They obtained vast quantities of new readers, for the middle
class was beginning to read with avidity; but the quality of
brevity, the knowledge when to stop, and with it the older classic
conciseness and the nobler Hellenic idea of a perfect measure—these
things were as though they had not been. Meanwhile,
the old schools were broken up and the foolscap addressed to the
old masters. Singers, entertainers, critics and historians abound.
Every man may say what is in him in the phrases that he likes
best, and the sole motto that compels is “every style is permissible
except the style that is tiresome.” The old models
are strangely discredited, and the only conventions which hold
are those concerning the subjects which English delicacy held
to be tabooed. These conventions were inordinately strict,
and were held to include all the unrestrained, illicit impulses of
love and all the more violent aberrations from the Christian code
of faith and ethics. Infidel speculation and the liaisons of
lawless love (which had begun to form the staple of the new
French fiction—hence regarded by respectable English critics
of the time as profoundly vitiated and scandalous) had no
recognized existence and were totally ignored in literature
designed for general reading. The second or Goody-two-Shoes
convention remained strictly in force until the penultimate
decade of the 19th century, and was acquiesced in or at least
submitted to by practically all the greatest writers of the Victorian
age. The great poets and novelists of that day easily
out-topped their fellows. Society had no difficulty in responding
to the summons of its literary leaders. Nor was their fame
partial, social or sectional. The great novelists of early Victorian
days were aristocratic and democratic at once. Their popularity
was universal within the limits of the language and beyond it.
The greatest of men were men of imagination rather than men
of ideas, but such sociological and moral ideas as they derived
from their environment were poured helter-skelter into their
novels, which took the form of huge pantechnicon magazines.
Another distinctive feature of the Victorian novel is the position
it enabled women to attain in literature, a position attained by
them in creative work neither before nor since.
The novelists to a certain extent created their own method like the great dramatists, but such rigid prejudices or conventions as they found already in possession they respected without demur. Both Dickens and Thackeray write as if they were almost entirely innocent of the existence of sexual vice. As artists and thinkers they Dickens.were both formless. But the enormous self-complacency of the England of their time, assisted alike by the part played by the nation from 1793 to 1815, evangelicalism, free trade (which was originally a system of super-nationalism) and later, evolution, generated in them a great benignity and a strong determination towards a liberal and humanitarian philosophy. Despite, however, the diffuseness of the envelope and the limitations of horizon referred to, the unbookish and almost unlettered genius of Charles Dickens (1812–1870), the son of a poor lower middle-class clerk, almost entirely self-educated, has asserted for itself the foremost place in the literary history of the period. Dickens broke every rule, rioted in absurdity and bathed in extravagance. But everything he wrote was received with an almost frantic joy by those who recognized his creations as deifications of themselves, his scenery as drawn by one of the quickest and intensest observers that ever lived, and his drollery as an accumulated dividend from the treasury of human laughter. Dickens’s mannerisms were severe, but his geniality as a writer broke down every obstruction, reduced Jeffrey to tears and Sydney Smith to helpless laughter.
The novel in France was soon to diverge and adopt the form of an anecdote illustrating the traits of a very small group of persons, but the English novel, owing mainly to the predilection of Dickens for those Gargantuan entertainers of his youth, Fielding and Smollett, was to remain anchored to the history. William Makepeace Thackeray.Thackeray (1811–1863) was even more historical than Dickens, and most of his leading characters are provided with a detailed genealogy. Dickens’s great works, excepting David Copperfield and Great Expectations, had all appeared when Thackeray made his mark in 1848 with Vanity Fair, and Thackeray follows most of his predecessor’s conventions, including his conventional religion, ethics and politics, but he avoids his worse faults of theatricality. He never forces the note or lashes himself into fury or sentimentality; he limits himself in satire to the polite sphere which he understands, he is a great master of style and possesses every one of its fairy gifts except brevity. He creates characters and scenes worthy of Dickens, but within a smaller range and without the same abundance. He is a traveller and a cosmopolitan, while Dickens is irredeemably Cockney. He is often content to criticize or annotate or to preach upon some congenial theme, while Dickens would be in the flush of humorous creation. His range, it must be remembered, is wide, in most respects a good deal wider than his great contemporary’s, for he is at once novelist, pamphleteer, essayist, historian, critic, and the writer of some of the most delicate and sentimental vers d’occasion in the language.
The absorption of England in itself is shown with exceptional
force in the case of Thackeray, who was by nature a
cosmopolitan, yet whose work is so absorbed with the
structure of English society as to be almost unintelligible
to foreigners. The exploration of the human heart
and conscience in relation to the Charlotte Brontë.
George Eliot.new problems of the time had
been almost abandoned by the novel since Richardson’s time.
It was for woman to attempt to resolve these questions, and with
the aid of powerful imagination to propound very different
conclusions. The conviction of Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855)
was that the mutual passionate love of one man and one woman
is sacred and creates a centre of highest life, energy and joy in
the world. George Eliot (1819–1880), on the other
hand, detected a blind and cruel egoism in all such
ecstasy of individual passion. It was in the autumn
of 1847 that Jane Eyre shocked the primness of the coteries by
the unconcealed ardour of its love passages. Twelve years later
Adam Bede astonished the world by the intensity of its ethical
light and shade. The introspective novel was now very gradually
to establish a supremacy over the historical. The romance of the
Brontës’ forlorn life colours Jane Eyre, colours Wuthering
Heights and colours Villette; their work is inseparable from their
story to an extent that we perhaps hardly realize. George
Eliot did not receive this adventitious aid from romance, and
her work was, perhaps, unduly burdened by ethical diatribe,
scientific disquisition and moral and philosophical asides. It
is more than redeemed, however, by her sovereign humour, by
the actual truth in the portrayal of that absolutely self-centred
Midland society of the ’thirties and ’forties, and by the moral
significance which she extracts from the smaller actions and
more ordinary characters of life by means of sympathy, imagination
and a deep human compassion. Her novels are generally
admitted to have obtained twin summits in Adam Bede (1859)
and Middlemarch (1872). An even nicer delineator of the most
delicate shades of the curiously remote provincial society of
that day was Mrs Gaskell (1810–1865), whose Cranford and
Wives and Daughters attain to the perfection of easy, natural
and unaffected English narrative. Enthusiasm and a picturesque
boyish ardour and partisanship are the chief features of Westward
Ho! and the other vivid and stirring novels of Charles Kingsley
(1819–1875), to which a subtler gift in the discrimination of
character must be added in the case of his brother Henry Kingsley
Kingsley. Trollope. Reade. Meredith. Hardy.
(1830–1876). Charles, however, was probably more
accomplished as a poet than in the to him too exciting
operation of taking sides in a romance. The novels
of Trollope, Reade and Wilkie Collins are, generally
speaking, a secondary product of the literary forces
which produced the great fiction of the ’fifties. The two last
were great at structure and sensation: Trollope dogs the prose
of every-day life with a certainty and a clearness that border
upon inspiration. The great novels of George Meredith range
between 1859 and 1880, stories of characters deeply interesting
who reveal themselves to us by flashes and trust to our inspiration
to do the rest. The wit, the sparkle, the entrain and the horizon
of these books, from Richard Feverel to the master analysis of
