disorderly abundance of dramatic creation--tragic, comic, and in all the
varieties that _Hamlet_ catalogues or satirises. The mid-nineteenth
century had something of the same hot-bed characteristic, though
sufficiently contrasted and fitted to produce a different growth. It
had, if at a little distance, the inspiriting memory of a great war,
where the country had taken the most glorious part possible. It also had
a great religious revival, which had taken no coarse or vulgar form.
Although the middle class had seized, and the lower classes were
threatening to seize, the government, even the former had not
monopolised the helm. There was in society, though it was not
strait-laced or puritanical, a general standard of "good form."
Scholarship and knowledge of literature had not yet been exchanged for
"education" and ignorance of letters. The national fancy for sport was
in about its healthiest condition, emerging from one state of
questionableness and not yet plunged in another. The chair of the chief
of the kinds of literature--poetry--which always exercises a singular
influence over the lower forms, was still worthily occupied and
surrounded. And, above all, the appetite for the novel was still eager,
fresh, and not in the least sated, jaded, or arrived at that point when
it has to be whetted by asafoetida on the plates or cigarettes between
the courses. Few better atmospheres could be even imagined for the
combined novel-romance--the story which, while it did not exclude the
adventurous or even the supernatural in one sense, insisted on the
rational in another, and opened its doors as wide as possible to every
subject, or combination of subjects, that would undertake to be
interesting. That the extraordinary reply made by genius and talent to
the demand thus created and encouraged should last indefinitely could
not be expected: that the demand itself should lead to overproduction
and glut was certain. But, as we shall see, there was no sudden
decadence; the period even of best or nearly best production went on