LATER JOURNALISM AND CRITICISM IN ART AND LETTERS
In a former chapter we conducted the history of criticism, especially
literary criticism, and that chiefly as displayed in the periodicals
which were reorganized and refreshed in the early years of the century,
to about 1850. We have now to take it up at that point and conduct
it--subject to the limitations of our plan as regards living authors,
and in one extremely important case taking the license of outstepping
these limits--to the present or almost the present day. We shall have to
consider the rise and performances of two great individual writers, one
of whom entirely re-created, if he may not almost be said to have
created, the criticism of art in England, while the other gave a new
temper, if not exactly a new direction, to the criticism of literature;
and we shall have, in regard to periodicals, to observe the rise, in the
first place of the weekly newspaper, and then of the daily, as
competitors in strictly critical and literary work with the quarterly
and monthly reviews, as well as some changes in these latter.
For just as we found that the first development of nineteenth century
criticism coincided with or followed upon a new departure or development
in periodicals, so we shall find that a similar change accompanied or
caused changes in the middle of the century. Although the popularity of
the quarterly and monthly reviews and magazines which had been headed
respectively by the _Edinburgh_ and _Blackwood_ did not exactly wane,
and though some of the most brilliant work of the middle of the
century--George Eliot's novels, Kingsley's and Froude's essays, and the
like--appeared in them, the ever fickle appetite of readers seemed to
desire something else in shape, something different in price, style, and
form. Why this sort of change, which is perpetually recurring, should
usually bring with it a corresponding change, and sometimes a
corresponding improvement, of literary production, is more than any one
can say, but the fact is not easily disputable.
On the present occasion the change took three successive forms--first,
the raising, or rather restoring, of the weekly sixpenny critical
newspaper to a higher pitch of popularity than it had ever held;
secondly, the cheapening and multiplying of the monthly magazines;
thirdly, the establishment of new monthly reviews, somewhat more
resembling the old quarterlies than anything else, but with signed
instead of anonymous articles.
The uprising of the weekly newspaper took shape in two remarkably
different forms, represented respectively by _Household Words_, which
Dickens started early in the fifties, and by the _Saturday Review_,
which came a little later. The former might best be described as a
monthly of the _Blackwood_ and _London_ kind cheapened, made more
frequent in issue, and adjusted to a considerably lower and more popular
standard of interest and culture--politics, moreover, being ostensibly
though not quite really excluded. Dickens contributed to it largely
himself. He received contributions from writers of established repute
like Bulwer and Lever; but he made his chief mark with the paper by
breeding up a school of younger writers who wrote to his own pattern in
fiction, miscellaneous essay, and other things. Wilkie Collins was the
chief of these, but there were many others. In particular the periodical
developed a sort of popular, jocular, and picturesque-descriptive manner
of treating places, travels, ceremonies, and what not, which took the
public fancy immensely. It was not quite original (for Leigh Hunt,
Wainewright the murderer-miscellanist of the _London_, some of the
_Blackwood_ men, and others, had anticipated it to a certain extent),
and it was vulgarised as regards all its models; but it was distinct
and remarkable. The aesthetic and literary tone of _Household Words_, and
of its successor _All the Year Round_ to a somewhat less extent, was
distinctly what is called Philistine; and though Dickens always had a
moral purpose, he did not aim much higher than amusement that should not
be morbid, and instruction of the middle-class diffusion-of-knowledge
kind. But there was very little harm and much good to be said of
_Household Words_; and if some of the imitations of it were far from
being happy, its own popularity and that of its successor were very
fairly deserved.
The aims, the character, and the success of the _Saturday Review_ were
of the most widely different character. It was less novel in form, for
the weekly review was an established thing, and had at least two very
respectable examples--the _Examiner_, which (under the Hunts, under
Fonblanque, under Forster, and under the late Mr. Minto) had a
brilliant, if never an extremely prosperous, career for three-quarters
of the century, and the _Spectator_, which attained a reputation for
unswerving honesty under the editorship of Mr. Rentoul, and has
increased it under that of its present conductors. But both these were
Liberal papers first of all; the _Saturday Review_, at first and
accidentally Peelite, was really (throughout the nearly forty years
during which it remained in the possession of the same family and was
directed by a succession of editors each of whom had been trained under
his predecessor) Independent Tory, or (to use a rather unhappy and now
half-forgotten name) Liberal-Conservative. It never tied itself to party
chariot-wheels, and from the first to the last of the period just
referred to very distinguished writers of Liberal and Radical opinions
contributed to it. But the general attitude of the paper during this
time expressed that peculiar tone of mainly Conservative persiflage
which has distinguished in literature the great line of writers
beginning with Aristophanes. Its staff was, as a rule, recruited from
the two Universities (though there was no kind of exclusion for the
unmatriculated; as a matter of fact, neither of its first two editors
was a son either of Oxford or Cambridge), and it always insisted on the
necessity of classical culture. It eschewed the private personality
which had been too apt to disfigure newspapers of a satirical kind
during the first half of the century; but it claimed and exercised to
the full the privilege of commenting on every public writing, utterance,
or record of the subjects of its criticism. It observed, for perhaps a
longer time than any other paper, the salutary principles of anonymity
(real as well as ostensible) in regard to the authorship of particular
articles; and those who knew were constantly amused at the public
mistakes on this subject.
Applying this kind of criticism,--perfectly fearless, on the whole
fairly impartial, informed, human errors excepted, by a rather
exceptionally high degree of intelligence and education, and above all
keeping before it the motto, framed by its "sweet enemy" Thackeray, of
being written "by gentlemen for gentlemen,"--the _Saturday Review_
quickly attained, and for many years held, the very highest place in
English critical journalism as regards literature, in a somewhat less
degree politics, and in a degree even greater the farrago of social and
miscellaneous matters. By consent too general and too unbiassed to be
questioned, it gave and maintained a certain tone of comment which
prevailed for the seventh, eighth, and ninth decades of the century, and
of which the general note may be said to have been a coolly scornful
intolerance of ignorance and folly. There were those who accused it even
in its palmiest days of being insufficiently positive and constructive;
but on the negative side it was generally sound in intention, and in
execution admirably thorough. It may sometimes have mishandled an honest
man, it may sometimes have forgiven a knave; but it always hated a fool,
and struck at him with might and with main.
The second change began with the establishment of the _Cornhill_ and
_Macmillan's Magazine_, two or three years later. There was no
perceptible difference in the general scheme of these periodicals from
that of the earlier ones, of which _Blackwood_ and _Fraser_ were the
most famous; but their price was lowered from half a crown to a
shilling, and the principle of signed articles and of long novels by
famous names was adopted. The editorship of Thackeray in the _Cornhill_,
with the contributions of Matthew Arnold and others, quickly gave a
character to it; while _Macmillan's_ could boast contributions from the
Kingsleys, Henry and Charles, as well as from many others. From this
time the monthly magazine, with the exception of _Blackwood_, found a
shilling, which attempts have been recently made to lower to sixpence,
its almost necessary tariff, while the equal necessity of addressing the
largest possible audience made pure politics, with occasional
exceptions, unwelcome in it. It is to the credit of the English
magazines of this class, however, that they have never relinquished the
tradition of serious literary studies. Many of the essays of Mr. Arnold
appeared first either in one or the other of the two just mentioned; the
_Cornhill_ even ventured upon Mr. Ruskin's _Unto this Last_; and other
famous books of a permanent character saw the light in these, in _Temple
Bar_, started by Mr. Bentley, in the rather short-lived _St. Paul's_, of
which Anthony Trollope was editor, and in others.
Whether the starting of the monthly "Review" as distinguished from the
"Magazine," which came again a little later towards the middle or end of
the sixties, be traceable to a parallel popularisation of the quarterly
ideal--to the need for the political and "heavy" articles which the
lightened monthlies had extruded--or to a mere imitation of the famous
French _Revue des Deux Mondes_, is an academic question. The first of
these new Reviews was the _Fortnightly_, which found the exact French
model unsuitable to the meridian of Greenwich, and dropped the
fortnightly issue, while retaining the title. It was followed by the
_Contemporary_, the _Nineteenth Century_, and others. The exclusion of
fiction in these was not invariable--the _Fortnightly_, in particular,
has published many of Mr. Meredith's novels. But, as a rule, these
reviews have busied themselves with more or less serious subjects, and
have encouraged signed publication.
It would, of course, be impossible here to go through all, or even all
the most noteworthy, of the periodicals of the century. We are dealing
with classes, not individuals, and the only class yet to be
noticed--daily newspapers falling out of our ken almost entirely--are
those weekly newspapers which have eschewed politics altogether. The
oldest and most famous of these is the _Athenaeum_, which still
flourishes after a life of nearly seventy years, while between forty and
fifty years later the _Academy_ was founded on the same general
principles. But the _Athenaeum_ has always cleaved, as far as its main
articles went, to the unsigned system, while the _Academy_ started at a
period which leant the other way. Of late years, too, criticism proper,
that is to say, of letters and art, has played a larger and larger part
in daily newspapers, some of which attempt a complete review of books as
they appear, while others give reviews of selected works as full as
those of the weeklies. If any distinct setting of example is necessary
to be attributed in this case, the credit is perhaps mainly due to the
original _Pall Mall Gazette_, an evening newspaper started in 1864 with
one of the most brilliant staffs ever known, including many of the
original _Saturday_ writers and others.
The result of this combined opportunity and stimulus in so many forms
has been that almost the whole of the critical work of the latter part
of the century has passed through periodicals--that, except as regards
Mr. Ruskin, a writer always indocile to editing, every one who will
shortly be mentioned in this chapter has either won his spurs or
exercised them in this kind, and that of the others, mentioned in other
chapters and in connection with other subjects, a very small proportion
can be said to have been entirely disdainful of periodical publication.
At the very middle of the century, and later, the older Quarterlies were
supported by men like John Wilson Croker, a survival of their first
generation Nassau W. Senior, and Abraham Hayward, the last a famous
talker and "diner-out." Other chief critics and essayists, besides
Kingsley and Froude, were George Brimley, Librarian of Trinity College,
Cambridge; Henry Lancaster, a Balliol man and a Scotch barrister; and
Walter Bagehot, a banker, and not a member of either University.
Brimley has left us what is perhaps the best appreciation of Tennyson in
the time between the days when that poet was flouted or doubted by the
usual critic, and those when he was accepted as a matter of course or
cavilled at as a matter of paradox; and Lancaster occupies pretty much
the same position with regard to Thackeray. It is not so easy to single
out any particular and distinguishing critical effort of Bagehot's, who
wrote on all subjects, from Lombard Street to Tennyson, and from the
_Coup d'Etat_ (which he saw) to Browning. But his distinction of the
poetical art of Wordsworth and that of these other poets as "pure,
ornate, and grotesque" will suffice to show his standpoint, which was a
sort of middle place between the classical and the Romantic. Bagehot
wrote well, and possessed a most keen intelligence. Also to be classed
here are Dr. John Brown of Edinburgh, the very agreeable author of _Horae
Subsecivae_, and James Hannay, a brilliant journalist, a novelist of some
merit and an essayist of more, and author of _A Course of English
Literature_ which, though a little popular and desultory, is full of
sense and stimulus.
Most popular of all at the time was Sir Arthur Helps (1813-75), a
country gentleman of some means and of the usual education, who took to
a mixed life of official and literary work, did some useful work in
regard to Spanish-American history, but acquired most popularity by a
series of dialogues, mostly occupied by ethical and aesthetic criticism,
called _Friends in Council_. This contains plenty of knowledge of books,
touches of wit and humour, a satisfactory standard of morals and
manners, a certain effort at philosophy, but suffers from the
limitations of its date. In different ways enough--for he was as quiet
as the other was showy--Helps was the counterpart of Kinglake, as
exhibiting a certain stage in the progress of English culture during the
middle of the century--a stage in which the Briton was considerably more
alive to foreign things than he had been, had enlarged his sphere in
many ways, and was at least striving to be cosmopolitan, but had lost
insular strength without acquiring Continental suppleness.
Of the literary critic who attracted most public attention during this
period,--the late Mr. Matthew Arnold,--considerable mention has already
been made in dealing with his poetry, and biographical details must be
looked for there. It will be remembered that Mr. Arnold was not very
early a popular writer either as poet or prose-man, that his poetical
exercises preceded by a good deal his prose, and that these latter were,
if not determined, largely influenced by his appointment to the
Professorship of Poetry at Oxford. He began, however, towards the end of
the fifties and the beginning of the sixties, to be much noticed, not
merely as the deliverer of lectures, but as the contributor of essays of
an exceedingly novel, piquant, and provocative kind; and in 1865 these,
or some of them, were collected and published under the title of _Essays
in Criticism_. These _Essays_--nine in number, besides a characteristic
preface--dealt ostensibly for the most part, if not wholly, with
literary subjects,--"The Function of Criticism," "The Literary Influence
of Academies," "The Guerins" (brother and sister), "Heine," "Pagan and
Mediaeval Religious Sentiment," "Joubert," "Spinoza," and "Marcus
Aurelius,"--but they extended the purport of the title of the first of
them in the widest possible way. Mr. Arnold did not meddle with art, but
he extended the province of literature outside of it even more widely
than Mr. Ruskin did, and was, under a guise of pleasant scepticism, as
dogmatic within the literary province as Mr. Ruskin in the artistic. It
might almost be said that Mr. Arnold put himself forth, with a becoming
attempt at modesty of manner, but with very uncompromising intentions,
as "Socrates in London," questioning, probing, rebuking with ironical
faithfulness, the British Philistine--a German term which he, though not
the first to import it, made first popular--in literature, in
newspapers, in manners, in politics, in philosophy. Foreign, and
specially French, ways were sometimes directly, sometimes obliquely,
held up as examples for our improvement; and the want of "ideas," the
want of "light," the want of "culture," was dwelt on with a mixture of
sorrow and satire. All this was couched in a very peculiar and (till its
mannerism became irritating) a very captivating style, which cannot be
assigned to any single original, but which is a sort of compound or
eclectic outcome of the old Oxford academic style as it may be seen at
times in Newman, of French persiflage, and of some elements peculiar to
Mr. Arnold himself. The strongest, though the most dangerous, of these
elements was a trick of iterating words and phrases, sometimes exactly,
sometimes with a very slight variation, which inevitably arrested
attention, and perhaps at first produced conviction, on the principle
formulated by a satirist (also of Oxford) a little later in the words--
What I tell you three times is true.
But besides and underneath all this flourish, all this wide-ranging
scatter of sometimes rather haphazard arrows, there was a solid literary
value in Mr. Arnold's method. As has been noticed earlier in this
chapter, the literary essay of the best kind had somewhat gone off in
England during the middle of the century, and the short, crisp
criticisms which had appeared to take its place in weekly papers were
almost necessarily exposed to grave faults and inadequacies. It was Mr.
Arnold's great merit that by holding up Sainte-Beuve, from whom he had
learnt much, and other French critics, and by urging successfully the
revival of the practice of "introducing" editions of classics by a sound
biographical and critical essay from the pen of some contemporary, he
did much to cure this state of things. So that, whereas the _corpus_ of
English essay-criticism between 1800 and 1835 or thereabouts is
admirable, and that of 1835 to 1865 rather thin and scanty, the last
third of the century is not on such very bad terms as regards the first.
And he gave example as well as precept, showing--though his subjects, as
in the case of the Guerins, were sometimes most eccentrically
selected--a great deal of critical acuteness, coupled, it may be, with
something of critical "will-worship," with a capricious and unargued
preference of this and rejection of that, but exhibiting wide if not
extraordinarily deep reading, an honest enthusiasm for the best things,
and above all a fascinating rhetoric.
The immediate effect of this remarkable book was good almost unmixedly
on two of the three parties concerned. It was more than time for the
flower of middle-class complacency, which horticulturists of all
degrees, from Macaulay downwards, had successively striven to cultivate,
and which was already overblown, to drop from its stalk; and the whiff
of pleasant scorn which Mr. Arnold directed at it was just the thing to
puff it off. So the public, upon which he was never likely to produce
too much effect, had reason to thank him for the effect that he did
produce, or helped to produce. And on the critics too his effect, or the
effect of which he was the symptom and voice, was also good, recalling
them on the one hand from the dulness of the long reviews of the period,
and on the other from the flippancy of the short, while inculcating a
wider if not always a sounder comparison. Practically German poetry had
nothing left to do in Mr. Arnold's day, and French had much: he thought
just the other way, and reserved his encomium of France for its prose,
in which it was drooping and failing. But this did not matter: it is the
general scope of the critic's advice which is valuable in such cases,
and the general scope of Mr. Arnold's was sound. On the third party,
however,--himself,--the effect was a little disastrous. The reception
which, after long waiting, he had attained, encouraged him not so much
to continue in his proper sphere of literary criticism as to embark on a
wide and far-ranging enterprise of general censure, which narrowed
itself pretty rapidly to an attempt to establish undogmatic on the ruins
of dogmatic Christianity. It would be very improper to discuss such an
undertaking on the merits here; or to criticise narrowly the series of
singular treatises which absorbed (with exceptions, no doubt, such as
the quaint sally of _Friendship's Garland_ on the occasion of the
Franco-German War) Mr. Arnold's energies for some fifteen or sixteen
years. The titles--_Culture and Anarchy_, _God and the Bible_, _St. Paul
and Protestantism_, _Literature and Dogma_, etc.--are well known. Of the
contents it is enough to say that, apart from the popular audacity of
their wit and the interesting spectacle of a pure man of letters
confidently attacking thorny questions without any apparatus of special
knowledge and study, they have not been generally thought quite worthy
of their author. There are many brilliant passages in these books as
writing, just as there are some astonishing lapses of taste and logic;
but the real fault of the whole set is that they are popular, that they
undergo the very curse, of speaking without qualification and without
true culture, which Mr. Arnold had himself so freely pronounced.
Fortunately, however, he never quite abandoned the old ways; and in his
last years he returned to them almost wholly. Nothing better of the kind
(individual crotchets always excepted) has ever been written than his
introductions to selected lives from Johnson's _Poets_, to Byron, to
Shelley (the most crotchety and unsound of all), to Wordsworth
(incomparably the best). He aided others; and a collection of his purely
or mainly literary work is still eagerly expected. Even this would be
extremely unequal and open to exception here and there. But it would
contain some of the very best things to be found in any English critic.
And this after all, if not the absolutely highest, is one of the highest
things that can be said of a critic, and one of the rarest. Undoubtedly
the influence of Mr. Arnold did not make for good entirely. He
discouraged--without in the least meaning to do so, and indeed meaning
quite the contrary--seriousness, thoroughness, scholarship in criticism.
He discouraged--without in the least meaning to do so, and indeed
meaning quite the contrary--simplicity and unaffectedness in style. But
he was a most powerful stimulus, and in some ways, if not in all, a
great example. Some at least of the things he said were in the very
greatest need of saying, and some of the ways in which he said them were
inimitably charming.
Contemporary with Mr. Arnold, and his complement in critical influence,
was John Ruskin, the sole living author of whom it has seemed proper to
treat here at length, and, since the death of Mr. Froude, the sole
surviving man of letters of the first class who had published before the
middle of the century. He was born in 1819: he has given copious
accounts of his family, of his youth at Denmark Hill, and so forth, and
all the world knows that his father was a sherry merchant who, though he
lived rather plainly, was able to give his son an early and plentiful
indulgence in that Continental travel which had so much to do with
developing his genius. Mr. Ruskin's education was oddly combined; for,
after going to no school, he was sent to Christ Church as a
gentleman-commoner and took his degree in 1842, having gained the
Newdigate three years earlier. He wrote a good deal of other verse in
his early years,--and he made himself a not inconsiderable draughtsman.
But his real vocation was as little the practice of art as it was the
practice of poetry. As early as 1843 there appeared, by "a Graduate of
Oxford," the first volume of the famous _Modern Painters_, which ran to
five large volumes, which covered seventeen years in its original period
of publication, and which was very largely altered and remodelled by the
author during and after this period. But Mr. Ruskin by no means confined
his energies before 1860 to this extensive task. The _Seven Lamps of
Architecture_ (1849), and (between 1851 and 1853) the larger _Stones of
Venice_, did for architecture what the companion work did for painting.
The Prae-Raphaelite movement of the middle of the century found in Mr.
Ruskin an ardent encomiast and literary apostle, and between 1850 and
1860 he delivered divers lectures, the text of which--_Architecture and
Painting_ (1854), _Political Economy of Art_ (1858)--was subsequently
published in as elaborately magnificent a style as his other works. As
_Modern Painters_ drew to its close he became prolific of more numerous
and shorter works, generally with somewhat fantastic but agreeable
titles--_Unto this Last_ (1861), _Munera Pulveris_ (1862), _Sesame and
Lilies_ (1865), _The Cestus of Aglaia_ (1865), _The Ethics of the Dust_
(1866), _The Crown of Wild Olive_ (1866), _Time and Tide by Wear and
Tyne_ (1867), _The Queen of the Air_ (1869), _Aratra Pentelici_ and _The
Eagle's Nest_ (1872), _Ariadne Florentina_ (1873), _Proserpina and
Deucalion_ (1875 _seq._), _St. Mark's Rest_ and _Praeterita_ (1885). Not
a few of these were issued in parts and numbers, but Mr. Ruskin's
bulkiest and most characteristic venture in this kind was _Fors
Clavigera_, which was published at irregular intervals from 1871 to
1884. He has written many other things even in book form, besides
innumerable essays and letters, some of which have been collected in two
gatherings--_Arrows of the Chace_ and _On the Old Road_.
Two things are mainly perceptible in this immense and at first sight
rather bewildering production. The first, the most disputable and
probably the least important, though the most at the author's heart, is
a vast, fluctuating, but on the whole pretty coherent body of doctrine
in reference to Art. Up to Mr. Ruskin's day, aesthetics had been little
cultivated in England, and such handlings of the subject as
existed--Burke's, Adam Smith's, Alison's, and a few others--were of a
jejune and academic character. Even writers of distinct literary genius
and of great taste for the matter, who had not resided abroad long, such
as Hazlitt, much more such as Charles Lamb and Hartley Coleridge, betray
the want of range and practice in examples. Even the valuable and
interesting work of Mrs. Jameson (1794-1860) was more occupied with
careful arrangement and attractive illustration than with original
theory; and, well as she wrote, her _Characteristics of Shakespeare's
Women_ (1832) is perhaps more important as literature than the series of
volumes--_Sacred and Legendary Art_, etc.--which she executed between
1845 and her death. The sense of the endless and priceless illustration
of the best art which was provided by Gothic domestic and ecclesiastical
architecture was only wakening; as for painting, the examples publicly
visible in England were very few, and even private collections were
mostly limited to one or two fashionable schools--Raphael and his
successors, the later Low Country schools, the French painters in the
grand style, and a few Spaniards.
Strongly impressed by the Romantic revival (he has all his life been the
staunchest of Sir Walter's devotees), a passionate lover of Gothic
architecture both at home and abroad, and early drawn both to the
romantic nature-painting of Turner and the gorgeous colouring of the
early Italian schools, Mr. Ruskin heralded Art with a passion of which
eighteenth century "gusto" had had no notion. But he was by no means
satisfied with heralding Art alone. Anathematising at once the doctrine
that utility is beauty--that beauty is utility he would always have
cheerfully admitted--and the doctrine that the beautiful is not
necessarily connected either with utility, with goodness, or with truth,
he from the first and to the last has endeavoured to work ethics and
aesthetics into a sort of single texture of warp and woof respectively,
pushing his endeavours into the most multiform, the most curious, and it
must be owned sometimes the most grotesque ramifications and
extremities. But he was not satisfied with this bold attempt at the
marriage of two things sometimes deemed hostile to, and generally held
to be independent of, one another. He must needs be bolder still, and
actually attempt to ally with Art, if not to subject to her, the
youngest, the most rebellious, and, as it might seem, the most
matter-of-fact and utilitarian of all the sciences--that of Political
Economy. As we have seen, he had brought the subjects together in
lectures pretty early in his career, and he developed the combination
further in the eccentric book called _Unto this Last_, originally
published in the _Cornhill Magazine_ as noted above. In this AEsthetics
and Economics combined took a distinctly Socialist turn; and as England
was under the very fullest dominion of the Liberal middle-class regime,
with its belief in _laissez-faire_ and in supply-and-demand, Mr. Ruskin
was not a little pooh-poohed. It would be improper here to attack or to
defend his views, but it is part of the historian's duty to say that,
for good or for ill, they have, though in forms different from his and
doubtless by no means always meeting his approval, made constant
headway, and that much legislation and still more agitation on the
extreme Liberal side, and not there only, may be said to represent, with
very slight transformation, Ruskinian doctrine applied, now and then, to
very anti-Ruskinian purposes.
With regard to aesthetics proper, it might be contended, without too much
rashness, that the history of Ruskinism has not been different; but to
some observers it seems to have described rather a curve than a steady
ascent. After being, between 1840 and 1860, laughed at, despised,
attacked all at once, Mr. Ruskin found his influence as an art teacher
rise steadily during the seventh decade of the century, and attain its
highest point about the close thereof, when he was made Slade Professor
in his own university, and caused young Oxford to do many fantastic
things. But, as always happens, the hour of triumph was the hour, not,
perhaps, of downfall, but of opposition and renegation. Side by side
with Mr. Ruskin's own theories had risen the doctrine of Art-for-Art's
sake, which, itself as usual half truth and half nonsense, cut at the
very root of Ruskinism. On the other hand, the practical centre of
art-schools had shifted from Italy and Germany to Paris and its
neighbourhood, where morality has seldom been able to make anything like
a home; and the younger painters and sculptors, full of realism,
impressionism, and what not, would have none of the doctrines which, as
a matter of fact, stood in immediate relationship of antecedence to
their own. Lastly, it must be admitted that the extreme dogmatism on all
the subjects of the encyclopedia in which Mr. Ruskin had seen fit to
indulge, was certain to provoke a revolt. But with the substance of
Ruskinism, further than is necessary for comprehension, we are not
concerned.
Yet there are not many things in the English nineteenth century with
which a historian is more concerned than with the style of the
deliverance of these ideas. We have noticed in former chapters--we shall
have to notice yet more in the conclusion--the attempts made in the
years just preceding and immediately following Mr. Ruskin's birth, by
Landor, by De Quincey, by Wilson, and by others in the direction of
ornate, of--as some call it--_flamboyant_ English prose. All the
tendencies thus enumerated found their crown and flower in Mr. Ruskin
himself. That later the crowns and the flowers were, so to speak,
divided, varied, and multiplied by later practitioners, some of whom
will presently be noticed, while more are still alive, is quite true.
But in 1895 it is not very unsafe to prophesy that the _flamboyant_
style of the nineteenth century will be found by posterity to have
reached its highest exposition in prose with Mr. Ruskin himself.
Like all great prose styles--and the difference between prose and poetry
here is very remarkable--this was born nearly full grown. The instances
of comparison in those who have tried both harmonies are rare; those in
poets only are delusive and uncertain. But with the three greatest poets
of England who have also been great prose writers, Milton, Dryden,
Shelley, the assertion that the distinctive quality of their prose
developed itself earlier than the distinctive quality of their verse is
only disputable in the case of Milton. And Milton, as it happened, wrote
prose and verse in manners more nearly approaching each other than any
one on record. Mr. Ruskin has not been a poet, except in extreme
minority; but he has been a great prose writer from the first. It is
almost inconceivable that good judges can ever have had any doubt about
him. It is perfectly--it is, indeed, childishly easy to pick faults,
even if matter be kept wholly out of sight. In Mr. Ruskin's later books
a certain tendency to conversational familiarity sometimes mocks those,
and not those only, who hold to the tradition of dignified and _ex
cathedra_ pronouncement; in his earlier, and in all, it is possible for
Momus to note an undue floridness, an inclination to blank verse in
prose, tricks and manners of this or that kind unduly exuberant and
protuberant.
But when all these things have been allowed for to the very fullest,
what an enormous advance there is on anything that had gone before! The
ornate prose writers of the seventeenth century had too frequently
regarded their libraries only; they had seldom looked abroad to the vast
field of nature, and of art other than literary art. The ornate writers
of the eighteenth, great as they were, had been as afraid of
introspection as of looking outwards, and had spun their webs, so far as
style and ornament were concerned, of words only. Those of the early
nineteenth had been conscious of revolt, and, like all conscious
revolters, had not possessed their souls in sufficient quietness and
confidence. Landor, half a classic and half a Romantic, had been too
much the slave of phrase,--though of a great phrase. Wilson, impatient
in everything, had fluctuated between grandeur and _galimatias_, bathos
and bad taste; De Quincey, at times supreme, had at others simply
succumbed to "rigmarole." Mr. Ruskin had a gift of expression equal to
the best of these men; and, unlike them, he had an immense, a steady, a
uniform group of models before him. Indulge as he might in extravagance,
there were always before him, as on a vastly extended dais set before
the student, the glories of nature and of art, the great personalities
and productions of the great artists. He had seen, and he could see
(which is a different thing), the perennial beauties of mountain and
cloud, of tree, and sea, and river; the beauties long, if not perennial,
of architecture and painting. A man may say foolish things,--Mr. Ruskin
has said plenty; but when he has Venice and Amiens and Salisbury, the
Alps and the Jura and the Rhine, Scott and Wordsworth, Turner and
Lionardo, always silently present before his mind's eye, he can never,
if he is a man of genius, go wholly wrong. And he can never go more than
a little wrong when he is furnished by his genius with such a gift of
expression as Mr. Ruskin has had.
For this gift of expression was such as had never been seen before, and
such as, for all the copying and vulgarising of it, has never been seen
since. It is a commonplace of literary history that description, as
such, is not common or far advanced in the earlier English prose. We
find Gray, far on in the eighteenth century, trying to describe a
sunrise, and evidently vexed at the little "figure it makes on paper."
Then the tourists and the travellers of the end of that age made valiant
but not always well directed efforts to induce "it" to make a figure on
paper. Then came the experts or student-interpreters in ornate prose who
have been mentioned. And then came Mr. Ruskin. "Never so before and
never quite so since," must be the repeated verdict. The first
sprightly runnings in these, as in other kinds, are never surpassed.
Kingsley, an almost contemporary, Mr. Swinburne, a younger rival, have
come near; others have done creditably in imitation; none have equalled,
and certainly none have surpassed. Let the reader read the "Wave
Studies" in the first volume of _Modern Painters_, more than fifty years
old; the "Pine Forest in the Jura," almost forty; the "Angel of the
Sea," fully thirty-five, and say, if he has any knowledge of English
literature, whether there had been anything like any of these before.
Shelley, perhaps, in some of his prose had gone near it. Shelley was
almost as great a prose writer as he was a poet. No one else could even
be mentioned.
Nor was it mere description, great as Mr. Ruskin is in that, which
differentiated him so strongly. He is a bad arguer; but his arguments
are couched in rhetoric so persuasive that the very critics who detect
his fallacies would almost consent to forfeit the power of detecting, if
they could acquire that of constructing, such delightful paralogisms.
His crotchets of all sorts are sometimes merely childish, and not even
always or very often original; for, like all fertile minds, he never
could receive any seed of thought from another but it bore plant and
fruit at once. But the statement of them is at its best so captivating
that weaklings may pardonably accept, and strong men may justly
tolerate, the worthless kernel for the sake of the exquisite husk. Few
men have less of the true spirit of criticism than Mr. Ruskin, for in
his enthusiasm he will compass sea and land to exalt his favourite,
often for reasons which are perfectly invalid; and in his appreciation
he is not to be trusted at all, having a feminine rather than a
masculine faculty of unreasoned dislike. But praise or blame, argue or
paralogise as he may, the golden beauty of his form redeems his matter
in the eyes of all but those who are unhappy enough not to see it.
That his influence has been wholly good no one can say. There is
scarcely a page of him that can be safely accepted on the whole as
matter, and the unwary have accepted whole volumes; his form is
peculiarly liable to abuse in the way of imitation, and it has actually
been abused to nausea and to ridicule. But this is not his fault. There
is so little subtlety about Mr. Ruskin that he can hardly deceive even
an intelligent child when he goes wrong. There is so much genius about
him that the most practised student of English can never have done with
admiration at the effects that he produces, after all these centuries,
with the old material and the old tools. He is constantly provocative of
adverse, even of severe criticism; of half the heresies from which he
has suffered--not only that of impressionism--he was himself the
unconscious heresiarch. And yet the more one reads him the more one
feels inclined almost to let him go uncriticised, to vote him the
primacy in nineteenth-century prose by simple acclamation.
Richard (or as his full name ran), John Richard Jefferies, occupies,
though an infinitely smaller and a considerably lower place than Mr.
Ruskin's, yet one almost as distinctly isolated in a particular
department of aesthetic description. The son of a farmer at Coate, in
North Wiltshire, and born in November 1848, he began journalism at
eighteen, and was a contributor to the _North Wilts Herald_ till he was
nearly thirty. Then he went to London, and in 1878 published some
sketches (previously contributed to the _Pall Mall Gazette_) under the
title of _The Game-Keeper at Home_. These, though not much bought, were
very much admired; and Jefferies was encouraged to devote himself to
work of the same kind, which he varied with curious and not very
vigorous semi-philosophic speculations and attempts at downright novels
(a kind which he had also tried in his youth). Unfortunately the
peculiar sort of descriptive writing in which he excelled was not very
widely called for, could hardly under the most favourable circumstances
have brought in any great sums of money, and was peculiarly liable to
depreciate when written to order. It does not appear that Jefferies had
the rare though sometimes recorded power of accommodating himself to
ordinary newspaper hack-work, while reserving himself for better things
now and then; and finally, he had not been long in London before
painful and ultimately fatal disease added to his troubles. He died in
August 1887, being not yet forty. A burst of popularity followed; his
books, _The Game-Keeper at Home_, _Wild Life in a Southern Country_,
_The Amateur Poacher_, _Round about a Great Estate_, etc., none of which
had been printed in large numbers, were sold at four or five times their
published price; and, worst of all, cheap imitations of his style began
to flood the newspapers. Nay, the yet later results of this imitation
was that another reaction set in, and even Jefferies' own work was once
more pooh-poohed.
The neglect, the over-valuation, and the shift back to injustice, were
all examples of the evils which beset literature at the present time,
and which the much-blamed critic is almost powerless to cause or cure.
In other days Jefferies was quite as likely to have been insufficiently
rewarded at first by the public; but he would then have had no
temptation to over-write himself, or try alien tasks, and he would have
stood a very good chance of a pension, or a sinecure, or an easy office
in church or state, on one or other of which he might have lived at ease
and written at leisure. Nothing else could really have been of service
to him, for his talent, though rare and exquisite, was neither rich nor
versatile. It consisted in a power of observing nature more than
Wordsworthian in delicacy, and almost Wordsworthian in the presence of a
sentimental philosophic background of thought. Unluckily for Jefferies,
his philosophic background was not like Wordsworth's, clear and
cheerful, but wholly vague and partly gloomy. Writing, too, in prose not
verse, and after Mr. Ruskin, he attempted an exceedingly florid style,
which at its happiest was happy enough, but which was not always at that
point, and which when it was not was apt to become trivial or tawdry, or
both. It is therefore certain that his importance for posterity will
dwindle, if it has not already dwindled, to that given by a bundle of
descriptive selections. But these will occupy a foremost place on their
particular shelf, the shelf at the head of which stand Gilbert White and
Gray.
Mr. Arnold, it has been said, abstained almost entirely from dealing
with art. Mr. Ruskin, who has abstained from dealing with nothing, did
not abstain from criticism of literature, but his utterances in it have
been more than usually _obiter dicta_. Yet we must take the two together
if we are to understand the most powerful influence and the most
flourishing school of criticism, literary and other, which has existed
for the last thirty years. This school may be said to halt in a way
between purely literary and generally aesthetic handling, and when it can
to mix the two. Most of its scholars--men obviously under the influence
both of Arnold and of Ruskin, either in submission or in revolt, are
alive, and we reason not of them. But, as it happens, the two most
famous, one of whom was a prose writer, pure and simple, the other a
copious artist in prose and verse, have died recently and call for
judgment. These were Walter Horatio Pater and John Addington Symonds.
The first-named was born in 1839, and went to Oxford, where he was
elected to a fellowship at Brasenose. He spent the whole of the rest of
his life either at that college or in London, practising no profession,
competing for no preferment, and for many years at least producing
literature itself with extreme sparingness. It was in 1873 that Mr.
Pater first collected a volume of _Studies in the History of
Renaissance_, which attracted the keenest attention both as to its
manner and as to its matter. The point of view, which was that of an
exceedingly refined and carefully guarded Hedonism, was in a way and at
least in its formulation novel. Mr. Pater did not meddle with any
question of religion; he did not (though there were some who scented
immorality in his attitude) offend directly any ethical prejudice or
principle. But he laid it down explicitly in some places, implicitly
throughout, that the object of life should be to extract to the utmost
the pleasure of living in the more refined way, and expressly and
especially the pleasure to be derived from education and art. The
indebtedness of this both to the Arnoldian and Ruskinian creeds, its
advance (in the main a legitimate advance) on the former, and its
heretical deviation from the development of the latter, require no
comment. But this propaganda, if so violent a word may be used, of Mr.
Pater's placid creed, called to aid a most remarkable style--a style of
the new kind, lavish of adjective and the _mot de lumiere_, but not
exceedingly florid, and aiming especially at such an arrangement of the
clause, the sentence, and the paragraph, such a concerted harmony of
cadence and symphony, as had not been deliberately tried before in
prose. The effects which it produced on different tastes were themselves
sufficiently different. Some found the purport too distasteful to give a
dispassionate attention to the presentment; others disliked the manner
itself as formal, effeminate, and "precious." But there were others who,
while recognising the danger of excess in this direction, thought and
think that a distinct and remarkable experiment had been made in English
prose, and that the best examples of it deserved a place with the best
examples of the ornater styles at any previous time and in any other
kind.
Mr. Pater was not tempted by such popularity as his book received to
hasten publication; indeed it was understood that after beginning to
print a second collection of Essays, he became dissatisfied with them,
and caused the type to be broken up. But the advance of so-called
AEstheticism was too strong an invitation, and prepared for him too large
and eager an audience, so that the last decade of his life saw several
books, _Marius the Epicurean_, _Imaginary Portraits_, _Appreciations_,
while others appeared posthumously. Of these the first-named is
unquestionably the best and most important. Although Greek had been the
indispensable--almost the cardinal--principle in Mr. Pater's own
literary development, he had been so strongly affected by modern thought
and taste, that he could hardly recover a dispassionate view of the
older classics. _Imaginary Portraits_, an attempt at constructive rather
than critical art, required qualities which he did not possess, and even
made him temporarily forget his impeccable style: _Appreciations_, good
in itself, was inferior to the first book. But _Marius the Epicurean_
far excelled all these. It, too, took the form of fiction, but the story
went for so little in it that deficiencies therein were not felt. The
book was in effect a reconstruction, partly imaginative, but still more
critical, of a period with which Mr. Pater was probably more in sympathy
than with any other, even the Renaissance itself, to wit the extremely
interesting and strangely modern period when classicism and modernity,
Christianity and Paganism, touched and blended in the second century
after Christ after the fashion revealed to us in the works of Apuleius
most of all, of Lucian to some extent, and of a few others. Mr. Pater
indeed actually introduced the philosopher-novelist of Madaura in the
book, though he was not the hero; and his own peculiar style proved
itself admirably suited to the period and subject, whether in
description and conversation, or in such translation or paraphrase as
that of the famous and exquisite _Pervigilium Veneris_.
For this style, however, in perfection we must still go back to the
_Studies of the Renaissance_, which is what Mr. Arnold liked to call a
_point de repere_. The style, less exuberant, less far-reaching and
versatile, and, if any one pleases to say so, less healthy than Mr.
Ruskin's, is much more chastened, finished, and exquisite. It never at
its best neglects the difference between the rhythm of prose and the
metre of verse; if it is sometimes, and indeed usually, wanting in
simplicity, it is never overloaded or gaudy. The words are picked; but
they are seldom or never, as has been the case with others, not only
picked but wrenched, not only adjusted to a somewhat unusual society and
use, but deliberately forced into uses and societies wholly different
from those to which readers are accustomed. Above all, no one, it must
be repeated, has ever surpassed, and scarcely any one has ever equalled
Mr. Pater in deliberate and successful architecture of the
prose-paragraph--in what may, for the sake of a necessary difference, be
called the scriptorial in opposition to the oratorical manner. He may
fall short of the poetic grandeur of Sir Thomas Browne, of the
phantasmagoric charm of De Quincey at his rare best, of the gorgeous
panoramas of Mr. Ruskin. But his happiest paragraphs are like
_flamboyant_ chantries, not imposing, not quite supreme in quality, but
in their own kind showing wonderful perfection of craftsmanship.
Of the same school, though a less exact and careful practitioner in it,
was John Addington Symonds, who was born in Bristol on the 5th of
October 1840, and died at Rome on 19th April 1893. He was the son of a
famous doctor whose name figures often in literary history, inasmuch as
he made Clifton a frequent resort for persons of consumptive tendencies.
Mr. Symonds himself lived there for a great part of his life.
Unfortunately the disease which his father had combated revenged itself
upon him; and it was only by spending the greater part of his later
years at Davos that he staved it off as long as he did. Educated at
Harrow and at Balliol, a Fellow of Magdalen, and succeeding tolerably
young to an affluent fortune, Mr. Symonds was able to indulge his
tastes, literary and other, pretty much as he chose. The result was
fortunate in one way, unfortunate in another. He could hardly have made
a living by literature, in which though an eager worker he was a
thorough dilettante. But if he had been at less liberty to write what
and howsoever he pleased, he might or rather would have been obliged to
compress and chasten the extreme prolixity and efflorescence of his
style.
His largest work, the _History of the Renaissance in Italy_, is actually
one of great value in information, thought, and style; but its extreme
redundance cannot be denied, and has indeed already necessitated a sort
of boiling down into an abstract. Both in prose essays (which he wrote
in great numbers, chiefly on Greek or Renaissance subjects) and in verse
(where he was not so successful as in prose) Mr. Symonds was one of the
most characteristic and copious members of the rather foolishly named
"aesthetic" school of the last third of the century, the school which,
originally deriving more or less from Mr. Ruskin, more and more rejected
the ethical side of his teaching. But Mr. Symonds, who had been very
much under the influence of Professor Jowett, had philosophical
velleities, which have become more generally known than they once were
through the interesting biography published after his death by Mr.
Horatio Brown. But for the redundance above mentioned, which is all
pervading with him both in thought and style, and which once suggested
to a not unfriendly critic the remark that he should like "to squeeze
him like a sponge," Symonds would probably or rather certainly occupy a
much higher place than he has held or ever will hold. For his
appreciation both of books and of nature was intense, and his faculty of
description abundant. But the _ventosa et enormis loquacitas_ of his
style was everywhere, so that even selection would be hard put to it to
present him really at his best.
William Minto, who was born in 1846 and died in 1893, Professor of Logic
and English Literature at Aberdeen, showed fewer marks of the joint
direction of "aesthetic" criticism to art and letters than these two, and
had less distinct and original literary talent. He had his education
mainly at Aberdeen itself, where he was born and died; but he made a
short visit to Oxford. Subsequently taking to journalism, he became
editor of the _Examiner_, and considerably raised the standard of
literary criticism in that periodical, while after quitting it he wrote
for some time on the _Daily News_. His appointment to the professorship
enabled him to devote himself entirely to literature, and he produced
some novels, the best of which was _The Crack of Doom_. He had much
earlier executed two extremely creditable books, one on _English Prose_,
and one on part of the History of English verse, the only drawbacks to
which were a rather pedagogic and stiff arrangement; he was a frequent
contributor to the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, and after his death some
of his professorial Lectures on the Georgian era were published, but
without his final revision. The strongest side of Minto's criticism lay
in his combination of sufficiently sound and wide knowledge of the past
with a distinct and rather unusual sympathy with the latest schools of
literature as they rose. He was untainted by the florid style of his
day, but wrote solidly and well. If it were necessary to look for
defects in his work they would probably be found in a slight deficiency
of comparative estimate, and in a tendency to look at things rather from
the point of view of modern than from that of universal criticism. But
this tendency was not in him, as it so often is, associated with
ignorance or presumptuous judgment.