THE EARLIER FICTION.

The characteristic literary form of the last two generations has been the novel. After a certain interval Scott was followed zealously, and by constantly increasing numbers; so that for every novelist who was writing in the first decade of the century, there were probably ten in the fourth; and, as the great increase of readers has been principally in the readers of fiction, the growth has naturally continued down to the present day. No one can believe that this immense preponderance of fiction has been altogether wholesome. It is questionable whether the novel is capable of producing the highest results in art; certainly we do not find in prose fiction the equivalent of Hamlet or of Faust, of the Iliad or the Divine Comedy. It may be that the Shakespeare of novelists has not yet come; but it may also be that the form is inherently inferior to the drama and the epic. The latter is the conclusion suggested by the fact that of all kinds of imaginative art the novel is the one which has least permanence. Novels are like light wine in respect that, while pleasant to the taste, they do not keep long; they resemble it too in the fact that a man may read much, as the disappointed toper found he could drink much, without making great progress. Notwithstanding the hostility, avouched by Horace, of gods and men and booksellers to the mediocre poet, the versifier who has just a little of the poetic spirit is, after two or three generations, far more readable than the merely competent novelist. There are few literary experiences more melancholy than to turn to an old novel, once famous, but not quite the work of genius. Moreover, the novel has yielded more than any other form of literature to certain influences of the time inimical to high art. It is in fiction above all that the periodical system of publication has been adopted; and we can trace its evil effects in the work even of men like Thackeray and Dickens. The novel tends at the best to looseness of structure, and periodical publication fosters the tendency.

In at least one other way the influence of the novel must have been partly evil. The gains of literature have been to an altogether disproportionate extent showered upon novelists; and the ordinary laws of human action force us to believe that some talent must have been thus diverted to fiction which would have been better employed otherwise. Theologians like Newman and historians like Froude are tempted from their own domain into the field of fiction. Yet on the other hand it must be said that the greater writers have been on the whole remarkably faithful to their true vocation. The leading novelists are those whose talents find freest scope in fiction. Historians, philosophers, novelists, poets, the great men everywhere remain what nature intended them to be. Still, the evil, though not as great as it might have been expected to be, is real. Matthew Arnold, it is said, ceased to write verse because he could not afford it. But for the absorption of the mass of readers in fiction he probably could have afforded it.

In the year 1830 literature in general, but especially fiction and the more fugitive forms both of verse and prose, received a notable stimulus from the establishment of Fraser’s Magazine. The idea of the magazine originated with William Maginn and a Bohemian acquaintance of his, Hugh Fraser, from whom, and not from the publisher James Fraser, it received its name. Maginn had been a contributor to Blackwood, and partly through his connexions with its staff he soon drew around him a band as brilliant as that of Blackwood itself. Coleridge, Carlyle, Lockhart, Thackeray and Southey were among the early contributors. Theodore Hook, famous for his somewhat coarse but copious and ready wit, also wrote for it. He was at that time one of the most popular of the novelists; but though he could tell a story well he could not draw a character, and it is for impromptu jests and for the clever fun of his articles that he is now remembered. Maginn himself was no mean contributor. He was never the editor of the magazine, but he was one of the most energetic and effective of its staff. Thackeray has immortalised him in Captain Shandon; but if he had the weaknesses of that well-known character he had certainly all his cleverness and more than all his accomplishments. For Maginn’s more serious articles show no inconsiderable learning; while his best humorous articles are simply excellent. Bob Burke’s Duel with Ensign Brady is a model of what the Irish story ought to be. Maginn was helped by others in giving an Irish flavour to the early Fraser. Crofton Croker, author of the Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland, was one of his colleagues; and the witty Francis Mahony was another. The famous Reliques of Father Prout first appeared in Fraser.

Men like Theodore Hook and Mahony were however merely the free lances of fiction, and it was Scott who moulded the legitimate novel. It is strange that his great success did not more speedily produce a crop of imitations. A few appeared during the twenties, but Scott’s life was near its close before any writers came forward of calibre sufficient to be called his successors. Of those who had begun to write before 1830, the chief were Bulwer Lytton, Disraeli and Marryat. Two others, worthy of mention though inferior to these, were the prolific but commonplace G. P. R. James and Harrison Ainsworth. All of these men were stimulated by Scott, but the greater ones were more than mere imitators.

The first Lord Lytton was by baptism Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer. On succeeding to his mother’s estate of Knebworth he became Bulwer Lytton; and in 1866 he was raised to the peerage as Viscount Lytton. The union of politics with fiction is one of the points of contact between him and Disraeli; but while in the case of Disraeli the politician is first and the man of letters second, the order of importance is reversed in the case of Lytton. In politics, Lytton was at the start a Whig, but afterwards attached himself to the Conservative party, and became, under Lord Derby, Colonial Secretary.

Lytton’s literary career began in boyhood with Ismail and other Poems (1820), and it ended only with his death. Perhaps fluency and versatility were his most remarkable characteristics. He distinguished himself as a novelist and as a dramatist, achieved a certain success as a lyric poet, believed that his greatest work was an epic, and attempted criticism and history. He had however the good sense and good taste to leave his historical work, Athens, its Rise and Fall, unfinished on the appearance of the histories of Thirlwall and Grote. It is only as a novelist and dramatist that he demands serious consideration; and in these departments he is the more worthy of attention because he is perhaps the best literary weather-gauge of his time.

Lytton’s first novel was Falkland (1827), which he afterwards called his Sorrows of Werther. It proves his literary affiliation to Byron, and the proof is strengthened by subsequent works. Lytton, who was not proud of the relationship, both thought and said that he had done much to put Byron out of fashion. Possibly he was right, but the kinship is none the less real. The posing and foppery of Pelham are both like and unlike the attitudinising of Byron; and the similarity of the sentimental and romantic criminals, Eugene Aram and Paul Clifford, to the heroes of Byron’s tales is obvious. Moreover, as Lytton once at least, in Pelham, sat for his own portrait, and Byron did so many times, the likeness was recognised as a personal one, so that one of Lytton’s early lady correspondents nicknamed him Childe Harold. Lytton was too sensitive to influences to escape the Byronic fever. But his Byronism is Byronism a little damaged. ‘The Hero as Criminal,’ as presented by him, is a being more sentimental and sickly, less violent and less forcible, but not a whit less dangerous to society, than his Byronic prototype.

Lytton’s excursions into the domains of dandyism and criminality drew down upon him the satire of Carlyle and Thackeray, both sworn foes of affectation, from which Lytton was never free. But in spite of hostile criticism the new novelist had caught the popular taste; and he retained it, perhaps because his own never remained long constant. Shortly after the publication of Eugene Aram (1832) he underwent a marked change, due immediately to a journey to Italy, the influence of which is seen both in the subject and the treatment of The Last Days of Pompeii (1834), and of Rienzi (1835). These, with The Last of the Barons (1843), form a group of historical romances, glittering and clever, but destitute of charm. The strength and the weakness of Lytton is nowhere more easily detected than in these novels. They show abundance of talent, supported by a quality not usually associated with such powers as those of Lord Lytton—indefatigable industry. Yet they fall short of excellence. To say that Lytton’s treatment of history will not bear comparison with Shakespeare’s, or with Scott’s, or with Thackeray’s, is only to say that he is not equal to the greatest masters. But there are other men, markedly inferior to these, who yet overtop Lytton. Such, for instance, is Charles Reade, in his Cloister and the Hearth. What Reade has in common with his greater brethren, and Lytton has not, is the light and shade of life. In Lytton all is polished glittering brilliance. The light is neither the sunlight of common day nor ‘the moonlight of romance,’ but the glare of innumerable gas lamps,—the rays from the footlights to which he was about to betake himself. All the softer shades disappear, and quiet effects are impossible. There is nowhere in these novels, and there is rarely in Lytton’s later works, that atmosphere of a home which we always breathe in the novels of the greater writers.

After the Italian novels Lytton for a time turned his energies to dramatic writing. The fantastic romance of Zanoni (1842) and The Last of the Barons, which followed it, are exceptions. With The Caxtons (1849) we find him entering upon a new period of prose fiction. My Novel (1853) was a sequel to it; and these two are generally ranked with What will He do with It? (1859) as a group devoted to contemporary life. Perhaps Kenelm Chillingly (1873) ought to be added. These novels are altogether mellower than the historical romances, and wholesomer than what may be called the criminal group. To a great extent the theatrical glare has disappeared. It is clear that in writing these novels Lytton was catering for the taste which had been partly indicated and partly created by Dickens and Thackeray. The difference is that, whereas Dickens and Thackeray are habitually in touch with nature, Lytton is so only in moments of inspiration. His true field was not the natural, but rather the fanciful and fantastic. Two of his most successful works are Zanoni, which flings probability to the winds, and The Coming Race (1871), in which the faculty exercised is that of prophecy. In the latter Lytton showed again his extraordinary sensitiveness. Forecasts like The Coming Race have been characteristic of recent literature, and he seems to have divined their approach.

Lytton’s dramas are remarkably like in tone to his novels, and the popularity they have enjoyed has been due to much the same causes. But whereas the novels are overshadowed, in critical opinion at least, and largely even in popularity, the dramas remain what they were when they were written, among the best plays of a non-dramatic age. Not that they can compare in literary merit with even such semi-failures as Browning’s plays, still less with Tennyson’s one great success, Becket. They are melodramatic, and the striving for stage effect is evident; but yet they are interesting and well adapted for representation, and the melodrama is good of its kind. Lytton’s first play, The Duchess de la ValliÈre, was a failure; but The Lady of Lyons (1838) speedily became, and still remains, a favourite on the stage. It is the best specimen of Lytton’s dramatic work. Attempts have been made to put the prose comedy, Money (1840) above it; but, though effective, Money is very flimsy in construction and characterisation. Lytton’s third drama, Cardinal Richelieu (1838), is like one of the historical novels adapted to the stage; though, curiously enough, it is less meretricious than they are.

The epic of King Arthur is scarcely worthy of mention; but Lytton’s lyrics deserve a few words, if only because they are in danger of being forgotten. They are not original; perhaps indeed it is as echoes that they are most interesting. We have already seen how Lytton appears to veer with every breath of popular taste; and it is curious to detect in a man so different by nature the occasional echo of the pensive reflexion of Arnold, and sometimes even a suggestion of the philosophy of Browning. It will appear hereafter that this faculty proved hereditary and descended to Owen Meredith. Two stanzas from Is it all Vanity? deserve to be quoted, because the modern note sounds so clear in them:

‘Rise, then, my soul, take comfort from thy sorrow;
Thou feel’st thy treasure when thou feel’st thy load;
Life without thought, the day without the morrow,
God on the brute bestow’d;
‘Longings obscure as for a native clime,
Flight from what is to live in what may be,
God gave the Soul;—thy discontent with time
Proves thine eternity.’

Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, was the man of letters most closely related in spirit and methods to Lytton; but even from the beginning his ambition was for eminence in the state. Political interests and a political purpose are features in his earlier works, and they are the essence of the intermediate novels, Coningsby and Sybil. Disraeli began his career with Vivian Grey, the first part of which was published in 1826, and the second in the following year. He next spent three years in the south of Europe; after which, in the interval between his return and his entrance into Parliament in 1837, came the period of his greatest literary activity. Between 1831 and 1837 there appeared, besides some minor works, five novels,—The Young Duke, Contarini Fleming, The Wondrous Tale of Alroy, Venetia and Henrietta Temple. Parliamentary work checked his pen and profoundly influenced what he did write, as we see in Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845), and Tancred (1847). After Tancred Disraeli wrote no fiction till Lothair appeared in 1870, followed by the disappointing Endymion (1880).

As literature, Disraeli’s novels are not great, because, using the word in an artistic and not in a moral sense, they are not pure. They are pretentious and unreal, and the rhetoric rings false. The impression of insincerity, conveyed to so many by his statesmanship, is conveyed also by his novels. But notwithstanding all defects, Disraeli’s novels have that interest which must belong to the works of a man who has played a great part in history. They throw light upon his character, they mark the development of his ambition, it may even be said that they have helped to make English history. It is worth remembering that Tancred foretells the occupation of Cyprus; and it is quite consistent with the character of Disraeli to believe that, when the opportunity came, the desire to make his own prophecy come to pass influenced him to add to the British crown one of its most worthless possessions, and to burden it with one of its most intolerable responsibilities, the care of Armenia. Indeed, the most remarkable feature in Disraeli’s novels is the way in which they reflect his life and interpret his statesmanship. The magniloquence, the flash and the glitter of the early novels seem of a piece with the tales current regarding the author’s manners and character, his dress designed to attract attention, and his opinions cut after the pattern of his dress. So in the Coningsby group we are struck with the forecast of the writer’s future political action. His later policy seems to be just the realisation of his earlier dreams.Impartially considered, these novels, notwithstanding their air of unreality, tell in favour of Disraeli’s sincerity. Many even of his own party believed him to be cynically indifferent to the real effect of his measures, and to aim only at party, and, above all, at personal success. But it ought to be remembered that the originator of Tory democracy was also the leader of Young England. Coningsby, and still more Sybil, advocate the claims of the people to a more careful consideration than they had hitherto received at the hands of government; and their advocacy was no mere passing thought. In the case of Sybil, at least, Disraeli’s views were the outcome of personal observation during a tour in the north of England. When he afterwards declared that sanitation and the social improvement of the working classes were the real task of government, he was only repeating what he had written many years before. Men who knew Disraeli well have said that his most wonderful quality was an almost portentous power of forecast. This is certainly confirmed by his literary works. There are no writings of the century which so distinctly foreshadow the actual course of politics and legislation as this group of Disraeli’s novels.

Of the other men selected as representative of this early period, Ainsworth and James, though younger than Marryat, claim treatment first, because their work is more closely connected with the novels of the preceding period. They were direct imitators of Scott, as Scott himself perceived in the case of Ainsworth at least;[2] and criticism of one side of their work could not be better expressed than in his words. The great novelist compares himself to Captain Bobadil, who trained up a hundred gentlemen to fight very nearly, if not quite, as well as himself. He goes on: ‘One advantage, I think, I still have over all of them. They may do their fooling with a better grace; but I, like Sir Andrew Aguecheek, do it more natural. They have to read old books and consult antiquarian collections to get their knowledge; I write because I have long since read such works, and possess, thanks to a strong memory, the information they have to seek for. This leads to a dragging-in of historical details by head and shoulders, so that the interest of the main piece is lost in minute descriptions of events which do not affect its progress.’

Little or nothing need be added about the historical novels of William Harrison Ainsworth. What Scott says is strictly true of The Tower of London (1840), reputed to be Ainsworth’s masterpiece, of Old St. Paul’s (1841), and of St. James’s, or the Court of Queen Anne (1844). The censure is indeed too mildly expressed.

Ainsworth had another side. Like Lytton, he showed a kind of perverse regard for interesting criminals. Rookwood (1834), with its famous description of Turpin’s ride to York, and Jack Sheppard (1839), are studies of the highwayman. The latter was severely criticised as demoralising in tendency, and the censure induced Ainsworth to abandon this species of story.

George Paine Rainsford James was even more prolific than Ainsworth. He is said to have written more than one hundred novels, besides historical books and poetry. No wonder therefore that the name of James became a by-word for conventionality of opening and for diffuse weakness of style. More perhaps than Ainsworth he has suffered from time, because he remains more constantly on a dead level of mediocrity. James trusted, and in his own day trusted not in vain, to adventure; but unless there is some saving virtue of style, or of thought, or of character, each generation insists on making its own adventures. James has sunk under the operation of this law, and he is not likely to be revived.

Frederick Marryat was a man of altogether higher merit than these two. Indeed there are several points, of vital moment for permanence of fame, wherein he surpasses Disraeli and Lytton as well. He was by far the most natural and genuine of the whole group. He was also, qua novelist, the most original. There is no affectation, no pretentiousness, in Marryat. Through his breezy style there blows the freshness of an Atlantic gale, rude and boisterous, but invigorating. He is moreover the best painter of the naval life of that day, and the fact that it has passed away for ever, by closing the subject to future writers, or condemning them to write at second-hand, gives to his works a special promise of permanence.

Marryat’s literary career reaches from Frank Mildmay (1829) to the posthumous Valerie (1849). His stories embody many incidents of his own life, and his characters are often reproductions of actual men. Thus, the Captain Savage of Peter Simple is partly a picture of Marryat’s first commander, the great Cochrane, to whose adventurous spirit he owed an experience richer, though crowded within a few years, than a lifetime of the ‘weak piping time of peace.’ This was his literary stock-in-trade. His rattling adventure, his energetic description, his fun and liveliness, are the charm of his best books—Peter Simple, Jacob Faithful, Midshipman Easy, Japhet in Search of a Father. His plots are rough but sufficient; his characters show little penetration; but the habit of drawing from the life prevented him from going far wrong.From the nature of his subjects and from his mode of treatment Marryat invites comparison with his predecessors, Smollett and Fenimore Cooper, as well as with his contemporary, Michael Scott, who, next to Marryat himself, is the best of the naval story-tellers of that time. Marryat is by no means the equal of Smollett in richness of humour. His is rather the humour of boisterous spirits than that intellectual quality which gives so fine a flavour to books. On the other hand, Marryat is much more humane than Smollett. The life depicted by both is rough to the last degree. In Smollett, the roughness frequently passes over into brutality; while Marryat, though he depicts brutality, never seems to share it. As against the American, Cooper, Marryat has the advantage, in his sea stories, of greater familiarity with the life he paints; Cooper’s strength is elsewhere, and there he reaches higher than Marryat’s highest point.

Michael Scott, one of the Blackwood group of writers, would be not unworthy to be bracketed with Marryat if a man could be judged by parts of his books without regard to the whole; but unfortunately Tom Cringle’s Log (1829-30) and The Cruise of the Midge (1836) are little more than scenes and incidents loosely strung together. Perhaps Scott was influenced by the genius loci; at any rate his books resemble the Noctes AmbrosianÆ in so far as they are the outlet to every riotous fancy and every lawless freak of the writer’s humour.

Marryat had several imitators, the best of whom were Glascock and Chamier, the latter still fairly well known by name as the author of Ben Brace and The Arethusa. But though they had practical experience of sea life, like Marryat, Glascock and Chamier had not his literary faculty. At a later date, James Hannay, the essayist and critic, essayed the naval tale with more literary skill, but without the practical knowledge possessed by these men.

To a wholly different class belonged the once famous Samuel Warren. He was a barrister and the author of several legal works, but his literary career was determined rather by a short period of medical study in Edinburgh, before he resolved to be a barrister. His acquaintance with Christopher North opened the pages of Blackwood to him, and he utilised his medical training in the Diary of a Late Physician, an unpleasantly realistic book which first appeared in that magazine. Ten Thousand a Year (1841), though commonplace in substance, was interesting. Warren lived upon the reputation of this book. His subsequent attempts were failures, and he was known through life as the author of Ten Thousand a Year.