Mrs. Gaskell was older than most of those hitherto mentioned in this chapter, having been born in 1810; but she did not begin to write very early. Mary Barton, her first and nearly her best book, appeared in 1848, and its vivid picture of Manchester life, assisted by its great pathos, naturally attracted attention at that particular time. Cranford (1853), in a very different style, something like a blend of Miss Mitford and Miss Austen, has been the most permanently popular of her works. Ruth, of the same year, shocked precisians (which it need not have done), but is of much less literary value than Mary Barton or Cranford. Mrs. Gaskell, who was the biographer of Charlotte Brontë, produced novels regularly till her death in 1865, and never wrote anything bad, though it may be doubted whether anything but Cranford will retain permanent rank.
The year 1857, which saw Guy Livingstone, saw a book as different as possible in ideal, but also one of no common merit, in John Halifax, Gentleman. The author of this was Dinah Maria Mulock, who afterwards became Mrs. Craik. She was born at Stoke-upon-Trent in 1826, and had written for nearly ten years when John Halifax appeared. She died in 1888, having written a very great deal both in prose and verse; the former part including many novels, of which the best perhaps is A Life for a Life. Mrs. Craik was an example of the influence, so often noticed and to be noticed in the latter part of our period, of the great demand for books on writers of any popularity. Her work was never bad; but it was to a very great extent work which was, as the French say, the "small change" for what would probably in other circumstances have been a very much smaller quantity of much better work. How this state of things—which has been brought about on the one hand by the printing press, newspapers, and the spread of education, on the other by the disuse of sinecures, patronage, pensions, and easy living generally—is to be prevented from affecting literature very disastrously is not clear. Its negative or rather privative effect cannot but be bad; if its positive effect is always as good as the works of Mrs. Craik, it will be fortunate.
It is difficult, in a book of this kind, to know how far to attempt the subdivisions of specialist novels which have been common, such as for instance the sporting novel, the practitioners of which have been innumerable. The chief perhaps were Robert Surtees, the author of the facetious series of which "Mr. Jorrocks" is the central and best figure, and Major Whyte-Melville. The former, about the middle of the century, carried out with much knowledge, not inconsiderable wit, and the advantage of admirable illustrations from the pencil of John Leech, something like the original idea of Pickwick as a sporting romance, and there is a strong following of Dickens in him. Major Whyte-Melville, born near St. Andrews in 1821 and heir to property there, was educated at Eton, served for some years in the Guards, and with the Turkish Contingent in the Crimean War, and was killed in the hunting-field in 1878. He touched various styles, chiefly those of Lever and Bulwer, while he had a sort of contact with George Lawrence. He was never happier than in depicting his favourite pastime, which figures in most of his novels and inspired him with some capital verse. But in Holmby House, Sarchedon, the Gladiators, etc., he tried the historical style also.
Nor must the brief life, embittered by physical suffering, but productive of not a little very cheerful work, of Francis Edward Smedley, a relation of the poetess mentioned in the last chapter, be forgotten. He, born in 1818, went to Cambridge, and then became a novelist and journalist, dying in 1864. His best work belongs to exactly the period with which this chapter begins, the early fifties, and had the advantage, like other novels of the time, of illustration by "Phiz." The three chief books are Frank Fairleigh (1850), Lewis Arundel (1852), and Harry Coverdale's Courtship (1854). With a touch of Bulwerian romance, something of the sporting novel, and a good deal of the adventure story, Smedley united plenty of pleasant humour and occasionally not a little real wit.
It will have been observed that more than one of the more distinguished novelists of this time attempted, and that at least one of them achieved, the historical novel; nor was it at all likely that a kind so attractive in itself, illustrated by such remarkable genius, and discovered at last after many centuries of futile endeavour, should immediately or entirely lose its popularity. Yet it is certain that for about a quarter of a century, from 1845 to 1870, not merely the historical novel, but the romance generally, did lose general practice and general attention, while, though about the latter date at least one novel of brilliant quality, Mr. Blackmore's Lorna Doone, vindicated romance, and historical romance, it was still something of an exception. Those who are old enough, and who paid sufficient attention to contemporary criticism, will remember that for many years the advent of a historical novel was greeted in reviews with a note not exactly of contempt, but of the sort of surprise with which men greet something out of the way and old fashioned.
This was the inevitable result of that popularity of the domestic and usual novel which this chapter has hitherto described, and it was as natural and as inevitable that the domestic and usual novel should in its turn undergo the same law. Not that this, again, was summarily, much less finally displaced; on the contrary, the enormous and ever-increasing demand for fiction—which the establishment of public free libraries, and the custom of printing in cheaper form for sale, has encouraged pari passu with the apparent discouragement given to it by the fall of circulating libraries from the absolutely paramount place which they occupied not long ago—maintained the call for this as for other kinds of story. But partly mere love of change, partly the observations of those critics who were not content to follow the fashion merely, and partly also the familiar but inexplicable rise at the same time of divers persons whose talent inclined in a new direction, brought in, about 1880 or later, a demand for romance, for historical romance, and for the short story—three things against which the taste of the circulating-library reader during the generation then expiring had distinctly set itself. The greater part of the results of this change falls out of our subject; but one remarkable name, perhaps the most remarkable of all, is given to us by the Fates.
For one of the pillars of this new building of romance was only too soon removed. Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson (more commonly known to the public by the first two, and to his friends by the second of his Christian names) belonged to the famous family of lighthouse architects who so long carried on the traditions of Smeaton in that department of engineering; and he was to have been an engineer himself. But he was incurably literary; and after school and college at Edinburgh, was called to the Bar, with no more practical results in that profession than in the other. Born on 13th November 1850, he was not extremely precocious in publication; and it was not till nearly the end of the seventies that his essays in the Cornhill Magazine and his stories in a periodical called London, short lived and not widely circulated, but noteworthy in its way, attracted attention. He followed them up with two volumes of somewhat Sternian travel, An Inland Voyage (1878) and Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes (1879); next collecting his Cornhill Essays in two other volumes, Virginibus Puerisque (1881) and Familiar Studies of Men and Books (1882), and his London stories in The New Arabian Nights (1882). But he did not get hold of the public till a year later than the latest of these dates, with his famous Treasure Island, the best boys' story since Marryat, and one of a literary excellence to which Marryat could make no pretensions. The vein of romance which he then struck, and the older and more fanciful one of The New Arabian Nights, were followed up alternately or together in an almost annual succession of books—Prince Otto (1885), The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Kidnapped (1886), The Black Arrow (a wonderfully good, though not very generally popular, York-and-Lancaster story) (1888), The Master of Ballantræ (1889), the exquisite Catriona (1893). It also pleased him to write, in collaboration with others, The Dynamiter, The Wrecker, The Ebb Tide, etc., where the tracing of the several shares is not unamusing. Stevenson also attempted poetry, and his Child's Garden of Verse (1885) has very warm admirers, who are often more doubtful about Underwoods (1887) and Ballads (1891). The list of his work is not exhausted, and one of the latest additions to it was A Footnote to History (1892), containing an account of the intestine troubles of the island of Samoa, where Mr. Stevenson, long a victim to lung disease, latterly fixed his abode, and where he died suddenly in the winter of 1894.
As has been the case with most of the distinguished writers of recent years, Mr. Stevenson has been praised by some of his contemporaries and juniors with an uncritical fervour which has naturally provoked depreciation from others; and the charm of his personality was so great that it is extremely difficult for any one who knew him to hold the scales quite even. As the most brilliant and interesting by far, however, of those English writers whose life was comprised in the last half of the century he absolutely demands critical treatment here, and it so happens that his method and results were extremely typical of the literary movement and character of our time. He has left somewhat minute accounts of his own apprenticeship, but they are almost unnecessary: no critic of the slightest competence could fail to divine the facts. Adopting to the full, and something more than the full, the modern doctrine of the all-importance of art, of manner, of style in literature, Mr. Stevenson early made the most elaborate studies in imitative composition. There is no doubt that he at last succeeded in acquiring a style which was quite his own: but it was complained, and with justice, that even to the last he never attained complete ease in this style; that its mannerism was not only excessive, but bore, as even excessive mannerism by no means always does, the marks of distinct and obvious effort. This was perhaps most noticeable in his essays, which were further marred by the fact that much of them was occupied by criticism, for which, though his taste was original and delicate, Stevenson's knowledge was not quite solid enough, and his range of sympathies a little deficient in width. In his stories, on the other hand, the devil's advocate detected certain weak points, the chief of them being an incapacity to finish, and either a distaste or an incapacity for introducing women. This last charge was finally refuted by Catriona, not merely in the heroine, but in the much more charming and lifelike figure of Barbara Grant; but the other was something of a true bill to the last. It was Stevenson's weakness (as by the way it also was Scott's) to huddle up his stories rather than to wind them off to an orderly conclusion.
But against this allowance—a just but an ample one—for defects, must be set to Stevenson's credit such a combination of literary and story-telling charm as perhaps no writer except Mérimée has ever equalled; while, if the literary side of him had not the golden perfection, the accomplished ease of the Frenchman, his romance has a more genial, a fresher, a more natural quality. Generally, as in the famous examples of Scott, of Dumas, and of Balzac, the great story-tellers have been a little deficient in mere style; the fault in Stevenson, if it could be called a fault, was that the style was in excess. But this only set off and enhanced, it did not account for, the magic of his scene and character, from John Silver to Barbara Grant, from "The Suicide Club" to the escapes of Alan Breck. Very early, when most of his critical friends were urging him to cultivate the essay mainly, others discerned the supremacy of his story-telling faculty, and, years before the public fell in love with Treasure Island, bade him cultivate that. Fortunately he did so; and his too short life has left a fairly ample store of work, not always quite equal, seldom quite without a flaw, but charming, stimulating, distinguished as few things in this last quarter of a century have been.
Nearly all of Mr. Stevenson's contemporaries in novel-writing, as well as many distinguished persons far his seniors whose names will occur to every one, lie outside our limits. And in no chapter of this book, perhaps, is it so necessary to turn the back sternly on much interesting performance once famous and popular—not once only of interest to the reader of time and chance but put by this cause or that out of our reach. We cannot talk here of Emilia Wyndham or Paul Ferroll, both emphatically novels of their day, and that no short one; and in the latter case, if not in the former, books deserving to be read at intervals by more than the bookworm. The exquisite Story without an End, which Sarah Austin half adapted, half translated, and which, with some unusually good translations from Fouqué and others, set a whole fashion fifty years ago, must pass with mere allusion; the abundant and not seldom excellent fiction of the earlier High Church movement pleads in vain for detailed treatment. For all doors must be shut or open; and this door must now be shut.