The English Novel - George Saintsbury (read novel full .TXT) 📗

due to the fact that most of the novels are political is a question rather to be hinted than to be discussed. But the present writer has never read a political novel, whether on his own side or on others, that seemed to him to be wholly satisfactory.

Bulwer--for it is perhaps here not impolite or improper still to call the first Lord Lytton by the name under which he wrote for forty years, and solidly niched himself in the novel-front of the minster of English Literature--had not a few points of resemblance to his rival and future chief. But their relations to politics and letters were reversed. Disraeli was a born politician who was also a very considerable man of letters: Bulwer was a born man of letters who was a by no means inconsiderable politician. His literary ability was extraordinarily diversified: but, once more, he was (here also) a born novelist, who was also a not inconsiderable dramatist; a critic who might not impossibly have been great, a miscellanist of ability, and a verse-writer than whom many a worse has somehow or other obtained the name of poet. He began novel-writing very early ( Falkland is of 1827), he continued it all his life, and he was the very Proteus-chameleon of the novel in changing his styles to suit the tastes of the day. He never exactly copied anybody: and in all his various attempts he went extremely near to the construction of masterpieces. In the novel of society with Pelham (1828); the novel of crime with Eugene Aram (1832) and Zanoni (1842); the novel of passion and a sort of mystery with Ernest Maltravers and Alice ; the historic romance with The Last Days of Pompeii (1834), The Last of the Barons (1843), and Harold (1848), he made marks deep and early. When the purely domestic kind came in he made them, earlier and deeper still, with The Caxtons (1850), My Novel (1853), etc. He caught the "sensation" ball at nearly its first service with his old "mystery" racket, and played the most brilliant game of the whole tournament in A Strange Story (1862). At the last he tried later kinds still in books like The Coming Race (1871), The Parisians (1873), and Kenelm Chillingly . And once, Pallas being kind, he did an almost perfect thing (there is not a speck or a flaw in it except, perhaps, the mechanical death of the bulldog) and produced one of the best examples of one of the best and oldest classes of fiction known to the world, in the ghost-story of The Haunted and the Haunters (1859).

Such a mass, such a length, such a variety of production, with so many merits in it, would be difficult to meet elsewhere in our department. And yet very few critics of unquestionable competence, if any, have accorded the absolute First Class to Lord Lytton as a novelist. That this is partly (and rather unjustly) due to the singular and sometimes positively ridiculous grandiloquence and to the half-mawkish, half-rancid, sentimentality which too often mar his earlier novels is probably true. But it is not all the truth: if it were, it would be almost sufficient to point out that he outgrew the first of these faults completely, the second almost completely; and that from The Caxtons (1850) onward there is hardly any stain on his literary character in any such respect. But other faults--or at least defects--remain. They may be almost summed up in the charge of want of consummateness . Bulwer could be romantic--but his romance had the touch of bad taste and insincerity referred to above. He could, as in The Caxtons , be fairly true to ordinary life--but even then he seemed to feel a necessity of setting off and as it were apologising for the simplicity and veracity by touches--in fact by douches --of Sternian fantastry, and by other touches of what was a little later to be called sensationalism. Even his handling of the supernatural, which was undoubtedly a strong point of his, was not wholly de ban aloi . To pronounce him, as was once done by an acute and amiable judge, "the hum miest of bugs " was excessive in life, and would be preposterous in literature. But there undoubtedly was, with rare exceptions, a suspicion of what is called in slang "faking" about his work. The wine is not "neat" but doctored; the composition is pastiche ; a dozen other metaphors--of stucco, veneer, glueing-up--suggest themselves. And then there suggests itself, in turn, a sort of shame at such imputations on the author of such a mass of work, so various, so interesting, so important as accomplishment, symptom, and pattern at once. And perhaps one may end by pronouncing Bulwer one of the very greatest of English novelists who are not of the very greatest.

It is difficult to say whether the usual attitude of criticism to Captain Marryat (1792-1848) is more uncritical than ungrateful or more ungrateful than uncritical. Because he has amused the boy, it seems to be taken for granted that he ought not to amuse the man: because he does not write with the artificial and often extremely arbitrary graces of the composition books, that he is "not literature." If it be so, why in the first case so much the worse for "the man," and in the second so much the worse for literature. As a matter of fact, he has many of the qualities of the novelist in a high degree: and if he were in the fortunate position of an ancient classic, whose best works only survive, these qualities could not fail of recognition. Much of his later work simply ought not to count; for it was mere hack-labour, rendered, if not necessary, very nearly so by the sailor's habit (which Marryat possessed in the highest degree) of getting rid of money. Even among this,
Masterman Ready and The Children of the New Forest , "children's books," as they may be called, rank very high in their kind. But he counts here, of course, for his sea-novels mainly: and in them there are several things for us to notice. One is that Marryat had the true quality of the craftsman, as distinguished from the amateur or the chance-medley man who has a lucky inspiration. If it were the case that his books derived their whole attraction from the novelty and (within its limits) the variety of their sea-matter, then the first ought to be the best, as in nearly all such cases is the fact. But Frank Mildmay (1829), so far from being the best, is not far from being the worst of Marryat's novels. Much--dangerously much--as he put of his own experiences in the book, he did not know in the least how to manage them. And if Frank is something of a bravo, more of a blackguard, and nearly a complete ruffian, it is not merely because there was a good deal of brutality in the old navy; not merely because Marryat's own standard of chivalry was not quite that of Chaucer's Knight:--but partly, also, because he was aiming blunderingly at what he supposed to be part of the novelist's business--irregular as well as regular gallantry, and highly seasoned adventure. But, like all good artists (and like hardly anybody who has not the artistic quality in him), he taught himself by his failure, even though he sometimes relapsed. Of actual construction he was never a master. The King's Own , with its overdose of history at the beginning and of melodrama at the end, is an example. But his two masterpieces, Peter Simple (1834) and Mr. Midshipman Easy (1836), are capital instances of what may be called "particularist" fiction--the fiction that derives its special zest from the "colours" of some form of life unfamiliar to those who have not actually lived it. Even Peter Simple is unduly weighted at the end by the machinations of Peter's uncle against him and, at intervals during the book, by the proceedings connected therewith. But Mr. Midshipman Easy is flawless--except for the amiable but surely excessive sentimentalists who are shocked at the way in which Mr. Easy père quits the greater stage by mounting the lesser. Than this book there is not a better novel of special "humour" in literature; as much may be said of the greater part of Peter Simple , of not a little in Jacob Faithful (a great favourite with Thackeray, who always did justice to Marryat), and Japhet in Search of a Father , and of something in almost all. Nor were high jinks and special naval matters by any means Marryat's only province. Laymen may agree with experts in thinking the clubhauling of the Diomède in Peter Simple , and the two great fights of the Aurora with the elements and with the Russian frigate in Mr. Midshipman Easy , to be extraordinarily fine things:--vivid, free from extravagance, striking, stirring, clear, as descriptive and narrative literature of the kind can be only at its best, and too seldom is at all. An almost Defoe-like exactness of detail is one of Marryat's methods and merits: while it is very remarkable that he rarely attempts to produce the fun, in which Defoe is lacking and he himself so fertile, by mere exaggeration or caricature of detail. There are exceptions--the Dominie business in Jacob Faithful is one--but they are exceptions. Take Hook, his immediate predecessor, and no doubt in a way his model, as (it has been said) Hook was to almost everybody at the time; take even Dickens, his fellow-pupil with Hook and his own greater successor; and you will find that Marryat resorts less than either to the humour of simple charge or exaggeration.

The last name on our present list belongs to the class of "eccentric" novelists--the adjective being used, not in its transferred and partly improper sense so much as in its true one. Peacock never plays the Jack-pudding like Sterne: and his shrewd wit never permits him the sincere aberrations of Amory. But his work is out of the ordinary courses, and does not turn round the ordinary centres of novel writing. It belongs to the tradition--if to any tradition at all--of Lucian and the Lucianists--especially as that tradition was redirected by Anthony Hamilton. It thus comes, in one way, near part of the work of Disraeli; though, except in point of satiric temper, its spirit is totally different. Peacock was essentially a scholar (though a non-academic one) and essentially a humorist. In the progress of his books from Headlong Hall (1816) to Gryll Grange (1860)--the last separated from the group to which the first belongs by more than twice as many years as were covered by that group itself--he mellowed his tone, but altered his scheme very little. Except in Maid Marian and The Misfortunes of Elphin , where the Scott influence is evident, though Peacock was himself a rebel to Scott, the plan is always the same. Headlong Hall and Nightmare Abbey, Melincourt and Crotchet Castle (1831), as well as Gryll Grange itself, all have the uniform, though by no means monotonous, canvas of a party of guests assembled at a country-house and consisting of a number of "originals," with one or more common-sense but by no means commonplace characters to serve as contrast. It is in the selection and management of these foils that one of Peacock's principal distinctions lies. In his earlier books, and in accordance with