Some Characteristics of English Fiction

North American Review, 1 April 1900, pages 504-517, 5,995 words

I.

It is always difficult to realize that circumstance is unstable and fleeting and that a dream outlasts an empire. Two years ago an Englishman died amid such vociferous testimony of his greatness that he seemed certain of eternal remembrance. But in spite of our resolution to remember, a veil of dust already divides us from him; his name, though vivid in the stone, is vague in the heart, for the heart only remembers ideas and dreams. A few years before, an Irishman died, abandoned by his country amid all circumstance of political disaster. But circumstance is unsubstantial and transitory and the light that he carried on earth seems merely to have been lifted into the sky. One man sprang from an ancient civilization whose life has passed out of dream into circumstance and facts, the other from a race still subject to dreams.

In Elizabethan times England was young, blithe, careless, interested in ideas rather than in facts, and neither in social customs nor in adventures in the South Seas did our early poets find subjects for their poems; the human heart was their adventure, and the Elizabethans span their poems out of the passions. A nation in its youth may be compared with a fountain which, bursting through the loose earth, scatters all the summer a refreshing brightness amid embowering trees. The birds come down from the branches and drink, with sweet movement of head and throat, and flowers brighten beneath the refreshing shower. The sun’s heat cakes the earth, but still the water flows, loosening it, and the grass and flowers renew themselves until the first frost marks a deadly change in the season. But even at the end of September, in October, after the first frosts, summer may come again; a gentle, inactive summer, with here and there a day that is most June-like. And a beautiful St. Martin’s summer happened at the beginning of this century. Our fountain of song burst forth again, the late summer lasted until nearly two-thirds of the century were done, and in the seventies were seen the last days of summer weather. November came with the eighties, a wheezy, asthmatic bard with gray in his beard. In December, in the nineties, the English garden was white; the diminishing water from the fountain ascended for the last time; and now it stands stiff and cold in the air!

There comes a moment in the life of every nation when it crystallizes, and England crystallized with Cromwell. An iron wind came out of the north, and Milton’s magnificence is stern and cold; the feet of the colossus are beginning to freeze; the month is September, and his verse is perceptibly chiller than the warm, live stream of Elizabethan poetry. The frost continued; upon the first thin ice Pope did some excellent figure-skating; and it took fifty years or more to melt this first ice. Then spring came again, or was it a second summer which happened in our literature at the beginning of the century? No more to a nation than to an individual man does spring come again; the most we can hope for is a second summer. The fountain showered as joyfully as before, but there was sleep in the drooping boughs, and the water that surged, babbled and sang and flowed in noisy and deep streams had lost something of its primal freshness; nor was the temperature of the water equable. Keats is like a hot bath, Wordsworth is tepid, Byron steams like a glass of toddy, and Coleridge is drugged with various narcotics. Shelley is the sublime exception, and in the middle of our St. Martin’s summer he stands a symbol of eternal youth. The greatness of none of these poets is in dispute; it is the sudden differences which they present that remind us that the month is October; and the poets that followed them are poets of the period. There are too many rectory gardens in Tennyson for the delight of any age except the Victorian age, and we cannot think of Rossetti singing in Elizabethan times; a little perhaps in the Italian Renaissance. Swinburne is our last universal poet; Atalanta is dateless; she seems to live in the eternal woods and hills of the morning, with the music of the Pastoral Symphony. The moralizing in “Jenny” is surely as modish as her crinoline, which advertised “dainties through the dirt;” and the Sonnets are gold and enamel, curiously inwrought ornaments, rather than the spontaneous singing coming straight out of the heart of the springtime.

In the seventies many a pretty song passed unheeded, and it was not until the nineties, until Tennyson died and Swinburne’s song had grown fainter, that people began to feel the absence of a great poet in London. For eighty years there had been an unbroken line of great poets, and suddenly there was not one; a frosty silence shivered in the ear, and we were all looking through the wintry woods where the waters stood like a great white stalk in the air. Here and there a few drops trickled through the ice, and these were collected in cups of many various designs, and whoever discovered a little muddy pool raised joyful cries, and the drinkers did not perceive that it was not spring but rain water they were drinking; water stagnant in some worn places, diluted perhaps with a few tricklings from the fountain. It was circulated in flasks of old Italian design, and in common tin flasks that the soldiers use. The palate had deteriorated, and in proportion as the water was brackish and filthy it was greedily swallowed. It suited a coarsened palate, and that this should happen in England, where poetry is a national art, is as strange as if music were to die out of the German ear, and Bayreuth were to mistake the disconnected scrapings of a Hungarian band for a Prelude by Bach.

Il.

Our youth began in verse, and it is in verse that England has best told the troubled throbbing of the heart and the yearnings and visions which the mind follows after. From the beginning prose went to earn a mercenary wage in the subaltern employment of facts; and it is nearly true to say that only one English prose writer has lifted prose out of its anchorage in facts, and with sails woven out of noble harmonies sailed it down the star-lit streams of dream and vision; others have done this occasionally and partially, but only one has done it continuously. Only by one has prose been considered as verse has always been considered in England, as a medium through which we may obtain dream and ecstasy, as we attain dream and ecstasy through music and painting. The mission of prose in England has always been limited to the service of real life, whereas the mission of painting and poetry and music has always had for its object the raising of our souls out of the lethargies of real life into a supersensuous heaven where the horizons are thrown back, and the soul is conscious of nothing but itself.

But the servitude of English prose to the things of this world began in the Elizabethan time, when men’s eyes did not see so clearly the things of this world as they do now, and so the early servitude of prose was a comparatively light one; and though the English essay occupies an inferior position to the poem, whether dramatic or narrative, it still holds through the genius of Pater, Landor and De Quincey, a high place in our literature — a place so high that if all our prose literature were destroyed except the works of our essayists and translators, the inferiority between English prose and English verse would probably not strike any one except the discerning critic. It is our prose fiction that brings into striking relief the inferiority of the minds of those who worked in prose to the minds of those whose work is in verse; and that English prose fiction should be the weakest part of our literature is consonant with all that has been advanced here regarding the change which came over the national temper about two hundred and fifty years ago. Prose fiction appeared in England about a hundred years after Cromwell; it was a child therefore of our middle age. Twins, I should say, were born to us, for “Clarissa Harlowe” and “Tom Jones” appeared simultaneously. But the twins differed exceedingly from each other; one threw back to the early literature; the other dictated the form which the English novel was to take down to the present day. For so far as we are aware, there exists no instance in our literature of a deviation from the “Tom Jones” type of novel to the “Clarissa Harlowe” type of novel, and to appreciate the shallowness of the tradition which has made our fiction, and the depth of the tradition which has made our poetry, we have only to understand the essential differences which divide these novels. That neither was written by a great writer does not affect the purpose of this article, which is to classify, rather than to stimulate our admiration for Fielding and for Richardson.

That there are some who cannot survive the loss of purity is the moral idea which Richardson’s tale embodies. It is said of the ermine that it dies if its immaculate fur becomes stained, and Clarissa’s purity is as sacred to her; and though she has no fault to repent — if she had, the tale would be impossible — she dies because the sense of bodily purity is essential to her. The scheme at first sight seems monastic and crude, but if we look into our hearts we find it there sure enough. It is beyond reason that we should think, yet we can think, if only for a moment, that the snow is purer over which the shadow of an eagle’s wings has not fallen than the snow across which the shadow has once fled. So the tale is the certain symbol of a moral idea, and symbolism is the characteristic of the literature which preceded it rather than the literature which followed it. Are not Shakespeare’s Tragedies all symbols? and that the moral idea is often so deeply hidden in the work that it escapes the notice of the casual reader, that it is so deeply hidden that it escapes the observance of so acute a critic as Mr. Quiller Couch, should not deceive us. It is always there, and our appreciation of the beauty of the tale will be heightened by finding it.

On a former occasion when this important literary question was being debated in the press, I remember that Mr. Quiller Couch, to my surprise, challenged me to point to a moral idea in the Iliad. At the moment I was weary of the argument, and too indolent to answer him. But, surely, Helen is a symbol of man’s constant pursuit of beauty, and that Homer was aware of the symbolism of his tale, can hardly be doubted. Why else should he have made the old men say when Helen passes them: “After all, she was worth it.” These are not the words, but I remember a scene when a number of old men grouped on the wall see Helen passing and in a phrase equivalent to that which I have marked by inverted commas make clear the symbolism of the epic. And it is this symbolism which makes the Iliad the story of all human life; divest the story of its moral idea, and it will be the story for the Greeks alone; for beautiful verses written about a merely romantic episode are never immortal verses; the verbal felicities in little literature are as numerous as those in great literature, and by felicities of diction it is impossible to distinguish one from the other. The certain sign by which we may distinguish the great from the small in literature is by asking ourselves if a story is symbolic; if it be a symbol, that is to say, if it be the outward sign of a moral idea.

III.

The publication of “Clarissa Harlowe” happened just before, or just after, the publication of “Tom Jones,” and those novels suggest the last milestone of the old, and the first milestone of the new road. The old road was tragedy — that is to say, a story which symbolizes a moral idea; and the new road was comedy — that is to say, the study of the appearances of life, the habit in which man lives; and manners were chosen by England, and tragedy was chosen by France. Richardson discovered disciples in France but none in England. L’Abbé Prévost is one instance of the influence of Richardson in France, but the influence of Richardson on the French novel is not the subject of this article.

That England should choose comedy was inevitable, for England had already produced tragedy, and when once an art has been developed to the highest point in any country it declines, and then disappears from that country forever. So England paid no heed to Richardson, and with Fielding turned to manners for change and relaxation; and since Fielding the English novel has been abandoned to the notation of the manners and customs of the different classes. And so absorbed has England been in her love of the novel of manners that criticism has forgotten that all literature which relies on manners for subject-matter cannot outlive the social aspect which it describes. It cannot outlive itself; its life is the life of one generation; after that it lives the life of a ghost; it becomes the history of trivialities which have passed away. And glimmerings of this truth float about Thackeray’s remark that no one since Fielding had dared to paint the portrait of a complete man. The remark is in constant use in the newspapers, the writers of the literary article quote it always approvingly, but it may be doubted if any one of these writers ever considered the remark; it is doubtful if Thackeray considered it; it is just one of those casual remarks which the public delights in, for it compromises no position, and its meaning is uncertain and vague. It is one of those remarks which save people from the trouble of thinking, of seeing to the end; it is like a pleasant cloud, it passes overhead, casting a little shadow, and the conversation can take another turn. But the time is opportune to consider the remark more severely, and the first thing that strikes us is the expression “dared to paint,” for it would not have occurred to Thaekeray to use these words if he had been speaking of a poet or an historian, for poets and historians had not abandoned their right to set down their whole thought on paper. So the word “dared” defines Thackeray’s conception of the novel as a subaltern and mercenary literary form whose province and limitations have been settled beyond further dispute. And the application of the adjective “complete” to a man’s portrait seems to us to indicate a mind naturally prone to superficial thinking. Pater could not have written a portrait of a complete man, for he would have known that it is impossible to paint the complete portrait of a man; and then Fielding’s portrait of “Tom Jones” is singularly incomplete. It would have seemed to Pater if he had written on the subject to be summary, and singularly on the surface, whereas Thackeray seems to have seen no more than the average man sces in the book; what struck him in reading “Tom Jones” is what strikes the casual mind. He seems to have thought that Fielding had painted the portrait of a complete man (I don’t remember if the words used are “complete portrait of a man” or the “portrait of a complete man”), because Fielding had spoken openly of Tom Jones's sexual instincts. The hungry and the lustful man always seems to us the most human, but lust and hunger are not especially human qualities. The common bull terrier may be as lustful and as hungry as any man; the qualities which man does not share in equal degree with the common bull terrier are a conscience and an intelligence; and as Fielding wished to write comedy, not tragedy, he omitted all mention of a conscience. In one of the little moralities which preface the chapters the word no doubt occurs, but he omitted to make us feel that Tom Jones ever suffered from a conscience, and on the question of Tom’s intelligence it is not probable that Fielding ever bestowed even a passing thought; his artistic sense led him aright and he instinctively omitted every faintest indication of these essentially human qualities in his Portrait of a Complete Man; he wisely omitted them, for he wished to write comedy, not tragedy, and psychology is not compatible with comedy.

Thackeray’s remark about Tom Jones is characteristic of all his remarks: it is at once shallow and evasive, and therefore popular in the newspapers. If he had said: “Fielding’s portrait is singularly incomplete, for it is comprised entirely of lust and physical courage, but as these are immortal instincts the man lives, in the shallows of animal life, it is true, but he lives,” he would have succeeded in defining the merits of Fielding’s novel in words which would not have been freely quoted in the newspapers.

“Tom Jones” is drawn in such fine, bold outline that it takes as high a place in literature as the drawings of Rowlandson and Gillray in pictorial art. But this by the way. The character of the novel which it is more to our purpose to notice is Squire Western, for on him hangs the long tradition of our fiction. Squire Western is described in the mere habit of his life; from him we learn facts concerning the squirearchy of 1750 — how they swore, and how they drank, and how they were immersed in sport beyond all other considerations. He is the novel of manners which, at the beginning of this century, was carried to its conclusion by Miss Austen; for consciously or unconsciously, this lady resolved to carry to its logical conclusion the novel which Fielding had indicated in “Tom Jones.” The casual reader perceives no character resembling Tom Jones among her characters, and he will seek vainly for a Squire Western; the casual reader is deceived by a difference of appearance, and he will have to make an effort if he would understand why a change from the drunken squire to the demure domesticities of Mr. Woodhouse does not constitute any change of intention or principle.

Miss Austen’s genius lay on the negative side, in an unfailing sense of her limitations, and on the affirmative side in a lively sense of the pathos of domestic life. Some one has called her a prose Shakespeare, and this remark has been almost as much quoted in the newspapers as Thackeray’s complete man. It would be difficult to differentiate between the two remarks; they are perfect examples of the phrases which men devise as a means of escape from thought. Was it not Lord Macaulay who called Miss Austen a prose Shakespeare? Even when we have imagined Shakespeare’s poetry turned into prose we are still thinking of works that are the opposite to Miss Austen’s. For as has been already said, every one of Shakespeare’s tragedies symbolizes a human passion, whereas the genius of Miss Austen is that no faintest trace of passion should appear. The author of this strange remark must have been merely aware of some extraordinary excellence, the exact nature of which escaped him, and it is such vague admiration that a work of art provokes in the common heart; we stop to admire, and to ponder at the power of art to awaken reverence even in the mind which fails to understand.

Still more than Fielding’s, Miss Austen’s genius was to confine herself to the representation of man in the habit of his life, unmoved by human passions; and it is our sense of the tragedy beneath the treacherous calm that induces us to read the three pages which she devotes to the discussion of which lady should get into the carriage first, and the endless disquisitions of an elderly gentleman on the excellencies of gruel as an evening beverage. Never is the mask dropped. If it were, though only for a moment, the mystery of the mask could never be recaptured. It is Miss Austen’s plausive lying that induces us to bear with her for a little, and allows us, when we put a book of hers down, to say that her novels are as perfect as they are tedious. Miss Austen dared everything; she was far more daring than Fielding, for she dared to be tiresome, and to dare that is the surest sign of genius.

In limiting the novel of manners strictly to manners, rivalry with Miss Austen was impossible. To say less than she said was to say nothing at all. On the other side of Miss Austen, the novel of instinct and of passion — over the threshold of which Richardson had merely ventured — was beyond Thackeray’s reach, so he did what his personal limitations and the circumstances of his life willed him to do, he introduced exciting events into the novel of manners. Becky Sharp is mildly melodramatic; we see her merely as we see a fly buzzing in a glass; of the workings of her mind we know nothing. In Tom Jones, Fielding omitted all qualities except lust and courage; Thackeray omits both from his portrait of a woman, and he does not include either a conscience or an intelligence. Being a woman, physical courage might be deemed unessential, but a sexual temperament is necessary in an adventuress, for to succeed in gallantry a natural taste for gallantry is requisite. Shakespeare no doubt had this in his mind when he conceived Cleopatra in the rhapsody of all her passion, and Mme. La Pompadour, who can speak with the certainty of experience on such a matter, writes to her friend, Madame Hudon, in terms too eighteenth-century for quotation in the nineteenth. We imagine Becky Sharp as we please, a cold or a passionate woman; and only by exterior signs do we surmise what her intimacy with Lord Steyne may have been. The narrative never reaches a higher intensity than drawing-room gossip: the bills are not paid, and his lordship calls every afternoon, etc. And the husband, who might have stood for a fine portrait of a wittol, is rehabilitated before the admiring gaze of the Conventions when he dashes the brooches in the face of the prostrate lord. This scene has been much admired, but those who have admired it have neglected to give the reasons for their admiration; it is surely no more than one of those extraneous scenes resting on no psychological foundation, which litter the second-rate literature of the world.

The merit of “Vanity Fair” is in the design, in the placing of the characters, in the ingenuity with which the parts are linked together. But if we consider the quality of the mind reflected in this book, we become aware that it is at once trivial and commonplace. Fielding has been compared to Gillray and to Rowlandson. It would be difficult to show that Thackeray’s merits are greater than those of Leech or Du Maurier. There is probably not a thought in the little moralities with which Fielding prefixes his chapters which Turgenieff or Balzac would have taken the trouble to write down. His reflections on life are commonplace enough, but they are not obsequious, like Thackeray’s. Thackeray did not reflect the mind of the club: he identified himself with it, with the deadly mind of St. James’s Street. He is spoken of as a satirist. Well, he twitted young ladies with wanting to get married, but why should they not want to get married? His general outlook on life seems to be that if their mammas would allow them to marry the young men their hearts sighed for, the last reproach that could be legitimately urged against society would be removed.

The question whether the novelist should or should not comment upon his characters is a favorite theme with the writers of the literary articles in the newspapers, and the theme is suitable for the writer’s purpose, for it is just one of those literary externalities which the casual reader can understand and be interested in. Nothing he likes more than that literature should be presented to him in the light of a card trick. You shuffle this way, and count ten from the king, etc. Narrate the facts, refrain from comment. That is how a superior modern fiction is written. And so the casual reader is happily led into a vague belief that literature is progressing; that the way to write perfect fiction has perhaps been found out. If the literary writer were to explain that a story cannot be written without comment, and that if it were done it would be intolerable as Bradshaw, and that it is not the abundance nor the paucity of comment but the amount of intellect that finds its way into the comment that matters, the excitement of the casual reader would not be nearly so intense. He is aware that his intelligence is not deep, and that it cannot be increased, so he takes refuge in the cloud, he follows the illusion, the “Wild Duck.” After all, who knows? “Perhaps the trick has been discovered.”

The measure of a writer’s intelligence transpires as much in his characters as in his comments, and no more. He may have more faculty in one direction than in another, but the true critic is never deceived; he reads the barrenness of the writer’s mind though his comments are reduced, as in Maupassant, to a few phrases, and he divines the great bulk of Flaubert’s mind in a single phrase; and he reads Balzac’s universal mind as well in his characters as in those multitudinous discourses, so numerous that it would be vain to attempt a summary.

Dickens, Thackeray’s contemporary, was a man of a deeper and a more richly colored temperament, a man of genius, but one whose genius did not meet with circumstances favorable to an intimate and energetic development. He partakes so largely of the nature of his time that it is open to doubt he achieved any serious literature. In the end it comes to this, that the English novelist does not occupy a higher place in literature than the Italian operatic composer does in music. A story is told of Rossini which might be very well told of Dickens. Rossini had been to hear Wagner, and meeting a friend, he said, sighing, “I too was gifted, and if I had been brought up in Germany I might have written music.” Rossini knew the truth; he knew that his natural gifts were of a very high order, but they were uncultivated, and he knew they would remain uncultivated because he was wanting in energy of mind. Dickens lived in a time when England had grown inaccessible to ideas, in an age in which facts alone seemed to be worth acquiring, and it is to his credit that in an honest or a simple and unsuspicious way he seems to have been aware of the materializing influences at work, that a second crystallization had begun in England. Mr. Gradgrind is not a great, clear vision of the century’s end, but in a limited way Mr. Gradgrind shows that Dickens was not incapable of philosophic speculation. But a man’s vision is proportioned to the light of his time, and it is impossible to imagine an English Victorian writer creating such instinctive men and women as Bazaroff, Helene, Irene, or seeing his race with that clear vision with which Turgenieff saw Russia, or re-thinking all the moral and intellectual ideas of Europe with the swiftness and prolonged power of Balzac. Fettered in a tradition, bad as that which held opera back until Wagner broke it, Dickens could not look humanity full in the face and allow his soul to flow out upon the paper. The English law of fiction was that man had to be considered as a joke or a humdrum creature of habit. Dickens chose the former as Miss Austen had chosen the latter; Dickens could be incisive and poignant; he could even lift a fold of the veil, for “under the cover of laughter” half a truth may be allowed to pass, but if the instincts were forbidden, and if there were no prose examples showing how they might be utilized, landscape was free to his imagination, and it was in places that Dickens’s genius found an outlet. He introduced the spiritual life of places into English fiction; Balzac had done this in “Seraphita,” but in Balzac we find everything; in other writers we find this and that quality. All that is spiritual in London found expression in “Bleak House” and “The Old Curiosity Shop;” the sanctity of the English landscape rises up in the pages of “Barnaby Rudge.” Dickens was a great visionary, living in a time when the soul was in eclipse; living at almost any other time, his characters would have bulked up in the tragic masses of Rembrandt’s imagination.

IV.

A large part of English time is given up to the reading of novels, and the supply has always been found equal to the demand; in England novelists are as plentiful as the common rabbit, and nearly as prolific, so it will not be assumed that if I do not speak of all our distinguished writers I have not shown that English novels are made of violent and episodical incidents or of descriptions of the manners and customs of the different classes. Of Scott, Reade, Trollope and Stevenson, I do not propose to speak; I expect some assistance from my reader, who is probably acquainted with these writers better than I am; he has already run their works over in his mind, and has decided if among them there is to be found a tale symbolic of a moral idea. He has probably decided if a symbolical novel is to be found among women writers. He has decided, no doubt, wisely in his own mind, but on this point I will hazard a few remarks, for in aesthetics there are few points more interesting to ponder than woman’s inferiority to man. The average woman seems so much more intelligent than the average man. Her appreciations of a book, a picture, a symphony, are more interesting than his. The woman is at least alert and sympathetic, the man is stolidly indifferent. It is quite true that in the ordinary intercourse of life it is difficult to perceive man’s superiority. It is not until the hand is laid to the work that it manifests itself. Only in the art of acting, and perhaps in that of singing, is woman the equal of man. Her poetry is as inferior to Shakespeare’s or Shelley’s as her music is to Beethoven, and it is as impossible to think of her writing, “The Human Comedy” as it is to think of her painting Michael Angelo’s “Last Judgment” or carving the statue of Victory in the Louvre. Women have written charming poems, and painted some charming pictures, but none except perhaps Miss Austen has achieved an artistic personality; yes, and perhaps Mme. Morizot. In looking at a picture by Mme. Morizot I have often asked myself if it did not contain a grace more delicate and touching than the graces which abound in the pictures of her great brother-in-law, whose art she carried with many lovely modifications across her fan. Often I have asked myself if the poems of Christina Rossetti were not more sincere than her brother’s, if the emotion in them did not come straighter from the heart than the emotions which writhe about the spiral staircases of “The House of Life.” Possibly they do, but the fact remains that one achieved a poetic personality and the other did not.

It is with diffidence that I intervene in this discussion, which always provokes protest; were it possible I would write only upon subjects upon which all men are agreed, but to do so would be, to borrow a phrase from Matthew Arnold, “to lie with them in the clean straw of their intellectual habits.” It has been said that woman is inferior to man because man has oppressed her in the past; that now she is free and educated she will show that she is his equal in intelligence. Educated! Again the cloud, the illusion, the “Wild Duck,” anything rather than courageous thought. The reason of man’s oppression of woman in the past could only be because she was his natural inferior, and what has existed for a hundred thousand years will not be altered by any system of education, however carefully devised. The mare and the stallion are nearly equal in speed, in endurance, in courage; the dog and the bitch are equal; the bull is manifestly superior to the cow in all these qualities, and the stag is still more manifestly superior to the hind. Why these things should be is Nature’s secret; and possibly the stag and the hind present as exact an image as we shall find among animals of man’s relation to woman.

It would be as vain to seek a symbolic novel among women as to seek a religion. Women occupy in art exactly the same place as they do in religion; they worship very prettily the gods that men create for them. They make very good saints, and they carry our ideas very gracefully across their fans. The Brontës wrote some admirable novels, melodramatic and social, but is it necessary to point out that “Jane Eyre” is not a symbol of a moral idea? That “Villette” is charming, and that “Wuthering Heights” is melodramatic? George Eliot tried to think like a man, and produced admirable counterfeits of his thoughts in wax-work. So far her novels may be said to be symbolical. Are Adam Bede and Arthur and the facetious farmer’s wife more living than the figures in any wax-work show? They are dumpty and doll-like, their eyes are fixed, and their skins are sallow and reddened. Maggie Tulliver seems for a moment like the embodiment of an ethical principle, but the story is interrupted by a flood, and the critic asks if the subject of the book is Maggie’s temperament or the rising of the Floss. Even religion has not won the English novel from its original character; neither here nor in America has religion made a single convert from Fielding; none has had the strength to break away from the raking and hoeing in the beds of rural and urban manners and build again upon the passions. In the English novel religion is lost sight of in the desire to distinguish between Roman Catholics and Baptists, and in intention the religious novel is the same as the social novel. In England the intention is to distinguish between the baronet and the grocer; across the Atlantic to distinguish between Americans who have been to Paris and those who have stayed at home.

I stop without having said all. England has produced the richest poetical literature in the world, and in Shakespeare, in Milton, in Shelley, in Wordsworth she will find her true immortality. Her empire will pass away and be forgotten like the Babylonian and the Persian, for the heart only remembers ideas and dreams.

GEORGE MOORE.