Studies in Early Victorian Literature | Page 8

sense of mankind remembers the best and
forgets the worst, even if the worst be four-fifths of the whole.
The place of genius is decided by its inimitable hits, and its misses
evermore drop out of memory as time goes on. The world loves its
bright spirits for what they give it, and it does not score their blots like
an examiner marking a student's paper. Thus the men and women of the
first rank still hold the field in the million homes where English tales
are a source of happiness; and it would be perverse to maintain that any
living men have reached that level. We can see no trace that Pickwick
or Emma, Natty Bumppo or Uncas, are losing their hold on the
imagination of men and women, any more than Jeanie Deans and the
Antiquary. Oliver Twist, the Last Days of Pompeii, Vanity Fair, Jane
Eyre, have more readers than ever. And I find the Last Chronicle of
Barset, Lothair, and Silas Marner as fresh as they were a quarter of a
century ago.
We all admit that there are delightful writers still. I am not about to
decry our living romancers, and certainly not to criticise them. If any
man choose to maintain that there is more poetry in Tess than in the
entire Barsetshire series, that Dickens could not have bettered the Two
Drummer Boys of Rudyard Kipling, that Treasure Island has a realism
as vivid as Robinson Crusoe, that Mrs. Wood's _Village Tragedy may
rank with Silas Marner_, that Howells and Besant, Ouida and Rhoda
Broughton, Henry James and Mrs. Burnett, are as good reading as we
need, that Bret Harte has struck a line as original as that of Dickens,
and that George Meredith has an eye for character which reminds us

not seldom of Thackeray and Fielding--I do not dispute it. I am no
one-book man or one-style man, but enjoy what is good in all. But I am
thinking of the settled judgment and the visible practice of the vast
English-speaking and English-reading world. And judging by that test,
we cannot shut our eyes to this, that we have no living romancer who
has yet achieved that world-wide place of being read and welcomed in
every home where the language is heard or known. George Meredith
has been a prolific writer for thirty years and Stevenson for twenty
years; but their most ardent admirers, among whom I would be counted,
can hardly claim for them a triumph so great.
We come, then, to this, that for the first time during this whole century
now ending, English literature can count no living novelist whom the
world, and not merely the esoteric circle of cultured Englishmen,
consents to stamp with the mark of accepted fame. One is too eccentric,
obscure, and subtle, another too local and equal, a third too sketchy,
this one too unreal, that one far too real, too obvious, too prosaic, to
win and to hold the great public by their spell. Critics praise them,
friends utter rhapsodies, good judges enjoy them--but their fame is
partial, local, sectional, compared to the fame of Scott, Dickens, or
Thackeray.
What is the cause? I do not hesitate to say it is that we have
over-trained our taste, we are overdone with criticism, we are too
systematically drilled, there is far too much moderate literature and far
too fastidious a standard in literature. Everyone is afraid to let himself
go, to offend the conventions, or to raise a sneer. It is the inevitable
result of uniformity in education and discipline in mental training.
Millions can write good grammar, easy and accurate sentences, and
imitate the best examples of the age. Education has been driven at high
pressure into literary lines, and a monotonous correctness in literary
taste has been erected into a moral code. Tens of thousands of us can
put the finger on a bit of exaggeration, or a false light in the local
colour, or a slip in perfect realism. The result is a photographic
accuracy of detail, a barren monotony of commonplace, and the
cramping of real inventive genius. It is the penalty of giving ourselves
up to mechanical culture.

If another Dickens were to break out to-morrow with the riotous
tomfoolery of Pickwick at the trial, or of Weller and Stiggins, a
thousand lucid criticisms would denounce it as vulgar balderdash.
Glaucus and Nydia at Pompeii would be called melodramatic rant. The
House of the Seven Gables would be rejected by a sixpenny magazine,
and Jane Eyre would not rise above a common "shocker." Hence the
enormous growth of the Kodak school of romance--the snap-shots at
everyday realism with a hand camera. We know how it is done. A
woman of forty, stout, plain, and dull, sits in an ordinary parlour