This is perceptible in Hardy, but may be traced with greater
distinctness in the best work of George Gissing, George Moore,
Mark Rutherford, and later on of H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett
and John Galsworthy. The old novelists had left behind them
a giant’s robe. Intellectually giants, Dickens and Thackeray
were equally gigantic spendthrifts. They worked in a state of
fervent heat above a glowing furnace, into which they flung
lavish masses of unshaped metal, caring little for immediate effect
or minute dexterity of stroke, but knowing full well that the
emotional energy of their temperaments was capable of fusing
the most intractable material, and that in the end they would
produce their great downright effect. Their spirits rose and fell,
but the case was desperate; copy had to be despatched at once
or the current serial would collapse. Good and bad had to make
up the tale against time, and revelling in the very exuberance
and excess of their humour, the novelists invariably triumphed.
It was incumbent on the new school of novelists to economize
their work with more skill, to relieve their composition of
irrelevancies, to keep the writing in one key, and to direct it
consistently to one end—in brief, to unify the novel as a work
of art and to simplify its ordonnance.
The novel, thus lightened and sharpened, was conquering new fields. The novel of the ’sixties remained not, perhaps, to win many new triumphs, but a very popular instrument in the hands of those who performed variations on the old masters, and much later in the hands of Mr William de Morgan, showing a new force and quiet power of its own. The novel, however, was ramifying in other directions in a way full of promise for the future. A young Edinburgh student, Robert Louis Stevenson, had inherited much of the spirit of the Pre-Raphaelitic virtuosos, and combined with their passion for the romance of the historic past a curiosity fully as strong about the secrets of romantic technique. A coterie which he formed with W. E. Henley and his cousin R. A. M. Stevenson studied words as a young art student studies paints, and made studies for portraits of buccaneers with the same minute drudgery that Rossetti had studied a wall or Morris a piece of figured tapestry. While thus forming a new romantic school whose work when wrought by his methods should be fit to be grafted upon the picturesque historic fiction of Scott and Dumas, Stevenson was also naturalizing the short story of the modern French type upon English ground. In this particular field he was eclipsed by Rudyard Kipling, who, though less original as a man of letters, had a technical vocabulary and descriptive power far in advance of Stevenson’s, and was able in addition to give his writing an exotic quality derived from Oriental colouring. This regional type of writing has since been widely imitated, and the novel has simultaneously developed in many other ways, of which perhaps the most significant is the psychological study as manipulated severally by Shorthouse, Mallock and Henry James.
The expansion of criticism in the same thirty years was not a whit less marked than the vast divagation of the novel. In the early ’eighties it was still tongue-bound by the hypnotic influence of one or two copy-book formulae—Arnold’s “criticism of life” as a definition of poetry, and Walter Criticism. Pater’s implied doctrine of art for art’s sake. That two dicta so manifestly absurd should have cast such an augur-like spell upon the free expression of opinion, though it may of course, like all such instances, be easily exaggerated, is nevertheless a curious example of the enslavement of ideas by a confident claptrap. A few representatives of the old schools of motived or scientific criticism, deduced from the literatures of past time, survived the new century in Leslie Stephen, Saintsbury, Stopford Brooke, Austin Dobson, Courthope, Sidney Colvin, Watts-Dunton; but their agreement is certainly not greater than among the large class of emancipated who endeavour to concentrate the attention of others without further ado upon those branches of literature which they find most nutritive. Among the finest appreciators of this period have been Pattison and Jebb, Myers, Hutton, Dowden, A. C. Bradley, William Archer, Richard Garnett, E. Gosse and Andrew Lang. Birrell, Walkley and Max Beerbohm have followed rather in the wake of the Stephens and Bagehot, who have criticized the sufficiency of the titles made out by the more enthusiastic and lyrical eulogists. In Arthur Symons, Walter Raleigh and G. K. Chesterton the new age possessed critics of great originality and power, the work of the last two of whom is concentrated upon the application of ideas about life at large to the conceptions of literature. In exposing palpable nonsense as such, no one perhaps did better service in criticism than the veteran Frederic Harrison.
In the cognate work of memoir and essay, the way for which has been greatly smoothed by co-operative lexicographical efforts such as the Dictionary of National Biography, the New English Dictionary, the Victoria County History and the like, some of the most dexterous and permeating work of the transition from the old century to the new was done by H. D. Traill, Gosse, Lang, Mackail, E. V. Lucas, Lowes Dickinson, Richard le Gallienne, A. C. Benson, Hilaire Belloc, while the open-air relief work for dwellers pent in great cities, pioneered by Gilbert White, has been expanded with all the zest and charm that a novel pursuit can endow by such writers as Richard Jefferies, an open-air and nature mystic of extraordinary power at his best, Selous, Seton Thompson, W. H. Hudson.
The age has not been particularly well attuned to the efforts of the newer poets since Coventry Patmore in the Angel in the House achieved embroidery, often extremely beautiful, upon the Tennysonian pattern, and since Edward FitzGerald, the first of all letter-writing commentators on life Poetry. and letters since Lamb, gave a new cult to the decadent century in his version of the Persian centoist Omar Khayyam. The prizes which in Moore’s day were all for verse have now been transferred to the prose novel and the play, and the poets themselves have played into the hands of the Philistines by disdaining popularity in a fond preference for virtuosity and obscurity. Most kinds of the older verse, however, have been well represented, descriptive and elegiac poetry in particular by Robert Bridges and William Watson; the music of the waters of the western sea and its isles by W. B. Yeats, Synge, Moira O’Neill, “Fiona Macleod” and an increasing group of Celtic bards; the highly wrought verse of the 17th-century lyrists by Francis Thompson, Lionel Johnson, Ernest Dowson; the simplicity of a more popular strain by W. H. Davies, of a brilliant rhetoric by John Davidson, and of a more intimate romance by Sturge Moore and Walter de la Mare. Light verse has never, perhaps, been represented more effectively since Praed and Calverley and Lewis Carroll than by Austin Dobson, Locker Lampson, W. S. Gilbert and Owen Seaman. The names of C. M. Doughty, Alfred Noyes, Herbert Trench and Laurence Binyon were also becoming prominent at the opening of the 20th century. For originality in form and substance the palm rests in all probability with A. E. Housman, whose Shropshire Lad opens new avenues and issues, and with W. E. Henley, whose town and hospital poems had a poignant as well as an ennobling strain. The work of Henry Newbolt, Mrs. Meynell and Stephen Phillips showed a real poetic gift. Above all these, however, in the esteem of many reign the verses of George Meredith and of Thomas Hardy, whose Dynasts was widely regarded by the best judges as the most remarkable literary production of the new century.
The new printed and acted drama dates almost entirely from the late ’eighties. Tom Robertson in the ’seventies printed nothing, and his plays were at most a timid recognition of the claims of the drama to represent reality and truth. The enormous superiority of the French drama as Drama. represented by Augier, Dumas fils and Sardou began to dawn slowly upon the English consciousness. Then in the ’eighties came Ibsen, whose daring in handling actuality was only equalled by his intrepid stage-craft. Oscar Wilde and A. W. Pinero were the first to discover how the spirit of these new discoveries might be adapted to the English stage. Gilbert Murray, with his fascinating and tantalizing versions from Euripides, gave a new flexibility to the expansion that was going on in English dramatic ideas. Bernard Shaw and his disciples, conspicuous among them Granville Barker, gave a new seasoning of wit to the absolute novelties of subject, treatment and application with which they
