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

in degree, to concoct the story (which is little more than a chronicle) together with a certain neglect to conciliate the sympathies of the reader. But the whole batch is a memorable collection; and it shows, rather exceptionally, the singular originality and variety of the novel at this time.

This remarkable pair may be supplemented by an in some ways more remarkable trio, all of them pretty close contemporaries, but, for different reasons in each case, coming rather late into the novel field--Charles Reade (b. 1814), Anthony Trollope (b. 1815), and Mary Ann Evans (b. 1819). It would be difficult to find three persons more different in temperament; impossible to find more striking instances of the way in which the new blend of romance and novel lent itself to the most various uses and developments. Reade--who thought himself a dramatist and wasted upon drama a great deal of energy and an almost ideal position as a possessor of an unusually rich fellowship at Magdalen College, Oxford, with no duties--came rather closer to Dickens than to any novelist previously named, not merely in a sort of non-poetic but powerful imagination, but also in the mania for attacking what seemed to him abuses--in lunatic asylums (on which point he was very nearly a monomaniac himself), prisons, and many other things. But he is almost more noteworthy, from our point of view, because of his use--it also must, one fears, be called an abuse--of a process obviously invited by the new demand for truth to life, and profitable up to a certain point. This was the collection, in enormous scrapbooks, of newspaper cuttings on a vast variety of subjects, to be worked up into fiction when the opportunity served. Reade had so much genius--he had perhaps the most, in a curious rather incalculable fashion, of the whole group--that he very nearly succeeded in digesting these "marine stores" of detail and document into real books. But he did not always, and could not always, quite do it: and he remains, with Zola, the chief example of the danger of working at your subject too much as if you were getting up a brief, or preparing an article for an encyclopedia. Still, his greatest books, which are probably It is Never too Late to Mend (1856) and The Cloister and the Hearth (1861), have immense vigour and, in the second case, an almost poetic attraction which Dickens never reaches, while over all sparks and veins of genius are scattered. Moreover, he is interesting because, until his own time, he would have been quite impossible; and, even at that time, without the general movement which we are describing, very unlikely.

There is not so much object here in discussing the much discussed question of the merits and defects of "George Eliot" (Mary Ann Evans or Mrs. Cross) as a novelist, as there is in pointing out her relations to this general movement. She began late, and almost accidentally; and there is less unity in her general work than in some others here mentioned. Her earliest and perhaps, in adjusted and "reduced" judgments, her best work-- Scenes of Clerical Life (1857-1858), Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861)--consists of very carefully observed and skilfully rendered studies of country life and character, tinged, especially in Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss , with very intense and ambitious colours of passion. The great popularity of this tempted her into still more elaborate efforts of different kinds. Her attempt in quasi-historical romance, Romola (1865), was an enormous tour de force in which the writer struggled to get historical and local colour, accurate and irreproachable, with all the desperation of the most conscientious relater of actual history. Felix Holt the Radical (1866), Middle March (1872), and Daniel Deronda (1876) were equally elaborate sketches of modern English society, planned and engineered with the same provision of carefully laboured plot, character, and phrase. Although received with enthusiasm by the partisans whom she had created for herself, these books have seemed to some over -laboured, and if not exactly unreal, yet to a certain extent unnatural. But the point for us is their example of the way in which the novel--once a light and almost frivolous thing--had come to be taken with the utmost seriousness--had in fact ceased to be light literature at all, and begun to require rigorous and elaborate training and preparation in the writer, perhaps even something of the athlete's processes in the reader. Its state may or may not have advanced in grace pari passu with the advance in effort and in dignity: but this later advance is at least there. Fielding himself took novel-writing by no means lightly, and Richardson still less so: but imagine either, imagine Scott or even Miss Austen, going through the preliminary processes which seemed necessary, in different ways, to Charles Reade and to Mary Ann Evans!

In a certain sense, however, the last of the three, though he may give less impression of genius than the other two (or even the other four whom we have specially noticed), is the most interesting of all: and qualms may sometimes arise as to whether genius is justly denied to him. Anthony Trollope, after a youth, not exactly orageuse , but apparently characterised by the rather squalid yet mild dissipation which he has described in The Three Clerks (1858) and The Small House at Allington (1864), attained a considerable position in the Post Office which he held during great part of his career as a novelist. For some time that career did not look as if it were going to be a successful one, though his early (chiefly Irish) efforts are better than is sometimes thought. But he made his mark first with The Warden (1855), and then, much more directly and triumphantly, with its sequel
Barchester Towers (1857). When the first of these was published Dickens had been a successful novelist for nearly twenty years and Thackeray had "come to his own" for nearly ten. The Warden might have been described at the time (I do not know whether it was, but English reviewing was only beginning to be clever again) as a partial attempt at the matter of Dickens in a partial following of the manner of Thackeray. An "abuse"--the distribution in supposed unjust proportion of the funds of an endowed hospital for aged men--is its main avowed subject. But Trollope indulged in no tirades and no fantastic-grotesque caricature--in fact he actually drew a humorous sketch of a novel à la Dickens on the matter. His real object was evidently to sketch faithfully, but again not without humour, the cathedral society of "Barchester" as it actually spoke, dressed, thought, and lived: and he did it. The first book had a little too much talk about the nominal subject, and not enough actual action and conversation. Barchester Towers remedied this, and presented its readers with one of the liveliest books in English fiction. There had been nothing like it (for Thackeray had been more discursive and less given to small talk) since Miss Austen herself, though the spirits of the two were extremely different. Perhaps Trollope never did a better book than this, for variety and vigour of character drawing. The masterful wife of Bishop Proudie, the ne'er-do-weel canon's family (the Stanhopes), and others stand out against an interest, not intense but sufficient, of story, a great variety of incident, and above all abundant and lifelike conversation. For many years, and in an extraordinary number of examples, he fell little below, and perhaps once or twice went above, this standard. It was rather a fancy of his (one again, perhaps, suggested by Thackeray) to run his books into series or cycles--the chief being that actually opened as above, and continuing through others to the brilliant Last Chronicle of Barset (1867), which in some respect surpasses Barchester Towers itself, with a second series, not quite disconnected, dealing with Lady Glencora Palliser as centre, and yet others. His total production was enormous: it became in fact impossibly so, and the work of his last lustrum and a little more (say 1877-1882), though never exactly bad or painful to read, was obvious hack-work. But between The Warden and The American Senator , twenty-two years later, he had written nearer thirty than twenty novels, of which at least half were much above the average and some quite capital.[26] Moreover, it is a noteworthy thing, and contrary to some critical explanations, that, as his works drop out of copyright and are reprinted in cheap editions, they appear to be recovering very considerable popularity. This fact would seem to show that the manners, speech, etc., represented in them have a certain standard quality which does not--like the manner, speech, etc., of novels such as those of Hook and Surtees--lose appeal to fresh generations; and that the artist who dealt with them must have had not a little faculty of fixing them in the presentation. In fact it is probably not too much to say that of the
average novel of the third quarter of the century--in a more than average but not of an extraordinary, transcendental, or quintessential condition--Anthony Trollope is about as good a representative as can be found. His talent is individual enough, but not too individual: system and writer may each have the credit due to them allotted without difficulty.

[26] His most ambitious studies in strict character are the
closely connected heroines of The Bertrams (1859) and Can you
Forgive Her? (1864-1865). But the first-named book has never
been popular; and the other hardly owes its popularity to the
heroine.

A novelist who might have been in front of the first flight of these in point of time, and who is actually put by some in the first flight in point of merit, is Mrs. Gaskell. Born in 1810, she accumulated the material for her future Cranford at Knutsford in Cheshire: but did not publish this till after Dickens had, in 1850, established Household Words , where it appeared in instalments. She had a little earlier, in 1848, published her first novel, Mary Barton --a vivid but distinctly one-sided picture of factory life in Lancashire. In the same year with the collected Cranford (1853) appeared Ruth , also a "strife-novel" (as the Germans would say) though in a different way: and two years later what is perhaps her most elaborate effort, North and South . A year or two before her death in 1865 Sylvia's Lovers was warmly welcomed by some: and the unfinished Wives and Daughters , which was actually interrupted by that death, has been considered her maturest work. Her famous and much controverted Life of Charlotte Brontë does not belong to us, except in so far as it knits the two novelists together.

From hints dropped already, it may be seen that the present writer does not find Mrs. Gaskell his easiest subject. There is much in her work which, in Hobbes's phrase, is both "an effect of power and a cause of pleasure": but there appears to some to be in her a pervading want of actual success--of réussite --absolute and unquestionable. The sketches of Cranford are very agreeable and very admirable performances in the manner first definitely thrown out by Addison, and turned to consummate perfection in the way of the regular novel (which be it remembered