INTELLECTUAL AND SPIRITUAL PROGRESS.
[Illustration: Robert Southey.]
"Man doth not live by bread alone." The enormous material progress of
this country during the last sixty years--imperfectly indicated by
the fact that during the last forty years the taxable income of the
United Kingdom has been considerably more than doubled--would be but
a barren theme of rejoicing, if there were signs among us of
intellectual or spiritual degeneracy. The great periods of English
history have been always fruitful in great thinkers and great
writers, in religious and mental activity. Endeavouring to judge our
own period by this standard, and making a swift survey of its
achievements in literature, we do not find it apparently inferior to
the splendours of "great Elizabeth" or of the Augustan age of Anne.
Our fifth Queen-regnant, whose reign, longer than that of any of her
four predecessors, is also happier than that of the greatest among
them, can reckon among her subjects an even larger number of men
eminent in all departments of knowledge, though perhaps we cannot
boast one name quite equal to Newton in science, and though assuredly
neither this nor any modern nation has yet a second imaginative
writer whose throne may be set beside that of Shakespeare.
[Illustration: William Wordsworth.]
[Illustration: Alfred Tennyson. _From a Photograph by Elliott & Fry_]
We excel in quantity, indeed; for while, owing to the spread of
education, the number of readers has been greatly increased, the
number of writers has risen proportionately; the activity of the
press has increased tenfold. Journalism has become a far more
formidable power in the land than in the earlier years when, as our
domestic annals plainly indicate, the _Times_ ruled as the Napoleon
of newspapers. This result is largely due to the removal of the
duties formerly imposed both on the journals themselves and on their
essential paper material; and it would indeed "dizzy the arithmetic
of memory" should we try to enumerate the varied periodicals that are
far younger than Her Majesty's happy reign. Of these a great number
are excellent in both intention and execution, and must be numbered
among the educating, civilising, Christianising agencies of the day.
They are something more and higher than the "savoury literary
_entremets_" designed to please the fastidious taste of a cultured
and leisured class, which was the just description of our periodical
literature at large not so very long ago. The number of our
imaginative writers--poets and romancers, but especially the
latter--has been out of all proportion great. We give the place of
honour, as is their due, to the singers rather than to the
story-tellers, the more readily since the popular taste, it cannot be
denied, chooses its favourites in inverse order as a rule.
[Illustration: Robert Browning. _From a Photograph by Elliott &
Fry_.]
When Her Majesty ascended the throne, one brilliant poetical
constellation was setting slowly, star by star. Keats and Shelley and
Byron, none of them much older than the century, had perished in
their early prime between 1820 and 1824; Scott had sunk under the
storms of fortune in 1832; the fitful glimmer of Coleridge's genius
vanished in 1834, and a year later "the gentle Elia" too was gone.
Southey, who still held the laureate-ship in 1837, had faded out of
life in 1843, and was succeeded in his once-despised office by
William Wordsworth, who, with Rogers and Leigh Hunt and Moore, lived
far into the new reign, uniting the Georgian and the Victorian school
of writers. Thomas Hood, the poet of the poor and oppressed, whose
too short life ended in 1845, gives in his serious verse such
thrilling expression to the impassioned, indignant philanthropy,
which has actuated many workers and writers of our own period, that
it is not easy to reckon him with the older group. His song rings
like that of Charles Kingsley, poet, novelist, preacher, and
"Christian socialist," who did not publish his "Saint's Tragedy" till
three years after Hood was dead.
There has, indeed, been no break in the continuity of our great
literary history; while one splendid group was setting, another as
illustrious was rising. Tennyson, who on Wordsworth's death in 1850
received at Queen Victoria's hand the "laurel greener from the brows
of him that uttered nothing base," had published his earliest two
volumes of poems some years before Her Majesty's accession; and of
that rare poetic pair, the Brownings, each had already given evidence
of the great powers they possessed, Robert Browning's tragedy of
"Strafford" being produced on the stage in 1837, while his future
wife's translation of the "Prometheus Bound" saw the light four years
earlier. The Victorian period can boast no greater poetic names than
these, each of which is held in highest reverence by its own special
admirers. The patriotic fervour with which Lord Tennyson has done
almost all his laureate work, the lucid splendour of his style, the
perfect music of his rhythm, and the stinging sharpness with which he
has sometimes chastised contemporary sins, have all combined to win
for him a far wider popularity than even that accorded to the fine
lyrical passion of Mrs. Browning, or to the deep-thoughted and
splendid, but often perplexing and ruggedly phrased, dramatic and
lyric utterances of her husband. All three have honoured themselves
and their country by a majestic purity of moral and religious
teaching--an excellence shared by many of their contemporaries, whose
powers would have won them a first place in an age and country less
fruitful of genius; but not so conspicuous in some younger poets,
later heirs of fame, whose lot it may be to carry on the traditions
of Victorian greatness into another reign.
There are not a few writers of our day whose excellent prose work has
won more of popular favour than their verse, which notwithstanding is
of high quality. Such was the "unsubduable old Roman," Walter Savage
Landor, a contemporary of Byron and Wordsworth, who long outlived
them, dying in 1864. Such--to bring two extremes together--are the
critic and poet Matthew Arnold, the poet and theologian John Henry
Newman. Intimately associated in our thought with the latter, who has
enriched our devotional poetry with one touching hymn, is Keble, the
singer _par excellence_ of the "Catholic revival," and the most
widely successful religious poet of the age, though only very few of
his hymns have reached the heart of the people like the far more
direct and fervent work of the Wesleys and their compeers. He is even
excelled in simplicity and passion, though not in grace and
tenderness, by two or three other workers in the same field, who
belong to our day, and whose verse is known more widely than their
names.
We have several women-poets who are only less beloved and less well
known than Mrs. Browning; but so far the greatest literary
distinction gained by the women of our age and country,
notwithstanding the far wider and higher educational advantages
enjoyed by them to-day, has been won, as of yore, in the field of
prose fiction. More than a hundred years ago a veteran novelist,
whose humour and observation, something redeeming his coarseness,
have ranked him among classic English authors, referred mischievously
to the engrossing of "that branch of business" by female writers,
whose "ease, and spirit, and delicacy, and knowledge of the human
heart," have not, however, availed to redeem their names from
oblivion. For some of their nineteenth-century successors at least
we may expect a more enduring memory.
Numerous as are our poets, they are far outnumbered by the novelists,
whose works are poured forth every season with bewildering profusion;
but as story-tellers have always commanded a larger audience than
grave philosophers or historians, and as our singers deal as much in
philosophy as in narrative, perhaps in seeking for the cause of this
overrunning flood of fiction we need go no further than the immensely
increased number of readers--a view in which the records of some
English public libraries will bear us out. We may therefore be
thankful that, on the whole, such literature has been of a vastly
purer and healthier character than of yore, reflecting that higher
and better tone of public feeling which we may attribute, in part at
least, to the influence of the "pure court and serene life" of the
Sovereign.
[Illustration: Charles Dickens. _From a Photograph by Elliott &
Fry_.]
[Illustration: W.M. Thackeray. _From a Drawing by Samuel Lawrence_.]
This nobler tone is not least perceptible in the eldest of the great
masters of fiction whom we can claim for our period--Dickens, who in
1837 first won by his "Pickwick Papers" that astonishing popularity
which continued widening until his death; Thackeray, who in that year
was working more obscurely, having not yet found a congenial field in
the humorous chronicle that reflects for us so much of the Victorian
age, for _Punch_ was not started till 1841, and Thackeray's first
great masterpiece of pathos and satire, "Vanity Fair," did not begin
to appear till five years later. Each of these writers in his own way
held "the mirror up" to English human nature, and showed "the very
age and body of the time his form and pressure," with manly boldness
indeed, but with due artistic reticence also; each knew how to be
vivid without being vicious, to be realistic without being revolting;
and despite the sometimes offensive caricature in which the one
indulged, despite the seeming cynicism of the other their influence
must be pronounced healthy. Thackeray did not, like Dickens, use his
pen against particular glaring abuses of the time, nor insist on the
special virtues that bloom amid the poor and lowly; but he attacked
valiantly the crying sins of society in all time--the mammon-worship
and the mercilessness, the false pretences and the fraud--and never
failed to uphold for admiration and imitation "whatsoever things are
true, whatsoever things are honourable, whatsoever things are just,
whatsoever thing are pure, whatsoever things are lovely." And though
both writers were sometimes hard on the professors of religion,
neither failed in reverence of tone when religion itself was
concerned.
[Illustration: Charlotte Brontë.]
The sudden death of both these men, in the very prime of life and in
the fulness of power, was keenly felt at the time: each had a
world-wide fame, and each awakened a blank, distressful sense of
personal loss in his many admirers as he was suddenly called away
from incomplete work and faithful friendship. Contemporary literature
has not benefited by the removal of these two men and the gradual
diminishing of the influence they so strongly exerted while yet they
"stood up and spoke." The work of Charlotte Brontë--produced under a
fervent admiration for "the satirist of Vanity Fair," whom she deemed
"the first social regenerator of his day"--is, with all its
occasional morbidness of sensitive feeling, far more bracing in moral
tone, more inspiring in its scorn of baseness and glorifying of
goodness, than is the work of recent Positivist emulators of the
achievements of George Eliot. Some romances of this school are vivid
and highly finished pictures of human misery, unredeemed by hope, and
hardly brightened by occasional gleams of humour, of the sardonic
sort which may stir a mirthless smile, but never a laugh. Herein they
are far inferior to their model, whose melancholy philosophy is half
hidden from her readers by the delightful freshness and truth of her
"Dutch painter's" portraying of every-day humanity, by her delicately
skilful reproduction of its homely wit and harmless absurdity.
Happily neither these writers, nor the purveyors of mere sensation
who cannot get on without crime and mystery, exhaust the list of our
romancers, many of whom are altogether healthful, cheerful, and
helpful; and it is no unreasonable hope that these may increase and
their gloomier rivals decrease, or at least grow gayer and wiser.
[Illustration: Lord Macauley.]
There are many other great writers, working in other fields, whom we
may claim as belonging altogether or almost to the Victorian age.
Within that period lies almost entirely the brilliantly successful
career of Macaulay, essayist, poet, orator, and historian. For the
last-named _rôle_ Macaulay seemed sovereignly fitted by his
extraordinary faculty for assimilating and retaining historical
knowledge, and by the vividness of imagination and mastery of words
which enabled him to present his facts in such attractive guise as
made them fascinating far beyond romance. His "History of England
from the Accession of James II," whereof the first volumes appeared
in 1849, remains a colossal fragment; the fulness of detail with
which he adorned it, the grand scale on which he worked, rendered its
completion a task almost impossible for the longest lifetime; and
Macaulay died in his sixtieth year. Despite the defects of
partisanship and exaggeration freely and not quite unjustly charged
upon his great work, it remains a yet unequalled record of the period
dealt with, just as his stirring ballads, so seemingly easy of
imitation in their ringing, rolling numbers, hold their own against
very able rivals and are yet unequalled in our time.
[Illustration: Thomas Carlyle.]
Macaulay was not the first, and he is not the last, of our
picturesque historians. It was in 1837 that Carlyle, who four years
before had startled the English-reading public by his strangely
worded, bewildering "Sartor Resartus," brought out his astonishing
"History of the French Revolution"--a prose poem, an epic without a
hero, revealing as by "flashes of lightning" the ghastly tragedy and
comedy of that tremendous upheaval; and in 1845 he followed up the
vein thus opened by his lifelike study of "Oliver Cromwell," which
was better received by his English readers than the later "History of
Friedrich II," marvel of careful research and graphic reproduction
though it be. To Carlyle therefore and to Macaulay belongs the honour
of having given a new and powerful impulse to the study they adorned;
dissimilar in other respects, they are alike in their preference for
and insistent use of original sources of information, in their able
employment of minute detail, and in the graphic touch and artistic
power which made history very differently attractive in their hands
from what it had ever been previously. Mr. Froude and Mr. Green may
be ranked as their followers in this latter respect; hardly so Mr.
Freeman or the philosophic Buckle, Grote, and Lecky, who by their
style and method belong more to the school of Hallam, however widely
they may differ from him or from each other in opinion. But in
thoroughness of research and in resolute following of the very truth
through all mazes and veils that may obscure it, one group of
historians does not yield to the other.
[Illustration: William Whewell, D.D.]
[Illustration: Sir David Brewster.]
And the same zealous passion for accuracy that has distinguished
these and less famous historians and biographers has shown itself in
other fields of intellectual endeavour. Our Queen in her desire "to
get at the root and reality of things" is entirely in harmony with
the spirit of her age. In scientific men we look for the ardent
pursuit of difficult truth; and it would be thankless to forget how
numerous beyond precedent have been in the Victorian period faithful
workers in the field of science. Though some of our _savants_ in
later years have injured their renown by straying outside the sphere
in which they are honoured and useful and speaking unadvisedly on
matters theological, this ought not to deter us from acknowledging
the value of true service rendered. The Queen's reign can claim as
its own such men as John Herschel, worthy son of an illustrious
father, Airy, Adams, and Maxwell, Whewell and Brewster and Faraday,
Owen and Buckland and Lyell, Murchison and Miller, Darwin and Tyndall
and Huxley, with Wheatstone, one of the three independent inventors
of telegraphy, and the Stephensons, father and son, to whose ability
and energy we are indebted for the origination and perfection of our
method of steam locomotion; it can boast such masters in philosophy
as Hamilton and Whately and John Stuart Mill, each a leader of many.
It has also the rare distinction of possessing one lady writer on
science who has attained to real eminence--eminence not likely soon
to be surpassed by her younger sister-rivals--the late Mrs. Mary
Somerville, who united an entirely feminine and gentle character to
masculine powers of mind.
[Illustration: Sir James Simpson.]
[Illustration: Michael Faraday.]
Only to catalogue the recent discoveries and inventions we owe to men
of science, from merciful anæsthetics to the latest applications of
electric power, would occupy more space than we ought here to give.
All honour to these servants of humanity! We rejoice to find among
them many who could unite the simplest childlike faith with a wide
and grand mental outlook; we exult not less to find in many Biblical
students and commentators the same patience, thoroughness, and
resolute pursuit of the very truth as that exemplified by the
devotees of physical science. God's Word is explored in our day--the
same clay which has seen the great work of the Revised Version of the
Scriptures begun and completed--with no less ardour than God's world.
And what vast additions have been made to our knowledge of this
earth! We have seen Nineveh unburied, the North-West Passage
explored, and the mysterious Nile stream at last tracked to its
source. To compare a fifty-years-old map of Africa with one of the
present day will a little enable us to estimate the advances made in
our acquaintance with the Dark Continent alone; similar maps
including the Polar regions of North America will testify also to a
large increase of hard-won knowledge.
[Illustration: David Livingstone.]
[Illustration: Sir John Franklin.]
Exploration--Arctic, African, Oriental and Occidental--has had its
heroic devotees, sometimes its martyrs. Witness Franklin, Burke and
Wills, and Livingstone. The long uncertainty overhanging the fate of
the gallant Franklin, after he and the expedition he commanded had
vanished into the darkness of Arctic winter in 1845, and the
unfaltering faithfulness with which his widow clung to the search for
her lost husband, form one of the most pathetic chapters of English
story. The veil was lifted at last and the secret of the North-West
Passage, to which so many lives had been sacrificed, was brought to
light in the course of the many efforts made to find the dead
discoverer. As Franklin had disappeared in the North, so Livingstone
was long lost to sight in the wilds of Africa, and hardly less
feverish interest centred round the point, so long disputed, of his
being in life or in death--interest freshly awakened when the remains
of the heroic explorer, who had been found only to be lost again,
were brought home to be laid among the mighty dead of England. The
fervent Christian philanthropy of Livingstone endeared him yet more
to the national heart; and we may here note that very often, as in
his case, the missionary has served not only Christianity, as was his
first and last aim, but also geographical and ethnological science
and colonial and commercial development. We have briefly referred
already to some of the struggles, the sufferings, and the triumphs of
missionary enterprise in our day: to chronicle all its effort and
achievement would be difficult, for these have been world-wide, and
often wonderfully successful. Nor has much less success crowned other
agencies for meeting the ever-increasing need for religious
knowledge, which multiply and grow in number and in power. Witness,
among many that might be named, the continuous development of the
Sunday School system and the immensely extended operations of the
unsectarian Bible Society.
[Illustration: John Ruskin. _From a Photograph by Elliott & Fry_.]
Great advances have been made during this reign in English art and
art-criticism, and more particularly in the extension of real
artistic education to classes of the community who could hardly
attain it before, though it was perhaps more essential to them than
to the wealthy and leisurely who had previously monopolised it. The
multiplication of Schools of Design over the country, intended to
promote the tasteful efficiency of those engaged in textile
manufactures and in our decorative and constructive art generally, is
one remarkable feature of the time, and the sedulous cultivation of
music by members of all classes of society is another, hardly less
hopeful. In all these efforts for the benefit and elevation of the
community the Prince Consort took deep and active interest, and the
royal family themselves, from Her Majesty downwards, highly cultured
and accomplished, have not failed to act in the same spirit. But the
history of English nineteenth-century art would be incomplete indeed
without reference to two powerful influences--the rise and progress
of the new art of photography, which has singularly affected other
branches of graphic work; and the career, hitherto unexampled in our
land, of the greatest art-critic of this, perhaps of any, age--John
Ruskin, the most eminent also of the many writers and thinkers who
have been swayed by the magic spell of Carlyle, whose fierce and
fervid genius, for good or for evil, told so strongly on his
contemporaries. Ruskin is yet more deeply imbued with his master's
philosophy than those other gifted and widely influential teachers,
Maurice and Kingsley; and yet perhaps he is more strongly and
sturdily independent in his individuality than either, while the
unmatched English of his prose style differs not less widely from the
rugged strength of Carlyle than from the mystical involution of
Maurice and the vehement and, as it were, breathless, yet vivid and
poetic, utterance of Kingsley. When every defect has been admitted
that is chargeable against one or all of this group of sincere and
stalwart workers, it must be allowed that their power on their
countrymen has been largely wielded for good. Particularly is this
the case with Ruskin, whose influence has reached and ennobled many a
life that, from pressure of sordid circumstances, was in great need
of such help as his spirituality of tone, and deeply felt reverential
belief in the Giver of all good and Maker of all beauty, could
afford.
[Illustration: Dean Stanley.]
[Illustration: "I was sick, and ye visited me."]
We have preferred not to dwell on one department of literature which,
like every other, has received great additions during our
period--that of religious controversy. A large portion of such
literature is in its very nature ephemeral; and some of the disputes
which have engaged the energies even of our greatest masters in
dialectics have not been in themselves of supreme importance; but
many points of doctrine and discipline have been violently canvassed
among professing Christians, and attacks of long-sustained vigour and
virulence have been made on almost every leading article of the
Christian creed by the avowed enemies or the only half-hostile
critics of the Church, which the champions of Scripture truth have
not been backward to repel. Amid all this confusion and strife of
assault and resistance one thing stands out clearly: Christianity and
its progress are more interesting to the national mind than ever
before. It has been well, too, that through all those fifty years a
large-minded and fervent but most unobtrusive and practical piety has
been enthroned in the highest places of the land--a piety which will
escape the condemnation of the King when He shall come in His glory,
and say to many false followers, "I was an hungred, and ye gave Me no
meat; I was thirsty, and ye gave Me no drink; I was a stranger, and
ye took Me not in; naked, and ye clothed Me not; sick, and in prison,
and ye visited Me not."
These dread words are not for those who have cared as our Sovereign
Lady and her beloved ones have cared for the sick and the suffering
and the sad; who have bound up the heart-wounds of the widow and the
orphan and ministered to their earthly needs; who, like our lost
Princess Alice and her royal elder sister, have tended the victims of
war, shrinking from no ghastliness or repulsiveness, no horrors of
the hospital where victor and vanquished lay moaning in common
misery; or, like their queenly mother, have shed the sunshine of
royal smiles and soothing words and helpful alms upon the obscurer
but hardly less pitiable patients who crowd our English infirmaries.
In her northern and southern "homes" of Osborne and Balmoral the
Queen, too, has been able to share a true, unsophisticated friendship
with her humble neighbours, to rejoice in their joys and lighten
their griefs with gentle, most efficient sympathy. It was of a
Highland cottage that Dr. Guthrie wrote that "within its walls the
Queen had stood, with her kind hands smoothing the thorns of a dying
man's pillow. There, left alone with him at her own request, she had
sat by the bed of death--a Queen ministering to the comfort of a
saint." It was in a cottage at Osborne that the same gentle and
august almsgiver was found reading comfortable Scripture words to a
sick and aged peasant, quietly retiring upon the entrance of the
clerical visitant, that _his_ message of peace might be freely given,
and thus allowing the sufferer to disclose to the pastor that the
lady in the widow's weeds was Victoria of England. These are
examples, which it would be easy to multiply, of that true oneness of
feeling between the lofty and the lowly which is the special, the
unique glory of Christ's kingdom. May our land never lack them; may
they multiply themselves to all time.
The best evidence of the truth of the Gospel is admittedly its
unequalled power of lifting up humanity to higher and yet higher
levels. In many and mighty instances of that power our age is not
barren. And in despite of the foes without and within that have
wrought her woe--of the Pharisaism that is a mask for fraud, of the
mammon-worship cloaked as respectability, of scepticism lightly
mocking, of the bolder enmity of the blasphemer--we cannot
contemplate the story of Christianity throughout our epoch, even in
these islands and this empire, without seeing that the advance of the
Faith is real and constant, the advance of the rising tide, and that
her seeming defeats are but the deceptive reflux of the ever-mounting
waves.