William Allingham
(1824-1889).
William Allingham was an Irish poet, of much taste, but of no great power. His inspiration is strangely fitful and uncertain, and after his removal to London, in consequence of the success of his earlier verses, it seemed almost wholly to desert him. He was for a time editor of Fraser’s Magazine.
John Stuart Blackie
(1809-1895).
John Stuart Blackie, for many years Professor of Greek in Edinburgh University, was a very vigorous miscellaneous writer. He translated Æschylus, the Iliad and Faust. He was very successful in the lighter lyrical strain, and appears at his best in his rollicking and amusing university songs.
Robert Barnabas Brough
(1828-1860).
Robert Barnabas Brough was the author of Songs of the Governing Classes (1859), a small collection of pieces, chiefly satirical, and remarkable for their vigour, point and sincerity. Strength of feeling, clearness of intellect and wit are his characteristics. Brough was generally very much in earnest, but in his Neighbour Nellie he showed that he could touch lighter themes very charmingly.
Charles Stuart Calverley
(1831-1884).
Charles Stuart Calverley, the scholarly and witty author of Verses and Translations (1862) and Fly Leaves (1872), had a faculty for more serious things, but, partly from indifference, partly because of the accident which made great effort in his later years impossible, he never wrote anything worthy of his talents. What he has left however is the very best of its kind. He is one of the most skilful of translators; and his parodies and satiric verse are excellent.
Mortimer Collins
(1827-1876).
Mortimer Collins, poet and novelist, had a very happy knack for the lighter kinds of lyrical verse, half playful and half serious. Under pressure of circumstances he wrote too much, and the failure to ‘polish and refine’ tells against a great deal of his work.
William Cory
(1823-1892).
William Cory, originally Johnson, for many years one of the masters of Eton, was the author of a small volume of Poems entitled Ionica (1858), which, after long neglect, won, in its third edition of 1891, the attention due to thoughtfulness and scholarly expression. Cory’s best pieces, such as Mimnermus in Church, soar beyond the range of the minor poet, and show that it only needed quantity to insure him a considerable place in literature. But he wrote few such pieces, and indeed little verse of any kind after Ionica.
Sir Francis Hastings Doyle
(1810-1888).
Sir Francis Hastings Doyle succeeded Matthew Arnold in the chair of poetry at Oxford. Doyle is distinguished for the spirit and the martial ring of the ballads in which he celebrates deeds of daring. The Red Thread of Honour, The Private of the Buffs, and Mehrab Khan are pieces that take high rank among poems inspired by sympathy with the heroism of the soldier.
Sir Samuel Ferguson
(1810-1886).
Sir Samuel Ferguson has been called the national poet of Ireland, on the score of Congal, an epic published in 1872. He is really more remarkable for his shorter pieces, some of the best of which deal with subjects not specially Irish. He was an active contributor to the Dublin University Magazine at the beginning of the period.
Adam Lindsay Gordon
(1833-1870).
Adam Lindsay Gordon divides with Charles Harpur and Alfred Domett (Browning’s ‘Waring’) the honour of being laureate of the Antipodes. Wildness in youth drove him to Australia. It is probably true that but for the stirring and adventurous life there he never would have written anything of note; nevertheless, what we find in his verse is rather the spirit of the English hunting field and of English adventure the world over, than much that is distinctively Australian.
David Gray
(1838-1861).
David Gray, author of The Luggie, a poem on a small stream which flowed near his home, was cut off too soon to do much in literature. His verse however is pleasant, and it might have acquired power. It retains a pathetic interest on account of the author’s fate. He was drawn by the hope of fame from his native village to London, caught a cold there, and died while his poem was in process of printing.
Dora Greenwell
(1821-1882).
Dora Greenwell is chiefly remarkable as a writer of religious verse, the best of which is to be found in Carmina Crucis. She also wrote prose of considerable merit.
Robert Stephen Hawker
(1803-1875).
Robert Stephen Hawker, a clergyman who spent his life in the remote parish of Morwenstow, in Cornwall, is best known for his Cornish Ballads (1869). The spirited and stirring Song of the Western Men, printed as early as 1826, and accepted by Scott as a genuine old ballad, is the most celebrated of all his compositions. Hawker wrote also The Quest of the Sangraal (1863), a poem displaying a mysticism which must have been deep-seated in the author’s character; for it led to his reception, just before he died, into the Roman Catholic Church.
Jean Ingelow
(1820-1897).
Jean Ingelow is one of the best of recent poetesses, and has also acquired a considerable, though a less conspicuous name as a writer of fiction. She is best as a lyrist, and some of her poems are touched with a very fine and true pathos. She likewise excels in the modern ballad form.
Edward Lear
(1812-1888).
Edward Lear, author of the Nonsense Rhymes (1861) stands high in the very peculiar and difficult kind of writing indicated by the title of his book. There are other writers of humorous verse, like Lewis Carroll, who possess greater qualities, but the Nonsense Rhymes are unique for rich whimsical inventiveness. Lear was an artist as well as a writer, and illustrated his own books.
Gerald Massey
(1828-1907).
Gerald Massey is a minor poet of unusual range. His attachment to the Christian Socialists gives a clue to his work; but in him the enthusiasm of humanity is concentrated in an intense patriotism. Massey’s martial verse is fine, but not quite excellent. Sir Richard Grenville’s Last Fight suggests comparison with Tennyson’s Revenge; and the comparison illustrates the difference between good art and consummate art. Neither is Massey the equal of Doyle on this side; but he is far more varied and copious.
The Honourable Mrs. Norton
(1808-1877).
The Honourable Mrs. Norton was a grand-daughter of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and inherited some of the family genius. Her poetic gift was not great, but her verse is spirited, and has frequently a ring of genuine pathos. Her sister, Lady Dufferin, also wrote verse, which, though less brilliant than Mrs. Norton’s, is on the whole of a more poetic quality.
Adelaide Anne Procter
(1825-1864).
Adelaide Anne Procter, daughter of Barry Cornwall, was a pleasing writer of the type of Mrs. Hemans, that is to say, feminine in the less flattering sense. There is a certain grace in her verse, but it is altogether destitute of weight and power of thought. Most of her poems were originally contributed to Dickens’s papers, Household Words and All the Year Round.
William Caldwell Roscoe
(1823-1859).
William Caldwell Roscoe was at once lyrist, dramatist and critic, but failed to achieve greatness in any of these lines. If Roscoe had lived longer he might possibly have justified the opinion of his friends; but his actual performance, though graceful, is not weighty.
William Bell Scott
(1811-1890).
William Bell Scott was a poet-painter, related to and in general sympathy with the Pre-Raphaelites, but never a member of the brotherhood. Scott’s verse is characterised by mysticism; but mysticism in verse demands very skilful expression, and Scott’s power over language was not sufficient. Perhaps his best poem is The Sphinx.
Menella Bute Smedley
(1820-1877).
Menella Bute Smedley wrote both prose and verse well, and occasionally with distinction. Though an invalid, she published several volumes of poetry, and contributed to her sister, Mrs. Hart’s Child-World and Poems written for a Child. Miss Smedley, like so many female writers, is in many of her poems markedly patriotic, and, though sometimes too rhetorical, she is, when stirred, successful in pieces of this type.
George Walter Thornbury
(1828-1876).
George Walter Thornbury, historian of the buccaneers, was also a poet who, in his Songs of the Cavaliers and Roundheads (1857) showed considerable skill in rapid and spirited narrative. The best of his later poems are gathered up in Legendary and Historic Ballads (1875).
Aubrey de Vere
(1814-1902).
Aubrey de Vere, an Irish poet, has written, in the course of his long career, a good deal of pleasing and thoughtful verse. His sonnets are especially good, as were also his father’s, but they would be still better if they were more terse. Much of his verse is religious, and the mystical tone of mind, indicative of the tendency which led him, as it led Hawker, into the Roman Catholic Church, is the one most distinctive of him.
CHAPTER XII
THE LATER FICTION
After the turn of the century fiction passes through a change similar to that of which we have seen evidence in poetry. The increased tendency to analysis, the greater frequency of the novel of purpose, and the philosophic strain conspicuous in George Eliot, all point to the operation of the forces which stimulated the intellectual movement in verse. The novelists, on the whole, take themselves more seriously than their predecessors—not always to their own advantage or that of their readers. Dickens, in his later days, is more of a reformer than at the opening of his career; and Charles Reade and Kingsley likewise make a conscious attempt to benefit society. In the case of the greatest novelist yet to be discussed this tendency to seriousness of aim grew till it injured her art. George Eliot was always serious in mind, but there is a great difference in treatment between Scenes of Clerical Life and Daniel Deronda.
George Eliot
(1819-1880).
Mary Ann Evans, who adopted the nom de plume of George Eliot, was the daughter of an estate agent. After the death of her mother in 1836 she was charged with the care of her father’s house. But she continued to study, her subject at this period being language, German and Italian, Latin and Greek. Her father moved in 1841 from Griff, near Nuneaton, to Coventry. There Miss Evans came under influences which affected her whole life. Intercourse with certain friends named Bray, and the reading of books like Hennell’s Inquiry concerning the Origin of Christianity overthrew her hitherto unquestioning orthodoxy, gave to her thought a permanent bent, and introduced her to literature. A project for translating Strauss’s Leben Jesu into English had been for some time entertained; the person who originally undertook the work had to abandon it; and Miss Evans took her place. The Life of Jesus was published in 1846. Miss Evans afterwards translated also Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity (1854), the only book ever published under her own name.
The death of her father in 1849 left her without domestic ties, and in 1850 or 1851 she accepted the position of assistant editor of the Westminster Review. In 1854 she took the most questionable step of her life. She went to live with George Henry Lewes, not only without the ceremony of marriage, but while he had a wife still living. All that can be said in defence has been said by herself; but there are several passages in her works which show that she was permanently uneasy, and was not fully convinced that what she had done was right either towards herself or towards society.
Apart from the moral and social aspects of the question, the influence of Lewes upon George Eliot’s literary career seems to have been mixed. On the one hand, it must be said that he acted with a delicate generosity for which his general character hardly prepares us. He encouraged her efforts, recognised her genius, avowed that all he was and all he did himself were due to her, and voluntarily sank into the second place. It is at least possible that without such fostering care the genius of George Eliot would not have run so smooth and successful a course. Further, the very difficulties due to the relation add a deeper note to her voice. There is often a solemn, almost tragic tone in her utterances about domestic life which might have been absent had all been smooth between the world and herself.
On the other hand, Lewes, loyally as he effaced himself, could not but foster tendencies in her mind which were strong enough without his encouragement. He was a philosopher, imbued with the tenets of positivism; and she was naturally prone to be fascinated by abstract thought. Not that she was ever exactly original in philosophic speculation: the danger would have been less had she been so. But she hungered for philosophy, took the results proclaimed for absolute truth, and wove them into the fabric of her own work. From the Scenes of Clerical Life to Daniel Deronda and Theophrastus Such her writings became more and more loaded with philosophy. The two last-named books are decidedly overloaded; and even Middlemarch, the most massive, and probably on the whole the greatest outcome of her genius, would be still greater were it somewhat lightened of the burden.
Blackwood, the nurse of so much genius, in January, 1857, contained the first part of what became the Scenes of Clerical Life. Adam Bede appeared in 1859, The Mill on the Floss in the following year, and Silas Marner in 1861. Romola (1863) was the outcome of a journey to Italy in 1860. After Felix Holt (1866) George Eliot attempted poetry, and visited Spain to gather materials for The Spanish Gypsy (1868). Her only other long poem, The Legend of Jubal, was published with other pieces in 1874. Middlemarch was issued in eight parts in 1871 and 1872. Daniel Deronda (1876) was her last novel; and the Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879) was her last work. In 1878 Lewes died; and in April, 1880, George Eliot married Mr. J. W. Cross, but survived the union less than a year, dying December 22, 1880.
George Eliot’s place is certainly among the great novelists. At the lowest, she is classed after Scott, Dickens and Thackeray (and a few might add Jane Austen); at the highest, she is placed above them all. She carried by storm the intellect of one of the most thoughtful and weighty of critics, Edmond Scherer, who in his Études sur la Littérature Contemporaine devoted three essays to her, which have been admirably translated by Professor Saintsbury. In the last of these Scherer goes so far as to say that for her ‘was reserved the honour of writing the most perfect novels yet known.’ In spite of the note of exaggeration this judgment is significant. Only a writer, not merely of genius, but of great genius, could have drawn it from a critic so sober-minded; a foreigner, unbiassed by the predilections of patriotism; a man of wide knowledge, well aware of all that his sweeping assertion implied.
Most writers, even the greatest, have loaded themselves with a weight of literary lumber. George Eliot carries less of such impedimenta than many, but it will be well nevertheless to put aside at once such works as are neither in her special field nor in her best manner. Under this head fall the heavy and laboured volume of essays entitled Impression of Theophrastus Such, and also the poems. The latter, thoughtful, and occasionally eloquent, nevertheless prove that the writer had not the gift of verse. Richard Congreve described The Spanish Gypsy as ‘a mass of positivism.’ The description is accurate; and perhaps the fact that it is so is, to others who are not positivists, a heavier objection than it was to him. The Legend of Jubal, though better, is not great poetry.
Leaving these works then aside, the novels of George Eliot fall pretty clearly into three groups, which conform to the divisions of chronology. In the first we have at one extreme the Scenes of Clerical Life, and at the other Silas Marner; in the second Romola stands alone; in the third, Felix Holt, the weakest if not the least readable of all, is transitional; while Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda illustrate her later manner respectively in full flower and in decay.
Each of these groups has found special admirers among critics. George Eliot herself was disposed to prefer Romola to all her other works; but she seems to have been swayed by the consideration that it had cost her more than any other book. Romola has been praised also as a marvellous picture of Florentine life in the fifteenth century. Only men who are profoundly versed in Italian character, literature and history are entitled to pronounce upon the question; and they are few in number. But if the statement be true the fact is wonderful, for George Eliot had only spent about six weeks in Florence before she wrote the book. In any case it smells of the lamp, and we may therefore suspect that it will give less permanent pleasure than most of her novels. Tito Melema is admitted to be a masterpiece of subtle delineation; but for the most part the picture of Romola, her home and her associates, is laboured to a degree almost painful.
Of the two other groups, if we take them as wholes, there can be little hesitation in assigning the palm to the earlier. The excellence here is evener, the artistic skill finer, the style more uniformly pleasing. The evenness of quality is proved by the fact that each work in turn has been praised as the author’s best, or at least as equal to her best; whereas there can be no reasonable doubt about the pre-eminence of Middlemarch in the last group. The artistic excellence, again, of Silas Marner, perhaps the most faultless (which does not necessarily mean the best) of English novels, is as conspicuous as are the artistic defects of Middlemarch. And as to style, nearly all readers have felt how the fresh, easy grace, the flexibility of language, the lightness of touch, gradually disappear from the works of George Eliot; and how in her later books passages of genuine eloquence, masterly dialogue or description or reflexion, are mingled with leaden paragraphs wherein the author seems to be struggling under a burden too great for her strength.
The early novels then have the advantage of grace, spontaneity, and the charm exercised by a great writer when the great work is done without apparent effort. Like a giant wielding a club, George Eliot seems to execute the heavy tasks imposed by Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss with an ease possible only because there is a reserve of strength behind. But some of these early products of genius, and among them the most charming of all, could hardly be repeated. Has child-life ever been as delightfully represented in literature as in the first part of The Mill on the Floss? But one secret of the charm is that the book, especially in this part, is autobiographical. Again, in the Scenes of Clerical Life and in Adam Bede the writer moves easily among characters with whom she had been familiar from girlhood. The religious enthusiasm of Dinah Morris is partly a reminiscence of her own early feelings, and partly a picture of her aunt Elizabeth; while in Adam Bede, as afterwards in Caleb Garth, may be seen the features of her own father. In those early years George Eliot skimmed the cream of her experience. Like Scott, she began to write novels rather late. Her powers were therefore mature, and in her first books she combines the perfect freshness of a new writer with the weight and the range of an experienced one.
Thoughtfulness and serious purpose were from the start conspicuous in the writings of George Eliot. It is the overgrowth of these qualities, to the detriment of the artistic element, that mars her later works. Daniel Deronda is ruined by its philosophy and its didactic purpose. The style is ponderous and often clumsy, and the question of heredity is made too prominent. Middlemarch too shows signs of failure on the part of the artist. More than almost any other great novel, it sins against the law of unity. The stories of Dorothea and Casaubon and Ladislaw, of Lydgate and Rosamond, of the Garths, and of Bulstrode, are tacked together by the most flimsy external bonds. They all illustrate a single thesis; but it is for this, and not for their natural connexion, that they are chosen. The keynote of the whole novel is struck in the prelude; and, as in the case of the young Saint Theresa and her brother, we see throughout ‘domestic reality,’ in diverse shapes, meeting the idealist and turning him back from his great resolve. But even want of unity will be pardoned, provided the details are conceived and presented in the manner of an artist, as they are in Middlemarch. Some of George Eliot’s books contain fresher pictures than we find here, but none contains more that dwell in the mind, and in none is her maturest thought so well expressed. Middlemarch gives us one of the rarest things in literature, the philosophy of a powerful mind presented with all the charm of art. For this reason it at least rivals the best work of her first period.
Mrs. Henry Wood
(1814-1887).
Dinah Maria Craik
(1826-1887).
George Eliot was the last of the race of giants in fiction. Some good novelists remain to be noticed, but none who can without hesitation be called great. Those who did respectable work are so numerous that the task of selection becomes exceedingly difficult; and moreover, as we draw near the dividing-line, it proves sometimes doubtful whether a man should be included in the present period, or viewed as belonging to that still current. It is safe to say however that of all forms of literature, fiction is the one in which a rigorous law of selection is the most necessary. Many popular writers must be passed over in silence. Mrs. Henry Wood, notwithstanding the success of her East Lynne, can be barely mentioned; and little more is possible in the case of Dinah Maria Craik, best known as the author of John Halifax, Gentleman, a pleasing but somewhat namby-pamby story, ranked by some unaccountably high. Mrs. Craik never shocks, never startles, nor does she ever invigorate. She is one of those writers who appeal to the taste of the middle class, not perhaps as it is now, but as it was a generation ago.
Three detached novels, by men who cannot be classed as writers of fiction, may be named for the sake of their authors—Eustace Conway (1834), by F. D. Maurice, and Loss and Gain (1848) and Callista (1856), by J. H. Newman. Maurice’s story was written when, a young man, he was still groping his way; but Newman’s deliberately and when the bent of his mind had been long taken. His novels are among the symptoms of the passing of theological interest into general literature, but they have in themselves no value.
Charles Kingsley
(1819-1875).
Charles Kingsley was also by profession a theologian, and his disastrous controversy with Newman remains as a proof of the interest he took in the movement Newman sought to serve by Callista. But fortunately Kingsley did not allow this interest to dominate his books. Tractarianism is indeed one of the themes of his earliest novels, Alton Locke (1850) and Yeast (1848), but socialism, to which his attention had been turned by the personal influence of Maurice, is a far more prominent one. Yeast pictures the condition of agricultural labour, Alton Locke that of labour in crowded cities. Both books are immature, sometimes rash, and on the whole not well constructed; but they have the merits of vigour, earnestness and knowledge at first-hand; for Kingsley had personally taken part in the labour movements in London which resulted in Chartism. Hypatia (1853) is an ambitious novel, at once historical and philosophical, impressive in parts, but on the whole heavy. Kingsley, a man whose physical nature and instincts were quite as well developed as his intellect, is happiest where he can bring to play the experiences of his life, and where he can describe scenes familiar to him. About his best work there is always a breath of the moor, of the fen or of the sea; for he had lived by them all and had learnt to love them. This is shown by his verse as well as his prose. His Ode to the North-East Wind, his Sands of Dee, and the images scattered everywhere through his poems, prove how the features of the scenery and of the weather had sunk into his mind. So do such novels as Westward Ho! (1855) and Hereward the Wake (1866). The former, a historical romance, the scene of which is laid in the time of Elizabeth, is generally considered Kingsley’s best work; and it is only a small minority, to which the writer happens to belong, who find it dreary. The power of some of the descriptions must be acknowledged; but whether Westward Ho! will live is a question on which there may be difference of opinion. Hereward the Wake, generally ranked much lower, is certainly uneven and in parts dull. But it has two great merits: it reproduces in a marvellous way the impression of the fen country; and, by vivid flashes, though not constantly, the reader seems to see before his eyes the very life of the old vikings.
Kingsley’s work was most varied. Besides his novels, his professional work, such as sermons, and his lectures as Professor of History at Cambridge, we may mention his beautiful fairy-tale, The Water Babies (1863), with its exquisite snatches of verse, ‘Clear and Cool,’ and ‘When all the world is young.’ His poetry, if it were as copious as it is often high in quality, would place him among the great. But it was only occasional. Besides short pieces, he was the author of a drama, The Saint’s Tragedy (1848), somewhat immature, and of Andromeda (1858), one of the few specimens of English hexameters that are readable, and that seem to naturalise the metre in our language. It is however noticeable that Kingsley’s success is won at the cost of wholly altering the character of the measure. Andromeda is true and fine poetry, but its effect is not that of ‘the long roll of the hexameter.’ There is a very great preponderance of dactyls. This is the case with almost all English hexameters; and the fact goes far to prove that the hexameter, as understood by the ancients, a fairly balanced mixture of dactyls and spondees, is not suited to the genius of English.
Henry Kingsley
(1830-1876).
Henry Kingsley, the younger brother of Charles, was a novelist likewise, but one of considerably less merit. He passed some years in Australia, and his experiences there supplied materials for one of his best stories, Geoffrey Hamlyn. That by which he is best known is however Ravenshoe (1862). His novels are extremely loose in construction, and he is no rival to his brother in that exuberance of spirits which gives to the writings of the latter their most characteristic excellence.
Anthony Trollope
(1815-1882).
Senior to both the brothers, alike in years and as a writer, was Anthony Trollope. Coming of a literary family (both his mother and his elder brother wrote novels), he proved himself, from 1847, when he published The Macdermotts of Ballycloran, to his death, one of the most prolific of novelists. No recent writer illustrates better than he the function of the novel when it is something less than a work of genius. The demand for amusement is the explanation of the enormous growth of modern fiction. But pure amusement is inconsistent with either profound thought or tragic emotion, while, on the other hand, it requires competent literary workmanship. Anthony Trollope exactly satisfied this demand. He wrote fluently and fairly well. He drew characters which, if they were never very profound or subtle, were at any rate tolerably good representations of human nature. He had a pleasant humour, could tell a story well, and could, without becoming dull, continue it through any number of volumes that might be desired. Perhaps no one has ever equalled him at continuations. What are commonly known as the Barsetshire novels are his best group. There are some half-dozen stories in the group, yet four of them, Barchester Towers, Doctor Thorne, Framley Parsonage, and The Last Chronicle of Barset, extending over a period of ten years (1857-1867), must all be classed with his best work. Perhaps it was the touch of the commonplace that made it possible for him thus frequently to repeat his successes. Trollope’s description of his own methods of work in his Autobiography shows that he worked himself as a manufacturer works his steam-engine, and with the same result, so much of a given pattern produced per diem. His monograph on Thackeray proves him capable of comparing his methods with the methods of a man of genius, by no means to the advantage of the latter.
James Grant
(1822-1887).
Among the minor writers a few, typical of different classes, may be briefly mentioned. James Grant wrote some historical works as well as many novels well spiced with adventure. His best book is perhaps The Romance of War (1845). It follows the fortunes of a regiment through the Peninsula; but while the plan gives it a good groundwork of reality and an abundance of stirring scenes, it is inartistic. George John Whyte-Melville
(1821-1878). George John Whyte-Melville was similarly fond of adventure, but, though he was a soldier who had seen service in the Crimea, he is specially identified with sporting rather than with military novels. His best work is descriptive of fox-hunting, a sport to which he was passionately devoted. He also wrote historical novels, of which the best known is The Gladiators. Both of these writers relied for their effect upon the feeling of interest produced by the situations in which they placed their characters. Wilkie Collins
(1824-1889). So, but in a totally different way, did Wilkie Collins. He was a master of sensational narrative. He excelled in the skilful construction and the skilful unravelling of plot, and in his own domain he is among the best of recent writers. His best known book is The Woman in White, while perhaps that which best deserves to be known is The Moonstone. George Alfred Lawrence
(1827-1876). In neither is there a single character worth remembering; the story is everything. The novel of society, again, is represented by George Alfred Lawrence, the author of Guy Livingstone, who repeats many of the faults of Bulwer Lytton, and has not the genius which in Lytton’s case partly redeems the faults.