The English Novel and the Principle of its Development

VIII.

If you should be wandering meditatively along the banks of some tiny brook, so narrow that you can leap across it without effort, so quiet in its singing its loudest tinkle cannot be heard in the next field, carrying upon its bosom no craft that would draw more water than the curving leaf of a wild-rose floating down stream, too small in volume to dream of a mill-wheel and turning nothing more practical than maybe a piece of violet petal in a little eddy off somewhere,—if, I say, you should be strolling alongside such a brook and should see it suddenly expand, without the least intermediate stage, into a mighty river, turning a thousand great wheels for man's profit as it swept on to the sea, and offering broad highway and favorable currents to a thousand craft freighted with the most precious cargoes of human aspirations; you would behold the aptest physical semblance of that spiritual phenomenon which we witnessed at our last meeting, when in tracing the quiet and mentally wayward course of demure Marian Evans among the suave pastorals of her native Warwickshire, we came suddenly upon the year 1857 when her first venture in fiction—The Scenes from Clerical Life appeared in Blackwood's Magazine and magically enlarged the stream of her influence from the diameter of a small circle of literary people in London to the width of all England.

At this point it seems interesting now to pause a moment, to look about and see exactly what network English fiction had done since its beginning, only about a century before; to note more particularly what were the precise gains to humanity which Thackeray and Dickens had poured in just at this time of 1857; and thus to differentiate a clear view of the actual contribution which George Eliot was now beginning to make to English life and thought.

It is not a pleasant task, however instructive, to leave off looking at a rose and cast one's contemplation down to the unsavory muck in which its roots are imbedded. This, however, is what one must do when one passes from the many-petalled rose of George Eliot's fiction to the beginning of the English novel.

This beginning was as curious as it was unlooked for by the people engaged in it.

In the year 1740, a book in two volumes called Pamela: or The Reward of Virtue, was printed, in which Samuel Richardson took what seems to have been the first revolutionary departure from the wild and complex romances—such for example, as Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia—which had formed the nearest approach to the modern novel until then. At this time Richardson was fifty years old, and probably the last man in England who would have been selected as likely to write an epoch-making book of any description.

He had worked most of his life as a printer, but by the time referred to had gotten so far towards the literary life as to be employed by booksellers to arrange indexes and to write prefaces and dedications. It so happened that on a certain occasion he was asked by two booksellers to write a volume of letters on different subjects which might serve as models to uneducated persons—a sort of Every Man His Own Letter Writer, or the like.

The letters, in order to be more useful, were to be upon such subjects as the rustic world might likely desire to correspond about. Richardson thinks it over; and presently writes to inquire, "Will it be any harm, in a piece you want to be written so low, if we should instruct them how they should think and act in common cases, as well as indite?" This seemed a capital idea and in the course of time, after some experiments, and after recalling an actual story he had once heard which gave him a sort of basis, he takes for his heroine a simple servant-girl, daughter of Goodman Andrews, a humbly born English farmer, rather sardonically names her Pamela after the Lady Pamela in Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia, carries her pure through a series of incredibly villainous plots against her by the master of the house where she is at service, and who takes advantage of the recent death of his wife, Pamela's mistress, to carry these on, and finally makes the master marry her in a fit of highly spasmodic goodness, after a long course of the most infamous but unsuccessful villainy, calls the book Pamela or Virtue Rewarded, prints it, and in a very short time wins a great host of admiring readers, insomuch that since the first two volumes ended with the marriage, he adds two more showing the married life of Pamela and her squire.

The whole novel, like all of Richardson's, is written in the form of letters passing between the characters. It is related, apropos of his genius in letter-writing, that in his boyhood he was the love-letter-writer-in-chief for three of the young ladies of his town, and that he maintained this embarrassing position for a long time without suspicion from either of the three. Richardson himself announces the moral purpose of his book, saying that he thinks it might "introduce a new species of writing that might possibly turn young people into a course of reading different from the pomp and parade of romance-writing, and ... promote the cause of religion and virtue;" and in the preface to the continuation before-mentioned, he remarks as follows: "The two former volumes of Pamela met with a success greatly exceeding the most sanguine expectations; and the editor hopes" (Richardson calls himself the editor of the letters), "that the letters which compose these will be found equally written to nature, avoiding all romantic flights, improbable surprises, and irrational machinery; and that the passions are touched where requisite; and rules equally new and practicable inculcated throughout the whole for the general conduct of life." I have given these somewhat tedious quotations from Richardson's own words, to show first that the English novel starts out with a perfectly clear and conscious moral mission, and secondly, to contrast this pleasing moral announcement of Richardson's with what I can only call the silly and hideous realization of it which meets us when we come actually to read this wonderful first English novel—Pamela.

I have already given the substance of the first two volumes in which the rich squire, Mr. B. (as he is called throughout the novel), finally marries and takes home the girl who had been the servant of his wife and against whom, ever since that lady's death, he had been plotting with an elaborate baseness which has never before been, and I sincerely hope will never hereafter be described. By this action Mr. B. has, in the opinion of Richardson, of his wife, the servant girl, and of the whole contemporary world, saturated himself with such a flame of saintliness as to have burnt out every particle of any little misdemeanors he may have been guilty of in his previous existence; and I need only read you an occasional line from the first four letters of the third volume in order to show the marvellous sentimentality, the untruth towards nature, and the purely commercial view of virtue and of religion which make up this intolerable book. At the opening of Volume III. we find that Goodman Andrews, the father of the bride, and his wife have been provided with a comfortable farm on the estate of Mr. B., and the second letter is from Andrews to his daughter, the happy bride, Pamela. After rhapsodizing for several pages, Andrews reaches this climax—and it is worth while observing that though only a rude farmer of the eighteenth century whose daughter was a servant maid, he writes in the most approved epistolary style of the period:

"When here in this happy dwelling and this well-stocked farm, in these rich meadows and well-cropped acres, we look around us and whichever way we turn our heads see blessings upon blessings and plenty upon plenty; see barns well stored, poultry increasing, the kine lowing and crowding about us, and all fruitful; and are bid to call all these our own. And then think that all is the reward of our child's virtue! O, my dear daughter, who can bear these things! Excuse me! I must break off a little! For my eyes are as full as my heart; and I will retire to bless God and your honored husband."

Here there is a break in the page, by which the honest farmer is supposed to represent the period of time occupied by him in retiring, and, as one hopes, dividing his blessing impartially between the Creator and Pamela's honored husband—and the farmer resumes his writing:

"So, my dear child, I now again take up my pen. But reading what I had written, in order to carry on the thread, I can hardly forbear again being in like sort affected."

And here we have a full stop and a dash, during which it is only fair to suppose that the honest Andrews manages to weep and bless up to something like a state of repose.

Presently Pamela:

"My dear father and mother; I have shown your letter to my beloved.... 'Dear good soul,' said he, 'how does everything they say and everything they write manifest the worthiness of their hearts! Tell them ... let them find out another couple as worthy as themselves, and I will do as much for them. Indeed I would not place them,' continued the dear obliger, 'in the same county, because I would wish two counties to be blessed for their sakes.'... I could only fly to his generous bosom ... and with my eyes swimming in tears of grateful joy ... bless God and bless him with my whole heart; for speak I could not! but almost choked with joy, sobbed to him my grateful acknowledgements.... ''Tis too much, too much,' said I, in broken accents. 'O, sir, bless me more gradually and more cautiously—for I cannot bear it!' And, indeed, my heart went flutter, flutter, flutter, at his dear breast, as if it wanted to break its too narrow prison to mingle still more intimately with his own."

And a few lines further on we have this purely commercial view of religion:

"And if our prayers shall be heard," continues Pamela, "and we shall have the pleasure to think that his" (her husband's) "advances in piety are owing not a little to them ... then indeed may we take the pride to think we have repaid his goodness to us and that we have satisfied the debt which nothing less can discharge."

Or, again, in the same letter, she exclaims anew:

"See, O see, my excellent parents, how we are crowned with blessings upon blessings, until we are the talk of all who know us; you for your honesty, I for my humility and virtue;" so that now I have "nothing to do but to reap all the rewards which this life can afford; and if I walk humbly and improve my blessed opportunities, will heighten and perfect all, in a still more joyful futurity."

Perhaps a more downright creed, not only of worldliness, but of "other-worldliness," was never more explicitly avowed.

Now, to put the whole moral effect of this book into a nutshell—Richardson had gravely announced it as a warning to young servant-girls, but why might he not as well have announced it as an encouragement to old villains? The virtue of Pamela, it is true, is duly rewarded: but Mr. B., with all his villainy, certainly fares better than Pamela: for he not only receives to himself a paragon of a wife, but the sole operation of his previous villainy towards her is to make his neighbors extol him to the skies as a saint, when he turns from it; so that, considering the enormous surplus of Mr. B.'s rewards as against Pamela's, instead of the title Pamela; or, The Reward of Virtue, ought not the book to have been called Mr. B.; or, The Reward of Villainy?

It was expressly to ridicule some points of Richardson's Pamela that the second English novel was written. This was Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews, which appeared in 1742. It may be that the high birth of Fielding—his father was great-grandson of the Earl of Denbigh, and a lieutenant-general in the army—had something to do with his opposition to Richardson, who was the son of a joiner; at any rate, he puts forth a set of exactly opposite characters to those in Pamela, takes a footman for his virtuous hero, and the footman's mistress for his villainous heroine, names the footman Joseph Andrews, explaining that he was the brother of Richardson's Pamela, who, you remember, was the daughter of Goodman Andrews, makes principal figures of two parsons, Parson Adams and Parson Trulliber, the former of whom is set up as a model of clerical behavior, and the latter the reverse; and with these main materials, together with an important peddler, he gives us the book still called by many the greatest English novel, originally entitled: The Adventures of Joseph Andrews and His Friend Abraham Adams.

I will not, because I cannot, here cite any of the vital portions of Joseph Andrews which produce the real moral effect of the book upon a reader. I can only say, that it is not different in essence from the moral effect of Richardson's book just described, though the tone is more clownish. But for particular purposes of comparison with Dickens and George Eliot hereafter, let me recall to you in the briefest way two of the comic scenes. That these are fair samples of the humorous atmosphere of the book I may mention that they are both among the number which were selected by Thackeray, who was a keen lover of Fielding generally, and of his Joseph Andrews particularly, for his own illustrations upon his own copy of this book.

In the first scene Joseph Andrews is riding along the road upon a very untrustworthy horse who has already given him a lame leg by a fall, attended by his friend Parson Adams. They arrive at an inn, dismount, and ask for lodging: the landlord is surly, and presently behaves uncivilly to Joseph Andrews; whereupon Parson Adams, in defence of his lame friend, knocks the landlord sprawling upon the floor of his own inn; the landlord, however, quickly receives reinforcements, and his wife, seizing a pan of hog's blood which stood on the dresser, discharged it with powerful effect into the good parson's face. While the parson is in this condition, enters Mrs. Slipshod—a veritable Grendel's mother—

"Terrible termagant, mindful of mischief,"

and attacks the landlady, with fearsome results of uprooted hair and defaced feature. In scene second, Parson Adams being in need of a trifling loan, goes to see his counter parson Trulliber, who was noted, among other things, for his fat hogs. Unfortunately Parson Adams meets Mrs. Trulliber first, and is mistakenly introduced by her to her husband as "a man come for some of his hogs." Trulliber immediately begins to brag of the fatness of his swine, and drags Parson Adams to his stye, insisting upon examination in proof of his praise. Parson Adams complies; they reach the stye, and by way of beginning his examination, Parson Adams lays hold of the tail of a very high-fed, capricious hog; the beast suddenly springs forward, and throws Parson Adams headlong into the deep mire. Trulliber bursts into laughter, and contemptuously cries: "Why, dost not know how to handle a hog?"

It is impossible for lack of space to linger over further characteristics of these writers. It has been very fairly said, that Fielding tells us what o'clock it is, while Richardson shows us how the watch is made; and this, as characterizing the highly analytic faculty of Richardson in contrast to the more synthetic talent of Fielding, is good as far as it goes.

In 1748 appears Richardson's Clarissa Harlowe in eight volumes, which, from your present lecturer's point of view, is quite sufficiently described as a patient analysis of the most intolerable crime in all history or fiction, watered with an amount of tears and sensibility as much greater than that in Pamela as the cube of eight volumes is greater than the cube of four volumes.

In 1753 Richardson's third and last novel, Sir Charles Grandison, appeared; a work differing in motive, but not in moral tone, from the other two, though certainly less hideous than Clarissa Harlowe.

Returning to bring up Fielding's novels, in 1743 appeared his History of the Life of the late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great, in which the hero Jonathan Wild was a taker of thieves, or detective, who ended his own career by being hung; the book being written professedly as "an exposition of the motives that actuate the unprincipled great, in every walk and sphere of life, and which are common alike to the thief or murderer on the small scale and to the mighty villain and reckless conqueror who invades the rights or destroys the liberties of nations." In 1749 Fielding prints his Tom Jones, which some consider his greatest book. The glory of Tom Jones is Squire Allworthy, whom we are invited to regard as the most miraculous product of the divine creation so far in the shape of man; but to your present lecturer's way of thinking, the kind of virtue represented by Squire Allworthy is completely summed in the following sentence of the work introducing him in the midst of nature: it is a May morning, and Squire Allworthy is pacing the terrace in front of his mansion before sunrise; "when," says Fielding, "in the full blaze of his majesty up rose the sun, than which one object alone in this lower creation could be more glorious, and that Mr. Allworthy himself presented—a human being replete with benevolence meditating in what manner he might render himself most acceptable to his Creator by doing most good to his creatures;" that is, in plain commercial terms, how he might obtain the largest possible amount upon the letter of credit which he found himself forced to buy against the inevitable journey into the foreign parts lying beyond the waters of death.

Out of Fielding's numerous other writings, dramatic and periodical, it is perhaps necessary to mention farther only his Amelia, belonging to the year 1751, in which he praised his first wife and satirized the jails of his time.

We must now hastily pass to the third so-called classic writer in English fiction, Tobias Smollett, who, after being educated as a surgeon, and having experiences of life as surgeon's mate on a ship of the line in the expedition to Carthagena, spent some time in the West Indies, returned to London, wrote some satire, an opera, &c., and presently when he was still only twenty-seven years old captivated England with his first novel, Roderick Random, which appeared, in 1748, the same year with Clarissa Harlowe. In 1751 came Smollett's Peregrine Pickle, famous for its bright fun and the caricature it contains of Akenside—Pleasures of Imagination. Akenside, who is represented as the host in a very absurd entertainment after the ancient fashion. In 1752 Smollett's Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom gave the world a new and very complete study in human depravity. In 1769, appeared his Adventures of an Atom; a theme which one might suppose it difficult to make indecorous; and which was really a political satire; but the unfortunate liberty of locating his atom as an organic particle in various parts of various successive human bodies gave Smollett a field for indecency which he cultivated to its utmost yield. A few months before his death in 1771 appeared his Expedition of Humphrey Clinker, certainly his best novel. It is worth while noticing that in Humphrey Clinker the veritable British woman, poorly-educated and poor-spelling, begins to express herself in the actual dialect of the species; and in the letters of Mrs. Winifred Jenkins to her fellow-maid-servant Mrs. Mary Jones at Brambleton Hall, during a journey made by the family to the North we have some very worthy and strongly-marked originals not only of Mrs. Malaprop and Mrs. Partington, but of the immortal Sairey Gamp and of scores of other descendants in Thackeray and Dickens, here and there.

I can quote but a few lines from the last letter of Mrs. Winifred Jenkins concluding the Expedition of Humphrey Clinker, which by the way is told entirely through letters from one character to another, like Richardson's.

"To Mrs. Mary Jones at Brambleton Hall,

Mrs. Jones,:—

Providence has bin pleased to make great halteration in the pasture of our affairs. We were yesterday three kiple chined by the grease of God in the holy bands of matter-money."

(The novel winds up with a general marriage of pretty much all parties concerned, mistress, maid, master and man); "and I now subscribe myself Loyd, at your sarvice." Here she of course describes the wedding. "As for Madam Lashmiheygo, you nose her picklearities—her head to be sure was fantastical; and her spouse had wrapped her with a long ... clock from the land of the selvedges.... Your humble servant had on a plain pea-green tabby sack, with my runnela cap, ruff toupee, and side-curls. They said I was the very moral of Lady Rickmanstone but not so pale—that may well be, for her ladyship is my elder by seven good years or more. Now, Mrs. Mary, our satiety is to suppurate; and we are coming home"—which irresistibly reminds us of the later Mrs. Malaprop's famous explanation in The Rivals:—"I was putrefied with astonishment."—"Present my compliments to Mrs. Gwillim, and I hope she and I will live upon dissent terms of civility. Being by God's blessing removed to a higher spear you'll excuse my being familiar with the lower sarvints of the family, but as I trust you will behave respectful and keep a proper distance you may always depend on the good will and protection of

Yours,

w. loyd."

To these I have now only to add the name of Lawrence Sterne, whose Tristram Shandy appeared in 1759, in order to complete a group of novel writers whose moral outcome is much the same, and who are still reputed in all current manuals as the classic founders of English fiction. I need give no characterization of Sterne's book, which is probably best known of all the three. Every one recalls the Chinese puzzle of humor in Tristram Shandy, which pops something grotesque or indecent at us in every crook. As to its morality, I know good people who love the book; but to me, when you sum it all up, its teaching is that a man may spend his life in low, brutish, inane pursuits, and may have a good many little private sins on his conscience, but will, nevertheless, be perfectly sure of heaven if he can have retained the ability to weep a maudlin tear over a tale of distress; or, in short, that a somewhat irritable state of the lachrymal glands will be cheerfully accepted by the Deity as a substitute for saving grace or a life of self-sacrifice. As I have said, these four writers still maintain their position as the classic novelists, and their moral influence is still copiously extolled; but I cannot help believing that much of this praise is simply well meaning ignorance. I protest that I can read none of these books without feeling as if my soul had been in the rain, draggled, muddy, miserable. In other words, they play upon life as upon a violin without a bridge, in the deliberate endeavor to get the most depressing tones possible from the instrument. This is done under pretext of showing us vice.

In fine, and this is the characterization I shall use in contrasting this group with that much sweeter group led by George Eliot, the distinctive feature of these first novelists is to show men with microscopic detail how bad men may be. I shall presently illustrate with the George Eliot group how much larger the mission of the novel is than this; meantime, I cannot leave this matter without recording, in the plainest terms, that, for far deeper reasons than those which Roger Bacon gave for sweeping away the works of Aristotle, if I had my way with these classic books I would blot them from the face of the earth. One who studies the tortuous behaviors of men in history soon ceases to wonder at any human inconsistency; but, so far as I can marvel, I do daily that we regulate by law the sale of gunpowder, the storage of nitro-glycerine, the administration of poison—all of which can hurt but our bodies—but are absolutely careless of these things—so-called classic books, which wind their infinite insidiousnesses about the souls of our young children, and either strangle them or cover them with unremovable slime under our very eyes, working in a security of fame and so-called classicism that is more effectual for this purpose than the security of the dark. Of this terror it is the sweetest souls who know most.

In the beginning of Aurora Leigh, Mrs. Browning speaks this matter so well that I must clinch my opinion with her words. Aurora Leigh says, recalling her own youthful experience:

"Sublimest danger, over which none weep,
When any young wayfaring soul goes forth
Alone, unconscious of the perilous road,
The day-sun dazzling in his limpid eyes,
To thrust his own way, he an alien, through
The world of books! Ah, you!—you think it fine,
You clap hands—'A fair day!'—you cheer him on
As if the worst could happen, were to rest
Too long beside a fountain. Yet behold,
Behold!—the world of books is still the world;
And worldlings in it are less merciful
And more puissant. For the wicked there
Are winged like angels. Every knife that strikes
Is edged from elemental fire to assail
Our spiritual life. The beautiful seems right
By force of beauty, and the feeble wrong
Because of weakness....
... In the book-world, true,
There's no lack, neither, of God's saints and kings...
True, many a prophet teaches in the roads ...
But stay—who judges?...
... The child there? Would you leave
That child to wander in a battle-field
And push his innocent smile against the guns?
Or even in the catacombs—his torch
Grown ragged in the fluttering air, and all
The dark a-mutter round him? not a child!"

But to return to our sketch of English fiction, it is now delightful to find a snow-drop springing from this muck of the classics. In the year 1766 appeared Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield.

One likes to recall the impression which the purity of this charming book made upon the German Goethe. Fifty years after Goethe had read it—or rather after Herder read to him a translation of the Vicar of Wakefield while he was a law-student at Strasburg—the old poet mentions in one of his letters to Zelter the strong and healthy influence of this story upon him, just at the critical point of his mental development; and yesterday while reading the just published Reminiscences of Thomas Carlyle I found a pleasant pendant to this testimony of Goethe's in favor of Goldsmith's novel in an entry of the rugged old man in which he describes the far outlook and new wisdom which he managed to conquer from Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, after many repulsions.

"Schiller done, I began Wilhelm Meister, a task I liked perhaps rather better, too scanty as my knowledge of the element, and even of the language, still was. Two years before I had at length, after some repulsion, got into the heart of Wilhelm Meister, and eagerly read it through; my sally out, after finishing, along the vacant streets of Edinburgh, a windless, Scotch-misty morning, is still vivid to me. 'Grand, serenely, harmoniously built together, far-seeing, wise and true. Where, for many years, or in my whole life before, have I read such a book?' Which I was now, really in part as a kind of duty, conscientiously translating for my countrymen, if they would read it—as a select few of them have ever since kept doing."

Of the difference between the moral effect of Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield and the classical works just mentioned I need not waste your time in speaking. No great work in the English novel appears until we reach Scott whose Waverley astonished the world in 1814; and during the intervening period from this book to the Vicar of Wakefield perhaps there are no works notable enough to be mentioned in so rapid a sketch as this unless it be the society novels of Miss Burney, Evelina and Cecilia, the dark and romantic stories of Mrs. Radcliffe, the Caleb Williams of William Godwin—with which he believed he was making an epoch because it was a novel without love as a motive—Miss Edgeworth's moral tales and the quiet and elegant narratives of Jane Austen.

But I cannot help mentioning here a book which occurs during this period, and which attaches itself by the oddest imaginable ties to what was said in a previous lecture, of The Novel, as the true meeting-ground where the poetic imagination and the scientific imagination come together and incorporate themselves. Now, to make the true novel—the work which takes all the miscellaneous products of scientific observation and carries them up into a higher plane and incarnates them into the characters (as we call them) of a book, and makes them living flesh and blood like ourselves—to effect this, there must be a true incorporation and merger of the scientific and poetic faculties into one: it is not sufficient if they work side by side like two horses abreast, they must work like a man and wife with one soul; or to change the figure, their union must not be mechanical, it must be chemical, producing a thing better than either alone; or to change the figure again, the union must be like that which Browning has noticed as existing among the ingredients of a musical chord, when, as he says, out of three tones, we make not a fourth, but a star.

Now the book I mean shows us the scientific faculty, and the poetic faculty—and no weak faculties either—working along together, not merged, not chemically united, not lighting up matter like a star,—with the result, as seems to me, of producing the very drollest earnest book in our language. It is The Loves of the Plants, by Dr. Erasmus Darwin, grandfather, I believe, to our own grave and patient Charles Darwin. The Loves of the Plants is practically a series of little novels in which the heroes and heroines belong to the vegetable world. LinnÆus had announced the sexuality of plants, and so had made this idea a principle of classification, the one-stamen class, Monandria, two stamen class, Diandria, etc., etc. Now all this the diligent and truly loving Doctor framed into poetry, and poetry which so far as technical execution goes is quite as good as the very best of the Pope school which it follows. Here are a few specimens of the poem:

"Descend, ye hovering sylphs! aËrial quires,
And sweep with little hands your silver lyres;
With fairy footsteps print your grassy rings,
Ye Gnomes! accordant to the tinkling strings:
While in soft notes I tune to oaten reed
Gay hopes, and amorous sorrows of the mead;—
From giant Oaks, that wave their branches dark,
To the dwarf Moss that clings upon their bark,
What Beaux and Beauties crowd the gaudy groves,
And woo and win their vegetable Loves.

"First the tall Canna lifts his curled brow
Erect to heaven, and plights his nuptial vow;
The virtuous pair, in milder regions born,
Dread the rude blast of Autumn's icy morn;
Round the chill fair he folds his crimson vest,
And clasps the timorous beauty to his breast!"

Here, however, a serious case presents itself; in Canna there was one stamen to one pistil, and this was comfortable; but in the next flower he happened to reach—the Genista or Wild Broom—there were ten stamens to one pistil; that is, ten lovers to one lady; but the intrepid Doctor carries it through, all the same, managing the whole point simply by airy swiftness of treatment:

"Sweet blooms Genista[A] in the myrtle shade,
And ten fond brothers woo the haughty maid."

But sometimes our botanist comes within a mere ace of beautiful poetry, as for example:

"When o'er the cultured lawns and dreary wastes,
Retiring Autumn flings her howling blasts,
Bends in tumultuous waves the struggling woods,
And showers their leafy honors on the floods;
In withering heaps collects the flowery spoil;
And each chill insect sinks beneath the soil:
Quick flies fair Tulipa the loud alarms,
And folds her infant closer in her arms;
In some lone cave, secure pavilion, lies,
And waits the courtship of serener skies."

This book has what it calls Interludes between the parts, in which the Bookseller and the Poet discuss various points arising in it; and its oddity is all the more increased when one finds here a number of the most just, incisive, right-minded and large views not only upon the mechanism of poetry, but upon its essence and its relations to other arts.[B]

[A] Genista, or Planta Genista, origin of "Plantagenet," from the original name-giver's habit of wearing a tuft of his native heath or broom in his bonnet.

[B] Carlyle's opinion of the book is given with a comical grimness in his Reminiscences À propos of the younger Erasmus Darwin, who used much to visit the Carlyles after they settled in London: "Erasmus Darwin, a most diverse kind of mortal, came to seek us out very soon ('had heard of Carlyle in Germany,' &c.), and continues ever since to be a quiet home-friend, honestly attached; though his visits latterly have been rarer and rarer, health so poor, I so occupied, etc., etc. He had something of original and sarcastically ingenious in him; one of the sincerest, naturally honest, and most modest of men; elder brother of Charles Darwin (the famed Darwin on Species of these days), to whom I rather prefer him for intellect, had not his health quite doomed him to silence and patient idleness—grandsons, both, of the first famed Erasmus ('Botanic Garden,' etc.), who also seems to have gone upon 'species' questions, 'omnia ex conchis' (all from oysters), being a dictum of his (even a stamp he sealed with still extant), as this present Erasmus once told me, many long years before this of Darwin on Species came up among us. Wonderful to me, as indicating the capricious stupidity of mankind: never could read a page of it, or waste the least thought upon it."

Nor need I dwell upon Scott's novels, which stretch from 1814 to 1831, which we have all known from our childhood as among the most hale and strengthening waters in which the young soul ever bathed. They discuss no moral problems, they place us in no relation towards our fellow that can be called moral at all, they belong to that part of us which is youthful, undebating, wholly unmoral—though not immoral—they are simply always young, always healthy, always miraculous. And I can only give now a hasty additional flavor of these Scott days by reminding you of the bare names of Thomas Hope, Lockhart, Theodore Hook, Mrs. Trollope, Mrs. Gore and Miss Mitford. It seems always comfortable in a confusion of this kind to have some easily-remembered formula which may present us a considerable number of important facts in portable shape. Now the special group of writers which I wish to contrast with the classic group, consisting of Dickens, Thackeray, Tennyson, Mrs. Browning, Charlotte Bronte, and George Eliot, are at work between 1837 and 1857; and for the purpose of giving you a convenient skeleton or set of vertebrÆ, containing some main facts affecting the English novel of the nineteenth century, I have arranged this simple table which proceeds by steps of ten years up to the period mentioned.

For example: since these all end in seven; beginning with the year 1807, it seems easy to remember that that is the date of Charles and Mary Lamb's Tales from Shakspeare; skipping ten years to 1817, in this year Blackwood's Magazine is established, a momentous event in fiction generally and particularly as to George Eliot's; advancing ten years, in 1827, Bulwer's Pelham appears, and also the very stimulating Specimens of German Romance, which Thomas Carlyle edited; in 1837 the adorable Pickwick strolls into fiction; in 1847 Thackeray prints Vanity Fair, Charlotte Bronte gives us Jane Eyre, and Tennyson The Princess; and finally, in 1857, as we have seen, George Eliot's Scenes of Clerical Life are printed, while so closely upon it in the previous year as to be fairly considered contemporary, comes Mrs. Browning's Aurora Leigh.

Now I do not know any more vivid way of bringing before you the precise work which English fiction is doing at the time George Eliot sets in, than by asking you to run your eye along the last four dates here given, 1827, 1837, 1847, 1857. Here, in 1827, advances a well-dressed man, bows a fine bow, and falls to preaching his gospel: "My friends, under whatever circumstances a man may be placed, he has it always in his power to be a gentleman;" and Bulwer's gentleman is always given as a very manful and Christian being. I am well aware of the modern tendency to disparage Bulwer, as a slight creature; but with the fresh recollection of his books as they fell upon my own boyhood, I cannot recall a single one which did not leave, as a last residuum, the picture in some sort of the chivalrous gentleman impressed upon my heart. I cheerfully admit that he sometimes came dangerously near snobbery, and that he was uncivil and undignified and many other bad things in the New Timon and the Tennyson quarrel; and I concede that it must be difficult for us—you and me, who are so superior and who have no faults of our own—to look upon these failings with patience; and yet I cannot help remembering that every novel of Bulwer's is skilfully written and entertaining, and that there is not an ignoble thought or impure stimulus in the whole range of his works.

But, advancing, here, in 1837, comes on a preacher who takes up the slums and raggedest miseries of London and plumps them boldly down in the parlors of high life; and, like the boy in the fairy tale whose fiddle compelled every hearer to dance in spite of himself, presently has a great train of people following him, ready to do his bidding in earnestly reforming the prisons, the schools, the workhouses, and the like, what time the entire train are roaring with the genialest of laughter at the comical and grotesque figures which this peculiar Dickens has fished up out of the London mud.

But again: here, in 1847, we have Thackeray exposing shame and high vulgarity and minute wickedness, while Charlotte Bronte and Tennyson, with the widest difference in method, are for the first time expounding the doctrine of co-equal sovereignty as between man and woman, and bringing up the historic conception of the personality of woman to a plane in all respects level with, though properly differentiated from, that of man. It is curious to see the depth of Charlotte Bronte's adoration for Thackeray, the intense, high-pitched woman for the somewhat slack, and as I always think, somewhat low-pitched satirist; and perhaps the essential utterance of Thackeray, as well as the fervent tone which I beg you to observe is now being acquired by the English novel, the awful consciousness of its power and its mission, may be very sufficiently gathered from some of Charlotte Bronte's words about Thackeray which occur in the Preface to the second edition of her Jane Eyre:

"There is a man in our own days whose words are not framed to tickle delicate ears; who, to my thinking, comes before the great ones of society much as the son of Imlah came before the throned kings of Judah and Israel; and who speaks truth as deep, with a power as prophet-like and as vital—a mien as dauntless and as daring. Is the satirist of Vanity Fair admired in high places? I cannot tell; but I think if some of those amongst whom he hurls the Greek-fire of his sarcasm, and over whom he flashes the levin-brand of his denunciation, were to take his warnings in time, they or their seed might yet escape a fatal Ramoth-Gilead.

"Why have I alluded to this man? I have alluded to him, reader, because I think I see in him an intellect profounder and more unique than his contemporaries have yet recognized; because I regard him as the first social regenerator of the day: as the very master of that working corps who would restore to rectitude the warped system of things."

Now, into this field of beneficent activity which The Novel has created, comes in 1857 George Eliot: comes with no more noise than that of a snow-flake falling on snow, yet—as I have said, and as I wish now to show with some detail—comes as an epoch-maker, both by virtue of the peculiar mission she undertakes and of the method in which she carries it out.

What then is that peculiar mission?

In the very first of these stories, Amos Barton, she announces it quite explicitly, though it cannot be supposed at all consciously. Before quoting the passage, in order that you may at once take the full significance of it, let me remind you of a certain old and grievous situation as between genius and the commonplace person. For a long time every most pious thinker must have found one of the mysteries most trying to his faith to be the strange and apparently unjustifiable partiality of God's spiritual gifts as between man and man.

For example, we have a genius (say) once in a hundred years; but this hundred years represents three generations of the whole world; that is to say, here are three thousand million commonplace people to one genius.

Now, with all the force of this really inconceivable numerical majority, the cry arises, How monstrous! Here are three thousand millions of people to eat, sleep, die, and rot into oblivion, and but one man is to have such faculty as may conquer death, win fame, and live beyond the worms!

Now, no one feels this inequality so keenly as the great genius himself. I find in Shakspeare, in Beethoven, in others, often an outcrop of feeling which shows that the genius cringes under this load of favoritism, as if he should cry in his lonesome moments, Dear Lord, why hast thou provided so much for me, and so little for yonder multitude? In plain fact, it seems as if there was never such a problem as this: what shall we do about these three thousand millions of common men as against the one uncommon man, to save the goodness of God from seeming like the blind caprice of a Roman Emperor!

It is precisely here that George Eliot comes to the rescue; and though she does not solve the problem—no one expects to do that—at any rate she seems to me to make it tolerable, and to take it out of that class of questions which one shuts back for fear of nightmare and insanity. Emerson has treated this matter partially and from a sort of side-light. "But," he exclaims in the end of his essay on The Uses of Great Men, "great men,—the word is injurious. Is there caste? Is there fate? What becomes of the promise to virtue?... Why are the masses, from the dawn of history down, food for knives and powder? The idea dignifies a few leaders, ... and they make war and death sacred; but what for the wretches whom they hire and kill? The cheapness of man is everyday's tragedy." And more to this purport. But nothing could be more unsatisfactory than Emerson's solution of the problem. He unhesitatingly announces on one page that the wrong is to be righted by giving every man a chance in the future, in (say) different worlds; every man is to have his turn at being a genius; until "there are no common men." But two pages farther on this elaborate scheme of redress is completely swept away by the announcement that after all the individual is nothing, the quality is what abides, and so falls away in that singular delusion of his, that personality is to die away into the first cause.

On the other hand, if you will permit me to quote a few pathetic words which I find in Carlyle's Reminiscences, in the nature of a sigh and aspiration, and breathed blessing all in one upon his wife and her ministrations to him during that singular period of his life when he suddenly left London and buried himself in his wild Scotch farm of Craigenputtoch, I shall be able to show you how Carlyle, most unconsciously, dreams toward a far more satisfactory end of this matter than Emerson's, and then how George Eliot actually brings Carlyle's dream to definite form, and at last partial fulfilment in the very beginning of her work. Carlyle is speaking of the rugged trials and apparent impossibilities of living at Craigenputtoch when he and his Jeanie went there, and how bravely and quietly she faced and overcame the poverty, the ugliness, the almost squalor, which was their condition for a long time. "Poverty and mean obstruction continued," he says, "to preside over it, but were transformed by human valor of various sorts into a kind of victory and royalty. Something of high and great dwelt in it, though nothing could be smaller and lower than many of the details. How blessed might poor mortals be in the straitest circumstances, if only their wisdom and fidelity to Heaven and to one another were adequately great! It looks to me now like a kind of humble russet-coated epic, that seven years' settlement at Craigenputtoch, very poor in this world's goods, but not without an intrinsic dignity greater and more important than then appeared; thanks very mainly to her, and her faculties and magnanimities, without whom it had not been possible."

And now, let us hear the words in which George Eliot begins to preach the "russet-coated epic" of everyday life and of commonplace people.

The Rev. Amos Barton, whose sad fortunes I have undertaken to relate, was, you perceive, in no respect an ideal or exceptional character; and perhaps I am doing a bold thing to bespeak your sympathy on behalf of a man who was so very far from remarkable,—a man whose virtues were not heroic, and who had no undetected crime within his breast; who had not the slightest mystery hanging about him, but was palpably and unmistakably commonplace; who was not even in love, but had had that complaint favorably many years ago. "An utterly uninteresting character!" I think I hear a lady reader exclaim—Mrs. Farthingale, for example, who prefers the ideal in fiction; to whom tragedy means ermine tippets, adultery, and murder; and comedy, the adventures of some personage who is quite a "character."

But, my dear madam, it is so very large a majority of your fellow-countrymen that are of this insignificant stamp. At least eighty out of a hundred of your adult male fellow-Britons returned in the last census are neither extraordinarily wicked, nor extraordinarily wise; their eyes are neither deep and liquid with sentiment, nor sparkling with suppressed witticisms; they have probably had no hair-breadth escapes or thrilling adventures; their brains are certainly not pregnant with genius, and their passions have not manifested themselves at all after the fashion of a volcano. They are simply men of complexions more or less muddy, whose conversation is more or less bald and disjointed. Yet these commonplace people—many of them—bear a conscience, and have felt the sublime prompting to do the painful right; they have their unspoken sorrows and their sacred joys; their hearts have perhaps gone out towards their first-born, and they have mourned over the irreclaimable dead. Nay, is there not a pathos in their very insignificance—in our comparison of their dim and narrow existence with the glorious possibilities of that human nature which they share.

Depend upon it, you would gain unspeakably if you would learn with me to see some of the poetry and the pathos, the tragedy and the comedy, lying in the experience of a human soul that looks out through dull gray eyes, and that speaks in a voice of quite ordinary tone. In that case, I should have no fear of your not caring to know what further befell the Rev. Amos Barton, or of your thinking the homely details I have to tell at all beneath your attention. As it is, you can, if you please, decline to pursue my story further; and you will easily find reading more to your taste, since I learn from the newspapers that many remarkable novels, full of striking situations, thrilling incidents, and eloquent writing, have appeared only within the last season.

Let us now pass on to Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, and the rest of George Eliot's works in historic order, and see with what delicious fun, what play of wit, what ever-abiding and depth-illuminating humor, what creative genius, what manifold forms of living flesh and blood, George Eliot preached the possibility of such moral greatness on the part of every most commonplace man and woman as completely reduces to a level the apparent inequality in the matter of genius, and so illustrated the universal "russet-coated epic."

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