mind that, while Thackeray wrote of the eighteenth century with a natural instinct to which study played a subordinate part, George Eliot wrote of the Italian Renaissance after a long course of reading which created and brought out an artificial instinct for the work. Her picture of Florence and Savonarola is undeniably impressive, and the book has its enthusiasts, but it smells too strongly of the lamp. In her next novel, Felix Holt (1866), she returned to the familiar "Felix ground of English life, but, in spite of much admir- (1866). able writing, she hardly succeeded in maintaining Holt" the high level of her previous works. The days of the Reform Bill failed to kindle within her the same living interest as the days of the immediately preceding generation. "Middle march Daniel Deronda" (1876). By this time her pen had begun to move more slowly. It was not until 1872 that her next novel, Middlemarch, reached the public. This book reveals the secret of her slowness. A conscious and loftier purpose and a grander design necessitated a broader and more populous canvas (1872) and and a more vigorous and steadily sustained effort. In Middlemarch we certainly find the old power and much more of it. We find a wonderful variety of strongly drawn characters and an abundance of calm energy, but hardly the same freshness and freedom; we seem to miss the old blithe, spontaneous movement, and, with it, some of the charm of the earlier books. In Adam Bede and Silas Marner the subject works its way, so to speak, through the author; in Middlemarch the author works her way through the subject. This remark applies with still greater force to her last and most elaborate novel, Daniel Deronda (1876), in which her visions of the greatness of the Jewish nation remind one of Disraeli's Coningsby or Tancred. Hard and excellent work is visible in every page; there is a great display of intellectual strength which always astonishes and often gives keen pleasure, but its constant demands on the reader's attention effectually preclude it from becoming popular, for it exacts a mental strain which is within the capacity of few. George Eliot was never wiser or more profound than in these two last books; her brilliant power of aphorism reached its full height. Yet these observations and reflections, which might be isolated into the most valuable of anthologies, gave the novels a singular heaviness and seriously injured their author's power of humorous expression. The burden of philosophy and culture cannot, it is true, conceal the manifold excellence of Middlemarch, one of the finest pictures of provincial society in any literature, but it casts its shadow completely over Daniel Deronda, and, indisputably great as the book is, its greatness as a novel may be challenged. The hero is a prig, and the human interest of his surroundings can appeal only to a limited class of readers. In both these last novels George Eliot's catholic spirit touched the sterner realities of life and drew within the range of its sympathy classes and individuals which prejudice has included under a social ban, and this of itself has placed them among the weightier classics of fiction. Their pages, moreover, are crowded with beautiful or forcible types of manhood and womanhood-in Middlemarch, Dorothea Brooke, Caleb and Mary Garth, and Mrs. Cadwallader; in Daniel Deronda, Mr. Gascoigne, the Jew Mordecai, and the Grandcourts, husband and wife, do but stand out from large groups of figures, each of which is striking. But, although the trouble of reading them is amply rewarded, they can never be popular or widely read. Miscellaneous work and verse. The last word of George Eliot's philosophy was the book of essays called The Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879), which, in its sketches of characteristics, follows the lines of the author whose name it borrows and of such writers as Overbury, Earle, and La Bruyère. She had strayed in time past into other paths than that of prose fiction, but never to the same excellent purpose. Poetry attracted her, and she did all that genius and toil could do to secure a position among the great poets of her country. In 1868 she published The Spanish Gipsy, a volume of verse that wanted little but the gift of song to make it a great poem. Throughout its pages we recognise the large heart, the ripe wisdom, the various knowledge, the luxuriance of imagery and illustration, the felicity and fulness of expression that distinguish George Eliot the novelist, but seldom the free-flowing force, the melody and glow inseparable from the idea of a poet. She has also given us many smaller poems, valuable for their profound matter and manner, with which we should be loath to part. Of these Jubal, How Lisa Loved the King, Stradivarius, and Brother and Sister-the last evidently a leaf from the history of her own early life-are especially noteworthy. Theophrastus Such was her last published work. Mr. Lewes, whose constant companion she had been for many years, died in 1878. In June 1880 she married Mr. John Walter Cross, her future biographer, and died at Chelsea on December 22nd of the same year. Greatness of George Eliot. The grand general feature that distinguishes George Eliot is a thoughtful, sympathetic, loving realism which rests on a deep natural feeling for the "kindly race of men" as its basis, and works in an element of knowledge and culture. Although this element permeates it and is to blame for a mistaken dogmatism and unconventionality of tone, disagreeable to many readers who take their fiction very seriously, it does not destroy its mellowness and kindliness. Of all modern writers, not excepting even Mr. Meredith, George Eliot watches the ways of men with the clearest and most faithful vision and the warmest sense of kinship; her breadth of culture gives distinctness and truth to the pictures to which her breadth of sympathy gives richness of colour and geniality. Her comprehensive charity embraces all creatures; every living thing that passes under her gaze is not merely touched with the revealing light of the intellect, but is bathed in an atmosphere of love and tenderness. This is especially true of her earliest works; in them the most delightful, because honest and homely types of English humanity are preserved for future times in an element of thought and feeling that neither distorts nor dims, neither blurs nor makes indistinct. These works certainly place clear images before our gladdened eyes." They do a vast deal more, but this chiefly; and in this, with its necessary implication of dramatic life and power, George Eliot is the lineal descendant of Shakespeare and Fielding, the two greatest masters of English fiction. 66 TROLLOPE § 5. In passing from George Eliot to ANTHONY TROLLOPE, we sink to a lower level of art and faculty, from consummate genius to admirable talent. Trollope's work is sound, wholesome, and genial; its quiet and true pictures ANTHONY of English life have a soft and winning, if somewhat tame and commonplace charm peculiar to themselves. The character of his writing was in no small measure the result of the circumstances of his life. Although born of a good family-his father was an Oxford man and a not very successful barrister, his mother was the authoress of The Widow Barnaby, and his elder brother wrote many novels-and educated at Winchester and Harrow, he was driven by his father's misfortunes to take a clerkship in the Post Office. He gradually rose to the position of surveyor, and, travelling much and living for more or less lengthy periods in various parts of England and Ireland, he mixed with and observed many local peculiarities and shades of individual character. His love of the hunting field, which amounted almost to a passion, added considerably to his opportunities of noticing the ways of men. For several years his literary attempts met with small encouragement, but struggling on with a methodical persistence which was arrested only by death, he at last contrived to make a palpable hit in The Warden (1855). The favour thus won was maintained by Barchester Towers (1857), a sequel to The Warden, and was never afterwards seriously imperilled. For á quarter of a century after this time he continued to produce untiringly a constant supply of modest and well-flavoured fiction, evenly flowing narratives of personal adventure, and an occasional slight biography, which appealed to and attracted readers of homely tastes. His method of writing was businesslike and is sufficient proof of his want of genius. For several years no day passed without its allotted number of pages, nor did any pause in the regular and almost punctual birth of book after book give warning of flagging energy and failing materials. Among the fifty novels or so which were thus created, perhaps the most worthy of notice are Doctor Thorne (1858), Framley Parsonage (1861), Orley Farm (1862), The Small House at Allington (1864), and The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867). This last book concluded the Barchester series, which, more than any of his other books, made his reputation; but out of such an abundance and so distinct and almost fatal a tendency to uniformity of merit it is not easy to choose. Trollope had merit enough to leave room for him to sink below himself, and this he certainly did in The Eustace Diamonds (1873) and Lady Anna (1874). He carried to a barely warrantable extent a practice, which had been used very happily by Thackeray, of introducing successful characters over and over again into his books; but he had the art of toning down its wearisomeness. He was most at home in clerical circles, and there are few who can resent the constant recurrence of Archdeacon Grantley, Dean Arabin, Mr. Crawley, and Mrs. Proudie. Mr. Plantagenet Palliser of Framley Parsonage, with or without Lady Glencora his wife, is, as Duke of Omnium, the central or an important figure in Can You Forgive Her? (1864), Phineas Finn (1869), The Prime Minister (1876), and The Duke's Children (1880). Trollope also wrote several books of foreign travel and brief lives of Cæsar (1870) and Thackeray (1879). Hawthorne's verdict on Trollope is likely to be final: "His characters are just as real as if some giant had hewn a great lump out of the earth and put it under a glass case, with all its inhabitants going about their daily business, and not suspecting that they were made a show of." Trollope, however, was by no means a giant, unless we take his industry into account. He was an ingenious and pleasant worker in the domestic department of the novel, whose books are healthy and excellent reading, but have no intrinsic claim to immortality. CHARLES § 6. The work of CHARLES READE, who was born a year before Trollope and was the oldest of the novelists mentioned in this chapter, was of a very different kind. Reade was the son of a country gentlemen at Ipsden in Oxfordshire, and, although called to the bar in 1843, never practised. At the same time he was fortunate enough to hold a fellowship at Magdalen, the most picturesque of Oxford colleges. However, there was little of the academic spirit in his nature or his work. A man of aggressive and inflammable temper, burning to redress social grievances and going about his work with no sense of the fitness of things, he was not seldom involved in war with his contemporaries. His novels began with the admirable sketch, Peg Woffington (1852), a story of the English stage, which was followed by Christie Johnstone (1853). În 1856 he made his mark in It is Never Too Late to Mend, a book which is typical of his eccentricities of construction and manner in the irritatingly abrupt sentences, the short paragraphs, the semi-dramatic method of dialogue (never really dramatic and often puerile), and numberless other childish tricks that appear over and over again. Like Dickens' books, Reade's novel had a social purpose, and aimed at some scheme of prison reform. The way in which he gathered and marshalled his details makes this and his succeeding novels extremely valuable to the student of English sociology. Thus Hard Cash (1863), which had appeared in Household Words, attacked the iniquities of private lunatic asylums with a directness and an amount of circumstantial knowledge that are almost as convincing as the figures in a blue-book and engross the reader's attention more successfully. In Foul Play (1869), which was written in partnership with the actor-dramatist Dion Boucicault, he wrote on the subject of unseaworthy ships, while in the admirable Put Yourself in His Place (1870) he went exhaustively into the subject of strikes and painted the life of a manufacturing town-Sheffield was his model-more unsparingly and even more vividly than Mrs. Gaskell. Other famous novels are Griffith Gaunt (1865) and A Terrible Temptation (1871). Of all it may be said that they groan under the eccentricities which so easily beset novels with a purpose, and under peculiarities of their own due to the combination of idealist and faddist in their author. But there is life in Reade's people, as figures like the generous Edward Dodd and the selfish, sensual Edith Archbold, both in Hard Cash, testify, while of the dramatic force of his scenes there can be no better instance than the bursting of the reservoir in Put Yourself in His Place. Nevertheless, Charles Reade is one of those writers whose masterpiece stands indubitably outside the general line of his work. If we doubt the pre-eminence of Esmond or Vanity Fair or of Romola over The Mill on the Floss, it needs no hesitation to declare that The Cloister and the Hearth (1861) is a far better novel than It is Never Too Late to Mend. The length of the book is something against it, but, as a faithful, entirely realistic picture of medieval life at a momentous epoch it has claims to be considered the best historical novel in English. It savours of Reade's idiosyncrasies, and, if it entered into comparison with Esmond or Romola on the ground of style, it would have very little chance. But Reade was a first-rate scholar and an omnivorous reader, who read to some purpose, and nothing more lifelike could be desired than his account of Gerard's tramp through Germany or of his experiences in Rome. Reade used Erasmus' Colloquies very liberally in his novel, and, in fact, applied them to the taste of modern readers. He pursued his work in no merely antiquarian spirit; every passage has its bearing on modern life, its own modernity of tone. And, if Reade, like most impulsive authors, made serious slips from accuracy and was, in many of his books, unfair and partial, he may be trusted and thoroughly enjoyed in the vast field which he covered in The Cloister and the Hearth. Not every man who succumbs to so many disadvantages, an imperfect sense of proportion, a disagreeably jerky style, and an occasionally miraculous want of taste, is able to produce a masterpiece of so high a kind. |