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

Women Novelists of the 'Seventies 51Unknown Eros, and Thrift, Character and Duty by theauthor of Self-Help.The civilised world may be pursuing the even tenor ofits way across the flats of tradition while one man whoseprivy thoughts are fated to have the effects of an earthquakeon that tradition may be living in completeobscurity. On the other hand, since great novelists occupythe world of their own day, that world must to some extentoccupy them. But they transmute it into their own terms.And so it comes about that the London of Dickens's dayis for most of us chiefly Dickens's London; just as Chauceris largely our fourteenth century, and Malory, who flourishedseventy years after Chaucer died, seems to have beenhis senior by centuries. Even though, too, a fine novelbe markedly the product of its own period, it is apt tocontinue to live because it little seems so. Or conversely,a novel that continues to live and shed its influence, tointerest, engross and amuse must in its own kind have somethingof greatness in it. It is no mere parasite of its period.While then any particular decade can be said toillumine the annals of literature only with its best andbrightest, it should modestly refrain from taking on thatscore too much unction to its soul. Apart from ThomasHardy himself, to whom and to what do we owe TheDynasts'? To Wellington, Nelson, Napoleon and theirsatellites, and to the first ten years of their century, orto the first ten years of this? Or to the chance thatintroduced a child of eight to a cupboard containing alavishly illustrated copy of The History of the Wars'? IsArabia Deserta—the author of which, when he was invitedto contribute to a grace-offering to the poet ofThe Dynasts on his eightieth birthday, quite innocentlyenquired, 'And who is Thomas Hardy?'—is ArabiaDeserta the patchoulied nosegay of artifice we associatehowever unfairly with the 'naughty 'nineties'?4-2