have ceased to persevere, and both they and the public that makes the fortunes of its favorites would have equally had cause to regret the decision. they may serve their purpose at least as or less, we have the less hesitation in allud ing to these, even at the risk of laying ourselves open to retort. They may be merely the unnecessary repetition of some Next to the indispensable imagination conjunction which seems to lift the writer and literary talent, the most helpful quali- more comfortably across the rift which ties are versatility and tact. There are yawns between a couple of his periods. men whose names will occur to everybody, What strikes one more, of course, is the who have lost reputation prematurely, be- reiteration of some epithet or qualifying cause they are fast fixed in a groove. adverb, which will invariably force itself Their books had once an amazing circula- to the front when the pen hesitates and tion, commanded high prices, and were pauses. For the use of words of the kind scattered broadcast in a succession of becomes well-nigh mechanical; actually cheap editions. They were rapaciously pirated in the United States, and translated into most of the languages of the Continent. Proprietors of pushing magazines thought it worth while to treat with them, even on the terms of losing money on each particular bargain. In some respects they may be said to have been English Gaboriaus. Working backwards, as we may presume from their carefully-planned denouements, they put together most cleverly intricate puzzles, like those ingenious complications of ivory-carving which are turned out by the patient Chinese. Pulling them to pieces when once you had the clue, you fancied you could detect the trick of their construction, although you could not help admiring its cleverness. But these feats of art and skill are not to be multiplied indefinitely; and yet, though each subsequent repetition of them has been falling flatter and flatter, it never appears to occur to the authors that it would be well were they to change their vein. Like the angler who keeps casting his fly in the pool where he has been excited by killing a good-sized fish, they return time after time to their première amour, though the pub-inent Hands," or to some of the parodies lic have ceased to rise, and each fresh cast is a fresh disappointment. Even Gaboriau, who was a master in his particular craft, was often hard put to it latterly. At the best of times in his "Crime d'Orcival" and "L'affaire Lerouge" - he had to spin out his volumes to the indispensable length, by dragging you through long episodical digressions; while, subsequently, he wandered away more and more from his criminal courts and the Rue Jerusalem and its detectives, into the commonplace world of dissipated Paris. Talking of mannerism of plot naturally leads on to mannerism of style. Almost every man has his tricks of writing, which are apt to grow upon him unconsciously. Sometimes they are so insignificant as to be almost unobjectionable; and yet they jar on the ear of the sensitive reader. As almost everybody must plead guilty, more un. and extravaganzas by the American hu morists, though these are wanting in Thackeray's more delicate discrimination. Mere crotchets in expression are comparative trifles, and injure the writer more than anybody else. What is infinitely more offensive are those stock-epithets which habitually do duty in the eloquent descriptions of the brilliant melodramatics of the sensational school. These writers are for the most part feminine, and their pens go dashing along with true feminine volubility. How well we know what we have to look for; and how easy it seems to be to catch the knack of the style! We have the weird beauty of waning moon. light; the sinister glare of glittering eyes; the lustrous effulgence of tawny locks; the firm, square-set jaws, eloquent of indomita ble resolutions; the sunny smiles; the long, shapely hands; the fairy feet; the 97 tion. fiendish scowls; and all the rest of it ad good in that way, nor, perhaps, did his repnauseam. Would that such "high falu- utation suffer much by his philanthropy; tin'" were confined to the language, but but it is not every novelist who is a Dickwe shall have something to say by-and-by ens. His satirical side-hits in the "Pickof the matter, of the sensational novel. In wick Papers" come in admirably; but the the mean time we may advert for a moment" Pickwick Papers" were merely linked toto the mannerism of picturesque descrip- gether by the loosest of plots. The workWe need hardly say that it is a fault, house system and the police courts in if fault it be, of a very different kind. But "Oliver Twist," Doctors' Commons in as there are artists who stick from first to "David Copperfield," the Court of Chanlast to storms breaking over Highland cery and the detectives in "Bleak House," hills, to Sussex harvest-fields and Surrey stage plagiarisms in "Nicholas Nicklewoodlands; so there are authors who will by," the Circumlocution Office in "Little repaint the identical scenery till, grand or Dorrit," were decidedly drags on these beautiful as it is, we begin to be wearied. stories. Dotheboys Hall and Mr. WackWe are reminded of Mr. Pecksniff's ele- ford Squeers were exceptions that proved vations of Salisbury Cathedral, taken from the general rule. It is another thing when every point of the compass. We are think- satire in fiction takes a wider range, and ing at the moment of Mr. William Black; embraces the humorous eccentricities of a and we have the less hesitation in mention-nation, or even of some great section of ing him, as we should suppose that few society. Whether the strictures on Amermen have less need to be monotonous. ican institutions in "Martin Chuzzlewit" His" Adventures of a Phaeton" embraced were fair or not, they fell in with the an infinite variety of English landscapes; scheme of the book - they brought out in and the Downs near Leatherhead, and the relief the traits of the characters; and the lanes around Dorking, were touched to the author so thoroughly succeeded in his aim, full as lightly and gracefully as the caves that everybody laughed, and laughed heartof Staffa or the whirlpool of Corryvreckan. ily. Thus no living writer has used the But Mr. Black will go back to the hills of novelist's art and gifts with more practical Skye and the Sound of Mull as regularly purpose than Mr. Charles Reade. He has as the sportsmen who have rented their shown up trades-unions, and prisons, and shootings there. The spirit of the Hebri- private madhouses, and more things of the dean minstrel inspires his pen, and his kind than we can well remember. We feelings find appropriate expression in have always thought his "Never too Late the delicate beauty and richness of his im- to Mend one of the most spirited and agery. But the very beauty appears to touching stories that has appeared in our argue a barrenness which we cannot read-own times; though for imaginative power ily believe in; so we resept having "The and perfection of literary workmanship, we Princess of Thule "repeat herself in " Mac- prefer " The Cloister on the Hearth." But leod of Dare." Those who are the warm- even those who admire Mr. Reade as we est admirers of Mr. Black, must have had do must admit that the horrors and poralmost enough of "the misty hills of traits in "Never too Late to Mend were Skye;" of Colonsay in tempest, and Jura more sensational than realistic. And in gloom, and Coll and Eigg and Tiree in whether the cold-blooded atrocity of the all the tints of the rainbow. Jacks-in-office be admissible or founded upon facts, it is certain that the tortures inflicted on the prisoners betray us into a sentimental sympathy with crime, and a dangerous oblivion of criminal antecedents. We believe that few counsel get up their cases more carefully than Mr. Reade; but if men of undeniable genius handicap themselves heavily in promoting social reforms through the medium of brilliant romance, the audacity of their duller imitators must incur its inevitable penalty. How well we know the impulsive Church controversialists, who undertake the propagation of their peculiar tenets who preach up or cry down ritualistic observances- who introduce their model parsons and their amiable ladies bountiful, Next to novels of a manner come the novels with a purpose; and the novelist who writes with a purpose must always be in some degree self-sacrificing. At best he is more or less tied down to preaching or pamphleteering; and though genius may gild the pill, there is a sense of effort in swallowing it. When an earnest man takes to teaching through novels, he must almost inevitably go to extremes, which are injurious to the principles of his art. He overcolors or distorts his characters, deepens his contrasts of light and shade; nay, he will sometimes be tempted to embody a disquisition in his story that he may force it down the throats of his reluctant readers. Dickens did some public VOL. XXVI. 1307 LIVING AGE. villa at Twickenham. You had been impressed by the chaste colors of the walls, and admired the rich texture of the tapestries. You might make a shrewd guess at the price of the table-cover, and you were familiar with the quaint patterns on the breakfast china. You knew the rare exotics on the lawn rather better than the gardener; and had revelled in all the effects of sunlight and moonshine, to which that hard-headed Scotchman was serenely indifferent. that circulate through the cottages with tea | the mansion in Park Lane, or the banker's and tracts, and are always saying words in season or out of season. The absurdity of such stories from the practical point of view is that, in their prolixity and shallow sectarianism, they defeat their own ends, and are only read by the people who are already converted to their principles. Those who differ shrink from them as Satan from holy water; while it needs neither their prejudices nor their bigotry to make them intolerably dull to anybody who reads with the idea of being amused. Almost more detestable is the political monomaniac who fancies himself a rising Disraeli; and the occasional jeu d'esprit of some better man, who has thrown it off in the vigor of his political enthusiasm, is giving those ponderous triflers perpetual encouragement. On the whole, if we were driven to choose and to read, we should decidedly prefer the modern sensational school. There at least you have brightness, and, occasionally, fun; and at one time it could boast a certain originality. It was rather a happy thought, and literally produced an agreeably shuddering "sensation" when it was suggested that in the sylph-like form of a shrinking maiden or a blushing bride, there might lurk the passions and the callous cruelty of a Brinvilliers. We had half forgotten the acqua Toffana, as the chemists have lost the secret of it; and here was something as deadly being infused into claret-glasses or handed round in teacups by respectable footmen. Eyes that beamed upon you with angelic softness the one moment, were shooting glances of concentrated venom the next, or gazing in seething malignancy with the stony stare of the basilisk. Murder stalked with stealthy tread up the back staircases of the most highly-rented houses; bravoes, disguised in powdered hair and gorgeous liveries, drew their chairs sociably to the tables in servants' halls; mothers made away with their children as if they were ordering the execution of a litter of puppies. Had all that been bluntly told, it would have sounded unnatural and extravagant in a police report. But writers like Miss Braddon had undoubtedly the talent of mixing it up with the realistic, so as to throw an air of possibility over the whole. You might have been slow to give Lady Audley credit for the vice which belied her beautiful face; but any scene appeared dramatically conceivable, when you had been made so thoroughly at home in the surroundings. It was your own fault if you did not feel like one of the family in But as bold conceptions of this sort began with a climax, it was difficult, or rather impossible, to cap them. No doubt there were creditable efforts of audacity in a milder if not a less improbable shape. As when Mrs. Henry Wood, in her "East Lynn," brought back an erring wife to the rooftree of her injured husband, and made her tend their cherished children as governess, avoiding recognition behind a pair of spectacles. Such brilliant fancies, however, could not come every day to everybody; and accordingly, both the originators of the sensational "dodge," and their indefatigable imitators, were hard put to it to keep up the excitement. After making their heroines wade through gore in their swan's-down slippers, they took to refining upon breaches of the moral law, and more especially of the seventh commandment. There, however, our English women are at a sad disadvantage, and greatly to be pitied they are. They must deny themselves the unfettered license of the French romance; and even when they dare to borrow some refinement of depravity, they must tone it down to the English taste. With the most praiseworthy ambi. tion, if they are to sell their books, or obtain admission for their stories into decent magazines, they can hardly write up to the disclosures of the divorce trials. The natural alternative is to launch out in the luxurious, to elaborate marvellous types of hopelessly demoralized sensuality, and to shadow out dim possibilities of guilt which may take shape in the fancies of their more imaginative readers. There is nothing the middle and the lower middle classes care for more than to be introduced to those unfamiliar splendors which Providence has placed beyond their reach, and, necessarily, they can never be very critical as to the beings who people these dazzling realms of mystery. No one knew that better than Eugene Sue, sternest of all stern republicans, who, writing in the scented atmosphere of his cabinet, secured for his books an enormous sale by his glowing pictures of the luxury he branded. | laugh or a shudder at the Antinous-like "Ouida," who has a good deal of the guardsman or the feline adventuress, French" genius " in her, may be said to though the hectic cheek be more haggard have set English women the example in that respect. She gave us her delicate life-guardsmen, who, like Rudolf in the "Mysteries of Paris," had the pluck of the bull-dog with the strength of the elephant. They could sit up the best part of the night over cigars and Curaçoa punch, gambling on credit for fabulous stakes, and rise "fresh as paint' to go on duty in the morning. They walked the streets and went their nightly rounds, as the embodiment of hyper-melodramatic action. For while their aristocratic superciliousness provoked the quarrel which the weakness of their physique seemed to make a foregone conclusion, in reality they had muscles of steel, set in motion by the agility of the catamount. They had been trained in the boxing schools under the most scientific professors, and being in tiptop condition, notwithstanding their debauches, they could knock the heaviest of roughs out of time in the course of half a dozen of rounds. Nay, they always escaped those honorable scars which would scarcely have set them off in the boudoirs they frequented. Nor were the resources of their mental nature less marvellous. Brainless sybarites as they might appear to the superficial observer, with soul and body deteriorating apace like those of the confirmed opiumsmoker, they could be reckoned upon at a moment's notice for a manly decision in the most momentous question, or for a heroic deed of superb self-sacrifice. For they had a code of honor and virtue of their own, though it was a code that clashed with the old-fashioned decalogue; and if they swindled a friend or seduced his wife, they would always back his bills to any amount, or give him a meeting at the certainty of social extinction with the chances of capital punishment thrown in. There was a touch of genius in the audacity that first played fast and loose with the confiding innocence and ignorance of the million. Of genius, we say, because these scenes and persons, being as far-fetched as fanciful, must have been invented at no small expenditure of imagination. In incidents and imagery the books reminded one of a grotesque English adaptation of the "Arabian Nights." And if we have expatiated on them at some length, it is simply because the mischief they must answer for is likely to survive the unnatural excitement and the extreme absurdity which were their redeeming vir tues. It is hard now to get up either a than ever, and the eyes may burn with sevenfold intensity of lustre. But the fact remains, as Thackeray says of one of his own burlesques, that though much of it all is absolutely unintelligible to us, "yet for the life of us we cannot help thinking that it is mighty pretty writing." The uneducated and thoughtless who have neither knowledge nor discrimination of taste, no doubt feel unmitigated admiration for those eloquent rhapsodies of lurid description. Foolish lads and girls fancy they have a reflection of high society in the most ludicrously distorted pictures and caricatures; virtue and vice are habitually confounded; and notions that might have been borrowed from the melodramas of the transpontine theatres, are developed and even travestied in those sensational novels. Stories written for the gratification of the ordinary subscribers to Mr. Mudie, are passed on in due course to be devoured by the milliners' apprentices and lawyers' clerks. There seems no reason why the young woman who admires her beauté du diable daily in the looking-glass should not make the acquaintance of one of these noblemen or millionaires, who can raise her to the position her charms would adorn. Whether she may have to make away with him afterwards or no is a question she may postpone for the present; at all events, she has sufficient self-respect to feel sure that she will prove equal to that or any other emergency: while the clerk who has been plunging for sovereigns at Kingsbury or Hampton, finds a store of ready precedents at his fingers' ends for forging cheques or embezzling cash. Felonies of the kind, when extenuated by circumstances, are amiable weaknesses of the most respectable men; and if he has lingering scruples as to their strict propriety, he is taught that he need only make restitution by way of thanks-offering when his ground coup has answered its purpose. These stories are circulated or imitated in the columns of the "penny dreadfuls; " and just notions they must give of the rich and the well-born to the intelligent artisan relaxing from his labor. The demagogues who get a living by stirring strife between classes and by preaching the socialism or communism by which they profit, have only to point to "The Aristocrat by One of Themselves." Taking for a text the novel Miss Tompkins has composed in the back parlor of the semi-detached villa at Brixton, they exclaim, in the triumph of irresistible logic: "You maintain that who has transferred her soul into the the infamous aristocracy may have good scenes she depicts. They are natural about it after all. Only read this here even in their most striking originality; novel. It is evidently written by one of and though the traits of the lonely mistheir 'ornaments'-by a woman born in anthropic weaver, or the crossgrained old the purple, as they call it, who drops into squire, come with the force of a novel the queen's palace, and dines every day creation, yet our experience yields full conwith dukes and duchesses. And just see viction to their most grotesquely marked what she has got to say about them. individualities. In short, all through these Would you marry a wife who had been earlier books, genius and penetration, the brought up like Lady Esmeralda there? shrewdest observation, and the broadest Or would you care to give your hand, as sympathies, have been at work in the coman honest man. to that swindler and de- mon workaday world. We are delighted bauchee the Earl of Diddleham? You see with the truths and beauties put in fresher that they are not only effete but rotten to and more attractive aspects, which fail to the core; they batten on the sweat and impress mere superficial observers. Her blood of the people. Depend upon it," Romola" stands by itself as perhaps the only things to agitate for are abolition the most forcibly suggestive representaand confiscation; and if we don't send tion of the active and intellectual life of these curled heads of theirs to the guil- the Italy of the Middle Ages that is to be lotine, by, sir, they may be grateful to | met with either in romance or history. In the clemency of the people!" The "Middlemarch" and "Daniel Deronda,' chances being that Miss Tompkins has on the other hand, we have a far higher never even had a peer pointed out to her. and wider exercise of extraordinary creaBut is it wonderful if the agitator's invec- tive power. The sense of truth is as tive seems justifiable and his reasoning strong as ever, but the world we are introwell-nigh unanswerable? And need we duced to is infinitely more ideal. We be surprised if the irrepressible mechanic should say that in the rich luxuriance of is persuaded that the shameless immoral- her imagination, in the intense and permaity of the upper orders cries aloud for con- nent realism with which her inspirations dign punishment like that which drew are borne in upon herself, George Eliot destruction on the cities of the plain? has excelled any writer we are acquainted with. She has a superabundance of the versatility we have noted as indispensable to the habitual writer of fiction; but her versatility takes the most unexpected forms, and rises to an altogether exceptional pitch, disporting itself in the pride of its vigor in the spheres of intellectual fancy. Like Shakespeare, she throws herself into her characters from the highest to the humblest; she breathes and thinks even in the lofty individualities which she has conjured out of the depths of her dramatic genius; so that we are more forci bly impressed perhaps by a Deronda or a Mordecai, than by Aunt Glegg or Mrs. Poyser. The analysis of the human heart and of character is as subtly exhaustive in the one as in the other; but in the later books, in the shape of a story that sustains the interest throughout, you are put through a course of practical philosophy. New ideas and possibilities are perpetually dawning on you; and your faculties are kept on the stretch by a double interest, while the intellect is at once enlightened and exercised. The polish of the style is almost incomparably brilliant; pregnant thoughts are condensed into pointed sentences. Epigram follows epigram: world of shrewd wisdom is embodied in It is refreshing to turn from the sensational novel, or from those novels of society that are as frivolous though more harmless, to the works of the gifted and powerful writers who redeem the profession from discredit and disgrace. We have lost Lord Lytton, and Dickens, and Thackeray. But in George Eliot we have a novelist who has brought her art to a perfection that has been attained by very few of her predecessors. We know that there are differences of opinion as to her later works. Differences so far, that the admirers of her earlier books, of those "Scenes of Clerical Life" we have alluded to, of "Adam Bede," and "Silas Marner," and "The Mill on the Floss," were so charmed with their vivid pictures of everyday English life, that they could have been well content had she gone on repeating them; for the simple reason that the novels we have referred to are literally nature itself, nature in ordinary thought and everyday though original types, nature in the most graphic reproductions of all that is poetic in our modern prose, nature in their simple pathos and quaint humor and drollery, nature in the varied tints of the rustic landscape, touched as lightly as sharply by the hand of an artist a |