Historians. discussion, this work contains his famous distinction between the Fancy and the Imagination, and his illuminating, if not always convincing, estimate of Wordsworth's poetry. In many parts of the Biographia Literaria, in the Aids to Reflection, and the magazine articles collected and reprinted from The Friend, Coleridge has a tendency to discursiveness, to mistiness, and-tranchons le mot-to dullness. But when the spirit is in him he writes with inspiration and insight probably unparalleled in English criticism; and there are few of his pages which do not contain strokes of lofty genius. His Shakespearean criticism, though marked in an unusual degree by his besetting faults, has gone far toward moulding modern appreciation of Shakespeare. He is the critic and philosopher as well as the poet of Romanticism, and in two of the three kinds he is supreme. We may here mention briefly the chief historians and philosophers of the early eighteenth century. The History of Greece of William Mitford (1744–1827), in spite of its great contemporary vogue, is as little read now as is his interesting treatise on prosody. William_ Roscoe's Life of Lorenzo de Medici (1796) and his Leo X (1805) are still read, as is John Lingard's History of England (1819-30), written largely from the Roman Catholic standpoint. Of greater literary force and vividness is the History of the Peninsular War (1828-40) by Sir William Napier (1785-1860), a work which completely eclipsed Southey's work on the same subject, and has become an English classic. Classic too, though rather through their historical than their literary merits, are the works1 of Henry Hallam (1777-1859). Judicial in his method, he was a Whig at heart, and started from Whig premises. In spite of the coldness of his style and his lack of enthusiasm, his comprehensive treatment of his subject gives him rank among the great English historians. Henry Hart Milman (1791-1868) published his History of the Jews in 1829, and his History of Christianity from the Birth of Christ to the Abolition of Paganism in 1840; but his greatest and most original work, and the one in which he shook himself free from suspicion of German influence, was his History of Latin Christianity (1854-5). The chief work of Dr. Thomas Arnold (the great head-master of Rugby, and the father of Matthew Arnold) was his History of Rome (1838-43), no longer possessing authority, but notable for its qualities of style. George Grote (1794-1871) wrote his History of Greece in order to combat Mitford's anti-democratic conception of Greek history. He had great industry, and is still widely read, but his style is uninspired, and he has little vision. The same criticism may be made upon the History of Greece of Connop Thirlwall, Bishop of St. David's (17971875), though Thirlwall was a better scholar than Grote, and his history has a somewhat finer literary quality. A View of the State of Europe during the Middle Ages (1818); The Constitutional History of England (1827); An Introduction to the Literature of Europe (1837-9). 313 CHAPTER XXVIII SCOTT AND THE NOVEL The novel of sentiment and terror Mackenzie, Walpole, Mrs. Radcliffe, Beckford-Scott and the historical novel - Jane Austen, Mrs. Gaskell, Trollope, Disraeli, Bulwer, Lever, Peacock - Minors. As has been indicated in the foregoing chapter, the new spirit is as definitely, though perhaps not as splendidly, evident in the prose of the period as in its poetry; and in the one case, as in the other, the origins of the movement must be sought far back in the eighteenth century. As far as the novel is concerned, the spirit of the earlier age had found expression, as we have seen, in the true realism followed, after varying ways, by Richardson and Fielding, and in the burlesque realism of Smollett. Sterne's proclivity for sentiment and the exploitation of his own personality in some sense foreshadow the newer tendencies; but the most marked reaction against the older realism must be sought, not in Sterne nor in such disciples of Sterne as Mackenzie1 and Henry Brooke,2 but in the novel of terror originated by Horace Walpole in The The Novel Castle of Otranto (1764) and carried on by Mrs. Radcliffe in of WonThe Mysteries of Udolpho (1795), and other novels, and by der. Matthew Lewis in his miscellaneous writings, of which the chief is the celebrated Monk. The distinguishing feature of these novels are their addiction to horror and sensationalism, their remoteness from the setting of ordinary life and, especially in Lewis's case, their proclivity for the cruder and more obvious kinds of supernaturalism. The impulse towards the remote and fantastic appears under a different guise in Vathek (1783), the Eastern, or pseudo-Eastern, romance of William Beckford, the ward of Chatham, and the celebrated Caliph of Fonthill'. In the novels of this class, for all their crudity and anachronisms, there was a foreshadowing, if a dim and broken one, of Scott. But through the period runs a quite different strain which finds expression in the novels of Fanny Burney (Evelina, 1778; Cecilia, 1782). Owing much to Richardson in her portrayal of feminine character, she deals with English domestic life in a sprightlier, homelier, and less tragic fashion, and thus helps to fashion the form that Jane Austen was to bring to perfection. We may pass at once from the numerous minors of the period (for example, Hannah More, Calebs in Search of a Wife; William Godwin, Caleb Williams, 1794; St. Leon, 1799, &c.) to him who triumphed 1 Author of three novels of sentiment, The Man of Feeling (1771), The Man of the World (1773), and Julia de Roubigné (1777); and editor in succession of The Mirror and The Lounger. 2 Author of The Fool of Quality (1766). Scott- Earlier Novels. His Second over that reluctant form at which so many of his predecessors had fumbled, the English historical novel. As we have already seen, the activity of Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) had been diverted from poetry to prose by the growing poetic predominance of Byron. In 1814 he finished his first novel, Waverley, which had been commenced many years before. Its success opened his eyes to a new source of strength, and a new path to wealth and fame. Within the next six years he had published eight other novels, Guy Mannering (1815), The Antiquary, Old Mortality, The Black Dwarf (all 1816), Rob Roy (1817), The Heart of Midlothian (1818), The Bride of Lammermoor, A Legend of Montrose (both 1819), all dealing with the history of his own country during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. All of these, except perhaps The Black Dwarf, show him writing at his best, and amongst his greatest masterpieces must be counted Old Mortality, with its swift sequence of adventure, and its splendid pictures of Claverhouse and Balfour of Burleigh. The Heart of Midlothian is hardly less magnificent, and is memorable for its introduction of the lowly and heroic Jeanie Deans, Scott's most greatly drawn heroine. ; A fresh period of his activity begins in 1819 with Ivanhoe, and continues through The Monastery and The Abbot (1820), Kenilworth and The Pirate (1821), The Fortunes of Nigel (1822), Peveril of the Peak, Quentin Durward, St. Ronan's Well, Redgauntlet (all 1823), to The Talisman and The Betrothed (1825). In this intermediate series Scott has frequently departed from Scotland and his favourite periods of history, and has ransacked the ages, spoiled the climes'. He could not have given us anything better than his best early work but he has given us more work equally good, after a slightly different kind. In Peveril of the Peak, Kenilworth, and The Fortunes of Nigel, the main scene is set in England, though the last novel gives Scott a chance of developing a theme always dear to him, the play of Scottish character against English. The Talisman is a tale of the Crusades, St. Ronan's Well a study of nineteenth-century life in a Lowland wateringplace. Redgauntlet, like Waverley, Rob Roy, and Montrose, contains magnificent descriptions of Scottish scenery; and it also includes that great essay in the terrible, Wandering Willie's Tale. The Jonsonian element in Scott, his use of the Comedy of Humours ', the quality in him which to some seems the most precious of all, becomes less racy and less large in the novels of this period; we have wandered from the Kaim of Kinprunes, we find few fellows to Dominie Sampson and Dugald Dalgetty: but against this, we meet a host of Scott's more gravely and soberly outlined characters; Lord Crawford, Le Balafré, Varney, and George Heriot; James I and Lewis XI; Mary the Queen and Catherine Seyton. The stage is fuller and more splendid, the scenery more various and rich. Moreover, Scott's capacity for management and 6 construction has lost nothing of its old power: there is no greater novel of foreign history in English than Quentin Durward. During his last phase Scott's genius was to a large extent His last thwarted by debt and ill-health: hence a certain decline in phase. the quality of his last novels, Woodstock (1827), The Fair Maid of Perth (1828), Anne of Geierstein (1828-9), Count Robert of Paris, and Castle Dangerous. Yet there are splendid description and characterization even in the weakest of these, and The Fair Maid of Perth, with its portraits of Ramorny and Hal o' the Wynd, and the clansmen of Chattan and Quhele, contains some of his most brilliant work. All of his old power reappears in the brief sketch of Scottish life, The Two Drovers, which belongs also to this period. The work of Scott marks one of the great epochs in English His place fiction. He did for the historical novel what Fielding had done among for the realistic that is to say, he first touched the form British with mastery, and made it possible for his countrymen to Novelists. handle it with success. His industry and rapidity of output were prodigious and Shakespearean: his thirty-one complete stories, including twenty-seven long novels, were all written within a period of sixteen years. And if he is deficient in Shakespeare's subtlety and sense of the finest issues, he resembles him again in the largeness of his sweep, in the serene impersonality of his outlook, and in the number of unforgettable figures he has given to the literature of England and the world. The spirit of his age is evident in his love of remote periods and climes, of his country's scenery in its Highland beauty and wildness, of the supernatural,1 of the humour and romance which he divined in lowly lives. But if these qualities make Scott a right romantic, his romanticism is for the most part kept true and steady by his broad and virile sanity of soul. Whatever be his faults, he never shrieks in the falsetto dear to Hugo, and his greatest pages are those in which he is nearest to common life. He saw romance with the same steadiness and clearness with which Fielding saw real life; and the manliness and generosity which make him beloved as a man are evident everywhere throughout his writings. It will here be convenient to say a brief word concerning Charles the not very distinguished history of the historical novel from Reade Scott's day onwards. His immediate successors were G. P. R. and James and Harrison Ainsworth, but neither of these produced others. work approaching the first order. Much more important is The Cloister and the Hearth (1861), by Charles Reade (18141884), a really great historical novel, dealing with the period and family of Erasmus. Reade's chief other novels, It is Never too Late to Mend, Peg Woffington, Christie Johnstone, &c., belong to a different type of story and an inferior order of 1 Cf. The Monastery, Anne of Geierstein, The Tapestry Chamber, and for the spurious variety beloved by Mrs. Radcliffe, Woodstock. The Novel of Man nersJane Austen. merit. Conversely the historical romances of Disraeli, e.g. Alroy, for all their theatrical vividness and colour, certainly do not represent his best work in fiction. The Last Days of Pompeii (1834), The Last of the Barons (1843), and Harold (1848) are the most notable attempts in this kind of Edward George Bulwer, the first Lord Lytton (1803-1873). They display remarkable power of historical reconstruction, but Lytton's lack of spiritual depth causes him to fall short of the highest in this, as in the other literary forms which he attempted. We may turn back a few years to examine the novel of contemporary manners which, as has been noticed, had already been furthered, if not actually founded, by Fanny Burney. To this class belong the novels of Mrs. Inchbald, Robert Bage, Mrs. Opie, and other minors, of whom the chief is Maria Edgeworth (1767-1849). Her Castle Rackrent (1801), The Absentee, and Ormond deal with Irish society after a fairly lively fashion, though the moralizing impulse is never far distant. The novel of manners came to its perfection in the novels of Jane Austen, one of the most fastidious artists in the fiction of our own, and of any, language. That she should have been a fairly exact contemporary of Sir Walter Scott shows the remarkable range of the period, for in spirit and choice of subject the two novelists were not so much different as mutually exclusive. Jane Austen deliberately banished from her canvas every figure of humanity alien to her own time and set. 'I could no more write a romance than an epic poem,' she replied to a librarian who had unwisely suggested such a subject. Three or four families in a country village is the very thing to work on.' Her chief novels are Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1812), Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1816), Northanger Abbey (1818), and the posthumously published Persuasion. These works contain a picture drawn with the most sure and delicate shading, and coloured by a satire nowise heartless, of the world in which Miss Austen moved. Self-restricted though she was to a single social vista, she has left us a number of characters of remarkable variety and the surest individualization. We have the sensitive Marianne Dashwood and her sensible' sister Elinor: the masterly-drawn Bennett family, of whom the shrewd and not unkindly Elizabeth was, as we know, near to the heart and nature of Jane herself: Elizabeth's wooer, Darcy, who shows like a dim foreshadowing of Sir Willoughby Patterne, but behaves and fares better in the event: the caste-proud Bertrams, with their correct, and, to many of us, impossible, son Edmund, and their dependant, Fanny Price, much-enduring till her final triumph: that grotesque wooer and letterwriter, Mr. Collins: Emma, at first a prig and a meddler, but in the end not unloving nor unloved: Anne Elliott, dearest of all Jane Austen's women to the heart of many Austenians; and many another unforgotten figure. |