Neither of these writers, except, as has been said, perhaps Black in his earliest stage, had taken novel-writing very seriously: it was otherwise with the third of the trio. Mr., afterwards Sir Walter, Besant did not begin early, owing to the fact that, for nearly a decade after leaving Cambridge, he was a schoolmaster in Mauritius. But he had, in this time, acquired a greater knowledge of literature than either of the other two possessed: and when he came home, and took to fiction, he accompanied it with, or rather based it upon, not merely wide historical studies, which are still bearing fruit in a series of posthumous dealings with the history of London, but rather minute observation of the lower social life of the metropolis. For some ten years his novel production was carried on, in a rather incomprehensible system of collaboration, with James Rice, a Cambridge man like himself and a historian of the turf, but one to whom no independent work in fiction is attributed, except an incredibly feeble adaptation of Mr. Verdant Green, entitled The Cambridge Freshman and signed "Martin Legrand." During the seventies, and for a year or two later, till Rice's death in 1882, the pair provided along series of novels from Ready-Money Mortiboy (1871) to The Chaplain of the Fleet (1881), the most popular book between being, perhaps, The Golden Butterfly (1876). These belonged, loosely, to the school of Dickens, as that school had been carried on by Wilkie Collins (v. inf.), but with less grotesque than the original master, and less "sensation" than the head pupil; with a good deal of solid knowledge both of older and more modern life; with fairly substantial plots, good character-drawing of the more external kind, and a sufficient supply of interesting incident, dialogue, and description.
It was certain that people would affect to discover a "falling off" when the partnership was dissolved by Rice's death: but as a matter of fact there was nothing of the kind. Such books as the very good and original Revolt of Man (which certainly owed nothing to collaboration), as All Sorts and Conditions of Men (1882), the first of the kind apparently that Besant wrote alone, as Dorothy Forster (1884), and as the powerful if not exactly delightful Children of Gibeon (1886) were perhaps more vigorous than anything earlier, and certainly not less original. But the curse of the "machine-made" novel, which has been already dwelt upon, did not quite spare Besant: and in these later stories critics could point, without complete unfairness, to an increasing obsession of the "London" subject, especially in regard to the actual gloom and possible illumination of the East End, and on the other to a resort to historical subjects, less as suggestions or canvases than as giving the substance of the book. The first class of work, however (which actually resulted in a "People's Palace" and was supposed to have obtained his knighthood for him), is distinctly remarkable, especially in the light of succeeding events. Most of the unfavourable criticisms passed upon Besant's novel-work were in the main the utterances of raw reviewers, who thought it necessary to "down" established reputations. But it would be impossible for any competent critic, however much he might be biassed off the bench by friendship, not to admit, on it, that he also shows the effect, which we have been illustrating from others, of the system of novel-production à la douzaine. In such a case, and on the, in themselves, salutary conditions of the new novel, the experiences and interests of life may or must come to be regarded too regularly as supplying "grist for the mill"; nay, the whole of life and literature, which no doubt ought in all cases to furnish suggestion and help to art and inspiration, are too often set to a sort of corvèe, a day-task, a tale of bricks. It is, one allows, hard to prevent this: and yet nothing is more certain that bricks so made are not the best material to be wrought into any really "star-y-pointing pyramid" that shall defy the operations of time.
A very curious and characteristic member of this group, Wilkie Collins, has not yet been mentioned except by glances. He was a little older than most of them, and came pretty early under the influence of Dickens, whose melodramatic rather than his humorous side he set himself to work to develop. In fact Collins was at least as much melodramatist as novelist: and while most of his novels are melodrama in narrative form, not a few of them were actually dramatised. He began as early as 1850—the dividing year—with Antonina: but his three great triumphs in the "sensation" novel (as it was rather stupidly called) were The Dead Secret (1857), The Woman in White (1860), and No Name (1862). Throughout the sixties and a little later, in Armadale (1866), The Moonstone (1870), perhaps The New Magdalen (1873), and even as late as 1875 in The Law and the Lady, his work continued to be eagerly read. But the taste for it waned: and its author's last fifteen years or so (he died in 1889), though fairly fruitful in quantity, certainly did not tend to keep it up in quality. Although Collins had a considerable amount of rather coarse vigour in him (his brother Charles, who died young, had a much more delicate art) and great fecundity in a certain kind of stagy invention, it is hard to believe that his work will ever be put permanently high. It has a certain resemblance in method to Godwin and Mrs. Radcliffe, exciting situations being arranged, certainly with great cleverness, in an interminable sequence, and leading, sometimes at any rate, to a violent "revolution" (in the old dramatic sense) at the end. Perhaps the best example is the way in which Magdalen Vanstone's desperate and unscrupulous, though more than half justifiable, machinations, to reverse the cruel legal accident which leaves her and her sister with "No Name" and no fortune, are foiled by the course of events, though the family property is actually recovered for this sister who has been equally guiltless and inactive. Of its kind, the machinery is as cleverly built and worked as that of any novel in the world: but while the author has given us some Dickensish character-parts of no little attraction (such as the agreeable rascal Captain Wragge) and has nearly made us sympathise strongly with Magdalen herself, he only succeeds in this latter point so far as to make us angry with him for his prudish poetical or theatrical justice, which is not poetical and hardly even just.
The specialist or particularist novel was not likely to be without practitioners during this time: in fact it might be said, after a fashion, to be more rife than ever: but it can only be glanced at here. Its most remarkable representatives perhaps—men, however, of very different tastes and abilities—were Richard Jefferies and Joseph Henry Shorthouse. The latter, after attracting very wide attraction by a remarkable book—almost a kind to itself—John Inglesant (1880), a half historical, half ecclesiastical novel of seventeenth-century life, never did anything else that was any good at all, and indeed tried little. The former, a struggling country journalist, after long failing to make any way, wrote several three-volume novels of no merit, broke through at last in the Pall Mall Gazette with a series of studies of country life, The Gatekeeper at Home (1878), and afterwards turned these into a peculiar style of novel, with little story and hardly any character, but furnished with the backgrounds and the atmosphere of these same sketches. His health was weak, and he died in early middle age, leaving a problem of a character exactly opposed to the other. Would Mr. Shorthouse, if he had not been a well-to-do man of business, but obliged to write for his living, have done more and better work? Would Jefferies, if he had been more fortunate in education, occupation, and means, and furnished with better health, have co-ordinated and expanded his certainly rare powers into something more "important" than the few pictures, as of a Meissonier-paysagiste, which he has left us? These inquiries are no doubt idle: but, once more, one may draw attention to the way in which two men, so different in tastes and fortune, neither, it would seem, with a very strong bent towards prose fiction as the vehicle of his literary desires and accomplishments, appear to have been forced, by the overpowering attraction and popularity of the kind, to adopt the novel as their form of literature, and to give the public, not what they wanted in the form which they chose, but something at least made up in the form that the public wanted, and disguised in the wrappers which the public were accustomed to purchase.
The principal development of mid-nineteenth-century fiction had been, as we have seen, in the direction of the novel proper—the character-study of modern ordinary life. But, even as early as Esmond and Hypatia, signs were not wanting that the romance, historical or other, was not going to be content with the rather pale copies of Scott, and the rococo-sentimental style of Bulwer, which had mainly occupied it for the last quarter of a century. Still, though we have mentioned other examples of the fifties and sixties, and have left ever so many more unmentioned, it was certainly not as popular[27] as its rival till, towards the end of the latter decade, Mr. Blackmore's Lorna Doone gave it a fresh hold on the public taste. Some ten years later again there came to its aid a new recruit of very exceptional character, Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson. He was a member of the famous family of light-house engineers, and was educated for the Bar of Scotland, to which he was actually called. But law was as little to his taste as engineering, and he slowly gravitated towards literature—the slowness being due, not merely to family opposition or to any other of the usual causes (though some of these were at work), but to an intense and elaborate desire to work himself out a style of his own by the process of "sedulously aping" others. It may be very much doubted whether this process ever gave any one a style of perfect freedom: and it may be questioned further whether Stevenson ever attained such a style.
But there could be no question that he did attain very interesting and artistic effects, and there happened to be at the time a reaction against what was called "slovenliness" and a demand for careful preparation and planned effect in prose-writing. Even so, however, it was not at once that Stevenson took to fiction. He began with essays, literary and miscellaneous, and with personal accounts of travel: and certain critical friends of his strongly urged him to continue in this way. During the years 1878 and 1879, in a short-lived periodical called London, which came to be edited by his friend the late Mr. Henley and had a very small staff, he issued certain New Arabian Nights which caught the attention of one or two of his fellow-contributors very strongly, and made them certain that a new power in fiction-writing had arisen. It did not, however, at first much attract the public: and it was the kind of thing which never attracts publishers until the public forces their hands. For a time he had to wait, and to take what opportunity he could get of periodical publication, "boy's book"-writing, and the like. In fact Treasure Island (1883), with which he at last made his mark, is to this day classed as a boy's book by some people who are miserable if they cannot classify. It certainly deals with pirates, and pieces of eight, and adventures by land and sea; but the manner of dealing—the style and narrative and the delineation of the chief character, the engaging villain John Silver—is about as little puerile as anything that can be imagined. From that time Stevenson's reputation was assured. Ill health, a somewhat restless disposition, and an early death prevented him from accomplishing any great bulk of work: and the merit of what he did varied. Latterly he took to a teasing process of collaboration, which his sincerest admirers could have willingly spared. But his last completed book, Catriona (1893), seemed to some judges of at least considerable experience the best thing he had yet done, especially in one all-important respect—that he here conquered either an unwillingness to attempt or an inability to achieve the portraiture of feminine character, which his books had previously displayed. The general opinion, too, was that the unfinished Weir of Hermiston (1897), which he left a fragment at his death, was the best and strongest thing he had done, while it showed in particular a distinct relinquishment, for something freer and more spontaneous, of the effective but also rather affected and decidedly laboured style in which he had hitherto written. For us, however, his style is of less importance than the fact that he applied it almost wholly to the carrying out of that rejuvenescence of romance of which we have been speaking, and which may be taken, as anybody pleases, either for a mere alternative to the domestic novel or as a definite revolt against it. It was speedily taken up by writers mostly still living, and so not to be dwelt on now.
Very late in the century the genius of Mr. William Morris turned from verse to prose tale-telling in a series of romances which caught the fancy neither of the public nor of the critics as a whole, but which seem to some whom the gods have made not quite uncritical to be, if rightly taken, of much accomplishment, and of almost more promise and suggestion. These, seven or eight in number, from The House of the Wulfings (1889) to The Sundering Flood, published after the author's death in 1898, were actual romances—written in a kind of modernised fifteenth-century English, and dealing, some with far back incidents of the conflict between Romans and "Barbarians," most with the frank no-time and no-place of Romance itself. They came at an unfortunate moment, when the younger generation of readers were thinking it proper to be besotted with crude realism or story-less impressionism, and when some at least of those who might have welcomed them earlier had left their first faith in poetry or poetic prose. There was, moreover, perhaps some genuine dislike, and certainly a good deal of precisian condemnation, of the "Wardour Street" dialect. Yet there was no sham in them: it was impossible for Mr. Morris to have anything to do with shams—even his socialism was not that—and they were in reality a revival, however Rip van Winklish it might seem, of the pure old romance itself, at the hands of a nineteenth-century sorcerer, who no doubt put a little of the nineteenth century into them. The best—probably the best of all is The Well at the World's End (1896)—have an extraordinary charm for any one who can taste romance: and are by no means unlikely to awake the taste for it in generations to come. But for the present the thing lay out of the way of its generation, and was not comprehended or enjoyed thereby. For it is no doubt nearly as annoying to have bread given to you when you want thistles as to have thistles given to you when you want bread. But just as the ballad is the appointed reviver of poetry, so is romance the appointed reviver of prose-fiction: and in one form or another it will surely do its work, sooner or later.
Here it may be best to stop the actual current of critical comment on individuals. Something has been hinted as to the general present condition of the novel, but there is no need to emphasise it or to enter into particulars about it: indeed, even if such a proceeding were convenient in one way it would be very inconvenient in another. One might, for instance, have to consider, rather curiously, a remarkable statement recently attributed to a popular novelist that "the general standard of excellence in fiction is higher to-day than ever it was before." But we can take higher ground. Far be it from me to bow to the Baal of "up-to-dateness," for even if I had any such hankering, I think I should remember that the surest way of being out-of-date to-morrow is the endeavour to be up-to-date to-day. Only by keeping perspective can you hope to confirm and steady your view: only by relinquishing the impossible attempt to be complete can you achieve a relative completeness.
Yet it is well to remember that Lockhart, one of the best critics who ever lived (when he let himself be so), a novelist too, and not likely to lose an opportunity of magnifying his office if he could, took occasion, in noticing the novels of his friend Theodore Hook at poor "Mr. Wagg's" death, gravely to deplore the decadence of the novel generally: and not much later, in reprinting the article, had the wisdom to recognise, and the courage to record, the fact that Thackeray had disappointed his prognostications. Literature, it has been said, is the incalculable of incalculables: and not only may a new novelist arise to-morrow, but some novelist who has been writing for almost any number of years may change his style, strike the vein, and begin the exploitation of a new gold-field in novel-production.
But this does not affect the retrospect of the past. There we are on perfectly firm ground—ground which we have traversed carefully already, and which we may survey in surety now.