“But for one Harry Esmond, there are fifty Ralph Newtons—five hundred and fifty of them; and the very youth whose bosom glows with admiration as he reads of Harry—who exults in the idea that as Harry did, so would he have done—lives as Ralph lived, is less noble, less persistent, less of a man even than was Ralph Newton.
“It is the test of a novel-writer’s art that he conceals his snake-in-the-grass; but the reader may be sure that it is always there. * * * In writing novels, we novelists preach to you from our pulpits, and are keenly anxious that our sermons shall not be inefficacious. * * * Nevertheless, the faults of a Ralph Newton, and not the vices of a Varney or a Barry Lyndon, are the evils against which men should in these days be taught to guard themselves—which women also should be made to hate. Such is the writer’s apology for his very indifferent hero, Ralph the Heir.”
In another volume[123] the same writer confesses,—
“Castles with unknown passages are not compatible with my homely muse. I would as lief have to do with a giant in my book—a real giant, such as Goliath—as with a murdering monk with a scowling eye. The age for such delights is, I think, gone. We may say historically of Mrs. Radcliffe’s time that there were mysterious sorrows in those days. They are now as much out of date as the giants.”
Victorianism of course had her own sorrows, patent and unmysterious as they were. At no time could she have been mistaken for Elizabethanism. But she grew gradually in strength and sobriety, and cast a heavier shadow in the afternoon of the century. In its mid-morning Disraeli could compliment his own Young Duke with the subtitle, “a moral tale though gay.” And the chief ambition of the young writers up to the early forties seems to have been to produce tales that were gay though moral.
Of this tendency Lytton is the most conspicuous example. Innately serious and thoroughly sentimental, he nevertheless dared not be as solemn as he could. He must live up to the requirement for ironic wit and the light touch of savior faire, even though, lacking native exuberance and somewhat deficient in taste, he often fell into the slough of facetiousness, or at least lapsed into childish jocularity.
To quote him at his best, however, we take a few excerpts from the last of his trilogy of domestic novels. In the second of the series, My Novel, he had adapted the prefatory device of Tom Jones, using the remarks of the Caxton family as a sort of introductory (or more properly, retrospective) chorus to each book. In What Will He Do with It, the idea is carried out on a smaller scale, in expository paragraphs preliminary to chapters. The following will be sufficient to indicate the tone:
Book I
Chapter XII
“In which it is shown that a man does this or declines to do that for reasons best known to himself—a reserve which is extremely conducive to the social interests of a community; since the conjecture into the origin and nature of those reasons stimulates the inquiring faculties, and furnishes the staple of modern conversation. And as it is not to be denied that, if their neighbors left them nothing to guess at, three fourths of civilized humankind, male or female, would have nothing to talk about; so we cannot too gratefully encourage that needful curiosity, termed by the inconsiderate tittle-tattle or scandal, which saves the vast majority of our species from being reduced to the degraded condition of dumb animals.”