My Contemporaries In Fiction | Page 3

people, would be a 'finer' artist than Michael Angelo,
whose custom it was to handle forms of splendour on an heroic scale of
size. In that sense, and in the hands of some of its practitioners, fiction
for a year or two became a finer art than it had ever been before. But
the microscopist was never popular, and could never hope to be. He is
dead now, and the younger men are giving us vigorous copies of
Dumas, and Scott, and Edgar Allan Poe, and some of them are fusing
the methods of Dickens with those of later and earlier writers. We are
in for an era of broad effect again.
But a great many people, and, amongst them, some who ought to have
known better, adopted the saying of Mr. Howells in a wider sense than
he ever intended it to carry, and, partly as a result of this, we have
arrived at a certain tacit depreciation of the greatest emotional master of
fiction. There are other and more cogent reasons for the temporary
obscuration of that brilliant light. It may aid our present purpose to
discover what they are.

Every age has its fashions in literature as it has in dress. All the
beautiful fashions in literature, at least, have been thought worthy of
revival and imitation, but there has come to each in turn a moment
when it has begun to pall upon the fancy. Every school before its death
is fated to inspire satiety and weariness. The more overwhelming its
success has been, the more complete and sweeping is the welcomed
change. We know how the world thrilled and wept over Pamela and
Clarissa, and we know how their particular form of pathos sated the
world and died. We know what a turn enchanted castles had, and how
their spell withered into nothing. We know what a triumphal progress
the Sentimental Sufferer made through the world, and what a bore he
came to be. It is success which kills. Success breeds imitation, and the
imitators are a weariness. And it is not the genius who dies. It is only
the school which arose to mimic him. Richardson is alive for
everybody but the dull and stupid. Now that the world of fiction is no
longer crowded with enchanted castles, we can go to live in one
occasionally for a change, and enjoy ourselves. Werther is our friend
again, though the school he founded was probably the most tiresome
the world has seen.
Now, with the solitary exception of Sir Walter Scott, it is probable that
no man ever inspired such a host of imitators as Charles Dickens. There
is not a writer of fiction at this hour, in any land where fiction is a
recognised trade or art, who is not, whether he knows it and owns it, or
no, largely influenced by Dickens. His method has got into the
atmosphere of fiction, as that of all really great writers must do, and we
might as well swear to unmix our oxygen and hydrogen as to stand
clear of his influences. To stand clear of those influences you must
stand apart from all modern thought and sentiment. You must have read
nothing that has been written in the last sixty years, and you must have
been bred on a desert island. Dickens has a living part in the life of the
whole wide world. He is on a hundred thousand magisterial benches
every day. There is not a hospital patient in any country who has not at
this minute a right to thank God that Dickens lived. What his blessed
and bountiful hand has done for the poor and oppressed, and them that
had no helper, no man knows. He made charity and good feeling a
religion. Millions and millions of money have flowed from the coffers

of the rich for the benefit of the poor because of his books. A great part
of our daily life, and a good deal of the best of it, is of his making.
No single man ever made such opportunities for himself. No single
man was ever so widely and permanently useful. No single man ever
sowed gentleness and mercy with so broad a sweep.
This is all true, and very far from new, but it has not been the fashion to
say it lately. It is not the whole of the truth. Noble rivers have their own
natural defects of swamp and mudbank. Sometimes his tides ran
sluggishly, as in 'The Battle of Life,' for example, which has always
seemed to me, at least, a most mawkish and unreal book. The pure
stream of 'The Carol,' which washes the heart of a man, runs thin in
'The Chimes,' runs thinner in 'The Haunted Man,' and in 'The Battle of