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

chapter the present writer possesses the knowledge of a reviewer, week by week and almost day by day, of contemporary fiction between 1873 and 1895. It so happened that the beginning of this period coincided very nearly with the beginning of that slightly downward movement of the nineteenth-century novel which has been referred to at the end of the last chapter: and he thus had opportunities of observing it all along its course, till we parted company. It must again, and most strongly, be insisted that this "downward movement," like such movements generally in literature, is only so to be characterised with considerable provisos and allowances. Literary "down-grades" are not like the slopes of an inclined plane: they are like portions of a mountain range, in which isolated peaks may shoot up almost level with the very highest of the central group, but in which the table lands are lower, the average height of the hills inferior, and the general sky-line a nearer and nearer approximation to the plain. At the actual death of Dickens there was no reason for any one less hopelessly pessimist than Peacock's Mr. Toobad, or Sydney Smith's Tuxford waiter, to take a gloomy view of the future of the novel. Of the greater novelists mentioned in the last chapter Charlotte Brontë and Mrs. Gaskell were indeed dead, and if Kingsley had not wholly ceased writing novels, he had, before ceasing, given signs that he had better do so. Yet, at least to the admirers of "George Eliot," she was at her most admirable; some of the very best stuff of Trollope was but just past, and some of all but his best was still to appear; Charles Reade was writing busily with that curious unsatisfactory genius of his; others were well at work.

There was also no lack of newer comers. Mr. Meredith had been writing for some dozen years: and though he had achieved no general popularity, though even critics might make reserves as to points in his procedure, there could be no competent doubt of his great powers. Mr. Blackmore had made his late beginning some time before: and had just caught the public ear unmistakably with Lorna Doone (1869). Mr. Hardy was on the eve of catching it with the new and powerful attractions of Under the Greenwood Tree (1872). In the heart of the sixties (1863-4-6), the
Chronicles of Carlingford had seemed the promissory notes of a novelist of the absolutely first class in Mrs. Oliphant, though somehow the bills were rather renewed than met. Others to be noticed immediately had come or were coming on. Let us take a little more detailed notice of them.

In the cases of Mr. Meredith and of Mr. Hardy--not to speak of others on whom the bar still luckily rests--the "great ox" was, until the original composition of this book was actually finished, "on the tongue" of any one who does not disregard the good old literary brocard " de vivis
nil nisi necessarium." You may and must criticise, with as much freedom as consists with courtesy, the successive stages of the work of the living master as he submits it to your judgment by publication. But justice no less than courtesy demands that, until the work is finished, and sealed as a whole--till the ne varietur and ne plus ultra of death have been set on it--you shall abstain from a more general judgment, which can hardly be judicial, and which will have difficulty in steering between the fulsome if it be favourable and the uncivil if it be adverse. Fortunately there was little difficulty in any of our three excepted cases. As has been already hinted in one case, the chorus of praise, ever since it made itself heard, has not been quite unchequered. It has been objected both to Mr. Meredith and to Mr. Hardy that there is in them a note, perhaps to be detected also generally in the later fiction which they have so powerfully influenced--the note of a certain perversity --of an endeavour to be peculiar in thought, in style, in choice of subject, in handling of it; in short in general attitude. And with this has been connected--not in their cases with any important or really damaging effect, though undoubtedly so in regard to some of their followers--a suggestion that this "perversity" is the note of a waning period--that just as the excessive desire to be like all the best models is the note of Classical decadence, so the excessive desire to be unlike everything else is the note of Romantic degeneration.

There is truth in this, but it damages neither Mr. Meredith nor Mr. Hardy on the whole; though it may supply a not altogether wholesome temptation to some readers to admire them for the wrong things, and may interpose a wholly unnecessary obstacle in the way of their full and frank enjoyment by others. The intellectual power and the artistic skill which have been shown in the long series that has followed The Ordeal of Richard Feverel ; the freshness and charm of the earlier, the strenuous workmanship and original handling of the later, novels of the author of Far from the Madding Crowd and of Tess of the D'Urbervilles , simply disable off-hand the judgment of the critic--and in fact annul his jurisdiction--if he fails to admire them; while in some cases universal, in many general, in all considerable and not trivial delight has been given by them to generations of novel readers. Above all, it may be said of both these veterans that they have held the standard high, that--in Mr. Meredith's case more specially and for a longer preliminary period, but virtually in both--they have had to await the taste for their work: and that in awaiting it they have never stooped for one moment to that dastardly and degrading change of sail to catch the popular breeze, which has always been the greatest curse of politics and of literature--the two chief worldly occupations and ends of the mind of man--that they have been and are artists who wait till the world comes to them, and not artisans who haunt the market places to hire themselves out to the first comer who will pay their price, or even bate their price to suit the hirer. If it were possible to judge the literary value of a period by its best representatives--which is exactly what is not possible--then the period 1870-1908 might, as far as novel-writing is concerned, point to these two names and say, "These are mine; what does it matter what you choose to say against me?"

The foregoing remarks were actually written before Mr. Meredith's death: and I have thought it better to leave them exactly as they then stood with hardly any correction; but it may justly be expected that they should now be supplemented. The history of Mr. Meredith's career and reputation, during the half century which passed between the appearance of Richard Feverel and his death, has a certain obvious resemblance to that of Browning's, but with some differences. His work at once arrested attention, but it did not at once in all, or in many, cases fix it, even with critical readers: and for a long time the general public turned an obstinately deaf ear. He followed The Ordeal itself--a study of very freely and deeply drawn character; of incident sometimes unusual and always unusually told; of elaborate and disconcerting epigram or rather of style saturated with epigrammatic quality; and of a strange ironic persiflage permeating thought, picture, and expression in the same way--unhastingly but unrestingly with others. Evan Harrington (1861) is generally lighter in tone; and should be taken in connection with the ten years later Harry Richmond as an example of what may be called a sort of new picaresque novel--the subjects being exalted from the gutter--at least the street gutter--to higher stories of the novel house. Emilia in England (1864), later called Sandra Belloni , and its sequel Vittoria (1866), embody, especially the latter, the Italomania of the mid-century. Between them Rhoda Fleming (1865), returning to English country life, showed, with the old characteristics of expression, tragic power superior perhaps to that of the end of
Feverel . In fact some have been inclined to put Rhoda at the head. In 1875 Beauchamp's Career showed the novelist's curious fancy for studying off actual contemporaries; for it is now perfectly well known who "Beauchamp" was: and four years later came what the true Meredithian regards as the masterpiece, The Egoist . Two other books followed, to some extent in the track of Beauchamp's Career, Diana of the Crossways (1886), utilising the legend of Mrs. Norton's betrayal of secrets, and
The Tragic Comedians (1881), the story of the German socialist Lassalle. The author's prediction, never hurried, now slackened, and by degrees ceased, but the nineties saw three books, One of Our Conquerors (1891), Lord Ormont and his Aminta (1894), and The Amazing Marriage (1895).

No bibliography of Mr. Meredith being here necessary or possible, smaller and miscellaneous things need not detain us; and we are not concerned with his sometimes charming verse. It is the character, and especially the "total-effect" character, of the major novels with which we have to do. This has been faintly adumbrated above, but the lines must be a little deepened and the contour filled in to some extent here.

By invoking (practically at the outset of his work) "the Comic Spirit" as the patron of his endeavours and the inspirer of his art, Mr. Meredith of course did no more than assert his claim to place himself in the right race and lineage of Cervantes and Fielding. Nor, though the claim be a bold one, can there be much dispute among competent judges that he made it out. To the study, not in a frivolous or even merely satirical, but in a gravely ironic mode, of the nature of humanity he addicted himself throughout: and the results of his studies undoubtedly enlarge humanity's conscious knowledge of itself in the way of fictitious exemplification. In a certain sense no higher praise can be given. To acknowledge it is at once to estate him, not only with Cervantes and Fielding themselves, but with Thackeray, with Swift, with Moliere, with Shakespeare. It places him well above Dickens, and, in the opinion of the present writer, it places him above even Balzac. But there are points wherein, according to that same opinion, he approaches much nearer to Balzac and Dickens than to the other and greater artistic creators: while in one of these points he stands aloof even from these two, and occupies a position--not altogether to his advantage--altogether by himself in his class of artistic creation. All the six from Thackeray to Shakespeare--one might even go farther back and, taking a more paradoxical example, add Rabelais--are, even in extravaganza, in parody, in what you please, at once pre-eminently and
prima facie natural and human. To every competent human judgment, as soon as it is out of its nonage, and barring individual disqualifications of property or accident, this human nature attests itself. You may dislike some of its manifestations; you may decline or fail to understand others; but there it is, and there it is first . In Balzac and Dickens and Mr. Meredith it is not first. Of course it is there to some extent and even to a large one: or they would not be the great writers that they are, or great writers at all. But it is not merely disguised by separable clothings, as in Rabelais wholly