Great Britain and Her Queen - by Anne E. Keeling
names.
We have several women-poets who are only less beloved and less well known than Mrs. Browning; but
so far the greatest literary distinction gained by the women of our age and country, notwithstanding the
far wider and higher educational advantages enjoyed by them to-day, has been won, as of yore, in the
field of prose fiction. More than a hundred years ago a veteran novelist, whose humour and observation,
something redeeming his coarseness, have ranked him among classic English authors, referred
mischievously to the engrossing of "that branch of business" by female writers, whose "ease, and spirit,
and delicacy, and knowledge of the human heart," have not, however, availed to redeem their names
from oblivion. For some of their nineteenth-century successors at least we may expect a more enduring
memory.
Numerous as are our poets, they are far outnumbered by the novelists, whose works are poured forth
every season with bewildering profusion; but as story-tellers have always commanded a larger audience
than grave philosophers or historians, and as our singers deal as much in philosophy as in narrative,
perhaps in seeking for the cause of this overrunning flood of fiction we need go no further than the
immensely increased number of readers - a view in which the records of some English public libraries
will bear us out. We may therefore be thankful that, on the whole, such literature has been of a vastly
purer and healthier character than of yore, reflecting that higher and better tone of public feeling which
we may attribute, in part at least, to the influence of the "pure court and serene life" of the Sovereign.
This nobler tone is not least perceptible in the eldest of the great masters of fiction whom we can claim
for our period - Dickens, who in 1837 first won by his "Pickwick Papers" that astonishing popularity
which continued widening until his death; Thackeray, who in that year was working more obscurely,
having not yet found a congenial field in the humorous chronicle that reflects for us so much of the
Victorian age, for Punch was not started till 1841, and Thackeray's first great masterpiece of
pathos and satire, "Vanity Fair," did not begin to appear till five years later. Each of these writers in his
own way held "the mirror up" to English human nature, and showed "the very age and body of the time
his form and pressure," with manly boldness indeed, but with due artistic reticence also; each knew how
to be vivid without being vicious, to be realistic without being revolting; and despite the sometimes
offensive caricature in which the one indulged, despite the seeming cynicism of the other their influence
must be pronounced healthy. Thackeray did not, like Dickens, use his pen against particular glaring
abuses of the time, nor insist on the special virtues that bloom amid the poor and lowly; but he attacked
valiantly the crying sins of society in all time - the mammon-worship and the mercilessness, the false
pretences and the fraud - and never failed to uphold for admiration and imitation "whatsoever things are
true, whatsoever things are honourable, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever thing are pure,
whatsoever things are lovely." And though both writers were sometimes hard on the professors of
religion, neither failed in reverence of tone when religion itself was concerned.
The sudden death of both these men, in the very prime of life and in the fulness of power, was keenly felt
at the time: each had a world-wide fame, and each awakened a blank, distressful sense of personal loss in
his many admirers as he was suddenly called away from incomplete work and faithful friendship.
Contemporary literature has not benefited by the removal of these two men and the gradual diminishing
of the influence they so strongly exerted while yet they "stood up and spoke." The work of Charlotte
Bronte - produced under a fervent admiration for "the satirist of Vanity Fair," whom she deemed "the
first social regenerator of his day" - is, with all its occasional morbidness of sensitive feeling, far more
bracing in moral tone, more inspiring in its scorn of baseness and glorifying of goodness, than is the
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