finest work regarded, for a time, as merely reading 'for boys.' From that implied reproach, Marryat's best novels, like Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, have, ultimately, escaped. Indeed, the stories that Marryat himself intended for boys-Masterman Ready (1841), The Settlers in Canada (1844) and others-are found to have qualities that make them welcome to grown men. In Marryat, there are touches here and there of the lower humour of Smollett, but these occur almost entirely in his early work, written before he had learned his business as novelist1. His mind, moreover, was finer in quality than that of another writer, to whom, doubtless, he owed something, Theodore Hook.

Of Hook's fiction, it is difficult to write. It had a wide influence; and it is of little value. It lacks all the higher qualities, but suggested possibilities to many a later writer. The nine volumes of Hook's novels, Sayings and Doings (1826-9), were, in their own day, very popular: to a modern reader, even the best of them, Gervase Skinner, seems flimsy, vulgar and trivial. However, there is a lively spirit in them; and Hook's value to English fiction seems to lie in his very freedom and 'modernity.' He reminded fiction-for, indeed, she seemed to have forgotten what Fielding had made clear-that all life was her province. He showed that it was possible to be 'up-to-date,' free (and also easy), without degrading the art; thus, he opened a way to minds like Marryat's which had a truer originality and a fresher vision. Before long, Dickens was to appear, to make supreme use of the lately won liberty.

Before this chapter is brought to a close, two Scottish novelists should not be left without mention. John Galt, in The Ayrshire Legatees, The Entail and The Annals of the Parish, gave admirably minute and real studies of rural life in Scotland, full of strong delineation of character and forcible detail. As imaginative pictures of homely life under perfectly known conditions, Galt's novels occupy an important place in fiction. The fame of the Waverley novels tempted him later to compete with Scott in historical fiction, in which he succeeded but moderately.

David Macbeth Moir wrote for his friend, Galt, the last chapters of a novel, The Last of the Lairds, and was the author of The Life of Mansie Wauch, Tailor in Dalkeith (1828), a partly satirical, and very amusing, study of humble Scottish

1 In connection with Marryat and the sea-novel two other writers of the time are worth mention: William Nugent Glascock and Frank Chamier.

character, so shrewdly observed and neatly set down that the reader regrets its interruption by the interpolated romance The Curate of Suverdsio.

The period, as a whole, was productive of no great fiction, and of very little that can be considered first-rate. Neither Scott nor Jane Austen inspired any eminent follower; and the time, in spite of an immense production of romances and novels, did little more than keep the art of fiction alive till the coming of Dickens and of Thackeray.

CHAPTER XII

THE OXFORD MOVEMENT

THE remarkable influence which affected English religion in the middle of the nineteenth century could not have failed to affect English literature. But the one stood apart from the other in a way unusual in English history. At the age of the reformation, at the time of the Laudian movement under Charles I and in the time of the later Caroline divines, religious literature occupied a prominent, sometimes a commanding, position in the eyes of all who were alive to the currents of public life. It is true that the great dramatic literature of Elizabeth's day was concerned very little with the wranglings of divines; but no record of the literary giants of those days could omit the name of Hooker, whose influence on English prose was immense. Jeremy Taylor was a great man of letters, and, in Dryden's day, theological questions were the staple of many a discussion which might appear to belong to pure literature. But the Oxford movement seemed, throughout almost its whole course, to stand apart from the literature of the day. Men went on for a long time thinking and writing in other fields of learning as if there were no such persons as Newman and Keble and Pusey; or, like Carlyle, dismissed them contemptuously from their thoughts as having but the brain of rabbits. Only very gradually was the persistence of their work felt outside religious or academic circles; and, to the end, there was not more than one of their writers who seriously affected the current of English letters. Mark Pattison, long after 'the Tractarian infatuation' had ceased to influence him, complained that there was 'no proper public for either' theology or church history. But, none the less, the Oxford movement, as it came to be called, formed a most important epoch in literature: yet, for a long while it stood apart, as philosophy commonly does, from the ordinary work of men who wrote and men who read.

Nor was it, at least till late in its progress, affected by foreign

influences. James Anthony Froude, who, at one time, had run hotfoot with the movement, said, in later life, that its whole history, if not that of the English church, would have been different if Newman had known German; and the extremely superficial generalisation has been widely accepted. It would be more true to say that with the German theology of the period, its theorising, its sentimentalism and its haste, the tractarian leaders had no affinity. Those who knew it, such as Pusey and Hugh James Rose, believed that they saw through and beyond it. The other leaders at least knew what its principles were, and decisively rejected them. Of Italian theology, on the other hand, there was practically none; but the religious aspect of Manzoni's I promessi Sposi at one time deeply affected Newman. The great French catholic writers gradually became known to the English leaders. Newman paid great attention to the church in France. French devotional books were translated and edited in great abundance, by Pusey and others, after 1845, and some of the later disciples of the school, such as Liddon, owed a great deal to the French manner and method. But, for the most part, tractarian literature was insular and had its roots deep in the past. The catholic influences which affected it belonged to the early, not the modern, church.

Yet, it is impossible to study the Oxford movement without seeing that it was essentially one with the romantic movement which had re-created the literature of Germany and France.

In France, Chateaubriand's Génie du Christianisme had been the signal for a reaction, in the world of letters, in favour of Christianity; and Joseph de Maistre, who had most powerfully supported it, looked on the church of England with considerable favour. Later, the career of Lamennais was followed with great interest in England, and Newman had deep sympathy on many points with Lacordaire. Nor was the movement without its affinities with Germany. The spiritual romanticism of Schiller, and the genius of the great Goethe on its medieval side, appealed, at least through English disciples and copyists, to some of the feelings which gave strength to the Oxford movement. From Goethe to Walter Scott is an easy step: he turned men's minds, said Newman, in the direction of the middle ages, and the Oxford leaders themselves knew how much they owed to the Wizard of the North. Behind their severity there was a vein of noble sentiment akin to his. Keble even, when he traced the influence that Scott had exercised in substituting his manly realities for the flimsy, enervating literature which peopled the shelves of those

who read chiefly for amusement, allowed himself to wonder what might have happened if this gifted writer had become the poet of the Church in as eminent a sense as he was the poet of the Border and of Highland chivalry.

The tractarians shared, with Scott at least, the understanding delight in a noble past; and the bizarre and critical genius of Peacock was, also, by their side. The liberalism which he abhorred was to them, too, the great enemy. For a certain political kinship in the early tractarians must not be ignored. Later developments have caused a distinction to be drawn between the liberalism which Keble denounced and the party which, in Gladstone, had for leader one of the most devout disciples of the Oxford movement. But the whigs were believed to be, and historically had been, an anti-church party; and, though the liberalism which the Oxford writers opposed was not actually the whig party, it was, in many of its principles, closely allied to that party, and ultimately absorbed the party's members into its fold and under its name. Tractarianism was certainly not a tory movement, but it was opposed to liberalism in all its aspects; and it soon shed from among its supporters those who, even if, like J. A. Froude, they remained conservative in some political principles, found themselves, when, like Arthur Clough and Mark Pattison, they looked deep into their hearts, to be fundamentally liberal and 'progressive.' To the philosophy of conservatism the Oxford leaders were much indebted. Dean Church says that the Oriel men disliked Coleridge 'as a misty thinker'; but, in the ideas which influenced them, apart from their strictly theological expression, they were undoubtedly, to some extent, his debtors; though Newman recognised that what, to him, were fundamental—'the church, sacraments, doctrines, etc.'-were, to the philosopher, rather symbols than truths. And, in the region of pure poetry, there was much in their thought which was in sympathy with Wordsworth in his loftiest moods.

But all this, though it may illustrate the origin, the character and the affinities of the Oxford movement, tells nothing as to its direct antecedents. Of these, it may suffice to say that the tractarians represented and continued a tradition which, though it had been submerged, had never died: a tradition of unity with the great Caroline divines and the theologians whom they had taken for their models. If this, in churchmanship as well as in literary expression, had become 'high and dry' among those who, in the early nineteenth century, might be regarded as its direct