No More Learning

A scene of crude theatricality which mars the play Masks and
Faces recurs in the novel Peg Woffington; but, apart from that
scene, both make skilful use of an old theme, the mingled glamour
and pathos in the double life of the stage queen. Christie Johnstone
(1853) owes much to Maria Edgeworth, not only in its representation
of the ennui of the leisured lord Ipsden, but, also, in the delinea-
tion of the markedly individual Scots fishing village, Newhaven.
Christie Johnstone, in her simplicity, devotion and heroism, is the
forerunner of other humbly born heroines—Mercy Vint, in Griffith
Gaunt (1866), and Jael Dence, in Put Yourself in his Place (1870).
In characters of this type, Reade is evidently breaking with conven-
tional romance and reacting against the satirical tone of Thackeray's
realism and the heroic challenge of Carlyle. The other novels of


## p. 426 (#442) ############################################

426
[CH.
Lesser Novelists
manners have a background more familiar in this kind of fiction,
that of English squirearchy. Love me Little, Love me Long (1859),
which gives the earlier history of characters in Hard Cash
(1863), has a brilliantly conceived portrait of an elderly egotist,
Mrs Bazalgette, going about with premeditated selfishness to
have her own way. Her niece, Lucy Fountain, like the Kate
Peyton of Griffith Gaunt and the Philippa Chester of The Wander-
ing Heir (1872), is a girl of graceful person, quick resource, high
spirit and incalculable feminine pride, such as Meredith was after-
wards to elaborate in Rose Jocelyn. In Griffith Gaunt, Reade
came nigh to producing a masterpiece; the earlier part, describing
the courtship of the young Cumberland girl Kate Peyton, has the
brilliance and fineness of style to which Reade could always
modulate his strength in his portraits of women. In this part
are seen the first phases of jealousy; later comes the masterly
diagnosis in dramatic, not analytic, fashion of the moods and
devices of that malignant passion. The flaw in the book was
indicated by Swinburne; the moving and pathetic development
follows from a criminal and incredible act, the bigamous marriage
of Gaunt with Mercy Vint, through envy of a rustic rival. The
inadmissible plot beneath all the fine workmanship affects us
like similar things in the plays of John Ford. The doctrine of
the celibate priesthood, a motif repeated from The Cloister and
the Hearth (1861), adds a complicating thread to the web of
intrigue; the tractarians had forced the subject to the forefront
of controversy, and Kingsley had already raised his protest in
The Saint's Tragedy in 1848. A Terrible Temptation (1871) is
altogether coarser in fibre than the novels hitherto named;
lurid and sensational elements, a demi-mondaine turned roadside
preacher, a kidnapping, asylum horrors and the like, overbear the
quieter and more gracious figure of lady Bassett. Nevertheless,
it is a book of power, and it anticipates some important
developments of the novel; it is a study of a strain of wild
blood handing on hereditary qualities of ferocity and brutality.
The Wandering Heir, which makes use of the murder and
peerage trials of the Annesley claimant in 1743, is notable for
a passage descriptive of Irish manners in the early eighteenth
century. The passage is based largely on Swift's The Journal of a
Modern Lady, and, on a smaller scale, shows the same power as
The Cloister and the Hearth of weaving scattered material into
a living picture of an unfamiliar period. A charge of plagiar-
ism from Swift, Reade repudiated angrily in a reply appended to


## p. 427 (#443) ############################################

XIII]
Novels based on Documents
427
6
a later edition; by what a mass and diversity of reading his
pictures are supported may be gathered from that document.
This was but one of numerous occasions on which Reade's
notions of literary property brought him under suspicion, and his
litigious and combative disposition often turned suspicion into
active enmity.
Reade was deeply in sympathy with the impulse towards realism
which was at work in fiction in the middle of the century.
Whereas Trollope thought a kind of mental daguerreotype' the
ideal manner of presenting truth, Reade put his trust in immense
accumulations of reports of actual events, by means of which
he supported his boast, that, when he spoke of fact, he was ‘upon
oath. ' In A Terrible Temptation, he describes his method of
collecting and indexing his material, a task upon which, at one
period, he spent five hours a day. The method was, of course,
that adopted later by Zola; the differences of temper between the
two writers are explained, to some extent, by the fact that Reade
comes before, and Zola after, the scientific revolution.
Reade's documentary novels are not all of one kind; there are,
first, those in which he makes use of his knowledge, Defoe-like in
its intimacy, of out-of-the-way trades and occupations; such are
The Autobiography of a Thief (1858), Jack of all Trades (1858)
and A Hero and a Martyr (1874). Jack of all Trades includes a
novel episode of picaresque, describing, with graphic force, the life of
a keeper of a murderous performing elephant. Secondly, there
are stories of philanthropic purpose; in these, Reade sweeps aside
Godwin's theories and Lytton's sentiment, replacing them by fact
irrefutably established and by direct denunciation. The ghastly
cranks and collars and jackets of It is never too late to mend
were things he had seen in the gaols of Durham, Oxford and
Reading, or knew by report in the trial of lieutenant Austin at
Birmingham in 1855. He could cite precedent for every single
horror of the asylum scenes in Hard Cash; on all the other
abuses which he attacked—ship-knacking' in Foul Play,
' rattening'in Put Yourself in his Place, insanitary village
life in A Woman Hater (1877)he wrote as an authority on
scandals flagrant at the moment, not, as sometimes happened in
the case of Dickens, about those of a past day. Pitiless, insistent
hammering at the social conscience is the method of these novels,
which remind us, at times of Victor Hugo, at times of Uncle
Tom's Cabin and, at times, of Eugène Sue's Mystères de
Paris. Reade's habit of challenging attention by capitals,


## p. 428 (#444) ############################################

428
[ch.
Lesser Novelists
dashes, short emphatic paragraphs, changes of type and other
Sternean oddities, accentuates the general impression of urgency,
This is a small thing in comparison with the gift, exemplified in
most of these novels, of sustained and absorbing narrative. The
homeward voyage of the ‘Agra,' escaping pirates and the tornado
to be wrecked amid Hugo-like scenes on the northern coast of
France; the rescue of Harvie and Dodd from the burning asylum;
the bursting of the reservoir in the Ousely valley : these and
other scenes are depicted with a power which makes the reader
a participant in the event, sets the pulse throbbing faster and
keeps the mind tense with solicitude for the outcome. Hugo's
headlong rhetorical outpouring is different in kind; Reade's
prose is concentrated, masterful, deliberate and, at the highest
pitch of excitement, can bear the closest scrutiny of detail. The
humorous English mind does not often produce pure narrative
of action ; on Reade's own scale, he has no competitor.
The documentary method has its most triumphant justification,
however, in the historical novel The Cloister and the Hearth,
enlarged from the slight and propitious love-story A Good Fight,
which appeared in Once a Week in 1859. This was Reade's only
incursion into the middle ages; the remoteness of the scene
relieves his intense humanity from the chafing of its fiery yoke-
fellow in the propagandist novels-indignation. His imagination
—
was inspired and steadied by the volume and worth of his documents,
the Colloquies and Compendium Vitae of Erasmus, the satires
of Gringoire, the writings of Froissart and Luther, Liber Vaga-
torum and other beggar books, monkish chronicles, jest books,
medieval encyclopaedias of medicine, astrology and the like.
He mounts above this mass of learning to view as from a peak
the dawn of the renascence over medieval Europe; the survey gives
historic significance to the simple closing phrase, Haec est parva
domus natus qua magnus Erasmus. In two points, in especial,
Reade's judgment and prevision are shown: first, in the creation
of Gerard the supposed father of Erasmus to fill the rôle of pro-
tagonist, and, secondly, in seizing upon the rich opportunity afforded
by the wandering scholar and soldier of the middle ages. The
scenes which are laid in taverns, monasteries, churches, studios,
palaces, above all upon the road itself, are not more various than
the characters-ruffians, beggars, freebooters, burgomasters, cam-
paigners, doctors, penitents, priests of loose or of grave behaviour,
artists, printers, bishops and dignitaries higher still in church
and state : each is portrayed with appropriate dialect and garb


## p. 429 (#445) ############################################

X11]
The Cloister and the Hearth
429
and custom, none more effectively than the master-beggar Cul de
Jatte; not one, however insignificant, is feebly imagined or care-
lessly drawn. What else might have been mere brilliant picaresque
gains unity from the large theme of the book, the conflict between
ecclesiastical system and human passion, in which the apparent is
not the real victor—a theme at once symbolic of the whole age
and of dramatic personal concern to Gerard and Margaret. These
characters and the Burgundian Denys are drawn with the bold
simplicity of outline, the freedom from subtlety, which befit the
epic scale; at the same time, their experience never lifts them
out of reach of common human sympathy. The endurance of
Margaret's passion dominates and ennobles all other impressions ;
the mind is drawn from every incident to view its effect upon her
fortunes in Holland. The plain prose of the philanthropic novels
is here coloured and varied and modulated to the expression of
every mood of courage, despair, pathos, chagrin, humour, poetic
exultation, as the narrative in its course gives occasion. Attempts
to classify The Cloister and the Hearth fail, because, in spacious-
ness of design and many-sidedness of interest, in range of know-
ledge, in fertility of creation, in narrative art and in emotional
power, the book is unique; the age must be rich indeed which can
afford to consider the author of The Cloister and the Hearth
a minor novelist.
The habit of minor novelists of inventing a kind of formula or
pattern according to which the production of scores or even
centuries of novels could go on almost automatically makes it
permissible to group the remaining names under some few lines
of general development. One of the things which best reveal the
practice of the individual writer and the trend of fiction at large
is the treatment of setting and scene. The earliest of those to be
considered here as making distinctive use of locality is Mary
Russell Mitford. She is rather an essayist than a novelist, her
one regular novel, Atherton (1854), a slight tale of love and a
missing legatee, being of small account. Her voluminous gossipy
letters (which better deserve the designation Recollections of a
Literary Life than the anthology of chosen passages and comments
to which she gave that title in 1852) reveal some significant
preferences; such as those for Cowley, Lamb, Hazlitt, Gilbert
White of Selborne, the simpler part of Wordsworth, Steele (whom
she thought worth twenty Addisons) and 'Geoffrey Crayon,' whose
Sketch Book appeared in 1820. Her fame is established by Our
.


## p. 430 (#446) ############################################

430
[CH.
Lesser Novelists
1
1
1
Village, begun in The Lady's Magazine (1819), published in five
volumes between 1824 and 1832. The scene was Three Mile
Cross, where she supported her reprobate father for the last
twenty years of his life; the village is near Reading, the county
town of her Belford Regis (1835). Her inmost desire was to write
ambitious tragedies in verse such as her Rienzi (1828); happily,
the art of Jane Austen taught her to work upon a miniature scale.
She brushes lightly over her small and rather beggarly world ; she
does not falsify it, nevertheless its dullness and insipidity dis-
appear; places, people, especially children, seasons, sports,
atmosphere are touched into bright and graceful animation. Our
Village evokes the spirit of place through its scene; Cranford,
through delicate subtleties of characterisation. An instinctive
sense of fitness rules in the apparently spontaneous prose; its
lightness and vivacity and unforced humour are deceptive; they
are, in fact, the outcome of strict discipline, as may be seen from
a comparison with the more unstudied letters.
Worthy of notice is a work of very different order, Chronicles
of Dartmoor (1866), by Mrs Marsh Caldwell, who was a pioneer
with Catherine Crowe of the novel of the domestic interior. The
scene of Chronicles is a village 'deeper in the moor than Chagford. '
Though it does not occupy a very large portion of the book, the
delineation of the barbaric life of this backwater, untouched by
any modern influence, the characters deep-grained by superstition
and long-standing irrational custom, is a remarkable anticipation
of one aspect of the Wessex novels.
Trollope's Barchester was fruitful in suggestion to other
novelists. Mrs Henry Wood's Helstonleigh, a re-creation of
Worcester, is on a smaller scale; the cloisters and the choir-boys,
Bywater and the rest of them, help out many of her stories. The
setting is described with a keener vision in Margaret Oliphant
Oliphant's Chronicles of Carlingford, one of which, Miss
Marjoribanks (1866), depicts with engaging humour the campaign
of an ambitious young girl for social leadership. Mrs Oliphant
gave the surest proof of genius in Salem Chapel (1863), the
second of the Carlingford series. The sensational part of the
story is naught; the penetrating, not altogether satirical, de-
lineation of the dissenting chapel is masterly; the tyranny of
an antiquated fashion of piety; the stuffy moral atmosphere;
the intolerance of the congregation for culture and thought; the
singular modes of entertaining; the revulsion of the young
pastor from the sordid and contracted world into which he is


## p. 431 (#447) ############################################

6
XIII] Margaret Oliphant
431
thrown-all this is confirmed in the works, at a later date, of
Mark Rutherford,' closest of all observers of the dissidence
of dissent. The butterman Tozer and the pastor's heroic little
mother M. Irs Vincent might pass unchallenged from the pages of
Salem Chapel to those of The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford
(1881).
Another region which Mrs Oliphant's art explored was the
unseen world. In A Beleaguered City (1880), with eerie imagina-
tive power she depicted the city of Semur in the department of
the Haute Bourgogne, ‘emptied of its folk' by a visitation of the
spirits of the dead, who move about in the streets with a
disconcerting purposefulness not to be fathomed by the grosser
intellects of men. A Little Pilgrim in the Unseen (1882) and other
books illustrate, again, this control of the springs of mystery,
compared with which Lytton's rosicrucianism seems frigid and
mechanical. Setting and place serve Mrs Oliphant well, again, in
her stories of her native land, which follow in the established
tradition of Mrs Hamilton, Susan Ferrier, Galt and Moir. We
pass from the mere facile inventiveness of Whiteladies (1876) or
The Cuckoo in the Nest (1892) (their scenes being laid in England)
to people whose dialect, manners and affections derive from roots
deep fixed in their native soil, in the Scots stories which begin
with Margaret Maitland in 1849. One of the best of these stories,
Kirsteen (1890), which paints the dour pride and passion of a
Douglas, the silent affection, quick temper and humorous practi-
cality of the daughter Kirsteen and the fidelity of the old retainer
Margaret, gives a living picture of an Argyllshire interior. To the
mere volume and miscellaneous nature of her work, undertaken,
somewbat apathetically, as the plaintive Autobiography (1899)
shows, in a heroic effort to provide for a family fated to disaster,
a
must be set down Mrs Oliphant's failure to win a place nearer to
George Eliot and Mrs Gaskell.
Other writers, familiar by their birth with various types of
Scots character and dialect, are George Macdonald and William
Black, early members of the 'kail-yard’ school. The county of
Macdonald's birth, Aberdeenshire, his fixed belief in human and
divine communion, his transition from Calvinism to a less for-
bidding religious faith and his wide reading in writers such as
Crashaw, Boehme, Wordsworth and others of a mystical trend in
their interpretation of nature, are the shaping influences upon his
work. The farmers, doctors, shepherds and ministers of the Moray
country he portrays with most sureness, and especially simple


## p. 432 (#448) ############################################

432
[CH.
Lesser Novelists
6
souls such as David and Margaret Elginbrod, deeply taught in
scriptural wisdom, and given to an intense practice of piety.
Characterisation is freer and more objective than is usual with
Macdonald in Robert Falconer (1868). The sensational elements
with which his stories are eked out are what Swinburne called
'electrified stupidity. ' His powers are best revealed in his various
fairy tales, in which he shows a fertile invention and a deft poetical
handling of the inverted causes and sequences and proportions
of that world. Phantastes (1858), much influenced by Novalis,
presents, in allegory, a mode of escape from the material world,
by means of mystical powers in nature ; as, in another way, does
,
a later romance, Lilith (1895).
William Black's first popular novel, A Daughter of Heth
(1871), has its setting in the Ayrshire country; but his wont is to
picture the western islands. He makes full use of the properties,
highland pride and feuds, pipers, legends, ballads and super-
stitions, the trusted and officious old retainer and dialect; to all
this he imparts a personal quality by two rather novel practices.
First, he develops the description, in a quasi-poetical style, of
the sky and heather and sea of the Hebrides into a separate art,
his skill in which won for him a standing among artists; twelve of
the most famous illustrators of the day contributed to Macleod of
Dare (1878). He afterwards employed this gift in the composition
of books such as The Strange Adventures of a Phaeton (1872), a
blend of guide book and novel; an epidemic of word-painting in
fiction resulted from his success. A second device which Black
elaborated (Susan Ferrier had already hit upon it) was the clash
of temperaments of widely differing racial types. The Gaelic
Macleod of Dare, moody, passionate, foredoomed, should have
shown vividly in contrast with the actress Gertrude White, city-
born and bred. More successful, perhaps because it retains some
actual memories of youth, is the contrast between the boisterous
whaup' and his charming French cousin Catherine Cassilis in
A Daughter of Heth; but, here and everywhere, Black's vision is
impeded by romantic sentiment.
It is only necessary to indicate wider territorial annexations,
such as those made in Basil Hall's Schloss Hainfeld (1836), a tale
of Styria, and colonel Meadows Taylor's Confessions of a Thug
(1839); Lytton, Reade and Trollope send their heroes—fore-
runners of imperialism-to the antipodes; the best use of this
opportunity is made by Henry Kingsley in his Geoffrey Hamlyn
(1859) and other Australian books, in which, in his meandering,


## p. 433 (#449) ############################################

x111] Henry Kingsley Du Maurier
433
anecdotal fashion, he paints the life of the new colony, its vast
rolling plains, the industry of the sheep-run, perils from bush-
rangers, aborigines, drought, forest fires and other dangers, which
he knew by first-hand experience. The strain of adventure
appears again in the Crimean scenes of Ravenshoe (1862). This
latter book and the Australian tales are all deeply scored by
the influence of Arnold of Rugby ; but Henry Kingsley was more
devoted to an old aristocratic ideal. The intrigue in his stories
is rather apt to depend upon mysterious villainies which result
in acts of overstrained quixotry, the author too often intervenes
to tell how sad a fate menaces his hero. Nevertheless, as in a
.
medieval romance, the fine spirit of courtesy and chivalry shines
out. Lord Charles Barty in Austin Elliot (1863) and lord
Saltire in Ravenshoe are 'very parfit gentle knights'; the latter
especially illustrates Kingsley's veneration for manners, whether
they come of hereditary right, or whether they are the fine flower
of character. A pleasing irresponsible humour, a mellow wisdom
and an immense fund of affection for men and animals are other
elements which blend in the individual quality of Henry Kingsley's
books.
The province which George Louis Palmella Busson Du Maurier
added in his best known novel Trilby (1894) was of a different
kind; the book is our English Scènes de la Vie de Bohème,
appropriate omissions being made; it fails in the attempt to
delineate the artist of genius. As in this writer's other novels,
Peter Ibbetson (1891) and The Martian (1896), the story is helped
out by fanciful occultism and by melodrama which is stark stagi-
ness. The charm of each of the books is found in the chasse des
souvenirs d'enfance, in the pictures of schools and studios at Passy,
Paris and Antwerp, and of early comradeships with Whistler,
Poynter, Lamont and the rest; Taffy in Trilby is one of the great
Victorian sentimental characters. The writing is in the kindlier
vein of Thackeray; the colloquial idiom and the confidential atti-
tude are other points of resemblance. The History of the Jack
Sprats is a clever piece of social satire, but, in general, Du Maurier
reserved the satire of conventional society for his other art, that of
black and white; he does not often escape from the drawing-
room ; there, however, is to be found the ideal scene for the
staging of the mid-century comedy of which the heroine is
Mrs Ponsonby de Tomkyns, and the theme, the striving of the
plutocrat's women folk to touch the hem of the garment of
penniless aristocracy.
28
E. L. XIII.
CH. XIII.


## p. 434 (#450) ############################################

434
Lesser Novelists
[CH.
Briefly, it may be remarked, in regard to these treatments of
place and setting, first, that the novel is seen to be taking
possession of its full inheritance, quidquid agunt homines; secondly,
that a closer presentation of the scene not only helps on the general
tendency towards realism, but also conduces to concreteness, and
is a safeguard, in some degree, against the intrusion of doctrine
and viewiness'; and, thirdly, that we may see the process at
work by which the individual novel comes to deal with special,
almost insulated, areas of life.
In the historical novel, date, as well as setting, is of importance;
many variants of Scott's established form make their appearance:
the novel of classical times in Lockhart, Lytton, Wilkie Collins
(Antonina 1850), Whyte-Melville, Kingsley and others; the auto-
biographic type, initiated by Hannah Mary Rathbone in her
Diary of Lady Willoughby (1844), and developed by Anne
Manning in The Maiden and Married Life of Mistress Mary
Powell (1849); the slight pictorial Lances of Lynwood (1855)
and other such works of Charlotte Mary Yonge. Two novels
only are of outstanding rank; the Lorna Doone (1869) of
Richard Doddridge Blackmore and the John Inglesant (1881,
privately printed in 1880) of Joseph Henry Shorthouse. In
Lorna Doone, the proportion of history is exceedingly small,
and the episode of Monmouth's rebellion of no great significance;
the form of the historical romance is modified, therefore, in
various ways. First, known personages, such as Charles II and
the notorious Jeffreys, come only into the remote background
of the story ; secondly, the theme treated is that of a medieval
romance, the deliverance of a lady in duress from the robber race
and stronghold by a chivalrous knight of low degree; thirdly,
there is the more occasion for romance; and the story is steeped
in romance of many kinds-romance of adventure and action,
romance of youthful passion, romance of the legendary deeds
wrought by the Doones, the herculean John Ridd and the
highwayman Tom Faggus, romance of the glorious hills and
valleys that lie between Porlock and Lynton. Some of the
material existed in manuscript, some in lingering memories of
the countryside, some of it is pure happy invention. The scene
is thickly peopled with bucolic originals and characters, speaking
their own dialect and living their placid lives until the peril of the
marauders overtakes them. The style is a little too near the
rhythm of verse and overloaded with fantasy and embroidery; at


## p. 435 (#451) ############################################

X11]
Lorna Doone John Inglesant
435
the same time, it is redolent of the scents and stained with the
hues which come of the tilling of the soil and the tending of stock;
and it has engaging tricks of humour, often played in the un-
expected clause tacked on to the end of a sober sentence. Of
Blackmore's other novels, Springhaven (1887), which gives a
charming picture of a small southern port threatened by Napo-
leon's fleet and visited, from time to time, by Nelson, is nearest to
Lorna Doone in its blending of chivalry, romance, adventure and
villainy. John Inglesant is a tale of the time of the civil war in
England and of the uprising and suppression of the Molinists in
Rome; and the fortunes of the hero Inglesant become credibly
interwoven in the web of European politics. In his preface, Short-
house suggests that the innovation that he is making is the
introduction of a larger measure of philosophy into the historical
framework; more exactly, it is the type of hero which is new to
novels of this kind. Inglesant is presented in the analytic way,
and he is a figure as complex in inner mental life as are the
personages in purely psychological novels. He is a mystic, to
whom apparitions and voices are borne through the thin veil of
the material world ; he would have spent his life in the pursuit
of the beatific vision, had not his Jesuit tutor distracted his
high-wrought, sensuous, subtle spirit and turned its powers to
the service of intrigue and cabal. The vision does not desert
him; it withholds him at the verge of temptation by the world,
the flesh and the devil in the three crises of the story; he is
one of those whom 'God saves by love. ' It is a relief to turn
from the tense emotional strain of the mystical story to the
episodes of diplomacy, crime, revenge and passion; to the
historical portraits and to the imaginative scenes—the court at
Oxford, the community of Little Gidding, the papal election at
Rome, Naples under the scourge of the plague: these are firm
in historical and intellectual substance, picturing an age not
only in external detail but in temper and spirit. The novel
connects itself with the Anglo-catholic movement which preserved
the seventeenth century Anglican alliance with learning and
culture; the mystical fervour of the movement rather than its
symbolic ritual appealed to Shorthouse as being that with which
he could blend most congruously his strongly held Platonic beliefs.
Current moral, religious and domestic ideals, reflected in books
such as The Heir of Redclyffe (1853), John Halifax, Gentleman
(1857) and Tom Brown's Schooldays? (1857) illustrate the
1 See, ante, chap. XI.
2
28-2


## p. 436 (#452) ############################################

436
[CH.
Lesser Novelists
diversity of the exhortations to which the mid-Victorian era
submitted ; but in the heyday of the preachers and prophets
there were mockers and indifferentists as well as enthusiasts. The
standard of positive rebellion was raised by two writers chiefly,
George Alfred Lawrence and Ouida (Louise de la Ramée), who
chose as her audience les militaires,' suggesting that they left
convention to those who cared to regard it. Guy Livingstone
1857, Lawrence's most characteristic book, is laughable in its
florid satanism ; nevertheless, it has a certain gross power in its
portrayal of the social buccaneer, Livingstone, with his vast
physical proportions, his untold lawless amours, his insatiable
thirst for adventure and blood, and his speech, blended of
sporting slang and classical allusion. The historical innovation
which Lawrence effects is the endowment of the superhumanly
immoral person with heroic qualities and social aplomb. Muscular
blackguardism, composed of Byronic and berserker traits (Carlyle
and others having brought the sagas into fashion) replaces muscular
Christianity. In her early novels of society, Ouida is of the lineage
of Lawrence; like him, she extends the world of Vivian Grey and
Pelham on the side of sport; for, total ignorance, except by
hearsay, did not prevent her from writing voluminously and with
diverting inaccuracy upon every kind of masculine affair. She
created artists of the sated Byronic type, and, in especial, superbly
insolent guardsmen, exquisite animals, basking in exotic luxury,
affecting languor and boredom in the midst of prodigious heroism,
equally irresistible in the boudoir, the chase and the battlefield
and faithful even in death to their singular code of loyalty. The
type is worth notice because it forms the model of the aristocratic
hero of novelette literature. For her delineation, in flushed and
ornate language, of these military heroes and their world, Ouida
has suffered the full measure of ridicule. In truth, her world is
operatic rather than romantic, twice removed from reality;
nevertheless, within it, she has many gifts, emotional energy,
narrative power, the sense of action, a conception of heroism
and fidelity, an eye for beauty of scene whether of the warm
luxuriance of Italy or of the cooler flower-haunted spaces of
Brabant. Her vivandière Cigarette, in Under Two Flags (1867),
comes near to poetry, in her last ride and death ; as does the
deserted Italian child Musa of In Maremma (1882), in her
innocence, devotion and suffering. When she curbs her con-
stitutional extravagance, Ouida has command of moving pathos
and of a purer style, as in the idyllic Two Little Wooden Shoes


## p. 437 (#453) ############################################

XIII]
William Wilkie Collins
437
(1874), in the best of her animal stories A Dog of Flanders
(1872) and in some of the children's stories in Bimbi (1882).
Though her flamboyant style is now out of date, Ouida's out-
spokenness, rebellious instinct and not altogether specious
cosmopolitanism played some part in widening the scope of the
novel.
One other considerable development, due to lesser novelists,
remains to be chronicled-a new form of the novel of crime, in
which the interest turns upon pursuit and detection? Godwin's
Caleb Williams (1794) is a tentative anticipation. A great fillip
was given to the type by the publication in France of Vidocq's
Mémoires in 1828–9 (Poe's Murders in the Rue Morgue is of the
year 1841). An early example in England is the Paul Ferroll
(1855), of Mrs Archer Clive (who is identical with the poetess V. ?
appreciated in Horae Subsecivae). Paul Ferroll is an admirably
restrained story of concealed crime; the interest, however, is not
that of detection, but of the approaching moment at which the
murderer must confess in order to save innocent suspects.
The chief master of the devices of the art in England is
William Wilkie Collins, the contemporary of Émile Gaboriau
in France; Collins discovered his métier in The Woman in
White, which appeared in All the Year Round in 1860. The
method is the long pertinacious unravelling of a skein of crime,
not by the professional detective, but by a person with a com-
pelling human interest in the elucidation-a more artistic thing
than Gaboriau's interpolated biographies. Surprises and false
trails keep curiosity on the rack; the struggle for concealed
documents or treasure adds the interest of action ; deeds done in
abnormal mental states add the touch of mystery; and the en-
counter of cunning with cunning, as between Godfrey Ablewhite
and the Indians in The Moonstone (1868), or between Mrs Lecount
and captain Wragge in No Name (1862), blends with other sensa-
tional elements that of constantly stimulated excitement. Collins
brings to bear, also, his accurate knowledge of law, medicine,
chemistry, drugs (he was an opium taker), hypnotism and somnam-
bulism. He has the power of generating the atmosphere of fore-
boding, and of imparting to natural scenes a desolation which befits
depression and horror of spirit. Most characteristic of his method
is the telling of the story by means of diaries, letters and
memoranda supposed to be contributed by the chief actors ; out
1 Cf. Chandler, F. W. , The Literature of Roguery, vol. 11, p. 524.
See, ante, chap. vi.


## p. 438 (#454) ############################################

438
[CH.
Lesser Novelists
of these materials, he creates a mental labyrinth through the in-
tricate windings of which he conducts the reader, rarely, if ever,
losing his bearings, whether as to time, place or person. His tales
are saved from being mere literary mathematics by the animation
and Dickensian ‘humours' of the puppets; we recall Miss Clack
by her incontinent evangelism, Betteridge by his admiration for
Robinson Crusoe, count Fosco by his corpulence and velvet tread,
his magnetic glance and his menagerie of pets; the creation of
Fosco is a remarkable effort, composed, as he is, of reflections
seen in the mirrors of many different minds. Swinburne has
called attention to the author's way of letting stories depend at
crucial moments upon characters disordered in mind or body.
Relying, in the Victorian manner, upon variety rather than upon
concentration of interest, Collins's books have a ponderous air
(some of his shorter tales excepted) as compared with the
economical technique of Poe, or with modern forms of the detective
tale which turn upon quick deductions from meticulous detail,
discard lumber and aim at a consistent psychology.
The influence of Wilkie Collins was widespread and various ;
upon Dickens, it was large and reciprocal ; the convivial Letters
of Charles Dickens to Wilkie Collins are full of discussions of
intrigues and plots. Collins set a standard of orderly and well-
knit narrative at a time when both the example of the masters
of fiction and the methods of publication, whether in parts or
by instalments in magazines, tended to chaotic construction.
Writers such as James Payn, Miss Braddon and Sir Walter
Besant have this skill in composition and combine with it
miscellaneous gifts of humour, observation and power to hold
attention. But, in the case of these writers, however talented
they may be, we are conscious that the impulse which began
about 1848 is exhausted. Fiction becomes more and more
competent in workmanship, while its themes, characters, scenes
and standards become conventionalised. One writer, however,
is untouched by these processes-Mark Rutherford (William Hale
White). He delineated a noteworthy phase of English life, that
of provincial dissent, at the moment when its younger educated
ministers became aware of the shaken bases of the beliefs accepted
by their congregations. The perplexity and misery of the sincere
and thoughtful pastor's situation are revealed with subtle insight
and with the poignancy of actual experience in the Mark Rutherford
books and in The Revolution in Tanner's Lane (1887). The
undercurrent of sadness which runs through his pages has,


## p. 439 (#455) ############################################

x11]
Mark Rutherford
439
however, a still deeper cause, namely the constant baffling of the
mind in the pursuit of absolute truth. Rutherford—himself an
authoritative interpreter of Spinoza-commends the avoidance of
metaphysical enquiry to those who value peace of mind. Thought,
deeply pondered, emotional sincerity, vivid descriptive power and
critical restraint distinguish the prose of this singular writer.
Apart from him, the lesser novelists show few signs of originality
until the influence of continental realism comes, belated, to
England through later writers of the first rank.


## p. 440 (#456) ############################################

CHAPTER XIV
GEORGE MEREDITH, SAMUEL BUTLER,
GEORGE GISSING
a
GEORGE MEREDITH was born on 12 February 1828, of parents
in both of whom there was a rather remote strain of Celtic blood,
Welsh in his father, Irish in his mother. At the age of fourteen, he
was sent for two years to the Moravian school at Neuwied. On his
return, he came into contact with literary people, among them
the son and daughter of Thomas Love Peacock, to whom he
dedicated his first published volume, Poems, in 1851. In 1849,
he married Mary Ellen Nicolls, a widowed daughter of Peacock.
Meredith then abandoned the law (he had been articled to a solicitor)
and turned to literature and journalism for support. His early con-
tributions to various periodicals', together with a first version of
Love in a Valley, were gathered into the volume named above.
He established relations, which continued till about the year
1866, with The Ipswich Journal, Once a week and The
Morning Post. His closest relations, later, were with The
Fortnightly Review, in which much of his work first appeared ;
for a brief space, in 1867, he was acting-editor. His first wife, from
whom he was separated in 1858, died in 1861. He took a room in
Rossetti's house at Chelsea in 1861, but made little use of it,
though the friendship established with Swinburne, at that time,
bore fruit in the latter's vindication of Modern Love in The
Spectator, 7 June 1862. He became reader to the firm of Chapman
and Hall in 1860, and continued in that office for some thirty-five
years. In 1864, he married his second wife Marie Vulliamy, to
whom, in his poem A Faith on Trial, he paid tribute on her
death in 1885. He had taken up his residence at Flint cottage,
Box Hill, in 1865, and this remained his home until his death on
18 May 1909.
1 Dates of Meredith's known contributions to periodicals are given in A
chronological list of George Meredith's publications, 1849—1911, by Arundell Esdaile,
a
1914


## p. 441 (#457) ############################################

CH. XIV]
Meredith's Novels
441
A rather loose grouping of the novels may be suggested. The
exotic stories The Shaving of Shagpat (1856), and Farina (1857),
have a rich vein of burlesque fantasy and romance which runs
on into the earlier novels, especially in characters such as the
countess de Saldar and Richmond Roy. To Meredith's maturer
taste, when he was revising his novels for later editions in 1878 and
1897, the farcical ebullience of The Ordeal of Richard Feverel
and Evan Harrington seemed excessive, and he pruned them
with an austerity which alters the proportions of the tales. The
Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859), Evan Harrington (1861), Emilia
in England (1864) (the title was changed to Sandra Belloni in
1887) and The Adventures of Harry Richmond (1871), all deal
with the upbringing of well-born youth to the stage of 'capable
manhood. ' Rhoda Fleming (1865) differs from them in giving
prominence to figures of the yeoman class, who, in the earlier
novels, are subsidiary. In Vittoria (1867), Beauchamp's Career
(1875) and, to a less degree, in The Tragic Comedians (1880) the
novelist takes a wider sweep of vision over the world of politics in
England and Germany and of high national aspiration in Italy.
The short stories, or, rather, the short novels, The House on the
Beach (1877), The Case of General Ople and Lady Camper (1877)
and The Tale of Chloe (1879), may be grouped together with The
Gentleman of Fifty and the Damsel of Nineteen, which was not
published till 1910. The Egoist stands apart, not only in the
latter half of the nineteenth century, but even among Meredith's
novels, by its complete originality of attitude and technique, the
clues to which are disclosed in the essay on the Idea of Comedy
and the Uses of the Comic Spirit (1877). The four novels Diana of
the Crossways (1885), One of Our Conquerors (1891), Lord Ormont
and his Aminta (1894) and The Amazing Marriage (1895), have in
common a chivalrous advocacy of women compromised in honour
and in pride by masculine despotism; three of the instances have
some historical foundation ; the working out of the situation in
Diana of the Crossways admittedly departs from historical facts
in the climax of the story. The early-written and unfinished
Celt and Saxon, published in 1910, has resemblances to Diana
of the Crossways, in particular in its criticism of English tem-
perament. Throughout his career, Meredith continued, without
public encouragement, the writing of verse, which, from time to
time, was gathered into volumes. In 1862 appeared Modern Love,
the poet's tragic masterpiece. Some of the poems, printed in
the same volume, are in a mood characteristic of Stevenson and


## p. 442 (#458) ############################################

442
[ch.
George Meredith
6
of Borrow, with whose Isopel Berners Meredith's portrait of Kiomi
may well compare. The volumes Poems and Lyrics of the Joy
of Earth (1883), A Reading of Earth (1888) and A Reading
of Life (1901), in which, chiefly, Meredith sets forth his cult of
'earth,' stand high in the tradition of metaphysical poetry
bequeathed by Wordsworth and Shelley. The work contained in
Ballads and Poems of Tragic Life (1887) challenges comparison
with similar productions of Rossetti, Swinburne and Morris ; The
Empty Purse was published in 1892; the poems in Odes in
Contribution to the Song of French History (1898) are, in form
and thought, allied to the political odes with which Coleridge,
Shelley and Swinburne, earlier in the century, had celebrated,
the struggle of liberty against tyranny. A final collection, Last
Poems, was published in 1909.
Meredith began to write at a time when Dickens, Thackeray,
Browning and Tennyson were at the height of their powers and
when George Eliot was hardly known; he is not, in any strict sense,
either the disciple or the founder of a school-nevertheless, he
receives and hands down many traditions. Deep traces are left
upon his thought by the poets of the school of Wordsworth,
and by Carlyle, whose influence is tempered by that of Goethe ;
indirectly, science taught him accuracy of observation and the
elimination of vague optimism. The lingering feudal society
he depicts, with its caste-feeling, its medieval view of women,
its indifference to thought, its instinct for command, its loyal
retinue and its fringe of social aspirants, is the background
familiar in the English novel of manners; the temper in which the
portrayal is done is that of keen onlookers, such as Saint-Simon
and Molière. Touches of poetic fantasy and caricature (and the
praise of old wine) remind us of Peacock. But, when all these
links are admitted, the isolation of Meredith (eccentricity, some
call it) remains. It is due, in part, to his revulsion from the
sentimentality of English, and the realism of French, fiction; in
part, to his rich endowment of the quality which used to be called
Celtic; in part, to the fact that he studies a stratum of experience
of an uncommon order; most of all is it due to the fact that
he carried further than any contemporary artist, not excepting
Browning, the process of intellectualisation which set in at the
middle of the century. This process is manifest in Meredith in
various ways; in his analytical method, in his curbing of emotion,
in the prevalence of his wit, above all in his complete re-
interpretation of the moral idea. This is what George Eliot
a


## p. 443 (#459) ############################################

xiv]
Poems
443
essayed, but with too many prepossessions. Meredith had none.
He envisaged afresh the whole area of life-natural, human and
universal-and aimed at ensuring the truth of his delineations of
particular characters and incidents by their consistency with this
wide survey. This is his meaning when he stipulates, in Diana of
the Crossways, that novelists should turn to philosophy rather
than to realism (which Meredith was apt to misjudge). The full
purport of his novels is not, therefore, to be grasped except in
the light of such poems as The Woods of Westermain, Earth and
Man, The Thrush in February and The Test of Manhood. The
key is the idea of an evolution carried on into the spheres of mind
and spirit. Life is a continuous unfolding of the germinal powers
of earth until the spiritual essence in earthly things is liberated.
Blood, brain and spirit are the names given to the successive
stages of the process. The instincts of the blood govern the
primal man ; they breed a progeny of evil and, for this, the ascetic
would eradicate them; but, at the same time, they are, in the
poet's view, the means by which man keeps firm hold on life, by
which he realises his ancestral kinship with 'earth. ' Earth fosters
him, allays his fevered blood and prompts him forward. In the
strife between the nobler and the baser parts of man, brain is
evolved; men learn that there are unalterable laws, accommodate
themselves to a social order, perceive in self-control and fellowship
the conditions of welfare and the direction of progress. The brute
part of man is ill at ease in this environment, and the shifts of the
rebel heart' and the 'dragon self' afford material for a great
part of Meredithean comedy. Spiritual valiancy, which is tried
in passionate ordeals of love, friendship and patriotism, is the
final goal; the 'warriors of the sighting brain ’ are the ideal type.
The sanction of this ethical code is found in the 'good of the race,'
the most prevalent idea in Meredith's writing.
The scheme of thought thus baldly abstracted from the poems
underlies all Meredith's picturing of the human condition; as may
be seen in many instances. Such an inter-relation of man and
nature as is suggested by this doctrine explains how 'earth' can
resume her suspended spiritual purpose in men; it is through the
senses that nature works to withhold Susan from tragic error in
the poem Earth and a Wedded Woman ; and through the senses
that the fevered spirit of Richard Feverel is bathed and cleansed
in the storm of the Rhine forest; phrases such as Nataly Radnor's
* Earth makes all sweet' and the equally characteristic Carry
your fever to the Alps' are steeped in the Meredithean creed.


## p. 444 (#460) ############################################

444
[ch.
George Meredith
The identity of human life and nature is so complete that, at
supreme moments, passion seeks expression in the language of
nature; the surrounding scene prolongs the ecstasy of Richard
and Lucy at the weir; the waves are richer in meaning than
words for Matey and Aminta. Through this identity of human
and natural law comes the perfect fusion of sensuous glory and
symbolic truth which characterises the poet's Meditation under
Stars, Dirge in Woods and Ode to the Spirit of Earth in
Autumn. The deep veining of Meredith's creative work by his
thought may be seen, again, in his studies of the mating of the
sexes ; rhetorical emotion on the theme of love gave way in
France to a pitiless insistence upon physical aspects of passion.
Meredith, though equally suspicious of mere sentiment, nevertheless
keeps the ideal aspects of love uppermost; to him it is a force
'wrought of the elements of our being. The unions which win
his sanction are those in which passion, mind and spirit each find
due response after sharp and long-during trial ; from these unions
are to come 'certain nobler races now very dimly descried. His
most brilliant diagnosis is practised upon alliances which fail in
one or other of those regards, as, for instance, in A Ballad of
Fair Ladies in Revolt; in The Sage Enamoured and the Honest
Lady ; in darker and intenser mood, in Modern Love and in the
characters of later novels, Diana, Nesta, Aminta, Carinthia, who
add to the qualities of Victorian heroines the greater power of
intellect, the more brain' which Meredith's ideal of womanhood
required and all that follows thence of dignity and largeness of
character. From the doctrine embodied in the poems is derived,
also, a juster and more delicate scale of judgment for motive and
action, a scale called for by the ever-growing consciousness of the
complexity of character and morality. Meredith has made it
incumbent upon the novelist of the future to take into account
remote hidden origins as well as the diverse play of the more
immediate forces which shape character. Seen in the perspective
of the poet's thought, the egotist Sir Willoughby Patterne proves
to be “the brutish antique' prolonged into the civilised state,
and 'become fiercely imaginative in whatsoever concerns himself. '
Sentimentalism has its roots, also, in the primitive man; it is a
sophisticated form of the instinct of sex; in Diana Warwick's
phrase, it is 'fiddling harmonics on the strings of sensualism. '
Alvan-Lassallel is brought nearer to comprehension by the same
scale ; the instance is the more germane because Meredith did not
1 Cf. The Tragic Comedians, chap. XIX.


## p. 445 (#461) ############################################

XIV]
The Comic Spirit
445
invent either the character or the story. The fine adjustment
of the claims of blood, brain and spirit is the ideal illustrated in
his grander figures ; Mazzini, 'an orbed mind supplying its own
philosophy,' Carinthia, and Vittoria, whose nature, compounded of
the elements of woman, patriot and artist, was 'subdued by her
own force. ' Finally, the conception of retribution in the poems
and novels shakes off the scriptural and puritan accretions which
cumbered George Eliot; other orders of human error and punish-
ment come to light, as in the instances of Sir Austin Feverel,
Victor Radnor and lord Ormont. On the largest scale, in Odes
in Contribution to the Song of French History, Meredith's ethic
reveals Sedan as the expiation of the errors of seventy years
before, when, rejecting her spiritual lover, liberty, France yielded
to the glamour of Napoleon.
Meredith summoned the novelist to define not only his
philosophy but, also, the temper and intention with which he
proposed to depict society. He symbolised the ideal attitude
in his creation of the comic spirit, an emanation of earth,' and,
therefore, endowed with sanity, clear vision, inborn purity and
sympathy with the final purpose of 'earth. ' Politely but relent-
lessly, it fulfils its office as guardian spirit of a civilisation of
which the members are but quasi-civilised. 'Accord' is its social
aim; it seeks out, therefore, not the obvious sinners, with whom
the moralist can deal simply and well, but the Patternes, Poles,
Daciers and Fleetwoods, in whom lurking savage instincts are
concealed by surface veneer and rectitude. The weapon of the
comic spirit is the silvery laughter of the mind'; its strokes take
the form of satire, humour, wit or irony. It is clear that the
comic spirit is a new form of the ideal observer, already known in
the Greek chorus, in the spirit of Aristophanes and of Molière
and of others reviewed in Meredith's Essay on Comedy, in
Addison's Mr Spectator, in Goldsmith's Chinaman ; the comic
spirit ranges over a wider field in the novel, exercises a more
incessant vigilance in its efforts to reconcile the diverse aims of
society.
There are two main kinds of structure in Meredith : one, a highly
individual form in which an outstanding character appears con-
stantly in the centre of the stage in a succession of loosely connected
scenes, for which the focus and angle of vision are determined by
the comic spirit. The method is exemplified in miniature in The
Case of General Ople and Lady Camper, and, at full length, in
The Egoist ; the model is evidently that of comedy; The Egoist
6


## p. 446 (#462) ############################################

446
[CH,
George Meredith
is called a 'comedy in narrative’; if Le Misanthrope could be
magnified to the proportions of the novel, we should have an
exact counterpart. The alternative kind of structure is, however,
more common in Meredith. In it is outlined a prolonged situation
depending upon delicate adjustments of honour, passion and
aspiration in many characters ; very often, some kind of problem
lies behind the story-educational in The Ordeal of Richard
Feverel, political in Beauchamp's Career, social in One of Our
Conquerors. The play of influences from nature is, also, un-
remitting. Action and the older sort of plot can almost be
dispensed with ; they are exchanged for large organic conception,
knowledge of the subterranean processes by which idea and will
gather force and externalise themselves, intuition as to the time
and places at which the tension and the disturbing vibrations
will work towards dramatic conjunctions—such, for instance, as
Beauchamp's final encounter with Renée de Croisnel, where we
witness the long-impending collision between incompatible French
and English customs; or the deep-founded misunderstanding
which precedes the apology of lord Romfrey to doctor Shrapnel.
The former kind of novel, the comedy in narrative, presents
figures, such as Sir Willoughby, who are both individual and
typical, after the fashion of Molière's Tartufe or Harpagon ; the
latter kind, the novel of highly charged situation, presents its
characters in more relations and with a more vivid sense of
complex personality. In both kinds, we draw our conception
of character chiefly from two sources : the first, speech and
dialogue, which are idealised and extended so that they offer
the largest sensitive surface whereon character may leave its
impress; the second, the analysis, sure, delicate and exhaustive,
of motive and feeling. In this analysis, Meredith is a realist
(though there are occasional failures, such as the central incident
of Diana of the Crossways), and his figures are distinguished
from the pleasing shadows of romance. At times, we feel, as in
George Eliot's works, that the novelist is helping us by lucid
and dispassionate reasoning to understand a figure viewed as
through a glass window; but, in the more notable characters,
especially those of women, we feel ourselves continually in the
presence of personalities quick with nervous and spiritual vitality
and having the power on their own account to engage our concern
and memory. Lucy, Rose, Kiomi, Vittoria, Renée, Clara Middleton,
Nesta, Carinthia, are as vivid in gesture, speech and movement,
in varied mood and in the quality they impart to our own humour,


## p. 447 (#463) ############################################

XIV]
His Style
447
as any figures in nineteenth-century fiction. Meredith's boys are
creations of profound insight; his men, even those cast in the
mould of Vernon Whitford, do not, in general, lodge so securely
in the memory. A rare gift of characterisation, which Meredith
possesses in the highest degree, is that of calling into being figures
belonging to other nationalities ; his Welsh and French and Italian
creations are marked both by completeness and by subtlety ; this
is the basis of the historical power which gives abiding value to
the picture of the rising under Mazzini in Vittoria, and to that of
Napoleon in Odes in Contribution to the Song of French History.
It is worth notice that, in the main, the analytical method is only
practised upon the complex, sophisticated people of the leisured
world; the simpler classes are delineated in other ways ; for in-
stance, Mrs Berry, who is alive, and Jack Raikes, who is moribund,
are in Dickens's manner of humorous exaggeration. Meredith's
rustics are apt to savour chiefly of beef and beer. The exception to
the avoidance of psychology in the case of humbler folk is in the
part of Rhoda Fleming which deals with the yeoman's family;
the age-long moulding influence of the Kentish soil, the inveigling
of the weaker sister, Dahlia, and the savage virginal pride of
Rhoda Fleming are set forth in the way of analysis.
The general effect of oracular allusiveness in Meredith's style
appears, on examination, to arise mainly from incidental comment,
in which the figurative and aphoristic elements, due, in some degree,
to the influence of Carlyle and, therefore, indirectly of Jean Paul
Richter, abound to such a degree that we often seem to be
looking at similes and metaphors instead of at the thing which
was to have been said. On the other hand, the narrative prose,
and that directly expressive of character, has, in general, a fine
precision, an almost ostentatious felicity of phrase and diction.
The writings of La Bruyère, Saint-Simon and Stendhal are parallels
and, sometimes, models, for the clear exposition of intricate
psychological and moral situations, and for the predilection for
wit and epigram, which overflow into receptacles such as “The
Pilgrim's Scrip' and 'Maxims for Men. ' The pervasive irony,
exultancy and poetic distinction of Meredith's writing are native
to his own mind. In his middle years, he seems to have retorted
upon public indifference by a wilful disregard for the convenience
of his readers ; he avoids simplicity and indulges in fantastic
circumlocution ; he sacrifices more and more of the narrative
quality, of which, on occasion, as in the duel in the Stelvio pass,
he is a master, in favour of effects derived from witty and ironical


## p. 448 (#464) ############################################

448
[CH.
George Meredith
analogy; there is a wasteful fusillade of phrases which do not
carry us forward ; imagery, at all times too prodigal, becomes
bewildering in its protean transformations. It is unfortunate that
these excesses culminate in the early part of One of Our Con-
querors, and thus bar the way to Meredith's most delicate and
poetic study of awakening womanhood, the character of Nesta
Victoria Radnor. His poetic style has other features, due, in part,
to a revulsion from the manner of Idylls of the King, in part to
the concentration which was his declared method of craftsmanship.
Unessentials are shorn away until words are left to stand side by
side, each preserving, sphinx-like, the secret which connects it
with other words; it is certain that not all the satisfaction which
comes with comprehension arises from poetic sources. At the same
time, as in all poets of insubordinate intellect—Donne, Chapman,
Browning and others—there are supreme imaginative passages,
pellucid in diction, and of radiant beauty and entrancing music.
Meredith is a great metrical experimenter. He devises new
forms of stanza in Modern Love, Hymn to Colour, A Ballad
of Fair Ladies in Revolt (where the rhythm sustains admirably the
sense of keen spontaneous debate), Love in a Valley (which plays
exquisite variations upon a nursery measure), Earth and Man and
The Thrush in February (two variants of the gnomic quatrain).
His tragic ballads invite comparison with similar forms in Rossetti,
Morris and Swinburne; his sonnets are very various in theme,
temper and structure; one of them, Lucifer in Starlight, is among
the most remarkable technical achievements of Meredith ; it
evokes the full epic strain of Milton from the restricted keyboard
of the brief sonnet form. The travail of creation tortures the
form of much of Meredith's poetry; the Lucifer sonnet has the
repose of perfect achievement. Individual effects are attained,
also, in his continuous measures; in the iambic movement of the
consummate lyric outburst The Lark Ascending; in the anapaestic
trimeters of The Day of the Daughter of Hades and A Faith on
Trial, the freedom of equivalence and substitution (and, in the
former case, of rime) preserves the emphasis of meaning from
the too great insistence of the metrical beat—the pitfall of this
metre. The Woods of Westermain and The Nuptials of Attila
are in the trochaic tetrameter catalectic; in the latter poem, the
impression of primitive violence in the theme is reinforced by the
persistence of four strong stresses within a short line of seven
syllables, and by the entire avoidance of weak syllables either at
the beginning or the end of the line. Phaéthôn, a splendid, if


## p. 449 (#465) ############################################

XIV]
Samuel Butler
449
rather free, attempt, in galliambic measure, for which Meredith
names the Attis of Catullus as his model, and Phoebus with
Admetus, with its three successive strong stresses at the end of
the even lines, and the use of pauses to complete the length of
the line, are other instances of the research and the testing
of metrical possibilities by the inner ear which impart a fresh and
unfamiliar music to his verse. There is evidence that, by its
imaginative, intellectual and metrical daring, and by its opening
of new springs of poetical inspiration, Meredith’s verse has
more immediate bearing upon the practice of following writers
than his novels; for, though it is admitted that he has set a high
standard to which the novel must attain, if it would be ranked as
literature, nevertheless, fiction has quite notably discarded his
philosophic way, and is committed to the path entered upon,
not with his approval, by the realists.
Samuel Butler was born on 4 December 1835 at Langar
rectory, Nottingham; he was the son of Thomas Butler and
grandson of Samuel Butler, headmaster of Shrewsbury school
and bishop of Lichfield. Samuel Butler was bracketed twelfth
in the first class of the classical tripos at Cambridge in 1858. In
the following year, abandoning his intention of taking orders, he
went to New Zealand and successfully managed a sheep-run.
Some of his leisure was spent in writing for The Press, Christchurch,
New Zealand, the articles Darwin on the Origin of Species (1862)
and Darwin among the Machines (1863) which were afterwards
expanded into Erewhon and Life and Habit. A volume published
in 1863, A First Year in Canterbury Settlement, is composed of
his letters from the colony. Returning to England in 1864, he
settled for the remainder of his life in Clifford's inn. He studied
painting and exhibited at the Royal Academy between the years
1868 and 1876. Erewhon was published in 1872; The Fair
Haven (1873) provides an ironical setting for the matter of his
pamphlet The Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ,
written in 1865. Meantime, he had begun, about 1872, The Way
of all Flesh; it was laid aside in 1885, and not published till 1903.
A Psalm of Montreal was written in Canada in 1875. His books
of scientific controversy include Life and Habit (1877), Evolution
Old and New and God the Known and God the Unknown
in 1879, Unconscious Memory (1880), Luck or Cunning (1887),
and the essays The Deadlock in Darwinism (1890). His Italian
journeys led to the publication, in 1881, of Alps and Sanctuaries
29
E. L. XIII.
CH. XIV.


## p. 450 (#466) ############################################

450
[CH.
Samuel Butler
of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino. His close interest in the
art of the Sacro Monte at Varallo-Sesia, especially in that of the
artist Tabachetti, is reflected in Ex Voto (1888). A number
of essays appeared in The Universal Review, between the years
1888 and 1890 ; in 1896 was published The Life and Letters of
Dr Samuel Butler. Butler's admiration for Handel's music, an
admiration dating from his boyhood and constantly increasing, led
to his attempt to compose in the Handelian manner, collaborating
with Henry Festing Jones. One of the subjects chosen as libretto
for an oratorio was Ulysses, and, hence, arose an independent study
of the Homeric poems, from which resulted Butler's theories of
the feminine authorship and Trapanese origin of the Odyssey.
The substance of many pamphlets and lectures on the subject is
contained in The Authoress of the Odyssey, published in 1897.
He also made prose translations, in a vigorous homely idiom which
he called Tottenham Court road English, of the Iliad (in 1898)
and of the Odyssey (in 1900). In 1899 appeared Shakespeare's
Sonnets, reconsidered and in part re-arranged, in which he
combated the view that the poems were academic exercises, and
contended that Mr W. H. was a plebeian of low character.
These literary controversies illustrate Butler's antipathy to pro-
fessional critics, and his view that the function of criticism is
to disengage the personality of an artist from his medium of
expression. Erewhon Revisited was published in 1901. Butler
died on 18 June 1902. A selection from his manuscript note-books
appeared in 1912, under the title The Note-Books of Samuel
Butler.
Only the briefest reference is possible to Butler's scientific
discussions. His interest in them was lifelong, and he imparted
to them, at times, an angry temper born of his belief that he was
flouted by an oligarchy of men of science, who regarded him as an
amateur because he was not a professional collector and experi-
menter. He accepted all their facts; but he challenged their
interpretations on the ground of what he deemed was their
loose reasoning. His contentions turn chiefly upon two points :
first, the restoration of the idea of design to the philosophy of
evolution—not the old teleological design of Buffon, Lamarck and .
Erasmus Darwin, but a cunning and will inherent in each separate
cell to shape the chances of its environment to ends of comfort
and stability. Secondly, he put forward a conception of heredity
based on the continuity of each generation with all its predecessors,
and the transmission of serviceable habits stored up by unconscious
a


## p. 451 (#467) ############################################

XIV]
Erewhon
451
memory. These conclusions are now, in a provisional way, accepted;
but the debate has passed away from this region and is concen-
trated for the present upon the internal economy of the reproductive
cell.
Butler's place in literature, however, must be finally determined
by his genius as satirist and essayist, as illustrated in Erewhon,
Erewhon Revisited, A Psalm of Montreal, The Way of all
Flesh, Alps and Sanctuaries and The Note-Books. Erewhon was
published in 1872 ; Butler's was not a solitary voice; Carlyle had
thundered ; Ruskin and Morris had entered the plea for beauty;
Matthew Arnold, in Friendship’s Garland (1871), and Meredith
had given warning of the shadow looming from the continent upon
complacent prosperity in England. But the appeal, in these
cases, is to the nation collectively; some practical reform is in
view. Butler's attitude is different; he does not vaticinate; he
has little to say of industry or of democracy. But he is struck by
evidences on all sides of the stagnation of thought. In religion,
thought, emptied of its propulsive energy, has sunk into the
moribund system of the musical banks; in education, the
universities are busied in suppressing originality and cultivating
evasion ; youthful mental vigour is dulled by grinding for many
years at the hypothetical language; professors are afflicted with the
'fear-of-giving-themselves-away-disease. ' In science, there has
been a promising upheaval in the coming of Darwinism ; but the
English aversion from mental effort is in process of making
Darwinism into a pontifical system for comfortable acceptance.
Butler carried on a ceaseless crusade to save science from the fate
of the musical banks. In the family, schools and churches, tyrannies
have been set up which have vested interests in mental stupor
and convention, and which permeate the atmosphere with cant
and hypocrisy convenient to themselves. These things are the
customary targets for the satirist of the Victorian compromise ;
and, when that phase has passed away as completely as the
commonwealth phase, Erewhon will need a commentary as Hudi-
bras does. But there is a profounder criticism in Erewhon ; it is
embodied in the paradoxical interchange of moral misdemeanour
with physical ailment. This is the basis of a classic piece of
ironical prose, descriptive of the trial of a youth, who, after being
convicted of aggravated bronchitis, is, a year later, condemned on
a charge of pulmonary consumption. An obvious interpretation
is that the passage is a plea against the puritanic morality which
isolates and condemns the individual without consideration of
29-2


## p. 452 (#468) ############################################

452
Samuel Butler
[CH.
environment, heredity or other uncontrollable factors. This would
be the position of a modern humanitarian, who would acknowledge
a deep intellectual debt to Butler. Behind this interpretation,
however, lies a conception which gives a clue to a large portion of
Butler's writing. Good-breeding' is the corner-stone of his
system, and, in implication, he identifies morality with health ;
he draws a contrast between puritanism and paganism, if the
word may be applied to the ideal of grace, strength and courtesy
which gives Erewhon its resemblance to Utopia. The same idea
comes out in his comment on The Pilgrim's Progress, which, he
says, 'consists mainly of a series of infamous libels upon men and
things. ' The same opposition, fundamentally that between ảyatin
and yvãous, between spirit and letter, is set forth in sardonic form
in his masterpiece A Psalm of Montreal; the Discobolus, the
emblem of pagan grace, is thrust aside in deference to a person
who boasts of his second-hand morality and thrives by a craft
which simulates life.
The most illuminating parallel to Erewhon is the obvious one,
Swift's Gulliver's Travels. Both authors adopt the ironical method
according to which a commonplace person carries with him his own
ingrained prepossessions when he comes upon a race with bodily
and mental habits, equally deep-rooted, but long ago given a
different direction. Both authors preserve an episcopal gravity
while they prolong and enrich the fantasy with witty inventions
and oddities of synthesis. Both are wanting in poetic endowment,
but rich in the humorous, pictorial gift which has the enduring
quality of poetry. Both wield a style keen, serried, precise in an
unstudied way, and, at the same time, flexible, calling to mind the
image of a Toledo blade. Swift, an eighteenth century politician,
has the sharper eye for the hot antagonisms of sects and parties;
Butler, for hypocritical mental jugglery; Swift's Laputans enshrine
the prejudice of Scriblerus against science; Butler's hostility is for
any kind of academicism. Swift, with his acuity of vision for
human injustice, portrays it with the passionate self-torturing
anger which flames in the later parts of Gulliver. Butler sees a
perverse indifference to commonsense and, for the most part,
paints it with a cool amused irony—the good form of his
Ydgrunites—which has become a common trait in later fiction
and essay writing.
Erewhon Revisited, published in 1901, is an ironist's way of
using the conclusions to which Essays and Reviews (1860), and
Seeley's Natural Religion (1882), had been tending years before.


## p. 453 (#469) ############################################

XIV]
The Way of all Flesh
453
The book is as much a sequel to The Fair Haven as it is to
Erewhon. In his accustomed way, Butler plants a 'seedling idea,'
in this case, the supposed miraculous ascent of Higgs from Erewhon
twenty years before. In ironical analogy, he traces from it the
origin of religious myth, of sacrosanct scriptures, of legend and
sophistry crystallising round public credulity and of the exploiting
of the new religion by unscrupulous professional magnates such as
Hanky and Panky. Erewhon Revisited has less of the free
imaginative play of its predecessor; it is apt to seem, in that
respect, sterilised and rigid, like the later satires of Swift; but,
in sharp brilliance of wit and criticism, in intellectual unity and
coherence, it surpasses Erewhon. All the skill which Butler had
acquired by his controversies in marshalling evidence and in
reviewing a whole system of thought in all its bearings is put
to the happiest use, especially in the effects of climax made
possible by the structural perfection of the work; the furious
outburst of Higgs against Hanky, for instance, in the cathedral;
and, again, the ecclesiastical round table conference, debating
whether Sunchildism shall be supported as a supernatural religion
or not—a perfect piece of high intellectual comedy.
There is, apparently, a Voltairean subversiveness about all this
which may obscure Butler's real view and intention. Voltaire is
the supreme rationalist; Butler puts no excessive faith in reason;
he found it, both in its extremes and in its mean, illogical. In
God the Known and God the Unknown, he offers, seriously, though
it is not usual with him to do so, conjectures which transcend
reason. He had, moreover, the utmost respect for certain simple
religious tenets, which he defined in the concluding chapter of his
Life of Dr Butler, and in the advice given by Higgs at the
ecclesiastical conference, and which he saw, in a measure, ex-
emplified in the religion of the Italian peasantry. He asserted,
not in jest, his membership ‘of the more advanced wing of the
English Broad Church. '
Butler thought contemptuously of the fiction of his day,
especially in comparison with that of the eighteenth century.
The Way of all Flesh owes practically nothing to any tradition ;
though its prodigality of idea and suggestion and wit has enabled
later authors to quarry from it books, novels and essays ever since
its publication. Butler claimed for it that it contains records
of the things I saw happening rather than imaginary incidents’;
it contained, also, things which he had undergone in his own
experience. It is like a book of the reign of queen Anne, inspired
3
>


## p. 454 (#470) ############################################

454
[CH.
Samuel Butler
6
by a controlled passion of hatred, which surges up with embittered
unassuaged memories of youth.