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

Novelists of the 'Seventies 37zest can do for a novelist. Practically every fault that anovelist can commit Henry Kingsley commits. He is inconsequent,verbose and casual; he is desperately sentimentaland a frantic moralist; he is for ever thrusting hisown opinions and personality before the reader; he usesevery possible device of melodrama and every impossibleone; his characters are so black and so white that theyblind the reader with their simplicity. He adores nobleheroes with brawny chests, athletic parsons, weepingheroines and, worst of all, earls soaked in the traditions ofOxford and Cambridge. He is so proud of being anEnglishman that one blushes for one's patriotism, andhis affection for cold baths deserves all Laurence Oliphant'ssarcasm. He has no technique, no powers of constructionand only a theatrical sense of effect. Nevertheless withall this, his best books survive and survive amazingly.He has neither the priggishness nor the intolerance ofhis brother and he is far, far stronger in the creation ofcharacter. It is indeed his creation of character thatcarries him through. How or why his characters survivehis emotional exposition of them it is difficult to say, butsurvive they do.His two best novels, Geoffrey Hamlyn and Ravenshoe,exhibit all his faults and all his virtues, but I wouldadvise any reader of them not to stop with those twobooks but to experiment farther. The Hillyars and theBurtons and Silcote of Silcotes are becoming, I think, ofincreasing value as they provide pictures, in their tumultuouscasual way, of a London and an England that seemalready historically remote.But it is his own interest in his own subject that givesHenry Kingsley his power; in this he is an object lessonto a number of very clever novelists to-day; again andagain he makes us ask the question which is the supremequestion forced upon us by the typical 'seventies novel—