A History of English Literature

lived in London with her mother in the greatest seclusion, occupied with an
ascetic devotion to the English Church, with her poetry, and with the
composition, secondarily, of prose articles and short stories. Her poetry
is limited almost entirely to the lyrical expression of her spiritual
experiences, much of it is explicitly religious, and all of it is religious
in feeling. It is tinged with the Pre-Raphaelite mystic medievalism; and a
quiet and most affecting sadness is its dominant trait; but the power and
beauty of a certain small part of it perhaps entitle her to be called the
chief of English poetesses.
THE NOVEL. THE EARLIER SECONDARY NOVELISTS. To Scott's position of
unquestioned supremacy among romancers and novelists Charles Dickens
succeeded almost immediately on Scott's death, but certain secondary early
Victorian novelists may be considered before him. In the lives of two of
these, Bulwer-Lytton and Benjamin Disraeli, there are interesting
parallels. Both were prominent in politics, both began writing as young men
before the commencement of the Victorian period, and both ended their
literary work only fifty years later. Edward Bulwer, later created Sir
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and finally raised to the peerage as Lord Lytton
(1803-1873), was almost incredibly fluent and versatile. Much of his life a
member of Parliament and for a while of the government, he was a vigorous
pamphleteer. His sixty or more really literary works are of great variety;
perhaps the best known of them are his second novel, the trifling 'Pelham'
(1828), which inaugurated a class of so-called 'dandy' novels, giving
sympathetic presentation to the more frivolous social life of the 'upper'
class, and the historical romances 'The Last Days of Pompeii' (1834) and
'Harold' (1843). In spite of his real ability, Bulwer was a poser and
sentimentalist, characteristics for which he was vigorously ridiculed by
Thackeray. Benjamin Disraeli, [Footnote: The second syllable is pronounced
like the word 'rail' and has the accent, so that the whole name is
Disraily.] later Earl of Beaconsfield (1804-1881), a much less prolific
writer, was by birth a Jew. His immature earliest novel, 'Vivian Grey'
(1826), deals, somewhat more sensibly, with the same social class as
Bulwer's 'Pelham.' In his novels of this period, as in his dress and
manner, he deliberately attitudinized, a fact which in part reflected a
certain shallowness of character, in part was a device to attract attention
for the sake of his political ambition. After winning his way into
Parliament he wrote in 1844-7 three political novels,' Coningsby,' 'Sybil,'
and 'Tancred,' which set forth his Tory creed of opposition to the
dominance of middle-class Liberalism. For twenty-five years after this he
was absorbed in the leadership of his party, and he at last became Prime
Minister. In later life he so far returned to literature as to write two
additional novels.
Vastly different was the life and work of Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855).
Miss Bronte, a product and embodiment of the strictest religious sense of
duty, somewhat tempered by the liberalizing tendency of the time, was the
daughter of the rector of a small and bleak Yorkshire village, Haworth,
where she was brought up in poverty. The two of her sisters who reached
maturity, Emily and Anne, both still more short-lived than she, also wrote
novels, and Emily produced some lyrics which strikingly express the stern,
defiant will that characterized all the children of the family. Their lives
were pitifully bare, hard, and morbid, scarcely varied or enlivened except
by a year which Charlotte and Emily spent when Charlotte was twenty-six in
a private school in Brussels, followed on Charlotte's part by a return to
the same school for a year as teacher. In 1847 Charlotte's novel 'Jane
Eyre' (pronounced like the word 'air') won a great success. Her three later
novels are less significant. In 1854 she was married to one of her father's
curates, a Mr. Nicholls, a sincere but narrow-minded man. She was happy in