The English Novel, George Saintsbury [romance book recommendations .txt] 📗

cultivated. The complement-contrast of the pair can need emphasising only to those on whom no emphasis would be likely to impress it: but it may not be quite so evident at once that between them they cover almost the entire possible ground of prose fiction. The more striking and popular as well as more strictly novel style of Scott naturally attracted most attention at first: indeed it can hardly be said that, for the next thirty years, much attempt was made to follow in Miss Austen's steps, while such attempts as were made were seldom very good.[19] But there is no need to hurry Time: and he generally knows what he is about. At any rate he had, in and through these two provided--for generations, probably for centuries, to come--patterns and principles for whoso would to follow in prose fiction.

[19] Some work of distinction, actually later than hers in date,
is older in kind. This is the case not only with the later books
of her Irish elder sister. Miss Edgeworth (see last chapter),
but with all those of her Scotch younger one, Miss Ferrier, who
wrote Marriage just after Sense and Sensibility appeared,
but did not publish it (1818) till after Miss Austen's death,
following it with The Inheritance (1824) and Destiny (1831).
Miss Ferrier, who had a strong though rather hard humour and
great faculty of pronounced character-drawing, is better at a
series of sketches than at a complete novel--only The
Inheritance having much central unity. And there is still
eighteenth-century quality rather than nineteenth in her
alternations of Smollettian farce-satire and Mackenziefied
sentiment. She is very good to read, but stand a little out of
the regular historic succession, as well as out of the ordinary
novel classes.


CHAPTER VI

THE SUCCESSORS--TO THACKERAY


A person inexperienced in the ways of life and literature might expect that such developments as those surveyed and discussed in the last chapter must have immediate and unbroken development further. Scott had thrown open, and made available, the whole vast range of history for the romancer: Miss Austen had shown the infinite possibilities of ordinary and present things for the novelist. And such a one might contend that, even if the common idea of definite precursorship and teachership be a mistake, the more subtle doctrine that such work as Scott's, and as Miss Austen's, is really the result of generally working forces, as well as of individual genius, would lead to the same conclusion. But the expectation would show his inexperience, and his ignorance of the fact that Art, unlike Science, declines to be bound by any calculable laws whatsoever.

It was indeed impossible that Scott's towering fame should not draw the nobler sort, and his immense gains the baser, to follow in his track: and they promptly did so. But, as he himself quoted in the remarkable comments (above alluded to) on his early imitators in the Diary , they had "gotten his fiddle, but not his rosin"--an observation the truth of which may be shown presently. Miss Austen's immediate influence in the other direction was almost nil : and this was hardly to be regretted, because a tolerably stationary state of manners, language, etc., such as her kind of novel requires, had not quite, though it had nearly, been reached. At any rate, the kind of ebb or half ebb, which so often, though not so certainly, follows flood-tides in literature, came upon the novel in the twenties and thirties. Even the striking appearance of Dickens and Pickwick in 1837 can hardly be said to have turned it distinctly: for the Dickensian novel is a species by itself--neither strictly novel nor strictly romance, but, as Polonius might say, a picaresque-burlesque-sentimental-farcical-realist-fantastic nondescript. Not till Vanity Fair did the novel of pure real life advance its standard once more: while the historical novel-romance of a new kind may date its revival with--though it should scarcely trace that revival to-- Esmond , or Westward Ho! or both.

Between Scott on the earlier side and Dickens and Thackeray on the other, there was an immense production of novels, illustrated by not a few names which should rank high in the second class, while some would promote more than one of them to the first. The lines of development, as well as the chief individual practitioners, may be best indicated by short discussions of Hook, Bulwer, Disraeli, Ainsworth, James, Marryat, and Peacock.

The most probable demur to this list is likely to be taken at the very first name. Theodore Hook has had no return of the immense popularity which his Sayings and Doings (1826-1829) obtained for him; nor, perhaps, is he ever likely to have any; nor yet, further, save in one respect, can he be said to deserve it. Flimsily constructed, hastily written, reflecting indeed the ways and speech of the time after a fashion, but in a distorted mirror and with a thin and superficial representation, nearer to bad drama than to good literature, full of horseplay and forced high jinks--his stories have all the inseparable faults of improvisation together with those of art that is out of fashion and manners-painting (such as it is) of manners that are dead, and when alive were those of a not very picturesque, pleasing, or respectable transition. Yet, for all this, Hook has a claim on the critical historian of literature, and especially of the novel, which has been far too little acknowledged. And this claim does not even consist in the undoubted fact that his influence both on Dickens and on Thackeray was direct and very great. It lies in the larger and more important, though connected, fact that, at a given moment, his were the hands in which the torch of the novel-procession was deposited. He stands to fiction almost exactly as Leigh Hunt stands to the miscellaneous essay. He modernised and multiplied its subjects, attractions, appeals: he "vulgarised" it in the partly good French sense, as well as in the wholly bad English one; he was its journalist and colporteur . He broke up the somewhat stock-and-type moulds of eighteenth-century tale-telling; admitted a plurality, almost an infinity, of interest and incident; gave a sort of universal franchise to possible subjects of novel; and (perhaps most important of all) banished from that novel the tendency to conventional "lingo" which, though never so prevalent in it as in eighteenth-century drama, had existed. It may seem to some readers that there is an exaggerated and paradoxical opposition between this high praise and the severe censure pronounced a little above--that both cannot be true. But both are true: and it is a really natural and necessary cause and proof at once of their truth that Hook never wrote a really good novel, hardly even a really good tale ("Gervase Skinner" is probably the best), and yet that he deserves the place here given to him.

Ainsworth and James perhaps deserve to be taken next, not so much in point of merit as because both, though continuing (especially Ainsworth) very late, began pretty early. Indeed, a book in which Ainsworth had a hand, though it is said to be not wholly his, Sir John Chiverton , was with Horace Smith's Brambletye House (1826), the actual subject of Scott's criticism above quoted. Both Ainsworth and James are unconcealed followers of Scott himself: and they show the dangers to which the historical romance is exposed when it gets out of the hands of genius. Of the two, James had the greater scholarship, the better command of English, and perhaps a nearer approach to command also of character: Ainsworth more "fire in his interior," more variety, somewhat more humour (though neither was strong in this respect), and a certain not useless or despicable faculty of splashy scene-painting and rough but not ineffective stage-management. But of Scott's combination of poetry, humour, knowledge of life, reading, grasp of character, and command of effective dialogue and description, both were utterly destitute: and both fell into the mistake (which even Dumas did not wholly avoid) of attempting to give the historical effect by thrusting in lardings of pure history, by overloading descriptions of dress, etc., and, in short, by plastering the historic colour on, instead of suffusing it, as Scott had managed to do. Popular as they were, not merely with youthful readers, they undoubtedly brought the historical novel into some discredit a little before the middle of the century.[20]

[20] Here and in a good many cases to come it is impossible to
particularise criticism. It matters the less that, from
Ainsworth's Rookwood (1834) and James' Richelieu (1829)
onwards, the work of both was very much par sibi in merit and
defect alike.

With Bulwer and Disraeli we get into a different sphere of literature--whether into the same in both cases, and whether, if so, into one of the highest, are questions on which no general agreement has yet been reached--on which, perhaps, no general agreement is even possible.

With regard to the second, it must be remembered that to him, whether as Mr. Disraeli or as Lord Beaconsfield, novel-writing was always a "by-work"--partly a means to his real end of politics, partly a relaxation from the work necessary to that end. He called himself a "gentleman of the press"--with that mixture of sincerity, purpose, and ironical simulation which brought on him, from unintelligent or not very honest opponents, and even from others, the charge of affectation, if not of hypocrisy. And, undoubtedly, he did a good deal of work for the press, and very remarkable work too--almost wholly in the kind of novel-writing, from Vivian Grey (1826) to Endymion (1880). Yet it may be permitted--in the face of some more than respectable opinion on the other side--to doubt whether, except in some curious sports and by-products, he ever produced real novel-work of the highest class. In the satiric-fantastic tale--in a kind of following of Voltaire--such as
Ixion , he has hardly a superior, unless it be Anthony Hamilton, who is the superior of Voltaire himself and the master of everybody. For a pure love-novel of a certain kind, Henrietta Temple (1837) is bad to beat--and in a curious cross between the historical, biographical, and the romantic, Venetia (same year) also stands pretty much alone. But all the rest, more or less political, more or less "of society," more or less fantastic-- Coningsby (1844) as well as Alroy (1833), Tancred (1847) as well as Vivian Grey, Sybil (1845), as well as The Young Duke (1831), "leave to desire" in a strange way. Like the three which have been excepted for praise, each is in a manner sui generis , while the whole group stands, in a manner also, apart from others and by itself. There is astonishing cleverness everywhere, in regard to almost every point of novel-composition, though with special regard to epigrammatic phrase. But the whole is inorganic somehow, and more than somehow unreal; without (save in the cases mentioned) attaining that obviously unreal but persuasive phantasmagoria which some great writers of fiction have managed to put in existence and motion. How far this is