Table of Contents for The English Novel by George Saintsbury

CHAPTER VII - THE MID-VICTORIAN NOVEL

At about the very middle of the nineteenth century ­say from 1845 to 1855 in each direction, but almost increasingly towards the actual dividing line of 1850 ­there came upon the English novel a very remarkable wind of refreshment and new endeavour.  Thackeray and Dickens themselves are examples of it, with Lever and others, before this dividing line:  many others yet come to join them.  A list of books written out just as they occur to the memory, and without any attempt to marshal them in strict chronological order, would show this beyond all reasonable possibility of gainsaying.  Thackeray’s own best accomplished work from Vanity Fair (1846) itself through Pendennis (1849) and Esmond (1852) to The Newcomes (1854); the brilliant centre of Dickens’s work in David Copperfield (1850) ­stand at the head and have been already noticed by anticipation or implication, while Lever had almost completed the first division of his work, which began with Harry Lorrequer as early as the year of Pickwick.  But such books as Yeast (1848), Westward Ho! (1855); as The Warden (1855); as Jane Eyre (1847) and its too few successors; as Scenes of Clerical Life (1857); as Mary Barton (1848) and the novels which followed it, with others which it is perhaps almost unfair to leave out even in this allusive summary by sample, betokened a stirring of the waters, a rattling among the bones, such as is not common in literature.  Death removed Thackeray early and Dickens somewhat less prematurely, but after a period rather barren in direct novel work.  The others continued and were constantly reinforced:  nor was it till well on in the seventies that any distinct drop from first- to second-growth quality could be observed in the general vintage of English fiction.

One is not quite driven, on this occasion, to the pusillanimous explanation that this remarkable variety and number of good novels was simply due to the simultaneous existence of an equally remarkable number of good novelists.  The fact is that, by this time, the great example of Scott and Miss Austen ­the great wave of progress which exemplified itself first and most eminently in these two writers ­had had time to work upon and permeate another generation of practitioners.  The novelists who have just been cited were as a rule born in the second decade of the century, just before, about, or after the time at which Scott and Miss Austen began to publish.  They had therefore ­as their elders, even though they may have had time to read the pair, had not ­time to assimilate thoroughly and early the results which that pair had produced or which they had first expressed.  And they had even greater advantages than this.  They had had time to assimilate, likewise, the results of all the rest of that great literary generation of which Scott and Miss Austen were themselves but members.  They profited by thirty years more of constant historical exploration and realising of former days.  One need not say, for it is question-begging, that they also profited by, but they could at least avail themselves of, the immense change of manners and society which made 1850 differ more from 1800 than 1800 had differed, not merely from 1750 but from 1700.  They had, even though all of them may not have been sufficiently grateful for it, the stimulus of that premier position in Europe which the country had gained in the Napoleonic wars, and which she had not yet wholly lost or even begun to lose.  They had wider travel, more extended occupations and interests, many other new things to draw upon.  And, lastly, they had some important special incidents and movements ­the new arrangement of political parties, the Oxford awakening, and others ­to give suggestion and impetus to novels of the specialist kind.  Nay, they had not only the great writers, in other kinds, of the immediate past, but those of the present, Carlyle, Tennyson, latterly Ruskin, and others still to complete their education and the machinery of its development.

The most remarkable feature of this renouveau, as has been both directly and indirectly observed before, is the resumption, the immense extension, and the extraordinary improvement of the domestic novel.  Not that this had not been practised during the thirty years since Miss Austen’s death.  But the external advantages just enumerated had failed it:  and it had enlisted none of the chief talents which were at the service of fiction generally.  A little more gift and a good deal more taste might have enabled Mrs. Trollope to do really great things in it:  but she left them for her son to accomplish.  Attempts and “tries” at it had been made constantly, and the goal had been very nearly reached, especially, perhaps, in that now much forgotten but remarkable Emilia Wyndham (1846) by Anne Caldwell (Mrs. Marsh), which was wickedly described by a sister novelist as the “book where the woman breaks her desk open with her head,” but which has real power and exercised real influence for no short time.

This new domestic novel followed Miss Austen in that it did not necessarily avail itself of anything but perfectly ordinary life, and relied chiefly on artistic presentment ­on treatment rather than on subject.  It departed from her in that it admitted a much wider range and variety of subject itself; and by no means excluded the passions and emotions which, though she had not been so prudish as to ignore their results, she had never chosen to represent in much actual exercise, or to make the mainsprings of her books.

The first supreme work of the kind was perhaps in Vanity Fair and Pendennis, the former admitting exceptional and irregular developments as an integral part of its plot and general appeal, the latter doing for the most part without them.  But Pendennis exhibited in itself, and taught to other novelists, if not an absolutely new, a hitherto little worked, and clumsily worked, source of novel interest.  We have seen how, as early as Head or Kirkman, the possibility of making such a source out of the ways of special trades, professions, employments, and vocations had been partly seen and utilised.  Defoe did it more; Smollett more still; and since the great war there had been naval and military novels in abundance, as well as novels political, clerical, sporting, and what not.  But these special interests had been as a rule drawn upon too onesidedly.  The eighteenth century found its mistaken fondness for episodes, inset stories, and the like, particularly convenient here:  the naval, military, sporting, and other novels of the nineteenth were apt to rely too exclusively on these differences.  Such things as the Oxbridge scenes and the journalism scenes of Pendennis ­both among the most effective and popular, perhaps the most effective and popular, parts of the book ­were almost, if not entirely, new.  There had been before, and have since been, plenty of university novels, and their record has been a record of almost uninterrupted failure; there have since, if not before, Pendennis been several “press” novels, and their record has certainly not been a record of unbroken success.  But the employment here, by genius, of such subjects for substantial parts of a novel was a success pure and unmixed.  So, in the earlier book, the same author had shown how the most humdrum incident and the minutest painting of ordinary character could be combined with historic tragedy like that furnished by Waterloo, with domestic drame of the most exciting kind like the discovery of Lord Steyne’s relations with Becky, or the at least suggested later crime of that ingenious and rather hardly treated little person.

Most of the writers mentioned and glanced at above took ­not of course always, often, or perhaps ever in conscious following of Thackeray, but in consequence of the same “skiey influences” which worked on him ­to this mixed domestic-dramatic line.  And what is still more interesting, men who had already made their mark for years, in styles quite different, turned to it and adopted it.  We have seen this of Bulwer, and the evidences of the change in him which are given by the “Caxton” novels.  We have not yet directly dealt with another instance of almost as great interest and distinction, Charles Lever, though we have named him and glanced at his work.

Lever, who was born as early as 1806, had, it has been said, begun to write novels as early as his junior, Dickens, and had at once developed, in Harry Lorrequer, a pretty distinct style of his own.  This style was a kind of humour-novel with abundant incident, generally with a somewhat “promiscuous” plot and with lively but externally drawn characters ­the humours being furnished partly by Lever’s native country, Ireland, and partly by the traditions of the great war of which he had collected a store in his capacity of physician to the Embassy at Brussels.  He had kept up this style, the capital example of which is Charles O’Malley (1840), with unabated verve and with great popular success for a dozen years before 1850.  But about that time, or rather earlier, the general “suck” of the current towards a different kind (assisted no doubt by the feeling that the public might be getting tired of the other style) made him change it into studies of a less specialised kind ­of foreign travel, home life, and the like ­sketches which, in his later days still, he brought even closer to actuality.  It is true that in the long run his popularity has depended, and will probably always depend, on the early “rollicking” adventure books:  not only because of their natural appeal, but because there is plenty of the other thing elsewhere, and hardly any of this particular thing anywhere.  To almost anybody, for instance, except a very great milksop or a pedant of construction, Charles O’Malley with its love-making and its fighting, its horsemanship and its horse-play, its “devilled kidneys" and its devil-may-care-ness, is a distinctly delectable composition; and if a reasonable interval be allowed between the readings, may be read over and over again, at all times of life, with satisfaction.  But the fact of the author’s change remains not the less historically and symptomatically important, in connection with the larger change of which we are now taking notice, and with the similar phenomena observable in the work of Bulwer.  At the same time it has been pointed out that the following of Miss Austen by no means excluded the following of Scott:  and that the new development included “crosses” of novel and romance, sometimes of the historical kind, sometimes not, which are of the highest, or all but the highest, interest.  Early and good examples of these may be found in the work of the Brontes, Charlotte and Emily (the third sister Anne is but a pale reflection of her elders), and of Charles Kingsley.  Charlotte and Charles were separated in their birth by but three years, Emily and Kingsley by but one.

The curious story of the struggles of the Bronte girls to get published hardly concerns us, and Emily’s work, Wuthering Heights, is one of those isolated books which, whatever their merit, are rather ornaments than essential parts in novel history.  But this is not the case with Jane Eyre (1847), Shirley (1849), Villette (1852), and The Professor (1857) (but written much earlier).  These are all examples of the determination to base novels on actual life and experience.  Few novelists have ever kept so close to their own part in these as Charlotte Bronte did, though she accompanied, permeated, and to a certain extent transformed her autobiography and observation by a strong romantic and fantastic imaginative element.  Deprive Thackeray and Dickens of nearly all their humour and geniality, take a portion only of the remaining genius of each in the ratio of about 2 Th. to 1 D., add a certain dash of the old terror-novel and the German fantastic tale, moisten with feminine spirit and water, and mix thoroughly:  and you have something very like Charlotte Bronte.  But it is necessary to add further, and it is her great glory, the perfume and atmosphere of the Yorkshire moors, which she had in not quite such perfection as her sister Emily, but in combination with more general novel-gift.  Her actual course of writing was short, and it could probably in no case have been long; she wanted wider and, perhaps, happier experience, more literature, more man-and-woman-of-the-worldliness, perhaps a sweeter and more genial temper.  But the English novel would have been incomplete without her and her sister; they are, as wholes, unlike anybody else, and if they are not exactly great they have the quality of greatness.  Above all, they kept novel and romance together ­a deed which is great without any qualification or drawback.

Charles Kingsley is one of the most precious documents for the cynics who say that while, if you please the public in only one way, you may possibly meet with only tolerable ingratitude; if you attempt to please it in more ways than one, you are certain to be suspected, and still more certain to have the defects of your weakest work transferred to your best.  He was a novelist, a poet, an essayist, a preacher, a historian, and a critic.  His history, though less positively inaccurate than the “dead set” against him of certain notorious persons chose to represent it, was uncritical:  and his criticism, sometimes acute and luminous, was decidedly unhistorical.  But he was a preacher of remarkable merit, a charming and original essayist, a poet of no wide range but of true poetical quality, and a novelist of great variety and of almost the first class.  He let his weakest qualities go in with his strongest in his novels, and had also the still more unfortunate tendency to “trail coats” of the most inconceivably different colours for others to tread upon.  Liberals, Radicals, and Tories; Roman Catholics, High Churchmen, Low Churchmen, and No-Churchmen; sentimentalists and cynics; people who do not like literary and historical allusion, and people who are meticulous about literary and historical accuracy ­all these and many others, if they cannot disregard flings at their own particular tastes, fancies, and notions, are sure to lose patience with him now and then.  Accordingly, he has met with some exacerbated decriers, and with very few thorough-going defenders.

Yet almost thoroughing-going defence is, as far as the novels (our only direct business) are concerned, far from difficult; and the present writer, though there are perhaps not a dozen consecutive pages of Kingsley’s novels to which, at some point or other, he is not prepared to append the note, “This is Bosh,” is prepared also to exalt him miles above writers whose margins he would be quite content to leave without a single annotation of this ­or any other ­kind.  In particular the variety of the books, and their vividness, are both extraordinary.  And perhaps the greatest notes of the novel generally, as well as those in which the novel of this period can most successfully challenge comparison with those of any other, are, or should be, vividness and variety.  His books in the kind are seven; and the absence of replicas among them is one of their extraordinary features. Yeast, the first (1848), and Alton Locke, the second (next year), are novels of the unrest of thought which caused and accompanied the revolutionary movement of the period throughout Europe.  But they are quite different in subject and treatment.  The first is a sketch of country society, uppermost and lowermost: the second one of town-artisan and lower-trade life with passages of university and other contrast.  Both are young and crude enough, intentionally or unintentionally; both, intentionally beyond all doubt, are fantastic and extravagant; but both are full of genius.  Argemone Lavington, the heroine of Yeast, is, though not of the most elaborately drawn, one of the most fascinating and real heroines of English fiction; an important secondary character of the second book, the bookseller Sandy Mackaye, is one of its most successful “character-parts.”  Both, but especially Yeast, are full of admirable descriptive writing, not entirely without indebtedness to Mr. Ruskin, but very often independently carried out, and always worthy of a “place on the line” in any gallery.  There is much accurate and real dialogue, not a little firm character-drawing.  Above all, both are full of blood ­of things lived and seen, not vamped up from reading or day-dreaming ­and yet full of dreams, day and other, and full of literature.  Perhaps “the malt was a little above the meal,” the yeast present in more abundant quality than the substances for fermentation, but there was no lack even of these.

Hypatia ­which succeeded after some interval (1853) and when the writer’s Christian Socialist, Churchman-Chartist excitement had somewhat clarified itself ­is a more substantial, a more ambitious, but certainly also an even more successful book.  It has something of ­and perhaps, though in far transposed matter, owes something to ­Esmond in its daring blend of old and new, and it falls short of that wonderful creation.  But it is almost a second to it:  and, with plenty of faults, is perhaps the only classical or semi-classical novel of much value in English.

But it was in the next year, 1854, that Kingsley’s work reached its greatest perfection in the brilliant historical novel of Westward Ho! where the glories of Elizabethan adventure and patriotism were treated with a wonderful kindred enthusiasm, with admirable narrative faculty, with a creation of character, suitable for the purpose, which is hardly inferior to that of the greatest masters, and with an even enhanced and certainly chastened exercise of the descriptive faculty above noticed.  The book to some extent invited ­and Kingsley availed himself of the opportunity in a far more than sufficient degree ­that “coat-trailing” which, as has been said, inevitably in its turn provokes “coat-treading”:  and it has been abused from various quarters.  But that it is one of the very greatest of English novels next to the few supreme, impartial and competent criticism will never hesitate to allow.  Of his remaining books of novel kind one was of the “eccentric” variety:  the others, though full of good things, were perhaps on the whole failures.  The first referred to (the second in order of appearance), The Water Babies (1863), is a half Rabelaisian though perfectly inoffensive fatrasie of all sorts of things, exceedingly delightful to fit tastes.  But Two Tears Ago (1857), though containing some fine and even really exquisite things, shows a relaxing hand on the crudity and promiscuousness which had been excusable in his two first books and had been well restrained in Hypatia and Westward Ho! by central and active interests of story and character.  “Spasmodic” poetry, the Crimean War, Pre-Raphaelitism, Tractarianism, the good and bad sides of science, and divers other things make a mixture that is not sufficiently concocted and “rectified.”  While in the much later Hereward the Wake (1866), though the provocation offered to the Dryasdust kind of historian is no matter, there is a curious relapse on the old fault of incorporating too much history or pseudo-history, and the same failure as in Two Tears Ago, or perhaps a greater one in degree, to concoct the story (which is little more than a chronicle) together with a certain neglect to conciliate the sympathies of the reader.  But the whole batch is a memorable collection; and it shows, rather exceptionally, the singular originality and variety of the novel at this time.

This remarkable pair may be supplemented by an in some ways more remarkable trio, all of them pretty close contemporaries, but, for different reasons in each case, coming rather late into the novel field ­Charles Reade , Anthony Trollope , and Mary Ann Evans .  It would be difficult to find three persons more different in temperament; impossible to find more striking instances of the way in which the new blend of romance and novel lent itself to the most various uses and developments.  Reade ­who thought himself a dramatist and wasted upon drama a great deal of energy and an almost ideal position as a possessor of an unusually rich fellowship at Magdalen College, Oxford, with no duties ­came rather closer to Dickens than to any novelist previously named, not merely in a sort of non-poetic but powerful imagination, but also in the mania for attacking what seemed to him abuses ­in lunatic asylums (on which point he was very nearly a monomaniac himself), prisons, and many other things.  But he is almost more noteworthy, from our point of view, because of his use ­it also must, one fears, be called an abuse ­of a process obviously invited by the new demand for truth to life, and profitable up to a certain point.  This was the collection, in enormous scrapbooks, of newspaper cuttings on a vast variety of subjects, to be worked up into fiction when the opportunity served.  Reade had so much genius ­he had perhaps the most, in a curious rather incalculable fashion, of the whole group ­that he very nearly succeeded in digesting these “marine stores” of detail and document into real books.  But he did not always, and could not always, quite do it:  and he remains, with Zola, the chief example of the danger of working at your subject too much as if you were getting up a brief, or preparing an article for an encyclopedia.  Still, his greatest books, which are probably It is Never too Late to Mend (1856) and The Cloister and the Hearth (1861), have immense vigour and, in the second case, an almost poetic attraction which Dickens never reaches, while over all sparks and veins of genius are scattered.  Moreover, he is interesting because, until his own time, he would have been quite impossible; and, even at that time, without the general movement which we are describing, very unlikely.

There is not so much object here in discussing the much discussed question of the merits and defects of “George Eliot” (Mary Ann Evans or Mrs. Cross) as a novelist, as there is in pointing out her relations to this general movement.  She began late, and almost accidentally; and there is less unity in her general work than in some others here mentioned.  Her earliest and perhaps, in adjusted and “reduced” judgments, her best work ­Scenes of Clerical Life (1857-1858), Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861) ­consists of very carefully observed and skilfully rendered studies of country life and character, tinged, especially in Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss, with very intense and ambitious colours of passion.  The great popularity of this tempted her into still more elaborate efforts of different kinds.  Her attempt in quasi-historical romance, Romola (1865), was an enormous tour de force in which the writer struggled to get historical and local colour, accurate and irreproachable, with all the desperation of the most conscientious relater of actual history. Felix Holt the Radical (1866), Middle March (1872), and Daniel Deronda (1876) were equally elaborate sketches of modern English society, planned and engineered with the same provision of carefully laboured plot, character, and phrase.  Although received with enthusiasm by the partisans whom she had created for herself, these books have seemed to some over-laboured, and if not exactly unreal, yet to a certain extent unnatural.  But the point for us is their example of the way in which the novel ­once a light and almost frivolous thing ­had come to be taken with the utmost seriousness ­had in fact ceased to be light literature at all, and begun to require rigorous and elaborate training and preparation in the writer, perhaps even something of the athlete’s processes in the reader.  Its state may or may not have advanced in grace pari passu with the advance in effort and in dignity:  but this later advance is at least there.  Fielding himself took novel-writing by no means lightly, and Richardson still less so:  but imagine either, imagine Scott or even Miss Austen, going through the preliminary processes which seemed necessary, in different ways, to Charles Reade and to Mary Ann Evans!

In a certain sense, however, the last of the three, though he may give less impression of genius than the other two (or even the other four whom we have specially noticed), is the most interesting of all:  and qualms may sometimes arise as to whether genius is justly denied to him.  Anthony Trollope, after a youth, not exactly orageuse, but apparently characterised by the rather squalid yet mild dissipation which he has described in The Three Clerks (1858) and The Small House at Allington (1864), attained a considerable position in the Post Office which he held during great part of his career as a novelist.  For some time that career did not look as if it were going to be a successful one, though his early (chiefly Irish) efforts are better than is sometimes thought.  But he made his mark first with The Warden (1855), and then, much more directly and triumphantly, with its sequel Barchester Towers (1857).  When the first of these was published Dickens had been a successful novelist for nearly twenty years and Thackeray had “come to his own” for nearly ten. The Warden might have been described at the time (I do not know whether it was, but English reviewing was only beginning to be clever again) as a partial attempt at the matter of Dickens in a partial following of the manner of Thackeray.  An “abuse” ­the distribution in supposed unjust proportion of the funds of an endowed hospital for aged men ­is its main avowed subject.  But Trollope indulged in no tirades and no fantastic-grotesque caricature ­in fact he actually drew a humorous sketch of a novel a la Dickens on the matter.  His real object was evidently to sketch faithfully, but again not without humour, the cathedral society of “Barchester” as it actually spoke, dressed, thought, and lived:  and he did it.  The first book had a little too much talk about the nominal subject, and not enough actual action and conversation. Barchester Towers remedied this, and presented its readers with one of the liveliest books in English fiction.  There had been nothing like it (for Thackeray had been more discursive and less given to small talk) since Miss Austen herself, though the spirits of the two were extremely different.  Perhaps Trollope never did a better book than this, for variety and vigour of character drawing.  The masterful wife of Bishop Proudie, the ne’er-do-weel canon’s family (the Stanhopes), and others stand out against an interest, not intense but sufficient, of story, a great variety of incident, and above all abundant and lifelike conversation.  For many years, and in an extraordinary number of examples, he fell little below, and perhaps once or twice went above, this standard.  It was rather a fancy of his (one again, perhaps, suggested by Thackeray) to run his books into series or cycles ­the chief being that actually opened as above, and continuing through others to the brilliant Last Chronicle of Barset (1867), which in some respect surpasses Barchester Towers itself, with a second series, not quite disconnected, dealing with Lady Glencora Palliser as centre, and yet others.  His total production was enormous:  it became in fact impossibly so, and the work of his last lustrum and a little more (say 1877-1882), though never exactly bad or painful to read, was obvious hack-work.  But between The Warden and The American Senator, twenty-two years later, he had written nearer thirty than twenty novels, of which at least half were much above the average and some quite capital. Moreover, it is a noteworthy thing, and contrary to some critical explanations, that, as his works drop out of copyright and are reprinted in cheap editions, they appear to be recovering very considerable popularity.  This fact would seem to show that the manners, speech, etc., represented in them have a certain standard quality which does not ­like the manner, speech, etc., of novels such as those of Hook and Surtees ­lose appeal to fresh generations; and that the artist who dealt with them must have had not a little faculty of fixing them in the presentation.  In fact it is probably not too much to say that of the average novel of the third quarter of the century ­in a more than average but not of an extraordinary, transcendental, or quintessential condition ­Anthony Trollope is about as good a representative as can be found.  His talent is individual enough, but not too individual:  system and writer may each have the credit due to them allotted without difficulty.

A novelist who might have been in front of the first flight of these in point of time, and who is actually put by some in the first flight in point of merit, is Mrs. Gaskell.  Born in 1810, she accumulated the material for her future Cranford at Knutsford in Cheshire:  but did not publish this till after Dickens had, in 1850, established Household Words, where it appeared in instalments.  She had a little earlier, in 1848, published her first novel, Mary Barton ­a vivid but distinctly one-sided picture of factory life in Lancashire.  In the same year with the collected Cranford (1853) appeared Ruth, also a “strife-novel” (as the Germans would say) though in a different way:  and two years later what is perhaps her most elaborate effort, North and South.  A year or two before her death in 1865 Sylvia’s Lovers was warmly welcomed by some:  and the unfinished Wives and Daughters, which was actually interrupted by that death, has been considered her maturest work.  Her famous and much controverted Life of Charlotte Bronte does not belong to us, except in so far as it knits the two novelists together.

From hints dropped already, it may be seen that the present writer does not find Mrs. Gaskell his easiest subject.  There is much in her work which, in Hobbes’s phrase, is both “an effect of power and a cause of pleasure”:  but there appears to some to be in her a pervading want of actual success ­of réussite ­absolute and unquestionable.  The sketches of Cranford are very agreeable and very admirable performances in the manner first definitely thrown out by Addison, and turned to consummate perfection in the way of the regular novel (which be it remembered Cranford is not) by Miss Austen.  But the mere mention of the last name kills them.  The author of Emma would have treated Miss Matty and the rest much less lovingly, but she would have made them persons.  Mrs. Gaskell has left them mere types of amiable country-townishness in respectable if not very lively times.  Excessive respectability cannot be charged against Mary Barton and Ruth, but here the “problem” ­the “purpose” ­interposes its evil influence:  and we have got to take a side with men or with masters, with selfish tempters of one class and deluded maidens of another. North and South is perhaps on the whole the best place in which to study Mrs. Gaskell’s art:  for Wives and Daughters is unfinished and the books just named are tentatives.  It begins by laying a not inconsiderable hold on the reader:  and, as it is worked out at great length, the author has every opportunity of strengthening and improving that hold.  It is certain that, in some cases, she does not do this:  and the reason is the same ­the failure to project and keep in action definite and independent characters, and the attempt to make weight and play with purposes and problems.  The heroine’s father ­who resigns his living and exposes his delicate wife and only daughter, if not exactly to privation, to discomfort and, in the wife’s case, fatally unsuitable surroundings, because of some never clearly defined dissatisfaction with the creed of the Church (not apparently with Christianity as such or with Anglicanism as such), and who dies “promiscuously,” to be followed, in equally promiscuous fashion, by a friend who leaves his daughter Margaret a fortune ­is one of those nearly contemptible imbéciles in whom it is impossible to take an interest.  In respect to the wife Mrs. Gaskell commits the curious mistake of first suggesting that she is a complainer about nothing, and then showing her to us as a suffering victim of her husband’s folly and of hopeless disease.  The lover (who is to a great extent a replica of the masterful mill-owner in Shirley) is uncertain and impersonal:  and the minor characters are null.  One hopes, for a time, that Margaret herself will save the situation:  but she goes off instead of coming on, and has rather less individuality and convincingness at the end of the story than at the beginning.  In short, Mrs. Gaskell seems to me one of the chief illustrations of the extreme difficulty of the domestic novel ­of the necessity of exactly proportioning the means at command to the end to be achieved.  Her means were, perhaps, greater than those of most of her brother-and-sister-novelists, but she set them to loose ends, to ends too high for her, to ends not worth achieving:  end thus produced (again as it seems to me) flawed and unsatisfactory work.  She “means” well in Herbert’s sense of the word:  but what is meant is not quite done.

To mention special books and special writers is not the first object of this survey, though it would be very easy to double and redouble its size by doing this, even within the time-limits of this, the last, and the next chapters.  It may, however, be added that in this remarkable central period, and in the most central part of it from 1840 to 1860, there appeared the first remarkable novel of Mr. George Meredith, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859), first of a brilliant series that was to illustrate the whole remaining years of the century; and the isolated masterpiece of Phantastes, which another prolific writer, George Macdonald, was never to repeat; while Mrs. Oliphant and Mrs. Craik, both of whom will also reappear in the next chapter, began as early as 1849.  In 1851 appeared the first of two remarkable books, Lavengro and The Romany Rye, in which George Borrow, if he did not exactly create, brought to perfection from some points of view what may be called the autobiographic novel.

Indeed the memory of the aged and the industry of the young could recall or rediscover dozens and scores of noteworthy books, some of which have not lost actual or traditional reputation, such as the Paul Ferroll (1855) of Mrs. Archer Clive, a well-restrained crime-novel, the story of which is indicated in the title of its sequel, Why Paul Ferroll killed his Wife.  Henry Kingsley, George Alfred Lawrence, Wilkie Collins, and others began their careers at this time.  The best book ever written about school, Tom Brown’s School Days (1857), and the best book in lighter vein ever written about Oxford, Mr. Verdant Green (1853-1856), both appeared in the fifties.

Although, indeed, the intenser and more individual genius of the great novelists of this time went rather higher than the specialist novel, it was, in certain directions, well cultivated during this period.  Men likely to write naval novels of merit were dying out, and though Lever took up the military tale, at second hand, with brilliant results, the same historical causes were in operation there.  But a comparatively new kind ­the “sporting” novel ­developed itself largely and in some cases went beyond mere sport.  Such early books as Egan’s Tom and Jerry (1821) can hardly be called novels:  but as the love of sport extended and the term itself ceased to designate merely on the one side the pleasures of country squires, and on the other the amusements (sometimes rather blackguard in character) of men about town, the general subject made a lodgment in fiction.  One of its most characteristic practitioners was Robert Smith Surtees, who, before Dickens and perhaps acting as suggester of the original plan of Pickwick (not that which Dickens substituted), excogitated (between 1831 and 1838) the remarkable fictitious personage of “Mr. Jorrocks,” grocer and sportsman, whose adventures, and those of other rather hybrid characters of the same kind, he pursued through a number of books for some thirty years.  These (though in strict character, and in part of their manners, deficient as above noticed) were nearly always readable ­and sometimes very amusing ­even to those who are not exactly Nimrods:  and they were greatly commended to others still by the admirable illustrations of Leech.  There is not a little sound sport in Kingsley and afterwards in Anthony Trollope:  while the novels of Frank Smedley, Frank Fairlegh (1850), Lewis Arundel (1852), and Harry Coverdale’s Courtship (1855), mix a good deal more of it with some good fun and some rather rococo romance.  The subject became, indeed, very popular in the fifties, and entered largely into, though it by no means exclusively occupied, the novels of George John Whyte-Melville, a Fifeshire gentleman, an Etonian, and a guardsman, who, after retiring from the army, served again in the Crimean War, and, after writing a large number of novels, was killed in the hunting field.  Some of Whyte-Melville’s books, such as Market Harborough (1861), are hunting novels pure and simple, so much so that it has been said (rashly) that none but hunting men and women can read them.  Others, such as Kate Coventry (1856), a very lively and agreeable book, mix sport with general character and manners-painting.  Others, such as Holmby House (1860), The Queen’s Maries (1862), etc., attempt the historical style.  But perhaps this mixed novel of sport, society, and a good deal of love-making reached its most curious development in the novels of George Alfred Lawrence, from the once famous Guy Livingstone (1857) onwards ­a series almost typical, which was developed further, with touches of original but uncritical talent, which often dropped into unintentional caricature, by the late “Ouida” (Louise de La Ramee).  All the three last writers mentioned, however, especially the last two, made sport only an ingredient in their novel composition ("Ouida,” in fact, knew nothing about it) and at least endeavoured, according to their own ideas and ideals, to grapple with larger parts of life.  The danger of the kind showed less in them than in some imitators of a lower class, of whom Captain Hawley Smart was the chief, and a chief sometimes better than his own followers.  Some even of his books are quite interesting:  but in a few of them, and in more of other writers, the obligation to tell something like a story and to provide something like characters seems to be altogether forgotten.  A run (or several runs) with the hounds, a steeplechase and its preparations and accidents, one at least of the great races and the training and betting preliminary to them ­these form the real and almost the sole staple of story; so that a tolerably intelligent office-boy could make them up out of a number or two of the Field, a sufficient list of proper names, and a commonplace book of descriptions.  This, in fact, is the danger of the specialist novel generally:  though perhaps it does not show quite so glaringly in other cases.  Yet, even here, that note of the fiction of the whole century ­its tendency to “accaparate” and utilise all the forms of life, all the occupations and amusements of mankind ­shows itself notably enough.

So, too, one notable book has, here even more than elsewhere, often set going hosts of imitations. Tom Brown’s School Days, for instance (1857), flooded the market with school stories, mostly very bad.  But there is one division which did more justice to a higher class of subject and produced some very remarkable work in what is called the religious novel, though, here as elsewhere, the better examples did not merely harp on one string.

A very interesting off-shoot of the domestic novel, ignored or despised by the average critic and rather perfunctorily treated even by those who have taken it as a special subject, is the “Tractarian” or High-Church novel, which, originating very shortly after the movement itself had began, had no small share in popularising it.  The earlier Evangelicals had by no means neglected fiction as a means of propagating their views, especially among the young.  Mrs. Sherwood in Little Henry and his Bearer and The Fairchild Family (1818) and “Charlotte Elizabeth” (Browne or Tonna) are examples.  But the High-Church party, in accordance with its own predecessors and patterns in the seventeenth century, always maintained, during its earlier and better period, a higher standard of scholarship and of general literary culture.  Its early efforts in fiction ­according to the curious and most interesting law which seems to decree that every subdivision of a kind shall go through something like the vicissitudes of the kind at large ­were not strictly novels but romance, and romance of the allegorical kind.  In the late thirties and early forties the allegorists, the chief of whom were Samuel Wilberforce and William Adams, were busy and effective.  The future bishop’s Agathos (before 1840) is a very spirited and well-written adaptation of the “whole armour of God” theme so often re-allegorised:  and Adams’s Shadow of the Cross is only the best of several good stories ­of a rather more feminine type, but graceful, sound enough in a general way, and combining the manners of Spenser and Bunyan with no despicable skill.  If, however, the Tractarian fiction-writers had confined themselves to allegory there would be no necessity to do more than glance at them, for allegory, on the obvious Biblical suggestion, has been a constant instrument of combined religious instruction and pastime.  But they went much further afield.  Sometimes the excursions were half satirical, as in the really amusing Owlet of Owlstone Edge and The Curate of Cumberworth and the Vicar of Roost of Francis Paget, attacking, the slovenly neglect and supineness which, quite as much as unsound doctrine, was the bête noire of the early Anglo-Catholics.  William Gresley and others wrote stories mostly for the young.  But the distinguishing feature of the school, and that which gives it an honourable and more than an honorary place here, was the shape which, before the middle of the century, it took in the hands of two ladies, Elizabeth Sewell and Charlotte Mary Yonge.

The first, who was the elder but survived Miss Yonge and died at a very great age quite recently, had much less talent than her junior:  but undoubtedly deserves the credit of setting the style.  In her novels (Gertrude, Katharine Ashton, etc.) she carried, even farther than Miss Austen, the principle of confining herself rigidly to the events of ordinary life.  Not that she eschews the higher middle or even the higher classes:  though, on the other hand, Katharine Ashton, evidently one of her favourite heroines, is the daughter of a shopkeeper.  But the law of average and ordinary character, incident, atmosphere, is observed almost invariably.  Unfortunately Miss Sewell (she was actually a schoolmistress) let the didactic part of her novels get rather too much the upper hand:  and though she wrote good English, possessed no special grace of style, and little faculty of illustration or ornament from history, literature, her own fancy, current fashions, even of the most harmless kind, and so forth.  The result is that her books have a certain dead-aliveness ­that the characters, though actually alive, are neither interestingly alive nor, as Miss Austen had made hers, interesting in their very uninterestingness.  Sometimes, for a scene or two, her truth to nature and fact is rewarded by that curious sense of recognition which the reader feels in the presence of actual mimesis ­of creation of fictitious fact and person.  But this is not common:  and the epithet “dull,” which too commonly only stigmatises the person using it, may really suggest itself not seldom in reference to Miss Sewell.  A “success of esteem” is about the utmost that can be accorded her.

With Miss Yonge the case was very different.  She was a lady of wide reading and, even according to the modern rather arbitrary restrictions of the term, something of an historical scholar; she had humour, of which there was scarcely a particle in Miss Sewell’s composition; she had a very considerable understanding, and consequently some toleration of the infinite varieties, and at least the more venial foibles, of human temperament.  She possessed an inexhaustible command of dialogue which was always natural and sometimes very far from trivial; and if she had no command of the greater novelists’ imagination in the creation of character and story, she had an almost uncanny supply of invention, of what may be called the second or third class, in these respects.  She wrote too much and too long; but it cannot be said that she ever merely repeated herself.  And her best books ­the famous Heir of Redclyffe (1853), which captivated William Morris and his friends at Oxford, and which, with a little unnecessary sentimentality and a little “unco-guidness,” is full of cleverness, nature, good sense, good taste, and good form; Heartsease (1854), perhaps the best of all; Dynevor Terrace (1857), less of a general favourite but full of good things; and the especially popular Daisy Chain (1856), with not a few others ­are things which no courageous and catholic critic of fiction will ever be tired of defending or (which is not always the same thing) of reading.  Some of her early tales, before these, were a little “raw”:  and most of her later work showed (as did Anthony Trollope’s and that of other though not all very prolific novelists) that the field had been overcropped.  But she was hardly ever dull:  and she always had that quality ­if not of the supreme artist, of the real craftsman ­which prevents a thing from being a failure.  What is meant is done:  though perhaps it might have been meant higher.

The comparison, backwards and forwards, of this great company of novels is of endless interest; perhaps one of many aspects of that interest may be touched on specially, because it connects itself with much else that has been said.  If we read, together or in near sequence, three such books as, say, Emilia Wyndbam, Pendennis, and Yeast, all of which appeared close together, between 1846 and 1849, the differences, in quality and volume of individual genius, will of course strike every one forcibly.  But some will also be struck by something else ­the difference between the first and the other two in style or (as that word is almost hopelessly ambiguous) let us perhaps say diction.  Both Thackeray and Kingsley are almost perfectly modern in this.  We may not speak so well to-day, and we may have added more slang and jargon to our speech, but there is no real difference, except in these respects, between a speech of Pen’s (when not talking book) or one of Colonel Bracebridge’s, and the speech of any gentleman who is a barrister or a guardsman at this hour.  The excellent Mrs. Marsh had not arrived at that point; what some people call the “stilted” forms and phrases of fifty or almost a hundred years earlier clung to her still.  The resulting lingo is far better than that part of the lingo of to-day where literary and linguistic good manners have been forgotten altogether:  but it is distinctly deficient in ease.  There are endless flourishes and périphrases ­the colloquialisms which Swift and others had denounced (and quite properly) in their ugliest and vulgarest forms are not even permitted entrance in improved and warranted varieties.  You must never say “won’t” but always “will not,” whereas the ability to use the two forms adds infinite propriety as well as variety to the dialogue.  You say, “At length a most unfortunate accident aggravated (if aggravation were possible) the unfortunate circumstances of the situation.”  You address your own characters in the oratorical manner of Mr. Burke and other great men, “Ah, Mr. Danby! if instead, etc.”  In short, instead of reserving the grand manner (and a rather different grand manner) for grand occasions, you maintain a sort of cheap machine-made kind of it throughout.  The real secret of the novel was not found out till this was discarded.  Perhaps that real secret does not lie so much anywhere else as here.

A few words may not improperly be said about some of the circumstances and details of novel-appearance and distribution, etc., at this palmy day of English fiction.  At what time the famous “three-decker” was consecrated as the regular novel line-of-battle-ship I have not been able to determine exactly to my own satisfaction.  Richardson had extended his interminable narrations to seven or eight volumes:  Miss Burney latterly had not been content with less than five.  From the specimens I have examined, I have an idea that with the “Minerva Press” and its contemporaries and successors at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century, four was a very favourite if not the most usual number.  But these volumes were usually small ­not much larger than those of the Belgian reprints of Dumas which, as one remembers, used to run into the dozen or something like it in the case of his longer books.  Three, however, has obvious advantages; the chief of them being the adjustment to “beginning, middle, and end,” though there is a corresponding disadvantage which soon developed itself ­and in fact, finally, I have no doubt helped to ruin the form ­the temptation to make the second volume a place of mere padding.  But the actual popularity of “the old three-decker” continued for quite two generations, if not more, and was unmistakable.  Library subscriptions were generally adjusted to it; and any circulating-library keeper would tell you that, putting this quite aside, even subscribers to more or fewer volumes than three would take the three-volume by preference.  More than this, still, there is a curious fact necessarily known to comparatively few people.  Although it was improper of Mr. Bludyer to sell his novel, and dine and drink of the profits before “smashing” it, there were probably not many reviewers who did not get rid of most of their books of this kind, if for no other reasons than that no house, short of a palace, would have held them all.  And, in the palmy days of circulating libraries, the price given by second-hand booksellers for novels made a very considerable addition to the reviewer’s remuneration or guerdon.  But these booksellers would not pay, in proportion, for two or one volume books ­alleging, what no doubt was true, that the libraries had a lower tariff for them.  Further, the short story, now so popular, was very unpopular in those days:  and library customers would refuse collections of them with something like indignation or disgust.  Indeed, there are reviewers living who may perhaps pride themselves on having done something to drive the dislike out and the liking in.

The circulating library itself, though not the creation of the novel, was very largely extended by it, and helped no doubt very largely to extend the circulation of the novel in turn.  Before it, to some extent, and long before so-called “public” or “free” libraries, books in general and novels in particular had been very largely diffused by clubs, “institutions,” and other forms of co-operative individual enterprise, the bookplates of which will be found in many a copy of an old novel now.  Sometimes these were purely private associations of neighbours:  sometimes they belonged to more or less extensive establishments, like that defunct “Russell Institution in Great Coram Street,” which a great author, who was its neighbour, once took for an example of desolation; or the still existing and flourishing “Philosophical” examples in Edinburgh and Bath.  In these latter cases, of course, novels were not allowed to be the main constituents of the library; in fact in some, but few, they may have been sternly excluded.  On the other hand, the private-adventure circulating libraries tended more and more, with few exceptions, to rely on novels only ­“Mudie’s” and a few more being exceptions.  Very few people, I suppose, ever bought three-volume novels; and the fact that they went almost wholly to the libraries, and were there worn to pieces, accounts for the comparative rarity of good copies.  The circulating library has survived both the decease of the three-volume novel and the competition of the so-called free library.  But it is pretty certain that it was a chief cause ­and almost the whole sustaining cause ­of the three-volume system itself.  Nor was the connection between nature of form and system of distribution limited to England:  for the single-volume novel, though older in France than with us, is not so very old.

But a very considerable proportion of these famous books made appearances previous to that in three volumes, and not distantly connected with their popularity.  For the most part these previous appearances were either in magazines or periodicals of one kind and another, or else in “parts.”

Neither process was exactly new, though both were largely affected by changed conditions of general literature and life.  The magazine-appearance traces itself, by almost insensible gradations, to the original periodical-essay of the Steele-Addison type ­the small individual bulk of which necessitated division of whatsoever was not itself on a very small scale.  If you run down the “Contents” of the British Essayists you will constantly find “Continuation of the story of Alonso and Imoinda” and the like.  But when, in the early years of the nineteenth century, the system of newspapers and periodicals branched out into endless development, coincidently with the increase of demand and supply in regard to the novel, it was inevitable that this latter should be drawn upon to supply at once the standing dishes and the relishes of the entertainment. Blackwood and the London, the first fruits of the new kind, did not at once take to the novel by instalments:  and the London had no time to do so.  But Blackwood soon became celebrated ­a reputation which it has never lost ­for the excellence of its short stories, and by degrees took to long ones; while its followers ­Fraser, Bentley’s Miscellany, The Dublin University Magazine, the New Monthly, and others ­almost from the first bated their hooks with this new appât.  A very large proportion of the work of the novelists mentioned in the last chapter, as well as of Lever, appeared in one or other of these. Fraser in particular was Thackeray’s chief refuge in the Days of Ignorance of the public as to his real powers and merits, while, just as he was going off, the very different work of Kingsley came on there.  And the tradition, as is well known, has never been broken.  The particular magazines may have died in some cases:  but the magazine-appearance of novels is nearly as vivacious as ever.

Publication in parts is nearly as old, but has a less continuous history, and has seen itself suffer an interruption of life.  There are scattered examples of it pretty far back both in France and England.  Marivaux had a particular fancy for it:  with the result that he left not a little of his work unfinished.  Such volume-publication as that of Tristram Shandy, in batches really small in quantity and at fairly regular if long intervals, is not much different from part-issue.  As the taste for reading spread to classes with not much ready money, and perhaps, in some cases, living at a distance from libraries, this taste spread too.  But I do not think there can be much doubt that the immense success of Dickens ­in combination with his own very distinct predilection for keeping the ring himself and being his own editor ­had most to do with its prevalence during the period under present consideration.  Thackeray took up the practice from him:  as well as others both from him and from Thackeray.  The great illustrators, too, of the forties, fifties, and sixties, from Cruikshank and Browne to Frederick Walker, were partly helped by the system, partly helped to make it popular.  But the circulating libraries did not like it for obvious reasons, the parts being fragile and unsubstantial:  and the great success of cheap magazines, on the pattern of Macmillan’s and the Cornhill, cut the ground from under its feet.  The last remarkable novel that I remember seeing in the form was The Last Chronicle of Barset.  Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda came out in parts which were rather volumes than parts.

This piece-meal publication, whether in part or periodical, could not be without some effects on the character of the production.  These were neither wholly good nor wholly bad.  They served to some extent to correct the tendency, mentioned above, of the three-volume novel to “go to seed” in the middle ­to become a sort of preposterous sandwich with meat on the outsides and a great slab of ill-baked and insipid bread between.  For readers would not have stood this in instalments:  you had to provide some bite or promise of bite in each ­if possible ­indeed to leave each off at an interesting point.  But this itself rather tended to a jumpy and ill-composed whole ­to that mechanical shift from one part of the plot to another which is so evident, for instance, in Trollope:  and there was worse temptation behind.  If a man had the opportunity, the means, the courage, and the artistic conscience necessary to finish his work before any part of it appeared, or at least to scaffold it thoroughly throughout in advance, no harm was done.  But perhaps there is no class of people with whom the temptation ­common enough in every class ­of hand-to-mouth work is more fatal than with men of letters.  It is said that even the clergy are human enough to put off their sermon-writing till Saturday, and what can be expected of the profane man, especially when he has a whole month apparently before him?  It is pretty certain that Thackeray succumbed to this temptation:  and so did a great many people who could much less afford to do so than Thackeray.  It was almost certainly responsible for part of the astonishing medley of repetitions and lapses in Lever:  and I am by no means sure that some of Dickens’s worst faults, especially the ostentatious plot-that-is-no-plot of such a book as Little Dorrit ­the plot which marks time with elaborate gesticulation and really does not advance at all ­were not largely due to the system.

Let it only be added that these expensive forms of publication by no means excluded cheap reprints as soon as a book was really popular.  The very big people kept up their prices:  but everybody else was glad to get into “popular libraries,” yellow-backed railway issues, and the like, as soon as possible.

It will have been seen that the present writer puts the novel of 1845-1870 very high:  he would indeed put it, in its own compartment, almost on a level with the drama of 1585-1625 or the poems of 1798-1825.  Just at the present moment there may be a pretty general tendency to consider this allowance exaggerated if not preposterous:  and to set it down to the well-known foible of age for the period of its own youth.  There is no need to do more than suggest that those who were young when Shakespeare, or when Byron, died, would not have been exactly in their dotage if, forty years later, they had extolled the literature of their nonage.  One does not care to dwell long on such a point:  but it may just be observed that the present writer’s withers are hardly even pinched, let alone wrung, by the strictest application, to his case, of this rather idle notion.  For some of what he is praising as the best novels were written before he was born; many while he was in the nursery; most before he had left school, and practically all before he had ceased to be an undergraduate.  Now acute observers know that what may be called the disease of contemporary partisanship rarely even begins till the undergraduate period, and is at its severest from twenty-five to thirty-five.  I would undertake that most of our reviewers who discover Shakespeares and Sainte-Beuves, improved Thackerays and bettered Molieres, week by week or day by day, count their years between these limits. Beati illi from some points of view, but from others, if they go on longer, Heaven help them indeed!

But all this is really idle.  A critic is not right or wrong because he is young or old as the case may be; because he follows the taste of his age or runs counter to it; because he likes the past or because he likes the present.  He is right or wrong according as he does or does not like the right things in the right way.  And it is a simple historical fact, capable now of being seen in a proper perspective, and subjected to the proper historical tests, that, in the large sense, the two generations from the appearance of Scott and Miss Austen to the death of Dickens (and considering the ebb which followed Scott and Miss Austen themselves, specially the latter of these two), supplied the spring tide of the novel-flood, the flower-time of its flowering season, the acme of its climax.

The comparison, both in the longer and shorter time, to the great summer of the drama may be too complimentary ­I do not think it is, except in so far as that drama necessarily involved poetry, a higher thing by far than either drama itself or novel ­but it is certainly not an altogether comfortable one.  For we know that the drama, thereafter, has never had a more than galvanised life, except in the imagination of the gentlemen who discover Shakespeares and Molieres as aforesaid.  And there are those who say that, not only at the moment, but for some time past, the state of the novel is, and has been, not much more promising.  The student who is thoroughly broken to the study of literary history is never a pessimist, though he may be very rarely an optimist:  for the one thing of which he should be thoroughly convinced is its incalculableness.  But he might admit ­while reserving unlimited trust in the Wind of the Spirit and its power to blow exactly as it listeth, and to awaken the dryest of dry bones ­that circumstances are not incompatible with something like a decay in the novel:  just as they were with a decay in the drama.  The state of society and temper in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century ­not too well regulated; stirred at once by the sinking force of the mediaeval and the rising force of the modern spirit; full of religious revival which had happily not gone wholly wrong, as it had in some other countries; finding ready to its hand a language which had cast most of its sloughs of accidence and prosody, and was fresh, limber, ready for anything; enterprising but not buried in business ­was favourable to the rise and flourishing of this disorderly abundance of dramatic creation ­tragic, comic, and in all the varieties that Hamlet catalogues or satirises.  The mid-nineteenth century had something of the same hot-bed characteristic, though sufficiently contrasted and fitted to produce a different growth.  It had, if at a little distance, the inspiriting memory of a great war, where the country had taken the most glorious part possible.  It also had a great religious revival, which had taken no coarse or vulgar form.  Although the middle class had seized, and the lower classes were threatening to seize, the government, even the former had not monopolised the helm.  There was in society, though it was not strait-laced or puritanical, a general standard of “good form.”  Scholarship and knowledge of literature had not yet been exchanged for “education” and ignorance of letters.  The national fancy for sport was in about its healthiest condition, emerging from one state of questionableness and not yet plunged in another.  The chair of the chief of the kinds of literature ­poetry ­which always exercises a singular influence over the lower forms, was still worthily occupied and surrounded.  And, above all, the appetite for the novel was still eager, fresh, and not in the least sated, jaded, or arrived at that point when it has to be whetted by asafoetida on the plates or cigarettes between the courses.  Few better atmospheres could be even imagined for the combined novel-romance ­the story which, while it did not exclude the adventurous or even the supernatural in one sense, insisted on the rational in another, and opened its doors as wide as possible to every subject, or combination of subjects, that would undertake to be interesting.  That the extraordinary reply made by genius and talent to the demand thus created and encouraged should last indefinitely could not be expected:  that the demand itself should lead to overproduction and glut was certain.  But, as we shall see, there was no sudden decadence; the period even of best or nearly best production went on with no important intermission; and was but yesterday still represented by two great names, is still represented by one, among the older writers, by more than one or two names of credit among the middle-aged and younger.  To these in some degree, and to those who have finished their career in the last thirty years to a greater, we must now turn.