Such a mass, such a length, such a variety of production, with so many merits in it, would be difficult to meet elsewhere in our department. And yet very few critics of unquestionable competence, if any, have accorded the absolute First Class to Lord Lytton as a novelist. That this is partly (and rather unjustly) due to the singular and sometimes positively ridiculous grandiloquence and to the half-mawkish, half-rancid, sentimentality which too often mar his earlier novels is probably true. But it is not all the truth: if it were, it would be almost sufficient to point out that he outgrew the first of these faults completely, the second almost completely; and that from The Caxtons (1850) onward there is hardly any stain on his literary character in any such respect. But other faults—or at least defects—remain. They may be almost summed up in the charge of want of consummateness. Bulwer could be romantic—but his romance had the touch of bad taste and insincerity referred to above. He could, as in The Caxtons, be fairly true to ordinary life—but even then he seemed to feel a necessity of setting off and as it were apologising for the simplicity and veracity by touches—in fact by douches—of Sternian fantastry, and by other touches of what was a little later to be called sensationalism. Even his handling of the supernatural, which was undoubtedly a strong point of his, was not wholly de ban aloi. To pronounce him, as was once done by an acute and amiable judge, "the hummiest of bugs" was excessive in life, and would be preposterous in literature. But there undoubtedly was, with rare exceptions, a suspicion of what is called in slang "faking" about his work. The wine is not "neat" but doctored; the composition is pastiche; a dozen other metaphors—of stucco, veneer, glueing-up—suggest themselves. And then there suggests itself, in turn, a sort of shame at such imputations on the author of such a mass of work, so various, so interesting, so important as accomplishment, symptom, and pattern at once. And perhaps one may end by pronouncing Bulwer one of the very greatest of English novelists who are not of the very greatest.
It is difficult to say whether the usual attitude of criticism to Captain Marryat (1792-1848) is more uncritical than ungrateful or more ungrateful than uncritical. Because he has amused the boy, it seems to be taken for granted that he ought not to amuse the man: because he does not write with the artificial and often extremely arbitrary graces of the composition books, that he is "not literature." If it be so, why in the first case so much the worse for "the man," and in the second so much the worse for literature. As a matter of fact, he has many of the qualities of the novelist in a high degree: and if he were in the fortunate position of an ancient classic, whose best works only survive, these qualities could not fail of recognition. Much of his later work simply ought not to count; for it was mere hack-labour, rendered, if not necessary, very nearly so by the sailor's habit (which Marryat possessed in the highest degree) of getting rid of money. Even among this, Masterman Ready and The Children of the New Forest, "children's books," as they may be called, rank very high in their kind. But he counts here, of course, for his sea-novels mainly: and in them there are several things for us to notice. One is that Marryat had the true quality of the craftsman, as distinguished from the amateur or the chance-medley man who has a lucky inspiration. If it were the case that his books derived their whole attraction from the novelty and (within its limits) the variety of their sea-matter, then the first ought to be the best, as in nearly all such cases is the fact. But Frank Mildmay (1829), so far from being the best, is not far from being the worst of Marryat's novels. Much—dangerously much—as he put of his own experiences in the book, he did not know in the least how to manage them. And if Frank is something of a bravo, more of a blackguard, and nearly a complete ruffian, it is not merely because there was a good deal of brutality in the old navy; not merely because Marryat's own standard of chivalry was not quite that of Chaucer's Knight:—but partly, also, because he was aiming blunderingly at what he supposed to be part of the novelist's business—irregular as well as regular gallantry, and highly seasoned adventure. But, like all good artists (and like hardly anybody who has not the artistic quality in him), he taught himself by his failure, even though he sometimes relapsed. Of actual construction he was never a master. The King's Own, with its overdose of history at the beginning and of melodrama at the end, is an example. But his two masterpieces, Peter Simple (1834) and Mr. Midshipman Easy (1836), are capital instances of what may be called "particularist" fiction—the fiction that derives its special zest from the "colours" of some form of life unfamiliar to those who have not actually lived it. Even Peter Simple is unduly weighted at the end by the machinations of Peter's uncle against him and, at intervals during the book, by the proceedings connected therewith. But Mr. Midshipman Easy is flawless—except for the amiable but surely excessive sentimentalists who are shocked at the way in which Mr. Easy père quits the greater stage by mounting the lesser. Than this book there is not a better novel of special "humour" in literature; as much may be said of the greater part of Peter Simple, of not a little in Jacob Faithful (a great favourite with Thackeray, who always did justice to Marryat), and Japhet in Search of a Father, and of something in almost all. Nor were high jinks and special naval matters by any means Marryat's only province. Laymen may agree with experts in thinking the clubhauling of the Diomède in Peter Simple, and the two great fights of the Aurora with the elements and with the Russian frigate in Mr. Midshipman Easy, to be extraordinarily fine things:—vivid, free from extravagance, striking, stirring, clear, as descriptive and narrative literature of the kind can be only at its best, and too seldom is at all. An almost Defoe-like exactness of detail is one of Marryat's methods and merits: while it is very remarkable that he rarely attempts to produce the fun, in which Defoe is lacking and he himself so fertile, by mere exaggeration or caricature of detail. There are exceptions—the Dominie business in Jacob Faithful is one—but they are exceptions. Take Hook, his immediate predecessor, and no doubt in a way his model, as (it has been said) Hook was to almost everybody at the time; take even Dickens, his fellow-pupil with Hook and his own greater successor; and you will find that Marryat resorts less than either to the humour of simple charge or exaggeration.
The last name on our present list belongs to the class of "eccentric" novelists—the adjective being used, not in its transferred and partly improper sense so much as in its true one. Peacock never plays the Jack-pudding like Sterne: and his shrewd wit never permits him the sincere aberrations of Amory. But his work is out of the ordinary courses, and does not turn round the ordinary centres of novel writing. It belongs to the tradition—if to any tradition at all—of Lucian and the Lucianists—especially as that tradition was redirected by Anthony Hamilton. It thus comes, in one way, near part of the work of Disraeli; though, except in point of satiric temper, its spirit is totally different. Peacock was essentially a scholar (though a non-academic one) and essentially a humorist. In the progress of his books from Headlong Hall (1816) to Gryll Grange (1860)—the last separated from the group to which the first belongs by more than twice as many years as were covered by that group itself—he mellowed his tone, but altered his scheme very little. Except in Maid Marian and The Misfortunes of Elphin, where the Scott influence is evident, though Peacock was himself a rebel to Scott, the plan is always the same. Headlong Hall and Nightmare Abbey, Melincourt and Crotchet Castle (1831), as well as Gryll Grange itself, all have the uniform, though by no means monotonous, canvas of a party of guests assembled at a country-house and consisting of a number of "originals," with one or more common-sense but by no means commonplace characters to serve as contrast. It is in the selection and management of these foils that one of Peacock's principal distinctions lies. In his earlier books, and in accordance with the manners of the time, there is a good deal of "high jinks"—less later. In all, there is also a good deal of personal and literary satire, which tones and mellows as it proceeds. At first Peacock is extremely unjust to the Lake poets—so unjust indeed as to be sometimes hardly amusing—to the two universities (of which it so happened that he was not a member), to the Tory party generally, to clergymen, to other things and persons. In Crotchet Castle the progress of Reform was already beginning to produce a beneficent effect of reaction upon him, and in Gryll Grange, though the manners and cast are surprisingly modern, the whole tone is conservative—with a small if not even with a large C—for the most prominent and well treated character is a Churchman of the best academic Tory type.
It is not, however, in anything yet mentioned that Peacock's charm consists, so much as in the intensely literary, but not in the least pedantic, tone with which he suffuses his books, the piquant but not in the least affected turn of the phrases that meet us throughout, the peculiar quality of his irony (most quintessenced in The Misfortunes of Elphin, which is different in scheme from the rest, but omnipresent), and the crisp presentation of individual scene, incident, and character of a kind. Story, in the general sense, there is none, or next to none—the personages meet, go through a certain number of dinners (Peacock is great at eating and drinking), diversions, and difficulties, marry to a greater or less extent, but otherwise part. Yet such things as the character of Scythrop in Nightmare Abbey (a half fantastic, half faithful portrait of Shelley, who was Peacock's intimate friend), or of Dr. Folliott (a genial parson) in Crotchet Castle—as the brilliant picture of the breaking of the dyke in Elphin, or the comic one of the rotten-borough election in Melincourt—are among the triumphs of the English novel. And they are present by dozens and scores: while (though it is a little out of our way) there is no doubt that the attraction of the books is greatly enhanced by the abundance of inset verse—sometimes serious, more often light—of which Peacock, again in an eccentric fashion, was hardly less a master than he was of prose.
Here also it has seemed fit to dwell on a single writer, not perhaps generally held to be of the absolutely first class, because these "eccentrics" are of very great importance in the history of the English novel. The danger of the kind—even more than of other literary kinds—lies in the direction of mould and mechanism—of the production, by the thousand, of things of no individual quality and character. This danger has been and is being amply exemplified. But the Peacocks (would the plural were more justified!) save us from it by their own unconquerable individuality in the first place and, in the second, by the fact that even the best in this kind is "caviare to the general," while anything that is not the best has no attraction either for the general or the elect. They are, as it were, the salt of the novel-feast, in more senses than one: and it is cause for thankfulness that, in this respect as in the physical, England has been well off for salt-pits.
Besides these individual names—which in most literatures would be great, and even in English literature are not small—the second quarter of the century added to the history of the novel an infinity of others who can hardly appear here even on the representative or selective system. All the suns of the novel hitherto mentioned had moons and stars around them; all the cadres of the various kinds were filled with privates and non-commissioned officers to follow the leaders. Gait and Moir carried out the "Scotch novel" with something of Scott, but more of Smollett (Gait at least certainly, in part of his work, preceded Scott). Lady Morgan, who has been mentioned already, Banim, Crofton Croker, and others played a similar part to Miss Edgeworth. Glascock, Chamier, and Howard were, as it were, lieutenants (the last directly so) to Marryat. The didactic side of Miss Edgeworth was taken up by Harriet Martineau. Mrs. Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) is among the latest good examples of the "Terror" class, to which her husband had contributed two of its worst, and two of the feeblest books ever written by a man of the greatest genius, in Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne, some seven years earlier. Many women, not unnaturally, encouraged by the great examples of Miss Burney, Miss Edgeworth, Miss Austen, and Miss Ferrier, attempted novels of the most various kinds, sometimes almost achieving the purely domestic variety, sometimes branching to other sorts. The novels of Mrs. Gore, chiefly in the "fashionable" kind, are said to have attained the three-score and ten in number; Mrs. Crowe dealt with the supernatural outside of her novels if not also in them; the luckless poetess "L.E.L." was a novelist in Ethel Churchill (1837) and other books; Mrs. Trollope, prolific mother of a more prolific son, showed not a little power, if not quite so much taste, in The Vicar of Wrexhill (1837) and The Widow Barnaby. Single books, like Morier's Hajji Baba (1824), Hope's Anastasius (1819), Croly's Salathiel (1829), gained fame which they have not quite lost: and the little known Michael Scott (1789-1835) left in Tom Cringle's Log and The Cruise of the Midge a pair of stories of West Indian scenery and adventure which are nearly first rate. In 1839, not long after Pickwick, Samuel Warren's Ten Thousand a Year blended Bulwer and Dickens in a manner which to this day is a puzzle in its near approach to success. Yet he never repeated this approach, though he had earlier done striking things in the Diary of a Late Physician (1830). But in the latest thirties and early forties there arose two writers who were to eclipse every one of their contemporaries in this kind.
The remarkable originality and idiosyncrasy of Dickens have perhaps, to some extent and from not a few persons, concealed the fact that he was not, any more than other people, an earth-born wonder. Scanted of education as he was, he has in several places frankly and eagerly confessed his early acquaintance with the great older novelists, and his special fancy for Smollett—whose influence indeed is traceable on him from first to last, and not least in the famous "interiors" of which he made far more than his example had done. Even in Pickwick the expert will trace suggestions from others. But if the work is read in its proper order, and the Sketches by Boz are taken first, nobody who knows both Leigh Hunt and Theodore Hook will fail to see that Dickens owed a great deal to both. The fact is in no sense discreditable to him: on the contrary, it adds, in the estimation of all reasonable and critical judges, a very great deal of interest, and takes away none. The earth-born prodigy is seldom good for much and never for very much. The genius who fastens on the points in preceding literature most congenial to him, develops them, builds on them with his own matter and form, and turns out something far greater than his originals is the really satisfactory person. Had Leigh Hunt lent to Hook his literature, his fund of trivial but agreeable observation and illustration, and his attractive style; had Hook communicated to Hunt his narrative faculty and his fecundity in character and manners:—neither could have written Pickwick or even the worst of its successors. Had there been no Hunt and no Hook, Dickens would no doubt have managed, in some fashion, to "do for himself." But it would have given him more trouble, he would have done it more slowly, and he would hardly have earned that generous and admirable phrase of his greatest contemporary in fiction which will be quoted shortly.
Neither from Smollett, however, nor from Hook, nor from Hunt, nor from anybody else did Dickens take what makes him Dickens. His idiosyncrasy, already mentioned, is so marked that everybody acknowledges its presence: but its exact character and nature are matter not so much of debate (though they are that also in the highest degree) as matter of more or less questing, often of a rather blind-man's-buff kind. There is probably no author of whom really critical estimates are so rare. He has given so much pleasure to so many people—perhaps there are none to whom he has given more pleasure than to some of those who have criticised him most closely—that to mention any faults in him is upbraided as a sort of personal and detestable ingratitude and treachery. If you say that he cannot draw a gentleman, you are told that you are a parrot and a snob, who repeats what other snobs have told you; that gentlemen are not worth drawing; that he can draw them; and so forth. If you suggest that he is fantastic, it is reproachfully asked if poetry is not fantastic, and if you do not like poetry? If you intimate small affection for Little Nell and Little Paul, you are a brute; if you hint that his social crusades were often quite irrational, and sometimes at least as mischievous as they were beneficial, you are a parasite of aristocracy and a foe of "the people." If you take exception to his repetitions, his mannerisms, his tedious catch-processes of various kinds, you are a "stop-watch critic" and worthy of all the generous wrath of the exemplary and Reverend Mr. Yorick. And yet all these assertions, objections, descriptions, are arch-true: and they can be made by persons who know Dickens and enjoy Dickens a thousand times better—who admire him in a manner a thousand times more really complimentary—than the folk who simply cry "Great is Dickens" and will listen to nothing but their own sweet voices.
The real, the great, the unique merit of Dickens is that he brought to the service of the novel an imagination which, though it was never poetic, was plastic in almost the highest degree: and that he communicated to the results of it a kind of existence which, though distinctly different from that of actual life, has a reality of its own, and possesses the distinguishing mark of genius, so that if it does not exactly force belief in itself, it forces suspension of disbelief. To have done this is not only to have accomplished a wonderful artistic triumph, but to confer an immense benefit on the human race. But in doing it Dickens exhibits various foibles, prejudices, and disabilities: though it is quite open to any one to maintain that these rather assisted the flow of his imagination than hindered it. He began very young; he had curiously little literature; his knowledge of life, extraordinarily alert and acute, was very one-sided, and the organs by which he attained it seem absolutely to shut themselves and refuse communion with certain orders of society and classes of human creatures. The wealth of fantastic imagery which he used to such purpose not infrequently stimulated him to a disorderly profusion of grotesque; he was congenitally melodramatic; and before very long his habit of attributing special catch-words, gestures, and the like to his characters, exaggerated, degenerated, and stereotyped itself in a fashion which it is difficult to think satisfactory to anybody. He was, moreover, a "novelist of purpose" in the highest degree; he had very strong, but very crude—not to say absurd—political ideas; and he was apt to let the great powers of pathos, of humour, of vivid description, which he possessed to "get out of hand" and to land him in the maudlin, the extravagant, and the bombastic.
But—to put ourselves in connection with the main thread of our story once more—he not only himself provided a great amount of the novel pleasure for his readers, but he infused into the novel generally something of a new spirit. It has been more than once pointed out that there is almost more danger with the novel of "getting into ruts" than with any kind of literature. Nobody could charge the Dickens novel with doing this, except as regards mannerisms of style, and though it might inspire many, it was very unlikely to create a rut for any one else. He liked to call himself "the inimitable," and so, in a way, he was. Imitations of him were, of course, tried: but they were all bad and obvious failures. Against the possible tameness of the domestic novel; against the too commonly actual want of actuality of the historic romance; he set this new fantastic activity of his, which was at once real and unreal, but where the reality had a magical touch of the unfamiliar and the very unreality was stimulating. He might have a hundred faults—he was in fact never faultless, except in Pickwick, which is so absolutely unique that there is nothing to compare with it and show up faults (if it has any) by the comparison. But you can read him again and again with unceasing delight, and with delight of a kind given by no other novelist.[21]