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.

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.

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 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, 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.

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.

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.

There remains one man of genius, Charles Reade, who towers over all these men of talent. Reade was mature in years before he began his literary career with a group of dramas, of which Gold, acted with moderate success in 1853, was the best. His easy circumstances as the son of an Oxfordshire squire, and fellow of Magdalen College, exempted him from the necessity of pushing his way in the world. In literature he had one great ambition and one great gift, and unfortunately the two diverged. His talent lay in prose fiction, while his ambition drew him towards the stage. It was the advice of an actress that caused him to turn Masks and Faces, a drama written in collaboration with Tom Taylor, into the prose story of Peg Woffington (1853), and so to find his true vocation. But he remained unsatisfied, and through his whole career he continued to make experiments in the drama, never with much success except in the case of Drink (1879), founded on Zola’s L’Assommoir. So strong was his predilection, that he desired that in the inscription on his tombstone the word ‘dramatist’ should be put first in the specification of his pursuits.

Those who study Reade can have no difficulty in detecting the cause of his failure in the drama. He is fertile of incident, but he has not the art of selecting a few striking scenes rising out of one another and leading rapidly up to a catastrophe. His copiousness finds room in the freer field of prose fiction, and his want of skill in selection is less noticeable there. Accordingly he soon won as a novelist the popularity he never secured as a playwright. Christie Johnstone (1853), one of his best stories, was the successor of Peg Woffington, and after It is Never Too Late to Mend (1856) he took his place as one of the first writers of fiction of the time.

Charles Reade was a man of strong individuality, intense in all his opinions, and bent on making them known. Hence he gives us perhaps the best examples of the novel with a purpose. Dickens had done much work of this description, but Reade went beyond him. Many of his novels are devoted to special questions. Thus It is Never Too Late to Mend deals with prison administration, Hard Cash with lunatic asylums, and Put Yourself in his Place with trade-unions. Moreover, Reade was by no means the man to approach these questions with a few a priori impressions only in his head. He was thorough, and he made an elaborate study of each before he wrote about it. Every incident reported in the newspapers, every trial in the courts of law, every fact wherever recorded, he made it his business to master. He cared less for theories, at least for the theories of other people: he made his own, and loved them. But his survey of the evidence was as nearly exhaustive as it could be. No other writer of fiction ever left such an apparatus of note-books, newspaper cuttings, etc., all digested and systematically arranged. It has been commonly held that Reade’s work was injured by this laborious method; and no doubt the opinion is in part sound. Yet his merits as well as his defects are closely related to his method. His variety and his inexhaustible resource are due to the enormous accumulation of his facts. He loved to illustrate the saying that truth is stranger than fiction, and he held that no man’s invention could supply incidents equal to those which patient investigation would reveal. There is no novelist with respect to whom it is so dangerous to say, ‘this is unnatural or impossible.’ Probably the seeming impossibility is a hard fact, disclosed by some forgotten trial or recorded in some old newspaper.

While however this backbone of reality gives strength to Reade’s novels, his devotion to fact sometimes leads him to forget unity and proportion. The violence of his convictions was apt to overbalance his judgment. He is at his best in his calmer and less didactic moods. For this reason The Cloister and the Hearth (1861) is his masterpiece. In a historical novel, of which the scene is laid in the fifteenth century and the hero is the father of Erasmus, there is ample scope for Reade’s love of investigation, and he has with great skill woven into the narrative the results of wide reading and patient study. The works of Erasmus are appropriately laid under contribution. But Reade has here no thesis to defend, no abuse to attack. The book is consequently better balanced than the novels of the class already mentioned; and the adventures are diversified with touches of pathos and with scenes of domestic life in the Dutch home, such as are hardly to be found elsewhere in Reade’s works. The delineation of character also is subtler. In many of Reade’s novels the characters are wholly subordinate to the purpose of the story. It is not Mr. Eden who interests us in It is Never Too Late to Mend, but rather his theories and methods.

There is no rival among Reade’s novels to The Cloister and the Hearth; but several of them nevertheless are of high quality. Christie Johnstone, a remarkably clever and successful study of the fisher population of the east of Scotland, is perhaps the freshest and least laboured of all his works; and Griffith Gaunt, an analysis of the workings of the passion of jealousy, is the subtlest as a psychological study; while It is Never Too Late to Mend stands pretty near the head of its own class, the novel of purpose. Except the greatest of the writers already dealt with, and one other, Mr. George Meredith, who belongs rather to the next period, there was no contemporary writer who could do work equal to any one of them.

We have now traced the course of literature through a period of forty years, distinguished for their fertility and for the variety of the talent displayed in them. In the prominence given to history, in the drift of philosophic speculation, in the prevalence of the novel of purpose, and in the spirit of the later poetry, we see the influence of social problems clamouring for solution. The Age of Tennyson has been essentially an age of reconstruction. It inherited from the preceding generation a gigantic task, which it has earnestly and laboriously striven to accomplish. What measure of success has been won is still doubtful; how long the literary expression of the effort will remain satisfying may be doubtful too. It is said to-day that we no longer read Carlyle; it may be said to-morrow that we no longer read Tennyson or Browning either. But there is substance in the work of all these men, and of all the leaders of the period. If they are no longer read it is because their thought has penetrated the life of the time; and we may be sure that they will revive and have a second vogue when they are old enough to be partly forgotten.