men I have encountered, he was the surest fund of drollery. I have
known many witty men, many who could say good things, many who
would sometimes be ready to say them when wanted, though they would
sometimes fail;--but he never failed. Rouse him in the middle of
the night, and wit would come from him before he was half awake.
And yet he never monopolised the talk, was never a bore. He would
take no more than his own share of the words spoken, and would yet
seem to brighten all that was said during the night. His earlier
novels--the later I have not read--are just like his conversation.
The fun never flags, and to me, when I read them, they were never
tedious. As to character he can hardly be said to have produced
it. Corney Delaney, the old manservant, may perhaps be named as an
exception.
Lever's novels will not live long,--even if they may be said to
be alive now,--because it is so. What was his manner of working I
do not know, but I should think it must have been very quick, and
that he never troubled himself on the subject, except when he was
seated with a pen in his hand.
Charlotte Bronte was surely a marvellous woman. If it could be
right to judge the work of a novelist from one small portion of
one novel, and to say of an author that he is to be accounted as
strong as he shows himself to be in his strongest morsel of work,
I should be inclined to put Miss Bronte very high indeed. I know
no interest more thrilling than that which she has been able to
throw into the characters of Rochester and the governess, in the
second volume of Jane Eyre. She lived with those characters, and
felt every fibre of the heart, the longings of the one and the
sufferings of the other. And therefore, though the end of the book
is weak, and the beginning not very good, I venture to predict that
Jane Eyre will be read among English novels when many whose names
are now better known shall have been forgotten. Jane Eyre, and
Esmond, and Adam Bede will be in the hands of our grandchildren,
when Pickwick, and Pelham, and Harry Lorrequer are forgotten;
because the men and women depicted are human in their aspirations,
human in their sympathies, and human in their actions.
In Vilette, too, and in Shirley, there is to be found human life as
natural and as real, though in circumstances not so full of interest
as those told in Jane Eyre. The character of Paul in the former of
the two is a wonderful study. She must herself have been in love
with some Paul when she wrote the book, and have been determined to
prove to herself that she was capable of loving one whose exterior
circumstances were mean and in every way unprepossessing.
There is no writer of the present day who has so much puzzled
me by his eccentricities, impracticabilities, and capabilities as
Charles Reade. I look upon him as endowed almost with genius, but
as one who has not been gifted by nature with ordinary powers of
reasoning. He can see what is grandly noble and admire it with
all his heart. He can see, too, what is foully vicious and hate
it with equal ardour. But in the common affairs of life he cannot
see what is right or wrong; and as he is altogether unwilling to be
guided by the opinion of others, he is constantly making mistakes
in his literary career, and subjecting himself to reproach which he
hardly deserves. He means to be honest. He means to be especially
honest,--more honest than other people. He has written a book
called The Eighth Commandment on behalf of honesty in literary
transactions,--a wonderful work, which has I believe been read by
a very few. I never saw a copy except that in my own library, or
heard of any one who knew the book. Nevertheless it is a volume
that must have taken very great labour, and have been written,--as
indeed he declares that it was written,--without the hope of
pecuniary reward. He makes an appeal to the British Parliament and
British people on behalf of literary honesty, declaring that should
he fail--"I shall have to go on blushing for the people I was born
among." And yet of all the writers of my day he has seemed to me
to understand literary honesty the least. On one occasion, as he
tells us in this book, he bought for a certain sum from a French
author the right of using a plot taken from a play,--which he
probably might have used without such purchase, and also without
infringing any international copyright act. The French author not
unnaturally praises him for the transaction, telling him that he
is "un vrai gentleman." The plot was used by Reade in a novel; and
a critic discovering the adaptation, made known his discovery to
the public. Whereupon the novelist became angry, called his critic
a pseudonymuncle, and defended himself by stating the fact of his
own purchase. In all this he seems to me to ignore what we all mean
when we talk of literary plagiarism and literary honesty. The sin
of which the author is accused is not that of taking another man's
property, but of passing off as his own creation that which he
does not himself create. When an author puts his name to a book he
claims to have written all that there is therein, unless he makes
direct signification to the contrary. Some years subsequently there
arose another similar question, in which Mr. Reade's opinion was
declared even more plainly, and certainly very much more publicly.
In a tale which he wrote he inserted a dialogue which he took from
Swift, and took without any acknowledgment. As might have been
expected, one of the critics of the day fell foul of him for this
barefaced plagiarism. The author, however, defended himself, with
much abuse of the critic, by asserting, that whereas Swift had
found the jewel he had supplied the setting;--an argument in which
there was some little wit, and would have been much excellent truth,
had he given the words as belonging to Swift and not to himself.
The novels of a man possessed of so singular a mind must themselves
be very strange,--and they are strange. It has generally been his
object to write down some abuse with which he has been particularly
struck,--the harshness, for instance, with which paupers or lunatics
are treated, or the wickedness of certain classes,--and he always,
I think, leaves upon his readers an idea of great earnestness
of purpose. But he has always left at the same time on my mind so
strong a conviction that he has not really understood his subject,
that I have ever found myself taking the part of those whom he has
accused. So good a heart, and so wrong a head, surely no novelist
ever before had combined! In storytelling he has occasionally been
almost great. Among his novels I would especially recommend The
Cloister and the Hearth. I do not know that in this work, or in any,
that he has left a character that will remain; but he has written
some of his scenes so brightly that to read them would always be
a pleasure.
Of Wilkie Collins it is impossible for a true critic not to speak
with admiration, because he has excelled all his contemporaries in
a certain most difficult branch of his art; but as it is a branch
which I have not myself at all cultivated, it is not unnatural
that his work should be very much lost upon me individually. When
I sit down to write a novel I do not at all know, and I do not very
much care, how it is to end. Wilkie Collins seems so to construct
his that he not only, before writing, plans everything on, down to
the minutest detail, from the beginning to the end; but then plots
it all back again, to see that there is no piece of necessary
dove-tailing which does not dove-tail with absolute accuracy. The
construction is most minute and most wonderful. But I can never
lose the taste of the construction. The author seems always to be
warning me to remember that something happened at exactly half-past
two o'clock on Tuesday morning; or that a woman disappeared from
the road just fifteen yards beyond the fourth mile-stone. One is
constrained by mysteries and hemmed in by difficulties, knowing,
however, that the mysteries will be made clear, and the difficulties
overcome at the end of the third volume. Such work gives me no
pleasure. I am, however, quite prepared to acknowledge that the
want of pleasure comes from fault of my intellect.
There are two ladies of whom I would fain say a word, though I feel
that I am making my list too long, in order that I may declare how
much I have admired their work. They are Annie Thackeray and Rhoda
Broughton. I have known them both, and have loved the former almost
as though she belonged to me. No two writers were ever more
dissimilar,--except in this that they are both feminine. Miss
Thackeray's characters are sweet, charming, and quite true to human
nature. In her writings she is always endeavouring to prove that
good produces good, and evil evil. There is not a line of which
she need be ashamed,--not a sentiment of which she should not be
proud. But she writes like a lazy writer who dislikes her work,
and who allows her own want of energy to show itself in her pages.
Miss Broughton, on the other hand, is full of energy,--though
she too, I think, can become tired over her work. She, however,
does take the trouble to make her personages stand upright on the
ground. And she has the gift of making them speak as men and women
do speak. "You beast!" said Nancy, sitting on the wall, to the man
who was to be her husband,--thinking that she was speaking to her
brother. Now Nancy, whether right or wrong, was just the girl who
would, as circumstances then were, have called her brother a beast.
There is nothing wooden about any of Miss Broughton's novels; and
in these days so many novels are wooden! But they are not sweet-savoured
as are those by Miss Thackeray, and are, therefore, less true to
nature. In Miss Broughton's determination not to be mawkish and
missish, she has made her ladies do and say things which ladies
would not do and say. They throw themselves at men's heads, and
when they are not accepted only think how they may throw themselves
again. Miss Broughton is still so young that I hope she may live
to overcome her fault in this direction.
There is one other name, without which the list of the best known
English novelists of my own time would certainly be incomplete,
and that is the name of the present Prime Minister of England. Mr.
Disraeli has written so many novels, and has been so popular as a
novelist that, whether for good or for ill, I feel myself compelled
to speak of him. He began his career as an author early in life,
publishing Vivian Grey when he was twenty-three years old. He was
very young for such work, though hardly young enough to justify the
excuse that he makes in his own preface, that it is a book written
by a boy. Dickens was, I think, younger when he wrote his Sketches
by Boz, and as young when he was writing the Pickwick Papers. It
was hardly longer ago than the other day when Mr. Disraeli brought
out Lothair, and between the two there were eight or ten others.
To me they have all had the same flavour of paint and unreality.
In whatever he has written he has affected something which has been
intended to strike his readers as uncommon and therefore grand.
Because he has been bright and a man of genius, he has carried his
object as regards the young. He has struck them with astonishment
and aroused in their imagination ideas of a world more glorious,
more rich, more witty, more enterprising, than their own. But the
glory has been the glory of pasteboard, and the wealth has been
a wealth of tinsel. The wit has been the wit of hairdressers, and
the enterprise has been the enterprise of mountebanks. An audacious
conjurer has generally been his hero,--some youth who, by wonderful
cleverness, can obtain success by every intrigue that comes to
his hand. Through it all there is a feeling of stage properties,
a smell of hair-oil, an aspect of buhl, a remembrance of tailors,
and that pricking of the conscience which must be the general
accompaniment of paste diamonds. I can understand that Mr. Disraeli
should by his novels have instigated many a young man and many a
young woman on their way in life, but I cannot understand that he
should have instigated any one to good. Vivian Grey has had probably
as many followers as Jack Sheppard, and has led his followers in
Lothair, which is as yet Mr. Disraeli's last work, and, I think,
undoubtedly his worst, has been defended on a plea somewhat similar
to that by which he has defended Vivian Grey. As that was written
when he was too young, so was the other when he was too old,--too
old for work of that nature, though not too old to be Prime Minister.
If his mind were so occupied with greater things as to allow him to
write such a work, yet his judgment should have sufficed to induce
him to destroy it when written. Here that flavour of hair-oil,
that flavour of false jewels, that remembrance of tailors, comes
out stronger than in all the others. Lothair is falser even than
Vivian Grey, and Lady Corisande, the daughter of the Duchess, more
inane and unwomanlike than Venetia or Henrietta Temple. It is the
very bathos of story-telling. I have often lamented, and have as
often excused to myself, that lack of public judgment which enables
readers to put up with bad work because it comes from good or from
lofty hands. I never felt the feeling so strongly, or was so little
able to excuse it, as when a portion of the reading public received
Lothair with satisfaction.
CHAPTER XIV ON CRITICISM
Literary criticism in the present day has become a profession,--but
it has ceased to be an art. Its object is no longer that of proving
that certain literary work is good and other literary work is
bad, in accordance with rules which the critic is able to define.
English criticism at present rarely even pretends to go so far as
this. It attempts, in the first place, to tell the public whether
a book be or be not worth public attention; and, in the second
place, so to describe the purport of the work as to enable those
who have not time or inclination for reading it to feel that by a
short cut they can become acquainted with its contents. Both these
objects, if fairly well carried out, are salutary. Though the
critic may not be a profound judge himself; though not unfrequently
he be a young man making his first literary attempts, with tastes
and judgment still unfixed, yet he probably has a conscience in the
matter, and would not have been selected for that work had he not
shown some aptitude for it. Though he may be not the best possible
guide to the undiscerning, he will be better than no guide at all.
Real substantial criticism must, from its nature, be costly, and
that which the public wants should at any rate be cheap. Advice is
given to many thousands, which, though it may not be the best advice
possible, is better than no advice at all. Then that description
of the work criticised, that compressing of the much into very
little,--which is the work of many modern critics or reviewers,--does
enable many to know something of what is being said, who without
it would know nothing.
I do not think it is incumbent on me at present to name periodicals
in which this work is well done, and to make complaints of others
by which it is scamped. I should give offence, and might probably
be unjust. But I think I may certainly say that as some of these
periodicals are certainly entitled to great praise for the manner
in which the work is done generally, so are others open to very
severe censure,--and that the praise and that the censure are
chiefly due on behalf of one virtue and its opposite vice. It is
not critical ability that we have a right to demand, or its absence
that we are bound to deplore. Critical ability for the price we
pay is not attainable. It is a faculty not peculiar to Englishmen,
and when displayed is very frequently not appreciated. But that
critics should be honest we have a right to demand, and critical
dishonesty we are bound to expose. If the writer will tell us what
he thinks, though his thoughts be absolutely vague and useless,
we can forgive him; but when he tells us what he does not think,
actuated either by friendship or by animosity, then there should