476 SERIALS-PREVALENCE OF FICTION-KITCHEN LITERATURE, [1842. may repeat a few sentences we have written elsewhere: "It is remarkable how, within the last quarter of a century, the Novel has been the principal reflector of manners-how the players have, to a great extent, foregone their function of being 'the abstracts and brief chronicles of the time.' It was not so when Fielding and Smollett held the mirror up to nature' in the modern form of fiction, whilst Goldsmith and Sheridan took the more ancient dramatic method of dealing with humours and fashions. The stage has still its sparkling writers-England is perhaps richer in the laughing satire and fun of journalism than at any period. But the novel, especially in that cheap issue which finds its entrance to thousands of households, furnishes the chief material from which the future philosophical historian will learn what were our modes of thought and living-our vices and our follies-our pretensions, and our realities-in the middle of the nineteenth century." The severe moralist of ten years ago might say, as he may now say, that the Theatre was a rare indulgence for the middle classes, and was scarcely accessible to the lower; but that the Circulating Library was sending its seductions into every household, and that the fictions of the Monthly Serial and the Weekly Sheet were interfering with the serious thoughts and duties of life amongst all classes; that, even if they did not corrupt, they were diverting from useful studies. There was something of justice in this harsh estimate. The socalled mischief, which before the age of Serials was confined to the Circulating Library, had reached the humblest ranks in the Penny Weekly Sheets. The popular tendency had forced upon every weekly periodical the necessity for introducing fiction in some form or other. The great masters of fiction did not shrink from publishing their creations in weekly or monthly fragments. The humblest hacks, utterly devoid of knowledge and abounding in bad taste, could reproduce all the forgotten trash of the Minerva Press, in what has been called the Kitchen literature. Their labours were crowned with an enormous popularity in periodicals which founded their large circulation upon a meretricious cheapness. Hence, for the most part, a deluge of stories that, to mention the least evil of them, abounded with false representations of manners, drivelling sentimentalities, and impossible incidents. The apologist for the light reading of his time could not shut his eyes to the ever-present fact, that in proportion as the number of readers had increased, the desire of the mass of the population had been rather for passing amusement than solid instruction. But his true apology would be founded upon another ever-present fact. The labouring people of this country were labouring barder than any other people, not only from the absolute necessity of the competition around them, but through the energy of their race. The middle classes were carried along that stream of excitement which had grown from the tranquil course of Denham's "Thames," "though gentle, yet not dull," into the rush of the "swift and arrowy Rhone." The quickened Post, Railways, Telegraphs, had made all life go faster. The energies of all had become overtasked. It could not, therefore, in the nature of things be expected that much of the reading of all classes should have been other than for amusement. Further, when it was considered how comparatively recent had been the training for any reading amongst a large * "Half Hours with the best Authors," vol. iv. p. 482, edit. 1848.. 477 1842.] MISS MARTINEAU'S ILLUSTRATIONS OF POLITICAL ECONOMY. proportion of those who had become readers, we could scarcely look for a great amount of serious application in their short leisure after a hard working day. The entertainment which was presented to all whether in the shape of a shilling novel or a penny journal was not debasing; it might enfeeble the intellect, but it did not taint it. We had got beyond the scurrilous stage-the indecent stage-the profane stage-the seditious stage, of cheap Miscellanies. Let us turn to another aspect of the prose fiction of our age, in regard to which it would be difficult for the most sturdy utilitarian to deny that it has accomplished higher ends than the supply of mere amusement. About the beginning of the reign of William the Fourth there was a lady whose zeal as a political and social teacher has been unwearied, who came suddenly upon the world as a writer of an extensive series of tales, having a more distinct purpose than other works of imagination. Her purpose was to teach political economy through fiction: "So we, if children young diseased we find, Anoint with sweets the vessel's foremost parts, Miss Martineau had small encouragement in the onset of her adventure. Paternoster Row would willingly have bargained for the sugar on the edge of the cup without the physic within. Gray's Inn Square, wherein dwelt the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, believed that the sweets would impair the efficacy of the physic. At length a somewhat obscure sectarian publisher made a bidding; and a little volume was cast upon the world entitled "Illustrations of Political Economy. No. 1. Life in the Wilds: A Tale." Without intermission for more than two years came out every month a new Tale, with a short "Summary of Principles" indicated therein. The success was complete. "I take my stand upon Science," said the now popular authoress. "The sciences on which I touch bear no relation to party." Without inferring that Miss Martineau did not strenuously labour to fulfil what she considered her mission as a teacher of political and social truths, we may venture to believe that her skilful development of an interesting story-her great power of assimilation, by which local images and scenes were reproduced as if they had been the result of actual observation -her skilful admixture of narrative and dialogue-her ability to conceive a character and to carry it through with a real dramatic power-that these qualities excited the admiration of thousands of readers, who rose from the perusal of her monthly volumes without the " Principles" having taken the slightest hold upon their minds. Her triumph as a novelist was the more remarkable as her purpose was a mistake in Art. It was the same mistake that Joanna Baillie made in her "Plays on the Passions." As it was a mistake to make the conduct of a drama wholly rest upon the exhibition of one intense master passion, it was also a mistake to conduct a novel so as to lay aside most of the modifying social circumstances which would divert the progress of the action, and render a denouement according to scientific laws at least improbable. Nevertheless, we hold these remarkable little books to * Tasso-Fairfax's translation-book i. canto 3. 478 NOVELISTS' SOCIAL AIMS-DICKENS-MRS. GASKELL-KINGSLEY. [1842. have, in a considerable degree, led the way in the growing tendency of all novel-writing to extend the area of its search for materials upon which to build a story, and to keep in view the characteristic relations of rich and poor, of educated and uneducated, of virtuous and vicious, in our complicated state of society, so as to bring all classes and conditions nearer to each other in the exposition of a common humanity prescribing a common brotherhood. This was the great benefit to his age which Charles Dickens has accomplished, without having a ground of scientific "Principles" for his social picturesindeed, sometimes too ostentatiously despising the doctrines of political economy in his search after a broader foundation for lessons to be implied by his readers rather than enforced upon them. Whatever be the political or theological opinions of the more prominent novelists of the Victorian era, no one, even twenty years ago, could get away from the fact that the one solemn and imperative duty of every man and woman in these days is to act upon the precept of "Blessed is he that considereth the poor,"-to act upon it, not in the spirit of alms-giving, but in the spirit of Christian brotherhood. To understand, wherever possible, what are the habitual thoughts and feelings of the great mass of the people; to go to the root of that isolation which separates the receiver of wages from the capitalist; to see where the scientific laws which regulate Labour and Capital press unequally, and how their inevitable tendency to a segregation of classes can be modified; to ascertain what is the true nature of the popular prejudice which requires to be enlightened on political questions; to cast away all undue suspicion of democratic opinions and of religious dissent, and to open as wide as prudence may prescribe the doors of the Senate and of the Church; lastly, to trace crime to its dens, and finding out how much it is identified with misery and with that barbarism which sits grim and dangerous by the side of civilization, to abate if possible the want, and to remove the ignorance before the dimness of the child becomes the total darkness of the adult ;-such are the duties which it is the especial honour of many of the present race of our writers of prose fiction to have successfully inculcated. They have brought us to know our fellows in the great community to which we belong. It is a knowledge which promises safety to the great and to the rich; to the landowner and the merchant; to the lawyer and the divine; to all who serve the State in administrative functions; to the secular teacher, and even to the abstracted student who would "let the world slip:"-" Blessed is he that considereth the poor; the Lord will deliver him in time of trouble." All honour to those beguilers of life's dull hours who have laboured to bring us all to a knowledge of each other by repeated efforts, such as those of Charles Dickens; to the illustrious females, such as Elizabeth Gaskell, who have seen in this work an especial vocation; to a band of manly thinkers, of whom Charles Kingsley is the type. They have their reward, though not a complete one, in seeing the great change which marks the difference between 1831 and 1861. The author of " Alton Locke," who, from his recollections of twenty years ago, drew a painful picture of the hateful severance of classes, thus describes the great change which presents itself to his view in 1862: "Before the influence of religion, both Evangelical and Anglican; before the spread of those liberal principles, founded on common humanity and justice, the triumph of which we owe to 1842.] THACKERAY'S NOVELS-POETS. 479 the courage and practical good sense of the Whig party; before the example of a Court, virtuous, humane, and beneficent; the attitude of the British upper classes has undergone a noble change. There is no aristocracy in the world, and there never has been one as far as I know, which has so honourably repented, and brought forth fruits meet for repentance; which has so cheerfully asked what its duty was, that it might do it. It is not merely enlightened statesmen, philanthropists, devotees, or the working clergy, hard and heartily as they are working, who have set themselves to do good as a duty specially required of them by creed or by station. In the gene rality of younger laymen, as far as I can see, a humanity (in the highest sense of the word) has been awakened, which bids fair, in another generation, to abolish the last remnants of class prejudices and class grudges." * The novels of Mr. Thackeray are signal examples of a great change in the mode of conducting prose fiction. When Garrick played Macbeth in the court costume of the reign of Anne, the pit did not hiss the anachronism. When the bold baron of the Minerva Press talked to his ladye-love in the style of Sir Fopling Flutter, the scene of their passion might have equally fitted Alnwick Castle or Sion House. The trusting reader did not regard language, or costume, or local colouring, as in any way essential to the development of a story whether of the 15th or the 19th century. Mr. Thackeray saw the great vulgar and the little vulgar of the Club or the Drawing-Room, when he first looked around him for his materials for satire, and he laid them bare in his "Book of Snobs." He has painted the passion for notoriety, the childish ostentation, the sacrifice of comfort for show, the pride that goes before a fall, the money-worship of the scheming mothers, the flirtations of the ambitious daughters, the sycophancy, the hypocrisy, the selfishness of his own age. He has shown the same inner life in the days of " two pages and a chair," of buckles and periwigs. But he never confounds the characteristics of the Past and the Present. If there is often a family likeness in his portraits, he is careful to individualize them by peculiarities characteristic of the shifting fashions of a generation. "The Virginians" belong to the time when Decorum sat prim and solemn by the side of George and Charlotte at Kew; when if the high-born wanted an occasional frolic with Licentiousness they were perfectly indifferent to the effects of their example upon the swinish multitude who admiringly looked on. "Vanity Fair" is of the Regency,its noise and its glitter, the constable to keep order in the crowd, the profligacy going forward where justice stands hoodwinked outside the door. If any attempt only to indicate those who have taken rank amongst the Novelists of the Victorian age be embarrassing from the length of the roll, what shall we say of the Poets, whose name is legion. The elder, such as Bowles and Robert Montgomery, will not be numbered by future critics as belonging to the same class as the ephemeral tribe of another age that Johnson's "Lives" have rescued from oblivion. Allan Cunningham and Bryan Waller Proctor, who belong to the middle period, are worthy of long memory. A younger race to whom we, individually, were bound by ties of friendly intercourse-Winthrop Mackworth Praed, Sidney Walker, John Moultrie, Derwent Coleridge-may perhaps be more impartially estimated by others, "Alton Locke," Preface to edition of 1862, p. viii. 480 TENNYSON-BROWNING. [1842. but by none with a more hearty esteem for those who are living, and with a deeper regret for those who were too prematurely taken away. Ebenezer Elliott will be remembered for more enduring qualities than are displayed in his "Corn Law Rhymes." John Clare is still amongst us in the flesh, but his true pictures of rural life and of the peculiar aspects of his own Midland scenery will never again delight by that truth and freshness which stand out amidst the imitative and conventional herd. Richard Monckton Milnes has accomplished the very difficult feat of taking a really distinguished position as a poet, without impairing his usefulness as a politician. Richard Barham was equally successful in producing the most humorous Fabliaux of the nineteenth century, without compromising his character as a clergyman by putting on the dress of a Troubadour. Dramatic Poetry had nearly reached its culminating point when Victoria came to the throne. Sheridan Knowles, Bulwer Lytton, Leigh Hunt, Thomas Noon Talfourd, James White, had attained a well-merited popularity, before the time when the scene-painter and the property-man usurped the functions of the poet. We need not enlarge upon their merits, nor contrast them with a time which has produced no drama to be acted which is likely to be known after it has dragged through a brief and inglorious life. We have dramas not for the stage; of which those of Henry Taylor may be mentioned as noble poems, and those of Robert Browning, of whom we have presently to speak in his general poetical character, as vivid dialogues without the "business" which makes a play. The two great poets who came early in the fourth decade of the nineteenth century, to fill up the void when Byron, and Keats, and Shelley had passed away, y were Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning. Wordsworth, Rogers, Crabbe, Southey, Coleridge, Campbell, were still amongst us when Tennyson, an undergraduate of Trinity College, Cambridge, published, in 1830, "Poems, chiefly lyrical." Browning, educated at the University of London, in 1835 published "Paracelsus." Moving onward by different roads towards high excellence and permanent fame, each is, in his several way, a representative of our age. To Browning belongs its inquiring and sceptical spirit; to Tennyson its cultivation of the home affections, its sympathy with all natural emctions, whether belonging to the refined or the uneducated. To Browning it belongs to follow Paracelsus in his wanderings through continental Europe; to see Pippa pass in the Trevisan; to be in Sardinia with Victor Amadeus and Charles Emmanuel; to celebrate Colombe's Birthday at Cleves. In his greater Dramas and his Dramatic Lyrics nearly all his scenes are laid in foreign lands which had become accessible to Englishmen in the age of steamboats and railroads. He leaves to others to walk in English lanes and amid English trees. This is the landscape amid which Tennyson moves. Where "The lady of Shalott" dwells, "On either side the river lie Long fields of barley and of rye." "The Gardener's Daughter" grew amidst meadows "Dewy fresh, browsed by deep-udder'd kine," and to the solitary garden comes The windy clanging of the minster clock." |