CONCLUSION
A conclusion which avows that it might almost as well have presented
itself as a preface may seem to be self-condemned; it must be the
business of the following pages to justify it. In summing up on such a
great matter as this it is desirable--it is indeed necessary--to
indicate, in broader lines than at the mere outset would have seemed
appropriate or indeed possible, the general course of thought and of
speech, of literary matter and literary form, during the century and
more which is submitted to the view. We can thus place individuals in
their position to each other and to the whole more boldly and with less
reserve; we can sketch the general character of existing movements, the
movers in which have been exempt from individual consideration by virtue
of their life and work being incomplete; we can at once record
accomplishment and indicate tendency.
The period dealt with in the first chapter of this book illustrates the
differences in appeal of such periods to the merely dilettante and
"tasting" critic, and to the student of literature in the historical and
comparative fashion. To the former it is one of the most ungrateful of
all such sub-periods or sub-divisions in English literature. He finds in
it none, or at most Boswell's _Johnson_, Burns, and the _Lyrical
Ballads_ (this last at its extreme end), of the chief and principal
things on which alone he delights to fix his attention. Its better
poetry, such as that of Cowper and Crabbe, he regards at best with a
forced esteem; its worse is almost below his disgust. Its fiction is
preposterous and childish; it contributes nothing even to the less
"bellettristic" departments of literature that is worth his attention;
it is a tedious dead season about which there is nothing tolerable
except the prospect of getting rid of it before very long.
To the latter--to the historical and comparative student--on the other
hand, it has an interest of an absolutely unique kind. As was observed
in a former volume of this history, the other great blossoming time of
English literature--that which we call Elizabethan, and by which we mean
the last five and twenty years of the Queen's reign and the fifty or
sixty after her death--was preceded by no certain signs except those of
restless seeking. Here, on the contrary, with no greater advantage of
looking back, we can see the old fruit dropping off and the new forming,
in a dozen different kinds and a hundred different ways. Extravagance on
one side always provokes extravagance on the other; and because the
impatient revolt of Coleridge and some others of the actual leaders into
the Promised Land chose to present the eighteenth century as a mere
wilderness in respect of poetry, enjoyment of nature, and so forth,
there have been of late years critics who maintained that the poetical
decadence of that century is all a delusion; in other words (it may be
supposed) that Akenside and Mason are the poetical equals of Herrick and
Donne. The _via media_, as almost always, is here also the _via
veritatis_. The poets of the eighteenth century were poets; but the
poetical stream did not, as a rule, run very high or strong in their
channels, and they were tempted to make up for the sluggishness and
shallowness of the water by playing rather artificial and rococo tricks
with the banks. The fiction of the eighteenth century was, at its
greatest, equal to the greatest ever seen; but it was as yet advancing
with uncertain steps, and had not nearly explored its own domain. The
history of the eighteenth century had returned to the true sense of
history, and was endeavouring to be accurate; but it only once
attained--it is true that with Gibbon it probably attained once for
all--a perfect combination of diligence and range, of matter and of
style.
In all these respects the list might, if it were proper, be extended to
much greater length. The twenty years from 1780 to 1800 show us in the
most fascinating manner the turn of the tide, not as yet coming in three
feet abreast, rather creeping up by tortuous channels and chance
depressions, but rising and forcing a way wherever it could. In the
poets, major and minor, of the period, omitting, and even not wholly
omitting, Burns and Blake--who are of no time intrinsically, but who, as
it happens, belong accidentally to this time as exponents, the one of
the refreshing influence of dialect and freedom from literary
convention, the other of the refreshing influence of sympathy with old
models and mystical dreaming--all the restlessness of the approaching
crisis is seen. Nothing in literature is more interesting than to watch
the effect of the half-unconscious aims and desires of Cowper and
Crabbe, to see how they try to put the new wine in the old bottles, to
compare them with Goldsmith and Thomson on the one hand, with Wordsworth
and Coleridge on the other. Hayley perhaps alone, or almost alone, is
rebel to the comparative method. Hayley is one of these hopeless
creatures who abound at all periods, and whose native cast of
nothingness takes a faint fashion from the time. But even in the verse
of "Monk" Lewis we see the itch for new measures, the craving for lyric
movement; even in the day-flies of the Della Crusca group the desire to
be "something different." And then in Bowles, with his sonnets of
places, in Sayers, with his rhymeless Pindarics, we come upon the actual
guides to the right way, guides the oddest, the blindest, the most
stumbling, but still--as not merely chronology but the positive
testimony and the still more positive practice of those who followed
them show--real guides and no misleaders.
Least studied, perhaps, because of its want of positive savour in
comparison with their later achievements, but more interesting than all
of these, is the early work of Southey, Coleridge, and Wordsworth
themselves, and the work, not merely early but later, of men like
Rogers and Campbell. Here the spectacle already presented in Crabbe and
Cowper is repeated; but the process is in a further stage, and the
fermentation is determining, according to the nature of the fermenting
material. On Rogers it is nearly powerless; in Campbell only in his
lyrics does it succeed in breaking up and dissolving the old crust; in
Southey the effect is never quite complete; in Coleridge and Wordsworth,
but especially in Coleridge, the leaven changes all the latter lump.
Thenceforward the process is reversed. Instead of instances of advance
amid a mass of inertia or aimless wandering we have instances of
reaction amid a mass of advance. The work of the revolutionary time is
done; the scholar, contrary to Goethe's dictum, has now not merely to
exercise himself but to perfect.
The phenomena of the time in fiction are of the same character, but they
lead as yet to no such distinct turn. The tale-telling of Beckford is
like the singing of Burns, not uncoloured by the time, but still in the
main purely individual; the purpose of the novels of Holcroft, Godwin,
and Bage is groping in the dark; the Radcliffian romance and its
exaggeration by Lewis exhibit the same uncertainty, the same application
of the Rule of False. And there is for once a more philosophical and
less cowardly explanation--that Scott, the Joshua in this instance, as
Coleridge and Wordsworth were in the other, was occupied elsewhere
before he sought the Palestine of the novel. For it must be remembered
that prose fiction, though it had been cultivated in a scattered and
tentative way for thousands of years, was up to this time the most
inorganic of literary kinds. Poets, when they chose to give themselves
up to poetry and to turn their backs on convention, were almost as well
off then as now. They had but to open the great Greeks of the fifth and
fourth centuries before Christ, the Latins such as Lucretius and
Catullus, the great mediaeval, the great Renaissance examples of their
own art, to see, as soon as they chose to see, where and how to go
right. The adventurer in fiction was destitute of any such assistance.
Only a few examples of much real excellence in his art were before him;
many of those existing (including most of the mediaeval instances) were
hardly before him at all; and none of these, with the exception of the
eighteenth century novel of manners and character (which, in the nature
of the case, was at that special time the last thing he wanted to
imitate), and the short tale of France and Italy, could be said to have
been brought to anything like perfection. Hence the wanderings and the
stumblings here were far greater, the touch of the groping hands far
feebler and less sure than even in poetry; but the crying for the light
was there too, and it was to be heard in time. Even as it was, before
the century closed, Miss Edgeworth had given important new lines to
fiction, and was on the eve of opening the most fertile of all its seams
or veins, that of national or provincial character; the purpose-novel
just referred to was full of future, though it might be a future of a
perilous and disputable kind; the terror-romance, subdued to saner
limits and informed with greater knowledge and greater genius, was not
soon to cease out of the land; and, a detail not to be neglected, the
ever increasing popularity of the novel was making it more and more
certain that it would number good intellects sooner or later.
In all other directions, with the single exception of drama, in which
there was neither performance nor promise, so far as literature was
concerned, to any great extent, the same restlessness of effort, and not
always the same incompetence of result was seen. The fact of the
revolutionary war abroad and the coercive policy thereby necessitated at
home may have somewhat postponed the appearance of the new kind of
periodical, in all shapes from quarterly to daily, which was to be so
great a feature of the next age; but the same causes increased the
desire for it and prepared not a few of its constituents. It is
impossible for any tolerably careful reader not to notice how much more
"modern," to use an unphilosophical but indispensable term, is the
political satire both in verse and prose, which has been noticed in the
first chapter of this book, than the things of more or less the same
kind that immediately preceded it. It was an accident, no doubt, that
made the _Anti-Jacobin_ ridicule Darwin's caricature of eighteenth
century style in poetry; yet that ridicule did far more to put this
particular convention out of fashion than all the attacks of the same
paper on innovators like Coleridge (who at that time had hardly
attempted their literary innovations) could do harm. The very interest
in foreign affairs, brought about by the most universal war that had
ever been known, helped to introduce the foreign element which was to
play so large a part in literature; and little affection as the critic
may have for the principles of Godwin or of Paine, he cannot deny that
the spirit of inquiry, the rally and shock of attack and defence, are
things a great deal better for literature than a placid contentment with
accepted conventions.
Theology indeed may share with drama the reproach of having very little
that is good to show from this time, or indeed for a long time to come.
For the non-conformist sects and the Low Church party, which had
resulted from the Evangelical movement in the earlier eighteenth
century, were, the Unitarians excepted, for the most part illiterate.
The Deist controversy had ceased, or, as conducted against Paine,
required no literary skill; and the High Church movement had not begun.
Philosophy, not productive of very much, was more active; and the
intensely alien and novel styles of German thought were certain in time
to produce their effect, while their working was in exact line with all
the other tendencies we have been surveying.
In short, during these twenty years, literature in almost all its parts
was being thoroughly "boxed about." The hands that stirred it were not
of the strongest as yet, they were absolutely unskilled, and for the
most part they had not even any very clear conception of what they
wanted to do. But almost everybody felt that something had to be done,
and was anxious--even childishly anxious--to do something. It by no
means always happens that such anxiety is rewarded or is a good sign;
but it is always a noteworthy one, and in this instance there is no
doubt about either the fact of the reward or its goodness.
The subsequent history of poetry during the century divides itself in an
exceedingly interesting way, which has not perhaps yet been subjected to
full critical comment. There are in it five pretty sharply marked
periods of some ten or fifteen years each, which are distinguished, the
first, third, and fifth, by the appearance in more or less numbers of
poets of very high merit, and of characteristics more or less distinctly
original; the second and fourth by poetic growths, not indeed scanty in
amount and sometimes exquisite in quality, but tentative, fragmentary,
and undecided. It will of course be understood that in this, as in all
literary classifications, mathematical accuracy must not be expected,
and that the lives of many of the poets mentioned necessarily extend
long before and after the periods which their poetical production
specially distinguishes. In fact the life of Wordsworth covers as nearly
as possible the whole five sub-periods mentioned, reckoning from his own
birth-year to that of almost the youngest of the poets, of whom we shall
here take account. And perhaps there are few better ways of realising
the extraordinary eminence of English nineteenth century poetry than by
observing, that during these eighty years there was never a single one
at which more or fewer persons were not in existence, who had produced
or were to produce poetry of the first class. And the more the five-fold
division indicated is examined and analysed the more curious and
interesting will its phenomena appear.
The divisions or batches of birth-years are worth indicating separately:
the first comprises the eighth and ninth decades of the eighteenth
century, from the birth of Scott and the Lakers to that of Shelley, with
Keats as a belated and so to speak posthumous but most genuine child of
it; the second covers about fifteen years from the birth of George
Darley, who was of the same year (1795) with Keats, to the eve of that
of Tennyson; the third goes from 1810 or thereabouts, throwing back to
include the elder Tennysons and Mrs. Browning; the fourth extends from
about 1825 to 1836; the fifth from the birth of Mr. Morris (throwing
back as before to admit Rossetti) to the end.
In the first of these we see the Romantic revolt or renaissance,
whichever word may be preferred, growing up under the joint influences
of the opening of mediaeval and foreign literature; of the excitement of
the wars of the French Revolution; of the more hidden but perhaps more
potent force of simple ebb-and-flow which governs the world in all
things, though some fondly call it Progress; and of the even more
mysterious chance or choice, which from time to time brings into the
world, generally in groups, persons suited to effect the necessary
changes. The "Return to Nature," or to be less question-begging let us
say the taking up of a new standpoint in regard to nature, made half
unconsciously by men like Cowper and Crabbe, assisted without intending
it by men like Burns and Blake, effected in intention if not in full
achievement by feeble but lucky pioneers like Bowles, asserts itself
once for all in the _Lyrical Ballads_, and then works itself out in
different--in almost all possibly different--ways through the varying
administration of the same spirit by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Shelley
and Keats, in the highest and primary rank, by Scott and Byron in the
next, by Southey, Campbell, Leigh Hunt, Moore, and others in the third.
And it is again most interesting to watch how the exertion of influence
and the character of it are by no means in proportion to the exact
poetical strength of the agent. Scott and Byron, certainly inferior as
poets to the first four mentioned, have probably had a greater bulk of
poetical influence and poetical action on mankind at large certainly,
and a vastly earlier, more immediate and more sweeping influence on
other poets than their betters. Leigh Hunt, a poet quite of the third
rank, exercised directly and indirectly, through Shelley and Keats, an
influence on the form of poetry, on metre, cadence, phrase, greater than
any of the others, save Wordsworth and Byron, and perhaps more than
these. In all ways, however, by this channel and that, in
straightforward or stealthy fashion, the poetic flood comes up, and by
the death of Byron, Shelley and Keats having still more prematurely gone
before, it is at its very highest spring. Six and twenty years passed,
from 1798 to 1824, from the time when the _Lyrical Ballads_ were
brought out to take their chance to the time when Mr. Beddoes, Mr.
Procter, and somebody else clubbed to publish Shelley's posthumous poems
at their own expense or at least guarantee, and justly objected to
paying for more than 250 copies, because more were not likely to be
sold. In these six and twenty years such an addition had been made to
English poetry as five times the space had not previously seen, as
perhaps was not far from equalling the glorious gains of a not very
different though somewhat longer space of time between the appearance of
the _Shepherd's Calendar_ and the death of Shakespeare.
But the sequel of this abnormally high tide is hardly less interesting
than itself. We generally expect at such moments in literature either a
decided falling off, or else a period of decent imitation, of "school
work." It would be absurd to say that there is no contrast, no falling
off, and no imitation in the group of poets noticed at the end of the
second chapter in this volume. But they are not utterly decadent, and
they are by no means purely or merely imitative. On the contrary, their
note is quite different from that of mere school work, and in a sort of
eccentric and spasmodic fashion they attain to singular excellence.
Hood, Praed, Macaulay, Taylor, Darley, Beddoes, Hartley Coleridge,
Horne, are not to Wordsworth or Coleridge, to Byron or to Shelley, what
the later so-called Elizabethan playwrights are to Jonson and Fletcher,
the later poets of the same time to Spenser and Donne. But they almost
all, perhaps all, seem forced to turn into some bye-way or backwater of
poetry, to be unable or unwilling to keep the crown of the causeway, the
flood of the tide. Hood and Praed--the former after actually attempting
great poetry, and coming nearer to it than some great poets come in
their first attempts--wander into the special borderland of humorous and
grotesque verse, achieving in different parts of it something not unlike
absolute and unsurpassed success. Beddoes, and to some extent Darley,
adopt fantastic varieties, grim in the former's hands, playful chiefly
in the latter's, but alike remote from everyday interests and broad
appeals; while the incomparable lyrics of Beddoes are of no special
time or school, their very Elizabethanism being somewhat delusive.
Taylor and Horne attempt the serious moral play with hardly any stage
purposes or possibilities, and Horne in _Orion_ tries an eccentric kind
of ethical or satirical epic. Macaulay--the most prominent of all, and
the most popular in his tastes and aims--is perhaps the nearest to a
"schoolman," adapting Scott as he does in his _Lays_; yet even here
there is no mere imitation.
Thus the people of this minor transition exhibit--in a most interesting
way, rendered even more interesting by the repetition of it which, as we
have seen and shall see, came about twenty years later--the mixed
phenomena of an after-piece and a _lever de rideau_, of precursorship
and what we must for want of a better word call decadence. They were not
strong enough in themselves, or were not favourably enough
circumstanced, entirely to refresh or redirect the main current of
poetry; so they deviated from it. But hardly in the least of them is
there absent the sign and symptom of the poetic spirit being still
about, of the poetic craft still in full working order. And their
occasional efforts, their experiments in the half-kinds they affected,
have a curious charm. English poetry would be undeniably poorer without
the unearthly snatches of Beddoes, the exquisitely urbane
verse-of-society of Praed, the pathetic-grotesque of Hood, even the
stately tirades of Horne and Taylor. Some of them, if not all, may at
this or that time have been exaggerated in value, by caprice, by
reaction, by mere personal sympathy. But no universal critic will refuse
admiration to them in and for themselves.
In the next stage we are again face to face, not with half-talents,
uncertain of their direction, but with whole genius, inevitably working
on its predestined lines. Nothing quite like the poetical career and the
poetical conception of Alfred Tennyson and of Robert Browning, so
different in all respects, except that of duration and coincidence in
time, meets us in English, perhaps nothing similar meets us in any
literature. It is easy to overestimate both; and both have been
over-estimated. It is still easier to depreciate both; and both have
been depreciated. Both wrote constantly, and at frequent intervals, for
some sixty years--the same sixty years--and, with not more than fair
allowance for the effects of time, both wrote at the end better than at
the beginning, and nearly as well as at the best time of each.
Wordsworth, it is true, wrote for nearly as long, but no one can assert
the same duration of equality in his production.
In a certain sense, no doubt, neither can claim the same distinct
individuality, the same unmistakable and elementary _quality_, as that
which distinguishes Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Shelley.
The work of each is always at once recognisable by any tolerably
competent judge; but the signs of identity are more composite than
atomic, more derived and literary than essentially native. Browning's
unconventional mannerisms, and his wide range of subject, have made him
seem even less of a mere scholar than Tennyson; but, as a fact, each is
independent enough to a certain extent and to a certain extent only. In
both appears, perhaps for the first time, certainly for the first time
in combination with distinct original genius, that indebtedness to the
past, that relapse upon it in the very act of forming vast schemes for
the future, which is more the note of the nineteenth century than
anything else. They not merely have all literature and all history
behind them; but they know it. Yet this knowledge does not weigh on
them. They do not exactly neglect it as Wordsworth and Shelley were
still able to do, but they keep it under. It is the attendant fiend for
which they must find work, but which they never, as too many of their
contemporaries and followers have done, allow to become their master.
And so they two, as it seems to me, do actually win their way to the
first class, not perhaps to the absolutely first division of it, but to
a first class still pretty rigidly limited.
It is not the object of this Conclusion to deal with the performances of
individuals at any length, and therefore I must refer back to the text
for a detailed indication of the position of Keats as the summer-up of
the tradition of the first of the groups or periods here noticed, and
the begetter, master, and teacher of the third, as well as for
descriptions of the different manners in which Tennyson and Browning
respectively shared and distributed between themselves that catholic
curiosity in poetical subject, that exploration of all history and art
and literature, which is the main characteristic of strictly nineteenth
century poetry. But it is very pertinent here to point out the
remarkable way in which these two poets, from the unexampled combination
of length and potency in their poetical period of influence, governed
all the poetry that has followed them. We shall now see that under their
shadow at least two well-marked groups arose, each of magnitude and
individuality sufficient to justify the assignment to it of a separate
position. Yet it was in their shadow that these rose and flourished, and
though the trees themselves have at length fallen, the shadow of their
names is almost as great as ever.
The first of these two groups, the fourth of our present classification,
renews, as has been said before, the features of its twenty or thirty
years older forerunner, the group between Keats and Tennyson, in a most
curious and attractive fashion. Once more we find the notes of
uncertainty, of straying into paths,--not always quite blind-alleys, but
bye-paths certainly,--the presence of isolated burst and flash, of
effort unsuccessful or unequal as a whole. But here we find, what in the
earlier chapter or section we do not find, distinct imitativeness and
positive school-following. This imitation, attempting Shelley at times
with little success (for, let it be repeated, Shelley is not imitable),
selected in regular chronological order, three masters, Wordsworth,
Tennyson, and Browning, though in each stage the master of the preceding
rather shared than yielded his chair. It has been said in a famous
passage that Wordsworth was more read about sixty years ago than at any
time before or since, and this may perhaps be true. But his influence on
writers has not depended on his popularity with readers, and from Sir
Aubrey de Vere, who was born more than a century ago, to verse-writers
who have only just published, his unmistakable tone, the tone which, so
far as we can see, would never have been if Wordsworth had never
existed, shows itself. The writing influence of Tennyson did not begin
till the issue of the _Poems_ of 1842, but it began almost immediately
then, and has remained in full force to the present day. It is an
influence somewhat more external and technical than Wordsworth's, but
for that reason even more unmistakable, and some of its results are
among the most curious of school-copies in literature. As for Browning,
imitation there tried both the outside and the inside, not very often
with happy results, but, of course, with results even more obvious to
the most uncritical eye than the results of the imitation of Tennyson
itself.
The attempts to be original and to break away from these and their
imitations--the principal of them being that of the so-called Spasmodic
school, which flourished at the dead waist and middle of the
century--were not particularly happy, and those who incline to gloomy
views may say that the imitation was less happy still. In Mr. Matthew
Arnold, a recalcitrant but unmistakable Wordsworthian, sharing a partly
reluctant allegiance between Wordsworth, the ancients, Goethe, and
Tennyson himself, it is impossible not to think that a freer attitude, a
more independent and less literary aim, might have strengthened his
elegance, supplied his curious mixture of stiffness and grace, and even
made him less unequal than he actually is. And yet he is much the
greatest poet of the period. Its effect was more disastrous still upon
the second Lord Lytton, who was content to employ an excellent lyrical
vein, and a gift of verse satire of the fantastic kind so distinct and
fascinating, that it approaches the merit of fantasists in other kinds
of the former group, like Beddoes and Darley, to far too great an extent
on echoes. The fact is, that by this time, to speak conceitedly, the
obsession of the book was getting oppressive. Men could hardly sing for
remembering, or, at least, without remembering, what others had sung
before them, and became either slavishly imitative or wilfully
recalcitrant to imitation. The great leaders indeed continued to sing
each in his own way, and, though with perfect knowledge of their
forerunners, not in the least hampered by that knowledge. But something
else was needed to freshen the middle regions of song.
It was found in that remarkable completion of the English Romantic
movement, which is in relation to art called prae-Raphaelitism, and which
is represented in literature, to mention only the greatest names, by
Rossetti, his sister, Mr. Morris, and Mr. Swinburne. The death of the
two former, and the fact that the movement itself, still active in art,
has in a manner rounded itself off, though it is not necessarily
finished, in literature, enable us to discuss it here as a whole, though
its two chief poets are luckily still alive.
The first thing of interest in general history which strikes us, in
regard to this delightful chapter of English poetry, is its
illustration--a common one in life and letters--of the fact that there
is a false as well as a true side to the question quoted by Aristotle:
"If water chokes you, what are you to drink on the top of it?" "Wine,"
one kind of humourist might answer; "More water," another: and both
rightly. It has been said that the group which preceded this suffered
from the pressure of too constant, wide, and various reminiscence,
literary, artistic, and other. The prae-Raphaelites refreshed themselves
and the world by applying still more strenuously to the particular kind
and period of such reminiscence which had been hitherto, despite the
mediaeval excursions of many from Percy to Tennyson, imperfectly
utilised. The literary practitioners of the school (with whom alone we
are concerned) were not indeed by any means purely mediaeval in their
choice of subject, in their founts of inspiration, or in their method of
treatment. English poetry has known few if any more accomplished
scholars both in the classics and in the modern languages than Mr.
Swinburne, for instance; and something similar might be said of others.
But, on the whole, the return of this school--for all new things in
literature are returns--was to a mediaevalism different from the
tentative and scrappy mediaevalism of Percy, from the genial but slightly
superficial mediaevalism of Scott, and even from the more exact but
narrow and distinctly conventionalised mediaevalism of Tennyson. They
had other appeals, but this was their chief.
It may seem that mere or main archaism is not a very charming or
powerful thing, and in weaker hands it would not have been either one or
the other; but it so happened that these hands were very strong indeed.
Mr. Rossetti had one of the most astonishing combinations ever known of
artistically separate gifts, as well as a singular blend of passion and
humour. His sister was one of the great religious poets of the world.
Mr. Swinburne has never been surpassed, if he has ever been equalled, by
any poet in any language for command of the more rushing and flowing
forms of verse. Mr. Morris has few equals in any time or country for
narrative at once decorative and musical. Moreover, though it may seem
whimsical or extravagant to say so, these poets added to the very charm
of mediaeval literature which they thus revived a subtle something which
differentiates it from--which to our perhaps blind sight seems to be
wanting in--mediaeval literature itself. It is constantly complained (and
some of those who cannot go all the way with the complainants can see
what they mean) that the graceful and labyrinthine stories, the sweet
snatches of song, the quaint drama and legend of the Middle Ages
lack--to us--life; that they are shadowy, unreal, tapestry on the wall,
not alive even as living pageants are. By the strong touch of modernness
which these poets and the best of their followers introduced into their
work, they have given the vivification required.
Beyond them we must not go, nor inquire whether the poets who have not
come to forty years represent a new school of the masterful and supreme
kind, or one of the experimental and striving sort, or something a good
deal worse than this, a period of sheer interval and suspense,
unenlivened even by considerable attempt. Not only our scheme, not only
common prudence and politeness, but most of all the conditions of
critical necessity insist on the curtain being here dropped. It is
possible that a critic may be able to isolate and project himself
sufficiently to judge, as posterity will judge them, the actually
accomplished work of his own contemporaries and juniors. But even such a
skilful and fortunate person cannot judge the work which they have not
yet produced, and which may in all cases, and must in some, modify their
position and alter their rank.
But what has been has been, and on this mass (not in the actual case
"vulgar" by any means) of things done it is possible to pronounce
securely. And with security it may be said that for total amount, total
merit, total claims of freshness and distinctness, no period of poetical
literature can much, if at all, exceed the ninety years of English verse
from _The Ancient Mariner_ to _Crossing the Bar_. The world has had few
poets better than the best of ours during this time in degree; it has
had none like Shelley, perhaps none exactly like Wordsworth, in kind.
The secret of long narrative poems that should interest has been
recovered; the sonnet, one of the smallest but one of the most perfect
of poetic forms, has been recovered likewise. Attempts to recover the
poetic drama have been mostly failures; and serious satire has hardly
reappeared. But lighter satire, with other "applied" poetry, has shown
variety and excellence. Above all lyric, the most poetic kind of poetry,
has attained a perfection never known before, except once in England and
once in Greece. It has been impossible hitherto to make a full and free
anthology of the lyric poets from Burns and Blake to Tennyson and
Browning to match the anthologies often made of those from Surrey or
Sidney to Herrick or Vaughan. But when it can be done it is a question
whether the later volume will not even excel the earlier in intensity
and variety, if not perhaps in freshness of charm.
And then it is needful once more to insist, even at the risk of
disgusting, on the additional interest given by the subtle and delicate,
but still distinctly traceable gradations, the swell and sinking, the
flow and ebb, of poetical production and character during the time. As
no other flourishing time of any poetry has lasted so long, so none has
had the chance of developing these mutations in so extensive and
attractive a manner; in none has it been possible to feel the pulse of
poetry, so to speak, in so connected and considerable a succession of
experiment. Poetical criticism can never be scientific; but it can
seldom have had an opportunity of going nearer to a scientific process
than here, owing to the volume, the connection, the duration, the
accessibility of the phenomena submitted to the critic. The actual
secret as usual escapes; but we can hunt the fugitive by a closer trail
than usual through the chambers of her flight.
Of the highest poetry, however, as of other highest things, Goethe's
famous axiom _Ueber allen Gipfeln ist Ruh_ holds good. Although there is
a difference between the expressions of this highest poetry in the fifth
and fourth centuries before Christ, in the fourteenth, seventeenth, and
nineteenth after Christ there is also a certain quiet sameness, not
indiscernibility but still identity. The lower kinds of literature admit
of more apparent and striking freshness of exterior. And perhaps the
most strikingly fresh, some might even say the distinctive, product of
the nineteenth century, is its prose fiction.
This, as has been shown in detail, is much later in date than the poetry
in anything like a characteristic and fully developed state. Although it
was busily produced during the last twenty years of the eighteenth
century and the first fifteen of the nineteenth, the very best work of
the time, except such purely isolated things as _Vathek_, are
experiments, and all but the very best--the novels of Miss Edgeworth,
those written but not till quite the end of the time published by Miss
Austen, and a very few others--are experiments of singular lameness and
ill success.
With Scott's change from verse to prose, the modern romance admittedly,
and to a greater extent than is generally thought the modern novel, came
into being; and neither has gone out of being since. In the two chapters
which have been devoted to the subject we have seen how the overpowering
success of _Waverley_ bred a whole generation of historical novels; how
side by side with this the older novel of manners, slightly altered,
continued to be issued, with comic deviations chiefly, as in the hands
of Theodore Hook; how Bulwer attempted a sort of cross between the two;
how about the middle of the century the historical novel either ceased
or changed, to revive later after a middle period illustrated by the
brilliant romances of Kingsley; how about the same time the strictly
modern novel of manners came into being in the hands of Thackeray, Miss
Bronte, George Eliot, and Anthony Trollope, Dickens overlapping both
periods in a fantastic and nondescript style of his own; and how more
recently still both romance and novel have spread out and ramified into
endless subdivisions.
There is, however, this broad line of demarcation between poetry and the
novel, that they are written for different ends and from different
motives. It is natural to man to write poetry; it does not appear to be
by any means so certainly or unvaryingly necessary to him to read it.
Except at rare periods and for short times, poetry has never offered the
slightest chance of livelihood to any considerable number of persons;
and it is tolerably certain that if the aggregate number of poets since
the foundation of the world had had nothing to live on but their
aggregate gains as poets, starvation would have been the commonplace
rule, instead of the dramatic exception, among the sons of Apollo.
On the other hand, it is no doubt also natural to man to tell prose
stories, and it seems, though it was a late-discovered aptitude, that it
is not unnatural to him to read them; but the writing of them does not
seem to be at all an innate or widely disseminated need. Until some
hundred or two hundred years ago very few were written at all; the
instances of persons who do but write novels because they must are
exceedingly rare, and it is as certain as anything can be that of the
enormous production of the last three-quarters of a century not 5,
perhaps not 1 per cent would have been produced if the producing had not
led, during the whole of that time, in most cases but those of hopeless
incompetence to some sort of a livelihood, in many to very comfortable
income, and in some to positive wealth and fame. In other words, poetry
is the creation of supply and novel-writing of demand; poetry can hardly
ever be a trade and in very rare cases a profession, while novel-writing
is commonly a very respectable profession, and unfortunately sometimes a
rather disreputable trade.
Like other professions, however, it enlists genius sometimes, talent
often; and the several and successive ways in which this genius and this
talent show themselves are of more than sufficient interest. But the
steady demand, and the inevitable answer to it, work adversely to such
spontaneous and interesting fluctuations of production as those which we
have traced in reference to poetry. There have been times, particularly
that between the cessation of Sir Walter's best work and the perfecting
of that of Thackeray, in which the average value of even the best novels
was much lower than at other times. But even in these the average volume
maintained itself very well, and, indeed, steadily increased.
It is this which, with another to be mentioned shortly, will, so far as
it is possible for a contemporary to judge, be noted in the literary
history of the future as the distinguishing crop or field of the
nineteenth century. Sermons, essays, plays, no doubt, continue to be
written; but the novel has supplanted the sermon, the essay, the play in
the place which each at different times held as the _popular_ form of
literature. It may be added, or repeated, that it has in part at least
achieved this result by trespassing upon the provinces of all these
three forms and of many others. This is true, but is of somewhat less
importance than might be thought. The fable has an old trick of
adjusting itself to almost every possible kind of literary use, and the
novel is only an enlarged and more fully organised fable. It does not,
no doubt, do best when it abuses this privilege of its ancestor, and
saturates itself overmuch with "purpose," but it has at least an
ancestral right to do so.
There is no doubt also that the popularity of the novel has been very
directly connected with a cause which has had all manner of effects
fathered upon it--often with no just causation or filiation whatever--to
wit, the spread of education. In the proper sense of course the spread
of education must always be strictly limited. The number of educable
persons probably bears a pretty constant ratio to the population, and
when the education reaches the level of the individual's containing
power, it simply runs over and is lost. But it is possible to teach
nearly everybody reading and writing; and it is a curious but exact
observation that a very large proportion of those who have been taught
reading require something to read. Now the older departments of
literature do not lend themselves with any facility to constant reading
by the average man or woman, whose requirements may be said to be
amusement rather than positive delight, occupation much rather than
intellectual exertion, and above all, something to pass time. For these
requirements, or this compound requirement, the hearing of some new
thing has been of old recognised as the surest and most generally useful
specific. And the novel holds itself out, not indeed always quite truly,
as being new or nothing by name and nature. Accordingly the demand for
novels has gone on ever increasing, and the supply has never failed to
keep up with it.
Nor would it be just to say that the quality has sunk appreciably. The
absolutely palmy day of the English nineteenth century in novel-writing
was no doubt some thirty-five or forty years ago. Not even the
contemporary France of that date can show such a "galaxy-gallery" as the
British novelists--Dickens, Thackeray, Miss Bronte, George Eliot,
Trollope, Kingsley, Bulwer, Disraeli, Lever, Mr. Meredith, and
others--who all wrote in the fifties. But at the beginning of the period
the towering genius of Scott and the perfect art of Miss Austen, if we
add to them Miss Edgeworth's genial talent, did not find very much of
even good second-rate matter to back them; there was, as has been said,
a positively barren time succeeding this first stage and preceding the
"fifty" period; and twenty years or a little more ago, when Thackeray
and Dickens were dead, Trollope and George Eliot past their best,
Kingsley and Bulwer moribund, Mr. Meredith writing sparely and
unnoticed, the new romantic school not arisen, and no recruit of
distinction except Mr. Blackmore firmly set, things were apparently a
great deal worse with us in point of novel-writing than they are at
present. Whether, with a return of promise and an increase of
performance, with a variation of styles and an abundance of experiment,
there has also been a relapse into the extravagances which we have had
in this very book to chronicle as characterising the fiction of exactly
a century ago,--whether we have had over-luxuriant and non-natural
style, attempts to attract by loose morality, novels of purpose, novels
of problem, and so forth,--and whether the coming age will dismiss much
of our most modern work as not superior in literary and inferior in
other appeal to the work of Godwin and Lewis, Holcroft and Bage, it is
not necessary distinctly to say. But our best is certainly better than
the best of that time, our worst is perhaps not worse; and the novel
occupies a far higher place in general estimation than it did then.
Indeed it has been observed by the sarcastic that to some readers of
novels, and even to some writers of them, "novel" and "book" seem to be
synonymous terms, and that when such persons speak of "literature," they
mean and pretty distinctly indicate that they mean novel-writing, and
novel-writing only. This at least shows that the seed which Scott sowed,
or the plant which he grafted, has not lost its vitality.
Certainly not less, perhaps even more, distinctive of the time in
history must be that development and transformation of what is broadly
called the newspaper, of which the facts and details have occupied two
more of these chapters. It is true that at times considerably earlier
than even the earliest that here concerns us, periodical writing had
been something of a power in England as regards politics, had enlisted
eminent hands, and had even served once or twice as the means of
introduction of considerable works in _belles lettres_. But the
Addisonian Essay had been something of an accident; Swift's
participation in the _Examiner_ was another; Defoe's abundant journalism
brought him more discredit than profit or praise; and though Pulteney
and the Opposition worked the press against Walpole, the process brought
little benefit to the persons concerned. Reviewing was meagrely done and
wretchedly paid; the examples of _Robinson Crusoe_ earlier and _Sir
Launcelot Greaves_ later are exceptions which prove the rule that the
_feuilleton_ was not in demand; in fact before our present period
newspaper-writing was rather dangerous, was more than rather
disreputable, and offered exceedingly little encouragement to any one to
make it the occasion of work in pure literature, or even to employ it as
a means of livelihood, while attempting other and higher, though less
paying kinds.
The period of the French Revolution, if not the French Revolution
itself, changed all this, assisted no doubt by the natural and
inevitable effects of the spread of reading and the multiplication of
books. People wanted to see the news; papers sprang up in competition to
enable them to see the news; and the competitors strove to make
themselves more agreeable than their rivals by adding new attractions.
Again, the activity of the Jacobin party, which early and of course
directed itself to the press, necessitated activity on the other side.
The keenest intellects, the best-trained wits of the nation, sometimes
under some disguise, sometimes openly, took to journalism, and it became
simply absurd to regard the journalist as a disreputable garreteer when
Windham and Canning were journalists. The larger sale of books and the
formation of a regular system of "pushing" them also developed
reviews--too frequently, no doubt, in the direction of mere puffing, but
even thus with the beneficent result that other reviews came into
existence which were not mere puff-engines.
Even these causes and others will not entirely explain the extraordinary
development of periodicals of all kinds from quarterly to daily, of
which the _Edinburgh_, _Blackwood_, the _Examiner_, and the _Times_ were
respectively the most remarkable examples and pioneers in the earlier
years of the century, though as a literary organ the _Morning Post_ had
at first rather the advantage of the _Times_. But, as has been said here
constantly, you can never explain everything in literary history; and
it would be extremely dull if you could. The newspaper press had, for
good or for ill, to come; external events to some obvious extent helped
its coming; individual talents and aptitudes helped it likewise; but the
main determining force was the force of hidden destiny.
There is, however, no mistake possible about the results. It is but a
slight exaggeration to say that the periodical rapidly swallowed up all
other forms of literature, to this extent and in this sense, that there
is hardly a single one of these forms capital performance in which has
not at one time or another formed part of the stuff of periodicals, and
has not by them been first introduced to the world. Not a little of our
poetry; probably the major part of our best fiction; all but a very
small part of our essay-writing, critical, meditative, and
miscellaneous; and a portion, much larger than would at one time have
seemed conceivable, of serious writing in history, philosophy, theology,
science, and scholarship, have passed through the mint or mill of the
newspaper press before presenting themselves in book form. A certain
appreciable, though small part of the best, with much of the worst, has
never got beyond that form.
To attempt to collect the result of this change is to attempt something
not at all easy, something perhaps which may be regarded as not
particularly valuable. The distinction between literature and journalism
which is so often heard is, like most such things, a fallacy, or at
least capable of being made fallacious. Put as it usually is when the
intention is disobliging to the journalist, it comes to this:--that the
_Essays of Elia_, that Southey's _Life of Nelson_, that some of the best
work of Carlyle, Tennyson, Thackeray, and others the list of whom might
be prolonged at pleasure, is not literature. Put as it sometimes is by
extremely foolish people, it would go to the extent that anything which
has _not_ been published in a daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly
publication is literature.
There is probably no subject on which it is more necessary to clear the
mind of cant than this. Of course there is journalism in the sense
opposed to literature, though not necessarily opposed in any bad sense.
No wise man intends, and no wise man will ever suffer, articles which
are in the strict sense articles, which are intended to comment on
merely passing events, and to produce a merely immediate effect, to be
extracted from journals and put on record as books. Not only is the
treatment unsuitable for such record, but it may almost be said that the
treatment suitable for things so to be recorded is actually unsuitable
for things ephemeral. But there is a very large amount of writing to
which this does not in the least apply, and in which it can make no kind
of real difference whether the result appears by itself in a bound cloth
volume as a whole, or in parts with other things in a pamphlet, covered
with paper, or not covered at all. The grain of truth which the fallacy
carries is really this:--that the habit of treating some subjects in the
peculiar fashion most effective in journalism may spread disastrously to
the treatment of other subjects which ought to be treated as literature.
This is a truth, but not a large one. There have been at all times, at
least since the invention of printing and probably before it, persons
who, though they may be guiltless of having ever written an article in
their lives, have turned out more or less ponderous library volumes in
which the very worst sins of the worst kind of journalist are rampant.
There are, however, more thoughtful reasons for regarding the
development of periodicals as not an unmixed boon to letters. The more
evanescent kinds of writing are, putting fiction out of the question, so
much the more profitable in journalism that it certainly may tempt--that
it certainly has tempted--men who could produce, and would otherwise
have produced, solid literature. And there is so much more room in it
for light things than for things which the average reader regards as
heavy, that the heavy contributor is apt to be at a discount, and the
light at a premium. But all this is exceedingly obvious. And it may be
met on the other side by the equally obvious consideration already
referred to, that periodicals have made the literary life possible in a
vast number of cases where it was not possible before; that whereas
"toil, envy, want, the patron, and the gaol" was not a very exaggerated
description of its prospects little more than a hundred years ago, the
patron has become superfluous, want and the gaol rather unlikely, except
in cases of extreme misconduct, incompetence, or ill-luck, while if toil
and envy remain unvanquished, they are not specially fated to the
literary lot. Indeed the more paradoxical of Devil's Advocates against
the press usually urge that it has made the literary life too easy, has
tempted too many into it, and has thereby increased the flood of
mediocrity.
The most serious objection of all perhaps, though even this is rather
idle in face of accomplished facts, is that the perpetual mincing up and
boiling down of the constituents of the diet of reading have produced,
in the appetite and digestive faculties of the modern reader, an
inability to cope with a really solid meal of perhaps slightly tough
matter, and that periodicals not merely eschew the provision of this
solid stuff themselves, but do their best to make things worse by
manipulating the contents of books that do contain it.
The fact, however, once more, concerns us much more than moralisings
about the fact; and the fact of the prominence, the extraordinary
prominence, of the periodical press in the nineteenth century, is as
little open to dispute as the prominence in that century's later
mechanical history of discoveries in electricity, or in its earlier of
experiments with steam. Occasionally one may hear enthusiasts of one
kind or another announcing with joy or horror that the periodical is
killing the book. But if it is, it is very impartially engaged in
begetting it at the same time that it kills; and it may be very
seriously doubted whether this killing of a book is an easy act of
murder to commit. With the printing press to produce, the curiosity of
man to demand, and his vanity and greed--if not also his genius and
ambition--to supply, the book is in all probability pretty safe. In the
forms and varieties of this periodical publication we have seen some
interesting changes. As might have been expected, the tendency has been
for the intervals of publication to be shortened--for the quarterly to
give way as the fashionable form to the monthly, the monthly to the
weekly, the weekly to the daily. Many years ago Macaulay, in a mild
protest against having his articles altered by Macvey Napier, suggested
in effect that the bloom might be left on poor things destined to be
read only for a month or so. The duration of an article now may be
measured rather by hours than by weeks. Still many of these changes are
more apparent than real; and just as the institution of the graver
monthly reviews twenty years ago simply reintroduced the quarterly
article in a scarcely altered form after it had been pushed out of
favour by the slighter magazine, so other introductions have been in
fact reintroductions.
One point, however, of real importance in literary history remains to be
noticed, and that is the conflict between signed and anonymous writing.
Partly from the causes above enumerated as having conduced to the
keeping of journalism in a condition of discredit and danger, partly
owing to national idiosyncrasies, the habit of anonymous writing was
almost universal in the English press at the beginning of the century.
It may have been perfectly well known that such and such an article in
the _Quarterly_ was by Southey or Croker, such another in the
_Edinburgh_ by Sydney Smith or Macaulay, but the knowledge was, so to
speak, unofficial. The question of the identity of "Zeta" in _Blackwood_
cost a man's life; and the system resulted (in daily papers especially)
in so much editorial inter-mixture and refashioning, that sometimes it
would really have been impossible to assign a single and authentic
paternity. Even about the editorship of the great periodicals a sort of
coquetry of veiling was preserved, and editors' names, though in most
cases perfectly well known, seldom or never appeared.
It is difficult to say exactly when or how this system began to be
infringed. But there is no doubt that the prominence given in _Household
Words_ to the name and personality of Dickens, who was not unfriendly to
self-advertisement, had a good deal to do with it; and when, a little
later, the cheap shilling magazines appeared, writing with names became
the rule, without them the exception. Criticism, however, for obvious
reasons still held back; and it was not till about five and twenty years
ago that the example, taken more or less directly from the French, of
signed reviews was set by the _Academy_ among weekly papers, and the
_Fortnightly_ among monthly reviews. It has been very largely followed
even in daily newspapers, and the _Saturday Review_ was probably the
last newspaper of mark that maintained an absolutely rigid system of
anonymity. It should, however, be observed that the change, while not
even yet complete--leading articles being still very rarely signed--has
by no means united all suffrages, and has even lost some that it had.
Mr. John Morley, for instance, who had espoused it warmly as editor of
the _Fortnightly_, and had, perhaps, done more than any other man to
spread it, has avowed in a very interesting paper grave doubts about the
result. Still it undoubtedly has increased, and is increasing, and in
such cases it is much easier to express an opinion that things ought to
be diminished, than either to expect that they will, or to devise any
means whereby the diminution is to be effected. As for what is desirable
as distinguished from what is likely, the weight of opinion may be
thought to be in favour of the absence of signature. Anonymous
criticism, if abused, may no doubt be abused to a graver extent than is
possible with signed criticism. But such a hackneyed maxim as _corruptio
optimi_ shows that this is of itself no argument. On the other hand,
signed criticism diminishes both the responsibility and the authority of
the editor; it adds either an unhealthy gag or an unhealthy stimulus to
the tongue and pen of the contributor; it lessens the general weight of
the verdict; and it provokes the worst fault of criticism, the aim at
showing off the critic's cleverness rather than at exhibiting the real
value and character of the thing criticised. And perhaps some may think
the most serious objection of all to be that it encourages the
employment of critics, and the reception of what they say, rather for
their names than for their competence.
In that very important department of literature which stands midway
between Belles Lettres and Science, the department of History, the
century cannot indeed claim such striking and popularly effective
innovations as in the departments of prose fiction and of periodical
writing. Yet it may be questioned whether the change of this old kind is
not in itself almost as noteworthy as in the other cases is the
practical introduction of a new. What the change is was
epigrammatically, if somewhat paradoxically, summed up recently by a
great authority, Lord Acton. "History," the Cambridge Professor of that
art or science said in his inaugural lecture, "has become independent of
the historian."
It is possible to demur to the fact, but it is not difficult to explain
the meaning. From the necessity of the case, the earliest history, at
least in the West, is almost independent of documents and records.
Thucydides and Herodotus wrote, the one from what he had actually seen
and heard of contemporary events, the other partly from the same sources
and partly from tradition of short date. Somewhat later historians of
course had their predecessors before them, and in a few cases a certain
amount of document, but never a large amount. When history, vernacular
or Latin, began to be written again in the dark and middle ages, the
absence of documents was complicated (except in the case of those early
chroniclers, English and Irish chiefly, who merely put down local
events) by that more peculiar and unaccountable, though possibly
kindred, absence of critical spirit, which, of the many things more or
less fancifully attributed to the mediaeval mind, is perhaps the most
certain. It is a constant puzzle to modern readers how to account
exactly for the fashion in which men, evidently of great intellectual
ability, managed to be without any sense of the value of evidence, or
any faculty of distinguishing palpable and undoubted fiction from what
either was, or reasonably might be held to be, history. But by degrees
this sense came into being side by side with the multiplication of the
document itself. Even then, however, it was very long before the average
historian either could or would regard himself as bound first to consult
all the documents available, and then to sift and adjust them in
accordance rather with the laws of evidence and the teachings of the
philosophy of history than with his own predilections, or with the
necessities of an agreeable narrative. But the patient industry of the
French school of historical scholars, at the end of the seventeenth and
the beginning of the eighteenth century, founded this new tradition; the
magnificent genius of Gibbon showed how the observance of it might not
be incompatible with history-writing of the most literary kind; the
national and natural tendency of German study adopted it; and shortly
after Gibbon's own day the school of historians, which is nothing if not
documentary, began gradually to oust that of which the picturesque, if
not strictly historical, legend about the Abbe Vertot and his "Mon siege
est fait" is the anecdotic _locus classicus_ of characterisation.
It has been shown, in the chapter devoted to the subject, how this
school of documentary historians grew and flourished in England itself,
from the days of Turner and Palgrave to those of Froude and Freeman.
Certainly there could not, at least for some time, be said to be any
very sensible tendency in history to dispense with the historian, or, in
other and perhaps rather more intelligible words, of history ceasing to
be literary. No historians have been more omnilegent, more careful of
the document, than Carlyle and Macaulay, much as they differed in other
respects, and in no histories has the "historian"--that is to say, the
personal writer as opposed to the mere "diplomatist"--been more evident
than he is in theirs. Nor is it very easy to see why the mere study of
the document, still less why the mere accumulation of the document,
should ever render superfluous the intelligent shaping which the
historian alone can give. In the first place, documents are
contradictory and want shifting and harmonising; in the second they want
grasping and interpreting; in the third (and most important of all) they
need to be made alive.
Nevertheless Lord Acton's somewhat enigmatic utterance points, however
vaguely, to real dangers, and it would be idle to say that these dangers
have not been exemplified in the period and department we are
considering. In the first place, the ever-increasing burden of the
documents to be consulted is more and more crushing, and more and more
likely to induce any one but a mere drudge either to relinquish the task
in despair, or to perform it with a constant fear before his eyes, which
prevents freedom and breadth of work. In the second it leads, on the one
hand, to enormous extension of the scale of histories, on the other to
an undue restraining and limiting of their subjects. Macaulay took four
large volumes to do, nominally at least, not more than a dozen years;
Froude twelve to cover fifty or sixty; Grote as many to deal with the
important, but neither long nor richly documented, period of Greek, or
rather Athenian, flourishing. To this has to be added the very serious
drawback that when examination of documents is ranked before everything,
even the slightest questioning of that examination becomes fatal, and a
historian is discredited because some one of his critics has found a
document unknown to him, or a flaw, possibly of the slightest
importance, in his interpretation of the texts.
Nevertheless it is necessary to lay our account with this new style of
history, and it is fortunately possible to admit that the gains of it
have not been small. Thanks to its practitioners, we know infinitely
more than our fathers did, though it may not be so certain that we make
as good a use of our knowledge. And the evil of multiplication of
particulars, like other evils, brings its own cure. The work of mere
rough-hewing, of examination into the brute facts, is being done--has to
no small extent actually been done--as it never was done before. The
"inedited" has ceased to be inedited--is put on record for anybody to
examine with little trouble. The mere loss of valuable material, which
has gone on in former ages to an extent only partially compensated by
the welcome destruction of material that has no value at all, has been
stopped. The pioneers of the historical summer (to borrow a decorative
phrase from Charles of Orleans) have been very widely abroad, and there
is no particular reason why the summer itself should not come.
When it does it will perhaps discard some ways and fashions which have
been lately in vogue; but it will assuredly profit by much that has been
done during the period we survey, no less in form than in matter. The
methods have been to a certain extent improved, the examples have been
multiplied, the historical sense has certainly taken a wider and deeper
hold of mankind. Very little is wanting but some one _ausus contemnere
vana_; and when the future Thucydides or the future Carlyle sets to
work, he will be freed, by the labour of others, alike from the paucity
of materials that a little weakened Thucydides, and from the brute mass
of them that embittered the life of Carlyle.
Not so much is to be said of the remaining divisions or departments
individually. If the drama of the century is not, in so far as acting
drama is concerned, almost a blank from the point of view of literature,
the literary drama of the century is almost a blank as regards acting
qualities. It is true that there have been at times attempts to obtain
restitution of conjugal rights on one side or on the other. In the
second and third decades, perhaps a little later, a strong effort was
made to give vogue to, and some vogue was obtained for, the scholarly if
pale attempts of Milman and Talfourd, and the respectable work of
others. Bulwer, his natural genius assisted by the stage-craft of
Macready, brought the acting and the literary play perhaps nearer
together than any one else did. Much later still, the mighty authority
of Tennyson, taking to dramatic writing at the time when he was the
unquestioned head of English poetry and English literature, and assisted
by the active efforts of the most popular actor and manager of the day,
succeeded in holding the stage fairly well with plays which are not very
dramatic among dramas, and which are certainly not very poetical among
their author's poems. With more recent times we have luckily nothing to
do, and the assertions of some authors that they themselves or others
have brought back literature to the stage may be left confronted with
the assertions of not a few actors that, for reasons which they do not
themselves profess entirely to comprehend, a modern drama is almost
bound not to be literary if it is to act, and not to act if it is
literary. Some have boldly solved the difficulty by hinting, if not
declaring, that the drama is an outworn form except as mere spectacle or
entertainment; others have exhausted themselves in solutions of a less
trenchant kind; none, it may safely be said, has really solved it. And
though it is quite true that what has happened was predicted sixty or
seventy years ago, as a result of the breach of the monopoly of Covent
Garden and Drury Lane, it is fair to say that the condition of the drama
of at least a quarter of a century earlier had been little if at all
better than it has been since. It is a simple fact that since Sheridan
we have had no dramatist who combined very high acting with very high
literary merit.
Of what have been called the applied departments of literature, a
somewhat less melancholy account has to be given; but, except in their
enormous multiplication of quantity, they present few opportunities for
remarks of a general character.
Very great names have been added to the list of theological writers, but
these names on the whole belong to the earlier rather than to the later
portion of the period, and even then something of a change has been
observable in the kinds of their writing. The sermon, that is to say the
literary sermon, has become more and more uncommon; and the popular ear
which calls upon itself to hear sermons at all prefers usually what are
styled practical discourses, often deviating very considerably from the
sermon norm, or else extremely florid addresses modelled on later
Continental patterns, and having as a rule few good literary qualities.
So, too, the elaborate theological treatise has gone out of fashion, and
it may be doubted whether, at least for the last half century, a single
book of the kind has been added to the first class of Anglican
theological writing. This writing has thus taken the form either of
discourses of the older kind, maintained in existence by endowment or by
old prescription, such as the Bampton Lectures, or of rather popular
polemics, or of what may be called without disrespect theological
journalism of various kinds. The general historical energy of the
century, moreover, has not displayed itself least in the theological
department, and valuable additions have been made, not merely to general
church history, but to a vast body of biography and journal-history, as
well as to a certain amount of Biblical scholarship. In this latter
direction English scholars have distinguished themselves by somewhat
less violation of the rules of criticism in general than their foreign
brethren and masters. But it cannot be said that the nineteenth century
is ever likely to rank high in the history of English theology. Even its
greatest names--Irving, Chalmers, the Oxford leaders, and others, with
perhaps the single exception of Newman--are important much more
personally and as influences than as literary figures; while the rank
and file, putting history aside, have been distinctly less noteworthy
than in any of the three preceding centuries.
The "handmaid of theology" has received, at any rate during the first
half of the period, or even the first three-quarters, more distinguished
attentions than her mistress; and the additions made to the list headed
by Erigena and Anselm, if we allow Latin to count, by Bacon and Hobbes,
if we stick to the vernacular, have been many and great. Yet it would
not be unreasonable laudation of times past to say that there hardly,
after Hume's death, arose any philosopher who combined the originality,
the acuteness, and the literary skill of Hume during the first half of
this century, while certainly, at least till within a period forbidden
to our scheme, the latter part of the time has not seen any writer who
could vie even with those of the earlier. To a certain extent the
historical and critical tendencies so often noticed have here been
unfortunate, inasmuch as they have diverted philosophical students from
original writing--or at least from writing as original as the somewhat
narrow and self-repeating paths of philosophy admit--to historical and
critical exercises. But there is also no doubt that the immense
authority which the too long neglected writers of Germany attained, a
little before the middle of the century, has been unfortunate in at
least one respect, if not also in others. The ignorant contempt of
technicalities, and the determination to refer all things to common
sense employing common language, which distinguished the eighteenth
century with us, was certain to provoke a reaction; and this reaction,
assisted by imitation of the Germans, produced in the decades from 1840
onwards an ever-increasing tendency among English philosophers or
students of philosophy to employ a jargon often as merely technical as
the language of the schoolmen, and not seldom far emptier of any real
argument. It is not too much to say that if the rough methods of Hobbes
with a terminology far less fallacious, were employed with this jargon,
it would look much poorer than Bramhall's scholasticisms look in the
hands of the redoubtable Nominalist. Fortunately of late there have been
more signs than one of yet another turn of tide, and of a fresh appeal
to the _communis sensus_, not it may be hoped of the obstinately and
deafly exoteric character of the eighteenth century, but such as will
refuse to pay itself with words, and will exercise a judicious criticism
in a language understanded of all educated people. Then, and not till
then, we may expect to meet philosophy that is literature and literature
that is philosophic.
Science, that is to say physical science, which has sometimes openly
boasted itself as about to take, and has much more commonly made silent
preparations for taking, the place both of philosophy and of theology,
will hardly be said by the hardiest of her adherents to have done very
much to justify these claims to seats not yet quite vacant from the
point of view of the purely literary critic. We have had some excellent
scientific writers, from Bishop Watson to Professor Huxley; and some of
the books of the century which would deserve remembrance and reading,
whatever their subject matter, have been books of science. Yet it is
scarcely rash to assert that the essential characteristics of science
and the essential characteristics of literature are, if not so
diametrically opposed as some have thought, at any rate very far apart
from one another. Literature can never be scientific; and though science
may be literary, yet it is rather in the fashion in which a man borrows
some alien vesture in order to present himself, in compliance with
decency and custom, at a foreign court. Mathematics give us the
example--perhaps the only example--of pure science, of what all science
would be if it could, and of what it approaches, ever more nearly, as
far as it can. It is needless to say that the perfect presentation of
mathematics is in pure symbols, divested of all form and colour, of all
personal tincture and bias. And it should be equally superfluous to add
that it is in form and colour, in suggestion of sound rather than in
precise expression and sense, in personal bias and personal tincture,
that not merely the attraction but the very essence of literature
consists.
By so much as verbal science or scholarship, which would seem to be more
especially bound to be literature, claims to be and endeavours to be
strictly scientific, by so much also necessarily does it divorce itself
from the literature which it studies. This, if not an enormously great,
is certainly rather a sore evil; and it is one of the most considerable
and characteristic signs of the period we are discussing. The older
scholarship, though sufficiently minute, still clung to the literary
side proper: it was even, in the technical dialect of one of the
universities, opposed to "science," which word indeed was itself used in
a rather technical way. The invention of comparative philology, with its
even more recent off-shoot phonetics, has changed all this, and we now
find "linguistic" and "literary" used by common consent as things not
merely different but hostile, with a further tendency on the part of
linguistics to claim the term "scholarship" exclusively for itself.
This could hardly in any case be healthy. What may be the abstract value
of the science, or group of sciences, called philology, it is perhaps
not necessary here to inquire. It is sufficient to say that it clearly
has nothing to do with literature except in accidental and remote
applications, that it stands thereto much as geology does to
architecture. Unfortunately, while the scientific side of scholarship is
thus becoming, if it has not become, wholly unliterary, the aesthetic
side has shown signs of becoming, to far too great an extent,
unscientific in the bad and baneful sense. With some honourable
exceptions, we find critics of literature too often divided into
linguists who seem neither to think nor to be capable of thinking of the
meaning or the melody, of the individual and technical mastery, of an
author, a book, or a passage, and into loose aesthetic rhetoricians who
will sometimes discourse on AEschylus without knowing a second aorist
from an Attic perfect, and pronounce eulogies or depreciations on Virgil
without having the faintest idea whether there is or is not any
authority for _quamvis_ with one mood rather than another. Nor is it
possible to see what eirenicon is likely to present itself between two
parties, of whom the extremists on the one side may justly point to such
things as have here been quoted, while the extremists on the other feel
it a duty to pronounce phonetics the merest "hariolation," and a very
large part of what goes by the name of philology ingenious guesswork,
some of which may possibly not be false, but hardly any of which can on
principles of sound general criticism be demonstrated to be true. It is
not wonderful, though it is in the highest degree unhealthy, that the
stricter scholars should be more or less scornfully relinquishing the
province of literary criticism altogether, while the looser aesthetics
consider themselves entitled to neglect scholarship in any proper sense
with a similarly scornful indifference.
It is, however, impossible that offences of this sort should not come
now and then in the history of literature, and fortunately, in that
history, they disappear as they appear. For the present purpose it is
more important to conclude this conclusion with a few general remarks on
the past, fewer on the present, and fewest of all on the future.
On this last head, indeed, no words were perhaps even better than even
fewest; though something of the sort may be expected. Rash as prophecy
always is, it is never quite so rash as in literature; and though we can
sometimes, looking backward, say--perhaps even then with some
rashness--that such and such a change might or ought to have been
expected, it is very seldom that we can, when deprived of this
illegitimate advantage, vaticinate on such subjects with any safety. Yet
the study of the present always, so to speak, includes and overlaps
something of the future, and by comparison at least of other presents we
can discern what it is at least not improbable that the future may be.
What, then, is the present of literature in England?
It can be described with the greater freedom that, as constantly
repeated, we are not merely at liberty _ex hypothesi_ to omit references
to individuals, but are _ex hypothesi_ bound to exclude them. And no
writer, as it happens rather curiously, of anything like great promise
or performance who was born later than the beginning of the fifties has
died as yet, though the century is so near its close. Yet again, all the
greatest men of the first quarter of the century, with the single
exception of Mr. Ruskin, are gone; and not many of the second remain. By
putting these simple and unmistakable facts together it will be seen, in
a fashion equally free from liability to cavil and from disobliging
glances towards persons, that the present is at best a stationary state
in our literary history. Were we distinctly on the mounting hand, it is,
on the general calculation of the liabilities of human life, certain
that we must have had our Shelley or our Keats side by side with our
Wordsworth and our Coleridge. That we have much excellent work is
certain; that we have much of the absolutely first class not so. And if
we examine even the good work of our younger writers we shall find in
much of it two notes or symptoms--one of imitation or exaggeration, the
other of uncertain and eccentric quest for novelty--which have been
already noted above as signs of decadence or transition.
Whether it is to be transition or decadence, that is the question. For
the solution of it we can only advance with safety a few considerations,
such as that in no literary history have periods of fresh and first-rate
production ever continued longer than--that they have seldom continued
so long as--the period now under notice, and that it is reasonable, it
is almost certain, that, though by no means an absolutely dead season,
yet a period of comparatively faint life and illustration should
follow. To this it may be added as a consideration not without
philosophical weight that the motives, the thoughts, the hopes, the
fears, perhaps even the manners, which have defrayed the expense of the
literary production of this generation, together with the literary forms
in which, according to custom, they have embodied and ensconced
themselves, have been treated with unexampled, certainly with
unsurpassed, thoroughness, and must now be near exhaustion; while it is
by no means clear that any fresh set is ready to take their place. It is
on this last point, no doubt, that the more sanguine prophets would like
to fight the battle, urging that new social ideas, and so forth, _are_
in possession of the ground. But this is not the field for that battle.
In dealing with what has been, with the secular hour that we have
actually and securely had, we are on far safer, if not on positively
safe ground. Here the sheaves are actually reaped and brought home; and
if the teller of them makes a mistake, his judgment, and his judgment
only, need be at fault. Not all ways of such telling are of equal value.
It may be tempting, for instance, but can hardly be very profitable, to
attempt to strike an exact balance between the production of the century
from 1780 to 1880 with that of the other great English literary century
from 1580 to 1680. Dear as the exercise is to some literary accountants,
there is perhaps no satisfactory system of book-keeping by which we can
really set the assets and the liabilities of the period from the
appearance of Spenser to the death of Browne against the assets and
liabilities of that from the appearance of Burns to the death of
Tennyson, and say which has the greater sum to its credit. Still more
vague and futile would it be to attempt to set with any exactness this
balance-sheet against that of the other great literary periods of other
countries, languages, and times. Here again, most emphatically, accuracy
of this kind is _not_ to be expected.
But what we can say with confidence and profit is that the nineteenth
century in England and English is of these great periods, and of the
greatest of them; that it has taken its place finally and certainly,
with a right never likely to be seriously challenged, and in a rank
never likely to be much surpassed.
The period which lisped its numbers in Burns and Blake and Cowper, which
broke out into full song with Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Byron,
Shelley, and Keats, which, not to mention scores of minor singers, took
up the tale with Tennyson and Browning and passed it on to Arnold,
Rossetti, Mr. Morris, and Mr. Swinburne, need fear no comparisons in the
matter of poetry. In prose fiction, as we have seen, it stands alone. It
is almost a century of origins as regards the most important kinds; it
is quite a century of capital and classical performance in them. In
"making"--prose or verse--no time leaves record of performance more
distinguished or more various.
That in one great literary kind, drama, it exhibits lamentable
deficiency, that indeed in that kind it hardly counts at all, has been
admitted; and it is not probable that in any of the serious prose kinds,
except history, it will ever rank very high when compared with others.
Its theology has, as far as literature is concerned, been a little
wanting in dignity, in finish, and even in fervour, its philosophy
either commonplace or jargonish, its exercises in science and
scholarship ever divorcing themselves further from literary ideals. But
in the quality of its miscellaneous writing, as well as in the
facilities given to such writing by its special growth--some would say
its special fungus--of the periodical, it again rises to the first
class. Hardly the period of Montaigne and Bacon, certainly not that of
Dryden, Cowley, and Temple, nor that of Addison and Steele, nor that of
Johnson and Goldsmith, can vie with the century of Charles Lamb and
William Hazlitt, of Leigh Hunt and Thomas de Quincey, of Macaulay and
Thackeray and Carlyle, of Arnold and Mr. Ruskin. Miscellaneous we have
been,--perhaps too much so,--but we should be a little saved by the
excellence of some of our miscellanists.
Pessimists would probably say that the distinguishing and not altogether
favourable notes of the century are a somewhat vagabond curiosity in
matter and a tormented unrest of style. The former concerns us little,
and is chiefly noticeable here because of the effect which it has had on
the great transformation of historical writing so often noticed; the
latter concerns us intimately. And no doubt there is hardly a single
feature--not even the growth of the novel, not even the development of
the newspaper--which will so distinctly and permanently distinguish this
century in English literary history as the great changes which have come
over style, and especially prose style. There has been less opportunity
to notice these collectively in any of the former chapters than there
has been to notice some other changes: nor was this of much importance,
for the present is the right place for gathering up the fragments.
The change of style in prose is undoubtedly as much the leading feature
of the century as is in poetry the change of thought and outlook, on
which latter enough perhaps has been said elsewhere; the whole of our
two long chapters on poetry being indeed, with great part of this
conclusion, a continuous exposition of it. But the change in prose was
neither confined to, nor specially connected with, any single department
of literature. Indirectly indeed, and distantly, it may be said to have
been connected with the growth of the essay and the popularity of
periodicals; and yet it is not quite certain that this was anything more
than a coincidence due to the actual fact that the first extensive
practitioners of ornate prose, Wilson and De Quincey, were in a way
journalists.
That the sudden ornateness, in part a mere ordinary reaction, was also
in part due to a reflection of the greater gorgeousness of poetry,
though it was in itself less a matter of thought than of style, is true.
But literary reactions are always in part at least literary
developments; and after the prose of Burke and Gibbon, even after that
of Johnson, it was certain that the excessive plainness reached in the
mid-eighteenth century would be exchanged for something else. But it
could not possibly have been anticipated that the change would exhibit
the extent or the variety that it has actually shown.
That it has enriched English literature with a great deal of admirable
matter is certain; that it has not merely produced a great deal of sad
stuff, but has perhaps inflicted some permanent or at least lasting
damage on the purity, the simplicity, and in the best sense the strength
of style, is at least equally certain. It is less easy to say whether it
is, as a movement, near its close, or with what sort of reaction it is
likely to be followed. On the one hand the indication of particular
follies and excesses may not seem decisive; for there is little doubt
that in all the stages of this _flamboyant_ movement--from De Quincey to
Carlyle, from Carlyle to Mr. Ruskin, from Mr. Ruskin to persons whom it
is unnecessary to mention--the advocates of the sober styles thought and
said that the force of extravagance could no further go, and that the
last outrages had been committed on the dignity and simplicity of
English. On the other hand there are signs, which are very unlikely to
deceive the practised critic, tending to show that the mode is likely to
change. When actual frippery is seen hanging up in Monmouth Street or
Monmouth Street's successors, when cheap imitations of fashionable
garments crowd the shop windows and decorate the bodies of the
vulgar--then the wise know that this fashion will shortly change. And
certainly something similar may be observed in literature to-day.
Cacophony jostles preciousness in novel and newspaper; attempts at
contorted epigram appear side by side with slips showing that the writer
has not the slightest knowledge of the classics in the old sense, and
knows exceedingly little of anything that can be called classic in the
widest possible acceptation of the term. Tyrannies cease when the
cobblers begin to fear them; fashions, especially literary fashions,
when the cobblers take them up.
Yet the production of what must or may be called literature is now so
large, and in consequence of the spread of what is called education the
appetite so largely exceeds the taste for it, that it is not so easy as
it would once have been to forecast the extent and validity of any
reaction that may take place.
If, without undue praising of times past, without pleading guilty to
the prejudices sometimes attributed to an academic education, and also
without trespassing beyond the proper limits of this book, it may be
permitted to express an opinion on the present state of English
literature, that opinion, while it need not be very gloomy, can hardly
be very sanguine. And one ground for discouragement, which very
especially concerns us, lies in the fact that on the whole we are now
_too_ "literary." Not, as has been said, that the general taste is too
refined, but that there is a too indiscriminate appetite in the general;
not that the actual original force of our writers is, with rare
exceptions, at all alarming, but that a certain amount of literary
craftsmanship, a certain knowledge of the past and present of
literature, is with us in a rather inconvenient degree. The public
demands quantity, not quality; and it is ready, for a time at any rate,
to pay for its quantity with almost unheard of returns, both, as the
homely old phrase goes, in praise and in pudding. And the writer, though
seldom hampered by too exact an education in form, has had books, as a
rule, too much with him. Sometimes he simply copies, and knows that he
copies; oftener, without knowing it, he follows and imitates, while he
thinks that he is doing original work.
And worse than all this, the abundance of reading has created an
altogether artificial habit--a habit quite as artificial as any that can
ever have prevailed at other periods--of regarding the main stuff and
substance of literature. Much reading of novels, which are to the
ordinary reader his books, and his only books, has induced him to take
their standards as the standards of both nature and life. And this is
all the more dangerous because in all probability the writers of these
very novels have themselves acquired their knowledge, formed their
standards, in a manner little if at all more first-hand. We have nature,
not as Jones or Brown saw it for himself, but as he saw it through the
spectacles of Mr. Ruskin or of Jefferies; art, not as he saw it himself,
but as he saw it through those of Mr. Ruskin again or of Mr. Pater;
literary criticism as he learnt it from Mr. Arnold or from
Sainte-Beuve; criticism of life as he took it from Thackeray or from
Mr. Meredith.
Something like this has occurred at least three times before in the
history of European literature. It happened in late Graeco-Roman times,
and all the world knows what the cure was then, and how the
much-discussed barbarian cleared the mind of Europe of its literary cant
by very nearly clearing out all the literature as well. It happened on a
much smaller scale, and with a less tremendous purgation, at the close
of the Middle Ages, when the world suddenly, as it were, shut up one
library and opened another; and at the end of the seventeenth and
beginning of the eighteenth century, when it shut both of these or the
greater part of them, and took to a small bookshelf of "classics," a
slender stock of carefully observed formulae and--common sense.
What it will take to now, nobody can say; but that it will in one
fashion or another change most of its recent wear, shut most of its
recent books, and perhaps give itself something of a holiday from
literature, except in scholastic shapes, may be not quite impossible.
Another _Lyrical Ballads_ may be coming for this decade, as it came a
hundred years ago: all we can say is that it apparently has not come
yet. But whether it does come or does not, the moment is certainly no
bad one, even if chronology did not make it inviting, for setting in
order the actual, the certain, the past and registered production of the
century since the dawn of the great change which ended its vigil. The
historian, as he closes his record, is only too conscious of the
objections to omission that may probably be brought against him, and of
those of too liberal admission which certainly will be brought. It is
possible that for some tastes even this chapter may not contain enough
of _Tendenz_-discussion, that they may miss the broader sweeps and more
confident generalisations of another school of criticism. But the old
objection to fighting with armour which you have not proved has always
seemed a sound one, and has seldom failed to be justified of those who
set it at nought. Careful arrangement of detail and premiss, cautious
drawing of conclusions, and constant subjection of these conclusions to
that process of literary comparison which I believe to be the strongest,
the safest, the best engine of literary criticism altogether--these are
the things which I have endeavoured to observe here. It might have shown
greater strength of mind to reject a large number of the authors here
named, and so bring the matter into case for more extended treatment of
interesting individuals. But there is something, as it seems to me, a
little presumptuous in a too peremptory anticipation of the operations
of Time the Scavenger. The critic may pretty well foresee the operations
of the wallet-bearer, but he is not to dictate to him the particular
"alms for oblivion" which he shall give. As it used to be the custom for
a dramatic author, even though damned, to have his entrees at the
theatre, so those who have once made an actual figure on the literary
stage are entitled, until some considerable time has elapsed, to
book-room. They lose it gradually and almost automatically; and as I
have left out many writers of the end of last century whom, if I had
been writing sixty years since, I should doubtless have put in, many of
the first half of it whom I should have admitted if I had been writing
thirty years since, so in another generation others will no doubt
exercise a similar thinning on my own passed or pressed men.
But few, however, I think, appear here without more or less right of
admission to the mind-map of the century's literature which a
well-furnished mind should at this moment contain. That such a mind-map,
quite irrespective of examinations and lecture-courses, and of literary
bread-study generally, is a valuable thing, I have no doubt. And I
think, without wishing to magnify mine office, that the general
possession of it might do something to counteract these disastrous
influences which have been referred to a little earlier. A man should
surely be a little less apt to take the pinchbeck poetry of his own day
for gold when he remembers the Della Cruscans and Sentimentalists, the
Montgomerys and the Tuppers; the terror-novel and the Minerva Press
should surely be useful skeletons to him at his feast of fiction in
kinds which it would be beyond my province to describe more
particularly. He will not clamour, as I have known very excellent
persons clamour, for the "raising of English to a new power" when he has
before him the long procession of ingenious jargonists whose jargon has
been in its turn hailed as a revelation and dismissed as an old song.
And he will neither overexalt the dignity of literature, nor be a
self-tormentor and a tormentor of others about its approaching decline
and fall, when he sees how constantly, how incessantly, the kissed mouth
has renewed its freshness, the apparently dying flower has shed seed and
shot suckers for a new growth.
INDEX
(_It has been endeavoured in this Index to include the name (with dates)
of every author, and the title of every book, discussed in detail. But
in order to avoid unnecessary bulk, books and authors merely referred
to, as well as parts of books, are not usually given._)
_Academy_, 383
_Adam Bede_, 322 _sq._
_Adam Blair_, 194
_Age of Reason, The_, 30 _sq._
Ainsworth, Harrison (1805-82), 138, 139
Alison, Sir Archibald (1792-1867), 217, 218
Allingham, William (1824-89), 307
_Alton Locke_, 326 _sq._
_Ancient Law_, 358
_Ancient Mariner, The Rime of the_, 61-63
_Andromeda_, 325
_Anna St. Ives_, 39
_Annals of the Parish_, 140
_Anti-Jacobin_, 2
_Apologia pro Vita Sua_, 327, 368
Arnold, Matthew (1822-88), 15, 52, 281-287, 385-388
Arnold, Thomas (1795-1842), 223, 224
Ashe, Thomas, 1836-89, 313
_Asolando_, 271 _sq._
_Athenaeum_, 383
Atherstone, Edwin (1788-1872), 124
_Aurora Leigh_, 280
Austen, Jane (1775-1817), 43, 128-131
Austen, Lady, 4
Austin, John (1790-1859), 357, 358
Austin, Sarah (1793-1867), 358
Aytoun, William Edmonstoune (1813-65), 302-304
Bage, Robert (1728-1801), 41, 42
Bagehot, Walter (1826-77), 383-384
Baillie, Joanna (1762-1851), 419, 420
Barbauld, Mrs. (1743-1825), 19, 62
_Barchester Towers_, 330
Barham, Richard Harris (1788-1845), 209, 210
_Barnaby Rudge_, 149
Barnes, William (1800-86), 118
Barry Cornwall, see Procter, B. W.
Barrow, Sir John (1764-1848), 179
Barton, Bernard (1784-1849), 107
Baynes, Thomas Spencer (1823-87), 351
Beckford, William (1759-1844), 40, 41
Beddoes, Thomas Lovell (1803-49), 114-116
_Bells and Pomegranates_, 270
Bentham, Jeremy (1748-1832), 343, 344
_Biographia Borealis_, 201
Blackie, John Stuart (1809-95), 300
_Blackwood's Magazine_, 168 _sqq._
Blake, William (1757-1827), 1-3, 9-13
_Bleak House_, 150
Bloomfield, Robert (1766-1823), 107
_Bon Gaultier Ballads_, 303
Borrow, George (1803-81), 162, 163
Bowles, Caroline (1787-1854), 65, 124
Bowles, William Lisle (1762-1850), 19, 105, 106
Brimley, George (1819-57), 383, 384
Bronte, Anne (1820-49), 319
Bronte, Charlotte (1816-55), 319-321
Bronte, Emily (1818-48), 315, 321
Brown, Dr. John (1810-82), 384
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett (1809-61), 276-281
Browning, Robert (1812-89), 90, 268-277
Bryant, Jacob (1715-1804), 405
Buckle, Henry Thomas (1821-62), 243, 244
Bulwer, see Lytton
Burges, Sir James Bland (1752-1824), 48
Burke, 1, 7
Burney, Miss (1752-1840), 125
Burns, Robert (1759-96), 1-3, 9, 10, 13-18
Burton, John Hill (1809-81), 240
Burton, Sir Richard (1821-90), vi
Byron, 6
Byron, Lord (1788-1824), 6, 75-81
_Caleb Williams_, 32 _sq._
Calverley, Charles Stuart (1831-84), 314
Campbell, Mr. Dykes, 57
Campbell, Thomas (1777-1844), 92-94
Canning, George (1770-1827), 19
Carlyle, Thomas (1795-1881), 232-240
Cary, Henry (1772-1844), 110
_Castle Rackrent_, 127
Chalmers, Thomas (1780-1847), 374, 375
Chambers, Robert (1802-71), 414
Chamier, Captain, 159
_Chartism_, 235 _sqq._
_Christabel_, 61-63
_Christian Year_, 362-364
"Christopher North," see Wilson, John
Church, Richard (1815-90), 371
Churchill, 3, 5
_City of Dreadful Night, The_, 298
Clive, Mrs. Archer (1801-73), 302
_Cloister and the Hearth, The_, 332
Clough, Arthur Hugh (1819-61), 309, 310
Cobbett, William (1762-1835), 2, 168-172
Coleridge, Hartley (1796-1849), 51, 200-203
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834), 56-63
Coleridge, Sara (1802-52), 119
Collins, Charles Alston (1828-73), 333
Collins, Mortimer (1827-76), 307
Collins, Wilkie (1824-89), 333
Combe, William (1741-1823), 47
_Confessions of a Justified Sinner_, 100
_Confessions of an English Opium-Eater_, 145 _sq._
Congreve, 6
Conington, John (1825-69), 407, 408
_Cornhill Magazine_, 382
"Corn-Law Rhymer, The," see Elliott, Ebenezer
Cornwall, Barry, see Procter, B. W.
Cory, William, see Johnson, William
Cottle, Joseph (1770-1853), 57
Cowper, William (1731-1800), 1-7
Coxe, Archdeacon, 252 _note_
Crabbe, George (1754-1832), 1-3, 7-9
Craik, Dinah Maria (1826-87), 336
_Cranford_, 335
Croker, Crofton (1798-1854), 141
Croker, John Wilson (1780-1857), 383
_Crotchet Castle_, 162
_Cruise upon Wheels, A_, 333
Cumberland, Richard (1732-1811), 42
Cunningham, Allan (1784-1842), 108
_Curiosities of Literature_, 179
_Daniel Deronda_, 324
D'Arblay, Madame (1752-1840), 125
Darley, George (1795-1846), 114
Darwin, Charles Robert (1809-82), 412-414
Darwin, Erasmus (1731-1802), 3, 19, 412
_David Copperfield_, 150
Davy, Sir Humphry (1778-1829), 410, 411
_Death's Jest-Book_, 115
"Della Crusca," see Merry
"Delta," see Moir, D. M.
De Quincey, Thomas (1785-1859), 194-198
Dickens, Charles (1812-70), 145-151
Digby, Kenelm, vi
Disraeli, Benjamin (1804-81), 160, 161
Disraeli, Isaac (1766-1848), 179
Dobell, Sydney (1824-74), 304-307
_Dombey and Son_, 149
Domett, Alfred (1811-87), 302
Doyle, Sir Francis (1810-88), 206
_Dramatis Personae_, 271 _sqq._
_Dream of Gerontius, The_, 367
Dryden, 5, 8
Dufferin, Lady (1807-67), 315
Dunbar, 9
Edgeworth, Maria (1767-1849), 126-128
_Edinburgh Review_, 167 _sqq._
_Elia, The Essays of_, 182
Eliot, George, see Evans, Mary Ann
Elliott, Ebenezer ("The Corn-Law Rhymer") (1781-1849), 110, 111
Ellis, George (1753-1815), 20
Emerson, 68
_Enoch Arden_, 265
_Eothen_, 241
_Epic of Women, The_, 295
_Esmond_, 152, 155
_Essays and Reviews_, 373
_Essays in Criticism_, 385
"Ettrick Shepherd," The, 100
Evans, Mary Ann (1819-80), 316, 321-324
_Examiner_, 98, 168 _sq._
_Fazio_, 421
Ferguson, 15
Ferguson, Sir Samuel (1810-86), 302
Ferrier, James Frederick (1808-64), 351
Ferrier, Susan (1782-1854), 351
Finlay, George (1795-1875), 252 _note_
FitzGerald, Edward (1809-83), 207-209
Forster, John (1812-76), 242, 243
_Fortnightly Review_, 382
Foster, John (1770-1843), vi
"Fraserians," The, 204
_Fraser's Magazine_, 168 _sqq._, 203 _sq._
_Frederick the Great, History of_, 235 _sqq._
Freeman, Edward Augustus (1823-92), 244, 245
_French Revolution, History of the_, 234 _sqq._
Frere, John Hookham, 19
Froude, James Anthony (1818-94), 246-252
Froude, Richard Hurrell (1803-36), 370
Galt, John (1779-1839), 139-141
_Gamekeeper at Home, The_, 396
Gaskell, Mrs. (1810-65), 335
Gibbon, 1
Gifford, William (1756-1826), 19, 23-25
Gilpin, William (1724-1804), 46, 47
Glascock, Captain, 159
Godwin, William (1756-1836), 2, 32-37
Goldsmith, 1
Gray, 6
_Great Expectations_, 150
Green, John Richard (1837-83), 245, 246
Greenwell, Dora (1821-82), 316
Greville, Charles, vi
Grosart, Dr., 52 _note_
Grote, George (1794-1871), 220-222
_Guy Livingstone_, 335
Hake, Thomas Gordon (1809-94), 301
Hall, Captain Basil (1788-1844), 159
Hallam, Henry (1777-1859), 212-214
Hallam, Arthur Henry (1811-33), 299, 300
Hamilton, Sir William (1788-1856), 349-352
Hannay, James (1827-73), 383
_Hard Times_, 150
_Haunted and the Haunters, The_, 143
Hawker, Robert Stephen (1803-75), 118
Hayley, William (1745-1820), 3, 18, 19
Hayward, Abraham (1801-84), 383
Hazlitt, William (1778-1830), 34, 184-187
Head, Sir Edmund (1805-68), 206
Head, Sir Francis (1793-1875), 206
Headley, Henry (1765-88), 47, 106 _note_
Heber, Reginald (1783-1826), 110
Helps, Sir Arthur (1813-75), 384
Hemans, Mrs. (1793-1835), 112
_Henrietta Temple_, 161
_Heroes and Hero-Worship_, 235 _sq._
Hogg, James (1770-1835), 99-101
Hogg, T. J., 82
Holcroft, Thomas (1745-1809), 38, 39
Hood, Thomas (1799-1845), 121-124
Hook, Theodore (1788-1841), 140, 141
Hopkins, Gerard Manley (1844-90), 294
Horne, Richard H. (1803-84), 117
Horne Tooke (1736-1812), 46
Houghton, Lord (Milnes, R. M.) (1809-85), 301, 302
_Household Words_, 379, 380
Hunt, Leigh (1784-1859), 81, 86, 88;
his verse and life, 98, 99;
his prose, 198-200
Huxley, Thomas Henry (1825-95), 415, 416
_Ideal of a Christian Church, The_, 371
_Idylls of the King_, 264, 265
_Imaginary Conversations_, 102 _sq._
_Imaginary Portraits_, 399
_Ingoldsby Legends, The_, 210
_In Memoriam_, 262, 263
_Ion_, 421
Irving, Edward (1792-1834), 375
_It is Never too Late to Mend_, 332
James, G. P. R. (1801-60), 138, 139
Jameson, Mrs. (1794-1860), 397
_Jane Eyre_, 318
Jefferies, John Richard (1848-87), 396, 397
Jeffrey, Francis (1773-1850), 71, 172-176
Jerrold, Douglas (1803-57), 210
Johnson, S., 1, 6, 8
Johnson, William (1784-1864), 246
Jones, Ebenezer (1820-60), 307
Jones, Ernest (1819-68), 307
Jowett, Benjamin (1817-93), 374
Keats, John (1795-1821), 86-91
Keble, John (1792-1866), 362-364
Kinglake, Alexander (1809-91), 241, 242
Kingsley, Charles (1819-75), 324-328
Kingsley, Henry (1830-76), 333, 334
Knowles, James Sheridan (1784-1862), 422
_Kubla Khan_, 61-63
_Lady of Lyons, The_, 423
Lamb, Charles (1775-1834), 13, 33, 38, 181-184
Lancaster, Henry (1829-75), 384
Landon, Letitia Elizabeth, "L. E. L." (1802-38), 118, 119
Landor, Walter Savage (1775-1864), 68, 101-104
_Latin Christianity, History of_, 220
_Latter-Day Pamphlets_, 235 _sqq._
Lawrence, Dr., 21
Lawrence, George Alfred (1827-76), 334, 335
_Lays of Ancient Rome_, 226, 227
_Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers_, 303
Lear, Edward (1812-88), 313, 314
Lee, the Misses, 45
Lever, Charles (1806-72), 158, 159
Levy, Amy (1861-89), 316
Lewes, George Henry (1817-78), 354, 355
Lewis, Sir George Cornewall (1806-63), 206, 207
Lewis, Matthew ("Monk") (1775-1818), 2, 44
Liddon, Henry Parry (1829-90), 371
_Life Drama, A_, 305
Lingard, John (1771-1851), 215
_Little Dorrit_, 150
Lloyd (the elder), 3
Lloyd, Charles (1775-1839), 181
Locker, Frederick (1821-95), 309, 310
Lockhart, John Gibson (1794-1854), 191-194;
his _Life of Scott_, 193
_London Magazine_, 168 _sqq._
Long, George (1800-79), 407
_Lyrical Ballads_, 48, 56
Lytton, the first Lord (1803-73), 142-145, 422, 423
Lytton, Edward Robert, first Earl of (1831-91), 310-312
Macaulay, Thomas Babington (1800-59), 34, 67, 68, 224-232
M'Crie, Thomas (1772-1835), 216, 217
Mackay, Charles (1814-89), 302
Mackenzie, 17, 18
Mackintosh, Sir James (1765-1832), 345
_Macmillan's Magazine_, 382
Maginn, William (1793-1842), 203-205
Mahon, Lord, see Stanhope
Maine, Sir Henry J. S. (1822-88), 357, 358
Malone, Edmund (1741-1812), 47
Malthus, Thomas Robert (1766-1834), 46
Mangan, James Clarence (1803-49), 118
Manning, Henry Edward (1808-92), 370
Mansel, Henry Longueville (1820-71), 352-354
_Marius the Epicurean_, 400
Marryat, Frederick (1792-1848), 157, 158
Marston, Philip Bourke (1850-87), 294, 297
Marston, Westland (1819-90), 424
_Martin Chuzzlewit_, 149
Martineau, Harriet (1802-76), 163, 164
Mathias, Thomas James (1754?-1835), 20, 23, 25, 26
Maturin, Charles Robert (1782-1824), 125, 126
_Maud_, 263, 264
Maurice, Frederick Denison (1805-72), 354, 375
Maxwell, Sir William Stirling (1818-78), 252 _note_
_Melmoth the Wanderer_, 126
_Men and Women_, 271 _sq._
Merivale, Charles (1808-93), 240, 241
Merry, Robert ("Della Crusca") (1755-98), 19, 24 _note_
Mill, James (1773-1836), 345
Mill, John Stuart (1806-73), 344-349
Miller, Hugh (1802-56), 414, 415
Milman, Henry Hart (1791-1868), 219, 220
Milnes, R. M., see Houghton, Lord
Minto, William (1845-93), 402
Mitford, Mary Russell (1787-1855), 164, 165
Mitford, William (1744-1827), 215
_Modern British Theatre_, 417
_Modern Painters_, 389
Moir, D. M. ("Delta") (1798-1851), 140
_Monk, The_, 44
Montgomery, James (1771-1854), 107
Montgomery, Robert (1807-55), 187 _note_
Moore, John (1729-1802), 2, 26-28
Moore, Thomas (1779-1852), 94-98
More, Hannah (1745-1833), 45
Morris, Mr., 90
Motherwell, William (1797-1835), 109
Movement, The Oxford, 342 _sq._
Munro, Hugh A. J. (1819-85), 408
_Music and Moonlight_, 295
NAPIER, SIR WILLIAM (1785-1860), 212
_Newcomes, The_, 152, 155
Newman, John Henry (1801-90), 364-370
_Nicholas Nickleby_, 148
_Noctes Ambrosianae_, 188
Noel, Roden (1834-94), 312, 313
Norton, Mrs. (1808-77), 315
_ODE on Intimations of Immortality_, 54
O'Keefe, John (1747-1833), 46, 418-419
_Old Curiosity Shop, The_, 149
Oliphant, Laurence, vi
_Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches_, 235 _sq._
_Oliver Twist_, 148
_Orion_, 117
O'Shaughnessy, Arthur (1844-81), 294-296
_Our Mutual Friend_, 150
_Our Village_, 164
Paine, Thomas (1737-1809), 2, 30-32
Palgrave, Mr., 87
Palgrave, Sir Francis (1788-1861), 216
Palgrave, William Gifford (1826-88), 216
_Pall Mall Gazette_, 383
_Paracelsus_, 269, 270
_Past and Present_, 255, _sqq._
_Patchwork_, 309, 310
Pater, Walter H. (1839-94), 398-401
Pattison, Mark (1813-84), 373, 374
Paul, Mr. Kegan, 34
_Paul Ferroll_, 341
_Pauline_, 269
Peacock, Thomas Love (1785-1866), 161, 162
_Pelham_, 143
_Pendennis_, 152, 155
_Peter Plymley's Letters_, 177
_Peter's Letters_, 192, 194
_Philip Van Artevelde_, 119
_Pickwick Papers, The_, 146
Pindar, Peter, see Wolcot, John
Planche, James R. (1796-1880), 423
_Plays on the Passions_, 419
_Poetical Sketches_, 10, 11
_Political Justice_, 32 _sq._
Pollock, Sir F. (1815-88), 207
Pope, 5, 7
Porson, Richard (1759-1808), 406, 407
Praed, Winthrop Markworth (1802-39), 121-124
_Praelectiones Academicae_, 364
Price, 26
_Pride and Prejudice_, 129
Priestley, 2, 26
_Princess, The_, 261, 262
Procter, Adelaide Anne (1825-64), 316
Procter, B. W. ("Barry Cornwall") (1790-1874), 109
_Prolegomena Logica_, 353
Prowse, W. J. (1836-70), 314
_Pursuits of Literature, The_, 25, 26
Pusey, Edward Bouverie (1800-82), 360-362
Pusey, Philip (1799-1855), 207
Pye, 19
_Quarterly Review_, 168 _sq._
Radcliffe, Mrs. (1764-1823), 2, 43, 44
_Ravenshoe_, 334
Reade, Charles (1814-84), 331-333
Reeve, Henry, vi
_Renaissance in Italy, The_, 401
_Rights of Man, The_, 30 _sq._
_Rights of Woman, The_, 37, 38
_Ring and the Book, The_, 271 _sq._
Robertson, Frederick (1816-53), 376, 377
Robinson, H. Crabb, vi
Rogers, Samuel (1763-1855), 91, 92
_Rolliad, The_, 20, 21
_Roman Poets of the Republic_, 408
_Rondeaux_, 21
Roscoe, William (1753-1831), 214
Rossetti, D. G. (1828-82), 97, 288-292
Rossetti, Miss (1830-94), 293, 294
Ruskin, John (1819), v, 388-397
_Sartor Resartus_, 234 _sqq._
_Saturday Review_, 380, 381
Sayers, Dr. (1763-1817), 19, 45
_Sayings and Doings_, 141
_Schiller, Life of_, 233 _sqq._
Scots, the literary virtues of, 15;
poets in, 13-18, 108, 109
Scott, John (1730-83), 185
Scott, Michael (1789-1835), 160
Scott, Sir Walter (1771-1832), 34, 63, 69-75, 131-138
Scott, William Bell (1811-90), 302
Seeley, Sir J. R. (1834-94), 252 note
Sellar, William Young (1825-90), 408, 409
Senior, Nassau W. (1790-1864), 383
Seward, Miss (1747-1809), 19
Shairp, Principal (1819-85), 15
Shelley, Mrs. (1798-1851), 38
Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822), 81-86
Skene, William Forbes (1809-92), 240
Smedley, Frank E. (1818-64), 337
Smedley, Menella Bute (1820-77), 316
Smith, Alexander (1830-67), 304-307
Smith, Sydney (1771-1845), 176-178
Smith, William Robertson (1846-94), 409, 410
Somerville, Mrs. (1780-1872), 411
_Songs of Innocence and Experience_, 11, 12
_Sordello_, 270
Southey, Robert (1774-1843), 3, 13, 63-69, 107, 110
_Spectator_, 380
Stanhope, Philip Henry, Earl (1805-75), 246
Stanley, Arthur Penrhyn (1815-81), 372
Stephen, James Kenneth (1859-92), 314
Stephen, Sir James (1789-1859), 358
Stephen, Sir James Fitzjames (1829-94), 358
"Sterling Club," The, 206 _sq._
Sterling, John (1806-44), 205, 206, 300
_Sterling, Life of John_, 205, 235 _sqq._
Stevenson, Robert Louis (1850-94), 338-341
_St. Leon_, 34, 36
_Story without an End, A_, 341
Strafford, 270
_Studies in the History of the Renaissance_, 398 _sqq._
Surtees, Robert (?-1864), 336
Swift, 6
Swinburne, Mr., 90
Symonds, John Addington (1840-93), 294, 401, 402
_Syntax, Dr._, 47
_Tale of Two Cities, A_, 150
_Tales of a Grandfather_, 212
_Tamworth Reading-Room_, 369
Tannahill, Robert (1774-1810), 108
Taylor, Sir Henry (1800-86), 119-121
Taylor, Thomas (the Platonist) (1758-1835), 46
Taylor, William (of Norwich) (1765-1836), 45
Tennant, William (1784-1848), 109
Tennyson, Alfred (1809-92), 89, 90, 253-268
Thackeray, William Makepeace (1811-63), 151-156
Thirlwall, Connop (1797-1875), 220-222
Thom, William (1789-1848), 109
Thomson, James (1834-82), 296-298
_Tracts for the Times_, 361
_Treasure Island_, 339
Trench, Richard Chenevix (1807-86), 300
Trollope, Anthony (1815-82), 329, 330
Trollope, Mrs. (1780-1863), 329
Trollope, Thomas Adolphus (1810-92), 329
Tupper, Martin Farquhar (1810-89), 299
Turner, Sharon (1768-1847), 215, 216
Twisleton, Edward (1809-74), 207
Tyndall, John (1820-93), 412
Tytler, Alexander (1747-1813), 217
Tytler, Patrick Fraser (1791-1849), 217
Tytler, William (1711-92), 217
_Uncommercial Traveller, The_, 148
_Unto this Last_, 391
_Vanity Fair_, 155
_Vathek_, 41
Venables, George S. (1811-88), 207
Vere, Sir Aubrey de (1788-1846), 111
_Verses and Translations_, 314
_Vestiges of Creation_, 414
_Virginians, The_, 155
Wade, Thomas (1805-75), 113
Wainewright, Thomas Griffiths (1794-1852), 198
Wakefield, Gilbert (1756-1801), 405
Walpole, 1, 6
Ward, William George (1812-82), 371
_Waverley Novels, The_, 131-138
Wells, Charles Jeremiah (1800-79), 113
_Westward Ho!_ 326 _sq._
Whately, Richard (1787-1863), 355, 356
Whewell, William (1794-1866), 356
White, Henry Kirke (1785-1806), 107, 108
Whitehead, Charles (1804-62), 113
Whyte-Melville, Major (1821-78), 336, 337
Wilberforce, Samuel (1805-73), 371, 372
Williams, Helen Maria (1762-1827), 29, 30
Williams, Isaac (1802-65), 370, 371
Wilson, John (1785-1854), 188-191
Wolcot, John ("Peter Pindar") (1738-1819), 20, 21-23
Wolfe, Charles (1791-1823), 124
Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-97), 37, 38
Wordsworth, Dorothy (1771-1855), 50, 54
Wordsworth, William (1770-1850), 49-56
_Yeast_, 326 _sq._
Young, Arthur (1741-1820), 2, 28, 29
_Zeluco_, 26, 27, 28