A History of English Literature

with minute and conscientious accuracy, an accuracy more complete than that
of Mrs. Gaskell, who was in large degree her model; and as a result her
books, from the beginning, are masterpieces of the best sort of realism.
The characters, life, and backgrounds of many of them are taken from her
own Warwickshire acquaintances and country, and for the others she made the
most painstaking study. More fundamental than her sympathy, indeed, perhaps
even from the outset, is her instinct for scientific analysis. Like a
biologist or a botanist, and with much more deliberate effort than most of
her fellow-craftsmen, she traces and scrutinizes all the acts and motives
of her characters until she reaches and reveals their absolute inmost
truth. This objective scientific method has a tendency to become sternly
judicial, and in extreme cases she even seems to be using her weak or
imperfect characters as deterrent examples. Inevitably, with her
disposition, the scientific tendency grew upon her. Beginning with
'Middlemarch' (1872), which is perhaps her masterpiece, it seems to some
critics decidedly too preponderant, giving to her novels too much the
atmosphere of psychological text-books; and along with it goes much
introduction of the actual facts of nineteenth century science. Her really
primary instinct, however, is the moral one. The supremacy of moral law may
fairly be called the general theme of all her works; to demonstrating it
her scientific method is really in the main auxiliary; and in spite of her
accuracy it makes of her more an idealist than a realist. With unswerving
logic she traces the sequence of act and consequence, showing how
apparently trifling words and deeds reveal the springs of character and how
careless choices and seemingly insignificant self-indulgences may
altogether determine the issues of life. The couplet from Aeschylus which
she prefixed to one of the chapters of 'Felix Holt' might stand at the
outset of all her work:
'Tis law as steadfast as the throne of Zeus--
Our days are heritors of days gone by.
Her conviction, or at least her purpose, is optimistic, to show that by
honest effort the sincere and high-minded man or woman may win happiness in
the face of all difficulties and disappointments; but her own actual
judgment of life was somber, not altogether different from that which
Carlyle repudiated in 'The Everlasting Yea'; so that the final effect of
her books, though stimulating, is subdued rather than cheerful.
In technique her very hard work generally assured mastery. Her novels are
firmly knit and well-proportioned, and have the inevitable movement of life
itself; while her great scenes equal those of Thackeray in dramatic power
and, at their best, in reserve and suggestiveness. Perhaps her chief
technical faults are tendencies to prolixity and too much expository
analysis of characters and motives.
SECONDARY MIDDLE AND LATER VICTORIAN NOVELISTS. Several of the other
novelists of the mid-century and later produced work which in a period of
less prolific and less highly developed art would have secured them high
distinction. Charles Kingsley (1819-1875) spent most of his life, by his
own self-renouncing choice, as curate and rector of the little Hampshire
parish of Eversley, though for some years he also held the professorship of
history at Cambridge. An aggressive Protestant, he drifted in his later
years into the controversy with Cardinal Newman which opened the way for
Newman's 'Apologia.' From the outset, Kingsley was an enthusiastic worker
with F. D. Maurice in the Christian Socialist movement which aimed at the
betterment of the conditions of life among the working classes. 'Alton
Locke' and 'Yeast,' published in 1849, were powerful but reasonable and