R,CHARD MONCKTON MILNES was born in the year - OUDL Home

28 Hugh WalpoleBut it may be that this moral simplicity led also to thestrengthening of creative zest. Unworried by psychologicalsubtleties the novelist could fix his eye on theswift current of events and could allow his characters, likethe Czar's subjects before the war, every sort of freedomsave the political one. We may suppose also that Victorianreaders were not quite so innocent as they seemedand knew a thing or two that their novelists were allowedonly to whisper in their ears.Through all this there was practically no sign of foreigninfluence. The French novel might be read furtively butits significance was never literary. When we read thelives and letters of Thackeray, Dickens, George Eliot,Charlotte Bronte, and Anthony Trollope, we find that all ofthem enjoyed fun and freedom on the continent but neverallowed the novel to be contaminated. French backgroundsare often painted but French morals alwaysreprehended: Charlotte Bronte can give us the life ofBrussels with wonderful vigour, but hers is always anEnglish figure pointing an almost defiant contrast.I said before that this insular morality was leading theEnglish novel away from reality, and the principal dramaof its adventures in the 'seventies lies precisely in this—itsstruggles towards honesty of statement, its fight for anew kind of realism.The men concerned in this battle divide themselvesquite clearly into three groups—the elders who are tooold to learn new tricks, the writers who are still youngenough to be plastic, the youngsters whose work is asyet almost unnoticed by their contemporaries althoughspecially important for ourselves. Of the older novelistsCharles Dickens, Disraeli, Wilkie Collins and AnthonyTrollope stand out in a group of their own. It should notbe the purpose of this paper to emphasise the charactersof men concerning whom already almost too much has been