In sharp contrast to Thompson stands John Davidson (18571909), the latest of our "poets in their misery dead." Thompson was one of the ascetics who abjure and renounce the world; Davidson was in fierce revolt against a world which he would fain have enjoyed. Thompson was a man of faith, Davidson a man of doubt. Both were unhappy. Even among poets few have had a career so harassed as Davidson's. This advanced sceptic, born into a family where the father was an evangelical minister, was foredoomed to taste of tragedy. The powerful Ballad of the Making of a Poet-one of his finest pieces-reads as if it were inspired by personal experience. After a chequered career as a teacher he made his way to London, and threw himself upon literature for a livelihood. He had previously attempted the drama; but his most characteristic work was that which is contained in the two series of Fleet Street Eclogues (1893-1896) and Ballads and Songs (1894), with the kindred volumes of later date. He reaches his zenith in Ballads and Songs. To it, besides the ballad already referred to, belong A Ballad of a Nun, A Ballad of Heaven and A Ballad of Hell, all strong and characteristic pieces. So does Thirty Bob a Week, where the influence of Mr Rudyard Kipling is manifest. In Romney Marsh and A Cinque Port are in the same collection. These pieces pretty nearly measure the range of Davidson's gifts; for in subsequent volumes he added few things entirely new. The two last-namedpoems of nature-show him in his rarer mood. The picture of the Cinque Port left by the receding sea is singularly fine :

"Where argosies have wooed the breeze,

The simple sheep are feeding now;

And near and far across the bar

The ploughman whistles at the plough;

Where once the long waves washed the shore,

Larks from their lowly lodgings soar.

Below the down the stranded town

Hears far away the rollers beat;

About the wall the seabirds call;

The salt wind murmurs through the street;

Forlorn the sea's forsaken bride

Awaits the end that shall betide."

The ballads which have been named illustrate a far more common mood of his mind. They are wrapt in an atmosphere of dusky gloom, and their indubitable force may prove to be a less trustworthy guarantee of permanence than the beauty of the quieter pieces. This mood of stormy passion more and more mastered Davidson in his later years, until in his "testaments" force gives place to violence and passion to fury.

CREATIVE art. B. PROSE FICTION

CHAPTER I

AFTER SCOTT

THAT decline in the market-value of poetry, to which attention has been called elsewhere, was partly due to the extraordinary rise and spread of the art of prose fiction in and after the third decade of the nineteenth century. Behind all other reasons for this there lies the fundamental one, that it was just a stage in the development of literature. Prose fiction is the most democratic of all forms of literature, because it makes least demand for education and training and puts the smallest strain upon the intelligence of the reader; and until the masses are educated to a point far above any as yet attempted, and are so far relieved from the burden of physical toil that at the close of the day the mind shall still keep its elasticity, it must remain the staple reading of those among them who read at all. Now the invention of the art of printing made literature potentially democratic; and recent changes of all sorts, political, industrial, social, have tended to render it actually SO. In the beginning of the nineteenth century the process was as yet only in its early stages; but it had unmistakably begun.

Two secondary causes operated about the period in question to strengthen and accelerate this process. One of these was the rapid development of periodical literature, and the other was the stimulus given to the imagination, the ambition, and sometimes the cupidity of his younger contemporaries by the wonderful

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success of Scott. The earlier and more ambitious periodicals, like The Edinburgh Review, had a fairly well-defined field of their own, and took no part in the publication of fiction. But as one magazine after another-Blackwood's, The London, Fraser's, The Dublin University, to name the chief representatives of the three kingdoms-sprang into existence, the competition became keener, and the net was spread wider and wider still both for contributors and for readers. The very name magazine" was suggestive of variety and invited experiment. Even the purely critical Athenæum helped to support men like Henry Fothergill Chorley (1808-1872), who was a critic for a livelihood and a novelist by choice. And as the popular appetite grew with what it fed on, every fresh step increased the demand for and the output of fiction. First the short story, then loosely-compacted serials like the Noctes Ambrosiana, then novels, more or less close-knit, became the staple article of the magazines. Sometimes the novel itself, divided into parts, stood alone as a serial publication. The case of Dickens is the best known; but the device had been tried before his day; and Pierce Egan's Life in London, better known as Tom and Jerry, was published in parts like The Pickwick Papers, which owes a few other hints as well to it.

The growth of the periodicals was, however, a matter of time, and in the earlier years of the nineteenth century their influence upon the longer works of fiction was comparatively slight. For many a day the orthodox mode of publishing a novel was in the old threevolume form at what would now seem the prohibitive price of a guinea and a half. The great outburst of activity among writers of prose fiction dates from the time of Scott. After he had shown the way, it seemed not so very difficult to follow; just as, a little earlier, it had seemed not so very difficult to imitate his tales in Byron had accomplished the latter feat with such success as to drive his predecessor from the field; though it seems obvious to the reader of the present day that it is not in the line of the metrical romance that Byron is the superior, or even the equal, of Scott. Among the novelists, however, there was no Byron, and the world has been contented to forget the imitations of the Waverley Novels which flowed plentifully from the press in the

verse.

third and fourth decades of the nineteenth century. On the Continent work which is worthy to be remembered was produced under the inspiration of Scott; but the distance which divides him from his immediate successors in England is greater than that between Shakespeare and the successors of Shakespeare.

There was one remarkable writer who remained uninfluenced by either of these causes. Thomas Love Peacock (1785-1866) was certainly no follower of Scott, and his leisurely writing was unaffected by the rise of the periodicals. Few authors are harder to classify. There is, to begin with, a chronological difficulty, for Peacock is not only "after Scott" but contemporary with Scott. He began writing almost as early as the latter. His Palmyra (1806) was published only one year after The Lay of the Last Minstrel, The Genius of the Thames (1810) appeared in the same year with The Lady of the Lake, and Headlong Hall (1816) came only two years later than Waverley. On the other hand, the last of Peacock's works was published almost a generation after the death of Scott. Peacock, like Landor, overlaps more than one age of literature. He saw romanticism in its dawn and meridian, and he was still living when the brightness was fading from a later romanticism.

The personal annals of Peacock are short and simple. In his desultory youth he acquired a learning for which he was indebted neither to public school nor to university, but the proof of which is written in many a page of his works. In later days Macaulay and he tried each other in Greek, and the former thought that they were both "strong enough in these matters for gentlemen1." Peacock had no permanent employment till the year 1819, when he procured an appointment in the East India House which enabled him to settle down and marry his " Welsh turtle," Jane Gryffydh. The chief event before this had been the formation of a friendship with Shelley. Beginning in 1812, it lasted as long as Shelley lived, and its influence is shown in the fact that Shelley was the one contemporary writer whom Peacock really liked and admired. Even in the case of Shelley it was a critical admiration: in Scythrop, as well as in Mr Cypress, though in far less degree, surgit amari aliquid.

1 Macaulay's Journal, December 31, 1851.