In this chapter I will venture to name a few successful novelists
of my own time, with whose works I am acquainted; and will endeavour
to point whence their success has come, and why they have failed
when there has been failure.
I do not hesitate to name Thackeray the first. His knowledge of
human nature was supreme, and his characters stand out as human
beings, with a force and a truth which has not, I think, been
within the reach of any other English novelist in any period. I know
no character in fiction, unless it be Don Quixote, with whom the
reader becomes so intimately acquainted as with Colonel Newcombe.
How great a thing it is to be a gentleman at all parts! How we
admire the man of whom so much may be said with truth! Is there
any one of whom we feel more sure in this respect than of Colonel
Newcombe? It is not because Colonel Newcombe is a perfect gentleman
that we think Thackeray's work to have been so excellent, but
because he has had the power to describe him as such, and to force
us to love him, a weak and silly old man, on account of this grace
of character. It is evident from all Thackeray's best work that he
lived with the characters he was creating. He had always a story
to tell until quite late in life; and he shows us that this was
so, not by the interest which be had in his own plots,--for I doubt
whether his plots did occupy much of his mind,--but by convincing
us that his characters were alive to himself. With Becky Sharpe,
with Lady Castlewood and her daughter, and with Esmond, with
Warrington, Pendennis, and the Major, with Colonel Newcombe, and
with Barry Lynon, he must have lived in perpetual intercourse.
Therefore he has made these personages real to us.
Among all our novelists his style is the purest, as to my ear it is
also the most harmonious. Sometimes it is disfigured by a slight
touch of affectation, by little conceits which smell of the oil;--but
the language is always lucid. The reader, without labour, knows what
he means, and knows all that he means. As well as I can remember,
he deals with no episodes. I think that any critic, examining
his work minutely, would find that every scene, and every part of
every scene, adds something to the clearness with which the story
is told. Among all his stories there is not one which does not
leave on the mind a feeling of distress that women should ever
be immodest or men dishonest,--and of joy that women should be so
devoted and men so honest. How we hate the idle selfishness of
Pendennis, the worldliness of Beatrix, the craft of Becky Sharpe!--how
we love the honesty of Colonel Newcombe, the nobility of Esmond,
and the devoted affection of Mrs. Pendennis! The hatred of evil
and love of good can hardly have come upon so many readers without
doing much good.
Late in Thackeray's life,--he never was an old man, but towards the
end of his career,--he failed in his power of charming, because he
allowed his mind to become idle. In the plots which he conceived,
and in the language which he used; I do not know that there is any
perceptible change; but in The Virginians and in Philip the reader
is introduced to no character with which he makes a close and undying
acquaintance. And this, I have no doubt, is so because Thackeray
himself had no such intimacy. His mind had come to be weary of
that fictitious life which is always demanding the labour of new
creation, and he troubled himself with his two Virginians and his
Philip only when he was seated at his desk.
At the present moment George Eliot is the first of English novelists,
and I am disposed to place her second of those of my time. She
is best known to the literary world as a writer of prose fiction,
and not improbably whatever of permanent fame she may acquire will
come from her novels. But the nature of her intellect is very far
removed indeed from that which is common to the tellers of stories.
Her imagination is no doubt strong, but it acts in analysing rather
than in creating. Everything that comes before her is pulled
to pieces so that the inside of it shall be seen, and be seen if
possible by her readers as clearly as by herself. This searching
analysis is carried so far that, in studying her latter writings,
one feels oneself to be in company with some philosopher rather
than with a novelist. I doubt whether any young person can read
with pleasure either Felix Holt, Middlemarch, or Daniel Deronda.
I know that they are very difficult to many that are not young.
Her personifications of character have been singularly terse and
graphic, and from them has come her great hold on the public,--though
by no means the greatest effect which she has produced. The lessons
which she teaches remain, though it is not for the sake of the
lessons that her pages are read. Seth Bede, Adam Bede, Maggie and
Tom Tulliver, old Silas Marner, and, much above all, Tito, in Romola,
are characters which, when once known, can never be forgotten. I
cannot say quite so much for any of those in her later works, because
in them the philosopher so greatly overtops the portrait-painter,
that, in the dissection of the mind, the outward signs seem to
have been forgotten. In her, as yet, there is no symptom whatever
of that weariness of mind which, when felt by the reader, induces
him to declare that the author has written himself out. It is not
from decadence that we do not have another Mrs. Poyser, but because
the author soars to things which seem to her to be higher than Mrs.
Poyser.
It is, I think, the defect of George Eliot that she struggles too
hard to do work that shall be excellent. She lacks ease. Latterly
the signs of this have been conspicuous in her style, which has always
been and is singularly correct, but which has become occasionally
obscure from her too great desire to be pungent. It is impossible
not to feel the struggle, and that feeling begets a flavour
of affectation. In Daniel Deronda, of which at this moment only a
portion has been published, there are sentences which I have found
myself compelled to read three times before I have been able to
take home to myself all that the writer has intended. Perhaps I
may be permitted here to say, that this gifted woman was among my
dearest and most intimate friends. As I am speaking here of novelists,
I will not attempt to speak of George Eliot's merit as a poet.
There can be no doubt that the most popular novelist of my
time--probably the most popular English novelist of any time--has
been Charles Dickens. He has now been dead nearly six years, and the
sale of his books goes on as it did during his life. The certainty
with which his novels are found in every house--the familiarity of
his name in all English-speaking countries--the popularity of such
characters as Mrs. Gamp, Micawber, and Pecksniff, and many others
whose names have entered into the English language and become
well-known words--the grief of the country at his death, and the
honours paid to him at his funeral,--all testify to his popularity.
Since the last book he wrote himself, I doubt whether any book
has been so popular as his biography by John Forster. There is
no withstanding such testimony as this. Such evidence of popular
appreciation should go for very much, almost for everything,
in criticism on the work of a novelist. The primary object of a
novelist is to please; and this man's novels have been found more
pleasant than those of any other writer. It might of course be
objected to this, that though the books have pleased they have been
injurious, that their tendency has been immoral and their teaching
vicious; but it is almost needless to say that no such charge has
ever been made against Dickens. His teaching has ever been good.
From all which, there arises to the critic a question whether, with
such evidence against him as to the excellence of this writer, he
should not subordinate his own opinion to the collected opinion of
the world of readers. To me it almost seems that I must be wrong
to place Dickens after Thackeray and George Eliot, knowing as I do
that so great a majority put him above those authors.
My own peculiar idiosyncrasy in the matter forbids me to do so. I
do acknowledge that Mrs. Gamp, Micawber, Pecksniff, and others have
become household words in every house, as though they were human
beings; but to my judgment they are not human beings, nor are any
of the characters human which Dickens has portrayed. It has been
the peculiarity and the marvel of this man's power, that he has
invested, his puppets with a charm that has enabled him to dispense
with human nature. There is a drollery about them, in my estimation,
very much below the humour of Thackeray, but which has reached the
intellect of all; while Thackeray's humour has escaped the intellect
of many. Nor is the pathos of Dickens human. It is stagey and
melodramatic. But it is so expressed that it touches every heart
a little. There is no real life in Smike. His misery, his idiotcy,
his devotion for Nicholas, his love for Kate, are all overdone and
incompatible with each other. But still the reader sheds a tear.
Every reader can find a tear for Smike. Dickens's novels are like
Boucicault's plays. He has known how to draw his lines broadly, so
that all should see the colour.
He, too, in his best days, always lived with his characters;--and
he, too, as he gradually ceased to have the power of doing so,
ceased to charm. Though they are not human beings, we all remember
Mrs. Gamp and Pickwick. The Boffins and Veneerings do not, I think,
dwell in the minds of so many.
Of Dickens's style it is impossible to speak in praise. It is jerky,
ungrammatical, and created by himself in defiance of rules--almost
as completely as that created by Carlyle. To readers who have taught
themselves to regard language, it must therefore be unpleasant. But
the critic is driven to feel the weakness of his criticism, when
he acknowledges to himself--as he is compelled in all honesty to
do--that with the language, such as it is, the writer has satisfied
the great mass of the readers of his country. Both these great
writers have satisfied the readers of their own pages; but both
have done infinite harm by creating a school of imitators. No young
novelist should ever dare to imitate the style of Dickens. If such
a one wants a model for his language, let him take Thackeray.
Bulwer, or Lord Lytton,--but I think that he is still better known
by his earlier name,--was a man of very great parts. Better educated
than either of those I have named before him, he was always able to
use his erudition, and he thus produced novels from which very much
not only may be but must be learned by his readers. He thoroughly
understood the political status of his own country, a subject
on which, I think, Dickens was marvellously ignorant, and which
Thackeray had never studied. He had read extensively, and was always
apt to give his readers the benefit of what he knew. The result
has been that very much more than amusement may be obtained from
Bulwer's novels. There is also a brightness about them--the result
rather of thought than of imagination, of study and of care, than
of mere intellect--which has made many of them excellent in their
way. It is perhaps improper to class all his novels together, as
he wrote in varied manners, making in his earlier works, such as
Pelham and Ernest Maltravers, pictures of a fictitious life, and
afterwards pictures of life as he believed it to be, as in My Novel
and The Caxtons. But from all of them there comes the same flavour
of an effort to produce effect. The effects are produced, but it
would have been better if the flavour had not been there.
I cannot say of Bulwer as I have of the other novelists whom I have
named that he lived with his characters. He lived with his work,
with the doctrines which at the time he wished to preach, thinking
always of the effects which he wished to produce; but I do not
think he ever knew his own personages,--and therefore neither do
we know them. Even Pelham and Eugene Aram are not human beings to
us, as are Pickwick, and Colonel Newcombe, and Mrs. Poyser.
In his plots Bulwer has generally been simple, facile, and successful.
The reader never feels with him, as he does with Wilkie Collins,
that it is all plot, or, as with George Eliot, that there is no plot.
The story comes naturally without calling for too much attention,
and is thus proof of the completeness of the man's intellect. His
language is clear, good, intelligible English, but it is defaced
by mannerism. In all that he did, affectation was his fault.
How shall I speak of my dear old friend Charles Lever, and
his rattling, jolly, joyous, swearing Irishmen. Surely never did
a sense of vitality come so constantly from a man's pen, nor from
man's voice, as from his! I knew him well for many years, and
whether in sickness or in health, I have never come across him
without finding him to be running over with wit and fun. Of all the
men I have encountered, he was the surest fund of drollery. I have
known many witty men, many who could say good things, many who
would sometimes be ready to say them when wanted, though they would
sometimes fail;--but he never failed. Rouse him in the middle of
the night, and wit would come from him before he was half awake.
And yet he never monopolised the talk, was never a bore. He would
take no more than his own share of the words spoken, and would yet
seem to brighten all that was said during the night. His earlier
novels--the later I have not read--are just like his conversation.
The fun never flags, and to me, when I read them, they were never
tedious. As to character he can hardly be said to have produced
it. Corney Delaney, the old manservant, may perhaps be named as an
exception.
Lever's novels will not live long,--even if they may be said to
be alive now,--because it is so. What was his manner of working I
do not know, but I should think it must have been very quick, and
that he never troubled himself on the subject, except when he was
seated with a pen in his hand.
Charlotte Bronte was surely a marvellous woman. If it could be
right to judge the work of a novelist from one small portion of
one novel, and to say of an author that he is to be accounted as
strong as he shows himself to be in his strongest morsel of work,
I should be inclined to put Miss Bronte very high indeed. I know
no interest more thrilling than that which she has been able to
throw into the characters of Rochester and the governess, in the
second volume of Jane Eyre. She lived with those characters, and
felt every fibre of the heart, the longings of the one and the
sufferings of the other. And therefore, though the end of the book
is weak, and the beginning not very good, I venture to predict that
Jane Eyre will be read among English novels when many whose names
are now better known shall have been forgotten. Jane Eyre, and
Esmond, and Adam Bede will be in the hands of our grandchildren,
when Pickwick, and Pelham, and Harry Lorrequer are forgotten;
because the men and women depicted are human in their aspirations,
human in their sympathies, and human in their actions.
In Vilette, too, and in Shirley, there is to be found human life as
natural and as real, though in circumstances not so full of interest
as those told in Jane Eyre. The character of Paul in the former of
the two is a wonderful study. She must herself have been in love
with some Paul when she wrote the book, and have been determined to
prove to herself that she was capable of loving one whose exterior
circumstances were mean and in every way unprepossessing.
There is no writer of the present day who has so much puzzled
me by his eccentricities, impracticabilities, and capabilities as
Charles Reade. I look upon him as endowed almost with genius, but
as one who has not been gifted by nature with ordinary powers of
reasoning. He can see what is grandly noble and admire it with
all his heart. He can see, too, what is foully vicious and hate
it with equal ardour. But in the common affairs of life he cannot
see what is right or wrong; and as he is altogether unwilling to be
guided by the opinion of others, he is constantly making mistakes
in his literary career, and subjecting himself to reproach which he
hardly deserves. He means to be honest. He means to be especially
honest,--more honest than other people. He has written a book
called The Eighth Commandment on behalf of honesty in literary
transactions,--a wonderful work, which has I believe been read by
a very few. I never saw a copy except that in my own library, or
heard of any one who knew the book. Nevertheless it is a volume
that must have taken very great labour, and have been written,--as
indeed he declares that it was written,--without the hope of
pecuniary reward. He makes an appeal to the British Parliament and
British people on behalf of literary honesty, declaring that should
he fail--"I shall have to go on blushing for the people I was born
among." And yet of all the writers of my day he has seemed to me
to understand literary honesty the least. On one occasion, as he
tells us in this book, he bought for a certain sum from a French
author the right of using a plot taken from a play,--which he
probably might have used without such purchase, and also without
infringing any international copyright act. The French author not
unnaturally praises him for the transaction, telling him that he
is "un vrai gentleman." The plot was used by Reade in a novel; and
a critic discovering the adaptation, made known his discovery to
the public. Whereupon the novelist became angry, called his critic
a pseudonymuncle, and defended himself by stating the fact of his
own purchase. In all this he seems to me to ignore what we all mean
when we talk of literary plagiarism and literary honesty. The sin
of which the author is accused is not that of taking another man's
property, but of passing off as his own creation that which he
does not himself create. When an author puts his name to a book he
claims to have written all that there is therein, unless he makes
direct signification to the contrary. Some years subsequently there
arose another similar question, in which Mr. Reade's opinion was
declared even more plainly, and certainly very much more publicly.
In a tale which he wrote he inserted a dialogue which he took from
Swift, and took without any acknowledgment. As might have been
expected, one of the critics of the day fell foul of him for this
barefaced plagiarism. The author, however, defended himself, with
much abuse of the critic, by asserting, that whereas Swift had
found the jewel he had supplied the setting;--an argument in which
there was some little wit, and would have been much excellent truth,
had he given the words as belonging to Swift and not to himself.
The novels of a man possessed of so singular a mind must themselves
be very strange,--and they are strange. It has generally been his
object to write down some abuse with which he has been particularly
struck,--the harshness, for instance, with which paupers or lunatics
are treated, or the wickedness of certain classes,--and he always,
I think, leaves upon his readers an idea of great earnestness
of purpose. But he has always left at the same time on my mind so
strong a conviction that he has not really understood his subject,
that I have ever found myself taking the part of those whom he has
accused. So good a heart, and so wrong a head, surely no novelist
ever before had combined! In storytelling he has occasionally been
almost great. Among his novels I would especially recommend The
Cloister and the Hearth. I do not know that in this work, or in any,
that he has left a character that will remain; but he has written
some of his scenes so brightly that to read them would always be
a pleasure.
Of Wilkie Collins it is impossible for a true critic not to speak
with admiration, because he has excelled all his contemporaries in
a certain most difficult branch of his art; but as it is a branch
which I have not myself at all cultivated, it is not unnatural
that his work should be very much lost upon me individually. When
I sit down to write a novel I do not at all know, and I do not very
much care, how it is to end. Wilkie Collins seems so to construct
his that he not only, before writing, plans everything on, down to
the minutest detail, from the beginning to the end; but then plots
it all back again, to see that there is no piece of necessary
dove-tailing which does not dove-tail with absolute accuracy. The
construction is most minute and most wonderful. But I can never
lose the taste of the construction. The author seems always to be
warning me to remember that something happened at exactly half-past
two o'clock on Tuesday morning; or that a woman disappeared from
the road just fifteen yards beyond the fourth mile-stone. One is
constrained by mysteries and hemmed in by difficulties, knowing,
however, that the mysteries will be made clear, and the difficulties
overcome at the end of the third volume. Such work gives me no
pleasure. I am, however, quite prepared to acknowledge that the
want of pleasure comes from fault of my intellect.
There are two ladies of whom I would fain say a word, though I feel
that I am making my list too long, in order that I may declare how
much I have admired their work. They are Annie Thackeray and Rhoda
Broughton. I have known them both, and have loved the former almost
as though she belonged to me. No two writers were ever more
dissimilar,--except in this that they are both feminine. Miss
Thackeray's characters are sweet, charming, and quite true to human
nature. In her writings she is always endeavouring to prove that
good produces good, and evil evil. There is not a line of which
she need be ashamed,--not a sentiment of which she should not be
proud. But she writes like a lazy writer who dislikes her work,
and who allows her own want of energy to show itself in her pages.
Miss Broughton, on the other hand, is full of energy,--though
she too, I think, can become tired over her work. She, however,
does take the trouble to make her personages stand upright on the
ground. And she has the gift of making them speak as men and women
do speak. "You beast!" said Nancy, sitting on the wall, to the man
who was to be her husband,--thinking that she was speaking to her
brother. Now Nancy, whether right or wrong, was just the girl who
would, as circumstances then were, have called her brother a beast.
There is nothing wooden about any of Miss Broughton's novels; and
in these days so many novels are wooden! But they are not sweet-savoured
as are those by Miss Thackeray, and are, therefore, less true to
nature. In Miss Broughton's determination not to be mawkish and
missish, she has made her ladies do and say things which ladies
would not do and say. They throw themselves at men's heads, and
when they are not accepted only think how they may throw themselves
again. Miss Broughton is still so young that I hope she may live
to overcome her fault in this direction.
There is one other name, without which the list of the best known
English novelists of my own time would certainly be incomplete,
and that is the name of the present Prime Minister of England. Mr.
Disraeli has written so many novels, and has been so popular as a
novelist that, whether for good or for ill, I feel myself compelled
to speak of him. He began his career as an author early in life,
publishing Vivian Grey when he was twenty-three years old. He was
very young for such work, though hardly young enough to justify the
excuse that he makes in his own preface, that it is a book written
by a boy. Dickens was, I think, younger when he wrote his Sketches
by Boz, and as young when he was writing the Pickwick Papers. It
was hardly longer ago than the other day when Mr. Disraeli brought
out Lothair, and between the two there were eight or ten others.
To me they have all had the same flavour of paint and unreality.
In whatever he has written he has affected something which has been
intended to strike his readers as uncommon and therefore grand.
Because he has been bright and a man of genius, he has carried his
object as regards the young. He has struck them with astonishment
and aroused in their imagination ideas of a world more glorious,
more rich, more witty, more enterprising, than their own. But the
glory has been the glory of pasteboard, and the wealth has been
a wealth of tinsel. The wit has been the wit of hairdressers, and
the enterprise has been the enterprise of mountebanks. An audacious
conjurer has generally been his hero,--some youth who, by wonderful
cleverness, can obtain success by every intrigue that comes to
his hand. Through it all there is a feeling of stage properties,
a smell of hair-oil, an aspect of buhl, a remembrance of tailors,
and that pricking of the conscience which must be the general
accompaniment of paste diamonds. I can understand that Mr. Disraeli
should by his novels have instigated many a young man and many a
young woman on their way in life, but I cannot understand that he
should have instigated any one to good. Vivian Grey has had probably
as many followers as Jack Sheppard, and has led his followers in
the same direction.
Lothair, which is as yet Mr. Disraeli's last work, and, I think,
undoubtedly his worst, has been defended on a plea somewhat similar
to that by which he has defended Vivian Grey. As that was written
when he was too young, so was the other when he was too old,--too
old for work of that nature, though not too old to be Prime Minister.
If his mind were so occupied with greater things as to allow him to
write such a work, yet his judgment should have sufficed to induce
him to destroy it when written. Here that flavour of hair-oil,
that flavour of false jewels, that remembrance of tailors, comes
out stronger than in all the others. Lothair is falser even than
Vivian Grey, and Lady Corisande, the daughter of the Duchess, more
inane and unwomanlike than Venetia or Henrietta Temple. It is the
very bathos of story-telling. I have often lamented, and have as
often excused to myself, that lack of public judgment which enables
readers to put up with bad work because it comes from good or from
lofty hands. I never felt the feeling so strongly, or was so little
able to excuse it, as when a portion of the reading public received
Lothair with satisfaction.