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

Novelists of the 'Seventies 31His influence on the 'seventies was quite clear anddefinite. He brought no new thing into the Englishnovel; he rather perfected a very good old thing. Hemade the Plot of so devastating an importance that allthe novelists of the 'seventies felt compelled to have somesort of dealings with it—and a number of them dealtwith nothing else.On the other hand he hampered himself with one of thecurses of the 'seventies' novel, and that was the quite intolerabledemon of Propaganda, the demon that almostthrottled poor Charles Reade, the demon who wasdrowned once and for all in a butt of the selfish amoralindifference of the early 'nineties. Collins, whether it wasthe abuse of private asylums in The Woman in White, themarriage laws of Man and Wife, the injustice to theprostitute in The New Magdalen, anti-vivisection inHeart and Science, or drunken nurses in Basil, could notcheck his most inartistic moral indignation. This moralindignation is the curse of the English novel of the'seventies; it is the element that makes it hardest for usto be patient with many of the liveliest writers of thatperiod.It is interesting to notice, however, that the propagandaand the melodrama almost invariably go handin hand. The pill is disguised with jam, the contrasts arepainted in most violent colours, the sheep and the goatsare separated more fiercely than either Thackeray orDickens ever dreamed of dividing them. In any casethere could not be clearer examples than some of thesenovels of Wilkie Collins if we wish to see the devastatingeffect on art that an honest determination to do good toyour fellow-mortals can have.Two other melodramatists should be mentioned inpassing, Whyte-Melville and James Payn.Of Whyte-Melville I shall say very little and for two