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

have named him and glanced at his work.

Lever, who was born as early as 1806, had, it has been said, begun to write novels as early as his junior, Dickens, and had at once developed, in Harry Lorrequer , a pretty distinct style of his own. This style was a kind of humour-novel with abundant incident, generally with a somewhat "promiscuous" plot and with lively but externally drawn characters--the humours being furnished partly by Lever's native country, Ireland, and partly by the traditions of the great war of which he had collected a store in his capacity of physician to the Embassy at Brussels. He had kept up this style, the capital example of which is Charles O'Malley (1840), with unabated verve and with great popular success for a dozen years before 1850. But about that time, or rather earlier, the general "suck" of the current towards a different kind (assisted no doubt by the feeling that the public might be getting tired of the other style) made him change it into studies of a less specialised kind--of foreign travel, home life, and the like--sketches which, in his later days still, he brought even closer to actuality. It is true that in the long run his popularity has depended, and will probably always depend, on the early "rollicking" adventure books: not only because of their natural appeal, but because there is plenty of the other thing elsewhere, and hardly any of this particular thing anywhere. To almost anybody, for instance, except a very great milksop or a pedant of construction,
Charles O'Malley with its love-making and its fighting, its horsemanship and its horse-play, its "devilled kidneys"[23] and its devil-may-care-ness, is a distinctly delectable composition; and if a reasonable interval be allowed between the readings, may be read over and over again, at all times of life, with satisfaction. But the fact of the author's change remains not the less historically and symptomatically important, in connection with the larger change of which we are now taking notice, and with the similar phenomena observable in the work of Bulwer. At the same time it has been pointed out that the following of Miss Austen by no means excluded the following of Scott: and that the new development included "crosses" of novel and romance, sometimes of the historical kind, sometimes not, which are of the highest, or all but the highest, interest. Early and good examples of these may be found in the work of the Brontës, Charlotte and Emily (the third sister Anne is but a pale reflection of her elders), and of Charles Kingsley. Charlotte (b. 1816) and Charles (b. 1819) were separated in their birth by but three years, Emily (b. 1818) and Kingsley by but one.

[23] Edgar Poe has a perfectly serious and very characteristic
explosion at the prominence of these agreeable viands in the
book.

The curious story of the struggles of the Brontë girls to get published hardly concerns us, and Emily's work, Wuthering Heights ,[24] is one of those isolated books which, whatever their merit, are rather ornaments than essential parts in novel history. But this is not the case with
Jane Eyre (1847), Shirley (1849), Villette (1852), and The Professor (1857) (but written much earlier). These are all examples of the determination to base novels on actual life and experience. Few novelists have ever kept so close to their own part in these as Charlotte Brontë did, though she accompanied, permeated, and to a certain extent transformed her autobiography and observation by a strong romantic and fantastic imaginative element. Deprive Thackeray and Dickens of nearly all their humour and geniality, take a portion only of the remaining genius of each in the ratio of about 2 Th . to 1 D ., add a certain dash of the old terror-novel and the German fantastic tale, moisten with feminine spirit and water, and mix thoroughly: and you have something very like Charlotte Brontë. But it is necessary to add further, and it is her great glory, the perfume and atmosphere of the Yorkshire moors, which she had in not quite such perfection as her sister Emily, but in combination with more general novel-gift. Her actual course of writing was short, and it could probably in no case have been long; she wanted wider and, perhaps, happier experience, more literature, more man-and-woman-of-the-worldliness, perhaps a sweeter and more genial temper. But the English novel would have been incomplete without her and her sister; they are, as wholes, unlike anybody else, and if they are not exactly great they have the quality of greatness. Above all, they kept novel and romance together--a deed which is great without any qualification or drawback.

[24] Some will have it that this was really Charlotte's: but not
with much probability.

Charles Kingsley is one of the most precious documents for the cynics who say that while, if you please the public in only one way, you may possibly meet with only tolerable ingratitude; if you attempt to please it in more ways than one, you are certain to be suspected, and still more certain to have the defects of your weakest work transferred to your best. He was a novelist, a poet, an essayist, a preacher, a historian, and a critic. His history, though less positively inaccurate than the "dead set" against him of certain notorious persons chose to represent it, was uncritical: and his criticism, sometimes acute and luminous, was decidedly unhistorical. But he was a preacher of remarkable merit, a charming and original essayist, a poet of no wide range but of true poetical quality, and a novelist of great variety and of almost the first class. He let his weakest qualities go in with his strongest in his novels, and had also the still more unfortunate tendency to "trail coats" of the most inconceivably different colours for others to tread upon. Liberals, Radicals, and Tories; Roman Catholics, High Churchmen, Low Churchmen, and No-Churchmen; sentimentalists and cynics; people who do not like literary and historical allusion, and people who are meticulous about literary and historical accuracy--all these and many others, if they cannot disregard flings at their own particular tastes, fancies, and notions, are sure to lose patience with him now and then. Accordingly, he has met with some exacerbated decriers, and with very few thorough-going defenders.

Yet almost thoroughing-going defence is, as far as the novels (our only direct business) are concerned, far from difficult; and the present writer, though there are perhaps not a dozen consecutive pages of Kingsley's novels to which, at some point or other, he is not prepared to append the note, "This is Bosh," is prepared also to exalt him miles above writers whose margins he would be quite content to leave without a single annotation of this--or any other--kind. In particular the variety of the books, and their vividness, are both extraordinary. And perhaps the greatest notes of the novel generally, as well as those in which the novel of this period can most successfully challenge comparison with those of any other, are, or should be, vividness and variety. His books in the kind are seven; and the absence of replicas among them is one of their extraordinary features. Yeast , the first (1848), and Alton Locke , the second (next year), are novels of the unrest of thought which caused and accompanied the revolutionary movement of the period throughout Europe. But they are quite different in subject and treatment. The first is a sketch of country society, uppermost and lowermost:[25] the second one of town-artisan and lower-trade life with passages of university and other contrast. Both are young and crude enough, intentionally or unintentionally; both, intentionally beyond all doubt, are fantastic and extravagant; but both are full of genius. Argemone Lavington, the heroine of Yeast , is, though not of the most elaborately drawn, one of the most fascinating and real heroines of English fiction; an important secondary character of the second book, the bookseller Sandy Mackaye, is one of its most successful "character-parts." Both, but especially Yeast , are full of admirable descriptive writing, not entirely without indebtedness to Mr. Ruskin, but very often independently carried out, and always worthy of a "place on the line" in any gallery. There is much accurate and real dialogue, not a little firm character-drawing. Above all, both are full of blood--of things lived and seen, not vamped up from reading or day-dreaming--and yet full of dreams, day and other, and full of literature. Perhaps "the malt was a little above the meal," the yeast present in more abundant quality than the substances for fermentation, but there was no lack even of these.

[25] It is curious to compare this (dealing as it does largely
with sport) and the "Jorrocks" series of Robert Surtees
(1803-1864). Kingsley was nearly as practical a sportsman as
Surtees: but Surtees's characters and manners have the old
artificial-picaresque quality only.

Hypatia --which succeeded after some interval (1853) and when the writer's Christian Socialist, Churchman-Chartist excitement had somewhat clarified itself--is a more substantial, a more ambitious, but certainly also an even more successful book. It has something of--and perhaps, though in far transposed matter, owes something to-- Esmond in its daring blend of old and new, and it falls short of that wonderful creation. But it is almost a second to it: and, with plenty of faults, is perhaps the only classical or semi-classical novel of much value in English.

But it was in the next year, 1854, that Kingsley's work reached its greatest perfection in the brilliant historical novel of Westward Ho! where the glories of Elizabethan adventure and patriotism were treated with a wonderful kindred enthusiasm, with admirable narrative faculty, with a creation of character, suitable for the purpose, which is hardly inferior to that of the greatest masters, and with an even enhanced and certainly chastened exercise of the descriptive faculty above noticed. The book to some extent invited--and Kingsley availed himself of the opportunity in a far more than sufficient degree--that "coat-trailing" which, as has been said, inevitably in its turn provokes "coat-treading": and it has been abused from various quarters. But that it is one of the very greatest of English novels next to the few supreme, impartial and competent criticism will never hesitate to allow. Of his remaining books of novel kind one was of the "eccentric" variety: the others, though full of good things, were perhaps on the whole failures. The first referred to (the second in order of appearance), The Water Babies (1863), is a half Rabelaisian though perfectly inoffensive
fatrasie of all sorts of things, exceedingly delightful to fit tastes. But Two Tears Ago (1857), though containing some fine and even really exquisite things, shows a relaxing hand on the crudity and promiscuousness which had been excusable in his two first books and had been well restrained in Hypatia and Westward Ho! by central and active interests of story and character. "Spasmodic" poetry, the Crimean War, Pre-Raphaelitism, Tractarianism, the good and bad sides of science, and divers other things make a mixture that is not sufficiently concocted and "rectified." While in the much later Hereward the Wake (1866), though the provocation offered to the Dryasdust kind of historian is no matter, there is a curious relapse on the old fault of incorporating too much history or pseudo-history, and the same failure as in Two Tears Ago , or perhaps a greater one