To work and counterwork out the influence of these various causes on separate authors, and the connection of the authors with the causes, would take a volume in itself. But on the scale and within the limits possible here, the names of Charlotte Brontë, Marian Evans (commonly called George Eliot), Charles Kingsley, Anthony Trollope, and Charles Reade will give us such central points as can be most safely utilised. Another, Miss Charlotte Yonge, the chief practitioner of the religious novel, was contemporary with almost the earliest of these, but falls out of this book as still living.
The members of this group were, as happens with a repeated coincidence in literary history too distinct to be altogether neglected, born within a very few years of each other: Reade in 1814, Trollope in 1815, Miss Brontë next year, Kingsley and Miss Evans in 1819; but as generally happens likewise, their appearance as authors, or at least as novelists, did not follow in exact sequel. The first-renowned, the shortest-lived, and though by no means the most brilliant or powerful, in a certain way the freshest and most independent, was Charlotte Brontë, the daughter of a Yorkshire clergyman of eccentric and not altogether amiable character and of Irish blood. She was born on 21st April 1816. The origin of the Brontës or Pruntys has, as well as their family history generally, been discussed with the curiously disproportionate minuteness characteristic of our time; but hardly anything need be said of the results of the investigation, except that they were undoubtedly Irish. Charlotte's mother died soon after the Rev. Patrick Brontë had received the living of Haworth, and Charlotte herself was sent to school at a place called Cowan's Bridge, her experiences at which have in the same way been the subject of endless inquiry into the infinitely little, in connection with the "Lowood" of Jane Eyre. After two of her sisters had died, and she herself had been very ill, she was taken away and educated partly at home, partly elsewhere. Her two surviving sisters, who were her juniors, Emily by two years and Anne by four, were both of more or less literary leanings, and as they were all intended to be governesses, the sole profession for poor gentlewomen in the middle of the century, Emily and Charlotte were sent to Brussels to qualify. In 1846 the three published a joint volume of Poems under the pseudonyms (which kept their initials) of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, and to people over middle age Charlotte Brontë is still perhaps most familiar as Currer Bell. Emily's poems are elsewhere commented upon. The eldest and youngest sister had no poetical vocation, and Anne had not much for prose. But she, like the others, attempted it after the failure of their verse in a triad of novels, The Professor, by Charlotte; Wuthering Heights (very much praised by those who look first for unconventionality and force), by Emily, who followed it with The Tenant of Wildfell Hall; and Agnes Grey, by Anne. But Charlotte could not get The Professor published—indeed it is anything but a good book—and set to work at the famous Jane Eyre, which after being freely refused by publishers, was accepted by Messrs. Smith and Elder and published in 1847, with the result of violent attacks and very considerable popularity. Death the next year and the year after robbed her of both her sisters and of her brother Patrick, a ne'er-do-weel, who, on the strength of his Bohemianism and his sisters, is sometimes supposed to have had genius. Shirley appeared in 1849, and Villette in 1852. In 1854 Charlotte married her father's curate, Mr. Nicholls, but died next year, on 31st March 1855.
Perhaps the most interesting way of looking at Charlotte Brontë, who, as has been said, has been violently attacked, and who has also been extravagantly praised (though not so extravagantly as her sister Emily), is to look at her in the light of a precursor or transition-novelist, representing the time when the followers of Scott had wearied the public with second-rate romances, when Thackeray had not arisen, or had only just arisen, and when the modern domestic novel in its various kinds, from the religious to the problematic, was for the most part in embryo, or in very early stages. This latter novel she in fact anticipated in many of its kinds, and partly to the fact of this anticipation, partly to the vividness which her representation of personal experiences gave to her work, may the popularity which it at first had, and such of it as has survived, be assigned. In this latter point, however, lay danger as well as safety. It seems very improbable that if Charlotte Brontë had lived, and if she had continued to write, her stock of experiences would have sufficed her; and it would not appear that she had much else. She is indeed credited with inventing the "ugly hero" in the Mr. Rochester of Jane Eyre, but in the long-run ugliness palls almost as much as beauty, perhaps sooner. Except in touches probably due to suggestions from Emily, the "weirdness" of the younger sister was not exhibited by the elder. The more melodramatic parts of the book would not have borne repetition, and its main appeal now lies in the Lowood scenes and the character of Jane herself, which are both admittedly autobiographical. So also Shirley is her sister Emily, the curates who pester her appear to have been almost in case to enter libel actions if they thought proper, and Villette is little more than an embroidered version of the Brussels sojourn. How successful an appeal of this kind is, the experience of Byron and many others has shown; how dangerous it is, could not be better shown than by the same experience. It was Charlotte Brontë's good fortune that she died before she had utterly exhausted her vein, though those who fail to regard Paul Emanuel with the affection which he seems to inspire in some, may think that she went perilously near it. But fate was kind to her: some interesting biographies and brilliant essays at different periods have revived and championed her fame: and her books—at least Jane Eyre almost as a whole and parts of the others—will always be simply interesting to the novel-reader, and interesting in a more indirect fashion to the critic. For this last will perceive that, thin and crude as they are, they are original, they belong to their own present and future, not to their past, and that so they hold in the history of literature a greater place than many books of greater accomplishment which are simply worked on already projected and accepted lines. Emily's work, though too small in bulk and too limited in character to be put really high, has this original character in intense equality.
The mantle of Charlotte Brontë fell almost directly from her shoulders on those of another novelist of her sex. The author of Jane Eyre died, as has been said, in the spring of 1855. In the autumn of the next year was written, and in the January issue of Blackwood's Magazine for 1857 appeared, the first of a series of Scenes of Clerical Life. The author, then and for some time afterwards unknown, was Mary Ann or Marian Evans, who took various styles during her life, but wrote habitually under the nom de guerre of "George Eliot." Miss Brontë had not been a very precocious novelist; but Miss Evans did not begin to write novels till she was nearly as old as Miss Brontë was when she died. Her time, however, had been by no means wasted. Born on 22nd November 1819, at Arbury in Warwickshire, where her father was land-steward to Mr. Newdigate, she moved, after twenty years' life in the country or at school, with her father into Coventry, and became acquainted with a set of Unitarians who had practically broken all connection with Christianity. She accepted their opinions with the curious docility and reflexiveness which, strong as was her mind in a way, always distinguished her; and as a sign of profession she undertook the translation of Strauss' Leben Jesu. In 1849 she went abroad, and stayed for some time at Geneva, studying hard, and not returning to England till next year. Then establishing herself in London, she began to write for the Westminster Review, which she helped to edit, and translated Feuerbach's Wesen des Christenthums. It is highly probable that she would never have been known except as an essayist and translator, if she had not formed an irregular union with George Henry Lewes, a very clever and versatile journalist, who was almost a philosopher, almost a man of science, and perhaps quite a man of letters of the less creative kind. Under his influence (he had been a novelist himself, though an unsuccessful one, and was an excellent critic) the docility above remarked on turned itself into the channel of novel-writing, with immediate and amazing success.
Some good judges have thought that Miss Evans never exceeded, in her own special way, the Scenes of Clerical Life. But it was far exceeded in popularity by Adam Bede, which, oddly enough, was claimed by or at least for an impostor after its triumphant appearance in 1858. The position of the author may be said to have been finally established by The Mill on the Floss (1860), though the opening part of Silas Marner (1861) is at least equal if not superior to anything she ever did. Her later works were Romola, a story of the Italian Renaissance (1863); Felix Holt, the Radical (1866); some poems (the Spanish Gypsy, Jubal, etc., 1868-74); Middlemarch (1871); and Daniel Deronda (1876). This last was followed by a volume of essays entitled the Impressions of Theophrastus Such. Mr. Lewes having died in 1878, Miss Evans, in May 1880, married Mr. John Cross, and died herself in December of the same year. Her Life and Letters were subsequently published by her husband, but the letters proved extremely disappointing to her admirers, and the life was not very illuminative, except as to that docility and capacity for taking colour and pressure from surroundings which have been noticed above.
As a poet George Eliot has been noticed elsewhere. She merely put some of the thoughtful commonplaces of her time and school into wooden verse, occasionally grandiose but never grand, and her purple passages have the purple of plush not of velvet. Nor is she very remarkable as an essayist, though some of her early articles have merit, and though Theophrastus Such, appearing at a time when her general hold on the public was loosening, not commending itself in form to her special admirers, and injured in parts by the astonishing pseudo-scientific jargon which she had acquired, was received rather more coldly than it deserved. But as a novelist she is worthy of careful attention. Between 1860 and 1870, a decade in which Thackeray passed away early and during which Dickens did no first-class work, she had some claims to be regarded as the chief English novelist who had given much and from whom more was to be expected; after Dickens' death probably four critics out of five would have given her the place of greatest English novelist without hesitation. Nevertheless, even from the first there were dissidents: while at the time of the issue of Middlemarch her fame was at the very highest, the publication of Daniel Deronda made it fall rapidly; and a considerable reaction (perhaps to be reversed, perhaps not) has set in against her since her death.
The analysis of George Eliot's genius is indeed exceedingly curious. There are in her two currents or characters which are more or less mingled in all her books, but of which the one dominates in those up to and including Silas Marner, while the other is chiefly noticeable in those from Romola onward. The first, the more characteristic and infinitely the more healthy and happy, is a quite extraordinary faculty of humorous observation and presentation of the small facts and oddities of (especially provincial) life. The Scenes of Clerical Life show this strongly, together with a fund of untheatrical pathos which scarcely appears in so genuine a form afterwards. In Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss it combines with a somewhat less successful vein of tragedy to make two admirable, if not faultless, novels; it lends a wonderful charm to the slight and simple study of Silas Marner. But, abundant as it is, it would seem that this is observation, not invention, nor that happiest blending of observation and invention which we find in Shakespeare and Scott. The accumulated experiences of her long and passive youth were now poured out with a fortunate result. But in default of invention, and in presence of the scientific or pseudo-scientific spirit which was partly natural to her and partly imbibed from those who surrounded her, she began, after Silas Marner, to draw always in part and sometimes mainly upon quite different storehouses. It is probable that the selection of the Italian Renaissance subject of Romola was a very disastrous one. She herself said that she "was a young woman when she began the book and an old one when she finished it." It is a very remarkable tour de force, but it is a tour de force executed entirely against the grain. It is not alive: it is a work of erudition not of genius, of painful manufacture not of joyous creation or even observation. And this note of labour deepened and became more obvious even when she returned to modern and English subjects, by reason of the increased "purpose" which marked her later works. It has been noted by all critics of any perception as extremely piquant, though not to careful students of life and letters at all surprising, that George Eliot, whose history was always well known, is in almost every one of her books the advocate of the strictest union of love and marriage—no love without marriage and no marriage without love. But she was not satisfied with defending this thesis, beneficial, comparatively simple, and, in the situations which it suggests, not unfriendly to art. In her last book, Daniel Deronda, she embarked on a scheme, equally hopeless and gratuitous, of endeavouring to enlist the public sympathies in certain visions of neo-Judaism. In all these books indeed, even in Deronda, the old faculty of racy presentation of the humours of life recurred. But it became fainter and less frequent; and it was latterly obscured, as has been hinted, by a most portentous jargon borrowed from the not very admirable lingo of the philosophers and men of science of the last half of the nineteenth century. All these things together made the later books conspicuously, what even the earlier had been to some extent, lifeless structures. They were constructed no doubt with much art and of material not seldom precious, but they were not lively growths, and they were fatally tinged with evanescent "forms in chalk," fancies of the day and hour, not less ephemeral for being grave in subject and seeming, and almost more jejune or even disgusting to posterity on that account.
Almost as much of the time, though curiously different in the aspect of it which he represented, was Charles Kingsley, who was born in the same year as George Eliot, on the 18th of June 1819. A fanciful critic might indulge in a contrast between the sober though not exactly dull scenery of the Midlands which saw her birth, and that of the most beautiful part of Devonshire (Holne, on the south-eastern fringe of Dartmoor) where, at the vicarage which his father held, Kingsley was born. He was educated at King's College, London, and Magdalene College, Cambridge, took a very good degree, and very soon after his appointment to the curacy of Eversley, in Hampshire, became rector thereof in 1844. He held the living for the rest of his life, dying there on the 23rd January 1875. It was not, however, by any means his only preferment. In 1860 he was made Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, not the most fortunate of appointments; for, with a tendency to small slips in fact at least equal to that of his friend and brother-in-law Mr. Froude, Kingsley, though capable of presenting separate aspects and facets of the past admirably, had not the general historic grasp which redeemed Froude. Nine years later he resigned the post and was made a Canon of Chester, while in 1873 this was exchanged for a Canonry at Westminster and a Chaplaincy to the Queen. Otherwise Kingsley's private life was happy and uneventful, its chief incident being a voyage to the West Indies (which, though unvisited, he had long before so brilliantly described) in 1871.
His literary work was very large, much varied, and of an excellence almost more varied than its kinds. He began, of course, with verse, and his Saint's Tragedy (1848), a drama on the story of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, was followed by shorter poems (far too few) at different times, most of them previous to 1858, though the later books contain some charming fragments, and some appeared posthumously. Of all men who have written so little verse during as long a life in our time, Kingsley is probably the best poet. The Saint's Tragedy is a little "viewy" and fluent. But in Andromeda he has written the very best English hexameters ever produced, and perhaps the only ones in which that alien or rebel takes on at least the semblance of a loyal subject to the English tongue. The rise of the breeze after the passage of the Nereids, the expostulation of Andromeda with Perseus, and the approach of the monster, are simply admirable. "The Last Buccaneer" and "The Red King"—call them "Wardour Street," as some critics may—are among the best of their kind; and scores of songs, snatches, etc., from "The Three Fishers" and "The Starlings" of a very early date to the "When all the world is young" ballad of the Water Babies and the posthumous fragment in rhyme of "Lorraine, Lorraine, Lorrèe"—one of the triumphs of that pure poetry which has the minimum of meaning, yet enough—are of extraordinary vigour, freshness, and charm.
But Kingsley was one of those darlings—perhaps the rarest—of the Muses to whom they grant the gift not only of doing a little poetry exquisitely, but the further gift of abstaining from doing anything ill; and he seems to have recognised almost at once that "the other harmony," that of prose, was the one meant for him to do his day's work in. An enthusiast for the people, and an eager disciple of Carlyle, he produced in the fateful year 1849 two novels, Alton Locke and Yeast, a little crude, immature, and violent, but of wonderful power and beauty as literature, and putting current ideas of Chartism, the Tractarian movement, the woes of the working classes, and what not, with that most uncommon touch which takes out of the expression all its ephemerality. He had joined Maurice in the "Christian Socialist" movement, and was a frequent newspaper writer in the same sense as that of his novels; while he soon began to contribute to Fraser's Magazine a series of extremely brilliant essays, since collected in various forms, on literature, scenery, sport (he was an ardent fisherman), and things in general. His next novel, Hypatia, is still shot with Christian Socialism, but is much less crude; and a further sobering down without any loss of force appears in the great Elizabethan novel of Westward Ho! usually, and perhaps rightly, thought his masterpiece (1855). Two Years Ago (1857), the title of which refers to the Crimean War, is much more unequal, and exhibits signs of a certain declension, though to a level still very high. His last novel, Hereward the Wake (1866), was and is very variously judged.