietta Mosse, otherwise Rouviere, she 
 represents the other school of abortive historical novel. 
 A Peep at Our Ancestors (1807) is fairly worthy of its 
 ridiculous name. It is preceded by expressions of thanks 
 to the authorities of " the British Museum and the Heralds'
 
 176 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 Office " for the " access to records " vouchsafed to its 
 author. As the date of the story is 1 146 (it was long before 
 Mr. Freeman wrote) access to records would certainly 
 not have been superfluous. The actual results of it are 
 blocks of spiritless and commonplace historic narrative — 
 it is nearly all narrative, not action — diversified by utter- 
 ances like this of Malcolm III. of Scotland, " O my Edward! 
 the deed which struck my son's life has centred [sic] thy 
 noble youthful bosom also," or this of the heroine (such 
 as there is), " the gentle elegant Adelaise," " And do I not 
 already receive my education of thee, mamma ? " It is 
 really a pity that the creator of this remarkable peep-show 
 did not give references to her " records," so that one might 
 look up this " elegant " young creature of the twelfth 
 century who talked about " education " and said 
 "mamma!" But this absolute failure in verisimilitude 
 is practically universal before Scott. 
 
 The works of the very beautifully named Regina Maria 
 Roche should probably be read, as they were for genera- 
 tions, in late childhood or early youth. Even then an 
 intelligent boy or girl would perceive some of the absurdity, 
 but might catch a charm that escapes the less receptive 
 oldster. They were, beyond all question, immensely 
 popular, and continued to be so for a long time: in fact it 
 is almost sufficient evidence that there is, if I mistake not, 
 in the British Museum no edition earlier than the tenth 
 of the most famous of them, The Children of the Abbey 
 (1798). This far-renowned work opens with the exclama- 
 tion of the heroine Amanda, " Hail, sweet sojourn of my 
 infancy! " and we are shortly afterwards informed that 
 in the garden " the part appropriated to vegetables was 
 divided from the part sacred to Flora." Otherwise, the 
 substance of the thing is a curious sort of watered-down
 
 LATER EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL 177 
 
 Richardson, passed through successive filtering beds of 
 Mackenzie, and even of Mrs. RadcHffe. It is difficult for 
 even the most critical taste to find much savour or stimulus 
 in the resulting liquid. But, like almost everybody 
 mentioned here, Regina is a document of the demands of 
 readers and the faculty of writers: and so she " standeth," 
 if not exactly " crowned," yet ticketed. 
 
 Work — somewhat later — of some interest, but not of 
 first-class quality, is to be found in the Discipline (r8i i) and 
 Self-Control (1814) of Mary Brunton. A Balfour of 
 Orkney on the father's side and a Ligonier on the mother's, 
 the authoress had access to the best Enghsh as well as 
 Scottish society, and seems to have had more than a 
 chance of taking a place in the former: but preferred to 
 marry a minister-professor and settled down to country 
 manse life. She died in middle age and her husband 
 wrote a memoir of her. Discipline seems to represent a 
 sort of fancy combination of the life she might have led 
 and the life she did lead. Ellen Percy, the heroine, starts 
 in the highest circles; forgets herself so far as to " waltz^ " 
 with a noble ne'er-do-weel, thereby earning the " stern 
 disapprobation " of a respectable lover; comes down in 
 the world; has Highland experiences which, at the book's 
 early date, are noteworthy; marries (like her creatress) 
 a minister; but " retains a little of her coquettish sauci- 
 ness." " Bless her, poor little dear! " one can imagine 
 Thackeray exclaiming in his later and mellowed days. 
 Mrs. Brunton's letters breathe a lady-hke and not un- 
 amiable propriety, and she is altogether a sort of milder, 
 though actually earlier. Miss Ferrier. 
 
 Ireland vindicated its claim to comparative liveliness 
 in the work of a better known contemporary and survivor. 
 Lady Morgan's (Miss Sydney Owenson's) Wild Irish Girl 
 
 M
 
 178 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 (1806) is one of the books whose titles have prolonged for 
 them a kind of shadowy existence. It is written in letters : 
 and the most interesting thing about it for some readers 
 now is that the heroine supplied Thackeray with the name 
 Glorvina, which, it seems, means in Irish " sweet voice," 
 if Lady Morgan is to be trusted in rebus Celticis. It is to 
 be hoped she is: for the novel is a sort of macedoine of 
 Irish history, folk-lore, scenery, and what not, done up 
 in a syrup of love-making quant, suff. Its author wrote 
 many more novels and became a butt for both good- and 
 iU-natured satire with the comic writers of the twenties, 
 thirties, and forties. The title was actually borrowed by 
 Maturin in T^he Wild Irish " Boy," and it is fair to say 
 that the book preceded Scott's, though not Miss Edge- 
 worth's, experiments in the line of the " national " novel. 
 The earlier Reviewers were discreditably savage on women- 
 writers, and Lady Morgan had her share of their truculence. 
 She did not wholly deserve it: but it must be said that 
 nothing she wrote can really be ranked as hterature, save 
 on the most indiscriminate and uncritical estimate. It is, 
 however, difficult to see much harm in her. 
 
 Ida of Athens^ for instance, which shocked contemporaries, 
 and which, by the way, has the very large first title of 
 Woman, could only bring a blush to cheeks very tickle of 
 that sere: a yawn might come much more easily. The 
 most shocking thing that the heroine, who is " an attempt 
 to delineate woman in her natural state," does (and that 
 not of mahce) is to receive her lover in a natural bath- 
 room. But her adventures are told in a style which is the 
 oddest compound of Romantesque and Johnsonese. ("The 
 hour was ardent. The bath was cool. He calculated upon 
 the probable necessity of its enjoyment.''^) The spirit is the 
 silliest and most ignorant Philhellenism — all the beauty,
 
 LATER EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL 179 
 
 virtue, wisdom, of the ancient Greeks being supposed to 
 be inherited by their mongrel successors of the early nine- 
 teenth century. An English and a Turkish, lover dispute 
 Ida's affection or possession. There are the elaborate 
 pseudo-erudite notes which one has learnt to associate 
 chiefly with Moore. The authoress boasts in her preface 
 that she " has already written almost as many volumes as 
 she has years," and that she has hardly ever corrected her 
 proofs. Perhaps this silhness will make some think her 
 not more an example of the savagery of contemporary 
 criticism than a justification thereof. 
 
 It was in fact not only brutal man who objected to the 
 preposterous excesses of pseudo-romance: and serious or 
 jocular parables were taken up against it, if not before 
 N onhanger Abbey was written, long before it was published. 
 In 1 8 10 a certain " G." or " S. G.," whose full name was 
 Sarah Green, wrote, besides some actual history and an 
 attempt at the historical novel, a very curious and rather 
 hybrid book entitled Romance Readers and Romance Writers. 
 Its preface is an instance of " Women, beware Women," 
 for though it stigmatises male creatures, such as a certain 
 Curteis and a certain Pickersgill, it treats Lady Morgan 
 (then only Sydney Owenson) and " Rosa Matilda " even 
 more roughly and asks (as has been asked about a hundred 
 years later and was asked about a hundred years before), 
 " Is it not amazing that the [two] most licentious writers 
 of romance are women ? " And it starts with a burlesque 
 account of a certain Margaret Marsham who exclaims, 
 " What then ? to add to my earthly miseries am I to be 
 called Peggy ? My name is Margarita ! " *' I am sure 
 that if I am called Peggy again I shall go into a fit." But 
 this promise of something to complete the trio with North- 
 anger Abbey and 7he Heroine (to be presently mentioned)
 
 i8o THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 is not maintained. Not only does the writer force the 
 note of parody too much by making " Margaritta " say to 
 herself, " Poor persecuted dove that I am," and adore a 
 labourer's shirt on a hedge, but she commits the far more 
 fatal fault of exchanging her jest for earnest. Margaritta — 
 following her romance-models — falls a victim to an un- 
 principled great lady and the usual wicked baronet — at 
 whose head, one is bound to say, she flings herself with such 
 violence as no baronet could possibly resist. Her sister 
 Mary, innocent of romance-reading and all other faults, 
 is, though not as guilty, as unlucky almost as Margaret: 
 and by far the greater part of the book is an unreal present- 
 ment, in nearly the worst manner of the eighteenth century 
 itself, of virtuous curates, wwvirtuous " tonish " rectors, 
 who calmly propose to seduce their curates' daughters 
 (an offence which, for obvious reasons, must, in the worst 
 times, have been unusual), libertine ladies, and reckless 
 " fashionables " of all kinds. The preface and the opening 
 create expectations, not merely of amusement but of 
 power, which are by no means fulfilled. It is " S. G." who 
 asserts that Ida of Athens " has brought a blush to the 
 cheek of many," and one can only repeat the suggested 
 substitution. 
 
 The only faults that can be found with The Heroine or 
 The Adventures of Cheruhina, by Eaton Stannard Barrett, 
 which appeared in the same year, with no very different 
 object and subject, though written in lighter vein, are one 
 that it could not help and another that it could. Unjustly, 
 but unavoidably, the first is the worst. That it is a 
 burlesque rather overdone — a burlesque burlesque — not 
 in the manner of Thackeray, but in that of some older and 
 some more recent writers — is unfortunate, but not fatal. 
 One can forgive — one can even enjoy — the ghost who not
 
 LATER EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL i8i 
 
 only sneezes but says, " D — n, all is blown! " When 
 the heroine is actually locked up with a man in a chest one 
 is more doubtful: recovering when the Marquis de Furioso, 
 " bowing gracefully to the bride," stabs himself to the 
 heart, which is almost " the real Mackay " as they say in 
 the North. The slight awkwardness of snow falling the day 
 after the characters have been eating strawberries does not 
 amuse us much, because this is a comparatively ordinary 
 event of the early twentieth century, whatever it might 
 be of the early nineteenth. But what is fatal, though the 
 author could not help it, is that the infinitely lighter, more 
 artistic, and more lethal dart of N onhanger Abbey had been 
 launched by the pen, if not the press, more than a dozen 
 years before. 
 
 There are few more curious and interesting personages 
 in the history of the English Novel than Maria Edgeworth. 
 The variety of her accomplishment in the kind was extra- 
 ordinary: and in more than one of its species she went 
 very near perfection. One is never quite certain whether 
 the perpetual meddling of her rather celebrated father 
 Richard — one of the capital examples of the unpractical 
 pragmatists and clever -silly crotcheteers who produced 
 and were produced by the Revolutionary period — did her 
 more harm than good. It certainly loaded her work with 
 superfluous and (to us) disgusting didacticism: but it 
 might be contended that, without its stimulus, she would 
 have done much less, perhaps nothing. As it was, she 
 lived for more than eighty years (till all but the middle of 
 the nineteenth century) and wrote for more than sixty. 
 Her work is thus very bulky: but it may be considered, 
 for our present purpose, in three groups — her short stories 
 written mainly but not wholly for children; her regular 
 novels: and her Irish studies. Of these the middle division
 
 i82 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 has been, and no doubt has deserved to be, the least 
 popular: but its principal example, Belinda (i8oi) (Patron- 
 age, a longer and later book, and others are inferior), is 
 considerably better than is usually admitted and, by its 
 early date, deserves special notice here. It preceded Miss 
 Austen's work in publication, and is specially cited by her 
 as a capital example of novel in connection with the work 
 of Miss Burney: and it is evidently founded on study of 
 the latter, of which, indeed, it is the first really worthy 
 continuation. Maria has nothing so good as Fanny's 
 Smiths and Branghtons: but the whole book is far superior 
 to Evelina. The extravagance of t\ve. Jin-de-siecle society 
 which it represents has probably disguised from not a few 
 readers who do not know the facts, the other fact that it is 
 a real attempt at realist observation of manners: and it 
 has the narrative merit which was Miss Edgeworth's gift 
 of nature. But the hero is patchy and improbable: the 
 heroine, a good and quite possible girl, is not sufficiently 
 " reliefed out"; and the most important figures of the 
 book. Lord and Lady Delacour, almost great successes, 
 are not helped by the peculiar academic-didactic moralising 
 which she had caught from Marmontel. 
 
 The following of that ingenious and now too much under- 
 valued writer stood her in better stead in the Moral Tales 
 (i8oi) (which she deliberately called after his ^), the 
 
 * The peculiar pedantic ignorance which critics sometimes show 
 has objected to this rendering of Marmontel' s Conies Moraux, urging 
 that it should read " tales of manneys." It might be enough to 
 remark that the Edgeworths, father and daughter, were probably a 
 good deal better acquainted both with French and English than 
 these cavillers. But there is a rebutting argument which is less 
 ad hominem. " Tales of Manners " leaves out at least as much on 
 one side as "Moral Tales" does on the other: and the actual 
 meaning is quite clear to those who know that of the Latin mores 
 and the French mceurs. It is scarcely worth while to attempt to help 
 those who do not know by means of paraphrases.
 
 LATER EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL 183 
 
 Popular Tales of the same kind, and (though Marmontel 
 did not intentionally write for children) the delightful 
 Parentis Assistant (1801) and Frank. In the two first- 
 named divisions, the narrative faculty just mentioned 
 appears admirably, together with another and still greater 
 gift, that of character-painting, and even a grasp of hterary 
 and social satire, which might not be anticipated from 
 some of her other books. The French governess {Mile. 
 Panache) and the satire on romantic young - ladyism 
 {Angelina) are excellent examples of this. As for the 
 pure child's stories, generation after generation of competent 
 criticism, childish and adult, has voted them by acclama- 
 tion into almost the highest place possible: and the gain- 
 sayers have for the most part been idle paradoxers, 
 ill-conditioned snarlers at things clean and sweet, or 
 fools pure and simple. 
 
 The " Irish brigade " of the work — Castle Rackrent (1800), 
 Ormond, and The Absentee, with the non-narrative but 
 closely-connected Essay on Irish Bulls — have perhaps com- 
 manded the most unchequered applause. They are not 
 quite free from the sentimentahty and the didacticism 
 which were both rampant in the novel of Miss Edgeworth's 
 earlier time: but these are atoned for by a quite new use 
 of the " national " element. Even Smollett and, following 
 Smollett, Moore had chiefly availed themselves of this for 
 its farcical or semi-farcical opportunities. Miss Edge- 
 worth did not neglect these, but she did not confine herself 
 to them: and such characters as Corny the " King of the 
 Black Isles " in Ormond actually add a new province and 
 a new pleasure to fiction. 
 
 Her importance is thus very great: and it only wanted 
 the proverbial or anecdotic "That!" to make it much 
 greater. " That ! " as it generally is, was in her case the
 
 i84 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 last fusing touch of genius to accomplish the grand ceuvre — 
 the perfect projection. She had humour, pathos, know- 
 ledge of the world, power of drawing it, acquaintance with 
 literature, shrewd common sense, an excellent style when 
 she was allowed to write in her own way, the feelings of 
 a lady who was also a good woman. King Charles is made 
 to say in Woodstock that " half the things in the world 
 remind him of the Tales of Mother Goose." It is astonish- 
 ing, in the real complimentary sense, how many things 
 remind one of situations, passages, phrases, in Miss Edge- 
 worth's works of all the kinds from Castle Rackrent to 
 Frank. She also had a great and an acknowledged 
 influence on Scott, a considerable and a certainly not 
 disavowed influence on Miss Austen. She is good reading 
 always, however much we may sometimes pish and pshaw 
 at the untimely poppings-in of the platitudes and crotchets 
 (for he was that most abominable of things, a platitudinous 
 crotcheteer) of Richard her father. She was a girl of 
 fourteen when the beginnings of the domestic novel were 
 laid in Evelina, and she lived to see it triumph in Vanity 
 Fair. But her own work, save in some of her short stories, 
 which are pretty perfect, represents the imperfect stage 
 of the development — the stage when the novel is trying 
 for the right methods and strugghng to get into the right 
 ways, but has not wholly mastered the one or reached 
 the others. 
 
 There are those who would assign what they might call 
 " higher genius," or " rarer gift," or something similar, to 
 her countryman Charles Robert Maturin. The present 
 writer is not very fond of these measurings together of 
 things incommensurable — these attempts to rank the 
 " light white sea-mew " as superior or inferior to the 
 " sleek black pantheress." It is enough to say that while
 
 LATER EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL 185 
 
 Miss Edgeworth very deliberately adopted the novel, and 
 even, as we have seen, slightly satirised at least pseudo- 
 romance, Maturin was romantic or nothing. His life was 
 hardly half hers in length, and his temperament appears 
 to have been as discontented as hers was sunny: but he 
 had his successes in drama as well as in novel, and one of 
 his attempts in the latter kind had a wide-ranging influence 
 abroad as well as at home, has been recently printed both 
 in whole and in part, and undoubtedly ranks among the 
 novels which any tolerably well instructed person would 
 enumerate if he were asked to give a pretty fuU list of 
 celebrated (and deservedly celebrated) books of the kind in 
 English. The others fall quite out of comparison. The 
 Fatal Revenge or the Family of Montorio (1807) is a try 
 for the " furthest " in the Radcliffe-Lewis direction, dis- 
 carding indeed the crudity of The Monk, but altogether 
 neglecting the restraint of Udolpho and its companions in 
 the use of the supernatural. The Wild Irish Boy (1808), 
 The Milesian Chief {1S12), Women (18 18), and The Alhi- 
 genses (1824) are negligible, the last, perhaps, rather less 
 so than the others. But Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) is 
 in quite a different case. It has faults in plenty — especially 
 a narrative method of such involution that, as it has been 
 said, " a considerable part of the book consists of a story 
 told to a certain person, who is a character in a longer story, 
 found in a manuscript which is delivered to a third person, 
 who narrates the greater part of the novel to a fourth 
 person, who is the namesake and descendant of the title- 
 hero." Stripped of these tiresome lendings (which, as has 
 been frequently pointed out, were a mania with the 
 eighteenth century and naturally grew to such intricacy 
 as this), the central story, though not exactly new, is 
 impressive: and it is told and worked out in manner more
 
 i86 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 impressive, because practically novel, save for, perhaps, 
 a little suggestion from Vathek. Melmoth has bartered 
 his soul with the devil for something like immortahty and 
 other privileges, including the unusual one of escaping 
 doom if he can get some one to take the bargain off his 
 hands. This leads up to numerous episodes or chapters 
 in which Melmoth endeavours to obtain substitutes: and 
 in one of these the love interest of the book — the, of course, 
 fatal love of Melmoth himself for a Spanish-Indian girl 
 Immalee or Isidora — is related with some real pathos and 
 passion, though with a good deal of mere sentiment and 
 twaddle. Maturin is stronger in his terror-scenes, and 
 affected his own generation very powerfully: his influence 
 being so great in France that Balzac attempted a variation 
 and continuation, and that there are constant references 
 to the book in the early French Romantics. In fact for 
 this kind of " sensation " Maturin is, putting Vathek aside, 
 quite the chief of the whole school. But it is doubtful 
 whether he had many other gifts as a novelist, and this 
 particular one is one that cannot be exercised very fre- 
 quently, and is very difficult to exercise at all without 
 errors and extravagances. 
 
 The child-literature of this school and period was very 
 large, and, had we space, would be worth dealing with at 
 length — as in the instances of the famous Sandford and 
 Merton (i 783-1 789) by Thomas Day, Richard Edgeworth's 
 friend, of Mrs. Trimmer's Story of the Robins, and others. It 
 led up to the definitely religious school of children's books, 
 first evangelical, then tractarian, with which we shall deal 
 later: but was itself as a rule utihtarian — or sentimental — 
 moral rather than directly religious. It is, however, like 
 other things — indeed almost all things — in this chapter — a 
 document of the fashion in which the novel was " filhng
 
 LATER EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL 187 
 
 all numbers " and being used for all purposes. It was, of 
 course, in this case, nearest to the world-old " fable " — 
 especially to the moral apologues of which the mediaeval 
 sermon-writers and others had been so fond. But its 
 popularity, especially when taken in connection with the 
 still surviving distrust of fiction, is valuable. It involves 
 not merely the principle that " the devil shall not have all 
 the best tunes," but the admission that this tune is good. 
 
 This point, and that other also frequently mentioned 
 and closely connected with it, that the novel at this time 
 overflows into almost every conceivable department of 
 subject and object, are the main facts of a general historical 
 kind, which should be in the reader's mind as the upshot 
 of this chapter. But there is a third, almost as important 
 as either, and that is the almost universal coming short of 
 complete success — the lack of consummateness, the sense 
 that if the Novel Israel is not exactly still in the wilderness, 
 it has not yet crossed the Jordan. Even if we take in the 
 last chapter, and its comparative giants, with the present 
 and its heroes, ordinary folk, and pygmies, we shall scarcely 
 find more than one great m.aster. Fielding, and one little 
 masterpiece, Vathek, deserving the adjective " consum- 
 mate." No doubt the obvious explanation — that the 
 hour was not because the man had not come except in this 
 single case — is a good one: but it need not be left in the 
 bare isolation of its fatalism. There are at least several 
 subsidiary considerations which it is weU to advance. The 
 transition state of manners and language cannot be too 
 often insisted upon: for this affected the process at both 
 ends, giving the artist in fictitious life an uncertain model 
 to copy and unstable materials to work in. The deficiency 
 of classical patterns — at a time which stiU firmly believed, 
 for the most part, that all good work in literature had been
 
 i88 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 so done by the ancients that it could at best be emulated — 
 should count for something: the scanty respect in which 
 the kind was held for something more. As to one of the 
 most important species, frequent allusions have been made, 
 and in the next chapter full treatment will be given, to the 
 causes which made the historical novel impossible until 
 very late in the century, and decidedly unlikely to be good 
 even then. Perhaps, without attempting further detail, 
 we may conclude by saying that the productions of this 
 time present, and present inevitably, the nonage and 
 novitiate of a branch of art which hardly possessed any 
 genuine representatives when the century was born and 
 which numbered them, bad and good, by thousands and 
 almost tens of thousands at its death. In the interval 
 there had been continuous and progressive exercise; there 
 had been some great triumphs; there had been not a little 
 good and pleasant work; and of even the work that was 
 less good and less pleasant one may say that it at least 
 represented experiment, and might save others from 
 failure.
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 SCOTT AND MISS AUSTEN 
 
 In i8i6 Sir Thomas Bernard, baronet, barrister, and philan- 
 thropist, pubhshed, having it is said written it three years 
 previously, an agreeable dialogue on Old Age, which was 
 very popular, and reached its fifth edition in 1820. The 
 interlocutors are Bishops Hough and Gibson and Mr. 
 Lyttleton, the supposed time 1740 — the year, by accident 
 or design, of Pamela. In this the aged and revered 
 " martyr of Magdalen " is mildly reproached by his 
 brother prelate for liking novels. Hough puts off the 
 reproach as mildly, and in a most academic manner, by 
 saying that he only admits them speciali gratia. This was 
 in fact the general attitude to the whole kind, not merely 
 in 1740, but after all the work of nearly another life-time 
 as long as Hough's — almost in 18 16 itself. Yet when Sir 
 Thomas published his little book, notice to quit, of a double 
 kind, had been served on this fallacy. Miss Austen's life 
 was nearly done, and some of her best work had not been 
 published: but the greater part had. Scott was in his 
 actual hey-day. Between them, they had dealt and were 
 dealing — from curiously different sides and in as curiously 
 different manners — the death-blow to the notion that the 
 novel was an inferior if not actually discreditable kind, 
 suitable for weak intellects only, and hkely to weaken 
 strong ones, frivolous when not positively immoral, giving 
 a distaste for serious reading, implying in the writer an 
 
 189
 
 190 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 inability to do anything more serious, and generally 
 presenting a glaring contrast to real " literature." 
 
 Interesting as each of these two great novehsts is in- 
 dividually, the interest of the pair, from our present 
 historical point of view, is almost greater; and the way 
 in which they complete each other is hardly short of 
 uncanny. Before their time, despite the great examples 
 of prose fiction produced by Bunyan, Defoe, Richardson, 
 Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne, and the remarkable deter- 
 mination towards the life of ordinary society given, or 
 instanced, by Miss Burney; despite the immense novel- 
 production of the last half of the eighteenth century and the 
 first decade of the nineteenth — it is hardly too much to 
 say that " the novel," as such, had not found its proper 
 way or ways at aU. Bunyan's was an example of genius 
 in a pecuhar kind of the novel: as, in a very different one, 
 was Sterne's. Defoe, possessing some of the rarest gifts 
 of the novelist, was quite lacking in others. Richardson 
 was not only exemplar vitiis imitahile and imitatum, but it 
 might be doubted whether, even when not faulty, he was 
 not more admirable than dehghtful. SmoUett, Hke Defoe, 
 was not much more than part of a novehst: and Miss 
 Burney lacked strength, equahty, and range. There 
 remained Fielding: and it certainly is not here that any 
 restrictions or allowances will be insinuated as to Fielding's 
 praise. But Fielding's novels are a circle in which no one 
 else save Thackeray has ever been able to walk. And what 
 we are looking for now is something rather different from 
 this — a masterpiece, or masterpieces, which may not only 
 yield delight and excite admiration in itself or themselves, 
 but may bring forth fruit in others — fruit less masterly 
 perhaps, but of the same or a similar kind. In other 
 words, nobody's work yet — save in the special kinds —
 
 SCOTT AND MISS AUSTEN 191 
 
 had been capable of yielding a novel-formula : nobody 
 had hit upon the most capital and fruitful novel-ideas. 
 And nearly everybody had, in the kind, done work curiously 
 and almost incomprehensibly faulty. Of these faults, the 
 worst, perhaps, were classable under the general head of 
 inverisimihtude. Want of truth to nature in character 
 and dialogue, extravagant and clumsy plotting, neglect of 
 (indeed entire bhndness to) historic colour, unreal and 
 unobserved description — all these things might be raised 
 to a height or sunk to a bathos in the work of the Minerva 
 Press — but there was far too much of them in all the novel 
 work of these sixty or seventy years. 
 
 Although the facts and dates are well enough known, 
 it is perhaps not always remembered that Miss Austen, 
 while representing what may, using a rather objectionable 
 and ambiguous word, be called a more " modern " style 
 of novel than Scott's, began long before him and had 
 almost finished her work before his really began. If that 
 wonderful Bath bookseller had not kept Northanger Abbey 
 in a drawer, instead of pubhshing it, it would have had 
 nearly twenty years start of Waverley. And it must be 
 remembered that Northanger Abbey, though it is, perhaps, 
 chiefly thought of as a parody-satire on the school of Mrs. 
 Radcliffe, is, as these parody-satires have a habit of being, 
 a great deal more. If Catherine had not made a fool of 
 herself about the Orphan of the Black Forest and Horrid 
 Mysteries (or rather if everything relating to this were 
 " blacked out " as by a Russian censor) there would stiU 
 remain the admirable framework of her presentation at 
 Bath and her intercourse with the Tilneys; the more 
 admirable character-sketches of herself — the triumph of 
 the ordinary made not ordinary — and the Thorpes; the 
 most admirable flashes of satire and knowledge of human
 
 192 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 nature, not " promiscuous " or thrown out apropos of 
 things in general, but acting as assistants and invigorators 
 to the story. 
 
 In the few words just used b'es, as far as it can be compre- 
 hended in any few words, the secret both of Miss Austen 
 and of Scott. It has been said — more than once or twice, 
 I fear — that hardly until Bunyan and Defoe do we get an 
 interesting story — something that grasps us and carries 
 us away with it — at all. Except in the great eighteenth- 
 century Four the experience is not repeated, save in parts 
 of Miss Burney and Miss Edgeworth later — it is simulated 
 rather than actually brought about by the Terror-novel — 
 except in the eternal exception of Vaihek — for Maturin 
 did not do his best work till much later. The absence of 
 it is mainly due to a concatenation of inabilities on the 
 part of the writers. They don't know what they ought 
 to do: and in a certain sense it may even be said that they 
 don't know what they are doing. In the worst examples 
 surveyed in the last chapter, such as A Peep at Our 
 Ancestors, this ignorance plumbs the abyss — blocks of dull 
 serious narrative, almost or quite without action, and 
 occasional insertions of flat, insipid, and (to any one with 
 a httle knowledge) impossible conversation, forming their 
 staple. Of the better class of books, from the Female 
 Quixote to Discipline, this cannot fairly be said: but there 
 is always something wanting. Frequently, as in both the 
 books just mentioned, the writer is too serious and too 
 desirous to instruct. Hardly ever is there a real projection 
 of character, in the round and living — only pale, sketchy 
 " academies " that neither live, nor move, nor have any 
 but a fitful and partial being. The conversation is, perhaps, 
 the worst feature of all — for it follows the contemporary 
 stage in adopting a conventional lingo which, as we know
 
 SCOTT AND MISS AUSTEN 193 
 
 from private letters as early as Gray's and Walpole's, if not 
 even as Chesterfield's and those of men and women older 
 still, was not the language of well-bred, weU-educated, and 
 intelligent persons at any time during the century. As 
 for the Fourth Estate of the novel — description — it had 
 rarely been attempted even by the great masters. In 
 fact it has been pointed out as perhaps the one unquestion- 
 able merit of Mrs. Radchfle that — following the taste for 
 the picturesque which, starting from Gray and popularised 
 by Gilpin, was spreading over the country — she did attempt 
 to introduce this important feature, and did partly, in a 
 rococo way, succeed in introducing it. As for plot, that 
 has never been our strong point — we seem to have been 
 contented with Tom Jones as payment in full of that 
 demand.^ 
 
 Now, this was aU changed. It is doubtful whether if 
 N onhanger Abbey had actually appeared in 1796 it would 
 have been appreciated — Miss Austen, Hke other writers of 
 genius, had, not exactly as the common but incorrect 
 phrase goes, to create the taste for her own work, but to 
 arouse the long dormant appetite which she was born to 
 satisfy. Yet, looking back a hundred years, it seems 
 impossible that anybody of wits should have failed at once 
 to discover the range, the perfection, and the variety of 
 the new gift, or set of gifts. Here all the elements come in : 
 and something with them that enhvens and intensifies 
 them all. The plot is not intricate, but there is a plot — 
 a good deal more, perhaps, than is generally noticed, and 
 more than Miss Austen herself sometimes gave, as, for 
 instance, in Mansfield Park. It is even rather artfuUy 
 
 * The frankness of the ingenious creator of Mr. Jorrocks should be imitated 
 by 99 per cent, of English novelists. " The following story," says he of 
 Ask Mamma, " does not involve the complication of a plot. It is a 
 mere continuous narrative." 
 
 N
 
 194 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 worked out — the selfish gabble of John Thorpe, who may- 
 look to superficial observers Hke a mere outsider, playing 
 an important part twice in the evolution. There is not 
 lavish but amply sufficient description and scenery — the 
 Bath vignettes, especially the Beechencliff prospect; the 
 sketch of the Abbey itself and of Henry's parsonage, etc. 
 But it is in the other two constituents that the blowing 
 of the new wind of the spirit is most perceptible. The 
 character-drawing is simply wonderful, especially in the 
 women — though the men lack nothing. John Thorpe has 
 been glanced at — there had been nothing like him before, 
 save in Fielding and in the very best of the essayists and 
 dramatists. General Tilney has been found fault with as 
 unnatural and excessive: but only by people who do not 
 know what " harbitrary gents " fathers of families, who 
 were not only squires and members of parliament, but mili- 
 tary men, could be in the eighteenth century — and perhaps 
 a httle later. His son Henry, in common with most of his 
 author's jeunes premiers, has been similarly objected to as 
 colourless. He really has a great deal of subdued individu- 
 ality, and it had to be subdued, because it would not have 
 done to let him be too superior to Catherine. James 
 Morland and Frederick Tilney are not to be counted as more 
 than " walking gentlemen," Mr. Allen only as a little more: 
 and they fulfil their law. But Isabella Thorpe is almost 
 better than her brother, as being nearer to pure comedy 
 and further from farce; Eleanor Tilney is adequate; and 
 Mrs. Allen is sublime on her scale. A novehst who, at the 
 end of the eighteenth century, could do Mrs. Allen, could 
 do anything that she chose to do; and might be trusted 
 never to attempt anything that she could not achieve. 
 And yet the heroine is perhaps — as she ought to be — the 
 greatest triumph of the whole, and the most indicative of
 
 SCOTT AND MISS AUSTEN 195 
 
 the new method. The older heroines had generally tried 
 to be extraordinary: and had failed, Catherine tries to 
 be ordinary: and is an extraordinary success. She is 
 pretty, but not beautiful: sensible and well-natured, but 
 capable, like most of us, of making a complete fool of 
 herself and of doing complete injustice to other people; 
 fairly well educated, but not in the least learned or accom- 
 plished. In real life she would be simply a unit in the 
 thousands of quite nice but ordinary girls whom Providence 
 providentially provides in order that mankind shall not 
 be alone. In literature she is more precious than rubies 
 — exactly because art has so masterfully followed and 
 duplicated nature. 
 
 Precisely to what extent the attractive quality of this 
 art is enhanced by the pervading irony of the treatment 
 would be a very difficult problem to work out. It is 
 scarcely hazardous to say that irony is the very salt of the 
 novel: and that just as you put salt even in a cake, so 
 it is not wise to neglect it wholly even in a romance. Life 
 itself, as soon as it gets beyond mere vegetation, is notori- 
 ously full of irony: and no imitation of it which dispenses 
 with the seasoning can be worth much. That Miss Austen's 
 irony is consummate can hardly be said to be matter of 
 serious contest. 
 
 It has sometimes been thought — perhaps mistakenly — 
 that the exhibition of it in Northanger Abbey is, though a 
 very creditable essay, not consummate. But Pride and 
 Prejudice is known to be, in part, little if at all later than 
 Northanger Abbey : and there can again be very little 
 dispute among judges in any way competent as to the 
 quality of the irony there. Nor does it much matter 
 what part of this wonderful book was written later and 
 what earlier: for its ironical character is aU-pervading,
 
 196 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 in almost every character, except Jane and her lover who 
 are mere foils to Elizabeth and Darcy, and even in these to 
 some extent; and in the whole story, even in the at least 
 permitted suggestion that the sight of Pemberley, and 
 Darcy's altered demeanour, had something to do with 
 Elizabeth's resignation of the old romantic part of Belle 
 dame sans merci. It may further be admitted, even by 
 those who protest against the undervaluation of Northanger 
 Abbey, that Pride and Prejudice flies higher, and maintains 
 its flight triumphantly. It is not only longer; it is not 
 only quite independent of parody or contrast with some- 
 thing previous; but it is far more intricate and elaborate 
 as well as more original. Elizabeth herself is not merely 
 an ordinary girl: and the putting forward of her, as an 
 extraordinary yet in no single point unnatural one, is 
 victoriously carried out. Her father, in spite of (nay, 
 perhaps, including) his comparative collapse when he is 
 called upon, not as before to talk but to act, in the business 
 of Lydia's flight, is a masterpiece. "Mr. Collins is, once 
 more by common consent of the competent, unsurpassed, if 
 not peerless: those who think him unnatural simply do 
 not know nature. Shakespeare and Fielding were the only 
 predecessors who could properly serve as sponsors to " this 
 young lady " (as Scott delightfully calls her) on her intro- 
 duction among the immortals on the strength of this 
 character alone. Lady Catherine is not much the inferior 
 (it would have been pleasing to tell her so) of her protege 
 and chaplain. Of almost all the characters, and of quite 
 •the whole book, it is scarcely extravagant to say that it 
 could not have been better on its own scale and scheme — 
 that it is difficult to conceive any scheme and scale on 
 which it could have been better. And, yet once more, 
 there is nothing out of the way in it — the only thing not of
 
 SCOTT AND MISS AUSTEN 197 
 
 absolutely everyday occurrence, the elopement of Lydia, 
 happens on so many days still, with slight variations, that 
 it can hardly be called a licence. 
 
 The same qualities appear throughout the other books, 
 whether in more or less quintessence and with less or more 
 alloy is a question rather of individual taste than for 
 general or final critical decision. Sense and Sensibility, 
 the first actually to appear (181 1), is believed to have been 
 written about the same time as Pride and Prejudice, which 
 appeared two years later, and Northanger Abbey, which 
 did not see the light till its author was dead. It is the 
 weakest of the three — perhaps it is the weakest of all: but 
 the weakness is due rather to an error of judgment than 
 to a lack of power. Like Northanger Abbey it has a certain 
 dependence on something else: the extravagances of 
 Marianne satirise the Sensibility-novel just as those of 
 Catherine do the Terror-story of the immediate past. But 
 it is on a much larger scale: and things of the kind are 
 better in miniature. Moreover, the author's sense of 
 creative faculty made her try to throw up and contrast 
 her heroine with other characters, in a way which she had 
 not attempted in Northanger Abbey : and good as these 
 are in themselves, they make a less perfect whole. Indeed, 
 in the order of thought, Sense and Sensibility is the 
 " youngest " of the novels — the least self - criticised. 
 Nothing in it shows lack of power (John Dashwood 
 and his wife are of the first order); a good deal in it 
 shows lack of knowledge exactly how to direct that 
 power. 
 
 Mansfield Park (18 14), though hardly as brilliant as 
 Pride and Prejudice, shows much more maturity than 
 Sense and Sensibility. Much of it is quite consummate, 
 the character of Mrs. Norris especially: and for subtly
 
 198 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 interwoven phrase without emphasis, conveying know- 
 ledge and criticism of life, it has few equals. But it has 
 an elopement. Emma, which has perhaps on the whole 
 been the most general favourite, may challenge that 
 position on one ground beyond all question, though possibly 
 not on all. It is the absolute triumph of that reliance 
 on the strictly ordinary which has been indicated as Miss 
 Austen's title to pre-eminence in the history of the novel. 
 Not an event, not a circumstance, not a detail, is carried 
 out of " the daily round, the common task " of average 
 English middle-class humanity, upper and lower. Yet 
 every event, every circumstance, every detail, is put sub 
 specie eternitatis by the sorcery of art. Few things could 
 be more terrible — nothing more tiresome — than to hear 
 the garrulous Miss Bates talk in actual life; few things are 
 more delightful than to read her speeches as they occur 
 here. An aspiring soul might fee] disposed to " take and 
 drown itself in a pail " (as one of Dickens's characters says) 
 if it had to live the life which the inhabitants of Highbury 
 are represented as living; to read about that life — to read 
 about it over and over again — has been and is always likely 
 to be one of the chosen delights of some of the best wits of 
 our race. This is one of the paradoxes of art: and perhaps 
 it is the most wonderful of them, exceeding even the old 
 " pity and terror " problem. And the discovery of it, as 
 a possible source of artistic success, is one of the greatest 
 triumphs and one of the most inexhaustible discoveries of 
 that art itself. For by another paradox — this time not of 
 art but of nature — the extraordinary is exhaustible and 
 the ordinary is not. Tragedy and the more " incidented " 
 comedy, it is well known, run into types and reproduce 
 situations almost inevitably. " All the stories are told." 
 But the story of the life of Highbury never can be told,
 
 SCOTT AND MISS AUSTEN 199 
 
 because there is really nothing in it but the telling: and 
 here the blessed infinity of Art comes in again. 
 
 Miss Austen's last book, like her first, was published 
 posthumously and she left nothing else but a couple of 
 fragments. One of these. Lady Susan, does not, so far as it 
 extends, promise much, though it is such a fragment and 
 such an evident first draft even of this, that judgment of 
 it is equally unfair and futile. The other. The Watsons, 
 has some very striking touches, but is also a mere beginning. 
 Persuasion — which appeared with Northanger Abbey and 
 which, curiously enough, has, like its nearly twenty years 
 elder sister, Bath for its principal scene — has also some 
 pretensions to primacy among the books, and is universally 
 admitted to be of its author's most delicate, most finished, 
 and most sustained work. And this, like ^'mmis, resolutely 
 abstains from even the slightest infusion of startling or 
 unusual incident, of " exciting " story, of glaring colour 
 of any kind: relying only on congruity of speech, sufficient 
 if subdued description, and above all a profusion of the 
 most delicately, but the most vividly drawn character, 
 made to unfold a plot which has interest, if no excitement, 
 and seasoned throughout with the unfailing condiment — 
 the author's " own sauce " — of gentle but piquant irony 
 and satire. 
 
 It is not to be supposed or inferred that Miss Austen's 
 methods, or her results, have appealed to everybody. 
 Madame de Stael thought her vulgaire — meaning, of course, 
 lot exactly our " vulgar " but " commonplace "; Charlotte 
 Bronte was not much otherwise minded; her own Marianne 
 Dashwood would doubtless have thought the same. 
 Readers without some touch of letters may think her 
 style old-fashioned: it has even been termed "stilted." 
 Not merely may amateurs of blood and thunder, of passion
 
 200 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 and sensation, think her tame, but the more modern 
 devotees of " analysis " may consider her superficial. On 
 the other hand, it is notorious that, from her own day to 
 this, she has never wanted partisans, often of superlative 
 competence, and of the most strikingly different tempers, 
 tastes, and opinions. The extraordinary quietness of her 
 art is only matched by its confidence: its subtlety by its 
 strength. She did not try many styles; she deliberately 
 and no doubt wisely refused to try the other style which 
 was already carrying all before it in her own later days. 
 She seems to have confined herself (with what seems to 
 some high-flying judges an almost ignoble caution) to the 
 strata of society that she knew most thoroughly: and the 
 curious have noted that she seldom goes above a baronet, 
 and hardly even descends to a butler, in her range of person- 
 ages who are not mere mutes. It is not at all unlikely — 
 in fact it is almost certain — that she might have enlarged 
 this range, and that of her incident, with perfect safety 
 and to the great profit and delight of her readers. But 
 these actual things she knew she could do consummately; 
 and she would not risk the production of anything not 
 consummate. 
 
 The value of her, artistically, is of course in the perfec- 
 tion of what she did; but the value of her historically is 
 in the way in which she showed that, given the treatment, 
 any material could be perfected. It was in this way, as 
 has been pointed out, that the possibilities of the novel 
 were shown to be practically illimitable. Tragedy is not 
 needed: and the most ordinary transactions, the most 
 everyday characters, develop into an infinite series of 
 comedies with which the novelist can amuse himself and 
 his readers. The ludicrum humani seculi on the one hand, 
 and the artist's power of extracting and arranging it on
 
 SCOTT AND MISS AUSTEN 201 
 
 the other — these two things supply all that is wanted. 
 This Hampshire parson's daughter had found the philo- 
 sopher's stone of the novel: and the very pots and pans, 
 the tongs and pokers of the house, could be turned into 
 novel-gold by it. 
 
 But even gold is not everything: and only a fanatic, and 
 a rather foolish fanatic, would say that this style of fiction 
 summed up and exhausted all the good that fiction could 
 give and do. Miss Austen's art excludes (it has been said) 
 tragedy; it does not let in much pure romance; although 
 its variety is in a way infinite, yet it is not various in 
 infinite ways, but rather in very finite ones. Everybody 
 who denies its excellence is to be blamed: but nobody is 
 to be blamed for saying that he should like some other 
 excellences as well. The desire is innocent, nay commend- 
 able: and it was being satisfied, at practically the same 
 time, by the work of Sir Walter Scott in a kind of novel 
 almost as new (when we regard it in connection with its 
 earlier examples) as Miss Austen's own. This was the His- 
 torical novel, which, in a way, not only subsumed many 
 though not quite all varieties of Romance, but also sum- 
 moned to its aid not a little — in fact a very great deal — 
 of the methods of the pure novel itself. 
 
 It is not very long since a critic, probably not very old, 
 sentenced the critical opinions of another critic, certainly 
 not very young, to " go into the melting pot " because they 
 were in favour of the historical novel: and because the 
 historical novel had for some time past done great harm 
 (I think the phrase was stronger) to the imaginative 
 literature of England. Now there are several things 
 which might be said about this judgment — I do not say 
 " in arrest " of it, because it is of itself inoperative: as it 
 happens you cannot put critical opinions in the melting
 
 202 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 pot. At least, they won't melt: and they come out again 
 like the diabolic rat that Mr. Chips tried to pitch-boil. In 
 the first place, there is the question whether the greater 
 part by far of the imaginative and other literature of any 
 time does not itself " go into the melting pot," and whether 
 it much matters what sends it there. In the second, if 
 this seems too cynical, there is the very large and grave 
 question whether a still larger proportion of the novel of 
 manners, in England, France, and all other countries during 
 the same time, has not been as bad as, or worse than, the 
 romantic division, historical or other. But the worst 
 faults of the judgment remain. In the first place there is 
 the fatal shortness of view. It is with the hterature of 
 two thousand, not with the literature of twenty, years 
 that the true critic has to do: and no kind which — in two 
 thousand, or two hundred, or twenty — has produced 
 literature that is good or great can be even temporarily 
 put aside because (as every kind of literature without 
 exception has been again and again) it is for a time barren 
 or fruitful only in weeds. And any one who does not 
 count Scott and Dumas and Thackeray among the 
 makers of good literature must really excuse others if 
 they simply take no further count of him. The historical 
 novel is a good kind, good friends, a marvellous good kind: 
 and it has the advantage over the pure novel of manners 
 that it is much less subject to obsolescence, if it be really 
 well done; while it can practically annex most of the 
 virtues of that novel of manners itself. 
 
 This excellent kind, however, had been wandering about 
 in the wilderness — had indeed hardly got so far even as that 
 stage, but had been a mere " bodiless childful of life in 
 the gloom " — for more than two thousand years before 
 Waverley. Of its earlier attempts to get into full existence
 
 SCOTT AND MISS AUSTEN 203 
 
 we cannot say much here: ^ something on the more recent 
 but rather abortive birth-throes has been promised, and 
 is now due. It is not improbable that considerable assis- 
 tance was rendered to the kind by the heroic romance of 
 the seventeenth century in prose and verse, which often 
 attempted historic, and almost always pseudo-historic, 
 guise. As has been seen in regard to such collections as 
 CroxaU's, historical stories were freely mingled with 
 fictitious: and it could not be for nothing that Horace 
 Walpole, the author of the Casile of Otranto, was a rather 
 ardent and even to some extent scholarly student of the 
 romance and the gossip of history. Much earlier, Fielding 
 himself, in his salad days, had given something of an historic 
 turn to the story of A Journey from this World to the Next. 
 And when history itself became more common and more 
 readable, it could not but be that this inexhaustible source 
 of material for the new kind of literature, which was being 
 so eagerly demanded and so busily supplied, should suggest 
 itself. Some instances of late eighteenth and early nine- 
 teenth century experiments have been given and discussed 
 in the last chapter: and when Scott (or " the Author of 
 Waverley ") had achieved his astonishing success, some 
 of the writers of these put in the usual claim of " That's 
 ■my thunder." This was done in the case of the Lees, it 
 was also done in the case of Jane Porter, the writer of 
 the once famous and favourite Thaddeus of Warsaw (1803) 
 and Scottish Chiefs (18 10): while, as we have seen, there 
 had been historical colour enough in Godwin's novels to 
 
 1 Those who are curious about the matter will find it treated in a 
 set of Essays by the present writer, which originally appeared in 
 Macmillan's Magazine during the autumn of 1894, ^^^ were re- 
 printed among Essays in English Literature, Second Series, London, 
 1895-
 
 204 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 make suggestion of his " authorship of Waverley " not 
 absolutely preposterous. Even Mrs. RadcliflFe had touched 
 the style; and humbler persons like the egregious Henrietta 
 Mosse had attempted it in the most serious spirit. 
 
 But with their varying degrees of talent — with, in one 
 or two cases, even a little genius — all these writers had 
 broken themselves upon one fatal difficulty — that of 
 anachronism: not in the petty sense of the pedant, but 
 in the wide one of the critic. The present writer is not 
 prepared, without reading A Peep at Our Aficestors again 
 (which he distinctly declines to do), to say that there are, 
 in that remarkable performance, any positive errors of 
 historic fact worse than, or as bad, as those which pedantry 
 has pointed out in Ivanhoe. But whereas you may be 
 nearly as well acquainted with the actual history of the 
 time as the pedants themselves, and a great deal better 
 acquainted with its literature, and yet never be shocked, 
 disgusted, or contemptuously amused in Ivanhoe by such 
 things as were quoted from the Pee-p a few pages back — so, 
 to those who know something of " the old Elizabeth way," 
 and even nowadays to those who know very little, and 
 that little at second hand, Miss Lee's travesty of it in 
 The Recess is impossible and intolerable. When Mrs. 
 Radcliffe, at the date definitely given of 1584, talks about 
 " the Parisian opera," represents a French girl of the 
 sixteenth century as being "instructed in the English poets," 
 and talks about driving in a " landau," the individual 
 blunders are, perhaps, not more violent than those of the 
 chronology by which Scott's Ulrica is apparently a girl 
 at the time of the Conquest and a woman, not too old to be 
 the object of rivalry between Front de Boeuf and his father, 
 not long before the reign of Richard L But this last 
 oversight does not affect the credibility of the story, or the
 
 SCOTT AND MISS AUSTEN 205 
 
 homogeneity of the manners, in the least. Mrs. Radcliffe 
 jumbles up two (or more than two) utterly different states 
 and stages of society, manners, and other things which 
 constitute the very atmosphere of the story itself. Perhaps 
 (we have very few easy conversations of the period to 
 justify a positive statement) a real Bois-Guilbert and still 
 more a real Wamba might not have talked exactly like 
 Scott's personages: but there is no insistent and disturbing 
 reason why they should not. When we hear an Adelaise 
 of the mid-twelfth century asking whether she does not 
 receive her education from her mamma, the necessary 
 " suspension of disbelief " becomes impossible. 
 
 But these now most obvious truths were not obvious at 
 all between 1780 and 1 810: and it is perhaps the greatest 
 evidence of Scott's genius that half, but by no means quite, 
 unconsciously he saw them, and that he has made every- 
 body see them since. It was undoubtedly fortunate that 
 he began novel-writing so late: for earlier even he might 
 have been caught in the errors of the time. But when he 
 did begin, he had not only reached middle life and matured 
 his considerable original critical faculty — criticism and 
 wine are the only things that even the " kind calm years " 
 may be absolutely trusted to improve if there is any 
 original goodness in them — but he had other advantages. 
 He had read, if not with minute accuracy, very widely 
 indeed: and he possessed, as Lord Morley has well said, 
 " the genius of history " in a degree which perhaps no 
 merely meticulous scholar has ever reached, and which was 
 not exceeded in quality even by the greatest historians 
 such as Gibbon. He had an almost unmatched combina- 
 tion of common sense with poetic imagination, of know- 
 ledge of the world with knowledge of letters. He had 
 shown himself to be possessed of the secret of semi-historical
 
 2o6 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 narrative itself in half a dozen remarkable verse romances, 
 and therefore had less to do in engineering the prose 
 romance. Last of all, he had seen what to avoid — not 
 merely in his editing of Strutt's Queenhoo Hall (a valuable 
 property-room for the novel, but nothing of a real novel), 
 but in his reading of the failures of his predecessors and 
 contemporaries. The very beginning of W averley itself 
 (which most people skip) is invaluable, because it shows 
 us that at the time he wrote it (which, it need hardly be 
 said, was a long time before its completion) he had not the 
 knowledge or the courage to strike straight out into the 
 stream of action and conversation, but troubled himself 
 with accumulating bladders and arranging ropes for the 
 possible salvation of his narrative if it got into difficulties. 
 Very soon he knew that it would not get into difficulties: 
 and away he went. 
 
 It ought not to be necessary, but from some symptoms 
 it may be desirable, to point out that Scott is very far from 
 being an historical novelist only. An acute French critic, 
 weU acquainted with both literatures, once went so far as 
 to say that there were a good many professed " philoso- 
 phical " novels which did not contain such keen psychology 
 as Scott's: and I would undertake to show a good deal of 
 cause on this side. But short of it, it is undeniable that 
 he can do perfectly well without any historical scaffolding. 
 There is practically nothing of it in his second and third 
 novels, Guy Mannering and The Antiquary, each of which 
 good judges have sometimes ranked as his very best: 
 there is as little or less in St. Ronan^s Well, a very fine thing 
 as it is, and one which, but for James Ballantyne's meddling 
 folly and prudery, would have been much finer. The 
 incomparable little conversation - scenes and character- 
 sketches scattered among the Introductions to the novels —
 
 SCOTT AND MISS AUSTEN 207 
 
 especially the history of Crystal Croftangry — show that 
 he could perfectly well have dispensed with all out-of-the- 
 way incident had he chosen. But, as a rule, he did not so 
 choose: and, in the majority of cases, he preferred to take 
 his out-of-the-way incident from historical sources. Not 
 here, unfortunately, can we allow ourselves even a space 
 proportionate to that given above in Miss Austen's case 
 to the criticism of individual novels: but luckily there is 
 not much need of this. The brilliant overture of Waverley 
 as such, with its entirely novel combination of the historical 
 and the " national " elements upon the still more novel 
 background of Highland scenery; the equally vivid and 
 vigorous narrative and the more interesting personages of 
 Old Mortality and Rob Roy ; the domestic tragedy, with the 
 historical element for little more than a framework, of the 
 Heart of Midlothian and the Bride 0/ Lammermoor ; the 
 little masterpiece of A Legend of Montrose; the fresh 
 departure, with purely English subject, of Ivanhoe and its 
 triumphant sequels in Kenilworth, Quentin Durzuard, and 
 others; the striking utilisation of literary assistance in the 
 Fortunes of Nigel ; and the wonderful blending of autobio- 
 graphic, historical, and romantic interest in Redgauntlet : — 
 one cannot dwell on these and other things. The magic 
 continued even in Woodstock — written as this was almost 
 between the blows of the executioner's crow-bar on the 
 wheel, in the tightening of the windlasses at the rack — it 
 is not absent, whatever people may say, in Anne of Geier- 
 stein, nor even quite lacking in the better parts of Count 
 Robert of Paris. But we must not expatiate on its effects; 
 we must only give a little attention to the means by which 
 they are achieved. 
 
 Another of the common errors about Scott is to repre- 
 sent — perhaps really to regard — him as a hit-or-miss and
 
 2o8 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 hand-to-mouth im-provisatore, who bundled out his crea- 
 tions anyhow, and did not himself know how he created 
 them. The fallacy is worse than a fallacy : for it is down- 
 right false witness. We have numerous passages in and 
 out of the novels — the chief of them being the remarkable 
 conversation with Captain Clutterbuck in the Introduction 
 to the Fortunes of Nigel and the reflections in the Diary 
 on Sir John Chiverton and Brambletye House — showing 
 that Scott knew perfectly well the construction and the 
 stringing of his fiddle, as well as the trick of applying his 
 rosin. But if we had not these direct testimonies, no one 
 of any critical faculty could mistake the presence of con- 
 sciously perceived principles in the books themselves. A 
 man does not suddenly, and by mere blind instinct, avoid 
 such a pitfall as that of incongruous speech and manners, 
 which has been noticed above. It is not mere happy-go- 
 lucky blundering which makes him invariably decline 
 another into which people still fall — the selection of 
 historical personages of the first importance, and elaborately 
 known, for the central figures of his novels. Not to beHeve 
 in luck is a mark of perhaps greater folly than to over- 
 believe in it: but luck will not always keep a man clear 
 of such perils as that unskilful wedging of great blocks of 
 mere history into his story, which the lesser historical 
 novelists always commit, or that preponderance of mere 
 narrative itself as compared with action and conversation 
 from which even Dumas, even Thackeray, is not free. 
 
 That he knew what he was doing and what he had to do 
 is thus certain; that he did it to an astounding extent 
 is still more certain; but it would not skill much to deny 
 that he did not always give himself time to do it perfectly 
 in every respect, though it is perhaps not mere paradox 
 or mere partisanship to suggest that if he had given him-
 
 SCOTT AND MISS AUSTEN 209 
 
 self more time, he would hardly have done better, and 
 might have done worse. The accusation of superficiality 
 has been already glanced at: and it is pretty certain that 
 it argues more superficiaHty, of a much more hopeless kind, 
 in those who make it. The accusation of careless and 
 slovenly style is not much better: for Scott had, perfectly, 
 the style suited to his own work, and you cannot easily 
 have a better style than that. But there are two defects 
 in him which were early detected by good and friendly 
 judges: and which are in fact natural results of the extra- 
 ordinary force and fertility of his creative power. One — 
 the less serious, but certainly to some extent a fault in art 
 and a point in which he is distinguished for the worse from 
 Shakespeare — is that he is rather given to allow at first, to 
 some of his personages, an elaborateness and apparent 
 emphasis of drawing which seems to promise an importance 
 for them in the story that they never actually attain. 
 Mike Lambourne in Kenilworth is a good example of this: 
 but there are many others. The fact evidently was that, 
 in the rush of the artist's plastic imagination, other figures 
 rose and overpowered these. It is an excuse: but it is 
 hardly a justification. The other and more serious is a 
 tendency — which grew on him and may no doubt have 
 been encouraged by the astonishing pecuniary rewards of 
 his work — to hurry his conclusions, to " huddle up the 
 cards and throw them into the bag," as Lady Louisa 
 Stuart told him. There is one of the numerous, but it 
 would seem generic and classifiable, forms of unpleasant 
 dream in which the dreamer's watch, to his consternation, 
 suddenly begins to send its hands round at double and 
 ten-fold speed. Scott is rather apt to do this, towards the 
 close of his novels, in his eagerness to begin something else. 
 These defects, however, are defects much more from 
 
 o
 
 210 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 the point of view of abstract criticism than from that of the 
 pleasure of the reader: while, even from the former, they 
 are outweighed many times by merits. And as regards 
 our present method of estimation, they hardly count at all. 
 For, in that calculus, the important thing is that Scott, 
 like Miss Austen, at once opened an immense new field to 
 the novelist, and showed how that field was to be culti- 
 vated. The complement-contrast of the pair can need 
 emphasising only to those on whom no emphasis would 
 be likely to impress it: but it may not be quite so evident 
 at once that between them they cover almost the entire 
 possible ground of prose fiction. The more striking and 
 popular as well as more strictly novel style of Scott 
 naturally attracted most attention at first: indeed it can 
 hardly be said that, for the next thirty years, much attempt 
 was made to follow in Miss Austen's steps, while such 
 attempts as were made were seldom very good.^ But 
 there is no need to hurry Time: and he generally knows 
 what he is about. At any rate he had, in and through 
 these two provided — for generations, probably for centuries, 
 to come — patterns and principles for whoso would to follow 
 in prose fiction. 
 
 ^ Some work of distinction, actually later than hers in date, is 
 older in kind. This is the case not only with the later books of her 
 Irish elder sister. Miss Edgeworth (see last chapter), but with all 
 those of her Scotch younger one. Miss Ferrier, who wrote Marriage 
 just after Sense and Sensibility appeared, but did not publish it 
 {1818) till after Miss Austen's death, following it with The Inheri- 
 tance (1824) and Destiny (183 1). Miss Ferrier, who had a strong 
 though rather hard humour and great faculty of pronounced charac- 
 ter-drawing, is better at a series of sketches than at a complete novel — 
 only The Inheritance having much central unity. And there is 
 still eighteenth - century quality rather than nineteenth in her 
 alternations of Smollcttian farce-satire and Mackenzicfied sentiment. 
 She is very good to read, but stands a little out of the regular historic 
 succession, as well as out of the ordinary novel classes.
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE SUCCESSORS TO THACKERAY 
 
 A PERSON inexperienced in the ways of life and literature 
 might expect that such developments as those surveyed 
 and discussed in the last chapter must have immediate 
 and unbroken development further. Scott had thrown 
 open, and made available, the whole vast range of history 
 for the romancer: Miss Austen had shown the infinite 
 possibihties of ordinary and present things for the novelist. 
 And such a one might contend that, even if the common 
 idea of definite precursorship and teachership be a mistake, 
 the more subtle doctrine that such work as Scott's, and as 
 Miss Austen's, is really the result of generally working 
 forces, as well as of individual genius, would lead to the 
 same conclusion. But the expectation would show his 
 inexperience, and his ignorance of the fact that Art, unlike 
 Science, declines to be bound by any calculable laws 
 whatsoever. 
 
 It was indeed impossible that Scott's towering fame 
 should not draw the nobler sort, and his immense gains 
 the baser, to follow in his track: and they promptly did 
 so. But, as he himself quoted in the remarkable comments 
 (above alluded to) on his early imitators in the Diary^ 
 they had " gotten his fiddle, but not his rosin " — an 
 observation the truth of which may be shown presently. 
 Miss Austen's immediate influence in the other direction 
 was almost 7iil : and this was hardly to be regretted, 
 because a tolerably stationary state of manners, language, 
 
 211
 
 212 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 etc., such as her kind of novel requires, had not quite, 
 though it had nearly, been reached. At any rate, the 
 kind of ebb or half ebb, which so often, though not so 
 certainly, follows flood-tides in literature, came upon the 
 novel in the twenties and thirties. Even the striking 
 appearance of Dickens and Pickwick in 1837 can hardly 
 be said to have turned it distinctly: for the Dickensian 
 novel is a species by itself — neither strictly novel nor 
 strictly romance, but, as Polonius might say, a picaresque- 
 burlesque - sentimental - farcical - realist - fantastic nonde- 
 script. Not till Vanity Fair did the novel of pure real life 
 advance its standard once more: while the historical novel- 
 romance of a new kind may date its revival with — though 
 it should scarcely trace that revival to — Esmond, or 
 Westward Ho! or both. 
 
 Between Scott on the earlier side and Dickens and 
 Thackeray on the other, there was an immense production 
 of novels, illustrated by not a few names which should rank 
 high in the second class, while some would promote more 
 than one of them to the first. The lines of development, 
 as well as the chief individual practitioners, may be best 
 indicated by short discussions of Hook, Bulwer, Disraeli, 
 Ainsworth, James, Marryat, and Peacock. 
 
 The most probable demur to this list is likely to be taken 
 at the very first name. Theodore Hook has had no return 
 of the immense popularity which his Sayings and Doings 
 (i 826-1 829) obtained for him; nor, perhaps, is he ever 
 likely to have any; nor yet, further, save in one respect, 
 can he be said to deserve it. Flimsily constructed, hastily 
 written, reflecting indeed the ways and speech of the time 
 after a fashion, but in a distorted mirror and with a thin 
 and superficial representation, nearer to bad drama than 
 to good literature, full of horseplay and forced high jinks —
 
 THE SUCCESSORS— TO THACKERAY 213 
 
 his stories have all the inseparable faults of improvisation 
 together with those of art that is out of fashion and manners- 
 painting (such as it is) of manners that are dead, and when 
 alive were those of a not very picturesque, pleasing, or 
 respectable transition. Yet, for all this. Hook has a claim 
 on the critical historian of literature, and especially of the 
 novel, which has been far too little acknowledged. And 
 this claim does not even consist in the undoubted fact 
 that his influence both on Dickens and on Thackeray was 
 direct and very great. It lies in the larger and more 
 important, though connected, fact that, at a given 
 moment, his were the hands in which the torch of the 
 novel - procession was deposited. He stands to fiction 
 almost exactly as Leigh Hunt stands to the miscellaneous 
 essay. He modernised and multiplied its subjects, attrac- 
 tions, appeals: he "vulgarised" it in the partly good 
 French sense, as well as in the wholly bad English one; 
 he was its journalist and colforteur. He broke up the 
 somewhat stock-and-type moulds of eighteenth-century 
 tale-telling; admitted a plurality, almost an infinity, of 
 interest and incident; gave a sort of universal franchise 
 to possible subjects of novel; and (perhaps most important 
 of all) banished from that novel the tendency to conven- 
 tional " lingo " which, though never so prevalent in it as 
 in eighteenth-century drama, had existed. It may seem 
 to some readers that there is an exaggerated and para- 
 doxical opposition between this high praise and the severe 
 censure pronounced a little above — that both cannot be 
 true. But both are true: and it is a really natural and 
 necessary cause and proof at once of their truth that 
 Hook never wrote a really good novel, hardly even a really 
 good tale (" Gervase Skinner " is probably the best), and 
 yet that he deserves the place here given to him,
 
 214 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 Ainsworth and James perhaps deserve to be taken next, 
 not so much in point of merit as because both, though 
 continuing (especially Ainsworth) very late, began pretty 
 early. Indeed, a book in which Ainsworth had a hand, 
 though it is said to be not wholly his, Sir John Chiverion, 
 was, with Horace Smith's Brambletye House (1826), the 
 actual subject of Scott's criticism above quoted. Both 
 Ainsworth and James are unconcealed followers of Scott 
 himself: and they show the dangers to which the historical 
 romance is exposed when it gets out of the hands of 
 genius. Of the two, James had the greater scholarship, 
 the better command of English, and perhaps a nearer 
 approach to command also of character: Ainsworth more 
 " lire in his interior," more variety, somewhat more 
 humour (though neither was strong in this respect), and 
 a certain not useless or despicable faculty of splashy scene- 
 painting and rough but not ineffective stage-management. 
 But of Scott's combination of poetry, humour, knowledge 
 of life, reading, grasp of character, and command of 
 effective dialogue and description, both were utterly 
 destitute: and both fell into the mistake (which even 
 Dumas did not wholly avoid) of attempting to give the 
 historical effect by thrusting in lardings of pure history, 
 by overloading descriptions of dress, etc., and^ in short, 
 by plastering the historic colour on, instead of suffusing 
 it, as Scott had managed to do. Popular as they were, 
 not merely with youthful readers, they undoubtedly 
 brought the historical novel into some discredit a little 
 before the middle of the century.^ 
 
 With Bulwer and Disraeli we get into a different sphere 
 
 ^ Here and in a good nnany cases to come it is impossible to particularise 
 criticism. It matters the less that, from Ainsworth's Rookwood (1834) 
 and James' Richelieu (1829) onwards, the work of both was very much 
 par sibi in merit and defect alike.
 
 THE SUCCESSORS— TO THACKERAY 215 
 
 of literature — whether into the same in both cases, and 
 whether, if so, into one of the highest, are questions on 
 which no general agreement has yet been reached — on 
 which, perhaps, no general agreement is even possible. 
 
 With regard to the second, it must be remembered that 
 to him, whether as Mr. Disraeli or as Lord Beaconsfield, 
 novel-writing was always a " by-work " — partly a means 
 to his real end of politics, partly a relaxation from the 
 work necessary to that end. He called himself a " gentle- 
 man of the press " — with that mixture of sincerity, pur- 
 pose, and ironical simulation which brought on him, from 
 unintelligent or not very honest opponents, and even from 
 others, the charge of affectation, if not of hypocrisy. And, 
 undoubtedly, he did a good deal of work for the press, and 
 very remarkable work too — almost wholly in the kind of 
 novel-writing, from Vivian Grey (1826) to Endymion (1880). 
 Yet it may be permitted — in the face of some more than 
 respectable opinion on the other side — to doubt whether, 
 except in some curious sports and by-products, he ever 
 produced real novel-work of the highest class. In the 
 satiric-fantastic tale — in a kind of following of Voltaire — 
 such as Ixion, he has hardly a superior, unless it be Anthony 
 Hamilton, who is the superior of Voltaire himself and the 
 master of everybody. For a pure love-novel of a certain 
 kind, Henrietta Temple (1837) is bad to beat — and in a 
 curious cross between the historical, biographical, and the 
 romantic, Venetia (same year) also stands pretty much 
 alone. But all the rest, more or less political, more or less 
 " of society," more or less fantastic — Coningsby (1844) 
 as well as Alroy (1833), Tancred (1847) as well as Vivian 
 Grey, Sybil (1845), as well as The Toung Duke (1831), 
 " leave to desire " in a strange way. Like the three which 
 have been excepted for praise, each is in a manner sui
 
 2i6 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 generis, while the whole group stands, in a manner also, 
 apart from others and by itself. There is astonishing 
 cleverness everywhere, in regard to almost every point of 
 novel-composition, though with special regard to epi- 
 grammatic phrase. But the whole is inorganic somehow, 
 and more than somehow unreal; without (save in the 
 cases mentioned) attaining that obviously unreal but 
 persuasive phantasmagoria which some great writers of 
 fiction have managed to put in existence and motion. How 
 far this is due to the fact that most of the novels are 
 political is a question rather to be hinted than to be 
 discussed. But the present writer has never read a political 
 novel, whether on his own side or on others, that seemed 
 to him to be wholly satisfactory. 
 
 Bulwer — for it is perhaps here not impolite or improper 
 still to call the first Lord Lytton by the name under which 
 he wrote for forty years, and solidly niched himself in the 
 novel-front of the minster of English Literature — had not 
 a few points of resemblance to his rival and future chief. 
 But their relations to politics and letters were reversed. 
 Disraeli was a born politician who was also a very con- 
 siderable man of letters: Bulwer was a born man of letters 
 who was a by no means inconsiderable politician. His 
 literary ability was extraordinarily diversified: but, once 
 more, he was (here also) a born novelist, who was also a 
 not inconsiderable dramatist; a critic who might not 
 impossibly have been great, a miscellanist of ability, and 
 a verse-writer than whom many a worse has somehow or 
 other obtained the name of poet. He began novel-writing 
 very early {Falkland is of 1827), he continued it all his hfe, 
 and he was the very Proteus-chameleon of the novel in 
 changing his styles to suit the tastes of the day. He never 
 exactly copied anybody: and in all his various attempts
 
 THE SUCCESSORS— TO THACKERAY 217 
 
 he went extremely near to the construction of master- 
 pieces. In the novel of society with Pelham (1828); the 
 novel of crime with Eugene Aram (1832) and Zanoni (1842); 
 the novel of passion and a sort of mystery with Ernest Mal- 
 travers and Alice ; the historic romance with The Last Days 
 of Pompeii (1834), '^^^ Last of the Barons (1843), and Harold. 
 (1848), he made marks deep and early. When the purely 
 domestic kind came in he made them, earlier and deeper 
 still, with The Caxtons (1850), My Novel (1853), etc. He 
 caught the " sensation " ball at nearly its first service with 
 his old " mystery " racket, and played the most brilliant 
 game of the whole tournament in A Strange Story (1862). 
 At the last he tried later kinds still in books like The Coming 
 Race (1871), The Parisians (1873), and Kenelm Chillingly. 
 And once, Pallas being kind, he did an almost perfect thing 
 (there is not a speck or a flaw in it except, perhaps, the 
 mechanical death of the bulldog) and produced one of the 
 best examples of one of the best and oldest classes of fiction 
 known to the world, in the ghost-story of The Haunted and 
 the Haunters (1859). 
 
 Such a mass, such a length, such a variety of production, 
 with so many merits in it, would be difficult to meet else- 
 where in our department. And yet very few critics of 
 unquestionable competence, if any, have accorded the 
 absolute First Class to Lord Lytton as a novelist. That this 
 is partly (and rather unjustly) due to the singular and 
 sometimes positively ridiculous grandiloquence and to the 
 half-mawkish, half-rancid, sentimentality which too often 
 mar his earlier novels is probably true. But it is not all 
 the truth: if it were, it would be almost sufficient to point 
 out that he outgrew the first of these faults completely, 
 the second almost completely; and that from The Caxtons 
 (1850) onward there is hardly any stain on his literary
 
 2i8 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 character in any such respect. But other faults — or at 
 least defects — remain. They may be almost summed up 
 in the charge of want of consummateness. Bulwer could be 
 romantic — but his romance had the touch of bad taste and 
 insincerity referred to above. He could, as in The Caxtons, 
 be fairly true to ordinary life — but even then he seemed 
 to feel a necessity of setting off and as it were apologising 
 for the simplicity and veracity by touches — in fact by 
 douches — of Sternian fantastry, and by other touches of 
 what was a little later to be called sensationalism. Even 
 his handling of the supernatural, which was undoubtedly 
 a strong point of his, was not wholly de bon aloi. To 
 pronounce him, as was once done by an acute and amiable 
 judge, " the humvaiest of bugs" was excessive in life, and 
 would be preposterous in literature. But there un- 
 doubtedly was, with rare exceptions, a suspicion of what 
 is called in slang " faking " about his work. The wine is 
 not "neat" but doctored; the composition is pastiche; 
 a dozen other metaphors — of stucco, veneer, glueing-up — 
 suggest themselves. And then there suggests itself, in 
 turn, a sort of shame at such imputations on the author 
 of such a mass of work, so various, so interesting, so 
 important as accomplishment, symptom, and pattern at 
 once. And perhaps one may end by pronouncing Bulwer 
 one of the very greatest of English novelists who are not 
 of the very greatest. 
 
 It is difficult to say whether the usual attitude of criticism 
 to Captain Marryat (1792-1848) is more uncritical than 
 ungrateful or more ungrateful than uncritical. Because 
 he has amused the boy, it seems to be taken for granted 
 that he ought not to amuse the man: because he does not 
 write with the artificial and often extremely arbitrary 
 graces of the composition books, that he is " not literature."
 
 THE SUCCESSORS— TO THACKERAY 219 
 
 If it be so, why in the first case so much the worse for " the 
 man," and in the second so much the worse for literature. 
 As a matter of fact, he has many of the quahties of the 
 novehst in a high degree : and if he were in the fortunate 
 position of an ancient classic, whose best works only survive, 
 these quahties could not fail of recognition. Much of his 
 later work simply ought not to count; for it was mere 
 hack-labour, rendered, if not necessary, very nearly so 
 by the sailor's habit (which Marryat possessed in the highest 
 degree) of getting rid of money. Even among this. Master- 
 man Ready and 7he Children of the New Forest, " children's 
 books," as they may be called, rank very high in their kind. 
 But he counts here, of course, for his sea-novels mainly: 
 and in them there are several things for us to notice. One 
 is that Marryat had the true quality of the craftsman, as 
 distinguished from the amateur or the chance-medley 
 man who has a lucky inspiration. If it were the case that 
 his books derived their whole attraction from the novelty 
 and (within its hmits) the variety of their sea-matter, then 
 the first ought to be the best, as in nearly all such cases is 
 the fact. But Frank Mildmay (1829), so far from being 
 the best, is not far from being the worst of Marryat's novels. 
 Much — dangerously much — as he put of his own experi- 
 ences in the book, he did not know in the least how to 
 manage them. And if Frank is something of a bravo, 
 more of a blackguard, and nearly a complete ruffian, it is 
 not merely because there was a good deal of brutality in 
 the old navy; not merely because Marryat's own standard 
 of chivalry was not quite that of Chaucer's Knight: — but 
 partly, also, because he was aiming blunderingly at what 
 he supposed to be part of the novelist's business — irregular 
 as well as regular gallantry, and highly seasoned adventure. 
 But, like all good artists (and like hardly anybody who
 
 220 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 has not the artistic quality in him), he taught himself by 
 his failure, even though he sometimes relapsed. Of actual 
 construction he was never a master. The King's Own, 
 with its overdose of history at the beginning and of melo- 
 drama at the end, is an example. But his two master- 
 pieces, Peter Simple (1834) and Mr. Midshipfnan Easy 
 (1836), are capital instances of what may be called " par- 
 ticularist " fiction — the fiction that derives its special zest 
 from the " colours " of some form of life unfamiliar to 
 those who have not actually lived it. Even Peter Simple 
 is unduly weighted at the end by the machinations of 
 Peter's uncle against him and, at intervals during the 
 book, by the proceedings connected therewith. But 
 Mr. Midshipman Easy is flawless — except for the amiable 
 but surely excessive sentimentalists who are shocked at 
 the way in which Mr. Easy pere quits the greater stage by 
 mounting the lesser. Than this book there is not a better 
 novel of special " humour " in literature; as much may 
 be said of the greater part of Peter Simple, of not a little 
 in Jacob Faithful (a great favourite with Thackeray, who 
 always did justice to Marryat), and Japhet in Search of a 
 Father, and of something in almost all. Nor were high 
 jinks and special naval matters by any means Marryat's 
 only province. Laymen may agree with experts in think- 
 ing the clubhauhng of the Diomede in Peter Simple, and 
 the two great fights of the Aurora with the elements and 
 with the Russian frigate in Mr. Midshipman Easy, to be 
 extraordinarily fine things: — vivid, free from extravagance, 
 striking, stirring, clear, as descriptive and narrative htera- 
 ture of the kind can be only at its best, and too seldom is 
 at all. An almost Defoe-like exactness of detail is one of 
 Marryat's methods and merits : while it is very remarkable 
 that he rarely attempts to produce the fun, in which Defoe
 
 THE SUCCESSORS— TO THACKERAY 221 
 
 is lacking and he himself so fertile, by mere exaggeration 
 or caricature of detail. There are exceptions — the Dominie 
 business in 'Jacob Faithful is one — but they are exceptions. 
 Take Hook, his immediate predecessor, and no doubt in 
 a way his model, as (it has been said) Hook was to almost 
 everybody at the time; take even Dickens, his fellow-pupil 
 with Hook and his own greater successor; and you will 
 find that Marryat resorts less than either to the humour 
 of simple charge or exaggeration. 
 
 The last name on our present list belongs to the class 
 of " eccentric " novelists — the adjective being used, not 
 in its transferred and partly improper sense so much as 
 in its true one. Peacock never plays the Jack-pudding 
 like Sterne: and his shrewd wit never permits him the 
 sincere aberrations of Amory. But his work is out of the 
 ordinary courses, and does not turn round the ordinary 
 centres of novel writing. It belongs to the tradition — if 
 to any tradition at all — of Lucian and the Lucianists — 
 especially as that tradition was redirected by Anthony 
 Hamilton. It thus comes, in one way, near part of the 
 work of Disraeli; though, except in point of satiric temper, 
 its spirit is totally different. Peacock was essentially a 
 scholar (though a non-academic one) and essentially a 
 humorist. In the progress of his books from Headlong 
 Hall (18 16) to Gryll Grange (i860) — the last separated from 
 the group to which the first belongs by more than twice 
 as many years as were covered by that group itself — he 
 mellowed his tone, but altered his scheme very little. 
 Except in Maid Marian and The Misfortunes of Elphin, 
 where the Scott influence is evident, though Peacock was 
 himself a rebel to Scott, the plan is always the same. 
 Headlong Hall and Nightmare Abbey, Melincourt and 
 Crotchet Castle (1831), as well as Gryll Grange itself, all have
 
 222 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 the uniform, though by no means monotonous, canvas of 
 a party of guests assembled at a country-house and con- 
 sisting of a number of " originals," with one or more 
 common-sense but by no means commonplace characters 
 to serve as contrast. It is in the selection and manage- 
 ment of these foils that one of Peacock's principal dis- 
 tinctions lies. In his earlier books, and in accordance with 
 the manners of the time, there is a good deal of " high 
 jinks " — less later. In all, there is also a good deal of 
 personal and literary satire, which tones and mellows as 
 it proceeds. At first Peacock is extremely unjust to the 
 Lake poets — so unjust indeed as to be sometimes hardly 
 amusing — to the two universities (of which it so happened 
 that he was not a member), to the Tory party generally, 
 to clergymen, to other things and persons. In Crotchet 
 Castle the progress of Reform was already beginning to 
 produce a beneficent effect of reaction upon him, and in 
 Gryll Grange, though the manners and cast are surprisingly 
 modern, the whole tone is conservative — with a small if 
 not even with a large C — for the most prominent and well 
 treated character is a Churchman of the best academic 
 Tory type. 
 
 It is not, however, in anything yet mentioned that 
 Peacock's charm consists, so much as in the intensely 
 literary, but not in the least pedantic, tone with which he 
 suffuses his books, the piquant but not in the least affected 
 turn of the phrases that meet us throughout, the peculiar 
 quality of his irony (most quintessenced in The Misfortunes 
 of Elphin, which is diiferent in scheme from the rest, but 
 omnipresent), and the crisp presentation of individual 
 scene, incident, and character of a kind. Story, in the 
 general sense, there is none, or next to none — the personages 
 meet, go through a certain number of dinners (Peacock is
 
 THE SUCCESSORS— TO THACKERAY 223 
 
 great at eating and drinking), diversions, and difficulties, 
 marry to a greater or less extent, but otherwise part. Yet 
 such things as the character of Scythrop in Nightmare 
 Abbey (a half fantastic, half faithful portrait of Shelley, 
 who was Peacock's intimate friend), or of Dr. Folliott 
 (a genial parson) in Crotchet Castle — as the brilliant picture 
 of the breaking of the dyke in Elphin, or the comic one of 
 the rotten-borough election in Melincourt — are among the 
 triumphs of the English novel. And they are present by 
 dozens and scores: while (though it is a little out of our 
 way) there is no doubt that the attraction of the books is 
 greatly enhanced by the abundance of inset verse — some- 
 times serious, more often light — of which Peacock, again 
 in an eccentric fashion, was hardly less a master than he 
 was of prose. 
 
 Here also it has seemed fit to dwell on a single writer, 
 not perhaps generally held to be of the absolutely first 
 class, because these " eccentrics " are of very great im- 
 portance in the history of the English novel. The danger 
 of the kind — even more than of other literary kinds — lies 
 in the direction of mould and mechanism — of the pro- 
 duction, by the thousand, of things of no individual quality 
 and character. This danger has been and is being amply 
 exemplified. But the Peacocks (would the plural were 
 more justified!) save us from it by their own unconquerable 
 individuality in the first place and, in the second, by the 
 fact that even the best in this kind is " caviare to the 
 general," while anything that is not the best has no attrac- 
 tion either for the general or the elect. They are, as it 
 were, the salt of the novel-feast, in more senses than one: 
 and it is cause for thankfulness that, in this respect as in 
 the physical, England has been well off for salt-pits. 
 
 Besides these individual names — which in most litera-
 
 224 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 tures would be great, and even in English literature are 
 not small — the second quarter of the century added to the 
 history of the novel an infinity of others who can hardly 
 appear here even on the representative or selective system. 
 All the suns of the novel hitherto mentioned had moons 
 and stars around them; aU the cadres of the various kinds 
 were filled with privates and non-commissioned officers 
 to follow the leaders. Gait and Moir carried out the 
 " Scotch novel " with something of Scott, but more of 
 Smollett (Gait at least certainly, in part of his work, preceded 
 Scott). Lady Morgan, who has been mentioned already, 
 Banim, Crofton Croker, and others played a similar part 
 to Miss Edgeworth. Glascock, Chamier, and Howard were, 
 as it were, lieutenants (the last directly so) to Marryat. 
 The didactic side of Miss Edgeworth was taken up by 
 Harriet Martineau. Mrs. Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) 
 is among the latest good examples of the " Terror " class, 
 to which her husband had contributed two of its worst, and 
 two of the feeblest books ever written by a man of the 
 greatest genius, in Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne, some seven years 
 earlier. Many women, not unnaturally, encouraged by 
 the great examples of Miss Burney, Miss Edgeworth, Miss 
 Austen, and Miss Ferrier, attempted novels of the most 
 various kinds, sometimes almost achieving the purely 
 domestic variety, sometimes branching to other sorts. 
 The novels of Mrs. Gore, chiefly in the " fashionable " kind, 
 are said to have attained the three-score and ten in number; 
 Mrs. Crowe dealt with the supernatural outside of her 
 novels if not also in them; the luckless poetess " L. E. L." 
 was a novelist in Ethel Churchill (1837) ^^^ other books; 
 Mrs. Trollope, prohfic mother of a more prolific son, showed 
 not a little power, if not quite so much taste, in The Vicar 
 of Wrexhill (1837) ^^"^ ^^^ Widow Barnaby. Single books,
 
 THE SUCCESSORS— TO THACKERAY 225 
 
 like Morier's Hajji Baba (1824), Hope's Anastasius (18 19), 
 Croly's Salathiel (1829), gained fame which they have not 
 quite lost: and the little known Michael Scott (i 789-1 835) 
 left in Tom Cringle'' s Log and The Cruise of the Midge a pair 
 of stories of West Indian scenery and adventure which are 
 nearly first rate. In 1839, ^^^ ^^"^^ after Pickwick^ Samuel 
 Warren's Ten Thousand a Tear blended Bulwer and 
 Dickens in a manner which to this day is a puzzle in its 
 near approach to success. Yet he never repeated this 
 approach, though he had earlier done striking things in 
 the Diary of a Late Physician (1830). But in the latest 
 thirties and early forties there arose two writers who were 
 to eclipse every one of their contemporaries in this kind. 
 
 The remarkable originality and idiosyncrasy of Dickens 
 have perhaps, to some extent and from not a few persons, 
 concealed the fact that he was not, any more than other 
 people, an earth-born wonder. Scanted of education as 
 he was, he has in several places frankly and eagerly con- 
 fessed his early acquaintance with the great older noveHsts, 
 and his special fancy for Smollett — whose influence indeed 
 is traceable on him from first to last, and not least in the 
 famous " interiors " of which he made far more than his 
 example had done. Even in Pickwick the expert will 
 trace suggestions from others. But if the work is read in 
 its proper order, and the Sketches by Boz are taken first, 
 nobody who knows both Leigh Hunt and Theodore Hook 
 will fail to see that Dickens owed a great deal to both. 
 The fact is in no sense discreditable to him : on the contrary, 
 it adds, in the estimation of all reasonable and critical 
 judges, a very great deal of interest, and takes away none. 
 The earth-born prodigy is seldom good for much and never 
 for very much. The genius who fastens on the points in 
 preceding literature most congenial to him, develops them, 
 
 p
 
 226 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 builds on them with his own matter and form, and turns 
 out something far greater than his originals is the really 
 satisfactory person. Had Leigh Hunt lent to Hook his 
 literature, his fund of trivial but agreeable observation 
 and illustration, and his attractive style; had Hook com- 
 municated to Hunt his narrative faculty and his fecundity 
 in character and manners: — neither could have written 
 Pickwick or even the worst of its successors. Had there 
 been no Hunt and no Hook, Dickens would no doubt have 
 managed, in some fashion, to " do for himself." But it 
 would have given him more trouble, he would have done 
 it more slowly, and he would hardly have earned that 
 generous and admirable phrase of his greatest contem- 
 porary in fiction which will be quoted shortly. 
 
 Neither from Smollett, however, nor from Hook, nor 
 from Hunt, nor from anybody else did Dickens take what 
 makes him Dickens. His idiosyncrasy, already mentioned, 
 is so marked that everybody acknowledges its presence: 
 but its exact character and nature are matter not so much 
 of debate (though they are that also in the highest degree) 
 as matter of more or less questing, often of a rather blind- 
 man's-buff kind. There is probably no author of whom 
 really critical estimates are so rare. He has given so much 
 pleasure to so many people — perhaps there are none to 
 whom he has given more pleasure than to some of those 
 who have criticised him most closely — that to mention 
 any faults in him is upbraided as a sort of personal and 
 detestable ingratitude and treachery. If you say that he 
 cannot draw a gentleman, you are told that you are a 
 parrot and a snob, who repeats what other snobs have told 
 you; that gentlemen are not worth drawing; that he can 
 draw them; and so forth. If you suggest that he is 
 fantastic, it is reproachfully asked if poetry is not fantastic,
 
 THE SUCCESSORS— TO THACKERAY 227 
 
 and if you do not like poetry? If you intimate small 
 affection for Little NeU and Little Paul, you are a brute; 
 if you hint that his social crusades were often quite 
 irrational, and sometimes at least as mischievous as they 
 were beneficial, you are a parasite of aristocracy and a foe 
 of " the people." If you take exception to his repetitions, 
 his mannerisms, his tedious catch-processes of various 
 kinds, you are a " stop-watch critic " and worthy of all 
 the generous wrath of the exemplary and Reverend Mr. 
 Yorick. And yet all these assertions, objections, descrip- 
 tions, are arch-true: and they can be made by persons 
 who know Dickens and enjoy Dickens a thousand times 
 better — who admire him in a manner a thousand times 
 more really complimentary — than the folk who simply 
 cry " Great is Dickens " and will listen to nothing but 
 their own sweet voices. 
 
 The real, the great, the unique merit of Dickens is that 
 he brought to the service of the novel an imagination 
 which, though it was never poetic, was plastic in almost 
 the highest degree: and that he communicated to the 
 results of it a kind of existence which, though distinctly 
 different from that of actual life, has a reality of its own, 
 and possesses the distinguishing mark of genius, so that if 
 it does not exactly force belief in itself, it forces suspen- 
 sion of disbelief. To have done this is not only to have 
 accomplished a wonderful artistic triumph, but to confer 
 an immense benefit on the human race. But in doing it 
 Dickens exhibits various foibles, prejudices, and dis- 
 abilities: though it is quite open to any one to maintain 
 that these rather assisted the flow of his imagination than 
 hindered it. He began very young; he had curiously little 
 literature; his knowledge of life, extraordinarily alert and 
 acute, was very one-sided, and the organs by which he
 
 228 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 attained it seem absolutely to shut themselves and refuse 
 communion with certain orders of society and classes of 
 human creatures. The wealth of fantastic imagery which 
 he used to such purpose not infrequently stimulated him 
 to a disorderly profusion of grotesque; he was congenitally 
 melodramatic; and before very long his habit of attributing 
 special catch-words, gestures, and the like to his characters, 
 exaggerated, degenerated, and stereotyped itself in a fashion 
 which it is difficult to think satisfactory to anybody. He 
 was, moreover, a " novelist of purpose " in the highest 
 degree; he had very strong, but very crude — not to say 
 absurd — political ideas; and he was apt to let the great 
 powers of pathos, of humour, of vivid description, which he 
 possessed to " get out of hand " and to land him in the 
 maudlin, the extravagant, and the bombastic. 
 
 But — to put ourselves in connection with the main 
 thread of our story once more — he not only himself provided 
 a great amount of the novel pleasure for his readers, but 
 he infused into the novel generally something of a new 
 spirit. It has been more than once pointed out that there 
 is almost more danger with the novel of " getting into 
 ruts " than with any kind of literature. Nobody could 
 charge the Dickens novel with doing this, except as regards 
 mannerisms of style, and though it might inspire many, 
 it was very unlikely to create a rut for any one else. He 
 liked to call himself " the inimitable," and so, in a way, 
 he was. Imitations of him were, of course, tried: but they 
 were all bad and obvious failures. Against the possible 
 tameness of the domestic novel; against the too commonly 
 actual want of actuahty of the historic romance; he set 
 this new fantastic activity of his, which was at once real 
 and unreal, but where the reality had a magical touch of 
 the unfamiliar and the very unreality was stimulating. He
 
 THE SUCCESSORS— TO THACKERAY 229 
 
 might have a hundred faults — he was in fact never faultless, 
 except in Pickwick, which is so absolutely unique that 
 there is nothing to compare with it and show up faults (if 
 it has any) by the comparison. But you can read him 
 again and again with unceasing delight, and with delight 
 of a kind given by no other novelist.^ 
 
 The position of Thackeray in the history of the novel is 
 as different from that of Dickens as the fortunes of the 
 two were in their own progress and development. In 
 fact, though a sort of pseudo-Plutarchian parallel between 
 them is nearly as inevitable as it is common, it is a parallel 
 almost entirely composed of differences, carried out in 
 matter almost incommensurable. In the first place, 
 Dickens, as we have seen, and as Thackeray said (with the 
 generous and characteristic addition " at the head of the 
 whole tribe "), " came and took his place calmly " and 
 practically at once (or with the preliminary only of " Boz ") 
 in Pickwick. Whether he ever went further may at least 
 be questioned. But Thackeray did not take his place at 
 once — in fact he conspicuously failed to take it for some 
 sixteen years: although he produced, for at least the last 
 ten of these, work containing indications of extraordinary 
 power, in a variety of directions almost as extraordinary. 
 
 To attempt to assign reasons for this comparative failure 
 would be idle — the fact is the only reasonable reason. 
 But some phenomena and symptoms can be diagnosed. 
 It is at least noteworthy that Thackeray — in this approach- 
 ing Dickens perhaps nearer than in any other point — began 
 with extravaganza — to adopt perhaps the most con- 
 
 1 It has not been thought necessary to insert criticism of Dickens's 
 individual novels. They are almost all well known to almost everybody: 
 and special discussion of them would be superfluous, while their general 
 characteristics and positions in novel-history are singularly uniform and 
 can be described together.
 
 230 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 venient general name for a thing which cannot be quite 
 satisfactorily designated by any. In both cases the 
 adoption was probably due to the example and popularity 
 of Theodore Hook. But it was also due, in a higher and 
 more metaphysical sense, to the fact that the romance, 
 which had had so mighty a success in Scott's hands, was 
 for the time overblown, and that the domestic novel, despite 
 the almost equally wonderful, though much quieter and 
 less popular achievement of Miss Austen, was not thoroughly 
 and genuinely ready. From extravaganza in a certain 
 sense Dickens, as has been said, never really departed: 
 and he achieved most of his best work in his own peculiar 
 varieties of it. Thackeray was, if not to leave it entirely 
 aside, to use it in his later days merely as an occasional 
 variation and seasoning. But at first he could not, appar- 
 ently, get free from it : and he might have seemed unable 
 to dispense with its almost mechanical externalities of 
 mis-spelling and the like. It must also be remembered 
 that circumstances were at first curiously unfavourable to 
 him: and that loss of fortune, domestic affliction, and other 
 things almost compelled him to write from hand to mouth 
 — to take whatever commission offered itself: whereas 
 the, if not immediate, speedy and tremendous success of 
 Pickwick put the booksellers entirely at Dickens's feet. 
 Still, a certain vacillation — an uncertainty of design not 
 often accompanying genius Hke his — must be acknow- 
 ledged in Thackeray. For a time he hesitated between 
 pen and pencil, the latter of which implements he fortu- 
 nately never abandoned, though the former was his pre- 
 destined wand. Then he could not, or would not, for 
 years, get out of the " miscellaneous " style, or patchwork 
 of styles — reviews, short stories, burlesques, what not. 
 His more important attempts seemed to have an attendant
 
 THE SUCCESSORS— TO THACKERAY 231 
 
 guignon?- Catherine (i 839-1 840), a very powerful thing 
 in parts, was ill-planned and could not be popular. 
 A Shabby Genteel Story (1841), containing almost the 
 Thackerayan quiddity, was interrupted partly by his wife's 
 illness, partly, it would seem, by editorial disfavour, and 
 moreover still failed to shake off the appearance of a want 
 of seriousness. Even The Great Hoggarty Diamond (1841- 
 1842) was apparently cut short by request, and still lay 
 open to an unjust, but not quite inexcusable, question on 
 this same point of " seriousness." In all there was, or 
 might seem to be, a queer and to some readers an unsatis- 
 factory blend of what they had not learnt to call " realism " 
 with what they were quite Hkely to think fooHng. During 
 these years Thackeray was emphatically of the class of 
 writers of whom people " do not know what to make." 
 And it is a true saying of English people — though perhaps 
 not so pre-eminently true of them as some would have it — 
 that " not to know what to make " of a thing or a person 
 is sufficient reason for them to distrust, dislike, and " wash 
 their hands of " it or him. 
 
 Some would have it that Barry Lyndon (1843) marks 
 the close of this period of indecision and the beginning of 
 that of maturity. The commoner and perhaps the juster 
 opinion is that this position belongs to Vanity Fair (1846- 
 1848). At any rate, after that book there could be no 
 doubt about the fact of the greatness of its writer, though 
 it may be doubted whether even now the quality of this 
 greatness is correctly and generally recognised. It is this 
 — that at last the novel of real life on the great scale has 
 been discovered. Even yet a remnant of shyness hangs 
 
 ^ For this reason, and for the variety of kind of his later novels a little 
 more individual notice must be given to them than in the case of Dickens, 
 but still only a little, and nothing like detailed criticism.
 
 232 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 on the artist. He puts his scene a little though not very 
 far back; he borrows a little, though not much, historical 
 and romantic interest in the Waterloo part ; the catastrophe 
 of the Becky-Steyne business, though by no means outside 
 of the probable contents of any day's newspaper, is slightly 
 exceptional. But on the whole the problem of " reality, 
 the whole reahty, and nothing but reahty " is faced and 
 grasped and solved — with, of course, the addition to the 
 " nothing but " of " except art." 
 
 He had struck his path and he kept to it: even when, as 
 in Esmond (1852) and The Virginians (1858-1859) actually, 
 and in Denis Duval prospectively, he blended the historical 
 with the domestic variety. Pendennis (i 849-1 850) im- 
 ports nothing out of the most ordinary experience; The 
 Newcomes (1854-1855) very little; Phili-p (1861-1862) 
 only its pantomime conclusion; while the two completely 
 historical tales are in nothing more remarkable than in 
 the way in which their remoter and more unfamiUar main 
 subject, and their occasional excursions from everyday life, 
 are subdued to the scheme of the realist novel in the best 
 sense of the term — the novel rebuilt and refashioned on the 
 lines of Fielding, but with modern manners, relying on 
 variety and life, and relying on these only. 
 
 There is thus something of similarity (though with 
 attendant differences, of the most important kind) between 
 the joint position of Dickens and Thackeray towards the 
 world of the novel, and the joint position of Scott and 
 Miss Austen. They overlap more than their great fore- 
 runners of the preceding generation. Both wrote historical 
 novels: it is indeed Thackeray's unique distinction that 
 he was equally master of the historical novel and of the 
 novel of pure modern society, almost uneventful. In 
 parts of some of his later books, especially Little Dorrit,
 
 THE SUCCESSORS— TO THACKERAY 233 
 
 Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend, Dickens at 
 least tried to exchange his picaresque-fantastic cloudland 
 for actual ordinary modern life. But on the whole the 
 method of Thackeray was the method of the novel, though 
 shot with a strong romantic spirit, and the method of 
 Dickens the method of the romance applied, for the most 
 part, to material which could hardly be called romantic. 
 Both, therefore, in a manner, recalled the forces of fiction 
 from the rather straggHng and particularist courses which 
 it had been pursuing for the last quarter of a century. 
 
 In fact, even in the two mighty men of genius whom we 
 have just been discussing, there may be seen — at their 
 beginnings at least — something of that irresolution, 
 uncertainty, and want of rehance on the powers of the 
 novel, it-by-itself-it, which we have noticed before: and 
 which the unerring craftsmanship of Scott had already 
 pointed out in the " Conversation of the Author of Waverley 
 with Captain Clutterbuck " more than once referred to. 
 They want excuses and pretexts, bladders and spring- 
 boards. Even Dickens, despite his irrepressible self- 
 reliance, burdens himself, at the beginning of Pickwick, 
 with the clumsy old machinery of a club which he practi- 
 cally drops: and, still later, with the still more clumsy 
 framework of " Master Humphrey's Clock " which he has 
 not quietly to drop, but openly to strip off and cast away, 
 before he has gone very far, Thackeray takes sixteen 
 years of experiment before he trusts his genius, boldly and 
 on the great scale, to reveal itself in its own way, and in 
 the straight way of the novel. 
 
 Yet in this time also a great advance was made, as is 
 shown not only by the fact that Dickens and Thackeray 
 themselves became possible, but by the various achieve- 
 ments of the principal writers mentioned in this chapter.
 
 234 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 of one or two who might have been, but are perhaps, on 
 the whole, best postponed to the next, such as Lever, and 
 of the great army of minorities who have been of necessity 
 omitted. In every direction and from every point of view 
 novel is growing. Although it was abused by precisians, the 
 gran conquesta of Scott had forced it into general recog- 
 nition and requisition. Even the still severe discipline 
 of family Hfe in the first half of the nineteenth century, 
 instead of excluding it altogether, contented itself with 
 prescribing that " novels should not be read in the morn- 
 ing." A test which may be thought vulgar by the super- 
 fine or the superficial, but a pretty good one, is the 
 altered status and position of the writers of novels. In the 
 eighteenth, especially the earlier eighteenth, century the 
 novelist had not merely been looked down upon as a 
 novelist, but had, as a rule, resorted to novel-writing 
 under some stress of circumstance. Even when he was 
 by birth a " gentleman of coat armour " as Fielding and 
 Smollett were, he was usually a gentleman very much out 
 at elbows: the stories, true or false, of Rasselas and John- 
 son's mother's funeral expenses, of the Vicar of Wakefield 
 and Goldsmith's dunning landlady, have something more 
 than mere anecdote in them. Mackenzie, though the 
 paternity of his famille deplorable of novels was no secret, 
 preserved a strict nominal incognito. Women, as having 
 no regular professions and plenty of time at their disposal, 
 were allowed more latitude: and this really perhaps had 
 something to do with their early prominence in the novel; 
 but it is certain that Scott's rigid, and for a long time 
 successful, maintenance of the mask was by no means 
 mere prudery, and stiU less merely prudent commercial 
 speculation. Yet he, who altered so much in the novel, 
 altered this also. Of the novelists noticed in the early part
 
 THE SUCCESSORS— TO THACKERAY 235 
 
 of this chapter, one became Prime Minister of England, 
 another rose to cabinet rank, a baronetcy, and a peerage; 
 a third was H.M. consul in important posts abroad; a 
 fourth held a great position, if not in the service directly of 
 the crown, in what was of hardly less importance, that of 
 the East India Company; a fifth was a post-captain in the 
 navy and Companion of the Bath. 
 
 And all this had been rendered possible partly by the 
 genius of novel-writers, partly by the appetite of the 
 novel-reader. This latter was to continue unabated: 
 whether the former was to increase, to maintain itself, or 
 slacken must be, to some extent of course, matter of 
 opinion. But we have still two quarter-centuries to 
 survey, in the first of which there may perhaps be some 
 reason for thinking that the novel rose to its actual zenith. 
 Nearly all the writers mentioned in this chapter continued 
 to write — the greater part, in genius, of Thackeray's accom- 
 plished work, and the greater part, in bulk, of Dickens's, 
 had still to appear. But these elders were reinforced by 
 fresh recruits, some of them of a prowess only inferior to 
 the very greatest : and a distinct development of the novel 
 itself, in the direction of self-reliance and craftsmanlike 
 working on its own lines, was to be seen. In particular, 
 the deferred influence of Miss Austen was at last to be 
 brought to bear with astonishing results: while, partly 
 owing to the example of Thackeray, the historical variety 
 (which had for the most part been a pale and rather vul- 
 garised imitation of Scott), was to be revived and varied 
 in a manner equally astonishing. More than ever we shall 
 have to let styles and kinds " speak by their foremen " — 
 in fact to some extent to let them speak for themselves 
 with very little detailed notice even of these foremen. 
 But we shall still endeavour to keep the general threads
 
 236 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 in hand and to exhibit their direction, their crossing, and 
 their other phenomena, as clearly as possible to the reader. 
 For only so can we complete the picture of the course of 
 fiction throughout English literature — withthesole exclusion 
 of living writers, whose work can never be satisfactorily 
 treated in such a book as this — first, because they are 
 living and, secondly, because it is not done.
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE MID-VICTORIAN NOVEL 
 
 At about the very middle of the nineteenth century — say 
 from 1845 to 1855 in each direction, but almost increasingly 
 towards the actual dividing Hne of 1850 — there came upon 
 the EngHsh novel a very remarkable wind of refreshment 
 and new endeavour. Thackeray and Dickens themselves 
 are examples of it, with Lever and others, before this 
 dividing Hne: many others yet come to join them. A list 
 of books written out just as they occur to the memory, and 
 without any attempt to marshal them in strict chronological 
 order, would show this beyond all reasonable possibility of 
 gainsaying. Thackeray's own best accomplished work 
 from Vanity Fair (1846) itself through Pendennis (1849) 
 and Esmond (1852) to The Nezvcomes (1854); ^^^ brilliant 
 centre of Dickens's work in David Copperfield (1850) — stand 
 at the head and have been already noticed by aniicipation 
 or impHcation, while Lever had almost completed the first 
 division of his work, which began with Harry Lorrequer as 
 early as the year of Pickwick. But such books as r^aj-/( 1848), 
 Westward Ho! (1855); as The Warden (1855); as Jane 
 Eyre (1847) and its too few successors; as Scenes of Clerical 
 Life (1857); ^5 Mary Barton (1848) and the novels which 
 foUowed it, with others which it is perhaps almost unfair 
 to leave out even in this allusive summary by sample, 
 betokened a stirring of the waters, a ratthng among the 
 bones, such as is not common in hterature. Death removed 
 Thackeray early and Dickens somewhat less prematurely, 
 
 237
 
 238 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 but after a period rather barren in direct novel work. The 
 others continued and were constantly reinforced: nor was 
 it till well on in the seventies that any distinct drop from 
 first- to second-growth quality could be observed in the 
 general vintage of English fiction. 
 
 One is not quite driven, on this occasion, to the pusil- 
 lanimous explanation that this remarkable variety and 
 number of good novels was simply due to the simultaneous 
 existence of an equally remarkable number of good 
 novelists. The fact is that, by this time, the great example 
 of Scott and Miss Austen — the great wave of progress 
 which exemplified itself first and most eminently in these 
 two writers — had had time to work upon and permeate 
 another generation of practitioners. The novelists who 
 have just been cited were as a rule born in the second decade 
 of the century, just before, about, or after the time at which 
 Scott and Miss Austen began to publish. They had there- 
 fore — as their elders, even though they may have had time 
 to read the pair, had not — time to assimilate thoroughly and 
 early the results which that pair had produced or which 
 they had first expressed. And they had even greater 
 advantages than this. They had had time to assimilate, 
 likewise, the results of all the rest of that great literary 
 generation of which Scott and Miss Austen were them- 
 selves but members. They profited by thirty years more 
 of constant historical exploration and reahsing of former 
 days. One need not say, for it is question-begging, that 
 they also profited by, but they could at least avail them- 
 selves of, the immense change of manners and society which 
 made 1850 differ more from 1800 than 1800 had differed, 
 not merely from 1750 but from 1700. They had, even 
 though all of them may not have been sufficiently grateful 
 for it, the stimulus of that premier position in Europe
 
 THE MID-VICTORIAN NOVEL 239 
 
 which the country had gained in the Napoleonic wars, and 
 which she had not yet wholly lost or even begun to lose. 
 They had wider travel, mor^. extended occupations and 
 interests, many other new things to draw upon. And, 
 lastly, they had some important special incidents and 
 movements — the new arrangement of political parties, the 
 Oxford awakening, and others — to give suggestion and 
 impetus to novels of the speciahst kind. Nay, they had 
 not only the great writers, in other kinds, of the im- 
 mediate past, but those of the present, Carlyle, Tennyson, 
 latterly Ruskin, and others still to complete their education 
 and the machinery of its development. 
 
 The most remarkable feature of this renouveau, as has 
 been both directly and indirectly observed before, is the 
 resumption, the immense extension, and the extraordinary 
 improvement of the domestic novel. Not that this had 
 not been practised during the thirty years since Miss 
 Austen's death. But the external advantages just 
 enumerated had failed it: and it had enlisted none of the 
 chief talents which were at the service of fiction generally. 
 A little more gift and a good deal more taste might have 
 enabled Mrs. Trollope to do really great things in it: but 
 she left them for her son to accompHsh. Attempts and 
 " tries " at it had been made constantly, and the goal had 
 been very nearly reached, especially, perhaps, in that now 
 much forgotten but remarkable Emilia Wyndham (1846) 
 by Anne Caldwell (Mrs. Marsh), which was wickedly 
 described by a sister novelist as the " book where the 
 woman breaks her desk open with her head," but which 
 has real power and exercised real influence for no short 
 time. 
 
 This new domestic novel followed Miss Austen in that it 
 did not necessarily avail itself of anything but perfectly
 
 240 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 ordinary life, and relied chiefly on artistic presentment — on 
 treatment rather than on subject. It departed from her 
 in that it admitted a much wider range and variety of 
 subject itself; and by no means excluded the passions and 
 emotions which, though she had not been so prudish as to 
 ignore their results, she had never chosen to represent in 
 much actual exercise, or to make the mainsprings of her 
 books. 
 
 The first supreme work of the kind was perhaps in Vanity 
 Fair and Pendennis, the former admitting exceptional and 
 irregular developments as an integral part of its plot and 
 general appeal, the latter doing for the most part without 
 them. But Pendennis exhibited in itself, and taught to 
 other novelists, if not an absolutely new, a hitherto little 
 worked, and clumsily worked, source of novel interest. 
 We have seen how, as early as Head or Kirkman, the possi- 
 bility of making such a source out of the ways of special 
 trades, professions, employments, and vocations had 
 been partly seen and utilised. Defoe did it more; Smollett 
 more still; and since the great war there had been naval 
 and military novels in abundance, as well as novels political, 
 clerical, sporting, and what not. But these special 
 interests had been as a rule drawn upon too onesidedly. 
 The eighteenth century found its mistaken fondness for 
 episodes, inset stories, and the like, particularly convenient 
 here: the naval, military, sporting, and other novels of 
 the nineteenth were apt to rely too exclusively on these 
 differences. Such things as the Oxbridge scenes and the 
 journalism scenes of Pendennis — both among the most 
 effective and popular, perhaps the most effective and 
 popular, parts of the book — were almost, if not entirely, 
 new. There had been before, and have since been, plenty 
 of university novels, and their record has been a record of
 
 THE MID-VICTORIAN NOVEL 241 
 
 almost uninterrupted failure; there have since, if not 
 before, Pendennis been several " press " novels, and their 
 record has certainly not been a record of unbroken success. 
 But the employment here, by genius, of such subjects for 
 substantial parts of a novel was a success pure and un- 
 mixed. So, in the earlier book, the same author had shown 
 how the most humdrum incident and the minutest paint- 
 ing of ordinary character could be combined with historic 
 tragedy Hke that furnished by Waterloo, with domestic 
 drame of the most exciting kind like the discovery of Lord 
 Steyne's relations with Becky, or the at least suggested later 
 crime of that ingenious and rather hardly treated little 
 person. 
 
 Most of the writers mentioned and glanced at above 
 took — not of course always, often, or perhaps ever in 
 conscious following of Thackeray, but in consequence of 
 the same " skiey influences " which worked on him — to 
 this mixed domestic-dramatic line. And what is still more 
 interesting, men who had already made their mark for 
 years, in styles quite different, turned to it and adopted 
 it. We have seen this of Bulwer, and the evidences of 
 the change in him which are given by the " Caxton " 
 novels. We have not yet directly dealt with another 
 instance of almost as great interest and distinction, Charles 
 Lever, though we have named him and glanced at his 
 work. 
 
 Lever, who was born as early as 1806, had, it has been 
 said, begun to write novels as early as his junior, Dickens, 
 and had at once developed, in Harry Lorrequer, a pretty 
 distinct style of his own. This style was a kind of humour- 
 novel with abundant incident, generally with a somewhat 
 " promiscuous " plot and with hvely but externally 
 drawn characters — the humours being furnished partly 
 
 Q
 
 242 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 by Lever's native country, Ireland, and partly by the 
 traditions of the great war of which he had collected a 
 store in his capacity of physician to the Embassy at 
 Brussels. He had kept up this style, the capital example 
 of which is Charles O^M alley (1840), with unabated verve 
 and with great popular success for a dozen years before 
 1850. But about that time, or rather earlier, the general 
 " suck " of the current towards a different kind (assisted 
 no doubt by the feeling that the public might be getting 
 tired of the other style) made him change it into studies 
 of a less speciahsed kind — of foreign travel, home life, and 
 the like — sketches which, in his later days still, he brought 
 even closer to actuality. It is true that in the long run 
 his popularity has depended, and will probably always 
 depend, on the early " roUicking " adventure books: not 
 only because of their natural appeal, but because there is 
 plenty of the other thing elsewhere, and hardly any of 
 this particular thing anywhere. To almost anybody, for 
 instance, except a very great milksop or a pedant of con- 
 struction, Charles CMalley with its love-making and its 
 fighting, its horsemanship and its horse-play, its " devilled 
 kidneys " ^ and its devil-may-care-ness, is a distinctly 
 delectable composition; and if a reasonable interval be 
 allowed between the readings, may be read over and over 
 again, at all times of life, with satisfaction. But the fact 
 of the author's change remains not the less historically 
 and symptomatically important, in connection with the 
 larger change of which we are now taking notice, and with 
 the similar phenomena observable in the work of Bulwer. 
 At the same time it has been pointed out that the 
 following of Miss Austen by no means excluded the follow- 
 
 * Edgar Poe has a perfectly serious and very characteristic explosion at 
 the prominence of these agreeable viands in the book.
 
 THE MID-VICTORIAN NOVEL 243 
 
 ing of Scott: and that the new development included 
 " crosses " of novel and romance, sometimes of the his- 
 torical kind, sometimes not, which are of the highest, or all 
 but the highest, interest. Early and good examples of these 
 may be found in the work of the Brontes, Charlotte and 
 Emily (the third sister Anne is but a pale reflection of her 
 elders), and of Charles Kingsley. Charlotte {b. 1 8 16) and 
 Charles {b. 18 19) were separated in their birth by but three 
 years, Emily {b. 18 18) and Kingsley by but one. 
 
 The curious story of the struggles of the Bronte girls 
 to get published hardly concerns us, and Emily's work, 
 Wuthering Heights^ is one of those isolated books which, 
 whatever their merit, are rather ornaments than essential 
 parts in novel history. But this is not the case with Jane 
 Eyre (1847), Shirley (1849), Villette (1852), and The Pro- 
 fessor (1857) (^^^ written much earlier). These are all 
 examples of the determ.ination to base novels on actual life 
 and experience. Few novelists have ever kept so close to 
 their own part in these as Charlotte Bronte did, though she 
 accompanied, permeated, and to a certain extent trans- 
 formed her autobiography and observation by a strong 
 romantic and fantastic imaginative element. Deprive 
 Thackeray and Dickens of nearly all their humour and 
 geniality, take a portion only of the remaining genius of 
 each in the ratio of about 2 1h. to i D., add a certain dash of 
 the old terror-novel and the German fantastic tale, moisten 
 with feminine spirit and water, and mix thoroughly: and 
 you have something very like Charlotte Bronte. But it 
 is necessary to add further, and it is her great glory, the 
 perfume and atmosphere of the Yorkshire moors, which 
 she had in not quite such perfection as her sister Emily, 
 
 * Some will have it that this was really Charlotte's: but not with much 
 probability.
 
 244 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 but in combination with more general novel-gift. Her 
 actual course of writing was short, and it could probably in 
 no case have been long; she wanted wider and, perhaps, 
 happier experience, more literature, more man-and-woman- 
 of-the-worldliness, perhaps a sweeter and more genial 
 temper. But the English novel would have been incom- 
 plete without her and her sister; they are, as wholes, unlike 
 anybody else, and if they are not exactly great they have 
 the quality of greatness. Above all, they kept novel and 
 romance together — a deed which is great without any 
 quahfication or drawback. 
 
 Charles Kingsley is one of the most precious documents 
 for the cynics who say that while, if you please the public 
 in only one way, you may possibly meet with only tolerable 
 ingratitude; if you attempt to please it in more ways than 
 one, you are certain to be suspected, and still more certain 
 to have the defects of your weakest work transferred to 
 to your best. He was a novelist, a poet, an essayist, a 
 preacher, a historian, and a critic. His history, though 
 less positively inaccurate than the " dead set " against him 
 of certain notorious persons chose to represent it, was un- 
 critical: and his criticism, sometimes acute and luminous, 
 was decidedly unhistorical. But he was a preacher of 
 remarkable merit, a charming and original essayist, a poet 
 of no wide range but of true poetical quahty, and a 
 novelist of great variety and of almost the first class. He 
 let his weakest qualities go in with his strongest in his 
 novels, and had also the still more unfortunate tendency to 
 " trail coats " of the most inconceivably different colours 
 for others to tread' upon. Liberals, Radicals, and Tories; 
 Roman Catholics, High Churchmen, Low Churchmen, and 
 No-Churchmen; sentimentalists and cynics; people who 
 do not like literary and historical allusion, and people who
 
 THE MID-VICTORIAN NOVEL 245 
 
 are meticulous about literary and historical accuracy — all 
 these and many others, if they cannot disregard flings at 
 their own particular tastes, fancies, and notions, are sure 
 to lose patience with him now and then. Accordingly, he 
 has met with some exacerbated decriers, and with very 
 few thorough-going defenders. 
 
 Yet almost thoroughing-going defence is, as far as the 
 novels (our only direct business) are concerned, far from 
 difficult; and the present writer, though there are perhaps 
 not a dozen consecutive pages of Kingsley's novels to which, 
 at some point or other, he is not prepared to append the 
 note, " This is Bosh," is prepared also to exalt him miles 
 above writers whose margins he would be quite content to 
 leave without a single annotation of this — or any other — 
 kind. In particular the variety of the books, and their 
 vividness, are both extraordinary. And perhaps the 
 greatest notes of the novel generally, as weU as those in 
 which the novel of this period can most successfully 
 challenge comparison with those of any other, are, or should 
 be, vividness and variety. His books in the kind are seven; 
 and the absence of replicas among them is one of their 
 extraordinary features. Teast, the first (1848), and Alton 
 Locke, the second (next year), are novels of the unrest of 
 thought which caused and accompanied the revolutionary 
 movement of the period throughout Europe. But they 
 are quite different in subject and treatment. The first is 
 a sketch of country society, uppermost and lowermost: ^ 
 the second one of town-artisan and lower-trade life with 
 passages of university and other contrast. Both are 
 young and crude enough, intentionally or unintentionally; 
 
 1 It is curious to compare this (dealing as it does largely with sport) and 
 the " Jorrocks " series of Robert Surtees (1803-1864). Kingsley was 
 nearly as practical a sportsman as Surtees: but Surtees's characters and 
 manners have the old artificial-picaresque quality only.
 
 246 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 both, intentionally beyond all doubt, are fantastic and 
 extravagant; but both are full of genius. Argemone 
 Lavington, the heroine of Teast, is, though not of the most 
 elaborately drawn, one of the most fascinating and real 
 heroines of Englishfiction; an important secondary character 
 of the second book, the bookseller Sandy Mackaye, is one of 
 its most successful " character-parts." Both, but especially 
 Teast, are full of admirable descriptive writing, not entirely 
 without indebtedness to Mr. Ruskin, but very often in- 
 dependently carried out, and always worthy of a " place on 
 the line " in any gallery. There is much accurate and real 
 dialogue, not a little firm character-drawing. Above all, 
 both are full of blood — of things lived and seen, not vamped 
 up from reading or day-dreaming — and yet full of dreams, 
 day and other, and full of literature. Perhaps " the 
 malt was a little above the meal," the yeast present in more 
 abundant quality than the substances for fermentation, but 
 there was no lack even of these. 
 
 Hypatia — which succeeded after some interval (1853) 
 and when the writer's Christian Socialist, Churchman- 
 Chartist excitement had somewhat clarified itself — is a 
 more substantial, a more ambitious, but certainly also an 
 even more successful book. It has something of — and 
 perhaps, though in far transposed matter, owes something 
 to — Esmond in its daring blend of old and new, and it falls 
 short of that wonderful creation. But it is almost a second 
 to it: and, with plenty of faults, is perhaps the only classical 
 or semi-classical novel of much value in English. 
 
 But it was in the next year, 1854, ^^^^ Kingsley's work 
 reached its greatest perfection in the brilliant historical 
 novel of Westward Ho ! where the glories of Elizabethan 
 adventure and patriotism were treated with a wonderful 
 kindred enthusiasm, with admirable narrative faculty,
 
 THE MID- VICTORIAN NOVEL 247 
 
 with a creation of character, suitable for the purpose, 
 which is hardly inferior to that of the greatest masters, 
 and with an even enhanced and certainly chastened 
 exercise of the descriptive faculty above noticed. The 
 book to some extent invited — and Kingsley availed himself 
 of the opportunity in a far more than sufhcient degree — 
 that " coat-traihng " which, as has been said, inevitably in 
 its turn provokes " coat-treading ": and it has been abused 
 from various quarters. But that it is one of the very 
 greatest of EngHsh novels next to the few supreme, im- 
 partial and competent criticism will never hesitate to 
 allow. Of his remaining books of novel kind one was of 
 the " eccentric " variety: the others, though fuU of good 
 things, were perhaps on the whole failures. The first 
 referred to (the second in order of appearance). The Water 
 Babies (1863), is a half Rabelaisian though perfectly in- 
 oSensive fatrasie of all sorts of things, exceedingly delightful 
 to fit tastes. But Two Tears Ago (1857), though contain- 
 ing some fine and even really exquisite things, shows a 
 relaxing hand on the crudity and promiscuousness which 
 had been excusable in his two first books and had been 
 well restrained in Hypatia and Westward Hoi by central and 
 active interests of story and character. " Spasmodic " 
 poetry, the Crimean War, Pre-Raphaelitism, Tractarianism, 
 the good and bad sides of science, and divers other things 
 make a mixture that is not sufficiently concocted and 
 " rectified." While in the much later Hereward the Wake 
 (1866), though the provocation offered to the Dryasdust 
 kind of historian is no matter, there is a curious relapse on 
 the old fault of incorporating too much history or pseudo- 
 history, and the same failure as in Tzvo Tears Ago, or 
 perhaps a greater one in degree, to concoct the story (which 
 islittle more than a chronicle) together with a certain neglect
 
 248 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 to conciliate the sympathies of the reader. But the whole 
 batch is a memorable collection; and it shows, rather excep- 
 tionally, the singular originality and variety of the novel 
 at this time. 
 
 This remarkable pair may be supplemented by an 
 in some ways more remarkable trio, all of them pretty 
 close contemporaries, but, for different reasons in each case, 
 coming rather late into the novel field — Charles Reade 
 {b. 1 8 14), Anthony Trollope {b. 181 5), and Mary Ann Evans 
 (b. 1 8 19). It would be difficult to find three persons more 
 different in temperament; impossible to find more striking 
 instances of the way in which the new blend of romance and 
 novel lent itself to the most various uses and developments. 
 Reade — who thought himself a dramatist and wasted upon 
 drama a great deal of energy and an almost ideal position 
 as a possessor of an unusually rich fellowship at Magdalen 
 College, Oxford, with no duties — came rather closer to 
 Dickens than to any novelist previously named, not 
 merely in a sort of non-poetic but powerful imagination, 
 but also in the mania for attacking what seemed to him 
 abuses — in lunatic asylums (on which point he was very 
 nearly a monomaniac himself), prisons, and many other 
 things. But he is almost more noteworthy, from our 
 point of view, because of his use — it also must, one fears, be 
 called an abuse — of a process obviously invited by the new 
 demand for truth to life, and profitable up to a certain point. 
 This was the collection, in enormous scrapbooks, of news- 
 paper cuttings on a vast variety of subjects, to be worked 
 up into fiction when the opportunity served. Reade had 
 so much genius — he had perhaps the most, in a curious 
 rather incalculable fashion, of the whole group — that he 
 very nearly succeeded in digesting these " marine stores " 
 of detail and document into real books. But he did not
 
 THE MID-VICTORIAN NOVEL 249 
 
 always, and could not always, quite do it: and he remains, 
 with Zola, the chief example of the danger of working at 
 your subject too much as if you were getting up a brief, 
 or preparing an article for an encyclopedia. Still, his 
 greatest books, which are probably It is Never too Late to 
 Mend (1856) and The Cloister and, the Hearth (1861), have 
 immense vigour and, in the second case, an almost poetic 
 attraction which Dickens never reaches, while over all 
 sparks and veins of genius are scattered. Moreover, he 
 is interesting because, until his own time, he would have 
 been quite impossible; and, even at that time, without the 
 general movement which we are describing, very unlikely. 
 There is not so much object here in discussing the much 
 discussed question of the merits and defects of " George 
 Eliot " (Mary Ann Evans or Mrs. Cross) as a novelist, as 
 there is in pointing out her relations to this general move- 
 ment. She began late, and almost accidentally; and there 
 is less unity in her general work than in some others here 
 mentioned. Her earliest and perhaps, in adjusted and 
 " reduced " judgments, her best work — Scenes of Clerical 
 Life (1857-1858), Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the 
 Floss (i860), Silas Marner (1861) — consists of very carefully 
 observed and skilfully rendered studies of country life and 
 character, tinged, especially in Adam Bede and The Mill 
 on the Floss, with very intense and ambitious colours of 
 passion. The great popularity of this tempted her into 
 still more elaborate efforts of different kinds. Her attempt 
 in quasi-historical romance, Romola (1865), was an enormous 
 tour de force in which the writer struggled to get historical 
 and local colour, accurate and irreproachable, with all the 
 desperation of the most conscientious relater of actual 
 history. Felix Holt the Radical (i 866), Middle March (1872), 
 and Daniel Deronda (1876) were equally elaborate sketches
 
 250 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 of modern English society, planned and engineered with 
 the same provision of carefully laboured plot, character, 
 and phrase. Although received with enthusiasm by the 
 partisans whom she had created for herself, these books have 
 seemed to some owr-laboured, and if not exactly unreal, 
 yet to a certain extent unnatural. But the point for us is 
 their example of the way in which the novel — once a light 
 and almost frivolous thing — had come to be taken with 
 the utmost seriousness — had in fact ceased to be light 
 literature at all, and begun to require rigorous and elaborate 
 training and preparation in the writer, perhaps even some- 
 thing of the athlete's processes in the reader. Its state 
 may or may not have advanced in grace fari passu with 
 the advance in effort and in dignity: but this later 
 advance is at least there. Fielding himself took novel-writ- 
 ing by no means lightly, and Richardson still less so: but 
 imagine either, imagine Scott or even Miss Austen, going 
 through the preliminary processes which seemed necessary, 
 in different ways, to Charles Reade and to Mary Ann Evans ! 
 In a certain sense, however, the last of the three, though 
 he may give less impression of genius than the other two 
 (or even the other four whom we have specially noticed), 
 is the most interesting of all: and qualms may sometimes 
 arise as to whether genius is justly denied to him. 
 Anthony Trollope, after a youth, not exactly orageuse, but 
 apparently characterised by the rather squalid yet mild 
 dissipation which he has described in The Three Clerks (1858) 
 and The Small House at Allington (1864), attained a con- 
 siderable position in the Post Office which he held during 
 great part of his career as a novelist. For some time that 
 career did not look as if it were going to be a successful one, 
 though his early (chiefly Irish) efforts are better than is 
 sometimes thought. But he made his mark first with
 
 THE MID-VICTORIAN NOVEL 251 
 
 The Warden (1855), and then, much more directly and 
 triumphantly, with its sequel Barchester Towers (1857). 
 When the first of these was published Dickens had been a 
 successful novelist for nearly twenty years and Thackeray 
 had " come to his own " for nearly ten. The Warden 
 might have been described at the time (I do not know 
 whether it was, but English reviewing was only beginning 
 to be clever again) as a partial attempt at the matter of 
 Dickens in a partial following of the manner of Thackeray. 
 An " abuse " — the distribution in supposed unjust pro- 
 portion of the funds of an endowed hospital for aged men — 
 is its main avowed subject. But Trollope indulged in no 
 tirades and no fantastic-grotesque caricature — in fact he 
 actually drew a humorous sketch of a novel a la Dickens on 
 the matter. His real object was evidently to sketch faith- 
 fully, but again not without humour, the cathedral society 
 of " Barchester " as it actually spoke, dressed, thought, 
 and lived: and he did it. The first book had a little too 
 much talk about the nominal subject, and not enough 
 actual action and conversation. Barchester Towers remedied 
 this, and presented its readers with one of the liveliest books 
 in Enghsh fiction. There had been nothing like it (for 
 Thackeray had been more discursive and less given to small 
 talk) since Miss Austen herself, though the spirits of the 
 two were extremely different. Perhaps Trollope never did 
 a better book than this, for variety and vigour of character 
 drawing. The masterful wife of Bishop Proudie, the ne'er- 
 do-weel canon's family (the Stanhopes), and others stand 
 out against an interest, not intense but sufficient, of story, a 
 great variety of incident, and above all abundant and life- 
 like conversation. For many years, and in an extraordinary 
 number of examples, he fell little below, and perhaps once 
 or twice went above, this standard. It was rather a fancy
 
 252 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 of his (one again, perhaps, suggested by Thackeray) to run 
 his books into series or cycles — the chief being that actu- 
 ally opened as above, and continuing through others to the 
 brilliant Last Chronicle of Bar set (1867), which in some 
 respect surpasses Barchester Towers itself, with a second 
 series, not quite disconnected, dealing with Lady Glencora 
 Palliser as centre, and yet others. His total production 
 was enormous: it became in fact impossibly so, and the 
 work of his last lustrum and a little more (say 1877-1882), 
 though never exactly bad or painful to read, was obvious 
 hack-work. But between The Warden and The American 
 Senator^ twenty-two years later, he had written nearer 
 thirty than twenty novels, of which at least half were much 
 above the average and some quite capital.^ Moreover, it is 
 a noteworthy thing, and contrary to some critical explana- 
 tions, that, as his works drop out of copyright and are 
 reprinted in cheap editions, they appear to be recovering 
 very considerable popularity. This fact would seem to 
 show that the manners, speech, etc., represented in them 
 have a certain standard quality which does not — like the 
 manner, speech, etc., of novels such as those of Hook and 
 Surtees — lose appeal to fresh generations; and that the 
 artist who dealt with them must have had not a little 
 faculty of fixing them in the presentation. In fact it is 
 probably not too much to say that of the average novel of 
 the third quarter of the century — in a more than average 
 but not of an extraordinary, transcendental, or quintessential 
 condition — Anthony Trollope is about as good a repre- 
 sentative as can be found. His talent is individual enough, 
 
 * His most ambitious studies in strict character are the closely connected 
 heroinesof The Bertrams (1859) and Car\.you Forgive Her ? (1864-1865). But 
 the first-named book has never been popular; and the other hardly owes 
 its popularity to the heroine.
 
 THE MID-VICTORIAN NOVEL 253 
 
 but not too individual: system and writer may each have 
 the credit due to them allotted without difficulty. 
 
 A novelist who might have been in front of the first flight 
 of these in point of time, and who is actually put by some 
 in the first flight in point of merit, is Mrs. Gaskell. Born 
 in 1810, she accumulated the material for her future 
 Cranford at Knutsford in Cheshire: but did not publish 
 this till after Dickens had, in 1 850, established Household 
 Words, where it appeared in instalments. She had a little 
 earHer, in 1848, pubhshed her first novel, Mary Barton — a 
 vivid but distinctly one-sided picture of factory life in 
 Lancashire. In the same year with the collected Cran- 
 ford (1853) appeared Ruth, also a "strife-novel" (as the 
 Germans would say) though in a different way: and two 
 years later what is perhaps her most elaborate effort, 
 North a?id South. A year or two before her death in 1865 
 Sylvia's Lovers was warmly welcomed by some: and the 
 unfinished Wives and Daughters, which was actually inter- 
 rupted by that death, has been considered her maturest 
 work. Her famous and much controverted Life of 
 Charlotte Bronte does not belong to us, except in so far as 
 it knits the two novelists together. 
 
 From hints dropped already, it may be seen that the 
 present writer does not find Mrs. Gaskell his easiest subject. 
 There is much in her work which, in Hobbes's phrase, is both 
 " an effect of power and a cause of pleasure ": but there 
 appears to some to be in her a pervading want of actual 
 success — of reussite — absolute and unquestionable. The 
 sketches of Cranford are very agreeable and very admirable 
 performances in the manner first definitely thrown out by 
 Addison, and turned to consummate perfection in the way 
 of the regular novel (which be it remembered Cranford is 
 not) by Miss Austen. But the mere mention of the last
 
 254 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 name kills them. The author of Emma would have 
 treated Miss Matty and the rest much less lovingly, but she 
 would have made them persons. Mrs. Gaskell has left 
 them mere types of amiable country-townishness in 
 respectable if not very lively times. Excessive respecta- 
 bility cannot be charged against Mary Barton and Ruth, 
 but here the "problem" — the "purpose" — interposes its 
 evil influence: and we have got to take a side with men or 
 with masters, with selfish tempters of one class and deluded 
 maidens of another. North and South is perhaps on the 
 whole the best place in which to study Mrs. Gaskell's art: 
 for Wives and Daughters is unfinished and the books just 
 named are tentatives. It begins by laying a not incon- 
 siderable hold on the reader: and, as it is worked out at 
 great length, the author has every opportunity of strengthen- 
 ing and improving that hold. It is certain that, in some 
 cases, she does not do this: and the reason is the same — 
 the failure to project and keep in action definite and 
 independent characters, and the attempt to make weight 
 and play with purposes and problems. The heroine's 
 father — who resigns his living and exposes his delicate 
 wife and only daughter, if not exactly to privation, to dis- 
 comfort and, in the wife's case, fatally unsuitable surround- 
 ings, because of some never clearly defined dissatisfaction 
 with the creed of the Church {not apparently with Chris- 
 tianity as such or with Anglicanism as such), and who dies 
 " promiscuously," to be followed, in equally promiscuous 
 fashion, by a friend who leaves his daughter Margaret a 
 fortune — is one of those nearly contemptible imbeciles in 
 whom it is impossible to take an interest. In respect to 
 the wife Mrs. Gaskell commits the curious mistake of first 
 suggesting that she is a complainer about nothing, and 
 then showing her to us as a suffering victim of her husband's
 
 THE MID-VICTORIAN NOVEL 255 
 
 folly and of hopeless disease. The lover (who is to a great 
 extent a replica of the masterful mill-owner in Shirley) is 
 uncertain and impersonal: and the minor characters are 
 null. One hopes, for a time, that Margaret herself will 
 save the situation: but she goes off instead of coming on, 
 and has rather less individuahty and convincingness at the 
 end of the story than at the beginning. In short, Mrs. 
 Gaskell seems to me one of the chief illustrations of the 
 extreme difficulty of the domestic novel — of the necessity 
 of exactly proportioning the means at command to the end 
 to be achieved. Her means were, perhaps, greater than 
 those of most of her brother-and-sister-novelists, but she 
 set them to loose ends, to ends too high for her, to ends not 
 worth achieving: end thus produced (again as it seems to 
 me) flawed and unsatisfactory work. She " means " weD 
 in Herbert's sense of the word: but what is meant is not 
 quite done. 
 
 To mention special books and special writers is not the 
 first object of this survey, though it would be very easy 
 to double and redouble its size by doing this, even within 
 the time-limits of this, the last, and the next chapters. It 
 may, however, be added that in this remarkable central 
 period, and in the most central part of it from 1840 to i860, 
 there appeared the first remarkable novel of Mr. George 
 Meredith, The Ordeal of Richard Fever el (1859), ^^^^ o^ ^ 
 briUiant series that was to illustrate the whole remaining years 
 of the century; and the isolated masterpiece of Phantasies^ 
 which another proHfic writer, George Macdonald, was 
 never to repeat; while Mrs. Oliphant and Mrs. Craik, both 
 of whom wiU also reappear in the next chapter, began as 
 early as 1849. In 185 1 appeared the first of two remark- 
 able books, Lavengro and The Romany Rye, in which George 
 Borrow, if he did not exactly create, brought to perfec-
 
 256 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 tion from some points of view what may be called the 
 autobiographic novel. 
 
 Indeed the memory of the aged and the industry of 
 the young could recall or rediscover dozens and scores of 
 noteworthy books, some of which have not lost actual or 
 traditional reputation, such as the Paul Ferroll (1855) of 
 Mrs. Archer Clive, a well-restrained crime-novel, the story of 
 which is indicated in the title of its sequel. Why Paul Ferroll 
 killed his Wife. Henry Kingsley, George Alfred Lawrence, 
 Wilkie Collins, and others began their careers at this time. 
 The best book ever written about school, Tom Brown^s 
 School Days (1857), and the best book in lighter vein ever 
 written about Oxford, Mr. Verdant Green (185 3-1 856), both 
 appeared in the fifties. 
 
 Although, indeed, the intenser and more individual genius 
 of the great novelists of this time went rather higher than 
 the specialist novel, it was, in certain directions, well culti- 
 vated during this period. Men hkely to write naval novels 
 of merit were dying out, and though Lever took up the 
 mihtary tale, at second hand, with brilHant results, the 
 same historical causes were in operation there. But a 
 comparatively new kind — the "sporting" novel — developed 
 itself largely and in some cases went beyond mere sport. 
 Such early books as Egan's Tom and Jerry (1821) can 
 hardly be called novels: but as the love of sport extended 
 and the term itself ceased to designate merely on the one 
 side the pleasures of country squires, and on the other the 
 amusements (sometimes rather blackguard in character) of 
 men about town, the general subject made a lodgment in 
 fiction. One of its most characteristic practitioners was 
 Robert Smith Surtees, who, before Dickens and perhaps 
 acting as suggester of the original plan of Pickwick {not 
 that which Dickens substituted), excogitated (between 1831
 
 THE MID-VICTORIAN NOVEL 257 
 
 and 1838) the remarkable fictitious personage of " Mr. 
 Jorrocks," grocer and sportsman, whose adventures, 
 and those of other rather hybrid characters of the same 
 kind, he pursued through a number of books for some 
 thirty years. These (though in strict character, and in part 
 of their manners, deficient as above noticed) were nearly 
 always readable — and sometimes very amusing — even to 
 those who are not exactly Nimrods: and they were greatly 
 commended to others still by the admirable illustrations 
 of Leech. There is not a little sound sport in Kingsley and 
 afterwards in Anthony Trollope: while the novels of Frank 
 Smedley, Frank Fairlegh (1850), Lewis Arundel (1852), and 
 Harry Coverdale^s Courtship (1855), mix a good deal more of 
 it with some good fun and some rather rococo romance. 
 The subject became, indeed, very popular in the fifties, and 
 entered largely into, though it by no means exclusively 
 occupied, the novels of George John Whyte-Melville, a 
 Fifeshire gentleman, an Etonian, and a guardsman, who, 
 after retiring from the army, served again in the Crimean 
 War, and, after writing a large number of novels, was killed 
 in the hunting field. Some of Whyte-Melville's books, such 
 as Market Harborough (1861), are hunting novels pure and 
 simple, so much so that it has been said (rashly) that none 
 but hunting men and women can read them. Others, such 
 as Kate Coventry (1856), a very lively and agreeable book, 
 mix sport with general character and manners-painting. 
 Others, such as Holmby House (i860), The Queen's Maries 
 (1862), etc., attempt the historical style. But perhaps this 
 mixed novel of sport, society, and a good deal of love- 
 making reached its most curious development in the novels 
 of George Alfred Lawrence, from the once famous Guy 
 Livingstone (1857) onwards — a series almost typical, which 
 was developed further, with touches of original but 
 
 R
 
 258 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 uncritical talent, which often dropped into unintentional 
 caricature, by the late " Ouida " (Louise de La Ramee). 
 AU the three last writers mentioned, however, especially 
 the last two, made sport only an ingredient in their novel 
 composition (" Ouida," in fact, knew nothing about it) and 
 at least endeavoured, according to their own ideas and ideals, 
 to grapple with larger parts of life. The danger of the kind 
 showed less in them than in some imitators of a lower class, 
 of whom Captain Hawley Smart was the chief, and a chief 
 sometimes better than his own followers. Some even of his 
 books are quite interesting: but in a few of them, and in 
 more of other writers, the obligation to tell something like 
 a story and to provide something like characters seems to 
 be altogether forgotten. A run (or several runs) with the 
 hounds, a steeplechase and its preparations and accidents, 
 one at least of the great races and the training and betting 
 preliminary to them — these form the real and almost the 
 sole staple of story; so that a tolerably intelligent ofiice- 
 boy could make them up out of a number or two of the Field, 
 a sufficient list of proper names, and a commonplace 
 book of descriptions. This, in fact, is the danger of the 
 specialist novel generally: though perhaps it does not 
 show quite so glaringly in other cases. Yet, even here, 
 that note of the fiction of the whole century — its tendency 
 to " accaparate " and utilise all the forms of hfe, all the 
 occupations and amusements of mankind — shows itself 
 notably enough. 
 
 So, too, one notable book has, here even more than else- 
 where, often set going hosts of imitations. Tom Brown^s 
 School Days, for instance (1857), flooded the market with 
 school stories, mostly very bad. But there is one division 
 which did more justice to a higher class of subject and 
 produced some very remarkable work in what is called the
 
 THE MID-VICTORIAN NOVEL 259 
 
 religious novel, though, here as elsewhere, the better 
 examples did not merely harp on one string. 
 
 A very interesting off-shoot of the domestic novel, 
 ignored or despised by the average critic and rather per- 
 functorily treated even by those who have taken it as a 
 special subject, is the " Tractarian " or High-Church novel, 
 which, originating very shortly after the movement itself 
 had began, had no small share in popularising it. The earlier 
 Evangelicals had by no means neglected fiction as a means 
 of propagating their views, especially among the young. 
 Mrs. Sherwood in Little Henry and his Bearer and The 
 Fairchild Family (1818) and "Charlotte Elizabeth" 
 (Browne or Tonna) are examples. But the High-Church 
 party, in accordance with its own predecessors and patterns 
 in the seventeenth century, always maintained, during its 
 earlier and better period, a higher standard of scholarship 
 and of general literary culture. Its early efforts in fiction — 
 according to the curious and most interesting law which 
 seems to decree that every subdivision of a kind shall go 
 through something like the vicissitudes of the kind at large 
 — were not strictly novels but romance, and romance of the 
 allegorical kind. In the late thirties and early forties the 
 allegorists, the chief of whom were Samuel Wilberforce and 
 WiUiam Adams, were busy and effective. The future 
 bishop's Agathos (before 1840) is a very spirited and well- 
 written adaptation of the " whole armour of God " theme 
 so often re-allegorised: and Adams's Shadow of the Cross 
 is only the best of several good stories — of a rather more 
 feminine type, but graceful, sound enough in a general way, 
 and combining the manners of Spenser and Bunyan with no 
 despicable skill. If, however, the Tractarian fiction-writers 
 had confined themselves to allegory there would be no 
 necessity to do more than glance at them, for allegory, on
 
 26o THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 the obvious Biblical suggestion, has been a constant 
 instrument of combined religious instruction and pastime. 
 But they went much further afield. Sometimes the 
 excursions were half satirical, as in the really amusing 
 Owlet of Owlstone Edge and The Curate of Cumberworth and 
 the Vicar of Roost of Francis Paget, attacking the slovenly 
 neglect and supineness which, quite as much as unsound 
 doctrine, was the bete noire of the early Anglo-Catholics, 
 Wilham Gresley and others wrote stories mostly for the 
 young. But the distinguishing feature of the school, and 
 that which gives it an honourable and more than an 
 honorary place here, was the shape which, before the middle 
 of the century, it took in the hands of two ladies, Eliza- 
 beth Sewell and Charlotte Mary Yonge. 
 
 The first, who was the elder but survived Miss Yonge 
 and died at a very great age quite recently, had much less 
 talent than her junior: but undoubtedly deserves the credit 
 of setting the style. In her novels {Gertrude, Katharine 
 Ashton, etc.) she carried, even farther than Miss Austen, 
 the principle of confining herself rigidly to the events of 
 ordinary life. Not that she eschews the higher middle 
 or even the higher classes: though, on the other hand, 
 Katharine Ashton, evidently one of her favourite heroines, 
 is the daughter of a shopkeeper. But the law of average 
 and ordinary character, incident, atmosphere, is observed 
 almost invariably. Unfortunately Miss Sewell (she was 
 actually a schoolmistress) let the didactic part of her novels 
 get rather too much the upper hand: and though she wrote 
 good English, possessed no special grace of style, and Httle 
 faculty of illustration or ornament from history, Hterature, 
 her own fancy, current fashions, even of the most harmless 
 kind, and so forth. The result is that her books have a 
 certain dead-aliveness — that the characters, though actually
 
 THE MID-VICTORIAN NOVEL 261 
 
 alive, are neither interestingly alive nor, as Miss Austen 
 had made hers, interesting in their very uninterestingness. 
 Sometimes, for a scene or two, her truth to nature and fact 
 is rewarded by that curious sense of recognition which the 
 reader feels in the presence of actual mimesis — of creation 
 of fictitious fact and person. But this is not common: 
 and the epithet " dull," which too commonly only stigma- 
 tises the person using it, may really suggest itself not 
 seldom in reference to Miss Sewell. A " success of esteem " 
 is about the utmost that can be accorded her. 
 
 With Miss Yonge the case was very different. She was 
 a lady of wide reading and, even according to the modern 
 rather arbitrary restrictions of the term, something of 
 an historical scholar; she had humour, of which there was 
 scarcely a particle in Miss Sewell's composition; she had 
 a very considerable understanding, and consequently 
 some toleration of the infinite varieties, and at least the 
 more venial foibles, of human temperament. She possessed 
 an inexhaustible command of dialogue which was always 
 natural and sometimes very far from trivial; and if she had 
 no command of the greater novelists' imagination in the 
 creation of character and story, she had an almost uncanny 
 supply of invention, of what may be called the second or 
 third class, in these respects. She wrote too much and too 
 long; but it cannot be said that she ever merely repeated 
 herself. And her best books — the famous Heir of Redely ffe 
 (1853), which captivated William Morris and his friends 
 at Oxford, and which, with a little unnecessary senti- 
 mentality and a little " unco-guidness," is fuU of clever- 
 ness, nature, good sense, good taste, and good form; 
 Heartsease (1854), perhaps the best of all; Dynevor Terrace 
 (1857), less of a general favourite but fuU of good things; 
 and the especially popular Daisy Chain (1856), with not a
 
 262 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 few others — are things which no courageous and cathoHc 
 critic of fiction will ever be tired of defending or (which is 
 not always the same thing) of reading. Some of her early- 
 tales, before these, were a httle " raw " : and most of her 
 later work showed (as did Anthony Trollope's and that of 
 other though not all very prolific novehsts) that the field 
 had been overcropped. But she was hardly ever dull: and 
 she always had that quality — if not of the supreme artist, 
 of the real craftsman — which prevents a thing from being a 
 failure. What is meant is done: though perhaps it might 
 have been meant higher. 
 
 The comparison, backwards and forwards, of this great 
 company of novels is of endless interest; perhaps one of 
 many aspects of that interest may be touched on specially, 
 because it connects itself with much else that has been said. 
 If we read, together or in near sequence, three such books as, 
 say, Emilia Wyndham, Pendennis, and Teast, all of which 
 appeared close together, between 1846 and 1849, the 
 differences, in quahty and volume of individual genius, will 
 of course strike every one forcibly. But some will also be 
 struck by something else — the difference between the first 
 and the other two in style or (as that word is almost hope- 
 lessly ambiguous) let us perhaps say diction. Both Thackeray 
 and Kingsley are almost perfectly modern in this. We may 
 not speak so well to-day, and we may have added more 
 slang and jargon to our speech, but there is no real differ- 
 ence, except in these respects, between a speech of Pen's 
 (when not talking book) or one of Colonel Bracebridge's, 
 and the speech of any gentleman who is a barrister or a 
 guardsman at this hour. The excellent Mrs. Marsh had 
 not arrived at that point; what some people call the 
 " stilted " forms and phrases of fifty or almost a hundred 
 years earUer clung to her still. The resulting lingo is far
 
 THE MID-VICTORIAN NOVEL 263 
 
 better than that part of the Hngo of to-day where literary 
 and linguistic good manners have been forgotten altogether: 
 but it is distinctly deficient in ease. There are endless 
 flourishes and periphrases — the colloquialisms which Swift 
 and others had denounced (and quite properly) in their 
 ugliest and vulgarest forms are not even permitted entrance 
 in improved and warranted varieties. You must never 
 say " won't " but always " will not," whereas the ability to 
 use the two forms adds infinite propriety as well as variety 
 to the dialogue. You say, " At length a most unfortunate 
 accident aggravated (if aggravation were possible) the 
 unfortunate circumstances of the situation." You address 
 your own characters in the oratorical manner of Mr. Burke 
 and other great men, "Ah, Mr. Danby! if instead, etc," 
 In short, instead of reserving the grand manner (and a 
 rather different grand manner) for grand occasions, you 
 maintain a sort of cheap machine-made kind of it through- 
 out. The real secret of the novel was not found out till this 
 was discarded. Perhaps that real secret does not lie so 
 much anywhere else as here. 
 
 A few words may not improperly be said about some 
 of the circumstances and details of novel-appearance and 
 distribution, etc., at this palmy day of English fiction. At 
 what time the famous " three-decker " was consecrated as 
 the regular novel line-of-battle-ship I have not been able 
 to determine exactly to my own satisfaction. . Richardson 
 had extended his interminable narrations to seven or eight 
 volumes: Miss Burney latterly had not been content with 
 less than five. From the specimens I have examined, I 
 have an idea that with the " Minerva Press " and its con- 
 temporaries and successors at the end of the eighteenth 
 and beginning of the nineteenth century, /owr was a very 
 favourite if not the most usual number. But these
 
 264 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 volumes were usually small — not much larger than those 
 of the Belgian reprints of Dumas which, as one remembers, 
 used to run into the dozen or something like it in the case 
 of his longer books. Three, however, has obvious advan- 
 tages; the chief of them being the adjustment to " begin- 
 ning, middle, and end," though there is a corresponding 
 disadvantage which soon developed itself — and in fact, 
 finally, I have no doubt helped to ruin the form — the 
 temptation to make the second volume a place of mere 
 padding. Butthe actualpopularityof "the old three-decker" 
 continued for quite two generations, if not more, and 
 was unmistakable. Library subscriptions were generally 
 adjusted to it; and any circulating-library keeper would 
 tell you that, putting this quite aside, even subscribers to 
 more or fewer volumes than three would take the three- 
 volume by preference. More than this, still, there is a 
 curious fact necessarily known to comparatively few people. 
 Although it was improper of Mr. Bludyer to sell his novel, 
 and dine and drink of the profits before " smashing " it, 
 there were probably not many reviewers who did not get 
 rid of most of their books of this kind, if for no other reasons 
 than that no house, short of a palace, would have held them 
 all. And, in the palmy days of circulating libraries, the price 
 given by second-hand booksellers for novels made a very 
 considerable addition to the reviewer's remuneration or 
 guerdon. But these booksellers would not pay, in pro- 
 portion, for two or one volume books — alleging, what no 
 doubt was true, that the libraries had a lower tariff for 
 them. Further, the short story, now so popular, was very 
 unpopular in those days: and library customers would 
 refuse collections of them with something like indignation 
 or disgust. Indeed, there are reviewers living who may 
 perhaps pride themselves on having done something to 
 drive the dislike out and the liking in.
 
 THE MID-VICTORIAN NOVEL 265 
 
 The circulating library itself, though not the creation of 
 the novel, was very largely extended by it, and helped no 
 doubt very largely to extend the circulation of the novel 
 in turn. Before it, to some extent, and long before so- 
 called " public " or " free " libraries, books in general and 
 novels in particular had been very largely diffused by 
 clubs, " institutions," and other forms of co-operative 
 individual enterprise, the bookplates of which will be 
 found in many a copy of an old novel now. Sometimes 
 these were purely private associations of neighbours : some- 
 times they belonged to more or less extensive establishments, 
 like that defunct " RusseU Institution in Great Coram 
 Street," which a great author, who was its neighbour, once 
 took for an example of desolation; or the still existing and 
 flourishing " Philosophical " examples in Edinburgh and 
 Bath. In these latter cases, of course, novels were not 
 allowed to be the main constituents of the library; in fact 
 in some, but few, they may have been sternly excluded. 
 On the other hand, the private - adventure circulating 
 libraries tended more and more, with few exceptions, to rely 
 on novels only — " Mudie's " and a few more being ex- 
 ceptions. Very few people, I suppose, ever bought three- 
 volume novels; and the fact that they went almost wholly 
 to the libraries, and were there worn to pieces, accounts for 
 the comparative rarity of good copies. The circulating 
 library has survived both the decease of the three-volume 
 novel and the competition of the so-called free library. 
 But it is pretty certain that it was a chief cause — 
 and almost the whole sustaining cause — of the three-volume 
 system itself. Nor was the connection between nature of 
 form and system of distribution limited to England: for 
 the single-volume novel, though older in France than with 
 us, is not so very old.
 
 266 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 But a very considerable proportion of these famous 
 books made appearances previous to that in three volumes, 
 and not distantly connected with their popularity. For 
 the most part these previous appearances were either in 
 magazines or periodicals of one kind and another, or else 
 
 in " parts." 
 
 Neither process was exactly new, though both were 
 largely affected by changed conditions of general literature 
 and life. The magazine-appearance traces itself, by almost 
 insensible gradations, to the original periodical-essay of 
 the Steele-Addison type — the small individual bulk of 
 which necessitated division of whatsoever was not itself 
 on a very small scale. If you run down the " Contents " 
 of the British Essayists you will constantly find " Con- 
 tinuation of the story of Alonso and Imoinda " and the like. 
 But when, in the early years of the nineteenth century, the 
 system of newspapers and periodicals branched out into 
 endless development, coincidently with the increase of 
 demand and supply in regard to the novel, it was inevitable 
 that this latter should be drawn upon to supply at once 
 the standing dishes and the rehshes of the entertainment. 
 Blackwood and the London, the first fruits of the new kind, 
 did not at once take to the novel by instalments: and the 
 London had no time to do so. But Blackwood soon became 
 celebrated — a reputation which it has never lost — for the 
 excellence of its short stories, and by degrees took to long 
 ones; while its followers — Fraser, Bentley's Miscellany, 
 The Dublin University Magazine, the New Monthly, and 
 others— almost from the first bated their hooks with this 
 new appdt. A very large proportion of the work of the 
 novehsts mentioned in the last chapter, as well as of Lever, 
 appeared in one or other of these. Fraser in particular 
 was Thackeray's chief refuge in the Days of Ignorance of
 
 THE MID-VICTORIAN NOVEL 267 
 
 the public as to his real powers and merits, while, just as 
 he was going off, the very different work of Kingsley came 
 on there. And the tradition, as is well known, has never 
 been broken. The particular magazines may have died 
 in some cases: but the magazine-appearance of novels is 
 nearly as vivacious as ever. 
 
 Publication in parts is nearly as old, but has a less 
 continuous history, and has seen itself suffer an inter- 
 ruption of life. There are scattered examples of it pretty 
 far back both in France and England. Marivaux had 
 a particular fancy for it: with the result that he left not a 
 little of his work unfinished. Such voIume-pvibHcation as 
 that of Tristram Shandy^ in batches really small in quantity 
 and at fairly regular if long intervals, is not much different 
 from part-issue. As the taste for reading spread to classes 
 with not much ready money, and perhaps, in some cases, 
 living at a distance from libraries, this taste spread too. 
 But I do not think there can be much doubt that the im- 
 mense success of Dickens — in combination with his own 
 very distinct predilection for keeping the ring himself and 
 being his own editor — had most to do with its prevalence 
 during the period under present consideration. Thackeray 
 took up the practice from him: as weU as others both from 
 him and from Thackeray. The great illustrators, too, of the 
 forties, fifties, and sixties, from Cruikshank and Browne to 
 Frederick Walker, were partly helped by the system, partly 
 helped to make it popular. But the circulating libraries 
 did not like it for obvious reasons, the parts being fragile 
 and unsubstantial: and the great success of cheap 
 magazines, on the pattern of Macmillan^s and the Cor7ihill, 
 cut the ground from under its feet. The last remarkable 
 novel that I remember seeing in the form was The Last 
 Chronicle of Barset. Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda
 
 268 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 came out in parts which were rather volumes than 
 parts. 
 
 This piece-meal publication, whether in part or periodical, 
 could not be without some effects on the character of the 
 production. These were neither wholly good nor wholly 
 bad. They served to some extent to correct the tendency, 
 mentioned above, of the three-volume novel to " go to seed " 
 in the middle — to become a sort of preposterous sandwich 
 with meat on the outsides and a great slab of ill-baked 
 and insipid bread between. For readers would not have 
 stood this in instalments: you had to provide some bite 
 or promise of bite in each — if possible — indeed to leave 
 each off at an interesting point. But this itself rather 
 tended to a jumpy and ill-composed whole — to that 
 mechanical shift from one part of the plot to another which 
 is so evident, for instance, in Trollope: and there was 
 worse temptation behind. If a man had the opportunity, 
 the means, the courage, and the artistic conscience neces- 
 sary to finish his work before any part of it appeared, or at 
 least to scaffold it thoroughly throughout in advance, no 
 harm was done. But perhaps there is no class of people 
 with whom the temptation — common enough in every 
 class — of hand-to-mouth work is more fatal than with 
 men of letters. It is said that even the clergy are human 
 enough to put off their sermon- writing till Saturday, and 
 what can be expected of the profane man, especially when 
 he has a whole month apparently before him ? It is pretty 
 certain that Thackeray succumbed to this temptation: 
 and so did a great many people who could much less afford 
 to do so than Thackeray. It was almost certainly respon- 
 sible for part of the astonishing medley of repetitions and 
 lapses in Lever: and I am by no means sure that some of 
 Dickens's worst faults, especially the ostentatious plot-
 
 THE MID-VICTORIAN NOVEL 269 
 
 that-is-no-plot of such a book as Little Dorrit — the plot 
 which marks time with elaborate gesticulation and really 
 does not advance at aU — were not largely due to the system. 
 
 Let it only be added that these expensive forms of 
 publication by no means excluded cheap reprints as soon 
 as a book was really popular. The very big people kept 
 up their prices: but everybody else was glad to get into 
 " popular libraries," yellow-backed railway issues, and the 
 like, as soon as possible. 
 
 It will have been seen that the present writer puts the 
 novel of 1 845-1 870 very high: he would indeed put it, in 
 its own compartment, almost on a level with the drama of 
 1585-1625 or the poems of 1798-1825. Just at the present 
 moment there may be a pretty general tendency to con- 
 sider this allowance exaggerated if not preposterous : and to 
 set it down to the well-known foible of age for the period of 
 its ownyouth. There is no need to do more than suggest that 
 those who were young when Shakespeare, or when Byron, 
 died, would not have been exactly in their dotage if, forty 
 years later, they had extolled the hterature of their nonage. 
 One does not care to dwell long on such a point: but it 
 may just be observed that the present writer's withers are 
 hardly even pinched, let alone wrung, by the strictest appli- 
 cation, to his case, of this rather idle notion. For some of 
 what he is praising as the best novels were written before 
 he was born; many while he was in the nursery; most 
 before he had left school, and practically all before he had 
 ceased to be an undergraduate. Now acute observers 
 know that what may be called the disease of contemporary 
 partisanship rarely even begins tiU the undergraduate 
 period, and is at its severest from twenty-five to thirty-five. 
 I would undertake that most of our reviewers who discover 
 Shakespeares and Sainte-Beuves, improved Thackerays
 
 270 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 and bettered Molieres, week by week or day by day, count 
 their years between these limits. Beati illi from some 
 points of view, but from others, if they go on longer, Heaven 
 help them indeed! 
 
 But all this is really idle. A critic is not right or wrong 
 because he is young or old as the case may be; because he 
 follows the taste of his age or runs counter to it; because 
 he likes the past or because he likes the present. He is 
 right or wrong according as he does or does not like the 
 right things in the right way. And it is a simple historical 
 fact, capable now of being seen in a proper perspective, and 
 subjected to the proper historical tests, that, in the large 
 sense, the two generations from the appearance of Scott 
 and Miss Austen to the death of Dickens (and considering 
 the ebb which followed Scott and Miss Austen themselves, 
 specially the latter of these two), supplied the spring tide 
 of the novel-flood, the flower-time of its flowering season, 
 the acme of its climax. 
 
 The comparison, both in the longer and shorter time, 
 to the great summer of the drama may be too compli- 
 mentary — I do not think it is, except in so far as that 
 drama necessarily involved poetry, a higher thing by far 
 than either drama itself or novel — but it is certainly not 
 an altogether comfortable one. For we know that the 
 drama, thereafter, has never had a more than galvanised 
 life, except in the imagination of the gentlemen who dis- 
 cover Shakespeares and Molieres as aforesaid. And there 
 are those who say that, not only at the moment, but for 
 some time past, the state of the novel is, and has been, 
 not much more promising. The student who is thoroughly 
 broken to the study of literary history is never a pessimist, 
 though he may be very rarely an optiniist: for the one 
 thing of which he should be thoroughly convinced is its
 
 THE MID-VICTORIAN NOVEL 271 
 
 incalculableness. But he might admit — while reserving 
 unhmited trust in the Wind of the Spirit and its power to 
 blow exactly as it listeth, and to awaken the dryest of 
 dry bones — that circumstances are not incompatible with 
 something like a decay in the novel: just as they were 
 with a decay in the drama. The state of society and temper 
 in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century — 
 enthusiastic; not too well regulated; stirred at once by 
 the sinking force of the medieval and the rising force of 
 the modern spirit; fuU of religious revival which had 
 happily not gone wholly wrong, as it had in some other 
 countries; finding ready to its hand a language which had 
 cast most of its sloughs of accidence and prosody, and was 
 fresh, limber, ready for anything; enterprising but not 
 buried in business — was favourable to the rise and flourish- 
 ing of this disorderly abundance of dramatic creation — 
 tragic, comic, and in all the varieties that Hamlet cata- 
 logues or satirises. The mid-nineteenth century had some- 
 thing of the same hot-bed characteristic, though sufficiently 
 contrasted and fitted to produce a different growth. It 
 had, if at a little distance, the inspiriting memory of a great 
 war, where the country had taken the most glorious part 
 possible. It also had a great religious revival, which had 
 taken no coarse or vulgar form. Although the middle class 
 had seized, and the lower classes were threatening to seize, 
 the government, even the former had not monopolised the 
 helm. There was in society, though it was not strait- 
 laced or puritanical, a general standard of " good form." 
 Scholarship and knowledge of literature had not yet been 
 exchanged for " education " and ignorance of letters. 
 The national fancy for sport was in about its healthiest 
 condition, emerging from one state of questionableness 
 and not yet plunged in another. The chair of the chief of
 
 272 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 the kinds of literature — poetry — which always exercises a 
 singular influence over the lower forms, was still worthily 
 occupied and surrounded. And, above all, the appetite 
 for the novel was still eager, fresh, and not in the least 
 sated, jaded, or arrived at that point when it has to be 
 whetted by asafoetida on the plates or cigarettes between 
 the courses. Few better atmospheres could be even 
 imagined for the combined novel - romance — the story 
 which, while it did not exclude the adventurous or even the 
 supernatural in one sense, insisted on the rational in 
 another, and opened its doors as wide as possible to every 
 subject, or combination of subjects, that would undertake 
 to be interesting. That the extraordinary reply made by 
 genius and talent to the demand thus created and en- 
 couraged should last indefinitely could not be expected: 
 that the demand itself should lead to overproduction and 
 glut was certain. But, as we shall see, there was no 
 sudden decadence; the period even of best or nearly best 
 production went on with no important intermission; and 
 was but yesterday stiU represented by two great names, 
 is still represented by one, among the older writers, by 
 more than one or two names of credit among the middle- 
 aged and younger. To these in some degree, and to those 
 who have finished their career in the last thirty years to a 
 greater, we must now turn.
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THE FICTION OF YESTERDAY CONCLUSION 
 
 In regard to a large part of the subject of the present 
 chapter the present writer possesses the knowledge of a 
 reviewer, week by week and almost day by day, of con- 
 temporary fiction between 1873 and 1895. It so happened 
 that the beginjiing of this period coincided very nearly with 
 the beginning of that slightly downward movement of the 
 nineteenth-century novel which has been referred to at the 
 end of the last chapter: and he thus had opportunities of 
 observing it all along its course, till we parted company. 
 It must again, and most strongly, be insisted that this 
 " downward movement," like such movements generally 
 in literature, is only so to be characterised with consider- 
 able provisos and allowances. Literary " down-grades " 
 are not like the slopes of an inclined plane: they are like 
 portions of a mountain range, in which isolated peaks may 
 shoot up almost level with the very highest of the central 
 group, but in which the table lands are lower, the average 
 height of the hills inferior, and the general sky-line a nearer 
 and nearer approximation to the plain. At the actual 
 death of Dickens there was no reason for any one less hope- 
 lessly pessimist than Peacock's Mr. Toobad, or Sydney 
 Smith's Tuxford waiter, to take a gloomy view of the 
 future of the novel. Of the greater novelists mentioned in 
 the last chapter Charlotte Bronte and Mrs. Gaskell were 
 indeed dead, and if Kingsley had not wholly ceased writing 
 novels, he had, before ceasing, given signs that he had 
 
 273 s
 
 274 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 better do so. Yet, at least to the admirers of " George 
 Eliot," she was at her most admirable; some of the very 
 best stuff of Trollope was but just past, and some of all 
 but his best was still to appear; Charles Reade was writing 
 busily with that curious unsatisfactory genius of his; 
 others were well at work. 
 
 There was also no lack of newer comers. Mr. Meredith 
 had been writing for some dozen years : and though he had 
 achieved no general popularity, though even critics might 
 make reserves as to points in his procedure, there could be 
 no competent doubt of his great powers. Mr. Blackmore 
 had made his late beginning some time before: and had 
 just caught the public ear unmistakably with Lorna Doom 
 (1869). Mr. Hardy was on the eve of catching it with the 
 new and powerful attractions of Under the Greenwood Tree 
 (1872). In the heart of the sixties (1863-4-6), the Chronicles 
 of Carlingford had seemed the promissory notes of a novelist 
 of the absolutely first class in Mrs. Oliphant, though some- 
 how the bills were rather renewed than met. Others to be 
 noticed immediately had come or were coming on. Let 
 us take a little more detailed notice of them. 
 
 In the cases of Mr. Meredith and of Mr. Hardy — not 
 to speak of others on whom the bar still luckily rests — the 
 " great ox " was, until the original composition of this book 
 was actually finished, " on the tongue " of any one who does 
 not disregard the good old literary brocard " de vivis nil nisi 
 necessarium." You may and must criticise, with as much 
 freedom as consists with courtesy, the successive stages of the 
 work of the living master as he submits it to your judgment 
 by publication. But justice no less than courtesy demands 
 that, until the work is finished, and sealed as a whole — till the 
 ne varietur and ne plus ultra of death have been set on it — 
 you shall abstain from a more general judgment, which can
 
 THE FICTION OF YESTERDAY 275 
 
 hardly be judicial, and which will have difficulty in steering 
 between the fulsome if it be favourable and the uncivil if 
 it be adverse. Fortunately there was Httle difficulty in any 
 of our three excepted cases. As has been already hinted 
 in one case, the chorus of praise, ever since it made itself 
 heard, has not been quite unchequered. It has been 
 objected both to Mr. Meredith and to Mr. Hardy that 
 there is in them a note, perhaps to be detected also 
 generally in the later fiction which they have so power- 
 fully influenced — the note of a certain perversity — of an 
 endeavour to be peculiar in thought, in style, in choice of 
 subject, in handhng of it; in short in general attitude. 
 And with this has been connected — not in their cases with 
 anyimportant or really damaging effect, though undoubtedly 
 so in regard to some of their followers — a suggestion that 
 this " perversity " is the note of a waning period — 
 that just as the excessive desire to be like all the best 
 models is the note of Classical decadence, so the excessive 
 desire to be unlike everything else is the note of Romantic 
 degeneration. 
 
 There is truth in this, but it damages neither Mr. 
 Meredith nor Mr. Hardy on the whole; though it may 
 supply a not altogether wholesome temptation to some 
 readers to admire them for the wrong things, and may inter- 
 pose a wholly unnecessary obstacle in the way of their full 
 and frank enjoyment by others. The intellectual power and 
 the artistic skiU which have been shown in the long series 
 that has followed The Ordeal of Richard Feverel; the fresh- 
 ness and charm of the earlier, the strenuous workmanship 
 and original handling of the later, novels of the author of 
 Far from the Madding Crowd and of Jess of the D'Urher- 
 villes, simply disable off-hand the judgment of the critic — 
 and in fact annul his jurisdiction — if he fails to admire
 
 276 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 them; while in some cases universal, in many general, in 
 all considerable and not trivial delight has been given by 
 them to generations of novel readers. Above all, it may 
 be said of both these veterans that they have held the 
 standard high, that — in Mr. Meredith's case more specially 
 and for a longer preliminary period, but virtually in both 
 — they have had to await the taste for their work: and that 
 in awaiting it they have never stooped for one moment to 
 that dastardly and degrading change of sail to catch the 
 popular breeze, which has always been the greatest curse 
 of politics and of literature — the two chief worldly occupa- 
 tions and ends of the mind of man — that they have been 
 and are artists who wait till the world comes to them, and 
 not artisans who haunt the market places to hire them- 
 selves out to the first comer who will pay their price, or 
 even bate their price to suit the hirer. If it were possible to 
 judge the literary value of a period by its best representa- 
 tives — which is exactly what is 7iot possible — then the 
 period 1 870-1908 might, as far as novel-writing is concerned, 
 point to these two names and say, " These are mine; what 
 does it matter what you choose to say against me ? " 
 
 The foregoing remarks were actually written before Mr. 
 Meredith's death: and I have thought it better to leave 
 them exactly as they then stood with hardly any correc- 
 tion; but it may justly be expected that they should 
 now be supplemented. The history of Mr. Meredith's 
 career and reputation, during the half century which 
 passed between the appearance of Richard Feverel and his 
 death, has a certain obvious resemblance to that of 
 Browning's, but with some differences. His work at once 
 arrested attention, but it did not at once in all, or in many, 
 cases fix it, even with critical readers: and for a long time 
 the general public turned an obstinately deaf ear. He
 
 THE FICTION OF YESTERDAY 277 
 
 followed The Ordeal itself — a study of very freely and 
 deeply drawn character; of incident sometimes unusual 
 and always unusually told; of elaborate and disconcerting 
 epigram or rather of style saturated with epigrammatic 
 quality; and of a strange ironic persiflage permeating 
 thought, picture, and expression in the same way — un- 
 hastingly but unrestingly with others. Evan Harrington 
 (1861) is generally lighter in tone; and should be taken in 
 connection with the ten years later Harry Richmond as an 
 example of what may be called a sort of new picaresque 
 novel — the subjects being exalted from the gutter — at 
 least the street gutter — to higher stories of the novel house. 
 Emilia in England (1864), later called Sandra Belloni, and 
 its sequel Vittoria (1866), embody, especially the latter, 
 the Italomania of the mid-century. Between them Rhoda 
 Fleming (1865), returning to English country life, showed, 
 with the old characteristics of expression, tragic power 
 superior perhaps to that of the end of Fever el. In fact some 
 have been incHned to put Rhoda at the head. In 1875 
 Beaucham-p^s Career showed the novelist's curious fancy 
 for studying off actual contemporaries; for it is now 
 perfectly well known who " Beauchamp " was: and four 
 years later came what the true Meredithian regards as the 
 masterpiece, The Egoist. Two other books followed, to some 
 extent in the track of Beauchamp' s Career, Diana of the 
 Crossways (1886), utilising the legend of Mrs. Norton's 
 betrayal of secrets, and The Tragic Comedians (1881), the 
 story of the German socialist Lassalle. The author's 
 prediction, never hurried, now slackened, and by degrees 
 ceased, but the nineties saw three books, One oj Our Con- 
 querors (1891), Lord Ormont and his Aminta (1894), and 
 The Amazing Marriage (1895). 
 No bibliography of Mr. Meredith being here necessary
 
 278 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 or possible, smaller and miscellaneous things need not 
 detain us; and we are not concerned with his sometimes 
 charming verse. It is the character, and especially the 
 " total-effect " character, of the major novels with which 
 we have to do. This has been faintly adumbrated above, 
 but the lines must be a little deepened and the contour 
 filled in to some extent here. 
 
 By invoking (practically at the outset of his work) " the 
 Comic Spirit " as the patron of his endeavours and the 
 inspirer of his art, Mr. Meredith of course did no more than 
 assert his claim to place himself in the right race and 
 lineage of Cervantes and Fielding. Nor, though the claim 
 be a bold one, can there be much dispute among competent 
 judges that he made it out. To the study, not in a 
 frivolous or even merely satirical, but in a gravely ironic 
 mode, of the nature of humanity he addicted himself 
 throughout: and the results of his studies undoubtedly 
 enlarge humanity's conscious knowledge of itself in the 
 way of fictitious exemplification. In a certain sense no 
 higher praise can be given. To acknowledge it is at once to 
 estate him, not only with Cervantes and Fielding themselves, 
 but with Thackeray, with Swift, with MoHere, with Shake- 
 speare. It places him well above Dickens, and, in the 
 opinion of the present writer, it places him above even 
 Balzac. But there are points wherein, according to that 
 same opinion, he approaches much nearer to Balzac and 
 Dickens than to the other and greater artistic creators: 
 while in one of these points he stands aloof even from these 
 two, and occupies a position — not altogether to his advan- 
 tage — altogether by himself in his class of artistic crea- 
 tion. All the six from Thackeray to Shakespeare — one 
 might even go farther back and, taking a more paradoxical 
 example, addRabelais — are, evenin extravaganza, in parody,
 
 THE FICTION OF YESTERDAY 279 
 
 in what you please, at once pre-eminently and prima facie 
 natural and human. To every competent human judgment, 
 as soon as it is out of its nonage, and barring individual 
 disqualifications of property or accident, this human 
 nature attests itself. You may dislike some of its mani- 
 festations; you may decline or fail to vmderstand others; 
 but there it is, and there it is first. In Balzac and Dickens 
 and Mr. Meredith it is not first. Of course it is there to 
 some extent and even to a large one: or they would not 
 be the great writers that they are, or great writers at all. 
 But it is not merely disguised by separable clothings, as in 
 Rabelais wholly and in parts of others, or accompanied, as 
 in Swift and others still, by companions not invariably 
 acceptable. It is to a certain extent adulterated, sophisti- 
 cated, made not so much the helpmeet, or the willing 
 handmaid, of Art as its thrall, almost its butt. I do not 
 know how early criticism, which now seems to have got 
 hold of the fact, noticed the strong connection-contrast 
 between Dickens and Meredith: but it must always have 
 been patent to some. The contrast is of course the first 
 to strike: — the ordinariness, in spite of his fantastic 
 grotesque, of Dickens, and the extraordinariness of 
 Meredith; the almost utter absence of literature in 
 Dickens, and the prominence of it in Meredith — divers 
 other differences of the same general kind. But to any one 
 reflecting on the matter it should soon emerge that a spirit, 
 kindred in some way, but informed with literature and 
 anxious " to be different," starting too with Dickens's 
 example before him, might, and probably would, half 
 follow, half revolt into another vein of not anti- but extra- 
 natural fantasy, such as that which the author of 7he 
 Ordeal of Richard Feverel actually worked. 
 
 " Extra- not anti-" that is the key. The worlds of
 
 28o THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 Dickens, of Balzac, and of Meredith are not impossible 
 worlds : for the only worlds which are impossible are those 
 which are inconsistent with themselves, and none of these 
 is that. Something has been said of the " four dimensions " 
 which are necessary to work Dickens's world, and our busi- 
 ness here is not with Balzac's. But something must now be 
 said of the fourth dimension — some would say the fifth, sixth, 
 and almost tenth dimensions — which is or are required to 
 put Mr. Meredith's in working order. I do not myself 
 think that more than a fourth is needed, and I have some- 
 times fancied that if Mohammedan ideas of the other 
 world be true, and an artist is obHged to endow all his 
 fictitious creations with real life, it will be by the reduction 
 and elimination of this dimension that Mr. Meredith will 
 have to proceed. There will be great joy in that other 
 world when he has done it : and, alarming as the task looks, 
 I think it not impudent to say that no one who ever 
 enjoyed his conversation will think it impossible. 
 
 The intrusive element can, however, only be designated 
 singly by rather enlarging the strict and usual sense of the 
 term Style so as to include not merely diction, but the 
 whole manner of presentation — what, in short, is intended 
 by the French word /aire. For this, or part of this, he 
 made, in relation to his poems, a sort of apology- 
 explanation in the lines prefixed to the collected edition, 
 and entitled " The Promise in Disturbance." I am not 
 sure that there is any single place where a parallel excuse- 
 defiance musters itself up in the novels: but there are 
 scores (the prelude to The Egoist occurs foremost) where 
 it is scattered about all of them; and it is certainly much 
 more required there. Indeed as far as the narrow sense 
 of " style " goes, the peculiarity, whether they admit it to 
 be a fault or not, is practically admitted as a fact by all
 
 THE FICTION OF YESTERDAY 281 
 
 but Meredith-monomaniacs. Here is a sors Meredithiana, 
 taken from Rhoda Flemings one of the simplest of the 
 books : — 
 
 " Algernon waited dinnerless until the stealthy going 
 minutes distended and swelled monstrous and horrible as 
 viper-bitten bodies, and the venerable Signior Time became 
 of unhealthy hue." 
 
 To match that — it would be exceedingly easy to match 
 and beat it out of the author himself — you must go to 
 the maddest of the seventeenth-century metaphysicals — 
 say to Edward Benlowes himself. But this is nothing: it is 
 at worst an obvious playful exaggeration, very Hke some 
 things of Dickens's own transposed into another key. 
 But take this opening of the fifteenth chapter of Diana of 
 the Crossways : — 
 
 " The Gods of this world's contests, against whom our 
 poor stripped individual is commonly in revolt, are, as we 
 know, not miners, they are reapers; and if we appear no 
 longer on the surface, they cease to bruise us: they will 
 allow an arena character to be cleansed and made present- 
 able while enthusiastic friends preserve discretion. It is 
 of course less than magnanimity; they are not proposed 
 to you for your worship; they are little Gods, temporary 
 as that great wave, their parent human mass of the hour. 
 But they have one worshipful element in them, which is, 
 the divine insistency upon there being two sides to a case 
 — to every case. And the People so far directed by them 
 may boast of healthfulness. Let the individual shriek, 
 the innocent, triumphant, have in honesty to admit the fact. 
 One side is vanquished according to decree of Law, but the 
 superior Council does not allow it to be extinguished." 
 
 Here undoubtedly there is something more than a simile, 
 an image, or a pointe ; there is a thought, and the author's
 
 282 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 admirers would, I suppose, rely triumphantly on it as a 
 marriage of original thought and phrase. But is it so ? 
 Is the thought really anything more than the perfectly 
 correct and obvious one that, if you let scandal alone it 
 will die, or at least go into abeyance ? Does that thought 
 reaUy gain anything from being tricked out with not 
 always very congruously arranged paraphernalia of Gods, 
 and arenas, and reapers, and miners, and the People with 
 a large P, and shrieks, and innocency, and the rest? A 
 palate or an appetite so jaded that it cannot appreciate 
 thought put before it plainly, or so sluggish that it requires 
 to be stung or puzzled into thinking, may derive some 
 advantage. But are these exactly the tastes and appetites 
 that should be accepted as arbiters ? 
 
 Again, partly through this perpetual mirage and steam- 
 cloud of style, partly by other methods, Mr. Meredith 
 manages, with consummate cleverness no doubt, to colour 
 his whole representation of character and story in the same 
 extra - natural way. Take the rick-burning at the be- 
 ginning of Feverel ; take the famous wine scene (a very 
 fascinating one, though I never heard anywhere else, in 
 some researches on the subject, of port that would keep 
 ninety years) in The Egoist. The things may have happened 
 this way in some Georgium Sidus, where the Comic Spirit 
 has arranged the proper Fourth Dimension: but that is 
 not the way they happen here. The Wise Youth, Diana, 
 Edward Blanco ve, Roy Richmond — but why begin a list 
 which w^ould never end? — are inhabitants of the same 
 region. They are not impossible: they could be trans- 
 lated into actual tellurian beings, which the men and 
 women of the bad novelist never can be. But at present 
 they are not translated: and you must know a special lan- 
 guage, in a wide sense, in order to translate them. I do not
 
 THE FICTION OF YESTERDAY 283 
 
 say that the language is impossible or even very hard 
 to learn: but it is required. And Meredithians say you 
 ought to learn it. An extremely respectable book of refer- 
 ence before me rebukes " those who lack the intelligence and 
 sensibility that can alone admit them to the charmed 
 circle of appreciative readers " and who " have not 
 patience to apply themselves to the study of the higher 
 fiction with the same ardour that they think necessary in 
 the case of any other art." 
 
 Now " Fudge! " is a rude word: but I fear we must 
 borrow it from Goldsmith's hero, and apply it here. As 
 for " charmed circles " there is uncommonly good company 
 outside them, where, as Beatrice says, we may "be as merry 
 as the day is long," so that the Comic Spirit cannot entirely 
 disdain us. And as for art — the present writer will fight 
 for its claims as long as he has breath. But the proof of 
 the art of the novelist is that — at first hand or very shortly 
 — he " enfists," absorbs, delights you. You may discover 
 secrets of his art afterwards with much pleasure and profit: 
 but the actual first-hand delight is the criterion. There 
 ought to be no need of sitting down before the thing with 
 tools and dynamite like burglars at a safe; of mustering 
 crucibles and reagents like assayers at some doubtful and 
 recalcitrant piece of ore. Now these not very adept 
 defenders of Mr. Meredith seem to assert that these pro- 
 cesses are desirable in any case, and necessary in his. As 
 a matter of fact the necessity is not omnipresent: but it is 
 present far too frequently. It is the first duty of the 
 novelist to " let himself be read " — anything else that he 
 gives you is a bonus, a trimming, a dessert. 
 
 It is not unamusing to those who regarded Mr. Meredith 
 during almost his whole career with those mingled feelings of 
 the highest admiration and of critical reserve which this
 
 284 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 notice has endeavoured to express, to note a new phase 
 which seems to be coming over the youngest criticism. 
 The original want of appreciation has passed, never, one 
 may hope, to return; and the middle engouement, which 
 was mainly engineered by those doughty partisans, Mr. 
 Stevenson and Mr. Henley, is passing likewise. But the 
 most competent and generous juniors seem to be a little 
 uncomfortable, to have to take a good deal on trust, and 
 not quite to " like the security." To those who know the 
 history of critical opinion these signs speak pretty clearly, 
 though not so as to authorise them to anticipate the final 
 judgment absolutely. Genius, all but of the highest, can 
 hardly be denied to Mr. Meredith: but it is genius marred, 
 perhaps by unfortunate education, certainly by undue 
 egotism, by a certain Celtic tapage, and by a too painful and 
 elaborate endeavour to be unlike other people. 
 
 A very interesting subject for examination from the 
 present point of view is Mr. Blackmore, because, on the 
 one hand there is complete parrhesia, and on the other 
 (here at least) enthusiastic admiration. Few of our modern 
 novelists have combined so much scholarship with so much 
 command of mother wit and racy English, so much close 
 study of minor character and local speech with such 
 wealth of romantic fancy; such a thorough observance of 
 " good form " with so complete a freedom from priggish- 
 ness and prudery. To this day there are lively contro- 
 versies whether he worked up the Doone story from local 
 tradition or made it " out of his own head." But which- 
 ever he did (and the present historian owns that he cares 
 very little about the point) the way in which he has turned 
 a striking, but not extraordinary, and certainly not very 
 extensive West Country glen into an Arabian Nights 
 valley, with the figures and action of a mediseval romance
 
 THE FICTION OF YESTERDAY 285 
 
 and the human interest of a modern novel, is really wonder- 
 ful. And there is hardly a book of his last thirty years' 
 production, from Clara Vaughan to Perlycross, which has 
 not vigour, variety, character, " race " enough for half a 
 dozen. In such books, for example, as The Maid of Sker 
 and Cripps the Carrier the idiosyncrasy is extraordinary: 
 the quaint and piquant oddity of phrase and apophthegm is 
 as vivid as Dickens, rather more real, and tinged somehow 
 with a flavour of literature, even of poetry, which was 
 Dickens's constant lack. 
 
 And yet when one comes to consider the books critically, 
 either one by one, or in pairs and batches, or as a whole, 
 it is somehow or other difficult to pronounce any one 
 exactly a masterpiece. Tliere is a want of " inevitableness " 
 which sometimes amounts to improbability, as in the case 
 particularly of that most vivid and racy of books, Cripps 
 the Carrier, where the central incident or situation, though 
 by no means impossible. Is almost insultingly unlikely, and 
 forces its unhkeliness on one at almost every moment and 
 turn. Never, perhaps, was there a better instance of that 
 " possible-improbable " which contrasts so fatally with 
 the " probable-impossible." In not a few cases, too, there 
 is that reproduction of similar denouements and crucial 
 occurrences which is almost necessary in a time when 
 men write many novels. In almost all there is a want of 
 central interest in the characters that should be central; 
 in some an exaggeration of dialect; or of quaint non- 
 dialectic but also non-catholic locutions on the author's part. 
 One rather hates oneself for finding such faults — no one of 
 which is absolutely fatal — in a mass of work which has 
 given, and continues to give, so much pleasure: but the 
 facts remain. One would not have the books not written 
 on any account; but one feels that they were written
 
 286 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 rather because the author chose to do so than because he 
 could not help it. Now it is possible to exaggerate the 
 necessity of "mission" and the like: but, after all, Ich 
 kann nicht anders must be to some extent the mood of 
 mind of the man who is committing a masterpiece. 
 
 Something of the sort is still more noticeable in the work 
 of other writers of the period. We have seen that two 
 ladies of great talent, Mrs. Oliphant and Mrs. Craik, began 
 to write, long before Mr. Meredith published Richard Feverel 
 and very little later than the time of Vanity Fair. They 
 produced, the one in Salem Chapel (1863), a book which 
 contemporaries might be excused for thinking likely to 
 herald a new George Eliot at least; the other, in 'John 
 Halifax, Gentleman (1857), a book of more sentimentalism, 
 but of great interest and merit. Both were miracles of 
 fecundity, Mrs. Craik producing, in the shorter life of the 
 two, not much fewer than fifty novels; Mrs. Oliphant, 
 besides a great deal of work in other departments, a tale 
 which did not stop very far short of the hundred. The 
 latter, moreover, gave, at a comparatively late period of 
 her career, evidences of being able to start new lines — 
 the supernatural stories of her last stages are only inferior 
 to the Chronicles of Carlingford themselves. Yet, once 
 more, we look for a masterpiece in vain: in fact in Mrs. 
 Oliphant' 8 case we ask, how could any human being, on 
 such a system of production, be expected to produce 
 masterpieces? Scott, I think, once wrote four or nearly 
 four novels in a year: and the process helped to kill him. 
 Mrs. Oliphant did it over and over again, besides alternating 
 the annual dose still more frequently with twos and threes. 
 In her case the process only killed her novels. 
 
 Three remarkable novelists of the other sex may be 
 mentioned, in the same way, together. They were all
 
 THE FICTION OF YESTERDAY 287 
 
 acquaintances of the present writer, and one of them was 
 his friend: moreover, he is quite certain that he could 
 not write as good a novel as the worst of theirs, and only 
 takes credit to himself for not having attempted to do so. 
 These are James Payn, William Black, and Sir Walter 
 Besant. Mr. Payn was an extremely agreeable person 
 with a great talent for amusing, the measure of which he 
 perhaps took pretty early — consoling himself for a total 
 absence of high pretension by a perhaps not quite genuine 
 affectation of good - natured but distinctly Philistine 
 cynicism, and a half serious, half affected belief that other 
 men's delight in their schools, their universities, the great 
 classics of the past, etc., was blague. He never made this 
 in the least offensive; he never made any one of his fifty 
 or sixty novels anything but interesting and (when the 
 subject required it) amusing. There never was any novelist 
 less difficult to read a first time: I really do not know that 
 it would be extremely difficult to read him a second; but 
 also I have seldom come across a novelist with whom I 
 was so little inclined to try it. It is a great thing, no doubt, 
 as has been said, from a certain point of view — that of 
 pastime — that the reading of a novel should be easy and 
 pleasant. But perhaps this is not aU that you are entitled 
 to ask of it. And as Mr. Payn began with Poems, and 
 some other suggestive books, I am inclined to think that 
 perhaps he did not always regard literature as a thing of 
 the kind of a superior railway sandwich. 
 
 It is quite certain that, in his beginning, Mr. William 
 Black entertained no such idea; for his actual debuts were 
 something like what long afterwards were called problem- 
 novels, and In Silk Attire (1869), Kilmeny (1870), and the 
 charming Daughter of Heth (1871) attempted a great deal 
 besides mere amusement. It is true that no one of them —
 
 288 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 not even the last — could be called an entire success: a 
 " little more powder " was wanted to send the shots home, 
 and such flight as they achieved did not even seem to be 
 aimed at any distinct and worthy object. But fortunately 
 for his pocket, unfortunately for his fame, he hit the public 
 taste of the time with a sort of guidebook-novel in The 
 Strange Adventures of a Phaeton (1872) and A Princess of 
 Thule (1873), and was naturally tempted to continue it, 
 or to branch off only into not very strong stories of society. 
 Once he made an effort at combining tragic romance with 
 this latter kind in Macleod of Dare (1878), but, though this 
 was nearer to a success than some of his critics admitted, 
 it was not quite a success: and though he wrote fully a 
 score of novels after it, he never came nearer the actual 
 bull's eye. In fact his later work was not up to a very 
 good average. 
 
 Neither of these writers, except, as has been said, perhaps 
 Black in his earliest stage, had taken novel-writing very 
 seriously: it was otherwise with the third of the trio. 
 Mr., afterwards Sir Walter, Besant did not begin early, 
 owing to the fact that, for nearly a decade after leaving 
 Cambridge, he was a schoolmaster in Mauritius. But he 
 had, in this time, acquired a greater knowledge of literature 
 than either of the other two possessed: and when he came 
 home, and took to fiction, he accompanied it with, or rather 
 based it upon, not merely wide historical studies, which 
 are still bearing fruit in a series of posthumous dealings 
 with the history of London, but rather minute observa- 
 tion of the lower social life of the metropolis. For some 
 ten years his novel production was carried on, in a rather 
 incomprehensible system of collaboration, with James Rice, 
 a Cambridge man like himself and a historian of the turf, 
 but one to whom no independent work in fiction is attri-
 
 THE FICTION OF YESTERDAY 289 
 
 buted, except an incredibly feeble adaptation of Mr. Ver- 
 dant Green, entitled The Cambridge Freshman and signed 
 " Martin Legrand." During the seventies, and for a year 
 or two later, till Rice's death in 1882, the pair provided 
 a long series of novels from Ready-Money Mortiboy (1871) to 
 The Chaplain of the Fleet (1881), the most popular book 
 between being, perhaps, The Golden Butterfly (1876). These 
 belonged, loosely, to the school of Dickens, as that school 
 had been carried on by Wilkie Collins {v. inf.), but with 
 less grotesque than the original master, and less "sensation" 
 than the head pupil; with a good deal of solid knowledge 
 both of older and more modern life; with fairly substantial 
 plots, good character-drawing of the more external kind, 
 and a sufficient supply of interesting incident, dialogue, and 
 description. 
 
 It was certain that people would affect to discover a 
 " falling off " when the partnership was dissolved by 
 Rice's death: but as a matter of fact there was nothing 
 of the kind. Such books as the very good and original 
 Revolt of Man (which certainly owed nothing to collabora- 
 tion), as All Sorts and Conditions of Men (1882), the first 
 of the kind apparently that Besant wrote alone, as 
 Dorothy Forster (1884), and as the powerful if not exactly 
 delightful Children of Gibeon (1886) were perhaps more 
 vigorous than anything earlier, and certainly not less 
 original. But the curse of the " machine-made " novel, 
 which has been already dwelt upon, did not quite spare 
 Besant: and in these later stories critics could point, with- 
 out complete unfairness, to an increasing obsession of the 
 " London " subject, especially in regard to the actual 
 gloom and possible illumination of the East End, and on 
 the other to a resort to historical subjects, less as suggestions 
 or canvases than as giving the substance of the book. 
 
 T
 
 290 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 The first class of work, however (which actually resulted 
 in a " People's Palace " and was supposed to have obtained 
 his knighthood for him), is distinctly remarkable, especially 
 in the light of succeeding events. Most of the unfavourable 
 criticisms passed upon Besant's novel-work were in the 
 main the utterances of raw reviewers, who thought it 
 necessary to " down " established reputations. But it 
 would be impossible for any competent critic, however 
 much he might be biassed off the bench by friendship, not 
 to admit, on it, that he also shows the effect, which we have 
 been illustrating from others, of the system of novel-pro- 
 duction a la douzaine. In such a case, and on the, in them- 
 selves, salutary conditions of the new novel, the experiences 
 and interests of life may or must come to be regarded too 
 regularly as supplying " grist for the mill "; nay, the whole 
 of life and literature, which no doubt ought in all cases 
 to furnish suggestion and help to art and inspiration, 
 are too often set to a sort of corvee, a day-task, a tale of 
 bricks. It is, one allows, hard to prevent this: and yet 
 nothing is more certain that bricks so made are not the best 
 material to be wrought into any really " star-y-pointing 
 pyramid " that shall defy the operations of time. 
 
 A very curious and characteristic member of this group, 
 Wilkie Collins, has not yet been mentioned except by 
 glances. He was a httle older than most of them, and 
 came pretty early under the influence of Dickens, whose 
 melodramatic rather than his humorous side he set himself 
 to work to develop. In fact Collins was at least as much 
 melodramatist as novelist: and while most of his novels 
 are melodrama in narrative form, not a few of them were 
 actually dramatised. He began as early as 1850 — the 
 dividing year — with Antonina: but his three great triumphs 
 in the " sensation " novel (as it was rather stupidly called)
 
 THE FICTION OF YESTERDAY 291 
 
 were The Dead Secret (1857), The Woman in White (i860), 
 and No Name (1862). Throughout the sixties and a little 
 later, in Armadale (1866), The Moonstone (1870), perhaps 
 The New Magdalen (1873), and even as late as 1875 in The 
 Law and the Lady, his work continued to be eagerly 
 read. But the taste for it waned: and its author's last 
 fifteen years or so (he died in 1889), though fairly fruitful 
 in quantity, certainly did not tend to keep it up in quality. 
 Although Collins had a considerable amount of rather coarse 
 vigour in him (his brother Charles, who died young, had a 
 much more dehcate art) and great fecundity in a certain 
 kind of stagy invention, it is hard to beHeve that his work 
 will ever be put permanently high. It has a certain re- 
 semblance in method to Godwin and Mrs. Radcliffe, exciting 
 situations being arranged, certainly with great cleverness, 
 in an interminable sequence, and leading, sometimes at 
 any rate, to a violent " revolution " (in the old dramatic 
 sense) at the end. Perhaps the best example is the way in 
 which Magdalen Vanstone's desperate and unscrupulous, 
 though more than half justifiable, machinations, to reverse 
 the cruel legal accident which leaves her and her sister 
 with " No Name " and no fortune, are foiled by the course 
 of events, though the family property is actually recovered 
 for this sister who has been equally guiltless and inactive. 
 Of its kind, the machinery is as cleverly built and worked 
 as that of any novel in the world: but while the author 
 has given us some Dickensish character-parts of no little 
 attraction (such as the agreeable rascal Captain Wragge) 
 and has nearly made us sympathise strongly with Magdalen 
 herself, he only succeeds in this latter point so far as 
 to make us angry with him for his prudish poetical or 
 theatrical justice, which is not poetical and hardly even 
 just.
 
 292 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 The specialist or particularist novel was not likely to 
 be without practitioners during this time: in fact it might 
 be said, after a fashion, to be more rife than ever: but it 
 can only be glanced at here. Its most remarkable repre- 
 sentatives perhaps — men, however, of very diiferent tastes 
 and abilities — were Richard Jefferies and Joseph Henry 
 Shorthouse. The latter, after attracting very wide 
 attraction by a remarkable book — almost a kind to itself — 
 "John Inglesant (1880), a half historical, half ecclesiastical 
 novel of seventeenth-century life, never did anything else 
 that was any good at all, and indeed tried little. The 
 former, a strugghng country journalist, after long failing 
 to make any way, wrote several three-volume novels of no 
 merit, broke through at last in the Pall Mall Gazette 
 with a series of studies of country life. The Gamekeeper at 
 Home (1878), and afterwards turned these into a pecuUar 
 style of novel, with little story and hardly any character, 
 but furnished with the backgrounds and the atmosphere 
 of these same sketches. His health was weak, and he died 
 in early middle age, leaving a problem of a character 
 exactly opposed to the other. Would Mr. Shorthouse, if 
 he had not been a well-to-do man of business, but obliged 
 to write for his living, have done more and better work? 
 Would Jeflferies, if he had been more fortunate in educa- 
 tion, occupation, and means, and furnished with better 
 health, have co-ordinated and expanded his certainly rare 
 powers into something more " important " than the few 
 pictures, as of a Meissonier-^^^;^^^^/^?, which he has left us ? 
 These inquiries are no doubt idle: but, once more, one may 
 draw attention to the way in which two men, so different 
 in tastes and fortune, neither, it would seem, with a very 
 strong bent towards prose fiction as the vehicle of his 
 literary desires and accomplishments, appear to have
 
 THE FICTION OF YESTERDAY 293 
 
 been forced, by the overpowering attraction and 
 popularity of the kind, to adopt the novel as their form of 
 literature, and to give the public, not what they wanted in 
 the form which they chose, but something at least made 
 up in the form that the public wanted, and disguised in the 
 wrappers which the public were accustomed to purchase. 
 
 The principal development of mid-nineteenth-century 
 fiction had been, as we have seen, in the direction of the 
 novel -proper — the character - study of modern ordinary 
 life. But, even as early as Esmond and Hypatia, signs 
 were not wanting that the romance, historical or other, 
 was not going to be content with the rather pale copies 
 of Scott, and the rococo - sentimental style "of Bulwer, 
 which had mainly occupied it for the last quarter of a 
 century. Still, though we have mentioned other examples 
 of the fifties and sixties, and have left ever so many more 
 unmentioned, it was certainly not as popular ^ as its rival 
 till, towards the end of the latter decade, Mr. Blackmore's 
 Lorna Doone gave it a fresh hold on the public taste. 
 Some ten years later again there came to its aid a new 
 recruit of very exceptional character, Mr. Robert Louis 
 Stevenson. He was a member of the famous family of 
 light-house engineers, and was educated for the Bar of 
 Scotland, to which he was actually called. But law was as 
 little to his taste as engineering, and he slowly gravitated 
 towards literature — the slowness being due, not merely to 
 family opposition or to any other of the usual causes 
 (though some of these were at work), but to an intense and 
 elaborate desire to work himself out a style of His own by 
 the process of " sedulously aping " others. It may be 
 
 ^ Anthony Trollope, in one of the discursive passages in his early 
 books, has left positive testimony to the distaste with which publishers 
 regarded it.
 
 294 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 very much doubted whether this process ever gave any one 
 a style of perfect freedom: and it may be questioned 
 further whether Stevenson ever attained such a style. 
 
 But there could be no question that he did attain very 
 interesting and artistic effects, and there happened to be 
 at the time a reaction against what was called " slovenli- 
 ness " and a demand for careful preparation and planned 
 effect in prose-writing. Even so, however, it was not at 
 once that Stevenson took to fiction. He began with 
 essays, literary and miscellaneous, and with personal 
 accounts of travel: and certain critical friends of his 
 strongly urged him to continue in this way. During the 
 years 1878 and 1879, ^^ ^ short-lived periodical 
 called London, which came to be edited by his friend 
 the late Mr. Henley and had a very small staff, he issued 
 certain New Arabian Nights which caught the attention 
 of one or two of his fellow-contributors very strongly, and 
 made them certain that a new power in fiction-writing had 
 arisen. It did not, however, at first much attract the 
 public: and it was the kind of thing which never attracts 
 publishers until the public forces their hands. For a time 
 he had to wait, and to take what opportunity he could get 
 of periodical publication, ^" boy's ^book "-writing, and the 
 like. In fact Treasure Island (1883), with which he at last 
 made his mark, is to this day classed as a boy's book by 
 some people who are miserable if they cannot classify. 
 It certainly deals with pirates, and pieces of eight, and 
 adventures by land and sea; but the manner of dealing — 
 the style and narrative and the delineation of the chief 
 character, the engaging villain John Silver — is about as little 
 puerile as anything that can be imagined. From that 
 time Stevenson's reputation was assured. Ill health, a 
 somewhat restless disposition, and an early death pre-
 
 THE FICTION OF YESTERDAY 295 
 
 vented him from accomplishing any great bulk of work: 
 and the merit of what he did varied. Latterly he took to 
 a teasing process of collaboration, which his sincerest 
 admirers could have willingly spared. But his last com- 
 pleted book, Catriona (1893), seemed to some judges of at 
 least considerable experience the best thing he had yet 
 done, especially in one all-important respect — that he here 
 conquered either an unwillingness to attempt or an inability 
 to achieve the portraiture of feminine character, which 
 his books had previously displayed. The general opinion, 
 too, was that the unfinished Weir of Hermiston (1897), 
 which he left a fragment at his death, was the best and 
 strongest thing he had done, while it showed in particular 
 a distinct relinquishment, for something freer and more 
 spontaneous, of the effective but also rather affected and 
 decidedly laboured style in which he had hitherto written. 
 For us, however, his style is of less importance than the 
 fact that he applied it almost wholly to the carrying out 
 of that rejuvenescence of romance of which we have been 
 speaking, and which may be taken, as anybody pleases, 
 either for a mere alterative to the domestic novel or as a 
 definite revolt against it. It was speedily taken up by 
 writers mostly still hving, and so not to be dwelt on now. 
 Very late in the century the genius of Mr. William 
 Morris turned from verse to prose tale-telling in a series 
 of romances which caught the fancy neither of the public 
 nor of the critics as a whole, but which seem to some whom 
 the gods have made not quite uncritical to be, if rightly 
 taken, of much accomplishment, and of almost more 
 promise and suggestion. These, seven or eight in 
 number, from The Hoiise of the Wulfings (1889) to 7he 
 Sundering Flood, published after the author's death in 1898, 
 were actual romances — written in a kind of modernised
 
 296 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 fifteenth-century English, and deahng, some with far back 
 incidents of the conflict between Romans and " Barbarians," 
 most with the frank no-time and no-place of Romance 
 itself. They came at an unfortunate moment, when the 
 younger generation of readers were thinking it proper to be 
 besotted with crude realism or story-less impressionism, 
 and when some at least of those who might have welcomed 
 them earlier had left their first faith in poetry or poetic 
 prose. There was, moreover, perhaps some genuine dislike, 
 and certainly a good deal of precisian condemnation, of 
 the " Wardour Street " dialect. Yet there was no sham in 
 them: it was impossible for Mr. Morris to have anything 
 to do with shams — even his socialism was not that — and 
 they were in reahty a revival, however Rip van Winklish 
 it might seem, of the pure old romance itself, at the hands 
 of a nineteenth-century sorcerer, who no doubt put a little 
 of the nineteenth century into them. The best — probably 
 the best of all is The Well at the World's End (1896) — have 
 an extraordinary charm for any one who can taste romance: 
 and are by no means unlikely to awake the taste for it in 
 generations to come. But for the present the thing lay 
 out of the way of its generation, and was not comprehended 
 or enjoyed thereby. For it is no doubt nearly as annoying 
 to have bread given to you when you want thistles as to 
 have thistles given to you when you want bread. But 
 just as the ballad is the appointed reviver of poetry, so is 
 romance the appointed reviver of prose-fiction: and in 
 one form or another it will surely do its work, sooner or 
 later. 
 
 Here it may be best to stop the actual current of critical 
 comment on individuals. Something has been hinted as to 
 the general present condition of the novel, but there is no 
 need to emphasise it or to enter into particulars about it:
 
 THE FICTION OF YESTERDAY 297 
 
 indeed, even if such a proceeding were convenient in one 
 way it would be very inconvenient in another. One 
 might, for instance, have to consider, rather curiously, 
 a remarkable statement recently attributed to a popular 
 novelist that " the general standard of excellence in 
 faction is higher to-day than ever it was before." But 
 we can take higher ground. Far be it from me to bow 
 to the Baal of " up-to-dateness," for even if I had any 
 such hankering, I think I should remember that the surest 
 way of being out-of-date to-morrow is the endeavour to 
 be up-to-date to-day. Only by keeping perspective can 
 you hope to confirm and steady your view : only by 
 relinquishing the impossible attempt to be complete can 
 you achieve a relative completeness. 
 
 Yet it is well to remember that Lockhart, one of the best 
 critics who ever lived (when he let himself be so), a novelist 
 too, and not likely to lose an opportunity of magnifying his 
 office if he could, took occasion, in noticing the novels of his 
 friend Theodore Hook at poor " Mr. Wagg's" death, gravely 
 to deplore the decadence of the novel generally: and not 
 much later, in reprinting the article, had the wisdom to 
 recognise, and the courage to record, the fact that 
 Thackeray had disappointed his prognostications. Litera- 
 ture, it has been said, is the incalculable of incalculables : 
 and not only may a new novelist arise to-morrow, but 
 some novelist who has been writing for almost any 
 number of years may change his style, strike the vein, 
 and begin the exploitation of a new gold-field in novel- 
 production. 
 
 But this does not affect the retrospect of the past. 
 There we are on perfectly firm ground — ground which we 
 have traversed carefully already, and which we may survey 
 in surety now.
 
 298 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 We have seen, then, that the prose novel — a late growth 
 both in ancient and in modern times in all countries — 
 was a specially late and slow-yielding one in English. 
 Although Thoms's Early English Prose Romances is by 
 no means an exhaustive collection, and for this reason was 
 not specially referred to in the first chapter, it is impossible 
 not to recognise that its three rather small volumes, of 
 matter for the most part exceeding poor and beggarly, 
 contrast in the most pitiful fashion with the scores and 
 almost hundreds containing Early English Romances in 
 verse. Malory of course brings the prose-scale down very 
 considerably from its uncomfortably meteoric position, and 
 some other things help: but the total of prose and verse 
 before 1500 can be brought level by no possible sleight of 
 weighing. Still, as we have seen, this did not matter very 
 much: for the verse got " transprosed " sooner or later, 
 and the romances and tales of other countries were 
 greedily admitted ad eundem in sixteenth and seventeenth 
 century English. 
 
 Yet the novel proper lingered: and, except in the single 
 and eccentric masterpiece of Bunyan, the seventeenth 
 century ended without having seen one real specimen of 
 prose fiction that was thoroughly satisfactory. Nearly 
 half the eighteenth had gone too, with nothing but the less 
 isolated but still not perfect performances of Defoe, and the 
 once more still eccentric masterpiece of Gulliver, before 
 the novel-period really opened. It is hterally not more 
 than two long lifetimes ago — it is quite certain that there 
 are now living hundreds, perhaps thousands, of persons 
 born when others were still living who drew their first 
 breaths in or before the year when Pamela made her 
 modest, but very distinctly self-conscious, curtsey to the 
 world. How soon it grew to a popular form of literature,
 
 THE FICTION OF YESTERDAY 299 
 
 and how steadily that popularity has continued and in- 
 creased, there is not much need to say or to repeat. 
 Statistical persons every year give us the hundreds of 
 novels that appear from the presses, and the thousands of 
 readers who take them out of, or read them in, public 
 libraries. I do not know whether there exists anywhere a 
 record of the total number pubHshed since 1740, but I 
 dare say it does. I should not at aU wonder if this total 
 ran into scores of thousands: if you were to bring in short 
 stories it would certainly do so. People have almost left 
 off shaking their heads over the preponderant or exclusive 
 attention to fiction in these public libraries themselves: 
 in fact the tendency seems to be rather to make out that it 
 is decreasing. It may be so; or it may not. But what 
 remains certain is that there is a very large number of 
 educated people to whom " reading " simply means reading 
 novels; who never think of taking up a book that is not a 
 novel; for whom the novel exhausts even the very meaning 
 of the word " Hterature." We know that the romance was 
 originally so called simply because it was the commonest 
 book in " Romance " language. We are less unsophisti- 
 cated now: but there are certainly large numbers of His 
 Majesty's subjects by whom a novel on this principle ought 
 to be called " an english " though it might have to share 
 that appellation with the newspaper. 
 
 Yet, as we have seen, for this or that reason, the average 
 novel did not come to anything like perfection for a very 
 long time. In a single example, or set of examples, it 
 reached something like perfection almost at once. Fielding, 
 Scott, Miss Austen, and Thackeray are the Four Masters 
 of the whole subject, giving the lady the same degree as the 
 others by courtesy of letters. But in the first (as for the 
 matter of that in the la'st) of the four the success was
 
 300 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 rather a matter of individual and inimitable genius than 
 of systematic discovery of method practicable by others. 
 Nobody, except Thackeray himself, has ever followed 
 Fielding successfully, and that only in parts and touches; 
 as Fielding had (unfortunately) no opportunity of following 
 Thackeray, no one has ever followed Thackeray satis- 
 factorily at all. Such reasons as presented themselves have 
 been given for the fact that nearly half of the whole period 
 passed before the two systems — of the pure novel and the 
 novel-romance — were discovered: and even then they were 
 not at once put to work. But the present writer would 
 be the very first to confess that these explanations leave 
 a great deal unexplained. 
 
 Yet whatever faults there might be in the supply there 
 could be no doubt about the demand when it was once 
 started. It was indeed almost entirely independent of 
 the goodness or badness of the average supply itself. 
 Allowing for the smaller population and the much 
 smaller proportion of that population who were likely to — 
 who indeed could — read, and for the inferior means of dis- 
 tribution, it may be doubted whether the largest sales 
 of novels recorded in the last half century have surpassed 
 those of the most trumpery trash of the " Minerva Press " 
 period — the last decade of the eighteenth and the first of 
 the nineteenth century. For the main novel-public is 
 quite omnivorous, and almost absolutely uncritical of what 
 it devours. The admirable though certainly fortunate 
 Scot who "could never remember drinking bad whisky" 
 might be echoed, if they had the wit, by not a few persons 
 who never seem to read a bad novel, or at least to be aware 
 that they are reading one. 
 
 At the same time, the failure of the quest for novel-recipes 
 was compensated by an absence of that working of those
 
 THE FICTION OF YESTERDAY 301 
 
 recipes to death which the last century — or the last three- 
 quarters of it — has seen. The average work of any one of 
 a dozen nineteenth-century producers of novels by the 
 dozen and the score, whom at this place it is not necessary 
 to name, is probably on the whole a much better turned 
 out thing — one better observing its own purposes, and open 
 to less criticism in detail — than even the best of the works 
 of the earher division outside of Fielding. But the 
 eighteenth - century books — faulty, only partially satis- 
 fying as they may be in comparison, say, with a well- 
 succeeded Trollope or one of the better Blackmores — very 
 often have a certain idiosyncrasy, a freedom from machine- 
 work, which supplies something not altogether unlike 
 the contrast between the furniture of the two periods. 
 Stress and dwelling have been purposely given, to some 
 minor books of this period, for this very reason. 
 
 But at the same time the limitations, outside the greatest, 
 are certainly peculiar. It seems wonderful that a man 
 like Cumberland, for instance, who had not a little literary 
 talent, should not have been able to make Henry into a 
 story of real interest that might hold the reader as even 
 second-class Trollope — say a book like Orley Farm — does. 
 We have ungraciously recognised that some of our lady 
 novelists, who wrote by forties and by fifties, did not 
 always sustain the interest of their novels. Miss Burney 
 wrote four in aU, and could hardly keep up the interest of 
 hers right through the second. Above all, there is the 
 difficulty of their failure with conversation and, in fact, 
 with any diction proper for conversation. If Horace 
 Walpole, a contemporary of the eighteenth-century novel 
 from its actual start to practically its finish, could give us 
 thousands and all but tens of thousands of phrases that 
 want but a little of being novel-conversation ready made,
 
 302 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 why could not the other people make it for their own 
 purposes ? But we have got no answer to these questions: 
 and probably there is none. 
 
 The way in which Scott and Miss Austen themselves 
 simultaneously found out the secrets of the two kinds of 
 novel is no doubt, as such ways always are, in the larger 
 part mysterious: but to a certain extent it can be explained 
 and analysed, independently of the direct hterary genius 
 of each. One of the greatest gifts of Scott — one with which 
 the non-historical novelist can dispense as little as his 
 brother the historical — was that " genius of history " with 
 which Lord Morley — a critic not Hkely to be misled by 
 sympathy in some respects at any rate — has justly credited 
 him. For unless you have this " historic sense," as it has 
 been more generally and perhaps better termed (though to 
 the intense disgust of some professed historians), it is not 
 only impossible for you to delineate scene and character at 
 a distance from your time, but you become really disquali- 
 fied for depicting your own time itself. You fail to dis- 
 tinguish the temporary from the permanent; you achieve 
 perhaps a fairly faithful copy of actual manners and 
 fashions, but you do nothing more, and as the subject dies 
 so does the picture. Contrast Hook, say, with Thackeray, 
 and the difference will emerge at once. 
 
 Secondly, Scott had, besides this historic sense and the 
 relish for humanity which must accompany it, a know- 
 ledge of literature with which he has been too seldom 
 credited to the full. When he published Waverley he had 
 been reading all sorts and conditions of books for some five- 
 and-thirty years, and assimilating them if, as the pedants 
 will have it, with a distressing inaccuracy in particulars, 
 with a general and genial fidehty of which the pedants do 
 not even dream and could not comprehend, or they would
 
 TPIE FICTION OF YESTERDAY 303 
 
 not be pedants. He was thus furnished with infinite 
 stores of illustrative matter, never to overpower, but 
 always to accompany and season, his knowledge of life. In 
 a few instances this felicity of adoption has been recog- 
 nised, but not a tenth part of it has ever been systematic- 
 ally put on record. The more widely and the longer a man 
 reads, the more constantly will he find that Scott has been 
 before him, and has " lifted " just the touch that he wanted 
 at the time and in the place. 
 
 But perhaps a greater gift (there were still others which 
 it would be long to perscribe — descriptive faculty, humour, 
 pathos, half a dozen other things of the highest importance 
 in themselves, but of less special application) was that 
 which enabled him to discover and apply something like 
 a universal novel language. He did this, not as Shakespeare 
 did (and as nobody but Shakespeare, except perhaps Dante 
 to some extent, ever has done or apparently could do), by 
 making a really universal language which fits all times and 
 persons because it is universal like its creator's soul. Still 
 less did he do it by adopting the method which Spenser did 
 consummately, but which almost everybody else has 
 justified Ben Jonson by doing very badly: — that is to say 
 by constructing a mosaic of his own. But his own method 
 was nearer to this latter. For historical creations (the 
 most important of his non-historic, Guy Mannering and 
 the Antiquary^ were so near his own time that he had no 
 difficulty) he threw back with remarkable cunning to a 
 period somewhat earlier, and coloured this up to the 
 required tint by actual suggestions from contemporary, 
 or nearly contemporary, literature, where he could get it. 
 He has done this so consummately that perhaps the only 
 novel of his where the language strikes us as artificial is
 
 304 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 the single one in which he actually endeavoured to be " up- 
 to-date " — St. Ronan's Well. 
 
 This question of " Lingo," on the other hand, was Miss 
 Austen's weakest point: and we have seen and shall see 
 that it continued to be a weak point with others. Some 
 admirers have defended her even here: but proud as I 
 am to be an Austen Friar, a knight (or at least squire) of 
 the order of St. Jane, I cannot go to this length. She very 
 nearly succeeded, and sometimes she did quite: but not 
 always. The easy dialogue and phrase that we find as 
 early as Horace Walpole, even as Chesterfield and Lady 
 Mary, in letters; which, in her own early days, appears in 
 Fanny Burney's diaries but not in the novels, does not 
 seem always within Miss Austen's grasp. But her advance 
 in this respect is enormous: she is, for instance, far beyond 
 Scott himself in St. Ronan's Well : and when she is 
 thoroughly interested in a character, and engaged in un- 
 folding it and gently satirising it at the same time, she 
 rarely goes even a hair's-breadth wrong. In almost every 
 other respect she does not go wrong to the extent of the 
 minutest section of a hair. The story is the least part with 
 her: but her stories are always miraculously adequate: 
 neither desultory and pillar-to-post, nor elaborated with the 
 minuteness which seems to please some people, but which is 
 quite indifferent to the majority, and is certainly a positive 
 nuisance to a few who are not quite of negligible judgment. 
 But the reason of this adequacy in story contains in itself her 
 greatest triumph. Not being a poet, she cannot reach the 
 Shakespearian consummateness of poetic phrase: though she 
 sometimes comes not so far short of this in the prose variety. 
 But in the other great province of character, though hers is 
 but a Rutland to his Yorkshire — or rather to his England or 
 hisworld — she is almost equally supreme. Andbyhermanipu-
 
 THE FICTION OF YESTERDAY 305 
 
 lation of it she showed, once for all, how the most ordinary set 
 of circumstances, and even the most ordinary characters in 
 a certain sense, can be made to supply the material of prose 
 fiction to an absolutely illimitable extent. Her philo- 
 sopher's stone (to take up the old parable again) does not 
 lose its powers even when all the metal in the house is 
 exhausted — if indeed the metal, or anything else, in the 
 House of Humanity were exhaustible. The chairs and 
 tables, the beds and the basins — everything — can be 
 made into novel-gold: and, when it has been made, it 
 remains as useful for future conversion, by the same or any 
 other magician of the same class, as ever. One of the most 
 curious things about Miss Austen is the entire absence of 
 self-repetition in her. Even her young men — certainly 
 not her greatest successes — are by no means doubles of each 
 other: and nature herself could not turn out half a dozen 
 girls more subtly and yet more sufficiently differentiated 
 than Catherine and Elizabeth, Marianne and Fanny, 
 Elinor and Emma, and finally the three sisters of Per- 
 suasion, the other (quite other) Elizabeth, Mary, and Anne. 
 The " ruts of the brain " in novelists are a by-word. There 
 are none here. 
 
 In these two great writers of English novel there is, 
 really for the first time, the complementary antithesis after 
 which people have often gone (I fear it must be said) 
 wool-gathering elsewhere. The amateurs of cosmopolitan 
 literature, I believe, like to find it in Stendhal and Michelet. 
 They praise the former for his delicate and pitiless psycho- 
 logical analysis. It had been anticipated a dozen years, 
 nay, nearly twenty years, before he saw the Beresina: and 
 was being given out in print at about the very moment 
 of that uncomfortable experience, and before he himself 
 published anything, by a young English lady — a lady if 
 
 u
 
 3o6 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 ever there was one and English if any person ever was — 
 in a country parsonage in Hampshire or in hired houses, 
 quite humdrum and commonplace to the commonplace 
 and humdrum imagination, at Bath and Southampton. 
 They praise Michelet for his enthusiastic and multiform 
 apprehension of the plastic reality of the past, his re- 
 creation of it, his putting of it, live and active, before the 
 present. The thing had been done, twenty years earlier 
 again, by a Scotch advocate who had deliberately turned 
 from poetic form, though he retained poetic imagination, 
 and who did not disdain not to make a fool of himself, as 
 Michelet, with all his genius, did again and again. Of all 
 the essentials of the two manners of fictitious creation — 
 Michelet's was not fictitious, but he almost made it so, 
 and Stendhal's was not historical, but he almost made it 
 so likewise — Scott and Miss Austen had set the types, 
 given the methods, arranged the processes as definitely as 
 Fust, or Coster, or Gutenberg, or Fust's friend Mephis- 
 topheles — who perhaps, on the whole, has the best title to 
 the invention — did in another matter three hundred years 
 before. 
 
 That Scott's variety should be taken up first, and should 
 for a time have the great popularity, the greater number 
 of disciples, the greater acceptance as a mode of pleasing — 
 was, as has been pointed out, natural enough; it is not a 
 little significant that (to avert our eyes from England) the 
 next practitioner of the psychological style in European 
 literature, Balzac, went through a long and mostly un- 
 successful probation in the other kind, and never wholly 
 deserted it, or at least always kept looking back to it. But 
 the general shortcomings (as they have been admitted to 
 be) in the whole of the second quarter of the century (or a 
 little less) with us, were but natural results of the inevitable
 
 THE FICTION OF YESTERDAY 307 
 
 expatiation, unsystematic and irresolute, over the newly 
 discovered provinces. And they gave admirable work of 
 various kinds — work especially admirable if we remember 
 that there was no general literary uprising with us as there 
 was, in France and elsewhere, about 1830. If it were in 
 any way possible — similar supposings have been admitted in 
 literature very often — it would be extremely interesting to 
 take a person ex hypothesi fairly acquainted with the rest 
 of literature — English, foreign, European, and classical — but 
 who knew nothing and had heard nothing of Bulwer, 
 Disraeh, Peacock, Marryat, even Ainsworth and James 
 and others between Scott and the accomplished work of 
 Thackeray (Dickens's is, as has been said, mainly a sport of 
 genius), and to turn him loose on this work. I do him the 
 justice to suppose that he would find not a few faults: I 
 shall also do him the justice to think it likely that he 
 (being, as said, ex hypothesi furnished with the miscel- 
 laneous knowledge necessary to enjoy them) would enjoy 
 them very keenly and thoroughly. If you added the 
 minorities of the time, such as that very clever Miss Robinson 
 (I think her name was Emma) who wrote Whitefriars and 
 other historical romances in the forties; such as Charles 
 Macfarlane, who died, hke Colonel Newcome, a poor brother 
 of the Charterhouse after writing capital things like The 
 Dutch in the Medzvay and The Camp of Refuge — if, I say, you 
 gave him these things and he was a good man, but lazy, 
 like Gray, I think he would vote for a continuance of 
 his hfe of novels and sofas without sighing for anything 
 further. But undoubtedly it might be contended that 
 something further was needed: and it came. This was 
 verisimilitude — the holding of the true mirror to actual 
 society. 
 
 This verisimilitude, it should be observed, is not only
 
 3o8 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 difficult to attain : it seems not to be easy even to recognise. 
 I have seen it said that the reason which makes it " hope- 
 less for many people even to try to get through Pickwick " 
 (their state itself must be " hopeless " enough, and it 
 is to be hoped there are not " many " of them) is that it 
 " describes states of society unimaginable to many people 
 of to-day." Again, these many people must be somewhat 
 unimaginative. But that is not the point of the matter. 
 The point is that Dickens depicts no " state of society " 
 that ever existed, except in the Dickensium Sidus. What he 
 gives is full of intensely real touches which help to create 
 its charm. But it is difficult to say that there is even a 
 single person in it who is real as a whole, in the sense of 
 having possibly existed in this world: and the larger 
 whole of the book generally is pure fantasy — as much 
 so as one of the author's own favourite goblin-dream 
 stories. 
 
 With Thackeray the case is exactly the opposite. It is 
 a testimony no doubt to Dickens's real power — though 
 perhaps not to his readers' perspicacity — that he made 
 them believe that he intended a " state of society " when, 
 whether he intended it or not, he certainly has not given 
 it. ButThackeray intended it and gave it. His is a "state 
 of society " always — whether in late seventeenth century, 
 early or late eighteenth, early or middle nineteenth — which 
 existed or might have existed; his persons are persons who 
 lived or might have lived. And it is the discovery of this 
 art of creation by him and its parallel diffusion among 
 his contemporaries that I am endeavouring to make 
 clear here. Fielding, Scott to some extent. Miss Austen 
 had had it. Dickens, till Great Expectations at least, never 
 achieved and I believe never attempted it. Bulwer, having 
 failed in it for twenty years, struck it at last about this
 
 THE FICTION OF YESTERDAY 309 
 
 time, and so did, even before him, Mrs. Marsh, and perhaps 
 others, falteringly and incompletely. But as a general 
 gift — a characteristic — it never distinguished novelists till 
 after the middle of the century. 
 
 It is, I think, impossible to find a better meeting and over- 
 lapping place of the old and the new novel, than that very 
 remarkable book Emilia Wyndham, which has been already 
 more than once referred to. It was written in 1845 and 
 appeared next year — the year of Vanity Fair. But the 
 author was twenty years older than Thackeray, though 
 she survived him by nearly a dozen; she had not begun 
 early ; and she was fifty-five when she wrote Emilia. The 
 not unnatural consequence is that there is a great deal of 
 inconsistency in the general texture of the book : and that 
 any clever cub, in the 'prentice stage of reviewing, could 
 make columns of fun out of it. The general theme is age-old, 
 being not different from the themes of most other novels 
 in that respect. A half-idiotic spendthrift (he ends as very 
 nearly an actual idiot) not merely wastes his own pro- 
 perty but practically embezzles that of his wife and 
 daughter; the wife dies and the daughter is left alone with 
 an extravagant establishment, a father practically non 
 compos, not a penny in her pocket after she has paid his 
 doctor, and a selfish baronet-uncle who will do less than 
 nothing to help her. She has loved half unconsciously, 
 and been half consciously loved by, a soldier cousin or 
 quasi-cousin: but he is in the Peninsular War. Absolutely 
 no help presents itself but that of a Mr. Danby, a convey- 
 ancer, who, in some way not very consonant with the 
 usual etiquette of his profession, has been mixed up with 
 her father's affairs — a man middle-aged, apparently dry 
 as his own parchments, and quite unversed in society. He 
 helps her clumsily but lavishly: and her uncle forces her
 
 310 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 to accept his hand as the only means of saving her father 
 from jail first and an asylum afterwards. The inevitable 
 disunion, brought about largely by Danby's mother (an 
 awful old middle-class harridan), follows; and the desk-and- 
 head incident mentioned above is brought about by her 
 seeing the (false) announcement of her old lover's death in 
 the paper. But she herself is consistently, perhaps exces- 
 sively, but it is fair to say not ridiculously, angelic; Danby 
 is a gentleman and a good fellow at heart; and of course, 
 after highly tragical possibilities, these good gifts triumph. 
 The greatest danger is threatened, and the actual happy 
 ending brought about, by an auxiliary plot, in which the 
 actors are the old lover (two old lovers indeed), his wife (a 
 beautiful featherhead, who has been Emilia's school-fellow 
 and dearest friend), and a wicked " Duke of C." 
 
 Even from this sketch the tolerably expert reader of 
 novels may discover where the weak points are likely to lie; 
 he wiU be a real expert if he anticipates the strong ones 
 without knowing the book. As was formerly noticed, the 
 dialogue is iU supplied with diction. The date of the 
 story is 1809: and the author had for that period a fairly 
 safe pattern in Miss Austen: but she does not use it at all, 
 nor does she make the lingo frankly that of her own day. 
 There are gross improbabilities — Mr. Danby, for instance 
 (who is represented as wrapped up in his business, and 
 exclusively occupied with the legal side of money matters 
 and the money side of the law), actually discharges, or 
 thinks he is discharging, hundreds and thousands of Mr. 
 Wyndham's liabilities by handing his own open cheques, 
 not to the creditors, not to any one representing them, but 
 to a country attorney who has succeeded him in the charge 
 of the debts and affairs, and whom he knows to be a sharp 
 practitioner and suspects to be a scoundrel. The inhuman
 
 THE FICTION OF YESTERDAY 311 
 
 uncle and the licentious duke aremere cardboard characters: 
 and the featherheaded Lisa talks and behaves like a 
 mixture of the sprightly heroines of Richardson (for 
 whom Lady Mary most righteously prescribed a sound 
 whipping) and the gushing heroines of Lady Morgan. 
 There is too much chaise-and-four and laudanum-bottle; 
 too much moralising; too much of a good many other 
 things. And yet, somehow or other, there are also things 
 very rarely to be found in any novel — even taking in 
 Bulwer and the serious part of Dickens — up to the date. 
 The scene between Danby and his mother, in the poky 
 house in Charlotte Street, when she discovers that he has 
 been giving a hundred-pound cheque to a young lady is 
 impressingly good: it is not absolutely unsuggestive of 
 what Thackeray was just doing, and really not far from 
 what Trollope was not for some years to do. There are 
 other passages which make one think of George Eliot, who 
 indeed might have been writing at the very time; there 
 are even faint and faltering suggestions of Ibsenic " duty 
 to ourselves." Mr. Danby (the characters regularly call 
 each other " Mr.," " Mrs.," and " Miss," even when they 
 are husbands and wives, daughters or nieces, and uncles or 
 fathers) is a miss, and not quite a miss, of a very striking, 
 original, possible, and even probable character. His 
 mother, with something more of the Dickensian type- 
 character, can stand by her unpleasant self, and came ten 
 years before " the Campaigner." Susan, her pleasanter 
 servant, is equally self-sufhcing, and came five years before 
 Peggotty, to whom she is not without resemblances.^ 
 
 But it is not so much the merits on the one hand, or the 
 defects on the other, of the book that deserve attention 
 
 ' Another novel of Mrs. Marsh-Caldwell's, Norman's Bridge, has 
 strong suggestions of John Halifax, and is ten years older.
 
 312 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 here and justify the place given to it: it is the general 
 " chip-the-shell " character. The shell is only being 
 chipped: large patches of it still hamper the chicken, which 
 is thus a half developed and half disfigured little animal. 
 All sorts of didactics, of Byronic-Bulwerish sentiment, of 
 conventionalities of various kinds, still hold their place; 
 the language, as we have said, is traditional and hardly 
 even that; and the characters are partly drawn from Noah's 
 Arks of various dates, partly from the stock company of 
 the toy theatre. On the other hand, besides the touches of 
 modernity already mentioned, and assisting them, there 
 is a great attention to " interiors." The writer has, for her 
 time, a more than promising senseof the incongruity between 
 Empire dress and furniture and the style of George H.: 
 and the shabbiness or actual squalor of Charlotte 
 Street and Chancery Lane show that she had either been 
 a very early and forward scholar of Dickens, or had dis- 
 covered the thing on her own account. Her age may 
 excuse some of the weak points, but it makes the presence 
 of the strong ones all the more remarkable: and it shows 
 all the more forcibly how the general influences which were 
 to produce the great central growth of Victorian novel 
 were at work, and at work almost violently, in the busi- 
 ness of pulling down the old as well as of building up 
 the new. 
 
 Of that new novel it is not necessary to say much more. 
 In the last fifty or sixty years of the nineteenth century it 
 did, as it seems to me, very great things — so great that, 
 putting poetry, which is supreme, aside, there is no division 
 of the world's literature within a time at all comparable to 
 its own which can much, if at aU, excel it. It did these 
 great things because partly of the inscrutable laws which 
 determined that a certain number of men and women of
 
 THE FICTION OF YESTERDAY 313 
 
 unusual power should exist, and should devote themselves 
 to it, partly of the less heroic-sounding fact that the 
 general appetite of other men and womenkind could make 
 it worth while for these persons of genius and talent not to 
 do something else. But even so, the examination, rightly 
 conducted, discovers more than a sufficient dose of nobility. 
 For the novel appeal is not, after all, to a mere blind animal 
 thirst for something that will pass and kill time, for some- 
 thing that will drug or flutter or amuse. Beyond and 
 above these things there is something else. The very 
 central cause and essence of it — most definitely and most 
 keenly felt by nobler spirits and cultivated intelligences, 
 but also dimly and unconsciously animating very ordinary 
 people — is the human delight in humanity — the pleasure 
 of seeing the men and women of long past ages living, 
 acting, and speaking as they might have done, those of 
 the present living, acting, speaking as they do — but in each 
 case with the portrayal not as a mere copy of particulars, 
 but influenced with that spirit of the universal which is the 
 secret and the charm of art. It is because the novels of 
 these years recognised and provided this pleasure in a 
 greater degree than those of the former period (except the 
 productions of a few masters) that they deserve the higher 
 position which has been here assigned them. If the novels 
 of any period, before or since or to come, have deserved, 
 may or shall deserve, a lower place — it is, and will be, 
 because of their comparative or positive neglect of the 
 combination of these conditions. Perhaps it is not easy 
 to see what new country there is for the novel to conquer. 
 But, as with other kinds of literature, there is practically 
 no limit to its powers of working its actual domains. In 
 the finest of its already existing examples it hardly 
 yields in accomplishment even to poetry; in that great
 
 314 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 secondary (if secondary) office of all Art — to redress the 
 apparent injustice, and console for the apparent unkind- 
 ness, of Nature — to serve as rest and refreshment between 
 those exactions of life which, though neither unjust nor 
 unkind, are burdensome, it has no equal among all the 
 kinds of Art itself.
 
 INDEX 
 
 Adam Bede, 249 
 
 Adams, VV., 259 
 
 Addison, 62, 63, 154, 253 
 
 Adeline Mowbray, 173 
 
 Aelfric, 5 
 
 Agalhos, 259 
 
 Ainsworth, H., 214 
 
 Alton Locke, 245, 246 
 
 Amadis, 30, 40, 41, 65 
 
 Amelia, 110-112, 118, 137 n. 
 
 Amis and Amillion, 23 
 
 Amory, Thomas, 140-143 
 
 Anabasis, The, 2 
 
 Anglo-Saxon, Romance in, 4-7 
 
 Anna, 173 
 
 Anna St. Ives, 167 
 
 Apollonins of Tyre, 2, 5 
 
 Apuleius, 1-3, 5 
 
 Arblay, Madame d', see Burney, F. 
 
 Arcadia, The, 33, 36-38, 66 
 
 A retina, 46 
 
 Arthour and Merlin, 16 
 
 Arthurian Legend, the, chap. i. 
 passim ; its romantic concentra- 
 tion, 15-17, 24-31 
 
 Ask Mamma, 193 n. 
 
 Ass, The Golden, 3, 5 
 
 Atlantis, The New, 133 
 
 Austen, Miss, 71, no, 155, chap. v. 
 passim, 230, 23S, 253, 298 sq. 
 
 Badman, Mr., 54 
 
 Bage, R., 164-166 
 
 Balzac, 35, 122, 186, 278-280 
 
 Banim, 224 
 
 Barchester Towers, 251 
 
 Barrett, E. S , 180, 181 
 
 Barry Lyndon, 231 
 
 " Barsetshire Novels," the, 250-253 
 
 Battle of the Books, The, 72 
 
 Beaconsfield, Lord, see Disraeli, B. 
 
 Beckford, 158, 159 
 
 Behn, Afra, 48, 50-53 
 
 Belinda, 182 
 
 Bennett, Mrs., 173 
 
 Bentivolio and Urania, 53 n. 
 
 Beowulf, 5, 6 
 
 Bergerac, C. de, 73 
 
 Berington, S., 134 
 
 Berkeley, 134 n. 
 
 Beniers, Lord, 30 
 
 Bertrams, The, 252 w. 
 
 Beryn, The Tale of, 31 
 
 Besant, Sir W., 288-290 
 
 Betsy Thoughtless, 136-138 
 
 Bevis of Hampton, 22 
 
 Black, VV., 287-288 
 
 Blackmore, R. D., 274, 284-2S6 
 
 Blair, 156 
 
 Borrow, George, 142, 255 
 
 Boyle, Roger, Lord Broghill and 
 
 Earl of Orrery, 44-46 
 Brambletye House, 208, 214 
 Bronte, Charlotte, 199, 243; Emily 
 
 and Anne, 243 
 Brooke, H., 146 
 Brunetiere, M., 122 
 Brunton, Mrs., 177 
 Bulwer, Sir E. B. Lytton- (ist 
 
 Lord Lytton], 216-218, 241 
 Buncle, The I ife of John, 140-143 
 Bunyan, 53-58, 190 
 Burney, F., 150-155, 190, 263 
 Byrne, Mrs., 173, i74 
 Byron, 96, 161, 172 
 
 Caleb Williams, 168 
 
 Cambridge Freshman, The, 289 
 
 Camilla, 151, 
 
 Canterbury Tales (the Misses 
 
 Lee's), 174 
 Can You Forgive Her ? 252 n. 
 Captain Singleton, 65-71 
 Castle of Otranto, The, 155-157 
 Catherine, 231 
 Catriona, 295 
 Caxtons, The, 218 
 Cecilia, 151 
 
 Chaniier, Captain, 224 
 Charles O'M alley, 242 
 " Charlotte Elizabeth," 259 
 Chateaubriand, 152 
 Children of the Abbey, The, 176 
 Chrestien de Troyes, 15 
 
 315
 
 3i6 
 
 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 Chronicles of Carlingford, The, 2 86 
 
 Chrysal, 146 
 
 Circulating libraries, effort of, 263- 
 
 265 
 Clarissa, 94-97 
 Clive, Mrs. A., 256 
 Cloister and the Hearth, The, 39, 
 
 249 
 Coleridge, 56 
 Collins, Wilkie, 290-291 
 Colonel Jack, 65-71 
 Complaint of Dear, The, 6 
 Congreve, 61 
 
 Convent of Grey Penitents, The, 175 
 Coventry', F. 145 
 
 " Coverley Papers," the, 62, 63, 154 
 Craik, Mrs., 255, 286 
 Cranford, 253 
 Cripps the Carrier, 285 
 Crisp, " Daddy," 153 
 Croker, Crofton, 224 
 Croly, 225 
 Crotchet Castle, 222 
 Crowe, Mrs., 224 
 Crovvne, John, 46, 47 
 Croxall, Dr., 135 
 Cumberland, R., 163 
 CyropcBdia, The, 2 
 
 Dante, 27 
 
 David Simple, 138 
 
 Defoe, 57, 5o, 64-72, 88, 190 
 
 Dickens, 122, 144, 212, 225-229, 
 
 243, 267, 268, 278-280, 308 
 Diderot, 97 
 Discipline, 177 
 Disraeli, B., 215, 216 
 Divina Commedia, The, 27, 28 
 Dumas, 202, 208 
 Dunlop, 9, 39 
 
 Edgeworth, Miss, 155, 178, 181-184, 
 
 210 n. 
 Ellis, G., Early English Romances, 
 
 9,22,23 
 Emare, 23 
 Emilia Wyndham, 29, 262, 263, 309- 
 
 312 
 Emma, 198 
 
 English Rogue, The, 48-50 
 Esmond, 232, 246, 293 
 Euphues, 33-35, 66 
 Eustathius, 2 
 Evans, Mary Ann {" George Eliot "), 
 
 249-250, 274 
 Evelina, 135, 150 sr/. 
 
 Fair Quaker of Deal, The, iiy 
 Ferdinand Count Fathom, 120, 121 
 Ferrier, Miss, 177, 210 n. 
 Fielding, H., 8, 55, 77, 78, 80, 98- 
 
 115, 118, 125, 149, 163, 190, 203, 
 
 234, 29859. 
 Fielding, S., 138 
 Florence of Rome, 23 
 Florice and Blancheflour, 22 
 Fool of Quality, The, 34, 146 
 Ford, Emmanuel, 41-44 
 Fortunes of Nigel, The, 208 
 Frank, 183 
 Frank Fairlegh, 257 
 Frank Mildmay, 117, 219 
 
 Gait, 224 
 
 Gamekeeper at Hotne, The, 292 
 
 Gaskell, Mrs., 253, 254 
 
 Gawain and the Green Knight, 23,24 
 
 Geoffrey of Monmouth, 17, 
 
 " George Eliot," see Evans, M. A. 
 
 Gilpin, 162 
 
 Glascock, Capt., 224 
 
 Godwin, W., 167-170, 203 
 
 Goldsmith, 147-149, 234 
 
 Gore, Mrs., 224 
 
 Graves, Rev. R., 139, 143, 144 
 
 Gray, 162 
 
 Great Hoggarty Diamond, The, 231 
 
 Green, Sarah, 179 
 
 Grey, Mr. W. W., 36 
 
 Gryll Grange, 222 
 
 Guadentio di Lucca, 134 
 
 Gulliver's Travels, 72-75 
 
 Guy Livingstone, 257 
 
 Guy of Warwick, 22 
 
 Hagiology, its effect on Romance, 
 
 3,4 
 Hamilton, Anthony, 215 
 Hardy, Mr., 274 sq. 
 Haunted and the Haunters, The, 217 
 Havelok the Dane, 12, 13, 14 
 Haywood, Eliza, 136-138 
 Hazlitt, 140 
 Head, R., 48-50. 
 Heir of Redely ffe. The, 261 
 Heliodorus, 2 
 
 Henley, Mr. W. E., 284, 294 
 Henrietta Temple, 215 
 Henry, 163 
 
 Hereward the Wake, 247 
 Hermsprong, 165 
 Herodotus, i 
 Heroine, The, 180, 181
 
 INDEX 
 
 3^7 
 
 Holcroft, T., i66, 167 
 
 Holy War, Tlic, 55 
 
 Hook, Theodore, 212, 213, 226, 230, 
 
 252, 297, 302 
 Hope, 225 
 Horn, King, 13 
 Humphry Clinker, 123-125 
 Huut, Leigh, 212, 226 
 Hypatia, 246, 293 
 
 Idalia, 136 
 
 Ida of Athens, 178-180 
 
 Iliad, The, 1 
 
 " Imitation" (the Greek = Fiction), i 
 
 lachbald, Mrs., 170, 171 
 
 Incognita, 61 
 
 Ingelo, N., 53 n. 
 
 Ipomydon, 23 
 
 Isle of Pines, The, 58-61, 67 
 
 Italian, The, 161 
 
 It is Never too Late to Mend, 249 
 
 Ixion, 215 
 
 Jack Wilton, 38, 39 
 
 Jacob Faithful, 220 
 
 James, G. P. R., 214 
 
 Jane Eyre, 243 
 
 Jefferies,, R., 292, 293 
 
 Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy, 136-138 
 
 John Buncle, 140-143 
 
 John Inglesant, 292 
 
 Johnson, Dr., 8, 56, 92, no, 139, 
 
 147, 234 
 Johnstone, C, 14b 
 Jonathan Wild, 104, 105 
 " Jorrocks," Mr., 193 n., 245 n., 257 
 Joseph Andrews, 98-104 
 Journey from This World to the Next, 
 
 A, 99 
 
 Kate Coventry, 257 
 
 Kingsley, C, 244-24S, 257, 262, 263 
 
 Kingsley, H., 256 
 
 King's Own, The, 220 
 
 Kirkman, F., 48-50 
 
 " Lady Mary " (Wortley-Montagu), 
 
 93, 149 
 Lady Susan, 199 
 
 Lancelot {of the Laik), the Scots, 17 
 Last Chronicle of Bar set, The, 252 
 Lawrence, G. A., 257 
 Layamon, 17 
 Lee, the Misses, 174, 203 
 " L. E. L.," 224 
 
 Lennox, Mrs., 139 
 
 Leoline and Sydanis, 43 
 
 Letter-form in novels, 89-91 
 
 Lever, C, 234, 241, 242, 268 
 
 Lewis, M. G., 159 
 
 Libertine, The, 173 
 
 Livy, 2 
 
 Lockhart, 297 
 
 London, 294 
 
 Longus, 2 
 
 Lorna Doone, 284, 293 
 
 Lucian, 2, 3 
 
 Lybius Discontis, 17, 21, 22 
 
 Lydia, 139-140 
 
 Lyly, 33-35 
 
 Lytton, see Bulwer 
 
 Macaulay, 152 
 
 Macdonald, George, 255 
 
 Macfarlane, C, 307 
 
 Mackenzie, Henry, 171, 172, 234 sq. 
 
 Mackenzie, Sir George, 46 
 
 Malory, 8, 14-17, 24-31 
 
 Man as He Is, 165 
 
 Manley, Mrs., 133 
 
 Man of Feeling, The, 171 
 
 Mansfield Park, 197 
 
 Map, W., II 
 
 Marianne (Marivaux), 84, 87 
 
 Marivaux, 84, 87, 170 
 
 Marryat, Captain, 218-221 
 
 Marsh, Mrs., 239, 262, 263, 305 
 
 Martineau, Mrs., 224 
 
 Marv Barton, 253, 254 
 
 Maturin, C. R., 178, 184-186 
 
 Melincourt, 223 
 
 Melmoth the Wanderer, 185, 186 
 
 Melville, Mr. L., 158 n. 
 
 Memoirs of a Cavalier, 65-71 
 
 Meredith, Mr. George, 8, 108, 255, 
 
 274-284 
 Merlin, 16 
 Michelet, 305, 306 
 Mill on the Floss, The, 249 
 Misfortunes of Elphin, The, 222 
 Mr. Midshipman Easy, 220 
 Mr. Verdant Green, 256, 289 
 Mrs. Veal, 70 
 Moll Flanders, 65-71, 87 
 Monk, The, 159 
 Montelion, 42, 43 
 Moore, Dr. John, 171, 172 
 Morgan, Lady, 177-179 
 Morier, 225 
 
 Morley of Blackburn, Lord, 205, 301 
 Morris, W., 295, 296
 
 3i8 
 
 THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 Morte d'ArUmr, the alliterative, 16. 
 the metrical, 17; IMalory's, 14-17 
 
 24-31 
 Mosse, Henrietta, 175, 176 
 Mount Henneth, 166 
 Mysteries of Udolpho, The, 159 sq. 
 
 Nash, T., 38, 39 
 
 Nature and Art, 170 
 
 Neville, H., 58-61 
 
 Nightnutre Abbey, 223 
 
 No Name, 291 
 
 North and South, 254, 255 
 
 Northanger Abbey, 155, 179, 191, 193- 
 
 195 
 Novelist, The, 135 
 AToufiWa, the Italian, influence of, 3 1 sg. 
 
 Oceana, 73 
 
 Odyssey, The, i 
 
 Old English Baron, The, 157 
 
 Old Manor House, The, 174 
 
 Oliphant, Mrs., 255, 274, 286 
 
 Opie, Mrs., 173 
 
 Ordeal of Richard Feverel, The, 255 
 
 Ortnond, 183 
 
 Ornatus and Artesia, 43, 44 
 
 Oroonoko, 51 
 
 " Ouida," 258 
 
 Ovid, 2 
 
 Paget, F., 260 
 
 Palace of Pleasure, Painter's, 33 
 
 Paltock, R., 145 
 
 Pamela, 82-93, 99-101 
 
 Pandion and Amphigeneia, 44, 46 
 
 Paris, M. Gaston, 15 
 
 Parismus and Parismenus, 41, 42, 66 
 
 Parthcnissa, 44, 45 
 
 Paul Ferroll, 256 
 
 Peacocli, T. L., 221-223 
 
 Peep at Our Ancestors, 175, 176, 204, 
 
 205 
 Pendennis, 240 
 Peregrine Pickle, 119, 120 
 Persuasion, 199 
 Peter Simple, 220 
 Peter Wilkins, 145 
 Petronius, i, 2 
 Phantasies, 255 
 Pharonnida, 43 
 
 Pickwick Papers, The, 225 s?., 308 
 Pilgrim's Progress, The, 53-58, 65 
 Plato. I, 56 
 Poe, Edgar, 242 n. 
 Polite Conversation (Swift's), 73-75 
 
 Pompey the Little, 145 
 , I Porter, Miss, 174, 203 
 I Pride and Prejudice, 195-197 
 I Proud King, The, 23 
 f Publication, system of, 266-269 
 
 \Queenhoo Hall, 206 
 \Quixote, The Female, 139 
 Quixote, The Spiritual, 139 
 
 Rabelais, 127, 140 
 
 Radcliffe, Mrs., 159-163, 204, 205 
 I Raleigh, Professor Sir Walter, 39, 47, 
 
 53 n., 61, 157 
 j Rasselas, 34, 147 
 ! Reade, C., 248, 249, 274 
 'Recess, The, 174 
 
 Reeve, Clara, 157 
 
 Rice, James, 288, 289 
 
 Richard Cceur de Lion, 22 
 
 Richardson, 8, 77, 82-97, 99-103, 125, 
 137 n., 190, 263 
 
 Ritson, 9 
 
 Robinson Crusoe, 64-72 
 
 Robinson, Emma ( ?), 307 
 [Roche, R. M., 176 
 \ Roderick Random, 117-119 
 
 Romance, ch. i. passim; its con- 
 nection with the "Saint's Life," 
 j 3 ; not completely separable from 
 I novel, 8; heroic, 39-48 
 I Romance Readers and Romance 
 Writers, 179 
 
 Romola, 249 
 I " Rosa Matilda," 174 
 ' Roxana, 65-71 
 Ruin, The, 6 
 \Ruth, 253, 254 
 
 \St. Irvyne, 224 
 
 \St. I eon, 169 
 
 ,St. Ronan's Well, 206 
 Sayings and Doings, 212, 213 
 " S. G.," see Green, Sarah 
 Scott, Michael, 225 
 Scott, Sir W., 71, no, 116, 122, 
 124, 144, 161, 174. 178, ch. V. 
 passim, 214, 230, 233, 234, 238, 
 298 sq. 
 Sense and Sensibility, 197 
 Sentimental Journey, A, 127-132 
 Seven Wise Masters, The, 22 
 Sewrll, Miss, 260, 261 
 Shabby Genteel Story, A, 231 
 Shadow of the Cross, The, 259 
 Shadwell, Charles, 117
 
 INDEX 
 
 319 
 
 Shebbearp, 139, 140 
 Shelley, 22;^. 224 
 Sheridan, Frances, 143 
 Sherwood, Mrs., 259 
 Shirley, 255 
 
 Shortest Way with the Dissenters, 70 
 Simple Story, A, 170 
 Sir Amadas, 23 
 Sir Charles Grandison, 94-95 
 Sir Eslamour, 23 
 
 Sir Eger, Sir Grame, and Sir Gray- 
 steel, 23 
 Sir John Chiverton, 208 
 Sir Isumbras, 23 
 
 Sir Lancelot Greaves, 117, 121, 122 
 Sir I aunfal, 23 
 Sir Offeo, 23 
 Sir Triamond, 23 
 Sketches by Boz, 225 
 Smart, Capt. H., 258 
 Smedley, Frank, 257 
 Smith, Charlotte, 174 
 Smith, Horace, 214 
 Smollett, 78, 79, 81, 115-126, 190, 
 
 225, 226, 234 
 Socrates, 2 
 
 Spiritual Quixote, The, 139, 143, 144 
 Squire of Low Degree, The, 23 
 Stacl, Mme. de, 199 
 Steele, 62, 63 
 Stendhal, 305, 306 
 Sterne, 79-81, 126-132, 190 
 Stevenson, R. L., 284, 293-295 
 Strange Story, A, 217 
 Stuart, Lady L., 209 
 Surtees, R., 245 n., 252, 256 
 -5wift, 72-75 
 Sydney Biddulph, 143 
 
 Tale of a Tub, A, 72, 104 
 
 Ten Thousand a Year, 225 
 
 Tennyson, 17, 29 
 
 Terror-Novel, the, 159 sq. 
 
 Thackeray. 54, 104, no, 116, 139, 
 190, 202, 208, 212, 229-235, 240, 
 241, 243, 262, 267, 268, 278, 297 
 sq., 308 
 
 Thaddeus of Warsaw, 174, 203 
 
 Thorns, 298 
 
 Tolstoi, Count, 8, 108 
 
 Tom and Jerry, 256 
 
 Tom Brown's Schooldays, 256, 258 
 
 To7n Cringle's Log, 225 
 
 Tom Jones, 105-111, 193 
 
 Tourguenief, 12 
 
 " Tractarian " Novel, the, 259 
 
 Treasure Island, 294 
 
 Tristram Shandy, 127-132 
 
 Tristram story, the, 14 
 
 Trollope, Anthony, 250-253, 257, 
 
 274, 293 n. 
 Trollope, Mrs., 224, 239 
 Two Years Ago, 247 
 
 Unfortunate Traveller, The, 38, 39 
 Urania, 44 
 Utopia, 75 
 
 Vanity Fair, 231 sq., 240 
 
 Vathek, 158, 159, 186 
 
 Venetia, 215 
 
 Vicar of Wakefield, The, 147, 148 
 
 Virgil, 2 
 
 Vision of St. Paul, The, 3, 4 
 
 Voyage Round the World, 65 
 
 Wace, 17 
 
 Walpole, H., 109, I55-I57, I59. 203, 
 
 301, 304 
 Wanderer, The, 151 
 Warden, The, 251 
 Ward's Catalogue of Romances, g 
 Warren, S., 225 
 Water Babies, The, 247 
 Watsons, The, 199 
 Waverley, 202 sq. 
 Weber, 9 
 
 Well at the World's End, 296 
 Westward Ho ! 246, 247 
 Whvte-Melville, G. J., 257 
 Wild Irish Girl, The, 178 
 Wilkinson, Sarah, 175 
 William of Palerne, 23 
 Wortley-Montagu, Lady M., see 
 
 " Lady Mary " 
 Wroth, Lady Mary, 44 
 Wuthering Heights, 243 
 
 Xenophon, 2 
 
 Yeast, 245, 246 
 Yonge, Miss, 260-262 
 Ywain and Gawain, 17-21 
 
 Zastrozzi, 224 
 Zeluco, 172
 
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