The English Novel and the Principle of its Development

by Sidney Lanier

But sometimes our botanist comes within a mere ace of beautiful poetry, as for example:

"When o'er the cultured lawns and dreary wastes,
Retiring Autumn flings her howling blasts,
Bends in tumultuous waves the struggling woods,
And showers their leafy honors on the floods;
In withering heaps collects the flowery spoil;
And each chill insect sinks beneath the soil:
Quick flies fair Tulipa the loud alarms,
And folds her infant closer in her arms;
In some lone cave, secure pavilion, lies,
And waits the courtship of serener skies."

This book has what it calls Interludes between the parts, in which the Bookseller and the Poet discuss various points arising in it; and its oddity is all the more increased when one finds here a number of the most just, incisive, right-minded and large views not only upon the mechanism of poetry, but upon its essence and its relations to other arts.[B]

[A] Genista, or Planta Genista, origin of "Plantagenet," from the original name-giver's habit of wearing a tuft of his native heath or broom in his bonnet.

[B] Carlyle's opinion of the book is given with a comical grimness in his Reminiscences à propos of the younger Erasmus Darwin, who used much to visit the Carlyles after they settled in London: "Erasmus Darwin, a most diverse kind of mortal, came to seek us out very soon ('had heard of Carlyle in Germany,' &c.), and continues ever since to be a quiet home-friend, honestly attached; though his visits latterly have been rarer and rarer, health so poor, I so occupied, etc., etc. He had something of original and sarcastically ingenious in him; one of the sincerest, naturally honest, and most modest of men; elder brother of Charles Darwin (the famed Darwin on Species of these days), to whom I rather prefer him for intellect, had not his health quite doomed him to silence and patient idleness—grandsons, both, of the first famed Erasmus ('Botanic Garden,' etc.), who also seems to have gone upon 'species' questions, 'omnia ex conchis' (all from oysters), being a dictum of his (even a stamp he sealed with still extant), as this present Erasmus once told me, many long years before this of Darwin on Species came up among us. Wonderful to me, as indicating the capricious stupidity of mankind: never could read a page of it, or waste the least thought upon it."

Nor need I dwell upon Scott's novels, which stretch from 1814 to 1831, which we have all known from our childhood as among the most hale and strengthening waters in which the young soul ever bathed. They discuss no moral problems, they place us in no relation towards our fellow that can be called moral at all, they belong to that part of us which is youthful, undebating, wholly unmoral—though not immoral—they are simply always young, always healthy, always miraculous. And I can only give now a hasty additional flavor of these Scott days by reminding you of the bare names of Thomas Hope, Lockhart, Theodore Hook, Mrs. Trollope, Mrs. Gore and Miss Mitford. It seems always comfortable in a confusion of this kind to have some easily-remembered formula which may present us a considerable number of important facts in portable shape. Now the special group of writers which I wish to contrast with the classic group, consisting of Dickens, Thackeray, Tennyson, Mrs. Browning, Charlotte Bronte, and George Eliot, are at work between 1837 and 1857; and for the purpose of giving you a convenient skeleton or set of vertebræ, containing some main facts affecting the English novel of the nineteenth century, I have arranged this simple table which proceeds by steps of ten years up to the period mentioned.

For example: since these all end in seven; beginning with the year 1807, it seems easy to remember that that is the date of Charles and Mary Lamb's Tales from Shakspeare; skipping ten years to 1817, in this year Blackwood's Magazine is established, a momentous event in fiction generally and particularly as to George Eliot's; advancing ten years, in 1827, Bulwer's Pelham appears, and also the very stimulating Specimens of German Romance, which Thomas Carlyle edited; in 1837 the adorable Pickwick strolls into fiction; in 1847 Thackeray prints Vanity Fair, Charlotte Bronte gives us Jane Eyre, and Tennyson The Princess; and finally, in 1857, as we have seen, George Eliot's Scenes of Clerical Life are printed, while so closely upon it in the previous year as to be fairly considered contemporary, comes Mrs. Browning's Aurora Leigh.

Now I do not know any more vivid way of bringing before you the precise work which English fiction is doing at the time George Eliot sets in, than by asking you to run your eye along the last four dates here given, 1827, 1837, 1847, 1857. Here, in 1827, advances a well-dressed man, bows a fine bow, and falls to preaching his gospel: "My friends, under whatever circumstances a man may be placed, he has it always in his power to be a gentleman;" and Bulwer's gentleman is always given as a very manful and Christian being. I am well aware of the modern tendency to disparage Bulwer, as a slight creature; but with the fresh recollection of his books as they fell upon my own boyhood, I cannot recall a single one which did not leave, as a last residuum, the picture in some sort of the chivalrous gentleman impressed upon my heart. I cheerfully admit that he sometimes came dangerously near snobbery, and that he was uncivil and undignified and many other bad things in the New Timon and the Tennyson quarrel; and I concede that it must be difficult for us—you and me, who are so superior and who have no faults of our own—to look upon these failings with patience; and yet I cannot help remembering that every novel of Bulwer's is skilfully written and entertaining, and that there is not an ignoble thought or impure stimulus in the whole range of his works.

But, advancing, here, in 1837, comes on a preacher who takes up the slums and raggedest miseries of London and plumps them boldly down in the parlors of high life; and, like the boy in the fairy tale whose fiddle compelled every hearer to dance in spite of himself, presently has a great train of people following him, ready to do his bidding in earnestly reforming the prisons, the schools, the workhouses, and the like, what time the entire train are roaring with the genialest of laughter at the comical and grotesque figures which this peculiar Dickens has fished up out of the London mud.

But again: here, in 1847, we have Thackeray exposing shame and high vulgarity and minute wickedness, while Charlotte Bronte and Tennyson, with the widest difference in method, are for the first time expounding the doctrine of co-equal sovereignty as between man and woman, and bringing up the historic conception of the personality of woman to a plane in all respects level with, though properly differentiated from, that of man. It is curious to see the depth of Charlotte Bronte's adoration for Thackeray, the intense, high-pitched woman for the somewhat slack, and as I always think, somewhat low-pitched satirist; and perhaps the essential utterance of Thackeray, as well as the fervent tone which I beg you to observe is now being acquired by the English novel, the awful consciousness of its power and its mission, may be very sufficiently gathered from some of Charlotte Bronte's words about Thackeray which occur in the Preface to the second edition of her Jane Eyre: