The Press.
London, England, 1857-11-14 00:00:00

1112

f ittrature.

NEW NOVELS.
Mattleverer's Divorce. By tho Author of
.‘ Whitefriars." London : Skeet.
Stininterleigh Manor ; or, Brothers and Sisters .

London : Masters.
3. Riverstun. By Georgiana M. Craik.
London ; Smith, Elder, and Co.
4. Hassan ; or, the Child of the Pyramid. An
Egyptian Tale. By the Hon. C. A. Mur-
ray. London : J. W. Parker and Son.
5. The Ruling Passion. By Rainey Hawthorne.

London: Bentley.
" NOBODY now," said Dr. Johnson eighty years
ago, " talks much of style. Everybody com-
" poses pretty well ;" taking cate to make his
meaning clear by adding—" We have no such
" inharmonious periods as there were a hun-
" dred years ago." Something of the same
kind may be predicated of the quality of our
present novels. Nobody now writes the trash
with which, thirty or forty years since, the
circulating libraries were inundated. The
" fashionable novel," which provoked the
mirth of Pelham, the weariness of Kate
Nickleby, and the satire of Mr. Snob, are, we
believe, on the verge of extinction; or, if they
flourish at all, have descended from the par-
lour to the kitchen, and from the counter of
the polite bibliopole to the office of the Sunday
newspaper. All classes of society now are
much better acquainted with each other than
they were in the days of the Regency. No
linendraper's daughter in the remotest county
town of Great Britain would now be deceived
by manners and incidents which in those
Augustan days found credence with young
ladies and gentlemen. The course of educa-
tion has been greatly enlarged. An acquain-
tance with continental languages and conti-
nental models has aided in cultivating the
taste and expanding the minds of the present
generation of writers. And the vastly-improved
position of the middle classes has enabled the
novelist to find subjects for his art without
travelling beyond the range of his own expe-
rience. We are not now alluding to the lumi-
naries of literature—to the few great names
which shine together with such brilliancy at
intervals of more or less duration in our lite-
rary annals. We are speaking of the great
mass of writers, whose works aro popular
without being famous, and who certainly gain
as much by literature as literature gains by
them. We do not feel that is at all an unfair
description of a very numerous class of authors,
to whom the public is indebted for a vast deal
of amusement and relaxation ; who write with
good taste, good sense, and some constructive
skill ; who produce, in fact, what may honestly
be called good novels, without being at the
same time great works of art or great lessons
of life.
Of this description of novels, during the
last few seasons, the name has been legion.
Some dozen years ago appeared concurrently
a series of religious and political fictions,
which wrought a marked change in the public
taste. Novel readers began to desiderate in
all future candidates for their favour some-
thing of a more masculine tone of thought,
greater distinctness of purpose, and truer pic-
tures of life than had previously contented
them. But when that religious and political
excitement had died away, an improved taste
remained, and with it, as we have already re-
marked, improved capabilities of gratifying it
The leaning of the age was towards the inves-
tigation of social problems. The school of
social novels was the result, and works of
great merit have been produced in greater
numbers than, perhaps, has ever happened
before in any department of literature.
More than half the stories which our pre-
sent notice will embrace would a quarter of a
century ago have been the talk of the season.
Several such we have recently praised in
these columns for their intrinsic merits.
When we feel that a book it a good one we do
not like to bestow on it a merely frigid ap-
proval because it may not rasa the standard
of Charlotte 'Renate, Sir Duister Lytton, or Mr.