During the second or third decades of the present reign, the literary system of the country, as shown in the introductory chapter to this work, was dominated by the presence of a few illustrious men, who naturally became models for imitation to a host of workers. During their lives, Dickens and Thackeray both founded schools. The former was, through the weekly magazines he edited, the founder of newspaper descriptive writing, especially of the picturesque Parliamentary narrative recently brought to so high a point of perfection by clever writers now alive. The entire company of satirical essayists in the weekly press, was first inspired by Thackeray. Each master was surrounded by personal admirers and literary imitators in a degree unapproached by any of his contemporaries or successors. The author of The Newcomes was outlived[91] by the accomplished writer of that series which began with Pelham in 1828 and neared its end with The Parisians almost fifty years later.
While the anniversaries of the Queen’s accession were few in number, Lytton by the side of Dickens, as a popular master of the pen, filled something like the place which Thackeray had occupied before him. During most of his time, another man of letters belonging like Lytton to the titled classes divided with Lytton the social patronage of literary beginners. No man of his day did so much as Lytton to help younger men with the booksellers, as in his old-fashioned phrase he was apt to call the publishers. He had indeed a rival or a colleague in these good offices in Lord Stanhope, then Lord Mahon, the historian, as also in Mr Monckton Milnes, afterwards Lord Houghton, the timely friend of Coventry Patmore, and the rescuer from great troubles of a forgotten but deserving poet David Gray.
When as yet journalism as a profession was not fully organized, and young authors still looked first to the pillars of Paternoster Row, an introduction to Lord Lytton or to Lord Stanhope was the surest stepping stone to print. In this way Antonio Gallenga, then an obscure refugee, with associations of the dagger and bowl about him, having won the good word of Lytton, found a publisher for his History of Piedmont. This in its turn opened to him the office of the Times. Here he made his name not only as among the most brilliant, best informed and versatile of newspaper writers but, together with William Howard Russell, as a founder of that school of graphic newspaper narrative since represented by Archibald Forbes, Edward Dicey, B. H. Becker, G. A. Henty, George Augustus Sala, and John O’Shea.
The development of the press has changed most of the conditions of literary life. For very many Englishmen of all classes, the periodical, daily, weekly, or monthly, is practically an exclusive synonym for literature itself. This fact of course has reacted upon the whole class of professional writers. The most commercially successful of men and women of letters are, as, since the days of Sir Walter Scott, they have been, authors of some novel which hits the taste of the moment, and fixes the interest of the town. When George Eliot wedded in her writings the artistic to the scientific spirit, she invented a combination unknown till then; she opened a gold mine for herself and the more dexterous of her disciples. Dickens and Thackeray both realized high prices for the labour of their pen. Wilkie Collins and Charles Reade were not far behind. But the men of this class were either original creators of literary types that will take their place with the characters of Shakespeare, and Cervantes, or else were masters in the manufacture of exciting and dramatic plots.
Lord Lytton knew a little of everything, science included. He was indeed not only a marvel of varied productiveness but a consummate student, summing up in his own person all the intellectual interests and tendencies of his time. During his most industrious period, before he had attained Cabinet rank in politics, and before Carlyle’s deeper studies of Fichte and Goethe had familiarized the English public with modes of German thought, Bulwer did more than anyone of his day to educate the average reader on lines, and in subjects, which now seem commonplace, but of which, when the dandy who dashed off Falkland, as Byron dashed off Beppo, had matured into the student who travailed with Rienzi, Englishmen knew nothing.
The mental inquisitiveness and activity of a newly enlightened generation, resolved, like Bacon, to take all learning for its province, finds the reflection of some aspect of itself in every page of Bulwer. The polished conceits, the recondite illustrations drawn from every sphere of human thought or achievement, the similes sometimes as far fetched, and obscurely ingenious as those of Sir Piercie Shafton or of Euphues himself, suggest at times the inspiration of an universally-informed, and precociously-gifted youth who displays his cleverness before it is yet quite disciplined, and parades his patchwork learning before it is fully digested.
In all these things Bulwer was essentially the product and the mirror of the new and eclectically educated Victorian age. He had been a young man of great fashion, a good specimen of that social school of which the younger Disraeli at his Vivian Grey period was a bad specimen. A dandy of the older type through life Lytton remained. Tennyson’s lines in Punch on the padded man who wore the stays, stuck to him throughout life as did Thackeray’s caricatures of Sir Edward Bulwig. People therefore insisted on finding affectations in his manner, and insincerities in his nature.[92] He saw his time in its entirety abroad as well as at home more clearly than most of his contemporaries. The reforming zeal and humanitarian spirit of his age were not expressed more powerfully, if to many persons more intelligibly, by Dickens himself than by Lytton.
All the modern masters of English fiction are in their different ways as much the products of that series of movements comprehended in, or grouped round, the French Revolution of the eighteenth century as Byron himself was in England the immediate progeny of that organic upheaval of thought and faith. The year of the accession produced Carlyle’s History of the French Revolution. Four years later, the most powerful picture of these episodes presented by any writer of fiction was given to the world by Bulwer in Zanoni. To the same era of revolutionary influences belonged A Tale of Two Cities, in which Dickens not only illustrated after his own manner the age of Robespierre, but produced a work not inferior in literary art to the Esmond of his great rival. Lytton’s genius impelled him to mysticism, as George Eliot’s associations inclined her to positivism. Both after their own manner dealt with human problems from what they respectively thought the scientific point of view. Add to this that Lytton remained a student annexing new domains of interest, thought and knowledge to the last; that he showed himself the prophet of the new and better France in The Parisians, as he had been the bard of the new England beyond the seas before the curtain fell on the fortunes and the friends of Pisistratus Caxton.
Enough is said to vindicate his place as among the most representative writers of the age, as well as to explain the recent renascence of his writings in France and the growing popularity of his works as attested by the fresh editions issuing from the house of Routledge in England. Macaulay, though never a newspaper man, is in point of manner, the father of the leading article. The terse impressionist style which has much superseded the Macaulayan in the press may be referred to George Borrow, author of The Bible in Spain, than whom no one has influenced periodical writers more beneficially; to Kinglake in his Eothen; to his literary disciple, Lawrence Oliphant in Piccadilly; to the late Grenville Murray, whose ‘Roving Englishman’ in All the Year Round contains the happiest of travel sketches, and whose Young Brown in the Cornhill Magazine is a miracle of clever writing. Each of these has contributed to make such happy writers of concise prose as Jehu, Junior, in Vanity Fair, and Violet Fane, now Lady Currie, in her clever and original novel, Sophy. Carlyle, Ruskin, Tennyson, Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold complete a representative list of educators of popular taste during our age. They are, however, heroic instances. Others, with not a tenth of their fame have reached at least as far in their influence, and have brought their refining mission home to the masses with an intimacy not approached by their mightier rivals.
Emerson’s writings, his visit to, and lectures in, London in 1847 leavened English thought with the same spiritualizing quality which had long since penetrated the American mind. For one Briton who was inspired by Emerson, hundreds were charmed and humanized by Longfellow first, and by Whittier afterwards. If Longfellow’s simple ballads had never been written, the higher offices of poetry, notwithstanding a Tennyson or a Browning, would have remained a mystery hidden from the toiling millions of the Anglo-Saxon world.