the most eccentric of human beings." He has overlooked the fact that to us all these people are indifferent, nay, for the most part, they are mean and repulsive. No real artist expends his skill exclusively on such persons.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GENERAL.-B. Tuckermann, A History of English Prose Fiction; Percy Russell, A Guide to British and American Novels (1894); Jeaffreson, Novels and Novelists; Julia Kavanagh, English Women of Letters.

The collections of Ballantyne (1824 and later) and Mrs. Barbauld contain most of the novels of the period.

RADCLIFFE.-Walter Scott's Introductions to her novels in the Ballantyne Collection. MARY GODWIN.—Mrs. Marshall, Life and Letters; Lucy M. Rossetti; Mrs. Shelley.

WILLIAM GODWIN.-Kegan Paul, William Godwin.

BURNEY.-An essay by Macaulay; her chief novels with introduction by Annie R. Ellis; W. C. Ward, The Diary and Letters of Madme. D'Arblay.

INCHBALD.-Memoirs by Boaden.

EDGEWORTH.-Helen Zimmern, in Eminent Women; Cornhill Magazine of 1882. AUSTEN.-G. Smith, Life of Jane Austen; J. E. Austen Leigh (her nephew), A Memoir of Jane Austen; Lord Brabourne, Letters of Jane Austen; Mrs. Malden, Jane Austen (1889).

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CHAPTER II

THE HISTORICAL NOVEL

WALTER SCOTT AND HIS SUCCESSORS

HE change of taste, and the degradation of the historical novel to merely cheap literary ware have in our days banished it from

the ranks of the higher works of art. At the beginning of the nineteenth century and from that time forward, the historical novel played a leading part among highly cultivated readers in England more than elsewhere, and with an ever increasing charm. The founder and chief fosterer of this class of novel, WALTER SCOTT (1771-1832), was not so much impelled by a desire to impart historical learning in a poetical form, as to present to his readers a comprehensive view of those romantic ideas, which, at the beginning of this century, arose out of the numerous changes in intellectual and political life, acting reciprocally upon each other. In England, when all Europe was shaken by the Revolution and by Napoleon, patriotic and intellectual feelings were further deepened by Percy's collection, and Robert Burns's Scotch ballads.

Besides these general and national impulses, Walter Scott was especially affected by German influence, notably by Bürger's ballads, two of which he translated: Lenore and Der wilde Jäger; and by the poems of Goethe's youth, in particular Götz von Berlichingen. This he also translated, and the after effects appear especially in h.s poems. For his allusions to the medieval world he was indebted, though in a very crude form, to the novels of Walpole and Anne Radcliffe, already mentioned (see p. 439).

In the poems of Bürger and Goethe their national stamp pleased their Scotch imitator above all things. The Romanticists (and Scott is the greatest of them) have everywhere combined a taste for foreign nationalities and foreign poetry with their enthusiasm for the past history of their native land. Scott soon perceived his mission, which was to clothe the romantic history of Scotland with the garment of poetry. While still a young man, he absorbed himself, as if in

preparation for his independent poetry of later date, in the primitive treasures of ancient Scottish minstrelsy. The collection entitled Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1803) was the fruit of this delightful study of the popular poetry of his native land.

This was followed between 1805 and 1814 by the poetic narratives entitled Lay of the Last Minstrel, Marmion, Lady of the Lake, Rokeby, and some of less importance. They have not sufficient value as works of art to ensure their immortality. But at the time they appeared, their success was extraordinary, and it was justified by the novelty of this kind of poem: romance in verse. For the metre he was indebted to Coleridge (compare p. 412), and transmitted the same in turn to Byron for his poetic stories. Scott, with his estimable straightforwardness, recognised Byron's superiority as soon as he appeared as an epic poet, and that readily: when the Giaour, Corsair, etc., appeared (1814) Scott ceased to write in verse.

He is indebted for his world-wide fame to the Waverley Novels, so called after the first of the series: Waverley (1814). After this, by means of his historical novels, twenty-nine in all, he contrived to fascinate the European reading-world by his untiring activity, as no writer of romance had ever done before. Here we give a list of the best Waverley Novels: besides the one bearing the name of the series these are: The Monastery, The Abbot, Ivanhoe, Kenilworth, Quentin Durward, Guy Mannering, The Antiquary, The Fortunes of Nigel, The Bride of Lammermoor, The Heart of Midlothian, Woodstock, The Fair Maid of Perth.

In a case like this, where the number of romantic, or at least captivating narratives is so great, there arises the question, "Which of these novels is the best?" We read them in our young days, and most of them have so delighted us that we hardly like to throw the midday glare of criticism upon the beloved dawn of our childhood's memory. One thing is common to them all; the skill of the narrator in inspiring the reader with an interest in the period of which he writes. Almost without any trouble, does this dear friend of our boyhood build up his old, ivy-mantled, battlemented castles with their armoured or wimpled inhabitants, before us. There is not much need for us to ask, if it were exactly thus in England, Scotland, France, or the Holy Land: these men and women are really men and women, almost like Shakespeare's, the men especially: and these dresses, implements, trees, the sky and the earth, the forests and the lakeswe see them all and believe in them all, because the poet has once seen and believed in them all. Of Walter Scott's power of observation, Goethe once declared distinctly, in an appendix to The Fair Maid of Perth: "It is perfect! It is indeed a hand! A certain

plan runs through the whole, and there is not a single line that does not lead to the goal. And what richness of detail, both in the dialogue and in the descriptive narrative, both of which are equally excellent! The scenes and situations are like pictures by Teniers: in their general arrangement they show the height of art, the various figures are strictly true to life, and the whole is carried out with artistic fidelity to the smallest detail, so that nothing is wanting."

The rock on which most of Scott's readers split is just this wealth of detail: the length of his descriptions, especially when speaking of landscapes. This innovation of Mrs. Radcliffe's he has exaggerated beyond measure. In Goethe's time readers had more leisure and more patience, and Goethe himself had no objection to the extensive descriptions introduced by Scott: "He gives me," he says, "much to think of, and I see in him quite a new art, having its own laws.” Goethe discerned at once that with Scott a new power had arisen in literature; the new novel! And he had lived long enough-(Goethe and Scott died in the same year, as friendly correspondents)-to trace its wonderful effects on the writers of romance in Europe. Victor Hugo, in Notre Dame de Paris, the elder Alexandre Dumas, and the Italians Manzoni and Guerrazzi all took Scott as their model. German literature, too, was indebted to him for the flood of historical novels with which our prose-writers have inundated us since the twenties, with varying success. The learned professors who write historical novels, such as Ebers and Dahn, are Scott's latest imitators, but lack his really poetic imagination. Willibald Alexis is his most important successor, in fact, almost his equal.

Scott's novels may be said to belong to that portion of our literary culture which will endure like iron. Many are sinking gradually into the great sea of oblivion, which first swallows up novels: but some will certainly long outlast the century in which they were produced; and of these most probably Kenilworth, Ivanhoe, Quentin Durward, and The Antiquary.

Several of his novels have furnished subjects for the opera; as, for example, The White Lady, The Jewess, and Lucia di Lammermoor.

Besides his stories in verse and novels, Scott has written: Tales of a Grandfather, a kind of History of Scotland for children, and a very mediocre Life of Napoleon, coloured with Toryism,

Walter Scott's life, richer in honours than that of most authors (George IV. honoured knighthood by creating Scott a baronet), and prosperous as it had been, ended sadly. This was partly due to his careless, though liberal mode of living, and his lavish expenditure on his famous estate, Abbotsford (near Edinburgh). The bankruptcy of his publishers, whose partner Scott had become in the

twenties, involved him, in 1827, in a vast load of debt, amounting to about £150,000; and in order to pay it off, he wrought, with superhuman strength of will, to the great detriment of his mental and bodily powers, until his death, which was thereby undoubtedly hastened. He had reduced the debt by one half when death snatched the pen from his hand.

His monument in Edinburgh is one of the most beautiful tokens of homage to the genius of romance that can be found anywhere. With Burns, Scott is one of the patron saints of Scotland.

Scott's life was written by his son-in-law, Lockhart; Elze's biography is the best German work on him.

Historical romance has never again risen to the same height of poetic imagination as that to which it attained in Scott's time. But he has always incited others to imitate him, and it is remarkable that every one of the English novelists of the first rank down to the present day has attempted to do so. Thus Bulwer, in The Last Days of Pompeii, has given us perhaps the most successful of historical novels; Thackeray has trodden the same path in Esmond and other novels; and even Dickens (in Barnaby Rudge), and George Eliot (in Romola), have not been able to resist the charm of this romantic representation of the past.

Among Scott's other successors, a few, at least, deserve mention. First, G. P. R. JAMES (1801-62), who certainly was not behindhand in his repetitions of detailed description and narrative: incomparably his best novel is Darnley. Also HARRISON AINSWORTH (1805-82), whose historical, criminal novel, Jack Sheppard, gives us a not very artistic, yet a most interesting account of this most notorious English malefactor. It has some value for the historian of culture.

The prolific novelist CHARLES READE (1814-84), of whose other novels It is Never Too Late to Mend is the best, has produced some very clever stories, founded on the older history of England: Peg Woffington and Christie Johnstone. He is an imitator of Scott's, but has a very pleasant narrative style of his own.

GEORGE MACDONALD (born in 1824) revived the artistic historical novel very successfully: his novel, St. George and St. Michael, is a pleasant and in places poetical picture, taken from the period of the civil war between Cavaliers and Puritans. In addition, he has written a number of moral novels, the best known of which is David Elginbrod; these are, however, to be considered rather as essays upon moral and religious questions than as purely artistic creations.

CHARLES KINGSLEY (1819-75) was the most important modern representative of the historical novel. As the preacher and spokesman of English "social Christianity" he wrote a number of books, which