But even the poems, the essays, and the novels, do not by any means fill up the list of the results of Kingsley's activity. He was a constant, and at his best a very good, sermon-writer for publication. He produced in the first flush of the rage for seashore studies (1854) a very pleasant little book called Glaucus; he collected some of his historical lectures in The Roman and the Teuton; and he wrote in 1863 the delightful nondescript of The Water Babies, part story, part satire, part Rabelaisian fatrasie, but almost all charming, and perhaps the latest book in which his powers appear at their very best. These powers, as exhibited in his novels, with a not dissimilar exhibition in little in his essays, are so remarkable that in certain senses Kingsley may, with a little kindness, be put in the very first class of English novelists, and might be put there by the sternest critical impartiality were it not for his concomitant defects. These defects are fairly numerous, and they are unfortunately of a kind not likely to escape attention. He was a rather violent, though a very generous partisan, and was perpetually going out of his way to provoke those on the other side by "flings" of this or that kind. He was extremely fond of arguing, but was a most poor and unhappy logician. One of the best known and most unfortunate episodes of his literary life was the controversy into which he plunged with Newman in 1864. Kingsley had before on various occasions spoken enthusiastically of Newman's genius and character: the reference to the peculiar estimate of truth held by some Roman Catholics, and approved, or supposed to be approved, by Newman, which was the text for the latter's wrath, was anything but offensive, and it afterwards became certain, through the publication of the Apologia, that the future Cardinal, with the inspiration of a born controversialist, had simply made Kingsley the handle for which he had been waiting. A very little dialectical skill would have brought Kingsley out of the contest with honours at least divided; but, as it was, he played like a child into Newman's hands, and not only did much to re-establish that great man in public opinion, but subjected himself at the time, and to some extent since, to an obloquy at least as unjust as that which had rested upon Newman. This maladroitness appears constantly in the novels themselves, and it is accompanied not merely by the most curious and outrageous blunders in fact (such as that which represents Marlowe as dying in the time of James the First, not that of Elizabeth), but by odd lapses of taste in certain points, and in some (chiefly his later) books by a haphazard and inartistic construction.
We must, of course, allow for these things, which are the more annoying in that they are simply a case of those which incuria fudit. But when they are allowed for, there will remain such a gallery of scenes, characters, and incidents, as few English novelists can show. The best passages of Kingsley's description, from Alton Locke to Hereward, are almost unequalled and certainly unsurpassed. The shadows of London low life and of working-class thought in Alton Locke, imitated with increasing energy for half a century, have never been quite reached, and are most brilliantly contrasted with the lighter Cambridge scenes. Yeast, perhaps the least general favourite among his books, and certainly the crudest, has a depth of passion and power, a life, an intensity, the tenth part of which would make the fortune of a novel now; and the variety and brilliancy of Hypatia are equalled by its tragedy. Unequal as Two Years Ago is, and weak in parts, it still has admirable passages; and Hereward to some extent recovers the strange panoramic and phantasmagoric charm of Hypatia. But where Westward Ho! deserves the preference, and where Kingsley vindicates his claim to be the author not merely of good passages but of a good book, is in the sustained passion of patriotism, the heroic height of adventure and chivalry, which pervades it from first to last. Few better historical novels have ever been written; and though, with one exception, that of Salvation Yeo, the author has drawn better characters elsewhere, he has nowhere knitted his incidents into such a consistent whole, or worked characters and scenes together into such a genuine and thorough work of art.
Anthony Trollope, one of the most typical novelists of the century, or at least of the half-century, in England, if not one of the greatest, was a member of a literary family whose other members, of more or less distinction, may for convenience' sake best be mentioned here. Little is recorded of his father, who was, however, a barrister, and a Fellow of New College, Oxford. But Anthony's mother, the "Mrs. Trollope" of two generations ago, who was born a Miss Milton in 1780, was herself very well known in print, especially by her novel of The Widow Barnaby (1839), which had sequels, and by her very severe Domestic Manners of the Americans, which appeared in 1832, after she had qualified herself to write it by a three years' residence in the United States. She wrote a great deal at this period, and survived till 1863; but her work hardly survived as long as she did. It has, however, been said, and not without justice, that much of the more vivid if coarser substance of her younger son's humour is to be traced in it. The elder son, Thomas Adolphus, who was born in 1810, and lived from 1841 for some half-century onwards in Italy, was also a prolific novelist, and wrote much on Italian history; while perhaps his best work was to be found in some short pieces, combining history with a quasi-fictitious interest, which he contributed to the periodicals edited by Dickens.
But neither mother nor elder brother could vie with Anthony, who was born in 1815, was educated at Winchester and Harrow, spent the greater part of his life as an official of the Post Office, and died in December 1882, leaving an enormous number of novels, which at one time were the most popular, or almost the most popular, of their day, and to which rather fastidious judges have found it difficult to refuse all but the highest praise. Almost immediately after Trollope's death appeared an Autobiography in which, with praiseworthy but rather indiscreet frankness, he detailed habits of work of a mechanical kind, the confession of which played into the hands of those who had already begun to depreciate him as a mere book-maker. It is difficult to say how many novels he wrote, persevering as he did in composition up to the very time of his death; and it is certain that the productions of his last decade were, as a rule, very inferior to his best. This best is to be found chiefly, but not entirely, in what is called the "Barsetshire" series, clustering round a county and city which are more or less exactly Hampshire and Winchester, beginning in 1855 with The Warden, a good but rather immature sketch, and continuing through Barchester Towers (perhaps his masterpiece), Doctor Thorne, Framley Parsonage, and The Small House at Allington (the two latter among the early triumphs of the Cornhill Magazine), to The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867), which runs Barchester Towers very hard, if it does not surpass it. Other favourite books of his were The Three Clerks, Orley Farm, Can You Forgive Her, and Phineas Finn—nor does this by any means exhaust the list even of his good books.
It has been said that Trollope is a typical novelist, and the type is of sufficient importance to receive a little attention, even in space so jealously allotted as ours must be. The novel craved by and provided for the public of this second period (it has also been said) was a novel of more or less ordinary life, ranging from the lower middle to the upper class, correctly observed, diversified by sufficient incident not of an extravagant kind, and furnished with description and conversation not too epigrammatic but natural and fairly clever. This norm Trollope hit with surprising justness, and till the demand altered a little or his own hand failed (perhaps there was something of both) he continued to hit it. His interests and experiences were fairly wide; for, besides being active in his Post Office duties at home and abroad, he was an enthusiastic fox-hunter, fairly fond of society and of club-life, ambitious enough at least to try other paths than those of fiction in his Thackeray (a failure), his Cicero (a worse failure), and other things. And everything that he saw he could turn into excellent novel-material. No one has touched him in depicting the humours of a public office, few in drawing those of cathedral cities and the hunting-field. If his stories, as stories, are not of enthralling interest or of very artfully constructed plots, their craftsmanship in this respect leaves very little to complain of. And he can sometimes, as in the Stanhope family of Barchester Towers, in Mrs. Proudie passim, in Madalina Demolines, and in others, draw characters very little removed from those who live with us for ever. It is extremely improbable that there will ever be a much better workman of his own class; and his books are certainly, at their best, far better than all but one or two that appear, not merely in any given year nowadays, but in any given lustrum. Yet the special kind of their excellence, the facts that they reflect their time without transcending it, and that in the way of merely reflective work each time prefers its own workmen and is never likely to find itself short of them, together with the great volume of Trollope's production, are certainly against him; and it is hard even for those who enjoyed him most, and who can still enjoy him, to declare positively that there is enough of the permanent and immortal in him to justify the hope of a resurrection.
In Charles Reade, on the other hand, there is undoubtedly something of this permanent or transcendent element, though less perhaps than some fervent admirers of his have claimed. He was born on June 1814 at Ipsden in Oxfordshire, where his family had been some time seated as squires. He had no public school education, but was elected first to a Demyship and then to a Fellowship at Magdalen College, Oxford. He was called to the Bar in 1842; but his Fellowship made him independent, and he pursued many crazes—he was one of the most eccentric of those English authors who are noticed in this volume—but no profession. He did not even begin to write very early, and when he did it was drama, not prose or fiction. He was not very successful with the stage, though he never quite gave it up. It was about 1852 when he began to write, or at least to publish, novels; and between the Peg Woffington of that year and his death on 1st April 1884 he produced nearly a score, diversifying the publication with law-suits, eccentric newspaper correspondences, and other things. Indeed he has in more than one of his books introduced mental delusions with such startling subtlety and truth, and was so entirely odd in the ordinary relations of life, that some have not hesitated to insinuate a slight want of sanity.
If there was any madness in him, the hackneyed alliance of great wits was certainly not refused. A novelist of violent likes and dislikes himself, he has found violent partisans and scornful pooh-poohers. Among the former there is perhaps hardly one of his chief books—the quaint and brilliant Peg Woffington, the pathetic Christie Johnstone, Hard Cash, Griffith Gaunt, Put Yourself in his Place, A Terrible Temptation, and the rest—which has not special sectaries. But catholic criticism would undoubtedly put It is Never too Late to Mend (1856) and The Cloister and the Hearth (1861) at the head of all. The former is a tale of the moment, based chiefly on some stories which had got abroad of tyranny in gaols, and on the Australian gold fever of a few years earlier. The latter is a pure romance, purporting to tell the adventures of Erasmus' father in the fifteenth century. The contrast of these subjects illustrates admirably a curious combination in Reade's genius which, for the matter of that, might be independently exemplified from either book. On the one side he was one of the earliest and one of the most industrious of those who have been called the "document" or "reporter" novelists—now collecting enormous stores of newspaper cuttings and busying himself with keenest interest in the things of the day; now, as in The Cloister and the Hearth, not disdaining to impart realism and vividness to his pictures by adapting and almost translating whole passages from Erasmus' own Colloquies. On the other, he was a poetic seer and dreamer, of the strongest romantic force, and capable of extraordinary flights of power, passion, and pathos. But there was another thing that he was not, and that was a critic. His taste and judgment were extremely deficient; he had no sense of general proportion in his work; and was quite as likely to be melodramatic as to be tragical, to be coarse as to be strong, to be tedious as to be amusing, to be merely revolting as to purify by pity and terror. Both the books just specially mentioned may be thought too long: it is certain that The Cloister and the Hearth is. That a freshness still evident in Christie Johnstone has been lost in both (having been killed by "the document") is also true. But still, Reade undoubtedly had genius, and to genius most things can without much trouble be forgiven.
The chief novelist of what is rather loosely called the School of Dickens, was Wilkie Collins, son of the painter of that name, who was born in London on 8th January 1824, and died in 1889. His greatest popularity was in the decade between 1857 and 1866, when The Dead Secret, The Woman in White, No Name, and Armadale, especially the second, had an immense vogue. Perhaps The Moonstone, which is later, is also better than any of these. The strictly literary merit of none could be put high, and the method, that of forwarding the result by a complicated intertwist of letters and narratives, though it took the public fancy for a time, was clumsy; while the author followed his master in more than one aberration of taste and sentiment. His brother Charles Collins, who had a much shorter life, had a much more delicate style and fancy; and the Cruise upon Wheels, a record of an actual tour slightly embellished and thrown into fictitious form, is one of the books which have, and are not, unless they drop entirely out of sight, likely to lose, a firm following of friends, few perhaps but faithful. Mortimer Collins, a contemporary, but no relation of these, whose poems have already been mentioned, was born in 1827 and died in 1876, the last twenty years of his life having been occupied by various and voluminous literary work. He was one of the last of the so-called Bohemian school in letters and journalism, something of a scholar, a fertile novelist, and a versatile journalist in most of the kinds which make up modern journalism.
Henry Kingsley, younger brother of Charles, was himself a prolific and vigorous novelist; and though a recent attempt to put him above his brother cannot possibly be allowed by sound criticism, he had perhaps a more various command of fiction, certainly a truer humour, and if a less passionate, perhaps a more thoroughly healthy literary temperament. But his life was not long, and he was unfortunately compelled during most of it to write for a living. Born in 1830, he was educated at King's College, London, and Worcester College, Oxford, on leaving which latter he went to Australia and lived there for five years. Returning in 1859, he wrote the admirable Australian story of Geoffrey Hamlyn, which, with Ravenshoe two years later, contains most of his work that can be called really first rate. He returned to Australia for his subject in The Hillyars and the Burtons, and wrote several other novels before his death in 1876, having been during part of the time a newspaper editor, a newspaper correspondent, and a journalist generally. The absence of composition, which Flaubert deplored in English novels generally, shows at its height in Henry Kingsley, whose Ravenshoe, for instance, has scarcely any plot at all, and certainly owes nothing to what it has; while he was a rapid and careless writer. But he had, in a somewhat less elaborate form, all his brother's talents for description of scene and action, and his characters, if more in the way of ordinary life, are also truer to that life. Also he is particularly to be commended for having, without the slightest strait-lacedness, and indeed with a good deal of positive Bohemianism, exhibited the nineteenth century English notion of what constitutes a gentleman perhaps better than any one else. "There are some things a fellow can't do"—the chance utterance of his not ungenerous scamp Lord Welter—is a memorable sentence, whereon a great sermon might be preached.
A little older than Henry Kingsley (he died in the same year), much more popular for a time, and the exerter of an influence which has not ceased yet, and has been on the whole distinctly undervalued, was George Henry Lawrence, who was educated at Rugby and Balliol, was called to the Bar, but was generally known in his own time as Major Lawrence from a militia commission which he held. He also fought in, or at least was present during, the war of independence of the southern states of America. Lawrence, who was born in 1827, published in his thirtieth year a novel, Guy Livingstone, which was very popular, and much denounced as the Gospel of "muscular blackguardism"—a parody on the phrase "muscular Christianity," which had been applied to and not unwelcomed by Charles Kingsley. The book exhibited a very curious blend of divers of the motives and interests which have been specified as actuating the novel about this time. Lawrence, who was really a scholar, felt to the full the Præ-Raphaelite influence in art, though by no means in religion, and wrote in a style which is a sort of transition between the excessive floridness of the first Lord Lytton and the later Corinthianism of Mr. Symonds. But he retained also from his prototype, and new modelled, the tendency to take "society" and the manners, especially the amatory manners, of society very much as his province. And thus he rather shocked the moralists, not only in Guy Livingstone itself, but in its successors Sword and Gown, Barren Honour, Sans Merci, etc. That Lawrence's total ideal, both in style and sentiment, was artificial, false, and flawed, may be admitted. But he has to a great extent been made to bear the blame of exaggerations of his own scheme by others; and he was really a novelist and a writer of great talent, which somehow came short, but not so very far short, of genius.