there. * * * In writing novels, we novelists preach to you from our pulpits, and are keenly anxious that our sermons shall not be inefficacious. * * * Nevertheless, the faults of a Ralph Newton, and not the vices of a Varney or a Barry Lyndon, are the evils against which men should in these days be taught to guard themselves—which women also should be made to hate. Such is the writer's apology for his very indifferent hero, Ralph the Heir."
In another volume[1] the same writer confesses,—
"Castles with unknown passages are not compatible with my
homely muse. I would as lief have to do with a giant in my
book—a real giant, such as Goliath—as with a murdering
monk with a scowling eye. The age for such delights is, I
think, gone. We may say historically of Mrs. Radcliffe's time
that there were mysterious sorrows in those days. They are
now as much out of date as the giants."
Victorianism of course had her own sorrows, patent and
unmysterious as they were. At no time could she have
been mistaken for Elizabethanism. But she grew gradually
in strength and sobriety, and cast a heavier shadow
in the afternoon of the century. In its mid-morning Disraeli
could compliment his own Young Duke with the sub-*title,
"a moral tale though gay." And the chief ambition
of the young writers up to the early forties seems to have
been to produce tales that were gay though moral.
Of this tendency Lytton is the most conspicuous example. Innately serious and thoroughly sentimental, he nevertheless dared not be as solemn as he could. He must live up to the requirement for ironic wit and the light touch of savoir faire, even though, lacking native exuberance and somewhat deficient in taste, he often fell into
- ↑ The Bertrams, 150.
