No More Learning

The
opening chapters of Shirley, begun in the first excitement of success,
with their hard and not very legitimate characterisation of neigh-
bouring curates, were lying on Charlotte Brontë's desk. Reality,
with its harsh surroundings, was not, after all, to be escaped from,
and 'Ferndean', with its conquering triumph, had been but a castle
in Spain. It was, therefore, in a mood of disillusionment that, after
the bravura of the first chapters, the new story was continued,
and very soon, coming nearer, though with hesitating steps, to the
past, it is subdued to the mood. A great artist speaks again, and
for the last time exquisitely, in the beautiful story of Caroline
Helstone's unavailing affection. Who, then, was Caroline-Ellen
Nussey or Anne or Charlotte—and who was Robert, as dis-
tinguished from Louis Moore? It does not matter; we are listening
to a tale of feeling.
In September, Branwell died, and, before the end of the year,
when the main story was nearly finished, Emily. By June of the
next year, with the death of Anne, Charlotte was alone.
To understand Charlotte Brontë's masterpieces, it should be
1 The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.
a


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XII]
Shirley and Villette
409
remembered that they were only compulsorily three-volume books.
Jane Eyre was eked out with the St John Rivers addition, and,
when, after Anne's death, Charlotte took up her pen to write the
third volume of Shirley, the interest is shifted. The second plot of
Louis Moore and Shirley was not an afterthought, but it reads
like one. More vivid, doubtless, than the earlier part, it is far less
full of meaning. In short, the recurrent tutor and pupil story,
a story that will insist on being told whether consonant or not, is,
here, but an addition. There are other weaknesses in Shirley.
Caroline's affair ends happily—perhaps a necessity of mid-Victorian
fiction—Mrs Pryor, though useful to the heroine as a confidante
and a fair copy of the life, is amateur's work, beneath the colour
of the other characters, and out of the picture; but Robert and
Hortense in their little parlour and Caroline in the twilight have
a grace d'outre mer.
Unlike Jane Eyre, Shirley is not easy to read. Beautiful as is
Caroline's love-story, it is of another order of art altogether from
that of the easy masterpiece-possibly of an even rarer order.
There is the distinction between what is of great beauty and what
is great.
Varying the next few years with visits to London and to friends,
Charlotte Brontë found recuperation, and her temperament
underwent some steeling. All her loved ones in early graves or
separated by 'surge and blast,' she can now bear to look back,
not absolutely without repining, but with much of the artist's
detached and curious interest at what once was. Another story
was owed to the public, and, perhaps, that one, too suddenly told
in the unpublished Professor, might unroll itself anew. Fresh
observations, too, had been added, and, when Villette opens, it is
the figure of Dr John that catches the eye—the boy John with his
tiny companion Paulina-whether or not a personal reminiscence,
certainly a charming effort of imagination. But the main theme
of Villette is the remembrance of Brussels, and we may suppose
that the effort to resolve past discords was now largely conscious.
In any case, there is no better exercise for the student of art and
its processes than to compare the unembarrassed handling of the
material of experience in Villette, with the treatment of the same
material in The Professor. For all that, the material still counts
for too much, and one feels, as one does not feel in Jane Eyre or
in the case of Caroline Helstone, that the characters, however
changed the circumstances, are, nevertheless, real people, to be
actually found somewhere. One does feel, and to a degree which,


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410
[CH.
The Brontës
artistically, is painful, that, after all, all this is observation or
record. We have an uneasy fear that we are looking into other
people's houses. The result is a novel which is a miracle of
characterisation, and most supreme where it seems most literal,
as in the wonderful “patriotic' scene in the schoolroom, or in
Lucy's tremors over her letter. Yet, even in such places, our
pleasure is alloyed by our consciousness that we are being put
off with mere description. At times, too, when we are out of
the school and where no great interest is taken by the author
in the character observed, it is evident that literalness of tran-
scription has interfered with artistic effort, as in the account of the
actress Rachel. As novel-readers, we do not expect to be reading
a diary. Nor is this weakness in Villette—a weakness due to the
absence of imagining and to its author's contentment in merely
seeing life's pages turn over-redeemed by the merits of the book.
The amazing variety of characters does not remedy it, nor does the
fact that this weakness is counted a chief excellence by those whose
interest is in the biography rather than in its subject, in her life
rather than in her work, in the least degree cure it. Villette is a
brilliant novel; in it, Charlotte Brontë threw off the incubus of the
past, without transforming the past into the ideal; or, in other
words, she built on her experience without making her experience
our experience of the soul. Villette is the work of a great genius;
but it does not bring the solace that comes from great art. It
makes us sad; but it leaves our eyes dry. We watch beings who
suffer, without sharing their suffering ; our identity is not merged
in the human crisis because, speaking of the book as a whole, it is
not poetry. At the end, doubtless, it is, and we put it down,
participating in that distant sorrow. But this is only to say that,
at the end, it achieves what it has not achieved during its progress.
This tour de force was the last of Charlotte Brontë's writings.
Two chapters of a novel, strangely called Emma—a sort of
challenge to fame-remain from her few months of married
life. She had said her say as the poets say it, and was dead
before she was thirty-nine.
Emily Brontë left only one book and some verses. As to her
novel, critical judgment is still in suspense. It is not desirable
to read; to take Wuthering Heights from the shelf is to prepare
for oneself no pleasure. The song of love and of morning that
makes Jane Eyre an imperishable possession is not sung here.
On the contrary, in this strange tale of outland natures on outland
moors all is thunder-clad-darkness, and the light more awful that


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411
XII] Wuthering Heights
breaks the storm, passions that, in their tempestuous strength at
once terrify us for human nature and enlarge our conception of its
dignity. It bears the same relation to Jane Eyre that Webster
bears to Shakespeare, if one could imagine Webster greater than
Shakespeare. This, indeed, is its defect, and in seeking to estimate
the proportional value of this defect judgment is at a loss. It is
a tale of diablerie, not of life. What happened in Jane Eyre
might have happened, part of it did actually happen, but all of it,
leaving out of account a little melodrama, here and there, which
is not essential, might have happened. These are beings agitated
by our desires, and we are reading about ourselves. . In Wuthering
Heights, it is not so; we see Heathcliff from the outside, and
observe this triumph of imagination. When we have admitted
that this is not a tale of our own life, the door is closed upon
detraction. In every other respect and of its kind, the work done
here is absolute. In these chapters, echoing with apprehension,
chapters that
Bring the unreal world too strangely near
and in which the disaster that one would often think has culminated
goes on culminating to the close, everything is found in place, and,
though it is a wild consistency, as Dobell was the first to say,
consonant. Perfectly in keeping' with the nature of Heathcliff,
as perfectly as the abduction of Isabella or the forced marriage of
the shivering Linton, are the hanging of the Springer-a demoniac
revelation—and the attack upon the younger Catherine, those
stunning and unceasing slaps on the young girl's face that
madden the reader as if he had been present. Undeviatingly,
almost without thinking, from Lockwood's nightmare at the
beginning to the last scene in Joseph's kitchen, when Heathcliff's
glazing eyes are tense with love's vision, the imagination pursues
its course because the authoress never for a moment dreams of
questioning the imagination.
In reading such a work, we are oppressed by an intensity of
personal feeling. There is no friendly author between us and
what is seen.
The fury of the events is by no means harmonised
or softened by human comment explanatory or apologetic. The
hideous drama merely comes before us, and is there; and yet we do
not absolutely hate Heathcliff. The scene in the death-chamber
with Catherine entitles him to speak of his affection as an 'immortal
love,' a feeling which ‘shackles accidents and bolts up change,'
and testifies to the infinity of humanity. In those few pages,
where the stormy villain and his dying beloved override time and


## p. 412 (#428) ############################################

412
[CH.
The Brontës
snatch a moment from eternity, we learn, as in Othello, something
of passion's transfiguring power. And this passion is not physical.
No doubt, a writer older and with more experience than Emily
Brontë must, of necessity, have known that the attraction exercised
by such a man, or by any man the least like Heathcliff, could only
be of that kind. She did not know, and in her ignorance she gave
to the transcendent a new setting, a setting far stranger than that
in Jane Eyre, but, also, more arresting. It is the main mark of
the Brontës' books and the inner reason why they are cherished
that, out of the innocence of the heart, the mouth speaketh.
Of Emily Brontë's poems, it may be said that they are on the
edge of greatness. So much cannot be pretended for those of her
sisters. Charlotte's have a strong autobiographical reference,
and, when they are most autobiographical, the truthful tenderness
of her emotion sometimes finds expression; but, in the main, they
are not poetry. Charlotte Brontë, though she did not care for
three volumes, achieves her results, as a prose authoress, by a
series of effects, not by single blows. Such a method is unsuited
to short poems, where poetry loses everything if it loses the quint-
essential. The verse-writing of the gentle Anne, like all her work,
has something winning in its appeal, or, it would be more correct
to say, in its absence of appeal. It compasses more only when it
is religious ; but the religious poems are distinguished rather by a
few rare verses than as complete or satisfying wholes. At their best,
they have more sincerity and less sentimentalism than most hymns.
Since the poems of Emily challenge a much graver attention,
it should be noted at once that, judged from a higher standpoint,
the chief defect of Anne's is, also, very observable here. Except
where the poems are very short-such as The Old Stoic, Remem-
brance, or Stanzas—they seldom hold attention to the end, and the
poetical experience is not coextensive with the poem. It is there
often—at the beginnings or episodically—but it is seldom con-
tinuous. Besides this, even the best of them are too frequently
dependent upon scaffolding. They have a set theme, or they work
through to a set pronouncement. They have, generally, something
definite to say, as prose has. The poetry does not express itself
for its own sake or mould its own setting. Yet, they have been
greatly prized by many fine critics. Their independence of the
ordinary aids to comfort, their habit of resting on an accepted
despondency, predisposes the modern reader in their favour.
Especially their pagan feeling for nature, and their deeply melan-
choly but unrepining sentiment, appeal to minds that have been


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XII]
Emily Brontë's Poems
413
already influenced by Meredith. Moreover, Emily's verse has-
what is scarcely to be traced at all in that of her sisters—metrical
music :
For if your former words were true
How useless would such sorrow be;
As wise, to mourn the seed which grew
Unnoticed on its parent tree,
and, sometimes, a very original feeling in the metre :
Silent is the house, all are laid asleep,
where the hesitancy of the verse, together with the stumbling treat-
ment of the allegory, expresses perfectly the quiver of the girl as
she withdraws into the world of dream. Occasionally, there is a
tenderness for which one would hardly have looked in the author
of Wuthering Heights—the real Emily that lived, one would think,
and to whom that vision came :
To-day, I will seek not the shadowy region
Its unsustaining vastness waxes drear.
In one farewell verse only, the great wind blows:
Though earth and man were gone
And suns and universes ceased to be
And Thou wert left alone,
Every existence would exist in Thee;
for, in poetry, what was elemental in her was not to find expression.
The graves and the moors are in these poems as they are in
Wuthering Heights, and it is the same Emily who is walking by
them, but how differently-without the delirium of strength.
Here, we are in contact with the actual human being, and find
ourselves listening to the low tones natural to the girl who, all
her life, and except when she was writing Wuthering Heights,
controlled the utterances of the heart :
So I knew that he was dying,
Stooped and raised his languid head,
Felt no breath and heard no sighing,
So I knew that he was dead.
The feeling beneath those poems, perhaps just because it is a
controlled feeling, does not always find full expression. One likes
them the better on rereading, one has to come again and taste,
for the atmosphere of the poet's thought is not quite com-
municated : they are not poems that compel one to feel with the
poet. To be complimentary, it might be said that they 'speak in
silences. ' They do speak, but to an attentive ear, with something
of soundlessness, something estranged, at least something very


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414
The Brontës
[ch.
far away from the sounding sureness of the prose. The lyric
medium did not supply her with sufficient imaginative material,
and this, perhaps, may suffice to explain why there is not more
to praise ; for, in her verse, though she communes freely with
her spirit of imagination, that spirit is not freely exercised.
Perhaps it also explains why their constant readers love these
poems ; for, in them, in the absence of her strange imaginings,
what is chiefly disclosed is her individualism, the author of
Wuthering Heights in her loneliness.
A word may be added as to the novels of Anne Brontë.
Agnes Grey has interest, a record of her governess experiences,
treated, so far as one can judge, not very freely, and, for this
reason, affording, in its mild way, something of the pleasure of
discovery. The eager interest in everything connected with the
biography of the Brontës aroused by Mrs Gaskell's Life has given
to those faint pages an attraction beyond their own. Yet, what
her sister once wrote to Mr Williams, in reply to a letter full of
family references, is not without appositeness : 'I think details of
character always have a charm, even when they relate to people
we have never seen, nor expect to see. ' The Tenant of Wildfell
Hall is as interesting a novel as was ever written without any
element of greatness. It is pleasant to read of all sorts of intrigue
and bad doings just as if they were a fairy tale and altogether
outside the atmosphere of badness. There is one drawback—the
tale is told by a man meant by the authoress to be quite 'nice,'
but, in fact, less likeable than Crimsworth in The Professor. The
Brontës had observed men not unclosely; but they were not able
to see things through the eyes of men.
.
APPENDIX
A Chapter in the History of a Tyrone Family being a tenth extract
from the Legacy of the Late Francis Purcell P. P. of Drumcoolagh,
appeared in The Dublin University Magazine for October 1839, pp. 398-
415, and was reprinted in The Purcell Papers, 1880, and in The Watcher
and other Weird Stories, 1894, by J. Sheridan Le Fanu.
While nothing could be more probable than that the author of The Irish
Sketch Book and Barry Lyndon had read this story, it is clear that
Charlotte Brontë could have had access to it. Her father, when at Cam-
bridge, sent money to his Irish relatives; in his will, he remembered them,
and there is an absurd legend that, after the publication of Jane Eyre, one of
them crossed the Irish sea to deal summary justice to Miss Bigby of The


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XII]
Appendix
415
a
Quarterly, whom he took to be a man. There was, therefore, some measure
of correspondence. ' Charlotte Brontë herself, in requesting Messrs Aylott and
Jones to send out review copies of the Poems, mentions, alone among Irish
papers, The Dublin University Magazine. A favourable notice appeared;
and, in writing to the editor to thank him for it, 6 October 1846, she signs
herself 'your constant and grateful reader. Later, 9 October 1847, she
makes a special request that Messrs Smith and Elder should send Jane Eyre
to the same review. It is not improbable that a forgotten remembrance of
Le Fanu's story, read years before, supplied what was never a fertile in-
ventiveness with the machinery it wanted.
In the story, which is about a twelfth of the length of Jane Eyre, lord Glen-
fallen, who is neither old nor ugly, neither young nor handsome, marries, or
pretends to marry, the young Irish girl who is the narrator, Fanny Richardson.
The couple then set off for his country house, Cahergillagh court, a large
rambling building, where they are welcomed by an old housekeeper who
is used as the storyteller's confidante. The day after, lord Glenfallen,
beginning in a jocular manner by saying he is to be her Bluebeard, counsels
the heroine to visit only that part of the Castle which can be reached from
the front entrance, leaving the back entrance and the part of the building
commanded immediately by it to the menials. He gives no reason for this
extraordinary request, further than a mysterious warning of danger; the
actual reason being that in that part of the castle there lived his blind wife,
who had arrived either from another of his houses or from abroad-one need
not understand everything in the story-on the very day of his own arrival.
A month later, coming up to her bedroom, the heroine is startled by finding
a blind lady seated in a chair. Some sudden talk follows, and, on Fanny's
saying that her name is lady Glenfallen, an outbreak of rage on the
part of her visitant. "The violence of her action, and the fury which con-
vulsed her face, effectually terrified me, and disengaging myself from her
grasp
I screamed as loud as I could for help. The blind woman continued
to pour out a torrent of abuse upon me, foaming at the mouth with rage,
and impotently shaking her clenched fist towards me. I heard Lord Glen-
fallen's step upon the stairs, and I instantly ran out: as I passed him I
perceived that he was deadly pale and just caught the words: “I hope that
demon has not hurt you. ” I made some answer, I forget what, and he
entered the chamber, the door of which he locked upon the inside. What
passed within I know not, but I heard the voices of two speakers raised in
loud and angry altercation. ' When lord Glenfallen returns after two
hours, he is pale and agitated; "that unfortunate woman,' said he,‘is out of
her mind. I daresay she treated you to some of her ravings: but you need
not dread any further interruption from her: I have brought her so far to
reason. The heroine can elicit nothing further. Lord Glenfallen becomes
silent and distracted, and one morning proposes they should go abroad.
That night, however, Fanny is again visited in her bedroom by the blind
woman, who tells her that she and not Fanny is the true lady Glenfallen,
commands her to leave her pretended husband the next day and threatens
her, if she refuses, that she will reap the bitter fruits of her sin. Com-
menting upon this adventure, Fanny continues – There was something
in her face, though her features had evidently been handsome, and were not,
at first sight, unpleasing, which, upon a nearer inspection, seemed to indicate
the habitual prevalence and indulgence of evil passions, and a power of
expressing mere animal rage with an intenseness that I have seldom seen
equalled, and to which an almost unearthly effect was given by the convulsive
quivering of the sightless eyes. She tells her husband, but he meets her
6
6


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416
[CH. XII
The Brontës
8
6
6
8
with his former defence: “the person in question, however, has one excuse,
her mind is, as I told you before, unsettled. You should have remembered
that, and hesitated to receive as unexceptionable evidence against the honour
of your husband, the ravings of a lunatic'; and, afterwards, Fanny is told
by old Martha that she hears her master had ill-used the poor blind Dutch-
woman. 'How do you know that she is a Dutchwoman? ' asks Fanny,
“Why, my lady,' answered Martha, the master often calls her the Dutch
hag, and other names you would not like to hear, and I am sure she is
neither English nor Irish; for, whenever they talk together, they speak
some queer foreign lingo. ' Her maiden name, it appears later, had been
Flora van Kemp.
The next incident occurs when Fanny is sitting in the parlour late one
evening. 'I heard, or thought I heard, uttered within a few yards of me, in
an odd, half-sneering tone, the words—“There is blood upon your ladyship's
throat. ” . . . I looked around the room for the speaker, but in vain. I went
then to the room-door, which I opened, and peered into the passage, nearly
faint with horror lest some leering, shapeless thing should greet me upon
the threshold. ' That same night, in her bedroom, the incident is repeated.
• After lying for about an hour awake, I at length fell into a kind of doze;
but my imagination was very busy, for I was startled from this unrefreshing
sleep by fancying that I heard a voice close to my face exclaim as before-
“There is blood upon your ladyship's throat. ” The words were instantly
followed by a loud burst of laughter. Sleep forsakes the terrified girl, and,
sometime in the small hours, she sees the long wall-mirror fixed opposite the
foot of the bed slowly shifting its position. In reality, the mirror was hung
on a concealed door now swinging open to admit a figure. 'It stepped
cautiously into the chamber, and with so little noise, that had I not actually
seen it, I do not think I should have been aware of its presence. It was
arrayed in a kind of woollen night-dress, and a white handkerchief or cloth
was bound tightly about the head. I had no difficulty, spite of the strangeness
of the attire, in recognising the blind woman whom I so much dreaded.
She stooped down, bringing her head nearly to the ground, and in that
attitude she remained motionless for some moments, no doubt in order to
ascertain if any suspicious sounds were stirring. Then comes the account
of the attempted murder, the murderess groping about the room till she
finds a razor and then swiftly sliding towards the heroine, who is paralysed
by fear. 'A slight inaccuracy saved me from instant death; the blow fell
short, the point of the razor grazing my throat. In a moment, I know not
how, I found myself at the other side of the bed, uttering shriek after shriek. '
Lord Glenfallen rushes in and fells the intruder, and the entrance of a crowd
of domestics prevents further danger.
At the trial, Flora van Kemp accuses him of having instigated the
attempted murder of the pretended wife and, on its failure, of having turned
upon herself. But she does not intend to perish singly, all your own handy-
work, my gentle husband. ' This was followed by a low, insolent, and sneering
laugh, which from one in her situation was sufficiently horrible. ' Neverthe-
less, justice is baulked of its prey and sentence is passed upon her alone.
'Before, however, the mandate was executed, she threw her arms wildly into
the air, and uttered one piercing shriek so full of preternatural rage and
despair, that it might fitly have ushered a soul into those realms where hope
can come no more. The sound still rang in my ears, months after the voice
that had uttered it was for ever silent. The husband becomes a prey to
maniacal delusions, hears voices and cuts his throat under circumstances of
peculiar horror; while the innocent Fanny seeks the refuge of a convent.


## p. 417 (#433) ############################################

CHAPTER XIII
LESSER NOVELISTS
a
EDWARD GEORGE EARLE LYTTON BULWER was born on 25 May
1803; on the death of his mother, in 1843, he succeeded to the
Knebworth estate and, in the following year, assumed the name of
Lytton; he was created baron Lytton of Knebworth in 1866.
Ismael and other Poems was published in 1820; his first novel,
Falkland, in 1827; and he continued, in the midst of social,
editorial and political concerns and disastrous matrimonial rela-
tions, to produce fiction, verse and drama until his death on
18 January 1873. His versatility is not more remarkable than his
anticipatory intuition for changes of public taste. In a first phase,
he wrote novels dealing with Wertherism, dandyism and crime;
in a second, he evolved a variant of the historical romance; in a
third, in The Pilgrims of the Rhine (1834), he brought together
English fairy lore and Teutonic legend; in a fourth, he imported
into fiction pseudo-philosophic occultism; in a fifth, he turned to
'varieties of English life,' comparatively staid and quiet; later
still, in The Coming Race (1871), he outlined a new scientific
Utopia; and, finally, in Kenelm Chillingly and The Parisians
(1873), he portrayed character and society transformed by the
vulgarisation of wealth.
Lytton's second and best novel Pelham, or The Adventures
of a Gentleman (1828), is a blend of sentiment, observation and
blague. Rousseau, Goethe, Byron and some ultra-sentimental
experiences of Lytton's own youth are drawn upon for the figure
of Sir Reginald Glanville. Pelham, on the other hand, is drawn
from life, not from books; he is a more credible character in
a more credible world than the almost contemporary Vivian Grey.
Pelham is a dandy, coxcomb, wit, scholar and lover, and, in many
ways, offensive and exasperating; but he is also a staunch friend
and an ambitious and studious politician, in these respects differing
from the corresponding figure in the preliminary sketch Mortimer.
27
E. L. XIII.
CH. XIII.


## p. 418 (#434) ############################################

418
[CH.
Lesser Novelists
What distinguishes Pelham from its author's later writings is its
concentration of creative and expressive effort; Henry Pelham
is the most vivid of all Lytton's characters; and the earlier
chapters have an incisive humorous cynicism which is all too
quickly dissipated into mere discursiveness by an influence every-
where apparent in the book, that of the encyclopaedists. Pelham
was issued at a time when a publisher's recipe for popular fiction?
was 'a little elegant chit-chat or so.
' The effect was galvanic;
Pelhamism superseded Byronism, established a new fashion in
dress and made Lytton famous eight years before Pickwick began
to appear.
In the second quarter of the century, the writings of Pierce
Egan, Ainsworth, Whitehead and Moncrieff give evidence of a new
lease of interest in criminal biography and low life; Lytton was
quick to seize the opportunity. The character Thornton, in
Pelham, is drawn from the actual murderer Thurtell; in The
Disowned (1829), Crauford is a representation of the fraudulent
banker Fauntleroy; Lucretia, or The Children of the Night
(1846), is based on the career of the forger Wainewright. The
point of view is different in Paul Clifford (1830), and Eugene
Aram (1832), which fall into line with The Robbers (1782), Caleb
Williams (1794), The Monk (1795), The Borderers written
1795-6, Melmoth (1820) and other books? concerned with the
criminal's justificatio of himself and demand for sympathy and
understanding. Paul Clifford won the benediction of Godwin,
who thought parts of it 'divinely written,' and of Ebenezer Elliott ;
in its melodramatic way, it furthered the efforts of Mackintosh,
Romilly and others for the reform of prison discipline and penal
law; it provided, also, an example, not lost upon Dickens, of the
novel of humanitarian purpose. The introduction of picaresque
figures, among them the rogue Tomlinson, who stands for "all the
Whigs,' and who becomes a professor of ethics—and, still more,
the quips and personal caricatures in the book-rouse suspicions
as to the depth of the writer's sincerity. Paul Clifford, the
chivalrous highwayman, has his counterpart in the philosophising
murderer Eugene Aram; the obscuring of the plain issue of crime
by sentimental, or, as in the case of Ainsworth, by romantic
sophistry, nauseated Thackeray; in George de Barnwell, Thackeray
described these heroes as 'virtuous and eloquent beyond belief,'
and, in his unvarnished Newgate chronicle Catherine (1839–40),
1 Cf. The Disowned (1829), chap. XXIX.
? Cf. Legouis, E. , The Early Life of Wordsworth, p. 271.
1


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XIII]
Bulwer Lytton
419
he put the whole matter in its naked and repulsive truth. The
melodramatic law-court scenes of Paul Clifford and Eugene
Aram are earlier evidences of the theatrical skill with which
Lytton composed his dramas, chief among them Richelieu (1838),
The Lady of Lyons (1838) and the comedy Money (1840). In the
characterisation of Claude Melnotte, hero of The Lady of Lyons,
again, the criminal fact is obscured by the veneer of sentiment.
Lytton next turned his attention to the historical novel; his
Devereux (1829) uses up more of the material (some had already
been put into Pelham) gathered in his study of the politician
Bolingbroke. The Last Days of Pompeii (1834) differs from
Lytton's chief historical romances in taking for its main interest
a natural, instead of a social, convulsion, and in introducing, by the
nature of the case, characters entirely invented. It established in
public favour the romance of classical days, which Lockhart had
attempted in Valerius (1821); at the close of his life, Lytton
returned to the type in his Pausanias the Spartan, published in
1876. In Rienzi (1835), The Last of the Barons (1843) and
Harold (1848), he works upon a consistent theory; abandoning
the practice of Scott, he elects as his central figure a person
of the highest historical importance ; his aims are, first, to give
a just delineation in action and motive of this character; secondly,
to build up, with all the records at hand, a picture of the age
in its major and minor concerns; thirdly, to bring to light the
deeper-lying causes-personal, social, political—of the events of
the period, a period in which the closing stages of an old, and the
opening stages of a new, civilisation are in conflict. His skill in
divining the forces at work in complex phases of society, and
in concocting illustrative scenes, almost nullified by the intolerable
diction of Rienzi and the facile imaginativeness of Harold, is
best seen in The Last of the Barons; though, even in this last
case, the comparison with Quentin Durward or Notre Dame is
fatal. His distinction between Scott's picturesque' and his own
“intellectual' procedure has in it a dangerous note of presumption.
Lytton's keen and credulous interest in all forms of the occult
first finds expression in the short Glenallan and in Godolphin
(1833). The diabolic aspects of rosicrucianism had been put to
use in Godwin's St Leon, and in Melmoth; spectral figures of
more beneficent origin loom in the semi-allegorical Zanoni (1842),
developed from Zicci (1841). The rosicrucian initiate, Zanoni,
yields up all he has won of youth and power for the sake of a
forbidden human passion ; in consequence, he falls a victim to
27—2


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420
[CH.
Lesser Novelists
the Terror; the book suddenly ceases to be vague and becomes
dramatic when dealing with the fates of Robespierre and Henriot.
Lytton's treatment of the Terror falls in date between that of
Carlyle and that of Dickens. Two works nearer to the date and
manner of Wilkie Collins also make use of the supernatural ; in
A Strange Story (1862), a murder mystery is darkened and com-
plicated by the power which one character possesses of suspending
natural law; the short story The Haunted and the Haunters
(1859) contains Lytton's most impressive use of the occult; the
machinery is explained, at the end, in the manner of Mrs Radcliffe-
by persistent will-power, a curse is preserved in a magical vessel,
generations after a crime has been committed. But the effect of
the tale is due less to this than to the half-impalpable loathsome-
ness which menaces the invader of the haunted house ; here, the
story may challenge comparison with the Monçada episode in
Melmoth. For the finer chords of mystery and terror struck by
Coleridge and Keats, Lytton had no ear.
Lytton had early premonition of the change in taste which
occurred about 1848, and sought to fall in with the new realistic
trend in The Caxtons (1849), My Novel (1853) and What will he
do with it? (1858). The result is illuminating. The hero of The
Caxtons is neither dandiacal,' overwrought nor perverted; and,
while in Lucretia the effects of evil home life and upbringing are
traced, in The Caxtons the conditions are reversed and nearer to
common experience. To this degree, Lytton becomes a realist.
But he could not bring himself to face life squarely; a great
part of The Caxtons is devoted to the Byronic youth Vivian ; the
simple annals of the family are narrated in the manner of Sterne ;
an elderly impracticable scholar, a lame duck, a street organ-
grinder feeding his mice provide some of the occasions for
emotional indulgence. If anyone should seek in My Novel for
varieties of English life, he will be disappointed: only one point of
view is possible for the writer, that of our territorial aristocracy';
the varieties may be found in Kingsley's Yeast (1848).
In the fantastic Asmodeus at Large (1836), Lytton had fore-
shadowed the idea of The Coming Race, which antedates by a
year Butler's Erewhon. Lytton's book gives an original turn to
an often-used convention; in this case, the ideal republic is domi-
nated by an irresistible destructive force Vril, and, therefore, is at
peace. The inhabitants look down upon civilisations barbarous
and unfixed in principle. By its implied criticism of contempo-
rary society, the book is connected with Kenelm Chillingly and


## p. 421 (#437) ############################################

XIII]
Anthony Trollope
421
The Parisians, which was left unfinished in the same year. These
books picture England and the Paris of the second empire, sterile in
large ideas and feverishly experimenting with new and untried
expedients; vast financial depredations, communism, political
shiftiness, muscular religion, realism in art—these are some of the
innovations which are contrasted with the older aristocratic pride
and conservatism.
Even in an age of voluminousness, Lytton is an outstanding
example; to his novels must be added a great mass of epic,
satirical and translated verse, much essay-writing, pamphleteering
and a number of successful plays. His wide range of accomplish-
ment, his untiring industry, his talent in construction, his practice
of dealing with imposing subjects, his popularity with the bulk of
readers, give him an air of importance in the Victorian epoch.
But he was rooted too deeply in the age of emotionalism and
rhetoric. Richardson, Sterne and the weaker part of Byron, on
the one hand, and the encyclopaedists on the other, encouraged
in him the sentimentalism which, incidentally, ruined Great
Expectations, and the didactic and abstract habit of thought
and expression with which Thackeray made high-spirited play.
The novel, in Lytton's view, was a study of the effect of something
upon something else; so, after Pelham, he rarely ever escaped
from the discursive to the idiomatic style, or created character by
dramatic sympathy. Finally, his early success confirmed him in
the adoption of the pose, hotly resented by Thackeray and
Tennyson, of the grand seigneur, dispensing the light of reason,
knowledge and humanity.
Anthony Trollope, after a wretched boyhood and youth, of
which he gives some glimpses in his Autobiography and in The
Three Clerks (1858), entered upon a doubly prosperous career as
a civil servant in the post office and as a man of letters. He had
behind him, in the work of his mother, Frances Trollope, an
incentive to literary fertility; from her, he inherited some preju-
dices, but little of his art. The two Irish stories The Macdermots
of Ballycloran (1847) and The Kellys and the O'Kellys (1848), and
La Vendée (1850), were out of accord with his natural aptitudes,
which fitted him rather for the treatment of material like that of
Jane Austen or Thackeray, for both of whom his admiration was
unbounded. The monograph on Thackeray falls below the level
of its subject; but the resemblances in essential points between
Trollope's best work and Thackeray's show that he understood


## p. 422 (#438) ############################################

422
[Ch.
Lesser Novelists
scenes.
more as an artist than he could express as a critic. In The
Warden (1855), a scene from clerical life which precedes by two
years those of George Eliot, the individual quality of Trollope's
genius first comes to light. Echoes of Titmarsh are heard in the
passages satirising Dickens and Carlyle; the characterisation and
the creation of a locality show complete originality. In both
respects, the novel is the nucleus of the Barsetshire series on
which the fame of Trollope most securely rests. Round about
Hiram's hospital, the scene of The Warden, is built up in
Barchester Towers (1857), the cathedral city with all its clerical
hierarchy. Beyond the city, in successive tales-Dr Thorne
(1858), Framley Parsonage (1861), The Small House at Allington
(1864) and The Last Chronicles of Barset (1867) come into view
the episcopal see with its outlying parishes rich and poor, its
houses of middle class folk and gentry, and, looming large and
remote, the castle of the duke of Omnium—a country of the
imagination which gives the illusion of actual life by the com-
pleteness of its visualisation. Clearly as he knows its topography,
he has few pages of description, except in his lively hunting
His foremost concern is with people; and the people in
his books come to our notice in the natural fashion of acquaint-
anceship; with the passage of time, characters are hardened or
mellowed; Trollope rivals Thackeray and Balzac in the skill with
which he suggests changes due to lapsing years. Following the
fortunes of Septimus Harding, the one poetic figure Trollope
created, we come into contact with the old bishop and his son
archdeacon Grantly, the new bishop and Mrs Proudie, Mr Slope,
dean Arabin, lord Lufton, the Thornes, the Greshams, the Dales,
the Crawleys, the whole multitudinous population of the county.
In the main, Trollope delineates quite ordinary types, though,
curiously, some of the most famous are drawn larger than life-size-
Mrs Proudie, Obadiah Slope, the signora Vesey-Neroni and, in
later novels, the famous Chaffanbrass. Trollope was a Palmer-
stonian, and his predilection was for the middle and upper middle
classes, for clerical dignitaries who have more of Johnson's
principles than of his piety, for the landed gentry, the county
representatives and the hunting set. For intruders in church
and state, the evangelical Slopes and Maguires, and for upstart
millionaires and speculators, Melmotte and Lopez and others,
Trollope has nothing but contempt.
No other writer of fiction has had so keen a perception of the
moeurs of a distinctive class as Trollope; his triumph is that, like


## p. 423 (#439) ############################################

XIII] Characterisation in Trollope 423
Chaucer, he preserves the traits of common humanity seen beneath
professional idiosyncrasy. In his ecclesiastical portraits-he knew
—
little of their prototypes at first hand-inference has the validity
of apparent observation; only less lifelike are his civil servants,
ranging from Charley Tudor to Sir Raffle Buffle, manor house
inhabitants, as in Orley Farm, journalists, London clubmen,
electioneering agents and the varied figurus of his political
novels from Phineas Finn (1869) to The Duke's Children (1880).
The rather chilly Plantagenet Palliser and the philandering young
Irishman Phineas Finn link the series together. These novels
suffer by the inevitable comparison with Disraeli's; for, except in
the person and intrigue of Mr Daubeny (a sketch of Disraeli him-
self), Trollope lacks Disraeli's power of piercing to the core of a
political situation, and his insight into politically minded character.
Trollope went on his way very little distracted by passing
literary fashions; he was just touched by the example of Dickens,
as when he describes the Todgers-like boarding house in The
Small House at Allington or the Dickensian bagmen of Orley
Farm; forgeries, murders and trials appear after the date at
which Wilkie Collins had made them popular, in Orley Farm, for
instance, and in Phineas Finn. In The Vicar of Bullhampton
(1870), the story of the outcast Carry Brattle, he ventured upon the
problem novel; but, for the most part, he upheld the Victorian
idea of wholesomeness, which included sexual impropriety among
the sweeping omissions which it exacted from the novelist. In
later novels, he unfortunately forsook his earlier practice of hold-
ing himself altogether apart from his characters and letting the
story convey his moral (he set as much store by the moral as any
Victorian) without challenge or comment; The Way We Live
Now (1875) drifts continually into satire and criticism of no great
pertinence; on the other hand, he scarcely ever used the novel
for the exposure of specific abuses.
These occasional departures from his accustomed practice
affected very little the lifelikeness with which character and occu-
pation are presented, or the unlaboured precision of detail with
which the interiors of households, deaneries, newspaper offices,
lawyers' chambers, clubs and the like are described; the future
social historian will regard Trollope as a godsend-a Trollope
of the Elizabethan age would be invaluable. His best stories
preserve the even texture of average experience; he excels in
imparting interest to commonplace affairs, to hopes and fears of
clerical or political patronage, to minor financial worries, to the


## p. 424 (#440) ############################################

424
[CH.
Lesser Novelists
6
working out in various lives of some initial blunder, or to love
affairs in which one of his staid, but attractive and very natural,
girls has to decide between two ardent suitors, or one of his
youths has two minds in his amatory devotions. In virtue of the
verisimilitude of his tales, Trollope has been called by some
a photographer, by others a realist ; he was neither. He was a
day-dreamer who could so order his dreaming that it partook of
the very texture and proportion and colour of ordinary life;
his genius resides in this. He had but to give some stimulus-
the view of Salisbury from the little bridge, for instance—to his
dream faculty, and it would improvise for him-effortlessly and
without the need of constant reference back to life-places, people
and events, having an animation and atmosphere denied to photo-
graphy, but, at the same time, lacking in the sense of sharpness
and solidity which is the first care of the realist. A dreamer has
little concern with the profounder causes which underlie action.
This view is confirmed in his Autobiography, where he speaks of
'constructing stories within himself,' of 'maintaining interest in
a fictitious tale,' of 'novel-spinning. ' 'I never found myself,' he
says, 'thinking much about the work I had to do till I was
doing it. ' What further supports this idea, is the exception, when
he created out of starved flesh and blood, and out of anguish,
pride and humility of spirit, the figure of Josiah Crawley, per-
petual curate of Hogglestock. In this character, there is a quality
different even from such unforgettable strokes in his other manner
as bishop Proudie's prayer 'that God might save him from being
glad that his wife was dead. '
Trollope's writing is, above all things, easily readable; it is
lucid, harmonious, admirable for purposes of even narrative and
familiar dialogue; it has a pleasant satiric flavour, but makes no
more claim to distinction in rhythm or diction than do his stories
to depth or philosophy or intensity. He had command of humour
and, much more, of pathos, which rings true even now because the
occasions are unforced and the placid and sensible tenor of his
narrative enables him to reach emotional climax without pitching
the note too high. In An Autobiography, written 1875—6 and
published 1883, he chose to emphasise the mechanical and com-
mercial aspects of his art. Froude's phrase-Old Trollope. . .
banging about the world'—has in it a touch of portraiture which
corresponds with Trollope's picture of himself
. His philistinism
was partly innate, partly the outcome of hostility towards affecta-
tion; there is legitimate satire in his ironical analogy between the
1
B
1


## p. 425 (#441) ############################################

a
XII]
Charles Reade
425
minor novelist waiting for the moment of inspiration and the
tallow-chandler waiting for the divine moment of melting. He
did, however, make a fetish of mere voluminousness and he became
a stand-by of magazines such as The Cornhill, Blackwood's and
The Fortnightly, whose editors valued punctuality in their con-
tributors. He has so vividly described himself ticking off his two
hundred and fifty words every fifteen minutes in the morning hours
that posterity has been willing to accept his writing at the valuation
he seems to put upon it; his fame has suffered in consequence.
a
Few writers of the nineteenth century could contend on the score
of wide and eager interest in life with Charles Reade, whose physi-
cal and mental vigour animate his pages, sometimes to the point of
violence. The most characteristic products of the man are those
in which he worked, Hugo-like, on a large symbolic scale, for
human compassion and justice. These more grandiose compositions
have a little obscured from view the novels of manners, in which he
exercises a more delicate art. The first of his novels, Peg Wof-
fington (1853), was of this lighter kind; it was made, on the advice
of his life-long friend Laura Seymour, out of one of his few successful
plays, Masks and Faces (1852). Reade spent an inordinate amount
both of mental energy and of his fortune upon the stage; he wrote
in a period of staginess and melodrama and easily succumbed to
the taste of the time. He shared the opinion of Wilkie Collins that
fiction and drama do not differ in essence, but merely in mechanism of
expression. His play Gold (1853) could, therefore, be turned into
It is never too late to mend (1856); Foul Play (1869) and other
writings could appear either as plays or novels; and his most
effective play Drink (1879) was made out of Zola's L'Assommoir.
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


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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


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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).