It was certain that an example so fascinating in itself, and of such extraordinary profit in fame and fortune to the author, would be followed. It was said with sufficient accuracy that Scott's novels, at the best of his career, brought him in about £15,000 a year, a sum previously undreamt of by authors; while their reputation overshadowed not only all others in England, but all others throughout Europe. And it is rather surprising, and shows how entirely Scott had the priority in this field, that it was not for six or seven years at least that any noteworthy attempts in his manner appeared, while it can scarcely be said that in England anything of very great value was published in it before his death. In the last ten years of his life, however, imitations, chiefly of his historical style, did appear in great numbers; and he has left in his diary an extremely interesting, a very good-natured, but a very shrewd and just criticism upon them in general, and upon two in particular—the Brambletye House of Horace Smith, one of the authors of the delightful parodies called Rejected Addresses, and the first book, Sir John Chiverton, of an author who was to continue writing for some half century, and at times to attain very great popularity. This was Harrison Ainsworth, and G. P. R. James also began to publish pretty early in the third decade of the century. James' Richelieu, his first work of mark, appeared in 1825, the same year as Sir John Chiverton; but he was rather the older man of the two, having been born in 1801, while Ainsworth's birth year was 1805. The latter, too, long outlived James, who died in 1860, while holding the post of English Consul in Venice, while Ainsworth survived till 1882. Both were exceedingly prolific, James writing history and other work as well as the novels—Darnley, Mary of Burgundy, Henry Masterton, John Marston Hall, and dozens of others—which made his fame; while Ainsworth (Jack Sheppard, The Tower of London, Crichton, Rookwood, Old St. Paul's, etc.) was a novelist only. Both, especially between 1830 and 1850, achieved considerable popularity with the general public; and they kept it much longer (if indeed they have yet lost it) with schoolboys. But while the attempt of both to imitate Scott was palpable always, the success of neither could be ranked very high by severe criticism. James wrote better than Ainsworth: his historical knowledge was of a much wider and more accurate kind, and he was not unimbued with the spirit of romance. But the sameness of his situations (it became a stock joke to speak of the "two horsemen" who so often appeared in his opening scenes), the exceedingly conventional character of his handling, and the theatrical feebleness of his dialogue, were always reprehended and open to reprehension. Harrison Ainsworth, on the other hand, had a real knack of arresting and keeping the interest of those readers who read for mere excitement: he was decidedly skilful at gleaning from memoirs and other documents scraps of decoration suitable for his purpose, he could in his better days string incidents together with a very decided knack, and, till latterly, his books rarely languished. But his writing was very poor in strictly literary merit, his style was at best bustling prose melodrama, and his characters were scarcely ever alive.
The chief follower of Sir Walter Scott in "Scotch" novels—for Miss Ferrier, the Scottish counterpart of Miss Edgeworth and Miss Austen, was, though his friend, hardly his follower, and Marriage was mainly written before Waverley—was John Galt, who also has some claim to priority. He was born (2nd May 1779) at Irvine in Ayrshire, the scene of his best work, but passed most of his youth at Greenock. His father was a retired West India captain; and Galt's biographers do not make it very clear whence he obtained the capital for the various travels and enterprises which occupied his not exactly eventful, but busy and varied life. He had entered the Custom-house; but went to London in 1804, and tried literature in many forms, and for the most part with very little success. While travelling in the Levant he met Byron, of whom long afterwards he published a rather absurd life; and after his return home his Ayrshire Legatees found welcome and popularity in Blackwood. This was in 1821, and after five years' busy writing Galt went to Canada in charge of a great scheme of colonisation and commerce called the Canada Company. This, after fair prospects, broke down completely. He came back again, wrote hard, and schemed incessantly. But fortune was not kind to him; and he died, in a way a broken man, at Greenock on 11th April 1839.
Galt, though with some of the national characteristics which have not always made Scotchmen popular, appears to have been a person of worth and amiability. He got on well with Byron, a very uncommon thing; and from Carlyle, whom he met when they were both on the staff of Fraser, he receives unwontedly amiable notice. His literary production was vast and totally uncritical; his poems, dramas, etc., being admittedly worthless, his miscellaneous writing mostly book-making, while his historical novels are given up by all but devotees. He had, however, a special walk—the delineation of the small humours and ways of his native town and county—in which, if not exactly supreme, he has seldom been equalled. The Ayrshire Legatees is in main scheme a pretty direct and not very brilliant following of Humphrey Clinker; but the letters of the worthy family who visit London are read in a home circle which shows Galt's peculiar talent. It is shown better still in his next published work, The Annals of the Parish, which is said to have been written long before, and in the pre-Waverley days to have been rejected by the publishers because "Scotch novels could not pay." It is not exactly a novel, being literally what its title holds out—the annals of a Western Parish by its minister, the Rev. Mr. Balwhidder, a Presbyterian Parson Adams of a less robust type, whose description of himself and parishioners is always good, and at times charming. Sir Andrew Wylie (a fantastic book of much good fun and much good feeling), The Entail, and The Provost (the last two sometimes ranked next to the Annals), followed rapidly, and are all good in a way which has been oddly revived of late years by some of our most popular novelists. A better writer than Galt, though a less fertile, was Dr. Moir ("Delta"), another Blackwood man, whose chief single performance is Mansie Wauch, but who wrote both prose and verse, both tales and essays, with considerable accomplishment of style, and with a very agreeable mixture of serious and comic power.
Meanwhile, the historical novel did not by any means absorb the attention of the crowds of aspirants who hurried to try their fortune in the wake of Scott. Lady Morgan (or rather Miss Sydney Owenson) did, in The Wild Irish Girl (1806) and other things, some "rattling Hibernian stories" quite early; John Banim (1798-1842) coincided with the two Englishmen and exceeded them in goût du terroir; and the Fairy Legends (1826) of Crofton Croker (1798-1854) are at their best simply exquisite. But the older styles continued after a fashion, or underwent slight changes, before the novel of purely ordinary life, on a plan midway between Scott and Miss Austen, triumphed in the middle of the century. One of the most popular of novelists in the reigns of George IV. and William IV. was Theodore Hook (1788-1841), a man of respectable connections and excellent education, who, having made himself a favourite with the Regent and many persons of quality as a diner-out and improvisatore, received a valuable appointment at the Mauritius, laid himself open by carelessness to a prosecution for malversation, and, returning to England, never entirely escaped from the effects of this, though he was extremely successful both as a novelist, and as a newspaper writer and editor, in the John Bull chiefly. Some of Hook's political squibs and light verses still retain attraction; and the tradition of his extraordinary faculties in improvising both words, music, and dramatic arrangement remains. But his novels (Sayings and Doings, Gilbert Gurney, Gurney Married, Maxwell, etc.) have become very dead-alive. They have little plot; a sort of rattling adventure in a modernised following of Smollett, which is their chief source of interest; manners true enough to their own day to be out-of-date now, but not handled with sufficient art ever to regain the attraction of revived antiquity; and a very careless and undistinguished style.
The first series of Hook's Sayings and Doings appeared in 1824, the year before that of the novels of James and Ainsworth above noticed. Three years later, and five before Scott's death, appeared Falkland, the first (anonymous) novel of a writer far surpassing any of the hour in talent, and credited by some with positive genius. Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer, afterwards Sir Edward Lytton-Bulwer, and later still Lord Lytton (born in 1800), was the youngest son of General Bulwer of Wood Dalling and Haydon in Norfolk, while he on his mother's side represented an ancient Hertfordshire family seated at Knebworth. He was a Cambridge man: he obtained the Chancellor's prize for English verse in 1825, and his first books were in poetical form. He became a Member of Parliament, being returned in the Whig interest for St. Ives before the Reform Bill passed, and in the first Reform Parliament for Lincoln, and he held this seat for a decade, receiving his baronetcy in 1835. For another decade he was out of the House of Commons, though he succeeded to the Knebworth estate in 1844. He was returned for Hertfordshire in 1852, and, joining Lord Derby's reconstituted party, ranked for the rest of his life as a Conservative of a somewhat Liberal kind. In the second Derby administration he was Colonial Secretary, but took no part in that of 1867, and died just before the return of the Tories to power in 1873.
This sufficiently brilliant political career was complicated by literary production and success in a manner not equalled by any Englishman of his time, and only approached by Macaulay and by Mr. Disraeli. Falkland was succeeded by Pelham, which was published with his name, and which was the first, perhaps the most successful, and by far the most brilliant, of the novels in which authors have endeavoured to secure the rank of man of the world even more than that of man of letters, taking the method chiefly of fashionable, and therefore somewhat ephemeral, epigram. Nor did Bulwer (as he was known in the heyday of his popularity) ever cease novel writing for the forty-five years which were left to him, while the styles of his production varied with fashion in a manner impossible to a man of less consummate versatility and talent, though perhaps equally impossible to one of a very decided turn of genius. The fashionable novel, the crime novel, the romance of mystery, the romance of classical times, the historical novel, by turns occupied him; and it is more easy to discover faults in Paul Clifford, Eugene Aram, The Pilgrims of the Rhine, The Last Days of Pompeii, Ernest Maltravers, Zanoni, Rienzi, The Last of the Barons, and Harold, than to refuse admiration to their extraordinary qualities. Then their author, recognising the public taste, as he always did, or perhaps exemplifying it with an almost unexampled quickness, turned to the domestic kind, which was at last, more than thirty years after Miss Austen's death, forcing its way, and wrote The Caxtons, My Novel, and What will he do with it?—books which to some have seemed his greatest triumphs. The veering of that taste back again to tales of terror was acknowledged by A Strange Story, which, in 1861, created an excitement rarely, if ever, caused by the work of a man who had been writing for more than a generation; while The Haunted and the Haunters, a brief ghost-story contributed to Blackwood's Magazine, has always seemed to the present writer the most perfect thing that he ever did, and one of the most perfect things of its kind ever done. In the very last years of his life, the wonderful girouette of his imagination felt other popular gales, and produced—partly as novels of actual society, partly as Janus-faced satires of what was and what might be—The Coming Race, Kenelm Chillingly, and the posthumous Parisians.
But this list of novels, which does not include by name much more than two-thirds of his actual production, by no means exhausts Lord Lytton's literary work. For some years, chiefly before he had passed middle life, he was an active dramatist, and at least three of his plays—The Lady of Lyons, Richelieu, and Money—had a success (not merely passing, and in the first case at least permanent) which few if any other plays of the century have had. He was always returning to verse, though never with real poetical success; the exceptions which may be urged most forcibly being his translations from Schiller, a congenial original. He was at one time editor of the New Monthly Magazine. He translated freely, he wrote much criticism,—which is often in isolated passages, if not so often in general drift and grasp, extremely good,—and he was a constant essayist in very various kinds. It is probable that if his entire works were ever collected, which is not likely, few, if any, authors of the nineteenth century, though it be one of unbridled writing and printing, could equal him in volume; while it is certain that very few indeed could produce more numerous testimonials of the kind given by the immediate, and not merely immediate, success of separate works.
Yet it has been sometimes complained, sometimes boasted, that "with the critics Bulwer is dead"; and it is not very certain that with the faithful herd of uncritical readers the first Lord Lytton keeps any great place. Even many years ago he had ceased to be, if he ever was, a general favourite with those who specially loved literature; and it is rather doubtful whether he will ever regain even a considerable vogue of esteem. Perhaps this may be unjust, for he certainly possessed ability in bulk, and perhaps here and there in detail, far surpassing that of all but the very greatest of his contemporaries. Even the things which were most urged against him by contemporary satirists, and which it is to be feared are remembered at second-hand when the first-hand knowledge of his work has declined, need not be fatal. A man may write such things as "There is an eloquence in Memory because it is the nurse of Hope" without its being necessary to cast up his capital letters against him in perpetuity, or to inquire without ceasing whether eloquence is an inseparable property of nurses. But he had two great faults—want of concentration and want of reality; and the very keenness, the very delicacy of his appreciation of the shiftings of popular taste may seem without unfairness to argue a certain shallowness of individual soil, a literary compost wherein things spring up rapidly because they have no depth of earth, but also because they have no depth of earth, rapidly vanish and wither away. The novel and the magazine have beyond all doubt given us much admirable work which without them we should not have had; they have almost as certainly, and in no case much more certainly than in Bulwer's, over-forced and over-coaxed into hasty and ephemeral production talents which, with a little more hardening and under less exacting circumstances, might have become undoubted genius. Sentimental grandiloquence is not by itself fatal: the fashion which tempts to it, which turns on it, may return to it again; and it is never impossible to make allowance for its excesses, especially when, as in the case under discussion, it is accompanied by a rare and true satiric grasp of life. In these early externals of his, Bulwer was only the most illustrious of the innumerable victims of Byron. But his failure to make his figures thoroughly alive is more serious; and this must be put down partly to incapacity to take pains.
It was nearly ten years after the first success of Bulwer, and more than half as much after the death of Scott, that a novelist greater than any the century had seen, except Scott himself and Miss Austen, appeared. Charles Dickens and Lord Lytton became rather intimate friends; but their origins and early experiences were curiously different. Dickens' father had been in a government office; but after the Peace he took to the press, and his son (born in 1812), after some uncomfortable early experiences which have left their mark on David Copperfield, fled to the same refuge of the destitute in our times. He was a precocious, but not an extraordinary precocious writer; for he was four and twenty when the Sketches by Boz were printed in a volume after appearing in the Morning Chronicle. But the Sketches by Boz, though containing some very sprightly things, are but as farthing candles to sunlight when compared with the wonderful and wholly novel humour of The Pickwick Papers, which (Dickens having been first (1836) employed to write them as mere letter-press to the sporting sketches of the caricaturist Seymour) appeared as a book in 1838. From that time their author had a success which in money came second to that of Scott, and which both pecuniarily and otherwise enabled him to write pretty much as he pleased. So to the last the style of his novels never bore much reference to any public taste or demand; and he developed himself more strictly according to his own bent than almost any writer of English who was not born to fortune. During the last twenty years of his life, which ended suddenly on 9th June 1870, he was a newspaper editor—first of Household Words, then of All the Year Round; but these very periodicals were of his own making and design. He made two journeys to America: one very early in 1842, with a literary result (American Notes) of very sharp criticism of its people; the other late in 1867, when he made large sums by reading from his works—a style of entertainment which, again, was almost of his own invention, and which gave employment to a very strong dramatic and histrionic faculty that found little other vent. But his life was extremely uneventful, being for its last two and thirty years simply one long spell of hard though lavishly rewarded literary labour.
The brilliancy and the originality of the product of this can never be denied. True to his general character of independence, Dickens owes hardly anything to any predecessor except Smollett, to whom his debts are rather large, and perhaps to Theodore Hook, to whom, although the fact has not been generally recognised, they exist. He had had no regular education, had read as a boy little but the old novelists, and never became as a man one of either wide learning or much strictly literary taste. His temperament indeed was of that insubordinate middle-class variety which rather resents the supremacy of any classics; and he carried the same feeling into art, into politics, and into the discussion of the vague problems of social existence which have so much occupied the last three-quarters of the century. Had this iconoclastic but ignorant zeal of his (which showed itself in his second novel, Nicholas Nickleby, and was apparent in his last completed one, Our Mutual Friend) been united with less original genius, the result must have been infinitely tedious, and could not have been in any way profitable. For Dickens' knowledge, as has been said, was very limited; his logical faculties were not strong; and while constantly attempting to satirise the upper classes, he knew extremely little about them, and has never drawn a single "aristocrat," high government official, or "big-wig" generally, who presents the remotest resemblance to a living being. But he knew the lower and lower middle classes of his own day with wonderful accuracy; he could inform this knowledge of his with that indefinable comprehension of man as man which has been so often noted; and over and above this he possessed an imagination, now humorous, now terrible, now simply grotesque, of a range and volume rarely equalled, and of a quality which stands entirely by itself, or is approached at a distance, and with a difference, only by that of his great French contemporary Balzac. This imagination, essentially plastic, so far outran the strictly critical knowledge of mankind as mankind just mentioned that it has invested Dickens' books and characters with a peculiarity found nowhere else, or only in the instance just excepted. They are never quite real: we never experience or meet anything or anybody quite like them in the actual world. And yet in their own world they hold their position and play their parts quite perfectly and completely: they obey their own laws, they are consistent with their own surroundings. Occasionally the work is marred by too many and too glaring tricks of mannerism: this was especially the case with the productions of the period between 1855 and 1865. The pathos of Dickens was always regarded as slightly conventional and unreal by critical judges. But his humour, though never again attaining the same marvellous flow of unforced merriment which the Pickwick Papers had shown, was almost unfailing; and, thanks to the gift of projecting imaginative character, above noticed, it was never exactly the same.