That which in England is conveniently described as the Victorian Age of
literature has a character of its own, at once brilliant, diverse, and
complex. It is an age peculiarly difficult to label in a phrase; but
its copious and versatile gifts will make it memorable in the history
of modern civilisation. The Victorian Age, it is true, has no
Shakespeare or Milton, no Bacon or Hume, no Fielding or Scott--no
supreme master in poetry, philosophy, or romance, whose work is
incorporated with the thought of the world, who is destined to form
epochs and to endure for centuries. Its genius is more scientific than
literary, more historical than dramatic, greater in discovery than in
abstract thought.
In lyric poetry and in romance our age has names second only to the
greatest; its researches into nature and history are at least equal to
those of any previous epoch; and, if it has not many great
philosophers, it has developed the latest, most arduous, most important
of all the sciences. This is the age of Sociology: its central
achievement has been the revelation of social laws. This social aspect
of thought colours the poetry, the romance, the literature, the art,
and the philosophy of the Victorian Age. Literature has been the
gainer thereby in originality and in force. It has been the loser in
symmetry, in dignity, in grace.
The Victorian Age is a convenient term in English literature to
describe the period from 1837 to 1895: not that we assign any
sacramental efficacy to a reign, or assume that the Queen has given any
special impulse to the writers of her time. Neither reigns, nor years,
nor centuries, nor any arbitrary measure of time in the gradual
evolution of thought can be exactly applied, or have any formative
influence. A period of so many years, having some well-known name by
which it can be labelled, is a mere artifice of classification. And of
course an Englishman will not venture to include in his survey the
American writers, or to bring them within his national era. The date,
1837, is an arbitrary point, and a purely English point. Yet it is
curious how different a colour may be seen in the main current of the
English literature produced before and after that year. In the year of
the Queen's accession to the throne, the great writers of the early
part of this century were either dead or silent. Scott, Byron,
Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Lamb, Sheridan, Hazlitt, Mackintosh, Crabbe,
and Cobbett, were gone. There were still living in 1837, Wordsworth,
Southey, Campbell, Moore, Jeffrey, Sydney Smith, De Quincey, Miss
Edgeworth, Miss Mitford, Leigh Hunt, Brougham, Samuel Rogers:--living,
it is true, but they had all produced their important work at some
earlier date. Carlyle, Dickens, Thackeray, Macaulay, Tennyson,
Browning, had begun to write, but were not generally known. The
principal English authors who belong equally to the Georgian and to the
Victorian Age are Landor, Bulwer, Disraeli, Hallam, and Milman, and
they are not quite in the very first rank in either age. It is a
significant fact that the reign of the Queen has produced, with
trifling exceptions, the whole work of Tennyson, the Brownings,
Thackeray, Dickens, the Brontës, George Eliot, Kingsley, Trollope,
Spencer, Mill, Darwin, Ruskin, Grote, Macaulay, Freeman, Froude, Lecky,
Milman, Green, Maine, Matthew Arnold, Symonds, Rossetti, Swinburne,
Morris, John Morley, to say nothing of younger men who are still in
their prime and promise.
Widely as these differ among themselves, they have characters which
differentiate them from all men of the eighteenth century, and also
from the men of the era of Goethe and Scott. Can we imagine _Sartor
Resartus_ being published in the age of Johnson, or _In Memoriam_ in
that of Byron? How different a land is the Italy which Ruskin sees
from the Italy that Rogers knew! What a new world is that of the
Brontës and George Eliot beside that which was painted by Miss
Edgeworth and Miss Austen! In what things would Southey and John
Morley agree, except about books and pure English? Place Burke _On the
Sublime and Beautiful_ beside Ruskin's _Modern Painters_; compare the
_Stones of Venice_ with Eustace's _Classical Tour_; compare Carlyle's
_French Revolution_ with Gibbon's _Decline and Fall_; compare the _Book
of Snobs_ with Addison's _Spectator_; contrast _The Ring and the Book_
with Gray's _Elegy_ or Cowper's _Task_. What wholly different types,
ideas, aims! The age of Pope and Addison, of Johnson and Gibbon, clung
to symmetry, "the grand air," the "best models"; it cared much more for
books than for social reforms, and in the world of letters a classical
manner was valued far more than originality of ideas. And when we come
to a later age, what an irrepressible and stormy imagination do we
find! Byron, Shelley, Scott, Coleridge, Campbell, Southey, Landor,
revelled in romance and colour, in battle and phantasmagoria, in
tragedy, mystery, and legend. They boiled over with excitement, and
their visions were full of fight. The roar and fire of the great
revolutionary struggle filled men's brains with fierce and strange
dreams.
Our Victorian Age is as different from the Virgilian and Ciceronian
style of the age of Gray and Johnson, as it is from the resounding
torrent which was poured forth by Byron and Scott. The social
earnestness of our time colours our literature, and almost distorts our
literature; while, on the other hand, our practical and scientific
genius scorns the melodramatic imagery with which our grandfathers were
delighted. Gibbon would have smiled a cruel epigram, if he had been
expected to thrust a Latter-Day Pamphlet on the social question into
one of his chapters on the Fall of Rome. But Carlyle's _French
Revolution_ is as much political rhapsody and invective as it is
history. Dickens made a series of novels serve as onslaughts on
various social abuses; and George Eliot's heart is ever with Darwin,
Spencer, and Comte, as much as it is with Miss Austen. Ruskin would
sacrifice all the pictures in the world, if society would transform
itself into a Brotherhood of St. George. Tennyson has tried to put the
dilemmas of theological controversy into lyric poetry, and Psychology
is now to be studied, not in metaphysical ethics, but in popular
novels. The aim of the modern historian is to compile a _Times_
newspaper of events which happened three or four, eight or ten
centuries ago. The aim of the modern philosopher is to tabulate
mountains of research, and to prune away with agnostic _non possumus_
the ancient oracles of hypothesis and imagination.
Our literature to-day has many characteristics: but its central note is
the dominant influence of Sociology--enthusiasm for social truths as an
instrument of social reform. It is scientific, subjective,
introspective, historical, archaeological:--full of vitality,
versatility, and diligence:--intensely personal, defiant of all law, of
standards, of convention:--laborious, exact, but often indifferent to
grace, symmetry, or colour:--it is learned, critical, cultured:--with
all its ambition and its fine feeling, it is unsympathetic to the
highest forms of the imagination, and quite alien to the drama of
action.
It would be a difficult problem in social dynamics to fix anything like
a true date for this change in the tone of literature, and to trace it
back to its real social causes. The historian of English literature
will perhaps take the death of Walter Scott, in 1832, as a typical
date. By a curious coincidence, Goethe died in the same year. Two
years later Coleridge and Lamb died. Within a few years more most of
those who belonged to the era of Byron, Shelley, Scott, and Sheridan
were departed or had sung their last effective note. The exceptions
were Wordsworth and his immediate Lakist followers, Landor and Bulwer,
of whom the latter two continued to produce. The death of Scott
happened in the year of the Reform Act of 1832; and here we reach a
political and social cause of the great change. The reformed
democratic Parliament of 1832 was itself the reaction after the furious
upheaval caused by the Revolution of 1789, and it heralded the social
and legislative revolution of the last sixty years. It was the era
when the steam-power and railway system was founded, and the vast
industrial development which went with it. The last sixty years have
witnessed a profound material revolution in English life; and the
reaction on our literature has been deep and wide.
The most obvious and superficial change in literature is the extreme
diversity of its form. There is no standard now, no conventional type,
no good "model." It is an age of "Go-as-you-please," and of _tous les
genres sont bons, surtout le genre ennuyeux_. In almost any age of
English literature, or indeed of any other literature, an experienced
critic can detect the tone of the epoch at once in prose or verse.
There is in them an unmistakeable _Zeit-Geist_ in phraseology and form.
The Elizabethan drama, essay, or philosophy could not be mistaken for
the drama, essay, or philosophy of the Restoration; the heroic couplet
reigned from Dryden to Byron; Ciceronian diction reigned from Addison
to Burke; and then the Quarterlies, with Southey, Lamb, Scott, De
Quincey, Coleridge, Sydney Smith, and Leigh Hunt, introduced a simpler,
easier tone of the well-bred _causeur_, as free from classical
mannerism as it was free from subtle mechanism or epigrammatic
brilliance. Down to about the death of Scott and Coleridge, almost any
page of English prose or verse could be certainly attributed to its
proper generation by the mark of its style alone.
The Victorian literature presents a dozen styles, every man speaking
out what is in him, in the phrases he likes best. Our _Zeit-Geist_
flashes all across the heavens at once. Let us place a page from
_Sartor Resartus_ beside a page from Macaulay's _History of England_,
or either beside a page from Arnold's _Literature and Dogma_ or one
from the _Stones of Venice_. Here are four typical styles in prose,
each of which has been much admired and imitated; yet they differ as
widely as Shelley from Ovid, or Tennyson from Pope. Again, for verse,
contrast _Paracelsus_ with _The Princess_--poems written about the same
time by friends and colleagues. Compare a poem of William Morris with
one by Lewis Morris. Compare Swinburne's _Songs and Sonnets_ with
Matthew Arnold's _Obermann_; Rudyard Kipling's _Ballads_ with _The
Light of Asia_. Have they any common standard of form, any type of
metre? The purists doubt as to the style of Carlyle as a "model," but
no one denies that the _French Revolution_ and _Hero-Worship_, at least
in certain passages, display a mastery over language as splendid as
anything in our prose literature. Exactly the same might be said also
of _Esmond_, and again of _Silas Marner_, and again of the _Seven Lamps
of Architecture_. Yet all of these differ as widely as one style can
differ from another. _Fifine at the Fair_, and _The Angel in the
House_, have each fervent admirers. No! there is no recognised "model"
either in verse or in prose.
In truth, we have now both in prose and in verse strongly-contrasted
types, each of which commands admiration and following. Both in prose
and verse we have one type which has carried subtle finish and a purism
studied almost to the point of "preciousness," alongside of another
type which crowds its effects without regard to tone and harmony, and
by its side a third type which trots along breathless in its
shirt-sleeves. Tennyson's _In Memoriam_ has that exquisite polish of
workmanship which we find in such poets as Virgil, Racine, and
Milton--that perfection of phrase which we cannot conceive the poet
capable of improving by any labour. Put aside for the moment any
question about the ideas, inspiration, or power of the poem as a whole,
and consider that, in all those hundreds of stanzas, there is hardly
one line that is either careless, prosaic, or harsh, not a single false
note, nothing commonplace, nothing over-coloured, but uniform harmony
of phrase. This perfection of phrasing is not always to be found even
in the greatest poets, for Aeschylus and Dante at times strike a fierce
discord, and Shakespeare, Calderon, and Goethe sometimes pass into rank
extravaganza. But this scholarly and measured speech has impressed
itself on the poetry of our time--insomuch, that the Tennysonian cycle
of minor poets has a higher standard of grace, precision, and subtlety
of phrase than the second rank of any modern literature:--a standard
which puts to shame the rugosities of strong men like Dryden, Burns,
and Byron. There is plenty of mannerism in this school of our minor
poetry, but no one can call it either slovenly or harsh.
The friend, contemporary, almost the rival of Tennyson, one whom some
think endowed by nature with even stronger genius, on the other hand,
struck notes of discord harsher, louder, and more frequent than any
poet since Elizabethan times. Whatever we hold about the insight and
imagination of Browning, no one can doubt that he often chose to be
uncouth, crabbed, grotesque, and even clownish, when the humour was on
him. There are high precedents for genius choosing its own instrument
and making its own music. But, whatever were Browning's latent powers
of melody, his method when he chose to play upon the gong, or the
ancient instrument of marrow-bone and cleavers, was the exact
antithesis of Tennyson's; and he set on edge the teeth of those who
love the exquisite cadences of _In Memoriam_ and _Maud_. Browning has
left deep influence, if not a school. The younger Lytton, George
Meredith, Buchanan, here and there Swinburne and William Morris, seem
to break loose from the graceful harmony which the Tennysonians affect,
and to plunge headlong into the obscure, the uncouth, the ghastly, and
the lurid. No one denies originality and power in many of these
pieces: but they are flat blasphemy against the pellucid melody of the
Tennysonian idyll. Our poetry seems to be under two contrary spells:
it is enthralled at one time by the ravishing symmetry of Mozart; at
another time it yearns for the crashing discords that thunder along the
march of the Valkyrie through the air.
As in poetry, so in prose. We find in our best prose of to-day an
extraordinary mastery over pure, nervous, imaginative language; and all
this, alongside here of a riotous extravagance, and there, of a crude
and garrulous commonplace. Thackeray's best chapters, say in _Vanity
Fair_, _Esmond_, the _Humourists_, contain an almost perfect prose
style--a style as nervous as that of Swift, as easy as that of
Goldsmith, as graceful as that of Addison, as rich as that of Gibbon or
Burke. No English romances have been clothed in a language so chaste
and scholarly--not even Fielding's. Certainly not the Waverley series;
for Scott, as we know, rehearsed his glowing chronicles of the past
with the somewhat conventional verbosity of the _improvisatore_ who
recites but will not pause to write. George Eliot relates her story
with an art even more cultivated than that of Thackeray--though,
doubtless, with an over-elaborated self-consciousness, and perceptible
suggestions of the laboratory of the student. Trollope tells his
artless tales in perfectly pure, natural, and most articulate prose,
the language of a man of the world telling a good story well. And a
dozen living novelists are masters of a style of extreme ease and grace.
Side by side with this chastened English prose, we have men of genius
who have fallen into evil habits. Bulwer, who knew better, would quite
revel in a stagey bombast; Dickens, with his pathos and his humour, was
capable of sinking into a theatrical mannerism and cockney vulgarities
of wretched taste; Disraeli, with all his wit and _savoir faire_, has
printed some rank fustian, and much slip-slop gossip; and George
Meredith at times can be as jerky and mysterious as a prose Browning.
Charlotte Brontë and Kingsley could both descend to blue fire and
demoniac incoherences. Macaulay is brilliant and emphatic, but we
weary at last of his everlasting _staccato_ on the trumpet; and even
the magnificent symphonies of Ruskin at his best will end sometimes in
a sort of _coda_ of fantasias which suggest limelights and coloured
lenses. Carlyle, if not the greatest prose master of our age, must be
held to be, by virtue of his original genius and mass of stroke, the
literary dictator of Victorian prose. And, though we all know how
wantonly he often misused his mighty gift, though no one now would
venture to imitate him even at a distance, and though Matthew Arnold
was ever taking up his parable--"Flee Carlylese as the very Devil!"--we
are sliding into Carlylese unconsciously from time to time, and even
_Culture_ itself fell into the trap in the very act of warning others.
Side by side with such chastened literary art as that of Thackeray and
George Eliot, Matthew Arnold and John Morley, Lecky and Froude, Maine
and Symonds, side by side with a Carlylese tendency to extravagance,
slang, and caricature, we find another vein in English prose--the flat,
ungainly, nerveless style of mere scientific research. What lumps of
raw fact are flung at our heads! What interminable gritty collops of
learning have we to munch! Through what tangles of uninteresting
phenomena are we not dragged in the name of Research, Truth, and the
higher Philosophy! Mr. Mill and Mr. Spencer, Mr. Bain and Mr.
Sidgwick, have taught our age very much; but no one of them was ever
seen to smile; and it is not easy to recall in their voluminous works a
single irradiating image or one monumental phrase.
There are eminent historians to-day who disdain the luminous style of
Hume and Robertson, and yet deride the colour and fire of Gibbon.
Grote poured forth the precious contents of his portentous notebooks
with as little care for rhythm and as little sense of proportion as a
German professor. Freeman and Gardiner have evidently trained
themselves in the same school of elaborate learning, till they would
appear to count the graceful English of Froude, Lecky, and Green as
hardly becoming the dignity of history. It would seem as if the charge
which some of our historians are most anxious to avoid is the charge of
being "readable," and of keeping to themselves any fact that they know.
The men who are rather pleased than pained to hear themselves called by
the barbarous term of "scientists" seem to think that it matters
nothing how ill-digested be their book, or how commonplace be their
language. They are accustomed to lecture to students in the laboratory
in their shirt-sleeves with their hands in their pockets; and they
believe that immortality may be achieved if they can pile up enough
facts and manufacture an adequate number of monographs. And they do
this, in the teeth of excellent examples to the contrary. Huxley and
Tyndall have given their brethren in science fine examples of a pure,
vigorous, and well-knit style. Yet, how many of them are still quite
content to go rumbling along with an interminable rigmarole of dry
"memoirs." Our ponderous biographies of third-rate people tend to
become mere bags of letters and waste-paper baskets. And all this with
such consummate models before us, and so very high a standard of
general cultivation. We have had in this age men who write an English
as pure and powerful as any in the whole range of our literature; we
have tens of thousands of men and women who write a perfectly correct
and intelligent prose. And yet out of a million books, we find so very
few which even aim at being works of art in the sense that _Tom Jones_
is a work of art, and the _Decline and Fall_ is a work of art.
It is, no doubt, this preponderance of the practical, scientific, and
social energies which has checked in our Victorian Age the highest
imaginative and dramatic genius. With all its achievements in lyric
and psychologic poetry, it has hardly attempted to scale the empyrean
of song. In the seventy-six years that have passed since Shelley
conceived his _Prometheus_, as he sat gazing over the sombre ruins of
the Campagna, no one has ever ventured into that seventh heaven of
invention. Since the _School for Scandal_ (1777) no English drama has
been produced which has anything like the same hold on the stage. For
more than sixty years the English stage has not known one consummate
actor. Though men of real genius have in these sixty years laboured at
the higher drama, they have hardly achieved even such measures of
success as fell to Byron and Shelley with _Manfred_ and the _Cenci_.
With all its lyric and psychologic power, with all its energy and its
learning, the Victorian Age has not quite equalled the age of Goethe.
It is as if its scientific spirit checked the supreme imagination: as
if its social earnestness produced a distaste for merely dramatic
passion.
One of the most striking facts about our modern literature is the
preponderance of the "subjective" over the "objective." The interest
in external events, as the subject of imaginative work, quite pales
before the interest in analysis of mental and moral impulse.
Wordsworth, Coleridge, Jane Austen, have completely dominated our age,
and have displaced the epic and legendary themes of Scott, Byron,
Campbell, and Southey. _The Two Voices_, _In Memoriam_, _The Ring and
the Book_, _Silas Marner_, _Vanity Fair_, _Bleak House_, dissect brain
and heart, but do not make their prime motive in any thrilling history.
The crisis of modern romance goes on in the conscience, not in the
outside world. Hence the enormous multiplication of the psychologic
novel, a form of art which the eighteenth century would have viewed
with wonder and perplexity. The curious part of this is the striking
abatement of taste for the historical romance, in spite of the immense
extension of historical study and archaeological revival. We know far
more about the past, both within and without, than did our fathers; and
we are always seeking to realise to ourselves the habits, ideas,
aspect, the very clothes and furniture of ages of old, which we study
with sympathetic zeal and in the minutest detail. Yet the historical
romance appears only at intervals. _Harold_ and _Esmond_ are both more
than forty years old, _Romola_ more than thirty years old. They are
none of them quite unqualified successes; and no later historical
romance has approached these three in power and interest. Why is it,
that, in an age pre-eminently historical, in an age so redundant of
novels, the historical novel is out of fashion? Partly, no doubt, our
romancers shun comparison with the mighty Wizard of the North; partly,
the analytic genius of our time so greatly exceeds its synthetic
genius; and mainly, the range of our historical learning inclines us to
restore the past by exact scholarship and not by fiction without
authority. George Eliot was so anxious to have her local colour
accurate that she ended by becoming somewhat fatiguing. Some day, no
doubt, the genius of romance will return to this inexhaustible field
with enthusiasm equal to Scott's, with a knowledge far more accurate
than his, and a spirit quite purged from political and social bias.
From the death of Scott in 1832 until 1894 are sixty-two years; and if
we divide this period into equal parts at the year 1863 (it was the
year of Thackeray's death), we shall be struck with the fact that the
purely literary product of the first period of thirty-one years
(1832-1863) is superior to the purely literary product of the second
period of thirty-one years (1863-1894). The former period gives us all
that was best of Tennyson, the Brownings, Carlyle, Thackeray, Dickens,
Bulwer, the Brontës, Mrs. Gaskell, Trollope, George Eliot, Kingsley,
Disraeli, Dr. Arnold, Thirlwall, Grote, Hallam, Milman, Macaulay, Mill,
Froude, Layard, Kinglake, Ruskin. The second period gave us in the
main, Darwin, Spencer, Huxley, G. H. Lewes, Maine, Leslie Stephen, John
Morley, Matthew Arnold, Lecky, Freeman, Stubbs, Bryce, Green, Gardiner,
Symonds, Rossetti, Morris, Swinburne. Poetry, romance, the critical,
imaginative, and pictorial power, dominate the former period:
philosophy, science, politics, history are the real inspiration of the
latter period.
The era since the death of Scott is essentially a scientific age, a
sociologic age; and this is peculiarly visible in the second half of
this era of sixty-two years. About the middle of the period we see how
the scientific and sociologic interest begins to over-shadow, if not to
oust, the literary, poetic, and romantic interest. Darwin's _Origin of
Species_ was published in 1859; and its effect on thought became marked
within the next few years. In 1862, Herbert Spencer commenced to issue
his great encyclopaedic work, _Synthetic Philosophy_, still, we trust,
to be completed after more than thirty years of devoted toil. Darwin's
later books appeared about the same period, as did a large body of
scientific works in popular form by Huxley, Tyndall, Wallace, Lewes,
Lubbock, Tylor, and Clifford. It is only needful here to refer to such
scientific works as directly reacted on general literature. About the
same time the later speculations of Comte began to attract public
attention in England, and the _Positive Polity_ was translated in 1875.
Between the years 1860-1875, there grew up in England an absorbing
interest in Social Philosophy, and a conviction that the idea of
invariable law offered a solution of the progress of society.
Evolution as an idea was in the air, and it was applied to Man as much
as to Nature. It is no part of our present purpose to trace its growth
from the scientific aspect. It is enough to note how it acted and
reacted on general literature.
Poetry began to hover round the problem of Evolution. It wrapped it in
mystery, denounced it with fine indignation, and took it for the text
of some rather prosaic homilies. Criticism fell into the prevailing
theory: so did history, and even romance. Philosophy and Science are
not the best foster-mothers of Poetry and Romance. Philosophy and
Science grew more solemn than ever; and Poetry and Romance lost
something of their wilder fancy and their light heart. Literature grew
less spontaneous, more correct, more learned, and, it may be, more
absorbed in its practical purpose of modifying social life.
The old notion of literature being a business apart from affairs, of
men of letters being an order, of an absorption in books being ample
work for a life--all this is far from the rule. At least twenty
members of the present and late Governments have been copious writers;
Mr. Gladstone and at least three or four of his late colleagues are
quite in the front rank of living authors--nay, several of them began
their career as literary men. It would be difficult to name an
important writer of the Victorian Age who has not at times flung
himself with ardour into the great social, political, or religious
battles of his time. Thackeray, Trollope, Green, Symonds, are possible
exceptions--examples of bookmen who passed their lives with books, and
who never wrote to promote "a cause." But all the rest have entered on
the "burning questions" of their age, and most of them with the main
part of their force. As a consequence "learning," as it was understood
by Casaubon, Scaliger, Bentley, Johnson, and Gibbon, as it was
understood by Littré, Döllinger, and Mommsen, may be said to have
disappeared in England. Cardinal Newman, Mark Pattison, Dr. Pusey,
were said to be very learned, but it was a kind of learning which kept
very much to itself. For good or for evil, our literature is now
absorbed in the urgent social problem, and is become but an instrument
in the vast field of Sociology--the science of Society.
This predominance of Sociology, the restless rapidity of modern life,
the omnipresence of material activity, fully account for the special
character of modern literature. Literature is no longer "bookish"--but
practical, social, propagandist. It is full of life--but it is a
dispersive, analytic, erratic form of vitality. It has a most
fastidious taste in form--but it often flings the critical spirit aside
in its passion for doing, in its ardour to convince and to inspire. It
is industrious, full of learning and research--but it regards its
learning as an instrument of influence, not as an end of thought. It
can work up a poem or an essay, as carefully as Mieris or Breughel
polished a cabinet picture--and it can "tear a passion to tatters," or
tumble its note-books into a volume all in a heap. It has no
"standard," no "model," no "best writer"--and yet it has a curious
faculty for reviving every known form and imitating any style. It is
intensely historical, but so accurately historical that it is afraid to
throw the least colour of imagination around its history. It has
consummate poetic feeling, and copious poetic gifts--but it has now no
single poet of the first rank. It has infinite romantic resources, and
an army of skilful novelists--and yet it has no single living writer
worthy to be named beside the great romancers of the nineteenth century.
This rich, many-sided, strenuous literature, which will place the name
of Victoria higher than that of Elizabeth in the history of our
language, would form a splendid subject hereafter for some one of our
descendants who was equal to the task of treating our Victorian
literature as a whole. In the meantime, it may be worth while for the
men and women of to-day, who are full of all the excellent work around
us, to be reminded of the good things produced now nearly sixty years
ago. As one who can remember much that was given to the world in a
former generation, I shall endeavour in these little sketches to mark
some of the characteristics of the best writers in the early Victorian
Age, confining myself for the present to prose literature of the
imaginative kind.
It is now some time since the country of Shakespeare and of Milton has
been without its poet laureate, and to the non-poetical world the
absence of that court functionary is hardly perceptible. Nay, the
question has begun to arise, If there is to be a laureate in poetry,
why not a laureate also in prose romance? And if there were a laureate
in prose romance, whom should we choose?
The same phenomenon meets us in the realm of prose fiction as in
poetry: that we have vast quantities of thoughtful work produced, an
army of cultivated workers, a great demand, an equally great supply, a
very high average of merit--and yet so little of the very first rank.
For the first time in the present century, English literature is
without a single living novelist of world-wide reputation. The
nineteenth century opened with _Castle Rackrent_ and the admirably
original tales of Maria Edgeworth. Jane Austen followed in the same
field. And since _Waverley_ appeared, in 1814, we have had a
succession of fine romances in unbroken line. Fenimore Cooper's work
is nearly contemporary with the best of Scott's. At Sir Walter's death
Bulwer-Lytton was in full career. And Lytton, Disraeli, Hawthorne, the
Brontës, Dickens, Thackeray, and Trollope were all at their best nearly
together. During the last twenty years or so of this splendid period
they had been joined by George Eliot; and of the whole band Anthony
Trollope was the survivor. With him our language lost the last of
those companions of the fireside in mansion and cottage whose names are
household words, whose books are in every hand, where the English
tongue is heard.
We need not engage in any critical estimate of these writers: we are
but too well aware of their failures and defects. Lytton indited not a
little bombast, Dickens had his incurable mannerisms, and Thackeray his
conventional cynicisms. There are passages in George Eliot's romances
which read like sticky bits from a lecture on comparative
palaeontology; and Disraeli, who for fifty years threw off most
readable tales in the intervals of politics, seems always to be
laughing at the public behind his mask. Yet the good sense of mankind
remembers the best and forgets the worst, even if the worst be
four-fifths of the whole.
The place of genius is decided by its inimitable hits, and its misses
evermore drop out of memory as time goes on. The world loves its
bright spirits for what they give it, and it does not score their blots
like an examiner marking a student's paper. Thus the men and women of
the first rank still hold the field in the million homes where English
tales are a source of happiness; and it would be perverse to maintain
that any living men have reached that level. We can see no trace that
Pickwick or Emma, Natty Bumppo or Uncas, are losing their hold on the
imagination of men and women, any more than Jeanie Deans and the
Antiquary. _Oliver Twist_, the _Last Days of Pompeii_, _Vanity Fair_,
_Jane Eyre_, have more readers than ever. And I find the Last
Chronicle of _Barset_, _Lothair_, and _Silas Marner_ as fresh as they
were a quarter of a century ago.
We all admit that there are delightful writers still. I am not about
to decry our living romancers, and certainly not to criticise them. If
any man choose to maintain that there is more poetry in Tess than in
the entire _Barsetshire_ series, that Dickens could not have bettered
the _Two Drummer Boys_ of Rudyard Kipling, that _Treasure Island_ has a
realism as vivid as _Robinson Crusoe_, that Mrs. Wood's _Village
Tragedy_ may rank with _Silas Marner_, that Howells and Besant, Ouida
and Rhoda Broughton, Henry James and Mrs. Burnett, are as good reading
as we need, that Bret Harte has struck a line as original as that of
Dickens, and that George Meredith has an eye for character which
reminds us not seldom of Thackeray and Fielding--I do not dispute it.
I am no one-book man or one-style man, but enjoy what is good in all.
But I am thinking of the settled judgment and the visible practice of
the vast English-speaking and English-reading world. And judging by
that test, we cannot shut our eyes to this, that we have no living
romancer who has yet achieved that world-wide place of being read and
welcomed in every home where the language is heard or known. George
Meredith has been a prolific writer for thirty years and Stevenson for
twenty years; but their most ardent admirers, among whom I would be
counted, can hardly claim for them a triumph so great.
We come, then, to this, that for the first time during this whole
century now ending, English literature can count no living novelist
whom the world, and not merely the esoteric circle of cultured
Englishmen, consents to stamp with the mark of accepted fame. One is
too eccentric, obscure, and subtle, another too local and equal, a
third too sketchy, this one too unreal, that one far too real, too
obvious, too prosaic, to win and to hold the great public by their
spell. Critics praise them, friends utter rhapsodies, good judges
enjoy them--but their fame is partial, local, sectional, compared to
the fame of Scott, Dickens, or Thackeray.
What is the cause? I do not hesitate to say it is that we have
over-trained our taste, we are overdone with criticism, we are too
systematically drilled, there is far too much moderate literature and
far too fastidious a standard in literature. Everyone is afraid to let
himself go, to offend the conventions, or to raise a sneer. It is the
inevitable result of uniformity in education and discipline in mental
training. Millions can write good grammar, easy and accurate
sentences, and imitate the best examples of the age. Education has
been driven at high pressure into literary lines, and a monotonous
correctness in literary taste has been erected into a moral code. Tens
of thousands of us can put the finger on a bit of exaggeration, or a
false light in the local colour, or a slip in perfect realism. The
result is a photographic accuracy of detail, a barren monotony of
commonplace, and the cramping of real inventive genius. It is the
penalty of giving ourselves up to mechanical culture.
If another Dickens were to break out to-morrow with the riotous
tomfoolery of Pickwick at the trial, or of Weller and Stiggins, a
thousand lucid criticisms would denounce it as vulgar balderdash.
Glaucus and Nydia at Pompeii would be called melodramatic rant. The
_House of the Seven Gables_ would be rejected by a sixpenny magazine,
and _Jane Eyre_ would not rise above a common "shocker." Hence the
enormous growth of the _Kodak_ school of romance--the snap-shots at
everyday realism with a hand camera. We know how it is done. A woman
of forty, stout, plain, and dull, sits in an ordinary parlour at a
tea-table, near an angular girl with a bad squint. "Some tea?" said
Mary, touching the pot. "I don't mind," replied Jane in a careless
tone; "I am rather tired and it is a dull day." "It is," said Mary, as
her lack-lustre eyes glanced at the murky sky without. "Another cup?"
And so the modern _romance_ dribbles on hour by hour, chapter by
chapter, volume by volume, recording, as in a phonograph, the minute
commonplace of the average man and woman in perfectly real but entirely
common situations. To this dead level of correctness literary purism
has brought romance. The reaction against the photographic style, on
the other hand, leads to spasmodic efforts to arouse the jaded interest
by forced sensationalism, physiological bestialities, and a crude form
of the hobgoblin and bogey business.
In all the ages of great productive work there were intense
individuality, great freedom, and plenty of failures. _Tom Jones_
delighted the town which was satiated with gross absurdities, some of
them, alas! from the pen of Fielding himself. Shakespeare wrote
happily before criticism had invented the canons of the drama, and Sir
Walter's stories had no reviews to expose his historical blunders. In
the great romance age which began to decline some forty years ago,
there was not a tithe of such good average work as we get now;
criticism had not become a fine art; every one was free to like what he
pleased, and preposterous stuff was written and enjoyed. Of course it
cannot be good to like preposterous stuff, and an educated taste ought
to improve literature. But it is almost a worse thing when general
culture produces an artificial monotony, when people are taught what
they ought to like, when to violate the canons of taste is far worse
than to laugh at the Ten Commandments.
With a very high average of fairly good work, an immense mass of such
work, and an elaborate code of criticism, the production of brilliant
and inimitable successes is usually arrested in every field. Having
thousands of graceful verse-writers, we have no great poet; in a
torrent of skilful fiction, we have no great novelist; with many
charming painters, who hardly seem to have a fault, we have no great
artist; with _mises-en-scène_, make-up costumes, and accessories for
our plays such as the world never saw before, we have no great actor;
and with ten thousand thoughtful writers, we have not a single genius
of the first rank. Elaborate culture casts chill looks on original
ideas. Genius itself is made to feel the crudeness and extravagance of
its first efforts and retires with shame to take a lower place. We are
all so fastidious about form and have got such fixed regulation views
about form, we are so correct, so much like one another, such good boys
and girls, that the eccentricities and idiosyncrasies of the inventive
spirit are taught from childhood to control themselves and to conform
to the decorum of good society. A highly organised code of culture may
give us good manners, but it is the death of genius.
There are other things which check the flow of a really original
literature, though perhaps a high average culture and a mechanical
system of education may be the most potent. Violent political
struggles check it: an absorption in material interests checks it:
uniformity of habits, a general love of comfort, conscious
self-criticism, make it dull and turbid. Now our age is marked by all
of these. From the age of Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau, the French
genius produced almost no imaginative work of really European
importance until it somewhat revived again with Chateaubriand in the
present century. Nor in England can we count anything of a like kind
from the death of Goldsmith until we reach Scott, Byron, and Wordsworth
after an interval of forty years. In the United States the great eras
of imaginative production have been those which were free from
political and military struggles.
The case of France is indeed conclusive proof how suddenly political
turmoil kills imaginative work. French literature, which during the
greater part of the eighteenth century had shown amazing activity,
suddenly seems arrested with Rousseau; and in the latter years of the
eighteenth century there is absolutely nothing of even moderate quality
in the field of art. The same is true of England for the last thirty
years of the same century. Shakespeare's dramas were not produced till
his country had victoriously passed through the death-struggle of the
religious wars in the sixteenth century. The civil war of the Puritans
arrested poetry, so that for nearly thirty years the muse of Milton
himself withdrew into her solitary cell. Dryden carried on the torch
for a time. But prose literature did not revive in England until the
Hanoverian settlement. Political ferment kills literature: prolonged
war kills it: social agitation unnerves it; and still more the uneasy
sense of being on the verge of great and unknown change.
Take our Queen's reign of now some fifty-eight years (1837-1895) and
divide it in half at the year 1866. It is plain that by far the
greater part of the "Victorian" literature was produced in the former
half and quite the inferior part of it was produced in the latter half.
By the year 1866 we had already got all, or all that was best, of
Tennyson, Browning, Carlyle, Ruskin, Lytton, Thackeray, Dickens,
Trollope, George Eliot, Disraeli, Kingsley, and others who lived after
that date. In 1865 Lord Palmerston died, and with him died the old
Parliamentary era. In the same year died Abraham Lincoln in the great
crisis of the reconstruction of the American Constitution. We attach
no peculiar importance to that date. But it is certain that both
English and American people have been in this last twenty-nine years
absorbed in constitutional agitations which go deep down into our
social system. We in England have passed from one constitutional
struggle to another, and we are now in the most acute stage of all this
period. Parliamentary reform, continental changes, colonial wars,
military preparations, Home Rule, have absorbed the public mind and
stunned it with cataracts of stormy debate. We are all politicians,
all party-men now.
There is upon us also, both in England and in America, a social ferment
that goes deeper than any mere constitutional struggle. It is the
vague, profound, multiform, and mysterious upheaval that is loosely
called Socialism--not Socialism in any definite formula, but the
universal yearning of the millions for power, consideration, material
improvement, and social equality. The very vagueness, universality,
and unbounded scope of the claim they make constitute its power. All
orders and classes are concerned in it: all minds of whatever type are
affected by it: every political, social, or industrial axiom has to be
reconsidered in the light of it: it appeals to all men and it enters
into life at every corner and pore. We are like men under the glamour
of some great change impending. The spell of a new order holds us
undecided and expectant. There is something in the air, and that
something is a vague and indescribable sense that a new time is coming.
Men felt it in France, and indeed all over Europe, from 1780 till 1790.
It was an uncertain and rather pleasing state of expectancy. It did
not check activity, nor enjoyment, nor science. But it diverted the
profounder minds from the higher forms of imaginative work.
There is no reason to assume that Socialism or the ideals of Socialism
are at all hostile to literature or even imaginative poetry, provided
they are not too close, not actually causing direct agitation. But
when men are debating bills in heated meetings, they do not often see
these questions in the halo of romance. Rousseau's _Héloïse_ and
Goldsmith's _Vicar of Wakefield_ were quite a generation before the
Revolution, at a time when franchise and agrarian politics had hardly
begun. The poetry and the romance of a great social reformation are
never visible to men in the midst of it, who are ready to tear each
other's eyes out in the name of Eight-Hours Bills and Land
Nationalisation. When men have got to this stage they want lighter
matter to amuse them at home; but they can hardly appreciate, even if
they could find, the loftier flights of social romance. Sam Weller
to-day has joined a union, and reads his Henry George. Rawdon Crawley
of our own generation is a mere drunken ruffian, only fit to point the
moral in a lecture on the drink traffic. And Becky Sharp is voted to
be a stupid libel on the social destiny of the modern school "marm."
The great advance in the material comfort and uniformity of life and
manners dries up the very sources of prose romance, even more than it
ruins poetry. The poet is by nature an isolated spirit dwelling in an
ideal world of his own. But the prose novelist draws life as he sees
it in the concrete from intimate knowledge of real men and women. How
intensely did Fielding, Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Miss Austen, Miss
Edgeworth know by experience the characters they drew! A romance
cannot be constructed out of the novelist's inner consciousness as
_Paradise Lost_, Shelley's _Prometheus_, and Wordsworth's _Excursion_
were constructed. Even Scott becomes grave and melodramatic when he
peoples his stage with those whose like he never saw. But how vastly
more romantic was the Scotland of Scott than is the Scotland of
Stevenson! The Vicar of Wakefield and Squire Western are not to be
found in an age that is busy with railways and telegraphs and the
_Review of Reviews_. Pickwick and Oliver Twist have been improved off
the face of the earth by cheap newspapers and sanitary reform. The fun
has gone out of Vanity Fair, and the House of the Seven Gables is an
hotel with seven hundred beds.
Comfort, electric light, railway sleeping-cars, and equality are
excellent things, but they are the death of romance. The essence of
romance is variety, contrast, individuality, the eccentric, the
unconventional. Level up society, put nineteen out of every twenty on
fairly equal terms, popularise literature, and turn the Ten
Commandments into a code of decorum, and you cut up by the roots all
romantic types of life. The England of Fielding and the Scotland of
Scott were breezy, boisterous, disorderly, picturesque, and jolly
worlds, where gay and hot spirits got into mischief and played mad
pranks as, in the words of the old song, "They powlered up and down a
bit and had a rattling day." Laws, police, total abstinence, general
education, and weak digestions have put an end to pranks, as we are all
proud to say. The result is that Romance, finding little of romance in
the real world, has taken two different lines in the desperate effort
to amuse us somehow. The virtuous line is the phonographic
reproduction of everyday life in ordinary situations. The disreputable
line is Zolaesque bestiality, and forced, unreal, unlovely, and
hysterical sensationalism.
It cannot be more than a paradox to pretend that _fin de siècle_ has
anything to do with it. But it is a curious coincidence how the last
decade of modern centuries seems to die down in creative fertility.
The hundred millions who speak our English tongue have now no accepted
living master of the first rank, either in verse or in prose. In 1793
there was not one in all Europe. In 1693, though Dryden lingered in
his decline, it was one of the most barren moments in English
literature. And so in 1593, though the _Faery Queen_ was just printed,
and Shakespeare had begun to write, there were nothing but the first
streaks which herald the dawn. But this is obviously a mere
coincidence; nor can an artificial division of time affect the rise or
fall of genius. It may be that, in these latter days, when our age is
the victim of self-conscious introspection, the close of a century
which has shown such energy may affect us in some unconscious way.
Perhaps there is a vague impression that the world is about to turn
over a new page in the mighty ledger of mankind, that it is now too
late to do much with the nineteenth century, and that we will make a
new start with the twentieth.
The world is growing less interesting, less mysterious, less manifold,
at any rate to the outer eye. The _mise-en-scène_ of external life is
less rich in colour and in contrast. Magnificence, squalor, oddity,
historic survivals, and picturesque personalities grow rarer year by
year. Everybody writes a grammatical letter in conventional style,
wears the clothes in fashion, and conforms to the courtesies of life.
It is right, good, and wise: but a little dull. It is the lady-like
age, the epoch of the dress-coat, of the prize lad and the girl of the
period. Mr. Charles Pearson, in his remarkable forecast of _National
Life and Character_, warned us how the universal levelling of modern
democracy must end in a certain monotony and a lowered vitality. We
live longer, but in quiet, comfortable, orderly ways. This is not at
all injurious to morality, politics, industry, science, philosophy, or
religion. It is not necessarily injurious to poetry, at least of the
lower flight. But it is adverse to high art. And it is asphyxiating
to romance.
The novelist must draw from the living model and he must address the
people of his own age. He cannot write for posterity, nor can he live
in a day-dream world of his own. The poet is often lost to his own
contemporaries. It may need two or three, five or six, generations to
reveal him, as Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley, and Wordsworth may remind
us. But the novelist must live in his generation, be of it most
intensely, and if he is to delight at all, like the actor, he must
delight his own age. What sons of their own time were Fielding, Scott,
Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope: how intensely did they drink with both
hands from the cup of life. George Eliot, George Meredith, Louis
Stevenson, Howells, James, look on life from a private box. We see
their kid gloves and their opera-glass and we know that nothing could
ever take them on to the stage and ruffle it with the world of the day,
like men of the world who mean to taste life. There is no known
instance of a great novelist who lived obscure in a solitary retreat or
who became famous only after the lapse of many generations.
It is the lady-like age: and so it is the age of ladies' novels. Women
have it all their own way now in romance. They carry off all the
prizes, just as girl students do in the studios of Paris. Up to a
certain point, within their own limits, they are supreme. Half the
modern romance, and many people think the better half, is written by
women. That is perfectly natural, an obvious result of modern society.
The romance to which our age best lends itself is the romance of
ordinary society, with delicate shades of character and feeling in
place of furious passion or picturesque incident. Women are by nature
and training more subtle observers of these social _nuances_ and
refined waverings of the heart than any others but men of rare genius.
The field is a small and home-like area, the requirements are mainly
those of graceful intuition, the tone must be pure, lady-like, subdued.
In this sphere it is plain that women have a marked superiority; it is
the sphere in which Jane Austen is the yet unapproached queen. But we
may look for more Jane Austens, and on wider fields with a yet deeper
insight into far grander characters. The social romance of the future
is the true poetic function of women. It is their own realm, in which
they will doubtless achieve yet unimagined triumphs. Men, revolting
from this polite and monotonous world, are trying desperate expedients.
But they are all wrong; the age is against it. Try to get out of
modern democratic uniformity and decorum and you may as well try to get
out of your skin. Mr. Stevenson was driven to playing at Robinson
Crusoe in the Pacific, and Mr. Rudyard Kipling once seemed bent on
dying in a tussle with Fuzzy-Wuzzy in the Soudan. But it is no good.
A dirty savage is no longer a romantic being. And as to the romance of
the wigwam, it reminds me of the Jews who keep the Feast of Tabernacles
by putting up some boughs in a back yard.
Let us have no nonsense, no topsy-turvy straining after new effects,
which is so wearisome to those who love the racy naturalism of Parson
Adams and Edie Ochiltree. But let us have no pessimism also. The age
is against the romance of colour, movement, passion, and jollity. But
it is full of the romance of subtle and decorous psychology. It is not
the highest art: it is indeed a very limited art. But it is true art:
wholesome, sound, and cheerful. The world does not exist in order to
supply brilliant literature; and the march of democratic equality and
of decorous social uniformity is too certain a thing, in one sense too
blessed a thing, to be denied or to be denounced. An age of colour,
movement, variety, and romantic beauty will come again one day, we know
not how. There will be then a romance of passion and incident, of
strenuous ambition and mad merriment. But not to-day nor to-morrow.
Let us accept what the dregs of the nineteenth century can give us,
without murmuring and repining for what it cannot give and should not
seek to give.
In this little series of studies, I shall make no attempt to estimate
the later literature of the Victorian Age, nor will I at all refer to
any living writer. Nor shall I deal with social and moral philosophy,
poetry, art, or religion. I propose to look back, from our present
point of view, on the literature, in the narrower sense of the term,
produced in the earlier part of the Queen's reign.